Purple Plague (1000 words) - Writers Forum

gary_wagner · 06-07-2007, 07:56 AM

I always knew there was something different about me and the purple plague proved me right. I don’t remember what the scientific name for it is, but who cares – it’s not like there’s going to be a test later – the teachers are all dead. All I know is that people turned a horrible shade of purple and were dropping like flies all around me. I locked myself in my house after both my parents died within hours of each other in the same hospital room. That’s when things got completely insane.

You wouldn’t believe how fast six billion people can die. Word on the blogs was that it was a biological weapon gone berserk. It started with reports of a terrorist attack in Paris. Europe was dead in about a week. Two weeks later, most everyone else was dead. At least that’s as much as those of us who survived could figure out before the internet collapsed and the electricity went off. I stayed in the house about two weeks but I ventured out when I ran out of food

Even though I didn’t have much in my stomach, I threw up over and over again that first day out. Everywhere I went, there were swollen up purple dead people and there was nothing you could do to get away from the smell. Purple dogs, purple cats, dead purple everything – and about a hundred billion flies.

I was scared going into the first few stores, but it didn’t take long to realize that I was the only person alive and if I was going to stay that way, I needed that stuff and the dead purple people didn’t. I guess its stealing, but who is it I’m stealing from? Do dead people still own stuff? Same thing with the drugs, I walked into a couple of CVS pharmacies and carted out at least a ten year supply of Adderall. I’m not a druggie – I have a prescription for it. I’m not going to quit taking it now, especially since it seems to be the only thing that kept us few survivors alive.

Yep, amphetamines and hormones seemed to have kept us from turning purple and croaking like the rest of the world. Just being on Adderall doesn’t seem to have been enough. You have to have been on Adderall and going through puberty in order for the purple angel of death to pass you by. Before the internet died, about a hundred survivors managed to find a discussion forum on www.purpleplague.com. No one found another person alive that doesn’t share both of those things – Adderall and puberty. Well, there could be some tribe of naked pygmies out in the middle of the second butt crack from nowhere, but we’ll never know it.

The youngest survivor was eleven and the oldest was fifteen. Only eight were girls. As far as I know, there might only be eight girls left in the world, and one of them was in Carmel, right next to Indianapolis where I lived. What are the odds of that? I finally convinced Angie to give me her address just hours before the net crashed. I took my dad’s Harley, found a city map at Wal-Mart, and managed to locate her house. I took the bike because there were cars blocking every single road and the motorcycle is easier to get around them. All right, I admit I wanted her to see me climbing off that big hog like a man. Then, I went and dropped it on its side when I didn’t get the kickstand all the way down and couldn’t lift it back up again. So much for being a big man.

That might have kept me from getting shot. She was sitting by the window watching for me with her dad’s loaded twelve-gauge shotgun on her lap. I guess she still had some worries that I might actually be a perverted forty-year-old online sexual predator trying to find a young girl to bop. Nope, just a skinny fourteen-year-old dweeb that can’t even stand a fallen motorcycle upright. I wasn’t too intimidating because Angie let me in. Even though she’s only twelve, the fact that she is about two inches taller than me and the other fact that she still had that loaded shotgun must have given her enough confidence to trust me.

Angie and I have been on the road for three months now. We stuck with Dad’s Harley because we don’t have to carry much stuff with us – we can get anything we need at every city we pass through. We stay at empty hotels – separate rooms. She slugged me when I joked once about sharing a bed. I haven’t joked about it again. We haven’t found another person alive. We went to Omaha first - found her grandparents dead. It wasn’t a surprise but she still cried. I cried too even though I didn’t know them. I was embarrassed that I cried in front of her but she never made fun of me or anything.

Angie and I have been through a lot together so far and we haven’t talked about it, but as far as I’m concerned her and I will be together from here on out. I love her but I can’t tell her that yet – it might spoil things. I can hear my mom telling me its just puppy love and I’m too young to get serious yet and all that parent shit. I know we’re still really young and every single day I realize how much we don’t know yet, but as much as I loved and miss my Mom and Dad, their world is dead and Angie and I live in a different world. Maybe we’ll end up messing things up as much as their generation did, but maybe this is a chance for a new beginning and Angie and I can make a world that is better than the world that died. That’s the plan for now, anyway.

Xtlk 1 · 06-07-2007, 05:59 PM

Hmm not bad.

A little fast paced but that can be fixed. Just try and go slightly into more detail.

Other than that its seems fine. Good writing style.

gary_wagner · 06-08-2007, 08:50 AM

Thanks, Xtlk_1. It's fast paced because it is for a writing competition and there is a 1000 word limit on the submissions. I like the concept of the story, though, and will probably use this as the starting point to expand this into something where I can include many more details and slow it down a little. I'm thinking novella or I might even be able to stretch this into a novel.

I wanted to get some impressions on the concept and appeal of the story itself. End of the world, boy meets girl, Adam and Eve all over again has been done a lot but I hope with some of the twists here - the young age of the survivors (from 11 to 15), the fact that they all have ADHD, and that there are so few of them left may give a twist to this that sets it apart from hundreds of other end of the world stories. It presents some challenges in writing it in a way that stays somewhat believable and I need to keep the characters age appropriate, but I like a challenge.

Thanks for the comments.

PurpleDragoness · 06-08-2007, 10:32 AM

Well It very well done personaly a very fun place to type is in cityofif but please don't move over there if your already got a reputation over here.
I think it would be a great piece in a magazine since I'm still niggling on some of my magazines and drawings for it. Very good hope the competition isn't to difficuilt. nice job

gary_wagner · 06-08-2007, 01:55 PM

Thank you, PurpleDragoness. I haven't posted here in the fiction section for a long time so I don't really have a rep here. I was just hoping for some young writer's perspective on the believablility of the storyline and the character.

liv_ashe · 06-08-2007, 02:56 PM

I reall enjoyed it, and the fact there are purple people lying dead everywhere, makes me laugh a bit. is that an actual plague? i don think so, maybe its just my mind going berserk again, not enough sleep. If it is and I offended someone im so sorry.
So yeah it was really well written, although it was fast paced, I would really love to read more!!

gary_wagner · 06-08-2007, 04:07 PM

Thanks, liv_ashe. As far as I know there is no such thing as the purple plague. I crammed quite a bit of story into 1000 words. Now that I know some people like the concept and would like to see this expanded, I'll start working on it when I get a chance. I've got some planning and outlining to do before I start cranking out the words but I'll post some of it here when I do.

Beethoven · 06-09-2007, 12:18 AM

Sorry, but I could not get passed the second paragraph.

From what I have read (2 paragraphs), your story has already been done a billion times.

Foreman1984 · 06-09-2007, 05:47 AM

I found the opposite to Beethoven. Although i dont think this particular idea has been done a thousand times, almost with any work, its unlikely that the concept is totally original. For a short story its very good, i was originally going to say that it lacked a bit of detail, but this was explained by length. I certainly dont think its boring, but i think it'd be hard to keep attention for anything greatly longer and i perhaps personally wouldnt be interested in the story of 2 small children?

F84

gary_wagner · 06-09-2007, 06:09 AM

Thanks for trying, Beethoven. Yep - a billion times and people are still attracted to them like a pig to shit if they have a little different angle on them. Think about romance novels. The exact same story-line has been done about 10 billion times and more romance novels are sold than any other genre. Ain't that a crock? Repeating a theme that has been used a lot is not necessarily a bad thing. The challenge is to make the reader feel like they are reading it for the first time ever.

Thanks, Foreman1984. The age of the children might prove problematic when I go forward with this. I might have to advance their ages into older teens. I used pubescent teens because they would be even more clueless about survival how to take care of themselves. I want to stay with teens because I want them to get a great big bite of a reality sandwich and begin to understand why their parents did some of the things they did when they are out there in the world on their own and have to survive. I don't want to go beyond high-school age but a twelve and fourteen year old as main characters might be pretty hard to sustain for any length. I locked myself into those ages when I started this story but that's why we edit what we write - if something doesn't work, we get to change it. Isn't writing great?

Nefieslab · 06-09-2007, 02:52 PM

great story mate! too bad i've know where it comes from. The Stand. ever heard of it? i believe this is almost and exact copy of the basic storyline. sorry to burst your bubble if you haven't heard of it but that's the way it is. the only difference i can see is that only a certain number of teenagers are left alive and that it started in europe and not somewhere in the south of the US. sorry about that but you have to admit that its a good storyline!

too bad you may not have known that its taken. but good sotry telling. i'm sure you've made Mr King very happy! you know when a story is a succes when people start using the storyline. if you didn't know then i'm just informing.

gary_wagner · 06-09-2007, 08:47 PM

Thanks, Nefieslab. Yes, I've read The Stand. I've read most of King's books. I think he borrowed the idea of the stand from Dean Koontz "Strangers". Koontz probably borrowed it from someone else. Heinlein did this type of story before King and Koontz were born. So did Herbert, Bradbury, and Asimov. Do you think Stephen King made up the idea of the end of the world and a group of survivors remaining behind? King pissed me off so much with the ending of the Dark Tower series and that monstrosity - Cell that I'm not going to mimic him. No zombies and no evil guys that break out of prison to chase down the good survivors. No, I don't think King has anything to fear from me.

Like I said earlier, this concept has been written about before. So what? So have stories about wars, sea adventures, pirates, people crashing onto a deserted island and other popular plots. In fact, almost all stories and novels fall into only about 20 different storylines. The concepts are the same, the difference is in the twists, characterizations, and details. That's all we do as writers - we don't create words, we just arrange them differently.