He only had to look up a moment before he keeled over and puked.  He did a lot of vomiting lately.  It didn't take much to set him off; all he needed to do was look up and it all came out.

What's funny is that he was starving.  Ravenous, really.  And he couldn't remember the last time he'd eaten, and yet something always came up, lumpy and green and tasting... fermented.  He was forgetting a lot of things lately, not just when he last ate.  His name was still here, but he'd forgotten his wife's face.  First, after he'd beaten her to death and forced vomit past her cooling lips, all he could see was her face slacking from something to something else to another thing, and then she ran, joined the others in finding them.  Damn.  There went something else.  What was it... emotion.  He tried to remember what feelings looked like and they were gone.  Maybe he was puking up memories.  He didn't remember her face and he was fairly certain she was Gone Forever, lost some time ago he couldn't quite place.

Time didn't mean a whole lot lately.  Time was the thing that happened when he wasn't running or killing or raising.  Time was the enemy.  When he had time he mulled uselessly, or he tried to catch their smell, or just kick around one of the others, play fights to pass the time.  Time was free time.  Free time was killing him.  Killing the world.  There were still so many of them, and though they were not as fast, not as pure, they were so...

He was losing words, hemorrhaging them in shuddering bouts of vomit.  Not that he could speak them, anyhow; he'd lost that first, right after the first two others he saw pounded him into hamburger, stomped him into cold, bitter sleep.  If he tried to speak the words were lost in a spray of spit, or a gurgle, a moan.  It made him feel worse, and he had never felt so bad, not even in dying, so he didn't talk anymore.  The others, the normal others, couldn't talk, so at least he wasn't alone.  But sometimes he thought he heard words, sentences even, from the fast or the fat or the big or the stinking.

Once he heard an angel sing in the voice of a crying girl.  He heard it after a successful run, after he had helped stomp a woman 'til she didn't fight back.  The other closest to her shoved aside the rest and loomed over her.  That was the process: find, kill, spit or bleed or throw up down their throats.  The change was inevitable.  He watched the other force blood from fresh injuries down the dead one's mouth.  He had nothing else to do--so he wandered off, like the rest, into the dark under the earth, hunting for an opening to the surface, or perhaps someone else to run.

He heard the choked, rasping sobs as he passed a crashed subway train.  He crawled to the sound, his hearing, uneven as it was now, stronger than his eyes in the dimness.

He never saw her, but he came close to the sound, and for the sake of the angel's song, he listened.  He stayed.  Time was time, passing by in ways he didn't have the ability to perceive.  He listened until it was no longer pertinent to listen.  When he felt the surge rise up his back and heard, loud as drumbeats in his head, the running of the others, he ran, knowing they were near and on their feet.

Now, after that last run, he was near the surface, near the...

Exit.  Subway exit.  That's what it was called.  And the ground was slick and stinking with his puke, because looking up at the exit afforded him a fine look at the sky.

The sky broiled with cosmic fire.  The sky churned like the sea in a storm, like a whirlpool draining into the ether.  It was going to fall, and soon, palpably soon, like the light of the sun on his face.  Time was a bastard.  When he was not running, soon was ten thousand years away.  When he was not, soon was always, always before his next breath, before the last run, well after his last puke.

The sky was burning because they had not all become others.  They clung on and fought back with... with...  Unmakers.  They made enormous noises and unmade the others.  They had unmakers, and they had bottles full of fire, and they had something tamped in a pipe.  When they threw the pipes the pipes would sing, and the others would swarm the pipe, and the pipe would unmake the crowd.  They had many weapons to take apart the others.  Through luck and grace he had not yet Gone Forever.

The sky was burning, was falling.  Not too long from now it would rip the world apart or simply swoop onto it, cloaking it in holocaust flames.  There were so many of them left to find, so many left to be born into others, and pitiful little time to find and feed.  When the last

There!  A flash of light in the exit, a light like the living carried.  (Poor Alex did not know why the flashlights they carried burned brighter than the sky; his brain, broiled in sickness, could not process it.)  He slunk up the stairs, quiet as he could manage, and tried to see how many there were.  There was one and another and another and another and another and another, the last very small, a little girl.  They had not seen him.  They ran the light across the street, trying to find something, maybe someone.

There were also a few cars between himself and them.  Old memories stung in his head, now nameless but seemingly important.  Why not listen?  Why not!

He ran, ran at them, ran howling, and one, the big tall one that may have been the father, raised a shotgun and fired.  In one near-clean hit the father tore his chest away.  One pellet sailed just under his arm, and struck a car instead.  An obnoxiously loud car alarm blared.  He was Gone Forever; he knew.  He couldn't breathe anymore, and his sight was failing.  He tripped over himself, gave out as though he could feel again, feel tired and in need of rest.

This is what I was waiting for.

He hadn't thought in a long time--not properly thought, anyway.  Not much time left to get used to it.  So, he thought.

I can go now.  I can Go Away Forever.  I can leave this place.  Wait for the others to finish the work.  My job is done.

A nation of millions vomited from the subway station, and he was gone before the tall shotgun man and the other and the other and the other and the other were surrounded, were dying, were falling under a million striking heels and fists.

He left them behind, left the others behind.  Left it all.

Sleep.