A World Slowed

by Rick Tippins

  The sun was high in the sky when Jared dismounted in front of his apartment complex. He wheeled the bicycle to the secure gate and punched in the code. Nothing happened; he re-entered the code, nothing.

  “Damn,” Jared swore out loud. The gate was controlled by some sort of electrical mechanism. He wheeled the bike around the building and found the gate across the parking area stood halfway open.

  “Score,” he exclaimed, rushing through the gap, pushing the bike to his lower-level apartment. The apartment smelled like rotten food. Jared opened the refrigerator and was nearly knocked off his feet by the stench that belched forth, enveloping him like a rancid fog.

  He staggered away from the disgusting array of smells flowing from his refrigerator. After nearly vomiting, Jared gathered himself, fleeing to the back of the apartment, where he grabbed a towel, wet it, and wrapped the fabric around his face before heading back to the kitchen.

  Halfway back, Jared stopped short. The water was working—the flipping water had run just like nothing was wrong. He made his way back to the small bathroom and turned the water on, seeing it flow out of the faucet. Jared slowly turned the hot water valve on and the cold water valve off. He waited and, there it came, hot water, not scalding hot, but hot enough.

  Jared slowly walked back towards the rancid kitchen, thinking about the water and the hot water. Water got to his house under pressure, not power, if he remembered correctly. Natural gas was also pushed to neighborhoods under pressure, but Jared was pretty sure there was an electrical component to the natural gas side. This meant Jared might soon not have hot water and would be taking cold showers. He didn’t much like the thought of that, deciding to toss the contents of the refrigerator and then take a long hot shower.

  Gagging and swearing, he dragged everything from his refrigerator and tossed it out in a dumpster. He returned to the apartment and, using some towels and hot water, cleaned the inside of the appliance. Jared removed the towel from around his face, looked at it, then threw it out as well.

  After the hazmat cleanup, Jared stripped and took a long hot shower; the water felt like it was actually peeling away all the stresses from the previous couple of days. The water poured down his back and he enjoyed its warmth, hoping it would last.

  The shower proved to help clear his head as he thought back over the last three days, mulling over what he’d seen, heard and come across. He slept in his car, slept under a bridge with a bum, and hadn’t had anything substantive to eat in seventy-two hours. He’d seen a dead woman and taken a bicycle from the police evidence locker at the behest of a cop. He either walked or rode all the way home from work, which was a first. Come to think of it, there had been several firsts during the last three days.

  Jared finished showering, changed into sweats, and laid down on his bed, where his head swam with everything going on outside his apartment. Looters, dead bodies, what the hell happened? Jared drifted off into possibly the deepest sleep he’d ever had in his life.

  Jared’s eyes flashed open as he came out of his comatose slumber, sitting upright in the darkness, senses searching for any sign of danger. Slowly he brought his breathing under control his eyes darting around the dark room. He couldn’t see a thing. The darkness was so absolute, Jared could almost feel its touch.

  He got out of bed, feeling his way to the front room, where he drew back the curtains, and examined the surrounding area. There was just enough ambient light to allow Jared to see the courtyard and some of the street. He knelt in front of the window, waiting as his eyes adjusted to the lack of light. He stared up into the sky and thought how utterly lightless the world was without electricity. Once his eyes adjusted, Jared stood and strode out the front door into the courtyard.

  Jared had no idea what time it was as he walked out to the street and surveyed the neighborhood. Out of the darkness came the sound of breaking glass and scuttling feet. Jared crouched, searching frantically for the source of the disturbance. He saw nothing as the night returned to its quiet normality. In the distance, gunshots erupted—that was all Jared had to hear. He turned and ran to his apartment, slamming and locking the door behind him. He glanced at the front door to ensure the deadbolt was locked. It was, which helped him relax about one hundredth of a percent.

  All around Jared, people huddled in their apartments, just as bewildered as he was. Down the road, looters moved in and out of businesses, taking items of perceived value. One man carried a sixty-inch television on his back, struggling down the road, weaving in and out of the deserted vehicles on his way home, laden with an object that at the moment and probably the foreseeable future was about as useful as nuts on a nun. Family men and women looted food and water for their families, while younger and single folk looted items they thought were of value. Little did they know few material items would be of any value in the coming months, years, and most likely decades.

  Jared sat in the flickering light of a single small candle only the sound of his breathing disturbing the stillness of the little apartment. He stared at his coffee table then reached for a photo album lying on the lower shelf. His mother had made the album and given it to him a couple of Christmases ago. It was a pictorial memorialization of his entire life.

  He thumbed the album open and stared at pictures of himself as a young boy, his father and mother always a constant in the collage of photographs chronicling his adolescence. In one picture, his father stood next to him, Jared proudly holding up a small trout while his father’s face beamed with fatherly pride. There were a great many pictures of projects he’d created throughout his youth. There was the fabled bed maker, which would have worked if it had only been properly funded. Then there was the quad toothbrush, whose only flaw was every mouth was a different size, so mass production never got off the ground.

  There were more pictures of him and his mother, her helping him get ready for the prom, which assuredly had caused her to cry herself to sleep since her perfect child was attending the event alone. Although he tried, he knew she was hurt and, even though he truly didn’t care or have the time to find a date, his mother would do what moms do and, when her expectations weren’t met, she would suffer emotionally. Jared felt bad about the whole experience, but there had truly been nothing he could have done. He doubted he could even have found a girl to go with him. Had his mother known he couldn’t get a girl to attend the prom, it would have affected her much worse than his excuse about not having the time to find a date.

  He continued leafing through the book until he came upon a picture of Monica and himself standing at his college campus. His parents had visited from Florida and wanted to see where he attended school. Monica had come bouncing across the campus when she spied Jared with his parents and charmed the ever-loving pants off not only his father, but his mother as well. Jared remembered watching it happen and knowing full well he was going to be asked about this vivacious young woman for weeks to come. His mother did not disappoint. Monica had hardly cleared earshot when his mother turned on him and began an interrogation any American water-boarding CIA agent would have been proud of.

  After the initial line of direct questions, which went unanswered, his mother had predictably shifted gears and began her motherly cajoling in an effort to extract the coveted information regarding this brilliantly entertaining young woman. In the end, Jared assured her, Monica was just a school friend whom he worked on projects with from time to time. His father had finally come to his rescue by gently suggesting his mother leave the lad alone. With a sideways glance, as if she wasn’t done with the matter, his mother had dropped the Monica interrogation.

  Jared felt suddenly very alone, holding the album, gazing at the pictures of Monica and his parents. He hadn’t talked to Monica in a long time and only talked to his mother once every few weeks. He was so busy he rarely took her calls and, when she would text him to say she loved and missed him, he usually only replied with a short one-sentence text. Now, feeling lonely, he also felt guilty for not having taken the time t
o call her back and ask about his father and their lives in Florida.

  He’d never even been to their new house. Jared missed his parents at the moment like he’d never missed anything or anyone in his entire life. He even found himself missing Monica, wondering where she was and what she was doing. Jared’s longing turned to anger as he realized how utterly this little power-outage thing had cut him off from the only people in the world who even remotely mattered to him.

  The following morning Jared woke, cleaned his face, and combed his hair. This part of his day felt as normal as any other day. It wasn’t till he walked into the front of the apartment, would have turned the TV on, and grabbed something from the refrigerator that the gravity of his situation struck him with the force of a speeding bulldozer. Jared stood grim faced, chest heaving, the emotions cascading through him like a wild river. His legs weakened and he slumped to the floor, eyes moistening in preparation for the cry of his life. Jared did not consider himself a tough guy and had not cultivated a hardened guise by growing a beard and adopting some swarthy style of walk like many other young men did these days. On the flip side, he’d never been a sensitive guy either; therefore, he found little reason to be upset enough to cry much. He was simply himself and that was fine with him.

  Now it was different. Jared started with clinched eyes, fighting the sensation in his chest, throat and head, but then it took control and he sobbed. Jared wept like never before. He moaned, he cried out to his mother, and then he bawled some more. He lay in a heap on the floor of his tiny apartment, face soaked in tears, arms crossed, rocking back and forth, riding out the emotional hurricane that had him in its clutches.

  After an hour, Jared rose, exhausted and disheveled. He walked back to the bathroom, where he, again, combed his hair, washed his face, and then returned to the front of his apartment. He ate cold cereal with water, after which he devoured an apple. He was too wrung out to be upset, lonely or even scared. He just sat, ate and stared at the wall. Overwrought as he was, Jared had just enough of his wits to know that the cold cereal and water sucked a lot of ass in the taste department. He’d have to go out and find some food that didn’t make him want to vomit, and he’d have to do it sooner than later. He’d thrown most of the food in his possession into a dumpster the previous day.

  Chapter Ten

  The weather was warm and clear, blues skies marred only by the still-wafting smoke from fires content with burning themselves out in the absence of pretty much any and all first responders.

  Jared rode the evidence bike up to the front of a supermarket and stopped. The store was dark inside, darker than he would have expected, his current self still clinging to his past self and those expectations from just a couple of days ago. He leaned the bike against a concrete pillar and stepped a few feet inside the front doors.

  The place smelled awful and the store was in shambles. The area just inside the business and around the checkout stands was almost impassable due to debris and overturned food racks. Jared scrutinized the dark interior, allowing his eyes to adjust, all the while trying not to gag as the smell of decaying food bombarded his senses. He slowly pulled his shirt up over his nose and ventured deeper inside the structure. He carried two shopping sacks, intending to fill them with food, water and whatever else he thought he might need in the coming days. Next he planned on leaving a note with his credit card information at the manager’s office in order to keep his conscience clear.

  Jared began filling the sacks with nonperishable food items. He grabbed cold cereal boxes, dried fruit, and mixed nuts. When he came to the dairy department, he nearly vomited. Someone had opened the glass doors, realized the milk had spoiled, and then tore all the cartons of milk out of the refrigerator, leaving them broken and leaking on the store floor. Jared quickly moved past this area in search of other foods he could take without fear of spoiling. The store had been picked through already, but there was a fair amount of usable food left in the aisles, not all of it on the shelves, but Jared didn’t really care at this point. While still in the rear of the store, Jared was about finished when he froze, adrenalin pouring into his bloodstream to the point of chest pain.

  A man about twenty-five stood in the dark doorway leading to the storage area in the back of the store. He was about six feet tall and naturally thick, but looked a little unhealthy. Jared thought he had the look of a drug addict, the man’s eyes and sallow face being the primary indicators.

  “You’re in my fucking store, fuck-face,” the man hissed out of the darkness.

  Jared stood frozen; he could not move. He thought about moving, running mostly, but he was actually frozen with fear. Part of his brain was thinking rationally and was amazed by his inability to move, while the other side of his brain had merely shut down, stopped working, unable to command muscles to engage, to flee, escape this threat.

  Jared heard the scuff of feet behind him and finally was able to engage his neck muscles, turning in time to see two equally insalubrious men moving up an aisle to his rear.

  Jared dropped the sacks. “I’ll leave; I didn’t know you guys were here.”

  The first man smiled, showing his yellowish teeth. “Don’t work like that, man. You gotta pay us if you come in here.”

  Jared held out his hands. “I’m here ’cause I don’t have anything. What do you want me to pay with?”

  The three men moved closer. Jared stood still, letting it happen. He knew deep down in some hidden and long-suppressed primal part of his brain that he should be doing something, anything to preserve his well-being, but he didn’t. He stood fast until one of the men stepped forward, striking him in the head from behind. Jared sprawled forward, landing hard on the cold floor. The first man caught him in the shoulder with a vicious kick that glanced off his shoulder and the side of his head, nearly taking his ear off.

  Jared instinctively curled into a ball and covered his face and head the best he could as the punches and kicks rained down from above. The beating lasted roughly thirty seconds before the men transitioned from beating to searching Jared’s pockets, grocery sacks and waistband. One man took his wallet and rifled through its contents, tossing them over his shoulder and tearing the wallet in half before throwing it violently at Jared.

  “Get the fuck out. Next time I see you, I’ll kill you,” the first man roared, his chest heaving from the exertion of the beating he’d just administered.

  Jared scrambled to his feet, staggering out the front doors, and burst out of the store into the bright sunny day, the light hurting his eyes. He grabbed the bike but stopped short when he heard the man behind him.

  “Leave the bike, shit stain.”

  Jared dropped the bike and ran—he ran for his life, running the entire mile home. He stumbled through the half-open gate, making his way to his apartment. Once inside, he drew the curtains and fell onto his couch, panting and bleeding. He lay on the couch for a long while, thinking about what had just happened and how surreal the event seemed.

  The initial blow from behind hadn’t even really hurt. His knee hurt more from the fall than any other wound he received during his failed shopping spree. The worst part had been being scared. The beating hadn’t been that bad although he could feel the soreness starting to creep into his body, and knew he was going to hurt like hell in the days to come.

  After a bit, Jared hauled himself up off the couch, making his way into the bathroom where he swallowed several ibuprofen, chasing them with water he palmed from the sink’s faucet. Jared thought of all the hurdles that lay ahead of him as he washed the clotted blood from his eyebrows, hair and face.

  After cleaning his face, he bent over the bathroom sink allowing the water to cascade through his blood-soaked hair, chilling him to the bone. He waited for the water to warm up and, when it didn’t, he realized the hot water was gone and wasn’t coming back. Slowly, he pulled his head from under the faucet, wrung as much of the cold water out of his locks as he could, then turned the faucet handle to the off position. No fu
cking hot water isn’t gonna kill me, but it’s going to sure make showers miserable, he thought.

  Back out on the couch, Jared started thinking about his predicament and how to problem solve the issues associated with the mess. No power—he didn’t really have an answer for that, so he simply removed it from the list of problems he would attack. No food was going to be a big issue, especially with lunatics like the guys he’d met earlier in the day claiming stake to the stores. Jared came up with two approaches to the issue. Avoid them or deal with them. He liked the avoid-them approach best, but wasn’t sure it was feasible.

  After several long minutes of thought, Jared stood, chose the largest wall in his tiny apartment, and tore every picture off it, tossing them into a corner. Next he took a black marker and began charting out what had happened and what he was going to do. He wrote the date and approximate time of the first event and everything he’d seen. He made a list of all the services missing, then added sublists of the effects the lack of these services had caused so far.

  Police, missing; he’d actually seen what he thought was the last of the San Carlos cops packing up and going home. This was going to cause all sorts of problems, one of which he had experienced firsthand. His list memorialized the number of days since the event and how society was deteriorating as the days passed. In the end, Jared knew he had to leave his home and move east into the country, where he would try to find work on a farm just so he could eat. He figured the sooner he got out east, the less competition he would have for work. Although he had been an engineer geek, he had enjoyed and subsequently paid attention to some of his history classes. He learned about the Great Depression and how valuable work was; it allowed a person to make a living. Without work, families would go hungry, lose their homes, and much worse.