Before We Die Alone

by Ike Hamill

  My mouth follows city instinct on its own.

  “Calm down, you furry fuck,” I say.

  I see him push away from the wall and amble out towards the light of the sidewalk. He glances up and down the street. This bear is a little antsy about being seen. Maybe I can hold my ground out here in view of the townhouses. Then again, the neighborhood looks pretty empty. My chest tightens a little, and that’s all the reminder I need of the wounds that are still healing. These are wounds that this bear gave me.

  His laugh has a growling burr under the tone.

  As he walks forward, his shoulders are just a little too stiff for his gait to appear casual. He seems a little taller this time. I glance down—he standing on his toes. That tiny little bit of bluff gives me just enough confidence to hold my ground, although the cuts on my chest start to throb, urging me to turn and run.

  “I thought you were in the hospital,” he says.

  “And I thought you got shot by the cops.”

  “They say that any time there’s something they can’t control. They have to maintain a sedate populace, or else this whole system comes tumbling down.” He gestures with his upturned paws.

  I saw coverage on TV. This bear is supposed to be dead. He has the same patch on his chest, that looks like a cartoon tie. He has the same height, weight, and, let’s say, attributes. I’m tempted to believe that the bear standing in front of me is just a hallucination, but I’ve made that mistake before and I’m not going to make it again. Could he be right? Could the police have simply lied to the press about killing this bear so that people wouldn’t panic.

  This is nonsense.

  I put my hands up, unconsciously mimicking his. I step to the grass margin between the sidewalk and the street and give him a wide berth. “Okay, Bear, I’ll just leave you to your conspiracy theories then.”

  I start to walk by him.

  “Yeah, keep moving, asshole. You’ll be dead in a week anyway.”

  I’m a couple of paces away when he makes his lazy threat. I turn so I’m facing him. Blame it on the morning I’ve had, but I’m in no mood for a threat.

  “What did you say to me?”

  “You’re going to die naked, just like you came into this world. Run home and sit in front of your TV so you can hypnotize yourself through your last days of existence.”

  “Yeah? How about I go get a gun and finish what the cops started?”

  He drops from his toes down to his flat feet and he shuffles forward. When I feel his trashy breath on me again, I remember that swirling feeling in my brain that preceded my last faint. I’m going to do it again. I clench my teeth. I refuse to pass out in front of this bear again.

  He raises a paw and pokes my shoulder with his claws.

  “You better watch what you say to me.”

  “Look around,” I say. Somehow, I find the strength to raise my own hand. With an firm finger, I poke his chest. Under that black fur is soft, pliable flesh, just like mine. My legs are longer, and his head is bigger, but we’re more alike than we are different. I mean, compared to jellyfish, or insects, he and I are practically brothers. “This is my world. People own this corner of the world, not bears. Around here, you belong locked up in a zoo.”

  He turns his big jaws towards the sky and laughs again.

  “You idiot,” he says. “I was never locked in there. You can barely see one percent of what’s going on around you. Don’t tell me where I belong.”

  I flinch back as he drops to all four paws. He’s still laughing as he turns and begins walking back towards the shadows between the buildings. He calls out just before he disappears. “Think of me as you’re running for your life. I voted for you, but now I’m kinda glad you’re going to die.”

  When he’s gone. I finally take a breath. It’s difficult, but I manage to walk away without hyperventilating or sprinting off. It’s empowering. I feel like I’ve conquered something—my own fear, or nature, I guess.

  All in all, it has been a pretty good day.

  Chapter Ten

  * Conference *

  “HEY, ADAM!” I SAY. I give the grate two taps.

  I repeat the call about ten minutes later. Meanwhile, I’m watching a TV show from my DVR.

  For clarity—DVR stands for Digital Video Recorder. Some time in the twentieth century, someone figured out how to capture a crude likeness of the world and represent it with an electromagnetic field that could be broadcast. I’ve covered parts of this before. As this process became more popular, more and more fields were broadcast, giving several different options for information and entertainment. Eventually, with the air filled with these electromagnetic waves, people decided that a copper wire would conduct a higher quality and quantity of signals to the home. They could send fifty programs to millions of people and each person could decide which to watch. That wasn’t enough options, so people invented various ways to capture the streams. By digitally recording the video stream, I can take my fifty options and record only the parts I like so I can watch them whenever I want.

  It’s a ridiculous system. Imagine food so plentiful that it was continuously delivered to everyone’s house, regardless of whether or not the person wanted it. They would drop off dozens of entrées and a person would save one and throw the rest away. Some of the things delivered would be things they would never eat. They just don’t care for that meal. Still, it’s delivered constantly. That’s cable TV. Why on Earth would they keep sending me stuff I have no intention of watching? It seems like a giant waste of time and energy.

  At the moment, I’m watching the latest episode of Corruptionable. It’s not one of my favorites, but I watch it a lot because it’s on a lot. If something is really interesting, I’ll save it for when I’m eating dinner, or relaxing at the end of the day. Corruptionable is the type of program that I’ll watch any time. It’s the TV equivalent of flipping through a magazine.

  For clarity—Corruptionable features real public servants. They approach a police officer, or state senator, or health inspector, and then offer them a bribe. Everything is recorded by hidden cameras, of course. The formula never varies. The person always rejects the first bribe. They never show really crooked people on Corruptionable. It’s only when they make the third or fourth offer that things get interesting. You get to watch the person start to do the mental math. What would they do with an extra thousand bucks. If money doesn’t sway them, the show will try to blackmail the person. Honestly, I don’t know how they get away with it. Isn’t blackmail illegal? As far as I know, there’s only one episode where the person didn’t cave in. It was a woman who was in charge of something dumb, like fire hydrant safety or something. It didn’t even seem like there was any downside to what they asked her to do. She just had to falsify some test records or something. She never caved. Later, she published a book about the experience and made a ton of money. Maybe the only time that being honest ever paid off.

  “What’s up?” Adam asks. “You’re not watching the news?”

  “No,” I say. “I’m watching them try to get this animal control officer to look the other way. This guy has an alligator on a leash. What’s the point of that?”

  “Wait, what are you doing home?” he asks.

  “I got fired,” I say. “Can you believe that? I got fired, and then on the way home that bear told me that I only had a week to live.”

  “He may be right,” Adam says.

  “What? What are you talking about?”

  “You should be watching the news. There’s an asteroid headed our way.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “I wish I was. Some amateur astronomer in Sweden spotted it. The reports have been going back and forth about the exact trajectory, but it’s supposed to either clip the atmosphere and deflect, or it’s going to hit the Atlantic Ocean on the twentieth.”

  I shut off the DVR and switch over to live TV. This has to be some kind of hoax or something. Adam gets all of his news second-hand. He’s been wrong before.r />
  The volume is pretty low, but a NASA graphic on the screen shows just what Adam has been talking about. They’re showing a view from out in space and the sun is beginning to dawn on the US when the video freezes. The viewpoint pulls back and a red arrow points to a tiny dot of light, out near the moon. Everything goes in slow motion for a second and the arrow tracks the course of the object. A dotted line appears. Near the earth, it splits into two lines. One misses us, and the other plows into the ocean. When they run the video at full-speed again, of course they show the asteroid following the track that hits the ocean.

  The NASA graphic goes away and they cut to a scene from some terrible movie. In it, an enormous wave is hitting New York City.

  “It wouldn’t be a wave,” Adam says.

  “Huh?”

  “The scientists are saying that the ocean would be vaporized where it impacts. The city would be destroyed by air pressure shock before any wave could get there.”

  “Oh.” I say. I don’t know why, but at first I thought there would be good news. A graphic appears on the screen showing a mockup of the asteroid next to the Grand Canyon. It looks like it would fit inside, but just barely. I have no idea what that means. Is this how we’re measuring the size of things now? Is the Grand Canyon a unit of measurement? I would like a quadrillionth of a Grand Canyon’s worth of ice cream please.

  “So maybe that bear was right.”

  I shake my head.

  “Come on,” I say. “I love that the English language is so versatile, but do we need to construct a sentence that includes, ‘maybe the bear was right’?”

  “I wouldn’t rule it out,” he says.

  I tried to listen to the newscaster, but they were only focusing on the destructive power of the asteroid. Nobody was giving me a sense of how real the threat might be.

  “Give me the quick version. Is this thing going to hit us?”

  “Probably.”

  “Like, fifty-fifty?”

  “More like sixty-forty. They said they’ll know more as it gets closer. Once it passes the moon, we have about nine hours until possible impact.”

  “Are they going to blow it up or something?”

  “Can’t,” he says. “You can’t just blow something like that up. All that would happen is the pieces would hit us. In fact, there’s a chance that it might skim by, but if we blow it up, it will definitely hit us. At least pieces of it.”

  “So we’re supposed to go up into the mountains or something?”

  “I guess, but it probably won’t help. Depending on the impact, most life on Earth would be eliminated.”

  “Great. That’s perfect. A minute ago, I was only concerned about losing my job and being mauled by a bear. Now, the whole world is about to be vaporized.”

  “Just the ocean.”

  “Huh?”

  “Only the ocean will be vaporized. Most people would be killed by the particulates in the atmosphere. You know, lung disease. Plus, when all the plants and animals die, we won’t have food. Even if you go into a bomb shelter, you can’t outlive the dust clouds.”

  “Great. Just great,” I say.

  Chapter Eleven

  * Reality *

  I’M BACK ON THE street, walking around. News like this needs to be processed outdoors. Now that I’m aware of what’s happening, I see the difference out on the street. I should have seen it before. There are more people moving around than there should be. Nobody is strolling, they’re all moving with purpose.

  Across the street, I see some guys unloading boxes from a store into a truck. It occurs to me that they’re looting. It’s a very civilized brand of stealing. There’s no broken glass or people running around, but I can tell by their shifty glances that they’re up to no good.

  I think a lot of people are just waiting for any excuse to shed the rules. They’re sweating inside the jacket of conformity, and they want out. Even the possibility of Armageddon and they’ve already walked away from the rules of a civil society.

  I turn at the sound of a car horn. A frustrated driver is stuck behind a pack of dogs. They’re trotting right down the center of the street in a canine phalanx. As they pass me, a Basset Hound turns and gives me the hairy eyeball, so to speak. The thing is an absurd little creature with stubby legs and droopy skin, but dominance is all in the attitude. I look away first.

  Ahead on the corner, I see a girl sitting on a milk crate. She’s whispering into her phone while she watches the sermon of a mad preacher. He’s waving his arms around and shouting about the end of the world. He grows quiet as I approach. He pulls his arms in close to his body and stares at me as I stand there, waiting for the traffic.

  “What?” I ask.

  The girl whispers something else into her phone. I wonder if she’s hissing.

  “Seriously,” I ask the guy. “What are you looking at?”

  Am I the Basset Hound in this situation?

  He raises a trembling hand and points at me. “You have the mark.”

  I want to tell him that I’m not part of this whole drama. I just found out about this asteroid thing minutes ago, and I’m not really a member of this whole “end of the world” thing. I’m like an employee from some major media outlet, sent to observe and report. But am I not part of all this? I’ll die too, I suppose. Still, all this panic seems like stuff that’s happening around me, not to me.

  I turn to the hissing girl. “Do you see a mark?”

  She points.

  I look down.

  Oh. Yeah, there’s a little blood on my shirt, spotting through. Hardly seems possible. They stitched and glued my chest and then covered it with a mile of gauze. I can’t imagine how the blood leaked through all that and stained my shirt. Even upside down, I can see that the blood there looks like an eye. No wonder it freaked out the preacher.

  “That’s just from where I was mauled,” I explain. That doesn’t seem to assuage the fears of the preacher.

  The light has changed. I move along.

  They sky is still blue and the leaves are still green. This should be a normal, beautiful day. There’s a neighborhood on my right that looks quieter. The street I’m on is mostly businesses. But, I suppose I’m not looking for quiet. I want to be around people.

  Up ahead, instead of taking boxes out, Mr. Jacobs is loading boxes in. He runs an Italian restaurant, and he has his two sons frantically carrying boxes from a truck through the front door. His role is to hold open the front door and dart his eyes around. I suppose he’s on the lookout for thieves. I don’t have to wonder what he would do if he encountered them. He’s holding a rifle down his leg.

  “Hey, Mr. Jacobs,” I say. “Everything alright?”

  He looks at me and cuts his eyes to the right, dismissing me. His youngest comes in with the final box and Mr. Jacobs closes the door behind them. I see him, looking out through the glass at me. I keep walking. What’s he going to do, hide in his basement with his boxes of supplies? I can’t see how that will help him when the city has been leveled by the shock wave and then drowned under an ocean of water.

  Ahead, the security guard is holding open the door to the bank. At least people are conducting themselves in an orderly fashion there. They’re queued up, and the line has reached all the way to the door. Soon, the line will be out to the sidewalk and then maybe down the street. Of course, the bank will probably run out of money by then. When the bank runs out of money, I’m sure the people will lose their civility quickly.

  “Janice?” I ask.

  She’s standing near the bank door. She looks like she wants to get in line, but she can’t decide.

  “Oh,” she says. She takes a second to place me, I can see it in her eyes. “How are you? How’s your?” She gestures at my chest.

  “I’m fine.”

  “I’ve been meaning to send you a message,” she says. “Our board met and they don’t think it’s the right time to expand our management staff.”

  “I suppose it won’t matter much soon,” I say. I
tilt my chin at the bank line. A man with a bamboo cane has joined it, taking the spot that Janice had been eyeing.

  “We’re international?” she says.

  I don’t know what that has to do with anything, but I don’t see the point in arguing with her.

  “You know, it occurs to me that I never even found out what kind of software puzzleBox creates,” I say.

  Clearly, she would rather not have this conversation right now. She has a lot of internal debate to finish, about whether or not she should line up for the bank. Apparently, that’s a more pressing issue than having a casual conversation with me.

  She decides. She moves towards the back of the line and stands behind the guy with the cane.

  It’s strange to even be having this conversation. It’s likely that the job—the company, even—won’t exist in a week. In my defense, she brought it up. I move with her to the back of the line.

  She’s distracted now that she’s made a decision. A second before, she didn’t even know if she wanted to be in line. Now, it’s not moving fast enough for her.

  “We make molecular encryption and decryption software.”

  “What?”

  We’re interrupted by a woman from inside the bank. Her voice is preceded by a wave of disappointed groans.

  “I’m sorry folks, but we’re closing in ten minutes. We’re going to let everyone go home to be with their families.”

  “Huh,” I say. When I turn back to Janice, she’s already walking away. I shrug and keep moving. People abandon their place in line and swell past me. I see a young man dart across the street and nearly get hit by a sedan. He slaps the hood with the palm of his hand and keeps running.

  Things are going downhill pretty fast now.

  ---- * ----

  I’m around the back of my block when I see a group of kids. They seem too young to be college students, but they’re out here at the entrance to one of the dorms. They’re making signs, like to picket with. There’s a circle of three nearest the sidewalk. They’re sharing big markers.