Prospero's Half-Life (8 page)

The further
they walked into the downtown, the more Richard could smell fire.
That smudge of smoke that hung on the horizon wasn’t as far off as
Richard had first thought. The wind freshened towards them and the
smell of wood-fire became even stronger. He wondered how far off
the fire was, with no small amount of unease. He also wondered if
those far-flung future archaeologists would have anything to dig
through, after all. He thought about discussing it with Samantha
but she seemed lost in thought as they walked; he didn’t want to
stir up anything, so soon after their last blowout, so he kept his
concerns to himself.

They passed
the for-sale sign on an empty brick office building and a gunshot
cracked from somewhere nearby. Richard stopped dead in his tracks,
trying madly to listen. Samantha seemed to be keeping an ear out to
the world as well, although she was staring off in a different
direction than Richard was. He breathed in long intervals, trying
to discern natural sounds from a repetition of something man-made.
Aside from the flutter of a flock of birds roosting atop a balcony
garden down the street, there was no sound. He licked his lips,
suddenly apprehensive about where they were heading. Samantha
seemed to accept it as a matter of course, however.

“
May as well keep going,” she shrugged. “Neither of us will
feel normal until we find some other people”.

She walked
ahead and Richard lingered for a moment before scrambling to catch
up. Their footfalls seemed to loud, now that that gunshot had
broken the afternoon stillness, and Richard winced with each loud
echo. They passed a boarded-up music store that seemed to have been
boarded up recently, and then they were on St. Paul Street, staring
south into the city core. The wind above them was drawing in a
series of clouds that bore a steadily increasing greyness. The
sunlight filtered through the gathering cloud layer and cast
strange shadows on the street ahead of them.

“
Not very impressive, is it?” Samantha asked, mirth tugging at
the corners of her mouth. Richard looked at her
sideways.

“
What do you mean?” he asked, honestly curious. She gave a
small smile.

“
Well, for the downtown of place with a couple hundred thousand
people, it looks an awful lot like the main drag of some small
town, doesn’t it?”

Richard gave
it another reappraisal. It was instantly familiar to him and so he
could not really give it an honest look; it appeared to him as the
downtown, somewhere that he’d always known and just seemed like the
place that it was. He wasn’t sure what she was talking about, in
any event; he hadn’t spent much time in small towns and had very
little familiarity with what their downtowns looked like.

There were
corpses, here; people whom had been unwilling or unable to hide
inside when they felt their time coming and had chosen instead to
bleed out of their main orifices in the final, pitiless glare of
the public eye. Cars were strewn about, equally as liberally.
Parking laws had given way when all other law and order had broken
down in the final, desperate last days of civilization.

Richard, for
his part, was horrified. He had remained fairly isolated, he
realized; he had lived in a nice condo in one of the newer
buildings out on the other end of town, where the city petered out
into the surrounding countryside. He had seen nothing like this in
the last few weeks, even though he’d followed the story on the
available news sources. It had all seemed so unreal, viewing it
through the thick filter of his various LCD screens. People were
dying but they weren’t people he knew. He didn’t have to see them,
or touch them. His neighbours began disappearing and he hadn’t
really noticed. They’d played a role in his life in only a very
minor, peripheral way, and so he’d dismissed it out of hand when he
no longer saw them. When people from the store had begun getting
sick and not showing up, he’d connected it to what was going on but
not in any real, tangible way. He hadn’t seen them die, and that
was really the key thing. He hadn’t seen any of his neighbours
dead, he hadn’t watched Mohammed die (although his demise was
certain, from what Richard had witnessed), the dead bodies outside
of Samantha’s apartment had seemed like a mocked-up television set,
even the few corpses he’d spied here and there since leaving the
apartment had been nothing more noteworthy to him than the roadkill
he’d occasionally seen on the highways in the time before. This,
however, was too blatant to ignore. There were dozens of them in
sight, blood-soaked bodies sprawled in contorting positions from
their final, phlegmatic spasms. They had died in the street, with
no one to collect and bury them. They would lie there until the
rains and the predations of animals took them away. Their bones
would bleach in the sun and finally crumble away into dust, years
from now. They would still be lying in the street years from now.
Decades from now. Richard fell to his knees. His hands found his
face without a shred of conscious thought, and he began to weep
heavily.

Presently,
Samantha knelt beside him and put a comforting hand on the back of
his head. She stroked his hair gently and whispered gentle nonsense
into his ear. His sobbing eventually grew less, and tapered off
into hitching breaths here and there. Finally, he was calm again,
and rose to his feet.

The bodies
were still there, visible through a crazed lens of remaining tears,
but he felt as though he could deal with it now. He could see them
and not immediately want to vomit everything in his stomach onto
the street. The sight didn’t seem quite as delirious – it was still
insane, beyond any real, instantaneous comprehension, but he could
look at it without feeling his mind begin to disengage and float
away.

In clearing
his mind of this, he began noticing the little details that he’d
been refusing to acknowledge before. The smell, that was the big
one. In addition to the strengthening scent of wood smoke hanging
on the air, he realized that there was an underlying redolence to
the breeze that he’d refused to admit. To put it crudely, he could
smell the sour tang of blood and the deeper, earthier smell of shit
everywhere. Once he detected it, he could smell it in everything.
It was such an overwhelming force that he wondered how he’d been
able to ignore it the entire time.

He noticed the
broken windows, as well, and the glittering carpet of glass that
lined the street and sidewalks as a result. The side streets that
they’d travelled on had been cleaner; the buildings had been
shuttered and the windows were mostly intact. St. Paul Street, by
contrast, was a complete mess. It looked as though a riot had come
rolling through, and from what Richard saw that might have been the
case. Some of the blood that stained the street came from wounds
that did not originate in plague.

The jagged
holes that had been shattered in the store fronts unnerved him as
they passed by. The light caught odd reflections in the sunlight,
and the unpredictable glitter constantly made Richard think that
there was someone moving inside. Whenever he would turn to confront
the person, though, he would catch himself on nothing. At first
Samantha reacted along with him, nervous and ready to sprint, but
after the first few times she became bored. Her slackening
demeanour annoyed him; his own nerves were tightened to the point
that he could play sweep arpeggios on them.

“
Do you think people were trying to get out of here?” Samantha
asked after a time. They were passing by a small tattoo shop and a
body hung halfway out of the front window. Richard eyed it
critically as the walked by it; the body’s head lay at an unnatural
angle. He looked out to the street and saw a pile-up of four cars
that, given time, would eventually fuse together into an
unrecognizable mass of steel and circuit board. There were victims
inside that heap, hidden behind impact-shattered glass and twisted
metal. He shook his head.

“
I don’t think anyone knew what they were trying to
do”.

Samantha did
not reply and they walked on. The more he saw it, the more it took
on the view of complete chaos. There were as many beaten, murdered
corpses on the street as there were bled-out plague victims. A
large furniture store had been driven into, and the car mouldered
inside the gapped-out show window, it’s back window crazed and
bloody. The smell of gasoline lay heavy around it, and Richard
motioned to Samantha to cross to the other side of the street. He
had no wish to get close to a sudden random explosion.

Across the
street was a tall brick-and-glass structure, more modern than most
of the other buildings on the street. The place looked completely
torn apart, and there were bodies ringing the smashed-out doors.
Richard looked up to the dark windows on the top floors with
trepidation, wondering if someone might be looking down on them as
they walked, with unknown intent. He shivered and made himself stop
imagining things. There was no movement in any of the windows,
although a small part of him whispered that he might not spy such
activity until it was too late.

Just past the
modern-looking building was a deep courtyard; there were a couple
of bodies and a small Japanese car flipped upside down. An arm
snaked motionless out of the wreckage of the car; Richard tried to
avert his eyes but he found that he couldn’t avoid looking at such
scenes anywhere he turned his eyes to. There were restaurants on
the other side of the street, and an abandoned cinema; there was
blood and flesh and viscera on display everywhere, littering the
sidewalks, hanging out of jagged glass holes, pulverized by the
lethal impact of auto accidents. Richard could feel the abattoir
closing in around him. The copper scent was everywhere, like old
pennies that had been stored in a drawer for years and then
withdrawn grudgingly into the light. He felt his stomach roll over,
and his gorge rise. He must have looked green, because Samantha’s
hand encircled his bicep shortly.

“
Are you going to be okay?” she asked, concerned. Richard
nodded emphatically, not really trusting himself to speak.
Everything wanted to spill out all at once, and his heart seemed to
be achieving new speed records. He breathed purposely, measuring
his inhalation and exhalation in equal intervals. He managed to get
himself under control within a short time, and got back up to his
feet.

“
I seem to keep doing that,” he said by way of apology.
Samantha smiled, although there seemed to be some impatience behind
it. He kept his breathing under control.

“
We should stop and eat something soon,” Samantha said, looking
appraisingly at the buildings around them. She pursed her lips.
“Somewhere less occupied”. Richard silently agreed.

They chose a
relatively untouched book store up the street. The sign declared it
as “Penelope’s Used Books” and the subscript on the cheaply-made
yellow-on-white said that it “used books eagerly”. The front window
had been smashed along with the rest, but the interior seemed
undisturbed. They crossed into cool, darkened stacks, where the
secret smell of aging paper dominated over all.

“
Do you think the lights are burned out?” Samantha whispered,
and Richard looked intently at the ceiling.

“
Maybe,” he said, “maybe someone shut them off, before they
left for the last time. You have a flashlight in that pack of
yours?”

“
Of course,” she said, offended. “I have two”. She took off her
knapsack and rummaged inside. She handed him the smaller of the
two, an emergency wind-up flashlight. He gave her a look and then
began winding it up. The
zipzipzip
sound it made seemed very loud in the close
confines of the jumbled shelves.

They peeked into recesses of the store and were impressed by
how far it went back. Richard had never been much of a reader, but
he was impressed by the sheer number and variety of the books that
were contained within the place. He found a whole section of
westerns, which his father would have loved. It was amazing how
quickly memory could flood back when confronted with familiar
stimuli, and as he fingered the worn-in spines of wide, curved
paperback novels his mind conjured up high resolution pictures of
thirty years past. His father drinking coffee in the morning,
bopping to Stevie Ray Vaughan and reading something by Louis
L’Amour. The sunlight came in a nearby window over top of him,
casting him in a higher contrast than normal, and he seemed to burn
into Richard’s interior sight like the sun. He’d been nine, he
remembers, the same year that he’d watched a group of people
demolish a cement wall bedecked with neon-coloured graffiti. His
father had been sitting on their ratty old couch; the video had
come on the news and his father had lain down the book he was
reading (L’Amour again,
How The West Was
Won
). His hands, long-fingered and
powerful. There was something like awe in the way that he was
watching the video, Richard remembered that. Awe and a sort of
stunned stupification.

Samantha nudged him and he shook away from his reveries. He
ran an appreciative finger down one more cracked spine and turned
away, back into the dim present. They went to the back of the
stacks and found stairs leading up. They were wide, and lined on
the sides with an overflow of paper novels. When the reached the
top they realized that there were even
more
rooms filled with books. The
main room extended out to the front of the store and had a large
picture window facing out onto the street – undamaged, a rarity.
This room was littered with stacks of boxes of books. Near the back
of the store were two rooms with very old-looking hardcover books.
Samantha decided that they would stop to eat in that room; she
seemed excited at the prospect of digging through what she called
“the collection”.