Ah finally, weekend. thumbs up if your favorite day is Saturday

Alicia couldn’t see anything, just spurts of sand and ragged cloth. Harsh gasping filled her ears, and a horrible smell-like decay, like disease-filled her nostrils. She could distantly hear Tom yelling, but his shouts swiftly became fainter as she was dragged further away. She struggled, kicked, and finally got away from her attacker, whirling around to face him.

And whirled around again to throw up.

A thin, sunburnt thing was standing there, its red eyes glaring at her from its blue face. Long, dirty yellow fingernails, stained with blood, stretched out from blue hands covered in blisters and sores. Long, torn strips of cloth that might once have been clothes hung on its frame, early shielding it from the elements. The face, arms, and legs were lined with scratches from sand blowing in the night gales.

But the worst part was the creature’s mouth. It hung wide open, a few yellow teeth glimmering dully in the sunlight. Foam covered the creatures cheeks and chin, and more dribbled out of the mouth onto the ground.

As Alicia slowly turned around again, the creature started hacking, a hoarse, horrible cough that threw spit and blood out of the creatures mouth and onto the sand around it. As Alicia turned to empty her stomach again, she knew what this must be. This was a Choker, one of the many cursed souls inflicted with Typhoon Fever and thrown out into the Inferno, to die far away from healthy civilization. She turned and looked at the creature, not with hate or disgust, but with pity and love.

And with pity and love came the realization that the pitied and loved creature was no longer standing there, but lying on the ground with smoke coming out of its chest.

Alicia turned yet again to see Tom standing there, a smoking blaster in his hand. Alicia gasped.

“Why Tom? Why? It wasn’t his fault. He knows that the more people he infects, the more he increases his likelihood of becoming healthy again.”

Tom glared at her.

“You got a death wish? You have that attitude out here in the Inferno, you’ll be dead within two hours. It’s kill or be killed, do or die. These people are fires too big to be out with water. You fight fire with water here, it’ll evaporate and you’ll be dead. Today, in this world, we need to be a bigger fire. Otherwise we get burned.”

Filled with hopelessness and the feeling that that wasn’t the way things should be, Alicia followed Tom, through the gales and was soon swallowed up by the mountains of sand.