“May I come in Dr. Herman?”, he asked. The doctor was sitting across a huge mahogany table with his nameplate on the left and files on the right. Strangely, Dr. Herman did not own a computer. He didn’t print out the prescriptions like the other doctors did these days. He was a traditional person, all nuts and bolts, as he would like to call it. The Doctor had called Mr. Sanders in his home office rather than the hospital. He rarely did that. The office had two gates – one for patients to walk in from the parking lot and another that lead to the doctor’s house.
“Oh, please come in Mr. Sanders. I have been waiting for you. How are you feeling now?”, asked the Doctor. As Mr. Sanders walked in, the doctor twiddled his thumbs. He was nervous, more than his patient. He gestured for Mr. Sanders to take a seat opposite him. As Mr. Sanders took the seat he couldn’t help but notice that even though this was a house-clinic, it still had that hospital smell that he hated. He tried not to think of all the hospital visits from previous months. It still made him feel nauseated.
“Much better now doctor, thank you. I think the medication is working. There were days when I couldn’t get out of bed, but now I feel fitter. I have started taking walks again. I have started eating solid food. My family is happy that I am back to my normal self. All thanks to you. Your drugs worked perfectly while the other doctors failed.”
“Umm, that is good”, said Dr. Herman, after a pause, his face betraying his words. Luckily for him, Mr. Sanders wasn’t paying attention.
“Yeah. I have never felt this hopeful in the past few months. But, now, I feel I could survive this, whatever it is that I have”, said Mr. Sanders, his voice sounding cheerful. “So tell me doc, why have you called me this fine day? Have the reports come back? Have you figured out what I am suffering from or rather was suffering from?”, asked Mr. Sanders with a hint of cheerfulness in his voice and a grin plastered on his face.
“Umm, yes and no, Mr Sanders. I don’t know how to put this to you”, the twiddling of the thumbs was intense now. He almost took a part of the skin off of his right thumb. That was when Mr. Sanders noticed that something was wrong. Fear started creeping in. “Ok, I will probably get straight to the point Mr. Sanders. We don’t know what is wrong with you. Your blood pressure is normal, your sugar levels are fine. You are fitter than ever. But, but..”
“But.. what Doctor?”
“You are dying. We don’t know, how. We don’t know why. But we know that you are. Your organs are slowly giving up. It is like they have made up their mind and they won’t budge, no matter what medication we give. I have sent the reports to the best doctors in the country. But they are as much in the fix as I am. We don’t know what is wrong with you and at this point, there is nothing we can do about it”, he couldn’t look Mr. Sanders in the eye as he quickly blurted out the words.
He thought he would feel lighter after saying those words, but strangely he didn’t. He felt a bolt of pressure weighing down his chest., he felt suffocated and he could only imagine what Mr. Sanders would go be going through. After so many months of the fight, after getting worse and then getting all better, after allowing hope to fill his nerves. It would destroy him and his family.
A silence followed, time stopped there. Mr. Sanders was looking out of the window with a blank expression. He looked at the green lush lawn outside and thought of his own house, his two beautiful kids playing out on the lawn, grinning. He saw his wife sitting on the porch outside, waiting for him to come back. His wonderful life now seemed in shatters. And it was all worse because there is nothing he, or for that matter anybody else, could do. He had never felt this helpless in his life.
“How much time do I have doctor? Give it to me straight.”
“6 months tops. Maybe a little more with the medication.”
The silence was now unbearable. If you listened carefully, you could hear the silence loud and clear. It was the silence before the storm. And then the storm came – the storm of laughter.
“Shh, Ryan. You are going to give away our position. Not so loud! Come on let’s get in. Let’s see what the doctor’s house has to offer us”, said Mark, “This is a nice place the doctor has here. Isn’t it?”. They looked around the place. The living room was all thrashed to a level where you couldn’t recognize which item would have decorated what part of the room. The sofa spring was hanging dangerously out, the broken photo frames lying on the floor, spoilt milk, half-filled, on the dining table, as if somebody decided to abandon the place without any notice.
“Looks like we are the first humans here since the outbreak. If we are lucky, we might even find some food in the fridge. Ryan, why don’t you close all the windows, make sure to cover them properly, and see if you can arrange for some food. I need to add an entry for today in the journal and then I will join you”.
Mark went to the bedroom on the upper floor. He took out his journal and pen and began to remember the day so far. Sometimes, it was difficult to tell one day from another. They all generally played out the same except for the little roleplays they did. As he had regained the activities of the day he started writing in his journal –
Day 213 :
We left the butcher’s place early in the morning. It was weird playing the part of a butcher and his gay partner, but as much fun. We even found some good food that filled our bellies. I slept soundly. Must have been difficult for Mark to take the night watch after being stuffed with meat. It isn’t going to be easy for me either today.
We found a nice house today. Victorian style. Belonged to a Dr. Herman. God rest his soul. I don’t even believe in that sentence anymore. God rest his soul. What a joke! There is no rest in this place and looking at the events that happened here, I am probably convinced there is no place elsewhere. This is heaven (before zero-day) and this is hell (now). Luckily we didn’t encounter any zombies today. I am not sure if that is a good sign though. But I will take it.
The house is nice and cozy. I think Mark will get a good sleep here. We roleplayed Doctor and Patient today. Me being the doctor, obviously. I sentenced him to an incurable disease and gave him six months to live. It was fun. Though I doubt any of us will survive another six months. We have been lucky to survive 213 days so far.
We do meet a few fellow humans once in a while, but at this point, we cannot stay more than 2 or 3 people together. If more people stay together, they can find us easily due to the increased heat. So we have to split up. And we decided to not stay at a place for more than a night. Someday, we will probably cycle through all the houses that we have stayed through and return back to the first house. That day isn’t far I guess.
I am lucky to have found Mark. He is crazy but has a good heart. He is one of the reasons why we have survived so far. That and also because we keep having these role-playing survival games every day. Every house we go, every place we stay, we try to assume the roles of people who would have stayed there. This way we try to keep them alive for a little while longer, even if in just our mischiefs. But above all, this helps us keep sane. The initial few days were worse where we always had to be on the watch. It was difficult to keep a straight head.
I don’t know what tomorrow brings. But I know that today there will be food in my belly and some sleep for my partner. And that is the greatest joy we can have today. Thinking of it, I think we have gone back to the days where joys lived in smaller things. I sort of like it here now, in this hell.
The story of Survival
I had first published this short story in April 2016. It was called the Gatekeeper Games back then. I was going through the archives and found this gem sitting there. And as I read through it, I realized that the apt title for this story is survival. Because that is what it essentially is. It shows how humans are programmed for survival and how they find the tiniest of joys in the worst of situations.
I hope you enjoyed reading this short story as much as I enjoyed writing and re-writing it. If you love fiction and poetry do check out my other short stories and poems and share them with your friends and family!
