The Only Ones

Part One
December 10


         The sun shone brightly through the elevated train tracks.
         The light brought Alex little warmth, however, as he stood on the roof of the hospital smoking his third cigarette of the hour.
         From the day he had taken refuge inside the hospital--July 19, as he remembered--he had been trying to keep up with how much time had passed.
         By his calculation, it was now December 10.
         He had suppressed his reason in favor of survival.
         When New York City was overrun with humans infected with a virus that made them eat one another, there was no time to figure out why.
         There was only time to either succumb or attempt to escape.
         If it had not been for that open window, he would be exactly like the woman lumbering down the middle of the empty street whom he now had to shoot.
         He kept his old neighbor's handgun on him at all times.
         His apartment had been no refuge.
         That pathetic old building had probably collapsed by now.
         He pulled the handgun out of the pocket of the heavyweight camouflage pants he had begun to wear every day since it had gotten so unnaturally cold.
         He aimed at the infected woman's head and pulled the trigger.
         As had happened with all the others, her head was torn apart by the bullet in a kind of volcanic eruption of greenish-black blood.
         At first, the thought and the act had horrified him.
         Now, with each one that he killed, he was affected less and less.
         None of the infected ever spoke. Actual words, that is.
         When Alex thought about it, he remembered the last person he talked to on the day his world caved in on him.
         It had been his boss at the warehouse.
         He could not remember exactly what had been said, but he could remember how much he had not wanted to talk to his boss that day.
         But that was it.
         His existence--he could not call it a life--was slowly weaving its own kind of normal.
         He took his cigarette out of his mouth with his bony right hand—he was growing ever thinner with his effort to preserve the food from the vending machines on which he nibbled every day--and exhaled deeply.
         He threw it onto the ground and put it out with his worn-out work boots.
         The only useful piece of clothing he had found in the godforsaken wing of the hospital had been a black down-filled coat that was much too big for him but at least kept him semi-warm.
         He crossed his long arms to warm his skeletal body.
         He would stay outside until the sun went down to keep the infected away from his refuge.
         At night, he would try, most of the time unsuccessfully, to sleep.
         He could hear their incoherent wails and shrieks even through the thick hospital walls.
         At first, he had tried to shoot them at night, but it had gotten so cold that he could not stand outside for that long without the meager bit of heat that the sun provided.
         All he had was the coat, which had become ridiculously large with his weight loss--he was six feet tall and now weighed about one hundred and twenty pounds, he guessed—and nothing else to keep him warm.
         No hat to cover his nearly shaven head and no gloves to warm his pale hands.
         Through his tired gray eyes, he could see another thing in the distance coming toward the hospital.
         They had all started to look the same, but Alex found that every time he saw one he tried to distinguish it--to whom? just to himself, he supposed--from the others.
         He would try to find something unique about each one--though they all met the same fate at his hands.
         He supposed that it was the monotonous terror that had become his life that made him do this.
         Before, his twenty-seven-year old days had been a gray sort of monotony that was neither exciting nor terrible.
         Work, talk to his friend James--who was nowhere to be found now--smoke, go to bed.
         Alex had tried to get in touch with James multiple times.
         Now Alex's cell phone was dead and the phones in the hospital did not work.
         Neither did the computers, though Alex had spent many of his already sleepless nights trying to fix them.
         Alex was alone.
         Completely alone.


Part Two
December 20


         The hospital was dark at night except for the fluorescent lights that had grown ever dimmer since Alex had retreated into the building.
         From where he lay on the cot in the examination room that had become his bedroom, he could hear only the groans of the infected in the distance  and the clock on the wall ticking away his life.
         The clock read two in the morning.
         Twelve hours ago, Alex had been at his usual spot outside with his handgun.
         Why he did that anymore, he did not know.
         Habit, he guessed.
         For a reason known only to them, the infected had not gone near the hospital in the past several days.
         Alex could hear them and see them in the distance during the day, but they never came as close as they once did.
         In the same way that he missed the monotonous job he used to resent, he missed the infected.
         They gave him a small purpose, at least.
         Now there was nothing.
         Now there was no one.
         There was Alex and an empty hospital.
         And a handgun.
         He lifted it from its place on the metal stand that he had wheeled next to the cot at some previous time that only distinguished itself from the present by the weather.
         The only light in the room came from the fluorescent overhead light in the hallway outside of the door.
         Alex had not bothered to fully close the door because he knew that he would not be able to sleep.
         In that light that would not go out, with his eyes that would not close, he held the gun in his right hand and gazed at it as if hypnotized.
         He did not dare leave the hospital and wander into a city that was probably eight million infected strong now.
         He could not get news from the outside world from any source no matter how diligently he tried to fix the phones, the computers, or the radios.
         He knew that no one waited for him outside these walls.
         His mother had passed away five years ago, and there had been no word from his father since he had abandoned Alex and his mother shortly after Alex's third birthday.
         So he brought the gun a little closer to his face.
         A feeling of deep, crushing peace rose up from his soul and embraced him like nothing had ever embraced him before this moment.
         He raised his arm a little more.
         He felt as if he were slowly wading into a bottomless pool of warm water in which he knew he would drown but from which he never wanted to escape.
         He put the barrel to his head--where his hair had not grown since he had shaved it in the summer, he did not know for what reason--and though it was so cold, it did not shatter that fatally warm feeling.
         He slid his index finger onto the trigger.
He closed his eyes.
         There was a crash from somewhere in the hallway.
         He leapt up from where he lay, as if startled awake from a dream, then paused for a moment.
         Still holding the gun, he slowly crept to the slightly open door.
         Another crash.
         It sounded like something falling over.
         Maybe the myriad piles of medical equipment that had fallen into disuse.
         He slid out into the hallway.
         He stopped at the sound of a voice.
         It was little more than a gasp, but it was definitely a human voice.
         Strange.
         Those things either groaned or were silent.
         Alex slowly walked down the hallway, holding the gun as if it were the most precious treasure in what was probably left of the world.
         He could hear footsteps that were not his own.
         They were much quieter than his, actually.
         Coming to the end of the hallway, he stopped again.
         The quiet little footsteps--it was as if they were trying to be quiet--came closer.
         He waited.
         A flash of a face and clothing and Alex aimed his gun.
         "NO!" a voice screamed. "I'm not .... not one of them!"
         Alex froze.
         There, in front of him, stood a young woman.
         Her large blue eyes were wide with fear.
         She was petite, probably five foot three, and very slender.
         Her brown hair was long and straight, covering her long-sleeved green dress that ended above her bony knees.
         "I'm not one of them," she repeated, much more quietly than before.
         Alex let his arm drop to his side.
         "I'm Lana," she tried to force a smile, as if their meeting had any semblance of normalcy.


Part Three
January 3


         Until her arrival at the hospital, Lana had been existing much like Alex in her apartment building.
         She was, in her view and in Alex's, extremely lucky to have survived the twelve-block walk to the hospital from her building--especially with a fillet knife as her only weapon.
         Her reason for seeking refuge in the hospital was none other than this--her apartment had been broken into by those things like Alex's had been.
         She had noticed that the infected stayed away from the hospital, so she went in, thinking there were no other survivors than herself but wistfully hoping that another human being had escaped a fate as horrific as the one that waited for her outside the hospital walls.
         In the few weeks that she had lived in the hospital with Alex, they had exchanged their stories of survival--though when Alex had gotten to the part about family, Lana had mentioned she had a sister with whom she had lived, but had said nothing else.
         There was a silent knowledge between them that her sister had met a tragic end at the rotting hands of a former human.
         They had talked quite a lot since her arrival.
         Desperation had woven its way through their conversations like a virus brought on by loneliness and fearful despair.
         They had also explored quite a lot now that they had each other to rely on.
         Lana was much livelier in her exploration that Alex had been in recent months, and thanks to her energetic curiosity, they had found a way to survive.
         At Lana's urging, they had used an axe to pry open a set of double doors that Lana was convinced led downstairs--where there might be some sort of food supply.
         And she had been right.
         It had taken countless nights of searching and finding nothing of use, but eventually they had made their way to a basement storeroom that housed a surprisingly large stockpile of dry goods. And so that problem was solved, at least for the time being.
         The more time Alex spent with Lana, the more grateful he became for her arrival.
         Every day, just as they were doing on January third at 1:30 in the afternoon, they stood on the roof together to make sure that none of those came near their refuge.
         They would take turns sometimes, considering the cold, but more often they would keep watch together.
         Alex had found scrubs for Lana to wear, left behind in one of the closets in which he had not bothered to take a good look around until now. But she had had nothing to wear other than that dress that left her freezing.
         There were only two packs of cigarettes left now.
         They shared a single cigarette as they stood next to one another on the roof.
         Lana had no gun, but her vision was much sharper than Alex's.
         "Right there," she pointed with the cigarette toward the southeastern edge of the view. "What's left of what used to be a tall woman in a business suit."
         Alex turned his gaze to what Lana saw.
         There it--or she, or whatever Alex should call it, not there was anyone who cared what it was called--lumbered, dragging one backwards leg behind it as it searched for something or someone to eat.
         Alex raised his right arm and aimed his gun at its head.
         He pulled the trigger.
         Its head disappeared into a hurricane of black blood.
         He lowered his arm once again.
         He leaned back on the wall behind them and sighed.
         She leaned back so there was nothing out of sync in their stance.
         "Do you think there's ... a purpose?" Lana turned and looked straight into his eyes.
         "A purpose to what? To spending your life blowing the heads off whatever the fuck those things are?" Alex laughed quietly to cover the bitterness of his statement.
         "Not just that, to all of this," Lana continued. "I always believed that life had meaning, that nothing was chaos, and that everything had an eventual purpose even if you couldn't see it. But this ... I've tried but I can't make sense of anything."
         "It took people eating each other to make you think that life was chaos?" Alex asked, realizing he came out sounding much more mocking than he had intended to sound.
         "You never thought there was meaning in anything?" Lana asked.
         Alex thought for a moment.
         "No, not really," he replied. "I suppose it always just seemed senseless to me. Before this, I mean. I think no one could make sense of this."
         "I think there has to be some reason for it," Lana replied, not as a retort but almost as an encouragement. "We're still here. I don't think we are random. And I don't think surviving something like this can have no meaning."
         "If you can still believe that after living through this, you might be on to something," Alex threw his cigarette out into the city that used to be.


Part Four
January 22


         Alex gazed down at Lana as she slept on her cot.
         It had been six days since the incident.
         Neither Alex nor Lana knew how it had happened, but one of those had appeared in the hallway one night.
         The conclusion Alex had come to was that it had been trapped in some area of the hospital he and Lana had explored and had not been able to get out until they had unintentionally given it freedom.
         Alex had been busy in the lobby at the end of the hallway when he had heard Lana's scream.
         The doctor--or what was left of him--was gleefully biting her right arm when Alex ran down the hall with his gun.
         It had taken only one shot to its head to bring it down.
         The trouble was, Lana had been laying next to it with blood pouring out of her arm.
         Alex had bandaged her well enough--as well as he had been able to bandage himself up on his arrival the previous summer, which had obviously been enough for him to be able to survive.
         What concerned Alex and Lana was not the precisely the injury itself, but the possible consequences of it.
         So far Lana had shown no signs of being infected. She was just very, very tired and needed pain medication often.
         She had taken some right before going back to sleep. It seemed to Alex that she began to take more every time.
         When she had first arrived, Alex had a sort of camaraderie with her as a fellow survivor.
         Lately, however, there was a silent understanding between them that their feelings for one another were growing into something much more than camaraderie.
         As Alex quietly pulled a chair to Lana's bedside, he tried to drown the thoughts in his mind that the only being who tied him to this world could soon be leaving it--and him.

         Lana awakened to noises and sights she had not seen for months.
         She lay in the same hospital bed in which she had gone to sleep--or so she thought.
         Her vision was a bit blurry, but she could tell that the room was--normal.
         The lights were on. Everything was clean.
         And there was a bouquet of flowers on the counter in the far right corner of the room.
         "Lana?" a female voice, quite familiar, rang faintly in her ear. "Lana?"
         Lana turned her head and she saw.
         There, in a chair at her bedside, was her sister Natalie.
         She looked as she always had: petite, slim and almost Lana's twin except for her blonde hair.
         Lana could tell from the look on her pale face that she was quite stressed.
         "Can you see me?" Natalie asked quietly, trying not to let the panic in her heart escape too much.
         "I can ... " Lana struggled to sit up. "But--"
         "You can? Oh my God," Natalie's voice wavered. "You see me? You can hear me?"
         "Yes," Lana replied. "But what is this!? You ... you were ... "
         "You're in the hospital," Natalie replied. "You're sick."
         Lana stared at Natalie, trying to decide if she were happy or horrifed.
         Outside the window in the door to her room, nurses and doctors bustled and talked.
         "What ... how are ... what do I have?" Lana asked.
         "They don't know," Natalie responded. "But you're getting better. I can see it."
         Lana wished to say more to her sister, but her eyes began to feel so heavy again.
         She looked down at her right arm where that thing had bitten her.
         There was the bandage that Alex had put on it.
         "Where's Alex?" she asked.
         Natalie opened her mouth and spoke, but Lana did not hear her words.
         Lana did not hear anything, actually.
         As abruptly as it had come, all the sound left her world.
         Then her eyes closed again.


Part Five
February 5


         Alex and Lana sat on the floor of the only "bedroom" at the end of the hallway in which they had locked themselves six days prior.
         Lana had recovered from her bite for the most part--enough to move to the end of the hallway, that is.
         They had gotten into the rest of the hospital. They had invaded the last safe haven in the city.
         But the thing that had struck Alex so much was the fact that they were changing.
         It was as if they had evolved since the beginning of the outbreak.
         The way they moved was much more walking than lumbering.
         Their vocalizations could almost be made into words if Alex listened closely enough.
         The only thing Alex had saved from outside their hallway was the one radio on which he had made a little bit of progress.
         He had gotten to the point where he could hear static when he turned it on.
         This was much farther than he had gotten before in his effort to repair it.
         Lana, though her condition had improved, was still not up to much of anything besides nibbling on the food they could access in the second--smaller--storeroom in the basement.
         From the angle of the harsh winter sun peering in through the window behind where Alex and Lana were seated, Alex guessed it was about three or four in the afternoon.
         "I'm gonna try this again," he said more to himself and the world than to anyone in particular.
         He rose from the floor and walked over to the counter in the corner where he had set the radio.
         "Alex?" Lana asked drowsily.
         He turned the radio on.
         Static.
         "Yes?" He turned around to face her.
         The faint sound of garbled voices fought their way through the white noise.
         "I didn't tell you ... about my dream, did I?" her tired eyes met his.
         "--infected ... search--" a male voice from the radio.
         "No," Alex shook his head.
         "It was when I was sick, when I first got bitten," she began. "In my dream, I was in the hospital, this hospital. And I was sick. But it was only me. There were doctors, and nurses--"
         The same male voice from the radio interrupted her: "--showing improvement ..."
         "And my sister," she swallowed. "Everything was ... normal."
         "Of course," Alex sighed a little and glanced back at the radio. "I've had dreams like that on most nights where I could sleep. It's--"
         He turned his head to look at Lana.
         But she wasn't there.
         Instead, what he saw in front of him was an unmade hospital bed and a perfectly painted beige wall.
         He looked back at the counter.
         No radio.
         Just a clean sink and soap.
         His gaze was drawn to the door.
         It was open.
         Light poured in from the windows in the hallway.
         A nurse passed briskly by the open doorway.
         "Hey!" he yelled after her. "Nurse!"
         He stepped towards the door.
         But it was closed.
         The floor was dirty as it had been.
         He looked back at the room.
         There was Lana, looking up at him from her place on the floor.
         "Alex, what's the matter?" she asked.
         "I was just ... " he stammered. "This place ... I wasn't here, Lana, it was all normal!"
         "Like my dream, you mean," she responded.
         Alex nodded.
         He walked across the room and sat back down next to her.
         He felt tears--not of sorrow, but confusion--welling in his eyes.
         He broke into quiet sobs.
         Lana, languid though she was, wrapped her arms around him.
         The radio was silent.


Part Six
February 6


         Alex awoke before Lana the next morning.
         They had slept in the same corner of the room all through the night, Lana's arms wrapped around Alex and her head on his chest.
         By the weak light that tried--and failed--to illuminate the room, it seemed to be around nine in the morning.
         He felt so tired.
         He realized that he and Lana had been sleeping for hours, but it felt to him as if he had not slept in days.
         "Lana," he looked down at her.
         Her eyes opened slowly.
         She backed away from him and sat up.
         "Do you hear that?" she whispered after a moment.
         All Alex could hear were the distant sounds of the infected.
         "What? Them?" he asked.
         "No ... not ... not the infected ... don't you hear that?" Lana raised her voice a little. "There's people, other humans! You can't hear them?"
         Alex paused.
         But he could not hear what Lana said she could.
         "I don't, Lana ... there's nothing," he responded.
         Lana leaned forward as if that would make him hear them.
         Alex rose from the floor and tried to stretch out his aches from falling asleep on the hard floor.
         He turned around to look out the window.
         What he saw left him frozen.
         From the window in the claustrophobic little room, he could see the street that ran behind the hospital.
         It was busy again.
         There were cars--and they moved as they once had.
         There appeared to be humans.
         But as Alex examined the scene laid out before him, he realized that they were not humans.
         They were infected, with wounds and black eyes.
         But they walked so purposefully.
         They talked with one another.
         His paralytic state was broken by a large crash from outside the door.
         "What the hell was that?" he asked no one in particular.
         Lana did not reply--or even seem to notice.
         Alex slid his handgun out of his back pocket.
         He moved quietly toward the door.
         Another crash--closer this time.
         Lana did not stir.
         "Lana," Alex now whispered as she had. "Don't you hear it?"
         But she did not reply.
         She rose from the floor.
         "Lana?" Alex asked as he felt his soul sink.
         She took two stumbling steps toward him.
         Her eyes went dark--like them.
         "No," he said to himself, his voice unable to become anything more than a whisper.
         Her mouth jerked open.
         Black blood shot out of it onto the floor.
         Alex raised his gun.
         He wanted to say her name. He wanted to stop her.
         But he knew that she was beyond reason now.
         He aimed at her.
         Then, the doorknob began to turn back and forth, back and forth.
         They had broken into the safe hallway.
         Motivated by instinct, Alex pulled the trigger.
         A bullet, faster than the infected blood that had escaped from her mouth, hit her in the chest.
         The doorknob rattled more loudly.
         Alex stared as Lana fell to the floor.
         The door behind him opened.
         Before he could react, he felt a blow to his head.
         Everything was dark.


Part Seven
March 16


         Alex's eyes opened to a room filled with light.
         He lay in a hospital bed, warm from the clean white blankets covering his body.
         The soft beige paint on the walls was no longer peeling.
         Afternoon sunlight shone through the perfectly clean window that faced his bed.
         Everything around him, from the spotless counter and sink by the window to the tumbler of ice water at his bedside, was normal.
         It felt like the real world again.
         He slowly sat up, the two pillows behind his head shifting a little as he moved.
         The back of his head--where he remembered being hit--ached slightly.
         He looked down at his arms.
         Both of them--pale and thin as he remembered--appeared to have round, dark scabs all the way up past his elbows.
         "Like them," he whispered to himself.
         He remembered the scabbed, peeling skin of the infected.
         His arms resembled theirs significantly.
         The door to the right of Alex's bed—the door that led to that fated room, and Lana— opened.
         In the doorway stood a nurse in scrubs.
         She stared at Alex for moment.
         "Oh!" the surprise in her voice filled Alex with dread--though the expression on her face was not one of horror. "Doctor! Doctor Kavanaugh!"
         Alex could hear footsteps coming down the hall.
         "Yes?" A male voice.
         "Doctor Kavanaugh, Patient X is awake," the nurse explained.
         Doctor Kavanaugh, a tall man in his mid-forties, hurried into the room, followed by the nurse.
         "Mr. Novak, can you hear me?" Doctor Kavanaugh looked into Alex's eyes.
         "Yes, yes, I can hear you," Alex responded. "Where ... what happened to everyone? Is this a safe place? How--"
         "Does everything look normal to you?" Kavanaugh interrupted, his voice deep and steady.
         "Yeah, that's what's wrong," Alex said. "Am I infected?"
         "When you checked on him yesterday, Heather, did he show any of the previous signs of infection?" Kavanaugh turned to the nurse.
         "No," she shook her head. "He has been comatose since the last shooting. And the violent hallucinations seem to have ceased."
         "What!?" Alex asked. "Oh ... oh ... Lana ... "
         "I see, I see," Kavanaugh ran his fingers through his gray hair.
         "Patient Y's autopsy report just came in this morning," Heather went on. "I took a quick look through it. The drug appeared to have worked perfectly, Doctor Kavanaugh. You are the only one who has the authority to report findings from the drug trial to General Adler, though."
         "Yes, I'll tell him," Kavanaugh nodded.
         Trial ... the word echoed through Alex's mind. July ... In July, I volunteered to test that new medication ...
         "You appear to be on your way to recovery," Kavanaugh's self-assured tone jarred Alex out of his thoughts. "However, the disease--"
         "I'm infected?" Alex asked, panic rising in his voice.
         "Yes, we believe you contracted a previously unknown disease," Kavanaugh explained calmly. "You were brought by military personnel to this hospital in the summer. The disease appeared to have caused vomiting blood, loss of mental functions, and hallucinations. You had confined yourself to the top of your apartment building and had begun shooting at people. Do you remember? You were brought in that same day. You had just gotten home from work when the disease began to take effect. Some civilians were injured, but I don't think charges will be press--"
         "What? Charges!? I had to shoot them! They were infected!" Alex's voice raised to a shout. "How many? Is it the whole city--"
         "No," Kavanaugh shook his head. "Not at all. The cause is not yet known, but you have shown remarkable improvement--"
         "I don't understand! And you said 'shooting,' ... Lana, she was infected, I ha--" Alex's confusion spilled out of him once more.
         "Yes, Lana Tillens was brought here shortly after you were," Kavanaugh looked down at the clipboard he held. "In ... December. And yes, there was an incident. Last month, you both escaped into a wing of the hospital, driven by hallucinations from the disease. You had gotten hold of the gun you had on you when you were brought in, and you and Lana had locked yourselves in a room. The gun fired, and she was hit--"
         "Did I ... " Alex's eyes filled with tears.
         "I’m sorry," Kavanaugh sighed a little.
         "What ... what about ... anyone else?" Tears poured silently down Alex's cheeks.
         "Not anyone else. I know that your delusions were violent and powerful, but nothing has changed, " Kavanaugh responded.
         "I heard you say ... something about ... about a trial, a drug trial," Alex stammered through his quiet sobs. "Does that have something to do with it?"
         "You and Miss Tillens participated in the same trial, yes," Kavanaugh replied. "You took the same drug. I’m sorry. I am really not at liberty to discuss this further with you."
         "Were we … the only ones ... affected?" Alex's voice dropped to barely a whisper.
         Kavanaugh paused.
         "Yes."


COPYRIGHT ALICE KEYSER 2010