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Carol wakes with headache pounding against her skull, and her face plastered to the living room floor. The familiar feeling of a hangover thrums through her body and for a few long, wonderful seconds her mind is peacefully blank. Anything could have happened last night. A night out for not-celebratory drinks at a bar with her favorite person, and, yeah, maybe things got a little out of hand, maybe she had a couple too many, having ended up passed out on the floor of all places, but really, that could be for any number of reasons.
She groans with the effort it takes to roll over onto her back. Her head really does hurt. Her arms and legs are sore, like she spent the evening lifting weights instead of drinking.
She opens her eyes. She breathes. She turns her head.
She sees--
Something inside her chest cracks, painful and loud in the quiet of the morning, and it all comes rushing back with the feeling of bile rising in her throat. The terror and the grief. She stares and she stares and she waits for the sob to ripple through her, for the scream to tear itself from her chest. But there's nothing. Her eyes sting, but she doesn't close them. She can't. She just keeps staring and staring and staring at
--Helen's eyes, wide and open and empty, turned up towards the ceiling. Looking at nothing at all.
Eventually, Carol moves. There's a numbness and exhaustion that's settled over her in place of last night's adrenaline. She crawls, unsteady, across the floor, swallowing in an unsuccessful attempt to clear the painful lump in her throat.
It doesn't feel real, none of it. A bad dream, a strange and surreal nightmare. There is nothing, nothing and nobody at all outside the walls of their home. Only the two of them, in the whole entire world, like always. Except of course, that it's only her now.
It's not fair.
It should have been her. Should have been her, dead on the pavement, in the trunk of a car, not here, kneeling on the living room floor, left behind alone to pick up the pieces.
Helen would know what to do. She always did. Helen would have a plan, and a morbid joke to make, and she would look Carol in the eye and tell her to get her shit together. Without her, Carol just feels lost and helpless, the endless, vast, empty uncertainty of the future laid out before her.
Carol touches Helen's face, softly, hesitantly. She feels like she's floating just outside of her own body, watching the movement of somebody else's hand. A stranger's hand moving down Helen's face, gently closing her eyes. And something about that visual snaps Carol back into herself, and she jerks her hand back violently. She turns her head away, pressing a hand against her mouth, afraid she's going to vomit.
They were going to take her. They were going to take Helen, like they took all the other bodies. To God knows where and to do God knows what. Carol doesn't want to know. It doesn't matter. She won't let them, she won't let it happen, if they decide to come back. Helen- Helen deserves a burial, a proper one, here in their home. By the backyard garden that she loved.
And Carol thinks, maybe, maybe it's best this way. It's not fair, none of it is fucking fair, but at least Helen isn't some puppet or a zombie or whatever the fuck. Instead, she's just dead. Dead, and gone, and never coming back. But that is better. Better to die as yourself than forced to become something else, something that isn't a person. It is. It has to be.
She buries her face in the blanket she's clutching in her arms and takes a deep breath, filling her lungs, her stomach, her entire body. It smells like home, like old memories. It smells like Helen.
Carol sets her jaw, exhales, and gets to work.
Half an hour later, Carol has dug a hole. It's not a grave, not yet, but it's something. It's a start. Her jeans are covered in dirt and so are her hands. Her knuckles bloody where the skin has cracked, her palms blistered from her desperate grip on the shovel.
She sits down heavily at the edge of the pit and puts her head in her hands, fingers digging roughly into her hair. She doesn't cry. She just feels empty. She tries for a little humorless laugh instead, but her throat is so dry it comes out as nothing more than a wheeze, followed by a cough.
She counts to ten in her head, sighs roughly through gritted teeth, and then she gets back up to continue digging.
She doesn't know how long she's been at it. Carol has left her body again, has achieved some kind of fucking zen or flow state. There's nothing but the sound of the shovel hitting dirt and rock over and over and over, until--
"Hello?"
Carol whips her head up so fast she feels a sharp twinge of pain in her neck. There's someone standing at her gate. A woman, tilting her head like a curious animal.
"You okay?" she calls, with concern that somehow manages to sound simultaneously fake and genuine. "Sorry, we didn't mean to startle you."
Carol remains silent, holding the shovel like a weapon in front of her, and stomps closer to the stranger, squinting at the shape framed by the blue Albuquerque sky. It's nobody she recognizes from the neighbourhood. Nobody she recognizes from anywhere, and yet there's something unsettlingly familiar about her. She talks about airforce drones, and water bottling plants, and Carol barely hears a word of any of it. Her head is spinning.
So she cuts to the chase. "Why are you standing in my yard talking about whatever the fuck it is you're talking about? Who are you?"
The woman smiles, has been smiling this entire goddamn time. "Someone we thought you might like?"
Carol feels a bit sick at that. Someone they thought she'd like? It sounds more like they're saying something she might like, as if they're bringing a toy to a toddler or a treat to a dog. Like this woman standing at the entrance to her yard isn't a person, like Carol isn't really either. She shakes her head slightly, and her voice shakes too, "Not so much. No."
The stranger doesn't stop smiling. "Sorry about that, Carol", she -- or they, or it, or whatever -- says, and it's all too fucking weird. Carol grips the shovel tightly in her fists, palms stretching over the wood until it hurts. "Regardless, you are on the verge of heat exhaustion. And that is the opinion of every medical doctor on earth." It would almost sound like a joke, if it weren't for her tone of voice resembling the condescending patience of a parent trying to reason with a particularly stupid child on the verge of throwing a tantrum. In response, Carol does her best to be as rude as possible, which isn't particularly difficult at all. They stand in silence as she slowly empties the contents of the bottle onto the ground.
When Carol tosses it, the woman catches the bottle effortlessly and throws one last plead to rest and hydrate and take care of yourself, before she turns around to leave. Carol angrily shoves the gate closed behind her. But she doesn't move. Doesn't pick up the shovel to go back to digging again. Despite everything, she doesn't quite manage to feel relieved at the departure.
Because, as she listens to the woman's retreating footsteps, she realizes that more than she wants these people to go away, more than she wants everything back to normal, more than she wants to close her eyes and never wake up to this nightmare again...
More than anything, she just doesn't want to be alone right now.