My Only Friend, the End by Steven Owad

I spent the next two days nursing a chill fever and watching the fires engulf pockets of the city—more slowly than you might expect, with prodigious walls of steam wherever fire met the Missouri floodwaters. Despite the vivid show, there was something anticlimactic about the way the town died so gradually after everyone in it had died so fast.

The amoxicillin and painkillers aided the convalescence, but they did nothing for my mental health. Whether awake or asleep, I obsessed over my wife and son. I also immersed myself in a sea of questions that had no answers, questions that begat other questions, borne of illness of the body and mind. Some of the more obvious ones:

What to do now? Go find survivors? Stay here and make sure I’m visible when the National Guard comes?

Some were darker: Did Ronnie and Evan suffer, or did everyone everywhere really drop dead at the same time?

The biggest question of all, which I asked myself every few minutes: What the hell happened?

And that question’s obvious cousin: Why didn’t it happen to me?

A fact that ruled out positive answers: No rescuers had come to the aid of the 60,000 souls of Great Falls, Montana. This, combined with the death of all radio signals from near and far, told me this plague or, I don’t know, supercharged virus or whatever had a potentially planet-wide scope. But since I was alive, other people were alive too, right? At the very least another skydiver. A deep-sea diver. Someone who was immune to this … to this what? Was it a virus? Bioterrorism? How could it kill the people on the ground and the people in my plane but spare me? Did my high-speed fall—115 miles per hour—was that what saved me? My unique movement within a certain pocket of air pressure shielded me from a blast from an otherwise apocalyptic pathogen or radiation pulse or microwave beam? If so, were other jumpers still breathing? Or climbers up on Everest? How about miners and spelunkers and sailors in submarines? I couldn’t be the only one left.