 |
And yes, I realize it sounds just like I Am Legend. But my city is completely empty right now because everyone is evacuating and it freaks me out so I have to write it. I thought it was cool.
Anyway:
~
It was dusk; my least favorite time of day.
It’s not the mosquitos or anything. Or the stifling heat. Or the trekking about in treacherous terrain. Well, no, it’s that too. But what I really hate is the silence.
It’s always silent here, to some degree. It happens when there’s never anyone around. But something about the purplish sky, the heavy curtains of darkness, the streetlights that you’d really expect to be on but aren’t, and the way the houses look--blank, empty, the windows dark, the cars and people and porch furniture gone--make it seem eerie, surreal. Not in a good, poetic way, though. More in a Twilight Zone kind of way.
Over the years, I thought I’d get used to it. I thought I’d be brave enough to venture out at dusk. Even if I was a total p***y in the dark, I thought I could at least get the nerve to deal with dusk.
But I didn’t. I forced myself out there, but I never stopped feeling so small, so alone, and so afraid of the silent, lurking darkness.
~
I’d forgotten the name of the city; those things never register properly when you’re young, and I can’t ever find a damn city limit sign. It’s like the borders aren’t there anymore; like the city morphed straight into the trees, blending with the suburbs until it was all just a nameless ruin of a place that was once teeming with life. I thought it was so small, back then; back when I couldn’t even cross the street, that’s probably why.
But now I realize it’s huge. Big enough for endless neighborhoods, wide avenues filled with restaurant after restaurant and store after store, big enough for a sprawling mall and six or seven grocery stores--which was what I was after now.
I tried to keep in the center of the road, keeping my eye on the yellow center line in the quickly failing light. I kept my eyes peeled--though it wasn’t like I was afraid of cars coming or anything--and my knife, sharp enough to slice clear through my arm, clutched tightly in my hand--though it wasn’t like I was afraid of being mugged. Things like that just didn’t happen. Probably because I was the only one alive for about a hundred miles.
Simply walking to the grocery store sounds easy, but it really isn’t. Back when the city was populated, people would normally have had to drive--even if they were fit enough to walk that far, they would have been smashed by a passing car as they crossed half a dozen busy avenues. I didn’t have that luxury anymore. It was hard enough to climb over or hike around every fallen tree that blocked my path; never mind how tricky it is in a car, especially the trendy, fragile, shiny foreign-made cars that were popular here, once. People left them behind, free for me to wreck as I please, but I doubt that anything but a monster truck or a hovercraft could get over most of these trees.
I usually take the seven-lane parkways and such when I’m going somewhere; it’s harder for a tree to block the entire thing, though not impossible. And the grass and weeds and s**t take ages to reach the center of a monster street like that, even if they’ve made the normal two-lane residential streets almost impassable.
I played a game with myself, balancing one foot in front of the other on the dashed yellow line, trying to pretend like I wasn’t in a hurry. Like I wasn’t longing to be home in bed, where there were bright electric lights and warmth and comfort and familiarity--none of which I had had in about six years.
I had found the store the previous day, so it was a cinch to find it again. I approached it carefully, wary of the sun sinking lower every minute mostly--and the possibility of rabid animals camping out in the ruined place.
It was a Wal-Mart, and it had once been in a place I would never have gone, a shady end of town; though now the whole city was mine, pretty much, and the only thing that mattered was that I could find it again, if there was anything left to salvage. The roof had collapsed in a few places, but I was optimistic; maybe the rain had destroyed the girl’s clothes department or something, or allowed some of the fruit to plant their seeds and flourish in the produce aisle, leaving the preserved food and boy’s clothing--pretty much the only useful things to me--intact.
The walls were made of painted cinder blocks, and the automatic doors were sealed shut, but I decided there was a God (it was a constant back-and-forth with me) when I saw that the metal security grilles had been forgotten; they were a pain in the a** to get through. The glass of the doors was cracked in places, and the wall had fallen through to the left of the front entrance. I took the safer route and kicked at the blocks surrounding the hole in the wall; a few chunks crumbled away beneath my tough hiking boots, but nothing caved or avalanched or jumped out at me. Knife still out, I proceeded to duck inside and check the place out before I looted it.
It was a huge place, twice as big as I had anticipated--I guess the “Super” part of “Super Wal-Mart” had fallen off the storefront a while back. It was the kind of place that medium-sized towns would have as a mall, or one of those everything-stores. I didn’t doubt that I would find something to eat here--even if I had to hunt down a raccoon or something. I’m sure there were plenty of those.
The floors had been ruined in the flood; the cheap plastic tile was buckled or missing in most places. Aisles had been knocked into each other, or had collapsed; skeletons of shirts and pants hung in delicate threads from rusted hangers. I started from the right and worked my way through, searching for anything of more enduring usefulness before I got to the food.
I passed, first, the eerie, lurking rows of gardening supplies, covered with the dead bodies of rodents and insects who had hacked into the poisons and perished. The rakes and hoes were rusted through, wicked and sinister; the lawn mowers and barbeque pits were no more than piles of rusted metal now, hulking in the darkness, home to God-knows-what. Rats probably. Rats are into s**t like that.
Hardware was next. It was getting dark, so I grabbed the nearest flashlight I could find and ripped open the casing with my knife. It seemed to be in decent condition; I popped a couple of batteries in and switched it on. The aisle was flooded with white light. It was too bright for the store; I’d scare everything off. I turned it off, stuck it and a dozen batteries in my backpack, and found another, smaller one. This one emitted dim yellow light--perfect. I flashed the beam over rows and rows of things in plastic casing, all perfectly preserved. “s**t, s**t, more s**t,” I muttered to myself. I didn’t need screwdrivers and drills and crap; I needed weapons and sources of light. Weapons, I figured, could come in many shapes and sizes--I nicked a nail gun and some ammunition, just in case--but if I wanted anything halfway decent I’d have to go elsewhere.
After passing about half a mile of paint buckets, I passed through the kid’s section. Pieces of bike littered the floor; the skeletons of their original forms were hanging precariously from the ceiling. Bright smiles like clown faces loomed from the darkness, the colors bleached and faded, leaving only peeling lines on the faces of dolls, plastic trucks and tractors, and action figures. The ghostly forms of naked Barbies watched me through dusty plastic cases, my flashlight shining eerily on their blank-eyed faces. I shuddered, and searched for my usual distraction: skateboards. I inspected each one I saw, briefly, decided that mine was much better, and moved on, my mind purposefully avoiding thoughts of the forgotten, forsaken toys lining the shelves, spilling onto the floor. I had nightmares about them coming after me--not like Toy Story or anything, more like Chucky the demon puppet.
Electronics. Nothing here was useful to me. Cameras--again, useless. What did I have to document? What could I take photos of? That had gotten old half a decade ago. What was the point? I could never get them developed. I could never have a place to put them. It was a waste of time. I passed DVDs and VHSs and wondered if they were considered beyond primitive now, if other people elsewhere used holograms now, virtual reality and teleportation and stuff from the Jetsons and Star Trek. I passed computers and wished to God that they would work for me, just for a few minutes, so I could access the Internet--so I could send a plea out there, tell someone what had happened to me, know what was going on, know what had happened to my family….
I ran out of that section and into the jewelry department. Cool. No nostalgia or fond memories here. I stopped, just to distract myself from depressing thoughts. Made a huge show of turning the glass case, examining the earrings and necklaces, pretending that there was someone helpful behind the counter, and a high-tech security system, and a lot of people so I wouldn’t feel so small and alone. I pretended that I was shopping for my girlfriend; I wanted to get her something special, maybe even pop the question. But then I sighed, and remembered that I could shatter the glass with the most pathetic of blows and never get caught, that I had no use for jewelry anyway, that I had no girlfriend and even if there were any girls around they wouldn’t want to be near me anyway.
This reminded me that it had been awhile since I’d shaved; my razor had broken and I wasn’t very good with just a knife. I swerved around the girl’s section, gagging at the faded pinks and blues and the completely revolting little characters on the fronts of the t-shirts, and explored the personal hygiene section. Deodorant--yep, that would come in handy. A pretty decent hand razor that wasn’t irrevocably rusty. Soap--shaving cream was useless when the foaming mechanism was rusted through. A towel that was only moldy and chewed away in one corner, which I sliced off with my knife.
While I searched around and viewed my hoard of self-cleaning supplies, I had put the flashlight ; the light wasn’t shining anywhere in particular, and this encouraged a few slimy little creatures of the night from hiding. It didn’t bother me much, except I hated not being able to make sudden moves or anything; if I did, the rats would bite me in self-defense, and God knew what sick forms of rabies those bastards had. One nudged against my boot; I shoved it to one side, grinding my teeth together. Then again, I was wearing the thickest jeans available to the public--maybe their teeth couldn’t penetrate and I could be free to bash the disgusting little creatures halfway to the Rio Grande.
I left the rats alone and continued on my way; they scurried to one side and watched me as I passed the appliances section, the pets section, the linens section, the little McDonald’s in the back for whatever reason. The deli, which reeked of rancid meat. I nabbed some cheese, wrapped in wax and plastic; that stuff’s supposed to be old and nasty anyway, right?
And then, at last, the food.
Decisions, decisions, decisions. Most of it was spoiled anyway, but I shopped around and nodded at the goods, checking expiration dates. 1998. 2002. 2005--s**t! So close! Chips were no good after three months or so, so I skimmed over them; boxes of cereal, with the same dusty smiles as the Barbie dolls, were pretty much the same, though I missed Lucky Charms so very, very much. The frozen foods smelled disgusting, as the freezers didn’t work very well anymore. There were bread crumbs on the floor, like a Hansel and Gretel type of trail to some rat’s nest of diseased rabid baby rats. I knew better than to follow.
Then I got lucky. Not only were there only vaguely rusted cans filled with the sort of food that never goes bad--preserved fruit, jellies, vegetables, soup without meat--as well as plastic containers with Spaghettios and Easy Mac, the kind that you really were supposed to microwave, but when I turned into the drinks aisle I found something that made my day.
Root beer! ******** YEAH! While boxes and cans were sitting there moldering away, their contents making the floor sticky and brown, the bottles of root beer stood there like the survivors of the Alamo. Did the Alamo even HAVE survivors? Who ******** cared? Some root beer had survived for nearly a decade, and there was no one around to claim it but me.
I didn’t bother unscrewing the cap; it was metal and rusted through, and if I touched it, not only would I get tetanus or something, but the rust would fall into the drink and make it disgusting. Instead, I held the bottle in my left hand and smashed the top off with my knife, pouring the soda into my mouth. It was flat, but so sweet and good that it was like liquor to me; I forgot everything for a moment, all the stress and loneliness and the weight of the world.
I took six bottles with me, threw in some of the other bottles for good measure--cream soda, Coke, Mexican soda in three different flavors--and grabbed a tough plastic gallon of water from the other end of the aisle. Then I continued my search. I found noodles and some candy, sugar clumped by the humidity though devoid of those tiny little ants, salt--which apparently never went bad and was a preservative, a few other spices and things, some boxers that were my size and weren’t holey and molded yet, and a raccoon for dinner.
The raccoon was actually the easiest part. Over the years I’d gotten so good that I could do it with one hand and one eye; spot it chewing on a loaf of stale bread, silently pull my pistol from its holster on my belt, and shot it between the eyes. It dropped with a tiny -fwump-. I prodded it with my foot, grabbed it by the tail, and stuck it in a plastic grocery bag. Maybe it was diseased. At this point, I didn’t know if I cared about dying or not.
~
And what do you know--it was dark outside when I left. You’d think it wouldn’t surprise me by then. But it did. You’d think it wouldn’t scare me. But it really, really did.
I pulled out the stronger flashlight like a light saber, gripping my knife in my other hand. Shivered as the wind picked up and moaned through the trees. “There’s nothing out there,” I thought, but I wasn’t fooling myself.
I told myself a hundred times not to run; there was too much stuff in my backpack, I would exhaust myself too easily, I couldn’t run, I’d have to walk. But then something howled in the distance, and I started to run anyway.
I used to have nightmares, where I was running through the woods, seeing bloated dead bodies all over the place, the ruins of civilization, rats and rodents and stray cats and dogs emerging from the gloom. In my dream, people were screaming all around me, women, children, grown men. Darkness was rolling over us all like a wave upon tiny grains of sand. The water was coming. The world was ending.
Every time I was alone in the woods at night, I felt like I was living that dream. I always ran, even though it made the nightmarish quality of the night even worse. Because let’s be honest here--if the Apocalypse was coming after YOU, would you walk…or run?
~
Sooo?
|
 |
Reply
