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There were times when I considered suicide. I think I may have mentioned that before. As painful as these memories are to dredge up, they are what come to me now, now as I sit here clutching my side. Now, as the blood leaks through my fingers and soaks into my shirt. Now, as the insidious infection extends its poisonous strands throughout my body and reaches into every cell, turning me from what once made me who I am into something I am not. Thoughts of ending my own life, even as something much more permanent and resembling nothing like death strips those thoughts away from me and urges me to keep on living, even if this new life resembles nothing before it in my entire experience.
“I guess I’ve made a mess of things, haven’t I?”
Noise grows. It surrounds me, voices raised in defiance and dismay. No one responds to my question.
I don’t even remember what the argument was about, that first time I gave suicide any serious thought. I was fourteen. I do remember that much. And I remember that it was triggered by something my mother said.
Or did.
Or, maybe, something she didn’t do.
A birthday? Did she forget my birthday?
I can’t seem to remember any of the details. I guess that should mean something. But for the life of me I can’t figure out what.
I do, however, remember standing at the base of the Stream transmission tower at the end of the block. I remember staring up at it and hearing the buzz of electricity and thinking how easy it would be to climb right up and reach out and...
And I don’t want to die. Remember?
But even as these thoughts come to me, from somewhere in the deepest recesses of my rational mind, I know that I am. Dying. I’ve been bitten. I’m going to die, and then I’m going to come back. There is no cure for it, no stepping back from this precipice. No treatment or antiserum. What a false hope all that turned out to be. I know that now. No matter how much I wanted to believe over the past few days. We’re all dead; it’s just that some of us don’t know it yet because we haven’t leveled up.
How fucking ironic that it should end this way.
I think about how easy it should’ve been, all those times — a razor blade in the tub, an overdose, the intentional ‘accidental’ step off the curb and into the rush of nonstop traffic on Hansby Way, where everyone drives fast and nobody gives a damn — and how much pain I could’ve avoided if I’d only just gone ahead and done it. Just once. But in all the times I’d contemplated ending my life — seriously contemplated it — I just couldn’t do it. I never had the guts.
The gun presses against my back, makes a gun-shaped imprint in my skin. One bullet. Kept with me from the very beginning of this fucking adventure. I guess I always knew it would come to this. Huh. One single solitary bullet, like a friend, faithful, never leaving me, never wavering in its promise. All I have to do is aim carefully. It’ll find its own way after that. Then everything that ever caused me such pain in this hell of a life will be nothing more than a footnote in someone else’s.
But my hands don’t move from the bleeding holes in my side. They’re useless, unable to stanch the flow, unable to extract the poison from the wound.
Who will mourn me? Eric? Strangely enough, it’s he who will be hurt the most by my passing. He always loved me, unconditionally, even though we’d never gotten along growing up— he with his unreasonable devotion to our absentee mother and that inexplicable smoldering disaffection for our long-dead father. He who unilaterally and irrationally decided that he would take on both their responsibilities for himself.
He of the strange, almost sympathetic, obsession for the undead.
He who was the only one to never back down from my grandfather. The resentment they bore for each other was always visible for anyone to see. And, I suppose, the mutual respect, too. Neither of them would ever admit to it. But it was just as apparent.
I doubt that either my mother or grandfather will mourn for me. Not much, anyway. Mom will drink her way to forgetfulness, just like she did with Dad.
And Grandpa will...
Well, I don’t think he even has the capacity to mourn. Maybe that’s what hurts the worst. I struggled all my life to connect with him. We touched each other’s lives, but only as if through a frosted pane of glass, he on one side, me on the other, just fuzzy silhouettes to each other and vague notions of movement.
Then there’s Kelly. He’ll mourn me in his own way, I suppose. Or maybe it’s too late for that. I think it might be. I wonder if the infection raging inside of him, the one that makes him harder and faster and stronger, that steals from us both what was uniquely ours, will leave just that one little shred of humanity inside of him.
Or maybe it’ll steal that way, too, just consume that last little bit of our times together, our feelings for each other, devouring them into oblivion.
In a way, his own living death will be a greater loss than my own. He has a family who needs him. His parents love him and depend on him. Kyle depends on him.
Like Shinji depended on me.
Poor Shinji. I couldn’t regain for him what he lost so long ago: a family, torn asunder by this never-ending tragedy.
But now that my own death is a certainty, as solid as a tangible presence standing before me, beckoning me to follow it, I cannot fathom how it was that I could ever consider wanting it. Right now, right in this very moment, I want nothing more than to live, even as I find the pistol in my hand, my finger on the trigger, the muscles contracting.
The scene around me is utter chaos. The plaintive cries of the undead mask the cries of those remaining few of us still alive and uncorrupted, uninfected. Yet, through it all, one sound rings clear...
