I’ll Be Seeing You Jay Townsend

JAY TOWNSEND APOCALYPTIC FICTION

I’LL BE SEEING YOU

Jay Townsend is a sophomore WLP major who is wanted by several government agencies that Jay promises are totally real and not fabricated to make themself sound cool. They can be found by solving several mysterious riddles hidden in discreet locations around campus.

When David first met Manuela, they were both closeted gay kids sitting in the back of their eleventh grade chemistry class. They weren’t drawn to each other so much as pushed by a seating chart, which deprived Manuela of her normal friends. David was a textbook loner, and he’d looked it, down to the gray hoodie. He’d noticed Manuela and immediately pegged her as a social butterfly who wouldn’t have any interest in him, so he was surprised when she smiled and said hello.

“You were in my English class last year, right?” She asked, leaning forward. She had dark, curly hair that fell in her face often, and, as she finished the motion, a chunk flopped over her eyes. She brushed it back in place absently.

David blinked and nodded. “Yeah. I’m David.”

“Manuela.” She leaned over to look as his desk. “Whatcha doing?”

David glanced down at his notebook and automatically moved his hand to cover its contents. “Nothing.”

“Were you writing lyrics?” Manuela asked excitedly.

“Ye- why do you say that?”

“The lines were all short.”

David paused, trying to figure out what he was going to say. “Yeah, I was.”

I’ll Be Seeing You 35

Manuela’s eyes lit up. “Really?” She barreled ahead without waiting for an answer: “Because I, like, compose music on the side, and I’ve been looking for someone who does songwriting. You wanna come over to my house this weekend and try it out?”

David packed up his belongings and climbed out of the ditch he’d been sleeping in to greet the highway, which stretched, empty and demanding, before him into distances he could not perceive.

All around him, the world was silent and still. He was away from major cities now, where most of the pilgrims were heading. And there weren’t too many pilgrims to start with.

There are so many apocalypses. Zombies, nuclear war, aliens, global warming, pandemics. People have a fascination with their own decimation. David watched one of those apocalypse prep reality TV shows one time sitting in a motel with his sister. The main man talked about how he was prepared for anything, as if the gentle scythe of death would pass him over if only he could stock up enough on canned peaches. As if a bunker could save you from the end.

No apocalypse preppers had been able to predict what really came for them.

David remembered the first death he’d seen: a girl in his psychology class, thought at first to be staring into space until someone finally checked her heartbeat. David couldn’t remember her name now. He couldn’t remember if she bled or if she smelled or what happened immediately after, but he could remember her eyes. They stared at him, open and grey and fathomless as the ocean.

More died after that. The college cancelled classes— too many dead or dying students. At first, the news stations tried to document what was going on. Then they shut down, and it was just government bulletins from the CDC, theorizing where the Disease came from, but every day it seemed to be something else. People wore hazmat suits and it stopped nothing. People carried oxygen tanks and drank water only after boiling it and near-destroyed food with heat or cold and it did nothing. It was as though millions of people’s bodies decided to give in, slowly, inevitably.

The government bulletins stopped, and the riots started. And the exodus.

Thankfully, David didn’t have to watch his roommate die since

36 Jay Townsend his roommate had dropped out a few weeks before. Life had been strangely kind to him. Or strangely cruel, depending on your viewpoint. He’d survived a surprising amount of time. The Disease killed seemingly at random, and quickly. People just laid down and died.

David had outlived almost all his college friends and paid for it every day. He’d listened to his mother sob through the phone about his father and sister, and then listened to Manuela’s grave call about his mother. Electricity cut out shortly after that. Nobody to run the power plants, after all. It had been a week after David had seen his first death.

He’d considered killing himself, of course. At that point it was a popular course of action. He was scared enough to do it. He’d never had that before. David had thought about killing himself many times but never had a good reason. This was a good reason. He was no scientist. He couldn’t cure himself, couldn’t help anyone else, couldn’t even talk to the only people he knew who might still be alive.

At the time he made his decision, David had been sitting on the floor of his bathroom because the smooth whiteness of the place made him feel calmer. Outside, he could hear screaming. Lots of that now. Lots of despair, here at the end of the world.

And then he had the desperate thought: I can’t die like that.

I can’t die afraid.

The thought surged through him, pulled him to his feet.

I can’t die afraid.

I’m going to die happy. I have to die happy.

The next day, he packed some essentials— cooking pot, lighter, blankets— took some food and an atlas from a nearby drug store that hadn’t been completely raided yet, and started walking. David was not going to die afraid. He would go back home. He would see his friends again. New York City to Northern Georgia? He could make it.

That split-second decision saw him to where he was now, trudging along an abandoned stretch of highway in what he was pretty sure was Virginia, terrified of the ticking time bomb that everyone held in the pit of their stomach nowadays, but still moving.

Green enfolded him. Nature hadn’t yet begun to reclaim man’s creations— it had barely been a month— but there was a sense of anticipation. The trees at the edge of the road moved in a gentle wind, seeming to lean down over David, and the grass rustled like

I’ll Be Seeing You 37 an unending maw: the new Scylla and Charybdis. He found himself sticking to the center of the road, brushing his knuckles against the steel of abandoned cars as if for comfort.

David walked on. The scenery changed, but the road did not. Gone were the trees, he was near an empty field; gone was the field, he was near a collection of gas stations at the edge of a town; gone were the gas stations; gone, gone, gone. Sometimes, in the towns, there would be another person, walking in a daze or lying on the ground. David did not stop for them. At the beginning of his journey, David tried his best to help. He boiled up fresh water, gave extra food supplies when he could.

David walked on. “Doesn’t matter,” he muttered under his breath at his survivor’s guilt. “Doesn’t matter.” He just had to get to Manuela. He’d missed her so much.

That first weekend, David sat in a tiny, clean-swept cool room as Manuela gestured excitedly at her banged-up laptop screen, asking if he could try singing to it.

“Wh— now?”

“Yeah,” Manuela said, looking confused. After a second, realization stuttered across her face. “Oh, right. If you don’t want to, I can just try.”

“Um.” David stopped. What was he doing? He barely knew this girl. He wasn’t that good at songwriting, he’d never sung for anybody else before, and even if he did want to, you know, make stuff, there was no way… David steeled himself. “No, I can do it.”

He didn’t let himself look at her while he was singing. He stared at a smudge on the computer screen, at the walls, at the light blue sheets on her bed. When he finally did look at her face, just as he sang the last notes, he didn’t know what he was expecting. Disappointment? Awe? Pained concern? She looked like she was concentrating, staring into space and biting her lip. When he finished, she nodded.

“Okay, I can work with that. I think if you use more skips in the chorus it’d help. Also…”

They talked into the evening, about music for the most part, but also about other things. David was surprised at how easy she was to talk to.

He’d expected it to be a one-time thing. Like, they’d make a

38 Jay Townsend song together and go their separate ways, but Manuela kept being around him. She joked that David had a calming aura, but, when her uncle died, it was him she went to for comfort. That was when he realized that she trusted him. And slowly, David started to trust her too.

David walked on. It was closing in on sunset, and the light made everything look dipped in butter. He wanted to stop but he’d only rested five minutes ago. There was another off-ramp heading towards a town. David gazed at the town name with weary eyes, then fished a beat-up atlas out of his back pocket to check his progress. Nace, Virginia. He was…

He was only halfway there.

David walked off the highway. He was so warm, and everything was spinning. David staggered to the side of the road, into the relative coolness of the grass, and did his best to make his buckling knees carry him a few feet further. He probably would have collapsed right there, if his gaze hadn’t settled on the corpse.

It appeared to have once been a young man, much like him; it was on its side, curled up as though in pain, but the decaying face was peaceful. Vultures and flies had already torn holes through the skin and clothes.

The stench hit David just a second after the sight, a smell still horrifying even after all the time David had spent in this dying world. He gasped and managed half a dozen more feet before folding against the weight of his own body.

The grass at the side of the road scratched at David’s cheek, but he didn’t have the energy to move.

He wasn’t going to make it.

David fought against the realization, but it hit him as inevitably as rain falls. He stared blankly at the weeds obscuring his vision, trembling and wishing that he’d made it just a little bit farther. He’d just wanted to see one person he loved. He’d just wanted to die without feeling scared.

There was a rustling off the side of the road. David’s head jerked slightly with the instinct to look, but his body was too weak to follow through. A pair of trembling hands sat him up, gripping him by the forearms. David looked up as best he could at the face of the traveler, who was muttering please be okay under her

I’ll Be Seeing You 39 breath like it was a prayer.

The sun behind Manuela’s head made it look like she had a halo. Her face was pale and drawn, with tear tracks tracing her cheeks, but it was her. David gasped. He found somewhere in himself the energy to laugh. “Are you real?” He said, half-smiling, half-crying.

“Are you?” Manuela leaned forward, resting her forehead against his. “I didn’t— this is so far from New York. What are you doing here?”

“What do you think?!” David shook his head. “I was coming to see you.” His breath hitched in his throat. “I— I love you. I wanted to see you one last time, before I. Before.”

“You— ha! I can’t believe we had the same idea,” Manuela said. Her expression wavered. She was trying to keep from crying. “My family’s dead, David.”

“I’m sorry.” Slowly, pain-stakingly, David wrapped his arms around her.

“Yeah.” She shook. “I miss them.”

“I’m sorry.” He wished he could say more. “I’m sorry. You don’t— you helped me so much. I think… you were the first person I really trusted in a long time. You don’t deserve all this.”

“You don’t either.” Manuela was barely whispering. “You were always so steady. I could depend on you, I— I missed you so goddamn much. You’re my best friend.”

They sank into each other, both too exhausted to stay sitting any longer, and, after a few moments, they lay curled around each other, fingers tangled. They both knew they wouldn’t be getting up, but David didn’t care. He was not afraid.