DEAD IN BED By Bailey Simms: The Complete Second Book

PART 14, SECTION 2

Ian and I drove south first, toward the warmer weather. We syphoned gas from abandoned cars along the way. There wasn't much food to be found. We mostly subsisted on the vegetables, greens, and fruits that were slowly maturing in overgrown fields and orchards.

We drove to Miami, Houston, and as far south as Mexico City. In June, we re-visited Atlanta and New York. We stopped in Toronto and Chicago, then moved on to Seattle and San Francisco.

Neither of us were ready to accept that we were the last living human beings on earth, despite the fact that we both knew how likely it was that we were.

But it was always the same. The streets of every city were eerily empty and silent. The parks were overgrown and green. Sidewalks and homes were almost completely free of the decaying bodies we'd prepared to see lying everywhere. Then we would follow the circling vultures and the horrific scent toward a graveyard. There, masses of human bodies, bloated and decaying, ravaged by house dogs, lay mounded over the tomb stones.

"They were starving," Ian had said when, in Dallas, we'd come across the first of these bizarrely gruesome graveyards. "The city's food supply must have run out."

Wherever a grave wasn't covered by a mound of corpses, we could see that the grave had been exhumed.

"Oh my God," I said. "They were cannibalizing the buried corpses, weren't they?"

Even with the car windows tightly sealed, the scent of decay was overwhelming.

"It's like a cluster, isn't it?" Ian held his hand over his nose and mouth as I slowly drove alongside the graveyard. "The positives fed on the corpses until they died," Ian said, "then more positives came to feed on them. . ."

". . . Until everyone was dead." I shuddered.

By the time we reached San Francisco, we knew to avoid graveyards. At every city, we'd driven up and down the empty downtown streets and through random suburbs, calling out for any survivors.

But, city after city, all we ever heard in response were the echoes of our own voices.

"What are the odds?" Ian said in frustration one day. "I mean, realistically? What are the odds that another TGVx parasite would evolve in a totally separate population of chickens, far from the coop at your parents' farm. It's hopeless."

"The odds are probably really small," I acknowledged. "Probably as small as someone developing a natural resistance to the virus. But that happened with AIDS, didn't it?"

"Yeah, it did." Ian considered this. "Before the plague, a few people—a very few people—did develop a natural immunity to HIV."

"Well, there were billions of people in the world," I added hopefully. "Maybe the odds are small, but small is better than zero. Right? And you can bet your ass that I'm not the only one who likes runny yolks. So there's a chance. A small chance . . . but a chance."

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