An Empty World.

She didn’t remember much about the drive to the farmhouse, she just remembered the rain tapping against the Land Rover windscreen and the smears left behind by the wipers. She remembered the way her father kept checking the side mirror, like he was expecting someone to be following them. He didn’t speak to her much at all. Not at the station, not on the road back to his farm, not even when they pulled up to the house, a place that looked so old. It was like it had been borrowed from another time. It had been three days since the funeral; she had hoped he would say something, something comforting, something about her, but he didn’t.

Patsey had seen him at the station even before the train pulled in. She had clutched her suitcase with both hands, half-hoping the train ride had been some awful misunderstanding, that her mother would be waiting on the platform with a warm coat and a worried smile. But no, it had just been him standing there all alone. Tall, tired, an unfamiliar person she knew was her dad. A man who shared her blood, but none of her memories. Just one photograph in an album buried in a forgotten draw.

The farm smelt of damp earth, old stone, and something faintly sweet, like hay left too long in the sun. He showed her to her room like a guest in a hotel; it was a small upstair room with creaking floorboards and yellowing floral wallpaper that barely hung on to the uneven walls. He didn’t stay, just ushered her in, then left silently, not saying a word.

She sat on the edge of the bed and stared at the window, listening to the wind and the distant crash of waves on the shore. Patsey knew it wasn’t that he was unkind, but just... unsure. As if he didn’t quite know what to do with her. She was as much a stranger to him, as he was to her.

He moved through the house like a ghost, with no emotion. He moved silently, his routine-bound life, always carrying out chores in the barn or tending to the animals with a kind of quiet reverence. Sometimes he’d forget she was there. Sometimes she wished he would forget her less. She had no one to talk to; she was so alone.

She had been there seven weeks when the world started to change. At first, it was just the television murmuring in the background, the odd reports of strange cases of a new illness overseas, interviews with doctors who spoke in clipped, nervous tones with no real answers. Her father began watching the news more than he spoke. She’d pass by the living room and see him leaning forward in his chair as if he was waiting for something, his lips pressed into a hard line, and his arms crossed tightly over his chest. Every day, the voices on the screen grew more urgent, but they had nothing new to say. Every day, it was as if he grew smaller, and still, he had little to say.

When it was reported that the virus reached England, the fear in his eyes was something new. Something she hadn’t seen in him before, not even when they stood at the graveside. He barely ate anymore, snacks and a beer as he stared at the screen. He stopped going out to the fields to check on the livestock, or prepare the ground for planting. She asked him about the chickens, the first job he did every day, but he said nothing, it was now left to her. He would sit for hours with the volume turned up far too high, as if missing a single word might cost him everything. She was just ten years old; he was meant to be her guardian, her father, but he wasn’t really there.

And then... the news of the children. The reports began to roll-in of an age cutoff line, something to do with puberty being the trigger. The death tolls soared, but children under a certain age weren’t even getting sick. The world started whispering words like immune, mutation, unprecedented. Patsy didn’t fully understand, but she saw the way her father’s hands trembled whenever he turned off the television, and the way he looked at her like she might also slip away. But he still said nothing. He didn’t comfort her, or prepare her for when he would no longer be there.

Then, one morning, she woke to silence. The kind of quiet that knew something just felt wrong, it was like someone had sucked all the air out of the house, and her father with it. The TV was her first cue, the noise she had woken to every day of the last week, but it was silent. She called out to him, but nothing. Her voice boomed in the stillness, but there was no answer. The kettle was cold, the living room was empty. The television was dark, not even static infested the screen.

Then she found him in the old barn. He was lying on his side near the door, one arm curled beneath him as if he’d been trying to get up. His eyes were closed, and there was a softness to his face that made her stomach twist suddenly. She fell to her knees. The pain of silence had gone and taken everything with it. She stood there for what felt like hours. No tears came. Just a hollow, aching numbness that started in her brain and spread through every inch of her body.

She didn’t know how she managed to bury him, her actions a blur. Night had fallen, the stars shone bright, her hands were raw as she sat by the grave. She didn’t mark it, she couldn’t bear to. It felt like pretending he’d actually been there, but that would be a lie.

For days, she didn’t speak. There was no one to talk to, there was no one there.

Then one evening, she just wandered, nowhere in particular, but arrived at the beach. She sat on the sand, and whispered into the wind, “I don’t know why I’m talking to you.”

The sea didn’t answer. But it didn’t leave, either.

Every night after eating, she made that journey down to the shore, watching the waves roll in, then roll out like the slow, steady breathing of this new silent world. She’d talk quietly, sometimes about nothing at all, sometimes begging for a sign that someone, anyone, was still alive somewhere out there. She talked to the sea because it was the only thing that hadn’t left her behind.

The chickens became her only company. She fed them every morning without fail, gently scooping grain from the rusted tin. She sat there and watched them while mumbling under her breath, as if she was reading them bedtime stories. They never laid more eggs, but that mattered little, they were producing more than she could eat. The garden gave her carrots, potatoes, a few stubborn tomatoes that still clung to their vines like they were not ready to give up either. She stuck to a routine, in this, her new world of silence.

And then came the fox one night. She never heard it, but she found the henhouse door open, swinging loose on its hinges the next morning. The ground was littered with feathers, red smears, and the bodies. She sank to her knees in the dirt and touched one of the hens gently, almost apologetically, breaking in to tears at the senseless loss. She just didn’t understand the wasteful carnage.

Her main food was now gone, and the company of the hens. Her rhythm of the day was broken, never to return.

That night, she didn’t speak to the sea. She just stared at it, her fists clenched in her lap, her breath shallow but tight, unable to speak the words in her head.

If she stayed here, she would starve, or just fade away.

She thought of the village; it was only15 miles inland, a distance she could easily walk in a day. Her father had pointed it out once on an old paper map, tracing the roads with his finger back to the farm. She knew there was a grocery store, he’d said, it was where he bought food, with a hardware store attached that he had purchased things needed for the farm.

She made up a packed early the next morning with bottled water, a few biscuits from the pantry, and her raincoat in case it rained. On her way out, she passed the Land Rover, but she could not drive.

The road stretched ahead, cracked and sun-faded, little used. The air smelled like wildflowers and something else, but she couldn’t place it. The silence was no longer peaceful it was more like the voice of the world having nothing to say anymore.

By the time she reached the village, the sun was hanging low in the sky. Every house she checked out was empty. Some were still tidy, as if their owners had only just left.

She used a trolly to collect food in the store, but transferred it to a garden trolly she found in the hardware shop, something with large wheels that would travel better on the road. She picked up several cans of fluorescent paint at the same time, a plan forming the moment she saw it. Outside, she knelt down and sprayed her first message across the pavement in a yellow brighter than the sun:

“I’m still here. My name is Patsy. Please be kind and follow the arrows.”

She signed it with the date and added the first arrow to the road.

That night, she slept curled up on a couch that smelled of lemon polish and emptiness, in a well-kept house that lay empty apart from the dust. She dreamed of footsteps she didn’t make and voices she couldn’t place. When she woke, she had no memory of what they had said.

The next day, as she travelled home, she left another message on the road. Adding arrows to guide anyone who saw them to where she would be. Each one a whisper of hope, scratched into the skin of a dead world.

On the eighth day, returning from another day of tagging buildings and roads, she climbed the last rise toward home, her legs aching and her eyes blurry with exhaustion. That was when she saw him, as she walked down her drive.

A boy. Sitting on the farmhouse steps.

His hands were wrapped around a half-empty water bottle. His eyes widened as she approached, and for a moment, they just stared at each other, two ghosts at the edge of the world.

“You wrote the message,” he said, voice hoarse but real.

Patsy didn’t answer straight away. Her throat was too tight and dry.

He stood up slowly, brushing dirt from his jeans. “I didn’t think there was anyone else left.”

Neither did she, but there he was.

The boy didn’t move at first. Neither did Patsy. They stood there like statues cast in late-afternoon light; the sun dipping behind the hills and turning the world to gold and long shadow.

He looked real. But then again, so did her dreams at the time.

He had a smudge of dirt on his cheek, a frayed hoodie that was far too big for him, and a cautious stillness in his shoulders, like someone who’d spent a long time hiding from things bigger and louder than himself.

“I saw your writing, your messages on the road,” he said, breaking the silence with a voice that was music to her ears. “On the shop. On the road. I followed the bright yellow arrows all the way here.”

Patsy blinked, and it was as if the world suddenly remembered how to spin.

“You came all that way from the village?” she asked, her own voice barely more than a whisper.

He nodded. “I didn’t have anywhere else to go.”

Patsy had spoken to no one in weeks, but suddenly didn’t know what to say. Part of her wanted to run to him, to hug him so tightly that the silence couldn’t get between them. The other part wanted to bolt in the other direction, or to run into the house and lock the door, pretend she’d imagined him stood there in front of her. It was safer being alone; she thought. Lonelier, but safer.

Instead, she sat down on the grass a few feet away, her backpack slipping from her shoulders.

“I’m Patsy,” she said, quietly, still not sure he was actually there.

The boy hesitated, then lowered himself to the step again. “I’m Callum. I am so happy to see you, I thought I would be alone forever.”

They didn’t speak for a while after that. The wind tugged gently at the tall grass around them. Somewhere out in the fields, a crow called just once, then fell silent.

It was Callum who spoke again. “I was in a caravan park on the other side of the village. With my mum and my sister. We were there for the summer, and due to leave when it started getting bad, they told everyone to leave. But we stayed. It was quiet, and Mum thought that would be safer than the city.” He picked at the hem of his sleeve. “She got sick first. My sister a few days after. I… I waited as long as I could. Then I just… walked.”

Patsy closed her eyes, the weight of his story sinking in beside her own. Grief was strange that way, it didn’t care how full your hands already were. It just kept piling on, like it was daring you to drop everything and finally give in.

“I’m sorry,” she said, and meant it with everything she had.

He gave a small shrug, the kind that meant thank you and don’t say anything else all at the same time.

Later, when the stars came out, they sat by the kitchen fire she’d managed to coax back to life after a day away. Callum hadn’t eaten properly in days, so she shared a tin of beans and two dusty crackers from the back of the pantry. He devoured them like they were a feast.

Patsy watched him quietly. He didn’t say much, but the way he held his spoon with both hands, like it might disappear, told her all she needed to know.

When she showed him the garden, he grinned for the first time.

“You did all this?” he asked, peering at the rows of stubborn little vegetables.

She smiled, just a bit. “Mostly the plants did it themselves. My father planted them, I just try not to mess them up.”

They worked together the next morning, watering, pulling weeds, checking the traps she’d set for rabbits, though none had caught anything yet. It felt strange, this rhythm with someone else moving beside her. She kept waiting for it to break apart like a marriage playing tricks with her eyes.

It didn’t. Not right away.

Each night, they shared stories under the stars, half-whispers of memories, of things they missed: chocolate milk, Saturday cartoons, the sound of a crowd in a shopping centre. They tried not to talk about the people they’d lost, but sometimes the words slipped through the cracks, anyway.

Callum confessed he didn’t sleep well these days. Too many nightmares, too many shadows haunted his dreams. So they dragged an old mattress into the living room, set it near the fire, and slept back-to-back, like a little fortress of warmth, a heartbeat of hope.

It wasn’t perfect. Some days were quiet and others were heavy. Once, Callum snapped at her when she tried to check his map. “It’s not like I don’t know where we’re going,” he’d muttered, “you know I do.”.

Patsy had walked away without a word, she didn’t want him to leave. She’d gone down to the sea shore and screamed into the waves until her voice was horse. But when she came back, he was sitting on the steps again, looking smaller than usual.

“Sorry,” he said. “I just didn’t want you to think I’m useless. I’m not.”

“I don’t think you are useless. It never crossed my mind,” she replied, and meant it.

It was after one of those quiet days, one where they didn’t speak much, just moved around each other like ghosts, that he brought up the town again.

“I think we should go,” he said, while they were eating in the garden. “To Aberystwyth. It’s the nearest big town. There might be others like us there, or supplies we can use, even if it is just... answers. The not knowing… things. We are kids. Are there any grownups still out there? Anyone that can help us?”

Patsy looked out at the horizon. She’d spent so long trying to hold on to the world she had, even after it stopped holding on to her. But now, sitting there with the dirt under her nails and the evening sun catching the tips of Callum’s hair, she realised something: She wasn’t scared of being alone anymore. She was more scared of losing what she had, of losing Calum. She was scared of trusting that it might all be real and this was her life now, but she had to know.

“Okay,” she said at last. “But only if we go together.”

He smiled, slow and quiet. “Wouldn’t want to go anywhere without you. We are a team, you are my best friend.”

“Yeh, I am your only friend,” she said, smiling at him.

They both laughed, and fist bumped.

“The decision is set then,” she said. “Let’s eat and get some sleep. We have a long way to go.”