by Trevor Zaple
He scavenged a plate from a cupboard and brought his breakfast out to the glass table in the living room. He sat and ate mechanically, not really tasting any of it. He kept replaying the salient points in Samantha’s letter repeatedly in his head. He chewed on her characterization of him as an uncaring, craven asshole. It couldn’t possibly be true, he assured himself. He was simply a rational, self-interested individual. Reasonable people would have seen that there was no help for those women. Rational actors would have weighed the options and chosen to save themselves; those other women made the choice to be there, after all. He nodded over the final few bites on his plate. That was it, in the end. They made their choice, they had to act on their own, or live with the consequences. He wasn’t beholden to anyone. He owed those women nothing.
With this carefully constructed perspective kept firmly in mind, he began to search the house for the supplies that he thought would be necessary for the continuation of his journey. As he did so, he realized that he no longer really had a destination for “his journey”. He and Samantha had been planning on walking up to the Brock campus, and climbing the tower. As he made his way down the stairs into the house’s basement, he decided that the original goal was as good as any. Even if he didn’t find anyone on the campus, he would be able to see the entire region from the top of the tower. It would allow him to see if there were any large-scale gatherings of people, some sort of survivor’s camp that he might have otherwise missed.
The basement was obviously the more lived-in area of the house, and was littered with expensive consumer electronics that, until just recently, would have been worth several thousand dollars. He fingered it with a wry expression and then realized that, since Samantha had left her messenger bag behind, he was now in possession of her tablet. THAT tablet, he amended ruefully in his mind. She had been so insistent on taking it with her, and then had left it behind in the end. He poked around some of the goods in the basement and ended up finding one just like it.
He also found a tall backpack that had originally been meant to hold a full laptop and accessories. He checked the inside of the backpack and decided that it would suit his purposes. He also found a pair of flashlights similar to those that Samantha had absconded with. He put them into his newfound knapsack but avoided taking any of the other electronics with him.
He returned upstairs and packed every last canned good that he could find into the knapsack, as well as some clothing that he had found in the dresser of an upstairs bedroom. One of the men who had lived in the house before the plague had feet that were similarly sized to his, so he took an extra pair of running shoes as well. He found a blanket in a linen closet and folded it up as small as he could; he figured that there would be a use for it at some point. He emptied out the messenger bag and divided the contents into things that he would pack and things that he would leave behind in the house. He wavered on Samantha’s tablet and ended up packing it; he couldn’t find it in himself to throw the thing away, despite its apparent uselessness and the way that Samantha had left him.
After packing he left the house, making sure to shut the door firmly behind him. His mind was still a bit foggy but his spirits were finally coming up. He had a fairly good idea as to how to get to the university campus from where he was, as long as he was correct as to where he actually was. There was a bit of a jaunt to his step as he walked, and he almost found himself whistling as he went.
The street led around a few curves and out onto what seemed like a blind intersection. He stood in the T-junction and marvelled over it, wondering how many accidents must have happened around the blind curve he found himself standing in. He took the street leading right and kept to the sidewalks, more as a force of habit than anything else. The traffic snarls weren’t terrible here, but it still felt eerie getting too close to any of the wrecks. He had seen enough corpses to last himself a lifetime, although he was blackly certain that he had only begun to experience the amount of death that surrounded him.
He came to another broad intersection and took it going left; he was now in familiar territory and knew where he was going. He’d been up this way a few times before; if deliveries or tech support needed to happen right away he would usually just have taken them himself. He’d been up to the university on any number of occasions, and the route was the same, albeit with the obvious difference. Trash blew through the street: red solo cups, plastic bags, the regular detritus of an area populated mainly by students. Big, wide, multi-residential houses lined either side of the road as it gently sloped up. The sun was hot and by the time he reached the edge of the big hill that lead to the top of the escarpment, he had already broken a sweat. He paused on the big steel railing that curved around the edge of the street to rest before attempting the climb. He spied a dog rooting through something in a backyard a few houses down; he began to climb the hill quickly after, not wanting another encounter with a wandering dog pack.
The sidewalk that curved along the edge of the road was shaded by a heavy growth of trees; in the light of the steadily strengthening morning the road seemed to cut through a primeval forest that filtered through a fey, hazy light. He felt as though he had stepped out of the depleted, tired, plague-ridden world and into something at once more alive than anything he’d ever seen. The feeling did not last long; when he reached the top of the hill there were two corpses lying in the middle of the road, both of them with the tell-tale exsanguinations that marked them as plague victims. He stepped gently around them and tried to get his bearings while he kept walking.
Everything seemed much bigger than he remembered; the university’s buildings seemed to massively dwarf him, even as far away as they were. He clutched at his gun as though it were a ward, staring wildly at everything. There was no overt movement anywhere, but there was plenty of sly, secret movement flitting in the corners of his eyes. He cringed from every perceived motion, every gust of wind that blew scattered garbage across the street. He made a hurried, uneven path across the entryway and parking lot that sprawled out in front of the university complex. As he approached one of the entrances he made an all-out dash, paranoia driving him like a whipped dog chasing the dark, cool interior as a steeple. He dove into the shadowed corner beside the covered entryway and cowered, waiting for his unseen pursuers to catch up and slaughter him.
No one came, of course, and in time he slowly rose and tried the door. It was unlocked, thankfully, and he slipped into the dim interior with a gladness that was near religious. He walked softly into the hallways of the university. The air was musty, but largely free of the smell of rotted flesh, coppery blood, and rich, wet decay that had permeated the outside world. He gulped it in, glad of it despite its inherent staleness. He felt as though he were inhaling pure oxygen; there was a giddy lightness to his head. He began to run through the corridors, jogging at first but soon flat-out running, and then sprinting. He took corners with utter abandon, nearly wiping out several times but grinning like a madman every time. He moved from the cramped, dingy classrooms holding the math and computer science classrooms and moved into the large, wide-mouthed lecture halls that held the humanities students. The only light to guide him was that which came in through the dirty, streaked windows. He ran up an access ramp and began singing, some nonsense pop song that his long years in retail had scratched into his soul. He sang what he knew of it at the top of his lungs, bounding up the ramp with long strides. He rested by the shuttered coffee shop at the top of the ramp and looked around to see if there were some way of getting into the shop – it was just a little Tim Hortons stand and it couldn’t have been sealed too securely. He couldn’t find a way, however, and grew bored after a few minutes of trying. Somewhat subdued, he walked on, ignoring the library on his left, and made his way towards the exit.
Outside once more, he found himself in a large courtyard dominated by the entryway to the tower. There were a couple of bodies here, violating that feeling of safety he’d built up inside of the academic complex. He stared at them mut
ely for quite some time, feeling the heat of the day in a vague fashion, protected from the full glare of the sun by the broad stone walkway that connected the upper levels of the two buildings flanking the tower. He watched a bevy of flies circle and land on them; they would be working up quite a boil of maggots soon.
He grew apathetic to them after a time and walked over them without looking down. The entrance to the tower was unlocked as well, and as he walked into its musty, swirling dim interior he thanked whatever nameless administrator or maintenance worker had decided that locking up wouldn’t be worth the trouble. He made sure to rectify the mistake; locking up would give him a sense of security, as long as the tower was empty. He looked around idly, noting the dust that lay thickly on everything in sight. He thought that there might not have been anyone in the building in days – maybe even a week.
He poked around the ground floor and found nothing of interest. The elevators still functioned and so he took them up to each floor in succession, looking around for signs of life or just anything that might alleviate his concerned boredom. The administrative floors were nothing but computer equipment and paperwork, which Richard scattered around messily before heading further up into the tower. The top floors were all one big library, full of some of the most random, incomprehensible books he’d ever seen. The stacks seemed full of bound copies of masters and doctoral theses on any number of obscure topics. He picked out a folio on the Scottish ancestry of the founders of some small town in the west end of Ontario. He flipped through a few pages before dropping it to the floor. The smell of the books was dry and somehow comforting, even if it all seemed like so much useless knowledge. He gazed around dully and wondered how long it would be before all of it would fade in human memory into a mass of indecipherable scrawlings.
With this gloomy thought in mind he took the elevator up to the top floor. It was just as devoid of life as the rest of the tower, and was just as filled with the bric-a-brac of a world that had violently died. He passed through a series of random stacks in order to determine that he was alone; when he satisfied himself, he went over to the side of the tower that faced out to the west, overlooking the city.
He camped at that window for three days, eating listlessly from his store of canned goods, drinking the bottles of water that had been in good supply on the administrative floors, and watching the city for any signs of life. He flipped through any number of dry papers, reading over pages that rolled on into meaningless paragraphs that began to bear only the slightest resemblance to the English language. He read idly of the original founding business of the city; the vagaries of the early salt trade through southern Ontario; the religious aspects of the massacre in Lucan; the usage of Chinese migrant labour as an othering presence in the development of Canada; and other subjects that he would never have been interested in and, truth be told, he still wasn’t interested in. On the second day he read a ponderous tome on the sexual habits of Depression-era women, and ended up masturbating bitterly while staring out of the window. He watched the city and came joylessly, thinking of Samantha’s warm, pliable curves and gritting his teeth. He fell into a black rage afterwards and decimated an entire row of books, ripping them from their peaceful positions and tearing the pages out with a certain dark glee. After making his way to the end of the row he threw himself onto the pile of torn paper and sprawled out into sleep, naked from the waist down.
He was awoken by a loud thump, like a bass drum being struck nearby. He arose cautiously and crawled across the paper-strewn floor, unsure of what he’d heard. There was another deep thwump from somewhere in the distance, and he paused in his crawling to see what would happen. The sound came again, louder this time, and there was a tiny flare reflected in what he thought of as his ‘sitting window’. He got to his feet, feeling somewhat foolish for having crawled, and walked nonchalantly to the cool window pane.
He saw a large fireball blossoming from within the city, a lurid orange glow radiating from it. It seemed to have obliterated an entire neighbourhood of the city; after some calculation he realized that it was the area of town where the hospital, and Samantha’s old apartment had been. They were definitely gone now, devoured by the rapidly encroaching fire spreading out from the ground zero of the explosion. Richard stared at it, wondering what had happened. There was a gas station in that area, he remembered; something must have set the volatile gasoline underneath the place to explode. He tried to think of something natural that would have caused such an explosion. Had it been a lightning strike, perhaps? He dismissed the idea; lightning would have struck something much taller than the gas station. One of the defenders of the hospital must have been trying to do something clever at the gas station. Too clever, by the looks of it. He watched the fire spread out from the original area, engulfing the city block by block. He judged the distance between the flames and the bar district, wondering if Samantha had succeeded or failed. It wouldn’t matter after a while, he saw; the whole downtown would be aflame before too long. He eventually fell asleep in the flickering glow as it was reflected in the window, and dreamt of the fireplace roaring before Christmas Eve when he was a child.
When he awoke in the morning the fire was still raging; it had spread out over half the city and the smoke that billowed up was blocking out the sun. He could hear the crackling rage of the burning buildings now, like paper crumpling across the room, and he slowly tracked down his pants. Putting them on, he kept an eye on the extent of the flames. They were expanding rapidly, too rapidly for his comfort. He would have to leave, he decided. By the time he made his way down the stairs and out of the university, the flames could well have worked their way to the edge of the escarpment. He gathered up what belongings he could, threw them into the messenger bag, and threw it over his shoulder. He felt Samantha’s tablet slam into his ribs and it was as a spur into a horse’s flanks. He ran from the tower as though all of the hounds of hell were arrayed against him, into a shapeless morning that held no more promise than the expressionless smudge of the smoke-clogged sky.
PART TWO:
THE FAITHLESS ELECTOR
“There is no work, however vile or sordid, that does not glisten before God”
-John Calvin
ONE
The world was a drained bottle of wine, and Richard Adams was the grit remaining at the bottom. True to form, he rattled around that vast emptiness soaked completely in alcohol.
He wandered the deserted rural roads without care, drinking jugs of cheap wine directly from the spout and raving wildly to the birds and animals that he met along the way. The more he drank, the less sense he made to himself. The less sense he made to himself, the more he spoke, trying in vain to come around full circle and make sense to himself again. The problem with his various attempts at this, of course, was that the amount of wine he was swilling necessitated a complete lack of sense. It was a vicious circle, and there was no getting out of it.
He would find farmhouses, set back from the rough roads and mouldering dreamily beneath the late-summer haze of humidity. Many of them were boarded up, like the stores in that far-gone city, but he hadn’t found a farmhouse yet that had been boarded up so tightly that he couldn’t make his way into it. The alcohol helped; he tore at the boards with a wild force that he would never have attempted sober. The interior of most of them were dark, cool, and musty; they were inevitably great stores of non-perishable foods as well. He would stay there for a night, two at the most, and then begin his ramble again. He couldn’t stand to stay in the same place for more than two nights; he would begin to feel a deep-seated itch grow in his feet and crawl up his body. He would begin to shake and twitch, and feel tiny, hook-footed insects crawl around his arms and legs. It was like the DTs, or so he imagined, except that he was at no time deprived of alcohol. He scavenged wine whenever he found it – red when he could, white if he had to. Just in case of emergency he kept two small twenty-six ounce bottles buried at the bottom of his knapsack, one of vodka and one of gin. He still dislike
d both types of spirits but knew the need to have it. Even in his soused state he could vaguely plan ahead.
Sometimes there were farmhouses that weren’t boarded up, and Richard was always very careful around these places. Many of them were simply places where the family had fallen sick and died before they could board the house up and flee. These were bad, especially when they were the houses belonging to animal farming operations. The houses would stink of human shit and death; the barn complexes would hold an unholy stench of masses of rotting animals mixed with their impacted feces. Out of a sort of black curiosity he had decided, at one of these farms, to investigate. He’d gotten to within six feet of the entry doors before he’d fallen to his knees and vomited for two minutes straight. The smell was worse than anything he could have ever imagined existing.
Strung along his chaotic walking route were small towns, most of which looked similar to the point of deeply confusing Richard’s sense of direction. These sad gatherings of houses and businesses seemed as though they’d been empty for decades, rather than weeks. On the streets of these towns decorum still held; those who counted amongst the dead (whom, it seemed to Richard, must number all of them) had hidden themselves before the final, bloody seizures. Any survivors must have blown town long before, or had hidden themselves when they had heard his cracked, soupy ramblings echoing through the empty streets. In each of these towns he would stand in a central intersection, sometimes the only part of town with street lights, and scream. He would weep, and plead with the unseen that he knew lurked just out of eye sight. He would cry out for them, curse their continued silence, and beg them to consider him rationally. He wasn’t such a bad guy, he stated over and over again. He didn’t murder people, didn’t rob them and then leave them for dead. He just looked out for himself. Was that so wrong, he pleaded before that invisible crowd of long-departed judges? The wind, when it deigned to blow, was his only response.