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You’re sitting on the edge of bed watching Allison get dressed and wondering when the television will start working. Allison is smiling at you, and pulling up her sweatpants, and asking if you’d like some coffee.

Outside the window of her untidy studio apartment the sky is bleak and white. The sun hasn’t made an appearance since last week, and with the exception of a cab on the corner of Fourth Street, and a man in a black suit in front of a closed bodega on Sixth Avenue, the streets are empty.

Her apartment smells faintly of mildew and pine-scented aerosol spray. There’s a pile of unwashed clothes in the hamper, and the television is on, but the volume is turned down, and there’s white fuzz on the screen, and you reach into the pocket of your jeans, pull out a crumpled soft pack of Marlboros, find one that isn’t broken, and look around for some matches.

"You can just ash in one of those cups over there," she tells you, gesturing at the nightstand, which has two or three empty Styrofoam cups filled with cigarette butts and rancid, brown water, and the table and the furniture and the floor and everything in the apartment is covered by a visible layer of dust, and you watch her put some coffee into the pot, and her kitchen sink is full of wine glasses and plates encrusted with last night’s macaroni and cheese, and you’re thinking Allison doesn’t look bad for someone who is thirty-two years old, an alcoholic, and who’s lost three children, and from where you’re sitting, in the dim light of her shabby little apartment, she looks ten years younger, about your age. Briefly, you wonder if you should stay.

You ask her the last time the television worked.

"Months maybe."

You ask her if she has anything left to drink.

"Like drink-drink? Or, like, juice?"

Like wine, you tell her. Or scotch if she has any.

"So you don’t want any coffee then?"

You tell her you don’t want any coffee.

"Let me see." She opens a cupboard, grabs a bottle of Pinot Grigio, shakes it to see if there’s any left at the bottom, and leaves it on the counter. You put on your shirt and slide into your jacket and stand up in time to see a white cat tear across Sixth Avenue, and you stop and stand there, a little startled, and think maybe you’ve seen a ghost, and then wonder if animals can have ghosts, and then, "You’re leaving?"

You turn around and see she’s holding up two glasses half-filled with Jack Daniels, and she has a look of nervous concern that you’ve grown to dislike in the short period of time you’ve known her, because you’re fairly certain it’s genuine, and looking at her now, you’re thinking necessity makes for some strange bedfellows, and it’s funny how some people have to keep learning the same lesson over and over again.

You tell her you have to be somewhere.

"Where?"

You shrug. You just have to go.

"Stay for a drink at least," and standing there, holding those glasses, her expression somewhere between fear and desperation, you’re thinking Allison looks like a puppy that’s been kicked too many times. She hands you the glass. She says, "It’s late, you know."

You ask her the time.

"Past curfew. You can stay the night if you want to."

You swallow your drink, drop your cigarette in the cup, and she just stands there, maybe mistaking your look for some type of romantic gesture, and outside, a plastic wrapper whips through the empty city streets, and the cat and the man in the black suit are gone.

"It isn’t a good time to be on the street," she says. "Maybe the television will start working. Maybe I can find some more booze."

You tell her you’re sorry, but you really have to go.

"Okay." She nods and you find her sudden acceptance odd and a bit pathetic. Then, "Please be careful."

Maybe she’s expecting a kiss on the cheek. You move past her, unlock her door, and leave.

* * *

Tall buildings form wind tunnels. On narrow streets the rush of air is ceaseless and concentrated. The trick is to keep your head down and your eyes half-closed and let your body move of its own volition, something that occurs on an intuitive level once you’ve made the same trip a certain number of times.

The first ten minutes are fine. You stare at your feet as you walk and can’t feel anything but the wind. The cars lining 3rd Street are covered by visible layers of dust and dried bird shit and remind you of dinosaurs for some reason, like fossilized wreckage, like the husks of dead animals that once cluttered the earth in a vast living profusion, but now lie inert and desiccated, functionless and out of time. There are rows of gutted tenement buildings on 2nd Avenue burnt black from a recent fire that people may have died in. There’s the sibilant rush of water from a decapitated hydrant on Houston. There are cracked cobblestone streets and storefronts on Broadway with rusted metal shutters pulled down over the doorways. There’s dust, lots of it, and it covers everything, so that your feet leave footprints in the sidewalk, and you’d never think inanimate objects and a city could be so dead.

There’s no dusk, just a sudden extinguishing of daylight when you cross Sutphin.

You encounter danger when you’re a block away from home.

* * *

You stop walking.

It’s instinctual, reflexive, this sudden paralysis, this locking of the joints and muscles. It’s what a newborn gazelle does when there are hyenas in the area.

You see two of them there, on the street corner, and you step into a nearby alleyway before you see any more, or they see you, and you try to meld into the shadows, and hope they don’t turn and move in your direction.

You hear one of them speak, and the other one replies, and then their voices and footsteps grow distant.

You peek outside the alley, see them lumbering up Broadway, walking strangely, as if uncomfortable with their own body weight. You look up and down the street one more time, and wait, and take a deep breath and when you peek outside the alley again, they’re gone.

* * *

At your apartment, which is only slightly more inhabitable than Allison’s, you find half a salami sandwich in the refrigerator, some mustard and mayonnaise, and the phone lines are working, and the television isn’t, and Allison has left you three messages already, and you don’t listen to them, just collapse on your bed, and fall asleep instantly.

* * *

The next morning, you’re outside early, and despite the fact that the sun has not yet risen and no cabs or buses are on the street and it’s cold, there are already a line of people behind you and many of them are muttering under their breaths and complaining about something.

"Your ID card, sir?"

The woman in the booth is staring at you with an expression so flat you question whether or not you’re actually even there.

You search your pockets, not yet panicking.

You tell her to wait just a moment, taking out your wallet and rifling through its contents, and she taps the glass and says, "Sir, there are people behind you," like it’s something that’s momentarily slipped your notice.

Above the booth, there is a new schedule plastered to the wall, and you realize now that this is the source of the muttering and the curses and the consternation of the people on line, and not so much your inability to find your ID card, though you’re sure it isn’t helping. The poster on the wall says, Schedule Effective June 28. The curfew has been made one hour earlier.

"Sir?" The woman’s expression has changed from apathy to irritation to suspicion. Like it’s the people she should be suspicious of. Like you and everyone here on line are the ones conspiring against her.

You find your card at that moment, and place it into the sliding panel. She gives it a cursory examination, then returns it to you, and then the person behind you steps forward, and she looks at him with the same dead expression and, "ID card, sir?"

* * *

As you reach for the pre-made sandwich inside the cooler, you feel someone place a hand on your shoulder, and the touch of another person is strange and almost makes you jump. You turn around and see an old man standing there, bone white, emaciated, and the fingers brushing the collar of your jacket are gnarled and disfigured, and his eyes are pale and blue like a vulture’s, and this walking corpse, this fossil, he looks around the room, then at you, then, "Careful, young man. You know, they put stuff in the food."

* * *

You spend the day alone in your apartment. You stare at the walls. You sleep. You read. You do nothing. When the phone rings you ignore it. You leave the apartment around eleven and indolently trudge around the city looking for someone to talk to, or to just be around, but today, there are even less people out than usual.

In the afternoon, the trains start working. There’s no warning, no announcements, the engines just start, and it’s sudden and inexplicable, like that day in June, three summers ago, when they stopped, and someone tells you it happened about an hour ago, but Penn Station is still inactive, and since no one really travels much anymore, because no one is allowed to leave the city, and has no reason to go much beyond the food dispensers and liquor stores, and since no televisions or radios have worked for several months, no one is aware of precisely why the trains have started running, except perhaps for whoever is running them.

So you decide to take a train, and you’ve got no particular destination in mind, but it might break up the monotony, you think, to take a tour of the city, it’s been a while after all, and you get on at the Eighth Street Station where a few other commuters are standing on the platform, and when you board the train, for a brief moment, it all feels normal.

There are a few things that break through this subterfuge, this illusion of normalcy, like how there are no more advertisements anywhere, and the automated voice of the conductor no longer announces the stops, and no one gets on at the stops, and there are only five people in your car, and they don’t talk to one another, or seem aware of anyone else, or appear to have any place to go, just like you.

It’s only when you preoccupy yourself with what isn’t there, however, that the illusion begins to stutter, and then the automated doors slide shut, and there’s a slight lurch, and the train moves forward, and everyone on board looks pleased. You settle back in your seat. You stare out the window.

The train is sluggish at first, like a beast who has just awakened from a long period of hibernation, and then it picks up speed, and rushes along through all the abandoned subway stations, West 4th Street, Christopher Street, Canal, Spruce, and these tunnels, black and empty, these rusted machine parts piled up on crumbling station platforms like broken toys, like animal bones, these graffiti-festooned walls, the murals bright and gaudy like primitive cave paintings; it all looks surreal to you for some reason, absurd, implausible, like you’re dreaming. These black chasms, these subterranean grottos, they stretch out before you now, each one the mouth of an enormous cavern, and this train, winding its way through twisting, cavernous crags, plying the dead along rusted iron tracks like Charon’s ferry barreling through the underworld.

It makes you sentimental and you think about this time when you sprain your ankle skateboarding, and it’s seven years ago, but it feels like much longer, and you’re fifteen years old, and you’re young and dumb, and you walk almost a mile home on that bad foot, and by the time you get back, there’s a lump the size of a golf ball on your ankle, and your father carries you to the hospital, and takes you home with your foot wrapped in an ace bandage, and holds your hand all night while you howl and scream and when the cast comes off, he stuffs your skateboard in a garbage bag and tells you if he ever catches you on one of these things again he’ll break your other foot.

You believe him, and you keep skateboarding anyway.

The train grinds to a halt at Avenue A and then the engine shuts down abruptly. A blonde girl sitting across from you bites her nails and glances around the car. Her skin is so pale it’s almost translucent. She looks nervous. An old, black man sitting to the left of her gets up like he’s not sure whether he should leave or stay.

The doors rattle on their hinges, the engine and then the lights come back on, the train shudders, and then the doors shut, and everyone appears relieved. The pale girl smiles at you, folds her hands across her lap, and looks away. The old man sits back down. The train slowly presses forward.

You see another train when you pass Loisaida, and it’s sitting on the track, dead, empty, covered with soot and grit and dust and as you rush past its inert body, you feel as if you’re looking at a carcass, at some ancient monstrosity preserved for an eternity inside this prehistoric tar pit, this saurian graveyard, and you think about what it must have been like for the last ones, the ones who linger around long enough to witness their species’ inexorable decline. The last Bengal tiger. The last Kodiak bear. The last tyrannosaur. The last ones, they have it the worst, you think. Extinction is never sudden, but rather, a gradual process of collective dissolution.

You remember the day you come home and it had only been a year since it all started, and you spend it like everyone else, walking around this city in a purposeless stupor—You know, they put stuff in the food—sleeping most of the day, most of the night, and you remember seeing a long line of people in front of Grand Central Station, and of course, they are standing there too, walking along the line, with their awkward, exaggerated movements, in their black suits, their breaths forming little clouds of vapor before their facemasks, even on warm days, you can still see their breath, like they’re from a place where it’s cold, and that coldness is inside of them, and they take it everywhere, and they’re holding these clubs with ends that glow bright orange, that will vaporize you, reduce you to dust should you take one menacing step in their direction, and slow and gradual is more conducive to their purpose than massive, full-scale extermination, for whatever reason, and that’s all you know, and you can imagine, quite clearly, all those dead planets drifting through the void, so many cities, passing through the ether, like ghosts, the cities, like junk in the attic, growing old, collecting dust, forgotten histories, forgotten people, barren, moldering, preserved for all eternity, like relics, like fossils.

You remember coming home that day, and before you reach for the doorknob, before you turn it and see the door to your parents’ apartment is unlocked for the first time in as long as you can remember, before you even step inside and realize the air conditioning is shut off even though it’s ninety degrees out there, and the television is on, and there’s white fuzz on the screen, you realize, of course, something is wrong. You open the door, and you see everything as it is when you left that morning. You remember an empty pizza box on the kitchen counter. A newspaper on the coffee table. A few cups in the sink. The bathroom door is open, and the only indication that anything has been disturbed is this rag doll with stringy red hair and button eyes that used to belong to your mother when she was a kid, and she put it up on a shelf in the living room, but now it’s on the floor, and there’s an enormous muddy footprint covering its silly button face.

Your parents are gone.

And no matter how long you call them, and how many people you ask, and how many pats on the back and sympathetic looks you get from these strangers, no matter how many places you go, your parents, they never come home.

That’s when you decide you can deal with anything, so long as you’re not the last one to go. The last ones, they have it the worst, you think. Anything is better than being alone.

The train stops at 19th Street. The doors open, and the power cuts out again. This time it doesn’t come back on. The doors don’t shut. Everything stays as it was before it died. You get up, get out, head up the grime-slicked subway stairs, and go home.

* * *

When you’re three blocks away from your apartment, the fine hairs along your forearm prickle and stiffen, and there’s an uncomfortable sinking feeling in your groin, and that’s when you see a pack of them, there, on Broadway, and your joints lock up, and your heartbeat flutters in your chest, irregular and frantic like the wings of a dying moth, like your body is aware of some awful knowledge your intellect isn’t privy to, and from a distance, you think they all look kind of normal, a head, two arms, two legs, like the universe isn’t all that vast. Like intelligent life isn’t all that varied. Similar structural design. Convergent evolution.

Except they have this way of standing too still.

And each one is over seven feet tall.

And they walk funny, like they’re unaccustomed to the weight of this world.

You turn and slink away like a rodent, keeping close to the walls, and find an alley to hide and wait in, and quite some time passes before you dare look outside and then you slowly begin your trek back home.

* * *

"Hey . . . it’s me, I know this is stupid, but I just wanted to make sure you got home safe. Call me back, okay? Bye."

You play the next message.

"Hey, it’s me again . . . you never called. I hope you’re okay. And I hope this isn’t a bother to you, it’s just, I don’t know . . . it’s so damn quiet here. It’s like everybody in my building is . . . well, anyway, I was thinking about that talk we had the other night, you remember? When I told you about Jake? It was a really good talk. I mean, I feel like we connected. Do you feel that way? I feel bad too, like maybe I did all the talking that night, and you just listened. Thank you for that, by the way. You can tell me anything you want, you know. Any time. You can—"

You play the next message.

"I’m scared. Why haven’t you called? I miss—"

You turn off the machine, and silence descends and settles on your apartment like a million dust particles, and you get up and half-heartedly search the shelves and cupboards for any liquor you might have stashed away, and then, finding nothing, you get up, and you head out the door.

* * *

You really shouldn’t be outside again. Everything in your body tells you this is the wrong thing to do. But you can’t keep still. And you don’t want to be alone.

It’s not just that it’s late, it’s night, and during the night everything left in the city moves in slow, cautious steps, and you stay close to the walls, and the vastness of all these empty buildings, these hollowed out giants, makes you feel small and insignificant, and that’s comforting, because you don’t want to be noticed.

You cross the street and pass the dead cars lined up on the boulevard, the closed up shops, the empty, dusty, cobblestone streets. A clothing store on Madison, which has been closed for two years, and the racks and the mannequins have been stripped of their garments, and you pass a gas station with boards over the windows, an oil slick by the curb, the pumps hanging like loose tentacles.

You’re thinking about the first time you met Allison when you turn left on Houston and cross the street.

Even before, when things are normal, this is the type of woman who must keep making the same mistakes again and again, with men, with all of her relationships.

You remember the night she tells you about her ex-husband, Jake, how he leaves her with three kids and a pile of bills. You remember, as she tells you about the day her younger son vanished, and when her two older ones went to go look for them, how they never come back, how you’re thinking the way to identify needy people is by how quickly they reveal themselves. All of it, and always far more than you need to know. You’ll find them at the local pub spilling their souls to bartenders, to other drunks, anyone who will listen. It’s in these places where you meet the Allisons of the world.

But tonight, you’ll listen, maybe get drunk, smoke, get bored, fall asleep in her arms. You’ll let her talk. You’ll pretend to listen. It’s better than, you think maybe, it’s better than being—

You stop walking.

Wind whips a plastic bag along the street and you shudder as the chill passes right through you. You want to run. You want to scream. You want to move. You can’t.

Even before you hear the footfalls, even before you hear those deep-throated, gurgling noises coming from behind you—your body knows it, it knows not to move.

The sound, it’s like a person trying to breath underwater. You turn around slowly. Your muscles, they’ve turned stiff, and your joints have locked up, your hairs stand on end, your heartbeat flutters.

There’s no hiding now.

* * *

It’s not clear what they want, but standing before them, you realize it doesn’t matter. You think about a few things, meaningless, pointless things, as they approach you, and the musty stench from their bodies fills up your nostrils. You stare up into the white flesh pressed against the dark black visors, the facemasks, and you think the faces behind the masks bear a superficial resemblance to your own, but they’re different, more different than you could imagine, these kings, these black-clad colossi, not like you, but the byproduct of a different plane, beyond you and your comprehension, these faces, ridged and corrugated like heads of cauliflower, like horned moons poking bulbous faces through black seas of cloud and ether, and you think about these pointless things, mostly, like your parents, and Allison, and empty cities covered with dust, and silent planets circling their distant suns, and dead trains and tar pits and fossils, and as you stare back into their eyes, black and unblinking, fathomless and empty, you realize it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t, not really, because the world is gone, and it doesn’t matter, not when you’re the last one to go.

One of them steps forward, and peers down at you, perhaps the way you’d stop to examine a particularly unusual insect, with slight disgust and only a passing interest, and you feel its cold breath wash over your face like an arctic wind, frigid, unbearable, like the bottom of the world, distant and inscrutable and cold, like space, and you can’t move your body, and all you can think about are the same stupid things, like your family, and like Allison, and how you wish you could have stayed with her, and that anything is better than this, than being alone.

They stand there for a short while longer, looming above you, perhaps in silent contemplation, perhaps thinking nothing at all, and then they move along, leaving you, and you know it in your heart, you feel it, in your soul, it’s over, and everyone is gone, everyone but you, and you’re insignificant and alone, and as you watch them, these giants, these gods, trudging down the street with those strange bobbing gaits, like they’re moving through water, like they’re unfettered, free, you hate them and you envy them, and you sit down, and wait for things to fall and crumble all around you, and you wait, because you’re stuck, you’re bound to this place, you’re held back, held down, by the weight of the world.