Work Text:
After it’s over, after everyone’s dead, he can’t help but lay in the sand. His car is pretty well hidden, and he feels like he should just wallow for a moment. Sink into the earth and let it try to heal him. He can feel the sun travel through the sky by which side of his face feels hotter, and feel the earth cool when it’s night. The wind blows sand over him until it covers his body, his face, his eyes. It buries him until he can’t feel the sun anymore.
He stays. Not asleep, but not awake either. His ghosts seem like they’re trying to scream at him from the surface, the sand a gritty cocoon keeping them away. He neither eats nor drinks, and he can feel his skin dry and crack, but he doesn’t bleed either. He’s narrowed down to nothing but the feeling of his hair growing, and his nails growing, and his skin flaking off, and blood inching through his veins.
He remembers when he became like this. When he found the woman walking through the sun. She looked like a corpse, but she still walked. When he spoke, she didn’t hear; when he touched her shrunken, emaciated arm she turned, grabbed his hand and bit. Her teeth were far too sharp, and she was much too strong for someone who looked like a skeleton covered in stretched skin.
There have been stories, of course, about things that feed on blood, things that can’t die, things that are too strong. He’s not sure, but maybe that one had gone a bit too long, because when he shoved her away, she fell back into the sand and stayed. Her hand twitched and her eyes rolled, but she did nothing.
That night he’d had a fever, and when he woke up he felt different. It’d taken a long time for him to figure out how he’d changed. What had changed. He’d found a half-dead corpse, the type he would usually just steal from and leave. But that time, he’d knelt down and bit, and drank. Drank until it wasn’t half-dead anymore. He’d felt better.
He’d thought it would make it easier, to stay away, to avoid connection. But connection found him anyway. The little girl. The makeshift family. Trying to find something good at the end of the world.
Fate seemed to want him to make connections and then lose them. No matter how often he tried to leave, something always forced him to stay, until suddenly he’s in the thick of it. Blowing up his car, getting shot.
Watching them die, or leave. Crawling through the blood and fire to find himself alone again.
Becoming immortal didn’t seem to help his fucked up knee any.
It’s safe to think about these types of things under the sand. They stretch out into the dark, but don’t hurt him. Not like the ghosts do.
Here under the sand, the past can just be a thing that happened.
He drifts for an indeterminable length. Maybe days pass. Maybe years. Maybe a thousand years. Maybe he’ll wake up one day and there will be absolutely no evidence that humans ever existed. Maybe he’ll wake up and find that everything’s fixed itself. That the world reset the apocalypse and everything is normal again.
Maybe he’ll wake up to find nothing’s changed at all other than the position of the closest sand dune.
His body feels like a husk when he finally decides to move. He’s stayed here long enough. He probably looks just like that woman who bit him.
He twitches his finger, and points it up and up and up, feeling toward the surface. It’s a little like pushing his finger into solid rock but he can do shit like that now so he pushes anyway. His arm is extended straight above him but he still can’t feel the surface.
He pushes with his legs, slowly, slowly. He moves his knees and the sand shuffles around him. He pushes up and up and up, until his finger feels warm, and then hot, and then pushes above the sand to the surface.
Exhausted, he lets his hand hang on the surface for a while. When he feels the sand start to cover it, he pushes again.
His head breaks the surface and his lungs cough out all the sand that’d filled them for the last however long. He sucks in the hot, dry air and thinks breathing never felt so sweet.
When he finally stands, carefully clears the grit from his eyelids. His eyes have dried out, and he can’t see. His skin is cracked and caked with sand, so he sits. He doesn’t let the sand cover him again, but he sits until he hears the rumble of one of those rare desert thunderstorms. The drops cover him and he opens his sightless eyes to the rain. Most of the water evaporates before it even reaches him, but it makes the air beneath the cloud humid enough to renew his parched body. This time when he blinks and wipes the sand from his eyes he can see the hazy grey sky and the hazy brown sand.
The storm passes quickly and he looks around for his car. He sees the rocks that he put it between, but they’ve almost been covered by the sand. He sighs and starts digging.
Digging through hot, dry sand is terrible, and it keeps sliding back down into the hole he’s making.
At least he doesn’t need to stop to eat. The ghosts and the sun keep him company in turn while he digs.
Finally, he finds a corner of his car. He clears around it until he can reach the door.
Not like he’s expecting it to start, after all this time, but he turns the ignition anyway.
Nothing.
He clears around the car and pushes it out of the sand. There’d been a town to the west, before he’d gone under. He decides to head that way.
He walks and walks. Shoving his car along and getting annoyed at the sand-matted hair in his eyes. Grabs a lizard or two to munch on.
The town isn’t much of a town anymore, but he trades some scrap to fix his car. He trades a bit of heavy lifting for some water, which he mostly uses to clean his car.
He drives and drives. Stops and drives. Drinks from some dead scavengers he finds, sucking hard to pull the blood from their cooling bodies. He guesses he looks less like a walking corpse when he goes into towns, although he still looks like a dirty vagabond.
One day, on the horizon, he sees a flash of green. He thinks he’s probably hallucinating, but he can’t help going toward it anyway.
Green. He doesn’t think he’s even seen that colour in his dreams for a long time.
He looks at the green until he hears them. Danger. Someone making that much noise driving around isn’t worried about being heard or found. They’re hunting.
He runs.