Authors: Wayne Wightman
The fatality rate in one paper was given at 87%, but later he read that it was over 98%, and he began to notice that the newspapers had fewer pages, almost no ads, and contained nothing unrelated to the pandemic. Every few minutes, thoughts of Delana and his parents filtered into his consciousness — where were they? Had they survived? Who had survived? Was he alone in the world? The one survivor? But he read on.
Halfway through the stack, numerous articles appeared about preserving law and order and maintaining the government. Then appeared the hare-brained speculations about irrational cures, but within a few weeks, those articles were replaced by editorials of a more philosophical tone that asked questions about what would come after the fall of civilization.
Martin looked up from the counter where he had been reading. The recording monitors sat in front of his face like tombstones, a layer of dust on the top surfaces.
“The end of civilization,” he pronounced, listening to the sound of the words.
Reading further, there were brief articles about the fall of governments, though “fall” did not seem to be the right word: most of them had simply drifted into nonexistence. In the Middle East, a brief nuclear exchange had occurred, though no one knew exactly which countries were involved, the extent of the catastrophe, or if it settled anything. The weather, several articles reported, would change as a result of this brief war and its subsequent fires, though in what ways were open to speculation. This interaction with global warming was interpreted seven different ways. One person wrote, “We won't live long enough to find out. You never see the color of the knife.”
The final newspapers were only single sheets, folded in half and even then there were blank columns. There were requests for survivors to go house-to-house in their neighborhoods, unplug all appliances and turn off the natural gas at the meter box. One article caught Martin's eye which reported that “zoo squads” were releasing all zoo animals and that several major dams in the central California area had been dynamited. “If we're an unsuccessful species,” said a speaker for the Natural World Liberation Front, “the least we can do before we leave is to undo some of the damage we've done. Let the earth rise out of the ashes of our plague!”
He dug through to the bottom of the stack. The date on the last newspaper was two months before he was scheduled to come up. It printed a collection of prayers from half a dozen religions. Many of the words were misspelled.
In an adjoining storage room, the workers had lockers, and before Martin had gone underground, he had been given one where he had put a bottle of champagne, a change of clothes, and his digital wristwatch.
He dialed the combination from memory. The champagne was missing, but that was nothing now. From the toe of one of his shoes, he shook out his wristwatch. The gray numbers sat neutrally on the watch face, the seconds counting silently into the future. He had been below-ground fourteen months and two weeks. It was May 30, Wednesday, 11:35 AM. Civilization had folded its arms across its breast, closed its eyes, and ceased.
Chapter 5
The dog lay in the wadded blankets and thought of food. After a while, she dragged herself off the bed and padded slowly to the back porch. She nosed the floor and licked at a spot where the food-smell was strongest then turned her head in a slow wide sweep to see if she had overlooked anything, but she hadn't. There was nothing else to eat. The food was gone.
She padded past the pantry where she had pawed out familiar cans in which she knew food was kept, but she had been able to do nothing but scrape off the labels with her teeth.
The dog went again to the front window and rested her muzzle on the sill. Sometimes she heard loud noises, human noises, but they had always been far away. Each time, though, she had come to the window, because she knew her two people would return. The first things they would do would be to pat and feed her. She had only to be patient and wait. They would return.
Even now, someplace far away, there was a faint popping noise. She turned her ears forward to hear better and for a moment imagined she could smell the hand of the woman, who always came through the door before the man did. She listened and watched for their car to appear in the street and in the back of her throat she made a brief, high-pitched whine.
No car appeared. There were no other noises.
She quietly waited at the window until the tree-shadows were long streaks, and then she returned to the bedroom. She jumped up on the edge of the bed and slid back onto the floor with a soft thump, her legs collapsing under her. She tried to get on the bed again but could not get her back legs up over the edge.
The dog stood and looked across the rumpled covers. Then, with what strength she had, she pulled at one of the blanket-edges with her teeth until enough of it was on the floor that she could lie down on it.
The dog waited, sleeping occasionally, sometimes dreaming that they had returned and awakening to phantom noises, and then realizing she was still alone. But she was certain the man and woman would return. They would come back. They would feed her and the pain would go away. She was not worried about this. They always came back.
Chapter 6
Martin sat slumped at the counter. He had restacked the pile of newspapers, and he wasn't thinking exactly — it was more that he was waiting and hoping that some of this would start to seem real.
He had tried to telephone Delana and his parents and then everyone else he could think of, but all batteries were dead and the land line gave nothing but busy signals. For a few minutes this had given him some hope, but then he tried calling the phone in the next room — and this, too, gave him a busy signal. Most of the computers booted up, but there was no Internet connection.
The first thing he wanted to do was go to his parents' house. Since he was their only child, it seemed reasonable that if they had survived, they would have come to get him or left him a message — but their deaths were inconceivable to him. At this point, everything about the situation was inconceivable, but the first thing was to check on them — this had to be done — and then he would try to find Delana.
Their house was on the far side of Santa Miranda, which was seven or eight miles away. Even if he walked, he could be there before dark, but he was thinking that with a little luck he could find an operable car. Or, failing that, a bicycle.
By now, the giraffe had left the driveway and was across the road, lazily grazing in the overgrown vineyard. So people had freed the zoo animals, he thought. If this had happened across the country, who could tell what balance nature would find? Hippopotamuses might bask in the Mississippi, rhinoceroses and lions could populate the Plains, and exotic birds would mingle with the native finches, mockingbirds, and crows.
As he left the facility, he looked once again at the bodies of Ted and Laura, sitting beneath the hazy midday light that filtered through the mulberry tree. He wondered if they had been lovers. He wondered if they had been happy.
He would keep in mind their last message to him, their warning.
Hoping to find a car in the nearby town, he started down the country road that curved toward the freeway and an overpass. As he walked along it, the air buzzed with insects in the vineyard on one side and in the weedy, overgrown alfalfa on the other. Behind the milky sky, the sun hung like a yellow bruise. Late May was usually very warm, but the afternoon air had the chill of an early March.
As Martin followed the curve of the road toward the overpass, he passed under a leafed-out walnut tree and two blackbirds dived at him and then swooped up to a low branch where they studied him with their black eyes. He slowed his pace, looking at the birds, and was of two minds.
First, after a year underground, confined in a thirty-by-thirty foot room, the sight of a bird in a tree filled him with joy. The fact of the bird's existence amazed him — its glossy black feathers with highlights of emerald and blue — but more, the fact of the bird's existence in an actual coarse-barked tree that had thick green leaves where pieces of sky showed through — this was astonishing beyond words.
But second, he was alone. Everything told him everyone was gone, apparently dead, yet this horrifying fact had no reality to it. The only thing that was real right now was the two blackbirds sitting on the low branch waiting to see if he was going to leave them alone. They certainly would not care that there were fewer people around. The giraffe was probably happier too... as would be every other zoo animal, the salmon that could now swim upriver, past the ruins of dams, coyotes that could spread across the country, wolves, mountain lions, all because the number one predator was gone. Who would miss mankind?
He remembered 99 Highway clearly. In the past he had driven on it from Santa Miranda as far south as San Diego and as far north as Vancouver, Canada. It was a deafening, exhaust-exhaling asphalt river of trucks and cars and trailers, and in the quiet evenings, the noise of it could be heard for miles, a mechanical surf. But now as he walked across an overpass, it was empty. No cars, no trucks, and not a sound anywhere except for the birds in the oleanders down the central divider.
No cars on the freeway.... He hurried on across the downside of the overpass, chilled by a wave of creepiness.
He came to a mini-mart gas station first. The three pumps had a layer of heavy layer of coarse dust across their tops.
“Hello? Anybody here?”
No answer. The birds calling in trees in the nearby yards paused momentarily and then started up again. How soon, he thought, that they get used to having us gone.
Martin tried the front door, but it was locked. He banged on it with the heel of his fist. The noise seemed unnaturally loud. Still, there was no response from inside.
He cupped his hands around his face, and through the dirty window in the door he could see that there had been some minor vandalism. Candy bars and bags of potato chips were scattered over the floor, the register was open, and the calendar on the wall showed February.
Around back, he found a broken window, with all the glass neatly knocked out. Apparently whoever had broken in had not hurried.
Once inside, he filled his pockets with beef jerky and candy bars... candy bars! He'd been eating healthy food for a year, and he had no idea how much he'd missed sticky, gooey caramel and chocolate melting across his tongue. Sugar-pains cramped the back corners of his mouth in sweet misery.
On the floor was a pink-wrapped Cherry-o-let. When he was a kid, he and his neighborhood friends would eat them till they thought they would vomit. And the next day they'd do it again. And those guys were all gone now, too. Nobody would be making any more Cherry-o-lets, either.
Martin stared at the pink-wrapped lump in his hand and watched it go out of focus, smeary and blurred from his tears.
“God, what a picture,” he said out loud. “'Despair With Cherry-o-let.'” He forced his thoughts back to what he was supposed to be doing, put the candy in his shirt pocket, and stepped out the window and went looking for a car.
It took an hour and he'd searched a dozen blocks. The year-old Toyota sedan stood in an open garage with the keys hanging from the driver's door. There was an open door leading from the garage to the house, and a cool breeze blew through it carrying the putrid smell of decay. Streams of ants flowed across the garage floor and up the step into the house. He didn't investigate.
The car turned over very slowly, and just when he thought it was hopeless, the engine caught and blew a cloud of gray smoke out the exhaust. After a few seconds of shuddering, it settled down and ran smoothly. Even better, the tank was full.
Leaving the town and heading toward 99, he caught himself slowing at intersections, checking carefully for cross-traffic, and once he stopped at a stop sign.
He turned on the car radio and let it scan the dial. Nothing but the rush of white noise came through the speakers. He turned the volume up as loud as he could stand it and then manually ran through the frequencies. Again, nothing. He knew that at night AM broadcasts bounced off some layer or other of the atmosphere and could be picked up over hundreds of miles, so he promised himself he would listen again later.
As he crossed the Stanislaus River, he thought he saw movement down near the water and pulled over. Two huge tule elk pushed through the brush and then waded into the muddy water. A calf followed behind. Apparently someone had opened the gates of their preserve, thirty or so miles to the south. Like brilliant white rags, several egrets perched in the trees over them. Everywhere he looked, in the form of strange beauty, the reality of the disaster loomed closer.
Once in Santa Miranda, a city that once had a population over 200,000 people, he saw the normal number of cars parked along the streets, and in several of them he saw the dark slumped shapes of the dead — people who had either been too weak to leave their cars, or, he suspected, people who preferred the location. A dozen dogs ran in a pack across one of the downtown streets and their leader, a long-legged yellow mutt, cast him an indifferent glance and trotted into a shopping arcade. They all looked well fed.
Nearing his parents' neighborhood, he felt a kind of breathy lightness in his chest, as though the air had thinned and he wasn't getting enough oxygen. His heart thumped in his ears.
Beside the overgrown lawns, weeds sprouted over a foot high along walkways and curbs. Tall clumps of weeds filled the normally luxurious beds of Mrs. Wendell's corner house. And in her shaggy yard, her rose bushes were wild and drooping with unthinned blossoms. Mrs. Wendell had always been known for her meticulous gardening. Mrs. Wendell could not be among the living.