by Adam Bennett
In the end, no one was fine. The Reaper was a simple mutation of Coryza, better known as the common cold. Of course, the usual suspects had waited barely a day to present the obligatory conspiracy theories: it had been cooked up by some tinhorn despot, it had gotten loose from a secret US government lab, it was the work of religious fanatics. The usual suspects were wrong one last time. Reaper was the creation of the most efficient killer of all time.
Nature.
Normal precautions didn’t work. Unlike most airborne pathogens, the Reaper had a long enough lifecycle to survive for hundreds of miles floating on a breeze. Within weeks, it had affected even the remotest populations.
By November 10, 2017, twenty percent of the world’s population had perished, or just under 1.5 billion fatalities in a week and a half. To say that this overtaxed humanity’s ability to process the dead in a dignified and hygienic manner would be an understatement of titanic proportions. This contributed to a quick spread of the Reaper.
By the spring of the following year, more than half of humanity was dead. They were the lucky ones. The Reaper’s first casualties had been governments, power stations, food supplies, and the entire human infrastructure.
Martial law was declared, ignored, overwhelmed, re-declared and again overwhelmed, thousands of times, in locations large and small around the world. In the end, death was the great equalizer.
By Halloween 2018, the Reaper had collected over six billion souls. Not all of the deaths were attributable to the virus. In the summer of 2018, a rogue nuclear ballistic missile submarine off the U.S. Atlantic coast had fired its deadly payload indiscriminately around the globe, killing a few of the remaining communists, capitalists, peace lovers, and warmongers.
This attack had actually helped matters, just a bit. There came a point at which the population and the amount of available nonperishable supplies reached an equitable balance. Had the Reaper run its course, given time, mankind could have survived and perhaps even rebuilt.
That’s how it worked in post-apocalyptic novels, didn’t it? A horrible disease rains down on mankind, but a hardy band of survivors wins the genetic lottery and survives to fight another day. It made great books, but it did not play out in humanity’s grim reality.
A small percentage of the population happened to have a natural resistance to the Reaper — but not immunity. Instead of dying in days or weeks, they died in months or years.
By the time the global population had fallen to just a million or so scattered people, most of the human-to-human violence had stopped simply because the majority of surviving humans had nearly no contact with one another. There were exceptions, of course, like the case of a woman who declared herself the reincarnation of Catherine the Great, Tsaritsa of all Russia. Through wits, strength, and cruelty, she managed to build a credible slave labor force of tens of thousands of survivors. Soon there was an uprising, and the former slaves tore her to bits, slowly and literally. All forms of mass media and communication were long gone, of course, but word still traveled because people still did.
Three years after the Reaper’s initial discovery, the entire world population could have lived comfortably within the city limits of St. Louis, Missouri.
After four years, all of them could have convened in Hannibal, Missouri, without needless encroachment on personal space.
After five, they could have fit in the Hannibal High School gym, former Home of the Pirates.
Now, after six, the global human population fit into Talia’s sleeping bag in an overgrown corn and pumpkin field somewhere outside Salem, Oregon.
Like most people, Talia had tried to survive with the people she loved. That had meant her dad, Madison, Cassie, and their families, sticking close to what they knew. Little New Haven had mostly been spared the chaotic, desperate violence that had struck prone the big cities. Early on, a roving band of survivalists had rolled through town, intent on taking what they wanted. The New Haven community had organized, met them in the town square, killed them all in a gun battle, then hung their remains up to rot at the stone archway that served as the town’s entrance. Of course, gunfire warded off only their least serious danger. By the end of the first year, the Reaper had claimed everyone Talia knew.
Talia had not survived by great strength, nor by great fighting prowess. The strong had tended to become over-reliant on sheer force, like the prepper band who had sought to plunder New Haven. That had killed a lot of them, and the virus had done the rest.
Talia survived because she turned out to possess the perfect combination of traits, skills, and natural abilities to survive in this new world. She was small, so she didn’t need much food. She was also bright and quick, but more than anything, she was a creature of good habits. Her mom, an RN, had taught her how to avoid diseases from earliest childhood. After fifth grade, Talia had gotten a Perfect Attendance award every year. While she wasn’t quite obsessive about washing her hands and disinfecting herself, she was borderline. Early on, she had decided to wear a surgical mask at all times. Combined with her body’s natural resistance and habitual caution, that had kept her alive while everyone around her perished. Many early clusters of survivors had concluded that they were blessed by natural immunity, or had developed a resistance. They had taken unnecessary chances, reveling in their luck. They were all dead, sooner than they otherwise would have been.
For most of the last six years, Talia had been a loner. After the Reaper had taken all her friends, she moved from town to town, always on foot, always watchful. After almost four years of complete solitude, she had stumbled across one of the small remaining survivor bands. She watched them for weeks, doing without a fire or hot food so she could observe their habits for any sign of violence or aberrant behavior. They were a pack of a dozen people, mostly surviving on fruit from an abandoned apple and pear orchard.
But for Grace, Talia would have left them to their scavenging. Children became rare creatures in the Reaper years, too difficult to bear and keep alive. Few newborns survived the first week, and the Reaper had come for the children first. Talia hadn’t seen a child Grace’s age in three years, and had never expected to see another. She was so tiny that Talia had thought she might only be five years old, which would have made her a post-Reaper baby. That was too implausible to consider.
Talia spent most of her days watching Grace. The little girl had shoulder-length flaxen hair, blue eyes, and an innocent air that had pierced Talia’s essential emotional armor. The group did a good job of protecting Grace. She was never more than ten feet away from an adult or older teen.
One warm Indian summer day, after she had observed the group for nearly a month, Talia slipped easily past the teenage lookout and walked up to Dan, whom she had pegged for the leader. She didn’t say a word; she didn’t need to. Her unheralded presence spoke volumes.
Dan had been shocked. He yelled out to the girl who was ostensibly on watch: “Brittany?”
“Yeah?” Brittany replied. Then she saw the evidence of her laxity. “Oh.”
Dan peered at Talia, taking in the bow slung over her back and long knife sheathed at her side.
“Peaceful group. Scavengers,” Dan said. “Just take what we need to survive.”
“I know.”
“Been watching us.”
Talia nodded.
“Thought I spotted you time back, but you’re fast.”
“If you saw me, then I’m lucky I’m not dead already. I’m losing my edge.”
Grace emerged from behind a tree to stand behind Dan. She stared at Talia without smiling, eyes wide.
“Name?”
“Talia. I’m a hunter, if you need meat.”
“Need everything.”
Talia could see that was true. The fact that they were alive testified to their basic survival skills, but the gaunt faces and tattered clothes suggested a doubtful outlook for the coming winter.
“Call ourselves the Family. Dan or Dad. Apple?” He reached into a bucket and proffered one.
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Talia and the Family formed a symbiotic relationship. Talia had her bow and arrows, which led to a better-supplied larder for the cold months. The Family had Grace, who gave Talia a reason to live.
Grace had a perspective unlike that of any other human being in history. Her brief life story was one of people dying around her. Her biological parents had both died before her first birthday. She had been passed on to three other sets of adoptive parents. Dan and Lilly, the Family’s Dad and Mom, were the most recent and longest lasting.
Grace had a difficult time sharing that perspective with anyone. She was deaf and mute. A previous foster mother had taught her sign language, but no one in the family knew it. Talia had learned American Sign Language in her teens while planning on a career working with deaf children. She became Grace’s voice to the rest of The Family.
Talia’s maternal instincts were underdeveloped, but a bond of unlikely strength formed between the strongest and the weakest members of The Family. Talia got permission from Lilly to take Grace hunting, and was pleased to find that Grace was a deft partner, slipping silently from shadow to shadow.
In the beginning, all Talia’s lessons involved stalking and hunting prey. Their conversations soon took flight in other directions: botany, astronomy, meteorology, natural history, everything Talia could communicate through her limited ASL, plus signed words they had developed on the fly. There were no term papers or pop quizzes, but Talia taught Grace all she could about everything she knew.
Like everything post-Reaper, that winter was harsh. Exceptional amounts of rain, sleet, snow, and wind pounded the Family’s small compound, exacerbating the onset of Reaper symptoms in everyone but Talia, Grace, and Lilly. By the time the first wildflowers began to bloom, the Family was down to three.
A week later, Lilly took her own life.
That left Talia and Grace alone. If Grace missed the rest of the Family, she didn’t show it. For her entire life, the sun had risen and set, and people had come into her life and died.
Talia had always been nomadic, but with Grace to care for, she sought out and found a more permanent camp. That spring and summer of 2023 were the happiest times either could remember. They never saw another human being. At that moment, the human race numbered less than one hundred, and dwindling.
Talia and Grace spent those months in the Sierra Nevadas of what had once been Northern California. They settled far off any known trail, in a deserted cabin too remote for the scavengers. There was a small, clear lake to provide water, and plenty of game that had grown unused to human predators.
They hunted, trapped, swam, and acted as if they were the last two people on earth. On July 27th, when Oodgeroo Nooniccal finally yielded to the Reaper in a very secluded Australian bush cabin, they were the last two people. They took no notice of the distinction.
In early August, Grace started coughing. They had both seen the routine too often for false hope or hysterics. A sense of the inevitable had long since supplanted the Five Stages of Grief. Talia took care of Grace as best she could, which amounted to finding ways to keep her occupied and as comfortable as possible.
The first of September brought a warm rain and the Reaper. At the very last, Talia held Grace’s thin body against her, kissing her hair, telling her in words and sign that she was loved. After Grace didn’t move for an hour, Talia realized that she wasn’t sleeping. She closed Grace’s dead eyes and wrapped her in the warm blanket they had been sharing.
She buried Grace beside the lake. Talia took off her surgical mask, breathed in the cool mountain air, and walked away without looking back.
After ten days, Talia too started to cough. It would have been easier to give up, stop, and wait for the Reaper to catch up to her, but she no longer knew how to do that. She kept moving.
Now, in a forgotten field, Talia crawled out of her bag, tried to stand, and sat back down with a thud. The endless vitality that had seen her through so many crises was gone. The effort brought on more coughing. She leaned over and spit out long ropes of phlegm. She saw the blood and knew what it meant.
After dancing with the Reaper for six years, it was time.
She had dodged the Reaper longer than anyone else on the planet, but it had tracked her down at last. She nodded her head, laid down on her sleeping bag, thought of Grace and the few months they’d had together, and let herself drift back to sleep.
A few minutes later, she let out a long sigh.
The poet had been wrong. Free of humans, the planet continued to spin. The world did not end. Humankind itself ended – not with a bang or a whimper, but a sigh.
A British Columbian Lower mainlander since 1992, Joseph Picard has always tinkered with art, music, and writing, choosing to focus primarily on writing in the early 2000s. In 2001, he found out that cars are harder than mountain bikes, and has been a paraplegic ever since; miraculously, this has not altered his career arc as a quarterback, basketball star, pole dancer, or kung fu movie stunt double. Thankfully he has that whole 'life-long nerd' thing to fall back on.
With a daughter, Caitlin, born in 2007, and a son, Lachlan, in 2011, free time has become a very valuable asset, and most of it gets poured into writing.
www.ozero.ca
SOWEEN SHOWDOWN
Joseph Picard
Halloween. The day of Samhain. Sowwwwww-eeeeen.
The ol’ ‘Get dressed like a freak and go beg for candy, with threats of vandalism’ day.
Yeah, okay, I’m in my mid-twenties. Okay, late twenties, but I still get dressed up. It’s not like it was back when I was a kid. I’m not after candy or pranks.
These days, getting dressed up goes beyond Halloween, or sex freaks.
Now we have ‘cosplay.’
Not that it’s exclusive of those other things. I should know. I’m a cosplayer. And it’s Halloween. And — and I’m not a sex freak, but you get what I mean.
Really. I’m not a sex freak.
And no, I’m not wearing any underwear. It’s a kilt, dammit. To be historically accurate, you don’t wear underwear with a kilt. Convention staff have never checked, and they don’t care to. Don’t ask, don’t tell.
At conventions, you often run into people you’ve run into before. Some cosplayers go to great lengths to constantly make new, incredible costumes, and others end up re-using a favourite costume.
I’m the latter. I’m the Highlander. ‘Jeremy MacLeod, of the clan MacLeod.’ And like many cosplayers, Halloween is just an excuse for me to wander around among the non-fandom crowd in costume. Your odds of running into another dedicated cosplayer are much less than at a convention, of course.
See an adult costume with no kids attached? Could be a cosplayer. Or someone going to a party. Or a pervert. Or any combination of the above. We don’t need to dwell on the pervert types.
I told you already, it’s a kilt, and I’m not supposed to have underwear.
One benefit to cosplaying outside of a convention is that I can carry my favourite sword around. It’s just a replica, but it’s real enough that it makes most convention officials unhappy. I used to want a katana, until I realized that the Highlander only used a katana in modern times, and would wreck the old Scottish theme of the costume anyway. I got a Braveheart claymore for under fifty bucks off of Ebay. Plus shipping, and… the point is, I got it, and it’s awesome.
Except that people think I’m being Braveheart half the time. Do I look like I have a blue stripe down my face?
No.
The pity is, the kids don’t get it. The adults? So many think it’s Braveheart, even at conventions when I don’t have the sword. One time, I got ‘Rob Roy’ MacGregor. Ugh. Even if he has more historically accurate badassery than William ‘Braveheart’ Wallace, it... no. Never mind.
I’m Jeremy MacLeod, dammit. And I’m on the town.
“Hey, Braveheart!”
Aw, fuck. It’s the Crow.
Lawrence something. A handful of years ago, I started seeing this guy at conventions, and I eve
ntually found out he lived near me. He’s... kind of a dick. His favourite costume is the Crow, because somehow he got it in his head that it would help him get laid.
I don’t think it’s worked yet. I think if it ever did, the world would hear about it.
“Hey, Lawrence,” I say. He’s called me Braveheart for years, only because he knows it pisses me off. But something was wrong with Lawrence the Crow today, so I asked, “What’s going on with your costume?”
He stands with arms spread, chin up, smiling devilishly. It’s got most of his usual Crow black items underneath, but he’s added a black furry collar... thing, black leather armlets, and instead of his usual ‘Crow’ make-up, a fake scar that goes from the side of his neck, and halfway up his face. The scar has big ‘staples’ on it, probably parts of small hair barrettes glued into the makeup or something. He strains his voice to be more raspy than usual, and calls out, “I thought you might like the new look, Mac! Leod!” A jangling of raspy laughs follows.
“Uh... okay. I think I get it. Why so serious, Crow?”
“What the hell?” He breaks back into his normal voice. “What do you mean why... Oh! No, what? Really?”
“You’re some kind of mix of the Dark Knight’s Joker with the Crow, right?”
“Neck scar, MacLeod! Don’t the MacLeods know someone with a neck scar?”
I think. Yes, yes. But this... “You’re... you’re the Kurgan?”
“I’m the motherfucking Kurgan!” he yells in his raspy voice, arms outstretched again with maniacal laughter.
“Scar’s supposed to be right across the front of the neck, and the outfit is all messed up.”
“The outfit is a hybridization of the olden times Kurgan and the modern look he gets in current times! And the scar is more historically accurate! I thought you’d be into that aspect!”
“He... it’s clear as day in the movie that —”
“Yes! I know what it’s like in the movie, but think of it! The scar was given to him by Sean Connery!”