Life is Short: The Collected Short Fiction of Shawn Inmon

by Shawn Inmon

  Life is Short

  By Shawn Inmon

  ©2017 by Shawn Inmon

  This book or parts thereof may not be reproduced in any form, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means without prior written permission of the authors, except as provided by United States of America copyright law.

  Kindle Edition License Notes

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  The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author.

  Cover Design/Interior Layout: Linda Boulanger

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  Published by Pertime Publishing

  Table of Contents

  Introduction

  Sigh

  Fallen

  Old Man

  Lucky Man

  Shannon

  My Monarch Summer

  My Matanuska Summer

  One Last Cup of Tea

  Chad Stinson Goes for a Walk

  Bull Lick Lodge

  Christmas Town

  The Short Goodbye

  The Legacy of August Wolf

  Life is Short Author’s Note

  Also by Shawn Inmon

  Introduction

  My first introduction to real, adult literature came in the form of short fiction—James Thurber, O. Henry, Mark Twain, Shirley Jackson. I loved the idea that I could digest a complete story without taking days or weeks to get there. I loved that there was so often a twist at the end. Oh, no, he sold his watch to get her combs for her hair, but she sold her hair to get a fob for his watch? I loved that as an adult, my favorite writer, Stephen King, no matter how huge and successful he became, continued to release collections of short fiction for those of us he dubbed constant readers

  The die was cast for me very early on, and it holds true to this day. Of course, loving to read short stories, I wanted to write them, as well. You hold in your hands my efforts in this arena. A baker’s dozen stories that I wrote between January 2013 and January 2017. There is a wide variety in this collection, as that is another wonderful thing about the art form—you can try something new without committing three or more months to the writing.

  Enough. I don’t want the introduction to be longer than one of the stories. I hope you enjoy reading these as much as I did writing them, because it has been a joy.

  Sigh

  If Eve was the Alpha, Talia was the Omega.

  She just didn’t know it.

  When Talia awoke on her last day on Earth, she peeled a layer of rheumy crust away from her eyes. She coughed, deep and wrenching, the first of a series of coughs that would last twenty minutes or so and would clear her airways enough that she could breathe. She was twenty-six years old, but in her bones, she felt ancient.

  She sat up, waited for the dizziness to subside, and saw that it was a lovely fall day. Those were not common this time of year. I’m sure I would enjoy the sunshine, blue skies, and warmth if I didn’t feel like I was dying.

  Death didn’t frighten her. It had been her constant companion for six years. She had seen it visit so many others, silently plucking their souls and sneaking away, she felt a little left out. In any case, she was agnostic. She had seen nothing in adulthood to make her believe in any sort of higher power that cared for humanity.

  She sat up in her sleeping bag and looked around. She had finally given up traveling in the middle of a moonless, pitch-black night. Had she chosen to waste the batteries in her flashlight, its light wouldn't have told her much about her location anyway. She had simply unrolled her bag and lapsed into fevered unconsciousness.

  Now she saw that she had collapsed into what had once been a farmer’s field. Without human stewardship, the years of wild growth had resulted in a cornucopia of plants both intended and accidental: wildflowers mixed with ragged stalks of corn, ferns mixed with fat orange pumpkins.

  Pumpkins.

  Talia fished around in her backpack and pulled out a blue notebook, bent and dirty from life on the road. Flipping through the pages, she found the homemade calendar she used to mark off the days.

  At the top of the page, she had written October, 2023. If you had asked her why she kept track of the days, she could not have told you, any more than she could have told you why she walked every day when it would have been just as easy to stay in one place.

  She retrieved the stub of a pencil from her pack and put an X through one of the boxes she had drawn. Her pencil drifted over the last, unmarked box, tapping lightly against it.

  Halloween.

  Halloween had been her favorite holiday as a child. There was no need to be good, yet she still got as much candy as she could eat—a much better deal than the jolly old elf's blackmail. She loved everything about Halloween: the fall colors, the cold that pinched her cheeks on the way to school, and the decorations of witches, black cats, and skeletons.

  Talia sighed. She had survived the last six years by always moving forward, never letting herself sink into nostalgia. Memory Lane: the road to certain death.

  The lure of the pumpkins, colorful and aromatic, was too much for even her steel-tempered willpower. She let herself lay back in her bag, breathed in the aroma as best her clogged sinuses would allow, and drifted.

  Talia thought back to the last time she had gone trick or treating. She and her best friends, Madison and Cassie, had been fifteen. They had known they were too old, but they didn’t care. They had dolled up as zombie prom queens, using pillowcases for goodie bags, and had gone knocking on doors all over their neighborhood in one final rearguard defense against the tide of adulthood. They had such a great time, they didn't even care that one of the middle-aged dads who answered the door had leered at them and asked, “Candy, little girls?” as though that were hilarious rather than crude.

  She remembered her mom's last Halloween. It had always been her favorite holiday as well, but her cancer-ravaged body was too sick and weak to let her hand out candy to the wee ghosts and goblins. Talia had moved the couch so that her mother could see the front door, propping her on a bed of quilts and comforters. Seeing the little ones in their costumes had brought a smile to Mom's face, maybe the last one of her life, which ended just a few days later.

  And it had been Halloween 2017, just a year later, when the original news had broken about the virus destined to end mankind’s run at the top of the food chain. In part due to the timing of the announcement, the media had named the disease the 'Reaper Virus,' soon shortened to 'the Reaper.' At first, the World Health Organization and the Center for Disease Control had run their normal playbook, announcing that a vaccine was in development and advising everyone to take normal precautions against airborne pathogens. If people did so, they were told, they would be fine.

  In the end, no one was fine. The Reaper was a simple mutation of Coryza, better known as the common cold. Of course, the usual suspects had waited barely a day to present the obligatory conspiracy theories: it had been cooked up by some tinhorn despot, it had gotten loose from a secret US government lab, it was the work of religious fanatics. The usual suspects were wrong one last time.

  Reaper was the creation of the most efficient killer of all time.

  Nature.

  Normal precautions didn’t work. Unlike most airborne pathogens, the Reaper had a long enough lifecycle to survive for hundreds of miles floating on a breeze. Within weeks, it had affected even t
he remotest populations.

  By November 10, 2017, twenty percent of the world’s population had perished, or just under 1.5 billion fatalities in a week and a half. To say that this overtaxed humanity’s ability to process the dead in a dignified and hygienic manner would be an understatement of titanic proportions. This contributed to a quick spread of the Reaper.

  By the spring of the following year, more than half of humanity was dead. They were the lucky ones. The Reaper's first casualties had been governments, power stations, food supplies, and the entire human infrastructure.

  Martial law was declared, ignored, overwhelmed, re-declared and again overwhelmed, thousands of times, in locations large and small around the world. In the end, death was the great equalizer.

  By Halloween 2018, the Reaper had collected over six billion souls. Not all of the deaths were attributable to the virus. In the summer of 2018, a rogue nuclear ballistic missile submarine off the U.S. Atlantic coast had fired its deadly payload indiscriminately around the globe, killing a few of the remaining communists, capitalists, peace lovers, and warmongers.

  This attack had actually helped matters, just a bit. There came a point at which the population and the amount of available nonperishable supplies reached an equitable balance. Had the Reaper run its course, given time, mankind could have survived and perhaps even rebuilt.

  That’s how it worked in post-apocalyptic novels, isn’t it? A horrible disease rains down on mankind, but a hardy band of survivors wins the genetic lottery and survives to fight another day. It made great books, but it did not play out in humanity's grim reality.

  A small percentage of the population happened to have a natural resistance to the Reaper—but not immunity. Instead of dying in days or weeks, they died in months or years.

  By the time the global population had fallen to just a million or so scattered people, most of the human-to-human violence had stopped simply because the majority of surviving humans had nearly no contact with one another. There were exceptions, of course, like the case of a woman who declared herself the reincarnation of Catherine the Great, Tsaritsa of all Russia. Through wits, strength, and cruelty, she managed to build a credible slave labor force of tens of thousands of survivors. Soon there was an uprising, and the former slaves tore her to bits, slowly and literally. All forms of mass media and communication were long gone, of course, but word still traveled because people still did.

  Three years after the Reaper's initial discovery, the entire world population could have lived comfortably within the city limits of St. Louis, Missouri.

  After four years, all of them could have convened in Hannibal, Missouri, without needless encroachment on personal space.

  After five, they could have fit in the Hannibal High School gym, former home of the Pirates.

  Now, after six, the global human population fit into Talia’s sleeping bag in an overgrown corn and pumpkin field somewhere outside Salem, Oregon, USA.

  Like most people, Talia had tried to survive with the people she loved. That had meant her dad, Madison, Cassie, and their families, sticking close to what they knew. Little New Haven had mostly been spared the chaotic, desperate violence that had struck prone the big cities. Early on, a roving band of survivalists had rolled through town, intent on taking what they wanted. The New Haven community had organized, met them in the town square, killed them all in a gun battle, then hung their remains up to rot at the stone archway that served as the town's entrance. Of course, gunfire warded off only their least serious danger. By the end of the first year, the Reaper had claimed everyone Talia knew.

  Talia had not survived by great strength, nor by great fighting prowess. The strong had tended to become over-reliant on sheer force, like the prepper band who had sought to plunder New Haven. That had killed a lot of them, and the virus had done the rest.

  Talia survived because she turned out to possess the perfect combination of traits, skills, and natural abilities to survive in this new world. She was small, so she didn’t need much food. She was also bright and quick, but more than anything, she was a creature of good habits. Her mom, an RN, had taught her how to avoid diseases from earliest childhood. After fifth grade, Talia had gotten a Perfect Attendance award every year.

  She wasn’t quite obsessive about washing her hands and disinfecting herself, but she was borderline. Early on, she had decided to wear a surgical mask at all times. Combined with her body’s natural resistance and habitual caution, that had kept her alive while everyone around her perished. Many early clusters of survivors had concluded that they were blessed by natural immunity, or had developed a resistance. They had taken unnecessary chances, reveling in their luck. They were all dead, sooner than they otherwise would have been.

  For most of the last six years, Talia had been a loner. After the Reaper had taken all her friends, she moved from town to town, always on foot, always watchful. After almost four years of complete solitude, she had stumbled across one of the small remaining survivor bands. She watched them for weeks, doing without a fire or hot food so she could observe their habits for any sign of violence or aberrant behavior. They were a pack of a dozen people, mostly surviving on fruit from an abandoned apple and pear orchard.

  But for Grace, Talia would have left them to their scavenging. Children became rare creatures in the Reaper years, too difficult to bear and keep alive. Few newborns survived the first week, and the Reaper had come for the children first. Talia hadn’t seen a child Grace's age in three years, and had never expected to see another. She was so tiny that Talia had thought she might only be five years old, which would have made her a post-Reaper baby. That was too implausible to consider.

  Talia spent most of her days watching Grace. The little girl had shoulder-length flaxen hair, blue eyes, and an innocent air that had pierced Talia's essential emotional armor. The group did a good job of protecting Grace. She was never more than ten feet away from an adult or older teen.

  One warm Indian summer day, after she had observed the group for nearly a month, Talia slipped easily past the teenage lookout and walked up to Dan, whom she had pegged for the leader. She didn’t say a word; she didn't need to. Her unheralded presence spoke volumes.

  Dan had been shocked. He yelled out to the girl who was ostensibly on watch: “Brittany?”

  “Yeah?” Brittany replied. Then she saw the evidence of her laxity. "Oh.”

  Dan peered at Talia, taking in the bow slung over her back and long knife sheathed at her side.

  “Peaceful group. Scavengers,” Dan said. “Just take what we need to survive.”

  “I know.”

  “Been watching us.”

  Talia nodded.

  “Thought I spotted you time back, but you're fast.”

  “If you saw me, then I’m lucky I’m not dead already. I’m losing my edge.”

  Grace emerged from behind a tree to stand behind Dan. She stared at Talia without smiling, eyes wide.

  "Name?"

  “Talia. I'm a hunter, if you need meat.”

  “Need everything.”

  Talia could see that was true. The fact that they were alive testified to their basic survival skills, but the gaunt faces and tattered clothes suggested a doubtful outlook for the coming winter.

  "Call ourselves the Family. Dan or Dad. Apple?" He reached into a bucket and proffered one.

  Talia and the Family formed a symbiotic relationship. Talia had her bow and arrows, which led to a better-supplied larder for the cold months. The Family had Grace, who gave Talia a reason to live.

  Grace had a perspective unlike that of any other human being in history. Her brief life story was one of people dying around her. Her biological parents had both died before her first birthday. She had been passed on to three other sets of adoptive parents. Dan and Lilly, the Family's Dad and Mom, were the most recent and longest lasting.

  Grace had a difficult time sharing that perspective with anyone. She was deaf and mute. A previous foster mother had taught her sign l
anguage, but no one in the family knew it. Talia had learned American Sign Language in her teens while planning on a career working with deaf children. She became Grace’s voice to the rest of The Family.

  Talia’s maternal instincts were underdeveloped, but a bond of unlikely strength formed between the strongest and the weakest members of The Family. Talia got permission from Lilly to take Grace hunting, and was pleased to find that Grace was a deft partner, slipping silently from shadow to shadow.

  In the beginning, all Talia’s lessons involved stalking and hunting prey. Their conversations soon took flight in other directions: botany, astronomy, meteorology, natural history, everything Talia could communicate through her limited ASL, plus signed words they had developed on the fly. There were no term papers or pop quizzes, but Talia taught Grace all she could about everything she knew.

  Like everything post-Reaper, that winter was harsh. Exceptional amounts of rain, sleet, snow, and wind pounded the Family's small compound, exacerbating the onset of Reaper symptoms in everyone but Talia, Grace, and Lilly. By the time the first wildflowers began to bloom, the Family was down to three.

  A week later, Lilly took her own life.

  That left Talia and Grace alone. If Grace missed the rest of the Family, she didn’t show it. For her entire life, the sun had risen and set, and people had come into her life and died.

  Talia had always been nomadic, but with Grace to care for, she sought out and found a more permanent camp. That spring and summer of 2023 were the happiest times either could remember.

  They never saw another human being. At that moment, the human race numbered less than one hundred.

  Talia and Grace spent those months in the Sierra Nevadas of what had once been Northern California. They settled far off any known trail, in a deserted cabin too remote for the scavengers. There was a small, clear lake to provide water, and plenty of game that had grown unused to human predators.

  They hunted, trapped, swam, and acted as if they were the last two people on earth. On July 27th, when Oodgeroo Nooniccal finally yielded to the Reaper in a very secluded Australian bush cabin, they were the last two people. They took no notice of the distinction.