Prospero's Half-Life (14 page)

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 mutely 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 disliked both types
of spirits but knew the need to have it. Even in his soused state
he could vaguely plan ahead.