It’s In The Water: a not bottled story by: GF Willmetts (story).
I doubt if anyone ever thought terrorists would sink so low. I mean, many of them come from Arab stock and know the importance of never to poison the water hole. That was until someone pointed out to me in old Arab wars, the kind made famous by ‘Lawrence Of Arabia’, that they would poison an oasis to prevent their enemies drinking from it by throwing salt into it. In other words, it wasn’t outside of their mindset. Nor was it salt but an effective poison that they had introduced into the water supply. You just couldn’t drink it without boiling out the salt first of all. This was far worse and one thing was certain, they weren’t going to be coming over here to take over our country, they saw genocide as the means to win quickly and efficiently. They weren’t going to care what happened to our country afterwards.
So here we are then. A terrorist group had poisoned our water supply and even told us about it which seemed very generous of them. A few thousand had died but we could work to save the rest of our population. How nice of them to tell us. Our scientists were racing to find a cure as indeed were our allies. It certainly wasn’t salt. We were the test subjects. If they took us out, then they would be the next targets. This made any other attacks minor skirmishes in comparison.
The media broadcast first announced that we shouldn’t drink any tap water leaving us all gasping and wondering what could we drink. Some turned to alcohol, naturally reasoning that they couldn’t possibly have contaminated the water in that. It also left a lot of people drunk and when they woke, what did they do? Drink some water. Tap water! They forgot. Big mistake. More deaths. That’s when it was publicly announced that the poison was in the reservoirs and it wasn’t being filtered out by the time it reached the taps. We were then advised to stick with bottled water as there wasn’t many other options. After all, it had to have been bottled before the poisoning and we couldn’t not drink anything. There wasn’t enough bottled water in the shops and an emergency order had free bottled water delivered everywhere. We weren’t dying of thirst but everyone took a swig when the safe water arrived.
Another big mistake. What was the best way to ensure we all drank from the same supply across the country? After all, reservoirs weren’t connected. We had literally walked into our own tight corner.
Everyone else in the cafeteria were dead around me. I’d just thrown up but I was pretty sure the poison was in me. Accumulative build-up for all the good knowing that would do me. I couldn’t feel my feet and it was creeping around my body. Who could I call? The rest of population had to be dead or like me…dying. All I could do was scribble the note. ‘It’s in the water….’
My hands gave up before I could write ‘bottle’.
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