At the next intersection the misting of rain that had been falling stopped completely.

The streets were still filled with the dead. Most were on the edges, sometimes in piles, other times scattered where they presumably fell to violence. Almost all the bodies were washed clean from the constant rain.

The white flesh drained of blood either through wounds or because it was pooled in dark bruise-like patches of skin near the ground.

Most bodies were in various states of rot and ruin, but on occasion I saw a face that looked like it might be sleeping. I didn’t let my eyes linger. It might be someone sneaking along, playing dead like I had.

In certain sections the bodies were stripped completely and in other places only the boots were removed.

Birds and rats ate the dead without concern of my my passing.

I paused at a cross street and watched a man saw the thigh muscles off a dead body with a knife. He met my eyes but only for a moment before he went back to work.

Three men raced across the street some distance ahead of me. They too made eye contact but neither changed their course nor spoke to me.

Another face glanced around a corner ahead of me sometime later and then disappeared. By the time I reached the corner they were gone.

The last time I was in the streets I was desperate to get to Cook. I knew of all people he’d have a plan.

Now I had no plan. No plan at all. No direction.

Being on the shit-water side of the Slums I was close to the ship-breaker docks and headed there.

South of Bridge Street there were no bodies in the streets. I wondered if the guards still patrolled here in quick bursts from the beaches. We’d heard warnings about that. People shouted updates in the streets in the beginning. Telling us where we could go or not. What the guards were doing, how many were dead, who needed help and where.

South of Bridge Street there were no more inlets to the aqueducts so people were allowed to enter the Ice River if they so wished.

I’d seen many children jumping into the ice cold water from the street and riding the caged river down to the harbor while I went about my duties as an apprentice. I wished I could have done that as I child instead of staying in the attic all the time.

I knelt near the ice cold mountain run-off and reached toward it, only then seeing how absolutely filthy my hands were.

I coughed again and leaned away from the water in case the coughing caused me to pass out.

I tasted blood in my spit after it was over with and the smell of metal in the air was stronger.

I started washing my hands with the intention of getting them clean enough to drink from, but ended up in an absolute frenzy scrubbing at the blood and bile that wasn’t mine.

I knew I should be crying when I thought of the dead, but I didn’t have the energy left for it. Instead I dunked my head into the river and then scrubbed at my hair and face.

The water was so cold it hurt. I took a deep breath intending to hold it while I drank but it set off a coughing fit.

I drank small handfuls of water when I recovered.

My joints ached and I knew the pain in my knees wasn’t only from crawling around the attic.

There was a woman on the other side of the river when I stood. She wasn’t as filthy as I was, but she wasn’t clean. She was struggling to carry the clothes basket on her back, both hands reaching up and over her shoulders to hold the upper edge even as the two straps dug into her shoulders. When she coughed she too went down on a knee and then, with great effort pushed herself up to her feet without letting go of the basket.

She looked up then, and I waved, because that seemed like the thing to do. We could have shouted at each other over the forty pace wide river. It was walled, contained, and deeper than a man was tall.

The king had cut the track through the city long ago. From the street there was a slight incline then a flat space without railing or hand hold. Not that the river needed a fence or railing. The Whitecoats patrolled the Ice River to make sure no one interfered with the water, as it was the source of the water that filled the aqueduct network.

She waved back, or at least she lifted a hand. Then she put her head down and slowly took the last ten or so steps. She didn’t pause, she didn’t look up, she just stepped off into the rushing river.

I stepped closer lifting a hand as if I could stop her, yet I couldn’t even see her. The water flowed so fast here and it was deep. Still, I felt a need to wait, to witness, on the off chance she broke the surface and called for help.

I stood there for a long time. First I was waiting, then I was lost in the numbness of existing during the end of the world, then I was considering stepping off as well.

I’d almost drowned several times when I learned how to swim and I remembered the panic that came with it.

Master Juun said that his apprentices had to collect their own snails for ink. To do that I needed to not only know how to swim, but how to dive.

I bolt would be better than drowning.

I had to backtrack twice before I made it through the warren of buildings to the ship-breaker docks. The dock was low enough to the waves that in storms the waves slammed up into the bottom of the planks and forced tall sprays of water out between the cracks.

The docks were empty of course. As was the harbor. I tried to spot the floating druid stones that blocked the harbor from the sea but they were too far away.

We’d seen the ships burning in the harbor and heard other’s tried their luck heading up the Ren River into the shallow swamps, which was just death of another sort.

The pillars of the dock were huge and I remembered coming down here to watch a ship be torn apart by the workers on one of the rare trips I got to leave the attic with Cook as a boy.

Hour by hour working men had crawled over the ship and the ship shrunk, transforming into boards and planks until there was nothing left.

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Piracy had stopped long before I was born, but once this dock had gutted pirate ships and captured ships alike if either were too damaged to sail again.

It hurt to do so, but I sat down on the edge of the dock and let my bare feet hang over the edge. They almost reached the top of the waves.

Now, feet bare to the spray of waves slamming into the pillars, I wondered what the point of it all had been. Would other people live here later once the sickness was gone?

Was the whole world dying? Dead?

I coughed from time to time. I’m not sure what started it, but when I started crying and couldn’t stop.

When the sobbing did end I felt completely empty.

I got to my feet and started back down the dock. I’d find a guard. A crossbow bolt would be best.

The dead lay scattered across the beach. Dried black bits clung to yellowish bones exposed by beak and claw.

The birds and crabs had made short work of the dead on the beach. There was a line of stacked dead, one of the town criers had spoke of it. That stepping beyond it meant death. There were only a few bodies beyond the line, though I couldn’t see where the guards were hidden.

I stepped over the line and lifted my arms to flap like bird and draw attention. There weren’t any guards on the city’s wall nor any on the beach before me.

I walked further, towards a blacked pile of what had once been a harbor fishing boat.

There were some burned bodies, bones black and gray with ash where they weren’t covered with charred flesh.

So no guards here.

I looked back and sighed. I’d walked a long way. I turned back to look toward the swamp. Then I headed back toward the city. The idea of dying alone in the swamps was not appealing.

Once I reached the street I stopped to take a break.

How long had it been since it had stopped raining I wondered. Two years of strong winds and flooding rains and now, with the dead rotting around me, sunshine. Then again there had been days of sunshine here and there. Even an eleven day stretch last year when everyone thought it was all over.

I started moving again, with no destination in mind. I rounded a corner and heard voices. I slowed but didn’t stop until I turned another corner and spotted them.

People were moving between cots set up in the street. Someone pointed at me. A man in a dark coat with a crossbow approached.

But he didn’t lift it.

“You sick?” he asked from ten paces off.

My eyes wandered up to the distant mountains behind him to the east as I nodded.

I never heard the crossbow snap.

After a while I realized he was talking to me.

“What?”

“If you’re already sick,” he said, “you can’t get any sicker. See Marcus over there,” he said indicating an alley with the crossbow. He turned away and walked back toward the people laid out on cots and beds and wagons with the wheels knocked off.

I walked on, because why not. People kept moving between the cots. They were wiping faces and dripping water into open mouths, or wiping spittle away after a wracking cough. The bodies were covered in sail cloth to keep the rain off but I saw people shiver from the wet.

“Marcus?” I asked after I turned down the alley and found people moving into and out of doorway.

“He’s-” a man began.

Then he started coughing, a moment later he doubled over. One of the men beside him helped him to the street so that he didn’t fall over.

“Marcus is dead,” someone said behind me.

When I turned I saw an older man with dried blood in the corner of his eyes.

“We are clearing this building,” he told me, “as we’ve got more than the hospital can handle and the street’s no place for them.”

They were a bunch of nameless dead men who were still able to work. There were large rugs that we used to roll, scoop, or shovel bodies onto. Then we carried them over two streets and left the remains in a massive haphazard pile.

The flies were so thick when we tossed a new body on that it looked like the piles were smoking. The feasting ravens and gulls didn’t do more than hop away from us, and the rats were all slick with filth like they’d just crawled out of the water.

The work was difficult, and twice I went down from the coughing.

“Pace yourself,” someone said, “it will only get worse. You need to work slower.”

No one introduced themselves. No one cared who I was. From time to time people went down. Most of the time it was from the coughing, but sometimes it was from sobbing.

Twice their sorrow spilled over into me and I began sobbing myself until I was once again empty.

I held the hand of a man while he was dying. We’d worked the previous morning together hauling water.

“I was supposed to be a fisherman, like my father,” he said while staring at the rainbow formed in the mist of falling water from a broken aqueduct line.

What little hair the man had left was gray. I wondered if it was normal to think of your parents when you were dying, even if they had died years before.

By mid-afternoon his coughs had turned wet and frothing. He walked over to one of the piles of bodies and just sat down near it. The rats and birds actually gave way, moving on a bit. The flies took no notice.

He didn’t ask me to wait with him but it didn’t seem right to leave him. So I sat.

A short time later he stopped me after I turned him over on his side and helped clear his mouth after a particularly hard bought of coughing. He’d gone over backwards onto his back. He didn’t say a word, just met my eyes and shook his head.

The next set of coughs were wet and sucking and after he recovered he took four or five wet breaths before the final wave of coughing got him. He squeezed my hand with no more strength than the children had. I watched him fall away into himself as his head wobbled and slumped back.

I waited with him for a while and then pulled my hand free.

It didn’t seem right leaving him here with all the other bodies. Most of them were far from human looking, having died weeks ago. Yet I didn’t know where else to move him.

I went back to work and when I next returned, carrying the partial remains of bodies in a rug with a different work partner, the fisherman’s son was already buried beneath a pile of remains.

In the evenings those of us who still had an appetite got a bowl of sea’s bounty stew that was mostly seaweed. There were bits of rat in the stew. I’d tried helping catch the rats and birds but mostly they just walked through the piles of dead stabbing them with makeshift spears. They skinned and gutted them right there in the street and if you waited long enough other rats or ravens would come feast on the fresh guts.

Sometimes there was singing or music in the evenings, but it was the sound of sex that drew my attention that first night. There weren’t many, maybe three handfuls of people. It was in the bottom room of some door-less building. Other people were watching as well. Someone pushed me forward mumbling that I was young and should have a go.

One of the women heard, and welcomed me with a wave of her hand.

I left.

As I huddled into a blanket laying down beside others, I was confused at first. Then it sorted out by the time I drifted off to sleep.

They knew they were going to die, and they wanted to feel alive in any way they could.

In the mornings we hauled away the workers that did not wake before we moved on to the more experienced dead.

Throughout the day people were sent to us, always looking for Marcus, whoever he had been. We put them to work. There was always water to haul or furniture to tear apart for firewood.

There were always more bodies to haul, or bodies to tend as they lay on cots in the various buildings that made up the hospital.

What was odd was that from time to time I noticed someone I’d known- well, not really known as I had grown up first in Cook’s attic and then the alchemist’s compound. Both places made seeing anyone from outside fairly rare. Yet I spotted a skinny man who had delivered bread and fish, and another man who brought the firewood.

In a way though I don’t think any of that mattered anymore. Who they had been, who they knew or didn’t know. No one wanted to talk about who they had lost and strangers, it seemed, were preferable to friends.

I learned one of Cook’s stories turned out to be true enough when we battered a door down and found the dead inside still on their feet.

The closest worker was grabbed and bitten by the dead on the other side. Thankfully the biter only took a small chunk of flesh from the heel of his hand before the rest of the workers clubbed the dead away with the shovels.

We made short work of the things, bashing the top of their necks with makeshift clubs or shovels. Then we hauled them away to the pile of dead just like every other body we found.

When I asked how often that happened, someone shrugged.

When my coughing got so bad I thought I only had a day or so left on my feet I volunteered to be a bell ringer.

I walked with an older man out into the Slums. Sometimes the bell ringers didn’t come back. Many of the guards had been trapped in the Slums during one of the cleaning runs and their crossbows taken by others. Some people just shot everyone that came close. So when we came to bodies that had bolts sticking out them we rang the bell, said our piece to the empty air, and went another way.

I made it two days with the man, and on the third he didn’t wake. I rang the bell for three more days until my coughing left me so weak I couldn’t get off the pile of rugs I’d slept on.

I was moved to a cot and mostly shifted between horrid coughing fits and unconsciousness as someone wiped my face with a wet rag, dribbled water into my mouth, and told me everything would work out.