I have tightened the bandage around my leg a little more to staunch the blood flow.  If I were to survive this day, I would lose the limb this way, but as it is, the tourniquet will buy me a few hours.  That is all I need, and all I have, and it is good enough.

Brian is dead.  Emily is dead.  John is dead.  Tim is dead.  Nikki is dead.  Amanda is dead.  Christopher is dead.

My pencil scratches loudly against the paper; the noise makes me uneasy as much as it soothes.  I look up after every few words, certain that the sound has attracted scavengers.  I am needlessly nervous; Ashley and I searched this empty neighborhood only three days ago.  Besides, this is a port town.  Anyone still here will be unable to hear anything.  I could scream until my throat bleeds and remain undetected.  But still I am tense.

Ashley is dead.  Elizabeth is dead.  William is dead.  Moira is dead.  Spencer is dead.  Jasmine is dead.  Jared is dead.

I think that if Devin were here, he would mock me for this, my need to write everything down.  If any human survives on this planet, which is a lost cause by itself, the odds are low that he or she will encounter this house.  More, the traces of civilization will most likely have been torn away, and the ability to read will have been forgotten in this desperation.  I will be lucky if the one who finds this account does not attempt to eat it.

Devin is dead.  Vanessa is dead.  Sarah is dead.  Nathaniel is dead.  Jonathan is dead.  Brooke is dead.  Ben is dead.

Nonetheless, I will sit here and scribe my tale until the world goes silent.  Then, I will put down my pencil and rise from this desk.  Dragging my weeping leg, I will go to the porch, and sit, and watch the sun set as I do.

Lindsay is dead.  Rob is dead.  Adriene is dead.  Lauren is dead.  Emily C. is dead.  Aron is dead.  Jay is dead.

Unless God is feeling particularly mirthful, the board game Clue will not survive this apocalypse.  Yet I feel compelled to use its tropes to outline my story.  Whodunit?  Pick a card, any card.  We all knew the last two thirds of the accusation.  In Tokyo, with the Gardner's disease.  But who released it in the first place?  The Muslims, of course.  Or the Christian fundamentalists, or the KKK.  Perhaps it was the government'but whose?  The United States, the Chinese, India, Russia.  Or it could have been Trinidad and Tobago.  Nobody knows.  Presumably somebody did once, but whoever did, they're dead now.

Kay is dead.  Ellis is dead.  Darrell is dead.  Carol is dead.  Jill is dead.  Charlie is dead.  Tom is dead.

Gardner's disease; how strange that it was I who first identified the symptoms and knew them to be linked.  I am not a research doctor, though, and so I showed the terrible information to my second cousin, Gretchen.  She investigated and discovered the awful truth; the horror bears her name.  I do not envy her; how could I?  For it was Gretchen who had to be a messenger of death, she who was forced to fly from country to country and say: 'this is what a million people have, these are the results of our tests.  There is nothing anyone can do; all who catch it die, and we will all catch it."  My poor cousin went around the world and broke humanity's heart with her hopeless speech.  Small wonder she shot herself.

Gretchen is dead.  Art is dead.  Ruth is dead.  Debbie is dead.  Dan is dead.  Em is dead.  Daniel is dead.

I have no idea why I am still alive.  I should have been one of the first exposed.  After all, I had my gloved fingers in the poor girl's chest.  She had been in her third year of college, spending a year abroad in Japan.  Then her host mother died and the family sent her home on a fast plane.  Too late, too late, for she died in the arrival airport.  They didn't know anything was wrong until she suddenly went deaf with an hour left in the flight.  Her eyes must have been unnaturally bright, her feet and hands faintly blue, but such things can be overlooked.  I couldn't see the eye symptoms when she arrived, but I did notice the swollen tear glands, and as the pilot arrived on my table, and co-pilot, and the flight attendants, and then'dear God'the passengers, I knew.  I found the last passenger in our hospital, and I looked into her brilliant gaze, and I was certain.

The student is dead.  The pilot is dead.  And all the attendants and the passengers, and seat 6A, and the doctors who treated them, they are dead.

Can I call myself a doctor if there's no-one left to treat?  I won't speak of the days spent awash in corpses, desperately working with the rest of the hospital to find some cause, something we could delay or slow or stop.  Nor will I dwell on the time when I finally ran away, unable to face a morgue full of only two manners of death'Gardner's and suicide.  Some of the suicides died in the drawers of my lab.  Parents and children and lovers of the dead came to identify the bodies.  Then, when I looked away for paperwork, they calmly climbed in and shot themselves or drank the deadly draught or slit their wrists.  I couldn't bear it.

The president is dead.  The queen is dead.  The pope is dead.  The prime minister is dead.  The movie stars are dead.  The basketball players are dead.

'Ring around the rosy, pocket full of posy.  Ashes, ashes, we all fall down.'�  A wonderful children's rhyme, marking the symptoms, circumstances, and consequences of the plague.  I, who once wished to write for a living, have made a new rhyme for Gardner's.  'Eyes all bright, one more night.  Ears lose power, one more hour.'�  Not as pithy, I'll admit, but I'm rather out of creativity for the moment.  Good enough for my purposes.  I've been reciting it over and over as I set this to paper.  My eyes were shining when I awoke this morning.  Romance authors of another era'perhaps a year should not be called an era under normal circumstances, but I think I am correct in believing this to be another era, if not another lifetime'would have used their description to show a sense of liveliness and beauty.  I've always said that God has a sense of humor.

All the writers but me are dead, and who am I?  I have never published one story.

No more romance stories.  The old me would have cheered, but I feel rather sad.  They might have been unrealistic dreams, but in this world of harsh truth, I could use a few dreams.  I will write one now.  'A boy and a girl fall in love.  A boy and a boy fall in love.  A girl and a girl fall in love.  They all die of Gardner's and are buried in mass graves.'�

I seem to have lost the knack of writing happy stories.  I wonder why.

What else to write?  More lists of the dead?  I should just stick telephone books next to this.  Aarons, A. is dead.  Aarons, Abigail is dead.  Aarons, Abby is dead.  So on and so forth until Zunger, Zulu, is also dead.  Repeat in every country in the world.

Every action has an equal and opposite reaction.  An object at rest stays at rest.  An object in motion stays in motion.  This is inertia.  The brain controls the functions of the body'the brain is the organ in the head'and the heart, a red, fist-sized organ in the chest, pumps the blood, the reddish stuff which comes out when the skin is cut.  Water freezes at zero degrees Celsius, and boils at one hundred degrees, and air is mostly made of nitrogen and oxygen, with a few other elements present in trace amounts.  Freud said that the cigar is a phallic symbol, but he also said that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and objects cool and bacteria grows exponentially.

We were not devils, and we were not gods, though we had machines that flew us through the sky.  We were just human, and we laughed and cried and loved and hated and worked and rested and slept and rose to another day.  There were thousands of languages and hundreds of religions and millions of reasons to want to kill each other.

I thought of something funny just now, and I laughed, albeit bitterly.  Here is the joke: I want to live.  Despite the devastation and the crushing sense of solitude, I want to live.  I could exist in this desolate world, even though I miss my species with a deep ache in my soul.  I would live on, writing our story so that we would not die so soon, and learning to love each name left behind.  But I have no choice in the matter; already my pencil sounds quiet.  I've little time left.

E=mc2, where E is energy, m is mass, and c is the speed of light, which is 3.0x108 meters per second.  Blink.  That is a second, and a meter is about the length of an arm.  If an object could travel close to this speed, time inside that object would somehow slow to a crawl, while everywhere else time went the same speed, and yet both the universe and the object would experience time in the same manner.

'In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure-dome decree, where Alph, the sacred river, ran, through caverns measureless to man, down to a shining sea,'� wrote Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and 'anyone lived in a prettyhowtown with up so floating many bells down,'� said e. e. cummings.

If only I could pen music!  But the Beatles were a band who said they were bigger than Jesus, and they may have been correct, and Elvis Presley was the king of rock and roll, and I liked The White Stripes, but Queen sang life better.

And all of them are dead, though Coleridge died centuries ago, and e. e. cummings never saw bright eyes set in a deaf face, and Freddie Mercury died of AIDS, which was a hideous disease in its time.  Nobody thought AIDS would ever lose its title as worst illness; strange how life works.  Or not.  Everything dies to give a space to something new.  We did.

I wonder if the earth will recover enough to let another species evolve to speech and tool use.  My money says yes; I'm sure that our bodies will form some new coal for the next generation eventually.  The trees will grow back; so will the ozone layer.  Sun can be used for power, as can the wind.  Sorry, I don't know how to make engines, or I'd describe them, too.  Something about pistons and such forth.  I'm sorry I can't help better.

God, I'm sorry.  So sorry, so sorry, so very sorry.  It's not even my fault and I'm sorry.  And to whom do I apologize?  I don't know.

Dear God.  My pencil moves silently.  I set it down for a few moments and scream, but I might as well have not opened my mouth.  A promise I made to leave this script behind, but now I find myself reluctant to relinquish my self-appointed role as chronicler.  There is so much more to write.  The battle of Hastings was in 1066 AD'that's after the birth of Christ.  I believe that Jesus Christ, a man and a Jew of Jerusalem, died for the sins of the world, but lots of people thought differently about that.

'Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.  Little ones to Him belong; they are weak and He is strong.'�

One hour, one hour, and no matter how fast I write, none of it will be enough.  Nothing will make any sense without context, but I still want to tell everything.  But I must stop.  Shouldn't I see the sunset one last time?  It's important, isn't it?  Another poet, a man named T. S. Eliot, said that the world will not end in a bang, but in a whimper.  I never liked him.  Humanity will therefore end, if it ends with me (and my heart tells me that it does), in a glory of color.  Time to go and watch.

Everything is quiet now.

I love you.

The end.