It took only 3 months before there weren’t enough nurses or doctors left to staff the hospitals. In Two more months, countries’ governments were collapsing into anarchy one after another, and some time after that, all that was left was silence. I stopped keeping track after that. The last date I remember is July 26th 2023. As I stood over the bed, gripping a sweaty hand as the dead man below me lay whimpering in pools of sweat and vomit, I read the calendar pinned to his wall.
“K-Khan…”
July 26th 2023
“It’s ok. It’s ok. Just keep breathing” I had tried to be comforting. Tried to sound brave, assured, but in the end my words came out devoid of any warmth.
“Please” My father managed to croak out “It hur-”
“Shut the fuck up shut the fuck up right now I cant!” I wanted to bash my head against a wall until I couldn’t move, scream and wail until my throat could make no more sound, cry until I fell to dehydration.
The cruel indifference of the universe is a hell of a thing, you can think you have gone through rock bottom, been hurt any way you can, and it will break you. It will destroy you and rejoice in your despair.
And then the universe goes on.
“Listen to me. Please. You need to help me son, i-it hurts, you need to make it stop.”
You could have your entire life and everything you love reduced to nothing.
“I Can’t, I just Can’t” My words trailed off
The sun still rises.
“Ple- Please!” He raised his voice in a groan, then began shallowly gasping. The intense emotions had given away to numbness, and my cries silenced.
Life is created.
“I love you” He didn’t hear me, I could see it in his eyes. Too much pain to be aware.
Life is destroyed.
Bang.
The universe goes on.
When the ringing stopped, in the absence of the moans of pain, and my hopeless cries, that is when the silence became the only thing I could think about. I don’t know how long I sat there, with the gun in my hand, waiting to muster up the courage to off myself. All I know is I did not move until the thirst and hunger combined with the smell of rot was enough to make me keel over.
Imagine that, too depressed about my inevitable demise to even bother killing myself.
I cremated my father in our furnace that night.
Awaiting my fate,
a walking corpse myself.
As the days went on though, I didn’t get sick. The disease I had watched turn my father into a shell of his former self, barely clinging onto life, had left me untouched.
What a sick joke.
Stuck to live in a dead, empty world.
The nights I could sleep, I would have the same dream. I am in a large empty white void, it’s quiet, so quiet that I can hear ringing in my ears. Absent of all sound. The ringing gets louder and louder until I hold my head and collapse to the floor. My ears bleed. I scream but no words come out. The pain is so intense it consumes my entire senses, then I wake up. Silence. I would spend my days behind walls and boarded windows. With the food we had stocked before shutting ourselves inside. I don’t know how long I spent there but at some point I started running out of food. My mind was ready to call it quits, to allow myself to starve or blow my brains out, but something in me fought. That innate instinct in all humans that causes us to want to survive against all odds. I had to go on.
Sunlight burned my tired eyes. The air nipped at my exposed ears. I guessed it was late October. Three months I had been inside. In silence. Losing my mind and sense of self. Now that I could feel it, I was losing my mind for other reasons. The cosmic horror and dread of the unknown hit me harder than the fresh air and chirps of birds.
I stood in the doorway. I’m not ready. Not ready for the 1000s of unimaginable retched fates that could await me, but I wasn’t given a choice. My feet are through the door. Into the abyss.
Justine was my first love.
Justine who I had 3rd period math with in 10th grade.
Justine who had a smile that could cure any bad day.
Justine who had eyes like oceans that held nothing but unwavering kindness and safety, the likes of which I had never known.
Justine who I fell for at first glance, forever lost in those rolling waves of belonging.
Justine who used to look at me like there was no one else in the world, but us.
Justine, who had no headstone, burned in a mass grave to control the spread like so many others.
Justine, who’s now just dust, will die with me. A soul so special it should have been commemorated for generations.
Justine, who’s face I’m beginning to forget.
I did not head for town.
Even if I could bring myself to get past the overwhelming loneliness of vast vacant streets and skyscrapers like monuments dedicated to our hubris..
We had done everything in our power to make our lives as easy to live as possible, we thought we were gods able to beat the standard confines of all other life, that we were special, but it’s an unforgiving world, and nature had the last laugh.
Besides, any food would be long gone by now. So I made my way into the woods.
Tall grass and weeds had overtaken our lawn. The sprawling greenery that had sprung out around the bones of long empty houses seemed alien.
A parasite driven by a hivemind, consuming everything around it.
Until all that is left is a vast green body stretching to the ends of the earth.
I walked on.
My whole life I had feared failure, I always had something to prove to someone.
Failing ment making myself vulnerable, showing that I have flaws, weaknesses.
Failing meant something very different now. Failing was the difference between life and death.
For 4 days, I failed to get any food.
Most of the game I saw was too large for the 9mm and I missed any squirrels or rabbits.
My whole life, I thought I feared failure.
I did not know true failure until those 4 days in my first autumn.
The gut wrenching feeling that my own fate was sealed, and there was no one to blame but me.
By the fifth day any ounce of hope I held had been beaten out of me.
I sat on my front porch, staring at the cold lonely world.
Born again just to die, submitting to my fate, when the strangest thing happened.
Out of the corner of my eye, I caught a small movement.
Before panic could set in I realized what I was looking at and held my breath
In front of me on my porch, previously hidden by the unkempt lawn, hopped a rabbit.
I watched as it stopped its grazing to stand still and look up at me with curiosity.
As I met its eyes, I caught the slightest glimmer of bright blue.
On the fifth day, I was fed.
My whole life I thought I was afraid of failure, I didn’t even know what failure was, but
I didn’t know success until that 5th day of my first autumn, and I could dream in peace.
With the morning sun at my back, I trekked through the snow checking my snares along the small trap line I had cut. I had started making snares with the wire from a piano I found rummaging through a neighbor’s house. Meant I wouldn’t waste bullets and could passively sustain myself. My dad had shown me how to trap.
When mom died, it was what brought us together. A united front against all the shit life had to throw at us.
A team.
But that was then.
I’m all I have now.
By my estimates, I had gone three years without seeing anyone. The threat of another human being had left my mind. I had taken down the boards from the windows. Let down my guard.
One late night, I awoke to the sound of movement outside my window coming from my smoke shed.
Fuck
A racoon, I told myself, It’s a racoon trying to get at your food.
As I got up to check, my chest tightened and I froze.
A racoon, just a racoon.
But what if it wasn’t.
It was then I knew I had not overcome my fear of this unknown world I was faced with, I just forgot.
I allowed myself to be distracted by my own survival, living in blissful ignorance, but it was all back now.
All weighing down on me with the pressure of a million oceans.
Just a fucking racoon.
Terror consumed my every thought.
Crouching, walking as silently as I possibly could.
Next to the shed, shrouded in darkness, was a figure.
I leaned in to focus
One step
Snap
Fuck
It jolted upright
BANG BANG
BANG
Ringing filled my ears to replace the white noise that had been drowned out in the chaos of the moment.
Fueled by adrenaline, fixated on the figure who had quickly fallen to the ground.
I stood over it.
The ringing is all I can hear.
In the pale moonlight, the sight below me is illuminated, and I see the face of a man no older than me. Expression frozen, no light behind his eyes.
His arms lie limp.
Empty and lazily ragdolled above his head on the ground where he fell.
I collapsed and began to weep.
My ears are bleeding,
Lost in the Abyss,
Please make the ringing stop.
My dreams weren’t safe anymore.
Every night, I was back in that vast empty void.
The dream has changed now, when I drop to my knees in pain, instead of waking, the ground gives way and I sink in an endless sea of ash. The ringing is mixed with a ghostly wailing I can barely discern. Billions of lost souls all screaming at once my body is consumed by the mountains of dust. Then I am pulled away back to my world by a jolt at the last minute.
Confusion turns to sadness.
Why can I not be with them?
Trekking through the snow, on my way through the forest i had come to know so well, like a big cat stuck in a zoo even outside the prison.
The restless nights have taken their toll.
I am done, I have been done since the beginning, It just couldn’t sink in.
A wave of nausea whips through me and suddenly I am on the ground.
I wriggle and struggle to lift myself, like an injured animal in a trap.
I fight,
with every breath I fight,
There is no more air.
On my back paralyzed, gazing around at the white flurry surrounding me, my eyes have been taken.
The forest is silent with the exception of the drone of howling wind.
The deafening wind continued to pelt my motionless form, screeching at me from all directions until all I could hear was ringing.
My vision grew dark and my breath remained as shallow gasps.
The ringing was consuming everything.
Everything.
In my final viewing of the barren land I leave behind, barely conscious, I notice a fork in the trees.
A path that had punched through the dense walls of forest that had never been there before.
Somehow, I stood.
The wind pushing with the might of all of nature against me,
I pushed back.
Limping,
I enter the awaiting gateway.
As I venture further,
The storm finds calm.
I am met with a clearing that contains a creek, crystal water reflecting the blue sky into my face.
The storm whispers away, the sound of rushing water fills my ear drums.
I had become entranced in the bubbling and splashing. Lost in a daze.
When suddenly I was disturbed, a noise had pierced through the rhythmic sounds of the stream.
My head whipped in the direction the sound had rung without a thought, and my eyes met the gaze of a woman.
She was staring at me, disbelief stricken across her face.
I met her eyes, those eyes that put the intense glimmering blue of the creek to shame. They stayed locked with mine, paying no attention to the snapped twig beneath her feet.
A noise broke through again, weak and stuttering like a broken radio, but this one I could hear clearer than anything I ever had.
I was all I had,
until her eyes met mine.