Chapter Text
Pim would always remember that the world ended, or at least began to end, on a Tuesday afternoon.
"I knew something like this would happen," he said to no one in particular while the TV blared.
Allan stood nearby, hand picking anxiously at the table, and Charlie sat beside him, silent. Glep had vanished into the hallway the moment the headline appeared on the TV screen.
They were calling it critter sickness: a mildly cute and unassuming name. Critters were the main carriers, but the disease was most dangerous to humans, the woman on the TV explained.
"Something like what? It's just some new virus, dude, not the next plague," Charlie retorted, and pulled out his phone to Google-search "Critter sickness". Pim continued to watch the TV.
The anchorwoman held a feigned countenance of indifference-- which, Pim had come to believe over the years of dealing with people who were only pretending to be all right, was a foolproof indicator that something was terribly wrong.
It was something unspoken, something that Charlie and Allan didn't seem to be picking up on.
Pim stood. He was hit with the overwhelming feeling that he should start moving, despite how paranoid it seemed.
He thought of the canned food and supplies stashed away in his closet, collected over several years with help from his friends Bill, Fillmore, and Duncan. Things he hadn't told Charlie about, because he knew Charlie would laugh in his face.
Charlie watched the TV even though the anchorwoman was simply repeating what had already been said. He looked perplexed but not entirely concerned with the ordeal.
Even if this wasn't what it looked like-- if the critter sickness would be obsolete in a few weeks, or revealed as a hoax to scare the general public-- it was better to be safe than sorry, right? Pim thought so.
"Charlie," he said, and Charlie gave him a disbelieving look. After deeming their conversation one that Allan and Glep would be better off not hearing, Pim motioned towards the hallway.
Charlie looked down at him, as unreadable as ever. Pim was hit with the abrupt urge to grab him by the shoulders and shake him.
You aren't getting it, he imagined himself saying. You can't minimize this. It's more serious than you know.
But how did Pim know that? Who was he to say whether critter sickness would be akin to a common cold or the next global plague? He knew just as little as Charlie, really-- so he refrained from indicating otherwise.
"Charlie, this isn't going to be good," Pim began once they were out of earshot. Charlie narrowed his eyes.
"What are you talking about?"
"The critter sickness. Did you hear the way she talked about it?"
"You're being paranoid, man."
"It's--"
"-- no, I'll tell you what this, okay? This isn't real. It's, like, fear-mongering, that's what it is." Pim huffed and pressed his palms to his face.
"Fear mongering," he echoed. His voice had gotten strained, and a little higher in pitch than normal. "Charlie, could you please just hear me out?"
"No. You're freaking out, Pim. You've done this before-- more than once. You... several times, actually," Charlie scoffed. Pim grimaced, though he tried not to. Why wouldn't Charlie listen?
Pim always listened to Charlie. He listened to what Charlie said if he already knew it, or if it made as much sense as an opinion formulated by a toddler.
It didn't matter because Charlie was his friend, and he deserved to be heard. Don't I deserve the same? Pim thought.
"Stop it. You're not listening. I haven't ever told you about it, but I've been collecting canned food and blankets and..."
He trailed off when he saw the look Charlie was giving him. An incredulous, almost appalled stare.
In the terrible stretch of silence, Pim looked down at the floor.
On the tile was a semi-opaque splatter of brown: coffee? Dried blood? Pim couldn't tell. For all he knew it could be shit, or animal guts-- a source as hopeless as he felt.
"You think I'm crazy," Pim said quietly, and Charlie's gaze softened.
"I didn't say that."
"But you wanted to say it, didn't you?"
"You're-- I didn't... you're putting words into my mouth, dude. This is bullshit."
"Charlie."
"Can we just drop it? It's not that big of a deal: it's like thinking flu season is Armageddon."
Pim stared at the floor, not sure if he could look Charlie in the eye at that moment.
He understood the reaction, really. Pim was being irrational. But why couldn't Charlie go along with him even when he wasn't logical?
"Okay."
And they went about their day as usual.
Well, not exactly as usual. Pim was uncharacteristically silent for the most part, and Charlie was sullen. They didn't really talk to one another: only little mumbles, all work-related.
Maybe Charlie was right. Maybe critter sickness would pass over them all like a light, friendly cloud. Things would be okay. They always were.
But on the other hand, what if it all crashed down in swift, swooping motions like every dystopian novelist described?
What would Pim do? If the grocery stores closed down, the highways got roped off, and the overhead powerlines severed, would Pim be ready?
Probably not. I should buy batteries, he thought. A lot of batteries. Surely it couldn't hurt to be cautious, even if it bled a little into paranoia.
It wasn't until late in the night, when a darkness dull from smog had enveloped the city and one or two lights-- satellites or stars, it couldn't be distinguished-- had appeared in the sky that Pim decided to call Charlie.
Five rings until Charlie picked up. Less than usual, Pim thought with minor inexplicable unease. He sat on the sofa.
The only light in the room was painfully bright and came from his TV, which played the nightly news. The anchorman talked about critter sickness, just as the anchorwoman did hours before.
Pim had to take that as a sign, didn't he?
"Yeah," said Charlie on the other end of the cell phone. The response brought Pim a little comfort: the world might be sick and worsening by the moment, but Charlie would remain the same. Unchanging, and therefore immortal in Pim's mind.
"Are you watching the news?"
"It's on."
"A hundred and thirty two cases in the past week," Pim read aloud from the TV.
"That's not a lot. For the whole U.S., I mean."
"But it's exponential, Charlie," he countered. "A hundred and thirty two in a week means, I don't know, five hundred cases in two weeks."
"Are you okay, dude?"
Pim was quiet for a moment.
"What do you mean?" he eventually asked.
"You're not normally this pessimistic."
"Charlie, I'm not..."
"You know what I think? I think you have two options here. Two things you can do."
Pim waited for him to go on. He could hear Charlie sigh softly through the phone.
"You can keep panicking and drive yourself crazy by prepping for a nonexistent doomsday," Charlie said, "or you can come over and have a few beers with me. Calm yourself down."
Pim looked at the TV and felt his stomach twist. He thought he was going to be sick.
Why couldn't he be calm about it? Why couldn't he, for once, act normal?
It was like Charlie already knew what he was going to say.
"I'm sorry," Pim whispered. "Charlie, I'm sorry." Charlie exhaled gently, regretfully.
"Come talk to me when you're ready to be reasonable about this," Charlie said before promptly hanging up the phone.
Pim looked at the phone screen, the only sounds in his apartment are the blare of commercials. The only thought in his mind: what now?
The calendar that hung in the kitchen read July 15th. It was a hot, balmy night-- the kind that would have gladly been spent with friends around a bonfire if not for the hellfire of the streets, if not for the fact that the world was tearing at its seams.
Pim wasn’t exactly sure that the calendar was accurate. He had left the city thirty-seven days ago, but there was always some anxious thought in the back of his mind that maybe-- just maybe-- he had counted wrong. It was an irrational fear, and it wasn’t as if it mattered, but he felt it was essential to keep track of the days.
It was essential, he thought, in order to keep some sense of routine and therefore sanity.
He thought that he should probably ask Bill. Bill would know what day it was, he assured himself.
Bill knew a lot of things: he was closer to the east coast, closer to where bodies burned in streets and humans campaigned, all seeming to be in agreement, about how the uninfected critters should be shipped out of the country and how the infected ones should be sent to abandoned hospitals.
They called them "containment facilities", Bill had told him. To "keep everyone safe". He'd recited the words from a politician in his area with a simultaneously disgusted and terrified tone of voice.
He wondered if Bill was ever afraid to be so close to it all. If, now that the world was so sick and wanted nothing more than to hurt him, Bill was in danger.
Pim had thought about that enough, and it would do him no use to think about it again. He looked down at his radio.
It was an ugly, hefty black box with wires and a little LED screen that he had gotten from a yard sale. At night, the screen would shine a dim light and flash numbers. Pim wasn’t too educated on how it worked-- Dave had showed him the basics.
Very rudimentary things, like what knobs not to mess with, how to fix the volume, and how to go about muting and unmuting the little microphone. It made him feel like he was driving a semi-truck.
He watched it now. It had a tiny red light that sat on top of its antenna. It blinked at him in intermittent bursts. Bill said it had something to do with how busy the line was, but he hadn’t retained that part of his explanation.
God, it was so quiet. Way too quiet for his liking. He wished the radio would crackle to life, so that he could hear Fillmore talk about his theory that critter sickness was a lab-created virus made to get critters and people away from one another.
Or maybe he could hear Bill talking about when the next raid would be moving to comb through the area. Heck, he’d be fine if he heard Duncan simply munching on whatever snack he had decided was going to be his dinner.
Pim had been held up in his father’s vacation cabin for thirty-six-- no, thirty-five? Thirty-seven days.
It was a cozy little place that sat right on a lakeside. Around 10 miles west was a highway blocked by a thick forest of red maples and flowering dogwoods. His Dad used to come here on weekends to fish and get drunk.
He’d never shared the latter part with Pim, but the colossal amount of whiskey bottles and beer cans was enough to give him at least some idea of what his father used to do here.
On nights like tonight, Pim was glad he picked up a small solar-powered generator before he left. If his box fan wasn’t working, he was sure he would have melted into the floorboards by now. The only thing plugged into the generator at the moment was that fan, so he was sure it would last until the morning.
Pim was lonely out in the cabin. He had prepared months' worth of canned goods, as many books as he could fit into his small car, and countless batteries for his old Gameboy Color.
But he didn’t bring a companion, and that’s what he found himself wanting more than anything.
Pim sat in his sofa, trading his attention between a book about mushrooms and Donkey Kong Country. He had his window open, his blinds drawn, and his fan whirring.
He wasn’t exactly content-- but not unhappy either. It could only be described as melancholic. And Pim found himself wishing for some thing to happen.
And, after two hours of relative silence, his wish was granted. For better or for worse.
He could hear it, whatever it was, before he saw it. It was rhythmic crunching of twigs and leaves-- footsteps. They had to be footsteps.
Something was coming for him.
What if they were armed?
What if it was one of those scouting groups, sent to round up critters and lock them in facilities so that they couldn't infect humans? Could they somehow have slipped past Bill’s radar? Or what if it was someone-- no, something-- worse?
His father had taught him how to shoot when he was young-- around the age of eight or nine. Apparently, it was supposed to help him "become a real man," but he didn’t see how shooting clay disks over a lake would make him a man.
That was behind him now, and despite everything, he had to do what his father had taught him.
The shotgun was his father’s. It was leaning against the doorframe of his bedroom, which was where it had been when he first showed up. It sat there collecting dust for the first eight days of his visit.
It wasn’t until Filmore had gone on a rambling tirade about how important it was to protect oneself from the ‘bloodthirsty jaws of death’ that Pim took it apart and cleaned it. He hadn’t even shot it yet-- he was far too worried it would draw unwanted attention to himself.
Plus, he really had no need for shooting things. Plenty of canned peaches and oatmeal to keep him satisfied.
But now he had to do something. So, he shakily picked it up, slid two bullets into the chamber, and swallowed as he turned the safety off. Silently, he pushed aside the blinds and took aim.
“Breathe. It’s not going to bite you, son," h is father had told him nearly twenty years ago.
Instead of being holed up in this cabin, he was at the lake. It was a summer day, and he was watching his father point at the clay disk that slowly decanted toward the water. With guiding hands, he corrected Pim’s hand placement. Then he moved his hand to his shoulder, giving it a soft squeeze.
"Don’t tense your shoulder, don’t flinch. Aim. Then squeeze.”
It felt like his arm was going to fall off. The recoil on this thing was always his second to least favorite part because he had a bruise on his shoulder for the week afterward. It wasn’t as bad as he had remembered, but it still felt wrong. And the sheer volume of it. It made his ears ring.
It made his ears ring so much that he almost didn’t hear the scream.
A very familiar scream.
He had to have been hearing things. Maybe the isolation had caused him to have an auditory hallucination-- maybe he was going crazy. But the scream continued, and it was loud.
It sounded like Charlie.
Pulling back the blinds and squinting, he could make out a blobby form hunched over in the dirt and detritus. Immediately he thought he recognized it, and the sight made Pim want to throw up.
Okay-- there had to be a correct order to do things. What if Charlie had been bitten? Could he really just go out there and...
No. He couldn’t think about that yet. He had to do one thing at a time. So, he shouldered his shotgun and unlocked his front door. Just like any other time you go out, he told himself.
During the day, the forest wasn’t all too scary. Sure, he would occasionally worry about bears and bobcats while fishing on the lake, but the majority of those fears were unfounded. But at night, everything had a hauntingly hostile air about it.
Normally he would have found comfort in the chirping of crickets and the soft howl of the wind. Now, it felt like everything was his enemy.
Pim ducked behind bushes and trees as he made his way toward whatever he had shot, and his mind was racing with worry. What if it wasn’t Charlie-- what if it was just some kind of decoy meant to lure him away from his house? Or, worse-- what if it was Charlie?
"Charlie," Pim called out with a tentative step forward. Charlie was splayed on the ground, a flailing canary starfish before him, and after a moment Pim realized that he might be too close.
After all, he still didn't know if this was the Charlie he knew. Even if it was: there could be humans in the bushes waiting for Pim to drop his guard, to take the bait. He scanned his surroundings and saw nothing. Nothing that you can see.
He gave Charlie's side a nudge with his foot-- not a kick, simply a test.
After a few more attempts at scrambling to his feet, Charlie looked up. When he saw that it was Pim, he let out a shaky laugh. But his smile quickly dropped into a scowl.
"Pim, fuck, man! Did you just shoot me?"
So it was Charlie. Not a zombie, not somebody who looked like Charlie. And despite the profuse bleeding in his leg, he looked relatively okay, Pim thought. Wait-- oh, Christ-- he's bleeding.
"Charlie, I shot you," he said, stunned. His arms hung slack at his sides and he blinked rapidly. This all felt like a scene in a twisted comedy play: enter Charlie, enter Pim, cue an aside to express the irony.
"Oh, you did? I didn't-- ugh-- fucking notice!” he hissed, crumpled inward and clutching his leg with both hands.
"Charlie--"
"--why," he groaned, "why did you shoot me, dude??"
"I didn't... I didn't think it was you," Pim stammered.
"Who else would it be? Jesus."
Pim knelt in the tall grass beside him and gently put an arm on Charlie's side; he winced into fetal position, akin to a frightened insect upon being prodded.
His attention turned to the leg wound. The blood was black under the moonlight, and as Pim felt around the entry wound in Charlie's thigh, his hands darkened as well.
"Shit, ow!" Charlie yelped.
"Sorry. I can't see."
Charlie gazed up at him, his expression blank and his eyes glinting. Pim held his gaze for a while-- he listened to the crickets and the frogs and the hiss of all the insects, performing as one dissonant orchestra.
Above all, he listened to Charlie's shallow breathing.
Was it relief he felt that Charlie was alive and laying in front of him? He couldn't tell.
"Okay, uh," Pim whispered, "let's-- I'm going to take you inside, okay? It's not safe out here at night." Charlie kept staring, but then he nodded.
Pim bit the end of his tongue. How was he going to get Charlie to the house? He certainly couldn't carry him, much less for a quarter-mile.
"How do we do this?" he muttered mostly to himself. Charlie shrugged.
"I don't know, man, I've never been shot in the leg by my best friend," he grumbled. "At least not until just now."
Pim chose to ignore that. Instead, he attempted to push Charlie upwards.
"I'll help you walk. We just-- we've got to get inside so I can stop the bleeding," Pim said. He half-expected Charlie to make a snide remark about this, too, but he didn't.
Pim did his best to guide Charlie through the bug-filled grass and up to the porch of the house. A few times Charlie stumbled and nearly knocked Pim over, but by some miracle they managed to keep themselves upright until they reached the porch.
Pim, still keeping one arm around Charlie, reached to unlock the front door.
"You locked your front door?"
"Somebody could have gotten in." Charlie laughed quietly and a bit mockingly at the remark.
"Holy shit, man, you're still paranoid," he said. Pim glared at Charlie over his shoulder.
"No. I'm right."
"Whatever." A disbelieving scoff.
"Charlie, I'm trying to help you. I get you're in pain," Pim sighed, "but could you stop that?"
Charlie said nothing, and Pim helped him into the house to sit him down on the sofa. Pim hurriedly clicked the LED lamp on. As he fished in his kitchen drawers for a first-aid kit, Charlie leaned into the cushion of the couch.
His left leg hung off of the end of the cushion-- the blood dripped onto a ratty towel that Pim had laid out. He still hadn't bandaged the wound, though he probably should have.
"God, I could go for some beer right now. You know, just to think about anything other than the bullet in my leg," he said, and Pim held back an eye-roll.
He found the first-aid kit-- finally-- and slammed the drawer shut once he'd grabbed the box.
"There's no bullet in your leg. I checked for it and didn't feel anything."
"I don't feel anything either. Actually, it's uh... I think it's going numb," Charlie responded with a gesture to his thigh.
Pim knelt in front of the sofa with a rag in his hand. First I have to clean the wound, he instructed himself. Basic priority.
"Umm. I have to take off your pants, Charlie," Pim murmured. Charlie turned to gawk at him.
"What?"
"To take care of the wound." Charlie looked like he was considering it, but before he could say anything Pim started to unbutton his jeans a little frantically.
"Woah, dude, what the hell?" Charlie jerked away, flinching when he moved his thigh.
"You're bleeding, I have to patch up the wound before you-- I don't know, before you pass out," Pim snapped. Don't panic, he inwardly told himself, but truthfully he already was panicking. Okay: then you need to stop panicking.
Pim inhaled.
"Okay. Pants are coming off now." Charlie didn't argue any further, nor did he pull away, when Pim tugged his pants down to his ankles and felt the wound with his hand again.
Still nothing that felt like it shouldn't be there; nothing he had to carefully remove from Charlie as though he were the man in an Operation board game.
"The antiseptic hurts," he said to Charlie. He got a hum as a reply: Charlie gave a sort of determined look to the ceiling while Pim scrubbed lightly at the wound.
With the rag in one hand and the antiseptic bottle in the other, he poured some onto Charlie's leg-- which was met with a pained yelp.
Pim dug in the first-aid kit for the gauze patch, and then the bandages. He held the gauze patch in place and saw it saturate with deep red. As fast as he could, he wrapped the bandages tight around Charlie's leg.
"Does that feel okay?"
"What, the hole in my leg where you shot me?" Pim huffed and squinted at Charlie as if to say "really?".
"The bandages."
"They feel okay."
"Good."
They sat in the dim light of the lamp for a while, studying one another. Charlie, with his dirt-streaked sweater and somewhat bloodied boxers, and Pim, with his own bloody hands and grass-stained knees.
Pim wanted to cry. It was Charlie, not sick or vanished or fatally wounded, sitting before him.
And if Charlie was here, there was still some hope in his life aside from the messages from Fillmore and Duncan and Bill on the radio.
This was tangible hope, one that he could see. And it meant that, unless Charlie chose to leave, Pim wasn't alone anymore.
"You're going to be okay," Pim said, and Charlie didn't seem to realize that he was saying it to himself.