Page 8 of Sick(ness)

Morning seemed impossibly far away. But morning meant there might be a plan, and a plan meant there was still a reason to move. She crossed to the counter, footsteps soft against the floor. The notepad sat beside the last, half-empty water bottle. She tore off the previous page and laid down a new one, the paper curling at the edges from the damp.

Her hand shook as she wrote:

We are still here; I’m not alone.

Somehow, she had gone from I to we. The shift was small, but it caught her off guard. It was strange how easily that word—we—slipped out now, how much comfort it carried. She stared at the words for a long time. They didn’t look like her handwriting anymore; they looked like something carved out of survival. Like a message meant to be found long after she was gone—proof that she’d been here, that she’d lasted this long, that someone else had too. Her voice broke the quiet, rough and thin from disuse. “I’m not alone.”

The words hung in the air, soft but heavy, and for a fleeting second they made the silence bearable. It wasn’t just silence anymore—it was shared.

She set the pen down carefully, afraid even the scrape of plastic against the counter might shatter the fragile calm that had settled over her. Outside, the wind sighed against the taped plastic covering her windows, a low, tired sound that matched the groan of the old building shifting in its bones. Everything seemed worn out—the walls, the world, even her. Addy closed her eyes and listened. The quiet no longer pressed against her like a threat. It moved around her instead, slow and rhythmic, like breathing.

* * *

The next morning, Addy moved to the wall.

The air had turned sharper overnight, the kind of cold that crept in through every crack and seam. Her breath fogged faintly in front of her as she crossed the room, wrapping her blanket tighter around her shoulders. Even under the layers, she could feel it—the unnatural chill that had settled over everything since the sickness had begun.

The Midwest had always been unpredictable in the fall—warm one day, frost on the windows the next, but this wasn’t weather. This was something else. The sun hadn’t looked right for days, dim and blurred behind a haze that turned the sky a color somewhere between ash and bruised yellow. When she’d last peeked through the plastic on her window, she’d seen a thin film of dust collecting on everything outside—cars, rooftops, the empty street below.

They’d called it dust on the last emergency broadcast before the static took over—not nuclear, not radiation. It was something else. Airborne particulates from the burn sites, they’d said. The number of bodies they would have had to burn to make that much “dust” sent chills down her spine.

Stay indoors. Shelter. Seal. Wait.

So she waited.

Now, as she pressed her palm to the wall, it became colder than ever, like the concrete beneath the paint was holding the chill in its bones.

She hesitated only a moment before knocking. Two quick, deliberate taps.

“Sawyer?” Her voice came out hoarse, small. “Are you still there?”

A long pause followed, and then, finally—his voice, low but steady. “Yeah. I’m here.”

Relief hit her in a wave so sudden it made her knees weak. She sank down to the floor beside the wall, clutching the blanket closer.

“Good,” she breathed. “I wasn’t sure.”

“I said I’d be here,” he replied. His tone hadn’t changed; it carried that same measured calm that made her wonder if he’d ever been afraid of anything.

“Did you sleep?” he asked after a moment.

“Not much,” she admitted. “It’s too cold.”

“Yeah,” he said quietly. “Power grid’s starting to go. I figured it would.”

Addy stared at the dark ceiling. “You sound as if you expected it.”

“I did.”

Of course, he had. He was a prepper—the kind of man who probably had a generator and backup filters, while she had… duct tape and granola bars. A man who’d read about collapse and held the conviction it was coming long before the rest of them saw the signs.

“You said you might have a plan,” she said finally.

There was a short silence on the other side of the wall, the kind that made her think maybe she’d imagined his voice the night before.

Then, softly, “Yeah. I’ve been thinking. We can’t stay here much longer. The air’s getting worse. You’ve seen the sky.”

Addy glanced toward the window. Even through the layers of plastic and tape, a sickly gray-yellow glow pressed through, staining everything it touched. It wasn’t sunlight anymore; it was haze, heavy and unnatural, like the world itself was running a fever.