Horror - Short

This story is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are fictitious and any similarities to actual persons, locations, or events is coincidental. This work cannot be used to train artificial intelligence programs.  No AI tools were used in the writing of this story.

All rights reserved. The Blues Copyright © Eddie Generous 2026

THE BLUES

Nights had changed. Pure dark most times, no light shines from the towers of cubed former existence, no light from the great glass hives, no light from the downed flying tubes; the last airplane having crashed looking for a clear place to land as the pilot coughed a sticky dark mess into his palm. Only fires and the rare moon offer a flash in the blackness of night. Calvin Granger wonders now and then if he is the last man on Earth.

The new dark is not all bad, the filth hides in the shadows and the sunlight brings the filth out to play. Clean is a state of the past. The world is quiet and filthy. Roads are showpieces of a world stuck at an end.

Calvin wonders as he walks, why me?

It’s been weeks since the last lights came along the highway, but they stopped a good distance before reaching him and then disappeared down a different vein. Humanity rests, stalled and thick, littering the air with scent and debris rather than light and sound.

Calvin’s footfalls echo from the shorts and longs, bouncing about the metallic paths cut by the road lines of the former world. Bodies stink and birds feast.

Bandana, or rag, or shirtsleeve over his nose as the passenger door opens and then he jumps in reverse to give the strongest of the trapped scent a moment to rush away. It’s dirty business searching cars of the dead, but it’s life. He thinks he could steal a big truck or a tank and drive over the whole mess, but he hasn’t seen anything like that and so many drivers died with the familiar viscous mess over their hands and steering wheel while the engine purred in wait for the traffic to move. People drove looking for health and cleanliness, most died in their cars and none found what they’d sought. Gasoline burned.

Reaching inside a car with an open window and two rotting passengers, should fill my nose with glue, he thinks. Sometimes glove boxes hold useful objects, something like everything drawers of the past, but instead of buttons, elastic bands, and batteries, one might find a handgun or a bottle of penicillin.

Calvin Granger feels that cool steel in his hand, straightening his back, careful to avoid disturbing the dead.

“Thank you,” he whispers to the puffy face silhouettes shining in the slivered moonlight. He can’t help but work when the moon finally shows some skin, even if it’s just a little. It reminds him of film scenes about long dead ankles poking scandalously out from under billowy gowns. Any little bit is enough to entice once all else is gone.

Calvin promised himself at the first sign of sickness, swore to the voice in his head at that first mouthful of filthy insides, that he’d put a gun barrel between his teeth. This particular filth will not get him, not completely. He would not sing that particular song.

Calvin considers the piece in his beltline that he rescued from that glove box. “Why wait for sickness?” he asks the night.

He’d put the barrel of a gun between his lips before the sickness, did so for much less than the apocalypse, but at the end of days, surviving suddenly becomes enough.

“Better people survived harder trouble,” he answers himself. When it’s all stripped and gone, to survive becomes enough.

Beyond the traffic cluttered around EXIT-39, on a bare patch in the road he unravels his soft pad that he’d stolen from a ransacked department store infested with critters. Sleeping under the stars, alone in the world, where only the light cutting through night still feels clean. If only he could master the dark; it’s difficult to function without sight and he waits until filthy daybreak.

—

A toe nudges at Calvin’s side and he wakes, the sun is bright, revealing the color of the new world. People stare down, their faces beyond sight, the yellow light throwing auras over their backs like angels.

“You got it?” a mannish voice asks.

“He don’t look sick,” a woman’s voice adds.

Calvin can see the shapes, five in total. Six people living in one spot seems a justifiably laughable scenario.

“Doesn’t mean he’s safe,” the first says.

“Yeah, could be he just got sick,” a third voice says, a woman, she speaks like a country music singer. “Never know ‘bout those thangs.”

“Never know, we might all have it, just putting in time,” an aged voice says; a man, weathered before the virus stole the world.

“Well, how about it,” says the man nudging Calvin with his toe.

Calvin shakes his head, mouth agape. Too scared to feel along his beltline for the most recent addition, not daring to open his pack and find the other pistols and knives he’s collected along the road.

“Does that mean you feel all right?”

Calvin clears his throat. “I suppose you could say I feel all right, given the circumstances. Not sick.”

“Where you headed, honey?” country twang asks.

“No place, just moving along. Looking…” looking for what? “looking for someplace.”

“We’re heading to the coast, heard things before it all ended, before the last ones caught the Blues,” says the man who’d nudged him.

Calvin gets to his knees. The different angle dims the glow and he sees faces. The haloes that the sun made over them has departed. These people are filthy, like him.

Is this what you walked for?

Patient Zero had left her job at the Brooklyn Zoo with a sore chest and joined friends for a midnight viewing of the cheesy mad scientist horror film, The Kindred, as it celebrated its thirtieth anniversary. She coughed and choked, never made it through the film. Ticket holders scattered, all discussing the poor girl that died with thick blue fluid smeared around her nose, mouth, eyes, and ears. Those spreading the word made it through the weekend, none made it a week, but all spread the virus. Blue smears, hand-printed about bathroom mirrors, bedroom walls, baby cribs, office telephones, and airport toilets.

The media put it together to sell papers and web hits; Midnight Blues at The Kindred, one headline read. Quickly, the cough spread alongside it’s new title. The world lost its clean places.

Science had no offering, people turned to the changing world. Some said the planet was a dog shaking inhabitants like ticks. Others suggested the depletion of the ozone, the change in the moon cycle, the disrupted tides, most with opinions coughed up their innards and quickly worried no more about the how or why. The leftovers of their existence adding to the filth seeping into the landscape.

“What did you hear?” Calvin asks.

Imagination offers no shortage of entire immune colonies, camps set out by the military, places the filthy virus wouldn’t dare go. It was unreality, viruses are the master race, top of the food chain, fences and sandbags matter not.

Now: clean places, the new Atlantis, El Dorado.

“A place off the coast, St. Paul Island. Last heard about it on a radio feed outside Saskatoon. The feed died last month, and we decided it was time to move.”

A heavy Chevy, snowblade, rust riding, paint chipping and engine growling, leads the way. A new Nissan SUV brings up the rear. Calvin rides in the Nissan, late to the conversation, and sits mostly quiet. All the sounds make him anxious. These people are not of the clean world he’s sought on the road.

Calvin is next to a man in his late fifties; the two women ride up front, both hiding secret pains of lost families. The woman who spoke in a country twang rides in the lead truck with another of the men.

Night came and parties separated, Calvin found himself one-half of something new. Cuddled against him, Gwen Dvorak spills horrors of the world. She’d welcomed the sickness. She was in the hospital already, sitting next to the pale bald ghost that used to be her son before Leukemia sought him out, caught him, and ate him up. He died but not before the coughs filled the air with harsh rhythm, by then it seemed half the world sang the familiar tune.

Gwen stayed in the ward, surrounded by dead children and dead parents, all pains gone but her own. She waited for the virus to find her, waited days. She awoke vomiting, knowing the end was there, knowing that she’d be free shortly. The stench fuelled her feet and dying or not, she sought clean fresh air. She passed the bodies alive with white maggoty action, cavernous throats speaking in the tongues of insectile evolution—people alive in an all-new sense. It was hot outside the hospital walls. She vomited once more and noticed the color, the lack of blue. It was the rot outside her body, not within; the scent of it all tickled her gag reflex and churned her tummy.

“There was a wall of dead automobiles stuck, in a pile up, outside the hospital doors. I climbed over the dead…the cars like, rolling metal caskets, entire families, all blackening and puffy. God, the birds,” she says and shivers.

Calvin puts his arms around her and inhales her scent, it mingles with his own. Awful. It isn’t until that second that he knows exactly why he’s walked alone, what it was exactly that he seeks. There is cleanliness out there, somewhere.

“I just wanted to die, but then I ran into some people, they’re all dead now. I should be dead, I think,” Gwen says.

Calvin nods. The end of the world has forgotten about them both.

Under the cool night, carnal urges meet. Calvin waits until he hears Gwen’s sleepy breaths and takes up his pack. There is a clank, he freezes, suddenly feeling guilty.

“It was nice to meet you,” Gwen whispers. “Good luck.”

Calvin exhales heavy air; he wants to explain the need that drives him. That he needs something clean and fresh. He needs what the virus stole from the planet.

The wrong words spill from Calvin’s crusty lips, “It’s not you, it’s that I—”

Gwen snorts.

Calvin creeps back to the highway. He’ll head south knowing the party is headed east.

—

There are gaps in the filth where the grass grows tall and the rivers wind, but he isn’t a hunter or a survivalist. He needs canned foods, he needs cement walls and wooden doors to protect him from fauna.

In the manager’s office high above the floor of a Tops Market, Calvin eats stale potato chips and canned tuna fish. He watches mice and rats working their way through the new world.

“No Blues for you,” he says.

Light shines in through the front doors and Calvin watches shadows step toward him. Two men and a woman. They trade faux-fierce eye contact. Calvin feels around in his pack for a rifle he does not think he can use.

One of the men speaks and the others rush around the aisles at his suggestion. The staring man waves, and Calvin’s bravado melts. Minutes pass and footfalls announce upward motion toward the manager’s perch. There is a knock. The door opens, despite that Calvin doesn’t answer. Three filthy faces come through. He has a plan if more filth tries to take him from his path.

“Hello?” the woman says as Calvin watches, “we’re going east, heard of a settlement. If you’re not sick—”

Calvin fakes a long, loud, hacking cough into his palm. The trio scatters like unveiled cockroaches that had hidden under a baby blanket. The thought that coughing has the same effect as a wolf baring its teeth makes him smile. He watches the filthy threesome grab their budding packs and depart.

It is darkening quickly, and he sleeps in the musty office under a sky of tree-shaped air fresheners hung from the ceiling by some survivor before him. He thinks again about those filthy faces and his play-cough. He laughs, sadly; covering his mouth just in case something unwanted approaches his sleeping quarters and hears his amusement.

Perhaps it is truly out there, a clean place.

Calvin dreams of sterile newness: vapor-locked mattresses in malls, food delivered by waitresses in uniforms, sharing a kiss with a stranger who has seen a dentist that very same day.

Morning finds the world and Calvin sits up feeling drained. Blue liquid the consistency of automotive brake fluid coats his hands and cheeks. He looks at the rifle and considers the pistols in his pack. The drive to stand up against the end of life is gone.

He coughs and then spits hot, foul-tasting blue gunk.

“Well, Calvin Granger,” he coughs, his chest aching at the effort, “that clean place was behind a bullet all along.”

XX