You're Not in This Alone

Once Gerard and I were finished eating, we packed our stuff and went to the apartment’s stairs. I doubted that the elevator would be working. I was right, and the lights weren’t working either, so we had a lot of flights of stairs to walk down in darkness.

Gerard went first, feeling the way with his hands. I followed with one hand on the railing and the other on his shoulder. About halfway down, I heard Gerard’s foot hit something other than the tiled stairs. I shivered at the dull sound.

Without saying anything, he turned around, lifted me into his arms, carried me carefully down a few steps, and then set me back down. I didn’t need to ask him what he had carried me over. I knew it was a body. We continued down the stairs grimly.

“We’ll get a flashlight as soon as we can,” he muttered to me.

“Yeah,” I agreed.

At last we came to the first floor of the building. Slowly, he opened the door, and we stepped out into the bright sunlight illuminating the streets of New York City.

I gagged and almost threw up when I saw it. Bodies were everywhere. In the streets, some cars were smashed, and there was blood. Gerard slipped an arm around me to help hold me up, his mouth a hard, thin line. He wasn’t nearly as shocked as I was because he had seen this in his dream. I had expected it, but it was still far too indecent, disrespectful, and unsanitary to have all those bodies everywhere.

“Where to?” he asked quietly, but it sounded loud. The only other sounds came from a creaky building, a plastic bag, and a wind chime on a little shop’s door.

I tried to collect myself. After a minute or so of mental preparation, I took his hand and forced my eyes to leave his face and look at the streets around us. We started walking.

It didn’t take us long to find her. Within an hour, we came across a young girl with dark curly hair and tan skin. She was sitting down on a bench, corpses on the pavement around her. She had her face buried in her hands. I glanced at Gerard, and he nodded. This was the girl he had seen in his dream.

When we approached, she looked up. Her eyes were wide like a deer’s in headlights, but she wasn’t surprised to see us.

“Hey, are you okay?” I asked.

She jumped at my voice and clasped her hands over her ears. “You’re too loud.” she complained. “You’re hurting my ears.”

Gerard and I exchanged another glance. I sat on the bench next to the girl, and he stood a little ways away. “I’m sorry,” I whispered as quietly as I could. “Is that better?”

She nodded and let her hands fall to her lap. Her face was streaked with tears, and she whined, “It’s too quiet. It’s been too quiet since last night. The quiet hurts my ears. I’m not used to it. Who are you?”

“My name is Ebony,” I whispered. “What’s yours?”

“Sarah,” she replied. “Why is it so quiet?”

I shrugged. “Everyone’s dead.”

“I know that,” she retorted irritably. “I can’t hear them breathing. I can’t hear the blood pumping through their veins. Why are they dead?”

Her words confused me. Then, in a second, I knew. “You have really good hearing, don’t you?” I asked in awe.

She laughed hysterically. “Yeah. I always knew that. Everyone else just thought I was insane.”

“Well, I don’t think you are. I think you’re like us,” I said, cautiously putting my arm around her shoulder. “You have great hearing. I know things other people don’t. And Gerard, my boyfriend…” I gestured to him. “He has special dreams.”

Sarah looked at me with distrustful eyes. Although she looked young, I believed she was very grown up inside. People like me and Gerard had to grow up fast. But at least Gerard and I had had each other. This girl seemed to have nothing.

“We don’t know why these things are happening either, but what we do know is that we are alive, and we should try to find other people that are alive,” I tried to explain quietly. “I think you should stay with us.”

“Okay,” she said more loudly than she had been speaking before. Maybe she was getting used to hearing people talk again. I could tell that she still didn’t trust me completely, though.

I pulled my backpack onto my lap and said, “We were just about to eat lunch. You can have some of our food if you want.”

“Thank you,” she replied, eyeing Gerard warily when he walked over to sit next to me. We ate breakfast bars and drank water. We didn’t have much to choose from.

When we finished eating, Gerard looked at me expectantly. He wanted to know if I knew what to do next. I nodded to him, and we began packing up.

“We’re going that way,” I told both Gerard and Sarah, pointing down a street we hadn’t been down yet.

“Why?” Sarah asked.

Gerard smiled at her. “It’s always best to do what Ebony says, to go the direction she thinks we should. It always ends up making sense in the end,” he explained to her.

I felt the corners of my lips curl up despite the depressing scene around us. Gerard was extremely confident in my judgment.

Sarah frowned, saying defiantly, “How does she know she’s right?”

I sighed. “Look. We aren’t the boss of you. We can’t make you do anything. We’d like you to come with us, but you’re free to do whatever you want.”

She looked at me for a few seconds, and I stared back into her eyes just as firmly as she looked into mine. I knew she was a stubborn girl, so the best way to get her to go with us was to give her the option not to. At last she gave in, and she followed us down the street.

Gerard held my hand tightly as we walked down the sidewalk, stepping around bodies. Sarah glanced at us many times before asking, “Are you in love?”

“Yes,” we replied in unison. I’d known that I loved Gerard for many years, probably since I was Sarah’s age. Now we were seventeen.

She didn’t seem to know how to answer. After many minutes, she said without much feeling, “I’ve never loved anyone before. Not even my family.”

I nodded, knowing what she meant, but then I added, “You’re still young. You have time.”

“I’m ten,” she informed us.

“We’re seventeen,” I replied.

“How long have you been able to hear better than everyone else?” Gerard asked Sarah curiously.

“Forever,” she replied, and we walked on for almost an hour before anyone spoke again.

“What can you hear right now?” he pressed.

She didn’t hesitate to start babbling. “I hear my heart, and your hearts, and our breathing. I hear our feet hitting the pavement. Someone left their water running. A dog is barking far away. The dust we unsettle as we walk is falling behind us, hitting the ground lightly. Ebony just blinked. The wind makes a whistling sound. The earth is moving very, very slowly underneath us. But there are no voices. I’ve lived in the city all my life, and there have always been so many voices. Now I can only hear myself and the echoes I make.”

Her speech was a solemn one, and Gerard and I knew we weren’t meant to answer. Sarah just needed to tell her story to people that would believe her.

Soon we came to the building we needed to be at.