My wife Lilly walked out on the front porch and waved to me while I was trimming the hedges. Sweat from the warm summer evening was trickling down the side of my face, matting my unkempt blond hair to my head. I wiped my forehead with the back of my arm and walked over to meet her, dropping the hedge clippers at my feet. Lilly was a rare woman indeed. Her skin was the color of milkweed fluff and her eyes were a mirror for the sunlit maple leaves surrounding the house. Her auburn hair was pulled back into a long braid down her back; a few loose strands dangled in her face.

“Robert, there’s something important on the news. I think you need to see it.” We walked back into the house together, into the dark, cool shadows of air conditioning and closed curtains. She had been cleaning; the smell of bleach and vinegar permeated the air. I took a seat on the couch, glad for the ice water my wife quickly brought me. The condensation on the glass was slippery under my calloused fingers.

I began to watch the news. For the first few minutes, the vague hints of disaster did not capture my attention, but then a video of a fifteen year old boy began to play. I looked closely, not sure I was really seeing what I was seeing. It was a video of a boy eating a pigeon. A live pigeon. His clothes were torn, his body was bruised, and his eyes were distant. His bottom and top lip had been torn off. There were bites out of his arms. He didn’t look at the camera – he seemed unaware that anyone was even there. The news reporter, a petite, dark-haired woman of about twenty five years, said it was the first incident of the disease in Iowa. There had been sixteen reported cases in the last four days, following the government issued warning. Scientists were claiming that it was a mutated strain of Prader-Willi Syndrome, only they believed it was contagious. That the victims – lethargic, unresponsive individuals – were overcome by an unending sense of hunger that caused them to eat practically anything. Animals. Chalk. Clothes. Even themselves.

My wife knew more about the condition than I did. Apparently it was something genetic, or it was supposed to be. Whatever was happening to our country acted more like a virus, and it was spreading.

We turned off the television and talked about it for a while. Lilly was a pretty tough woman, but I could tell she was worried. “There have been less than twenty cases nationwide,” I said, trying to calm her. “It’s nothing to worry about. Don’t listen to the television. Newscasters and reporters – they’re all doom seekers. This isn’t an epidemic. Nothing is going to happen.” I kissed her on the forehead and went back outside to finish trimming the hedges. The bleach and vinegar was giving me a headache. But every time I saw my wife after that, there was a crease on her brow, telling me all the things I didn’t want to hear.

Five days later, everyone in our little town started to panic. The grocery store was cleaned out in a matter of days. Shipments stopped. Businesses closed. The amount of reported cases had quadrupled, and Iowa was the third most infected state. The government advised people to stay inside. Lock your doors and windows, they said. Wash your hands. Cover your mouth. They would let us know when it was all over.

A few cities were quarantined. It didn’t seem to help; the virus kept on spreading. Coworkers ate clients. Children ate their dolls. With the hunger came other symptoms. The victim would first discover an increase in appetite. Then they would find themselves exhausted, but unable to sleep. Spouses reported spouses staring blankly at the walls for hours, before they began to mentally deteriorate. Eventually, the victim stopped talking. At first, there would be little things. A spot of blood here. A chunk missing there. Then suddenly, bodies were found in the streets – people with finger holes in their throats, their ribs exposed to bleaching sunlight after they were stripped of flesh. In some cases, the infected used weapons. Blunt instruments. Fireplace pokers. Forks and knives and guns. The biggest problem was that the victims could arm themselves, too.

One week after the first reported incident, the electricity was shut off. My wife and I didn’t have a generator. We didn’t have kids, and we didn’t have pets. All we had were a few golf clubs, a .22 rifle, and a set of kitchen knives my mother-in-law had given us for Christmas. Lilly locked herself in the bathroom for hours at a time. I tried to get her to eat something, but she said she was too nervous, that if she ate something she was certain she wouldn’t be able to keep it down. I lit some candles and we sat in the bathroom all night. When morning came, I loaded the rifle and walked the house, making sure all of the windows and doors were stilled locked. The curtains were still drawn. The blinds were shut. I peeked through once in a while, to see if any life remained in our little town. The roads were abandoned. I assumed that, as long as no one saw us, no one would bother us, and we would outlive the virus.

It was like a bad horror movie. We ran out of water first. We still had food, but the milk had spoiled, our alcohol supply had dried up, and we had no way to hydrate ourselves. I figured I could pick up a case of water at the grocery store, assuming there was any left, but Lilly didn’t want me to leave the house. She wouldn’t let me leave without her, but she was too terrified to go with me. So we stayed thirsty. We hid in that house until our mouths were too dry to swallow and our voices caught in our throats. “The infection doesn’t spread by a bite or a scratch, Lilly,” I said. “If someone attacks you, you kill them. It’s a simple matter of defending yourself. God will forgive you.”

There was a golden cross around her neck that she usually tucked under her shirt. She rolled it between her fingers now. “I’m not worried about God,” she told me. I showed her how to work the rifle, and then I picked up a golf club and a few knifes. Tucked them in my boots. Grabbed my keys. We were outside for the first time in what felt like ages.

The car wouldn’t start. I checked under the hood; someone had stolen the battery, and also siphoned the gas. Most of the neighbors had empty driveways. Where had they all gone?

Lilly and I walked to the grocery store. It was less than a mile away, and a strange desire to find life kept us going. Two blocks from the grocery store was a small brick house with an iron fence. There were sunflowers growing in the garden, surrounded by harsh, blood-thirsty weeds. The house used to belong to Mr. Jensen, the local gardener. It didn’t look liked it belonged to anyone now.

I was a little worried about the infection. If it was a virus, any one of us could be susceptible just by being out in the open air. But we hadn’t heard from anyone in days, and it didn’t look like anyone was coming to help us.

I don’t know why I expected broken windows and abandoned cars, but I wasn’t disappointed. The front doors of the grocery store were broken, and there were a few cars parked along the street that looked as if they hadn’t been touched in days. But overall, it wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be.

We walked into the store and were immediately greeted by the stench of something rotting. Lilly promised not to shoot me in the back with the rifle, but I didn’t feel so safe with her walking behind me. The store was empty of life, but not empty of bodies. Among the isles of empty shelves was the body of a forty-year old Caucasian male. His stomach was bloated, and his skin had turned a nasty shade of brown. His eyes were missing, along with his nose, his ears, and his lips. Several pieces of skin had been stripped from his face and arms. Chunks of his hair were missing. And there were maggots. Hundreds and hundreds of maggots.

All I could think of was that it was here. The virus, the infected – it was in our perfect little town, destroying the last of what was good in our world. My wife didn’t make a sound when she saw the body. If anything, she became something of a zombie herself. Unblinking. Transfixed. I took her by the shoulder and led her away. We went as far around the isle as we could, but there were other, fresher bodies in what used to be the frozen section. We found a single bottle of water under one of the shelves. It had rolled away, out of sight – waiting for us to find it. We knew it wouldn’t be enough, but it helped wash the paste of rotten air from our mouths.

We took what supplies we could from the store and went home. Lilly felt guilty, saying she wish she knew how to contact the owner so we could repay him. I told her not to worry about it – I was pretty sure one of those bodies was the owner, but that’s the last thing I wanted to tell her. I felt like I needed to protect her. My frail, fragile, beautiful wife. I wanted her to stay that way. I was more afraid that she would become a hard, calloused, unfeeling woman than I was of the virus itself.

Exhausted, we both went to bed as soon as we got home. The routine continued. Lock the doors. Close the curtains. Shut the blinds. Lilly said we should consider getting the motorcycle out of the garage and driving to the next town, but with bigger cities came more people, and with more people came more infected. I didn’t want to chance it. Deep down, I knew there would be nothing left there, either.

Being cut off from the rest of the world made the disaster much harder to cope with. I found myself trying not to think about how hungry I was. Since hunger was one of the symptoms of the infected, I ate as little as possible, telling Lilly I just wasn’t hungry. But then I started blacking out. One minute I laid down to take a nap, and then next minute I was awake, standing out in the backyard, unaware of how I had gotten there. My breathing was shallow, and my head was beginning to ache, as if someone had poisoned my blood and with each beat of my heart, it sent the poison through my brain. I went back inside to find Lilly asleep on the bed upstairs. I watched her carefully, to make sure she was okay, to make sure she was breathing. I don’t know how long I stood there. An hour, maybe two. I couldn’t bring myself to move, as if each minute was really a second that passed by, and the only way I kept track of time was by the antique clock on the wall. Tick, tick, tick. The clock was slowing down.

I went downstairs, finding that I was ravenous. I became more and more worried about the virus as I ate, trying to hide what I did eat, afraid that Lilly would find out and ashamed that I had to hide it from her. Canned goods, cereal, dry rice. No matter how much I ate, I never felt full. My stomach expanded, and my hands trembled. I forced myself to stop before Lilly woke up. I went to the couch, forced my face into the cushions, and tried to believe that I wouldn’t wake up somewhere else.

In the middle of the night, I found myself staring into the bathroom mirror. There was just enough light from the candle in the bedroom that I could see into the hollow reflection of myself. Dark circles rested under my once brown eyes; now, a strange gray sheen overlapped each iris. My sallow skin and the ravenous hunger told me what I already knew. I was infected. How long did it take, from the initial infection, until the mind was gone? I didn’t want to hurt my wife. I just wanted to protect her. I took four Tylenol PM, went downstairs, and ate everything I could get my hands on. I needed a plan. It was becoming more and more difficult to control the unusual cravings. I wanted textures. I wanted anything that had flavor. I forced myself not to chew on my nails, afraid that I would swallow them.

I found a stack of copy paper by the computer in the living room, and a scribbled out a note to Lilly. It said, I’m sorry. I love you. Be safe. And then I went outside, unarmed, into the infected town.

My memory came in spurts. I remember looking back at the house, and then I remember standing on a bridge. One moment, I was under the bridge, and then the next moment I was eating something dead off the road. I walked. I ambled. I strolled. I threw my head back and screamed at the beautiful, clear, sunlit sky. I screamed until my vocal chords were raw and the constellations of heaven twirled above me. Stars blinking. Twinkling. Laughing. Memories from my childhood; a failing grade on a science paper. My sister, beating me at a game of chess. A caterpillar crawling under the porch. The day I met Lilly; I was fifteen. Her hair had been highlighted, and back then, she wore too much makeup. Our wedding. My dad laughing. What had happened to my family? Were they safe?

I thought I was starving. I became so hungry that I ate rocks. Grass. Sticks. And in one of my last memories, I ran into another infected on the road side. She was eating a raw fish that had washed up on the shoreline of the river I hadn’t realized I was following. I fell into the water and drank deeply, inhaling the scent of fish, of moss, of pollution. I think the girl saw me, and she came toward me. I remember the taste of human flesh. The raw, warm, juice of it, the way the skin stuck between a small gap in my teeth. I could smell her blood, and I could smell my blood. If we both had lived long enough, we would have eaten each other to death. But she died first, and my wounds weren’t fatal. I realized that, as exhausted as I was, I was compelled to move forward. Someone needed to know what it was like. Were there words left on my tongue? Could I speak? If I had a pen, could I even write my own name?

There was a dock up ahead by the river. I found a sharp rock and climbed the bank up to it, unaware of the dripping, muddy clothes on my back, of the blood on my chin, the flesh under my nails. I took that rock and I carved my life into the wood. My name. My age. My weight. My wife. My job. My hopes. My dream. My end. And then I signed it, tracing the letters of my name over and over until each suddenly foreign symbol became engraved, meaningless, into my memory. I heard the rushing water of the river. The sound of agitated crows. The thud of muffled footsteps in grass. The last thing I heard was the sound of a gunshot as the bullet passed through my ear, taking the craving away.

***