Nobody
I lie next to Annie while she quietly dies. Her skin grows hotter and hotter beneath my fingers as the fever rages through her. A cool autumn breeze tosses leaves through the broken window, scattering them across Annie’s body. Her struggle to breathe is the only noise in the room, but from outside, the wind whistles and drops more leaves onto us. My hand quivers with effort as I brush a leaf away. Not much time left for me, now, but still too much time. More than Annie. I can feel the hunger in the pit of my stomach so viscerally that it is starting to overpower my common sense.
I force myself to turn to Annie and watch as her chest heaves and sweat rolls off her forehead. Her eyes are glazed and unfocused, her lips glossy, her mind no doubt fever-eaten and delirious. I have never been more jealous of her. She was jealous of me, at first, but not after we both realized what it meant for me to be immune. It meant a sort of unwanted immortality. Extended mortality, at least. A longer life than the rest of the human race.
What little is left of Annie’s hair is plastered to her skin, pale strawberry blonde clashing with the dark bruises that marked the disease. Nobody bothered to name it. By the time anyone knew it was happening, everyone was sick, and why bother naming something if no one will come afterward to learn that name? Everyone else was sick together, dying together, ending the world together. I’ll just be a little late.
Annie has been growing exponentially weaker these past few days, and I know somewhere deep inside that these are her final moments. I am too weak to pay her my respects properly and she is too far gone to hear them anyway, but even so, I whisper my love in her ear. Her only response is another ragged breath.
I look away. The cabin around us is bare and our bed is a mattress on the floor, but it’s enough for two dying women. The world outside the broken window is red and gray from the bombs, but it will move on without us in time. Everything will.
With a final wheeze, Annie’s eyes flutter shut for the last time. Her hand drops from mine. The room is quiet and still. In the space of a moment, the world’s population has been cut in half. The human race has gone from “we” to “I.” I lie still for a moment, half-hoping she will open her eyes again, but I know she won’t. Annie had died long before her body finally expired.
My head spins as I stand and my vision goes black for a second. A good sign. Annie and I had always wanted to go together, but this was hardly the original plan. We were supposed to be old women together, still hand and hand in bed, but not starving or feverish. Just a peaceful sort of drifting.
I want to drift.
Instead, I leave our cabin and stand in the doorway. A deer, bold in the way all animals have been since the war, nibbles at a berry bush. My mouth waters, but I know the berries are just as poisoned as the deer, and it will only hurt more to eat them. I would rather not spend my last moments contorted in agony. Even without the threat of the plague, everything in this world is dangerous now. After the war, it was adapt or die, and we humans couldn’t keep up.
The deer steps close and bleats softly at me. To my tired ears, that bleat is a eulogy for humanity. High above, the ash clouds part to reveal the uncaring moon. The deer kneels beside me. Wind ruffles its irradiated fur.
I sit with the deer.
I wait.
