Prospero's Half-Life (7 page)

Like walking past a row of tombs
he
thought, and the idea severely disturbed him. He suddenly imagined
himself surrounded on all sides by the mouldering,
crimson-splattered dead, and he began to shiver uncontrollably. His
hand shot out and found Samantha’s; her lithe, tough hand curled
into his with an eager force. They walked hand-in-hand in the
center of the roadway, feeling like two children lost inside a
haunted house that stretched on forever.

Here and there
were windows with wide plywood planks nailed across them, and doors
that were double-boarded in the same fashion. Richard was strongly
reminded of photos of hurricane preparations in the American south;
the people who had fled these houses were also fleeing a sort of
natural disaster, he realized, and had thought that maybe there
would be something worthwhile coming back to, in the end. Looking
around, Richard was rather doubtful of this. The oppressive silence
was a testament to the lack of anyone coming back to reclaim any of
it. The sounds that he could hear could be counted on one hand: a
car alarm, insistent in the distance; a dog barking from a few
blocks to their right; their own, overloud footfalls; and something
that sounded like a collapsing building from a long way behind
them. He eyed the boarded-up houses speculatively. There were
likely more supplies and better bags in some of those houses,
especially if the families in question had fled with whatever they
could carry. Things would have had to have been left behind, it was
only logical. He thought about proposing a few break-ins to
Samantha but remembered her issue with his “dancing on the grave of
everyone”. He continued to eye the sealed-up houses with interest,
but kept his mouth shut.

After a time
they passed a small workshop that purported to repair commercial
food equipment. After that point the landscape began to change.
Empty fields lay on both sides for a block, and then there was a
large U-Haul storage complex. The chain-link fence was locked
tightly at the entry point and Richard saw that the doors and
windows on the visible entry points in the complex were boarded up
as well.

“
Think of all the stuff in that place,” Richard mused. “All of
it, just ready to be taken by anyone. Chances are, the person who
owned it is dead by now. Who owns it now?”

“
Let it stay in there,” Samantha replied sharply. “I’m not
spending God knows how long peeking through every last little pile
of junk in there”.

Richard
shrugged his shoulders as they passed it. “It was more of a
philosophical question, really,” he said, somewhat grandiosely.
“Who owns what dead people leave behind, when you can’t find a
court to settle the matter?”

“
Who cares?” Samantha answered acidly. Richard let it drop and
they passed by the rest of the storage compound in silence. After
the storage center there was a large industrial building, named
“Trensept Automation” by the no-nonsense lettering on its side. The
wind blew a ragged cardboard box along the empty, cracked cement
parking lot that alongside it, on the other side of the fence. To
their left, across the street, a small substation hummed with
high-intensity electricity. The sound was comforting to Richard,
refreshingly normal.

There was a
dog lurking by the locked gate into the Trensept parking lot. It
had a scrawny, starved look to it; Richard thought this immediately
odd, since there was plenty of food lying around. He wondered, on
the heels of this thought, if the dogs ate plague victims. Did they
smell appetizing, to dogs? Richard thought that they might; he had
once witnessed a friend’s dog vomit, and then happily lap up the
steaming brown pile not even two seconds later. Still, he thought,
the plague victims might have an off-smell to them, even for
creatures that would eat practically anything.

This
particular dog certainly looked as though it were willing to eat
practically anything; Richard noted that he could count its ribs
quite easily and the dog’s tongue slathered at its muzzle in a
restless movement. Neither of them commented on it as they passed
it. A block later, however, as they were passing a strip of
automotive repair and parts shops, Richard turned back and saw that
the dog was following them. Its pace was brisk, and it was only a
half-block behind them.

“
Watch out,” Richard warned Samantha in a low tone of voice.
Samantha turned her head to look at what he was talking about and
gave a start. Then she began to look around.

“
There aren’t any others, are there?” she asked nervously.
Richard began looking around as well, suddenly paranoid. Dogs were
pack animals, after all. It didn’t seem like there were others,
however; the cheap buildings with the filthy white vinyl siding
that they passed were as quiet as graves.

They
approached an intersection and Richard noted with small amusement
that the traffic lights were still functioning, cycling through
red-yellow-green in a slow, stately waltz. A red pickup sat in the
middle of the intersection, its tires flat. A body lay next to it,
sprawled away from the cab as though the person had opened the
door, fallen out, and died. There was a spread, tacky stain of
crimson spread around its head and lower abdomen, so Richard
inferred that this was, in fact, exactly what happened. He hurried
through the intersection, trying to give the corpse no more thought
than necessary. Samantha looked at it as they passed, her eyes
lingering longer than was strictly necessary. The dog stopped to
sniff and then nibble at it, which Richard let out a sigh of relief
at. They were edible after all.

Except, as
they made their way a few blocks west down Welland Avenue, it
became apparent that they weren’t. Richard noticed that the dog had
resumed following them by the time the first block had passed. He
noticed that it had been joined by two others as they were passing
by a small healthcare plaza with a wound care clinic that had often
intrigued Richard (although never to the point where he would go to
investigate it). He swore under his breath, and as they passed by a
small used car lot he began frantically looking around for
something to use as a weapon.

At the corner
of the car lot’s fence he noticed a brick amidst a growth of grass.
He darted for it, spun around, and hurled it at the dogs. It landed
with full force into the middle dog, the one whom had begun
following them, and caused a spray of blood and brains to splash
outward to either side. The dog dropped dead in its tracks and the
other two scattered away, yelping and yipping. Richard nodded
smugly and turned back to Samantha, who was staring at him with a
horrified expression on her face.

“
What the fuck are you doing?” she exclaimed loudly. Richard
held his hands up.

“
Keep your voice down!” he hissed, and immediately wondered why
he’d said that. There was no one around, except the dogs he’d
driven off; even if there were someone lurking around, would it
really be remiss to attract their attention? Somehow, at the base
of his brain, Richard felt that it might be. He quailed from the
idea that someone might discover them. Samantha gave him a strange
look that quickly melted back into her original disgust.

“
How could you
do
that?” she asked, her voice wincing. “The poor thing was just
hungry, you didn’t have to kill it”.

Richard looked
at her with disbelief.

“
What the fuck are you going on about?” he demanded, standing
in the middle of the sidewalk and stretching out his arms in
askance. “Seriously, now. Those dogs were looking for a quick meal,
and we were it. Maybe you want to be a dog’s dinner, but I’ll
fucking pass, thanks a bunch”.

She bristled
at him and seemed on the brink of exploding.

“
It’s just a dog!” she screamed. “You could have scared it off!
You didn’t have to break it’s head! It’s just some poor kid’s dog!
Everyone that used to feed it died, and it just wants a
meal!”

“
Yeah – YOU!” Richard screamed back in reply. Samantha reared
back and a second later a silver blossom of sharp pain bloomed
across the left side of his chin. He stumbled back and held his
hand to his injured face, more from indignation than from any sort
of healing help. His eyes bored into her, trying to catch her afire
with just a glance.

“
You hit me,” he said dully. She seemed slightly ashamed but
didn’t apologize. She didn’t say anything, in fact, for quite some
time. They continued walking, albeit at a forced distance from each
other, for twenty minutes. By that time they were on the edge of
the downtown, passing by run-down buildings that housed businesses
whose boards were not a paranoid precaution of fleeing owners. A
small hut stood by itself, with a sign hanging in front that
claimed it to be a hair salon. By the look of it, it hadn’t been an
actual hair salon it close to a decade. Behind it, a pair of stolid
apartment buildings stood watch, eyeing them as they stumped by.
They stopped in front of a house with broken windows and a
long-abandoned look. Richard peered down the street that led away
towards the actual downtown, rising lowly in the near distance in
front of them. There was no movement, except for a smudge of smoke
in the sky, and although Richard tried to stop breathing for a
moment in order to hear better, there was no sound
either.

“
Are we doing this?” he asked, and the question hung in the air
like the black smoke on the horizon. When it became obvious that
Samantha wasn’t planning on responding, he turned around quickly
and threw his hands to the sky.

“
What do you want?” he shouted, aggravated by her sullen face,
“I didn’t mean to kill the dog, okay? I was just trying to scare it
away, or make it run, or
something
! I didn’t mean to kill it,
and I’m sorry it pissed you off”.

Samantha
glared at him for a minute and then rolled her eyes.

“
Oh, whatever,” she sighed. “You killed it, you can’t take it
back. I guess I’ll just have to accept your apology”.

“
You guess”

“
I guess”

“
You’re so generous,” he said, unable to keep the sarcasm out
of his voice. “How lucky am I?”

“
We can always go our separate ways,” she said, her voice
sizzling with anger. “There’s more than enough out there to keep us
both fed and occupied for the rest of our lives”.

For a brief
moment he nearly accepted her offer; he was instantaneously ready
to blow up and scream, to tell her to get gone and good riddance.
The prospect of being completely alone held him back. The thought
of the empty, motionless buildings around them, and about the wind
rustling low through the empty yards and lots like a stalking
snake. He thought of the corpses, mouldering behind walls just
outside of his line of sight; people who had dragged themselves
into a hiding spot before facing their mortality, feeling the
animal instinct to die in peace and dignity. What about being alive
in dignity? Could that still exist? He didn’t think he would be
able to do it if he were alone. The urge to revert to animalism
would be too great. He would strip himself raw, sleep in the rough,
eat whatever he could catch. Would he use his voice, if he were
alone? For a time, he thought that he might. After the novelty of
talking to himself wore off, he would likely fall as silent as the
world around him, and the language center of his brain would
eventually rust away into a sodden pile of meaningless symbols and
tortured almost-understandings. He had a sudden image of himself,
naked as the day he was born, coursing on all fours through the
rock-strewn, weed-choked wasteland of a factory parking lot,
streaking after some nameless small animal bounding away on four
legs. He shuddered, and in that instant made his decision.

“
No,” he pleaded, “please don’t leave. I’m sorry,” he stopped
there, unable to prod his overly tired and stimulated brain into
finishing the sentence. He felt himself on the verge of sobbing,
and was astounded. Samantha saw this and her expression melted from
anger into a more vaguely disappointed resentment.

“
Oh, stop,” she said, and
you big
baby
was the implied finish that she never
spoke. She walked forward and put her arms around him. Leaning her
head against his chest, she murmured something that Richard
couldn’t quite make out. Stiffly, he put his arms around her in
turn, and some of the tension ended up leaving his
muscles.

“
So, are you ready?” he asked again. She stepped away and
looked down the street behind him.

“
I guess,” she replied, nodding. “I’m not sure what else we
would do”. Richard shrugged.

“
We could run off into the country, find a farm, and grow old”.
Samantha pursed her lips.

“
Just the two of us?” she asked sardonically. Richard clenched
his jaw but let it pass without incident. It had only been a
half-hearted suggestion anyway. Richard knew that, if there were
other survivors than just them (and there had to be, the gang holed
up in the hospital proved it) they would be gathering downtown as
well. For most of them, it would be to the same purpose that
Richard and Samantha found themselves – the simple quest for other
people.

“
Yeah, silly idea,” he groused quickly. “Let’s go”. He walked
away towards the gentle rise of the unimpressive skyline without
waiting for her to move.

SEVEN

They walked
down Court Street and as they did so the buildings grew closer
together and older. Aged red brick replaced dirty white siding and
the businesses that had previously inhabited them grew more
prestigious: doctors, lawyers, investment brokers, dentists. There
would be valuable equipment stashed inside those darkened
interiors, Richard thought. Medical equipment worth thousands.
Those touch-screen computers that were ubiquitous in the offices of
well-to-do dentists. The personal information of tens of thousands,
all locked away in filing cabinets and left to spend eternity in
the darkness. He wondered if anyone would ever come across them,
and make a master record of them someday. A sprawling book that
detailed the people that used to exist, and then didn’t. The future
archaeologists would have a series of giddy field days with even
this, a row of professional buildings in a second-rate decaying
industrial burg in the tail end of Ontario.