The coughing had seemed harmless at first, just like the lemur. Innocent at the first glance, until it revealed its inner horrors. Marley's parents had treated it by drinking cold medicine, and when that did not work they switched to pain medications in the hopes that they could wait it out. It did not work; nothing worked.
The coughing progressed to hacking progressed to choking, and then there was silence. It was not the comforting silence of a winter night, nor was it the insect-interrupted silence of a summer night. No, it was a dead silence. The silence reached his father first, closing his throat and then his eyes. Marley found him lying face down with blood leaking from his lips. Then it found his mother, taking her from him mid-laugh. Laughter was not the best medicine, after all.
They were among the first to go, so the whole neighborhood was still alive to mourn them. They mourned the life that they could have had, and the loss of their seven-year-old son's childhood innocence. Then Universal Life Church took him in, along with several other children whose parents who had mysteriously lost their voices and breath. Nobody made the connection that it could be the new strain of the Spanish Flu that had already taken down every other continent. Every sickness always struck the East Coast first, so illness on the West Coast had to be a coincidence.
But 'coincidence' was a word invented for people who disagreed with reality. Marley had hated the word when people used it to describe his parents' passing; their death was not a coincidence, it was a sign. Of course, he had not known that. He simply wanted their deaths to have more importance than a simple 'coincidence.' The other newly orphaned children agreed with him, though they did not live long enough to explain the horrific reality of the word 'coincidence' to any adults. Their parents had been contagious, after all, and sickness always passed to relatives first.
By the time the Flu had come into full effect, the Universal Life Church had already given up on fighting it. Instead, they fought the misery that it brought. Because laughter was the best medicine, right? They put on plays for the survivors, and every actress and actor was eager to memorize lines rather than remaining mesmerized in the hollowness in their loved one's last gaze.
It did not work, of course. The actors died, one by one. The remaining members of the Church moved on to other lessons, always teaching optimism as a cure, even if laughter did not work. The Priestess focused on Marley as the sole surviving child of the Church, and she made it her mission to make Marley happy despite the chaos that had come to dominate the world. When nothing worked, the Priestess resorted to bringing him to the local insane asylum. There, she could show him that there were worse fates than dying from the Flu.
His first steps into that horrible institution brought screams to his ears and the smell of black sulfuric bile to his nose. Every bed was equipped with straps to hold its occupant down, preventing escape and self-mutilation. Marley saw a man break free of the strap holding his head down as they walked down the corridor, then he saw the man snap his own neck with a single twist. He kept talking afterwards, as if the connection to his spinal cord had no impact on his ability to speak. The patients only ever spoke gibberish when they did speak. Most of the time, however, they just screamed, growled, or screeched like a banshee. The banshee screech was a crowd favorite, or at least among the possessed it was.
The Priestess placed her hands on his cheeks, turning his wide eyes away from the man's broken neck. She smiled. "Don't you see? There are worse things than the Flu. These poor people are trapped within their minds as demons control their bodies. They cannot die and escape the torture, as your parents did. This asylum is proof that the Flu is not the End. If our time on this holy ground were complete, there would be a sign."
Marley turned back to the broken-necked man. If demon possessions and a pandemic were not a clear sign that mankind's time on Earth was complete, he did not know what was. What sign were they supposed to look for? Where were the angels that lit the way for the people of ancient times?