The ghosts of mankind come here every night. I feel their spirits issue from the earth, surging up through the cables and plumbing, like milk drawn through a mass of tangled straws. The building sucks them in with the ease of a well-practiced whore. They course through its veins like an infection, heading for me, the occlusion at its heart.

      I lie here in my bed, unmoving, helpless, and totally alone. It is dusk and I am staring at the ceiling, waiting for them to arrive. I can do nothing else. I feel so goddamn tired all the time. My head feels like it has been packed with cotton wool, and the slightest movement sends me reeling. I can’t move about, anyway; my limbs hurt like hell. I think I must have caught a dose of the flu: not the Big One—those symptoms are very different—just the ordinary, run-of-the-mill variety.

     I still can’t believe how quickly the world has been turned on its head. A year ago I had a normal life. I held a responsible, highly paid job with a printing company, where I got on well with my colleagues and my boss; promotion was imminent. I was surrounded by a loving family and plenty of friends. And then, isolated outbreaks of Necrotic Flu began to appear in Asia. At first, they were all but ignored by the West. Within a few weeks, however, there were cases across every continent; a month after that, the disease was rife in every neighbourhood.

     So, Necrotic Flu had come to town: the Big One, with its suppurating sores, gangrenous organs, wild deliriums and protracted agonies. Nobody would escape the devastation because nobody recovers from Necrotic Flu.

     In my hometown, every park, stadium, and patch of waste ground was soon dug out and refilled with piles of rotting corpses. They were promptly doused with fuel and burned, the process being repeated, again and again, until the pits were full of ash and bones. The remains were quickly covered with mounds of earth in a desperate effort to halt the spread of the disease. It all turned out to be futile.

     I spent months walking the streets, sleeping rough, and waiting to expire; my family had already been stolen from me, one by one. Completely detached from society, I watched it die, collapsing in on itself as the infrastructure (the things all of us had hitherto taken for granted) crumbled away.

     Eventually, I came back home. When it comes down to it, where else is there to go? Here I stayed, only leaving the safety of my house to search for food. As time passed, I came across fewer and fewer people when I went out foraging on the streets. Finally, it was evident that I was truly alone…until the ghosts began their nightly visits.

     Energy starts to build in my room. I feel static electricity crackling insanely at my fingertips, but I am too weak to lift my head and look. My gaze drops from the ceiling and I see apparitions crowding at the windows, wispy at first—wraith-like—their bones filamentary, their bodies incandescent. They peer silently in at me through the dirty glass. I am terrified—just like I was last night…and the night before…and the night before that.

     Perhaps it is fitting that the destroyer of mankind has avian origins, birds being the legacy of the dinosaurs. Their fossils have endured across the millennia, demonstrating that earth’s children are not immune to extinction. But we dared to think we humans were special. Now, our race is about to join all the countless species we pushed into oblivion. I am the only deviation from the new norm.

     The phantoms enter my room, oozing through cracks in the walls, shimmying from gaps around the door and windows. They encircle my sickbed, their eyes never leaving my recumbent form. And they seem to glare at me as if I am the one who is trespassing on their domain.

     At some point, Necrotic Flu will surely get me, too, won’t it? What if the unthinkable happens, though, and it spares me? The last man on the planet might then be forced to take his own life. That would be far worse a fate, wouldn’t it? If I don’t, they will surely take me. I fear they want to slowly tap what little dignity I have left, before dragging my shrieking soul to the bowels of the earth, where the devil waits to complete his collection.

     The apparitions push even closer. Men, women, and children press in on me with dark, claustrophobic, cloying emotion, until all I want is to scream with rage and terror, with passion and pain. The cry sticks in my throat like an escaping prisoner, mercilessly recaptured; no sound breaks free from my lips.

     So, here I am, the last survivor of the mother of all pandemics: I, who, in a better world (seemingly centuries ago) chose a self-righteous path of self-destruction, who kicked my boss’s ass—metaphorically, at first, but then oh, so very literally—and who alienated my family and friends before charging off like a lone berserker...

     I remember how suicidal I was when my depression hit rock bottom. I genuinely wanted to die then. Now, horribly alone and the only one who isn’t dead, I feel so very different.

     The ghosts are becoming more corporeal; in their midst I recognise all the people I ever loved or cared for. Just like I did last night, the night before, and the night before that, I spy my mother near the front. Her mouth is turned down at the corners. Always happy in life, she frowns with disapproval...or maybe worry. Wasn’t she my first family member to disappear beneath the ravages of Necrotic Flu?

     The spectre of my wife, Elizabeth, steps forward and reaches for my brow. I can almost feel the stroke of her ethereal fingers, almost smell the aroma of her favourite scent in the stale air. Lizzie is beautiful in her ghostly form, as if the disease had never destroyed her. She mouths a single, silent word: David...my name. Although her face is very pale, it is whole again, free of any blemish. The ghost of a smile plays across her delicate lips. Hadn’t the killer flu left those lips swollen and split, the skin of her cheeks coal-black and pustular?

     My little boys are there, too, Mike and Eddie, hand-in-chubby infant-hand—the perfect twins, still inseparable. I would smile if I could. But didn’t I witness them pass away, arms around each other?

     My beautiful daughter glides forward and leans over me. She seems so solid and real. If only I could raise my weary head to kiss her on the forehead. My little judo champion, Rebecca had been expected to take a medal at this year’s national championships. She won’t be entering any more competitions, will she? Wasn’t I forced to watch the horror of her death in the very bed on which I now lie?

     But this time it is different. She is holding something out to me—a golden medallion. And this time, when her lips move, I hear every word she speaks. “I wish you’d come back to us, Daddy.”

     My senses are momentarily sharpened. Fascinated, I observe a glistening tear roll down her cheek. It slides along her jawline and drops. I feel the wetness on the bare skin of my arm, which I can’t move. Are my limbs strapped to the bed? For the first time I become aware of a tube, snaking away from my wrist; lights flicker on the periphery of my vision.

     My wife’s ghost turns towards a figure I don’t recognise, a woman dressed in white. “The new drugs haven’t shown any improvement, have they?” says Elizabeth, very clearly.

     “No,” replies the figure. “But this treatment has sometimes shown positive results with patients suffering from affective psychoses.”

     I can’t grasp what they are talking about, but for a fleeting moment I feel that I am on the verge of a breakthrough, that the gossamer veil hanging between our two worlds is about to fall away, letting me leave this intolerable loneliness behind to be reunited with my loved ones.

     But no, it is too late for fanciful dreams. My daughter’s form is already receding, along with the twins, my wife, my mother, and all the other ghosts of my life. As they drift away from my bed, I see their skin turning incandescent once more. They ooze back through the gaps and cracks, and vanish into the night. My gaze returns to the ceiling, and I wait. They will be back tomorrow, just like last night…and the night before…and the night before that.

Barry J. House, bjhouse@btinternet.com, who wrote “The Ghosts of My Life,” lives in the U.K. He has had work published online at Open Wide, This Is It, Whispers of Wickedness (where he is a member of the reviews team) and Sinister City, with stories appearing in print in Scifantastic, Fusing Horizons and The Horror Express. Further short stories were to appear in Black Petals, Thirteen, The Horror Express and the 2006 anthology Old Blood, New Souls. Barry also has a 2006-scheduled comedy-science fiction novella, and is working on a collection of themed horror stories.