Apocalypsis 01 - Kahayatle

bugged out of my head.   “A transvestite was living behind me this whole time and I didn’t even know it?”
    Peter shook his head at me again, this time more in disgust.   “She was a person , Bryn.   Not a transvestite.   You say it like she was a creature.”
    I instantly felt like an ignorant ass.   “Oh, yeah.   Of course she was.   I didn’t mean anything by it.”
    “My parents weren’t the most tolerant people in the world.”
    There was a world of meaning wrapped up in that simple sentence, and I wondered if I dared to ask for clarification.   He was stirring the beans around in his can, but not eating them.   It was as if he were waiting for me to say something.   So I did.
    “Was your uncle gay?”
    He shrugged, mumbling, “I don’t know.   Maybe.   Is that a problem?”
    “No.   Not for me.   Was it for you?”   My ears burned for some reason.   I wasn’t sure if I was embarrassed for having asked or just uncomfortable putting him in this position of having to explain himself to me.
    He cleared his throat.   “No.   I’m gay myself, so I don’t have a problem with it at all.”
    I went back to stirring the noodles.   “Well, that’s good.   I didn’t want to have to be forced into fending off your advances on my person.   A guy could get hurt that way.”
    Peter laughed.   “Nothing to worry about there.”
    “Hey!” I said, in mock outrage, throwing a dishtowel at him.
    He caught it with a surprisingly quick move, pulling it out of the air and tossing it carelessly to the counter.
    “Nice reflexes,” I said, nodding in appreciation.   Maybe he wouldn’t be hopeless to train after all.
    “I used to play a lot of ping pong.”
    I started laughing so hard, I snorted .
    ***
    After Peter had eaten his fill of noodles and beans, and I had joined him, indulging in another jar of sauce to boot, we sat down in the living room and took stock of our stuff.
    He held up each book from his suitcase in turn.   “First, I have a gardening book.   My aunt said this one is specifically for Florida.”
    “Awesome,” I said, holding out my hand to take it from him.   “This goes in the keeper pile.”
    “Then, she left me this one.   It’s an encyclopedia of natural remedies that you can make using herbs and plants and stuff from the things growing in South Florida.”
    “No way!” I said, taking it from him to read the back.   “Wow, this is amazing.”   My dad and I had talked about me being injured, but not much about me being sick.   I guess he’d figured with all the people dying off, there’d probably not be a lot of everyday diseases going around.   “I wonder if this has a cure for whatever killed all the adults in it,”   I said jokingly.
    “It doesn’t.   I already looked.”
    “Not sure how you could expect to find something when you don’t even know what it is,” I said sarcastically.
    “I have my theories,” he said, looking arrogant.  
    I could totally tell in that moment that he was one of those kids who won the science fair every year with some radical experiment he’d done, looking for cancer cures or whatever.   In my old life I would have scoffed at the stupidity of wasting so much time.   In my new life, I decided, this guy could be valuable to have around.   At least when I got sick.   But that didn’t mean I wasn’t going to give him a hard time about it.
    “Oh, you’re going to cure the disease that killed ten billion people, when the smartest minds in the world working together weren’t enough?”
    “No.   I don’t think I’ll need to.   The disease died with them.”
    “You don’t think we’re all going to die when we reach twenty?”   That seemed to be the cut-off age for most of the living.
    “No.   There are no more hosts.   We’re all resistant, for whatever reason.”
    “Our hormones.”
    “So they said.   But no one ever proved it.   And people taking hormones at teen levels weren’t able to survive.”
    I shrugged.   “It doesn’t matter to me.   Either I live or I die.   I’ll do what I can to keep the death part from coming, but when it’s my time to go, I’ll just go.”
    “Easy to say when you’re healthy.”
    “Yeah.   I know.”   It was a sobering thought.   My dad was the coolest guy I’d ever known, and even he had freaked out in the end when faced with his own mortality.   I decided to push those thoughts out of my head and get back to our planning.
    “What