by Trevor Zaple
On his right there appeared what looked like a church. There were two jagged metal stumps in front of it; he reasoned that there must have been a sign there at one point. The church-like building itself had all of its front windows smashed out. Scrawled across the front in wide, jittery black lettering was the word “BLASPHEMY”. Looking at it, he realized that it was the first word he’d seen in hours. It did not do anything to alleviate his mood.
The sky began to spit flakes as the houses bunched closer together; here and there rows of townhouses began to appear. He kept up his rapid pace, berating himself for not stopping for shelter in any of these houses but unwilling to stop just then. There had to be more suitable places. Surely if he went further into the city there would be an end to the baffling visual muteness. He crossed his fingers and tried to ignore the increasing complaints from his thighs.
He began to see apartment buildings and more motels on his right; to his left seemed to be a wide, unending tangle of wilderness, lost in the increasing gloom. It began to snow more heavily and he turned into a small collection of new-looking houses next to a building that looked suspiciously like a Dairy Queen. His need to get out of the storm that was gathering overwhelmed his eerie, superstitious fear of this place.
The first house he tried was unlocked; he let himself in and proceeded to sneak through the ground floor, checking each room with a pounding heart for signs of life. When he satisfied himself that no one was sharing the space with him, he unrolled his sleeping bag and dug a can of tomato pasta from out of his knapsack. He ate in silence, sitting in the living room where the former owners had placed a rather comfortable overstuffed couch against a wall opposite a big picture window. He watched the snow fall softly outside for an hour and then decided to explore the house, hoping to find something to entertain himself with for the night in an effort to avoid his own tortured imagination. He ended up finding a stash of books in a room that looked like it had been inhabited by a particularly messy adolescent. He picked through them listlessly and chose On The Beach.
He spent that night and the next day hibernating inside of the house, eating sparingly, watching the snow trickle off and stop, and reading through the book. By the time the sun had come out on the morning of the third day to melt the wave of snow, he was sick of tomato pasta and thoroughly depressed. He left the house in a dark funk, keeping his travels to the middle of the road and trying to ignore the wordless existence the outside world continued to revel in.
He walked through the east side of the city during the rest of the morning, watching the houses wash by him in a slow blur. None of them had numbers to indicate their address; this blended into a lack of any words written on signs, walls, or doors to become just another part of the background of his life. He stopped wondering about it by the time he stopped in front of what looked like a large academic building, a high school of some sort. He ate lunch in a run-down plaza across the street; the sign out front that identified it was blank, but the building he broke into had been a bar at one point. The pool tables had been shredded; it looked as though they had been cut up with dully serrated knives. He checked the place thoroughly, peeking through the bathrooms and the kitchen to make sure that no one was hiding in wait for him.
He’d had some apprehension about staying in a bar but it was a moot point anyway; someone had taken all of the booze out of the place at some point anyway. He pulled another wretched can of tomato pasta out of his knapsack and ate it morosely. He would have to replenish his stocks at some point, especially to get some variety. He felt that he might well as well just kill himself if he had to eat much more of the stuff. He threw the empty can against the juke box mounted to the wall beside the bar. It hit with a sullen clunk and rattled to the floor. All the music you can expect out of the thing, you know? he thought with unexpected sadness. He hadn’t thought about music in a long time, but he would give anything just to hear some at that moment. He would even have accepted some of the junk-pop he’d been forced to endure during his days at work. He felt himself slipping down a black hole in the earth; his mood seemed to get progressively worse as the days went on.
He slept curled up behind the bar, entering a REM state in only a very superficial way. The wind rattled against the front windows all night, making Richard think that there was a crowd standing outside the bar pounding their fists on the glass in a chaotic non-rhythm. When he ‘awoke’, it was just past dawn. The morning had come, cold but dry. It had not snowed during the night, and Richard counted his blessings in this matter. He was beginning to wonder what he would do when winter descended upon him and forced him inside for months. If the earliness of the snowfall could be counted for something, he thought that it might be a hard, cruel sort of winter. He pushed it out of his mind and kept walking. He would come across something, or someone, eventually.
He stopped near noon to stare into another deserted plaza. There was a building that was unmistakably a Canadian Tire at some point dating back to well before the plague. The place seemed forlorn, covered in a dust that predated all other. The glass on the windows was untouched; no one, even in the final, looting throes of the plague, had bothered to break into the place. He considered being the first, but dismissed the idea after a while. He would still need to find a food supply, and at any rate breaking into such a pristine place would ensure that anyone passing by would see that someone was inside. With a heavy heart, he kept walking.
By the time the sun had set halfway through the sky directly ahead of him, he was passing through an area that was all stores. The idea of not knowing what kind of stores they were seemed unnerving to him. He could make some educated guesses, of course. One of the stores, its windows as pristine as that long-abandoned plaza, had white bridal gowns hanging in display. He looked at them, entranced by their lacy designs. Across the street, another store was obviously a music store; it was only obvious because someone had broken in, carefully extracted all of the musical instruments, and had just as carefully smashed them all into small, jagged pieces. He walked into the middle of it and tried to make sense of the scene. The sign that named the store had of course been painted over. He stepped through the splintered hole in the glass of the front window of the store and looked inside. Whomever had vandalized the store had ripped everything from the walls and piled it up in the center of the front room. He stepped back outside, unable to find anything of any real worth.
He passed another church, and this one had smashed windows as well. The walls were free of scrawled accusations of “BLASPHEMY”, but the sign that would have named the denomination of the church was muted like everything else. Across the street from the church was a park and walked alongside it. He felt exposed with the wide expanse of land next to him, but he preferred it to the cheap-looking, shoddily boarded buildings that were on the other side of the street. They had an abandoned look to them that Richard found to be too eerie to be near.
He walked alongside more churches, and more buildings that had the weary look of abandonment to them. He saw taller buildings rising in the distance; not skyscrapers by any stretch of the imagination, but definitely taller than any of the buildings in the part of town he was walking through. His surroundings seem to go by him in a haze of repetition: store-fronts abandoned long ago, store-fronts painted over with an incommunicative white, and wrecked churches. Even the traffic lights became monotonous, their garbage-bag coverings flittering endlessly in the brisk, chill wind. He began to think that he might have died in the basement of the yellow-brick house, and that what he was experiencing was simply a season in purgatory.
The buildings rose around him as the sun started to sink into the horizon. He began to feel everything closing in on him again. Ever since he had passed the church he had felt as though he were being followed. He never heard footsteps, but from time to time he could feel movement behind him; whenever he turned to look there was nothing but the empty stretch of the street behind him. This was a mistake, he thought continuously, but he knew that h
e couldn’t turn back. He would have to seek shelter in the unknown that lay ahead of him – his own paranoia would let him do nothing less.
Many of the store fronts began to sport two levels of apartment buildings on top of them; they seemed to loom over him and curve inward, peering down at him with blank-eyed intent. He kept to the line of the buildings on the right hand side of the street, fearing to walk too openly in the middle. He was certain that someone was following him by this point, and he wanted to avoid their sight as much as possible. He gritted his teeth and hoped that he would be able to lose them soon.
Ten minutes later the street opened up into a sort of square. To the right, a small, stylish mall rose cleanly out of the end of what had been a long, monolithic brick building. He looked inside of it but the interior seemed torn to shreds, and littered with shards of busted glass. Across the street was a building that he thought might have been a library at some point. There was no sign to name it, but there were bookshelves inside, as he saw when he gingerly crossed the street and looked in. There were no books to prove this, however; all of the shelves were empty, seeming pathetic in the deep shadows.
Next to the library was a long, glass-covered tunnel that seemed to lead toward a tall parking garage. Beside this tunnel was a square plaza, adorned only by tall lamps, out of which grew a building that seemed to be made, on the front side at least, of glittering, reflective green glass. He looked up, and saw another set of traffic lights bound in tight black bags. He stared around at the painted-over signs, hiding the keys to understanding the city as it had been. On a whim, he decided to take shelter in the building. The rifle on his back felt reassuring; if his pursuers tried to come after him, they would find him to be no easy meat.
The doors into the building were unlocked but the main way up to the other floors seemed to be an elevator. After retrieving his flashlight from his knapsack and peeking around for some time, he discovered a narrow emergency stairwell that led up through the building. He took it, shining his flashlight cautiously up the stairs and taking each step as carefully and as quietly as he could. Finally, after climbing for what seemed like hours, he arrived at a floor that had no stairs leading up from it. Instead, there was a hatch that seemed like it might lead up on to the roof. He decided to eschew this path and try his luck on the top floor instead.
After exploring the floor for some time he came to the realization that the building had to be a student residence of some sort. The rooms were more opulent than any residence that he’d ever been a part of, but there were any number of clues to point towards its usage as such. The preponderance of canned goods and boxes of Kraft Dinner were unmistakable, and also a boon from his perspective. After raiding the third room he stopped to give thanks to a horde of faceless dead parents. Another sign were the textbooks, of course, as well as the littered remains of paper, writing instruments, and the sheer number of laptop computers everywhere – at least two or three in every suite. He smiled at them, ruefully; once upon a time he’d sold them, used golden speech techniques and basic-level psychology to push them onto everyone who’d come into his store. Now they were so much useless dead plastic.
It reminded him suddenly of Samantha’s tablet, still pressed up into the side of the knapsack, nudging against his ribs from time to time. He came to the last room on the right before a bend in the hallway and decided to use that room to shelter in. Once he entered and ascertained that the suite was empty (checking carefully in the bathroom and in each bedroom) he sat on the spare, tartan-covered couch and tried to turn Samantha’s laptop on. He held the power button down several times, lengthening the attempt each time, but it would not turn on. The battery was likely dead, and he had no way of charging it. He thought about tossing it away and kept it at the last moment. He could not have explained why he felt compelled to keep the darkened, useless hunk of plastic and circuit board, but he felt that he needed to. It didn’t take up much room, in any event.
He ate a mixture of tuna and crackers, applauding the former inhabitants of the suite for their good taste. The suite was smaller than many of the others, seemingly designed for two people, and was shockingly messy. Unlike many of the buildings he’d come through on his journey, this particular room seemed like it had been trashed well before the plague, and almost on purpose. There were food containers all over the coffee table, dirty, moulded dishes in the sink, and a dirty, cigarette-laden stink to the air that Richard felt vaguely nauseated by. He forced himself to accept it, at least for the time being; he was becoming exhausted, and it was now nearly dark outside.
He began rooting through the left-behind items and found some old porno magazines. One of them seemed focused on enormous breasts and he took it back to the couch with him. He flipped through it; it was the first female flesh he’d seen in months, but he had none of the normal reactions to it. He tried to stimulate himself while checking out the ample, perfectly formed curves of some brunette British breast model, but there was nothing. He finally gave up in disgust and took to staring out of the window. There was no movement out on the street below, not that he had strictly expected any. Whomever his followers were, they would not let him see them. Of this he was bleakly certain.
He had no idea as to when he fell asleep but he was quite certain of when he awoke. There had been a loud knock that had reverberated through his subconscious, reaching down even into the unremembered jumble of dreams that ran through his sleep like a swift river. His eyes flew open and he found himself on the couch, staring up into the bland, boring ceiling. He almost dismissed the noise as a product of his dream when it came again, and louder. It was the door. Someone was pounding on the door.
He went cold all over and his mouth suddenly became very dry. He crept over to where he’d placed his gear and grabbed the hunting rifle from beside his knapsack. He very quietly checked to make sure that there was a shell in the chamber and thumbed the safety off. He crouched beside the couch, trying to keep his aim steady despite his befuddled, rudely-awoken state.
Let these bastards come he screamed inside of his head, his voice triumphant. At that moment the door burst open and something flew in through the door. It landed in the kitchen and then rolled into the living room. Richard had just enough time to stare at it (it looked like a white can with a strange brass spigot on top) before it erupted with an acrid, cloudly gas. It filled his nose and eyes with a burning, stinging sensation that was completely impossible to escape. He began to choke and gag, and when the legs rushed into the room and the arms wrestled him down to the floor he struggled for only the briefest instant before giving in to rapidly blossoming unconsciousness.
THREE:
Richard awoke into purgatory – at least, this was what Richard had to assume. With all the data that he had at hand, it seemed at the time to be the only logical conclusion. Later, when his data set expanded, he concluded the same thing, except for the caveat that it was completely intentional.
When he opened his eyes there was only white. At first he thought that he was falling and he threw his arms up in a panic to cover his face. In that raw burst of animal flight reaction, he could not bear to face his own demise. It was something that had been haunting him for some time; he often thought that he was simply lagging behind in the great eventual fate of the human race. When faced with the final moment, however, he quailed, clamouring for his own weak flesh.
After a moment, his heart pounding, he realized that if he were in fact falling, it felt a great deal like sitting down. He reached his hands out and realized that he was sitting on a floor. Some further, tentative exploration confirmed that the floor was bordered on all sides by walls. He lay on the white floor, nude, surrounded by white walls, and stared up at what he assumed must be a white ceiling. If there was a ceiling up there, he had discovered that it was too far up to reach even through jumping. His hands felt the firmness of the floor, but his eyes still refused to believe, continuing to report the existence of the illusion of nothingness.
If
this was purgatory, as he thought that it might be, he was sorely disappointed in it. Wasn’t there supposed to be some sort of eternal waiting room, the antechamber where he would wait with the souls of others waiting for whatever process would occur after this way station? Some sort of sign to indicate that his turn would come eventually? He tried to glean some information from the texture of the floor and walls, but the most that he could decipher was that they were flat, smooth concrete. Would the waiting room of the afterlife be made of concrete, he wondered? He thought about this and decided that he had no reason to assume that it would not.
The novelty of being in a cage that seemed suspended in the void only lasted a short time. Within an hour or so he was startlingly bored. His mind crawled across any thought that would rise up out of his subconscious. He spent several hours singing any song that came into his head. He rarely remembered a full song; he sang bits and pieces that formed themselves into a chaotic, staggered medley. When his voice finally grew silent he returned to contemplation of the white void he hung suspended in. He wondered how long it would be before the situation changed. Surely this couldn’t be the afterlife, he reasoned. It couldn’t possibly be the fate of every sentient thing to sit in a cage in the middle of nothingness for the rest of eternity. Could it? His mind shuddered back from the idea; he’d often tossed around words like ‘forever’, ‘always’, ‘eternal’ with a glib casualness. He felt himself inching towards a real of understanding about the yawning gape that lay behind those symbolic bits of language, however, and he began to choke on how big the concept could actually be.
