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Like so much else, Dr. Kelson's survival was an accident. Had he gone to his office, he undoubtedly would have been torn apart and died there, or been bitten and transformed. His office was a structurally shoddy place, prefab and lightweight. It had few windows and there were locks on the doors, of course, but a mob of infected could crash straight through the walls. But he had, apparently, thrown an arm out in his sleep, knocked his alarm clock to the floor, and slept through the little crash.
He woke up late, in the old stone cottage he'd spent so many pleasant weekends restoring, to the sound of screaming. One person screaming would have sent him running outside to help. Many screams, from all directions, gave him pause. His first thought, which he often recalled later, was that perhaps there was a rabid dog on the loose. Rather than heading straight outside, he stood still and listened before taking a very cautious look. And so, behind sturdy old wooden doors and narrow windows set into thick stone walls, he lived long enough to see and understand and plan.
His great breakthrough was the result of another accident. Warily approaching his office (ruined and broken, strewn with the corpses of his friends and patients, splattered with blood, but still containing much that was undamaged and of use), he slipped on a bit of flesh, fell, and scraped himself from cheek to thigh. In a panic at the thought of contamination and uncertain how quickly infection occurred, he dashed inside, found a plastic jug of iodine, and upended it over his head. By the time he realized that there would have been more survivors if the infection could be contained so simply, enough time had passed that he knew he was safe from that fate, at least. But other, more common infections would be far more serious now, so he gathered the supplies he'd come for and walked out dripping brown and sharp-smelling. An infected woman leaped out from behind a gate, and his heart froze in his chest before she dashed straight past him.
Iodine, it seemed, was good for more than disinfectant.
An accident. Two accidents, if he counted his broken alarm clock. He wondered if this new and broken world had also been the result of an accident. Had someone failed to take sufficient precautions in a laboratory? Had someone put their hand into the hollow of a tree somewhere, and been bitten by an animal? Had someone stepped on a mushroom and inhaled a cloud of spores?
He would never know, he supposed. But the idea seemed right. An accident. An accident that changed the world, an accident that saved his life, and an accident that would allow him to leave this ruined town where everyone he loved was dead or horribly transformed. He wanted to go somewhere else. Somewhere lonely. Somewhere less full of reminders of what he'd lost.
And so he took his supplies and left his dead behind. But, of course, the dead were everywhere. There was nowhere free of them. How absurd of him to think that he could run away from death and loss. It was woven into the fabric of the world. It always had been.
I could embrace that truth, he thought. I should embrace it. I should give the dead here the respect they deserve, and create a memento mori for myself. For them. For the world. An absurd idea. Who needed to be reminded of death now? Death was everywhere. It was life that was rare, life that one needed to be reminded of. Even his own life felt distant to him.
He didn't believe in life after death in the religious sense: a terrible judgement, a knock at the pearly gates. No doubt many had seen the end of the world as they knew it as a judgement, but he did not; consequences happened, that was all, as the natural result of causes. As for pearly gates, the only pearls he believed in lay solitary and shining in briny wet flesh, or rooted in babies' jaws.
But there was still life after death, of course. As concrete crumbled and metal rusted and cars sat still, life thrived as it hadn't for a hundred years. Velvet carpets of moss unrolled themselves over what had once been sidewalks, the spores of fungi found welcoming homes everywhere, and plants grew unchecked by weedkillers or gardener's hands. It was a green world now, a lush and living world like he'd never expected to see. He could squat down anywhere and see little scenes of life and death and birth: ants cooperating to carry the corpse of a heavy beetle, earthworms yanked from the dirt and sucked down like spaghetti strands by hungry moles, papery chrysalises peeling back to reveal the damp and crumpled wings of butterflies.
It was a beautiful world, lush and thriving. But he didn't want that older world, the world of humans who built homes and read books and practiced medicine, to be forgotten. It lived in his memories, but they would die with him, and when they did, that world he had known would endure another, final death. And didn't the people who'd died, all those unique and precious individuals, deserve something a little less fleeting?
And so, bone by bone and skull by skull, his monument was made. Days passed, and the tower of skulls grew taller. Months passed, and the forest of bones grew. He lived among bones and trees, white and green, and sometimes he took a step back to view his work, and knew that it was good.
He had not seen an uninfected living human in years, and yet he was neither alone nor lonely. There was Samson and the others, perhaps evolving a new kind of tribe or pack. And there were the dead. Every bound bone had once belonged to a human being who had run or crawled or kicked in a crib; every skull had contained all the thoughts and passions, the pettinesses and worries and loves of a human being. They were with him always, the reminders of death and life.
He only hoped that when he died, someone - maybe a survivor like himself, maybe some evolved infected, or maybe some being he couldn't even imagine - would take his skull and add it to the tower.