Harry Styles at the End of the World

No One

Harry still had it, his white Lamborghini with custom leather seats. It still went fast. Not a ding or scratch, but there was no one to praise his Lambo anymore. No one around to tell him he cut a dashing figure in his car. He would zoom down the empty highways, going 100 miles an hour, and there was no one there to tell him to stop. It robbed the act of its sweetness.

 He looked out at miles and miles of overgrown corn fields. Grasshoppers were leaping about in unabashed ecstasy. The rain beaten scarecrow couldn't discourage them, slumped as he was at the bottom of his pole, disintegrating  into a sad pool of tattered denim. The world belonged to the corn and the grasshoppers now, and all things bug and flora.

Though it had been three years since he'd seen another person- a breathing one anyway-his throat still tightened uncomfortably at the thought. He had planned his exit on his 366th day alone. He'd gone so far as to take a handful of Ambien he'd found in a couple's medicine cabinet. Harry stood over their maggot-chewed skeletons, grinding his teeth into one, two, eight purple pills. He woke to vomit running burning trails through his nostrils. Fully conscious but unable to sit up, he had to endure hours of nose-puking before he could get to his knees. Everything smelled like burritos for a week. He fucking hated burritos.

That night, he pulled out his old "Goals" notebook from his console. The first page said: Start a production company," "Record an Album with Steve Albini," "Marry Olivia." He ripped it out. With his Mont Blanc pen, he added a solitary goal. FIND ANOTHER PERSON.

And since Day 367, that's all he thought about. Once, he saw a set of what looked like fresh footprints, in San Diego, but he spent months searching the area, until he had to press on. He saw a family of mice outside of Nebraska, and three pigeons in New York. Those were good signs. He saw a dog in a Chicago suburb he couldn't lure it for all his desperate heart. That was the first dog he'd seen in years. The virus, it took the animals, and all things warm-blooded.

Everyone was dead. Some of his friends and family died as he wiped away at the blood gushing from their mouths, and he screamed aloud to their wicked God as their eyes became glass. Some he heard had passed early on when everyone was still tender-hearted. 

 England so far away. Home. If he could only be near his childhood bedroom, the places he used to drink vodka with his friends while his mum was in London shopping with his sister. He'd sleep in his old bed. They were all dead there. All his people.  And he wasn't there for them when they met such violent ends. All gone. All dead. 

Sometimes, he had to pretend that he was solo camping, and the cities he had lived in and loved were still buzzing with the thump of EDM, the wail of guitar, and the sweetest of all music, the happy chatter of distant voices . Those muffled mundane conversations that sing of life and safety. He had to imagine they were all still there, just some miles and days away. What was the harm, if it helped him pass another night with only ghosts for company?

Maybe Harry was genuinely the last soul. There was an old friend unaccounted for in the death log. Harry knew that he too was gone, lost to STRAND 7.  But he liked to pretend he was drinking beers in Doncaster, his heart beating strong though broken.