Alpha Male

It had been such a long time since Lewis had seen another person that he wasn’t sure he was really seeing her. He’d spent weeks wandering the vast, silent city, unable to think of anything other than the smell of decay, heavy and cloying in the August heat.

Lewis had gone insane for a while, spending the beginning of June in a feverish state where he would be just as likely to run down Main Street naked as he would to leave his house fully dressed. It didn’t matter any more. There was no one left to complain about decency no matter how many times Lewis went outside with his balls flapping in the breeze.

Except today. Today he’d remembered to put on pants, and they were even clean for a change. Clearly, he’d dressed for success.

As for the rest of his outfit, he was neither sloppy nor overdressed. He wore a white shirt underneath an open button-down, and a baseball cap.

The woman was sitting in the middle of a park at a picnic table, her eyes glazed over. For a moment, Lewis thought he may have just stumbled across another corpse; but then she yawned. He jumped a little, feeling as skittish as a colt. He hadn’t seen any other forms of life for nearly four months now, and wasn’t sure how to act around her.

He decided to bite the bullet.

“Hello?” he said when he was about ten feet away.

The woman let out a startled gasp and stood to run.

“Whoa, slow down lady, I’m not going to hurt you.”

She stopped, hesitating for a moment before she sat back down at the table. “Did I startle you? I’m sorry. I’m Lewis, by the way.”

The woman chewed her lip for a moment before answering, “I’m Anne.”

“Nice to meet you, Anne.”

“I’m sorry I started to run away from you,” she said. “It’s just that I’ve forgotten what other people are like. I thought I was the only one left.”

Lewis nodded. “I know. I thought the same thing until about five minutes ago.”

Anne went quiet for a moment before saying, “And then when I saw you, the first thing I thought about was how everyone started acting when things got really bad, near the end of May.” She trailed off, letting her gaze travel to a nearby storefront. The store was a wreck, a tangled jumble of broken glass and bent metal, all streaked with soot from the fire started by rioters. The rate for murders, rapes, and suicides, all jumped to match the levels from the previous year in a single month. The whole process sped up the gradual extinction of the human race immensely, and estimates from any of the news sources still operating at the time said that on that one night alone, over six million violent crimes were committed.

Lewis was silent for a moment, reliving that night in his own mind. He’d been at home when a man with a large bloodstain trailing down his shirt burst into his home, ransacking it. He lunged for the knife drawer first, withdrawing a large meat cleaver and promising to plant it in Lewis’ head if he tried to stop him. Lewis let the man do what he wanted, terrified the whole time, both by the man’s refusal to put the cleaver down and by the incoherent mumbling that he kept up for the whole time he was in Lewis’ home. Roughly every five minutes or so, he would heave a loud, watery sounding cough that would add to the bloodstain on the front of his shirt, and depositing a spattering of blood on the surface of Lewis’ kitchen counter.

Finally, after what felt like hours, the man left.

Lewis found him the next day, curled up under a bush no more than sixty feet from Lewis’ front step, still clutching the meat cleaver in one cold, stiff hand.

“How did you survive?” Anne asked, jarring him out of his thoughts.

“What do you mean? You mean that night?”

“No, just in general. I thought everyone else caught the bug but me.”

“I don’t know. I guess I have some sort of immunity to it.”

“Lucky you,” Anne said, a faint smile playing across her lips. “I’m surprised at you,” she said after a moment.

He looked confused for a moment, then said, “Why?”

“Most guys I know would have already tried to get me into bed by now, using the whole repopulate the earth thing.”

He smiled. “The thought did cross my mind. I was trying to think how best to approach the subject without seeming like an asshole.”

“Don’t worry. I don’t think the old rules apply any more.”

“Well, in that case, your place or mine?”

The faint smile returned, and she said, “I live a block away. Unless you’re closer, mine is fine.”

She walked up to him, smiling as she took his hand. “It’s not far.” They began to walk.

They had walked no more than twenty feet when when Anne began to cough.

Lewis froze, staring at her wide-eyed. No, that’s not true. He didn’t look at her so much as he looked at the fine misting of red that still hung in the air between them. He looked at the blood that landed on her shirt, and on his, the red as delicate as the speckles on a robin’s egg, and yet as damning as a fingerprint.

“I...” Lewis began, and then faltered.

Anne stared at the red spots, trembling, and then she laughed. “So much for repopulating the earth.”

The rest of their walk was silent, although Lewis thought he heard her sniffling every now and then. The empty city stared out at them.

When they got to Anne’s place, they made no attempt to do what they had set out to do. Instead, Anne crawled into bed fully dressed, patting a place on the bed next to her.

She said two words, and to Lewis they were the most pitiful words he had ever heard come out of anyone’s mouth.

“Hold me,” she said.

Lewis did.

In the morning, Lewis was unsurprised to find that her arms were cold around him, feeling less like arms and more like old seaweed, clinging to the side of a ship. He untangled himself from her arms gently, as though he didn’t want to wake her.

He walked back to his apartment in the pouring rain, feeling a grim satisfaction when he felt the first cough rising in his throat.