The Girl with the Last Strain

The valley around the girl is a stage with no actors. She stands alone, dressed in a ratty, moth-eaten sundress and a hood the color of flint over it. Her hair is long and matted with grease, but still, she ties it up in a bun to stop it from webbing across her face.

Her feet are swollen and stained brown from endless days of walking through the woods. Still, she feels proud of herself—of the sacrifice she’s making by being out here alone.

She reaches down and cradles the heart-shaped locket in her palms. It’s tarnished aquamarine, with grooves cut into it and a small clasp that’s tightly secured. Her somber smile grows as she looks at it, realizing just how real her life is now; her position in the world. The Carrier, the village called her as they sent her off on the trail. The Girl with the Last Strain.

She looks up, the cool morning wind stirring her dirty hair. It’s been three months since she left to stop a second outbreak from happening. The weight of her backpack crushing into her adolescent shoulders reminds her. Soon, she thinks, it’ll be much lighter.

The more she takes from the supplies, the higher the chance is that she’ll have to go scavenging for herself.

She climbs the valley, walking alongside a chattering river and listening to the birds as they sing to one another. As far as she knows, she’s the farthest human from civilization, now a nomad in a world she doesn’t fully understand.

As she crunches along a sand-beaten path in the woods, tracing the dapples of sunlight on the ground, she recalls the first outbreak. She recalls how many people died… how many people are left. The villages that coagulated around the East Coast—four, she’s aware of existing—say that there are roughly five-hundred-thousand people left on Earth. They say that the virus thinned out the population in four years. They say that the virus is contained as long as a Carrier takes the burden of leaving mankind with the only strain left.

She presses the locket to her collarbone. The last person to ever die from the virus, a little girl named Molly from Village Four, once wore the locket around her neck with a picture of her mother inside.

It was then that the locket was taken off of Molly and deemed as the last piece of contamination.

The girl stops at a ledge overlooking the misty ridges of the Appalachian Mountain; the sun rises steadily over it and a great sadness fills her. Stinging loneliness and paralyzing despair. I’ll die out here alone, she tells herself as tears well up in her eyes and blur the world ahead of her. My friends and family will get to live in community, and I’ll die out here alone.

Her legs buckle and she guides herself to the ground. She sobs. The locket hangs from her neck, swinging back and forth like a pendulum. She’s only fourteen. The epiphany wrenches more tears out of her: she’s contaminated by merely touching it… even if she throws the locket into the nearest river, she can never go back.

She wipes her tears with the bony ridges of her knuckles and stands up. Birds erupt into the air far off on the horizon. She turns and continues along the trail without another word. Her feet will soon be calloused and she’ll grow up to be a young woman whose sacrifices will be shown by the blisters and hard parts on her feet and hands. She’ll start wrinkling by her mid-thirties until she resembles some mythos of a wandering witch with a heart-shaped locket resting on her chest.

She’ll find home somewhere, at some point in time, but she’ll have to find it alone.