Authors: David Berardelli
Idiot. No power or water. Do the math
.
I dashed out of the room.
The little girl hadn’t moved. I didn’t want to leave her but had no choice. I
had nowhere to take her and wasn’t able to care for a kid. Reed wouldn’t want the
added responsibility, either.
“I’ll be leaving now.” Something tugged at my heart when I said it.
She watched me in eerie silence.
A black cowhide wallet sat on the counter in front of a scratched, red tin can
labeled COOKIES. I picked up the wallet and opened it, finding several credit
cards and some bills. The plastic wasn’t usable anymore, so I ignored them. I
found two twenties, three tens, and two ones. I took two tens then glanced at the
little girl and the old woman, who continued working on her afghan. This was
probably all the money they had.
Stealing from this family would haunt me. I’d always wonder if some of it
had been earmarked for milk—or maybe fresh underwear.
I put the money back and returned the wallet to its place on the counter. The
little girl still hadn’t moved. I waved and went back outside.
I’d originally wanted to search the place for firearms. If the two outside were
hunters, they might have guns lying around, possibly in one of the upstairs
rooms. But I couldn’t spend another moment in that house. The disgusting
situation had made me nauseous.
I rushed over to an overgrown hedge in the trash-cluttered back yard,
unzipped my jeans, and urinated in the bushes.
The two jumbos still sat in the same place on the front lawn. They watched
me as I returned to my van and began waving after I’d slipped behind the wheel.
I hoped they’d remember to buy milk for that little girl.
Maybe if I go back inside and leave a note...
A wasted effort at best. They wouldn’t be able to read it.
I saw the little girl watching me through one of the windows. For a moment, I
imagined her dying, her big brown eyes glazing over moments before her head
dropped. I forced my mind off it.
Sympathy and regret had become wasted emotions in this bleak new world.
I got back on the interstate and headed north, keeping the speedometer at about
ninety. I wasn’t afraid of being pulled over—I saw no traffic. The few people still
functioning knew how dangerous the roads had become. The others could no
longer operate a moving vehicle.
Depression set in. I forced it away. Depression could be lethal nowadays. I
generally had no trouble keeping it a safe distance away, but this time I couldn’t
help it. That little girl had no future. No one did any more, but it seemed so much
worse for kids, who’d never had the chance to experience any joy in life.
I’d seen forty years of it. I’d served in the military, defended this country in
many unspeakable ways, and witnessed things that would stay with me the rest of
my life. I fell in love several times, married and divorced once, met all sorts of
people, made friends and enemies, and operated my own successful business.
I’d seen what the politicians had done to this country. I’d seen people kill one
another and steal from one another. I’d seen love turn to hatred, hatred to murder.
I’d seen envy. And deceit. I’d seen stupidity in all its forms.
Worst of all, I’d seen the end of life as we all knew it.
Viewed this way, the little girl was fortunate she wouldn’t have to endure
much more. The young shouldn’t be forced to watch hell emerging from the
darkness to claim the lives of everyone on this godforsaken planet.
“What happened back there?” Reed asked.
“An old woman and a little girl. Their water and power were cut off.”
“I guess they didn’t have any fruit, then.”
Reed’s statement sounded selfish and callous, but the survival instinct had
emerged in many forms. Selfishness and callousness were merely two. I
considered Reed’s reaction a form of denial.
“There were roaches, flies, and rats. It was pretty disgusting in that house.”
“How old was the little girl?”
“Nine or ten.”
“How bad ... was she?”
“A few more days, maybe.”
“Bummer.” Reed sighed.
“If things were different, we might’ve taken her with us.”
“If things were different.”
“But they aren’t.”
“No. They aren’t.” Reed settled back in his seat. He probably wanted to talk
to his friend about the little girl.
As I forced the van into the darkness of the night, I found myself once again
trying to believe the last six months hadn’t actually happened. I wished it had all
been a hellacious dream, because all dreams end, so things would eventually
revert back to the way they once were, and the world hadn’t
really
become a
gruesome hell filled with death and slobbering idiots. The powerful, intelligent
people running the planet’s governments would
never
let such horrors happen.
Would they?
Unfortunately, after spending so many mornings gazing out the bedroom
window of my apartment and staring numbly at the growing number of bodies
lying on the pavement behind the complex, I came to the frightening realization
that I wasn’t dreaming at all. And the stench assaulting my nostrils whenever I
opened my window served as yet another clue.
A living nightmare had been born, sending reality gasping in the dust. In just
a few short years, the System finally broke apart and began its decline into chaos
and death, gaining momentum as things deteriorated, and turning society into a
dark wasteland.
For ten years, I had been running my own auto detailing business, employing
six men who drove to people’s homes and thoroughly cleaned, washed, and
polished their vehicles. I provided a terrific service, using hard-working,
professional-minded young men and offering an unconditional money-back
guarantee. The business earned much repeat service and many valuable contacts.
But when the phones stopped working just a few months ago, customers could no
longer call for appointments. And when my boys and my faithful secretary Leona
stopped coming in to work, I knew the business was finished.
I remained in my apartment, scraping by on what cash I had left. I didn’t have
enough for rent, but that no longer mattered. The association running the
apartment complex had suspended all activities and collections weeks earlier.
Orlando Utilities suffered serious changes that damaged their service. As the
doping grew to mammoth proportions, their billing department turned chaotic,
dying quietly over a period of days.
One afternoon, the meter reader showed up, just as she had on the fifteenth of
every month. She got out of her small white pickup and shuffled over to my
building. Just as she approached my meter, she stopped moving and stood very
still, staring at the equipment in her hand. She remained standing there all
evening. By next morning, she’d fallen dead on the pavement.
A week later, Orlando Utilities announced it would operate until the end of
the month and then terminate its services. That meant all the stores on its grid
would eventually follow suit.
Although most of this chaos took effect fairly quickly, it hadn’t exactly
happened overnight. I’d noticed several bad omens years earlier, for instance,
while watching TV in my apartment. Every so often, the broadcasts would suffer
signal glitches followed by white noise. It wasn’t earth-shattering, so I didn’t give
it much thought at the time. I would just get up from the sofa, grab another beer,
and wait for the program to resume. I didn’t attribute such minuscule fuckups to
anything serious or far-reaching. The guy running things from the computer room
could have spilled coffee on the keyboard. He might have been shooting up, and
when the drug penetrated his system, he fell out of his chair, pulling out power
cords during his mind-blowing odyssey to the floor. Or maybe Barbie, the
stacked, sunny-faced weather girl, had distracted him by walking by.
Signal hiccups and other interruptions quickly took a back seat to other
meltdowns, however. Commercials began interfering with programming. Or, the
image would become grainy and soft, almost muted followed by a blast of sharp
and deafening audio, forcing me to lunge for the mute button. Eventually, normal
programming appeared only fitfully, a few seconds here and there, only to revert
back into inappropriately timed commercials and signal distortions.
One afternoon, as I watched a documentary, a grainy print of a home movie
appeared in the middle of a break, showing two naked teenagers humping away
in front of a swimming pool.
Then, a few months ago, the misspellings started, first in the commercials,
soon thereafter on the local news, and finally on the national news.
I saw an ad for a local law firm that went something like this:
DON’T LET THE IRS BETE YOU UPP—
CALL NORMIN BLAINE, ATTORNIE-AT-LAW—
HELL FIX YOU
LOCL SHOWERS
HIGHTS IN THE EIGHTYS LOWS IN THE SIXTYS
TOPICAL DISTURBENCES ON THE TOPRICS…
DETALES LATR ON, WITH THE EVNING NEWCAST
Inquiries proved pointless. Each time I tried reporting a problem, I received a
busy signal or recording saying the number was not valid, or no longer in service.
I eventually stopped calling altogether and turned off the set.
Things worsened. My WiFi connection, which normally ran flawlessly, broke
down. Telephone service tanked. Internet service grew sporadic and frequently
stopped for days on end. Electricity went off for hours. Cell phones lost their
signals. ATMs stopped dispensing cash. Credit cards could no longer be scanned
and were frequently chewed up by the machine.
As the doping epidemic increased, the chaos intensified. Because of the
numbers of people winding down, the cities proved much more dangerous than
the rural areas. And as more people became affected, violence increased, and
some of it was unimaginable in a normal world.
As for me, for reasons I couldn’t explain—because I still didn’t know what
was going on—I remained unaffected. I wasn’t alone. Many others who seemed
still able to function wandered about. Like me, they’d witnessed the growing
plague and its consequences, determined what they needed to do to survive, and
did what was necessary. Their sense of self-preservation, heightened to the nth
degree by the horrors they’d seen, forced them to do terrible things.
I’d been doing some terrible things myself. I’d walked into someone’s house
less than an hour ago to use their facilities and take whatever I wanted. If it
hadn’t been for the little girl and the old woman, I would have taken their money
and anything else I could find. But I couldn’t possibly steal from the unfortunate.
Even in this nightmare world, I clung to the principles I’d been following
since I was a kid.
I realized that having principles at this stage was a weakness, and if I didn’t
soon toughen up, it would mean my demise. I understood this but still couldn’t
bring myself to do certain things. On the other hand, I couldn’t bring myself to
give up or come to grips with the world dying this way. I was a survivor and
always had been. This was certainly a devastating blow to civilization, but I
refused to believe it was the final one—though for me it had come awfully close
just a few days earlier.
Orlando Utilities, operating with a skeleton crew of functioning employees,
was providing service on a very limited basis: one hour in the morning and two
hours in the evening. I would use this opportunity to cool off the sweltering
apartment by turning the thermostat to 60 and keeping it there until the power
switched off.
The severely crippled Internet followed the same pattern as the power
company, providing service between 6 and 8 p.m. each day.
I switched on my screen one night during the two-hour window to see if
anything was going on. It displayed the usual dated news reports and one new
email message.
The email was from my mother, who still lived on the 88-acre property my
great-grandparents had bought nearly a century earlier in Western Pennsylvania.
Mom was in her mid-sixties and had lived on the farm her entire life. When Dad
died five years earlier, Mom moved back into the main house with her older
brother, Joe, and rented out the small frame house next door, where Mom and
Dad had raised me.
Mom’s message made my pulse pound.
HI SON WISH YOU WERE HERE THINGS HAVE BEEN GETTING BAD UP
HERE LATLY AND I HOPE I GET TO SEE YU SOONE
MOM
The message was ominous enough in its content, but the misspellings told me the
worst. My mother had graduated with honors from Carnegie-Mellon University
in Pittsburgh and taught College English for twenty years.
It was the email that convinced me to return home. I had no idea how affected she
was, but I’d never seen her misspell a word before. I hadn’t seen her since Dad’s
funeral and felt badly about it. I’d considered moving back to Pennsylvania, but
since my business had been doing so well, I didn’t want to tempt fate. Now that
fate had dealt us all the worst hand imaginable, I had no more excuses. If I didn’t
go back now, I’d probably never see my mother again.
Like many apartment complexes in Florida, mine adjoined the rear parking lot of
a major Safeway. Normally, living within walking distance of a supermarket can
be a terrific convenience. But the rules had changed dramatically. Even if I hadn’t
planned to leave the state, I would have moved out of my apartment. I refused to
spend my final days next door to a building filled with massive amounts of
putrefying foods.
The store normally operated twenty-four/seven, but because of the power
loss, even with backup generators, the staff had given up on the facility weeks
ago. Now, the evening air hung heavy with decay, assaulting my sinuses. Still, I
had an errand to do before leaving town.
The parking lot was practically empty. I saw half a dozen vehicles parked
farther down, in front of the local bar. That’s where the few unaffected people in
the neighborhood had chosen to gather—obviously to get sloshed. If I wasn’t
heading out of town, I would have joined them. Downing free drinks would have
been a sensible way of facing a bleak future.