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Q: How long’s it been since the world ended?
A: It never ended. The world’s just fucking fine. Trees shoot up through the cracks in Tokyo’s streets. Most corpses are done rotting, so flowers sprout from between ribcages, birds nest in cracked skulls. Vines wind around lampposts up into nothing, grasping around for something to hold onto, not entirely unlike Niragi. It’s been seven or eight years since humanity ended. He’s not ashamed to say he’s lost count.
Q: What the fuck happened?
A: There’s plenty of theories. Maybe it’s the Black Death, now freshly resistant to every antibiotic under the sun (unlikely; the Sick spread far, far faster, and killed far, far more people). Maybe it’s a bio-weapon, incoming from Russia or the US or North Korea (possible; but there’s been no men in armour to claim Japan’s near-empty shores). Maybe it’s divine intervention, punishment for man’s unbounded arrogance (batshit insane; man’s unbounded arrogance existed long before people started puking up their insides in the streets). If there’s anyone left alive who knows the answer, Niragi’s never met them. (And frankly, the why doesn’t matter. The end result’s the same.)
Q; How’s he still alive?
A: Niragi is, in all honesty, not sure. One day he was barely a year out of college, developing carpal tunnel at his entry-level game development gig and getting blackout drunk on the weekend. The next he was hungover on his couch, throwing back some lemon-and-caffeine concoction that did fuckall for his headache. The mid-afternoon sun glared on the horrid white walls. The TV blared. Niragi’s eyes spurred all the way open.
He’d sat there. Wondered if he was still drunk, wondered if maybe someone had spiked his drinks. The news reader, in her white lacy blouse and perfect lipstick, opened her mouth. She heaved. Her throat contorted; her eyes strained open wide; she puked up thick red blood on national television. Like, violently. All over the camera. And over the camera man.
Niragi checked his phone. Somehow the rest of the news was worse.
The first day he holed up in his apartment. Counted out his ramen (thirteen packages), his energy drinks (ten cans), his fruit and vegetables (half a cucumber, most of a lemon, and a frozen bag of okra he did not remember buying). He filled his plastic laundry tub with tap water, just in time, because by evening his running water cut out.
Niragi locked his doors.
On the fourth day he witnessed some guy fall down in the street below his apartment. He’d been stumbling to begin with, his sweats stained red and his eyes thick like he’d been crying. (By then they’d all been crying.) The guy crashed to the pavement, knees first, skull second. His mouth leaked blood. His gut crawled with something bad, and when he didn’t get up Niragi tossed an empty energy drink can down onto him. It bounced off his twisting stomach, rolled down the pavement and came to a standstill in the gutter.
The guy still didn’t move. Like a mannequin. Like a sack of store-bought hamburger. By evening his bones were half picked clean by pigeons—fucking pigeons. The same cunts that liked to shit all over Niragi’s front window. That roo-koo’d at him with their dull fucking pinprick eyes, which he’d always assumed to mean fuck you too, man.
By the third week, the pigeons were too fat to fly, and Niragi stopped counting the corpses.
Q: So he didn’t get sick?
A: Sure he did. He woke up with a fever one morning and strongly considered jumping out the window. Except by the time he’d made up his mind that splat sounded better than whatever fucking worms the corpses had in their stomachs, he was too weak to unlatch his window. He leaned his forehead against the cool glass, and didn’t cry. His muscles were all soft with the fever. The back of his mouth tasted of blood.
So Niragi did the sensible thing, and poured his last half-bottle of vodka down his throat. (Missing from his inventory count because he’d assumed he drank it during the world’s last normal weekend). It burned all the way down. He hoped that would, at least, speed things up.
He doesn’t think about the night that followed.
Okay, well. Maybe he does think about it. He pretends he doesn’t, though, ‘cause if he gives in to those thoughts he feels his bowels dance through his gut again. They’ll writhe like they have a will of their own, infested with hell knows what. He’ll taste deep rich iron in the back of his throat and retch. He’ll feel the strength recede from his muscles until he’s curled up on his side on the bathroom floor, grasping for his half-tub of water, too weak to make it there.
Only a day or two later, Niragi gets up.
Most everyone doesn’t.
Q; Why are you telling me all this?
A: Because in the present day—seven or eight years after the complete and total collapse of society—Niragi’s caught in a bear trap, which is a stupid way to die. It’s the way he’s going to die, though, if he doesn’t stop spiralling and comes up with something soon. The trap’s metal teeth dig deep into the muscle of his right leg. The pain’s a blur of red-hot irons poking right down into his marrow. He hopes, through gritted teeth, that the trap’s not eating into the bone, though knowing his luck of course it is. Either way, he’s not a doctor. If he was he’d at least know which sinews to give up on. How long recovery’s likely to take. Whether recovery’s even possible, seven or eight years into the end of the world. He’s panting with the pain. Outside, the sky is going dark.
He could’ve gone to college for something useful. Something other than fucking game development. Hell, he could’ve gone into the army (not that he would’ve fitted in. But it’s been seven-or-eight years and also, bear trap. Cut the man some slack.)
He’s panting harder. The trap has a fucking lock on it. His hands are slick with his own blood and he cannot pry himself loose. It’s autumn and the air’s cold and thin, but all the same his skin’s flush with sweat.
He’s spiralling again. Quick, ask another question.
Q: How the fuck do you get your leg caught in a bear trap?
A: That’s a stupid, mundane story. It begins with a can of hopefully-food, dented and with one of those pull up tabs that breaks the moment Niragi tries to use it. It just comes off and he sits there, staring at what was supposed to be dinner. Now there’s plenty of other cans—some even have labels!—that he could go back and get, only that’d take time. And he’s stubborn. And he’s not spoken to any real-life people in a while (the pigeons do not count). So he does what anyone would do in his position, really.
He takes it personally.
Not three minutes later he’s stabbed through the rusty lid with his favourite serrated hunting knife, goes to grab the can, and tears a long deep cut into the palm of his hand. Once upon a time that would have been fine, because once upon a time there’d been doctors, and hospitals, and professional-grade sterilising equipment and antibiotics. Now the best he can do is eat the contents of the can (peaches, sickly sweet), wrap a length of expired cotton bandage around his hand, and hope for the best.
Four days later the best hasn’t happened. His palm’s painful, swollen, the skin red and flush and leaking. He’s out of antibiotics—traded his last for a pack of ammo, rare like gold and far more precious—but there’s a hospital a few hours’ walk away. In the early weeks, when it became clear most everyone was dead and the world was never going back to normal, Niragi raided the hospital’s storage and hid a stash of meds behind a ceiling tile in a break room. There’s far more drugs in there than he can reasonably lug around (or use, really.) It’s his. All he’s got to do is go and get it.
Only it seems someone’s moved into the hospital, since.
Niragi doesn’t make it past urgent care.
Q: Who put that bear trap there, in that shadowy waiting room, in between long-dead corpses and collapsed IV-poles?
A: Niragi’s got a fever, and he’s not sure if it’s anyone at all.
The moon casts long hard shadows through the broken window. He’s lying on his shoulder, in between a dead nurse (name tag: Watanabe) and patients collapsed right in their shitty plastic chairs. He’s too warm. His muscles feel like lead in his limbs. His hand throbs. His right shin’s been replaced by a rusty knife that stabs right through him. Maybe the trap’s chomped the limb straight off. He can’t recall making a sound. All the same his throat’s raw from screaming.
It’s a way to die. Most of the world died a whole lot harder, and the world’s not the sort of place to grow old in anymore.
There’s a figure in the corner of his eye. Niragi twists despite the wrong-godawful-fucking-bad that is his leg. He huffs a laugh. So he’s seeing things. The hallucination is in a white coat. Like it’s playing at being a doctor. The hallucination fucking waves.
‘Go away,’ Niragi croaks. He’d prefer pigeons over things that aren’t there.
‘If I leave, you die,’ the figure says. ‘That’s fine with me.’
‘Course it would be,’ Niragi says, ‘Motherfucker.’
‘Rude.’ His voice doesn’t change. Doesn’t care. ‘Why’d you come here?’
‘Why does anyone come to a fuckin’ hospital—’
‘Last chance,’ the figure says.
Last chance. Niragi’s breath is shallow is his throat. He could die here. Easily, and even relatively quickly. But seven-or-eight years ago he got up from that bathroom floor when he could’ve stayed down, too.
‘Hand’s infected,’ Niragi says, ‘I’m out of antibiotics.’
The stranger hums. ‘You weren’t going to raid me?’
‘I didn’t know you were here, now fucking did I—’
‘There’s not a whole gang of bandits coming right in behind you?’
‘I wouldn’t tell ya if there were, would I,’ Niragi croaks. (Bandits. Really?) His throat’s dry and his leg’s going strangely cold. ‘Either help me or shoot me, would ya?’
Q: So the figure’s real?
A: Niragi’s fading brain seems to think so. The stranger—short, white-clad, tied-back hair and a dangerously neutral expression—strolls up to him, paces around him like he’s just casing out a potential hideout. Deft hands pull Niragi’s bag off his shoulders. Loosen his holster, and take away his gun. Niragi groans some half-meant swear.
‘Rude,’ the man repeats, voice low.
He crouches—he’s pretty, Niragi’s fever thinks stupidly, pretty like an avalanche right before it buries you—and Niragi flinches back.
‘Stay still,’ the man says, almost soothing except for the sharp edge of disdain. He ties something around Niragi’s right calf, pulls the knot tight and the pain shoots hot and white all the way up into Niragi’s vision. Niragi’s breath is too fast and too shallow and his lungs whine. He’s close to hyperventilating and he’d love—love—to pass the fuck out right about now.
The stranger hunches over the bear trap. Alarm bells go off in the back of Niragi’s brain. The stranger looks at him—black eyes glinting, blank, in the low light—and reaches for the lock. (What kind of bear trap has a goddamn lock?)
‘This is going to hurt,’ the stranger informs him.
Then there’s the grind of metal on metal, and maybe even metal on Jesus-fuck-is-that-his-bone, and Niragi finally does pass out.
Q: Does he wake up again?
A: Niragi’s genetically half cockroach. So he does fade back into his body, in a hospital bed, sun streaking golden across the wall. For half a minute he’s so delirious with the fever that he allows himself to believe the past seven-or-eight years have been a nightmare. That maybe he just got that fucked up, overdosed like that kid in his database class, only maybe they managed to pump Niragi’s stomach in time. Maybe he’ll be able to go home and sit in his desk chair and put on his headphones and block out the noise of the city. Maybe—
He tries to move an arm. It manages five inches before it’s jerked back towards the bed frame.
His wrist’s strapped to the bed.
Not a nightmare, then. A particularly unique brand of terror—sharp as acid and equally as all-encompassing—washes through him. His bad hand throbs. He looks down. Both his wrists are cuffed to the bed frame, the ties white, plastic, padded. Medical. He yanks. He’s weak. The bed doesn’t even move. The cuff, on the other hand, has the fucking gall to creak.
‘You’re awake,’ the stranger says, leaning in the doorframe. His coat’s the whitest thing Niragi’s seen since the end of the world, his smirk the smuggest since long before that. ‘Sleep well?’
‘You cut me the fuck loose—’
‘No, I don’t think so.’ The man pushes off the doorframe, stalks into the room. ‘How’s the hand? Bad?’
‘You weird-ass serial killer motherfucker—’
The man smiles thinly. ‘You came into my home. With a gun.’
Niragi lunges. His wrists whine when he snaps back into the mattress. ‘What the fuck do you want?’
The fucker leans back against the next bed over (empty, and significantly dustier than the one Niragi’s in). He draws a strip of pills from the pocket of his lab coat, holds them up between two fingers. The sunbeam gives the pills a small-fortune halo. The man’s feline eyes, blackened at the edges though he lives in a post-apocalyptic wasteland and surrounds himself with bear traps, narrow.
‘Penicillin,’ he says, ‘That’s what you wanted.’
Niragi glares. ‘Antibiotics. Fuck if I care which. You gonna blackmail me?’
The man huffs. Cocks his head. ‘I could.’
‘I shoulda shot you.’
‘Possibly,’ the cunt smirks, then tosses the pills onto the ground.
And grinds them down into the linoleum with the sole of his shoe.
‘Christ, man—’
‘They’re expired,’ the fucker deadpans, then pulls another strip out of his pocket. ‘Cefalosporin—these might’ve given you a shot, four, five years ago. Aminoglycosides—people are killing for these, but they might as well be sugar. Tetracyclines—’
‘Get to the point.’
‘Expired tetracyclines might actually do harm. These, though—’ The guy fishes an entire box of pills from his coat, ‘—these are ciproflaxins. They might still work, assuming they’ve been stored in decent conditions.’
Niragi eyes the box. Might is the sort of thing he liked to hedge his bets on, way back when. In video games. In bars, his lungs full of smoke-machine poison, his oxygen cut short and the morning as far off as the moon. In front of the mirror with a lighter and a needle and a new silver barbell, in the middle of the night, ‘cause the pain was at least familiar.
‘You’re not gonna give them to me,’ Niragi says, ‘Are ya?’
The box of pills disappears back into the fucker’s pocket. ‘Nope.’
Silence. Niragi strains his arms, the cuffs far too tight for kit that’s been disintegrating in storage for close to a decade. His jeans are cut away above his right knee, his mangled leg wrapped in pristine cotton, pain bleeding up into his thigh in the rhythm of his heartbeat. His killer stands there, hair bleached despite the impending end of the humanity, shirt hanging too loosely off his frame. He’s stopped just short of hanging a stethoscope around his neck.
Two years into the apocalypse Niragi was jumped by some fucker with a machete and Kevlar body armour, stolen from some dead cop. They’d fought, skin scraping on pavement, teeth biting through layers of old scars and old bruises. He’s still got a deep white scar on his forearm, and the memory of that guy’s eyes fading to organ-meat-blank as Niragi sat on his chest and choked him out.
The fucker in the lab coat isn’t currently being strangled (though, Niragi thinks, objectively he should be).
Even so, this man’s eyes are just as fucking dead.
‘Why am I alive?’ Niragi says. Hunches his shoulders. Doesn’t quite manage the snarl.
‘You’re going to take the medication I give you,’ the cunt says, ‘Or I wait until you’re so weak I can jam a feeding tube down your throat.’
Q: How many ways are there to kill a man?
A: Infinite ones, really.
Niragi runs through most of them that first day. The sun moves across the wall at a crawl, his muscles lax with fever and his leg—oh-god-his-fucking-leg—is a mystery of Bad underneath the bandages. His hand throbs and his head does, too. The cunt—his name badge says Chishiya, which cannot possibly be his real name, because this man is not a doctor—has disappeared. To let him mull over the threat, no doubt. To let him test the strength of the cuffs (too strong) and the strength of his will (rapidly degrading). His throat feels like the Sahara’s moved in. He’s not sure when he last drank anything.
Niragi could strange him. Chishiya. Could kneel on his chest and dig his thumbs deep into the arteries, until the skin goes very blue or very purple and Chishiya goes very, very still. He could steal the gun back and start by shooting his kneecaps. He could find an inch of gasoline, somewhere, and drag him behind a motorcycle until his skin’s more tarmac than, well, skin. He could—
He drifts. The fever’s hot and easy in a way, ‘cause he’s been tired a long time. Not dying does a number on your body, when you do it the way Niragi does. There’s communities out there. Villages. Fucking hamlets. People shacking up with one another, having kids, dying in childbirth like it’s the 1800s. After the machete he tried for a while. Eating community meals. Evenly dividing whatever they dug up in untouched gas stations or long-deserted 7-11’s. Figuring out who’s gonna raise that toddler ‘cause mum didn’t make it and dad took off after he heard the baby got the Sick. Holding up his hands and saying, fuck no, not me. Standing guard in the dark and firing at strangers.
It’s never, ever long before Niragi becomes a stranger, too.
‘You’re not dead,’ Chishiya says. He hovers over Niragi like the ghost of hospitals past. His hair’s artificial-white and loose, falling in his face, projecting deep dark shadows.
‘Not yet,’ Niragi croaks, which is meant to be a joke but once it leaves his mouth he forgets why it’s funny.
Chishiya hums. ‘You’ll be thirsty.’
Not like Chishiya gives a fuck about that. But the threat of the feeding tube still hover through the air. Chishiya holds a paper cup—how?—up in front of Niragi, and though he still pictures catching Chishiya in a bear trap and leaving him to die, he opens his mouth.
The liquid’s bitter on his tongue, decaying leaves and rotten bread and weed. Niragi tenses. Maybe he dies here. Maybe he dies worse if he swallows. Chishiya raises an eyebrow.
The eyebrow says feeding tube.
Niragi swallows.
‘There you go,’ Chishiya says, all sweet and sour. ‘That wasn’t so hard.’
‘Shut the fuck up,’ Niragi says. His tongue’s coated in sticky residue. ‘You some sort of fuckin’ serial killer?’
Chishiya unscrews a bottle of water—seriously, how?—and holds it to Niragi’s mouth. The plastic clinks against his teeth and by now what he’s drinking has to be half micro-plastic. It doesn’t matter. It’s water, and it’s cold, and he’s not dead.
‘I don’t enjoy it,’ Chishiya says, ‘If that’s what you’re asking.’
Q: Are there others?
A: They’re not alive, as far as he can tell.
Niragi’s the lone occupant of a five-person hospital room. The other beds are dusty, covered in the debris of almost a decade. There’s no cuffs strapped to the bedframes. The second time he wakes up—spine crooked, fever hot, leg so sore he’d almost wish it had been lopped off—Niragi screams his throat raw. No one answers.
He’s not entirely conscious. He’s going to die here. He sinks back into the depths of his fever dreams and doesn’t startle back into his body until Chishiya’s bend over his bad leg. He’s doing something absolutely fuck-off evil with a needle and thread, pulling it through the skin and oh-god-the-muscle with practised efficiency. When Niragi’s throat starts groaning and whining all of it’s own accord, Chishiya’s cool black eyes rise up to meet Niragi’s.
‘You need morphine,’ Chishiya says.
‘Give,’ Niragi manages.
‘It’s expired,’ Chishiya says, and digs the needle back in, and the pain pushes Niragi right back out of the world of the living.
Morning comes, eventually. His eyelids are heavy as Niragi pulls them open. His wounds throb. The only window in the room is at his back; the shadow of a flock of pigeons drifts across the wall as the birds take off into the sky. Never in his life has Niragi been jealous of a fucking pigeon. He pulls, tugs, yanks on his restraints again. They creak, and are otherwise impenetrable.
‘It’s pigs, you know,’ Chishiya says, once he appears in his favoured spot in the doorframe. Not quite in the room, not quite outside of it. On the border. Like he doesn’t want to get too close. Too involved.
‘Pigs,’ Niragi repeats. His leg’s still sore with his fresh stitches.
‘I was at a conference when it started,’ Chishiya says. He tucks his hands in the pockets of his doctor’s coat and stalks into the room. ‘The first clusters—you wouldn’t have heard about them, we kept them quiet—all occurred around pig farms.’
‘Bullshit,’ Niragi groans, ‘You’re not in on any actual state secrets.’
‘By the time I was in on it it wasn’t much of a state secret anymore.’ Chishiya leans against the next bed over and cocks his head. ‘They were calling in every single doctor in hopes any of us would have a hunch.’
‘You’re not a doctor.’
‘You’re right,’ Chishiya says sweetly. ‘I’ve failed to renew my registration.’
Niragi drops his head back down. It thuds into his pillow and on the ceiling, a whole family of spiders is building some sort of mass housing complex. His hand feels like it’s double it usual size. Whatever concoction he’s been force-fed, there weren’t any painkillers in it.
‘Pigs,’ he says again, because Chishiya’s lies are better than the boredom. Better than the haze of the fever swirling behind his eyes, the weakness in his muscles. He pulls on the cuffs and nothing moves.
‘First it was farmers,’ Chishiya complies, ‘Farm workers, neighbours, that sort of thing. Bad, but not apocalyptic. Then it was slaughterhouse employees. From the kill line to the packaging floor.’
Niragi looks back up. ‘It was in the meat.’
The faintest twitch of Chishiya’s mouth. ‘It was.’
‘Wouldn’t cooking…’ Niragi falters. He’s no biologist and no, seeing the state of the world, heat wouldn’t help.
‘They thought so. They hoped so,’ Chishiya says, eyes dead like he’s recounting his primary school math grades. ‘The second factor was the incubation time.’
‘Too short?’ Niragi says, pictures the news reader dying on live television, blood dripping off the camera lens.
Chishiya raises his eyebrows. ‘He knows what an incubation time is.’
Niragi snarls, dives forward, reels back when the cuffs snap tight. His brain bounces around his skull. Chishiya chuckles, a lifeless sound like he’s been practising it in front of the mirror.
‘It’s over three weeks,’ Chishiya says, ‘And once you’re infected, there’s nothing anyone can do.’
Q: Is it gone? The Sick?
A: No, it’s not.
The first year or two he’d hoped so. It’d spread so fast and killed so easily, surely everyone had caught it, surely everyone alive had survived it. Was immune. He’s not a doctor and back then he hadn’t wanted to be. Even then he’d known, deep down, that matters of biology were rarely that simple.
It was his third winter. He travelled south to wait out the cold and it was something to do, hiking down the island to the sea shore. He set up camp in what used to be a farmhouse. It had dried rice in the kitchen, still, and no sign of any occupants. For a week or two he set snares and gutted rabbits and cooked rice, went down to the shore to collect seaweed, wondered idly if on the other side of the ocean, the world was still the world. (He knew, even then, that it wasn’t.) He build a fire in the backyard and rifled through the family’s photo albums, through the bedside tables. There were dead chickens in a coop out back. It’d been a month since he got kicked out of his last group and he won’t try again until the machete.
Three weeks in a man came stumbling out the woods. He was thin and sinewy like they all were now, but he had a gait like he was drunk and Niragi stood frozen behind his cooking fire because—
The man’s gut crawled in a way Niragi hadn’t seen in three years. He was screaming, Niragi only heard then, a high-pitched siren-like wailing sort of noise.
‘They’re dead,’ the man sobbed, ‘They’re dead they’re dead they’re all dead—’
For the first time, Niragi’s hands trembled on his gun.
Q: Niragi doesn’t fight?
A: How much fighting can he do, really?
He’s sick. He’s weak. Chishiya loosens his cuffs enough that he can eat rice porridge off world’s bluntest spoon, and watches to make sure Niragi doesn’t steal even that bit of cutlery. Once he spits Chishiya in the face as he approaches with a thermometer. Chishiya frowns, wipes his cheek clean, and walks out with his magic plastic water bottle without giving Niragi any. By evening, he’s too thirsty to do any more spitting.
Somehow, time passes. He sinks back into his fever. His throat’s sore and his leg’s sore and his hand’s sore, too, and whenever he’s awake enough to be aware of that he wants to pass out and/or die. He doesn’t understand why he’s alive. He doesn’t understand why Chishiya’s alive, either, so Niragi kicks him in the face as soon as he comes close and the next time he wakes up his legs are cuffed up, too.
Sunspots slip across the wall. There’s birds cooing in the distance, pigeons someplace beyond the window (it may as well be the moon). There’s a bruise, fat and purple, on Chishiya’s icy fucking cheekbone. Niragi sleeps. Niragi wakes. (There’s some godawful ridiculous fucking fiddling with a bedpan they both pretend to forget about immediately). He downs another dose of Chishiya’s disgusting concoction.
He dreams. Pigeons picking through his brain. Pigs appearing by the window, grunting up a storm, heavy like laughter. We got you, they say. We got you, and you’re all gonna die. He dreams the guy with the machete. The guy with the Sick. The newsreader, puking up her guts on prime time live TV. He dreams Chishiya, a cold shadow lingering in the doorframe, saying incubation time, saying it’s all expired, you know.
Then somehow, one morning, his brain’s a little clearer and the ache’s gone down and maybe it’s just wishful thinking, but the swelling in his hand isn’t as bad as it was. His skin’s still sweaty and pale. All the same he feels less like he’s dying and more like that time he’d somehow bullshitted his way through his final job interview and got absolutely shitfaced after.
‘Your temperature’s gone down,’ Chishiya says, pulls the thermometer out of Niragi’s mouth and moves away before Niragi can work up enough saliva to spit him in the face. ‘I’ll have to change your bandages.’
‘Those two things have fuckall to do with each other.’
‘I don’t waste supplies on the dying,’ Chishiya says, simply, and disappears out of the room with a flash of lab coat.
Niragi stares at the ceiling. Not dying. He’d sort of forgotten that that was an option. The family of spiders on his ceiling have caught a half-dozen flies, one of which is struggling to break free. Even that tiny stupid creature has to know it’s useless. More out of habit than anything else, Niragi struggles against his restraints. They groan, and that’s it.
‘What’s so bad about a three week incubation time,’ Niragi says, when Chishiya reappears with an armful of bandages and water and ointment.
‘Hmm? Oh,’ Chishiya says, pulling a stool towards Niragi’s bed. ‘You payed attention.’
‘Consider me a captive audience,’ Niragi says, with as much sarcasm as he can manage. (A lot).
‘Charming,’ Chishiya mutters. He grabs Niragi’s hand, pulling at the tape that keeps the gauze in place. ‘It’s not that the incubation time is an issue, really.’
Niragi grits his teeth. Chishiya’s not gentle and his hand blooms with the pain.
‘It’s that,’—Chishiya’s brow creases as he concentrates and Niragi does not want to notice—‘You’re already able to infect others well before you develop symptoms. About as soon as you’re infected, as best as we were able to estimate before—well.’
‘Everything went to shit.’
Chishiya shrugs. ‘Eloquent.’
For once, Niragi’s quiet. Chishiya works steadily on his hand and yeah, it fucking stings, but what stings more is the fucking useless unfairness of it all. Is that in the weeks before it got bad, Niragi went to work, and took the subway, and bought sketchy pills off a friend-of-a-friend for too much cash. He went to get takeout and ordered new key caps that never arrived and he unblocked Matsuo’s phone number to have an ill-advised one night stand that turned into two nights and a bad high. And in all that time—in that haze of deliciously mundane normalcy—they were all breathing on each other, and coughing, and sticking tongues down each other’s throats. They were passing the fucking Sick back and forth like a shitty bottle of vodka.
Of course they were. He’d known that. He’d just refused to think about the mechanics, ‘cause when you do that a problem becomes something that can be solved. Only he can’t go back in time. Only he can’t grab his past self by the shoulders and tell him how to fix any of this shit.
‘Did you get it?’ Niragi says. Chishiya’s fingers are clammy on his skin. He doesn’t shiver. ‘At whatever fancy fucking conference for kidnappers slash serial killers you were?’
Chishiya looks up from Niragi’s almost-wrapped hand. His hair’s tucked behind his ear and his dead gaze falters, just a fraction, for just a millisecond.
‘I did get sick,’ Chishiya says. ‘We all did.’
Q: What’s the meaning of life?
A: There’s no such thing, as far as Niragi’s concerned.
One day you’re born for no discernible reason. You go to school so someone other than your father can consider you a disappointment for a change. Somehow you don’t die, and one day you’ve got to start shaving, and you graduate. You move someplace where no one knows you and discover that it doesn’t help. You pretend it does. You grow a hard shell of some persona around the rotting corpse of the kid you used to be. You get drunk and high and bruised the fuck up and sometimes it helps. You still believe it won’t ever be great.
Except maybe it won’t ever again be as bad as it used to be.
And then one day your world ends.
Another day passes. Two. Niragi’s strapped to the bed and his head clears as the swelling in his hand—ridiculously—actually does go down. Chishiya loosens his cuffs far enough that he can hold a cup of water to his mouth, can scratch the horrid itch at the back of his neck. He’s disgusted at how grateful he is just to be able to brush his own damn teeth.
(He tries to steal the toothbrush. He’s sure he could whittle it into a shiv, except Chishiya knows that, too. Whenever Niragi has something in his hands that isn’t made of paper, Chishiya’s dead black eyes laser-focus on it. Soon Niragi stops tossing shit onto the floor ‘cause when he does, he doesn’t get it back.)
Three, four times a day Chishiya shows up with more foul-tasting drugs, and bland-as-hell rice porridge, and canned fruit from some long-gone grocery chain brand. The pigeons coo outside the window. His toes still move. (At one point Chishiya tosses him a sponge and some lukewarm soapy water and tells him that he stinks.) Sometimes it rains.
‘Are you planning on boring me to death,’ Niragi says, on the morning of the seventh day. His bad leg has begun to itch, a low, thready feeling thrumming underneath the pain. He’s becoming more and more ashamed of the fact he’s not at least bitten Chishiya’s finger off yet.
‘I gave you books,’ Chishiya says. He’s staring at the palm of Niragi’s fucked-up hand. His skin’s rougher and more calloused than makes sense. For some stupid reason he rather not contemplate, the back of Niragi’s hand feels every rough crease.
‘I finished them,’ Niragi says. ‘You have terrible taste.’
The quirk of an eyebrow. ‘I kept the good ones for myself.’
‘So give me some of them,’ Niragi says. Hisses as Chishiya prods the gash. ‘Motherfucker.’
‘Still sore.’ Chishiya drops Niragi’s hand, notes something down, then looks back up. ‘Do you play chess?’
So they play chess.
They balance the board on a table next to Niragi’s bed. He can almost comfortably reach it, though his shoulder strains, which he presumes Chishiya organised on purpose. Chishiya ties his hair back like chess is as serious as changing bandages, though he’s shed his doctor’s coat. Half a collarbone sticks out from the collar of his oversized white T-shirt, the tendril of a thin white scar snaking down onto his chest. Chishiya’s eyes catch on Niragi’s. He pulls his shirt back into place. The scar disappears underneath the too-white fabric.
The thin morning sun paints squares of yellow light on the hospital walls. Chishiya plays in silence, no matter how much Niragi laughs or sneers or curses. He considers sticking his queen in one of Chishiya’s eyes, but he’s still tied up with no way out. The pigeons coo outside the window. Niragi’s bad leg throbs.
‘I know what you’re up to,’ he says, when Chishiya’s three moves out from checkmate.
Chishiya’s hand does not flinch as he sacrifices a horse. ‘You could be worse.’
‘Not chess,’ Niragi says, flexes his bad hand. ‘The penicillin.’
Chishiya looks up. His eyes are dark and sharp and attentive, colder than the autumn sun.
‘You’re cooking up antibiotics,’ Niragi says, ‘You’re gonna be richer than god, doc.’
‘There’s no cooking involved,’ Chishiya says. There’s a quirk at the edges of his mouth as he checks Niragi’s king. ‘Check.’
‘I can fucking see that,’ Niragi bites. ‘You gonna let me go when my hand’s better, or are you gonna kill me?’
He makes the only move he can, sacrificing his queen. It’s fine. He doesn’t need her anymore. Chishiya scoffs. He’s seen through it, of course he has, but there’s no other move left to make.
‘Fucking tell me,’ Niragi says, ‘Your little human experiment is done, ain’t it?’
‘You’ll need a few more doses,’ Chishiya says, calmly, and moves his bishop. ‘Check.’
Niragi takes the bishop. ‘Check, motherfucker.’
They’re at a tie. Both stuck. Chishiya looks up at Niragi. He’s blackened the corners of his eyes like they’re not living in hell, like he’s part of some weird club scene that’s died out with the rest of civilization. It works on him. Niragi chews on the inside of his cheek instead of finishing that thought.
‘You can walk out of here,’ Chishiya says, and does something strange with his remaining horse, ‘If and when you’re able. Checkmate.’
He leaves Niragi to stare at the impossible board.
Q: Can he walk? With his leg?
A: He doesn’t know. Chishiya hums and smirks and writes things down whenever he changes Niragi’s bandages—getting way too close for way too long—and Niragi’s toes still move. But when he tries to move his foot the pain forces him to stop, and Chishiya simply won’t tell him if that’s muscles or sinews or nerve damage. Simply won’t tell him when it’ll heal. If it’ll heal.
It’s the apocalypse. It’ll be winter soon. If Niragi can’t walk—
He catches the thought and digs his nails into the palm of his hand, hard. He will heal. He’s had worse.
They all have.
They play chess. Chishiya plays on the defence until all of a sudden he sacrifices four pieces in a row but wins, every time, as though Niragi’s skull is fucking transparent and his thoughts are etched right onto it’s insides. Chishiya’s forehead creases and he’s still blackening his eyes and sometimes his collar opens wide enough that Niragi’s eyes can trace the scar down from his collarbone.
‘Checkmate,’ Chishiya says, every time, deadpan and uncaring except for the faint glint in his eye. Twice Niragi throws the board onto the floor. (It’s the only thing thrown on the ground that Chishiya doesn’t confiscate.) Once Niragi tries to steal the queen—the pointiest object that’s been close to him in a week—and after that Chishiya replaces the queens with cut-up pieces of bath sponge.
On the second Day of Chess, Niragi’s suicidal strategy succeeds for the first time. It costs him all his pieces save two pawns and a rook. Chishiya sits back, his eyebrows about raised up into his hairline. Niragi grins so wide his face splits in two. His hand’s almost normal again, and the fever’s gone, and Chishiya studies the board for a further six minutes before he concedes:
‘You won.’
Their eyes meet above the board. Niragi’s wrists are still bound to the bed frame and his leg’s still a mess of pain and bandages. Chishiya’s still feeding him gross concoctions twice a day. For the first time, though, there’s a flash of genuine loathing at the back of Chishiya’s blank stare.
‘I win.’ Niragi’s sneer cuts unreasonably wide. The pigeons roo-koo behind the window. Above Niragi’s head, the spiders continue their architectural endeavours.
Chishiya cocks his head. His eyes dig into Niragi like he’s seeing him for the first time. Seeing something other than temperature and saliva and experiments no medical board would ever have approved. The scar dips from his collarbone into his shirt. The bruise on his cheek has faded into sickly yellow. Chishiya says, cold like he really believes it:
‘It’s just one game of chess.’
Niragi’s sneer curls. He licks his teeth, slow, shows off his tongue piercing. Chishiya’s gaze doesn’t stutter. He stands. Disappears the way he always does.
There’s no more chess after that.
Q: How many doses are “a few more”?
A: This is the last one, apparently.
It’s evening. Chishiya’s back in his doctor’s coat, one hand in his pocket, the very picture of composure. He’s taken Niragi’s temperature (acceptable), changed his bandages (a hum, a few characters scribbled into a notebook) and produced his shot glass worth of vile liquid from fuck-knows-where.
‘The last one,’ Niragi repeats. ‘I don’t believe you.’
Chishiya’s eyebrows rise. ‘Your hand’s fine, now.’
It is. It doesn’t throb, or leak, or swell. The fingers work and the wound’s scarring perfectly normally. Except—Niragi bares his teeth—he’s been waiting for the catch. Civilization is over. Out there, people are dying of illnesses that were barely defined as illnesses even a decade ago. If Chishiya had just fucking asked if anyone wanted to try his penicillin, he’d have a line of people out the door.
Instead he lined the place with bear traps.
‘Your hand’s fine now,’ Chishiya repeats. His voice drops. ‘The feeding tube is still an option.’
And Niragi—who hates himself for it, but has not managed to steal so much as a chopstick without Chishiya noticing—opens his mouth.
Q: Is Niragi right? Is there a catch?
A: Of course.
He’s fine for an hour. Chishiya lingers in the doorframe, face blank and indifferent but shoulders hunched almost like he’s leaning in, like he wants to get closer. Niragi lies there. The itch in his stomach is, at first, only paranoia. The pigeons make a fuckton of noise outside the window. The spiders catch another fly. The sun sets. The room’s bathed in warm orange light, and Chishiya’s statue-still in the doorframe, and Niragi spits:
‘What the fuck are you on about, you serial killer motherfucker—’
And then he throws up.
It’s sudden, and it’s violent, acid and oatmeal and watery things he doesn’t remember swallowing. It stings all the way up and his restraints groan as he forces his upper body to lean out of the bed. He’s panting. He’s sweating. There’s a second wave of puke and there’s something itching down in his gut—
Oh.
Oh no.
‘Jesus fuck,’ Niragi manages, his throat raw, fear like ice settling down in his veins. ‘What the fuck did you fucking do, you maniacal batshit motherfucking cunt—’
Chishiya tosses him a bottle of water. He doesn’t get closer. He eyes the puddle on the floor with distaste and says:
‘It’s not just pigs.’
‘You fucking tell me—’ Niragi retches. There’s not much left to come up.
‘It’s rats, too.’ Chishiya pulls a mask over his face. ‘You’ve seen it out there, right? The Sick?’
Yeah. Niragi’s panting. He’s seen it, alright, stumbling out of the woods, killing kids in ramshackle communities that aren’t gonna survive another year, he’s seen the pyres burning gasoline-black in the distance. He’s seen the ravaged corpses and he’s seen the fat fucking pigeons and he’s seeing Chishiya, hands in his pockets, face dead neutral. Eyes perfectly blank.
‘Your immunity wanes, after a while,’ Chishiya says. ‘If you get it too late, your chances the second time ‘round are about as good as they were the first time.’
The fear is primal, primeval in Niragi’s veins. He yanks the sheets down, his shirt up. His gut itches but the skin is still, for now, how long until—
‘How long—’ Niragi rasps. His stomach reels, again.
‘Do you know how many rats there are in Japan?’ Chishiya says, and Niragi throws his torso off the bed to throw up again. The bed frame creaks. He vaguely registers there’s no blood in the splatter. ‘Actually, nevermind, I don’t think there’s anyone left alive who knows.’
‘Why the fuck would you infect me with the fucking Sick, you piece of shit—’
‘It’s a weakened dose,’ Chishiya shrugs. ‘It shouldn’t kill you.’
Q: Shouldn’t?
A: Niragi screams the question after Chishiya, as he disappears back to wherever it is he disappears to. His throat’s raw and his gut’s sore and his forehead’s wet with sweat. He yanks on the cuffs again, in earnest, but they groan and creak and the bed frame doesn’t even move. He’s trembling. He’s staring at his stomach just in case his guts start writhing again, and this time he doesn’t even have a half a litre of vodka to try and overdose on.
Sun leaks through the window. Pigeons swear at each other outside. The air’s getting colder in here and Niragi’s clammy, the sheets sticking to him, the fear saturating his organs.
He’s trying to make a vaccine, he registers somewhere in the distance, no fucking wonder he needs bear traps. His leg throbs with exaggerated pain. The penicillin had worked, hadn’t it? So maybe—maybe he’ll be fine. Maybe he’ll still get to wrap his bony hands around Chishiya’s skinny neck and wring the life out of him. See how he likes it, with his eyeliner and his smirks and his checkmate.
Niragi sinks into himself. He pictures that news reader on live TV, throwing up thick red blood and bits of stomach lining, all over her lacy white blouse and her notes and the camera lens. The guy dying in the street below his apartment. The man with the machete and the guy stumbling out of the woods, his stomach crawling like it was alive, like it had a will of his own. Niragi’s clammy hands ghost down his own skin, at least as far as they can go, and he can’t tell if it’s moving or not. He can’t tell—
Four, five years ago a group cast him out again. They held a vote by the fire, as was the group’s custom. Around them the ruins of a Kyoto suburb blocked out the black horizon. The group was fifteen adults, counting everyone over sixteen, and at that point not a single one wanted to look Niragi in the eye.
He’d have liked it better if they’d hated him. If they left him while he slept, or shot arrows at him as he ran, or said they’d burn him alive if he tried to stay. Once he’d almost been stabbed ‘cause he’d been sneaking off with the wrong man—or any man at all—but he’d been with this particular group for quite a while. He’d kept to the sidelines. He’d thought maybe this time they’d make it through the winter. The fire burned hard. Overhead the stars were silver-bright.
‘You need to choose,’ the oldest man had said when they’d all raised their hands. ‘You can’t be with us and be alone.’
Niragi gasps back into his aching body. The fever runs down his back, chills trembling through his muscles. His teeth chatter. His vision swims. Chishiya hovers above him, eyes black above his mask, hair falling loose.
‘Just fuckin’ kill me,’ Niragi groans. The back of his mouth tastes suspiciously metallic and his bad leg throbs.
‘I won’t,’ Chishiya says. His voice is very far away. ‘You’re free to die once I know whether this worked.’
Whether. Shouldn’t. Niragi groans. Chishiya puts one of his magical fucking water bottles to Niragi’s mouth and he drinks, ‘cause he’s used to it by now, ‘cause he’s weak enough Chishiya could ram a feeding tube down his throat dead easy.
He disappears into himself again. He’s back in his apartment, chained to the balcony as below the street fills up with corpses and crawling stomachs and pigs. His skin moves until something slick-red and writhing bursts out of his gut. (He doesn’t die. He wants to.) He’s at some party. The ceiling’s low and the crowd’s thick, sweat and fever and skin. No one’s ugly in the smoke machine haze, the flashing lights. Mouths move but all he hears is the bass on his eardrums, his heart beating at the same speed. He knows, the way you know in dreams, that it’s someone’s birthday but he’s not invited. Isn’t supposed to be here, ‘cause that’s Nagase downing shots, that’s Miyashita hanging off his arm. They’re all in high school uniforms and Niragi’s sick to his stomach. Nagase’s grin says piss rice. Miyashita’s perfect smile says you deserve it.
The beat goes faster. Niragi’s heartbeat does, too, and at the back of the crowd there’s a flash of white. They’re all turning to look at him. That’s Kuroda, sixteen years old, in his perfect white school shirt. His mouth splits. Still have the piercing, I see?
Kuroda raises a hand.
Niragi runs. Forces himself through the throng of sweat-slick people. (Some of them are pigs, standing on their hind legs, grinning wide). The club’s larger than it has any right to be and there’s no exit, anywhere, just the smoke and Niragi’s heartbeat and Nagase, everywhere he turns.
He crashes through the bathroom door. There’s a line of stalls and urinals and too-white light glaring on the tiles. Chishiya’s standing by the sink, up to his elbows in foaming, soapy blood. He turns. All of a sudden it’s dead quiet.
See, Chishiya smirks, I knew you’d be glad to see me.
Niragi gasps. The night air is cold on his skin and his brain’s too big for his skull and his thoughts are fuzzy with the fever. The room’s dark no matter how wide he spurs his eyes open. There’s a weight on him, shifting, body-warm. Somehow that isn’t strange. Somehow it makes sense that there’s someone’s breath ghosting down his face, that Niragi’s running his nails up someone’s back, across the ridge of a spine and the texture of unfamiliar scars.
The fingers that lock into his hair tug, hard. The pain worms right down into him. Somehow it’s warm. Good. Something he wants more of. He bucks up. The weight on him doesn’t move. He opens his mouth, sucks more air in, shows off his tongue piercing. Come on. In the distance someone chuckles. Fingers slip past his lips, into his mouth, push his tongue down. Niragi’s nails dig harder. He snaps his teeth down and doesn’t taste blood and the tug in his stomach is electric and disgusting and the best thing he’s felt in years.
Come on, Chishiya’s voice says in the distance, You’re free to die once I know whether this works.
When he wakes—actually wakes—the room’s silvery with cold white moonlight. Chishiya’s a lingering ghost in the doorway. Niragi’s body feels like he’s been held upside down. His throat’s raw with stomach acid. The weight on top of him is a blanket, pure and simple, which he’s dead glad for ‘cause his jeans are far, far too tight.
‘I’m gonna kill you,’ Niragi croaks. His gut’s a strange mixture of heat and disgust and self-loathing. ‘I’m gonna hang you out the window by a bear trap.’
‘That’s death threat number eight.’ Chishiya notes something down. ‘But this one’s rather more creative. Are you feeling better?’
Niragi heaves. Nothing comes up. No porridge, no water, but no blood, either. No liquified organs. He tries to wipe the sweat off his forehead and can’t, because he’s still cuffed up, because the chain’s too short and he’s going to die here and his subconscious is trying to cope with that via sex dream, apparently. He forces his eyes shut.
‘How many others?’ he manages.
Chishiya hesitates. ‘Six.’
‘Any of them live?’
The moon casts soft shimmering light into the room. Niragi’s shivering underneath his thin blanket. His stomach’s not crawling and Chishiya’s face is hidden behind a disposable mask, his hair framing it in all monochrome. His eyes don’t narrow.
‘The last one almost made it,’ Chishiya says.
Q: Does Niragi make it?
A: He thinks so.
He’s still clammy and shivery and itchy when he wakes, the next time, but he does wake. (If he has any more dreams, he tries very hard to forget them). His muscles don’t ache with the fever. His hand’s not swollen and his foot moves, mostly, when he tells it to. The pain that ruts up through his bone he’ll take. He takes a breath of cool, thin, autumn air and tunes out the fucking pigeons.
‘You’re alive,’ Chishiya says, from the doorframe. He’d sound surprised, if he was capable of emotions, but all Niragi gets is less-dead-than-usual.
‘You’re getting off on this,’ Niragi croaks.
For some godforsaken reason Chishiya smirks. He pushes a strand of loose hair behind his ear and jots something down in his notebook. Niragi’s throat is dry. Out of habit, he yanks on the cuffs. He doesn’t expect them to move. They don’t. He’s not disappointed. Honest.
‘You are getting off on this,’ he tries again, ‘cause it’s about the last thing he’s not tried saying and he can’t cope with Chishiya’s gut punch of a non-reaction.
‘I promise you I’m not,’ Chishiya says. He looks up from his notebook. ‘Any chills, still? How’s your stomach?’
‘Course you are,’ Niragi says. Holds up one manacled wrist. ‘Look at these, you can’t tell me that shit’s hospital issued—’
‘I can, because they are.’
Their eyes meet. Niragi’s alive and he supposes that makes him useless so maybe he dies here, still. Up by the ceiling the spiders eat their fucking fly.
‘You’re less,’—Chishiya hesitates—‘boring than the others.’
‘Jesus Christ.’ Niragi drops his head back into the pillow. ‘That makes it all fucking worth it, then, don’t it. I’m cuffed to a goddamn bed for weeks, you fucking infect me with the thing that wiped out all of humanity, I about puke my organs up but fine, at least the doctor isn’t fucking bored.’
‘I said less boring.’ Chishiya’s eyes curl above his mask. ‘Not not boring.’
‘Right. Gotcha. Holy fuck.’ He raises his head just so he can drop it down again. ‘Do me a favour and just put a fucking bullet in me, yeah?’
‘You’re not done yet,’ Chishiya says, ‘I need to know if it worked. Any chills, still?’
Niragi yanks at his cuffs. ‘Fuck off or I’ll make you eat your fucking teeth.’
Chishiya smiles his thin smile. ‘Good luck with that.’
He turns, and has the fucking gall to leave the room.
Q: When, exactly, is Niragi done?
A: Niragi wonders that, too. The day drags by. Chishiya reappears and this time Niragi lists his symptoms, and pretends not to be grateful for the food he gets as a reward. The air’s colder; winter’s creeping up on them. His muscles still feel thin with the remnants of one infection and then another. He thumbs through another of Chishiya’s paperbacks but can’t bring himself to care about the minor problems of characters in a world that’s still whole. He stares down at his bandaged leg. Wonders at the clean scar in his hand. Wonders why he’s still alive, now that he’s survived the vaccine.
It’s evening. The light’s grey so presumably the sky’s clouded over. Niragi lies staring at the ceiling. He’s been naming the flies caught in the spiderwebs. Nagase, Kuroda, Miyashita—
Chishiya appears in the doorframe. Waves, then says:
‘Chess?’
‘Fuck.’ Niragi shakes his head. Rolls his eyes. ‘Sure. What the fuck. Sure.’
Chishiya pads into the room, sets up the board on its stool by Niragi’s bed and picks white. (Of course he picks white). His hair’s damp, his eyes blackened at the edges all the same. He’s dropped the doctor’s coat in favour of a loose white sweater. It’s frayed at the cuffs, the tears fixed with small, neat stitches. His hands are deft as he lines up the pieces. Niragi swallows; has a short, infuriating flashback of dreaming fingers in his mouth. He digs his teeth into the side of cheek. Chishiya’s eyes look up to meet his. He quirks an eyebrow. Niragi forces a sneer onto his face, to mask whatever Chishiya’s seeing there. (He’ll have plenty of time to wonder about that, later). Chishiya moves a pawn.
‘How are you so casual about this,’ Niragi says. Moves one of his own pawns. There’s the flicker of a smile at the edge of Chishiya’s mouth.
‘This?’ he asks, and moves another piece without taking the time to think.
‘Kidnapping,’ Niragi says, ‘Attempted murder. Bear traps. And now you wanna play fucking chess.’
‘I can get a deck of cards if you prefer.’
‘Not the point.’
Chishiya smiles his thin smile again. ‘I’ve done you a favour, you know.’
‘You won’t even tell me if I’ll be able to walk again.’
Chishiya shrugs. ‘I’m a paediatric cardiac surgeon. I can’t say much about legs.’
‘Paediatrics.’ Niragi stares at him. ‘You worked with kids.’
‘They’re easier than adults.’
‘The fuck they are.’
‘They’re generally just glad to be taken seriously.’ Chishiya moves another piece. Raises an eyebrow. ‘Simple. Adults want more coddling.’
Niragi snarls. ‘Fuck you.’
‘Adults demand I tell them exact time frames,’ Chishiya deadpans, stares him down, ‘Asking for percentages, and chances, and failing to understand that even a 99% recovery rate isn’t a guarantee they won’t be in the remaining 1%. Asking when, exactly, they’ll walk again.’
Niragi lunges, or tries to, but the cuffs snap tight and he falls back against his pillow. Chishiya sits back, eyes tinged with amusement.
‘You coulda killed me,’ Niragi bites.
‘The Sick would have killed you,’ Chishiya says, ‘If you got it next year, or the year after.’
The pigeons coo outside. Chishiya moves another piece, his damp hair sticking to his face, his sweater perfectly white like he’s been bothering to bleach it. He’s grey in the evening light, and it suits him. The Sick would have killed you. Niragi would have thrown up his own guts in some shack or other and there wouldn’t have been anyone watching.
Niragi moves his bishop.
Q: Stockholm Syndrome isn’t real, is it?
A: Niragi can’t recall. Days pass. He’s not dead and Chishiya keeps reappearing with the chess board, and though his mouth tightens whenever Niragi wins he doesn’t disappear over it again. He gives Niragi some less-bad books. Hell, Chishiya sits by his bed to read his own book, a water-stained hardcover on viral evolution, a frown appearing in his forehead whenever he focuses.
The sun sinks below the window, and the light grows colder. Chishiya doesn’t look up from his book.
‘When you leave here,’ Chishiya says, ‘Where will you go?’
Niragi dog-ears his paperback. ‘South for the winter.’
‘You’ll be late,’ Chishiya says. Outside the wind howls around the building. ‘Especially with that leg.’
‘And who’s fuckin’ fault is that, huh?’
Chishiya shrugs. ‘Would you have helped me if I’d asked politely?’
Niragi scoffs. ‘Might’ve shot your head off.’
‘Exactly,’ Chishiya says. Finally looks up from his book. ‘You don’t have somewhere to go back to?’
‘It’s the end of the world, doc,’ Niragi says. ‘No one’s got anywhere to go back to.’
That’s not true, and Chishiya knows it too. He stares, his eyes dark and blank and fucking infuriating. Out there there’s settlements and families and cults, if you’re that desperate. There’s Feruno and his band of college friends, raiding one big rich-people house after another. Niragi stuck it out with them for most of a summer until one night they got too drunk and in the morning someone’s arm had a knife in it. There’s the community near Nakatsugawa, where all the survivors have moved into a single high-rise, imposing a full month of quarantine on anyone who wants in. There’s the Beach cult out by Tokyo bay, which was fun while the drugs lasted, right up until someone shot the batshit leader and it got too cold for bikinis, anyway.
There’s people who have places to go. Niragi’s just not one of them. He’s no good at integrating himself into groups. Not long-term. Not when he’s without a gun and the ammo to use it.
‘Was this shack down by Tottori, couple winters back,’ Niragi says. He’s not sure why he’s talking but the wind’s howling and Chishiya’s looking at him with those strange black eyes. ‘Off the local prefectural road. Place was plywood and sheet metal, overgrown, the whole fucking deal. Looked like it’d been empty since people started puking up their guts.’
‘It’s not your intestines, actually.’
‘I don’t fucking care,’ Niragi says. ‘So I go in, ‘cause it looks like no one’s touched it yet—and it’s fucking freezing, yeah, it’s snowing and I’m turning fucking blue, or I would’ve smelled them.’
Chishiya cocks his head. Opens his mouth but Niragi’s quicker.
‘There’s this—corpse. Just laying on the futon like it’s asleep or some shit, only it’s fucking mummified. All skin and bone. Been dead for years. So fine. There’s dead people all over the street, up in Kanazawa some fucker’s using bones to build himself a palace. I don’t care. But—’
Niragi falters. Chishiya raises his eyebrows and Niragi grits his teeth, ‘cause it’s weirder to bow out now.
‘There’s a stack of empty cans next to the futon,’ Niragi says. ‘And the table’s set right next to the dead guy, for two, nice bowls and all. The food’s all rotten. Glad it was winter or the flies woulda been everywhere. And this other corpse’s slumped over in the middle of it. Frozen solid. Eyes wide open. It’s the end of the fucking world and this guy’s still cooking for a goddamn corpse.’
Chishiya shrugs. ‘Most people are irrational to a fault.’
‘Yeah, well,’ Niragi says, ‘If that’s what it is to have something to go back to, you’d be fucking mad to want it.’
Q: When’s the last time Niragi’s been honest with anyone?
A: His name was Oomura, and he was spending his apocalypse living in a beached fisher’s boat near Tottori. It was easier to pretend the rest of the world was fine, Oomura explained, if he stayed out of the cities. He was shorter than Niragi, only ever wore cut-off jeans and loose shirts, was all tan from the sun with a perpetual three-day beard. At night he’d point at shooting stars and proclaim that they were satellites, which meant that somewhere, someone was fine. During the evenings he’d light fires on the beach, big wild bonfires, hoping to be rescued. No global aid ships ever came.
Niragi showed up, though.
That summer, Niragi easily went weeks without speaking to anyone. All the same it came dead simple, living in Oomura’s delusion for a while. He had a mean streak he reserved mostly for fish and small game, but sometimes Niragi craved a fistfight. The kind where the actual menace was directed at yourself, where the goal were the just-to-feel-something bruises. Which was where the honesty came in. Oomura wasn’t stupid. Got what it meant when Niragi showed up with some alcohol stolen from a dead man’s house and low-effort insults.
One day, of course, it went too far.
The scar’s just one of many littering Niragi’s torso. Chishiya’s seen them before—there’s precious little privacy in Niragi’s current situation—but this is the first time Chishiya’s staring at them quite as intently as this morning. He’s sat on the stool by Niragi’s bed as Niragi washes his chest, best he can. The water’s almost warm. The soap smells frustratingly medical. Chishiya’s black eyes are focused on a ragged burn on Niragi’s ribcage.
‘Ask,’ Niragi bites, eventually.
‘Why are there so many of them?’ Chishiya says. He’s in that white sweater again. The thing swallows him whole. Makes him look less dangerous than he is. Niragi idly wonders if he’s skinny. If he’s stronger than he looks.
Niragi shrugs. ‘Got in a lot of fights.’
‘What kind of fight results in burns?’
The kind where you fight too close to one of Oomura’s bonfires. Niragi drops the sponge back into the bowl of water, grabs the towel. He doesn’t say anything. It’s none of Chishiya’s business, honestly, but then they’re long past that.
‘I don’t understand how you’re still alive,’ Chishiya says. He leans forward. He stares at Niragi from behind his hair. It’s loose and soft and he’s finally touched up his roots. Niragi would like to lock his fingers in that hair. Pull it back until it hurt. As revenge, of course, Niragi makes sure to think next. There’s a lot of ways to kill a man. A lot of them involve conveniently angled throats.
Niragi shrugs. ‘I fuckin’ win the fights, doc.’
‘Sure.’ Chishiya’s eyes flick up at him. ‘How many people have you killed?’
‘I don’t keep count.’ It’s six, or eight, depending on whether he counts self-defence.
Chishiya’s mouth curves. ‘Liar.’
‘Let me go,’ Niragi says, ‘And we can make it one extra.’
The bastard smiles thinly. ‘I’m taking out your stitches today.’
Oh. Fuck. In the back of Niragi’s brain there’s a fever dream of a memory—Chishiya hunching over his leg, slowly dragging thread through his skin. Nausea rises at the back of Niragi’s throat.
‘Why,’ Niragi says.
‘They need to come out,’ Chishiya says, ‘If you want to walk out of here.’
Niragi doesn’t at all believe that’s actually going to happen. But he’s still cuffed to the bed, so either way it doesn’t really matter what he thinks. Chishiya pulls the stool closer to the bed. He ties his hair back, his fingers quick and practised, the line of his neck disappearing towards that scar at his collarbone.
He’s pretty, Niragi’s fever whispered way back when. The thought’s sharp like electric shock. Yeah, maybe he’d have gone for it if it’d been ten years ago and they’d met in some Saturday night haze. Maybe if the world hadn’t broken apart it’d have been fun, finding out how deep Chishiya’s façade goes. Prying out of him what the fuck happened to break him quite like this.
Except the world did end, and Chishiya’s lining his tools up besides Niragi’s bed, and anyway Niragi’s tied up because the fucker’s insane.
Not that that always stopped him. Before.
‘Why do you bother with the bleach,’ Niragi hears himself say. ‘Everyone’s fucking dead, you know.’
‘I’m not.’ Chishiya starts winding back Niragi’s bandages. ‘Why do you still bother with the piercings?’
‘Not the same,’ he says. Piercings aren’t an ongoing project. His voice twitches ‘cause Chishiya’s wound down the last of the bandage, and his bad leg looks, well—bad. It’s not a gash, singular; it’s multiple, each steel tooth leaving its own ragged, red imprint in Niragi’s leg. The bite dips lower than the skin around it, red and agitated and full of thin black thread.
Chishiya prods at a mostly-healed gash and hums. ‘You’ll walk.’
‘Fuck you,’ Niragi says.
Chishiya’s eyes flick up. They’re dark and he’s quiet for a beat too long.
‘No,’ he says.
‘Wasn’t fuckin’ offering, weirdo,’ Niragi says, then flinches as Chishiya yanks out the first of the stitches. The pain’s sharp as it juts through him.‘Motherfucker—’
Chishiya smirks. Niragi claws at the bedsheets and tries not to jolt with every stitch that’s forced out of his flesh. The pain sweats through his skin. Every thread is a sharp burst of thin white agony. If not for the cuffs, he’d have kicked Chishiya in the face on pure instinct. The fucker’s insane. Truly, clinically, batshit. Who lines his hideout with bear traps? Who then bothers fixing up the guys he traps in them?
Another piece of thread burns out of his skin. Niragi hisses. Tries to keep still. There’s a crease in Chishiya’s forehead and a strand of his badly bleached hair has come loose. Time shudders to a crawl. Chishiya hunches further over his leg, to get at the other side, and the whole thing starts over again.
By the end Niragi’s chewed a hole into the inside of his cheek.
‘You did well,’ Chishiya says, ridiculously, as he rolls the stool back and tugs his hair loose.
‘I hate you,’ Niragi croaks. His leg still stings with the remnants of the pain. His calf trembles. ‘Next time cook up some fucking pain pills.’
‘Pain doesn’t kill you.’ Chishiya stands. He pulls a piece of cloth out of a pocket, wets it with one of his water bottles. ‘It isn’t a priority.’
‘Cunt,’ Niragi hisses. ‘Go step in a bear trap.’
Chishiya smiles thinly. He steps up closer, hovers. Rain ticks at the windows. Chishiya—absurdly, impossibly—wipes the pain sweat off Niragi’s forehead. The cloth’s soft. Chishiya stands there, hair loose in his face, eyes a little less blank than usual. Niragi forgets to breathe. His leg’s awash with pain and his forehead’s cold and Chishiya pulls his hand back. He looks almost melancholic. Almost sad.
What the fuck, the back of Niragi’s brain whispers. His throat’s dry.
‘I was planning on killing you,’ Chishiya says. He says it dead casual, leaning his head slightly to one side, hands in the pockets of his loose trousers.
Niragi’s head swims. ‘I’ll fucking haunt you.’
Chishiya hums. ‘I’m sure you’d try.’
He peels the gloves off his fingers. His eyes are baggy like he’s not slept and he’s regarding Niragi with a mild downturn of his mouth. Chishiya shakes his head. Doesn’t touch Niragi again, and he’d be fucking mad to want it, but his skin thrums and he’s fucking empty and once upon a time he dreamed fingers in his mouth.
The pigeons coo. Rain batters at the window. Chishiya’s face smooths back into its familiar blank.
‘I was the only survivor,’ Chishiya says, ‘At that conference. I had a hotel room on the top floor and from the balcony I could see the rest of them, dying in the parking lot. Some made it to their cars. Some lasted a few hours. Two or three survived a day like that.’
‘I don’t care.’
‘I didn’t, either,’ Chishiya says. ‘But it’s sort of funny. They’re all down there trying to get back to whatever families they left behind. Some of them might’ve lived if they hadn’t gone and laid down in the street. They cared too much. That’s what killed them.’
‘If you’re going to shoot me,’ Niragi says, ‘Do it.’
Chishiya smiles. It’s a shallow, barely perceptible smile, twitching at the corners of his mouth. It almost reaches his eyes.
‘You’ve had a long day,’ Chishiya says, ‘You’ll be thirsty.’
Chishiya’s saying all the wrong things. Niragi pulls on his restraints but they don’t move, of course they don’t, and his bad leg’s still itching with old pain. And sure, he’s thirsty, and Chishiya’s wry smile still reads feeding tube.
Chishiya grabs a water bottle from the floor. He stands there, cradling the plastic in his hands, and takes another long look at Niragi.
‘Why do you keep staring?’ Chishiya says. He gestures at the white line at his collarbone. ‘It’s just a scar.’
Niragi sneers. ‘Cause I’m tied the fuck up, doc.’
Chishiya passes him the bottle. Raises his eyebrows. What?
‘It means you ain’t perfect.’ Niragi bares his teeth. He unscrews the cap. ‘Someone got close enough to hurt ya once before.’
Chishiya smiles his thin smile. ‘And you think you’ll be next?’
Niragi takes a long drink from the bottle. ‘I—’
The water tastes off.
It’s grimier than usual. Like maybe there’s something dead in it. Niragi crumples the bottle between his fingers. Freezes. The shock trails through his system.
‘Don’t throw up,’ Chishiya says.
‘The fuck is it this time,’ Niragi manages. The grime’s coated his tongue and a very small, very young part of him wants to curl up and die.
‘I did tell you you weren’t done yet,’ Chishiya says.
‘That’s not an answer.’
‘You should be fine,’ Chishiya says. He looks Niragi up and down. ‘It’s just to check the vaccine worked.’
Niragi screams. It’s the only thing he can do, scream and toss the bottle in Chishiya’s direction, but the chains on his cuffs are too short for the bottle to make it very far. It crashes onto the floor, useless, and Chishiya’s already out the door. Course he is. Niragi’s gut crawls. Maybe that’s just placebo. Maybe he’ll be dead in three week’s time.
He’s not got the energy to hope for either.
Q: How long is three weeks? Truly?
A: The hospital’s build on a soft spot in the universe. A fault line, a ley line, fucking something because time becomes viscous and sometimes shudders to a halt completely. The sun drags its muddy course over Niragi’s walls and twice a day Chishiya appears, wrapped in a yellow plastic suit and a full face mask that’s got to be expired. He stays as far away from Niragi as he physically can, delivering porridge and oatmeal and wrinkly apples dug up from God knows where. There’s more books. There’s a wooden puzzle game, a cluster of rings you’re supposed to untangle, only Niragi’s too fucking wired to actually do it and the whole thing feels far too much like a metaphor. He throws the thing at Chishiya’s head the second evening. Chishiya’s face tightens somewhere below his air-tight plastic.
There’s honey in the porridge and it makes Niragi want to fucking heave. (He’s not tasted honey in years).
The nights are worst. They’re moonless, so there’s no way to tell the time, and they crawl by at an entirely random pace. He doesn’t want to sleep. Doesn’t want to dream. He stares at the ceiling and counts the cracks. Outside the wind howls; the cold’s settling in in earnest. Niragi’s breath is thin white fog that dissipates into the dark. He can’t tell when, in the end, he does fall asleep.
He can’t tell his dreams apart from that dark. There’s Chishiya, in all white, hovering in the doorframe. His hair’s long and loose and his fingers are tinged red with blood. Niragi can’t recall if it’s his; soon it doesn’t matter. All there is is Chishiya, gliding into the room, trailing his bloody fingers up Niragi’s chest. He smiles too wide. His teeth are sharp and white and real-world perfect. His fingers trace the dip between Niragi’s collar bones, up the curve of his throat, the sharp line of his jaw. Blood trails on his skin. Niragi shivers, and opens his mouth.
When he wakes the room’s empty, and the weak morning sun paints the room a pale blue. Niragi’s skin’s all goosebumps. Chishiya’s not spoken to him in days.
Three weeks.
Three weeks on average.
Niragi bats the thought back until day six, when right as he wakes up he accidentally, drowsily realises that Chishiya will wait until after the incubation time. Which means maybe he’s in for a month, a full on fucking month, and by then it’ll be snowing. He doesn’t cry. He screams. He names all the spiders on his ceiling and comes up with a couple hundred more ways to kill a man and thinks of rabbits who gnaw off their own legs when caught in metal wire snares. (He’d bleed out if he chewed off every single one of his limbs. Maybe that’s worth it).
Every thin grey morning there’s a spoon in his porridge. Chishiya leans against the closest bed and watches him eat. The spoon’s still the bluntest bit of cutlery in all of East Asia, though it’s metal and tastes of foul blood in the back of Niragi’s mouth.
Somehow the filtered mask is worse than Chishiya’s dead black eyes. If he’d just slip up—just once—maybe Niragi could’ve done something. Stolen something. Learned how to pick the locks on his cuffs with scraps of metal. Bitten through Chishiya’s skin, right down to the fucking bone.
The morning ritual never lasts long. Chishiya leaves, fast as he can, and doesn’t come back until the world’s gearing up for twelve hours of darkness.
Soon—and Niragi hates himself for it—he misses the goddamn chess.
The hours stretch and contort like bubblegum, only the taste’s gone out of it. The spoon takes on mythical proportions in his mind. If he could only hold onto it—if he could steal it, somehow, and sharpen it, and get Chishiya close, and jam it into his flesh, and—Niragi stares at his ceiling until his eyeballs crawl with anxiety. Time loses all meaning. He counts his heartbeat and runs through the plots of old games, only he can’t ever remember them properly, can’t get through the twists and the multiple endings. Somehow he loses them every time.
The pigeons coo outside the window. His leg throbs with ghost pain just to give him something to think about. He’s going to gut Chishiya and string him up by his intestines the second he’s out. He sleeps and dreams grinning pigs and metal spoons and the heavy weight of a body on top of him, and when he wakes there’s porridge.
Q: Is a life in the apocalypse worth surviving all of this?
A: So the world’s never going back to normal.
Seven-or-eight years ago, the streets were piled too high with corpses. The Sick was one thing—after that first wave came starvation, other illnesses, violence and suicide. Most everyone died. The Sick’s still going round in waves. There’s no planes in the sky and no ships sailing towards Japan’s shores, no matter how much Oomura prays for them. If humanity lives, they’ll be plunged right back into the dark ages. Niragi’s never touching a computer program again. He spends his days digging for canned food and cigarettes and snaring small game. Everyone he knew before is dead.
It’s not much of a life.
Only—in an odd, hear-me-out sort of way—the end of the world is the best life Niragi’s ever had. He’s got no deadlines. No carpal tunnel. He doesn’t feel the need to get fuck-off drunk as often. When he’s done someplace—when someplace is done with him—he simply leaves. He’s got blood on his hands but there’s no cops to chase him down for it. He’s not gonna grow old but then he never expected to, anyway. Besides, there’s another plus.
Everyone he knew before is dead.
Somehow, one morning it’s day twenty six since the stitches. He’s tried not to count them but at least the sun’s daily disappearing act is something to hold on to, to dig his teeth into, to bite through properly. He’s eaten half his bowl of porridge. The bowl’s made of cheap ceramic and if he’d break it on the side of the bed he’d have shards, he’d have weapons, only Chishiya’s eight feet away. Leaning against the other bed in his space suit. Watching. The morning sun’s golden for a change, spilling syrupy over the garish yellow of Chishiya’s plastic outfit.
‘Y’know,’ Niragi says, just to feel his tongue move in his mouth, ‘That colour doesn’t suit ya.’
Chishiya cocks his head behind his full-face mask. He doesn’t say anything because he never says anything, anymore, just scribbles notes in his fucking diary like Niragi’s some kind of lab rat.
He is some kind of lab rat.
The honey’s sickly sweet. The porridge is slightly burned around the edges today and Niragi savours it ‘cause it’s a change in rhythm, and any fucking change in rhythm is a way to cling to his sanity. Or what’s left of it.
‘It won’t work, y’know,’ Niragi says, ‘That goddamn space suit.’
Chishiya says nothing. The pigeons coo.
‘If I’ve got it,’ Niragi says, ‘If in a couple days I’m gonna be throwing up my fucking guts, then you’ve got it too. That shit’s so fucking infectious it crawls through goddamn concrete if it’s got to. You seen those corpses in the parking lot?’
They’re old. Originals. Died after they stopped bothering to remove dead bodies. Their flesh is gone but the bones remain, scattered more every year. Some wear jeans and leather jackets. Some wear polyester skirts and office heels.
Some wear yellow plastic.
‘Just give me my gun back, man,’ Niragi says. Burned porridge sloshes through his stomach. ‘It’ll be quicker on the both of us.’
Chishiya twitches. It’s faint and quick but Niragi sees it all the same. The light sharpens. Intensifies as it glares on the suit and his mask and everything else walled up between them.
For a moment Niragi honestly, genuinely thinks Chishiya’s going to say something.
There’s a clatter and then screaming in the distance. It echoes through the hospital’s hallways, twisting and turning until it bounces onto Niragi’s eardrums, and Chishiya’s entire body full-on snaps towards the sound. He doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t take a last, lingering look at Niragi. He just ups and leaves, fast like he’s actually worried someone’s coming in, fast like he actually wants Niragi’s stare off of him.
Niragi drops his spoon into his porridge. Another scream cuts through the quiet. This means two things.
First, Chishiya is physically capable of such un-Chishiya emotions as “concern”.
Second, Niragi’s been left alone with that goddamn spoon.
It’s blunt. It’s pathetic. It is, after all, a spoon. But it’s also made of metal, shiny and not at all dinged up. There’s globs of burned porridge still stuck to it and the thing’s not a weapon in even the broadest sense of the word.
The side of his hospital bed is metal, too.
Chishiya’s made a mistake.
Niragi doesn’t finish the porridge. There’s more screaming in the distance—sharp, blood-curdling, none of it Chishiya’s—and Niragi takes the ceramic bowl and tosses it, hard as he can, onto the floor. The shards jump through the morning light and the last of his breakfast lies there. Staring at him. Honey and burned edges.
Niragi scrapes the back of the spoon against the bed frame. Eventually it’ll sharpen. It’ll take ages and that’s fucking fine ‘cause all he’s still got is time. Metal screeches on metal. For the first time in weeks Niragi’s sneer cuts through his face. He licks his teeth. Pictures the spoon embedded into Chishiya’s flesh.
Q: What, exactly, does Chishiya do with intruders he doesn’t need?
A: He doesn’t say. He doesn’t need to, because the next time he pads by Niragi’s open door he’s out of his plastic suit. Dried blood clings to the bottoms of his sweats, the curve of his jaw. It’s evening by then and he’s a ghost in the twilight. Chishiya eyes the porridge on the floor, the shattered bowl. He rubs at the bloodstains on his face with the back of one sweater-clad hand.
His eyes flick up to meet Niragi’s.
‘Did you miss me that much?’ Chishiya says. Juts his chin towards the porridge.
Niragi lies there. His stomach’s empty and he’s been rubbing a spoon against a bed frame all day and his wrist’s sore from the odd angle. Chishiya’s hair frames his face like he’s trying to hide behind it and no, Niragi didn’t miss Chishiya, only yes maybe he did, and that’s all kinds of fucked up and he’s not going to admit to a bit of it.
‘Why do you bother,’ Niragi says, instead. He’s got the spoon curled up in his right hand, snug against his wrist. ‘Making a vaccine.’
Chishiya raises his eyebrows. ‘Why?’
‘You don’t give a shit about anyone else,’ Niragi says. They’ve got that in common in an uncomfortable, undeniable way. ‘Why save them?’
‘You’re not under the impression I’ll be doling out vaccines to everyone who comes knocking on my door?’
‘Then what are you gonna do, doc,’ Niragi says. His voice rasps with weeks of disuse. The evening light isn’t golden. Clouds have no doubt rolled in and his vision’s gone to monochrome. ‘You gonna do shots of dead rat juice until you’re the only man left alive?’
There’s that Chishiya-patented twitch again. It rolls across his features like he’d rather pretend it never existed at all, and within barely a second he’s back to sly and blank and feline.
‘I’m not going to be killed by a slip of DNA that isn’t even properly alive,’ Chishiya says. That’s reason enough, his steady gaze says. The twitch said otherwise. (The fucking Sick. A slip of DNA).
Niragi laughs. It’s sharp and sour and he doesn’t really mean it.
‘You ain’t properly alive, neither,’ he bites.
Chishiya’s smirk curls high. ‘Are you, Niragi?’
He forces himself to sneer. It’s a reflex, survival instinct, only it works better when he’s tall and looming and armed. His breath’s coming out in wisps of smoke and the spoon’s dull edge presses into the soft skin of his wrist. Niragi’s survived the end of the world.
Isn’t that enough?
No, Niragi knows deep down. It really fucking isn’t.
Chishiya chuckles. Thought so. He paces into the room. His footsteps are tinged red with blood and Niragi’s nerves buzz with static electricity and his fucked-up leg throbs with remembered pain. Chishiya’s skin is patterned with lacy blood splatter. It’s black in the moonlight and it suits him and Niragi’s held out longer with him than with any group of people he’s found out there.
Chishiya grabs Niragi’s right hand. Peels the fingers loose. Chishiya’s skin is warmer than makes sense in the grey-silver twilight, the threat of winter sharp in the autumn air.
‘You’re right about the suit, of course,’ Chishiya says, when his hand finds Niragi’s spoon. ‘I needed time to think.’
‘Fuck off,’ Niragi groans. He tugs on his restraints but it’s more of a ritual, at this point, and he doesn’t actually expect them to budge. (They don’t.) ‘All you fuckin’ do is think—’
He’s got just enough reach to wrap his fingers around Chishiya’s thin wrist. He digs his nails in as deep as they will go. The bones are so fucking fragile underneath Chishiya’s skin. Chishiya simply plucks Niragi’s spoon away with his other hand. Just like that it’s gone, the half-sharpened edge and the faintest bit of hope he’s had in months. (Hope of what? Escaping into another end-of-the-world winter with a bad leg and no weapon?)
‘You’re the double check,’ Chishiya says. His voice doesn’t waver. ‘The last one lived, too.’
Niragi’s nostrils flare. ‘What—’
‘He’s dead, of course.’ The blood’s black on Chishiya’s jaw. ‘I can’t have word get out. I’d get overrun.’
‘What did you need time to think about, you sociopath—’
‘You don’t care about any of them either,’ Chishiya says, ‘Do you?’
Niragi’s heartbeat is thick in his chest. Chishiya’s wrist is warm in the palm of his hand and his eyes are black and narrow and so goddamn insincere. Niragi wants nothing except to see the light sink out of those eyes. Wants to hurt him until he remembers Niragi’s more than a body in a fucking bed. Wants, so fucking desperately, not to feel that goddamn sick, overwhelming relief because Chishiya’s talking to him again.
He yanks on the wrist he’s holding, and Chishiya stumbles.
Q: What the fuck is wrong with them?
A: Anything and everything. The moonlight’s a silver-white blur and Chishiya doesn’t make a noise as he catches himself with one hand on Niragi’s chest. The spoon’s a shimmer as it falls onto the sheets and Chishiya smells of blood and sweat and antiseptic. They’ve never been this close but Niragi can’t do shit with it because of the goddamn cuffs. Except—
He surges up. The cuffs snap tight and his teeth sink into Chishiya’s jaw, hard. His skin’s stubble and soap and the faint metallic tinge of blood. Chishiya’s breath catches and Niragi’s teeth snap tight and Chishiya’s not even got the fucking decency to groan. Adrenaline bleeds into his system. Chishiya’s hand disappears off his chest.
There’s a sharp, sudden burst of agony in Niragi’s forearm. He gasps and Chishiya’s gone, out of reach of his teeth but still hovering right there. A grin ghosts around Chishiya’s mouth. Niragi’s half-sharpened spoon is embedded into his own arm. Niragi’s teeth are patterned starkly into Chishiya’s jaw. His arm beads black.
‘I could live with being the last man alive,’ Chishiya says. He cradles the side of Niragi’s face. It’s more vice grip than caress and Niragi’s jaw snaps shut. ‘I’m simply not going to die unnecessarily.’
Niragi can’t do anything but push up. Glare. It’s useless. His arm throbs. Chishiya’s still hovering right above him. He’s warm. Heavy. They’ve not touched beyond the absolute bare minimum and some animal part of Niragi is so glad for the skin on his that he’s nauseous.
His stomach’s more concrete than organ. Chishiya—absurdly, impossibly—leans in. His fingers dig into Niragi’s jawline. Niragi’s blood runs hot and cold and hot again. The goddamn pigeons screech.
Chishiya presses his mouth against Niragi’s. His nerves string tight. His blood’s too warm. None of this makes sense. He could drop back down. Could try and break Chishiya’s wrist. Except he doesn’t want to. Except Chishiya’s the closest thing to understanding Niragi’s ever gotten.
Neither of them breathe. Chishiya’s lips are chapped and scratchy and they don’t move. But they’re warm. Alive. Human. Chishiya’s holding onto Niragi’s jaw like he can’t let go. Niragi stops thinking.
It’s perverse in how chaste it is. Wrong in how naturally it comes. Cruel in the way that half-second scars him. Niragi should snarl. Bite. Fight, only Chishiya’s hand on his jaw keeps him from snapping. From faking, from transforming this into something violent that would, at least on the surface, make sense.
Niragi waits for Chishiya’s teeth to dig into his lip. The pain. The blood, and the laughter.
None of it comes.
Chishiya pulls back, and Niragi’s so stunned he lets go of the man’s wrist.
‘What the fuck,’ Niragi manages.
‘You’ll need a new dose within the next three years,’ Chishiya says. The smirk’s gone from his face and his eyes aren’t as dead. Scared, almost. Like he doesn’t know what the fuck he’s doing, either. ‘That’s when immunity begins to wane, best as I can tell.’
‘You’re not actually letting me live,’ Niragi says. His arm throbs. His leg’s still a mess of scar tissue and heartbeat-pain. His mouth, very vaguely, tastes of antiseptic.
Chishiya swallows. He says nothing. He stands, and takes one last black-eyed look at Niragi, and stalks out of the room.
Niragi’s too stunned to even scream.
Q: How long’s it been since the world ended?
A: It never ended. The world’s just fucking fine. It’s been eight-or-nine-years since the pigeons grew fat on the corpses on Tokyo’s streets. There’s still no planes in the sky and far too often the horizon’s black with pyre smoke, but all the same summer’s crashing into autumn like it’s always done. Young trees burst through old concrete, old asphalt, their leaves heavy with every shade of firelight. It’s been three months since Niragi fully ditched the crutches and three weeks since he managed to get his hands on a gun again.
(It’s been ten months since Niragi woke up with a key within hand’s reach. There’d been a backpack with a few weeks worth of food, a set of crutches, and no weapon. The note had simply said Leave. He’d been planning on killing Chishiya all the same, except he’d gotten out of bed and stumbled right through his bad leg. His knees collided with the floor and he’d punched the sickly green linoleum before he got the message. He could barely walk. There wouldn’t be any fighting. He grit his teeth. Struggled his way out of the hospital. Limped past the corpses in the parking lot. Looked back once, over his shoulder, and found no one watching from the hospital’s grey windows.)
The gun’s a rifle, this time. It’s long and sleek and useless at short range, but that’s fine. Niragi really only needs it for one thing. He’s got knives for hand-to-hand situations. Snares for rabbits. Bigger traps for bigger game. He spends his evenings by the fire, oiling the gun, learning its mechanisms by heart. It takes him three days, and most of the bullets he could get his hands on, to be confident in the shot.
(It’ll still be a gamble. That’s fine. Chishiya gambled with Niragi’s life plenty.)
You’ll need a dose within the next three years.
Niragi’s still got no clue what Chishiya’s hoping will happen. Is he waiting for Niragi to stumble back into the ER, to avoid the bear traps, to take his place in a hospital bed like he wanted to be there to begin with? Will he be waiting for Niragi with a game of chess and a plastic bottle of water and a feeding tube? Is he planning on sitting out the end of humanity together?
Does he really think Niragi won’t want revenge?
Niragi’s flat on his stomach on the roof of a building opposite the hospital. He’s been here for days. Keeping watch. Keeping score. The sky’s been blue and it hasn’t rained, though the chill of autumn is already crisp on the wind. He’s seen movement behind the hospital’s windows, but that’s not enough. He needs Chishiya to step through those doors. Needs to see him go down onto that pavement.
Niragi’s stopped dreaming.
So he tells himself, at least, but when he wakes up half-strangled in his own blankets there’s a rotten melancholy burrowed into his marrow. It’s wrapped in loathing, hatred, wrath. It’s a sick nostalgia. Twisted grief. He’d lost something, limping out of that hospital, and he feels it until he wakes up properly. Until he moves and finds he can, in fact, use his limbs. Until he shakes the ghosts of fingerprints off his skin and sets to work.
The sun’s dipping towards the horizon. The low light glints on the rows and rows of hospital windows. Which one had been his? He’d never seen out of it, had only ever heard the pigeons nesting on the ledge outside. There’s a flock of them in the parking lot. There’s fewer of them than there were before.
Of course there’s less corpses to pick clean. He supposes that means they’re eating each other, now. He chews on the inside of his cheek.
Chishiya had kissed him.
He can make sense of bear traps. Of home-brew antibiotics and sick joy and chess. Of stitches and scars and sex dreams, if he’s got to. What bothers Niragi is that Chishiya hadn’t snapped his teeth down, hadn’t drawn blood; hadn’t ran his nails down his skin or forced his mouth open or done anything that made sense.
Violence he understands. Anything else worms its way underneath Niragi’s skin and threatens to flay him from the inside out.
Niragi tenses. The hospital door opens; it’s child’s play to catch the figure that emerges in his cross hairs. His hair’s still silver and overgrown, his clothes still white and bleached clean like there’s anyone left alive who cares. Chishiya stands in the doorframe, scans the parking lot. He sets the garbage bag he’s carrying down on the pavement.
Maybe he feels something’s up. Maybe he’s spend so long around Niragi that they recognise each other’s auras. Niragi’s finger is tight on the trigger. Chishiya’s skull is fragile in his cross hairs. It’s a single movement. Bang. He’d be dead, just like that. Every fucked-up thought he’s ever had would be nothing but splatter on the pavement.
I was planning on killing you, Chishiya whispers, in the back of his brain.
Niragi grits his teeth. Chishiya looks up; straight into the scope. He simply cannot see Niragi from this distance and still it’s like the fucker’s staring straight through him. His black eyes are the same, still, blank and indifferent. They pin Niragi to his rooftop like a butterfly pinned to a collector’s display. In the distance, there’s three columns of choking funeral pyre smoke blackening the horizon. Chishiya could, very easily, have prevented that.
He certainly fucking deserves the bullet.
You don’t care about any of them either, Chishiya whispers, do you?
Has he ever? Why would he? Even back when an absurd eight billion people walked the planet, none of them had so much as extended Niragi a hand. They’d bruised him, cut him, burned him. They’d seen the damage and said nothing. Even when he was small—even when the bad in him wasn’t showing yet, even before the rot seeped all the way through—even then they’d made damn clear that anything done to him was his own fucking fault.
Niragi bares his teeth. His finger’s steady on the trigger. He’ll hit his target, or maybe he won’t; Chishiya’s played with his life plenty. Chishiya’s still staring up into the scope. He’s got his hands in the pockets of his sweats. He’s almost smiling.
Did you miss me that much? Chishiya whispers in the back of Niragi’s brain.
His finger twitches on the trigger. The gunshot pours through his eardrums; turns to ringing in his skull. The pigeons flock up into the sky. They’re black against the bright firelight of the sunset.
Chishiya goes down.
When Niragi gets up his bad leg twitches underneath him. He leans on the rifle—useless, now—and licks his teeth. His nerves are red-hot with adrenaline. His heart beats heavy in his chest.
Somewhere in the distance Chishiya’s curled up on the pavement, clutching at the calf of his left leg. It’s easy to picture the pooling blood. The pain. The hot irons searing down into his marrow. Niragi’s so well aware what it’s like to try and work out if the bullet hit the bone.
The sun dips towards the horizon. The year spins towards its close. Humanity crawls towards its end.
Niragi climbs down the building’s overgrown fire escape. He left on a rather bad note, last time.
It’s time he and Chishiya had a proper chat.