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Sometimes late at night, when all I hear is the sound of Sherlock’s steady breathing beside me, I wonder if the life we have now is my reward for surviving everything that went before. But then Sherlock cries out in the dark, his body sweaty and tangled in the sheets, legs kicking out against some imagined villain, and I wonder how my reward can also be his punishment.
****
There are a lot of things I miss about our old life. Takeaway. Telly. Toast. And that’s just the Ts. Don’t get me started on coffee.
The apocalypse was well, apocalyptic. No plagues or alien invasions. No zombies. Hollywood got it all wrong. Turns out if you cram enough disease, hurricanes, tsunamis, tornadoes, droughts and fires into one summer, the planet can’t cope.
On the bright side, if you can call it that, it didn’t last very long. Three months, four if you count those first few weeks when we thought there was still a chance. I don’t know why it ended when it did, it was as if the entire world was standing on the edge of a cliff ready to jump off and then suddenly lost its nerve. I think God finally started paying attention. Sherlock suspects he got bored and walked away. He says things like that now.
There was never an official count of the dead. The internet and television went out long before a final number ribboned across the remaining screens. The one thing I do know is that I’ll never have to wait in line for anything ever again. The bodies all disappeared, spirited away by some cosmic SOCO team in the middle of the night. I’d like to send someone a thank you note for that – the alternative’s a little too Stephen King for me. Sherlock said it was proof that Mycroft was still alive. No one else was that efficient.
****
We drive into what used to be Chichester – there isn’t much left except for a few burnt out buildings and the remains of the Cathedral. Like most places these days, it’s deserted. The whole world feels like secondary school on a Saturday afternoon.
Sherlock is antsy. He doesn’t say much, but I can tell something is bothering him from the way he keeps rubbing his hands against his thighs.
I coast through what used to be a busy roundabout on Priory Road. “You’re doing it again,” I say.
“Doing what?” he lies.
“What you always do when something’s bothering you. What’s wrong?” A shite question considering the Mad Max theme park we live in.
“I’m not sure.” He has that look he used to get when he was in the middle of a grand deduction. “It’s as if I’m seeing echoes. Well, not seeing exactly –”
No shit.
“There are halos around what I imagine are buildings and trees. Abandoned cars. Similar to sundogs.”
I stop the car in the middle of the empty road. “Okay, Einstein. What is a sundog?”
“A parhelion.” Typical. He explains one word I don’t understand with a bigger one. I swat him and he sighs. The sigh of a man forced to live with an idiot. “It’s an optical illusion created when the sun’s rays pass through ice crystals at the correct right angle.”
I have no idea what he’s talking about, but I have years of practice pretending I do. “And?”
“It’s odd. It’s as if I can see the city. No details, just lights around the shapes of things. Tell me what you see. Exactly.”
I look around again. “I don’t know. Free parking forever.”
“Please, John.”
“Fine. Vacant lots on either side of us. A park bench covered in graffiti. No trees. One building that escaped the worst of it.”
“Where?”
“Up ahead on your right. It’s a Starbucks – it’s missing its windows but nothing else.”
“Is anyone else here?”
“There’s never anyone else here.”
“I see halos everywhere.”
“So now you’ve got some strange halo vision?” In the first months after it happened, we both harboured some small hope that his sight would improve. But it never did.
Sherlock turns to face me. He still does that, force of habit, I imagine. His hair is longer now and the scars around his eyes have faded. “I don’t know what it is,” he says. “It’s happened a few times, but I dismissed it.” He takes a breath like he doesn’t want to tell me the rest of it. “Sometimes I think see the outlines of people too. But you would’ve told me if there was anyone else around.”
“You know I would.” It was one of the first things he made me promise. The first and easiest. “So you’re saying you developed a super power?” I know how ridiculous that sounds.
“I don’t know, John. I don’t know.” Then he kind of disappears into his head and doesn't say anything else.
We do our “shopping” at what used to be Tesco on South Street – we trade the Hobart sisters some magazines for petrol and six bottles of homemade beer – and get back to the cottage before dark. If Sherlock is still seeing halos – sorry, parhelions – he’s not saying.
****
We found this place by accident. Sherlock was badly hurt and all I was looking for was a peaceful place for us to die. I didn’t plan on living without him. I’d done that once and knew I couldn’t do it again. I laid him in the back seat of Mycroft’s Bentley and drove all night. And somehow ended up here.
Here is a cottage on Ivy Lake in Sussex. Walk five miles in any direction and the world looks the way it used to. The lake gives us all the water and fish we need. I still crave a decent curry, but most of the animals disappeared around the same time the bodies did. My brain would explode if I thought too hard about what that meant. I’ve spotted a few deer in the woods, but I haven’t had the heart to kill any. I’ve seen enough dying to last a lifetime.
We have a lumpy couch and two armchairs in what passes for a lounge. A kitchen table and four mismatched chairs. An old tape deck and radio we run off batteries when the silence gets too loud. Sherlock fiddles with it every so often, but we’ve never found a broadcast from anywhere except London and that’s just an emergency alert that plays the same message over and over. Sherlock was thrilled when he found a chess set in the wardrobe in the bedroom – he beats me twice a week. I won once but that was only because I cheated and switched his bishop for a pawn.
Two battered bookcases frame the living room window. They’re filled with old Scientific American magazines from the sixties and seventies. We’re up to 1969 – I read them to Sherlock every morning at breakfast. We can trade six issues for a whole tank of petrol, so we’re lucky.
We’ll never trade the set of Harry Potter books we found in a cupboard in the kitchen. Neither one of us had ever read the books or seen the films. I meant to, but had never gotten around to it and Sherlock of course had never even heard of them. And as proof that the universe still has a sense of humour, the last book was missing. When we’re bored, Sherlock and I like to guess how it ends. Sherlock insists that Harry and Voldemort must die, or else what was the point of it all? I think it will end well, though I fear for Snape’s life. I can’t believe he’s quite as wicked as he seems.
The dog – a Golden retriever mix we named Keller after we realized he was deaf – came with the cottage. He’s Sherlock’s dog now. The deaf leading the blind. The world’s as mad as it ever was.
The sex is . . . good. Really good. Which once and for all proves that there is no such thing as bad sex.
We’ve been here almost a year now.
It’s strange that Sherlock has never seen the place.
*****
We sit outside after supper and drink the homemade beer – as weak as piss – and talk about the old days. About Lestrade and Molly and Mycroft and Mrs. Hudson and everyone else we used to know. We never say it out loud but every conversation ends with us wondering if they’d made it through.
We go in as soon as it’s dark and I light the oil lamp in the bedroom.
Sherlock stands at the end of the bed and slips out of his robe. Yes, he still managed to find a robe. It’s terrycloth and says Manchester United on the chest, but it’s a robe. And when he turns away from me and it hangs at his elbows, and he gently shakes his arms and it falls to the floor, I am hard in a moment. I tear off whatever clothes I have on like the fire brigade.
He waits quietly and I walk up behind him and begin kissing his shoulders, tracing the scars (some Serbia, some Moriarty, some apocalypse) on his back with my fingers. He shivers at the touch and turns to me. It’s all I can do not to shove him back on the bed but I’ve learned to go slow. His other senses overcompensate and too rough, too fast sends him out the door.
He leans down and kisses me. I try to slow my heartbeat and I put my hands on his hips, pulling him close. He wraps his arm around me and the kisses deepen, tongues collide and I feel his heart through his chest. He used to always taste like cigarettes and whiskey. Now he tastes like beer and campfires.
My legs are shaking and he pushes me off his chest and takes my hand and leads me to the side of the bed. I sit down and he kneels in front of me, and kisses me hard on the lips and I reach out and grab his shoulders to keep from falling. He slips a hand between my legs and barely touches my cock, moving down to my balls, kneading lightly.
I take in a breath and fall back on the bed. He leans down and takes my cock in his mouth, sucking and licking the head, kneading my balls. I arch my hips – I need to get closer, I need him deeper. He sucks harder and my shoulders come off the bed. I can’t think and I can’t move and I know that if we are going to die, this is when it will happen. Neither one of us is paying attention to anything but the breathing and the sensations.
I feel the wave and I touch Sherlock’s shoulder. He lifts himself off my cock and onto my chest, grinding his hips into mine, my cock caught between his leg and his own hard cock.
I’m so close I can’t stop moving and I thrust my hips and he puts his hands on either side of my head and lifts himself a bit and follows my rhythm and our cocks are sliding against each other and I grab his ass and I buck up hard and then I can hear nothing but my moan and his long breath in my ear. I feel his body tense and I stop moving and I feel him shudder and for a moment we are both suspended in midair, and then we fall to earth.
The oil lamp sputters and the room is dark. We fall asleep, his foot pressed against my ankle, his hand against my back.
****
There are bee hives in the orchard. Sherlock has taken charge of them and we have honey enough to last us through the winter. Each evening I watch him from the window, walking sure and steady back to the cottage, backlit by the setting sun, and know I will never ask for anything more.
****
We’ve been here almost ten years now.
Sherlock still sees what he calls his halos – but nothing more than that. Making it through the apocalypse together was the only miracle we were going to get.
I stare at myself in the small mirror over the sink and trace the lines around my eyes, the grey in my beard and I wonder what Sherlock would think if he could see me now. Does he still imagine me the way I used to be? When he holds my face between his hands, does he catalogue the wrinkles and creases? Does he know I limp when it rains? That I only pretend to eat what he calls his special stew?
I hear him come in and he stands behind me, his hands on my shoulders. Our faces are side by side in the mirror and his eyes are as blue as they have ever been. He smiles and raises one eyebrow and I am transported back to the bathroom in Baker Street and I half expect him to start grousing about the steam on the mirror or the staleness of the biscuits. Instead he massages my neck and I lean into his touch and he whispers everything that matters and he takes my hand and leads me to bed.