Aftermath

I wake up, and I am alone. Sleep is a private thing, by nature. As surely as we can press another’s hand in ours at the moment of our death, hear familiar whispers of “It’s okay” and “Just go now” fluttering through our minds, only to have that snatched away so we might face what comes after completely isolated from all we have known before – we sleep alone. Waking alone... that is something different.

I go about the regular motions of dawn. I go to the bathroom, and there is still water held and pressurised in the pipes. I turn on my computer, a desk lamp. I let the dogs out. I read. I write. xxxxx isn’t up yet. She sleeps in sometimes.

I pause over a cup of tea and consider the dead silence of the morning. No lawnmowers or leaf blowers or rage of morning traffic from down the hill. A rare treat. I make use of the silence to write more.

The power goes out. I go to flick the mains switch. Nothing. I flick the second one, outside. Still nothing. Winter is coming. These things happen. Power cuts are common this time of year. I pull up a curtain, lie down on my bed, read. I lie there for a while, thinking.

I get lunch. xxxxx still isn’t up. I peek into her room, and she’s dead to the world. Days like these happen, once in a moon or two. There’s no point in waking her. Power’s out, water’s out too, by now. Back to reading, Bringing in the dogs, a supper of bread and avocado, and as daylight dies, falling asleep.

I wake up in the middle of the night, dimly aware that something isn’t quite right. The power is still out. It’s still so quiet. I can’t get back to sleep, so I stare at the moon, thinking. Eventually, an hour or so later, I drift back, floating there until dawn. I wake up. Still no sign of xxxx, or electricity, or water. I let the dogs out. I go to check on her, tiptoeing over to her bedside.

My heart skips. She’s not breathing. I check her pulse to be sure. Her skin is stiff and cold. I draw my hand away and puzzle over this for a moment. What now? I reach for the phone, but the line is dead. No tone, no nothing. I check my cellphone. No signal. A thought enters my head: an impossible thought, but I have to be sure.

I go to the cottage out back. I knock on the doors. No answer. I peer through the windows. The family are just lying there, deaf and blind. Bodies.

Curious. Ghoulish, I think to myself calmly. But I need to know more. I need certainty.

The battery in the electric gate still has juice, so it opens with no trouble. I close the gate behind me, just in case. I briefly consider breaking into a neighbour’s house, but I decide against it. I walk downhill, towards one of The City’s arteries. Dogs are baying mournfully. I see no one on the streets, but I make an intentional detour along one of the greener routes.

There are bodies in the park. Homeless who have curled up on the benches, dying in their sleep. Bodies. Just bodies, still and serene, as natural as anything beneath the swaying green trees.

xxxxxxxxxx Avenue is empty. No deadlock of traffic, no wink of red and green lights, no rush of a lone car off to somewhere better. The City has died. Am I the only one left? I consider shouting, but decide against it. I’ll find out eventually. I have seen enough to know that everything has changed. The world I knew, shed and coiled in the corner, skin stretched over air, playing at life.

The dogs are baying.

On my way back home, I climb over fences and break windows. I can’t stop thinking about the pets. There are more houses in this city than I could visit in a week, and most of them have dogs, cats, hamsters, snakes – pets. So many pets. It was amusing when the city was alive. We needed animals. They were our companions, our protectors and our amusements. But they didn’t need us, not until we made sure we took something they needed – freedom and food – and dolled it out to them for their loyalty. It wasn’t wholly wrong, I don’t think. But standing here in this dead city, listening to the dogs howl... it was flawed. So little do we consider that which may outlive us.

Dobermans and Dalmatians are running through the streets. Some growl at one another. Others bite. I leave their disputes up to them, as I have other problems. As I open each gate and break open the windows and doors, I make a pilgrimage to the beds in every house. Just to make sure. With each I grow more certain. I am the only one who is still awake, and still breathing.

I return to my own home, though I do not want to. I think of the bodies there, and how they will slowly decay if I leave them. But I don’t want to move them. I want to cover them in sheets; endless sheets so that I never have to look at them like that. I want to leave, but I can’t. I have my own pets to look after, and they are comfortable here. And the bodies are everywhere.

We must make a heaven, my ears ring, a heaven of our own earth, no matter what that means.

So while things are still strange and liminal, paper-thin between my old life and my new, I wrap up xxxxxx in her bedsheets and drag her down the stairs, her face hidden in linens I have borrowed from the neighbours. I put her in the car. I break open the cottage doors and get to the other bodies, and put them in the car, too, in grand laundry sheets. I drive them far away, deliberately taking them to a part of the city I do not know and I never go to. I find somewhere to park the car, and I leave them there. I can’t offer anything more. This whole damn place will be rotting, soon enough.

I steal a car from another dead sleeper, letting its lovebirds fly free into its garden before I do so. I drive past a bakery, smash its window and stock up on as much bread as I can. When I get home, I feed the dogs. I lock up the cats for the night, and I sit outside, staring at the moon, thinking of everything that needs to be done.

Over the next few weeks I canvas the neighbourhood, going house to house to free the starving animals, piling up the bodies to dump them as far away from my house as possible. I don’t want the smell. I don’t want the reminder of dead things in my new world. As the days go on, I lost my terrestrial appearance. I cover my skin completely to better deal with the bodies and dogs who don’t want me around. I wear fabric over my nose, goggles over my eyes to stop them stinging at the acrid touch of decay. I feel absurd. Once I have cleared several blocks I stop moving dead things. Three weeks. After three weeks, the pets I have not visited have joined their masters. My grim work is as complete as it will ever be.

So I stop looking behind, and I plan ahead. Winter is coming. It’s almost normal. I visit the grocer’s for firewood. I stock up on pet food. I get enough blankets to surround the house entirely. I visit the supermarket – many, actually, and pile as much food as I can into a clean moving van. The houses surrounding my own have become warehouses. The City had millions living in and around it. There was a tin can for each of those people. On those alone, I could eat for years.

Water is a different issue. I know that eventually without our pumps and dams it will run dry. So I stock up on truckloads of it. All throughout the Winter I go out, seeing the occasional dog or cat staring at me oddly, as I am wrapped up in my protective bandages to keep out the smell.

By the end of it, I’m not so worried anymore. I can think about other things. I can focus on the present.

I move out just about everything we used to own. Why keep it? I can walk into any store in the city and take what I want, and I do. Blown glass orbs, books, furniture, a compound bow, building materials, plants – small pleasures. There are a lot of things I don’t have to work for any more, and a lot of things I do.

I spend months wrapped inside my home, reading books by daylight, and then by candlelight. I adore the silence. I adore the solitude. There is no rush. There is no chaotic city beat. I don’t need to go anywhere, or do anything. I am a beetle living in the soft flesh of a corpse. I am on a continent’s worth of human effort, barely scraping its surface with my daily needs.

How long does it take for the smell to die? Not long. A year or two at most. I spend much of that time reading and biding my time, tending the garden, loving my animals. Making a home – not an ideal home, as one might imagine themselves in should they have the choice of any one in a whole world, but my home, none-the-less. There are shelves from floor to ceiling filled with books. I have taken the bars off the windows, built a greenhouse, filled rooms with paper lined with maps and sketches. I am alone. Some evenings I walk up to the top of the hill and camp beneath the water tower, watching the darkness below and thrilling at every inch of it.

I am alone.

I dress up fancy every day, just for myself.

I write about my Sixth World every day, just for us.

I learn things I don’t need to, because I want to.

And I sleep. I sleep, because I am alone.

It’s a little sadder when it happens a second time. My pets are long dead. One by one my feeble veterinary skills failed them, and they passed on. I dug actual graves this time. I appreciated the deaths more, because they were not accompanied by so much excess.

But then when I am driven to an abstract, friend to only plants and a few rare insects in my garden, they are taken away, too. I awake to wilting, skeletal trees. To chitin in glass chambers, statuesque in repose. The last of the world is dying. I survive. I watch as the grass and leaves turn to dust over the seasons. Everything is left barren and grey. Tinned food and pasta. Cereal and bottled water. The softness has gone out of the world.

Enduring this, I read. Myself and my books are the last living things in The City. It is so calm – but I grow tired of calm. I want an adventure.

I load up a car with books and preserves, and head east to the coast. Croplands and grasslands and jungles have burnt away to raw desert. Sand and stone. I appreciate the beaches. With a full backpack, I walk the coast, pillaging for books and food as I need them.

When my vacation is done, I return to my gaping hollow sanctuary. I sit. I while away the days. It is so infuriatingly silent, but still – still after all this, life remains. It’s so curious, but here, right at the end, only the machines have been left alive. We lie dormant and need only fuel to pass the time, our functions stripped bare. Almost any machine I know of, when left without a living being to guide it, will stare blankly and refrain from operating. We are set in motion by the living. That is our function.

I write. It is all I have left to me. Once everything and everyone is stripped away, what more can I do but write? It is what the books demand, after the final apocalypse. I write, because that is my function.

And last, when they crumble to dust, I sleep. Stories are the final things to leave a devastated world. My ending is with theirs – how to put it? They are my species. We are a social race. Without them, I too shall die.