Lovers in the Great Collapse ◊ NOVELLA

iii. » Sunburn

iii.

SUNBURN

When I was little, everything twinkled.

The night sky was pillars of light, satellites and rockets smearing their glowing tails across the sky. Daytime was chrome televisions and automated housekeepers and the red leather seats in Dad's car. 'We're living in the new Space Age!' proclaimed the TV man with the pinstriped suit.

Years passed in needles. Flu—eradicated. Acne—cured. Monthly cramps—negated. Visiting the clinic was like getting an oil change, regular as clockwork.

'We're living in a medical Renaissance!' cried the anchor on channel 11.

Back then, my life was mostly snapshots. Orange ring cakes and jump rope on Sundays; dandelions turning brown in the grass and blowing away; reeking of chlorine from the public swimming pool; the white picket fence between our house and Mr. Rodriguez's—each moment immortalized in photographs captured with the vintage Polaroid I got on my sixteenth birthday.

Now that everything's gone sour, I try to remember how it all started, but... the snapshots won't come. No matter how I walk myself through those early days, it's all broken. A hopelessly tangled ball of yarn that I can't unspool into threads.

I'm not sure anyone can quantify the Great Collapse.

For me it began the day of the AXI shot. The newest medical masterpiece, the newest glittering cure—this time for sunburns. It helps humans produce astaxanthin, the chemical in algae that protects them from sunlight. The waiting room was white and clean and smelled of sanitizer. An elderly lady in a pink housecoat thumbed through a magazine; two young women with sunglasses in their hair chatted in giggling tones.

"Gillian Larchwood?"

My name had been called. Just as I stood, the doors behind the nurse banged open. A doctor appeared, breathing hard.

I thought there might've been blood on his gloves.

"I... we're sorry." He gripped the doorframe, eyes darting. "But you'll... you'll have to return tomorrow for your AXI."

Behind him, just before the doors swung shut, I glimpsed two nurses restraining a man in a pinstriped suit. The next day, flipping through the channels and doing the dishes, I noticed the usual anchor wasn't on channel 11.

The next week, I was fetching the mail when an ambulance screamed to a halt in front of our neighbors' house. I froze, bare toes burning in the tar. They dragged away Mr. Rodriguez on a gurney; his wife was screaming. The EMTs wore face masks.

After that, there were no more shots.

The neighborhood was half empty by the end of the month. In three months' time, all flights were grounded and most island nations had closed their ports. The plague that mutated from AXI was taking down humanity's hearts and lungs and livers one by one—men and women stumbling in the streets and falling to their knees, hacking up bits of organs onto the asphalt...

God.

We were killed by sunburns.

Dad paid off a helicopter pilot using all our first aid kits and all the clothing we could spare. I clenched my Polaroid camera in white-knuckled hands while we boarded. As we lifted off the ground, abandoning the little cul-de-sac in Surrey where I'd jumped rope and danced in puddles and peddled lemonade my entire life, I raised it to the flames and took a snapshot.

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