Simone bows her head. I put the car in reverse and back out of the driveway. I don’t need to look for her in the rear-view mirror to know what I’ll see.

XXXVI

We slalom through the traffic and make our way into the city. We pass several vehicles heading in the opposite direction. They flash their lights and sound their horns to warn us of what lies ahead.

The act of disappearance seems to have happened more quickly in the city. We see the outbound traffic gradually begin to wane until the cars we pass are all empty, silent except for their idling engines. Some have managed to pull to the shoulder before succumbing to the sickness. Others have vanished at breakneck speeds, sending their vehicles into the backs of others.

On the outskirts of the city the buildings creak and groan. The wind whips loose paper and trash high into the air. I see fires raging on the horizon. Smoke pillars that rise to hold up the sky. I see ash falling like snow against the windshield.

I stop the car multiple times to clear away debris. When I get back behind the wheel I hold up my hands and find that they are black with soot. On the highway we pass the smoking remnants of a news helicopter.

‘It’s the end of the world,’ I say.

The white-haired woman writhes on the back seat.

‘Jennifer?’ she calls out. ‘Jennifer?’

I tell her no and she mumbles incoherently.

XXXVII

It’s obvious that the hospital is deserted before I even kill the engine but I park up anyway and tell the woman I’ll be back with help. She speaks in frantic whispers, reaching out with her hands to cup some imagined face. When I step out of the car the heat of the late afternoon hits me and I think better of leaving her alone. I swaddle her in a blanket and scoop her into my arms.

Outside the sky is the colour of bruised skin – the sun setting slowly over a skyline now thick with smoke – and I feel a sudden urgency to my work, as if the falling darkness will swallow all that it touches.

I call out for help in corridors and waiting rooms but find no response. With each footstep I feel myself becoming the sound of my own voice. Desperate, frantic. Searching for something that cannot be found.

I walk through wards full of machinery and empty beds. The floors wet with leaking IV lines. The air saturated by the shrill calls of dialysis machines and heart monitors. They speak in a foreign dialect. The language of grief not universal at all, but individualistic, coded. Woven into the fabric of people in a way that makes it impossible to fully decipher.

‘I’m tired,’ she says, wrapping her arm round my neck and drawing herself into me in the way a child might.

She is impossibly light in my arms. I imagine that she could be Phineas, and when I close my eyes I see his crooked smile floating in the dark of my mind like some disembodied phantom.