I like this title better.
The damned Plague. The damned Plague.
When there were more of us — the ones who understand what’s really happening — we’d try to figure out just what went wrong. And that wasn’t easy to do! It’s ironic: the same rules we had to use to keep the Plague away wouldn’t let us get together to fight the real danger. I bet the mouthies laugh like sharks about that.
By the time enough people figured out what was happening, it was too late. The mouthies were here, burrowing in and biding their time. And you couldn’t tell one by looking, back then. They kept their faces covered, just like everybody else. The Plague wasn’t safe for them, either, just like it wasn’t for us.
Except it wasn’t the same, was it?
The line between “crazed conspiracy theorist” and “desperate hero of a cosmic horror story who knows too much” is really *terribly* thin, after all.
As far as I can tell, the only difference is whether they are objectively correct or not, and it’s so hard to distinguish objective truth sometimes.
You could go an entire story and still not know which one the protagonist was at the end.