Incorporated with DeepSeek
The rain never stopped. It hadn’t for five years. In the summers it came down warm and thick as broth, carrying the rot of drowned cities and the salt of a rising sea. In the winters it turned to a slush that froze into grey ribs on the hood of every abandoned car. There was no spring, no autumn. Just the wet, the heat, and the dark.
He drove through it.
The car was a stolen Škoda, diesel, with a quarter-million kilometres on the clock and a smell of old cigarettes baked into the seats. He’d lifted it from a garage in Sofia where the owner had long since died—meds dependent, like half the world, taken by the Lullaby virus that nobody ever officially acknowledged. The garage had been a tomb of luxury SUVs with flat tyres and dead batteries, but the Škoda still had juice in the tank and a key under the mat. He’d taken it and pointed the nose northwest, into the permanent night of his own life.
His name was Meesh, once. The Marines of First Reconnaissance Battalion had called him that because they couldn’t wrap their mouths around Mishal, and because he’d been a skinny kid who could slip through a crowd and come back with cigarettes, batteries, or a rumour. He’d grown up in their Humvees, learnt English from Sergeant Colbert’s calm corrections and Corporal Person’s relentless filth. When they rolled north out of Iraq in 2011, he’d stayed behind, a collaborator in a city that had no use for collaborators. He’d been seventeen. Now he was forty-three, and the world had collapsed around him, and he was driving to the Netherlands to get high.
The road was a black river unspooling through the Balkan night. Rain hammered the roof with the rhythm of a thousand impatient fingers. He kept the headlights off—the old motorway was a ghost track, and light attracted the wrong kind of attention. Gangs, militias, splinters of splinter groups who’d painted their faces with eco-runes or Christograms or the scorpion of the New Black Sun and decided that anyone still breathing owed them a toll. Meesh had a Tokarev under the passenger seat and four cans of diesel strapped in the boot. It was enough. It had to be.
He drove by memory and the faint green glow of a cracked GPS unit that still managed to catch a dying satellite. The map showed Belgrade somewhere to his right, a smear of flooded districts and floating casinos that nobody had the money to visit. The finance scandal had killed banking, vaporised half the jobs in the City of London and Frankfurt and Zurich, and turned the luxury resorts of the Adriatic into empty concrete shells where only the rats had pensions. Meesh had seen a resort once, from a hilltop in Montenegro, its infinity pools filled with brown rainwater and its lobbies occupied by a cult who believed the virus was a baptism. He’d steered clear.
Around two in the morning the rain slackened to a drizzle and the temperature dropped just enough that he could crack the window. The air that slipped in tasted of wet pine and diesel exhaust. He lit a cigarette—tobacco, dry and stale—and let the smoke curl out into the slipstream. The real smoke, the one he was chasing, was still a thousand kilometres away, in a country that might not even exist anymore.
He’d been twelve the first time he’d tasted it. The Marines had cleared a warehouse in Al-Kut, found nothing but empty crates and a scared kid with a broken nose, and after the adrenaline bled off, Trombley had produced a joint from the band of his helmet. *The world’s gonna burn anyway, habibi,* he’d said, and passed it to Meesh in the back of the Humvee while Colbert scanned the rooftops and Person shouted about how Trombley was a fucking liability. Meesh had coughed until his ribs hurt, but behind the coughing was a stillness, a suspension of fear, a feeling that for the first time since the invasion he was exactly where he belonged. He’d never forgotten it.
Then the Lullaby came.
A leaked nightmare from a lab in Guangdong, it had swept through the world’s invisible populations first—the immuno-compromised, the pill-dependent, the chemo patients, the transplant survivors. Within weeks it had mutated a taste for recreational chemistry: opiate users dropped in their thousands, meth addicts drowned in their own lung fluid, weekend cocaine warriors died clutching their chests in club bathrooms that soon became mass graves. Stoners, too. The virus didn’t care about legality. If a substance had rewritten your body’s baseline, Lullaby rewrote you back into the dirt. By the time the authorities—what was left of them—realised it was happening, seventy million were dead and the rest were too scared to take an aspirin.
Meesh had survived because he’d been too poor for meds and too careful for drugs. The Marines had given him cigarettes and that one joint, and later, after they left, he’d been too busy staying alive to chase a high. The irony was a splinter in his mind: the virus had killed the users, but it had also killed the world that made survival feel worth the effort. Now he wanted the smoke more than he wanted tomorrow.
He drove until the sky began to bruise with a grey, leaking dawn. The heat climbed. By the time the sun was a pale burn behind the permanent cloud layer, the temperature had passed thirty degrees and the rain had returned, heavy and vertical, turning the Škoda into a mobile sauna. Meesh pulled off into the shell of a petrol station, its canopy rusted through, its pumps ripped out for their copper. He parked in the deepest shadow he could find, killed the engine, and crawled into the back seat. The upholstery was damp. He didn’t mind. He folded his jacket into a pillow and closed his eyes.
Sleep came with memories, always the same. Colbert’s voice: *We do not leave people behind.* Person laughing: *Dude, we leave people behind all the time, it’s called the Marine Corps.* The weight of a fifty-cal shell casing that Trombley had pressed into his palm. The sound of boots moving away down a dusty street in 2011, leaving him with a handshake and a hundred dollars and a silence that had never ended.
He woke in the late afternoon, soaked in sweat, the rain still hammering the roof like a judgement. He drank water from a plastic bottle, ate a strip of dried meat, and forced himself back into the driver’s seat. The GPS flickered: Zagreb behind, Graz ahead. The borders were nothing now, just lines on a dead map, but the road still held checkpoints of a different kind.
His first real test came on the third night, in the Austrian foothills. A roadblock of burnt-out lorries funnelled the motorway into a single lane, and standing in the rain were a dozen figures in rain-slicked black with red armbands. The New Black Sun, from the symbols. A splinter of a splinter, armed with hunting rifles and a hatred for anyone who didn’t fit their narrowing definition of human. A man with a shaved head and a smile full of gaps tapped the window with a machete.
Meesh rolled it down.
“Destination,” the man said in English, the universal language of post-collapse threat.
“Amsterdam,” Meesh said. No point lying.
“Amsterdam is a faggot swamp. Why go there?”
“Family.” The word was a fossil, but it still worked. “Sister. She’s sick.”
“Sick with what?”
“Not the Lullaby. Cancer. She needs me.”
The man stared. Rain dripped off his nose. Behind him, the others were searching a van, hauling out a terrified family. Meesh kept his hands visible, his eyes down, his heartbeat steady. The Marine training he’d absorbed by osmosis: *never show fear, never show threat, be the grey man.*
“You got weapons?”
“A pistol. Under the seat. I’ll give it to you.”
He reached slowly, pulled the Tokarev out by the barrel, and offered it through the window. The man took it, checked the magazine, and grunted. “Diesel?”
“Two cans in the boot. One’s yours.”
The man looked at him for a long, wet moment, then nodded. “Take your sister and get the fuck out of Europe. It’s done.”
Meesh didn’t argue. They took the diesel and the gun, but they didn’t take the car, and they didn’t take him. He drove on into the Austrian night, hands shaking only when the red glow of the roadblock faded in the rearview.
By the time he crossed the Dutch border, the landscape had become a single sheet of shallow water. The Netherlands was drowning—not dramatically, not in a single catastrophe, but slowly, day by day, the sea reclaiming its claim. The motorway became a causeway between flooded fields where the tops of greenhouses poked through like the skeletons of glass beasts. The rain was warm and relentless, the air thick with the smell of salt and silt. He followed a hand-painted sign that read COFFEESHOP, faded but legible, until the road ended at a canal.
He left the Škoda on high ground, took his remaining water and a handful of euros that were worth less than the paper they were printed on, and walked. The rain plastered his hair to his skull. The canal water was murky and still, broken only by the ripples of the endless downpour. After a kilometre, he found the barge.
It was an old Dutch *woonboot*, rust-streaked and listing slightly, with a hand-painted sign that read DE LAATSTE HOOP—The Last Hope. A gangplank led to a low cabin lit by a single yellow bulb. The air inside was thick with the ghost of a thousand past sessions, sweet and resinous and utterly alien after so many sterile years.
A woman sat behind a counter made of pallets. She was perhaps seventy, her face a map of wrinkles, her hair a white cloud. An oxygen tube ran from a tank beneath the counter to her nose, and Meesh felt a jolt of recognition—she should have been dead, meds-dependent, a Lullaby victim. But she smiled, and the smile said *I know what you’re thinking, and I’m still here.*
“First customer in six months,” she said in accented English. “You want something?”
He could barely speak. “A joint. Anything. Please.”
She nodded, reached into a glass jar, and pulled out a pre-rolled cone. “Amnesia Haze. What’s left of it. Grown right here under the lamps, before the floods. You know the price?”
He offered the crumpled euros. She shook her head.
“No. The price is you sit here and you smoke it with me. I want to see someone enjoy it. It’s been too long.”
So he did.
She lit it for him with a cracked Zippo, and he took a pull that was deeper than any breath he’d drawn since the world stopped making sense. The smoke hit his lungs like a memory, hot and familiar and terrifying, and for a second he waited for the Lullaby to wake, for the bleeding, for the silence. But nothing came. Just the burn, and the calm, and the rain on the water.
He sat on a stool by the open hatch, watching the canal swallow the rain. The high came on slowly, a loosening of the knot behind his eyes, a softening of the edges. He thought of Trombley, back in that Humvee, grinning through the dust. *The world’s gonna burn anyway.* It had. It was still burning. But here, in this floating room with a dying woman and a joint, there was a small pocket of something that the flames hadn’t reached.
“First in many years?” the woman asked.
“First since I was a child.”
She nodded. “Then savour it. The world doesn’t give many second chances.”
He did. He savoured every pull until the joint was a roach pinched between his calloused fingers, and the rain began to hammer harder, and the canal crept a little higher up the gangplank. He didn’t know if he’d make it back to the car. He didn’t know if he wanted to. For the first time in five years of endless, drowning noon, he was awake in the night, and the night was enough.
