Prospero's Half-Life

by Trevor Zaple

  “We might have a use for it,” she replied. “Or we might be able to trade it to someone. I’m not leaving it behind, anyway. This was a lot of money for us”.

  “It was your choice to buy it,” he said. “No one forced you to do it”.

  She eyed him oddly until he felt acutely uncomfortable with it. He shrugged his shoulders slightly.

  “Alright,” he amended, “you’re right, it probably has some trade value”. Samantha did not speak to him again until they had hoisted up the supplies and left the apartment. They paused on the balcony to listen to the sounds of the city before they departed. From far off there was a bevy of car alarms braying; there was a pop that might have been gunfire, or really anything. Richard realized that he’d never really taken the time to stand still and listen to the sounds of the city he lived in. He would never again get the chance to hear it as it had originally been intended, and this saddened him in a way that brushed at something nameless buried deep within him. He suddenly felt very lonely and looked to Samantha. She was staring off into the parking lot, watching for any movement. Richard did not see any, but he let her take as long as she needed.

  Finally she looked at him and her look was flinty. I’ve really pissed her off he thought suddenly, and tried to think of what it might have been that had set her off.

  “Shall we?” she asked, and her tone, at least, was warm. He smiled with some confidence and gestured ahead. After you.

  They descended the staircase and crossed through the parking lot briskly, keeping a careful and tense eye on their surroundings. The wind freshened past them and they caught the scent of burning lumber on it, but it was gone as quickly as it had come. They turned left, away from Queenston Street and the hospital. There was another parking lot across the street, serving a spillover building from the hospital, and they crept by it with no small sense of paranoia. They were soon surrounded by quiet fifty-year-old houses, and they allowed themselves to relax. There was a strange, hushed beauty to the street; the blown wind was the only immediate sound. Most of the windows on the street were intact, and the blinds were open in some of them. Richard felt odd walking past the houses where the blinds were shit; he felt as though the blinds had been drawn so that the occupants could bleed out in peace.

  Like walking past a row of tombs he thought, and the idea severely disturbed him. He suddenly imagined himself surrounded on all sides by the mouldering, crimson-splattered dead, and he began to shiver uncontrollably. His hand shot out and found Samantha’s; her lithe, tough hand curled into his with an eager force. They walked hand-in-hand in the center of the roadway, feeling like two children lost inside a haunted house that stretched on forever.

  Here and there were windows with wide plywood planks nailed across them, and doors that were double-boarded in the same fashion. Richard was strongly reminded of photos of hurricane preparations in the American south; the people who had fled these houses were also fleeing a sort of natural disaster, he realized, and had thought that maybe there would be something worthwhile coming back to, in the end. Looking around, Richard was rather doubtful of this. The oppressive silence was a testament to the lack of anyone coming back to reclaim any of it. The sounds that he could hear could be counted on one hand: a car alarm, insistent in the distance; a dog barking from a few blocks to their right; their own, overloud footfalls; and something that sounded like a collapsing building from a long way behind them. He eyed the boarded-up houses speculatively. There were likely more supplies and better bags in some of those houses, especially if the families in question had fled with whatever they could carry. Things would have had to have been left behind, it was only logical. He thought about proposing a few break-ins to Samantha but remembered her issue with his “dancing on the grave of everyone”. He continued to eye the sealed-up houses with interest, but kept his mouth shut.

  After a time they passed a small workshop that purported to repair commercial food equipment. After that point the landscape began to change. Empty fields lay on both sides for a block, and then there was a large U-Haul storage complex. The chain-link fence was locked tightly at the entry point and Richard saw that the doors and windows on the visible entry points in the complex were boarded up as well.

  “Think of all the stuff in that place,” Richard mused. “All of it, just ready to be taken by anyone. Chances are, the person who owned it is dead by now. Who owns it now?”

  “Let it stay in there,” Samantha replied sharply. “I’m not spending God knows how long peeking through every last little pile of junk in there”.

  Richard shrugged his shoulders as they passed it. “It was more of a philosophical question, really,” he said, somewhat grandiosely. “Who owns what dead people leave behind, when you can’t find a court to settle the matter?”

  “Who cares?” Samantha answered acidly. Richard let it drop and they passed by the rest of the storage compound in silence. After the storage center there was a large industrial building, named “Trensept Automation” by the no-nonsense lettering on its side. The wind blew a ragged cardboard box along the empty, cracked cement parking lot that alongside it, on the other side of the fence. To their left, across the street, a small substation hummed with high-intensity electricity. The sound was comforting to Richard, refreshingly normal.

  There was a dog lurking by the locked gate into the Trensept parking lot. It had a scrawny, starved look to it; Richard thought this immediately odd, since there was plenty of food lying around. He wondered, on the heels of this thought, if the dogs ate plague victims. Did they smell appetizing, to dogs? Richard thought that they might; he had once witnessed a friend’s dog vomit, and then happily lap up the steaming brown pile not even two seconds later. Still, he thought, the plague victims might have an off-smell to them, even for creatures that would eat practically anything.

  This particular dog certainly looked as though it were willing to eat practically anything; Richard noted that he could count its ribs quite easily and the dog’s tongue slathered at its muzzle in a restless movement. Neither of them commented on it as they passed it. A block later, however, as they were passing a strip of automotive repair and parts shops, Richard turned back and saw that the dog was following them. Its pace was brisk, and it was only a half-block behind them.

  “Watch out,” Richard warned Samantha in a low tone of voice. Samantha turned her head to look at what he was talking about and gave a start. Then she began to look around.

  “There aren’t any others, are there?” she asked nervously. Richard began looking around as well, suddenly paranoid. Dogs were pack animals, after all. It didn’t seem like there were others, however; the cheap buildings with the filthy white vinyl siding that they passed were as quiet as graves.

  They approached an intersection and Richard noted with small amusement that the traffic lights were still functioning, cycling through red-yellow-green in a slow, stately waltz. A red pickup sat in the middle of the intersection, its tires flat. A body lay next to it, sprawled away from the cab as though the person had opened the door, fallen out, and died. There was a spread, tacky stain of crimson spread around its head and lower abdomen, so Richard inferred that this was, in fact, exactly what happened. He hurried through the intersection, trying to give the corpse no more thought than necessary. Samantha looked at it as they passed, her eyes lingering longer than was strictly necessary. The dog stopped to sniff and then nibble at it, which Richard let out a sigh of relief at. They were edible after all.

  Except, as they made their way a few blocks west down Welland Avenue, it became apparent that they weren’t. Richard noticed that the dog had resumed following them by the time the first block had passed. He noticed that it had been joined by two others as they were passing by a small healthcare plaza with a wound care clinic that had often intrigued Richard (although never to the point where he would go to investigate it). He swore under his breath, and as they passed by a small used car lot he began frantically looking around for something to use as a w
eapon.

  At the corner of the car lot’s fence he noticed a brick amidst a growth of grass. He darted for it, spun around, and hurled it at the dogs. It landed with full force into the middle dog, the one whom had begun following them, and caused a spray of blood and brains to splash outward to either side. The dog dropped dead in its tracks and the other two scattered away, yelping and yipping. Richard nodded smugly and turned back to Samantha, who was staring at him with a horrified expression on her face.

  “What the fuck are you doing?” she exclaimed loudly. Richard held his hands up.

  “Keep your voice down!” he hissed, and immediately wondered why he’d said that. There was no one around, except the dogs he’d driven off; even if there were someone lurking around, would it really be remiss to attract their attention? Somehow, at the base of his brain, Richard felt that it might be. He quailed from the idea that someone might discover them. Samantha gave him a strange look that quickly melted back into her original disgust.

  “How could you do that?” she asked, her voice wincing. “The poor thing was just hungry, you didn’t have to kill it”.

  Richard looked at her with disbelief.

  “What the fuck are you going on about?” he demanded, standing in the middle of the sidewalk and stretching out his arms in askance. “Seriously, now. Those dogs were looking for a quick meal, and we were it. Maybe you want to be a dog’s dinner, but I’ll fucking pass, thanks a bunch”.

  She bristled at him and seemed on the brink of exploding.

  “It’s just a dog!” she screamed. “You could have scared it off! You didn’t have to break it’s head! It’s just some poor kid’s dog! Everyone that used to feed it died, and it just wants a meal!”

  “Yeah – YOU!” Richard screamed back in reply. Samantha reared back and a second later a silver blossom of sharp pain bloomed across the left side of his chin. He stumbled back and held his hand to his injured face, more from indignation than from any sort of healing help. His eyes bored into her, trying to catch her afire with just a glance.

  “You hit me,” he said dully. She seemed slightly ashamed but didn’t apologize. She didn’t say anything, in fact, for quite some time. They continued walking, albeit at a forced distance from each other, for twenty minutes. By that time they were on the edge of the downtown, passing by run-down buildings that housed businesses whose boards were not a paranoid precaution of fleeing owners. A small hut stood by itself, with a sign hanging in front that claimed it to be a hair salon. By the look of it, it hadn’t been an actual hair salon it close to a decade. Behind it, a pair of stolid apartment buildings stood watch, eyeing them as they stumped by. They stopped in front of a house with broken windows and a long-abandoned look. Richard peered down the street that led away towards the actual downtown, rising lowly in the near distance in front of them. There was no movement, except for a smudge of smoke in the sky, and although Richard tried to stop breathing for a moment in order to hear better, there was no sound either.

  “Are we doing this?” he asked, and the question hung in the air like the black smoke on the horizon. When it became obvious that Samantha wasn’t planning on responding, he turned around quickly and threw his hands to the sky.

  “What do you want?” he shouted, aggravated by her sullen face, “I didn’t mean to kill the dog, okay? I was just trying to scare it away, or make it run, or something! I didn’t mean to kill it, and I’m sorry it pissed you off”.

  Samantha glared at him for a minute and then rolled her eyes.

  “Oh, whatever,” she sighed. “You killed it, you can’t take it back. I guess I’ll just have to accept your apology”.

  “You guess”

  “I guess”

  “You’re so generous,” he said, unable to keep the sarcasm out of his voice. “How lucky am I?”

  “We can always go our separate ways,” she said, her voice sizzling with anger. “There’s more than enough out there to keep us both fed and occupied for the rest of our lives”.

  For a brief moment he nearly accepted her offer; he was instantaneously ready to blow up and scream, to tell her to get gone and good riddance. The prospect of being completely alone held him back. The thought of the empty, motionless buildings around them, and about the wind rustling low through the empty yards and lots like a stalking snake. He thought of the corpses, mouldering behind walls just outside of his line of sight; people who had dragged themselves into a hiding spot before facing their mortality, feeling the animal instinct to die in peace and dignity. What about being alive in dignity? Could that still exist? He didn’t think he would be able to do it if he were alone. The urge to revert to animalism would be too great. He would strip himself raw, sleep in the rough, eat whatever he could catch. Would he use his voice, if he were alone? For a time, he thought that he might. After the novelty of talking to himself wore off, he would likely fall as silent as the world around him, and the language center of his brain would eventually rust away into a sodden pile of meaningless symbols and tortured almost-understandings. He had a sudden image of himself, naked as the day he was born, coursing on all fours through the rock-strewn, weed-choked wasteland of a factory parking lot, streaking after some nameless small animal bounding away on four legs. He shuddered, and in that instant made his decision.

  “No,” he pleaded, “please don’t leave. I’m sorry,” he stopped there, unable to prod his overly tired and stimulated brain into finishing the sentence. He felt himself on the verge of sobbing, and was astounded. Samantha saw this and her expression melted from anger into a more vaguely disappointed resentment.

  “Oh, stop,” she said, and you big baby was the implied finish that she never spoke. She walked forward and put her arms around him. Leaning her head against his chest, she murmured something that Richard couldn’t quite make out. Stiffly, he put his arms around her in turn, and some of the tension ended up leaving his muscles.

  “So, are you ready?” he asked again. She stepped away and looked down the street behind him.

  “I guess,” she replied, nodding. “I’m not sure what else we would do”. Richard shrugged.

  “We could run off into the country, find a farm, and grow old”. Samantha pursed her lips.

  “Just the two of us?” she asked sardonically. Richard clenched his jaw but let it pass without incident. It had only been a half-hearted suggestion anyway. Richard knew that, if there were other survivors than just them (and there had to be, the gang holed up in the hospital proved it) they would be gathering downtown as well. For most of them, it would be to the same purpose that Richard and Samantha found themselves – the simple quest for other people.

  “Yeah, silly idea,” he groused quickly. “Let’s go”. He walked away towards the gentle rise of the unimpressive skyline without waiting for her to move.

  SEVEN

  They walked down Court Street and as they did so the buildings grew closer together and older. Aged red brick replaced dirty white siding and the businesses that had previously inhabited them grew more prestigious: doctors, lawyers, investment brokers, dentists. There would be valuable equipment stashed inside those darkened interiors, Richard thought. Medical equipment worth thousands. Those touch-screen computers that were ubiquitous in the offices of well-to-do dentists. The personal information of tens of thousands, all locked away in filing cabinets and left to spend eternity in the darkness. He wondered if anyone would ever come across them, and make a master record of them someday. A sprawling book that detailed the people that used to exist, and then didn’t. The future archaeologists would have a series of giddy field days with even this, a row of professional buildings in a second-rate decaying industrial burg in the tail end of Ontario.

  The further they walked into the downtown, the more Richard could smell fire. That smudge of smoke that hung on the horizon wasn’t as far off as Richard had first thought. The wind freshened towards them and the smell of wood-fire became even stronger. He wondered how far off the fire was, with no small amount
of unease. He also wondered if those far-flung future archaeologists would have anything to dig through, after all. He thought about discussing it with Samantha but she seemed lost in thought as they walked; he didn’t want to stir up anything, so soon after their last blowout, so he kept his concerns to himself.

  They passed the for-sale sign on an empty brick office building and a gunshot cracked from somewhere nearby. Richard stopped dead in his tracks, trying madly to listen. Samantha seemed to be keeping an ear out to the world as well, although she was staring off in a different direction than Richard was. He breathed in long intervals, trying to discern natural sounds from a repetition of something man-made. Aside from the flutter of a flock of birds roosting atop a balcony garden down the street, there was no sound. He licked his lips, suddenly apprehensive about where they were heading. Samantha seemed to accept it as a matter of course, however.

  “May as well keep going,” she shrugged. “Neither of us will feel normal until we find some other people”.

  She walked ahead and Richard lingered for a moment before scrambling to catch up. Their footfalls seemed to loud, now that that gunshot had broken the afternoon stillness, and Richard winced with each loud echo. They passed a boarded-up music store that seemed to have been boarded up recently, and then they were on St. Paul Street, staring south into the city core. The wind above them was drawing in a series of clouds that bore a steadily increasing greyness. The sunlight filtered through the gathering cloud layer and cast strange shadows on the street ahead of them.

  “Not very impressive, is it?” Samantha asked, mirth tugging at the corners of her mouth. Richard looked at her sideways.

  “What do you mean?” he asked, honestly curious. She gave a small smile.

  “Well, for the downtown of place with a couple hundred thousand people, it looks an awful lot like the main drag of some small town, doesn’t it?”

  Richard gave it another reappraisal. It was instantly familiar to him and so he could not really give it an honest look; it appeared to him as the downtown, somewhere that he’d always known and just seemed like the place that it was. He wasn’t sure what she was talking about, in any event; he hadn’t spent much time in small towns and had very little familiarity with what their downtowns looked like.