Chapter Text
Weeds tuft the cracks down the center of the rural highway, blacktop fragmented into ruined archipelagos. Heavy emptiness stretches on all sides.
“Let’s go south, Dorian. They could use someone like you.” He sucks at his teeth, spits. A bad idea is a bad idea.
Months ago, he traveled three hundred miles down the coast supply line by truck, every building stripped bare. No stragglers, a few hunters. One Firefly encampment devoid of life. In that town, generators hummed in the distance, portents of ill will. In another, the croak of clickers echoed in an underground lot. Staying alive was a matter of skirting the main roads, eyes on the upper floors to catch any gleam off a sniper’s muzzle, ears tuned to street level for scuffles or cries.
They came south hoping to find... Hoping to find hope, he supposes. All they found was two abandoned zones, plus a handful of functional ones pointing guns at desperate people who limped to the intakes. Makeshift barricades crumbling around small towns where inhabitants had long since left or died. Moved on, in one way or another.
That was all anyone did, these days.
Outside of Syracuse, hunters ambushed the convoy. Those among their group who weren’t killed were scattered. By some miracle, Dorian escaped, as did his partner, and from there they fled west on foot with some success for a long while.
He lost Felix in North Dakota. A group of newly infected split them up, and when Dorian stopped running he waited for Felix in an old gas station on the edge of town, picked clean as whale bones strewn over the tundra. No food to be had, only a single packet of nails in a rusted shut drawer by way of supplies, but there was a storage room with concrete walls and no windows. Safe. Securable. For three days, every morning he climbed to the roof and whistled, again and again, their practiced birdsong designed to help them find one another without drawing attention to a human voice.
Nothing. No more Felix. He’d moved on.
Dorian spent another night holed up to cry his guts out, and then he moved on, too.
From there he followed the Missouri river until he stumbled into a rundown Firefly camp where they looked ready to be rid of him the second he said hello. Someone recognized him from back east, so he was brought indoors and fed, albeit begrudgingly. A couple weeks later one of their supply trucks let him off by the roadside in a dingy little town. They were southbound, and he was done with any notion of carrying on in that direction. Instead, he pursued what turned out to be the Milk River as it wound slowly but surely northwest. He survived a brush with hunters outside of Havre, Montana, and decided to head due north, but not before he managed to scrounge some supplies. Enough to keep him going a little longer.
North. Why not.
The approach to the border always strikes him as surreal. Hell’s ruined gates left standing open. Every port of entry is high-walled, like the zones, built up on both sides when the United States and their Canadian neighbours locked down the movement of people between spheres in hopes of containment.
Too little, too late. Not the biggest problem, anyway. Crops were contaminated, whole food chains disrupted. Countries the world over stocked produce shelves and in doing so accidentally deployed a pathogen capable of annihilating cities overnight.
The fact that anyone is alive at all boggles the mind. The fact that he is still alive when countless others are dead defies all rational explanation. A child of wealthy parents, spoiled heir to a legacy in a world where those sorts of things once mattered, he used to joke that he wouldn’t last a week roughing it—he’d never camped a day in his life.
September looms at the end of summer, and its arrival will mark seven years of surviving the apocalypse. Last he’d heard his parents were alive, but an ocean away. That had been half a decade ago, before telecommunications finally went down. Mass power outages were the global norm, thus transmitting messages across thousands of miles, land or sea, became one more extinct luxury. He hopes they’re alive, somewhere. There’s a chance, with island nations, that any population left might be able to rebuild eventually. If enough of the infection were burned out and there was no longer a method of transmitting it from the mainland...
He wonders about that sort of thing, from time to time.
Nobody guards the border anymore. Not even scavengers hoping to streamline their murder and thievery. He steps through the gates of hell unchallenged, from silence into more silence. This is Wild Horse, Alberta. So far, there’s sweet fuck all here.
North, then. Onward. He walks because holding still in this world will kill you every bit as quickly as moving through it.
Rangeland, as far as the eye can see, untended for closing in on a decade. Scrub trees spring from the scratchy fields, golden grasses swell on either side of the crumbling blacktop. Mid-July heat is merciless. He follows creek beds, gulches, old irrigation lines, the barest hint of water, in the hopes of keeping his canteen full. It’s hard going. He’s very thirsty, and there’s little shade. He’s thankful for the sweat-stained ball cap keeping the sun off his face, but his mouth is ash dry and he’s beginning to worry.
The dry means less infection. As far as blights go, the Cordyceps are monstrously hardy, but parched heat doesn’t seem optimal for them. They flourish in moisture, which is perhaps why the human body is such an advantageous host.
As comforting as it is to know he’s unlikely to see many infected, that knowledge doesn’t help him not die of dehydration. Admittedly, it isn’t the death he pictured for himself back when he left the zone.
There were rumors early on, of secret vaccines. Possible salvation. Not the failed government run trials the public heard about before broadcasts stopped, but successful prototypes synthesized in private laboratories for society’s remaining elite. Now, years out from the onset, it’s an obvious lie. If the elite are alive and protected, living on without fear, they’re doing it beyond the purview of every single survivor he’s come across in North America’s wasteland. The story strikes him more as something concocted by a populace so bereft of hope they cannibalize what little remains to them, twist it into bitter rage to fuel their own will to go on.
The wind gusts, stirs road dust into the air, and he flinches, thinks about the mask in his backpack and his impermanent supply of filters. Any living person he encounters might up and kill him for both, but there are no people out here, and no infected, either. There’s hardly even a tree higher than his shin, to be frank.
Felix used to tell him he had a knack for avoiding infected. He often seemed to know where they’d be, and possessed a keenness that allowed him to triangulate just how to throw the Molotov over a wall and burn a group of runners to cinders. Intuition and fire solved a lot of life’s problems these days, but not all of them. Most of his success came down to luck, and that luck proved, time and again, not to extend to those close to him. In fact, it only narrowly applied to him.
Throw a Molotov out here and the whole prairie would erupt in flames. He picks his way through a crumbling fence and begins digging for water near a rare winding stripe of green grass.
Living seven years past the end of the world has been a harsh teacher. He learned first aid, initially. How to cleanse wounds and sew stitches. After that, how to find water and edible plants. From there, his education steadily devolved into something less humanitarian. Vicious techniques to end fights before they could begin. How to fire a gun. How to kill another human being who wanted to kill you and take the clothes off your back. A crash course in monsters, both destroying them, and becoming one.
And of course, there are the actual monsters. Cordyceps are a perfect storm: highly communicable, rapid onset, spread by fruiting bodies or bodily fluids. Incurable, and irreversible. Populations the world over decimated within weeks to leave behind ravaged husks, dangerous not only for their infectious potential but because they actively seek to rend the living limb from limb.
There are no exceptions, but observations have led Dorian to certain conclusions. Bites spell certain death, with proximity to the head being a mitigating factor. By air, there’s slight leeway. It takes a high concentration of spores, inhaled fully into the lungs, for the infection to root. Some people have stronger immune systems than others, or are better adapted to ward off disease through the vagaries of genetics, and he’s known one or two that ought to have succumb and didn’t. That was early on, however. These days, everyone is running on fumes. He’s had his own close calls, times he believed he inhaled in the wrong corridor before getting his mask on. Once he was so certain it was over that he locked himself in a basement to wait, alone, shut up where he’d rot before he could do harm. When day broke, he stirred, yawned, and felt his stomach growl. He waited another twelve hours, to be certain of the outcome.
All clear. Here he stands, exhausted, devastated, but alive. So far, he’s woken each morning to the thin light of an indifferent sun, still himself. Hungry, always hungry, and now alone, but in possession of his faculties and able to put one foot in front of the other.
North, and then maybe west to the mountains. Better to die surrounded by awe-inspiring scenery. That is, if he doesn’t die in the middle of a wheat field on the way there.