part iii

Then the king said to his servants, "Do you not know that a prince and a great man has fallen this day in Israel?”

-

It is exactly 3:53 am on day 42 when the last chimpanzee has survived for over 48 hours without presenting any symptoms of LDS. We name her Arizona and she is infected the day Raza was. The only difference being she lived. We haven’t created a name for the vaccine, we call it 01 for now. I reach for the button on the top of the wall and press it.

“We did it.”

The voice of the woman chimes in from the speaker to tell us that someone would be coming down to retrieve us shortly. Riley sits on the edge of my bed and folds his hands in his lap.

“Do you think we could’ve saved him?”

I think about it for a second, I consider lying but decide against it.

“No. He was already gone.”

-

“I always knew.”

“Knew what?” I look up at Mason, his hands rest in his pockets.

“Why I was sent here. I know why.” He rolls up his sleeve and points at a huge scar on his arm, “haven’t you noticed? It doesn’t affect me. I got this one year ago when I ran into a Drifter on my way to Georgia looking for my family. After a couple days of nothing happening, I realized that something was different. I can’t directly tell you what it is, but something was different.” He points to the woman, “and they even knew before I did." The hum of the train sits beneath our feet like a sleeping dog. The view of our broken world goes by quickly. I look for his palm and slowly take Mason’s hand. His fingers are warm, there is blood still pumping through him and he reminds me one more time, what it feels like to be human.

It ends with a girl, as most things will.

EPILOGUE

The start of the of the world is warm.

Warm fingers, warm bodies. Our reawakening is slow. The days become peaceful and the nights become beautiful; everything begins to grow. The blood in the air disappears, it traps itself and sinks back in the ground, people take off their gas masks and breathe for the first time in years. In the end, I am still looking for solace. We still wait. The end of the world was a virus, and we were the fever. Impatient, unwilling to leave, loud, and small. We chose to not be still. The end was close, but never does come.

At least not while I’m alive. It was put in a little box for a later, lazier melenia to sit on and watch. Sometimes I do wonder if we could’ve saved Raza, if he really was gone before we could do anything. Then I remember that there’s no way for me to ever know. Did I make the right call? Maybe. Will I continue to question myself? Absolutely.

Mason doesn’t look at anything quite the way he used to, I can't tell if he’s too scared to let himself or if the veil across his eyes really does exist. I see it in Riley, too. He does not watch for the good things or acknowledge them in the slightest when they come. Not after Raza. Like them, the world is not a peaceful place right away, it took its time to adjust. The soil takes its time to be replanted, the people take their time to come out of hiding, even the animals start to appear from their caves of isolation.

When the end of the world does not happen, everyone is shocked. We had prepared so well, to sit and wait for our inevitable doom, like a baby about to be fed. You may even be able to say that we were somewhat disappointed. Humans were never supposed to leave easy, or break even in the simplest fashion. We were bred to fight. We were bred to shatter, the pieces of us that break leave jagged edges. We were bred to learn, watch, and devour. We are creatures of habitual change and chronic bad decision making. Accepting the end as something as little simple as a blip in the cell cycle or a tragic epidemic, is what we’d like to believe it comes down to.

But is it ever that easy? When has it ever?

Yes, we’d like to hope that everything comes down to one, singular sweet hereafter; but it never is. Humans are a series of paradoxes, constantly falling apart if only in hopes that someone will come along and put us back together. We are beings of finalities, despite it contradicting our every being. We search for things to blame our mistakes on; one way, one love or one word to solve everything.

If we were made to be simple, we would stop falling in love. We would stop reaching for it, we would stop trying. If it was made to be easy, then we would not want it, but the moment we come into this world; it is the first thing we crave. If there was ever anything to explain the way humans act, it would be love. However, that decision in itself is complicated in virtually every way I could say it.

The answer to everything comes simply: we may never know.