Alone, at the End of all Things

No one ever said the apocalypse would be so lonely.

She’s been on her own for some time now, since the last community fell to infighting, and the one before that to a dictator. Mayhaps a dystopia will rise out of the ash and rubble, but for now society consists of isolationist colonies too greedy or afraid to interact with one another.

It was too much anyway, the bickering and selfishness. The way that when the food ran low, tempers flared and before long the only light in the dark was the muzzle flash of a failed mutiny. The way no one could agree on what was ‘too far,’ or what actions were justified in the name of survival.

There’s nothing left for her in the city now but blood and bones, so she gathers up what supplies she can and heads for the outskirts and the wilderness, following the same roads as the outcasts and madmen who’d gone before her.

After all, better to be mad with the world than sane alone.

---

The scavenger darts out of a dilapidated rest stop along the highway leading out of the city. His knife stabs into her side with a painful ease as he collides with her, sending them both to the ground in a mess of rags and tangled limbs. There is a manic fervor in his eyes as his blade, red with her blood, slashes through the shoulder straps of her backpack before he yanks it out from under her and bolts across the highway.

How far we have fallen, that a bottle of water and a few cans of food are so easily worth a life.

She has nothing now, nothing to stitch her wound with, nothing to use to clean or bandage it. No food, no water, not even the pack of spearmint gum she had been so carefully rationing. Even if the city hadn’t already been picked clean, it’s a fair trek to the nearest hospital, and the shear wave of weariness and defeat that washes over her keeps her from so much as rising to her knees.

Why prolong things, she thinks. Death comes for us all one way or another.

I just wish I wasn’t dying alone.

---

It is with great surprise, and no small amount of reluctance (for it had been such a good sleep) that she finds herself blinking awake some indistinguishable amount of time later. A campfire flickers at the edges of her vision, small and barely anything more than spluttering embers.

She doesn’t even notice the other presence to start with, too busy reveling in the realization that I’m alive. It’s only when they rise from where they had been crouched on the other side of the fire, and begin to walk towards her, that she realizes she isn’t alone. She fights the urge to reach for a weapon that isn’t there (the scavenger had taken that too), but the stranger only checks her wound, unwrapping and re-wrapping the bloodied bandages with an emptiness everyone seems to have adapted in these times.

The foreignness of the stranger’s kindness is enough to shock her to silence, allowing sleep to claim her before she can even think of saying thank you.

---

It takes her a few days to accept that her savior doesn’t speak. She doesn’t make a sound, not even so much as a hum. One night her fingers get a little too close with the fire, and all she does is wince and shake her hand as if the pain can be dislodged with something as simple as a flick. No expletive curse or whine of pain. She wonders if in the emptiness and silence of the End, she has simply forgotten how to speak.

She listens, though, attentive to her every word. Nods her head along to the others rambling, tilts it questionably whenever something is said she doesn’t understand. Doesn’t roll her eyes or walk away like others did in the Before.

God, I had forgotten how nice it is to just be listened to.

---

After a week of namelessness, she decides to call the other Loc, at least in the privacy of her mind. The other is always toying with the locket which hangs around her neck. Whether they are walking or settled down for the night, she tugs it out from under her shirt, rubbing it seemingly unconsciously between her fingers. The locket itself is silver and heart shaped, with empty gem settings. She sometimes wonders what stones they held in their prime. Any engravings have long since worn smooth under Loc’s stressing fingers. It makes little chr and zink noises as she runs it back and forth along its chain. Sometimes she listens to it as she lies awake, letting the rhythmic sound lull her to sleep.

Loc never asks for her name, and she never gives it. These days it doesn’t matter who you are, but what you are. In this regard they are allies, at least for the moment. Besides, maybe Loc has her own nickname for her.

---

Even after the wound in her side heals, they stick together. Each day she awakes, expecting to find Loc gone, and sometimes she is, but she always returns with a hare to roast or a handful of berries for their first (sometimes only) meal.

They are heading further from the city, out towards the mountains, into the wilderness, the greenery. It is less daunting with someone by her side. Loc’s quiet companionship is a balm on her soul, soothing an ache that had been present since long before she left the city. She hopes that she does something similar for Loc.

They aren’t friends, not by a long shot, but she likes to think that that may change.

---

There’s an air of misery to Loc and that necklace she treasures. She treats it as a priest would his rosary, with gentle, reverent touches, but in another sense, it is also the air to her drowning sailor, and she shudders to think how Loc would take it were it to be lost.

What does it contain, she wonders? A tuft of hair, perhaps, from a love long lost? Photos of Loc’s precious people, gone with the rest of the world? Does Loc even know? She never opens it. Was it a gift, mayhaps, from another survivor at the parting of the way, a token of remembrance? Is it empty?

It is evidently sentiment that guides Loc’s fingers back to the pendent time and again, and she cannot help but wish it was fondness rather than a gaping, echoing sadness that enveloped Loc each and every time.

I’ve never seen someone look so alone.

---

Slowly, the green of the trees fades to shades of red, yellow and orange, and they take a quiet joy in watching the leaves drift to the ground, in crunching the particularly dry ones under their excited feet. The forests are peaceful, empty, most animals and survivors alike having gone North for the coming winter. Maybe they should be as well, but Loc has the lead, and seems content to meander along at a casual pace.

They are on the edges of a clearing when Loc freezes, peering out through the trees. She watches as a deer and its fawn enter the glade from the opposite side, the fawn bounding ahead of its dam to frolic among-st the not-yet-dead grass and falling leaves. It twists and spins this way and that, a joyous carelessness to its movements that she has not seen since before the world stopped.

She turns to Loc, and it’s the first time in their tentative friendship that she sees her smile.

She doesn’t yet know it’ll be the last.

---

As the days get shorter, and nights grow colder, she finally gets to hear Loc make a sound. It’s a cough, a wet, heaving thing that leaves her braced against a tree. It worsens as the heavy snow begins to fall, forcing them to seek shelter in an abandoned cabin. It’s warm, cosy, and would be almost peaceful were it not for the rattling cough that Loc cannot shake, that persists even with the warmth of the log fire and the stack of moth-eaten blankets she piles over her. When the mucus that comes with each cough turns red, she feels a chill envelop her, even as Loc only stares at it with feverish eyes. Not once does she think about leaving, or of catching whatever disease is stealing Loc from her.

She goes out for wood one day, only to return to Loc splayed across the floor, a puddle of red-tinged vomit near her head. She cleans it up, returns Loc to her nest of blankets by the fire, and wiles away the night watching the shallow rise and fall of her chest.

Sleep claims her before she can watch it still.

---

She buries Loc beneath a cairn of rocks in the now snow-covered glade where they had watched the fawn together. The ground is too solid, too frozen, for a proper grave, and she has no shovel anyway. With the frost, she has no flowers to leave, but she manages to scrape together some grass Bunny Tails, the kind she used to dye with her mother as a child, and lays them in a posy on top of the cairn.

After some debate, she decides to keep Loc’s necklace. She doesn’t open it, doesn’t even plan to. It’d be wrong, to pry now that Loc isn’t here to stop her.

It’s just something to remember her by, even if she never really knew her.

No one ever said the apocalypse could be so lonely.