Page 79 of The End of the World As We Know It

Around Silvia and the stranger.

“They’re all going to die,” Helena whispered one day.

They had moved her from the couch to the bed, where she spent most of her time coughing or shivering no matter the blankets. But sometimes, at her most feverish moments, she rambled out the worst things Silvia had ever heard.

“He looks for us,” Helena went on. “Wants us. I’ve seen him. He walks the hospitals, and he opens the doors, and he watches the patients sleep, waiting for his chance to taste them. And sometimes he opens my office door. Especially at night. He opens it, and he stares at me, those cold eyes. Waiting to taste me, too.”

“Who?” Silvia asked.

Helena coughed again, the force of it raking blood from her throat. “He’s watching me now. Right by the door.”

It took every ounce of Silvia’s control not to glance at the bedroom’s open doorway. Not to give credit to Helena’s delirium. Not to see a figure standing there.

She wondered if this was a panicky phase of the virus. Or did Captain Trips command a ship of premonition, with Helena’s soul keeping one foot on the pier and another on the gangplank? Except that assumed she had a choice between life and death.

Her fingers tore at the sheets. “He’s hunting,” she rasped. “Does he have territory? A psychic frontier at death? Or is it a trick? I’ve seen it in my patients, like they’re going to pull through, and then he pulls them away.”

Silvia couldn’t make sense of this. She licked her lips and adjusted her nurse’s cap, and then she tried for distraction with a hissing impish voice.

“Oh, what’s that vision of the future over there, everybody’s okay—nope, fooled you, time to die!”

Helena’s eyes caught Silvia’s, and then she wheezed through a cracked smile.

It was enough.

The rain’s drizzly pitter-patter swells to crashing drums as light shrinks from the gas station, the storm blotting out the sky. A woman could sneak across a linoleum floor under this racket.

Silvia glances around the counter’s corner, but she only sees three aisles of shelving clearly. The far wall beyond is a vague black curtain, hiding the stranger.

She speaks again, maybe summoned by Silvia’s gaze. “I wonder about those gas pumps.”

She pauses like she’s pointing at something and expects Silvia’sgaze to follow. Can she see Silvia looking across the floor? Silvia ducks behind the counter again, just in case.

“How long until the gas seeps out?” the stranger asks. “It’s funny how we’ve made parts of our world depend on us. Farmland. Oil rigs. Zoos. Without our attention, it all goes to shit. Maybe our species has killed itself, but we’re not going down alone, that’s for damn sure.”

Silvia keeps her mouth shut. The stranger can’t hold a one-sided conversation.

But she tries. “Know what really annoys me? I got a little cut on the webbing between my left hand’s middle and pointer fingers. Hard to bandage. And the world’s end makes it near impossible for anyone to invent an easy solution someday.”

“We don’t have to talk,” Silvia says.

The stranger chuckles. “What are you so afraid of? You’ve already outlived the worst.”

Silvia quakes, half-angry, half-bewildered. The stranger can’t understand the truth, has never met Helena. Never watched her slip away.

The rain bangs little fists on the roof and windows, and the sky flashes and growls, a wild animal desperate to get in.

Somebody let her out.

That was the last thing the man outside said before Silvia gunned him down. And what came next? The stranger’s arrival.

Silvia licks her lips. “Ever been in prison?”

The stranger gives another chuckle. “Is it that obvious?”

Silvia bites her tongue to stop from licking her lips again. She imagines there must be ChapStick on the outer portion of the counter, but no way will she reach for it. That man outside, his wild eyes—he’d been terrified enough to run at a gun.

Somebody let her out.