Prospero's Half-Life (4 page)

Richard
glanced back at Samantha, but she seemed enraptured with what she’d
found, and seemed to have forgotten that Richard was there
entirely.

“
Brothers and Sisters, a great calamity has befallen us. The
souls of many of our brethren have been called home to the
glittering palaces of the Angelic Host, wherein dwells Our Lord.
Many more, I’m sad to report, have had their chickens come home to
roost. Brothers and Sisters, I speak of those whose souls have died
in the full shadow of wickedness, and who will spend the rest of
their days burning eternally in that old, old Lake of Fire. Satan’s
been warming up his hot tub for a long, long time, friends, and now
the godless swinger party of Eternity has begun. Only now, instead
of the adultress taking a man in her mouth and another in her
rancid, vile split, Brothers and Sisters, she is
LICKING
fire and
TAKING
fire! Oh, how it
will burn for the rest of forever, my Brothers and Sisters!
Detroit! Can I get a hallejujah!”

There was a thin chorus of
hallejujah!
from the background of
the station, and Richard felt an ugly chill crawl languidly up his
spine. He thought crazily of the phone call he had placed earlier
to the store on Hamilton Mountain, and felt a cold fist clench in
the pit of his stomach.

“
Brothers and Sisters, the path to salvation is clear! It is
too late for those that have already died but those that are left
face a black and white choice! Either reject Satan and his
temptations and lies, or join those unfortunate souls in the
cookout of Hell! I am a humble, honest man, my Brothers and
Sisters, and I would tell you no lies, oh no. Only the righteous
shall enter the Kingdom of Heaven, it says in the Bible in plain
workman English.
None get to the Kingdom
of Heaven except through me, no not one
, is
what it says my Brothers and Sisters.

What must you do, I hear you asking? Well, you must first
accept the power and the
glory
of Jesus Christ into your hearts, my Brothers and
Sisters! You must then
reject
the devices by which Satan operates in this world.
For you know in your hearts what caused this sickness, this death
to settle itself upon the world”.

I do?
Richard thought, wanting to
laugh.
I only
wish
I knew
.

“
It was the gays, my Brothers and Sisters! The promiscuous
women, and the men who fell to their temptation! The drug addicts
who ran the clubs that allowed debauchery to reign supreme on their
premises! The buggers and those who believed that theirs was a
sickness of the body, and not a corruption of their immortal soul!
The prostitutes, who made a mockery of the gift of continued life!
The
Liberals
!”

“
OK, this is just getting silly”, Richard decided aloud, hoping
to get Samantha to shut it off. Even a strained silence was
preferable to this. Samantha didn’t seem to hear him,
though.

“
These are all symptoms, though, Brothers and Sisters! They are
despicable, vile,
evil
creations of the black mind of Satan, but they are not the
ultimate cause of the fall of Man! No! What truly killed us, what
caused us to turn our heads from the Voice of God and suckle at the
sweet, silicone-filled Teat of Satan, was information! Information!
Adam and Eve lived in bliss, my Brothers and Sisters, bliss in the
Garden of God’s Great Eden. They knew nothing and wanted for
nothing! Then Satan slithered his way in, and gave them the Curse
of Information! They knew, Brothers and Sisters! Knew more than
they should! Read it in Genesis, and you will see. If you
KNOW
, then you
will
BURN
! Can I
get a Hallejujah!”

“
Hallejujah!” the ragged chorus on the station repeated,
sounding sweaty and roused.

“
Burn your books, and break your computers Brothers and
Sisters! Burn all the information that you”. Samantha cut the mad
preacher off mid-sentence, and then dropped the remote on the
floor. It hit the hardwood with a clatter that caused Richard’s
heart to jump two feet out of his chest.

“
Wanna help me make dinner?” Samantha asked pertly, and went
into the kitchen without bothering to wait for an
answer.

Richard
followed and discovered that her kitchen was just as small as her
living room. It wasn’t quite what people termed a “galley” kitchen
but it was definitely edging close to it. Samantha was rummaging
through her cupboards, pulling out packages and boxes and sorting
them into two piles. Richard stood awkwardly in the doorway,
watching her do this. One pile was much bigger than the other, and
it was full of battered rice packages and spice packets and cans of
various vegetables. The pile on the left was mostly pasta, and
canned pasta sauce.

“
Spaghetti?” Richard asked.

“
Mmmm” was all Samantha replied. Then, “look through the fridge
for some fresh vegetables and stuff while I go get changed”. She
squeezed past him without looking and left him alone in the
kitchen.

The fridge was
getting bare, Richard noted, but it did have a lone green pepper
and some likely-looking mushrooms. He put those beside the pile of
pasta ingredients and leaned against the stove. After what seemed
like forever Samantha came back into the kitchen, having changed
into a white halter top and a pair of jeans. Richard’s eyes widened
and then he immediately began scratching his nose, trying to cover
it up. Samantha apparently had some curves, underneath that green
uniform.

“
So, do you want to chop these while I get water boiling?” she
asked, her voice tired and uncaring.

“
Sure”, Richard replied, and sought out a largish knife from
the block on the counter.

They made
dinner in silence, with Richard doing all of the prep work and
Samantha the actual cooking. There was no meat, but the sauce that
she had chosen was a four-cheese blend and sounded like heaven to
Richard, who had spent the last few weeks eating his mother’s store
of frozen dinners. He’d stuck to crackers and biscuits for the
first few days after she’d disappeared, and then, after slowly
realizing that she was in all likelihood not returning, began to
dig into her stores.

After
everything was finished cooking they combined it into a large steel
pot and brought it out into the living room. Samantha left and
returned shortly with plates and utensils. She sat back in the
loveseat and Richard reclaimed his spot on the couch.

“
Do you want to watch a movie?” Samantha asked. “I’ve got a
bunch of DVDs kicking around here”.

“
Sure, that sounds fine” Richard replied. She gestured towards
the pile of cases that lay beside the TV and then began dishing
herself up a plate of food.

Richard pored through the DVDs for a few minutes, not really
caring what was there. It seemed strange, after the events of the
past few weeks, to be doing something as mundane as sitting down to
eat and watch a movie with a pretty co-worker. Then again,
he
had
tried to go
about his business running the store as if nothing had changed in
the world. As he chose a random DVD he concluded wryly that perhaps
he didn’t have the right to determine what was strange anymore.
Maybe
everything
was strange now.

“
Sex and the City?” Samantha asked, half-confused and
half-amused. Richard looked down at his hand and cursed
silently.

“
Sure, why not?” he covered. “I haven’t seen it yet, and
there’s no time like the present, right?” Samantha just smiled
mysteriously, nodded, and proceeded to feed the disc into the
player.

They ate and
watched the movie in silence. Outside, the sun set and darkness
slowly replaced the light filtering through the curtains. About
halfway through the movie, at a seemingly arbitrary point, Samantha
pressed the pause button.

“
Quietly”, she whispered to him. “To the window. Don’t move too
much. Pull the curtains aside a little bit”.

Richard did as
he was told. He crept up to the curtains and pulled them aside ever
so slightly. Momentarily he wished that he had not.

The
streetlight still shone out on the street, illuminating a varied
collection of bloodied corpses. It was immediately apparent, even
in the strange artificial light thrown off by the streetlamp, that
not all of the blood was from the hemmhoraging that accompanied the
sickness. Bullet wounds were evident on several of the corpses,
especially those on the other side of the street. Some had only
ragged, pulped remains where much of their heads had been. Some
were missing their heads entirely.

The hospital
that many of these gunshot corpses lay in front of was not the
hospital that Richard remembered from the few times that he had
been forced to go there. That hospital had been a mundane, almost
boring place, rundown and needing a modern retrofit. This hospital
was a jury-rigged fortress, barricaded and boarded with whatever
must have been handy at the time. The entrances were blocked off by
battered ambulances, some of which were riddled with bullet holes
and scorch marks. Most of the windows, especially those near to the
ground floor, were boarded over with a variety of planks, broken
shipping skids, and metal plates that appeared as though they had
been ripped wholesale from the medical equipment inside. Two of the
windows had light issuing from behind their fortifications; the
rest were distressingly dark and silent.

“
Who the hell is in there?” Richard thought aloud. It was such
a strange and foreign sight to him that he hadn’t realized that he
had spoken the question until Samantha answered him.

“
I don’t know”, she whispered back. She was very close to him,
trying to look out the window as well, and her breath was hot on
his neck. Richard’s breath quickened, and his heart began pounding
maddeningly loud inside his rib cage.

“
Doctors, maybe? But why wouldn’t they be trying to help those
people?”

He felt
Samantha shrug blankly beside him.

“
Whoever is in there doesn’t want to catch it”, she answered
simply. Richard stared across the street at the crazed parody of a
hospital. It didn’t seem real. None of it seemed real.

“
Probably not doctors, though”, Samantha continued, her voice
now tickling his ear. “I heard that they were the first to die,
after treating all of those first patients”.

“
Who did you hear that from?”

“
My boyfriend. He said that all the doctors were dead and no
one knew what to do. The radio was saying that everything would be
all right, that it was just a few days until they were going to
deliver a vaccine, but my boyfriend said that he’d heard that all
that was just bullshit”.

“
What was your boyfriend’s name?” It was out before he could
really think about it.
Was
. He cursed himself for his lack
of tact.

“
Doug”, she answered promptly. If she’d taken offence to his
slip with the past tense, she didn’t show it.

“
His mom was a nurse”, she supplied. “That’s why he knew about
the doctors, and the vaccine. He said that on the fourth day after
it all started, she showed up to work and none of the doctors had
come in. The ones who had been there on duty were all dead. Most of
the other nurses were dead too”.

“
Jesus”. It was all he could think of to say.

“
He hung up the phone and started making plans. Like
reinforcing the door, and putting all the locks on. Getting a whole
bunch of food. He went out to find some guns, even though I begged
him to stay. He never came back”.

“
I’m sorry”. It seemed horrifically inadequate.

She shrugged. “Whatever. He’s gone. My family’s gone. Your
family’s gone. Everyone’s family’s gone”. Her voice hitched, and
Richard looked over in alarm. Her shapely oval face was starting to
scrunch up; she was crying. “City’s gone. Whole fucking
country
is gone. Maybe
the whole world. Everyone’s dead”.

“
Hey”, he said, and his throat closed up. He didn’t remember
what he had been about to say. She was crying now, freely, and the
sight of it erased any warm platitudes that he had been about to
spout off.

“
It can’t be as bad as all that, right?” he continued on
lamely. She spun her face around to stare at him, eyes
blazing.

“
What the fuck do you think?” she grated at him. “Do you see
very many people up and walking around? Do you see that street out
there. Do you really
see
it? There’s like a hundred dead bodies in the
street out there.
Dead
bodies
. Now imagine the rest of the city,
the parts you haven’t even seen yet. How many
dead fucking bodies
do you think are
there?”

She left his
side violently and threw herself back on to the loveseat. Her face
turned resolutely to the television and didn’t move a millimetre.
Richard shut the curtain and sat on the couch awkwardly. He looked
at her for a minute or so, hoping that she would look over so that
he could apologize. When she didn’t, he picked up the remote and
started the movie back up.