He made lists.

          Favorite vacations?  Sydney, Hong Kong, Aruba, Santiago, the States: Seattle, San Francisco, Las Vegas, New Orleans, New York City.

          Favorite desserts?  Digestives, lemon curd, crème brulée.

          Best lovers?  Jill, Ashley, Barbara, Diane-- definitely Diane.

          That line of thinking shunted his mind down a path of exploration he’d have rather avoided, but it was unavoidable at this point.  Lovers…  The implications of that term resonated with new, unexpected horrors.

          The smoke was still visible from far across the Channel.  The tumbled rocks of Brighton Beach ground beneath him as he shifted position; they weren’t the most comfortable sitting surface.  As a child, he’d wondered how far down they went, layer upon haphazard layer of smooth, round deposits, spectrums of red, blue from black to almost gray, the whites mixed in, the occasional half shell.  A Yorkie Bar wrapper, a half-consumed, now green with mold sleeve of crisps, a used condom now mocking his position in life, that of a man sitting on the edge of the world as it ended.

          He avoided making one list.  He wasn’t good at avoiding anything at all.

          He tried the emergency radio again; the hand crank whirred down, the internal flywheel sparking enough energy to life to give him enough minutes to confirm that there was only static now.  The final broadcast of whom he assumed was Brighton’s solitary living ham operator had been three long weeks before.  The message?  Well, that’s it then, is it?  This is how we end?  Cheers.  Followed by a gunshot.

          The smoke across the water had once been blacker.  It still amazed him that he could see it at all from this distance, from this tangential path around the curvature of the planet.  How anything could have survived that holocaust--

          But that really hadn’t been the point, had it?

          Terry Churchill felt none of the resolve another with his surname had once exuded during a time of tragedy.

          His occupation had once afforded him the opportunity to travel on the aforementioned vacations and order the aforementioned desserts and make love with the aforementioned women, none of which would have been possible or probable if he’d not been an experimental oncologist, one of a coveted dozen people on the planet whose minds were arrayed in such a way that allowed them to theorize and implement the most innovative of curative and palliative solutions to The Big C.  They’d never found a cure; other situations had suddenly taken precedence.

          Lists: whooping cough, influenza, Ebola...

          Perhaps it was his inaccessibility that had helped him survive.  He’d meticulously crafted an obsessive, highly-introspective lifestyle before the contagion, and maybe his survival leant itself in part to the fact that he didn’t outwardly (and his denial told him: inwardly) need people.  So when the end of the world came, he was neither surprised nor truly concerned, besides the fact that he realized that he’d suddenly be unemployed.  No people, no cancer.  No cancer, no oncologists.  That had been the existential crisis that had led him to his childhood home, the smooth stones of the beach, the pier.

          There are legitimate and necessary reasons for hermits.  Churchill had many.

          Another list: a tower, a plane, a baby, a wife.

          It had always been there, you know, the end of the world.  They’d ignored it through the century of its fruition, through the century of the perpetual war sparked by that list.  It’d been a faggot thing, a junkie thing, a nigger thing.  The list of nations that ignored it far exceeded in depth and tragedy the list of those that tried to stop it, but by that point, it was too far gone to stop.

          They’d wondered from where it had come from, at the turn, tried their best to contain the outbreak.  He remembered childhood instructions involving bananas and rubbers, the insistence that his classmates, who were more concerned with video games and instant messaging, never, ever share needles.  They’d stopped worrying about transfusions by that point; the filters were good.  Maybe they should have been better.

          The rich let a continent collapse: Africa.  Ten million, thirty million, two-hundred fifty million: numbers begin to lose meaning at points of critical mass.  They’d blockaded the continent, cut all ties, left it to its smoldering, controlled burn.  Maybe the world was too busy with its perpetual war to recognize the inhumanity of such action.  Maybe they simply had different shades of brown to liberate.

          A list of one.  AIDS.

          The end of the world had been staring it in the face for decades, but polite society doesn’t acknowledge such threats, the fucking and needling, the mostly-forgotten, disproven menace of soiled toilet seats, shared champagne flutes, the hacking homeless man on the Tube.  Polite society forgets.

          Terry Churchill had once considered himself a member of polite society, and even the fact that he had been a prestigious cancer doctor hadn’t excused him from being blind.  There were other doctors for other afflictions.

          He creaked to his feet, arthritic knees protesting, and tossed his unfiltered Lucky Strike into the waves.  There were no longer any gulls to fight over the maybe-food.  Unfiltered?  He did love his nicotine, and at that point, it was useless to be concerned about the long-term health detriments.  Those Yanks and their fag ingenuity.  Toasted, delicious.  Deadly, he mused.  Hoped he lasted long enough to feel carcinomas take hold.

          He was hungry, and there was no food left in his rucksack, just some bottled water and extra clips for his pistol.  He crunched up the beach toward the hotels and eateries of the shoreline, the stones shifting beneath each step, making him feel as if each forward movement were half comprised of backward and down, as if the salt water didn’t want to let him leave.

          Through the sheets of stones, up stairs and across sidewalk and pavement, he had no fear of visitors.  The last hint that Brighton still possessed any life at all besides himself had quelled with the final radio broadcast.

          There’d been warfare here, after the continental exodus.  The military had done everything it could to repel the sorties of refugee boats and rafts invading the shore.  Later, there had been more organized landing attempts from the last vestiges of continental armed forces, and those great gray vessels still scattered the beach, skeletal hulks burned out and disinfected.  Disinfected is subjective.

          Churchill wandered and wondered at the present emptiness, a maze of streets that had once bustled with businesspeople and tourists, couriers and lorrie drivers, couples old and young confident that their love would last as far as they could see into the future.  The future is subjective.

          He passed the antique shop where he’d found the pistol and rounds.  The experience had been traumatic; the shop was filled with history that would be forgotten forever once the last human changed over.  For all he knew, he might be that human.  What a responsibility-- to hold on to the scope of human history for as long as breath still passed.

          He was unlucky in most ways, given that the world had ended, but lucky in others.  A fish and chips shop on the beach had a back storeroom filled from floor to ceiling with provisions.  Provisions is subjective; in this case, it meant mushy peas.  He’d never understood the appeal of mushy peas augmenting a meal of battered haddock and fried potatoes, but he was lucky.  Peas had been a favorite food since childhood.

          The sun was setting as he entered the shop, but he had no real fear of being eaten alive-- anything still strong enough to chase, corner, and disembowel him had rotted into its constituent parts weeks ago.  The contagion had been beautiful in its effective, virulent dissemination.  He went into the back room to retrieve another catering-sized can of mashed peas.  It seemed a shame to open such buckets of peas each time he got hungry, but he had no choice as to the size of the foodstuffs and no way to refrigerate leftovers.

          The back room was an olfactory assault.  The power had been out for-- how long?  The freezers had burst their seals and oozed the blackened, rotten sludge that had once been frozen haddock by the hundreds and condiments by the gallon over the floor.  Churchill found that his senses had dulled in the time of his solitude, or perhaps those early days of nausea over the scent had been replaced with a Pavlovian conditioning: the waft of the back room meant he’d eat soon.  He salivated reflexively.

          The peas were stored on shelves at the back of the storeroom.  He retrieved the hacksaw and vice-grips that he used each night to cut and pry open the cans from a cubby that had once held employees’ street clothes.  The tools had been in the antique shop; he’d not yet worked up enough ambition to venture closer to the city center and locate a non-electrical can opener.

          A new can of peas under one arm and his tools in the other hand, he turned to go take his customary stool at the store’s front and watch the sun set.  That was when he first heard it, the shuffling, wheezing movement of company.

          It was Diane.

          Or at least a Diane.

          No, not the aforementioned Diane, a mousy-haired cervical cancer survivor from Lewes.  DIANE.  He’d taken it upon himself to name the affliction after the end of the world, because he suspected that he might be the last doctor left.  Dynamic immunological assault/necrolysis epidemic.  Diane.  It’d taken him a few days to assemble that acronym; he’d never been good with words.

          After the African blockade, some enterprising businessmen became very rich smuggling new AIDS drugs in and diamonds out.  None ever really went into the hot zones-- most of the most lucrative business opportunities were still in the cities, and most of the most lucrative business deals were carried out in airport lounges, even when none of the flights went over the wall anymore.  There were holes in the fence, ways to get into the continent, and anyone who really wanted to could still go in.  They just couldn’t come back out without traversing an intricate web of underground (sometimes literally) routes of passage.

          One such businessman was a Nigerian criminal named Mario Achebe, a mercenary and opportunist who was a veteran of forgotten little genocides in Rwanda and Sudan.  Mr. Achebe had several bad habits including smoking, heroin, murder, and rape.  He liked rape.  He liked virgins.  He liked baby girls.  His likes coalesced into a pivotal moment of human history, perhaps the most pivotal, when his spiritual advisor spiritually advised Achebe that the only way he’d rid himself of the HIV boiling through his bloodstream would be to release his seed in untouched ground.  Untouched ground is subjective.

          Human rights groups had long protested the African blockade, and pirate reports successfully communicated through the internet indicated that something was happening-- the AIDS crisis wasn’t just raging out of control; it was evolving into something much more horrific.

          “Too late” is a concept often overused and underpaid, but by the time the United Nations allowed the Blockade Reprieve Act through committee and limited medical observer groups were sent on one-way trips into the hot zones, it was indeed too late.  Mario Achebe had fucked a stricken baby, collected enough of the new strain in his bloodstream to end human civilization, and snuck out across the underground back to Europe, his cargo of diamonds the least of his transgressions.

          The underground took him to Amsterdam.  Step one.

          His travels took him to Eindhoven and on to Heathrow.  Step two.

          Step three?

          There’s no way to calculate how many people Achebe came into contact with during his journey, but eventually, a little bit of Mario would be floating within the bloodstreams of seven billion people.

          The U.N. observers who made it into the hot zones reported very little once they got there.  Most transmissions were more tears and screams than words.  The visuals were a nightmare cacophony of--

          The Diane was on the floor of the back room, at the foot of the walk-in freezers, scooping black fish sludge in greedy handfuls to its mouth, or at least what remained of a mouth.  The jaw had distended and been lost somewhere along the Diane’s path.  It was essentially forcing cupped hands of rotten fish into the hole at the back of its throat.  It didn’t indicate that it had heard Churchill, or maybe it was satiated enough by the dark, viscous slurry of what had once been haddock and cod to care about its inadvertent companion.

          Churchill’s grip on the vice-grips tightened.  It wasn’t the best weapon, but he had limited ammunition and had never actually fired a gun.

          He gingerly placed the hacksaw and peas back on the shelf and lifted himself to sit on the edge of the work counter along the room’s wall.  He regarded the Diane with a dizzying wash of pity and disgust.

          “What was your name, then?”  He couldn’t remember the last time he’d spoken out loud; his voice was a harsh remainder of what it had once been, an unpracticed, dry growl.

          The Diane looked up then, the rib bone of a cod glued black against its dwindling supply of neck flesh.  It didn’t seem to realize that most of the sludge it was consuming was just pouring lazily out the remnants of draped viscera that comprised its neck, never to find purchase in any stomach.  The Diane’s head drooped; it appeared weak, with good reason: it was entering the final stages of ambulatory necrosis, almost ready to surrender to the ground, non-living the rest of its non-life attempting to crawl toward food.

          Churchill was impressed, though.  This Diane was truly a survivor to last this long.  Must have had a good constitution not to succumb to the affliction weeks, months before.

          Mario Achebe had effectively seeded the world with DIANE, carrying within his rapidly-weakening body a mutated form of HIV/AIDS to every stop on his trip.  The most effective seeding had taken place at Heathrow, from which the contagion spread to every imaginable corner of the world, had it been cubic.  He died not long after reaching London, somewhere on the Tube between Charing Cross and Leicester Square, where he had intended to meet with a buyer for the diamonds.  The buyer had left his park bench in an uproar after his dozen voicemails had not been returned, convinced that he’d been the victim of a fraud.  He’d died within a week and had been walking through Leicester Square again within two.

          Can you imagine a world at panic?  Terry Churchill had seen it several times before, the day the towers fell (and his wife and unborn daughter with them), the assassination of the Pope broadcast live on the net, the flarings of war.  There’s something that changes physiologically in those moments, a rewiring of specific pathways within the brain, but circuits can only be rewired so many times before burning out.  He’d been at a conference in Belfast when the world began to end, preparing to give what would have been the most important presentation of his career, and he could only watch with a detached interest the images of continents burning and what appeared to be corpses wandering the streets, committing acts of what he should have interpreted as unspeakable atrocity.  Instead, he found a morbid (intended) fascination simmering to life in his belly, the kind of catalyst that he’d not experienced for many years, so frustrated was he with the roadblocks and dead ends of his oncological practice.

          He refused to believe that they were dead.  The Z word.  Romero.  Bullshit.

          It took him three days to get back to London, or what was left of it, the tilted Eye, the bloodied Thames, great flames arcing from Underground stations.  He made it to the Royal London Hospital with the assistance of the group of heavily-armed soldiers that had been assigned to guard him.  Apparently doctors of his reputation were in short supply, and His Majesty wanted to ensure that that supply didn’t decrease further.

          Comprehending an unknown pandemic isn’t something taught in med school.  The doctors we almost as confused as the general public, but they had made some headway in securing viable patients for diagnosis and… treatment.  What disturbed Churchill the most was the fact that most of the hospital staff had developed a cough.  Common cold.  Even under super-secure safety procedures.

          One thing was certain: the patients had full-blown, hell, over-blown AIDS, a virulent strain like none before seen.

          Many things were uncertain, such as why the patients were experiencing liquefaction and necrosis coupled with hemorrhagic fever.  Flesh-eating bacteria?  Ebola?  Had each and every one of man’s greatest medical nightmares suddenly merged?  And if they had, how had it happened and how could they stop it?

          The patients were also experiencing a severe loss of reality and deterioration of normal social functioning.  They were biting people.  What semblances of functional humanity they had left were rapidly transforming into basic animal instincts.

          Before they could find any answers, the doctors were dead, everyone who’d been exposed to the patients.  The city was on fire.  The shit had truly hit the fan, and that had been Churchill’s cue to leave.

          The trip south to Brighton took almost a week, even with the occasional assistance from a truck packed with coughing, hacking refugees or the British Rail line that still, miraculously, operated between Lewes and Brighton Road.  The experience gave Churchill ample time to think; he tended to think too much, but something was itching at the back of his mind…

          Those had been the darkest of the end days.  While the bio-suited military boys shot at and sank incoming French destroyers and the rich black smoke from the continent still scarred the horizon, much of Brighton proper was overrun with the afflicted, the walking dead, those shambling, mindless, rotting corpses lashing out at the living unfortunate enough to pass within reaching distance, base desires taking over, the gutting of an abdomen, the splitting of a skull; they hungered, and Churchill couldn’t know why.

          List: Airborne?  Blood-borne?  Waterborne?

          The Diane in the storeroom was the first of the afflicted he’d seen in… His mind was going; solitude tends to expedite that process.  Days blend.  Nights are lonely assemblages of cold sweats and nightmares.  He’d never required much human contact, especially since the day his family had been murdered, but now he yearned for something, anything, a hug, a kiss, a handshake, just something to assure him that he wasn’t all that was left of humanity.  The afflicted, even if there were more than this sole Diane, had left humanity already.

          She might once have been pretty, as zombies tend to be, but now, given the lack of a jaw and the moldering flesh barely containing her guts, she was the kind of ugly that sticks.

          He’d watched them rot from close proximity before, having captured and chained an infected child in one of Brighton’s many thin alleyways.  The fury in his eyes-- Churchill had wanted to club the thing to death-- death?-- to put it-- him?-- out of his misery, but he also knew that he had to observe the boy to satisfy his medical curiosity.

          He’d not been an AIDS doctor, not even an infectious disease doctor, but he knew he had an obligation to attempt to solve this sudden riddle, if indeed there were anyone left to save.  After the boy fell apart, he took to capturing and detaining more and more patients in that alley, but he never found anything more than the information the boy could offer: a hacking cough, boils and blisters and lesions, eventual disintegration when the flesh became too weak to support the body.

          That was something he’d wish on no one, watching the patients fall apart.  The rot started quickly in England’s unexpectedly balmy high summer.  In his mind, Churchill likened the process to red, undercooked chicken falling from the bone, a greasy, stinking mess.  Even after great sheets of skin and muscle had sloughed off, most of the patients writhed on the ground, reaching for him with fingers half bony claws.

          “I wish I could help you, I really do,” he said to the Diane.  “But I didn’t have time.”

          She snarled at him from the floor, more meat hanging low on her arms, one triceps surrendering to gravity and landing with a strangely-satisfying splat in the fish smeg on the floor, leaving her arm to dangle precariously from a rotten socket.

          He stood from the counter, the vice-grips in his hand.

          “I wish I could have cured you.  All of you.”

          He swung and sheared off the top of her moist, brittle skull.  When she hit the floor, he ground her head to paste.  He wouldn’t be coming back to this chips shop for peas again.

          He took his can and tools to the shop’s front, retrieved his ruck, and walked back toward the beach.

          It’d been the most inhumane of inhumanities to blockade Africa, and sometime during those decades, the disease that had so frightened the world had mutated into something vastly more destructive, pulling from the library of medical threats an array of siege techniques.  Rapid dissemination.  Total morbidity.  The complete dismantling of the human immune system in so short a time the world never knew what hit it.

          Churchill had an inkling of why he was still alive, why he’d not yet succumbed to the plague that made living people heaps of dead animal flesh.  In Belfast, he’d been about to give a presentation when the world started to go to crap.  His research had yielded unexpected results.  He’d been able to convince HIV-infected white blood cells to consume tumors.  He’d cured a thousand terminal patients, patients who would have gone on to live normal lives, albeit infected with HIV, if the world hadn’t ended.  But people had been living with HIV for decades; the new drugs were remarkable at suppression.  If the world had given Africa a chance, DIANE would never have happened.

          He’d live for quite some time longer, he suspected, if he could avoid any remaining Dianes.  There wouldn’t be many left anymore, given the heat and humidity.

          He’d live until the HIV with which he’d infected himself overcame his limited supply of cocktail drugs.  He’d have to take trips to every hospital he could find and hope for the best.

          He’d been dying of lung cancer a year before.  Six months before, he’d developed the radical cancer treatment and tested it on himself first.  Dead family, hermit-- nothing left to lose.  He suspected that somewhere out there, his thousand patients were still alive.  He’d fashioned a miracle out of certain loss and defeat.

          On the beach, Terry Churchill sat on the trillion round stones and ate mushy peas as the sun set through the smoke.