​The last thing we said.

Hospitals overflowed with bodies mid-word, mouths open, eyes wide, foam dried on their lips. Survivors began wearing ear protection, covering their mouths, and writing frantic notes to each other. Some people tore out their own tongues in desperation. It didn’t help. Even reading someone else’s words, imagining how they would sound, was sometimes enough.

The virus didn’t need sound anymore. It lived in meaning. As days passed, cities emptied. Planes fell from the sky when pilots spoke to each other out of habit. Powerplants shut down. Fires burned unchecked. The last broadcasts were text only, flashing warnings no one could answer. Eventually, there were no voices left. The world stood still, full of people who had tried to speak one last time, and finished the story of humanity with their final words.

For a while, the silence felt temporary, like the pause after a disaster before help arrives. But no one came. Weeks passed, then months. With no voices to coordinate, the remaining systems failed one by one. Satellites drifted out of alignment. Nuclear plants shut down or melted quietly behind locked doors. Animals wandered freely through cities, stepping around fallen bodies frozen mid-gesture, mouths still open as if waiting for an answer.

A handful of people survived longer than the rest, those who had been alone when it began. They learned quickly. No speaking. No humming. No whispering to themselves when fear crept in at night. They stuffed their ears with cloth and communicated only with symbols scratched into the walls. Even thinking too hard about words became dangerous.

One survivor wrote in charcoal inside an abandoned supermarket:

‘I can feel it when I almost talk. Like something waking up’

Another message appeared days later, written shakier, the lines uneven.

‘It’s waiting for me to finish a sentence’

One by one, even the silent ones disappeared. Some slipped and muttered a single sound. Some laughed at a memory. Some screamed when they realised they were truly alone.

Those screams echoed through empty streets and then cut off. In the end, there were no humans left to carry the virus. No minds left to understand meaning. No conversations to complete the deadly pattern.

The wind moved through broken buildings. Trees grew through asphalt. Oceans kept rising and falling.

The world was finally quiet, and somewhere, unfinished and starving the last sentence ever spoken faded into nothingness.

Silence didn’t mean safety. In the ruins of what once had been a city, one person still moved. She had survived by accident. When the first warnings appeared, she had been underground, sealed inside a storm shelter after the earthquake. Days had passed before she dared to climb out. By then, the world above was already wrong. Too still, too quiet, like a held breath that never released.

She learned quickly. No speaking. not even alone. Not even a whisper.

At night, when fear pressed hard against her chest, she bit down on her sleeve to stop herself from making a sound. She wrote reminders on her skin with a marker: DON’T TALK, DON’T THINK IN WORDS.

But silence has a sound of its own.

She began to notice it following her, just at the edge of awareness. A pressure in her head. A feeling that something was listening, waiting for her to slip. Sometimes her thoughts almost shaped themselves into sentences, and when they did her vison blurred and her heart raced.

Once she tripped and gasped, just air. No word. Still, she collapsed to her knees, shaking, convinced she had felt something stir. She found that she wasn’t the last.

In a library, books lay open with frantic markings. Half-finished sentences scratched into desks. A message written over and over on the wall, each version shorter than the last, as if the writer had been losing time.

‘IT HEARS YOU, IT WAITS, IT.

She didn’t finish reading. That night, as she slept, she dreamed of voices. Not speaking, almost speaking, the shape of conversation without sound. She woke with tears streaming down her face and blood trickling from her nose.

The virus was still alive.

Not spreading

Waiting.

Days later, she saw movement in the distance. Another person, thin and cautious, eyes wide with the same terror she felt. They froze when they noticed each other. They stood there, staring, communicating nothing.

Minutes passed. Her heart pounded. Her mouth filled with saliva, she dared not to swallow too loudly. Every instinct screamed to call out, as if he were real, if she was still human. He raised his hands slowly. In one, he held a notebook. He opened it, showing a single sentence written in careful block letters.

‘WE CANT THINK TOGETHER.’

She understood, two minutes in the same place, too close. The virus didn’t need sound anymore. It needed connection. Her vision narrowed. She felt the pressure building, meaning the forming between them, the start of a shared thought. She turned and ran. Behind her, she heard a sound, half a word, half a sob.

She didn’t look back. She ran until her lungs burned and her thoughts broke apart into fragments, until even fear stopped making sense. Somewhere far behind her, something finished a sentence, and then the world went quiet again. She didn’t stop until her lungs gave out.

When she finally collapsed inside a collapsed parking structure, the cold concrete against her cheek, she pressed her face into the dust and forced her breathing to slow. In. Out. No rhythm. No counting. Numbers were words, too, if you let them be.

Minutes passed. Or hours. Time had become something slippery since silence took over.

Nothing followed her. That was worse.

She stayed there through the dark, eyes open, listening to the faint sounds of the world reclaiming itself. Wind scraping debris, distant metal shifting, water dripping somewhere deep below. Each noise felt like it wanted to become something else. Like it was testing shapes.

At dawn, she found the notebook again in her mind.

‘WE CAN’T THINK TOGETHER.’

The man had known; he had already learned what she was beginning to understand. The virus hadn’t disappeared with humanity’s voices. It had adapted. It lingered in the spaces between minds, in shared understanding, in recognition. Two people didn’t need to speak. Seeing each other was sometimes enough. Knowing someone else was there, thinking, remembering, created a bridge, and bridges were dangerous.

She moved only at night after that, avoiding reflective surfaces, keeping her head down. She destroyed every mirror she found. Faces were too close to words. Expression meant things. Meaning was the enemy. Then she found the signs.

Not writing, symbols carved into walls and sidewalks. Crude shapes repeated again and again. Circles broken by lines, spirals that stopped just before closing. Warnings made by people who had learned the same lesson and tried to pass it on without finishing the thought.

A community had existed once. It had failed. She reached the edge of the city and froze. In an open field beyond the buildings, figures lay scattered, dozens of them still. Upright. Not bodies. Not corpses. Living people, frozen in place, eyes open, mouths closed tight as if sewn shut by fear.