Silence. That’s all he heard. Ethan’s world closed in on him. The noise in the room was muted as he heard the beating of his racing heart. His fingers had grown numb and his mouth was dry as a dessert. His legs began to shake. His entire body had frozen as reality set in.

Her skin turned charcoal-grey and flaked off her body. His mother’s eyes were still bloodshot and the pupils had rolled to the top of her eye as if she was staring at the ceiling. Her hair had fallen off her head and scattered all over her body. He grabbed her hand and shook it violently, praying she would wake up.

“No, no, no... Please, please, please, please...” he pleaded. “Please wake up, mom.”

Ethan held to his mother so tightly that his nails dug into her skin thinking that if his voice could not wake her, perhaps pain might. He buried his head in her arm. Now, he couldn’t hold the tears back.

“Please, God. Please, ple-e-e-ase...” His words were lost in his sobs. A steady stream of tears ran down his face and dripped onto the sheets of the white hospital bed. Wails of grief painfully echoed through the hallways in the hospital.

He tightened his grip further. I’m not letting you go until you wake up, mom! Ethan thought. Eventually, his wails ceased and his body shook intermittently as he sobbed. His sniffles were the only sound left.

A bald man knelt down next to Ethan. “It’s time to go, Ethan. She’s not coming back.”

He lifted his forehead from his mother’s arms and met the man’s gaze. Ethan’s eyes were bloodshot from the tears, and his face was puffed up and red like a tomato. His hands quaked as he finally let his mother go. The nurses said something to him, but he couldn’t process any of it. He buckled to his knees, his shoulders slumped and his head dropped like the life had been sucked out of him.

“No,” he replied in a hushed voice.

“Ethan,” protested the man.

“I said No!”

He wished the earth would swallow him up and grant him the same fate as his mother, only it didn’t. He still had a purpose to fulfill before his time was up. The bioweapon. She was one of the thousands of casualties when a bio-bomb was dropped on the city she was in. It felt as if his very soul left with his mother and all that was left was a void. A void that could only be filled by vengeance.

The sixteen-year-old boy stared one more time at his mother. This time, he forced himself to absorb every detail. Every burn, every scar, every flaking skin, and every piece of rotting flesh he could see. He took it all in because he knew that if he ever wanted vengeance for his mother, he needed to remember this scene clear as day for the rest of his life.

I will not die, Ethan swore, until I avenge her by wiping every bio-weapon off the face of this earth.