A Distant Refrain
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang, but with a whimper.
-T.S. Eliot
For Fox Mulder, time has been separated into two beings, before and after. After is melancholy and bland. He stopped seeing color, really seeing it, months ago. The world has been repainted with a neutral palette; the green of grass now dead, the sky a lonely gray. It holds silent atrocities he couldn't have imagined before. Homes long abandoned stand on broken streets, their shutters wide open as if to welcome them inside but he knows what they will find, if they're lucky. There are empty beds, the occasional threadbare blanket or can of asparagus, but more often than not they find the bodies.
Turned inside out at the chest, they lie in their beds, on floors, and in bathtubs once filled with bubbles and warm water. They are fathers caught unaware in their backyards, children taken during dinner. There is nothing peaceful about their deaths. Cloudy eyes stare blankly at the sky, the fear on their faces palpable.
He keeps one eye open at all times when they enter these tombs. Amongst the bodies and the loot and the coagulated, blood stained floors she finds the bees, missing their stingers, curled into little striped commas with legs.
They take care not to touch anything, to leave no trace of their existence.
"We probably don't need to do this, Mulder. We're immune to the virus," she says softly, watching him wipe down doorknobs and rearrange the kitchen cupboards.
Mulder pauses, the dirty rag hanging from his hand. "Not if one of those things finds us."
He smears dirt on the stove handles before they leave through the open back door. They step carefully over fallen phone lines and a large orphaned branch. It's amazing what a widespread virus will do to the population's sanity, but Mulder is so used to it that he barely notices the evidence of the disaster anymore.
Where cities once thrived, there are now graveyards.