The Apocalypse Started Today, but I've Lived It for Ten Year

The Spores

The man in the hardware store kept his hand up.

He didn't wave it or call out. He just held it there, palm open, like someone waiting for a handshake to be returned. Twenty-one other people stood beside him in a line with their arms at their sides and their faces turned toward us.

I did not raise my hand back.

"Do you know them?" Ruth asked quietly.

"No."

"They know you."

"Yes."

Dale's voice came muffled through the wet apron. "Maybe they're just survivors. Maybe they need help."

"People who need help don't stand in a row." I was counting again. Twenty-two. Every one of them wore a strip of white cloth tied around the left wrist, the same width, the same knot. Somebody had handed those out before noon. "We're leaving."

"Which way?"

"West. Slowly. Don't run."

We backed out from behind the kiosk and crossed Eighth Avenue at a walk. I kept the axe low and watched the reflection in a parked car's window. As we passed the corner, every head in that line turned to follow us, together, at the same speed, like the heads of sunflowers. Then the man lowered his hand and the line closed again.

Nobody came out. That was almost worse.

We made it a block and a half before Ruth finally let out her breath. "I've worked in an ER for eleven years," she said. "I have seen a lot of strange things. That was the strangest."

"It's going to be a strange week," I said.

The pharmacy was on the corner of Ninth and Forty-Eighth, a narrow shop with a green cross over the door and HALLORAN'S in peeling gold letters on the glass. The door was unlocked. A bell jingled when I pushed it, and a voice from behind the counter yelled, "I have a bat!"

"We're not here to rob you," I said. "Put it down."

A bald man in a white coat rose slowly from behind the register. He was somewhere past sixty, and he held a wooden bat in both hands like a man who had never swung one at anything bigger than a ball. Behind him, the shelves were bare. Not looted. Bare. Whole rows of boxes were gone and the gaps between them had been neatly closed up, as if someone had tidied after themselves.

"There's nothing left," he said. "I'm sorry. You're too late."

I looked at the shelves again. Antifungals, charcoal, saline, bandages, gloves. Those were the five aisles I had come to strip. Every one of them was empty.

"Who got here first?" I asked.

He blinked. "How did you know someone did?"

"Humor me."

"A woman." He lowered the bat an inch. "Ten o'clock this morning. Tall, dark hair pulled back, ordinary coat, nothing special about her. She came in with two duffel bags and bought everything on that list. Cash. She paid three times what it cost and didn't even wait for change. I asked if she was a prepper. She said not exactly." He swallowed. "She said the world was going to end at noon, and that nobody would be buying anything after that."

"And you didn't believe her."

"I'm a pharmacist. I believe in lab results." He looked past me at the purple sky through the window. "I suppose I'm updating."

Ruth stepped forward. "What's left? Anything. Salt, sterile water, anything with an antifungal in it."

Halloran thought about it. He went behind the counter and came back with a handful of things. A tube of athlete's foot cream. Two bottles of saline eyewash. A box of cheap dust masks. A jar of medicated shampoo.

"That's all she left," he said. "Said it wasn't worth the trouble."

Ruth looked at the pile, then at me. "This isn't going to cure anything."

"No," I said. "But it might slow it down."

She nodded and went to work. I stood by the door with the axe and watched the street while she sat Dale on a stool, pulled the wet apron off his face, and made him rinse his eyes with saline. She swabbed his hands and neck with the cream. She fitted a dust mask over his nose and mouth and tightened the straps, her fingers quick and steady.

"I don't feel sick," Dale said.

"Good," said Ruth.

"I feel okay. Honestly. Maybe the cloth worked."

"Maybe."

I didn't turn around. I had been watching the corner of Ninth for several minutes, and I did not like how quiet it had become. The screaming had thinned out. In its place was a low, shuffling sound, like feet dragging through leaves, and I was trying to work out how many.

I also couldn't stop thinking about the woman with the duffel bags.

She had stood in this room at ten in the morning. She had bought the exact supplies I had planned to buy, in the exact amounts I would have wanted, two hours before anyone should have known to want them. She had left a note at my cafe at nine. She had not simply guessed what I'd do. She had known, and she had moved ahead of me, clearing every shelf I would have reached for.

Why? To help me, or to stop me?

"Ethan."

Ruth's voice was different. I turned.

Dale was still sitting on the stool, but his face had gone the color of old paper. He held his left hand out in front of him and looked at it with the dull curiosity of a man examining someone else's skin. Dark lines were spreading under it. Thin as hair at first, then wider, tracing the veins from his wrist up toward his elbow like ink dropped into water.

"That's not normal, is it," he said.

Ruth had his wrist in her fingers. She counted silently, lips moving. "His pulse is a hundred and forty. His temperature is climbing. This is faster than anything I've seen." She looked up. "How long does he have?"

I knew the answer. I had watched it happen to a man in year one, a man with a face like Dale's, patient and tired and decent. With Vitality ten and no treatment, the dust took a full hour to turn someone. But this was twenty minutes after exposure, and the lines were already past the wrist.

"Not an hour," I said. "Closer to twenty minutes. Maybe less."

"What do we do?"

There was one thing. Activated charcoal, an antifungal course, and a saline flush, all given together in the first thirty minutes, bought you six hours. Six hours was enough to find the real treatment. Those had been the five aisles. They had been the whole plan.

The aisles were empty.

Dale looked up at me. His eyes had begun to turn a faint, sickly yellow around the edges of the pupil, and his breath came short behind the mask.

"Ethan," he said. "It's okay. I can see your face. You've got a plan. You always get that look when you've got a plan."

I didn't. For the first time since I woke up in that cafe, I did not have a plan.

Somewhere out there, a woman with dark hair and two duffel bags had taken the only thing that could save him. She had known I would come looking for it. And she had left me an empty shelf.