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FOR MY WONDERFUL, LOVING, AND SUPPORTIVE MOTHER, ANN MARIE BROWN. I LOVE YOU INFINITY AND MORE THAN THAT.

ANDREW

I hope the afterlife has a little movie theatre where you can sit in silence and watch the sequence of events that led to the watershed moments of your life. Take me, for instance: a tasteful long shot of the patient-zero bird that first got the bug – set to a Philip Glass score, something foreboding and moody – and then it jumps over the pandemic and all the stuff with my family and friends dying and focuses on some survivalist nutcase out in the woods setting a bear trap eleven months ago.

Time lapse of the trap, bears walking past, a thick branch falling on it and somehow not setting it off, leaves covering it.

And then while I’m sitting there, munching on afterlife Sour Patch Kids and butter-flavoured popcorn, thinking to myself where the hell is this going?, my dumb ass saunters on-screen and I step in the bear trap.

Oh, that’s right.

I remember I spent almost three hours screaming and crying, trying to figure out how to open the trap. Finally I ended up tying down the metal catches with T-shirts from my pack, and used the branch the universe foreshadowed – the one that kept the trap from cutting my leg clean off – to pry the rusted jaws open.

Now I’m just hopping around the forest with a yellow T-shirt tied over my wounded leg. At least watching this in the afterlife I’ll have the tongue-burning delights of Sour Patch Kids.

Unlike now, where all I have to eat in my pack is the canned food I grabbed in Jersey before I had the silly idea to get off the main roads.

I shift my weight on the crutch beneath my armpit, wincing. It’s actually just a big tree branch I found. Last night I wrapped a sweater around the Y-shaped fork to pad it, but it’s not working and now it feels like my armpit is just a massive bruise.

The pain in my leg is worse. Every step I take with my good leg creates a pull in the bad one that shoots fire up my calf. I tried resting last night after I found the crutch branch, shivering while my leg went numb with damp cold. I nodded off a few times, half expecting to die like that, but when the sun came up this morning, my eyes still opened.

Now here I am, hobbling through the woods with absolutely no idea where the closest road is. I just hope that if I keep walking straight it will lead me to something. A road, a town, a stream to clean my wounds. Anything before infection sets in. And of course now I’m on the lookout for more bear traps, so that slows me down, too.

Because of the low cloud cover I have no idea what time it is when I stumble upon not a road but a cabin. It’s cute. Modest. From what I can tell from the outside, it’s maybe two bedrooms. There’s a small front porch with two chairs under a wide picture window. The shades are drawn and leaves litter the front gravel drive and pile against the stairs.

No car in the driveway. Maybe it’s empty. Abandoned – the owner dead in their condo in some city or in a mass grave.

Or shot dead on the side of the road by another survivor.

I take a few tentative steps out of the woods on to the gravel.

It doesn’t look like anyone has been here in a while. A small, chunky garden gnome sits at the bottom of the steps, a fluffy sheep in her lap. She sits on a toadstool, smiling at the drive as if she’s waiting for someone.

Kinda creepy

Especially since the leaves aren’t covering her. Like she just shook them off herself.

But I don’t think too much about that – garden gnomes that come alive when you aren’t looking are the least of my troubles. There are four steps up to the front porch. Maybe I can just hop up them, see if the door is unlocked.

Of course it won’t be – that would be too perfect. A nice little cabin open and free for the taking? Maybe even something to eat. I let my mind have a short food fantasy moment, as a treat, then crunch across the gravel to the steps.

JAMISON

The house is too quiet. I should have put on some music, something to distract me from the absolute silence. But now I can’t be bothered to stop and put a record on.

Seventeen. That’s how many cans of black beans I have left. I write it down on the yellow legal pad on my knee, crossing out the number nineteen from last week. I do this every Monday morning: count the food I have and watch the numbers slowly dwindle. It was maddening at first, but now it’s almost meditative.

Eight cans of corn. I cross out the number nine on the sheet and write the new number to the right of it. There are maybe two more weeks before I run out of space and need to start a new sheet. And this time it will all be in my handwriting, not my mom’s.

Pasta sauce. It’s written in her barely decipherable scrawl. And then her perfect numbers – zeros slashed and sevens with a line through the middle so there’s no misunderstanding – before her writing stops and mine takes over.

I don’t need to count the jars of pasta sauce because I didn’t make any pasta last week, so I leave the number eleven there and continue on down.

But something stops me. A sound outside, like leaves crunching.

I jump up and look out the kitchen window. The world outside is grey and cold, while the wood-burning stove behind me keeps the kitchen nice and warm. The back deck is covered in leaves, but there aren’t any animals or people to be seen. The trees are still bare, the spring buds not ready to come back from the harsh winter just yet.

‘You’re hearing things again,’ I tell the silence of the kitchen. I talk to myself a lot now. It used to make me think I was going insane, but now it might be the only thing keeping me from going insane.

Last week I swore I heard someone walking across the gravel drive out front, but by the time I psyched myself up to look, no one was there.

Just the thought of the crunching gravel creates the sound in my mind, this time unmistakably coming from the front of the house. But it’s not real – I’m making it up again. Or it’s an animal, but it’s way too much rustling to be a squirrel or a fox.

Usually all it takes is a quick reminder that, yes, I am alone and there’s no one out here before the sound goes away, but this time it doesn’t. It sounds strange, though. There’s no one-two pattern of footsteps; instead it’s a lopsided crunch of gravel and a short, quiet click.

Then the first step on the front porch creaks.

My heart leaps and sweat gathers at the nape of my neck. I hold my breath and my body burns with fear, but I can’t move. There’s a grunt and a thump from outside. The second step.

It’s definitely a person out there.

Finally, I break free of my paralysis, running for the living room. I have no idea when the last time I even went out the front door was; probably a few weeks back. Before I heard the noises the last time.

Outside, there’s another thump as whoever is there loudly reaches the third step. The rifle leans up against the wall by the front coat closet. I grab it and put my back to the wall across from the front door. The rifle might not even be loaded, but I don’t have the time to check. It should be. I haven’t used it, after all.

The front door.

Shit.

I have no clue if it’s locked, or if it would matter. Maybe that loud thumping is a battering ram or something.

This isn’t made up. It’s not me jumping at shadows and silence.

The doorknob turns. It’s not locked.

There’s someone out there, and now they’re coming in here.

The door swings open and I take aim.

ANDREW

He has the gun on me before I even realise he’s there. I’m not unobservant; I’m just distracted by the throbbing pain in my leg. But once I’m looking down the barrel of some kind of rifle, everything goes numb.

‘Wait,’ I say, throwing up my arms. I put all my weight on my good leg and drop the makeshift crutch.

The boy in front of me must be around my age. Maybe sixteen, seventeen. He has that look, though. I saw it happening to me when people I knew started dying – with every glance in the mirror it got worse. I was young, but I began to look haggard. Tired. Beaten down. He has that same broken stare.

That’s how I know he won’t hesitate to shoot me.

‘Wait,’ I say again. ‘I just came here looking for supplies. I didn’t know anyone was here.’

‘Well, I am,’ he says. He isn’t looking me in the eye; instead he’s focused on my chest, aiming the rifle at my heart.

This is becoming a theme for me, and I’m not a fan. I flash back to the last time I had a gun pointed at me, on the side of the road in New Jersey. To the rash, senseless violence that could have been easily avoided.

My stomach lurches. I don’t want things to go bad like that again.

‘I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘I can leave.’

But I’m not so sure I can. I’ve been hobbling through the woods for the past day and a half looking for some shelter and a way to clean my wounds. Finding some medical supplies, a pantry full of food and Tom Holland wouldn’t hurt either.

Instead, here we are. And not a Tom Holland in sight.

‘Then turn – slowly,’ is all he says.

I try to bend over, reaching for the crutch, but he lets out a warning that sounds like ‘eh,’ then adds, ‘Leave it.’

‘I need it to walk,’ I tell him. ‘I’m hurt.’

He glances down at my bad leg, looking at the torn denim for some time. His gaze drifts up, finally meeting my eyes.

He has nice eyes. Dark blue. Clear but frightening. Like he’s prepared to pull that trigger if he has to. I know the feeling.

‘Turn as best you can,’ he says. ‘I’ll pick it up and throw it to you when you’re out there.’

I want more than anything to let out a frustrated sigh, to tell him he’s a jerk-off.

But the jerk-off’s got a gun, so I don’t. The world has ended, but jerk-offs still have a leg up.

Ha. Leg up.

Christ, even after the apocalypse I can’t resist a pun.

I turn my foot like I’m doing some fucked-up version of the hokey-pokey. You put your right foot in, you put your right foot out, you put your right foot in and get a bullet to the chest.

I finally have my back to him when it hits me – he could have been lying all along. Maybe he doesn’t want to look me in the eye when he shoots me.

‘Please,’ I say, glancing back. ‘I need help. I can’t make it much further out there. Please just help me and then I’ll leave. I need to clean this wound and wrap it with a bandage that isn’t a shitty Walmart T-shirt before it gets infected.’

‘I don’t have any supplies.’ His voice breaks as he speaks. Is that his tell? Is he lying?

‘Bullshit. You’re telling me you’re out here, alone, with no first aid supplies?’

‘I am. Now step forward.’

‘How?’

‘Hop.’

‘Christ.’ I let out the annoyed sigh I’ve been holding in. Finally, I put my back against his wall and slowly, carefully, slide down.

‘What are you doing?’ he asks. I use my hands to brace myself as I scoot down the wall, being careful to keep my right leg up until my butt hits the floor. Then I lower it slowly

‘Shoot me if you want,’ I say. The pain’s excruciating, and at this stage of the game, what the hell’s the point any more? I survived the bug when better people didn’t. Better people like my little sister.

Now all that’s left is people like me. I focus again on the gun pointed at my chest, and the boy who’s holding it.

People like us, I guess.

‘But remember,’ I say. ‘If you do, you’re the one who has to carry me out of here.’

‘Get up.’ He points the gun right in my face.

Good. Then it’ll be over quickly.

‘I’d make a Dreamgirls reference and tell you I’m not going, but this doesn’t seem like the right audience for that.’ His silence and confused look prove my point. I let out a joyless laugh. ‘Just do it, dude.’

The idea of a quick death is actually starting to sound appealing. It lets me off the hook. No more guilt. Who knows what comes next – maybe a movie theatre that will show me all the watershed moments in this guy’s life that led to him shooting me – but even if what comes next is just darkness, it’s better than the pain. Better than being aware of how truly fucked everything is.

Still he doesn’t pull the trigger. I watch his face change from anger to fear.

He isn’t going to do it.

‘Get up.’ But his voice is wavering.

Wait. What’s that feeling in my gut? Is that … hope? Maybe I was wrong before about his eyes. They were frightened, not frightening.

‘I. Need. Help.’ All confrontation and fight have left him. I can see he doesn’t want to shoot me just as much as I don’t want him to. He’ll help me if I can convince him. ‘I’m alone,’ I say. ‘I have been for over five months. Please.’

He’s lowering the gun now.

‘Please,’ I beg him. ‘My name’s Andrew. I’m not infected and my last family member died five months ago. My sister. She was twelve years old. You’re the first person I’ve talked to since.’

The last part is a lie, but I don’t want to think about the Fosters. I look away from him as my eyes burn with tears.

‘Dammit,’ he says under his breath. He sets the gun against the back of the sofa and holds out a hand to me. ‘Come on.’

I take his hand and he helps me stand. My muscles tense; I take a breath so as not to cry out. As we pass the cabin door he slams it shut with his foot.

My mystery boy is strong and manages to do most of the work himself. We make our way over to a dining room off the living area. There’s a large wooden table with six chairs around it.

With his free hand, he flicks the switch by the doorway and the chandelier hanging above the table lights up.

He has electricity?

‘Hop up,’ he says, turning me around. I do as he says and push myself back on to the table. ‘I’ll be right back, wait here.’

‘Oh, OK, because I was thinking of making myself a sandwich.’ He looks back at me on his way out of the dining room, as though he doesn’t realise I’m joking. I open my mouth to apologise, but he speaks first.

‘Sucks for you, I’m all out of bread.’ As he leaves I swear I can see a smirk pulling at his cheeks.

Excuse me, new kid, having a post-apocalyptic sense of humour is my thing. But his joke manages to put me a little more at ease.

I throw my coat to the floor and look around at the cabin for the first time. A gun to the face, I’ve learned, tends to shut down one’s attention to detail. The fireplace is cold and empty. I would expect to see animal heads on the wall, a mounted big-mouth bass, a crocheted rug under the couch in the living room. Instead, the living room rug is white shag and the sofa is an oversized and expensive- looking grey leather number. There are two other leather chairs in the living area, and mounted above the fireplace is a sixty-inch TV covered in dust.

The dining room has no china cabinet or sideboard. Instead there are framed pictures on the walls, scattered in a way that makes it seem like whoever did it spent a lot of effort making it look effortless.

I look closer at the picture of a child and his mother at the beach. They’re both white, but the mother’s tan hints that they’ve been in the sun for a while. Lucky. Any time I tried to tan I just burned. It looks like the son is similar, as his skin is still fair and there’s an unabsorbed glob of sunscreen on his shoulder.

The mother has brown hair. She’s wearing red sunglasses and a white-and-navy striped bathing suit, and is holding a sun hat on her head, the brim pushed up by the wind.

The boy is no more than seven; his smile is wide and gapped with missing baby teeth. Freckles dust his nose and cheeks. He’s closing one of his eyes against the glare of the sun; the other is bright blue.

I recognise this boy, only ten years older.

The now-older boy enters the dining room with a small plastic box in his hands. He sets it down on the dining room table and looks over at the picture he caught me examining.

‘Is that your mom?’ I ask him.

He frowns and doesn’t answer.

‘Sorry,’ I say. ‘I’m nosy. I’ll shut up.’

He pulls the lid off the white container and sets it on one of the chairs as he digs through medical supplies. My eyes go wide.

He doesn’t just have gauze and alcohol and antibacterial ointment. He has a small jar of burn gel, individually wrapped sterile syringes, cotton balls, peroxide, a few sterile scalpels, and instruments that I recognise from medical dramas that used to run on repeat before the bug.

Shit, maybe Tom Holland is here!

He unties the brown – formerly yellow – T-shirt from around my leg, then reaches down to the cuff of my jeans. He tries to pull it up, but the blood and damp weather have made the denim shrink and the jeans go no further. I breathe in deeply as pain shoots up my leg.

‘Don’t think jeans were a good choice today,’ he tells me.

‘This happened yesterday.’

‘Take them off.’

‘Shouldn’t you buy me dinner first?’ I ask. I don’t realise I’m going to say the joke until it’s already out. My face warms, but my embarrassment is short-lived as he finally lets his smirk grow into a smile.

I unbuckle my belt and pull my pants down to my knees, taking my left leg out first. He helps me with the right leg as we both pull at opposite sides so the denim doesn’t rub against my wound.

‘Jesus!’ His eyes go wide at what’s left of my calf. It’s the first time I’ve seen it without the jeans obstructing the view, and my stomach churns. He leaves the room, running to the kitchen, but I can’t pull my eyes away from my leg. My chest tightens and my arms and legs tingle with fear.

Things are worse than I thought.

It looks like raw meat. The back of my leg from just below my knee to the cuts from the trap is swollen and a beautiful shade of horrific purple. My left leg is dirty but about half the size of the right one.

The boy comes back with a small glass vial and a bottle of pills in one hand. In the other is a small leather- bound notebook, the pages of which are well-worn and yellowed. He sets the vial and pill bottle down on the table along with the book. I pick up the vial; it’s cold and filled with a clear liquid. The word bupivacaine is printed on the label. Whatever that means.

‘Where did you get this?’ I ask him, reaching for the bottle of pills.

The -illin suffix on the label tells me it’s antibiotics. Even post-apocalypse, those SAT prep courses weren’t such a waste after all.

He unwraps a sterile syringe and sticks it into the vial, filling the plastic tube and setting it on the table before getting up and heading back to the kitchen. ‘You aren’t allergic to penicillin or any antibiotics, are you?’ he calls out. I hear the sound of water pouring into a glass.

‘I don’t think so. How do I know?’ I ask.

He returns and hands me the glass and two pills. ‘I guess take it and find out.’

‘This won’t kill me, will it?’

‘If you’re allergic, yeah, probably.’

Great bedside manner, dude.

His eyes drift down to my leg. ‘But you said this happened yesterday, so if you don’t take them, the infection will definitely kill you. And it’ll be worse.’

He’s probably right. If it’s infected already and I do nothing, I’m dead. Do I have a choice? Yeah, I guess I just risk it, but … that hasn’t worked out so far. And amputation without anaesthesia – well, I hope even I don’t deserve that. I swallow the pills and drink all the water.

He picks up the syringe filled with the liquid from the vial he brought out.

‘What’s that do?’ I ask, still nervous. Why am I taking pills and medicine from a strange boy in the woods?

‘You’ll see.’ Before I can stop him, he sticks it in my leg and I howl out in pain. He pulls it out and sticks it in again, further down.

‘What are you doing?’ I scream.

‘Just a little more.’ He sticks me several more times, holding down my leg just above my knee while he does so. Tears are streaming down my face and I can hear my heart throbbing in my ears. I curse and scream until he finally stops.

He returns to the kitchen with the vial and used syringe. The burning in my leg begins to subside, but the memory still aches. The shriek of a tea-kettle comes from the kitchen and I glance to the doorway, my vision blurred by my tears.

He soon emerges with a large ceramic bowl, moving slowly and setting it down on the table.

‘You have a stove, too?’ I ask him.

‘I’ll show you later. How does your leg feel now?’

Numb. The leg pain is almost gone. My brain has gone back to focusing on the pain in my armpit from leaning on the crutch.

‘Fine,’ I say.

‘I wouldn’t say “fine”,’ he says, pulling a chair out and sitting down. He pulls the medical container over. ‘But at least you won’t have to bite a stick to deal with the pain while I stitch you up.’

He sets a few needles and black thread on the table and takes out the bottle of rubbing alcohol. He dips a washcloth in the hot water, wringing it out with one hand at a time, then sets it down on the table and waits in silence.

‘Still hot,’ he says, looking up at me.

‘Who are you? Some kind of kid doctor?’

He smiles his sad smile; it’s nothing like the grin he has in the pictures hanging on the wall. ‘Sorry.’ He holds out his hand, red from the hot water. ‘I’m Jamison.’

‘Andrew. Nice to meet you.’ We shake. His hands are warm and I’m jealous – it feels like I won’t ever be able to shake the cold from my bones. When he lets go, he pours alcohol into a cupped hand and then rubs them together.

Jamison picks up the hot towel and begins to clean the area around my wound. I flinch, expecting pain. But there is none.

Watching him clean my wounds, I’m immediately thankful that Jamison, Kid MD, gave me some kind of local anaesthetic. The white washcloth turns red-brown, but as he cleans the wounds, things don’t look so scary. Gross, but not scary.

‘So what happened?’ he asks. ‘A dog attack you?’

‘No.’ I shake my head and let out a groan. ‘It was a damn bear trap.’

Jamison shoots a look up at me as he continues cleaning. ‘You’re kidding.’

‘I’m not.’

His smirk returns. ‘It’s the apocalypse and you decide to make enemies with Wile E. Coyote.’

‘Seriously.’ I let out a sigh. ‘I had no idea people even used those things any more. I’m sure it was set up before the bug but, honestly, who sets a damn bear trap?’

‘How did it not cut your leg off?’ he asks, looking at the gashes.

‘Dumb luck?’ I tell him. ‘It didn’t snap all the way shut.’ I still don’t understand how the branch landed between the jaws of the trap and didn’t set it off. I barely even stepped on the trigger myself.

Jamison threads the needle. He douses it with alcohol and puts the needle to one of the wounds in my leg. ‘Any feeling coming back yet?’ he asks.

I shake my head and he slides the needle into my skin. I tense up at the sight but feel no pain.

‘It’s gonna be a pretty rough stitch job since the needle’s flat,’ he says, not looking away. ‘But it should help you heal faster.’

I watch as he pulls the thread tight on the first puncture. ‘Seriously, how do you know how to do this? Were you pre-med or something before the bug?’ Maybe he’s older and just looks young?

‘No,’ he says. ‘My mom taught me how to sew buttons on my shirts or fix a seam that busted. Same principle, right?’

I look back at the pictures on the wall. Out of the corner of my eye, I see Jamison glance up at me, follow my gaze to the picture, then look back down at my leg. I don’t press the matter further.

‘Why’d you decide not to shoot me?’ I finally ask after he’s sewn up three of the six wounds in my leg. How is he so good when none of the rest of us survivors are?

He lets out a sigh. ‘I guess because … I don’t know.’ He shakes his head. ‘Probably because I’m too stupid to realise when I need to look out for myself.’

‘If that makes you stupid, it means I’m a hundred and fifty per cent dipshit.’

‘I figured out that part when you said you stepped in a damn bear trap.’

I laugh, and it feels like it’s the first time in months. Maybe it is.

He ties off the final stitch and wipes away the blood. Then he throws the wet towel back in the bowl of bloody water and holds out his hand to me.

‘Think you can walk? You can take a shower if you want.’

I stare at him. ‘Shower?’

‘Yeah. W— I have well water.’

I caught that almost-‘we’. So he’s alone. ‘Running water and electricity?’

‘And a hot water heater that runs on that electricity.’

My stomach does a flip with excitement. This place sounds amazing. I let myself think, just for a second, whether I could take it from him. After he didn’t shoot me, after he helped me, could I take this place? But that second is enough to make me feel sick.

‘You OK?’ Jamison asks.

‘Yeah. And yes, I would love to shower.’ Only the shower, then I’m gone.

I straighten my leg out in front of me and set the heel on the floor. The pain increases a touch, but it’s bearable.

I put a little more weight down. A little more pain.

A little more weight … and … not a little more pain. That’s good, right?

I put the rest of my weight down and make the second biggest mistake of my life.