He grips my hand but it feels like nothing is there. His strength, the little that he possessed before this, must be leaving him.

The sounds that I've gotten used to long ago- the wailings, cries, groans of the almost dead- are louder and more prominent today.

He opens his small mouth, littered with traces of his own bile, but he can't form coherent words. His eyes have long lost focus, and I'm not sure if he even knows that I am here, that I'm next to him, that he's not alone. A small moan escapes through his parted lips.

The stench is almost unbearable. The scented herbs by his bed no longer are able to mask the smell of his vomit and pus and blood.

I've grown afraid to touch him. The large, hard lumps adorn his shriveled body, and the liquids- milky mixtures, decorated with strings of red- are dried blotches on his once soft skin. More ooze from the blackened swells, fresh from within his flesh.

It has been only five days since I saw him outside, skipping, running across the road, jumping over corpses strewn about, poking at the piles of abandoned bodies.

Get away from there, I had screamed. Before the Devil gets his hands on you.

He tries to say something, but he still can't string together a sentence; all that escapes his mouth is a groan before he jerks his hand away from mine.

He shivers and twitches, teeth clattering together and limbs twisting inhumanly. For the first time in days, his eyes meet mine and he's screaming through them, Mom, Mom, help me, and I'm screaming, too, but I can't hear myself over his low groans and outcries because they are so, so much louder.

Maybe hours passed. I probably haven't moved for just as long.

The distant sound of crackling is soon accompanied by a warmth coming through the bare windows. There are scuttling noises of feet frantically running across the dirt pathway outside, cries of children and mothers alike.

They're burning the city, and the dead with it.

I would want nothing more than to stay and burn alongside his body, but that hated human part of me is so scared of those tendrils of orange and yellow coming so closely.

I think I tripped along the way, but everything before this moment is a blurred, vague memory.

It is so much hotter outside.

I follow the scattered groups of people, away from the oncoming licks of flames.

There's no where to go, no one left, and I wonder if everybody else feels the same longing for the city that, just two months ago, was filled with playful children and happy families and liveliness.

People die and cities burn down, but the memories before the inevitable end is able to haunt us forever.