The End Has Come

My tears dampened the mud, but they couldn’t wash it away. That was only fair. In a world that had sunk into a mess of my own making, I never deserved to be clean again.

* * *

Time was an inconsequential thing in this well-lit, semi-sterile room, with mud on the floor and the machines quietly, contentedly whirring along behind me. As long as I didn’t open my eyes it could have been an hour, or it could have been a lifetime. The IV was keeping me hydrated, which would stave off death by dehydration. As my veins began to re-inflate and remember what it was to be whole, the rest of my body began sending signals that I would have been happier to ignore. Starvation had been my constant companion since Nikki left me, held back only by (the black dog, running, gray strands on its fur, so trusting, so condemned) what little I could scavenge out of the gray world. I had eaten more out of penance than out of hunger. I didn’t deserve to die before the soft could claim me. If I waited long enough, if it ate enough of the world, it would find a way to swallow me as well.

All I’d needed to do was wait. But now here I was, and the gray was far away from me, and my penance was denied.

The IV fluids had restored enough of my bodily equilibrium that all the tears I hadn’t been able to shed for the past few months were leaking out at once. They kept the mud on my cheek from drying completely, turning it wet and terrible as they fell. Every time they stopped I could feel it harden and crack, and then the tears would start again, until it started to seem like the IV was a useless affectation: I was pumping moisture out faster than I could possibly have been taking it in. Everything was white and bright and terrible. I had grown unaccustomed to hard lines and clean edges, spending my days walking through the soft gray world. I didn’t know how to handle them anymore.

(“I’ll be eating double melon,” Rachel had said, and she’d dipped her fork into the bowl, and I had been so consumed with loving her — so eaten alive by my own desires — that I hadn’t stopped her, not then and not ever, even though I knew the melon was cursed. I had allowed her to cross so many lines, to break so many rules that I knew would lead to ruin. It had all begun with double melon. It had ended with the death of everything I’d ever loved.

I should have seen this coming. I should have known there would be consequences.)

I had no way of knowing how long I lay there, crying but failing to wash the mud from my face, so overcome with hopelessness that the very idea of movement seemed like a cruel joke. At least if I had died outside I would eventually have gone into the gray and been reunited with my family. But I had allowed Rachel to eat the melon; I hadn’t stopped her, even though I’d known there would be consequences. There were always consequences. My first and greatest mistake had been believing I could somehow avoid them forever.

The door hissed softly as it was opened. They probably had some sort of airlock system to keep the mold out; positive pressure combined with sufficiently thorough sterilization would do it. The anti-fungal drugs that had been in use at the beginning of the gray world hadn’t worked, but if people had continued to search for better options — working even as their flesh dissolved into softness — they would have been able to find something. Human ingenuity always found a way, even if the cure was sometimes worse than the disease.

That led to a new, cruel thought, chilling as a hypodermic needle sliding under my skin: if I hadn’t run, I could have been one of those researchers. I could have steered their work along the lines that had already been pioneered by Project Eden, and whatever advances they had made would have been immediately available to Nikki. Nikki, who had been uninfected when I pulled her out of the hospital and into the short, bitter life of a fugitive. I had done what I thought was best for her at the time, but how much of that had been my fear speaking? Fungus was messy. It was inherently unclean. I hadn’t been prepared to live with a world where I could never be clean again, and so I had run, and I had damned my daughter in the process.