The End Has Come

I sank down deep into a mattress of mold, the dry, dusty scent of it filling my nostrils, and closed my eyes. Sleep came like a welcome friend, wrapping its arms around me and pulling me down into a better world, one where I was not alone, was not living my worst nightmare one aching, itching moment at a time — and where I didn’t deserve exactly what I was living through. I would have slept forever, if I could have.

I slept so deeply that I never felt the tranquilizer dart, or heard the running feet. I didn’t feel them lift me into the back of their truck, or notice when the gray world slipped away.

I just slept on.

* * *

The smell of antiseptic cleaning fluid and bleach tickled my nostrils like a long-lost friend, comforting and reassuring me. I sighed through the haze of wakefulness that was settling in all around me. Dreams of cleanliness were so rare these days, when it seemed like I would never be clean again, like the world would never be clean again. I didn’t want to wake up. I didn’t want to let this go.

“I think she’s waking up.”

The voice was male, unfamiliar and fast, so fast, more like the black dog (so delicious, it had been so delicious, even as I hated myself for killing it) than the soft gray world that had become my entire universe. I snapped the rest of the way awake, although I didn’t open my eyes. I needed to know what was going on around me. I needed to know how much danger I was in.

One small, treacherous part of my mind relaxed its guard, uncurling and sending a wave of sudden peace washing over me, diluting my protective panic. If there were voices, if there were people, then the smells of bleach and cleaning fluid might be real, not just olfactory hallucinations. Bleach couldn’t exist anymore, not since the gray had taken the stores and cleaning services. Sometimes I smelled it all the same, as my overtaxed mind attempted to create sense out of a world that had gone quietly, conclusively mad.

My body was waking up, whether I wanted it to or not. It began sending reports to my brain, things like “you need to use the bathroom” and “there is a pain at the crook of your left arm.” The pain was almost encouraging. That sort of pain, in that sort of place, could mean an IV drip. I was dehydrated, I knew that: all the sources of standing water had been long since covered by the gray, and it hadn’t rained in months. Drought conditions again. It had been a warm, dry winter, thanks to the changes humanity had made to the weather with our cheerful denial of global warming, before the gray had come along and made rising sea levels a moot point. Almost anywhere else in the country, I would have frozen. The gray would have frozen. But here, where the dry desert land met the unforgiving Pacific, thirst had been my greatest enemy.

There was a sort of clean, clear beauty in that. Thirst was the only thing that reliably killed the gray, the only thing that consistently cut it down and left it withered on the pavement. Fire would burn it clean, but the spores could survive. Desiccation, on the other hand, was the scourge from which even the gray could not recover, and desiccation was the death I had deserved.

Until this space, this clean-smelling space, and this needle in my arm. Someone was saving me. Someone was saving me, and I didn’t know why, and I didn’t deserve it.

“Has she said anything?” The new voice was female, older and slower than the first, filled with the weight of so many horrible things. It was a voice that had seen things it could not unsee, done things it could not undo (the dog, the black dog in the gray world), and it was closer to me than any human voice had been since Nikki had died.

The gray had taken her from me. The gray took everything, in time.

“Not yet.” The first voice again. “She was pretty severely dehydrated, and she’s malnourished enough that it’s a miracle she was still alive.”

“It’s a miracle that any of us are still alive, Cadet.” The female voice moved closer still as it spoke, until it was originating only inches from my face. “Since you are among the living, Dr. Riley, I suggest you open your eyes and start acting like it. Your future depends on it.”

“I don’t have a future.” My voice was . . . rusty, almost, like the gray had eaten pits in its surface. How long had it been since I’d spoken? How many days, weeks, months since Nikki left me for the soft world, and I had no more cause to open my mouth for anything but eating and screaming? “I buried my future in the gray.”

“Megan Riley. Civilian. Last known survivor of Project Eden. Two degrees, the first in molecular biology, the second in molecular genetics. Widowed early in the outbreak, when your spouse, Rachel Riley, succumbed to a R. nigricans infection. Am I ringing any bells, Dr. Riley, or shall I begin reading your daughter’s school records? Where is Nicole?”