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Should I wait for the rain to stop or should I… There, I don’t even have a clue what to do. He didn’t ask for anything heroic or cool or difficult.
Stay alive, Micka.
Can’t be that hard, can it?

I check the contents of my pockets, although I know what I packed. A knife for whatever purpose, pieces of an old shirt, wool. How ridiculous! Menstruation hygiene items, of all things. I could use a pullover and food instead. Maybe a sleeping bag, too. Not that I know anyone who possesses such a thing. Okay, what are the first things I need to find? Water, food, a dry place to spend my nights.

The nearest food supply would be the orchard in the valley with its peach, apple, and pear trees. It might be a bit early for harvest. I could eat rabbits, too. I’ve often hunted them during school holidays using father’s air rifle. I wonder if I should break into our house tonight and get the gun, my woollen pullover, some food, and a blanket. But if anyone sees me, I’m screwed.
 

My aching butt reminds me of the clumps of hemp in my pockets. I take them out and I’m about to throw them into the stream when an idea hits me: Traps!

I comb the fibres with my fingers, twist them into two long threads, then ply them tightly and secure them with knots on either end. My hemp yarn is barely the length of my arm, but it’ll have to do.

Once the rain lessens and the rumbling is far on the other side of the valley, I set off to find a rabbit trail. I install my snare between two sticks and hope that my human-stink will be washed off soon enough and that the rain doesn’t make the hemp so soft the rabbit can rip it apart. Or chew it apart.

That could be a problem. I decide to observe the snare. A nearby oak provides shelter and an elevated position. I scramble up the trunk along thick branches and pick a spot not too uncomfortable to sit. My legs are drenched and I’m shivering when I remember it’s not even midday. The rabbits won’t come until nightfall. I’m damn nervous. I have to get my brains together.

I plop off the branch and go for a walk, slowly drifting towards the valley — always careful to remain invisible — before making my way back into the forest. People will be working in the community orchard now. I’ll have to wait until nightfall, but then I can’t keep an eye on the snare
and
go down to pick fruits.

Hands in my trouser pockets, I stare at my boots and try to think. This absurd situation makes my brain frizzly.
 

What is the most important thing I need?

Yes! A shelter for the night. Something that keeps the rain outside and my body heat inside, but it must be built so that I can disassemble it fast enough — Runner doesn’t want a search party to find me, so they shouldn’t find my shelter either. The food issue will be tackled later. All is cool.

With my priorities set, I collect material for my temporary home. The spruce trees provide branches for a roof and twigs for bedding. The construction is finished around noon, or around what I suspect to be noon, because my stomach roars. When was the last time I ate something? I had an apple yesterday morning before my finals, and that’s it — an apple in twenty-four hours because I was too nervous to eat anything. And now I’m trembling with hunger and cold.

Okay, no problem, I think.

I trod to the reservoir — no one seems to be looking for me just yet — and get my fill of water. My belly makes sloshing noises when I walk back to my makeshift spruce home. The thing suddenly looks very unprofessional. I was proud of it just after I finished it. Now it seems the pathetic pile will collapse the moment I move in. Carefully, I inch my limbs in, trying not to bump against a weight-bearing branch. It’s too small for me to stretch my legs. From outside, it looks much bigger.
 

With hours to kill, I’m sorting through my potential food sources, and the prospects aren’t good. There’re no edible mushrooms — the season is just about to approach. The blueberries are all gone. Everyone between age five and fifteen, me included, took a bucket, a blueberry comb, and a backpack with provisions into the woods. After two weeks of this, we had stripped naked all blueberry bushes in a radius of ten kilometres around the village. Now the root cellars are filled with jam, sauce, and dried berries — unreachable for me.
 

The blackberries are just getting ripe, and I might be able to find a few handfuls of sweet fruits. No need to even think about nuts, they’re due in two months. If push comes to shove, I’ll eat dandelions. But…yuck.

My best bets are the rabbit trap and the community orchard. I decide that food really isn’t a problem and open Runner’s book, certain it will bring boredom galore.

The first chapter shows a picture with piles of corpses.

The Great Pandemic was caused by two bacteria,
Mycobacterium tuberculosis
and
Vibrio cholerae
, and spread across our planet in several waves, starting in the 1960s.

Factors leading to the Great Pandemic are considered to have been:

(A) Elevated atmospheric temperatures and sea surface water temperatures, and thus better growth conditions for pathogenic bacteria.

(B) Raised seawater levels and heavy rainfalls, causing an elevation of groundwater levels, which resulted in

(C) flooding of at least 63% of all sewer lines worldwide and substantial fluxes of faecal matter into aquifers, rivers, and lakes, contaminating all major drinking water resources.

(D) Frequent long-distance travelling of Western and Central Europeans, North Americans, Australians, and Asians by air, sea, and land, facilitating the spreading of virulence factors and antibiotic resistance genes, and later, significantly accelerating the spreading of disease.

(E) Use of large amounts of antibiotics (in the range of hundreds of thousands of tonnes per year), both for the treatment of disease and for industrial meat production, leading to antibiotics contamination of soils, aquifers, rivers, and lakes, and thus triggering bacterial multidrug-resistance in a great variety of ecosystems.

(F) Spontaneous acquisition of an extremely potent virulence factor in a multidrug-resistant strain of
V. cholerae
, and

(G) prevalence of various multidrug-resistant strains of
M. tuberculosis
since the 21
^st
century.

 
While we cannot ascertain whether the infection with both, tuberculosis and cholera, was the norm, we found evidence for dual bacterial infection in 879 out of the investigated 2176 bone samples. Based on these data and further analyses of bone injuries of various severity (for detailed information, refer to standard works by E.R. McCullough and A.G. Karkarov), a morbidity rate of greater than 40%, with a mortality rate of greater than 80% in the infected population, can be assumed.

And on it goes. I’ve never heard any of these explanations and — despite reading the chapter twice — I merely understand half of them. What the heck is a morbidity rate? Mortality rate is easy — that’s the number of people who died of disease. But if only 80% of the infected people died, why are more than 99.9% of humans gone? I flip to the index, but can’t find anything by Karkarov or McCullough.
 

The part about the antibiotics reads as absurd. I’ve heard about them and once I even saw one — a few spoonfuls of red powder in a sealed glass flask. It’s one of the most valuable substances to be found in our village. Zula has it locked up in his bedroom, as far as rumour goes. I can’t even imagine hundreds of thousands of tonnes of it. How could people manufacture all this? And what’s industrial meat production? Meat coming out of machines?

I snap the book shut and rub my eyes. The part with the bone injury data nags at me, but I can’t figure out why.

———

The sun sinks into the forest, painting trees with fire. I sit in my oak without paying much attention to the spectacle. My eyes are stuck to the snare. My stomach yowls with emptiness and anticipation. The bunch of dandelion leaves didn’t really help against the hunger. Their taste is still stuck to my tongue and all my words constrict around the white and bitter dandelion milk. I can’t think properly.

A marten sneaks across the clearing, its slender body bow-like and quick.
Go away
, I urge silently.
 

Darkness falls. The branch beneath me digs into my butt. I pull my legs up and balance on the balls of my feet. The moon is a thin sliver, providing only a little light.

The crickets begin their song and firebugs dance to the tune. I love the woods. If not for the winter, I wouldn’t understand why people moved away from the forest to live in small rectangular boxes.

A scream cuts through the night. Judging from its direction and pitch, it sounds very much like a rabbit trapped in my snare. I fall from the tree as I scramble down. My legs have fallen asleep.

Half limping, half running, I approach the trap. The rabbit’s white tail is flashing. It’s fighting, kicking and squealing in pain or in panic. I jump, my knife unclasped, and then…

The rabbit shoots across the clearing, gone in an instant.
 

My vibrating fingers search the spot where the sticks and my snare should be, but can’t find them. The poor animal must still have the string around its neck, probably choking to death slowly. There’s no chance I can find it in the dark. I kneel in the soft grass and groan into my hands.

When I make my way back to my spruce hut, my knees wet and muddy and my hands empty, I decide to never again hunt without proper equipment.

Then I realise I have nothing to start a fire with, not even dry wood. I couldn’t have cooked the meat and I can’t eat it raw; the risk of catching rabbit fever is too high. The animal would have died in vain.

Tired and defeated, I slip into my hut and hug Runner’s book to my chest. With hunger rumbling through my stomach and only a shirt, a pair of pants, and a rain jacket covering my skin, I drift into a fitful sleep.

The burning in the pit of my stomach wakes me at sunrise. I pick dandelion greens and eat three handfuls at once, but I’m still hungry. After a trip to the reservoir for a drink and a visit to the blackberry bushes for a few sour, reddish fruits, I return to my makeshift hut and open Runner’s book. It distracts me from the empty feeling that spreads all through my abdomen, chest, and brain.
 

The mentioning of bone injuries kept me thinking until I fell asleep. Then came the dreams of piles of bones, all dented, thick blood leaking from them.
 

I reread the first chapter and can make a little more sense of all the information. If mortality means dead people, morbidity could mean infected people. There’s no alternative explanation that would make more sense. So if 40% were infected and of these, 80% died, then only a third of humanity died because of the pandemic. No other disease is mentioned in the book, at least, none that seems important. Typhus was discussed, as were syphilis and a few others that had caused a number of deaths, but nothing close to ten billion.

I lie back down and gaze up at the ceiling, tracing the injuries my knife has inflicted on each twig and branch. Bone injuries. What else but hard impact can make bone yield?

A shudder runs up my arms. Is it possible we killed each other?

The idea doesn’t make much sense. One person hitting the other, sure. One person murdering another is possible, too. I’ve read about this. Some sickos have their own chapter in our history books because they butchered an entire family, kids included. But murder on a global scale and then…everyone taking part?

Runner’s words niggle at the back of my neck. The council decides how much the citizens are allowed to know; but what about memories? If there were so many people killing other people, Grandfather must have seen it. Why did he never talk about it?
 

I shake my head and rub my eyes. What crazy thoughts. The book must be wrong.

I creep out of my hut and brush pine needles off my pants. Warm thick liquid leaks from between my legs. Yuck. I hurry my pants off and squat next to a tree. My stomach grumbles unhappily. I need more breakfast. And I need this menstruation crap to be over already.

———

The bush doesn’t provide much cover, but it’s all there is. The lawns are shaved; the tree line is far behind me. Nothing but a few small hazels block the view from orchard to forest. I’m crouched down behind the largest of them, twigs and leaves tickling my face. In the dusk, the orchard looks ghostly with the linen fabric draped over each tree for storm protection. I’m surprised they are keeping the trees covered. The last heavy wind and rainfall was yesterday. They must be expecting more of it. Runner’s words are ringing in my ears, ‘I came because of the storm.’ How can he know the weather days in advance?

A rumble issues from my stomach. I thought of stealing eggs from birds’ nests, but all the chicks have hatched already. And I don’t think I’ll ever try raw eggs. I’m probably not hungry enough. My brain feels furry, though, and my knees and fingers are weak.