- - End of All Things, The (6 page)

He came back with a small shopping basket filled with drugs. 

“What is all that?” 

“Antibiotics, mostly. A few pain-killers, though the junkies already got most of those. A couple other odds and ends.”

Carly wondered why he thought he’d need so many antibiotics. Maybe he had some health issues.

They collected what food was left on the shelves. Very little in the way of canned goods remained. Sam bumped Carly’s leg twice more with cans in his mouth. Justin stared. “Did you train him to do that?”

Carly shook her head. “I think he just figured out I want cans, so he’s bringing them to me.” Sam couldn’t differentiate between the cans, though. One had been a diet soda, which she opened and gulped down on the spot, only afterward thinking she ought to have offered Justin a drink. She flushed again and dropped the empty can, but he shrugged and said he disliked diet soda, anyway.

They went into the next aisle, and Carly struggled to push the cart past a fallen rack of batteries. Justin took control of it and swung the cart to the side with ease. 

“Hard to believe I once went to the gym twice a week,” she said.

“You haven’t been eating enough. That’s what this is for.” Justin held up a can of powdered weight-loss shake.

“How’s that going to help?”

“You mix up a shake to drink along with what you’re eating. It gives you the extra calories and vitamins you might be missing.”

Justin headed back to the stock room but paused in the doorway and told her to wait where she was. Carly wondered what he’d seen but shrugged and spent the next few minutes in the health and beauty aisle, where she selected a few sticks of deodorant and some leave-in spray conditioner that might help contain the frizzy mess her hair had become. She saw a row of baby wipes and flung a few large packets into the cart. If she couldn’t shower, she could at least wipe herself down. It was better than nothing, she supposed.

Justin returned, carrying a case of liquor. Carly’s eyes widened. “Headed to a kegger this weekend?”

“Trade goods,” he explained and dropped the case into a second cart that had been abandoned nearby. “It’s a pain-killer, a disinfectant, and a good time, all rolled into one.”

They rolled the carts back up to the front of the store, and Carly pulled her checkbook out of her pocket.

“Don’t worry about it,” Justin told her. “Besides, I hate waiting in line behind someone who’s writing a check.”

Carly gave him a small smile. She knew he was joking to soften the reaction his words were bound to have, and she appreciated it. She considered for a moment and then put her checkbook back into her pocket. He was probably right. Even if the owner of the store returned, who would be at the bank to cash her check? “How are we going to carry all of this?” Her tote wouldn’t hold it all.

“We’ll just wheel the carts back to your place.”

Carly swallowed back a protest about stealing the carts when she considered the fact everything inside the carts was stolen as well.

“Is there a gun shop here?” Justin asked.

“On the other side of the bridge.”

“Care to take a stroll with me?”

Carly smiled at him. “Certainly.”

They walked down 10th Street toward the bridge. Sam trotted beside her, his tongue lolling out the side of his mouth. He looked happy, and it made her heart lighten a bit. “You said you were from Omaha. Is that where your family is?”

For a moment, Carly didn’t think he was going to answer, and she regretted asking the question. 

“I don’t have any family.”

“Are they all . . . gone?”

Justin shrugged. “I’d imagine so, but I have no way of knowing for sure. I grew up in the foster care system and enlisted as soon as I was old enough to sign the papers.”

Carly didn’t know if she should she offer sympathy, or if she should—

“What about your family?”

“They’re . . . gone.” Carly’s throat tightened.

“I’m sorry. Were you close?”

“Very. My mom and dad . . . they were wonderful. But you knew my dad, at least a little bit, right?”

“He was my Arabic teacher for a few months, until he retired.”

That must have been the language her dad had been speaking in his fevered delirium the night he died. She pushed the thought away and blinked hard to combat the stinging in her eyes. Justin gave her a pat on the shoulder, his eyes compassionate. She felt a little closer to Justin, knowing he had a connection to her father, no matter how slight. 

“How old are you, Carly?”

“Twenty-two.”

“Did you still live at home?”

“No, I had my own apartment upstairs. Mom and Dad were on the ground floor. So I still saw them every day and went downstairs for dinner all the time since I’m not much of a cook.” Carly gave a little laugh even as she wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. “My mom worried I wasn’t eating enough vegetables and healthy stuff.”

Justin was quiet for a moment. “The men spoke highly of your father. He left the field around the time you were born and became an instructor, but his reputation as a brave man and loyal friend remained.”

“He never said much about his army days. Just that he was in the Middle East for a while.”

Justin nodded. “He
couldn’t
tell you, Carly. And you wouldn’t have wanted to hear it anyway.”

“How old are you, Justin?” Her dad had retired before her tenth birthday, so he had to be at least—

“Thirty-four,” he said.

She peered at him closely. Under that scruffy beard, his features still had a youthful cast, but that might have been because he usually had a mischievous grin and a wicked twinkle in his eye. Knowing him a little better, he didn’t look so scary. “Wow, you look younger.”

Justin cast her an amused glance. “You say that like you think I should have wrinkles and a cane.”

“No . . . you just look . . . young,” Carly said lamely.

“The virtues of healthy living.”

Carly giggled, though the sound of it was still unusual enough to give her a little start of surprise. “Nobody who gets that excited about Lucky Charms can claim to be a health nut.”

“Come on. I get to have
one
guilty pleasure, don’t I?”

“Don’t ask me. The only healthy thing I did was go to the gym to use the Stairmaster twice a week.”

“If your jeans weren’t so baggy, I could tell you if it had paid off or not.” Justin gave her an exaggerated leer, but she didn’t smile.

“They weren’t always baggy on me,” Carly said. Even if there had been plenty of food, her appetite had been virtually nonexistent for a while.

Justin shook his head. “You poor girl. I had no idea you had been hungry for so long.”

“I was afraid to go outside. It wasn’t just the quarantine. At first there were lots of . . .
crazy
people on the street. The Infected. Healthy people would try to walk past them quickly, and sometimes the Infected would just attack them without warning. I didn’t start going outside until I didn’t see anyone. And then it was scary that I
didn’t
see anyone, you know? I started thinking the government may have evacuated all of the healthy people out of Juneau, and I just wasn’t informed because they didn’t know I was in my apartment. I started wondering . . .” Her voice cracked, and she cleared her throat before she continued. “. . . I started wondering if I was the only one left. I read this book once,
I Am Legend
by Richard Matheson. Have you ever read it?”

Justin thought for a moment. “I saw the movie.”

“The book is different.” Carly felt a stinging pain in her hands and realized she had both fists clenched tightly, her nails digging into her palms. “The main character, that’s what happens to him. He’s the only normal person left in the world. I kept telling myself there
had
to be other people, and things would go back to normal, but until I saw you, I—” Carly had to stop. Her throat was too tight to speak any further, but from Justin’s expression, he understood what she was trying to say.

They had come to the Juneau-Douglas Bridge. There was a roadblock of concrete lane dividers set up across the center of the bridge and lines of cars on both sides of it. Out in the harbor beyond, a few cruise ships floated where they would wait eternally to be cleared for docking. Carly considered the cars lined up behind the barriers. “Where were they hoping to go?”

“The problem with quarantine is most people think they should be exceptions to it. They think their circumstances are different, special. They
have
to go get a sick relative or a child. They
have
to go to the store or to the bank to get their money. Just a quick trip; they’ll be right back.”

Carly knew this was true. Her own father had broken quarantine to go to the hospital to see if he could get her mother admitted, and she knew some of her friends had ignored the order because they wanted to go be with their families. Her best friend, Michelle, had set out with her baby, Kevin, intending to drive to Anchorage, where her parents had moved after they retired. Carly sometimes wondered if Michelle and Kevin had made it, or if she had been stopped somewhere along the route, unable to travel onward and unable to come back to Juneau.

“Some people refused to believe there was a pandemic and thought the government was trying to ‘take over’ and turn America into a dictatorship.” Justin paused for a moment. A hint of a cynical smile tugged at his lips. “You know how it was, Carly. People didn’t trust the government for small things, let alone for something that affects their personal freedom.” 

“But they had to know how dangerous it was. They could have been bringing the Infection to their friends and family.”

Justin shook his head. “The Infection had a long incubation period in which people were contagious but asymptomatic . . . People felt fine, so they ignored the quarantine orders, and the government was slow to enforce the quarantine. It was an election year, after all. By the time they got serious about enforcing it, it was far too late.” 

An election year.
Carly was sickened at the thought that politicians might have been willing to let people get sick and die rather than hurt their chances to keep their offices. She hoped it wasn’t true, but she didn’t ask Justin anything more about it. She wasn’t sure she wanted to know.

Her father had been concerned people were ignoring the quarantine orders. Carly remembered her mother teasing him for being
such a Boy Scout
about following the government’s directives because of his time in the military. Her father had just smiled and teased her back, but even then, Carly had known there was something he wasn’t telling them. In retrospect, she could see her father had known the situation was far worse than Carly and her mother had realized. 

Carl had gone to the emergency town meeting to lend his voice in support of those trying to convince the mayor to isolate Juneau, but the mayor refused on the grounds that it was coldhearted. The ferry and airport had been shut down only about a week before her parents died, after it was far too late to do any good. 

Justin startled her out of her thoughts when he put a hand on her shoulder. “I think you should keep your eyes on the sidewalk, okay?”

She followed as he started across the bridge, keeping as far away from the vehicles as possible, trying to pretend they didn’t exist. She kept her eyes glued to the heels of Justin’s black leather boots and kept a tight grip on Sam’s leash, clamped under her hand on the handle of the cart. Sam kept casting concerned looks up at her; maybe he could read the tension in her posture. Carly patted him on the head to try to reassure him . . . and to reassure herself as well.

She heard a bang from the other side of the bridge and jumped. It wasn’t loud, but in the eerie silence, it seemed exaggerated. She glanced around to search for the source of the sound, and she saw a small shack on the side of the bridge, built for the troops guarding the barricade. The door swung lazily in the breeze. Then she saw a pair of boots sticking out from behind the edge of the barrier and looked away. She caught sight of a car straight ahead of them, emitting a strange humming sound. The windows were blacked out with some kind of undulating material that had a dull glimmer to it.
A trash bag, maybe?
But as she got closer she realized it wasn’t a trash bag. It was flies. Thousands of flies covering the inside of the windows, and the sound of their wings was the humming she heard. They lined the edge of the small gap in the window, new arrivals and departures.

Carly gagged and fell to her knees at the side of the bridge. Up came the soda she had drunk in the store, and she continued to retch until her stomach muscles ached and quivered. Her head pounded. Behind her, Sam danced and whined, unsure of how to assist her.

Touching her shoulder, Justin put a bottle of water into her line of sight. She accepted it with gratitude and took a drink, which promptly came up again.

“Small sips,” Justin said. He sat down beside her on the curb. She felt his hand on her back, rubbing in small, soothing circles. She took a tiny sip from the bottle, just enough to wet her tongue, and her stomach decided to be gracious about it. 

“Sorry. I didn’t mean to look.”

“I know.”

The loss of electric power and telephones hadn’t done it. The empty stores and streets hadn’t done it. But the fact that human bodies were sitting in a car in the middle of a bridge finally convinced her Justin had been telling the truth. Civilization was gone. 

There was no one left to collect and bury the dead. They would rot where they fell. Her parents’ apartment would be their tomb, but the more she thought about that, the more it seemed appropriate—almost like the pharaohs sent to the afterlife with all of their possessions. Her parents would rest surrounded by pictures of their friends and family and the items that had defined their daily lives. But the people in the car . . . A sob tore from her throat, louder than normal because she had been trying to hold it back. And then she was crying and unable to stop. Kneeling on the bridge over Juneau Harbor, she wept for a world that was dead and gone.