Prospero's Half-Life
Read Prospero's Half-Life Online
Authors: Trevor Zaple
Tags: #adventure, #apocalypse, #cults, #plague, #postapocalypse, #fever, #ebola
Prospero's
Half-Life
Smashwords
Edition
Trevor James
Zaple
Copyright 2014
Trevor James Zaple
Smashwords
Edition License Notes:
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This
ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you
would like to share this book with another person, please purchase
an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book
and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only,
then please return to your favorite ebook retailer and purchase
your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this
author.
CONTENTS:
PART ONE: THE CLOCKWORK
GOD DRIFTS OFF TO SLEEP
PART TWO: THE FAITHLESS
ELECTOR
PART THREE: THE OPEN
BOOK OF SECRETS
How To Get In Touch With
The Author
PART ONE:
THE CLOCKWORK GOD DRIFTS OFF TO SLEEP
“Who wields a
poem huger than the grave?
From only Whom
shall time no refuge keep
Though all the
weird worlds must be opened”
-e.e.
cummings
ONE
When Richard pulled up
to the darkened store front and saw that his was the only car in
the parking lot, he knew that for all intents and purposes it was
over. He was twenty minutes late.
Out of habit,
he got out of the car and walked up to the front doors. He glanced
back and noticed that his parking job was decidedly crooked. He
shrugged. He’d stopped caring about those sorts of things days ago.
The first layer of doors came apart fairly easily when he pried
them open, but the second were locked fast. So. He paused for a
moment. Someone had come in, obviously, but then had locked
themselves in. He knew that it wasn’t simply a case of whomever
last closed the store having not bothered to close the outer doors;
Mohammed was a tight captain and would brook no loosening of the
rules, even this late in the game. He tried an experimental knock
on the glass of the inner door. When no one answered he did it
again, rooted out of a morbid curiosity.
He waited for
as long as any sane human being would have waited, and then three
minutes longer. He was about to turn to leave, had in fact turned
his shoulder slightly to the left, when he caught movement from
within the dim confines of the store. A slim blonde figure in a
green uniform shirt darted around the customer service desk and ran
furtively towards the doors. Samantha had shown up for work, then.
Richard smiled at that. What else had she to do, after all? He knew
that feeling rather well.
Samantha, her
pretty Dutch face streaked and leaden, fiddled with the lock and
quickly pulled the doors open. She hesitated a moment and then
stepped aside. Richard moved past her, a purpose to his stride, and
divested his heavy leather coat onto the service desk. Samantha
moved to close the doors.
“
Keep ‘em open,” Richard told her without turning around. His
voice was casual, light even, but it was a command nonetheless. He
looked around the wide expanse of the sales floor. The lights were
dimmed, and the laptop and LCD screen displays were powerless and
silent. The digital picture frames were one, looping through the
overly bright set of sample pictures. Richard suspected that this
was merely because whomever had last left the sales department had
forgotten (or not bothered) to shut them off. He pursed his lips.
He had a momentary urge to look up who it was, so that he could
reprimand them, but then checked himself. What was the point?
Whomever it was, they were likely long gone by now.
He drummed his
fingers on the service counter, and the sound echoed cavernously
around him. He knocked his knuckles on the counter, relishing the
way it ripped through the silence. When the music was off, the
store sounded exactly like what it was built to resemble: a
sprawling, mostly empty warehouse. He considered turning the music
on and decided against it. If this was, as he suspected, his last
day, he could do it without having to hear the most ubiquitous
Billboard hits of the last three decades. If there was one good
thing about the whole situation, it was that he might never have to
listen to Mariah Carey again. Silver linings and small
miracles.
He turned
around. Samantha was still there. He paused, took a closer look at
her. There were dark, deep circles under her eyes, and mascara
streaks framing them. Her shoulders were slumped, and her head
bowed slightly. Her hair, normally either delicately curled or
immaculately straightened, was tangled and formless. She’d been
doing a lot of crying, and likely not enough sleeping.
“
Who else came in today?” he asked quietly. Samantha blinked
and stared through him for a moment, not comprehending the
question. Then she shook her head and a spark slowly came back into
her eyes.
“
Mark came. Said he had some stuff to finish up. And…” she bit
her full lower lip, cutting herself off. Richard looked at her
sharply.
“
And?”
“
And Mohammed is here. In his office. I…I can’t go back
there.”
“
Why not?” Richard asked, a little more harshly than he’d
meant. Samantha recoiled ever so slightly.
“
He’s really, really sick,” she replied, her voice near a
whisper.
Richard swore
under his breath. Why had the Old Man come to the store to die, he
wondered. Probably wanted to go down with the ship, or something
equally useless. Well. He’d have to tackle that problem later.
There was a
store to run.
Richard picked
up the phone, pressed the PA button.
“
Mark, can I have you to service for the morning
meeting?”
His voice
boomed overhead, echoed solidly off of everything. He replaced the
phone in it’s cradle, remembering at the last minute to thumb the
release button first. There were few things he hated more than
listening to a phone being hung up live on the PA system.
Mark appeared
presently, walking up from somewhere deep within the store. He was
a walking ghost of a man, pale to the point of translucence,
dressed in a wrinkled green uniform that seemed to hang off of him.
As he approached the service counter, Richard saw that there were
sparse patches of stubble all over the southern half of his face.
There was also a far-gone stare to the man’s eyes that Richard
didn’t like much. He wondered what Mark had been doing and seeing
these past few weeks, then decided that he didn’t much care. What
he himself had been doing and seeing was more than enough for him
to be concerned with.
“
There’s no response from the servers in Boston,” Mark said
flatly as he settled in to lean against the counter. Richard
shrugged.
“
Do we have an internet connection at all?”
“
Yeah, miracle of miracles. Some sites won’t respond but a lot
are still up. They may not have been updated in a few days but you
can still access them”.
“
Hmm,” Richard replied, only semi-interested.
“
My cell phone still works,” Samantha reported.
“
Yeah, just nobody answers,” Mark jeered. Richard shot him a
deadly glance, to which Mark just shrugged in reply.
“
I still get Twitter updates,” she said, stung and
defensive.
“
Oh yeah, what do they say?” Mark continued needling. “11:45 –
Still dying?”
“
Go fuck yourself Mark,” she spat, her previously dulled eyes
flaring into dangerous life. Richard stepped in to head this
off.
“
Enough, both of you. We’re getting off-topic. Now, you said
that there was no response from the servers in Boston?”
“
Yeah, big fuckin’ deal,” Mark replied sullenly. “I mean, it’s
not like we’ve sold anything the past coupla’ days. Even the
looters are leaving us alone. Who the fuck wants a computer when
they’re gonna be totally useless soon?”
“
Much of our inventory is not geared towards the current
situation, true,” Richard admitted, “but there may still be a
customer base out there. We need to be here for
those
people.”
“
Did you go nuts or are you just being a dick?” Mark snapped.
“There ARE no customers. No one is gonna come waltzing in here
looking to buy the latest technology for their cutesy little
fucking business. People are either dying or looting or both. So
stick your morning meeting up your stupid, deluded ass”. Mark
started walking away, towards the doors.
“
Where the hell do you think you’re going, Mark?” Richard
yelled, his sudden anger palpitating his heart.
“
I’m leaving,” he shot back, “I’m done. Getting the fuck outta
here before I end up as batshit as you!” With that, he walked out
of the doors without looking back.
“
You’re fired, you insolent little FUCK!” he called out to
Mark’s vanishing back, screaming the sentence-ending obscenity at
the top of his lungs. He stared at the doors for a minute,
trembling from the sudden upswing in anger. He knew he looked
ridiculous, felt ridiculous. All of a sudden he felt awkward, and
dreaded turning back to look at Samantha.
He was in
charge, though, so he had to carry on. Samantha’s eyes were wide,
but she seemed to recover quickly.
“
So do you think anyone will be here in today?” he asked
slowly. Richard blew his breath out in an explosive
sigh.
“
Who knows. I suppose stranger things have happened” he
replied.
TWO
As it turned
out, they did have one customer on that final day.
Richard spent
his first three hours there tidying up loose paperwork and assorted
debris; this after trying the door to Mohammed’s office and finding
it locked and silent. Samantha spent the time situated firmly
behind the service counter, staring out at nothing in particular.
In the background, a retrospective of the Top 40 banged away.
Richard had tried to avoid it but Samantha had in the end insisted,
claiming it to be “too creepy” without it.
Richard also
tried phoning other stores in the chain; the closest regional ones
first and then radiating outward. Most gave no answer, either an
endless ring or an incessant busy signal. When he called the store
on Hamilton Mountain, he got the following exchange:
*ring*
(On the other
end) “Who’re you?”
Richard paused. The voice was loud and belligerent. “The
better question”, he replied slowly, “is who
you
are”.
