Authors: Wayne Wightman
Diaz strolled over to the passenger side of the car and casually reached inside his leather vest, bringing out the automatic. When he raised it above the door, the kid began trying to scramble straight up, getting his feet into the seat just as the gun went off, twice, the pops sounding almost harmless inside the fury of the music. And then, except for the ringing in Martin's ears, everything was silent.
“I said,” Diaz repeated to the staring kid, “that you're stupid.”
“You shot my car!” the kid yelled. “You god damn ruined my car!” Yelling at someone who looked like Diaz, who was standing a foot away with a gun in his hand, didn't seem bright.
“You can get another where you got this one,” Diaz said, putting the pistol back inside his jacket.
“You shot my car!” the kid said, as amazed as he was furious. “This was my car! What's the matter with you?” The kid got out and slammed the door and stomped around the back of the Cadillac toward Diaz. “God damn you, you think you're god or something?” He sputtered and flailed his arms at the air in complete outrage.
“Martin,” Diaz said over his shoulder, “I'm going to waste this moron, so you might not want to look.” He already had the pistol out again and was handling it loosely, not really pointing it in any specific direction.
Reality finally descended on the kid. “Wait a minute,” he said, losing all his breath, stopping in his tracks, and then backing up two steps. “Okay, okay, okay, it's all right, man, I'll get another car, no sweat, no problem. Shoot it again if you want. It's all right.”
“No, it isn't,” Diaz said. “Nearly everyone's dead and you drive around irritating the survivors. Then you spoke coarsely at me.”
Martin was liking Diaz more and more; he was unpredictable, but he had a good sense of humor and he probably wouldn't kill the boy.
“I'm sorry, man, I didn't mean to hurt your feelings, really. I was just driving around with my tunes. I wasn't meaning to bother nobody and I got a bad habit with my mouth.”
The kid's forehead wrinkled in an upside-down V, an expertly sorrowful and pleading expression.
“You don't ever get smart with someone who's holding a firearm and has been shooting in your general direction. Did you not have a mother to teach you such things?”
“That was bad of me, man. I got a bad habit with my mouth.”
“You got a bad habit with your brain,” Diaz said, “that's gonna get your whole body in trouble.”
The kid shook his head dramatically as he leaned rather casually against the back fender of the Cadillac. “I'm really sorry, I really am. Can I go now?”
“What's your name?” Martin asked the kid.
“Stewart Bailey.” His intonation made it sound like a question. “Can I just go now?”
“Who else have you seen alive?”
“Nobody. Some guys on the north side. No girls. though.”
“How many did you see, Stewart,” Martin asked quietly.
“I don't know. Half dozen. One or two Mexicans. Shit, who cares, I just want to go now, all right?”
“Stewart,” Martin said quietly, “my friend here, the one with the gun, he's unstable, you know? So you should try not to be irritating — for just a few minutes. Do you think you can do that?”
Stewart folded his arms and rolled his eyes. “You guys always have to lord it over somebody.”
“Did you speak to any of these people across town?” Martin asked.
“No. Well, yeah, but I couldn't hear what they said back. Can I go now? I need to get another car.” Stewart's eyes suddenly lit up. “Can you believe it, man, anything you want, you just take it.”
Diaz cleared his throat. “Stewart, shut up. These people you saw, what were they doing? What activities were they engaged in?”
“Engaged in?” he mocked. “You sound like a dickhead teacher or something.”
“You're being rude,” Martin said. “Why give each other a hard time? What were these people doing, Stewart?” Martin asked. Diaz could probably beat the answers out of him much more quickly than they could be got through conversation. “Tell us what they were doing, and we'll all go our separate ways.”
“They were standing around. How should I know what they were doing? I'm no mind-reader.”
“He's right about that,” Diaz said.
“And I'm not stupid, either,” Stewart sneered at Diaz, pointing his finger at him. “You treat me like I'm stupid and I'm not!”
“We're just treating you like you're not a mind-reader, Stewart,” Martin said. “Why don't you go get yourself another car now.”
“Fine. I will.” He stomped away from us, up the street, his steps echoing hollowly in the quiet street.
“Thanks,” Diaz said. I was on the verge of putting him out of my misery.”
From up the street, Stewart turned around and shouted, “Eat shit, you homos!” and then ran around a corner and disappeared.
“The exuberance of youth. You wouldn't have shot him, would you?” Martin asked.
“Probably not. I don't have any more room on my list.”
As they walked back to Martin's parents' home, Diaz stopped at a few houses and kicked in the doors and went inside for a few minutes. “Just checking,” he explained. Finally he came out of the last house with a pump shotgun. It was shiny with oil and on the dark stock was a detailed carving of the American flag. Diaz had filled his pockets with shells and they bulged in lumps. “In case we run into any mutants when we go looking for your friend. Drive a car, you're high profile.”
Martin drove, with Diaz in the passenger seat and Isha in the back. She sat up and quietly looked out the side window, as a human would.
Except for the overgrown yards, everything looked exceptionally normal. Martin even lifted his foot from the accelerator and started to brake when they came to a stop sign.
“Old habits,” he said.
“What did your friend, Delana, do?”
“She was a paramedic. Rode in the back of an ambulance and tweezed body parts up off the pavement.”
“Ah. A fellow traveller of mine. She'd have drugs at her place then.”
“Drugs?”
“Antibiotics,” Diaz said. “Pain killers. You should check. It's going to be a long time before anyone's manufacturing any more tetracycline. Once anybody thinks twice about it, antibiotics'll be more valuable than gold. You should check her place out while you're there.”
“I will,” Martin said. The thought of looking through Delana's apartment made his throat ache.
Cars were parked along the streets, in driveways, and once they turned onto a thoroughfare, even the restaurants and fast food chains had cars in their parking lots, as though they were doing business. But through the windows, nothing moved.
“Where are all the bodies?” Martin asked.
“They're everywhere. At the beginning, when people got sick, they went to the clinics and hospitals. When they died, they buried them — at the beginning. Then they started the mass graves. I've seen a few. Finally, they just loaded them on trucks and dumped 'em in the river. If they get to the ocean, they're shark bait. It was noxious for a while, but the river cleans itself pretty fast with this kind of rain. Buried in the ground, a body stays nasty for a long time. ”
Diaz didn't say anything for half a minute. The street rose slightly as it went over one of the larger irrigation canals that crisscrossed the city. The water in it was smooth and flowed steadily.
“But whatever else you've seen, it don't compare to a mass grave. They used dump trucks to unload 'em and bulldozers to cover 'em up. Moms, dads, teenagers, all just germ bags after MIV messed 'em up. Let me tell you, bud, you stick around here, you shouldn't oughta drink the water, not after what I seen put in the ground.” He paused a moment. “God. All those dead people, and a vapor-brain like Stewart lives. And me.” He shook his head. “I was countin' on dyin'. One of the biggest disappointments in my life. Maybe the only ones who lived through it are the screwheads — me, Stewart, Captain Zero."
“And me,” Martin said. They passed by a shopping center. Some of the larger windows had been broken out, but it looked surprisingly normal.
“Yeah,” Diaz said. “You're the one normal.”
“Just as normal as a guy can be,” Martin said, “who volunteers to spend a year underground in total isolation and didn't go nuts.”
“Like I said, only the normal screwheads lived.” Diaz flashed him his big yellow-toothed grin.
When they turned into Delana's neighborhood, Martin felt his chest tighten up, as it did when he approached his parents' house. She lived in an upscale apartment complex, surrounded by clusters of birches, blue spruce, redwoods, and dense hedges of nandina, mock orange, and privet. In the cool, wet weather, everything grew thick and green.
From the foot of the stairway that led up to her door, he could see the pond in the center of the complex with its carefully arranged boulders. Every other time he had been here, the fountain had filled the air with a rhythmic rushing sound — but now it was silent and the water was green. No cars passed on the surrounding streets, no one was chattering a hello or goodbye, no one sunbathed, no smells of suntan lotion or barbecue.
Up on her balcony, he saw her potted azaleas — they were now leafless collections of naked sticks.
Martin put his hand on the banister and said to Diaz, who leaned against the car fender, “I may be a few minutes.”
“I got no appointments,” he said. “Do what you need to do.”
Isha sat on the sidewalk, looking toward Martin, also waiting.
As he climbed the stairs, Martin was assailed by memory — coming up the stairs with wine, Delana opening the door before he could ring the bell, her black hair hanging in curls to her shoulders, her bright blue eyes, the smell of her neck, the smell of bread from her kitchen, her voice, low and liquid.... He pressed the doorbell and heard it chime twice inside.
Down on the sidewalk, Diaz still leaned against the car, his thick arms folded, his eyes turned discreetly away. Isha looked up at Martin.
Stupid, Martin thought, ringing the bell. But he waited a decent interval, while around him bugs clicked and a single midday cricket sawed slowly.
He tried the door and the knob turned easily. He pushed it open. He was thinking that perhaps she knew he would come here one day; perhaps she knew it soon wouldn't matter whose door was locked, because no one would be left to steal anything.
The air was thick with stale apartment smell. Everything was in its place, neat and in order. No dishes were left out in the kitchen, the two red pillows on the sofa were fluffed and symmetrically arranged, and in the bedroom the bed was made — the bed where many times they had made love — and a white envelope lay on the near corner. It had his name on it.
He held it in his hand a moment, feeling its thinness, its dry surfaces, wondering if he had the nerve to read it now, another message from the past. From the dead.
Martin pulled open the envelope flap and took out the one small thin sheet of paper.
My dear Martin—
I am so sorry I could not stay to see you again. Take as good care of yourself as I would. I love you now more than I have words for, so do well with what there is left. I'll give you my last thoughts.
—Delana.
With a period at the end of her name.
He put the note in his pocket, next to the papers his parents had left, and never felt so alone in his life. Everything was gone — he'd known it for a full day, but now he felt it. He felt it down to the middle of his bones and he wanted to die.
“Y'okay?” It was Diaz, standing just inside the front door, craning his head just enough to see him.
Martin didn't answer, but he turned and came out.
Diaz stood in front of him and put one of his big hands on each of Martin's shoulders. “I don't want to intrude, man,” he said quietly, “and I don't want to get into your personal business. But if you're thinkin' of puttin' yourself away, give it a pause. Take it from me, gettin' dead is easy, doesn't take much time, and you can do it in any thirty seconds.” He touched his vest, where he carried the pistol. “You can always go that direction. The problem is, do you really want to leave the world to the a-holes like Stewart and Captain Zero?"
Isha stood behind Diaz, her head hanging but she was looking up at Martin.
“I'm all right.”
“Good.” Diaz dropped his hands from Martin's shoulders. “Because I can't make no more sense today. I'm out of bein' reasonable.” He gave his big grin again.
“I'll check for drugs,” Martin said.
“Right. While you're doing that, I'll browse through some of the other apartments.”
Isha stayed with Martin while he went through Delana's things. Periodically, he heard the heavy thumps and splintering of Diaz kicking in doors. Under her bathroom sink he found a shoe box of sample packets — four or five kinds of antibiotics, decongestants, tranquillizers, analgesics, miscellaneous things. He took them all and then looked one last time around the room where he had spent the happiest hours of his adult life. He sat on the edge of her bed and wept into his hands until tears ran down his arms.
When he could see again, Isha was sitting beside him, watching him anxiously with her clear brown eyes.