Ring around the sat on the hill

---

Ring around the sat on the hill.

Jack fell down and lost his three blind mice.

And we all died happily ever after.

He was breaking down. He was alone; utterly and truly alone. There was no one left for him to talk to, not just here, on Earth. Not as if he could talk much in an Asylum.

He was used to being alone though, the silence hardly bothered him. His parents, the other kids at the orphanage, everyone in school; they all left him alone.

His path to the Asylum was as peculiar as the rest of his life. He’d worked as head janitor at a pharmaceutical company while in school. He rose fairly quickly through the ranks, since he had no social life and no one to distract him.

Wash the plates by 6

or they’ll explode

At the company, the main project was the elimination of Malaria. The head researcher decided it was time to test the drug on humans. Seeing an opportunity to earn a little extra, he enrolled.

The drug worked. Almost. He was put in a room with wild mosquitoes and came out without a single bite. It came at a cost though. He started showing signs of Tourette’s syndrome the next day.

The drug had travelled through his blood and entered his brain. It messed with his pituitary gland, destroying his hormonal balance. He had his good moments, when he was as close to normal as he ever got.

Most of the time though, he saw things that weren’t there and heard voices that should have been impossible to hear. He could remember his life, and that his situation was the direct result of his choices. That only added to his torment.

He saw the memories playing over and over. He couldn’t stop himself from signing the waivers, from taking the pill. These were his phantoms and obsessions in the psych ward. The mind torture was only punctuated by the meals.

He’d usually eat a bite or two, depending on how well he felt, then slide the rest out the door. The food came with the pills, the only other colour in his entirely white room. He took the pills, he always took the pills. Perhaps he felt that these would undo the one he took a year earlier.

Food and food and water

and food and cockroaches and

play and doctors today

He ranted, he mumbled, he held entire conversations with himself. He recited snippets of nursery rhymes from the only truly happy time he’d had. The days washed over him along with the sensation and the pain. The food came regularly, and he ate it.

Until it all stopped.

He took the pills, lay on the cushioned floor, and waited. He sang to himself, rolled around, suffered through the hallucinations and the voices, until he felt something he hadn’t felt in a year: hunger. The food came in small regular portions, and they made sure everyone was well fed.

He was too far gone to feel scared, just a moment of surprise before the voices came back.

---

She ran out, scared. She felt her neck. It was hot. “Fever,” she recalled. That’s what her mum called it. Her mum would never say another word. She ran as fast as she could from the memories in that house.

Her 6 year old body couldn’t handle all the stress of fighting a disease while running under the hot sun, so it decided to take a break. She fainted halfway down the driveway.

A man out jogging saw the little girl faint. He had not seen the news before setting out that morning, so he knew no better. He touched her.

“The strain of the virus is transmitted by houseflies,” said the message being looped on CNN. “If you’re watching this, you almost certainly have the virus. Settle your debt with whatever god you believe in, because there is no hope.

“The virus is communicable. Any contact with an infected person will get you infected, so stay indoors. Symptoms don’t appear till 30 days after blood saturation, beginning with a rash at the centre of your palm.

“As soon as an hour after that, patients develop a fever. The fever is severe, death occurs less than 15 minutes after that. The infection rate of live humans right now is 100%. The only person that could survive has not met another person or touched a fly in the last two months. Basically, the human race is going extinct. God help us, we’re all going to die!”

The girl stopped spasming. Her last memory was seeing her mother in the same state she presently was in.

---

He was still hungry. He had no way to know the amount of time that had passed since his last meal. His stomach growled. He was already pretty thin, but he still needed food.

He shouted as loud as he could. Voices filtered back, but he couldn’t tell whether they were real or those of his constant companions.

He flattened himself to the floor to check. The putrid odor of decaying flesh hit his nostrils. He moved a bit and saw a woman stretched out on the floor outside the room, motionless. Flies buzzed around her dead body.

The food tray was still outside the door, still with some food on it. He tried to reach out and use his fingertips to drag the tray inside. He was still a walking insect repellent, so all the flies dispersed. The flies, looking for other food sources, entered the other rooms, perching on the inmates.

He ate the food. It was stale, it was cold, it was utterly delicious. He ate it like a 5-star meal, like his final meal. Finishing his food for the first time in a year, he sat behind the door.

He rocked slowly, back and forth, back and forth. “Jingly bells on a well, in a silent, lonely night.” The caretaker was dead. He heard a large scream, followed by the sounds of a body convulsing. Identical sounds came from the cell next door. He heard a groan from the door opposite his. The hall went up in a cacophony of sounds of suffering, like a wartime infirmary.

15 minutes later, silence.

Four blinded mice

hit a bottle of water

standing on the wall

for the king’s men.

---

The world has turned to shit. Knowing that there wouldn’t be consequences and that they’d all die anyways, people took to the streets.

They stole all they could. Expensive cars, designer clothes, virginity. For all of three hours before society broke down completely.

A couple in Lagos, Nigeria made frantic, desperate love in their final hours together, to the background noise of the apocalypse.

He had no way to know what was going on outside, and he felt hungry again. Somehow, maybe because of his genes, maybe because of the drugs he took, he was alive.

There was no scientist left to study him, no labs left to try and make a vaccine from his blood, just him and his voices.

The last man on Earth sat alone in his mad house. He heard a knock on the door.