From the back porch I look towards the city. How long could modern infrastructure survive without human interaction? Were there fail-safes in place for this kind of eventuality? Could the water and electrical systems operate autonomously? If so, for how long? If the illness swept away the city’s population would we feel the aftershocks immediately, or would it take time for the impact to ripple out into the suburbs?

I water the vegetable garden profusely, though it seems to have become an exercise in futility. No matter how much attention we pay to it, the crop continues to spoil. Nevertheless, I let the hose run until the ground beneath my feet is a bog.

It’s then that I remember the compost bin at the foot of the garden. A freestanding plastic drum that could easily hold a few hundred gallons of water.

I tip it onto its side and scrape out the damp contents with my hands. I remove autumn leaves and dirt, but am surprised when my hand wraps round a lilac-coloured ribbon. I pull at it and from the mouth of the drum emerges a floral wreath that I don’t recognise. I reach inside and find another, and then another. The drum is full of them. The flowers long dead, but still held together in their bouquets.

Attached to one is a card. I wipe the dirt from it and hold it up to the light. The writing is hard to decipher, but I can make out my name. I lay each of the bouquets on the ground, like tiny bodies, and inspect them. Every single one is tied with purple ribbon. I feel my mind searching desperately in the heat. I know that there is relevance to the discovery, but no part of it sparks recognition.

XXXIII

I sit in the shade of the garden and think of Phil and Helen and their son, Josh. I wonder where they might be at this exact moment. I see several possible futures playing out simultaneously in my mind.

In one I see their bodies strewn unnaturally about the RV, the windscreen a spiderweb of broken glass. The doors ajar and bullet-riddled. Their pallets of water and canned goods long gone.

In another I see them pulling into the parking lot of some pristine government facility. I see men in hazmat suits escorting them into medical tents. I see Josh lying nervously on his stomach as a nurse sterilises the base of his spine, and I see a tired-looking doctor injecting a serum into the bone. I see the family reunite behind the fortified walls of the compound, finally free from the burden of the illness.

I think of Phineas and how we would have handled things differently were he still here. I see the three of us leaving in Phil and Helen’s RV and heading east, our families safe in greater numbers.

I see us setting up camp and learning to live off the land, far from the mess of the cities. We sleep in shifts, and at night we tell stories round the campfire, the absence of technology resurrecting the pastime of conversation.