backwards

It's as if everything has gone backwards.

There was a time, long before this one, when the world was in this much of a disarray. When people who were sick, even with the simplest of maladies, laid in bed for weeks with nothing more than hope that fevers would break and they would live. When one illness, one cold, one rash, one plague, could wipe out entire towns, communities.

It was called the Dark Ages.

Though so many consider the Prophet's words to bear an age of enlightenment in their wake, caught on wings of hope and glory, others can acknowledge the pestilence, the grim and the death that also follows. Doctors, nurses, and volunteers have left the field of medicine, taking on their own spiritual journeys, their own assumed clarity, leaving humanity to fend for itself.

As always, humanity struggles.

Some towns are wiped clean. Everyone but the few who are able to move one dies. There are rumors that the original bubonic plague might have resurfaced. Though who can tell? Cities lack the proper maintenance they once had, the proper upkeep and in the wake of it all, so much is left rotting, dying.

It's as if people have forgotten why all of the precautions were there to begin with.

The death toll starts to rise, even though people are dying slowly, they are still dying. More than before. And yet, no one does anything to stop it. Doctors don't remember their Hippocratic Oath in the night and find themselves searching the towns and cities for patients. People watch those die around them and merely look away. Many will still live, despite it all, but that does little for those who will die.