The Anguish of Survival (What Comes After, part 2)

There was a peace by the creek that Iris could sense but not touch. She sat on the rocky overhang, her arms wrapped tight around her legs and her chin nestled in the hollow between her knees, and stared into the water as it wandered its way downstream, ignorant and uncaring of the devastation wreaked on civilisation in the last six months.

She so desperately wanted to forget.

The faces of the dead flickered before her, pale sweaty cheeks and weeping, crusted eyes and cracked, blood-flecked lips and that expression just before death took them, that moment of recognition and relief that the pain and suffering were finally over. And with the faces came the misery and hatred of being alive, again and again and again, as every person she had ever known, ever met, ever seen, sickened and died horribly and left her alone once more.

Maybe it was punishment, retribution for the part she’d played, for her past.

She had avoided the sick in the beginning, as everyone had, but as time had gone by and more had died she’d grown more and more deliberately careless, courting illness with every breath, only to always find herself once more in perfect health and setting out alone on the road again, leaving behind her a trail of the charred corpses of the dead.

By now, she’d started to forget every face—or at least that was the lie she tried to tell herself each night, as she wrapped herself up in her sleeping bag and dreamed of never waking again, thrusting errant thoughts of her long-distant and almost certainly dead family to the farthest reaches of her mind. In truth, she was terrified she’d never stop seeing them—and that she’d never see them again.

The last had been a week earlier, the only one left of the group out of Smithville—Patricia. For more than two weeks she’d stayed healthy, stayed safe, to the point that Iris had started to think, to hope, that Patricia was immune too, that maybe going forward it wouldn’t just be her struggling to stay afloat above her guilt. And then Patricia had woken up with that devastating scratchiness in her throat, the deep hacking cough and the blood-spattered cloth that painted her future clearer than any Rorschach. Iris had thought maybe, just maybe, she might be one of those that survived; she’d heard about such unicorns, though her experience had never produced one. Rumour had it that if you survived, if you battled your way through it, that you were safe forever—and Iris could have used a miracle.

She’d soon been reminded why she believed in science, not miracles.

Sometimes she thought she’d dreamed the world as it was before, when people were buried and given individual memorials and markers, or cremated and tucked away for eternity in mausoleums. With the world as it was now, she sometimes felt like she’d donned the mantle of the Grim Reaper and entirely abandoned society’s patterns of grief and burial and remembrance. Anymore, you burned the dead. Immediately. You didn’t take the time to sob over their corpses; there was no time, to say nothing of manpower, to dig individual graves. She’d hauled too many of the dead onto a communal funeral pyre to ever think of death as anything other than tediously inconvenient.

Or at least that was what she tried to tell herself.

There was such a dramatic difference between the human world, which had split into the ugliness of blood-puking, gasping-breathed individuals destined for the ever-growing pile of the dead and the grasping, conniving bastards seeking to stay alive at whatever cost, and the eerie peace of the natural world, which had continued clicking along despite humanity’s collapse. The water kept trickling; the trees kept rustling; the world kept spinning.

Maybe that was the answer, Iris thought, getting to her feet. She stared down at the water. So many people died of the disease that you almost forgot that there were other ways to die. Like drowning, for instance. She slipped off her shoes and set them down on top of her pack before she could change her mind, then hesitated, hand gripping the locket around her neck.

“It’s not a great spot for a swim,” said a voice from behind her. “Or a suicide, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

Iris turned around and just about kept her mouth from falling open. A tall, broad-shouldered black woman had appeared behind her, mounted on what to Iris looked like the biggest horse in the world, a thick wooden staff held lightly across her thighs. For a moment Iris wondered if she were hallucinating—if in fact she had actually finally succumbed to the disease and had conjured a gorgeous Amazon out of nowhere in lonely desperation.

“The creek turns into rapids around the bend,” the vision said. “Not ideal for swimming, and if it’s death you’re after you’d be better off picking something less painful and prolonged. I’m Bowser. What’s your name, if you think you might stick around for a bit longer?”

Iris rocked on her toes for a moment, contemplating hallucinations. “Iris,” she said at last. “I’m Iris.”

Bowser looked down at her and frowned. “Darling, you’re turning blue,” she said, tugging her kerchief up over her mouth and nose before dismounting and swinging her cloak off her shoulders and around Iris.

Iris stood in silence, drowning in fabric and regrets, and finally said, “Have you a better option?” She added, curious, “Seeing as you’ve interrupted my death, it would be bloody nice to think that there’s something other than corpses to look forward to.”

“Well, I’m not dead,” Bowser offered.

“Yet,” Iris muttered. Scowling, she said, “You’re not immune, or a survivor, not if you’re still bothering to cover your nose and mouth. So why the fuck should I care?”

Bowser made a humming noise deep in her throat. “You’re right,” she said. “I’m not immune, nor have I miraculously survived the plague currently wreaking havoc across our planet. However, I do have a disease-free safe haven, if you’re interested.”

Iris snorted. “There’s no such thing as disease-free anymore.”

“Well, it’s your best bet against hooking up with another group only to watch them die.” When Iris didn’t respond, Bowser sighed and said, “In that case, the best I can offer at the present moment is chocolate-covered coffee beans.” She produced a small pouch from one of the numerous pockets dotting her trousers. Iris’s head came up and she lurched forward, snatching the bag out of Bowser’s hands almost before she finished speaking, blue eyes sparking for the first time since Bowser had spotted her.

“What kind of name is Bowser?” Iris asked as she shuffled back towards her abandoned shoes, adding around cheeks pouched out like a chipmunk, “Do you moonlight in the mushroom kingdom on non-apocalypse days?”

“No, I just like to cause mayhem,” Bowser said pleasantly. Iris gave her a squinty-eyed look. “My namesake set the White House on fire. I’ve yet to be quite so chaotically destructive. Sweetpea, when was the last time you ate something? Or slept?”

“Who has time?” Iris muttered, wobbling as she attempted to stomp back into her boots. Holding the bean pouch in her teeth, she leaned down to do up her laces, witnessed the black sparkles presaging she was about to pass out, and had a last split-second thought that it would truly be a shame to die just after finally getting her hands on coffee again.

Bowser caught the tetchy little blonde as she tipped over, narrowly rescuing the coffee beans from vanishing forever into the river below, and easily tossed her up onto her horse’s back. The mare snorted and flicked an ear, utterly unimpressed at her new burden; unconscious humans were the least of the cargo she’d carried. Iris’s few belongings joined Bowser’s saddlebags, and after a quick look around the area to be sure Iris hadn’t left anything out of sight, Bowser swung up into the saddle, settled her staff across her thighs, and clucked to the mare to get moving.

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Catch up with What Comes After here.