all been speaking; her body’s shock was wearing off completely, and panic was settling in. “Johnny, I can’t move my legs. I can’t feel them, please help—” She repeated herself several times then, telling me how she was afraid to die, begging me to help her, begging not to leave her alone, even though I was right there, grasping her hand! I grew desperate to calm her, to let her know that I was here, that I would always be here! The only survivor in the school was me, and I came looking for her because I cared! I knew this was my one chance to let her know how I felt. Before I could think it through, I was kissing her, horribly, despite the blood she’d coughed up, trying to transmit every feeling I’d ever had for her in it. She moaned during the kiss, but I’ll never know if that was because she enjoyed it or because she was in pain— when I came up for air, the reasons why suddenly didn’t matter. She was still. After that, I made my way home through the wrecked streets of New York in a haze of grief. The place was a war zone and there was slime everywhere where the tentacles had touched. The walk, which normally took fifteen minutes, ended up being over an hour long between my grief and the destroyed street. Home was a final bastion, and I prayed to every god I didn’t believe in that my mom was still alive. She worked from our apartment, and kept my dog, Asimov, company until I came home, if I still had a home to come to. Our building was knocked completely over, and the window that indicated my home, was smashed and covered in slime. The bits of heart left over from seeing Lana die, were jangling in my chest like wind chimes. I scaled the fire escape, which was attached
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to the building by one twisted leg, cutting my arms on the jagged edges that had been snapped like ligaments. My apartment was on the third floor and I called out my mother and my dog’s names like a frightened kid, lost in the grocery store. I shouldn’t have rushed up there; for all my trouble, I climbed through my window into a room splattered in blood. I didn’t bother checking the rest of the rooms; if they hadn’t heard me sobbing by now, they were never going to. The bloody fingernail marks scoring the windowsill
THE PLACE WAS A WAR ZONE. pretty much gave it away anyhow. They were gone, as my classmates were gone, and I was alone, emancipated, way before I was even close to being ready. Staying in my own house was too painful after that. I grabbed some of my clothes and as much food as I could carry and camped in my neighbors’ homes. I checked for survivors in my building, of course, but I couldn’t find anyone. So I raided their homes for usable items like clothing, blankets, deodorant and canned foods. For four lonely months I had meals that required no heat, because there wasn’t any electricity, and I used flashlights until the batteries died. Candles were kind of risky, because there wasn’t a stable place to rest them, when the building leaned so precariously