She had promised to return in a few hours, and she did, but he didn’t see her again for three days.

After she delivered her incredible story and left, he tried to work his way into the collection of newspapers but didn’t make much progress the first night. Thom did read an article deep in the first L.A. Times that warned of a strange outbreak of some deadly infection at Cedars-Sinai. So apparently she wasn’t feeding him a complete line of bull. Still, he would have to see a lot more to buy what she was selling.

It was dark when she woke him and as the night got later Thom keenly felt the exhaustion of slurping a bowl of soup for the first time in a decade and hearing about the death of everyone he loved. He fell asleep desperately looking for something to contradict her, to catch her in a lie. So far, the yellowing paper supported her every claim.

He woke up the next day with the sun filtering through his nearly-closed blinds. They had been twisted completely open when he drifted off the night before; she must have returned while he slept and closed them.

He found a note from Ana and a thermos on a wheeled table pulled up beside the bed. The thermos contained tomato soup that was somewhere between warm and hot. He was disappointed, though, when he tasted it and found it had been made with water. He preferred it with milk, of course, but allowed that not too many milkmen were probably making runs if civilization had come to an end.

The note was relatively direct. “Thom, stay in bed and rest. You must regain your strength as quickly as possible as we will need to move before long. Read everything I have left you and we will talk again soon. The electricity works, but there MUST be no use of the lights after dusk. If you find you can walk, there is a restroom across the hall. I will return tonight. I am sorry I cannot be there, but I have a lot to occupy me. There is dried food in the cabinets. Ana.”

It was nice of her to assume he could reach the cabinets on his own.

He spent the next two days mostly reading and dozing in the dusty sunlight that drifted in through the blinds. At dusk on the second day he folded the last newspaper from her stack and set it on his finished pile. From the collection Ana left him, he found absolutely nothing to contradict her and an overwhelming amount of corroboration.

He wanted to vomit when he read about the destruction of Los Angeles and was unsure what made him sicker in the next’s day’s New York Times: the story about the first cases of Charon on the East Coast, or the political piece about the President’s re-election chances, having just nuked his own constituents.

Thom spent the third day trying to escape boredom by filling out whatever puzzles and games he could find in the newspapers. In the afternoon, he wheeled his IV hook and bag into the hall, just to prove that he could do it. Stopping in the middle of the hallway, he found double doors at both ends and briefly considered picking a direction and setting off on an admittedly short adventure. His legs, though, still mostly felt like jello from just standing there beside his room.

With a promise to venture further in the next few days, he returned to bed and fell asleep in the early evening. He dreamed of riding his motorcycle along the ocean, of playing with this chocolate Labrador Retriever, Chester, and of a spring picnic with his beautiful Heather, the wife she had been in the days before the problems. He also saw disturbing things: a fire that burned out millions of lives, a mob of moaning plague-ridden friends, clamoring for his help, and a pale bald man with fiery red eyes and a open-mouthed grin.

Thom awoke with a shout in the dark, startling Ana enough to nearly drop the thermos she was setting on his side table.

“I had a strange dream,” was all he could think to say.

“Do you want to tell me?” she asked.

“No. Not….not now.”

She nodded her head in understanding. “I have about an hour before I need to look after some other things. Would you like to talk about the news I left?”

“Yes, but not now. Not first. First, you’re going to explain to me where the hell I am, and how the hell I got here.”