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They travel for at least a week without seeing another person. Or at least Michael does. He doesn’t know where Jessica goes off to when she takes the car and leaves him by the side of the road, but he can guess.
Sometimes, when she drives, he’s drawn to her hands on the steering wheel, to the cuffs of Jen’s white turtleneck—bleached and disinfected but still speckled with pink.
This time, they brake next to a field as open as a wound. Jessica’s already halfway out the car door by the time he snaps to, her body craning toward horizon like she’s trying to see past the edge, like she could peel back the skyline easy as skin. He turns away quick. There’s already millions of things he’d rather forget—those first few cases quarantined away in their death tent, London full of a smell like rotten violets, Jessica throwing his wife’s clothes in a bag, his wife—
“There’s a big structure to the north, looks like a pyramid,” she says. Hesitates. “Don’t follow me unless you already know you’re sick.”
“I’ll be back before nightfall,” she continues, and he nods along, resigns himself to counting cans and clouds for the next few hours. Her bleached hair bobs through the field like wreckage in sea.
She doesn’t come back.
And he doesn’t look for her.
After a day, he guns up the car and starts for London, driving through the countryside fast enough to tear up flowers in his slipstream. He doesn’t know what he’s racing toward, but it has Alice’s laugh and Jen’s perfume and is probably already gone. He runs out of conviction before he runs out of gas.
The hands grabbing at his hair don’t feel like his own. Michael doesn’t even know why he’s still alive, let alone if anyone else is, or why. They had overstayed in the city, watching the news reports go from bad to worse in disbelief. Or, rather, he had watched while Jessica prepared.
He should’ve asked her to go fetch his family. Instead, Michael spent those last few days watching looters ghost through the neighborhood and plumes of smoke play over the roof of the Palmers’ house. They had pulled out wardrobes and refrigerators and then abandoned them, half-wrecked, in the dizzy streets. Some of his old coworkers received the same treatment on live TV.
So this is how the world ends, he’d thought. Not with a whimper but a bang. A rock through his living room window.
Except, he guesses, it hadn’t. And it continues, just barely, to not end.
He remembers that, on the third day after the sickness chased them out of London, Jessica had knelt by the mouth of a burrow and fished out two kits, blind and squirming.
He’d hung back as he always did, her pack-carrying shadow. He’d said something about rabies. But Jessica made him hold them anyway, in a dirty shopping bag he raised to eye-level, like a boy with goldfish at the fair. The rabbits’ shadows against the plastic were outlined by a halo of light.
Some part of him forgot to feel bad. Something, even now, crowds out the grief. Like a sheet’s been dropped over the body. Michael can only glimpse it in impressions—a lace curtain fluttering in the wind or the glass of Jessica’s eyes, the glaze in them that wasn’t there before she disappeared.
Afterwards, around their shoddy campfire, Jessica had taken his letter opener—sixth anniversary, iron—and unzipped a kit from tail to neck, one clean motion. She showed him which organs to take out, and he mirrored her, clumsy but learning: gallbladder, liver, stomach. Heart.
Cowardice on an existential scale. Or maybe Michael just hasn’t yet seen his fill of bodies and rabbit hearts. Either way, he heads back.
They’d stumbled across a town four days ago, invisible smoke and the smell of gasoline over buildings dark and silent. Jessica had stopped and he had stopped with her, watching her eyes flit around the dark—like a lizard tasting the air. No sound but his gasp of pain as Jessica pulled him back and behind her, her ragged fingernails conveying some knowledge she’d gathered from years on the run—about people, he guesses, their tells and signs.
She knew to wait for him, and he’s not surprised.
It’s in her hair this time, so much that the ends look dip-dyed, red and crunchy. But when she tells him, cocking her head, that he’s been crying, the smear over her mouth parts to show very white teeth.
He returns the smile out of sheer momentum, the same force that unlocks the passenger door, lifts the brake. The same force that inhales and asks, “So, where to?” as if this wasn’t his first time behind the wheel with her in the car.
“Sorry about the sweater,” Jessica says, lifting her hands like touching anything would be an offense to him. “She did it to herself, in the end. I suppose that means there’s not a cure.”
She turns to him, sudden and sharp. “But we’re not done yet.”
He presses down on the gas. “No,” he says calmly, “we’re not.
He remembers trying to kill her in the upstairs bathroom, before everything else happened.
“You fight,” she had murmured. Her hand had gripped the barrel of the gun, just short of a throttle.
At the time he’d thought of the few other, unlucky incidences he’d held a weapon: the coil in the deer’s hind leg before he’d shot and missed. Jessica was some animal looking at him from across a distance, eyes big enough to see himself in—until she dipped closer. Then there was just the smell of bleach, a rattle: you fucking fight.