Archive of Our Own ^beta

Another day dawned slowly, the pale early light creeping over the edge of the horizon. It was hot, at first a heat like the daytime in the summer of a place with a much warmer climate, and then hot like the dry scourge of death valley. And then, hot like being left alone, open to the solar flares, a unique feeling of frying without apt metaphor, pinned to the surface of the earth as your skin peeled away, fat beneath oozing out and melting.

That was what it was like out there, all of the time, every day.

Hot.

Dying earth, expiring sun.

Hot.

As hot as predictions had estimated, and hotter still. And this was only the beginning; the very earliest stages of the sun’s expansion.

Every day was a little closer to being too hot for the structure of the house itself to withstand. Ten years, astronomers had predicted, before the radiation from the sun exceeded a level at which human-designed systems could maintain integrity. And then, no one said anything about what would happen after. No one wanted to say the words. Every night, the temperature rose another fraction of a degree, and there was never any acknowledgment of this on the news or in the papers.

He had heard of colonies of scientists, working together, building cooling systems meant to withstand more heat; the kind of technology that NASA scientists needed for space craft.

That was not for the average person, no. The average person was left to fend for themselves, should their shelter be adequate, and given reassurances that were as meaningless as they were falsely promising.

Slowly, Aleksandyr rose to standing, an action that always left him feeling drained, regardless of how long he had slept during the day. The sun had that capacity; past a certain temperature, it drained energy instead of imparting it.

Alek was walking, out of the house and down the once worn path which was now only loose dirt, piling like desert sand in places where it wasn’t impacted enough. Restlessly, it was swept about, even in the dead of night. He didn’t remember having opened the door, or even having the desire to leave. His body acted of its own accord, pushed perhaps by some kind of instinctive restlessness. It wasn’t cold, it never was, but he shivered nonetheless.

He had wandered down to the lake. The water was always lukewarm; tepid, even at midnight. Here, the neighborhood teenagers used to gather together and kill time, their voices ringing out across the distance to the plain outside of his home, a familiar sound from when he used to be able to sit on the front porch and drink beer in the mornings. Now, it was silent, and there was only the sound of his feet on drying and decaying remnants of grass; what little was left of the stuff surrounded the lake. There were still a few colonies of algae clumping on the surface of the lake, floating beneath what little remained of the underside of the bank, and surviving the day. The water held enough heat resistant bacteria to give an infection and fever that would last two days if it got into any of the body’s soft membranes. But Alek didn’t care.

Beneath the surface of the water, the world was quiet. But this wasn’t a lonely, empty sort of quietness. Nor was it the eerie quietness of nightfall, punctuated by the occasional insect sound or rare animal noise. This was the rush of blood in his ears, the sound of life force still coursing through his body, resisting. This was the water on all sides, hugging him, his lungs beginning to burn in his chest, reminding him that he was alive. Alek lowered himself down into the water, closing his eyes and exhaling roughly half the air in his lungs so he might push himself to the bottom and stay there for a moment.

On his way back, he avoided the strange, deep and empty holes that dotted the landscape every few hundred meters. No one knew where they came from, but more seemed to appear every night, the edges swept smooth by the persistent wind.  He looked up at the sky, hoping for some sign of cloud cover by the rising sun. There was none; only the heat that was already beginning to make rivulets of sweat run down his back. He hastened back home.

It rarely rained, and the passing storms didn’t impart water unless they came at night, and even then, usually left no more than a temporary dampness hanging in the air that disappeared as soon as the clouds were blown away. Ounce by ounce, therefore, the lake was disappearing, and soon, so would the rest of the earth’s surface water.

Therefore, there was something sacred about this sickening water, and Alek made a point to visit every month, until it disappeared.

The flor and fauna, too, would go along with it, either starving or scalded away. What was left of the area’s agriculture was massive underground gardens and livestock repositories, owned and operated by rich individuals who had no interest in sharing. What Alek and other townsfolk ate were canned foods, and what few fresh vegetables they were able to grow indoors by the windows, heavily protected by sheet plastic and tarps to prevent them from burning. Most people were on their way to starving; a few had enough back stock. This was Alek’s case. One man several houses away had a room where he kept chickens, fattened by a back stock of corn, but he hadn’t heard anything from him in months. The wild animals had all but disappeared, with the occasional call of a bird, or sound of a snake passing through the grass at night, and the scattered song of crickets.

This was the background noise of his life; a near complete absence of the kind of noises that had made up daily life on earth for years. But now, with power shortages, there was no technology to cover the silence, only the dearth of what used to be there, yawning and lonely.

The people were different, too. And some were not human, human though they appeared. It was never the ones that one expected, either.

They visited him every night, as though all of humanity was currently in some state of displacement, and could only be convinced to be homed by a stranger’s promise of shelter. Some had been disrupted by FEMA, some had been kicked out of their lodgings for one reason of another, and some had left their prior inadequate shelter of their own free will, hoping to survive by the kindness of a stranger alone. Some were human, and some were what was left of what had once been human, trapped inside of slowly rotting flesh bodies that ached with the hunger of being simultaneously imbued with consciousness and deprived the energy of life.

Daytime passed quicker than usual; he slept longer than he had in weeks, perhaps only from exhaustion. It was always more difficult to sleep during the day. When he woke up, the sound of the television greeted him, as always, set by the automatic timer which he had installed years ago.

The newscaster claimed they were being visited by an alien race, which selected beings at random. These beings saw humanity, a dying race on a doomed planet, as ripe for experimentation. There were stories of people being taken in the middle of the night, disappearing without a trace. Usually, it was the ones who lived alone. They always seem to meet such an end; either violent or a mysterious one. People said that the aliens only liked people with exploitable vulnerabilities; ones without ties left. Shortly after the first alleged alien visit, the visitors began to appear. As time passed, the visitors came to his door all the more frequently, until it seemed as though half of every stranger at his doorstep was an inhuman mimic of a person. Still, he let in the desperate humans whenever he could. It was difficult to tell them apart, and when it came down to the wire, Alek went on gut instinct.

Tonight was a night like every other. It was a Monday, but it hardly mattered anymore whether it was a Monday or Saturday, because they came just the same, always at least two a night. Tonight, it was a long faced, implacably tired looking woman, carrying a very skinny body over one shoulder. She didn’t look alive, but when she spoke, despair poured out of her mouth like smoke.

“Come in.” Reluctant as he was, he had been alone for several days. More people were always needed, because it was hard to know when a wandering guest would leave, or if they would stay for a matter of years. And if nightfall came at the week’s end and no one was staying at his home, the uncanny man would come and take him with him, and do something that was perhaps worse than death with what was left of his body and mind. That scared Alek more than anything.

She wouldn’t stay long, she claimed. She settled into the bathroom across from the fanatical obese man, placing the thing that really was a corpse inside of the empty bathtub and positioning it with her scrawny fingers, propping him up as if to make him more comfortable, without so much as a word. He wondered if this night was the beginning of the end, or, if not, how much later it would come. He had enough supplies in the bunker beneath his home that would last for years even with many people eating, but it was hard to say if he himself would weather the coming changes.

Fear never made the time pass any more quickly than it ever had. The night stretched on like an old rubber band, being pulled past its capacity for usefulness.

The tall, uneven faced man residing in the living room resented his attempts to check him for signs of a visitor. But it had to be done. Like a horse, he peered into his mouth, studying his uneven teeth. He was real.

Like clockwork, in the dead middle of the night, once per week, the same strange man with skin wrapped too loosely around his frame would come, and ask about his guests. Every time, he would have to answer that he had guests staying with him.

And every time, he would leave disappointed, as if he could not cross the threshold of his home of his own volition so long as he had knowledge of others staying there.

If he had been alone…

Alek shuddered.

Alek had been a loner most of his life, the kind of person that one avoided in a store. For years, he had gathered every supply within his reach, haunted by the inexplicable feeling that doomsday would come; as though spellbound, he had prepared accordingly. He had hated people, hated going out, hated every unpredictable aspect of life that had felt like a curse since he was young.

Now, he was being punished for that hatred.

But he had been prepared, when no one else had been.

And every night, the thing that wasn’t a person stood outside of his window, staring through the house with a mocking, empty grin.

Alek hated it. This, too, must be part of the punishment, but it was one that he was grateful for, because it scared him, and he knew that meant he was still human.

Another came the next night, a foul mouthed middle aged man with one drooping eye, followed by a wrinkled old man claiming to be a doctor. He let both in. 

That night, he heard rustling. The strange, loose skinned man approached from the west side, standing just outside of the property line, one arm outstretched. He grinned emptily at him, holding the severed head of a soldier who had formerly patrolled the area. Their bodies were littered on the east side, the carnage too difficult to make out, but dark bloodstains and chunks of flesh visible even in the scant porch light. That night, his neighbor’s daughter came to his doorstep, claiming that her father had been killed by visitors, the house burned. It was a chilling sight, and Alek wondered if it had been done by visitors, or merely people passing through who had mistaken her father for one.

The foul mouthed man murdered the little girl on another night. He found her in pieces, scattered across the floor. He shot the man outright at point blank range, chilled by the lack of tells; the man had seemed entirely human. The corpse that resulted was animalistic; twisted. He disposed of it accordingly. Another woke him from sleep in the witching hour, and by some instinct, he had immediately known her intent. Another inhuman corpse, another grave. Perhaps it was the smell that had given it away, he later reflected, the sickly sweet smell of death hanging on her garments. 

New people came to his doorstep the following night, unaware of the degree of danger they were in, or perhaps just left without options.

Each night, he gained a better understanding of why these people came to him. Other houses were kept dark, or people sensed some sort of evil emanating from them; the evil of absence, or an abundance of trust where it shouldn’t be. But the refugees came to his house, which seemed to promise something that others didn’t. They were looking for someone like him; someone who still had hope, frail as it was. Someone who wasn't consumed by paranoia, nor eaten by apathy. Such people must be getting harder to find. Alek wouldn’t know; he hadn’t left within a mile radius of his house for the past ten years.

Those that voiced paranoia in any form, he turned away.

Those that had some spark of human passion remaining, he allowed to enter.

One by one, they came, until Alek had a full house. And in the end, they decided to close off the house completely from the outside world, barricading the windows and doors to insulate them as much as possible from the scorching heat as it consumed the surface of the earth. With the help of a stranded FEMA scientist, they heat proofed the house. That summer was the tipping point, and after it, even the news anchor told people to stay inside. Still, they pretended that humanity still had time.

Ten years, the scientists had said. So long as they all remained indoors. Alek laughed. They might last one.

-

The last thing Elena remembered on that day was an overwhelming suffocating feeling. People on all sides of her, demanding answers. The heat of the day creeping into her poorly insulated house. And then, a pressing feeling, being squeezed on all sides by the atmosphere around her. She had taken a hold of some object, had felt its weight in her hands. Hefted it experimentally. And then her focus had slipped away from her.

lapse.

She was running, barefoot. It was twilight, so hot that the asphalt beneath her feet was melting. The searing pain on the soles became abstracted, twisted into something that followed her as a fact, and not her material reality. Then, the dusty dead grass was twisting beneath her feet, there was something that might've been pain pouring down on her from above, passing through her skeletal system unimpeded.

lapse.

She woke up in her bedroom on the floor, without any memory of what had happened. She went into the kitchen and filled a glass of water, holding it, but not raising it to her lips.

They had made accusations, had followed through with him, and had put her out of her own home. She walked along the narrow road, now only slightly warm beneath her feet. The tattered skin peeled away from the muscle and bone.

The house of a stranger with a lit porch stood out to her like a beacon, and she stumbled her way there.

She was inside the house. He had let her in, she supposed. The memory felt like a picture. She stood in the threshold, trying to gauge what it had been like to enter. The more she thought about it, the less it felt like anything at all.

She went into the closet; somewhere safe, somewhere she could hide. That would make her happy; she was sure of it. But hours later, there she was still sitting, trying to remember what it was that she had been thinking when she had entered the closet. There was something else outside, wasn't there? It could get her, couldn't it? But not from here, right? Was it safe here?

Another person introduced himself, a doctor. He had entered; there was an exchange of words. He had smiled, and so had she. His face began melting at the edges.

Something filled her body; her mind was beginning to be placed outside of its container. It was as though her consciousness was floating through the top of her skull, while her body jerked and grasped of its own accord, the feeling in her limbs like the satisfying rush of narcotics and adrenaline mixing in her bloodstream. She watched, half dumb and unfeeling, unsensing and derealized, as her hands pulled apart limbs from torso, brain melting in her skull, the thing within trying to get free. Every part of her was being touched, squeezed all at once.

lapse.

Then, warmth inside; settling.

There is something black like blood on his clothing. His— the parts. Had it been a man? What had she seen beneath her hands? A black triangle and a red square, many smaller red squares on the floor in front of her. An odd feeling filled her. It was the blank emptiness of anesthesia given in low-dose; an all encompassing sense of unbeing. Inside of her, the remnants of what might have been crawling fear skittered like insects.

Go to sleep, she thought to herself. You'll feel better in the morning, she thought.

She pulled back the covers. There was someone sleeping in her bed. No it wasn't her bed; she was just visiting. The memory of dread filled her. Then, a moment later, there she was, staring at the barrel of the rifle, facing a certain end.

Was this what it was like to know you would die? Was it fear that she felt? It echoed inside of her. She met the eyes of the home owner, but couldn’t recall his name; couldn’t focus on any aspect of him, could look but not comprehend the man in front of her.

There was something inside of her. It was gone— the thing that should've been there. In its place was a remnant, and the remnant told her what her memories had been.

The gun went off, and within the span of a moment, neither part remembered any more.