THE LAST WAKING A Story of Rybs

The first thing Rybs noticed was not the silence. It was the smell.

Not the antiseptic scrub of hospital corridors, not the rubber-wheeled squeaking of night nurses doing their rounds, not even the low electrical hum of machines measuring the precise distance between a man and his death. No. What filled his nostrils when his eyes opened was something older. Something the world had apparently decided to produce in his absence. Moss, maybe. Wet stone. The particular sweetness of rot that has gone so long unchallenged it has begun to smell almost like peace.

He lay still for a long time.

That is not a small thing. Most people, when they wake from something extraordinary, sit up immediately. They need to confirm the room, the ceiling, the edges of the ordinary world. Rybs did not move. He had always been the kind of man who understood that whatever you are lying in, you are safe until you stand. The moment you stand, you commit to whatever the world has prepared for you. And Rybs had learned, in the thin cold hours of every difficult night in his thirty-eight years, that the world rarely prepares anything comfortable.

So he breathed.

In. The moss and the rot and the ghost of something that may once have been coffee, long burned to cinder somewhere in a corridor he could not see.

Out. The slow mechanical wheeze of a man testing whether his lungs still remembered their job.

They did. Barely. But they did.

He turned his head. This was his concession to consciousness. Just the head, the neck, the slow revolution of bones that had been pointing at a ceiling for God knows how long. He noticed the IV line first, still attached to his left arm, the bag long since empty, deflated like a small plastic ghost. The monitor beside his bed had gone dark. Not switched off, not in standby. Dark in the way that means the power that fed it no longer exists anywhere nearby. The green diode that had presumably blinked his heartbeat at someone who cared was simply gone. An eye closed permanently.

He looked at the window.

The window told him everything and explained nothing.

Where there had been a car park, he remembered a car park, at some point before whatever had happened to him, a grey square of tarmac with a broken parking ticket machine tilted at a drunk angle, there was now a forest. Not a large forest. Not an ancient one. But a forest all the same, definite and unapologetic, birch trees threading upward through cracked concrete, their white bark catching a grey afternoon light with the casual indifference of things that have been growing without permission and simply decided not to stop.

Rybs closed his eyes again.

He counted to ten.

He opened them.

The forest was still there.

Getting out of the bed was the work of about twenty minutes. His legs had forgotten themselves completely. The muscles had atrophied to a point that would have alarmed a physiotherapist, had there been a physiotherapist to alarm. His right knee clicked in a way he did not remember it clicking before. His feet, when they finally found the linoleum floor, felt the cold of it like a news bulletin, sharp, immediate, undeniable. He stood. He did not fall. He considered this a small victory, and Rybs had learned long ago to celebrate small victories because the large ones had a habit of never arriving.

He was still wearing the hospital gown. The ridiculous, open-backed, dignity-destroying hospital gown. The thought crossed his mind that he was perhaps the only person left on earth wearing one of these, and the thought carried a flavour he could not name. Not quite funny. Not quite tragic. Something in between, like a joke told at a funeral by someone who genuinely means well.

He shuffled to the window.

Up close, the forest was even more insistent. Three or four years of growth, he guessed, though he was no botanist. The birch trees had pushed through the tarmac where the cracks already existed, exploiting weaknesses the way life always does, not with force, but with patience. With the quiet, geological patience of things that have nowhere else to be. Ivy had colonized the outer wall of the hospital. A crow sat on the windowsill for precisely three seconds, regarded him with the professional detachment of something that has seen a great deal of death and has made its adjustments, then departed.

Rybs pressed his palm flat against the glass.

The glass was cold. Below, in the ruined car park, a fox was picking through something in what had been a vehicle, the skeletal remains of a hatchback, the orange rust of its body eaten to lace. The fox looked up. It did not run. It simply looked at him with amber eyes and continued whatever it was doing. It had clearly never been given reason to fear a man. The concept had not been necessary in its lifetime.

That told Rybs something. That told Rybs quite a lot.

He stood at the window for a long time.

He was trying to feel something specific. Grief, perhaps. Or terror. The appropriate, proportionate human response to the apparent end of everything. But what came instead was something quieter. Something that felt uncomfortably like the lifting of a weight he had forgotten he was carrying. Which was a terrible thing to feel. He knew it was terrible. He filed it away in the part of himself labelled examine later, do not trust yet.

He turned back to the ward.

There were other beds. Seven of them, arranged in the standard ward configuration he vaguely remembered from the weeks or months before his whatever-it-was. He did not know what had been wrong with him. He remembered pain. He remembered a doctor with kind eyes and terrible news. He remembered the IV going in and a ceiling tile with a water stain that looked, if you tilted your head, a little like a running dog. He had stared at that water stain a great deal. It had been a comfort, in its way. The running dog going nowhere, outlined in old damp, suspended mid-stride for eternity.

The other beds were empty. Had been empty, he thought, for a very long time. The sheets had the grey, ossified quality of fabric that has not been touched in years. Dust had settled in the folds. One bed had been stripped entirely, the mattress bare and spotted with a brown stain whose origin he did not investigate.

On the floor near the nurses' station, he found a phone. A smartphone, the screen cracked, the battery presumably long dead. He picked it up, turned it over in his hands. The case had a sticker on the back, a small cartoon animal, a bear with enormous eyes, the kind of thing a younger person puts on their phone to make the world slightly more bearable. He looked at it for a long time. Whoever had put that sticker there had wanted something from the world. A small friendly thing at the edge of vision. A reminder that it was possible to find things pleasing.

He set the phone down carefully. As if it were something fragile. As if someone were coming back for it.

He knew no one was coming back for it.

That was when he felt it, finally. Not grief, exactly. Not the hot, specific grief of losing a person you can name. Something colder and larger. The grief of totality. The grief of a world. It arrived in his chest like weather, the kind of weather that does not announce itself, that you simply look up and find has arrived while you were attending to other things.

He sat down on the floor of the nurses' station, on the cold linoleum, in his ridiculous open-backed gown, and he breathed until it passed.

It passed.

Most things pass. This is either the most comforting or the most desolating fact in the universe, depending on the day.

Rybs was not, by nature, a man who panicked. This had served him poorly in social situations throughout his adult life, people had often mistaken his stillness for coldness, his calmness for indifference. He had lost at least two relationships to this misreading. Possibly three, if he counted the one that had never been formally declared a relationship at all but had nevertheless ended in the particular silence that is worse than any argument.

What he was, beneath the stillness, was a man who made lists.

Not on paper, necessarily. In his head. The quiet, methodical cataloguing of available resources, immediate problems, logical next steps. He had done it as a child when his father's anger had filled the small flat on the estate like a tide coming in. He had done it through his years of greyish employment in offices whose purposes he had never found entirely convincing, through the hospital weeks that had ended here, wherever here now was.

He made a list now.

What he knew: he was alive, and this was the primary fact and it deserved first position. He was in a hospital that had been abandoned for what appeared to be several years based on the vegetation, the dust, the state of the equipment. He appeared to be alone, not alone in the way you are alone in a building when everyone is elsewhere, but alone in the deeper sense, the sense the fox had communicated, the sense the empty car park communicated, the sense the crow had communicated before it left without looking back. He was wearing a hospital gown and his legs were unreliable. He was, despite all of this, breathing. And breathing was the beginning of everything.

He started with clothes, because the hospital gown was not a garment for exploring the end of the world, and because finding clothes was a concrete problem with a concrete solution. He moved through the ward slowly, testing his legs with each step, letting the muscles remember themselves. Down the corridor. Past the nurses' station. Past a door that had been propped open with a fire extinguisher and had been propped that way for long enough that the extinguisher had been half-swallowed by the sill's slow rot.

The staff room was further along. He found it by memory and by the vestigial smell of a thousand stewed teas. The lockers inside were mostly unlocked. He found a set of scrubs, blue, his size approximately, and a pair of trainers that were slightly too large but that laced up tight enough to function. He found a fleece jacket with a logo he didn't recognise, a tech company with an optimistic name, defunct now presumably, its optimism converted into archaeological evidence. He put everything on.

Standing in the mirror above the staff room sink, he looked at himself for the first time.

He was thinner. Significantly thinner. His face had the hollowed, architectural quality of someone who has been fed by a drip for an extended period. His beard had grown substantially, not long, but present, giving him the look of a man who has made certain decisions about the world or alternatively a man who has had those decisions made for him. His eyes were the same. Dark, still, with that particular quality that people had sometimes described as deep and sometimes described as difficult, and that amounted to the same thing.

He looked like a man who had missed something important.

He cupped water from the tap. The tap worked. He stared at it as the water ran over his hands, the particular, banal miracle of running water in a building that everything else had abandoned. Some residual pressure in the system, perhaps. A tank somewhere on the roof, full of the last rain that no one had been alive to turn off. He drank. It tasted of metal and time. He drank more.

In the pharmacy, secured behind a locked door that gave way with a fire extinguisher applied methodically to the hinges, he found antibiotics, painkillers, bandages, antiseptic. He found antidepressants, great quantities of them, and thought something sideways and unkind about the world that had existed before whatever this was. In the hospital canteen, the food was long gone, consumed by time and by whatever microorganisms had found their way in after the refrigeration stopped. But he found tinned goods in a supply cupboard. Beans, mostly. Some sweetcorn. Three tins of peaches, which felt, in that moment, like a small impossible luxury. He found a box of crackers that had been sealed in plastic wrap and were still, technically, edible.

He sat at a canteen table and ate peaches from a tin, using a fork he found in a drawer.

The light through the canteen windows was declining. Late afternoon. The quality of it was extraordinary, he noticed, a clean, unobstructed gold, the kind of light you only see in paintings or in real places that have been stripped of pollution. No exhaust fumes. No particulate matter. Just light doing what light does when nothing gets in the way.

He watched it move across the wall and thought about what he knew.

He knew about the virus that had been coming. He had heard about it in the weeks before his hospitalisation, in the peripheral way you hear about approaching catastrophes when you are preoccupied with your own smaller, more personal catastrophe. There had been reports. Scientists on news programmes speaking with the particular controlled urgency of people who know more than they are being permitted to say. Something about neural networks. Not the technological kind. The biological kind. Something moving through the pathways of human consciousness itself, as if thought were a vector, as if the very act of being aware could carry the thing from mind to mind.

The consciousness virus, someone had called it, on a late-night programme he had half-watched from this same bed.

He had thought, at the time, that it sounded like science fiction. He had changed the channel.

He looked at the empty canteen. At the chairs still pulled out from tables, as if their occupants had simply stood up and walked away mid-meal. One tray still on a table near the window, the food on it reduced to something brown and unrecognisable.

He reconsidered his earlier assessment of whether it sounded like science fiction.

He slept in the hospital that first night, in his own ward bed because it was the only bed whose sheets he trusted and because there was nowhere else that made sense. He had found a candle in the staff room drawer alongside a lighter. He burned it for an hour, sitting up in bed, listening to the building.

A building empty of people is not silent. It has its own vocabulary. The groan of contracting metal as the temperature dropped. The small percussion of something, a pigeon, he thought, roosting in the upper floors. The wind through a broken window somewhere, its pitch varying as the air pressure changed. The building was speaking. Rybs, who had always been better at listening than at talking, listened.

He could not sleep for a long time. Not because he was afraid, exactly, but because sleep felt like a reckless thing to do in a world this unpredictable. Every time he closed his eyes, his mind drew maps. Of the hospital. Of what lay beyond the hospital. Of what he remembered of the streets outside, last seen from a window on his way into the ambulance, the ordinary busy streets of an ordinary busy city, and what those streets might look like now, after three years, or four, or however long the birch trees in the car park suggested.

Eventually, though, the body is not a philosophical instrument. The body is a machine that requires maintenance, and one of its maintenance requirements is sleep, regardless of what the world is doing outside. He slept.

He dreamed of people. Not specific people, mostly, just crowds. The particular density of human beings in motion, the accidental music of it, footsteps and conversations and engines and all the thousand small sounds that you never notice until you are asleep in an empty hospital trying to remember what the world used to sound like.

He woke in the dark, heart beating with unremarkable steadiness, the candle long burned out. He lay still until the grey pre-dawn light was enough to see by. Then he got up, drank water from the tap again, ate crackers, and began making proper plans.

The world outside the hospital was worse than the window had suggested. Better in some ways. Worse in others.

He had found a bicycle in the basement car park, a mountain bike, padlocked to a railing, the padlock yielded to a wrench he found in a maintenance cupboard. The tyres were flat but not split. He pumped them using a hand pump from the same cupboard, which worked with the cheerful indifference of things that have no opinions about what has happened and no feelings about being pressed back into service.

He rode out through the car park entrance and onto the road.

The road was alive.

This is not a metaphor, or not only a metaphor. The tarmac was cracked everywhere, every crack a green tendril, the whole surface softening into something in between road and meadow. Saplings, small but determined, pushed upward from the deeper fissures. The kerbs were invisible under grass and wildflower. He passed a postbox, still standing, still red, impossibly festive against the green, a climbing plant twisting up its flank. He passed the wreck of a bus, pulled to the stop as if the driver had followed protocol to the last, its windows opaque with grime, its flanks decorated with the first stages of becoming something natural.

He rode slowly. His legs were weak and the road was uneven and he was absorbing so much that going faster would have been a kind of waste.

There was no one.

He rode for two kilometres, through streets he did not know and streets he thought he might half-know, and there was no one. Not in the sense of an empty afternoon, not that particular urban emptiness that feels temporary, that carries the implicit assurance that people are elsewhere and will return. This was a different emptiness. Categorical. Complete. The kind of emptiness that has had time to settle into itself and become something structural. The absence was not a gap. It was a presence of its own.

He stopped outside what had been a supermarket. The automatic doors, lacking power, stood permanently open, their rubber edges colonised by a slender moss. Inside, the light was the underwater light of a greenhouse, filtered green through the film of vegetation on the skylights. The shelves were in various states of entropy, some still upright, some collapsed, some sort of dissolving at the edges into the general conversation between structure and nature that was happening everywhere he looked.

He walked the aisles in the green light. Found tinned goods here too, more of them, enough to last him a very long time if he chose to stay in this city. Enough to last one person a very long time. He stood in the middle of the tinned goods aisle and did the arithmetic he had been avoiding since the car park. One person. Enough for one person. There was no calculation that involved more than one person, because more than one person required the existence of more than one person, and the evidence available to him at this moment suggested that this was not the arithmetic the world was currently offering.

He took what he could carry in the supermarket's reusable bags and went back to his bicycle.

He sat on it for a moment before setting off. Not resting. Just sitting. Giving himself the space to feel the full strange weight of the morning.

I am here, he thought. Not triumphantly. Just factually. In the manner of a man completing an inventory. I am here and the world is here and neither of us knows yet what to do with the other.

A butterfly, something orange and black, a tortoiseshell, he thought, though he had never been a man who knew his butterflies, crossed in front of him and disappeared into the green wreckage of what had been a florist's shop. The flowers it now contained had nothing to do with commerce. They had simply happened, year after year, the seeds of whatever had been sold there taking root in the floor, in the soil that had gathered in the corners, growing without instruction, without audience, without reason except the reason that flowers have always had, which is to say no reason at all and the most fundamental reason imaginable simultaneously.

He watched the place where the butterfly had gone until he could no longer see it.

Then he rode home. Back to the hospital. Back to the crackers and the tinned peaches and the candle stub and the bed with the clean-enough sheets.

Because even the last man on earth needs somewhere to sleep. And even the last man on earth, in the particular, peculiar silence of an afternoon at the end of everything, knows that tomorrow will require him to be rested.

He was Rybs. He had always been the man who survived the thing he had no business surviving.

He pedalled home through the green cathedral of the abandoned city, and above him the sky was an unconscionable blue, and somewhere behind him, he was almost certain, almost entirely certain, the butterfly had found something worth landing on.