Love in the Apocalypse

Adapted first as an audio drama by The NoSleep Podcast, here is Love in the Apocalypse, a genre-mashing short story, for the first time in print.

Love in the Apocalypse

By Austin Gragg // Illustrations by Rachel Wietrick

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BELL & TAN

Unaware of their watcher, Bell and Tan load guns in their rowboat. They drift past the top half of a submerged streetlight as the water grows shallow. Behind them, is a sunken city. Skyscrapers wade in water and around them, are smaller buildings, like drowned children, faces barely covered. HVAC units and rooftop patios spot the horizon.

Bell stares at the makeshift tourniquet, then the bloody cotton-wrapped stump where Tan’s hand used to be. “You can do this,” she says while scooping water out of the boat with a foam cup. It’s a slow leak, but enough to make one-person rowing a bitch.

Tan adjusts the revolver in his lap, then fumbles another bullet into the chamber. They’d unwrapped their guns from plastic shopping bags when the rain finally let up. Tan can’t feel his injured arm anymore. The tourniquet is too tight. But he doesn’t tell Bell. There’s no reason to. It’s only a matter of time for both of them. He knew they wouldn’t die right off the bat—and they hadn’t. But they’d had friends along the way. They’re alone now. He doesn’t want to speak for Bell, but he knows he won’t last much longer. It's a tingling feeling in the back of his head, a nagging to close his eyes.

“You hear me?” Bell asks. “You’re gonna be okay.”

Tan opens his eyes. They both look awful. Bell’s shirt is worn thin, his jeans are ripped, both are covered in sweat and grime. He forces a smile. “I know, love.”

The boat grinds against concrete as they slow to a stop “ashore.” Bell tightens the straps of her backpack and looks hard at the vines growing out of the water and up the road. They’re as thick and pale as Tan’s arm. The growths near or around water never attacked unless provoked. The dry growths, the ones coming out of soil, those were the ones to worry about.

She turns to Tan. “Should we run?”

Tan doesn’t bother to look at the road. His eyes drift between the gun and his bandaged stump. “I think you can make it.”

“What? No! I’m not leaving you. You need meds. The infection, your fever—everything we need is there!” Her black curls bob as she points to the hospital at the top of the hill. “Everything we talked about is there.”

“Do you see any lights, Bell?” He doesn’t mean to sneer, but there it is.

She looks to the hospital, a long stare, conjuring tears. “What if they’re keeping the fires out? Lanterns off?” She had realized, a mile out, that this wouldn’t be the haven they’d heard of. But hope kept her from talking.

“Why, Bell? Fires keep the growths back—if anyone was here, we’d see them. Like at the camps.”

“Survivors or not, I’m getting what we need for you. You’re going to be fine. Come on.”

He doesn’t move. “Bell, I’m not worth—”

“Shut up.” Her expression is stone.

He shakes his head. “Bell, baby, I can’t.” He blinks back tears and the only reason it works is because he’s too tired to cry. He just wants her to make it, for him to be wrong—for their friends to be waiting for them like they’d planned. For them all to live on this little hill of safe, undrowned land. There was a grocery store only a few miles back—a safe one they had already cleared—stocked with at least a month or two of canned goods. No growths inside.

Bell takes a deep breath. “If they’re not here, I’ll be back with supplies, and we’ll wait for them. I’m sure they’ll be here soon. Your gun loaded?”

He nods.

She’s nodding quickly as she kneels beside him and squeezes his hand.

He lets go first.

NIALL

Niall knows he is dead and is convinced his lingering is punishment. He looks out the hospital window at two people who’ve just arrived by boat. Are they seeking shelter, supplies, both? It must be supplies because the woman, strong legged with bouncing dark curls, comes alone. She sprints up the driveway over cracked concrete. Jungles of deadly growth line each side of the street. Is she fast enough to make it? Or is the garden humoring her? It must be. She’s still alive.

Finally. He wouldn’t be seen, but this was another chance to speak with the living. At least, to try to speak. To maybe, just maybe, find a way to rest.

He isn’t sure why he thinks speaking to someone will solve his lingering. Maybe it's all the television. Maybe it's all the paperback urban fantasies and paranormal romances he’s read. There’s no evidence to support the belief. But maybe she’s different. Maybe she’d hear him. He knows his chance is real as she leaps over the largest pile of creepers in her path. She’s so fast Niall isn’t sure they could’ve got her if they wanted to. This means he also has to be fast.

Niall turns from the window and pulls hard for his first step toward the stairs. His thighs blaze with rigid pain. The sensation of rigor mortis never left. And that’s what moving through the afterlife feels like. Stiff, with motion hard to grasp, and once obtained, slippery and hard to stop. A world without traction.

He stops and looks back at his room; his momentum continuing to drift him toward the door. His corpse in the bed had bloated and leaked, deflated and shifted from red to green. The hair and nails are going now. He doesn’t think of it as him because it clearly isn’t. It’s just a slow-melting shell, still holding the get-well card Mara had given him.

Mara had painted violets on sepia watercolor cardstocks. Despite spending hours trying to manifest the energy to turn the card over for one last read, he wasn’t sure he actually wanted to read it again. If today brings his chance at peace, he won’t miss staring at that card every day. Over time, its reaching leaves and jutting flowers had developed a certain menace.

TAN

Tan cries as Bell sprints up the hill. She’s soon out of view and Tan sinks back against the peeling emerald green of the rowboat. He looks at the stars and feels their weight. There’s nothing to pray to. He can’t help Bell if she needs it and every second is a second he could watch her die. Would it be worse to see it happen, or not? A growth could catch her ankle, a pile of vines might hold her still while a giant stalk bows and reveals its killer face to her. Bell would scream, then she wouldn’t.

 In the beginning, everyone seemed to have a theory about why people stopped screaming those last few seconds as the “bloom” descended.  Maybe it was their decorative design, some hypnosis, meant to lure and silence prey. When the stalks had first sprouted from the ground, moving like time-lapse videos spilled into reality, Tan saw a woman entranced by one. A neighbor on the other side of the busy street was approaching a bloom in her yard. It looked like nothing more than a surprise sunflower in a strange purple. The woman had leaned into it, then screamed when it lunged. She’d stumbled back and fell. Even from that distance, Tan could see she was mesmerized in her final moments. Entranced.

 Tan prays to the sky. He might as well. With the gun in his lap weighing him down like Thor’s hammer, all he can do is pray. He prays his friends and family are okay and that Bell comes back soon.

Tan struggles to sit up. He hasn’t heard Bell at all, but this far away, would he? His brain feels like a rat’s nest of crossed wires, stuck in should’ves and would’ves as a fresh blot of blood grows on his bandaging. How fast would he die if he took it off? Was he brave enough for such a selfish gift?

BELL

Bell rounds the corner and finds the hospital entrance. She looks back at the forest of growths on the path behind her. The stalks of the forest grow everywhere there is soil, the whippers and tendrils grow out of the street’s cracks like masses of Play-Doh pushed through a spaghetti accessory. None of them had lunged for her on the way in. Were they dead? Did the growths sleep?

She hesitates to call them plants, thinking of what Tan had said adamantly one night around their campfire: “They’re not of Earth. Just can’t be.” Bell had disagreed with him. She had an idea about why there was so much rain. “There had to be enough,” she’d said, “to soak deep enough to wake these things up.” Bell wasn’t sure which theory was worse.