Sean E. Britten

I’ve always been inspired by music (I know, super original!) and music has always been a part of my writing. Way back in the days of burnt CDs, my mates and I used to put together CD mixtapes and I came up with the idea of a series of short stories based around pieces of music. Mixtape is all short stories sharing their titles with different songs and inspired, to various degrees, by their lyrics, artists, and vibe.

Currently Playing: Tiffany – I Think We’re Alone Now

The world ended not with a bang or a whimper but with a cough. Trapped inside his apartment, one self-described loner has watched as a final, lethal pandemic burned down the rest of the world . But even in the aftermath, he might not be as alone as he thinks.

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It had been a week and a half since the end of the world, depending on how you measured it. Personally, I’d been counting the days since the power went out. That seemed, I don’t know, final somehow. Last one alive, turn out the lights. Looking out the windows, listening, it really did feel like I was the only living person left in the whole city.

The world didn’t end with a bang or a whimper but with a cough. Maybe it ended with the first person to catch that final, lethal bug, or it ended when they died. Or it ended with the first thousand deaths, or the first million, or when cases had been officially found on every continent on the planet except for Antarctica. Or maybe it ended earlier, as soon as a bat fucked a chicken, fucked that final pandemic into the world, or however it was that the virus started. I couldn’t tell you what date any of that stuff happened though. What date we crossed the line into completely and utterly fucked. You didn’t know you were living history, or the end of history, until after it had already happened.

I’d seen it coming before it got really bad. Maybe not before the bat fucked that chicken but sometime before the first million deaths. Before the virus was right outside my windows. I’d managed to get to the store before everybody else had the same idea. I already had a lot of stuff I’d bought in bulk, on special, and I’d been meal prepping for the last few years. I bought up so much stuff, I figured I wouldn’t have to leave the apartment for months. I prepped a shitload of meals. Our office gave everyone permission to work from home before the government made that pretty much mandatory so when the virus started popping up in my city I decided I wasn’t going outside again at all until it was all over. I even used some duct tape to seal up the gaps around my apartment’s front door and my windows. I didn’t even go out on the balcony, much as I started to crave some fresh air and sunlight.

I didn’t count on the power going out though. And with it, my water as well. It wasn’t too bad, I kept a lot of prepped meals cold or frozen for as long as possible, and kept eating them until they started to spoil. But the bags of pasta and rice were useless until I could cook them, even trying to soak them for hours didn’t really help. I figured I could eat that stuff when it was safe to go outside again, when I could cook using a fire. I’d been smart enough to buy a bunch of bottled water and fill a couple of containers with more water like you were supposed to do in an emergency. But that was why, a week and a half after the end of the world, I was eating smears of peanut butter on crackers for lunch as I stared through the balcony door and wondered when it would be safe to go outside.

With a whack, I saw a blur of motion and something hammered the glass right in front of my face. I fell backward with a scream. A dropped cracker spiralled from my hand to the carpet and landed with the peanut butter side facing down. A bird, brown feathers, dropped to the ground outside. Its neck bent at a weird angle and its wings flailed. Like a dying fish, drowning on air, it flopped and spasmed around on my narrow balcony.

“What the fuck?”

The bird came to rest against the leg of one of my balcony’s cheap, rusty, metal chairs, quivering. I wanted to help it but maybe it had the virus. I hadn’t heard of it infecting birds but it had jumped species once and it could jump again. No bird had ever run itself into my window like that before. Maybe it saw me eating crackers and it wanted one. Maybe it was sick. I watched it shake itself to pieces until it finally stopped moving.

Beyond the balcony, I could peer down into the street. Across the way were several other apartment buildings, garages, and the corner store. Nothing moved out there. Once the bird had stopped, nothing else moved. A car had come to rest outside the corner store and there was a body inside of it. Someone, already sick, had parked there, gone to sleep, and never woken up. That was the only body I could see but there must have been dozens more, hundreds more, hidden inside the buildings. Inside my own building too, in the apartments to either side as well as above and below me. The smell had started to seep through the windows and the walls. Sour, rotting meat. Subtle but always present, I could never get used to it.

If the smell could get inside, I wondered if the virus could too. If I had my phone and the internet I would have looked up just how long a virus could survive in the air. I was pretty sure it died quickly when airborne but lasted a lot longer on surfaces, but I couldn’t look that up either. That’s what kept me from going out there.

It was probably boredom as much as anything that made me want to leave. Boredom and loneliness. I’d thought I was a loner but I’d never experienced anything like this. Stuck in a box, not a single soul to be seen outside. No connection at all to the outside world. No distractions or new forms of entertainment. I could survive a little while longer on the food I still had, I told myself. Days, weeks, before I had to collect more. But I badly wanted to go out and try to find more just for something to do. I figured I couldn’t stay here forever, I’d have to go out and find a new place to live. Maybe a farm or a mansion right next to a park where I could plant rows of vegetables, or by the sea. And, of course, most importantly, I’d try to find other people who’d avoided getting sick. But not yet, it was still too early. I had to be sure.

“Survive. All you’ve got to do is survive. Eat and sleep and shit, like an animal, you don’t even exist like a person. Not right now, not until it’s safe to be a person again. You just survive.”

Night, and I couldn’t sleep. I wasn’t eating that much and I tried to keep exercising as best I could but it was like I still had too much energy. I couldn’t make myself tired. With nothing to distract me, I padded through my empty apartment and stared out the windows.

It was dark, and silent. A city of millions of people but it was the kind of dark and quiet you used to talk about existing only out in the countryside. No streetlights, no cars, no lights on in any buildings. No one talking, no music, no televisions. The only glow in the sky came from the moon, almost full directly overhead, and the only sounds came from me.

The windows in the kitchen and the second bedroom looked straight into the apartment building next door to me. Rows of small balconies and windows, all of them dark. I stopped in the kitchen and scanned them. No light except for the moonlight glittering off panes of glass.

Movement. I jolted backward and almost let out an involuntary cry, like when that bird hit the balcony door earlier in the day. The kitchen window looked down into the living room of an apartment directly across from me. It was totally dark, like every other apartment in the building, but I’d swear I’d seen movement. Black on black, someone moving behind the balcony door and peering through the glass just like I was doing.

I probably should have been cautious. There was a reason, after all, that I’d avoided people in the early days of the pandemic. But lonely as I’d been feeling, I reached out and smacked the glass without thinking.

“Hey! Hey, can you hear me?”

My voice reverberated through my empty apartment. It must have carried through the window and into the quiet of the night. The shadow in the apartment below shifted but I couldn’t tell if they were reacting to my voice or not. I looked to open the window but I’d taped it closed in the early days of the pandemic. I hesitated about peeling it off. What if the person below was sick, and they came out on the balcony and hacked a cough at me?

The shadow faded back into blackness. Moving from one end of the window to the other, I pressed my face to the glass but could no longer see them. They would have only needed to take a couple of steps backward to be completely invisible in the darkness after all. I couldn’t tell if they’d been a man or a woman. Maybe there’d really been nothing there but a trick of the moonlight.

“Hello?”

I considered opening the window again or going outside. But dark as it was, I didn’t have a flashlight or anything. And I hadn’t seen them, maybe it was a trick, maybe if I’d seen them they would have looked like someone I didn’t want to mess with. I left the tape in place, didn’t cross to the front door, and backed away into the dark.

In spite of the excitement, and the fact I hadn’t felt that tired, I fell deeply asleep that night. Weird dreams followed me through the night. I was all alone and yet surrounded by people on all sides. Darkness clung to their forms and faces. No matter how much I shouted and tried to get their attention, they couldn’t hear me.

I woke up with the dawn. As soon as I had my bearings, I hurried back to the kitchen. Leaning over the sink, I cupped my hands over my eyes and pressed them against the glass. The blinds of the apartment below were wide open. Squinting, I studied it from signs of the person I’d seen the night before.

“There’s someone in there, I see them!”

At the back of the room was an armchair. It seemed to be exactly where I’d seen the shadow last night. In the armchair was a person, a woman I was pretty sure, in a long, dark dress. In excitement I struck the glass and shouted. She didn’t react but she might have been sleeping.

I tried to force my eyes to adjust but I couldn’t make out any more details. I had to wait for the morning sun to rise higher, sliding down the building. It crept through the balcony door and across the carpet of the apartment below. Staring as hard as I could, I could see a pair of feet below the dark dress, legs, the way she was sitting, arms resting on the armrests, and then a face with its chin bent forward against the woman’s chest. She didn’t shift from what I’d assumed was sleep the entire time.

A corpse. I was looking at the corpse of a woman who had, presumably, sat down in the armchair, sick, and never gotten up. Her skin was grey and decaying. She must have been there for over a week. She must have been, I told myself. I hadn’t noticed her before but then I’d never really looked and it was only thanks to the morning sunlight that I could see her at all.

“It wasn’t her last night. Obviously, she’s been dead for ages. She wasn’t moving around and then just died. Maybe someone else was in there, or I was just imagining things.”

More and more, I thought it must have been a trick of the light. The thought of another person moving around that room with a corpse in it, in complete darkness, creeped me out too much. If there had been someone else in the apartment, alive, immune, I saw no sign of them. If they were hunting around the apartment, maybe looting, I can’t imagine why they wouldn’t have used a flashlight. My imagination, it couldn’t have been the dead woman after all. It couldn’t have been.

Morning bled slowly, timelessly, into afternoon. I had no phone and no clock to tell time by anymore, all I had was the movement of the sun. Sitting on the couch, feet propped on the table in front of me, I listened to the sound of my own breathing. There was nothing to distract me from it, no sound, no birdsong, certainly not from that dead bird on the balcony, not even a breeze against the windows.

A noise. A scraping sound. The last man on Earth didn’t hear a knock but it was close to one. For a moment I thought it came from the front door but really it probably came from upstairs, in the apartment above me or close to it. I bolted upright. Another scrape, softer, maybe further away, but enough to reassure me that the first sound hadn’t been imagined. It almost sounded like someone moving furniture. The kind of noise I wouldn’t have thought twice about a month ago. That I wouldn’t have even consciously noticed, living in an apartment building full of people.

It had been over a week of total silence. If there had been someone else living in the building I’m sure I would have heard them before now. Not necessarily moving furniture but walking around, talking to themselves, something. There was no way someone else had been living that close to me the entire time without me knowing. The walls in this place were too thin. That suggested maybe someone had come in from the outside. I thought of the shadow I thought I’d seen in the other apartment last night. A looter or a survivor, going building by building, maybe looking for stuff to eat or something.

Maybe I should barricade the door, I thought. Stay safe, keep them out. But surely if they were alive at this point they’d figured out how to stay uninfected. Maybe they had news? Maybe there was a cure? Maybe there were other survivors? Or, if they were dangerous, maybe it would be better to confront them before they tried to break down my door.

I had a baseball bat in the closet next to the front door. Aluminium, bright red, lightweight. I removed it then, after a moment’s thought, I grabbed a knife from the kitchen as well. I used the knife to cut through the tape I’d stuck around the front door. It slit through the tape easily. Instead of putting the knife back in the kitchen, I stuck it in the pocket of the tracksuit pants I was wearing. The blade rested against my thigh through the thin material. Before leaving, I took a paper mask, like the ones people were wearing in the early days of the pandemic, and used it to cover the lower half of my face.

I hadn’t ventured into the hallway in weeks now. Hadn’t dared to open my front door. Emerging, I led with the bat. The hallway was dark with no electricity. There was a window in the stairwell, at the far end of the corridor. Enough light to make sure I didn’t trip over some random boxes that had been left scattered on the carpet. Listening, I heard another scraping sound from above and up ahead. Someone or something moving.

“Hello? Is anyone there?”

No one responded. I padded the rest of the way to the stairwell and looked up toward the next floor before committing. I didn’t want to surprise anyone if they were looting or whatever.

“Hello?”

Barefoot, I crept up the stairs to the next floor. I should have put on shoes, I realised. My breath rasped against the paper mask. My heart seemed loud enough to broadcast my presence in the quiet of the stairwell.

Even with the mask on, the foul, sour smell I’d been smelling day in and day out was stronger in the hallways. On the next floor, rows of doors stretched into darkness but I couldn’t see any sign of break-ins. Approaching the apartment directly above mine, I thought I heard something, soft, muffled, almost like a chair falling over.

“Hey, I’m not sick! I live here, I heard something moving around and I-, I don’t know, I haven’t seen anyone else in what feels like ages!”

I reached for the door handle but hesitated. Using the side of my t-shirt, wrapped around my hand, I took hold of the handle without actually touching it. The door was unlocked.

A fresh stench roiled out of the apartment. The blinds in the living room were drawn shut but dusty shafts of sunlight crossed the room. Carefully, I made my way into the apartment. The layout was identical to mine, the walls and floor the same, even if the furnishings were obviously different.

“Hello?”

A soft thump came from the bedroom, then nothing. Maybe whoever was up here didn’t want to be found. Maybe they could be dangerous if cornered. I worried about turning my back on them now, however. Creeping down the hall, I used my bat to prod open the door to the main bedroom.

A fresh wave of decay, so bad it made me retch. I forced myself to enter anyway, looking for the source of the noise I’d heard. Two corpses occupied the bed, tissues and water bottles and the remains of a few meals piled around them. An older couple, not old but older than me. I recognised them from around the building although their faces were grey and swollen with rot. Hands clenched the bedcovers like claws, the blanket stained with dark juices.

“Is anyone in here?”

Dust sifted through the air above the bed as if something, some movement, had just disturbed it. Maybe it was the way I’d knocked the door open but I didn’t think so. I felt like I’d just walked in on something. Propped up on filthy pillows, the couple stared right at me in the doorway, eyes sunken, mouths agape.

I checked the room, the bathroom, and the rest of the apartment. Quickly, before the smell made my throw up. I found nothing and no one. Maybe the sound I’d heard had come from a different apartment. Maybe. From the living room, right before I left, I looked down the hallway and saw the two corpses staring at me from the bed. Their faces seemed to have shifted slightly, adjusting their eyelines. But that was impossible. I could feel my heart thumping against my ribs again.

As I exited back into the main corridor, another apartment door clicked closed. I jumped. There was someone here with me, I knew it! They must have been in the first apartment and got around me somehow. I leapt forward.

“Hey! Hey!”

Caution fled. The bodies had creeped me out and I needed something to distract me from them. Bat raised in one hand, I grabbed the door handle with the other without thinking. The knife bounced in my pocket.

The smell of more rotting flesh slapped me across the face. Right across from the door, another body slumped in an oversized armchair. A filthy dressing gown fell open around thin, naked legs. Ribs showed in the corpse’s chest. Its head rested to one side, eyes open and staring.

“What the fuck?”

More weird tension hung in the air. The door, it had clicked! Someone was in here! Not just the body, there had to be someone.

The layout was a mirror image of my apartment. The same in reverse. Cluttered with more furniture and knick knacks than my place. Stomping around in bare feet, I stubbed a toe and nearly tripped. Checking the rooms, I found no one. Just the dead guy.

“Fuck!”

I’d had enough. I left the apartment and ran back downstairs. My bat clipped against the walls. When I got back to my apartment, I made sure the door was locked and then barricaded. I stripped off the mask and the clothes I’d been wearing then stuffed them into some trash bags.

The rest of the afternoon, I strained to hear anything happening. There were soft noises around the building. The kind I would have never noticed during normal times. I tried to tell myself that it was the building settling, or rats in the walls, but something had shifted and I could feel a weird tension in the air even in my own apartment.

When night fell, I kept listening in the darkness. The scraping sounds, if anything, intensified. Eventually, I couldn’t take it anymore and got up to roam around the apartment, peering out of the windows, stopping in the kitchen.

There was movement in the other apartment again, the one directly below my window. With a wordless sound, I slammed my face against the glass. Shadows shifted behind the balcony door, blackness on black. I couldn’t make out details but my brain tried to fill them in. I thought I could see a woman in a dark dress. Like the woman in the armchair, the dead woman.

Something scraped against the ceiling. Someone moving through their own kitchen directly above my head. I backed away, out of the kitchen doorway, as if the roof might fall in on me.

A feeling drew me to the glass door of my balcony. Across the street, I could see more buildings and more windows. Cupping my hands over my eyes, I stared through the glass. It was dark. The moon had only just risen but in the windows I could sense flickers of shadow where before there had been nothing.

I retrieved the kitchen knife and slit the tape around the balcony door. It squealed as it opened. I’d left it closed for weeks. I remembered the dead bird under the table and avoided it, still worried about disease. Circling wide, I moved to the railing. Leaning forward, I searched the windows across the road from me. There, I could see movement. A silhouette behind glass. Hands ran across the surface of another window.

“Hey! Hello, who are you? Who’s over there?”

I felt fluttering near my feet. With a squeal, I nearly jumped over the railing. A bird crashed and flapped across the ground. Wings spasming, out of alignment. I tried desperately to avoid it until it righted itself. The bird took off and flew past my shoulder into the night.

“No, no!”

It couldn’t be the dead bird. It had been lying there for over a day with its neck broken, fully dead. It couldn’t have come back to life and flown away. The people in those apartments all around me, they couldn’t be coming back to life somehow. Some kind of life.

Retreating back inside, I slammed the sliding door closed again. For the next half an hour, I crossed from room to room, window to window, watching, listening. There was no talk, no music, nobody on the street, but something was definitely happening. As noises increased above and below and all around me, I felt like they were closing in.

“I’ll go, okay? You can have it, you can have this place! Just, leave me alone and I’ll go!”

I didn’t sleep the rest of the night. In darkness, I did my best to pack myself clothing, food, and random stuff I didn’t want to leave behind. I tried to stay away from the windows as I packed but occasionally I got glimpses of movement in the surrounding buildings and on the street. The sounds in the apartments around me continued, sometimes closer and louder, sometimes further away.

It continued, but lessened, as dawn approached. I had to make the most of the day I’d decided, even with no sleep. Shouldering my two bags, I left my apartment door unlocked and walked down to the street. I’d keep walking until I found a farm, or a place by the sea. Somewhere quiet where there’d never been a lot of people to begin with but where I could survive.

I could feel eyes watching me from the windows. Dead eyes, dead hands plucking at the curtains or blinds. I didn’t think they would harm me but I couldn’t stay. This wasn’t a place for the living anymore. This was their place now, a necropolis. A city of the dead.

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Sean: It has been a very stressful week to tell you the truth, a very stressful couple of weeks, so I’m not sure I’ve got much to add! My cat Cain, who I love very much, is prone to urinary blockages although we haven’t had to deal with one in about a year until last week. A lot of money and effort later and it is still pretty touch and go at the moment, but I’m hopeful that we’re past the worst of it.

I’ve been battling to figure out what stories to go with next but not to worry, I’ve updated the Mixtape playlist to give you at least a little bit of an idea.

Keep your eyes on the site, and you can find more updates from me on Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and Instagram.

Next Track: Billy Idol – Dancing With Myself