Chapter Text
The end of the world had arrived, and Jimmy, with his fifteen years weighing on him like a lead slab, didn't have the faintest idea how it had happened. The question, as vast as it was terrifying, echoed in his head with a hollow ring: Were they zombies? The word, taken from video games and B-movies, felt both familiar and profoundly inadequate. He couldn't be sure. The only thing his eyes, brimming with a primal panic, could register were the hordes. Waves of people, or what were once people, running, stumbling, moving with a mechanical and unhinged urgency. And their eyes... those were the indelible stamp of the horror. There was no life in them, no rage, no evil. They were simply extinguished, veiled, as if thick, gray clouds had settled permanently over their retinas, erasing any glimpse of humanity. They were windows to an empty interior, and looking at them sent a chill that froze him to the bone.
Jimmy was no hero. Barely a teenager, cataloged by a weary system as a "problem child." Just when the first screams tore through the afternoon, he wasn't in class. He had skipped again, wandering aimlessly through the streets of a city that had always felt hostile to him. His appearance was proof of his rootlessness. His blond hair, once perhaps well-kept, was now crudely and unevenly shaved. A physical reminder of a minor domestic drama that, in retrospect, seemed absurdly trivial. His mother, exasperated, had refused to give him money for the barber. In a fit of rage and rebellion, Jimmy had taken the clippers from the bathroom and solved the problem himself, leaving his scalp riddled with small cuts and uneven patches. That had been months ago, just before she, with her new husband, had abandoned him at the Bullworth boarding school with a vague promise to return soon and a kiss on the forehead that tasted like goodbye. Since then, the phone never rang, and Jimmy heard nothing more from her. The silence was his only inheritance.
The cataclysm began with a symphony of terror. It wasn't a single sound, but a cacophony assembled in a matter of seconds. Screams, the kind that don't come from fright, but from pure horror, from visceral pain. Then, the explosions. They weren't distant; they rumbled in the belly of the city, making shop windows shake and sending ripples through the asphalt. Jimmy, driven by an animal instinct for survival, didn't think twice. With a desperate movement, he lifted the heavy, stinking lid of a garbage bin that reeked of rot and the remnants of a life that no longer existed, and threw himself inside. The cold, damp metal struck his ribs. The darkness was almost total, only filtered through the cracks in the lid. There, curled up among torn bags and waste, the outside world became an auditory nightmare. Gunshots rang out, close, dry, impersonal. Each one was a whip-crack that made him flinch. And between the bursts, came the pleas and the shrieks, sounds no human should ever make, which spoke of an agony Jimmy couldn't even imagine. Fear had paralyzed him, turning him into a trembling ball in the fetid bowels of the city.
He didn't know how much time had passed. Time lost its measure, dissolved into a thick soup of pure terror. It could have been minutes, compressed into an eternity of anguish, or hours that slipped by like seconds in his state of shock. Until, suddenly, silence came. Not a peaceful silence, but a heavy, oppressive one, laden with a latent threat. It was the silence that follows a massacre, an acoustic void that was more terrifying than the sounds of the battle itself. With a caution that tensed every muscle, Jimmy pushed the lid of the container and peeked out.
The air that greeted him was tainted with a metallic, sweetish smell that turned his stomach: the smell of blood. A lot of blood. They weren't isolated puddles, but a sticky, dark blanket covering the sidewalks and the road, gleaming with a sinister light under the leaden sky. And the bodies. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, lay scattered, frozen in grotesque and unnatural poses. They weren't people, not anymore. They were remains, inert objects tossed aside with absolute disdain, as if a giant hand had swept across a game board. Jimmy looked at them, and saw the bullet wounds, the destruction, the violence imprinted on each one. He climbed out of the dumpster, staggering, and stood in the middle of the carnage, in an even deeper silence of his own. He was completely alone. The enormity of that solitude was a physical weight threatening to crush him.
And then, Jimmy thought. They weren't orderly thoughts, but a chaotic torrent crowding his mind. He looked at the blood dirtying his shoes, splattering the walls, staining the world. He thought about his tragic situation, his abandonment, the school, his mother, the rage he had always carried inside. He let himself be carried by the current of his thoughts, without resistance, because he had no strength left for anything else. And in the middle of that whirlwind, something crystallized. It wasn't a conclusion reached through logic, but an idea, an absolute and heartbreaking truth that emerged from the ashes of his world and took root with the force of law in his heart.
Life, he suddenly understood, did not have the sacred value everyone proclaimed. It was nothing more than a fiction, a fragile construct, a narrative humanity told itself to give meaning to the meaningless. It was something that man himself could create, with his loves and dreams, and destroy, with terrifying ease, with bullets and hatred. Life, in its purest essence, merely existed as a transition, an unnecessary and often painful prelude, whose only irrevocable destiny was to reach death. Amid the existential darkness enveloping him, denser even than the night, Jimmy saw with desolate clarity that everyone, without exception, would gradually disappear. He, the bodies in the street, his parents, the zombies with clouded eyes... everything was dust on the path to oblivion.
He looked up and scanned the horizon. The city, his city, was devastated. Half-collapsed buildings, charred cars, rubble everywhere. There was nothing to look at in a place like that. Nothing to tie him down. Nothing worth remembering.
With a calm that was the antithesis of the chaos surrounding him, Jimmy turned around. There was no conscious decision, no plan. He simply started walking. Step by step, he moved his left foot and then his right. The sound of his footsteps on the broken glass was the only rhythm in the deathly silence. He walked and walked, without hurry but without pause, his gaze fixed on a distant, undefined point. He walked so much that, before he knew it, the tall buildings began to grow scarce, the streets widened, and the air, though still polluted, lost some of its fetid density. He had left the city.
Jimmy kept moving. Walking became his natural state, his only reason for being. He didn't look back. There was no "back" worth returning to. He walked during the days, driven by an internal inertia he didn't understand. When night fell, he would sit, or lie on the ground, and wait. He found an empty steel thermos next to an abandoned truck. Further on, he reached a stream of turbid but drinkable water, and filled it. And he kept walking. He found a sturdy, olive-green backpack discarded in a ditch. Next to it, an inert body, stiff and pale. Jimmy looked at it without a trace of emotion. He assumed it was the original owner. "Borrowed," he murmured to himself, picking up the backpack. And he kept walking.
The nights were a somber ritual. He would make a small campfire with whatever he found—dry branches, papers—and sit facing the flames, which danced reflecting the emptiness in his eyes. Then he would try to sleep. But sleep was an elusive commodity. As soon as he closed his eyelids, the incessant violence he had witnessed returned with cruel fidelity. The blood, the screams, the shattered bodies became endless nightmares that made him writhe on the ground. The images appeared again and again, an infernal loop he couldn't escape. The night, with its cloak of indifferent stars, always seemed eternal, and the darkness inside him never ended.
Sometimes, in his endless walking, he encountered military convoys. Armored cars and tanks rumbling in the opposite direction, towards the city he had abandoned. They ignored him completely. To them, he was just another ragged survivor, a solitary statue on the roadside margin, a specter of no importance. And Jimmy, in turn, ignored them. Their worlds did not touch. Some of those enormous war machines, with their cannons like deadly stingers, made Jimmy look up for a couple of seconds, a flash of animal curiosity. But then, he would lower his head and keep walking. They were not part of his path.
One night, the darkness fell with special intensity, with no moon to relieve the blackness. Jimmy was walking along the shoulder of an interstate highway when he saw it. There, half-hidden in the ditch, was a bus. One of those old intercity buses, with its faded side stripe. It seemed abandoned, stranded forever. The doors were open, inviting an even greater darkness inside.
Jimmy stopped and observed it for a long minute. He felt no hope, no fear. Just an infinite weariness. Without further ado, he climbed the steps and entered. The inside smelled of dust, dampness, and something vaguely sweet he preferred not to identify. There was no one. The seats, of worn plastic, were empty. It was a silent shell, a capsule outside of time.
He lay down on one of the long seats at the back. It was almost pleasant to be under a roof, safe from the night's dew. He closed his eyes, seeking oblivion even if just for a few hours. But that night, like all the others, sleep did not come. The nightmares, punctual and merciless, kept their appointment. The incessant violence, the blood everywhere, turned his rest into another session of torture. Over and over, he relived the horror, trapped in the cage of his own mind, while outside, in the absolute stillness of the ghost bus, the darkness seemed to have no end.
And Jimmy woke up. It wasn't a peaceful awakening, but a sudden emergence from the murky waters of his nightmares. The morning light filtered through the bus's dirty windows, dusty and speckled with old rain stains, projecting a deceptive golden light that made the dust motes dancing in the still air gleam. A light wind, carrying scents of damp earth and distant fires, howled with a faint whistle through the vehicle's cracks, a funeral dirge for a world that no longer existed. The teenager sat up with a groan, his bones aching from the uncomfortable posture on the hard plastic seat. He rubbed his eyes, trying to dispel the last vestiges of the bloody images that inhabited his sleep.
And then, he saw it.
He wasn't alone.
At the other end of the aisle, curled up like a cornered animal behind one of the front seats, was another teenager. His brown hair was a greasy tangle falling over a sweaty forehead. His skin had a cadaverous pallor, like someone who had been hidden from the light for a long time, and on his face, standing out almost violently, was a small but deep scar that cut through his right eyebrow, a whitish lightning bolt marking his skin and giving him an air of wounded fragility. He seemed to be Jimmy's age, perhaps sixteen, but experience had added a decade of horror to his gaze. He was dressed in what was once a hospital uniform, a set of rough, grey cotton scrubs, now dirty and worn out. On the chest pocket, sewn with white thread, a rectangular tag read a name, simple and definitive: GARY.
Gary hadn't moved. His eyes, large and dark, were fixed on Jimmy with the intensity of prey that has sensed the presence of a predator. It was clear he had been watching him for a while, studying every movement, every breath, from the relative safety of his hiding spot. His body, tense as a bowstring, transmitted a nervousness that was almost palpable in the stale air of the bus.
Jimmy saw Gary. Gary saw Jimmy.
There were no greetings, no questions. Only silence, heavy and eloquent. The two teenagers stared fixedly at each other for seconds that stretched, transforming into hours of mutual, tacit scrutiny. Time, that broken convention, seemed to have stopped completely, and the eyes of the two youths, laden with a similar pain, were solely responsible for this parenthesis in reality. They observed each other, searching the other's face for the traces of the same nightmares, the reflection of the same absolute solitude. The fear in Gary's eyes found an echo in the existential void dwelling in Jimmy's.
And without a single word, a primitive and deep understanding blossomed in both. It wasn't friendship, not even camaraderie. It was the instinctive recognition of two souls that have been struck by the same hurricane. Perhaps... perhaps they had shared the same terrifying experiences, perhaps they were living familiar situations of abandonment and survival. Gary's scar spoke of one history; Jimmy's lost gaze, of another. Together, they formed the same story of failure.
Jimmy opened his mouth. A slight tremor ran through his dry lips. He wanted to articulate a word, any word—"Hello," "Who are you?", "Are you okay?"—but nothing came out. The courage needed to break that spell of silence had vanished, dissolved into the air like smoke. Gary, for his part, hunched his shoulders even more, as if he wanted to disappear into the seat. He too could not find the courage to speak.
They remained in silence, and finally, both looked down, defeated. Was it fear? Was it shame? Was it the simple, overwhelming inability to process a human encounter after so much desolation? There was no time for "maybes." The hell that had held a momentary, deceptive silence erupted again with renewed fury.
A deafening explosion, close and visceral, shook the bus as if it were a toy. The roar wasn't just sound; it was a physical force that slammed their eardrums and made the ground tremble beneath their feet. Through the dirty windows, the outside world transformed into a moving, Dante-esque painting. Soldiers, small and anonymous in their uniforms, fired bursts of machine gun fire in every direction. Figures, some agile, others stumbling—people? zombies?—ran desperately among flames licking the remains of vehicles. The air filled with hot ash and the acrid smell of gunpowder and burnt flesh. The screams, the same ones that had haunted Jimmy in his nightmares, rose again, but now they were real, immediate, and seeped into the bus like daggers.
Jimmy, driven by an instinct he didn't know he possessed, looked at Gary. The other boy was paralyzed, his face had lost all its pallor to become a mask of white plaster, his eyes fixed on the chaos outside, perhaps seeing his own personal hell reflected there. There was no time for catatonic panic.
"Come on!" Jimmy shouted, or perhaps he just thought it with such force that his body reacted. He lunged forward, grabbed Gary's wrist—cold and thin like a bird's—and, without giving him time to react, dragged him along towards the exit.
They left the bus just as the world erupted in flames and twisted metal. A second explosion, likely the gas tank of a nearby vehicle, hit the old bus head-on. A wave of scorching heat pushed them from behind, and the blast threw them several meters forward. Jimmy felt the whip-crack through his entire body, but he didn't let go of Gary's hand. Both fell to the debris-covered ground, only to immediately get up and, still holding hands, start to run.
They weren't running towards safety, because none existed. They were running straight into the heart of hell. The landscape was a nightmare made real. People—a crazed crowd—crashed into each other. Soldiers firing at everything that moved, be it shadows with clouded eyes or terrified civilians. The blood didn't just stain the ground; it splattered, it flew, creating a grotesque mist that tinged the grey air crimson. The screams were no longer just of fear, but of acute, gut-wrenching pain. Grown men wept like children, kneeling beside bodies that would never move again. The stench of death's decay mixed with the reek of gunpowder.
As they dodged a body falling, struck down by a bullet, Jimmy thought, with terrifying clarity: "How did the world come to this?" It was a philosopher's question in a child's mouth. People running like insects in a crushed anthill, bullets whistling and finding their mark with a wet, repulsive sound, empty eyes staring unseeingly from the ground. The darkness, the same one Jimmy felt in his soul, had devoured the day. Even if the sun tried to break through the smoke, a shroud of moral gloom reigned over everything.
If this was life, if this was the only future, an endless, bloody present... then maybe Jimmy shouldn't try so hard. It would be so easy, so terribly easy, to let go of Gary's hand, to stop, and to let one of those anonymous bullets put an end to the suffering. They could end this hell quickly. They could stop suffering. They could... They could have done many things in their past lives, but it was too late for that now.
Then, something pulled him. It wasn't a violent force, but a gentle, yet insistent tug. Jimmy looked up, tearing himself away from his self-destructive thoughts. It was Gary. It was Gary pulling *his* hand now. The scarred boy's face was streaked with tears that carved clean paths through the grime, and there was a splash of blood on his cheek that wasn't his own. But above all, in his eyes, there was fear. A pure, animal fear, but also a glimmer of something else: a faint, fragile, and indomitable desire not to die.
And in that instant, Jimmy squeezed Gary's hand with a strength he didn't know he had, as if through that contact he could transmit, or receive, a spark of will. And he began to run too, taking back the initiative.
Gary was thin, too thin to be considered healthy. His bones seemed fragile under the rough cloth of the hospital uniform, and his breathing was a weak, wheezing gasp. Jimmy, though not in much better shape, had a sturdier build. He easily took the lead, guiding Gary, pulling him along, becoming his anchor in the midst of the chaos. They dodged bullets that kicked up dust at their feet, jumped over bodies, pushed away figures that lunged at them with unknown intentions.
Jimmy panted, his lungs were two bags of ground glass burning with every breath. Gary's feet, shod in worn-out sneakers, began to stumble, to drag. Every step was a battle, every meter gained, a fleeting victory. To keep running was difficult, too difficult. The temptation to give up, to accept the peace of nothingness, was a powerful siren's call.
Why? Why live? Why drag this tired body through a landscape of death? Why do people, even in the most abject circumstances, feel that visceral, almost absurd need to cling to a thread of life?
Jimmy had no answer. Neither did Gary. But, holding onto each other, their sweaty hands intertwined like the last link of a chain about to break, they kept running. There was no rational why. There was only a how. And the how was to run, to dodge, to survive. One more step. And then another. And another. Plunging deeper into the fog of war, two teenage ghosts clinging to the only thing they had left: the fragile warmth of another human hand in the darkness.
They ran and ran, until the air in their lungs became fire and their legs heavy pillars of lead. They didn't know how long or what distance they had covered; space and time had dissolved into the pure, raw instinct of flight. The world shrank to the frantic beating of their hearts, the crunch of their footsteps on rubble which then transformed into dry grass and, finally, into the soft earth of the forest. It was a blind escape, guided only by the visceral need to put as much distance as possible between themselves and the hell of metal and gunpowder.
Suddenly, as if they had passed through an invisible veil, they became aware of the silence. There were no more gunshots tearing the air, no more dull roars of explosions. The cacophony of screams, pleas, and shouted orders had faded, replaced by an acoustic void that was at first almost more terrifying in its strangeness. The smell of blood and smoke, which had clung to their clothes and their memory, dissipated, cleansed by a fresh breeze carrying scents of moss, damp earth, and pine bark.
Had they run across the entire world? In the disorientation of their flight, it was a question floating in their exhausted minds. Together, holding hands like a single frightened organism, had they crossed continents in their escape? The reality was more modest, but no less miraculous: they were in a forest. A dense, living forest, where trees rose like pillars of a natural cathedral, their canopies filtering the sunlight into golden gleams that settled on the ferns and bushes. There was no trace of road, of concrete, of the brutal geometry of civilization. Only the organic landscape and the sound of their own breathing, panting and ragged, as they still held their intertwined hands, their knuckles white from the strength of their grip.
They looked at each other then, really looked at each other, for the first time without the veil of immediate panic. They were covered in a layer of sweat, dirt, and dried splatters of a dark, shameful red. Gary's pale face was smudged with grime, making his scar seem even whiter, like a lightning bolt in a cloudy sky. Jimmy's shaved head was covered in leaf fragments and dust. But their chests rose and fell with the vital rhythm of breath, and in their eyes, behind the exhaustion, there was a glimmer of wonder. They were alive. The phrase, simple and monumental, resonated in the silence they shared.
And there, in the solemn solitude of nature, whose roots seemed to absorb the last vestige of their strength, both young men collapsed onto the ground. It wasn't a dramatic fall, but a slow, deliberate sinking, as if their bodies understood that they could finally afford to surrender. They sat facing each other, in a clearing carpeted with pine needles, without letting go of each other's hands. The silence wasn't uncomfortable; it was a balm. It was a shared space that didn't need to be filled with vain words. It was, to a certain extent, pleasant. A small, fragile bubble of calm, a truce forged by two teenagers lost in the smoking ruins of the world the adults had shattered.
"Hello."
The word left their lips at the same time, a hoarse and synchronized whisper that cut through the tranquil air. It wasn't a greeting, but a recognition. The first word they had spoken to each other, a tacit contract sealing their alliance forged in chaos. It was the sound of two lonely worlds meeting on the shore of nothingness.
From that moment, a new chapter began. They got to their feet with a joint effort, their muscles protesting the mistreatment. It was then that Jimmy noticed the small, faded and worn canvas bag hanging from Gary's shoulder, slung across his chest. It was so small it looked more like a case than a survival backpack. Jimmy looked at it, but said nothing. There was no need. Its modest size ruled out anything dangerous; it seemed to hold only the crumbs of a previous life, the wreckage of a shipwreck.
They began to walk together, going deeper into the thicket. They walked for what felt like hours in a complicit silence. What was there to say? How could the nightmares they had both lived through be articulated? Neither Jimmy nor Gary had figured it out. Words seemed instruments too crude for the delicate reality they now inhabited. Instead, they communicated with the language of the body: the synchronized rhythm of their steps, the occasional brush of a shoulder, the exchanged glance to make sure the other was still there.
Nature enveloped them in its indifferent embrace. It was pleasant, almost therapeutic. The silence wasn't empty, but full of minor, comforting sounds: the low buzz of a bee feeding on a clover flower, the meticulous nibbling of a caterpillar on the underside of a leaf, the whisper of the wind caressing the treetops. The flowers, unlike everything they had left behind, were not withered. They displayed their colors with an audacity that seemed like an act of rebellion.
They walked and walked, until Gary's stomach let out a low, prolonged rumble, a sound so vital and mundane it seemed almost comical in the midst of the stillness. Almost in response, a frog croaked from an invisible stream. Jimmy, without breaking his stride, reached into his own worn backpack, rummaged among his meager belongings, and pulled out a wrinkled but intact protein bar. He handed it to Gary in a simple gesture. Gary accepted it with a slight nod, his fingers brushing Jimmy's for a moment. He unwrapped it and ate in silence, and then, without a word, they kept walking.
The forest was a world in itself. The trees were immense, ancient giants with bark furrowed like maps of time. The leaves displayed a palette of greens Jimmy had never imagined: the emerald green of mosses, the lemon green of new shoots, the dark, velvety green of conifers. Life, insistent and resilient, went on.
In a moment of carelessness, Jimmy passed too close to a particularly aggressive bramble bush. A long, sharp thorn dug into his forearm, leaving a thin red line from which crimson drops of blood welled. He stopped, looking at the cut with a distant curiosity. Gary approached. From his small bag, like a magician pulling a rabbit from a hat, he produced a plastic jar with an amber liquid and an individually wrapped band-aid. With careful movements, surprisingly delicate for someone who seemed so fragile, Gary took Jimmy's hand, cleaned the wound with the disinfectant that burned with a purifying sting, and placed the bandage over the cut, pressing gently to secure it. They didn't exchange looks of gratitude or acknowledgment. The act itself was the language. They said nothing, and kept walking.
Finally, the trees began to thin, the light grew more intense, and the ground changed beneath their feet. They had reached the edge of the forest. Before them stretched a wide, deserted asphalt road, snaking away until it was lost on the horizon. It was a grey scar on the landscape, a reminder of the world that once was.
Both teenagers stopped at the boundary, looking at the ribbon of asphalt and then at each other. Without needing words, they took the step that brought them out of the green refuge and placed them on the artificial surface. The sky, now completely clear, was an immense blue vault. There were no more trees to cover them, only the vast, lonely road stretching toward what seemed to be infinity.
They both looked at that infinity, that horizon line where earth and sky merged. But for the first time, the immensity did not seem terrifying. There was no longer solitude in the infinite. The infinite now had two pairs of feet to travel it.
"Where are we going?" asked Gary, his voice a faint thread, but clear, laden with genuine curiosity.
"Anywhere," replied Jimmy, and his own voice sounded firmer than he expected. It wasn't a statement of defeat, but of possibility.
They walked along the road, the warm sun on their backs. It was an oddly sunny day, as if nature, in an act of cruel irony or absurd mercy, had decided to provide them with a perfect stage.
"One thing's for sure," said Jimmy, breaking the silence again. "This road has to end somewhere."
"End?" Gary observed the distance, his head tilted like a bird's. The idea seemed new to him, an abstract concept in a world with no clear endings.
"Yeah..."
"What's waiting for us at the end of the road?" asked Gary, his gaze lost on the horizon line, as if he could divine the future in the heat haze.
"Just the end of the road," said Jimmy, with a simple, incontestable logic.
Because, deep down, what could possibly lie beyond? When the world had ceased to have a purpose, when cities were tombs and institutions dust, the "what" had lost its meaning. Only the "where" mattered, and the "with whom."
They walked in silence a while longer, the crunch of their sneakers on the gravel shoulder marking the rhythm of their existence.
"The Earth is round," murmured Gary suddenly, looking up at the sky where a whale-shaped cloud sailed leisurely. "So, technically, there never will be an end..." He paused, processing the idea. "Maybe that means we'll be able to keep moving forward. Forever."
Jimmy looked at Gary, at his thin profile against the vast blue sky. This person, this one fragile person, was the only fixed point in a disoriented universe. He was the only one who had given him a purpose, however minuscule and insignificant: the purpose of not walking alone. It was a reason, the only one he needed, not to stop, not to give up.
"Maybe," replied Jimmy, and for the first time, the word didn't sound like resignation, but like a faint, tangible possibility. The infinite, shared, no longer seemed like such a bad thing.
Gary sketched a small, tired smile, a slight movement of his lips that barely altered his face, but lit up his eyes for an instant. He looked toward the endless road.
"Maybe."
And so, under the immensity of the sky, with the warmth of the sun on their tired bodies and the dust of the road on their clothes, Jimmy and Gary kept walking together. Not toward a destination, but simply forward, making the act of walking, in itself, the only home they had left.