Time

Time

            I stood at the graveyard, staring down at the broken grave. On the grave it was marked as R.I.P. Abner Thornton, 1790-1852. Tears streamed down my cheeks as I stared at it, thinking of everything that happened. The worst part was the unmarked graves, all those people never to be remembered. Even I didn’t know who all of them were.

What happened truly was a travesty, and an unexplainable one at that. Everybody attributed it to a disease, which in a way it was. Though not entirely a disease of the body, but a disease of time. I say not entirely because in a way, it was a disease of the body. I’m not entirely sure how it worked, but I know it was linked to the person affected.

We called it the shadow disease, because it snuck up on you like a shadow to the shadow caster. It was silent, and almost unnoticeable, but once you had it you were doomed. No escape, no way out, nothing to do but spend your last days in seclusion so you didn’t infect anybody else.

The way you knew you had it was your eyes. Your eyes had a second pupil, which slowly grew larger until it took up your entire eye, and it looked like a shadow at first which also gave its name. Nobody but me could figure out how to save everybody, and as the leader of the town it was my job anyways.

Nobody knew exactly what the disease did, and now I’m truly the only one who can. What it did was strange, and I’m not sure how it works. Once you had it, you could infect anybody. You started becoming nervous, shaky, and sweaty. Then it progressed to full blown paranoia, making you a train wreck of a human being. Then you attacked everybody you saw. Finally, after your eyes were eaten entirely by the shadow, you disappeared.

But now, I know where you go. You get sent to the future, where you live out your age and die. But you can infect other people in the future, thus spreading the disease. So the disease needed somebody to stop the infected from spreading their disease, and contain them. Of course, as the leader, that person was me.

Since I was the only one who volunteered to do it, they made a marked grave for me it seemed. This was the last time I’d see anything. I had gotten infected with the disease in keeping them contained, and transported with them. Apparently I managed to stay sane through it all, though nobody else did.

I had put them all, one by one, in the graves made for them as I had instructed before I left. Now I was the only one left. I worked through the night, digging the marked grave six feet down. I put myself in, and he came. The descendant of my best friend, as he had promised just in case something like this would happen. He looked shocked to actually see me, as if he had thought his ancestor was crazy and he was just doing this to upkeep the tradition.

Without a word, I lied down in the freshly dug grave below the marked headstone, and he started shoveling. Out of all of it, the saddest part was the people who had died from this disease wouldn’t get proper headstones. That resonated with me the most, and they were the last thoughts running through my head as the dirt hit me.