Chapter 1
After the Rain by Jordan Demaine
The end, when it comes, is quicker than Jeremy expected.
A soldier appears at his parents’ country house one afternoon, her mask pulled down to show her human face.
She tells them to stay inside, all windows and doors shut, for the next week at least. As if that isn’t what they’ve been doing for the past twenty-one months.
Three days later, Jeremy and his family watch through the panes of glass as a thick pink mist descends over the countryside.
“Will it kill the animals, too?” Jeremy’s youngest niece wonders.
“I don’t know,” Jeremy admits. It does kill the creatures.
When ten days have passed since they last heard a groan in the night or a thump on the door, Jeremy and his sister Laura venture out for a look. They keep their hands on their hunting rifles, but everything is quiet.
“Come over here,” Laura calls. The carcasses of two creatures lie against a mossy stone wall which has been standing since the time of the Romans. They look almost as if they were embracing when they died. “Do you think they felt anything?”
Jeremy shrugs. “I don’t think it matters.
” The creatures were people once, but the illness had long since robbed them of any trace of humanity.
If they’d made it to the house, they would have done the same to Jeremy, Laura, their parents, and her kids.
They wouldn’t have thought twice about it. They couldn’t.
A week after that, Jeremy pulls his car out of the stables.
He’s been diligently driving it for fifteen minutes every week, even when there was nowhere to go, worried that leaving it idle too long would ruin the engine.
His diligence has paid off. It starts easily, bursting to life with a roar that sounds too loud in the silent world.
“I wish you’d stay a little longer.” His mother frets.
“I want to see if my flat’s still standing.
If anything is still standing,” Jeremy replies.
It’s partly true. After twenty-one months cowering in a house with seven other people, he also desperately needs some time alone.
“I’ll come back,” he promises. “It’ll be four or five days, at the most.” The rifle rests against the passenger’s seat beside him.
That’s the only reason his mother lets him go, he’s sure, waving him off as tearfully as if he’s going to war.
The closer he gets to the city, the more it does look like a war zone.
The army is out in force. Jeremy sees figures in large masks, protective yellow suits, and thick gloves tossing the bodies of creatures into the back of olive-green trucks.
He raises a hand, in greeting and in thanks, as he drives by. Some of them wave back.
The traffic, as well, grows thicker as he nears the city, although it’s still a tenth of what it would have been before, and a hundredth of what it was the day he fled.
Jeremy arrives home in record time. His once-leafy street is in poor shape, although not, Jeremy suspects, as poor as it might have been.
Many of the buildings—the coffee shop, the bookshop, the place that sold Irish sweaters Jeremy always thought he might look good in, but never bought—are derelict, nothing more than dark, empty shells with broken windows and missing doors.
A few, like Jeremy’s small block of flats, are in one piece, but marred with scorch marks and scribbles of graffiti that weren’t there before.
Jeremy parks behind a burned-out car and picks up his rifle.
He doesn’t bother with the lift. Instead, he climbs the four flights of stairs to his flat. The stairwell smells like rot. Dried brown blood is splashed like paint up the walls and along the banisters.
Jeremy’s front door is marked with deep scratches, but the lock has held fast. The same can’t be said for the flat across the hall.
That door has been torn off entirely. The hinges hang loose and that same odor of decay wafts from inside.
Jeremy tries once again not to think about it, not to wonder if the presence of the family that had lived there, a single mother with two teenage daughters, had drawn a creature’s attention away from Jeremy’s empty flat.
Inside, everything is as Jeremy left it that Wednesday afternoon nearly two years ago.
Like everyone, he went hastily; the clothes he’d decided against bringing are still on his bed, the books he’d wanted to bring but forgot are on the kitchen table.
A layer of dust lies over everything. Apart from that, it almost seems as if Jeremy is returning home after a regular day of work.
Still moving cautiously—he will likely move cautiously for the rest of his life—he makes his way to the kitchen.
Probably best not to open the fridge, Jeremy thinks, although maybe everything in there is long past the disgusting stage by now.
He places the bag of tinned vegetables, biscuits, and other nonperishables he and Laura borrowed from a little grocery shop months ago on the counter.
He reaches for the light switch with silent hope. Nothing happens when he flicks it.
He’s about to head to the bathroom, to see if the water is in a similar situation, when Jeremy hears a sound. Not from within his flat, but next door, on the other side of the kitchen wall. He goes for the gun, left lying on the sofa, and creeps into the corridor.
“Oh, for goodness’ sake!” A voice exclaims from the flat next door, very human and rather sweet.
“Hello?” Jeremy calls in return, lowering the gun. “Is anyone there?”
It’s Daniel.
“Jeremy!” His neighbor looks so happy to see him; Jeremy’s heart leaps before he remembers it’s probably not personal. “You made it!”
“So did you.” It’s a stupid reply, but there’s something about Daniel that always made Jeremy feel stupid.
His looks, maybe, which are impossibly handsome.
Or maybe just the way he is: always positive, always cheerful, with a kind word for everyone, all the time.
Even for Jeremy, who rarely saw him before all this and even more rarely stopped to chat.
“Is your partner…” Jeremy trails off when he realizes that might not be a polite question to ask.
Daniel frowns, those lovely thick eyebrows of his furrowing. He looks mostly the same as he did two years ago. A little thinner, a little more haggard, but all of them can say that. “My partner?”
Daniel lived with an older man, someone Jeremy saw even less frequently than Daniel himself.
The man seemed as ill-tempered as Daniel is friendly.
They didn’t appear to be a very good match, but that’s the story of Jeremy’s life.
The men he fancied are inevitably attached, usually to people who are so much less than they deserve.
“Do you mean my father?” Daniel asks, and, in an instant, Jeremy is happier than he’s been in two years.
“Well, stepfather, but we don’t need to get into all that.
Did you really think he was my…” Daniel trails off, grimacing.
Jeremy had, but he’d never taken the time to ask.
They had never been particularly close. Jeremy hadn’t been that close to anyone.
“He’s fine. We went to stay with a friend of his in the country. He’s still there, but I needed…”
“A break?” Jeremy puts in when Daniel trails off.
Daniel always had the most beautiful smile. Jeremy’s pleased to see it hasn’t changed a bit. “Something like that.” The silence stretches. “I’m very glad to see you again,” Daniel adds, at last.
“You, too.” There seems to be nothing more to say. Jeremy gives him a nod and retreats to his own flat.
There has been no mobile service for the past eighteen months. Still, as he sits in his dark flat later that evening with an open tin of mandarin orange slices in front of him, Jeremy gives it a try. He dials his mother’s number, then Laura’s. Nothing, of course.
Jeremy has no idea how things are going to progress from here.
How are they going to rebuild the world?
Where are they even going to begin? He had a good career before, in management at an investment company that was always looking to discover the next big thing.
Would he go back to that? Jeremy can’t imagine caring about investment opportunities now that he knows what it’s like to steal food for his sister’s children, to continually be on his guard, to wake up every morning not knowing whether he was going to die that day, or, worse, whether he would lose someone he loved.
He can’t think about it. It’s too overwhelming.
The dark comes early. Jeremy changes his bedsheets by the light of his otherwise useless phone, shakes the dust off a pair of long-unworn briefs, and climbs into bed. He’s barely there ten minutes when he hears a knock on the door.
“Sorry,” Daniel says, when Jeremy answers.
He’s also holding up his phone like a torch.
Jeremy can see his cheeks redden a little.
Even though Daniel keeps his eyes politely trained on Jeremy’s face.
Jeremy wonders, belatedly, whether he should have put on some more clothes before he came to the door.
“I think there’s only you and me in the building right now.
I wanted to make sure you’re okay.” He’s not.
But Jeremy doesn’t know anybody who is. “Sorry if I woke you up.”
“I wasn’t asleep.”
“Right. Okay. Anyway, sorry to bother you.”
Before, Jeremy would have let him go, then lain awake most of the night cursing himself for it. Jeremy is different now. “Are you okay?” he asks.
Daniel swallows. “It’s…I’m used to being around people. There were a lot of people in the house I was at.”
Jeremy understands. “Do you want to stay here?” Jeremy expects him to say no, thanks for the offer, I’ll leave you alone.
“Please. If it’s not too much trouble.”
“No problem,” Jeremy replies automatically, before processing that Daniel, in fact, accepted. “I mean, it’s fine. Great. Sounds good.” He hopes it’s too dark for Daniel to see him cringing.