Blue Injection Of Joy [Fiction]

Eureka!

Cyril could only scream the word in his mind, his wrinkled fingers moving as fast as they could to pour the pale blue liquid into a syringe.

His face was stoic—sunken eyes gleaming under a shriveled skin that sagged like melted wax, pooling around his jaw area. His lips were chapped with open sores at the corners.

He was better looking than the people staggering on the dusty road of the deserted street where his apartment slash laboratory was located.

They trudged with agonising efforts, their groans like a haunting harmony that dissolved into the dense, foggy atmosphere. The sounds were not strange in the city of Isletyon.

The once bustling city was now a wasteland where humans appear like the living dead with no emotion. Humans had evolved to the point where time slipped by and barely much was achieved in every twenty-four hours. The factories still emitted black smoke that corrupted the air and made it foggier.

People moved with effort, skins paled and shrivelled, and dotted with painful sores all over. Sores that had no cure. Depression was the fastest killer.

But not for Cyril, a lab technician who found a way around the painful sores. He injected himself with a shot of a sparkling yellow liquid and sighed with relief.

He tried to crack a smile. He was close….close to a cure that would change his world. Perhaps his name would be noted in history as the man who saved humanity in 3044—the millennium of misery.

A knock on the door jolted him, making him clench his teeth. He nodded to himself and banged his table twice. A frail man or more like a boy cracked the door open and staggered in.

His round, bloodshot eyes slowly scanned the cramped apartment where a bed stood at a corner and the rest of the space was cluttered with lab equipment.

Cyril moved towards him with a steadiness uncommon in that city. The boy's eyes widened in surprise. He tried to speak but only drool spilled out.

Cyril held his shoulder and pushed the syringe with the blue liquid inside his bicep. The boy squeezed his eyes shut for a long moment only to open them slowly as his thin face broke into a smile.

“It'sss…ss…workingg,” he wheezed, displaying yellowish teeth that had not been cleaned for a long time. “I feel….happy…fineee.”

Cyril grabbed another syringe and gave himself a shot. A few minutes later, these two young men were laughing uncontrollably.

They made jokes about each other. Their words slightly slurred but clear enough. They moved, trying to remember how to dance in celebration.

Cyril noted down in his pad: EXPERIMENT SUCCESSFUL.

With his newfound energy, he prepared to visit the government office with the boy to report his breakthrough when their legs gave way and they crumpled to the floor. They were out of breath, gasping. Their bodies seemed to shut down, returning to its former shrivelled state.

Cyril screamed in anger but the sound bounced around in his mind, his lips firmly closed. His injection of joy lasted only two hours.

He watched with dismay as the boy fell asleep on his cold floor. As his eyelids drooped, his body going into a sleepy mood, he was determined to find a permanent cure for the zombie virus that plagued their city.

I hope you enjoyed reading this short dsytopian story inspired by Freewrite #dailyprompt phrase "injection of joy"". I'm not a fan of zombie stories but decided to give this a try.

Thank you for visiting my blog.

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