by Trevor Zaple
“Brothers and Sisters, listen carefully to the words that I will be saying to you. They are words that may not save your life, no my Brothers, my sisters, but they may save something even more important”. The voice paused, and radio crackle was all that they heard.
“I’m talking, of course, about your soul”, the voice continued, “your immortal spiritual contract with the Almighty Lord God of Hosts. Your shepherd in the darkness of the world, your bright and brilliant Saviour, He Who Walks Beside Unseen”.
Richard glanced back at Samantha, but she seemed enraptured with what she’d found, and seemed to have forgotten that Richard was there entirely.
“Brothers and Sisters, a great calamity has befallen us. The souls of many of our brethren have been called home to the glittering palaces of the Angelic Host, wherein dwells Our Lord. Many more, I’m sad to report, have had their chickens come home to roost. Brothers and Sisters, I speak of those whose souls have died in the full shadow of wickedness, and who will spend the rest of their days burning eternally in that old, old Lake of Fire. Satan’s been warming up his hot tub for a long, long time, friends, and now the godless swinger party of Eternity has begun. Only now, instead of the adultress taking a man in her mouth and another in her rancid, vile split, Brothers and Sisters, she is LICKING fire and TAKING fire! Oh, how it will burn for the rest of forever, my Brothers and Sisters! Detroit! Can I get a hallejujah!”
There was a thin chorus of hallejujah! from the background of the station, and Richard felt an ugly chill crawl languidly up his spine. He thought crazily of the phone call he had placed earlier to the store on Hamilton Mountain, and felt a cold fist clench in the pit of his stomach.
“Brothers and Sisters, the path to salvation is clear! It is too late for those that have already died but those that are left face a black and white choice! Either reject Satan and his temptations and lies, or join those unfortunate souls in the cookout of Hell! I am a humble, honest man, my Brothers and Sisters, and I would tell you no lies, oh no. Only the righteous shall enter the Kingdom of Heaven, it says in the Bible in plain workman English. None get to the Kingdom of Heaven except through me, no not one, is what it says my Brothers and Sisters.
What must you do, I hear you asking? Well, you must first accept the power and the glory of Jesus Christ into your hearts, my Brothers and Sisters! You must then reject the devices by which Satan operates in this world. For you know in your hearts what caused this sickness, this death to settle itself upon the world”.
I do? Richard thought, wanting to laugh. I only wish I knew.
“It was the gays, my Brothers and Sisters! The promiscuous women, and the men who fell to their temptation! The drug addicts who ran the clubs that allowed debauchery to reign supreme on their premises! The buggers and those who believed that theirs was a sickness of the body, and not a corruption of their immortal soul! The prostitutes, who made a mockery of the gift of continued life! The Liberals!”
“OK, this is just getting silly”, Richard decided aloud, hoping to get Samantha to shut it off. Even a strained silence was preferable to this. Samantha didn’t seem to hear him, though.
“These are all symptoms, though, Brothers and Sisters! They are despicable, vile, evil creations of the black mind of Satan, but they are not the ultimate cause of the fall of Man! No! What truly killed us, what caused us to turn our heads from the Voice of God and suckle at the sweet, silicone-filled Teat of Satan, was information! Information! Adam and Eve lived in bliss, my Brothers and Sisters, bliss in the Garden of God’s Great Eden. They knew nothing and wanted for nothing! Then Satan slithered his way in, and gave them the Curse of Information! They knew, Brothers and Sisters! Knew more than they should! Read it in Genesis, and you will see. If you KNOW, then you will BURN! Can I get a Hallejujah!”
“Hallejujah!” the ragged chorus on the station repeated, sounding sweaty and roused.
“Burn your books, and break your computers Brothers and Sisters! Burn all the information that you”. Samantha cut the mad preacher off mid-sentence, and then dropped the remote on the floor. It hit the hardwood with a clatter that caused Richard’s heart to jump two feet out of his chest.
“Wanna help me make dinner?” Samantha asked pertly, and went into the kitchen without bothering to wait for an answer.
Richard followed and discovered that her kitchen was just as small as her living room. It wasn’t quite what people termed a “galley” kitchen but it was definitely edging close to it. Samantha was rummaging through her cupboards, pulling out packages and boxes and sorting them into two piles. Richard stood awkwardly in the doorway, watching her do this. One pile was much bigger than the other, and it was full of battered rice packages and spice packets and cans of various vegetables. The pile on the left was mostly pasta, and canned pasta sauce.
“Spaghetti?” Richard asked.
“Mmmm” was all Samantha replied. Then, “look through the fridge for some fresh vegetables and stuff while I go get changed”. She squeezed past him without looking and left him alone in the kitchen.
The fridge was getting bare, Richard noted, but it did have a lone green pepper and some likely-looking mushrooms. He put those beside the pile of pasta ingredients and leaned against the stove. After what seemed like forever Samantha came back into the kitchen, having changed into a white halter top and a pair of jeans. Richard’s eyes widened and then he immediately began scratching his nose, trying to cover it up. Samantha apparently had some curves, underneath that green uniform.
“So, do you want to chop these while I get water boiling?” she asked, her voice tired and uncaring.
“Sure”, Richard replied, and sought out a largish knife from the block on the counter.
They made dinner in silence, with Richard doing all of the prep work and Samantha the actual cooking. There was no meat, but the sauce that she had chosen was a four-cheese blend and sounded like heaven to Richard, who had spent the last few weeks eating his mother’s store of frozen dinners. He’d stuck to crackers and biscuits for the first few days after she’d disappeared, and then, after slowly realizing that she was in all likelihood not returning, began to dig into her stores.
After everything was finished cooking they combined it into a large steel pot and brought it out into the living room. Samantha left and returned shortly with plates and utensils. She sat back in the loveseat and Richard reclaimed his spot on the couch.
“Do you want to watch a movie?” Samantha asked. “I’ve got a bunch of DVDs kicking around here”.
“Sure, that sounds fine” Richard replied. She gestured towards the pile of cases that lay beside the TV and then began dishing herself up a plate of food.
Richard pored through the DVDs for a few minutes, not really caring what was there. It seemed strange, after the events of the past few weeks, to be doing something as mundane as sitting down to eat and watch a movie with a pretty co-worker. Then again, he had tried to go about his business running the store as if nothing had changed in the world. As he chose a random DVD he concluded wryly that perhaps he didn’t have the right to determine what was strange anymore. Maybe everything was strange now.
“Sex and the City?” Samantha asked, half-confused and half-amused. Richard looked down at his hand and cursed silently.
“Sure, why not?” he covered. “I haven’t seen it yet, and there’s no time like the present, right?” Samantha just smiled mysteriously, nodded, and proceeded to feed the disc into the player.
They ate and watched the movie in silence. Outside, the sun set and darkness slowly replaced the light filtering through the curtains. About halfway through the movie, at a seemingly arbitrary point, Samantha pressed the pause button.
“Quietly”, she whispered to him. “To the window. Don’t move too much. Pull the curtains aside a little bit”.
Richard did as he was told. He crept up to the curtains and pulled them aside ever so slightly. Momentarily he wished that he had not.
The streetlight still shon
e out on the street, illuminating a varied collection of bloodied corpses. It was immediately apparent, even in the strange artificial light thrown off by the streetlamp, that not all of the blood was from the hemmhoraging that accompanied the sickness. Bullet wounds were evident on several of the corpses, especially those on the other side of the street. Some had only ragged, pulped remains where much of their heads had been. Some were missing their heads entirely.
The hospital that many of these gunshot corpses lay in front of was not the hospital that Richard remembered from the few times that he had been forced to go there. That hospital had been a mundane, almost boring place, rundown and needing a modern retrofit. This hospital was a jury-rigged fortress, barricaded and boarded with whatever must have been handy at the time. The entrances were blocked off by battered ambulances, some of which were riddled with bullet holes and scorch marks. Most of the windows, especially those near to the ground floor, were boarded over with a variety of planks, broken shipping skids, and metal plates that appeared as though they had been ripped wholesale from the medical equipment inside. Two of the windows had light issuing from behind their fortifications; the rest were distressingly dark and silent.
“Who the hell is in there?” Richard thought aloud. It was such a strange and foreign sight to him that he hadn’t realized that he had spoken the question until Samantha answered him.
“I don’t know”, she whispered back. She was very close to him, trying to look out the window as well, and her breath was hot on his neck. Richard’s breath quickened, and his heart began pounding maddeningly loud inside his rib cage.
“Doctors, maybe? But why wouldn’t they be trying to help those people?”
He felt Samantha shrug blankly beside him.
“Whoever is in there doesn’t want to catch it”, she answered simply. Richard stared across the street at the crazed parody of a hospital. It didn’t seem real. None of it seemed real.
“Probably not doctors, though”, Samantha continued, her voice now tickling his ear. “I heard that they were the first to die, after treating all of those first patients”.
“Who did you hear that from?”
“My boyfriend. He said that all the doctors were dead and no one knew what to do. The radio was saying that everything would be all right, that it was just a few days until they were going to deliver a vaccine, but my boyfriend said that he’d heard that all that was just bullshit”.
“What was your boyfriend’s name?” It was out before he could really think about it. Was. He cursed himself for his lack of tact.
“Doug”, she answered promptly. If she’d taken offence to his slip with the past tense, she didn’t show it.
“His mom was a nurse”, she supplied. “That’s why he knew about the doctors, and the vaccine. He said that on the fourth day after it all started, she showed up to work and none of the doctors had come in. The ones who had been there on duty were all dead. Most of the other nurses were dead too”.
“Jesus”. It was all he could think of to say.
“He hung up the phone and started making plans. Like reinforcing the door, and putting all the locks on. Getting a whole bunch of food. He went out to find some guns, even though I begged him to stay. He never came back”.
“I’m sorry”. It seemed horrifically inadequate.
She shrugged. “Whatever. He’s gone. My family’s gone. Your family’s gone. Everyone’s family’s gone”. Her voice hitched, and Richard looked over in alarm. Her shapely oval face was starting to scrunch up; she was crying. “City’s gone. Whole fucking country is gone. Maybe the whole world. Everyone’s dead”.
“Hey”, he said, and his throat closed up. He didn’t remember what he had been about to say. She was crying now, freely, and the sight of it erased any warm platitudes that he had been about to spout off.
“It can’t be as bad as all that, right?” he continued on lamely. She spun her face around to stare at him, eyes blazing.
“What the fuck do you think?” she grated at him. “Do you see very many people up and walking around? Do you see that street out there. Do you really see it? There’s like a hundred dead bodies in the street out there. Dead bodies. Now imagine the rest of the city, the parts you haven’t even seen yet. How many dead fucking bodies do you think are there?”
She left his side violently and threw herself back on to the loveseat. Her face turned resolutely to the television and didn’t move a millimetre. Richard shut the curtain and sat on the couch awkwardly. He looked at her for a minute or so, hoping that she would look over so that he could apologize. When she didn’t, he picked up the remote and started the movie back up.
He couldn’t concentrate on it. He hadn’t really wanted to see it in the first place. In a normal world, he thought, if a night was going like this it would probably best to just get up, say that you should get going, and just go. Now, though, what am I supposed to do? He had a mental image of the street outside, with the gunshot corpses piled up in the streets, and knew that going outside was simply not an option. Samantha hadn’t asked him to leave, so he was going to stay. Simple as that.
Presently he had to use the washroom. He knew where it was, thankfully, having seen it on his way in, so it eliminated the need to ask her a question and risk a glare or worse. He simply got up quietly and tried to be as quiet as possible on his way there.
After voiding his bladder, he spent some time staring at himself in the mirror. He looked alright on the surface, he knew; hair still staying put, clothes still on straight, bearing upright and intact. His eyes had a wild look, though, that went well with the speed of his heartbeat. You’re the manager he told himself sharply. She’s the worker. You’re in charge, don’t let her dictate the terms. He knew it was absolute crap. That relationship had ended the moment that they had left the store’s parking lot. Now they were just two random people thrown together by something that Richard still couldn’t feel as a cold reality. It was unnerving.
When he left the bathroom he was startled to see Samantha standing in the kitchen. She didn’t look angry anymore. She was half-looking at the floor, and there was a sorrowful expression playing around the edges of her face. Richard stood in the doorway and looked at her without speaking.
“I’m sorry” she began.
“I’m sorry too” Richard cut her off. “I should really learn to think before I say things”. He smiled ruefully. “Maybe it’s a manager thing”.
She smiled at that, a real smile that went all the way to her eyes. “I wasn’t really mad at you, I guess. I just don’t see how things can be any better”.
“Well, now I don’t know about that”, he replied warmly. “Except for this little spat tonight was going pretty well. All things considered”.
She laughed a little. “Yeah, I guess so. Tonight’s been pretty distracting, in the best way”.
They stood where they were, neither one talking, for a moment that was temporally brief but felt psychologically much longer.
“I have some wine stashed away”, Samantha said suddenly, mercifully breaking the silence. “Want some?”
“I’d love some” Richard replied, nodding emphatically. Samantha retrieved an opaque bottle of red wine from under the sink and a pair of dusty wine glasses from the cupboards over the stove. After a moment or so she found a corkscrew as well, and with a bit of effort popped the cork out of the bottleneck. The wine gurgled richly into the glasses and for a brief, nauseating moment Richard imagined that it was blood pouring out. He shook his head and gritted his teeth, and the image soon passed.
They took the wine back into the living room and resumed the movie. Samantha sat beside Richard, moving closer every few minutes until they were practically cuddling. Instinctively he put an arm around her, panicking slightly at the last moment about whether he was being too forward with her. She didn’t seem to mind, however. She nuzzled into his side after he did it, and sipped at her wine. Her closeness made him feel oddly nervous, as if he were doing something va
guely illegal and she was at any moment going to get up and tell him to leave, that she wasn’t like that. He sipped at the wine (rich, fruity, hints of blackberry) and tried to keep his mind on the movie and not the warm, curvy woman currently snuggling next to him.
He was shocked when he felt her hand caress the fly of his pants but, in a feat of superhuman will, tried valiantly to keep himself from showing it. His heart pounded even louder; it was now to the point that he could feel his ears throbbing in time to it. The wine and the shock combined to dry his mouth out. His breathing became shallow. He had all the usual responses he’d experienced in this sort of situation in the past—except the important one.
Her fingers traced him up and down for a minute and then she began to slowly, tantalizingly draw the zipper of his pants down. In a second his flaccid member was out, a respectable size to be sure but nowhere near the size that it was supposed to be right now. Her fingers were warm and her touch was gentle and sensual but still—nothing. Richard closed his eyes and tried to get himself into order.
Get it together, man was all he thought before he felt her shift her position lower. A second later he felt that familiar hot breath on his exposed sex, then her lips and tongue rolled over him. This obliterated all thought processes for an instant, and he leaned back to get more comfortable. After he did this, however, he realized that he still had no response. Samantha, to her credit, was trying everything that she could think of, and it was clear that she had some experience in the area, but it was to no avail. Nothing was stirring.
Presently she sat up. Her eyes were large, a deep, confused blue.
“Am I doing something wrong, Richard?” she asked, a slight tremble in her voice. Richard, he thought. I don’t think she’s ever called me by my name before.
“No, of course not,” he assured her smoothly.
“Are you gay? Some people said you were but I was never sure”.
She said it so matter-of-factly that Richard didn’t really have a chance to be shocked. He briefly wondered whom “some people” were, then dismissed the thought. They were probably dead anyway.