Between moments when the sky wore red, when it took on that classic blue color, she felt like the world was lying to her. Sure, everything couldn’t be on fire all at the same time, and fires were less common on the east coast anyway, but the blue did not describe what the world had become. Of course the world would stop the charade eventually, and the red sky would herald the coming of more ash, which she almost looked forward to at this point, because it meant the new beetles would take shelter. An absurd instinct - didn’t they know this was their world? - but one that allowed her a moment to forage.
She found out early she could not eat the beetles. Even their fat little larvae, puzzled in thick mats that dipped into the cracks of houses and gaping wounds of the dead, were too bitter to keep down. Before the whole world went bad, she’d read that they’d been bred to be less appealing prey so as to not disrupt the local ecosystems. Given the things they’d been eating she suspected that was for the best, but it didn’t make the hunger go away, and it certainly didn’t feed the baby.
She found an open, moldy can of apricots two days before, if the days could be counted reliably, in the basement of a decaying house, and she’d peeled the mold off the best she could before mashing the fruit up and trying it with her son. She’d managed to force some down, but he coughed it back out. Almost an hour of this before she gave up and ate the apricots herself - sour, and she almost threw them up later. They’d taken shelter in that basement for a while until it became clear that the beetles were hard at work on the wooden supports, and that the shelter could not last.
Fucking beetles. They had almost become more of a mess than the one they’d been intended to clean up. Another night under the stars.
Yesterday, a rabbit. She took her time creeping up on the patch of fur until she got a good look and saw it could not possibly be alive under the blanket of maggots and beetle larvae that worked their way through its patchwork pelt and bones.
Still, something was off. Too much movement. She peeled back the carcass and found three baby bunnies, still alive, a dead fourth to the side. Larvae of all sorts crawled the tiny pit, trying to find an opening in the live bunnies anywhere they could. She picked up the babies and brought their soft struggling forms to a sidewalk that looked far too pristine for the apocalypse, aside from the weeds blooming from the spaces in-between the tiles. It didn’t take long to find a rock and put them out of their misery, swinging between half-hearted apologies to something in her head insisting even now she had done something wrong.
She tried to start a fire, but everything was just too damp. Of course, the rain never seemed to be quite enough to put out the wildfires, but she could not be allowed anything good. That was the one truth in the world and whatever processes of physics lingered in the deep end of human civilization would bend and twist furiously to keep it that way.
She skinned the rabbits - not that she was good at it - and ate the meager meat off their bones raw. Two of them she choked down herself. She mashed the meat from the third with a few gobs of spit and tried to put it in the baby’s mouth. He spit it out again. She forced it in, talking to him gently, trying to make him understand, holding his mouth shut and waiting for him to swallow. He started in with his thin little cry and not ten minutes later he had thrown the meat up in a bloody clump.
Not once did she think to cry out for someone. She knew where everyone was. She had no clue how she’d managed to outlast them. Probably it was just some trick of metabolism. Someone had to be the last.
—
For someone who had swallowed every possible tragedy, it took her far too long to admit to herself that the baby was dead, and even longer to leave him behind. She would not eat him. That was the one thing she would not do. Wouldn’t have been much good anyway, she thought. She didn’t let herself dwell on the horror of how she’d managed to arrive at the thought in the first place.
Where was she going? She couldn’t literally be the last one, right? Someone had to be there. Someone had to have figured this world out.
Water was easy enough to come by. She thought it might not even be polluted, though she saw no fish. She imagined biting into a fish and almost cried.
Blue sky, bright sky, the heat of the Sun. It should be winter right now.
A dead bird. Infested, of course. She ate it anyway. She had not heard a bird sing for months. Could it have been dead that long? She saw a living sparrow a week back, maybe a month, who could say, but it had not made a sound. It just looked at her, like it was daring her to try and catch it. A beetle larva in its beak. That was when she had tried to eat the bugs. Or had it been before that? Back when there were a few others? They’d done… something. Something for food. Something that wouldn’t work anymore. Her brain was foggy now.
She decided to die in a church. She didn’t know why. She wasn’t particularly religious. She’d been to Sunday school, but Sundays and schools were so far away now. As far away as the people who’d done this to the world, to her. They were safe in Hell now, if such a thing existed after all. She supposed she’d find out soon.
Rafters, chewed through. Stained glass smashed. Seats infested, benches full of holes, polyester threads pulled out and feeling the air like the whiskers of some massive animal while larvae hungered around underneath. She sat down, shivering in the heat and the hunger.
I wish I’d brought the baby. I wish I could’ve died holding the baby.
“Hello?”
It startled her so much it almost gave her the energy to get up. But not quite. She looked to her side and saw a man who she recognized as the Jesus of her childhood, the beardy white guy in pristine robes who’d been in all the reading materials the church provided. She knew it wasn’t him, and of course it wasn’t Jesus either.
“I’m glad you can see me,” he said. “I’m glad you’re here.” There was an earnestness and kindness behind his words that finally broke her down, and she started to cry, big ugly sobs which longed for a more complete church to echo in. They died in the open air instead.
“What did I do?” she asked the man.
“You did so good.” He was crying now, too, gentle streams of tears running down his face, but his expression did not change. He looked lost, more lost than her, and she had the absurd urge to comfort him.
“Are you okay?” she asked, and knew it was silly as she said it.
“No. But we’re here. We’re still here.”
“I guess so.”
“You’re still here.”
“Not for-” she coughed, almost fainted, hit her forehead on the back of the bench in front of her. It was too soft from infestation to knock her out, so she just leaned against it. “Not for long.”
“No.” His voice was suddenly stern. “For long. For forever. For at least until we can figure it out.”
“What is there to… to figure out?”
“I don’t know. We might need some help with that.”
They sat that way for a long time. Him crying, her leaning. Around and beneath and below them the beetles moved.
“Who are you?” She finally asked.
“Jesus Christ of Nazareth.”
She looked up at him, into his face. “No, who are you really?”
“Crybaby Holocene.” They stared at each other for a few minutes, the sky growing redder, the beetles starting to disperse. “Does that scare you?”
“It makes me mad.”
“Me too.”
“God,” she moaned. “I’m so fucking mad!”
“All of this,” he said, matching her tone, a fire igniting in him that hadn’t been there before. “All of this and for what?”
“I’m so fucking mad!” She screamed, hoarse, something breaking in her throat, and she slumped to the ground and died.
—
Fire swept along the trees on the bank of the river, covered in flakes of ash, and the beetles hid in the ground and deep within the rubble of the church. The flames would not consume the church, not today, but they came close, and that spelled opportunity. A vacant corpse the beetles would not attempt to settle for another few hours.
A fly landed on the body, tasting its sweat, knowing she had no time to waste. She laid eggs in the crevices and creases of the skin, seeking out the spots where the flesh was most tender. In doing so, she made herself vulnerable, but to lay eggs in this place was worth the risk-
Quickly, a pounce, a flash, and the fly was upside-down and aimlessly waving her legs around. A jumping spider held her down, burying sharp fangs into her soft exoskeleton and flooding her insides with venom. The fly had done what she was here to do, and now the spider would eat.
The spider crawled over a leg, an elbow, an eye, utterly incurious about the surface she stepped over. She knew the fire was coming for her, but not now. Now she could rest.
Whether it was a patch of hair or a clump of polyester threads from the ripped church cushions did not matter to anyone alive. She spun a shelter of silk under its frayed strands and went to sleep.