Apocalypse

I can still remember it - the day the whole world went mad. It doesn’t start like you expect it to. You expect it to be sudden and all at once, not this slow crawl towards death. It started far off, at first. Remote, like everything else in my life. When it made its way over, it was still remote. Only for the old, they said. I should’ve known something was wrong when they started closing everything down, like the organs of a body, all shutting down one by one. We thought it was only for a little while. We thought of the future as a surety and were already wondering how we were going to come back from this; plotting, strategizing. But we had brought the great beast of our civilization down, bit by bit, until it lay still and moved no more. Nothing stirred and an unnerving quiet settled amidst the houses and empty store fronts. The last thing to go was the heart. When the screens went dark, I knew, then, that we were never going to come back from this. I knew something had gone very, very wrong. I waited in my apartment for as long as I could, but eventually, I had to go out or starve. What I found out there was emptiness. Lots of emptiness. Empty streets, empty shops, empty everything. It was the lack of homeless that bothered me the most. Where would they have gone? I eventually went to go knock on a neighbor’s door. I tried several, but no one was answering. It took a few more days before I became brave enough to try opening a door without invitation. I’d like to think my first encounter with another human was a relief, a sense of comfort washing over me, telling me I’m not alone. I’d like to think that. Instead, I found an inanimate, husk of a person. No smell. No decay. Almost like this person had been mummified for millennia. I couldn’t even be sure it was real, until I found more of these mummies laying around the house. I tried another house, hoping to find an answer. Just more mummies. And that’s when the panic finally washed through me, gripping my chest tight in its ice cold fingers, sending chills from the base of my neck down to the very tips of my toes. Food be damned, all I could think of then was finding another living soul. The silence I had thought of as a shared hush, a joint holding of breath, had been just me all along.