Page 215 of The End of the World As We Know It

We sit together into the night and at some point fall asleep.

I’m awoken with the feeling of something cold and wet.

“Oh no!” Ferris cries.

Blood, I think. He’s bleeding out. It’s the final stage. But my eyes adjust. He’s slick all over, dripping sweat. The heat coming off of him is gone. His fever has broken.

“It’s so gross. I’m so sorry!” he whispers.

It’s not like I thought. I’m not repulsed. I’m just happy he’s alive. Happy I won’t have to escape without him.

“You’re crying. Oh no, please don’t cry,” he says.

And it takes a second—I don’t understand what he’s talking about, before I realize that I really am crying. But it’s not sadness. It’s relief.

The next morning, the old doctor comes with his friends in white. They’re all sick now, and all the assistants are sick, too. The old mancan hardly stand. The veins in his sclera have popped and broken, red blood swelling under a layer of tight skin. The assistants hold us down and take our blood. They’re so out of it they don’t notice that Ferris is better. They lock the door behind them, but they forget to bind us or put sleep gas through the vents.

We walk to the end of the hall, watching them through the glass window. The old man falls to the ground. He shakes with seizure, mouth foaming, then goes still. I’ve seen this before in my own people and know already, even as the staff surrounding him perform CPR and check his pulse, that he’s dead.

“Looks like they invented a new variant,” Ferris says.

“And it kills them, but not us?” I ask.

We stand at the glass, looking out. The attendants in white notice us then. Their expressions confuse me. Slowly, I realize they’re afraid.

We stay in the room for the following twenty-four hours while Ferris rebuilds his strength. No one comes back to check on us after the doctor’s death. We watch out the window as the hospital fills ominously with coughing people, sick people. We hear the cacophony. And then, just as quickly as the coughing started, it goes quiet. It happens with a snap, or the strike of thunder. Everything is still.

We break the window, reach down and unlock the door from the outside.

There are bodies on the floor, bleeding out from eyes and mouths and ears, staining white uniforms and floors red. I’ve seen this before. I’ve seen lots of bad things. But that doesn’t make any of it easy.

I’m holding Ferris’s hand. Or maybe he’s holding mine. How do these things start? I don’t know. We’re out a main door and down the steps. It’s daylight. We’re exposed for all the town to see. But the people are gone. The cars are still. The town, once teeming, is silent.

“Are they all dead?” I ask.

Ferris looks up toward the roof of a large mansion. Something moves. A human blur charges around a corner, but it doesn’t go far. I feel its watching eyes.

The vantage has shifted. We have become the immune.

We gather food, but otherwise don’t spend long. Ferris wants to investigate, to wander their stores, to eat fresh fruit and meet their animals—their cats and livestock. To read their books. But it’s dangerous to linger. They might have guns. We leave through the gate we must have been carried through, pass the altar, now empty. They took our offerings just like they took us.

The rest at the death hospital has healed my blister. Sometimes Ferris leans on me, sometimes I lean on him. We walk until we’re at the halfway house. We rest there.

“Why did you volunteer to help me forage?” I ask.

“I like you.”

Except by necessity, I’ve avoided paying attention to other people. It opens too many doors. Like Maple or my mom, they might die and I don’t want to have to mourn them. If I’m loyal to them, I might have to sacrifice more than I can afford. But it occurs to me that he’s been paying attention. The Preacher.

“Why?” I ask.

“You get things done,” he says. “Other people, they just pretend. Or they do as little as they can. Our whole group is falling apart. You don’t seem to notice. From the outside, it looks like you do that because you have hope.”

I can’t evaluate this. I don’t have the perspective to know whether it’s hope or animal instinct that keeps me going. But I like that he thinks so highly of me. “They killed our missing,” I say.

“Yeah,” he says. “They did. They stole them like lab rats and then murdered them.”

“They killed Maple. They killed my friend.”