haunt
bastille dressed up as zombies and i got wine-drunk and this is the resulting prose piece. i have nothing further to say
- - -
“See you…”
The words slip out unexpectedly, and the man stops dead in his tracks. It’s been a long time, too long since he heard an open-ended farewell like this. There’s just not room for such things in the world anymore, not now.
The sun is long gone, leaving the last traces of light to spill over the horizon. The fiery colors of the sunset have vanished, leaving the sky to fade to somewhere between frigid blue and steel gray. The dull, flat light throws the second man, standing in the doorway, into sharp relief. His features are covered by a beard grown slightly out of control, sheltered by a hood thrown over his head. His eyes, though, are still bright, still carry a trace of optimism, still cling to a thread of hope.
“Odds are you won’t,” the first man finally says, turning back slightly. “What with… everything.”
“Well, yeah,” admits the other. “I guess so.”
They used to be six. Five men and one woman, hunkered down in this joke of a cabin, with blood on the walls and cracks in the floor. They were thrown together by simple geographic convenience - when the plague struck, it was hide or die. At first, it was fun, almost. They had reminisced about the pandemic (the other pandemic - the one where the worst thing you had to worry about was death, and not coming face-to-face with a rotting, empty shell of a person you used to know). They’d told stories, sang songs in hushed voices, jumping at every creak of the walls, and reassured each other it would be over soon.
And one by one, they’d been taken. Sometimes they were dragged away screaming, struggling against the arms of their captors, shadows of people without the brain stem function necessary to stop them sinking their teeth into another human’s flesh. Sometimes they were bitten on the spot. Sometimes, they went out to find food, water, any shred of news from the rest of the world, and never came back.
“Why?” says the first man after a moment, the one who’s leaving. “What changed?”
The second man thinks of everything that’s happened, everything that’s yet to come. How wisdom replaced the naivety of youth, or at least, a version of adulthood gone by. How the end of the world was not instantaneous, but stretched on into obscurity, and how there would be something at the end of the world, something that would simply begin again.
What that something is, he doesn’t know, but it’s not going to be him. It’s not going to be any of them.
There’s blood on the first man’s shirt, blood around his mouth, blood on his hands. He twitches, shivers, eyes rolling in his head. The moment passes as quickly as it comes, and the second man looks at his last friend in the world, seeing what he’s become. The bite must have come sometime in the night, in a rare moment of solitude when the second man wasn’t watching the first’s back. He’s become so pale, so restless these last few days, with no idea why, and the second man can’t bring himself to tell the truth, and spare them both a world of pain. It’s a risk, living with him like this, but he just can’t erase this last shred of human connection, the only thing he’s got left in the world.
And besides, is he really so much better? Is he really above his friend as every convention of this nightmare would demand? It’s a virus, nothing more. The second man knows better than to think himself more powerful, more vital than a disease. After all, it’s only fighting for its life, just like him.
“Why?” asks the first man again, in a slightly more guttural voice. The second man smiles.
“It just felt right,” he says. “I’ll see you… see you there.”
“See you there,” echoes the first. “I’ll see you there.”
He stumbles off into the gloam, a second shudder wracking his body. The second man stands in the doorway, watching him go. Memories of the first will taunt him for the rest of his life, however long that may be; full of color and laughter and life, when his eyes weren’t sunk deep into their sockets and when his gaze wasn’t a deadened thousand-meter stare. The first man makes his way over the edge of the horizon, and the world is, for now, blissfully, breathlessly silent.
The second man makes his way back inside and shuts the door. For the first time in a long time, he doesn’t bother with the lock.
