All that's left in the world

What happens if no one is there? If everyone is dead and all that’s left in the world is Fort Caroline, a
gay guy, a broken straight boy, a cartography genius with PTSD, and a seventy-year-old woman with a shotgun fighting zoo animals? Plus Howard’s crew. Then there’s Chris and his brother and sister, but hopefully they’re in Chicago by now.

We can launch the first postapocalyptic sitcom.

We weren’t made for a world like this. Before the bug, there were rules and regulations and laws. We had years of moral code ingrained in our minds and now none of it matters. Does anything matter?

“You know, if the internet was still around, someone could just look up how to make electricity again.”

“If the internet was still around and I’d looked up your broken leg symptoms online, it would say you were dying of total organ failure.”

“If the internet was still around, we could watch Netflix instead of me just giving you scene-by-scene summaries of movies.”

“No more internet,” I say.

“I’m actually okay with that.”

“Heathen!” I point an accusatory finger at him. He laughs and swats away my hand.

“The only thing it was good for was looking up stuff you didn’t know. Other than that, it was all just people being assholes.”

But I’m scared. Disappointing Andrew is what scares me. There’s a massive difference between thinking about things and doing them. What happens if I’m wrong and it’s just friendship and loneliness and horniness all mixed up? And then we try something and it’s awkward and weird and I suck, and then I’ve ruined the only relationship I have left.

Only how do you start a story that ends with you becoming a murderer?

It becomes too real; I’ve learned that now. I’ve seen the bodies of my mother and sister—it isn’t real until you see that life is gone from them. Until you see the corpse that looks nothing like the person they used to be.

“Do you believe in fate, kid? A higher purpose and God and all that?”

I let out a low grunt. “I used to. Not anymore.”

She nods. “Same with me. It’s hard to believe there’s a greater purpose for everyone when ninety percent of them have been wiped out.„

“Just because there’re stories about monsters don’t mean they don’t exist in real life. Especially not nowadays.”

Eventually the worrying was too much. It was like the beginning of the superflu all over again—every night I would be up, pacing around the house, trying not to read posts online about the sick and dying, worrying about my mom while she was at the hospital.

In fact, I’ve seen so many, there are some I’ve rewatched in their entirety thinking they were a new movie, only to realize at the end I had seen them before.

But that’s what I like about them. They’re safe and predictable.

Unlike the world now.

“We should probably get off the road and find shelter soon,” Jamie says, glancing at the clouds. “The last thing we need is to get struck by lightning.”

“Aw, man. Now that the lottery’s defunct that’s the only gamble we really had left.”

“You can even just tell me Endgame if you want.”

He finally cracks a smile. “I can’t tell them like you. All I remember is the big scenes like when everyone who died comes back at the end.”

And wouldn’t it be nice if that could happen in real life?

Why should I travel so far just to give a family bad news? We’ve all had bad news. Bad news is, like, the only news post-bug.