Selection Event (17 page)

And the gift his body most craved was rest.

“Isha! Mona!” He stood up and Isha bounded over the taller weeds toward him. Mona rocketed ahead of them and into the house.

Inside, he lit a candle and led them to the bedroom. “Okay, guys,” he said, “I sleep here. Isha, here, lie down.” She lay on the rug beside the bed and immediately stretched out, making a restful moan. “Mona, you can sleep—” But Mona was already finding a place next to Isha's belly. “Exactly. I was going to suggest that.”

Martin stripped off his dirty clothes and threw them in the corner and slipped between the fresh sheets. The room had the strange feeling of all rooms where one sleeps for the first time, seeming that it could never become familiar, but he closed his eyes and sighed once deeply and let everything relax.

Tomorrow, he decided, he would see what he could gather up in the way of medicines, antibiotics and painkillers, and then, perhaps, he would begin searching for others, first here in Santa Miranda and then if he was unsuccessful, he could go up to Sacramento. But he would search cautiously.

In less than a minute, he fell asleep, ending another of the first days of his new life.

Chapter 29

He stopped at the first neighborhood drug store he came to and knew immediately that his search was not going to be a simple, straight-forward gather-and-go-home pill run. The pharmacy looked like it had been looted by manic compulsives with very good eyesight. Every pill, every drug, and every ointment was gone. All the aspirin, the hemorrhoid suppositories, eyedrops, nose sprays — all of it — gone.

What remained were sunglasses, ashtrays, the cheap wristwatches, a few magazines, and all the greeting cards. There wouldn't be much market for greeting cards anymore. In the back, where there used to be locked cabinets for the drugs with a high street value, there were jagged holes in the walls. It looked like someone had used a fire ax to get what they wanted.

He picked out a pair of wrap-around tortoiseshell sunglasses and left.

Next, he tried a large grocery store. Obviously they wouldn't carry what he was after, antibiotics and painkillers, but he wanted to see if it had been looted to the same degree. And it was. Same thing. All the drugs were gone except a half-empty bottle of child's cough syrup which he left behind.

Martin sat in the car and thought. He was not going about this the right way. He was thinking like a person from the old world. Back in those times, if you wanted aspirin, you went to a grocery or drug store. That, obviously, no longer worked. He had to have a method to fit the times.

So he had to ask himself, Who would have what he needed? Of course.

He drove to Edgebrook Estates, where the houses cost five times what his parents' house cost, and parked his car. Then he went from house to house, kicked in the doors, and checked out the three or four bathrooms in each house.

He was amazed. From the cabinets he pulled chloral hydrate, Seconal, and mysterious drugs with exotic names he'd never dreamed of: Tussionex, Florinal, Persantine — the names rolled off his tongue like the names of distant cities — Depakene, Wyamycin, Loxitane, Virilon, and the ominous sounding Medrol. There was no end to it, and by the time he got to the tenth house, he was filling the third pillowcase.

He had enough drugs to keep him busy sorting and looking up their uses for a week. Supply would never be a problem. The problem would be that many of the drugs would gradually become less effective as they grew older. And how long before someone learned to manufacture simple old penicillin? Fifty years? A hundred?

That gave him pause.

When he thought of the old world and its civilization, there was much he wouldn't miss — cars, the traffic, lawn-mowing, well-organized vacations, pleasing one's co-workers, and a hundred other things. They all seemed beside the point now, irrelevant in the highest degree. But what he would miss was the safety from minor infections that would be lethal without a couple dozen capsules of the simplest antibiotic.

On his way back to his house, he thought about that. Death would come easy and often, once the antibiotics aged and became impotent.

Grimly considering this, he drove back to his new home. Halfway there he became very lonely.

Chapter 30

By the end of the first week, Martin had hooked up the generator to the well pump and had planted a garden. Then it started to rain. It drizzled off and on for two days and then the sky broke open and it poured until the street in front of the house was six inches deep and flowed like a river. After two days, he could see the water-logged bodies of chickens and fat rats floating by whenever he looked out. The back yard and his garden were under a solid sheet of rain-dimpled water. He kept checking the basement to see if it had started to fill, but the house was well made, and the basement remained dry.

As Diaz had told him, the weather was changing — this, for Santa Miranda, was unheard of weather for June. And next year, he wondered, what would that be like? Endless rain? Or drought? There were certainly no experts on television to advise him.

More and more, he was not worrying about the future. The future had already proved to be utterly unpredictable, and that was the only certainty. So he focused as well as he could with the immediate problems.

Sufficient unto the day, he thought, is the work thereof.

If the Central Valley became a flood plain or a desert, he would move. If neither, he would stay. In the meantime, he would eat. From the garage, he brought in his parents' two burner propane camp stove. He boiled some pasta, chopped up some dried tomatoes and put them in with some basil, anise, and dried parmesan.

  After a few tastes, he forgot about generators, gasoline, his garden, and the rain. More and more these days, he noticed that when he ate, he paid attention to his eating. He tasted his food, felt it between his teeth and over his tongue. The pasta had boiled just the right length of time, and the tomatoes were both sweet and tart and tinged with the flavor of anise. In the old world, he had never taken the time to pay attention to such things. He made a mental note to find a garden where someone had planted asparagus. It occurred to him that as Mona and Isha already knew, he was teaching himself to live through his senses. Slow to fade was the rush of civilization that had numbed him to life through his skin.

....

Still, it continued to rain. Between naps, Isha and Mona sat at the windows through the day and watched it pour.

He would not starve — the food situation was well under control — but if the rain continued, he started thinking, they could drown.

Four days of heavy rain sheeted the entire neighborhood with water. Only the taller sturdier weeds stuck above the surface. Bodies of larger animals now were occasionally swept down the street.

The evening of the seventh day of rain, he heard Isha barking madly at something she had seen through the front window.

Martin took the shotgun from where he kept it beside the front door and went out to the wrought iron gate to check. Casually wading down the street were two full-sized hippos and one baby, although it probably weighed five or six hundred pounds. The water barely came up to their short knees, and as they moved along, they lowered their broad snouts and chomped and snorted through the water. None of them looked in Martin's direction. He touched Isha and she ceased barking and growled tensely.

“It's all right. When you see something on two legs, that's when you to raise hell.”

Later in the day, Martin found himself, for the first time, with nothing that needed doing. He'd cleaned out the house, removing everything unnecessary — most of the lamps, replacing them with candles or the kerosene lanterns he'd scavenged from surrounding houses. He'd emptied the bedroom he presumed belonged to the family teenager and turned it into an extensive pantry which contained food and supplies from the surrounding houses. And he'd run a line from the generator into the house for the refrigerator and a couple of lights. After that, it seemed like there there was nothing to do.

Out of boredom, he plugged a movie player into a live outlet and put in one of the family's movies. It was a film he remembered seeing once several years before, a complex story about a private investigator who starts out looking into a husband's infidelity and ends up uncovering a grand scheme about wealthy southern Californians stealing land and water rights from farmers. It might as well have been about stealing sheep in Ethiopia.

It was an artifact from a gone world. Money and power were what people were concerned about back then. With both feet braced in their society of laws and traditions, money and power was what they used to manipulate each other to accumulate more money and power. Now it all seemed very strange, and it wasn't even particularly entertaining. It was like a specimen of extinct nastiness spread on a glass slide for his examination.

He popped out the disk and put in another, this one an adventure about a man and a woman who were thrown together, didn't like each other, but were destined to fall in love. At their first kiss, he turned it off.

He had been too busy to think much about being alone, but this, now, had reminded him of Delana and the last time he had seen her, when they had said goodbye, not on particularly good terms. He had stood in front of her, holding her hands in his and had kissed her once, lightly. She had been indifferent and a bit uncomfortable. Of course, they agreed that they would think of each other and reevaluate their futures when his isolation experiment was over — but the world had changed on them and his isolation experiment would never be over. Would it? Would there ever be anyone he would love again?

He lay on the sofa, the rain drumming on the roof and the air in the house damp and still, and without prelude, he wept — for himself, for Delana, for what he had lost and might never have again, for his parents, for the dead woman in Curtiz' bathroom, for everything he'd put off that he'd never get the chance to do, and for everyone, finally, that he would never see again.

How many times, in how many ways, would he have to say goodbye, goodbye, goodbye to the old world?

After a while, he slept, and when he awakened, Isha had curled up at his feet and Mona slept in a ball against his side. His two remaining friends kept him warm in the cold house, and for this he was thankful.

He lay there and listened to the rain pouring through the downspouts and wondered how long it would be before he began searching for others.

Not long, he bet himself.

....

The next morning, the sun rose into a nearly blue sky, the clearest sky Martin had seen. The rain had stopped, and crows flew high overhead, so high they looked like black dashes.

The air warmed early and became muggy, and out in the street, the water began to flow away. By noon, the middle of the road was above the water, and the birds came out. Thousands of them landed on exposed islands of dirt and pecked at bugs and worms... blackbirds, sparrows, finches, starlings, and on the peaks of the roofs, huge glossy crows strutted and cawed at the world.

Martin fixed himself lunch and coffee and went outside the front gate to watch. A pack of wet dogs galloped yapping down the street, scattering shrieking birds everywhere. They ignored Martin and seemed to be on their way to nowhere in particular, bumping each other and nipping at each other's legs as they ran. As soon as they were out of sight, the birds came back from the trees and resumed their noisy feeding. But now along with the smaller birds had appeared several gray and white geese.

Considering how humankind had populated beyond the limits of the earth's capacity and had now become nearly extinct, there was a lot of room for other species to pick out their own spaces.

Later in the day, he drove to a few electronics stores to find himself a battery-operated shortwave radio. He didn't know anything about broadcasting, but he wanted to listen for others. Simply knowing that people existed somewhere would lighten his loneliness, even if they were on another continent. And if there was someone out there, then he could figure out how to answer back.

Finding the radio was not difficult, and within an hour and a half, it was in the seat beside him and he was on his way to Arden Park, to climb the outcropping again.

There were two things he wanted to do while up there. First, above most of the buildings of the city, he wanted to tune slowly through the frequencies, however long it took — AM, FM, and shortwave, listening carefully for any voices. Second, when night had fallen, he wanted to look across the city for lights. Now that the power was off, any lights would be a sign of other survivors. But if he did see a light, he certainly wasn't going to drive straight for it, honking and yelling that he was a friend. Not after his last experience. He would approach cautiously.

He pulled out the long whip antenna and began. The AM band was nothing but static. And there was nothing on FM. Then, slowly, for the next hour, he tuned up through all the shortwave frequencies and back down again. Twice he thought he heard something, but double-checking revealed only white noise. Once more he went through the AM band, hoping and hoping.

There was nothing there.

Martin pushed the antenna back into the radio and touched the power switch. The lighted indicator went dark. He gazed sadly at it. So much for that. He knew that at different times of the day different shortwave frequencies carried better than at other times, so he would try again tomorrow. But it wasn't promising.