THE EPIDEMIC

All of a sudden everyone went insane.

The first rumblings were cryptic Instagram posts, people Vaguebooking about feeling down and depressed. Seemingly overnight came an online mental health industry because in-person therapy was in such overwhelming demand. Commercials for pharmaceuticals were on TV every hour of every day.

But the way it manifested itself most was a blight of suicides. Doctors and nurses were first, often injecting themselves with purposeful overdoses, then dentists overloading their nitrous masks. Stock brokers began jumping out of sky scrapers; there were reports of hordes of soldiers shot in their barracks with their own weapons.

EMTs, firefighters, and police were next. Then came the month when citizens – regular people with office jobs and 30-year mortgages – started using cops to kill themselves by threatening the officers with guns and admitting their method directly to the body cams, which only made the law officers even more prone in what became a vicious cycle.

It was an epidemic. Within months, suicide was the leading cause of death in the country, and after a year, one percent of the population, over three million, were dead, with families shattered.

The government declared a national emergency and formed a task force, and surprisingly quickly, scientists discovered there was some sort of brain disease causing it all, and the way it was transferred was through touch. Not coughing, not sneezing, not laughing or singing or talking.

Touch.

Stores immediately ran out of hand sanitizer. Overnight, everyone wore gloves. You couldn't buy a bar of soap – they sold on eBay for ten times the price. Every surface in public places was instantly wiped down by a federally-run crew of cleaners in puffy white suits.

The lack of physical intimacy of any kind – no hugs, no handshakes, no European-style double cheek kisses, and definitely no sex – led to more mental health problems, more people offing themselves.

It began to happen in increasingly public ways: cutting wrists at malls and grocery stores, hangings in trees in city parks, self-immolation on the sides of highways.

Morgues were overrun, refrigerated trucks idled outside of hospitals, potter's fields dug for mass graves. Another three million dead in the blink of an eye.

The strange thing is that it remained confined to the United States. Sure, you'd hear weird stories about cases cropping up in Canada or inklings of something in Mexico, but it was exclusively a USA problem. The rest of the world banned flights from us, and carried on living.

There were protests, of course. College kids held cuddle parties, church groups led public hug-a-thons, flash mobs in homemade shirts proclaiming their constitutional rights accosted strangers in viral videos.

It was campaign season, and everything politicians did was done either virtually or from a distance. Except the man running against the current President. He'd hold in-person rallies raging against any restrictions, pushing his supporters to embrace each other, urging conservatives to dare law enforcement to arrest them by forming human chains.

When a sitting senator shot himself in the head live on C-Span, the White House called for a nationwide lockdown. Everyone at home for two months, groceries and pharmacy trips outside only, one outdoor exercise allowed per person per ten days. With everyone at home, each week you could follow the phases online, trends that happened organically: this week everyone made origami, next week they all seemed to listen to polka, then people pickled vegetables a week later, and on and on.

There were wild rumors while everyone stayed inside. One was that invisible military vehicles were roaming the streets, rounding up undocumented immigrants. Another was that the dead who died in public places were really holograms, projected by the government. Finally, that the disease wasn't transmitted through touch, but taste, so thousands all around the country went on a mass hunger strike.

The lockdown ended, but no one knew what to do. The whole thing felt like a form of purgatory. You could go out, you could eat at a restaurant or watch a movie or see friends, but no one really wanted to. There was too much risk and you never knew who was sick, who was infected, who was perfectly normal, and who was right on the edge of insanity. We all walked around covered head to toe. Non-Muslim wore hijabs. I learned the word fomites. I stopped touching my face. My hands were rubbed raw from scrubbing them so much. Every public space was covered in plexiglass and plastic. No business took cash anymore. Some people wore what looked like space suits. Everyone just stopped looking at each other. Gun sales soared. Canned goods became currency.

One day, cooped up from too many Zoom calls, I decided to cash in my outdoor exercise card to take a walk.

I put on my running shoes and went east, down the hill along Los Feliz Boulevard towards Atwater Village. I thought I might make my way into Griffith Park, but instead I kept walking straight and ended up crossing the 5 Freeway. Normally there would be scores of cars buzzing by, up towards Burbank, or down towards DTLA. But now there was merely a trickle, an errant ambulance or a sanitation truck passing.

I thought about how much things had changed, and how much I wished they were back to normal. I had a wild desire to be tickled. I wanted to go on a hugging spree when it was all over. I daydreamed about french kisses.

When I got to the bridge over the LA River, I stopped. There was a woman there, sitting on the edge, feet dangling with a pair of pink flip-flops hanging off her toes. She looked over at me and gave a thin-lipped smiled. Her eyes were rimmed bright red.

“Are you okay?” I asked, approaching her with my arms outstretched.

“I'm great,” she said. “Best day of my life.”

She smiled again, open-mouthed this time. That's when I realized she had no teeth.

“Do you need some help?” I asked.

“Help with what?” she asked.

“I don't know,” I said. “Getting off there?”

“No,” she said. “I don't need any help with that. I can do that all by myself.”

She stood up quickly on the concrete ledge and I took a sharp breath, coming closer to help her down. Instead, she folded her hands and dove off the side like she was jumping into a pool.

It all seemed to happen in slow-motion, and without thinking, I grabbed for her. I caught a bit of her leg and her foot – she was shoeless now, the flip-flops went before the rest of her – as she went down, and I couldn't help myself from glancing briefly at the bottom.

She had landed headfirst. Her skull split open, bright red blood pooling in the shallow water of the river. Her legs were akimbo, her black hair moving with the current.

I wasn't wearing gloves. I stood there, looking down at her, then looking down at my hand, then her, then it again.

I speed-walked home, ran my hand under hot water, used a whole bottle of liquid soap to clean it. I made sure it didn't touch any other part of my body or any of my clothes, but I laundered those immediately anyway.

Then I waited. I paced. I scrolled Twitter. I watched the news, the same stories over and over. I ate a bowl of ice cream. I checked out my hand a lot, staring at it like it wasn't a part of me anymore.

And I wondered. Would I get sick? Was I already sick? Was I asymptomatic? If I was sick, what symptoms would I show, exactly how ill would I get? What's it like going crazy, anyway? What's it like having suicidal thoughts? What's it like killing yourself? I once read bridge jumpers who survived reported they had second thoughts before they landed in the water, hoped at that moment that it wasn't too late, and they never take life for granted again.

The image of the woman at the bottom of the river ran through my head, flickering like an old piece of film at the end of a reel, until I could worry no more and my eyelids closed slowly and I mercifully fell asleep.

**

When I woke up, things were not the same. My brain throbbed, my throat was a desert, the sheets were soaked. I stood up, sat back down. My legs felt like jelly. I clutched my head, tried again.

I went to the bathroom and downed a few aspirin, noticed by eyebrows were overgrown, little hairs spreading across my brow. I furrowed it.

Then I went to the living room. The plants were dead. The milk in the fridge was curdled. I might have been imagining it, but when I looked out the window, I think a tumbleweed blew across the courtyard.

I had been asleep for a week. Isn't that technically a coma? From what I could tell while watching the news and reading a few websites, a new variant of the virus had popped up and ravaged the population, killing almost the same amount in four weeks as the last year.

Everyone was leaving the cities, since it was more contagious, and moving in with parents or to rural areas. Los Angeles residents all went to the desert or the mountains, midwesterners bought plots of farmland sight unseen.

It was a ghost town outside. No cars on my street. I figured I could take a walk since I hadn't been out of the house in forever, so I suited up and tried to forget the last walk I took, making sure I wore gloves this time. I went west, up the hill towards Hillhurst. Trash littered the gutters. Dog shit was spread on the sidewalks. Bird scooters were scattered about. No walkers, no skaters, no bikers, no nannies with babies in strollers, definitely no joggers. The whole thing was eerie.

Then I saw him. There was only one man out, and he was dressed in all white. He was across the street from me. He raised his hand and waved.

I turned around and ran.

I looked behind me and, to my horror, he was running too. He yelled for me to stop, but I didn't. I ran harder. But I couldn't run fast, because I had atrophied and felt like death, my breath ragged, my heart racing, my legs aching.

As I passed the overflowing trash can at Commonwealth, I tipped it, spilling it into his path. He yelled again for me to stop.

“I'm calling the cops!” I yelled behind me.

I dialed 911. They put me on hold.

I continued to run Los Feliz Blvd, he continued to try to talk to me in a too-loud voice but I wasn't listening. More garbage cans upended, then I threw an electric scooter in his path. Normally I would have tried to flag down a car to ask for assistance, but none passed.

Finally I got back to my apartment and he was still just jogging behind me. I realized then that he wasn't putting in much effort, could have easily caught up to me. So what was he doing?

“Stop following me!” I said, as I pulled the keys out of my bag. There was pepper spray in there, too, but I didn't want him to know that, so I held my hand in there just in case. Also I didn't want him to know where I lived.

“I just want to talk,” he said.

“Well, I don't,” I said.

“Fair enough,” he said. “But you should know that I'm not infected.”

“Yeah, well I am,” I said.

“You do know that means you're immune now, right?” he said. “Don't know if you saw that on the news.”

“No, I didn't,” I said. “Thanks for the info.”

He nodded, started to walk away. Then he stopped.

“Can I be honest with you?” he said.

There was something about the way he said it, the tone of his voice. I saw it in his eyes, the way he looked at me. It was with curiosity, with kindness, with melancholy, with joy.

“I was just happy to see someone else. I thought you might want to chat, that's all. Like, all I want to do is talk to someone else not on video. I just feel so alone.”

I didn't know what to say. I knew exactly how he felt. Now I felt like an asshole for avoiding him.

“I'm sorry for scaring you. I was honestly just so excited to see someone else out and about. I'll leave you alone now.”

He started to walk away again. The 911 operator asked me my emergency, and I hung up on her. I took my hand off my mace. I put my bag down.

“Do you want a glass of lemonade?”

He stopped at turned back to me, smiled.

We went to the courtyard of my building and I brought out a pitcher and two glasses. There was a lemon tree on the premises, near the parking lot, and I had taken to picking up whatever fruit fell so it wouldn't go to waste. After so much marinated fish, marinated vegetables, salad dressing, lemon cake, lemon meringue pie, lemon butter, lemon risotto, lemon marmalade, I finally got out the juicer and the sugar.

It was tart, but we drank it all. I realized then how much my small talk had stalled. I tried to break the ice by saying stuff like “Drinks are good, but I like food better”, and “What sort of entertainment do you prefer?” We laughed because he had gotten bad at it as well, and we both knew it would be a long time before we could be around other people at a party or another social setting and feel normal again. It was at that moment that I realized I hadn't even asked his name. I was just about to when --

My phone rang. I ignored it. The call was unlisted. It rang again, and I asked him if I should answer it. He said no. I agreed. That's when the heard the banging at the front gate.

We looked at each other. The gate was near us, but we were behind a row of tall bushes, so no one could look in. I put my finger up to my lips to indicate quiet.

Banging again. Then: “Police, open up! We got a call to investigate.”

“Should we go talk to him?” he asked.

“I guess so,” I said. “I'll go.”

I walked from behind the shrubbery to the front gate. There was a lone police officer in uniform, mirrored sunglasses on. A motorcycle stood behind him, parked directly on the sidewalk. I talked to him from behind the iron bars that separated us.

“What seems to be the problem, Officer?” I asked.

“Got a call from this location, pinged off the cell tower. Is this your number?” He had my number written on his pocket notepad.

“Yeah, but it's a misunderstanding,” I said. “I thought I was being followed, and I was wrong.”

“So there's no disturbance?” he asked, eyebrow raised.

“No,” I said. “Everything is fine.”

He leaned in closer.

“You're sure?” he said quietly. “You can tell me in a whisper or give me some other indication if there's a problem and you can't speak about it openly.”

“Honestly,” I said. “It's no problem. Some guy I saw on the street, but it's nothing. Really.”

“If you say so,” he said. “But if you have any other issues, let us know. We're here to help.”

“Thank you, Officer,” I said.

“One other thing,” he said. “You'll need to sign this.” He held out a little form that looked like a ticket.

“Is it a ticket?”

“No,” he said, laughing. “Just looks like one. Just paperwork to show that I answered the call. New thing we're doing.”

He handed it to me, then searched his pockets.

“I don't have a pen on me,” he said. “Do you have one?”

“Sure,” I said. I let him in the gate.

We walked down the steps, past the bushes, and I started to enter the door of my apartment when the officer looked at my friend, sitting there with a lemonade in his hand.

He stopped in his tracks, took his mirrored sunglasses off, put his hand on his gun holster. That's when I noticed he had no fingernails.

“Sir, drop the weapon!” he said. But he was smiling when he said it.

My friend was frozen in place in fear, the lemonade held in the air like it was suspended.

I looked at the officer, thinking for a moment that he must be joking. Then I remembered all the cops having gone nuts these last months. Then I looked into his eyes, and saw they were a bit scarlet, just like the woman at the river.

“No,” I said. “You don't understand --”

“It's not a weapon, it's just lemonade,” my friend said.

“Ma'am, please let me do my job. Sir, this is your final warning.”

“There's no threat, it was a mistake.”

“I said: drop your weapon!”

The officer flipped the off the safety, his hand butt of the gun.

“This is crazy!” I said.

“Drop it now!”

He dropped the lemonade on the ground, the glass smashing against the concrete.

The broken shards and drops of liquid sprayed onto him, giving me a second or two. I ran to my purse and pulled out the pepper spray.

The officer raised his gun up to shoot my new friend, but before he could pull the trigger, I maced his eyes until he cried and fell to the ground, the weapon slipping out of his hand.

My accomplice kicked the gun away from the cop like he was in an action movie. He writhed on the ground, crying and cursing. We looked at each other, wondering what we should do next. He picked up the pistol and held it with two fingers like it was a dirty diaper.

Then we heard the click.

The cop brought out his taser and pointed it. He was still basically blind so he couldn't locate us, was wiping his eyes. I backed away and that's when he fired. The clips dug into my skin and the electrical volts sent me to the ground. I looked up to see him pull a giant knife out of his boot and step towards me.

And that's when my partner-in-crime killed him. He shot the cop in the chest, and he fell right next to me. I looked into his eyes, which were now even more lifeless than before. The knife clanged. The taser stopped. Time seemed to stretch. The pavement was hot. My spine tingled. I tried to catch my breath. I threw up. I thought about how I might never go on a walk again.

**

His name was Kyle. This I learned the first day we were on the lam. We finally introduced ourselves properly to each other as we got into my car and drove east, away from LA.

First, I went to the closet and got everything from my earthquake kit. I had been listening to so many podcasts during quarantine, and one of them warned of the imminent threat of earthquakes in southern California. I had stocked up on canned goods and bottled water, and bought a survival manual, a multi-function tool, and a hand-cranked radio. We threw it all into plastic bags, along with some clothes, and stuffed it into the trunk to make our getaway.

Then we stopped by Kyle's house and got his stuff too, including his computer and a bottle of bourbon and an olive green duffel bag filled with his wardrobe.

We took pains to not brush up against each other, to always wipe down the steering wheel when we switched seated positions.

He drove first. Once we were on the road, I scrolled on my phone endlessly to see if there was news of the cop's murder. Nothing. I tried to mollify myself because it was self-defense. Horrified as I was that another dead cop wasn't even a news item, eventually my attention ran to how bad things were around the country.

Things just didn’t work the way they used to. There was a labor shortage, partially due to all the newly dead, but also due to so many people in treatment for mental health issues. Most places, if they were open, had only one employee. Every place had a help wanted sign posted somewhere. Almost no where was open past 8pm.

But it wasn't like you see in the movies. There were no roving bands of motorcycle miscreants, no Immortan Joe ruling the wasteland. Most people were helpful, pleasant, even as they kept their distance. You could buy gas, if at inflated prices. Stores were still open. Groceries were on shelves, but in a bit limited supply. Life just carried on somehow.

Still, millions were killed. Body bags littered large fields that became makeshift graveyards. Trees held hung corpses. Cars crowded cul-de-sacs with hoses hanging out of tailpipes, snaked into windows. And people increasingly started shooting themselves in public spaces: parks, public squares, plazas, at the base of statues. Sometimes their bodies would remain longer than they would have in the Before Times, but with fewer first responders, it was often up to everyday citizens to do that work.

I had heard stories and seen news reports, but witnessing it myself, through direct experience, gave me a thick feeling in my throat. The boarded-up buildings in cities, the abandoned cars on the sides of highways, chain-link fences erected around homes, spray-painted signs in front of stores announcing the owners were armed, yard signs with numbers of hotlines for those contemplating suicide. Society wasn't completely breaking down yet, but it would be getting there if things didn't change soon.

A new thing I noticed was how many people were wearing custom gloves. Some had henna tattoo like designs, some had cute sayings or slogans (“I don't touch anything but myself!”), still others had hands printed on the tops, with fake fingernail polish, so you had to do a double-take when you looked to see if that person really was wearing gloves or not.

One of the only good things about the epidemic was everyone in the country was part of the tragedy. It was universal. Once we got past our initial awkwardness, we had so much to talk about in regards to things that we had felt and experienced over the past year. It wasn't a tornado that tore up one town, a hurricane that wrecked houses on the Atlantic coast, or a wildfire that destroyed a wooded area, and only locals understood the extent of the devastation. Flags everywhere were at half-mast. Everyone was experiencing some version of the same thing, everyone was affected in various ways, and everyone knew someone who had died.

For Kyle, it was his brother. He had jumped in front of a commuter train. That's all he wanted to tell me about it, and I didn't press the issue.

After a self-imposed imprisonment, it felt great to be on the road, staring at something other than the series of screens I rifled through each day, between work and entertainment, draining me of any remaining energy; staring instead at desert, forest, ocean, mountain, horizon. Still, there was a tension between the freedom of traveling again and the pain of witnessing firsthand the devastation the disease had caused across the country.

After three days of driving, singing cheesy TV theme songs for comic relief, we stopped in Chicago. It was out of the way, but I used to live there for several years, and even though I moved away, I still missed it.

We drove on I-80 east to see military vehicles circling the city and stationed at interstate off-ramps. We got off at Kedzie and drove north to Logan Square, then down Milwaukee to Wicker Park, Division east to the lakefront.

There was a gathering at Montrose Beach, a group in a semi-circle around a man in olive drab. He stood on a lifeguard stand, yelling into a megaphone. The assembled were similarly dressed, all wearing what seemed like old Army garb, but with checkered Vans slip-ons.

We rolled down our windows to listen to him conclude his speech:

“...Now is the time! You know what to do! It's too late to stop now! This is where you belong!”

They all took off their shoes, leaving them in the sand. We watched them stuff rocks into their pockets from a bunch of red buckets they had with them, cargo pants holding more than would seem normal. Some held huge boulders, others tied free weights to their wrists with ropes.

Led by the man with the megaphone, who droned on about their destiny, they walked past the vacant snack shop and waded into the lake. Kyle and I got out of the car and ran to them, our footfalls thick. I went up to a couple who held hands as they walked into the water. I pleaded with them, put my entire body in front of them, tugged on loose articles of clothes. That's when I noticed their skin was flaking off their arms and legs in sheets.

They smiled at me with wild red eyes, stared out into the setting sun, and submerged themselves as we screamed at them to stop.

Some time passed before we went back to my car and drove in the dark to Ohio in silence.

**

We arrived in Columbus to find my parents gone. Everyone was traveling to funerals these days, and no one trusted the airlines, so there were lots of roadtrips. My parents had friends who'd jumped off their boat off the coast of North Carolina, legs attached to an anchor and drowned. The note they left for us on a yellow legal pad on the kitchen counter said they'd be back after the wake, not more than a week in total. My thought was that it made sense to ride the epidemic out here and wait for my parents to come home. Kyle agreed. He had no where else to go either; we were both pandemic refugees.

So we had the place to ourselves. I thought about what I would do in that house, like when I was a kid and I'd gorge myself on ice cream and frozen pizza when they were away. And indeed, it was like that with Kyle and I.

I hadn't lived in this house since the late 90s, and I was surprised at how much it felt the same as when I was a teenager. Maybe this past year had made me regress mentally. I felt like Tom Cruise in Ricky Business. I didn't dance around in my underwear, but we blasted loud music and I showed him around:

My room, unchanged since I left for college. My brother's room, where Kyle would be sleeping, still decked out with cross-country trophies. My dad's office, next to the kitchen. The living room, unchanged since the 80s, plaid furniture and all. The screen door from there that lead to the fenced-in yard, planted flowers and shrubs.

Then I took him downstairs. In the basement, there were rooms full of junk. My mom's old clothes: floral print scarves, pleated pants, jackets with sequins. My dad's old teaching materials: walls lined with bookcases full of Biblical literature. He had been a theologian, a seminary professor. When he retired, he donated as much of his library to the seminary as they would allow. The rest went here. We browsed the stacks.

There was a workshop area with dad's tools, too. A ham radio on the workbench that I used to remember hearing him listen to at all hours of the night as he built model planes, often falling asleep to the static sounds. An old fridge was in the other corner, stocked with beers and my mom's cans of Diet Coke.

My mom loved Diet Coke, drank it for breakfast in a special yellow insulated cup, always with a straw. She had a stash right by the fridge, flats of it in long boxes, next to stacks of canned goods they had been keeping since at least 1999.

It made me remember how concerned I was just before the New Year two decades ago about Y2K. I had told my dad to make a bug-out bag, buy dried goods and ammo. I was wrong then, but he stayed prepared subsequently anyway.

We had dance parties, spaced out on opposite ends of the living room so we didn't have to worry about accidentally touching each other. We listened to old CDs I kept in black towers in the garage, Pre-Millennium Tension by Tricky, Dummy by Portishead, everything by Aphex Twin, old techno from my rave days when I wore pants that didn't fit and for some reason carried around a pacifier on my keychain. I was also a big fan of hip-hop then, so many good albums from the 90s. I brought out “It's Dark and Hell Is Hot” and we played it loud while washing the dishes.

So many good films came out in 1999: The Matrix, Office Space, The Sixth Sense, Fight Club, The Mummy. We watched movies every night on VHS in those big white plastic cases and ate my mom’s microwave popcorn. We exercised on the stationary bike downstairs and lifted my dad's dumbbells he kept in his closet. We read travel books in the basement, escaping our currently reality and imagining the borders being open again, living vicariously through Rick Steves.

We read my old yearbooks. Middle school and high school both, the multi-colored sentiments from friends in the margins. My old haircuts and outfits in black and white pictures, watching myself grow up in slow motion. I thought about how many kids were that age now, experiencing school through this time in history, scared to touch each other or experience their first kiss.

We set my parent's alarm system before we went to bed so we wouldn't have to worry about looters or any other intruders.

I slept in my childhood bed, dreaming most nights about my parents coming home, discovering me there with smiles on their faces as they walk in the front door. They drop the bags in their hands and hug me, my mom's hands cup my face, my dad kisses me on the top of my head.

I wake up, embracing only my pillow, dried tears crusty around my eyes.

I had woken up late, so after saying hi to Kyle in the kitchen, I went out to the mailbox to find my parents car in the driveway.

I ran in to look for them all over the house, but they weren't there. I had a text message from my mom: “Be Home Soon!” but I looked in their bedroom, the bathrooms, the garage, the backyard, even the neighbors house. Kyle couldn't find them either, so we split up. He went up the street towards the McDonald's. I started widening my search, walking down towards the middle school, yelling their names with cupped hands over my mouth. I was still in my pajamas, my hair a rat's nest, no makeup, so I probably seemed crazy, people overhearing thinking I would be the next one to kill herself after a public breakdown. Someone who was mowing the lawn ran inside and slammed the door.

Eventually I got to the little bridge over Alum Creek and that's when I saw them. My parents were dead in the water, a blue bottle of antifreeze next to their open mouths. I walked down the rocks to their bodies, creekwater bubbling past them. Eyes circled scarlet, bellies swollen, skin pale. I knew I couldn't be infected again, so I hugged them, the cold water and their frigid skin making me shiver.

I didn't trust the police to help, or to even answer the phone, so I pulled their car up as close as I could and dragged their grubby bodies up the hill and slumped them in the backseat. I wondered what must have happened to them. I figured they got infected at the funeral and went crazy on the drive home, but I knew I would never know for sure.

Kyle came home and I told him what had happened. He couldn't touch them, so he helped by digging the holes. We buried my parents in their backyard garden, then read a passage from one of my dad's bibles to eulogize them. I showered afterward, washing blood and mud and chemicals off me.

It was dark, and I was exhausted and hungry and tired and thirsty. I went downstairs to the basement to find something to drink, and a bunch of my mom's cans of Diet Coke spilled out of the fridge and onto the floor when I opened the door.

I stood there looking at them, and suddenly couldn't stop crying. I put my head in my hands, weeping, my shoulders bobbing up and down, my chest heaving.

Kyle must have heard the noise or my cries, because he came rushing down the stairs, clad only in a towel after jumping out the shower early. I turned around and saw him dripping, and he embraced me right there in the refrigerator light.

It felt like little electric shocks all over my body. I hugged him back.

We drew our heads away from each other for a second, then kissed. Before I knew it we were up the stairs, into my childhood bedroom, onto the bed. I devoured him. I enveloped him. I covered him with all my pent-up love.

“This is crazy,” I said in the middle of it all. He nodded, but we silently agreed to continue.

When we finished, he got back in the shower, then flopped back into bed and I found myself in the crook of his arm.

“I think we fucked up,” I said.

“I don't regret a thing,” he said.

“Me either,” I said, and he kissed me big on the lips.

“But I have to admit,” he said. “I'm a little worried.”

“Me too,” I said.

After he fell asleep, I slipped out from under his arms and snuck downstairs. I made myself a rum and Diet Coke, then turned on the ham radio and fell asleep to its sounds just like my dad used to do.

**

He was right to be worried: the next morning he was sick. We tried to treat his symptoms but mostly we just freaked out. He offered to leave, to go to a hospital or urgent care, and I told him no way. He slept all day and I stood at his bed, fretting over how much it was my fault. Then that night, while washing his soup bowl and syringes, I watched the news and learned about the coup.

When the President was reelected, his opponent held a press conference that was meant to serve as a concession speech. Instead, he railed against the incumbent and whipped up his supporters to storm the White House, pulling the President out of the Oval Office and executing him in the Rose Garden, hanging him from a tree in a sickening lynching that was livestreamed over the internet. The military stood by.

This came just hours after he had announced his win, as well as a vaccine for the disease that his campaign had previously been cautious about, that they would roll out in the coming weeks at universities and sports stadiums.

It was safe to say that society was now breaking down.

Kyle was breaking down too. Like me after I grabbed the jumper on the bridge, he was sleepy above anything else. I took the opportunity to learn more about the treatment. I checked countless websites, refreshed Twitter, watched as many Youtube videos as I could. I learned that some people get initially sick with simple symptoms then get better, and some people get a variety of indicators and get worse and go crazy and I was the former and Kyle was the latter.

I made another rum and Diet and listened to the ham radio, and this time there was chatter over the wires about the cure at certain universities around the country. The new government didn't want anyone to know about it, but tenured professors at colleges were offering treatments to friends and family and those in the know.

The closest to us was at Miami University, in Oxford, Ohio. There was a scientist treating acute patients at Boyd Hall. It was one of a few dozen colleges around the country with the remedy, scientists at these institutions banding together to offer it.

Miami just happened to be my alma mater.

I radioed them to see if it was true. The answer was yes, but it didn't matter anymore what they had or what they were offering or even if it was somehow a hoax: there was nothing for me here in Columbus anymore, and I needed to get Kyle help now. I had to try something.

I packed an overnight bag and woke him up, told him the plan.

“I'll drive,” he said.

“Not a chance,” I said, snatching the keys from his grip.

I could see his eyes changing, so before we left, I fashioned him a makeshift straight-jacket. He writhed in the passenger seat while I drove. There were no police anymore to enforce speed limits, so I went fast. I put on some of those CDs from the 90s to drown out the sounds of my sobs. It felt like a race against time.

Since Miami was my old school, I remembered how best to get there. Still, I was worried about soldiers quartered at Wright-Pat. I was worried about roadblocks. I was worried about Kyle, most of all, couldn't stop glancing over at him, sick.

Posters and flags propping up the new president were present everywhere. Barns and billboards in support were all along the route. His image leered, peering from behind trees. News reports on the radio told of the former President's family in exile in France. Some countries offered support, others condemned the new government. No one lifted their travel bans.

The new president staged a rally that day, and his supporters showed videos of themselves online taking off their gloves and touching people in public places. They'd pick fistfights just to be able to touch someone.

He urged his flock to poke, punch, pinch, and slap strangers on the streets in cities all over the country, creating even more infections. He told the country he would rule past the traditional two terms, would never admit defeat.

We approached Oxford from the north, throughout Preble County, across Acton Lake and Hueston Woods, over those country roads. As we came down the canopied trail that was Morning Sun Road towards Yager Stadium, the barricade appeared as if out of nowhere. I realized at once they were smart: they set it up around a bend in the road, so you couldn't see until you were right up on it and by then it was too late.

They pulled us over in their their cobbled-together hotrods, bumper stickers proclaiming how they thought this whole thing was a hoax. They looked like extras from the set of Waterworld. They wore old surplus Army helmets and unlaced boots and mesh shirts and carried aluminium baseball bats and sharpened gardening shears for weapons. They weren’t menacing, they mostly just seemed hungry. Plus, they smelled. Instead of being scared, I felt sorry for them. They were cosplaying the apocalypse.

When they saw Kyle, agitated in the passenger seat, they backed away fast. I told them about the antidote in Oxford, and they asked to be paid for passage. I let them have ten cans of peaches in light syrup. They opened the cans with the garden shears, then asked if they could siphon some gas before we left. I gave them a gallon.

The military was mustered at Millett Hall, so we drove well out of our way to avoid them, going to the west side of town and parking near the country club, now a graffiti-laden shell of itself with an empty swimming pool.

I parked the car in a wooded lot I remembered from college, a place I used to make out with boys when my sorority sisters didn't want them in our dorm. We waited until dark, then snuck past the old Taco Bell and Jiffy Lube, through neighborhoods, parking lots, and academic offices, staying in the shadows.

We needn't have worried. No one was around. It was a cow town. I carried Kyle slumped in my arms, like he was a drunk college student. In fact, if anyone asked, that would be my cover story for him. I saw a reflection of us in a window and it reminded me of the VHS cover of Weekend At Bernie's.

As I dragged across campus and down the Slant Walk, my mind wandered and I thought about everything that had occurred since this epidemic started. The isolation. The mind-numbing screen time. The cop we killed, staring at me on the concrete.

I thought about my parents, dead in the creek. I thought about the millions of sons and daughter and mothers and fathers and aunts and uncles and grandparents and doctors and dentists and firefighters and soldiers and office workers and all those people that died. I wondered if Kyle could tell how I felt. He seemed so serene on the outside, but what was happening inside him now? Would the disease take him too? If he tried to harm me, or harm himself, would I be able to stop him?

We paused in front of the door of Boyd Hall and I set him down. He came to, spoke for the first time since we left Columbus.

“Where are we?” he asked in not much more than a whisper. Clumps of his hair had fallen out, scattered on the ground. When I looked into his eyes, they contained traces of cherry.

“Somewhere safe,” I said, trembling.

“This is really hard,” he said.

“I know,” I said. “But we're here now, they can fix you up, and you're going to be OK.”

“No,” he said. “I mean, it's just been a really hard year.”

I nodded, turned my head away so I wouldn't show my emotions. I had to keep it together for him.

A lone yellow light shone in the window. That was the signal. I kissed Kyle on the forehead, then knocked on the door. A bearded man in a white coat cracked it open.

“We need your help,” I said, and he let us enter.