SelectionEvent (2ed)

  ....

  Still, it continued to rain. Between naps, Isha and Mona sat at the windows through the day and watched it pour.

  He would not starve — the food situation was well under control — but if the rain continued, he started thinking, they could drown.

  Four days of heavy rain sheeted the entire neighborhood with water. Only the taller sturdier weeds stuck above the surface. Bodies of larger animals now were occasionally swept down the street.

  The evening of the seventh day of rain, he heard Isha barking madly at something she had seen through the front window.

  Martin took the shotgun from where he kept it beside the front door and went out to the wrought iron gate to check. Casually wading down the street were two full-sized hippos and one baby, although it probably weighed five or six hundred pounds. The water barely came up to their short knees, and as they moved along, they lowered their broad snouts and chomped and snorted through the water. None of them looked in Martin's direction. He touched Isha and she ceased barking and growled tensely.

  “It's all right. When you see something on two legs, that's when you to raise hell.”

  Later in the day, Martin found himself, for the first time, with nothing that needed doing. He'd cleaned out the house, removing everything unnecessary — most of the lamps, replacing them with candles or the kerosene lanterns he'd scavenged from surrounding houses. He'd emptied the bedroom he presumed belonged to the family teenager and turned it into an extensive pantry which contained food and supplies from the surrounding houses. And he'd run a line from the generator into the house for the refrigerator and a couple of lights. After that, it seemed like there there was nothing to do.

  Out of boredom, he plugged a movie player into a live outlet and put in one of the family's movies. It was a film he remembered seeing once several years before, a complex story about a private investigator who starts out looking into a husband's infidelity and ends up uncovering a grand scheme about wealthy southern Californians stealing land and water rights from farmers. It might as well have been about stealing sheep in Ethiopia.

  It was an artifact from a gone world. Money and power were what people were concerned about back then. With both feet braced in their society of laws and traditions, money and power was what they used to manipulate each other to accumulate more money and power. Now it all seemed very strange, and it wasn't even particularly entertaining. It was like a specimen of extinct nastiness spread on a glass slide for his examination.

  He popped out the disk and put in another, this one an adventure about a man and a woman who were thrown together, didn't like each other, but were destined to fall in love. At their first kiss, he turned it off.

  He had been too busy to think much about being alone, but this, now, had reminded him of Delana and the last time he had seen her, when they had said goodbye, not on particularly good terms. He had stood in front of her, holding her hands in his and had kissed her once, lightly. She had been indifferent and a bit uncomfortable. Of course, they agreed that they would think of each other and reevaluate their futures when his isolation experiment was over — but the world had changed on them and his isolation experiment would never be over. Would it? Would there ever be anyone he would love again?

  He lay on the sofa, the rain drumming on the roof and the air in the house damp and still, and without prelude, he wept — for himself, for Delana, for what he had lost and might never have again, for his parents, for the dead woman in Curtiz' bathroom, for everything he'd put off that he'd never get the chance to do, and for everyone, finally, that he would never see again.

  How many times, in how many ways, would he have to say goodbye, goodbye, goodbye to the old world?

  After a while, he slept, and when he awakened, Isha had curled up at his feet and Mona slept in a ball against his side. His two remaining friends kept him warm in the cold house, and for this he was thankful.

  He lay there and listened to the rain pouring through the downspouts and wondered how long it would be before he began searching for others.

  Not long, he bet himself.

  ....

  The next morning, the sun rose into a nearly blue sky, the clearest sky Martin had seen. The rain had stopped, and crows flew high overhead, so high they looked like black dashes.

  The air warmed early and became muggy, and out in the street, the water began to flow away. By noon, the middle of the road was above the water, and the birds came out. Thousands of them landed on exposed islands of dirt and pecked at bugs and worms... blackbirds, sparrows, finches, starlings, and on the peaks of the roofs, huge glossy crows strutted and cawed at the world.

  Martin fixed himself lunch and coffee and went outside the front gate to watch. A pack of wet dogs galloped yapping down the street, scattering shrieking birds everywhere. They ignored Martin and seemed to be on their way to nowhere in particular, bumping each other and nipping at each other's legs as they ran. As soon as they were out of sight, the birds came back from the trees and resumed their noisy feeding. But now along with the smaller birds had appeared several gray and white geese.

  Considering how humankind had populated beyond the limits of the earth's capacity and had now become nearly extinct, there was a lot of room for other species to pick out their own spaces.

  Later in the day, he drove to a few electronics stores to find himself a battery-operated shortwave radio. He didn't know anything about broadcasting, but he wanted to listen for others. Simply knowing that people existed somewhere would lighten his loneliness, even if they were on another continent. And if there was someone out there, then he could figure out how to answer back.

  Finding the radio was not difficult, and within an hour and a half, it was in the seat beside him and he was on his way to Arden Park, to climb the outcropping again.

  There were two things he wanted to do while up there. First, above most of the buildings of the city, he wanted to tune slowly through the frequencies, however long it took — AM, FM, and shortwave, listening carefully for any voices. Second, when night had fallen, he wanted to look across the city for lights. Now that the power was off, any lights would be a sign of other survivors. But if he did see a light, he certainly wasn't going to drive straight for it, honking and yelling that he was a friend. Not after his last experience. He would approach cautiously.

  He pulled out the long whip antenna and began. The AM band was nothing but static. And there was nothing on FM. Then, slowly, for the next hour, he tuned up through all the shortwave frequencies and back down again. Twice he thought he heard something, but double-checking revealed only white noise. Once more he went through the AM band, hoping and hoping.

  There was nothing there.

  Martin pushed the antenna back into the radio and touched the power switch. The lighted indicator went dark. He gazed sadly at it. So much for that. He knew that at different times of the day different shortwave frequencies carried better than at other times, so he would try again tomorrow. But it wasn't promising.

  He turned his attention to the city around him. Wherever he looked, there was not a single spark of light. Perhaps he was now alone in the city. The only lights were above him, the fuzzy glow of a few bright stars through the hazy atmosphere. He wished he had brought Isha along to keep him company.

  With the radio on his shoulder, he mucked his way down the outcropping and back to his car, feeling more alone than ever.

  Like an Adam with no Eve. Or, more likely, he thought, like the last Neanderthal, remnant of a failed species.

  Chapter 31

  Diaz rode like the wind, full throttle, a hundred and ten. Around him, the desert bloomed as he'd never imagined it could. A haze of lavender colored the land near the horizon, and clumps of red and gold along the roadside blurred past him. Steel gray thunderclouds were already gathering again, and it had begun to mist, but the wind kept his goggles swept clear. Diaz leaned forward across the handlebars to lower his wind resistance and get a few more miles an hour out o
f the babe. Salt Lake City was no place to crash and burn. It was too flat, too much salt water. Too many negatory vibes in the air. But Denver, he was thinking, let me just get to Denver. Drops of rain hit his ears like bullets.

  He had taken too long, screwed around too much in Winnemucca with an ex-whore he'd met, stayed long after his feet had healed up from a sixty-mile skate after the Indian threw a rod, spent too many cooled-out evenings on the top floor of the Winnemucca Hilton watching the rain make the desert bloom and drinking black rum with Jan-Louise, burning money in the fireplace to keep warm, smoking Cadillac joints and writing poetry.

  He thought he was in heaven, above the earth like that, lightning flashing on Jan-Louise as she danced for him, freezing her perfect body in blue-white light, thunder shaking the walls like an angry god, and then he woke up one morning and knew he was on the down-side of his cycle, on a fast slide into the land of the shitrain where everything would be ugly, and all livings thing would have DEATH stamped across them. While he was paralyzed by the poison his DNA arranged to be periodically pumped into his blood, he would remember all the faces of the names on his list.

  So he got out of bed, said goodbye to the bewildered Jan-Louise, put some food and his re-wheeled skates in the saddlebags of a six-cylinder Kawasaki Warpspeed, and left with a capital L.

  Blazing out of the flats, along the Salt Lake shore, he knew he wasn't going to make it out of the city limits. This was the end of the trail. His thoughts had gone blank, died, and some leaden-voiced stranger in his head intoned, “Enter the land of death, detritus of civilized defecation, world without hope, garden of the euth artist, end now, done now... prepare... prepare....”

  He swerved off the freeway, slid the bike into the gravel parking lot of a cheap motel, stepped off it as it spun out from under him, concentrated hard and dug out his drug kit from the saddlebags, staggered to the nearest door, number 5, slammed it open with his shoulder and collapsed on the bed, not unconscious, he was conscious enough, but he no longer saw any point in moving.

  The rain began to fall in earnest, the storm enclosing the city in a cocoon of rain and thunder. Through the open door, Diaz watched the motorcycle flicker in the lightning, rain puddling around it. The heat of his body begin to dissipate in the cold room. Psychic entropy progressed geometrically.

  He lay on his stomach, head crooked toward the door, and in his shirt pocket he could feel his list of names, like the flat seed of death pressing against his heart.

  Chapter 32

  After he had stored the drugs in a cabinet the animals couldn't get into, had lunch, and had run through the empty shortwave bands again, he stood in the middle of the living room asked himself, “What next?” There wasn't anything left to do. He knew it was unreal security, but, at the moment, with a well-provisioned living space and the protection of drugs, living at the end of the world was not all that difficult. In fact, he was bored.

  He needed to plant another garden, but the ground was so wet he wouldn't be able to do that for several days. But other than that...?

  He could read. The people who had lived here had all kinds of books. He took a paperback mystery down off the shelf and stood beside the bookcase and read a few pages. It was about people back in the old times going to movies and talking to each other, and it made him think of Delana. These people ate in restaurants, had wine brought to them, they kissed.... It made his heart ache to read it. He closed its covers and slid it back with the others.

  He walked back and forth through the house, Isha's head turning to follow him each time he passed through through the living room, but nothing further occurred to him that he could do.

  He took a bottle of beer from the floor of the garage where the cement kept it cool and stood out on the sidewalk in the bleary sunlight and drank it. A cow grazed in a neighbor's yard. The water had receded from a broad path down the middle of the street, but the gutter water moved very slowly. Probably it would be several days before it was gone. So. “What next?”

  He knew the answer all along, of course. But admitting it to himself, actually saying the words inside his head, meant stepping into further uncharted territory, giving himself over to something that could be either momentous, lethal, or have grindingly depressing results.

  “Well, now, shall I do it?” he asked himself as he stood on the edge of the street, the waters beginning to recede. Birds chattered as they waded and fed from the neighbors' yards. “I suppose now's the time.”

  Now he had said it. Now he would start looking for other people.

  First thing, he strapped on the holster and pistol he'd found in the house, a .22 semi-automatic, went to a hardware store and got a small generator and a good-sized crowbar. Then, in the business area of the city, he selected one of the newer office buildings, broke in, and lugged the generator to an office where there was a copy machine. The dim, lifeless air in the place smelled of plastics and polyesters and raw cement.

  He enjoyed putting the generator in the middle of the fake rosewood conference table and pulling the starter cord, bringing it to life. Then he plugged the copier into the outlet, turned it on, and watched the display lights turn from an orange Wait to a green Ready.

  He pried open a storage cabinet and took out two reams of bright orange paper and stacked them into the copy machine's feeder tray. On a white sheet, the master, he wrote,

  ANYONE OUT THERE?

  I'll be at Arden Park

  near the Outcropping

  at sunset.

  He centered this on the glass, punched in 999 copies, and the machine went to work.

  “Neo-post-modern living,” he said with a smile, a caveman with a copier instead of a club.

  He wandered through the building while he waited. Already the roof of the fifteen story building had leaked down here to the third floor. The slump-block wall had grown slick with algae where water dribbled behind a secretary's desk.

  On desks lay litters of papers and forms and blank-screened computers. Down the hallway, through a glass door, he saw the body of a man in an expensive pin-striped suit, still at his desk, slumped across an array of complex forms. The decomposition of his body was extreme and the plush carpet around his chair had stained black.

  Martin felt himself grimacing as he thought of dying in such a place. The dead man must have been one of the few at the end who wanted to spend more time at the office.

  How long would it be, he wondered, before mankind got this far again, building computers, information networks, and tall synthetic buildings in which to house everything? Two hundred years? Three hundred? Or maybe people would do something entirely different and base their livelihoods on something other than making money. But from what he knew of people, if it wasn't the acquisition of money, it would be the acquisition of something else that could readily be transformed into power.

  He went back to the copier, disconnected the generator but left it where it was, and took the 999 sheets down to his car.

  Before he left the office building's parking lot, he punctured the gas tanks of two cars, collected the fuel, refilled his own car, and went on to phase two of his project.

  For two hours, he drove through Santa Miranda, mainly in the residential areas, honking the car horn — three short blasts every block — and dropping several orange sheets out the window. In the rearview mirror, he watched them spin behind the car, float down into the street or drift into the yards.

  As usual, he had to drive around the dairy cows that stood dull-eyed and helpless in the middle of streets, probably wondering in their passive, hybridized minds if something had changed. What had changed was that now they were the prey of other animals. In three places he had seen the remains of cows that had been brought down. Their scattered bones had been picked clean.

  It didn't seem to him that he had seen enough dog-packs to account for this. Perhaps there were other predators out there — leopards or bears or wolves that had been released from the zoo.

  One neighborhood
seemed to have been taken over by magpies. Whereas in the old world, he remembered occasionally seeing only one or two, now, in this one block, there were hundreds, perched on television antennas, power lines, pecking at bugs in wet overgrown lawns, strutting and flashing their stark black and white feathers in the cottony sunlight.

  Passing by a neighborhood park, he saw a coyote trot stiffly through the overgrown weeds, see him, pause in midstep, and then vanish, like magic.

  Nature was resuming its reign over the earth. As soon as man let up his endless cutting, leveling, fencing, and patroling, all designed to push nature into neatly controlled parcels, it came back in a rush. Now coyotes, birds, hippos, giraffes, wandering dog-packs, and who knew what else would compete, prey and evade, and fill the niches in the redefining ecology.

  He dropped the last of his advertisements out the car window and still had a couple of hours before sunset, so he drove the three miles to the appliance store where he had hooked up the freezers and found they were working fine. He refilled the generators' gas tanks, and from one of the freezers he took a frozen loaf of bread dough, and a package of bacon, and drove on to his house.

  When he let himself in, Isha pranced around him and made breathy whining noises till he gave her half a dozen long, head-to-rump strokes.

  “We may have company,” he said to her, putting out some food for her and the cat. They both ate heartily. He hadn't paid much attention to it, but the young cat was growing noticeably, just in the last week, and he had read but hadn't noticed till now that the manx was built differently from other cats: its body was shorter than an ordinary cat, and its back legs were longer than the front, giving it a raked look. “Mona, what kind of beast will you be when you grow up?”