FFOct4 - Flash Fiction 1

Just a ten minute bus ride. My father's sitting in one of the handicapped seats. Handicapped meaning you're physically unable to stand, you're old, or you're pregnant. He doesn't look old, but he feels it, so he sits down. The rest of the bus is full. I stand by the window behind the last row of handicapped seats.

I plug my headphones into my 4-year-old iPod Nano--I don't even remember what generation it is. Whatever generation, it's not the new one, so it's old and has some sort of unfixable issue, or so says the lady that I took my iPod to when their storefront falsely advertised "REPLACE. UNLOCK. REPAIR. APPLE PRODUCT." I should have known that "APPLE PRODUCT" meant the one: iPhone. It's all the rage in Thailand these days. Or the world in general.

I'm listening to a track that played during an apocalypse film I watched earlier in the year. It starts off with slow breathing and I'm staring out into the busy streets of Taipei. People are walking and driving and riding and running. It's about four o'clock, so traffic is starting to get a little heavy, but the buses have their own lanes, so the traveling is smooth on our part.

We stop and a foreigner walks onto the bus, looking at home in a black T-shirt, khaki trousers, and dirty-white sneakers. He was young--probably between the age of 20 and 28. I've gotten worse at determining age. He looks like a mix between Daniel Radcliffe and Ben--whom I met in Thailand and is currently a Christian missionary. I couldn't tell what his nationality was. I didn't care.

I stare back out into traffic. The drums are starting to sound faster, and the music louder--the climax of the first scene of the movie was coming soon. I'm starting to see people as little plague bombs. One wrong circumstance, and an outbreak is going to occur. And it's going to occur here, right in front of my eyes.

I don't want to think about it anymore, so I stare at the foreigner's black backpack for a while before I registered the Canadian flag sewn onto it. The song stops--I press the repeat button. The breathing starts again, the bus stops, and I walk off in the direction of my aunt's apartment, feeling like I'm the only one in Taipei who can defeat the virus resting dormant in the citizens' bloodstreams. Under the right circumstances, the viruses will activate. The young Canadian will turn and he'll have the strongest thirst for blood. My father will be slow and an emotional threat.

Which one would I shoot first?