Beyond All Time

Sunrise. Or, what was left of it. It tiptoed across the ash sky and paused for a few seconds in the centre. Pink radiated across everything. It shined, magenta beams covering the world. The remnants of concrete towers and stations seemed, albeit briefly, almost cheerful.

‘Are you sure that’s the right sun?’ a voice whispered from behind a large grey boulder. A girl was leant against it, peeking across the side at another girl, who was sat a few metres ahead.

‘Yeah,’ the other girl replied, tipping her head back as she bathed in the rays. She was slightly older, though it was hard to tell. ‘Yeah, Jaz, it must be.’

The two girls watched on in silence. Watched the pink sun shake slightly in the sky, and gradually fall back again. They watched the hard empty buildings become shapes of horror, rather than the powdered pink decorations they momentarily were.

All around them were hills, sloped and rough like everything else. There was a foggy green lake, caked in left over bones, and that was pretty much it. Mostly monochrome, and mainly minimalistic.

‘What are we going to do?’ Jaz stared up through sea-foam eyes, blinking back tears. Tears were common. Tears were part of acceptance, and even though sixteen was well and truly an adult, especially there, everyone that was left had done their fair share of crying.

‘Immy,’ Jaz said, softer, carding a hand through her own short black hair. ‘We can’t just stay here.’ She pushed herself up against the boulder, and stared out across the ground. Nothing. Just dust settling, derelict buildings, and the deep lake.

Immy sighed and padded softly back towards the boulder. She dropped down next to Jaz and tugged her knees up, hugging them close. ‘No, we can’t.’ She nodded in agreement. Through a curtain of pale blonde fringe, she watched as darkness settled again.

It wasn’t actually night time, really. There was no real sense of time besides the sunrises, but once that pink orb had bobbed back down, it was fair game. Occasionally, there was another sun, a new sun, but that seemed to appear entirely at random. There hadn’t been a ‘night’, or ‘day’ for years. Immy couldn’t actually remember a time where they were distinguishable, but apparently they were once.

Back when there were still people to call her Imaldi, when there was still some sort of community. Not government. It was too basic a civilization to call what they had any kind of governed state, but the oldest within the community still remembered being taught about it in school. Knowledge was passed down, recycled and retuned slightly every time. It wasn’t a lot, but it was what they had.

Immy dropped her knees and pushed the hair out of her eyes. She looked over at Jaz, a girl that she really barely even knew. Immy was two years older, but not necessarily wiser. She’d vaguely known Jaz before the virus, even though she lived a good couple of miles away. Most everybody knew each other before the second wave.

She didn’t really know much about her at all, but company was company, and that particular company was turning into family as they adapted and grew around each other like vines. Anyone else would’ve done the same, Immy thought distractedly.

‘How about next sunrise?’ Immy asked, shuffling closer to Jaz. For comfort, more than anything. Whilst generally the cold nipped at them, most people had adjusted to it, skin thickening and changing colour slightly.

‘We always say next sunrise.’ Jaz looked up, eyes a darker green now the sun had disappeared. She was right, for the past half a dozen sunrises it had always been next time, next time.

Immy sighed, huddling in even more. ‘I guess we do.’ She stared out across everything. Moving on, which was inevitable, it was move on or die, meant leaving it behind. The concrete bunkers, the soft hills, even the pungent lake. They were the sort of things you got used to after a while, and besides, her childhood memories stood resolute, and no amount of toxic lake water could erode them.

They’d been hauled up on ever so slightly higher ground for a good while, rationing food so severely that neither of them really had any sort of appetite at all left. There was no urgency, or hurry. It’s not like they had any dire need to leave in a rush. There was nothing chasing them, the virus had all but died out, and as far as either of them knew, they were the only people for miles and miles around.

They could take their own sweet time, which just made Jaz want to leave even more. Every time she woke up and looked over to her backpack, full of everything she could grab from her family’s makeshift home before she left, she just wanted to snatch it and bolt. But that was just nerves. She wouldn’t last a day without Immy, and she didn’t think she wanted to either.

Company was hard to come by. Good company may as well have been impossible.

Jaz pulled at her long thin sleeves as she let her head rest on Immy’s shoulder. Her father would’ve killed her for appearing so ‘vulnerable’ in front of someone she’d only known a short while, but he was dead, and holding those sorts of beliefs in life hadn’t gotten him very far at all.

They stayed sat as they were, the only audible sound their own breathing for a long while after the sun had gone. Everything they had between them was within view: two plain backpacks leant against a sizeable rock a couple of metres away. That was it. Everything else was tucked up inside the bags, apart from one blanket, which they were both sat on.

‘I’m glad you didn’t die,’ Jaz whispered, even though there was no one else around to hear it.

‘Well I nearly did, to be fair,’ Immy replied, smoothing a bit of Jaz’ hair down. The cowlick just popped straight back up, but it didn’t matter. ‘If you hadn’t have found me, I---‘

‘Don’t,’ Jaz lifted her head and straightened her tired back, cracking her spine out against the curve of the boulder. ‘It doesn’t really matter now.’

The first time they’d met properly, Immy was minutes away from dying. The virus, as far as anyone could tell, did something to skin cells. Itching and oozing for days on end with random bursts and fits as it progressed, but that was manageable. That was just like any other illness really. But if you were caught in a sunrise, that was the end of you. It reacted with something the sun seemed to radiate and within minutes every organ would be rupturing, and you’d bleed to death. So much internal bleeding left you grey from bruises. Swollen features, body scratched from the uncontrollable seizures.

The worst part was that after the first few cases, people knew they were practically walking dead as soon as they scratched the first boil. There was hardly any shelter at all, and what there was wouldn’t block out radiation. Immy had only survived because Jaz stumbled past just in time.

Being a stranger to that particular plain of land, Jaz didn’t know that the river came so far in. It was practically identical to the ground, so when she hastily grabbed Immy’s writhing body mid seizure, she tripped backward, and straight into the toxic bile just as the sun rose, saving Immy's life.

Neither of them were sure how it saved her, but Immy liked to joke afterwards that it was because the water was so foul, even the radiation didn’t want to swim.

People had tried it before, Immy recalled, but all of them had died. The water really was disgusting, but maybe they had mutated enough to actually survive in it. Either way, they never went back to the lake. They didn’t want to take the chance, and at the time Immy still looked like she could give out any second.

No one really knew much about the virus itself. It was contagious, painful, and there were only a handful of people that’d caught it and lived afterwards. At first, according to stories, it was some sort of government experiment. Kind of a population control, but it’d gotten out of hand. It was probably, Jaz thought, something to do with the current situation all the survivors were in. Mutated and almost not human, but alive.

That was the first wave anyway. There were news broadcasts, radio updates, and special information on how to keep people safe. Both Immy and Jaz had read about them, seen photos of the new reporters with their pale peachy skin and curled hair. They were sort of a wonder to the survivors.

If the first wave was genocide, an experiment gone wrong, then the second wave was nature hitching her skirt up and kicking back. The virus morphed and changed, and those who had survived the first wave had no immunity like they did before.

By that time though, there was no government to pretend to care. People were on their own. Almost everyone died. As far as Immy and Jaz knew, there could've been ten other people, scattered around the planet. No one knew, and no one had any way of finding out for sure.

Immy looked at Jaz, reaching over for the bottle of water, she wondered if Jaz had ever considered, way back when, that it would just be them. The only ones left out of both of their familial groups. Jaz unscrewed the cap and took a small gulp, then passed the bottle to Immy.

The rest of their little world was just past the rocks, but although it held memories it didn’t even seem close to what she wanted, not anymore. It was just recycled air, haunted with the dead.

‘Come on,’ Immy said softly as she stood up. She grabbed at the pale red blanket and folded it up, ‘Let’s just go. No more waiting.'