Dandelion Season
He buried her beside the house.
She was the only one who got a decent burial, for she was the only one who meant anything to him. The others stayed where they were, sprawled out in the places death had found them. Their eyes bloodshot, their necks red with boils, all the pain of their final moments was still heavy on their faces.
He turned and walked back to the street. A stray dog bit at one body where it lay on the sidewalk, while a flock of grackles picked at the soft parts of a child’s corpse on a nearby porch. The virus hadn’t affected the carrion eaters. Now they carried on the cycle.
The afternoon sun was high in a sky so blue it was maddening. There were no contrails signaling the passage of a jet overhead. There weren’t even any natural clouds. Just that insane blue expanse. It hung over everything, taunting the remains of the town below.
The shifting breeze brought the stench of decay back to his already burned out nostrils. A week ago he might have puked. But he had been among the rot long enough that it didn’t bother him anymore. He was used to that smell now, just as he was to the smell that dead flesh makes when it is burnt.
He burned the bodies usually. They could carry disease. While he hadn’t succumbed to the virus yet, he knew he was still susceptible to all the other sicknesses that had plagued mankind. So for the past week he had fallen into a pattern of wake up, care for her, burn bodies, care for her, then fall asleep. But now all he had to do was burn.
He picked up his gasoline can and walked over to the house where the grackles were. They took to the air at his approach, squawking at this disruption of their meal. As he walked up the front steps his eyes fell upon the child’s body. It was an odd and saddening thing, to see someone so young in rags, but fully clothed. The virus did not pity the innocent.
He passed on by the child and entered the house. Now the smell was strong, so strong that it was no longer a smell but a presence, a putrid presence of stagnation and decomposition. It was humid, oppressingly so, like the air before a thunderstorm. But the storm had already passed. This was its wake, a dark and overbearing wake.
He entered the living room. There was a body there, buried under what seemed to be a mountain of blankets upon an old flowery, couch. He walked over to it and saw that it was a large man with only a few blankets over him, too few to protect him from the chill of death. His corpulence only made his body even more sickening. The body had probably rotted enough to become fused to the couch, although no investigation of that was forthcoming.
He opened the lid of the gasoline can. The distinct odor one can only associate with gas instantly permeated the room, drowning out the smell of death. He splashed a little on the body, then began to make a trail through the house.
He passed through the kitchen. The counters were cluttered, the sink was full of dishes, and the table was full of papers and other odds and ends. Everything seemed normal, as though the terrible winter when the virus had descended in all its sanity defying might was only a bad dream for a sleeping child. But that was not so. The child was not sleeping, it was dead on the porch. So he left some gasoline in the kitchen.
He left some gasoline in every part of the first floor. He didn’t bother going upstairs. The fire would weaken the lower level enough to cause the second level to collapse. The house would fall in on itself. Then it would be consumed.
He went back to the porch. Now the gasoline smell and the dead smell mixed in a noxious cloud. He threw the can back inside. He didn’t mind loosing it. There were plenty of gasoline cans now, and plenty of gas to fill them with.
He lit a match and tossed it into the house. The flame touched the gasoline and grew into an immense fireball. He could feel the heat from out on the porch, a blazing heat that boiled like a pit of red hot magma. Soon the flames had become a full blown inferno.
He turned and walked away from the burning house. Now the smell of burning wood and flesh rose up into the air. It had become a familiar smell now. He had taken care of over half the town in just such the same manner. This had become a familiar smell now. He doubted he would stop smelling it anytime soon. As long as the dead remained that smell would return.
He stood on the front walk, gazing down the street, the heat from the fire still very much in evidence. Down the street there was the vicious hell of chaos that the virus had left in its passing. Cars strewn everywhere, as though a giant, childlike god had tired of playing with them and wandered off, leaving them all out in the weather. Here and there the debris of a final, panicked existence was scattered among the bodies of its makers. Newspapers fluttered in the wind, their pages detailing the tragedy of the pandemic and all the horrors that it brought. But that was the news of three months ago. There were no more newspapers now. There was no more news. The human race was dead. The world was moving on.
His eyes returned to her grave. It was brown and barren dirt. He had labored long and hard at that grave for two straight days. For he had loved her, and all labors of love are long ones.
His mind drifted back to a year ago, a time when love was young and the world had not yet gone wrong. It had been a cool, spring evening. They had both been lying out in the lawn, the very same lawn she now lay in. The sun had shown through her golden hair with a divine light. She had been smiling. He had loved to see her smile. The way her lips curved up when she was pleased was often the very thing that pleased him as well.
On that particular evening she had put dandelions in her hair as though she was a young girl again. She had always liked dandelions. Why that was he had never known. She had loved the little flowers though, loved them even though they were weeds.
“You look beautiful,” he had told her.
He couldn’t remember her reaction. That killed him better than any plague could have. He thought she had laughed and snuggled up closer to him, but had she said something, anything?
He looked down at the ground. There were a few dandelions there at his feet. It was spring after all. Spring was their season, the time of the year when they sprang forth with all their annoying vitality. There could be no denying that spring was dandelion season. And up until recently, when the virus had come boiling out of West Europe, it had been humanity’s as well.
He reached down and picked the dandelions. They were quite small in his hand, vulnerable too. He walked across the street with slow, broken steps. At last he stood beside her grave again. He looked down at it for a moment. A tear ran down his face. He had loved her. Oh, to God he had loved her more than life itself.
He knelt down and very carefully placed the dandelions at the head of her grave. Then he stood again. This was more fitting than tulips, lilies, or even roses, the flowers of love. She had loved dandelions more than all of those. She would have wanted nothing else.
He turned back to the street. As he walked away he noticed that the lawns were almost covered in dandelions. In times before that had never happened. Husbands with weed killer and lawnmowers had kept their lawns green with grass, and nothing else. But now they were gone, and the dandelions flourished. He guessed that they would continue to do so for a very long time. He could picture it now, a great field of dandelions growing up through the asphalt, among the ruins of the burned houses, and, he fancied, thickest around her grave. In a decade or so, this would be a beautiful place come springtime.
He walked off down the street, his eyes filled with tears and a purpose. There were things to burn, and the sky was still maddeningly blue.
This was something I wrote up in one day. I don't think it belongs in science fiction, so I'm putting it here.
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, I'd leave out the "to."