Perceived Lunacy

Prolouge

It’s funny how sometimes the cures are worse then the diseases. Sometimes the cures actual bring out the very thing they are trying to whisk away. Like the cure for insanity for example. The doctors monitor and record, they employ reason, psychiatry, mind games, but all they end up doing is pushing pills and needles into a guinea pig just hoping that something will work to alter their brain function and produce whatever outcome they perceive to be sane. Doctor’s are the epitome of defiance of nature. They believe they are curing evil, but are really only creating mayhem. When Florence Abernathy decided that all diseases stem from one horrible Delirium it caused a ripple effect. Passion became poison, creation became carnage, and love became lunacy.
        Developing the cure for the newly declared terminal disease of love meant the abolishment of freedom. This highly contagious disease was easily spread by touch, the exchange of passionate words and has even been recorded to have been spread at first sight. Abernathy declared that love is the bacterium from which all illnesses manifest. It is the cause of insomnia, trouble catching a breath, depression and even the cause of more serious diseases. Love can break your heart causing heart attacks and other deadly diseases therefore love has been declared nothing more then a deadly nascence that is to be feared and taken every precaution against. Amor Deliria Nervosa is the new black plague and Abernathy is the priest meant to Baptist the world of it.
        At the beginning of the governments crusade to rid the country of the Delirium they began building walls and fences, outposts and cure facilities, and they threw every resister into the crypts to waste away except for those who escaped to the wilds, the areas outside the fences where the disease was free to run rampant. The disease was finally eradicated when the president ordered the Blitz in 2054. They sent in every aircraft that was available to them and bombed out the wilds, destroying whole cities of Americans that refused to move into the new Delirium free quarantined areas. They had defeated the disease that threatened their perfect society, or so they thought.
        Like cockroaches, love survives even if humanity doesn’t. It breeds in the cracks and crevices of the bombed out society waiting to make it’s come back. The invalids are a myth they tell themselves, but deep down they know that we are coming for them. They fear us as they tremble behind their fences pretending that their disease is the stuff of history. History repeats it’s self if you’re not careful. Like the rise of the zombies the invalids will get their time. Some might say we are crazy to go up against the cureds and their guns and plains while we just barley survive with sticks and rocks, but those are also the people that tell you you’re crazy if you feel something. To them love will be infectious. It will infiltrate their societies, take control of their people, and take its rightful place as the wonder of humanity once again.


        
Sometimes it actually matters how you are perceived by other people. If others think you are crazy and treat you that way you will start to believe it yourself. You might even begin to go crazy. If they have the power to detain you, shove pills down your throat, poke around in your brain, and take everything from you that you hold to value then there is not much left to do, but go insane. You’re not yourself. You’re not even what they expect you to be. You’re just an empty shell. You are a nut case because you’re human. Somehow the world has become so twisted that the heartless are considered in their right mind.
The difference from this side of the fence and the other is night and day, black and white, zombies and invalids. Here it is tasteless and bitter, colorless and empty air. The lack of emotion on this side is so apparent that the life of the party is here at Abernathy House, home to the mentally ill and other wise terminally diseased. The only reason those of us that are here at Abernathy House are not killed or thrown in the crypts to rot away is simply for the sake of science they tell us. We are lab rats to be studied and nothing more than that.
I had freedom once. Room to roam freely. I didn’t mind the lack of food or shelter, I was raised that way. The wilds have been my home forever until I was pushed into the resistance. I didn’t want to leave the wilds, but they made me feel as though it was my duty so I went. When I left they didn’t tell me where I would be ending up. I was expecting either success in my placement in San Francisco or death, but what I got was much worse. I was left here, with the zombies who suffered the risks of the procedure, the defectives. Some were in their right minds, but most suffered brain damage from early procedures or they just couldn’t take the surgery. All of us here have the same three pronged scar etched behind our ears, but the difference is mine is faked. When an invalid enters the resistance they get the mark, the mark of a heartless so we can blend in and infiltrate their society. We must abandon emotion and let cruelty and logic take its place creating a void. You do not have your freedom to fill that void so it becomes a shell. You have a new name, a new life and you are left to watch the emotionlessness of the zombies unfold. My shell is called Delaney Harper and she is an inmate at Abernathy house just waiting for her chance to run free.