Page 63 of The End of the World As We Know It

So, four hours. That’s a long walk, but she can do it. A long walk is nothing if what Mercedes told her is true.

Mercedes, Sandra’s neighbor from three doors down, had knocked on her door the night before. Sandra had panicked for a second before Mercedes identified herself.

Sandra had been convinced Mercedes was immune to the disease, just like her. Their entire neighborhood had succumbed in a matter of days, but they hadn’t. The more people died, the more they talked, checked on each other, and shared news and food. Mercedes was a very positive person, and she had helped a lot when Miguel died. Mercedes’s own husband, Roberto, died two days later. She had dragged him out and buried him in their yard. “I don’t want his angry spirit haunting my dreams,” she said to Sandra afterward whilescraping dirt from under her nails. “Men are moody, and dead men are no different.” She’d tried to smile through the tears then, a bit of gallows humor, but all she managed was a strange twitch of her lips that spoke more of devastation than mirth. Now it was just the two of them, Sandra and Mercedes, a few doors from each other, surviving alone, but together.

The moment Sandra opened the door, she knew she was wrong. Mercedes—in her early forties, short and stocky, with dark skin and a beautiful mane of black curls framing a pretty face—looked like the ghost of her former self. Her face was bloated and strangely pale. She had dark bags under her eyes that seemed ready to pop. Her face and neck were slick with that shiny, oily sweat that the sick were always covered in. Mercedes had knocked on the door in the early afternoon and called out her name, but by the time Sandra reached the door, her friend had stepped back almost ten feet. She was shivering from the fever and had a glistening line of snot covering her upper lip.

“I… I got it,” said Mercedes. It was obvious, but the words still felt like a gut punch to Sandra.

“Oh, Mercedes…”

Mercedes looked at Sandra’s arms and then at her legs. Sandra knew what she was looking for. It filled her eyes with tears again.

“Baby Angie?” Mercedes asked, her voice low, like she was afraid of waking her up.

Sandra couldn’t answer. She shook her head, the tears now running down her face.

“I’m so sorry,” said Mercedes. The last word had been buried under so much emotion that it sounded like something else, a small animal drowning instead of a word.

For a moment, both women stood there, looking at each other. All the things they wanted to say were left unsaid. And maybe that was for the better. Nothing reveals the uselessness of words quite like the presence of Death, riding its black horse silently down your street with its scythe at the ready. Mercedes was dying. Sandra was surroundedby death. The enormity of their pain silenced them. Looking at each other was enough.

“I came to tell you something,” said Mercedes. She sniffled and wiped her face with her hands before continuing. “I got a call three days ago. From my mom back home. She said whole families survived in the Dominican Republic. She told me they all moved to Punta Cana and they’ve… built a place there. A refuge. There’s a lot of food and stuff from all the hotels there. They’ve been sending fishing boats over to pick up survivors from the beaches in Rincón, Joyuda, and a few other places. For a price, obviously. My mom, she… she got me a ticket. For tomorrow at midday. You should go.”

“No, I can’t do that,” said Sandra. “That’s your…” She wanted to say that was Mercedes’s ticket, her opportunity to get out, but the woman would probably be dead before she reached the coast, even if she found a car to get her there. They both knew it. Turning down the opportunity was an instinct from a time when the world still worked. There, standing in front of each other with tears running down their faces and a decomposing world around them, turning it down made no sense. The social contract was no longer in place.

“I won’t make it,” said Mercedes. “We both know it. Just… go. You can walk to there from here. Leave early tomorrow. When the boat comes, someone will come to the beach. Tell them you have hope. That’s the password. They’ll take your temperature. If you’re still fine, they’ll take you to Punta Cana.”

Sandra nodded. More tears came, and she didn’t know who they were for. They could be for Mercedes because she was dying, but they could also be for Baby Angie. Or for Miguel. Or for the countless dead neighbors in all the dark houses up and down the street that had turned into graves.

Or for herself.

“Thank you,” said Sandra. She didn’t believe it. Whole families? Food? It had to be a rumor. But she couldn’t tell Mercedes that. You don’t snatch a dying woman’s last dream from her.

“I’m… I’m so sorry about Baby Angie,” said Mercedes, her voice cracking again.

There could be no hug and saying goodbye would hurt too much, so Sandra was relieved when Mercedes turned and walked away, grabbing her head and grunting as she went.

Sandra closed the door and stood there a minute, thinking about what Mercedes had told her. It couldn’t be, but what if it was?

Tell them you have hope.

The smell smacked her in the face a few moments after she closed the door. Decay. Rotting flesh. Bodily fluids soaking into her bed, through her mattress, dripping onto the floor. Like every other house out there, Sandra’s house contained dead bodies.

In her bedroom was her husband, Miguel. He had gone out one morning a few days ago to see if he could find some food. He’d come back a few hours later, tired and complaining of a headache. The fever started soon after. That night, he started talking about his brother Tomás, who died ten years ago in a car crash. The sweating and the headaches were horrible, but they didn’t last long. He died in the middle of the night, calling for his brother. Sandra had been sitting right outside their bedroom, listening to him through the door and praying Baby Angie wouldn’t catch the sickness from her own father.

After Miguel went quiet, she checked in on him. He looked bloated and shiny. Liquid was coming from his mouth and nose. He wasn’t breathing or complaining. He wasn’t talking to his dead brother. He would never do any of those things—or anything else—ever again. Sandra’s heart cracked in half and she fell to her knees a few feet from the bed she had shared with Miguel for nine years.

After a while, Baby Angie cried. Sandra got up and went to her. She held her daughter and caressed her head, wanting to apologize for the way things had turned out.

An hour later, Baby Angie finally fell asleep again, so Sandrareturned to her room. She didn’t want to touch Miguel, so she grabbed some clothes from the dresser and her toiletries from the bathroom and stuffed them in the traveling backpack she kept under her side of the bed. Then she grabbed Miguel’s gun from the closet. A small revolver in a leather holster he’d inherited from his father. From her nightstand, she took her mother’s old rosary and the two novels she was trying to read whenever Baby Angie took a nap and she wasn’t too tired: Stephen King’sThe Dark Halfand John Grisham’sA Time to Kill.With her backpack full and her heart empty, Sandra walked out into the hallway and closed the door to her bedroom for the last time.

The following day felt like an agonizing performance. Sandra took care of Baby Angie and pretended her father wasn’t rotting in their bedroom while her daughter played with her food, blissfully oblivious of the crumbling world around her.

The sun was going down when Baby Angie started crying. Her face started swelling soon after. Sandra touched her lips to her daughter’s forehead. She was burning up.

No, no, no. Please, God, no.

Sandra cried and prayed and held her mother’s rosary against her daughter’s bloated face, but God was tending to the apocalypse and her prayers went unanswered.