by Trevor Zaple
There were corpses, here; people whom had been unwilling or unable to hide inside when they felt their time coming and had chosen instead to bleed out of their main orifices in the final, pitiless glare of the public eye. Cars were strewn about, equally as liberally. Parking laws had given way when all other law and order had broken down in the final, desperate last days of civilization.
Richard, for his part, was horrified. He had remained fairly isolated, he realized; he had lived in a nice condo in one of the newer buildings out on the other end of town, where the city petered out into the surrounding countryside. He had seen nothing like this in the last few weeks, even though he’d followed the story on the available news sources. It had all seemed so unreal, viewing it through the thick filter of his various LCD screens. People were dying but they weren’t people he knew. He didn’t have to see them, or touch them. His neighbours began disappearing and he hadn’t really noticed. They’d played a role in his life in only a very minor, peripheral way, and so he’d dismissed it out of hand when he no longer saw them. When people from the store had begun getting sick and not showing up, he’d connected it to what was going on but not in any real, tangible way. He hadn’t seen them die, and that was really the key thing. He hadn’t seen any of his neighbours dead, he hadn’t watched Mohammed die (although his demise was certain, from what Richard had witnessed), the dead bodies outside of Samantha’s apartment had seemed like a mocked-up television set, even the few corpses he’d spied here and there since leaving the apartment had been nothing more noteworthy to him than the roadkill he’d occasionally seen on the highways in the time before. This, however, was too blatant to ignore. There were dozens of them in sight, blood-soaked bodies sprawled in contorting positions from their final, phlegmatic spasms. They had died in the street, with no one to collect and bury them. They would lie there until the rains and the predations of animals took them away. Their bones would bleach in the sun and finally crumble away into dust, years from now. They would still be lying in the street years from now. Decades from now. Richard fell to his knees. His hands found his face without a shred of conscious thought, and he began to weep heavily.
Presently, Samantha knelt beside him and put a comforting hand on the back of his head. She stroked his hair gently and whispered gentle nonsense into his ear. His sobbing eventually grew less, and tapered off into hitching breaths here and there. Finally, he was calm again, and rose to his feet.
The bodies were still there, visible through a crazed lens of remaining tears, but he felt as though he could deal with it now. He could see them and not immediately want to vomit everything in his stomach onto the street. The sight didn’t seem quite as delirious – it was still insane, beyond any real, instantaneous comprehension, but he could look at it without feeling his mind begin to disengage and float away.
In clearing his mind of this, he began noticing the little details that he’d been refusing to acknowledge before. The smell, that was the big one. In addition to the strengthening scent of wood smoke hanging on the air, he realized that there was an underlying redolence to the breeze that he’d refused to admit. To put it crudely, he could smell the sour tang of blood and the deeper, earthier smell of shit everywhere. Once he detected it, he could smell it in everything. It was such an overwhelming force that he wondered how he’d been able to ignore it the entire time.
He noticed the broken windows, as well, and the glittering carpet of glass that lined the street and sidewalks as a result. The side streets that they’d travelled on had been cleaner; the buildings had been shuttered and the windows were mostly intact. St. Paul Street, by contrast, was a complete mess. It looked as though a riot had come rolling through, and from what Richard saw that might have been the case. Some of the blood that stained the street came from wounds that did not originate in plague.
The jagged holes that had been shattered in the store fronts unnerved him as they passed by. The light caught odd reflections in the sunlight, and the unpredictable glitter constantly made Richard think that there was someone moving inside. Whenever he would turn to confront the person, though, he would catch himself on nothing. At first Samantha reacted along with him, nervous and ready to sprint, but after the first few times she became bored. Her slackening demeanour annoyed him; his own nerves were tightened to the point that he could play sweep arpeggios on them.
“Do you think people were trying to get out of here?” Samantha asked after a time. They were passing by a small tattoo shop and a body hung halfway out of the front window. Richard eyed it critically as the walked by it; the body’s head lay at an unnatural angle. He looked out to the street and saw a pile-up of four cars that, given time, would eventually fuse together into an unrecognizable mass of steel and circuit board. There were victims inside that heap, hidden behind impact-shattered glass and twisted metal. He shook his head.
“I don’t think anyone knew what they were trying to do”.
Samantha did not reply and they walked on. The more he saw it, the more it took on the view of complete chaos. There were as many beaten, murdered corpses on the street as there were bled-out plague victims. A large furniture store had been driven into, and the car mouldered inside the gapped-out show window, it’s back window crazed and bloody. The smell of gasoline lay heavy around it, and Richard motioned to Samantha to cross to the other side of the street. He had no wish to get close to a sudden random explosion.
Across the street was a tall brick-and-glass structure, more modern than most of the other buildings on the street. The place looked completely torn apart, and there were bodies ringing the smashed-out doors. Richard looked up to the dark windows on the top floors with trepidation, wondering if someone might be looking down on them as they walked, with unknown intent. He shivered and made himself stop imagining things. There was no movement in any of the windows, although a small part of him whispered that he might not spy such activity until it was too late.
Just past the modern-looking building was a deep courtyard; there were a couple of bodies and a small Japanese car flipped upside down. An arm snaked motionless out of the wreckage of the car; Richard tried to avert his eyes but he found that he couldn’t avoid looking at such scenes anywhere he turned his eyes to. There were restaurants on the other side of the street, and an abandoned cinema; there was blood and flesh and viscera on display everywhere, littering the sidewalks, hanging out of jagged glass holes, pulverized by the lethal impact of auto accidents. Richard could feel the abattoir closing in around him. The copper scent was everywhere, like old pennies that had been stored in a drawer for years and then withdrawn grudgingly into the light. He felt his stomach roll over, and his gorge rise. He must have looked green, because Samantha’s hand encircled his bicep shortly.
“Are you going to be okay?” she asked, concerned. Richard nodded emphatically, not really trusting himself to speak. Everything wanted to spill out all at once, and his heart seemed to be achieving new speed records. He breathed purposely, measuring his inhalation and exhalation in equal intervals. He managed to get himself under control within a short time, and got back up to his feet.
“I seem to keep doing that,” he said by way of apology. Samantha smiled, although there seemed to be some impatience behind it. He kept his breathing under control.
“We should stop and eat something soon,” Samantha said, looking appraisingly at the buildings around them. She pursed her lips. “Somewhere less occupied”. Richard silently agreed.
They chose a relatively untouched book store up the street. The sign declared it as “Penelope’s Used Books” and the subscript on the cheaply-made yellow-on-white said that it “used books eagerly”. The front window had been smashed along with the rest, but the interior seemed undisturbed. They crossed into cool, darkened stacks, where the secret smell of aging paper dominated over all.
“Do you think the lights are burned out?” Samantha whispered, and Richard looked intently at the ceiling.
“Maybe,” he said, “may
be someone shut them off, before they left for the last time. You have a flashlight in that pack of yours?”
“Of course,” she said, offended. “I have two”. She took off her knapsack and rummaged inside. She handed him the smaller of the two, an emergency wind-up flashlight. He gave her a look and then began winding it up. The zipzipzip sound it made seemed very loud in the close confines of the jumbled shelves.
They peeked into recesses of the store and were impressed by how far it went back. Richard had never been much of a reader, but he was impressed by the sheer number and variety of the books that were contained within the place. He found a whole section of westerns, which his father would have loved. It was amazing how quickly memory could flood back when confronted with familiar stimuli, and as he fingered the worn-in spines of wide, curved paperback novels his mind conjured up high resolution pictures of thirty years past. His father drinking coffee in the morning, bopping to Stevie Ray Vaughan and reading something by Louis L’Amour. The sunlight came in a nearby window over top of him, casting him in a higher contrast than normal, and he seemed to burn into Richard’s interior sight like the sun. He’d been nine, he remembers, the same year that he’d watched a group of people demolish a cement wall bedecked with neon-coloured graffiti. His father had been sitting on their ratty old couch; the video had come on the news and his father had lain down the book he was reading (L’Amour again, How The West Was Won). His hands, long-fingered and powerful. There was something like awe in the way that he was watching the video, Richard remembered that. Awe and a sort of stunned stupification.
Samantha nudged him and he shook away from his reveries. He ran an appreciative finger down one more cracked spine and turned away, back into the dim present. They went to the back of the stacks and found stairs leading up. They were wide, and lined on the sides with an overflow of paper novels. When the reached the top they realized that there were even more rooms filled with books. The main room extended out to the front of the store and had a large picture window facing out onto the street – undamaged, a rarity. This room was littered with stacks of boxes of books. Near the back of the store were two rooms with very old-looking hardcover books. Samantha decided that they would stop to eat in that room; she seemed excited at the prospect of digging through what she called “the collection”.
Richard ate from a can of cold pasta in tomato sauce and watched her dig through her treasures. She exclaimed over each discovery, chattering excitedly over them. Richard paid only a spurious attention to what she was saying; she seemed to know a great deal more about literature than he did, and much of what she said went over his head. He did take notice at books that he’d actually heard of, however; she pulled a very old edition of Uncle Tom’s Cabin out of a hidden pile and he remarked in surprise. She seemed astounded when she came across a fairly regular-looking hardcover edition of some novel or another.
“Algis Budrys,” she said, and smirked. “He had quite a lot to say about a similar situation”. He shook his head; he had no idea what she was talking about. That, however, was the only book she put in her backpack. She sat down shortly thereafter and opened a can of tuna, wolfing it down hungrily. She seemed disappointed when it was finished and she eyed the can as though there might be more inside. She reluctantly placed it aside. She then eyed Richard speculatively and quirked a smile across her curvy lips.
“Now I think we have time,” she said mysteriously and all of a sudden she was across and on top of him, her lips pressing down onto his with ferocity. Richard was taken aback at first but after his initial surprise he gave into it with abandon. His hands quickly found her breasts and she ground her pelvis into him greedily. She broke away to stare into his eyes.
“You have tuna breath,” he quipped, and she giggled.
“True,” she whispered, her voice flushed and breathy. “I guess you’ll just have to throw me over something in here. I saw a copy of Ringworld on a table over there. That might be hot”.
“Yeah?” he challenged her, and tackled her. He got her up to her feet and then promptly spun her around and over the position on the table she’d mentioned. Everything after that belonged to the silent, secret room away from everything, where the dust flew in thin, outraged clouds as they were rhythmically disturbed.
EIGHT
By the time they left the book store the sun was half-way down in the sky to it’s bed in the west. It was half-visible over the buildings that flanked them, causing the shadows that shrouded the dead to grow even longer. They continued to walk through the downtown, although their pace was much slower than it had been. The smell seemed to have died down, although Richard was sure that this phenomenon was due more to his mentally filtering it out than to any actual reduction in the bacteria festering in the decaying flesh of those once human. Whatever it was due to, he was grateful for it. He felt more relaxed than he had been since waking up that morning.
They walked in comfortable silence for ten minutes, and Richard revelled in the lessened tension between them. They were each the only person the other had in the whole world, after all, and it would be best to keep relations light and easy between them. Richard thought about reaching out to take her hand but decided not to push things. All in good time he told himself. Time is really all we have, after all.
They passed by a couple of convenience stores and Richard thought about stepping inside to see what might be available for looting. When he got close, however, he could see that the interiors of the store were smashed and torn. It would take a long time to sift through the debris to find anything useful, and Richard judged that they only had maybe four or five hours of sunlight left. If they hadn’t found anyone by then, they would have to find somewhere to hole up for the night. He turned away from the stores with faint regret; they had enough food in Samantha’s pack to last a while, but it would give out eventually, and Richard definitely wanted to restock their supplies before it came down to eventually.
He smiled and then even chuckled a little. The idea that their supplies would run out was a laughable one, when he thought about it. Even if the stores had been looted by a desperate group hell-bent on getting what they thought they needed before dying or blowing town, there were houses. 180,000 people had lived in the city before the plague blew through; the homeless rate being as negligent as it was, almost all of those people had lived in some sort of house or apartment. The most common thing that could be found in the cupboards of such a place were canned goods; even if some of the homes had been looted (and Richard knew that some of them had to have been, by this point) not all of them could possibly have been looted, especially if the population was as reduced as it seemed. He let his shoulders drop a little more. There would be time enough to go searching through darkened kitchens and pantries later. Right before St. Paul Street curved around to the left, there was a franchised pita restaurant. The sullen, rancid smell of gone-over meat and vegetables wafting out of the crashed-in front door made his decision final. The stomach turning-smell made him want to stay in the street as much as possible.
After the curve the character of the street changed. The buildings on either side of the street were by and large bars, with the odd coffee shop or bank thrown into the mix. The reek of alcohol was heavy in the air; the hunks of former cars thinned out but the corpses remained, littered with slivers and chunks of glittering, jagged glass. Logos remained on some of the larger glass pieces, symbols of vodka, gin, vermouth, rye. The aroma was sharp and it assaulted Richard’s nose; from the expression on her face he saw that it was doing the same to Samantha. There would be no stopping along this stretch.
“God, why would they have smashed all of this?” Samantha asked aloud, looking around at the sheer amount of liquor bottles lying busted in the fading sunlight. She sounded disgusted. Richard shrugged.
“It’s the end of the world,” he said heavily, suddenly aware of how ridiculous the phrase sounded. “People are very different when faced with a crisis situation”. He thought back to the con
fused, deranged phone call he’d had with the store up on Hamilton Mountain. The orgiastic violence that had been alluded to through the crackling connection had shocked him at the time, but now, in the sober light of day, he started to find a sort of rudimentary understanding. When the whole thing was spiralling down the drain, why not go out with a smashing whirlwind of destruction? Looking around at the stretch of bars on this part of the street, he realized that this was exactly what had happened. The sick and the scared, in need of distraction and dissolution, had been drawn to these places. They’d gotten drunk, and then they’d gotten violent.
He shook his head. The state of nature he thought grimly, nasty, brutish, and short. Where was that from? He reached back to his university days, thinking it was probably from some philosophy course or another. He puzzled over this for a while as they walked solemnly passed the still remnants of what had, by all observations, been the mother of all chaotic riots a few nights before. They stepped lightly, watching for dangerously angled shards of glass, and stepped gingerly over the sprawl of bodies here. Richard was convinced that one of them would twitch and get up, like a surreal image out of a horror film, but the corpses lying in the street were as still as a rural midnight.
The street widened into a large four-way intersection; kitty corner to their standing position, the land dropped away off of the road into a deep, forested ravine. The Niagara escarpment rose in the distance, on the other side of the ravine, and out of the escarpment a single, blocky tower rose into the sky. Samantha halted in the street and pointed out to the tower.
