Shortly after the plague

Shortly after the plague had swept through most of the country, they started coming down out of the hillside hovels and small town grottos in which they had hidden. Scores of men and women, none younger than teenagers or older than mid-30s, all came trickling into the cities hoping to find someone, anyone, who could tell them what had happened.
At first, it was just an outbreak, an epidemic. Then the canisters were found, their sides torn open by explosion, and people began to put the pieces together. It was most certainly an attack, a massive, well-planned annihilation of the American public. Everyone said it was the Arabs. Everyone said it was the Chinese. Everyone said it was the Jews. Everyone said it was the Gays. Everyone said it was Everyone Else. They were all out to get us, jealous of our money, our freedom, our democratic values. Our satellite television and SUVs and easy access to hardcore porn. They wanted what we had, what they could never have. Those Sand Niggers. Those Chinks. Those Kikes. Those Faggots. Those Everyone.
But then word trickled in from up north, down south, across the pond: people everywhere were dying. We were all dying, slowly and en masse. In Europe, Africa, Asia, South America, Oceania, we were all dying. Our Muslim friends. Our Communist brethren. Our Jewish sons and daughters. Our Gay lovers. Our Everyone.
Fuck.
We were all dying. And there was no one to blame. No one to hate or target or dream about torturing. And those goddamned survivors kept coming. From miles around, looking bedraggled and blistered in the heat and sun. July was a shitty time to die in America. Those who had been caught by the first wave, their bodies overflowing hospitals, morgues, funeral homes, even jail cells, they were beginning to go bad. The rot, the heavy stench of decay, was everywhere. Was unavoidable.
On particularly hot days, the biggest cities became ovens. Baking, broiling the dead. On those days, if you lived in those cities, you had to shut your windows and fan yourself—the electricity long since cut off—to keep from dying of heat exhaustion. We were the strong ones, though. We were the ones who could shut our windows and live. We could sit in an apartment in Brooklyn, nude, sweating, drinking small sips of water from the reserve tank on the back of the toilet. We could all do this because we had all survived the plague. Anyone who would have been too weak to lock themselves away on those worst days, they were already dead by then.
Near the end of July, a movement had begun to get everyone out of the cities—abandon them for more open spaces. The same open spaces that the survivors had trickled in from, in fact.
The Movement said: Let’s go to the country. Everything will be fine there. There will be fewer bodies there, less stench, less baking flesh.
The Survivors from the Hills said: There is nothing there. We left there because we could not survive there. We will not return.
The Movement said: Then stay here and die.
The Survivors from the Hills said: Then go and die.
There was no fighting, there was no rioting. Only the simple division of people. None of us had lived through the Civil War, but if we had, this division would have looked remarkably familiar. Friends chose different paths. Families were torn apart. Brother against brother, sister against sister. Both sides damned to death by the other. Unlike most people, I stayed in Brooklyn. I was the only one in my building, aside from the body of the crazy lady who lived on the first floor who, when alive, smelled terribly like cabbage and cat shit. Even dead she smelled like cabbage and cat shit. Decaying cabbage and cat shit which, being three floors above her, was not that noticeable. Though I did have to hurry down the stairs when I left so as to avoid the smell as much as possible.
There was a supermarket across the street from my apartment. It had been broken into and raided many, many times, but there was still plenty of food to take. Especially with nearly all of my neighborhood choosing to follow The Movement out of the city and into New Jersey or Connecticut or some such place. There were entire rows of uneaten, unstolen food. Most of it was not ready-to-eat, so the lazy fucks who robbed the market left them on the shelf. But I didn’t. I took them all. As many as I could carry. Without any gas on in the oven or electricity to run the microwave, I resorted to cooking all of my meals on my small propane camping stove. I did it so often, and in the same place each time, that a black ring of fire and ash had formed in the center of my kitchen table.
Three months, two weeks, and three days after the first people had started leaving—leaving in the millions—I heard music coming from somewhere. With no electricity and all of the cute little cafes with acoustic open mike nights closed down, I hadn’t heard any music in nearly two months. My iPod was long dead and, it being the only battery-operated music-making device in the house, there was no other source of music for me to use. I had tried playing a vinyl record by placing it on the turntable and, after lowering the needle, spinning the record manually, but all I was able to produce were a few undecipherable chirps and pops, though I continued to stand there and spin the record for hours. That is how desperate I was for sound. Any sound. After the iPod died, I stole a portable stereo from an electronics store down the street, but I couldn’t find batteries anywhere to run it. Even before all of the bread and water was gone, the batteries were taken. People could stand to let their stomachs growl and throats dry up, but no one would stand for silence and darkness. I guess I didn’t act fast enough. I was able to steal a Discman, but only had four AA batteries in my house. The thing died after a few weeks of play. I tried to limit myself to listening to only one CD a day, but it still didn’t last very long.
So when I heard that music coming in through the window, I stopped. I was making a small lunch of Ritz cracker and Velveeta cheese sandwiches when I heard the noise. It was the distinct sound of the Beatles—“Rocky Raccoon” in fact. I peered out the kitchen window and tried to see where the sound was coming from. Odd, thing to say, huh? “See” where the sound was coming from. But that’s just what I did. Same as I would if I were watching an orchestra, or a choir, and wanted to pick out one particular instrument or singer. Just look directly at that person and the sound of their violin or trombone or baritone would grow and take over the other sounds and voices around them. This is what I did when I looked out of the window. I scanned the empty backyards and rooftops that I could see from my kitchen window, but there was nothing. Curious, and bored of course, I put on a pair of shoes, said goodbye to the cat—animals were immune to whatever it was that had killed the rest of us, in fact the number of stray cats and dogs in my neighborhood about tripled during the course of the plague, people dying and leaving their pets alone and unattended; my cat, luckily, still had me to take care of her; hell, there was plenty of cat food in the supermarket since no one had yet resorted to eating it—and headed out the door.
As I left, I grabbed my gun, well, a gun. I had collected about a dozen guns over the course of the past few months. From handguns to rifles to one alarmingly large automatic weapon. Once people started leaving the city, I felt that I should protect myself. I entered abandoned apartments, shops, and offices and grabbed every gun that I could find. Not that I thought I would need all of these guns, but because if I had them, that meant that no one else could get their hands on them. Might as well give myself the advantage as much as possible. Also, since I usually only found the guns and not the bullets, once a gun was empty it was pretty much useless. Not that I fired the guns that much. In fact, since my foraging for deadly weapons, I had only fired a gun three times; twice accidentally. Both of those times I was trying to figure out where the safety was and ended up shooting a hole into the wall of my apartment. The third time I shot a gun, just a few days before I heard the music through my kitchen window, I killed a dog in the middle of 5th Avenue. It was rabid, starving, or mad. Hell, it may have been all three. In any case, I had stepped out of my apartment building, hurrying past the rotting cabbage smell on the second floor, to go “shopping” and had seen the dog across the street. It was walking slowly, weaving back and forth across the sidewalk. When the door to my building slammed shut it looked over at me. At first I felt sorry for the poor thing, all skin and bones. But then it growled at me and started to walk towards me. It barked twice and began running. I stood with my hand on the door, ready to open it in case I missed, and pulled my gun from my pocket. I fired once, hitting the dog in the throat. I wasn’t really aiming for anything in particular, just hoping to hit or, at the very least, scare the animal. But it was definite kill shot. One painful yelp and the dog collapsed onto the ground in the middle of the street. I looked around to see if anyone had seen me shoot a dog in cold blood. No one was around. No one was ever around.
I walked to the supermarket, taking a wide path around the dog’s body, careful not to get too close for fear that it was just pretending to be dead in order to lure me close enough to bite. I hurried to the supermarket. By the time I was done with my shopping, arms laden with crackers, cereal, cans of beans, rice, and cat food, there were three birds standing on the road near the dog’s body. I walked around all of them and went back into my building, not leaving until that day of the music. When I stepped outside I looked for the dog’s body. It was gone. A dark, red stain marked its former resting place. Whether it had been taken away by man or another animal, I had no idea. And didn’t really want to think too much about. It was enough that it was gone. Dead and gone. I walked down the street, towards the back of my building where the sound had seemed to come from, and stopped when I heard another song. This time it was “Why don’t we do it in the road?” I stood on the sidewalk and lingered for a little while as the song continued.
Without electricity or phone access, there really wasn’t much to do after the plague. And, since I had lost my wife to the plague and my family to the plague and my friends to the plague, there wasn’t anyone worth calling anyway. So that just left me, my cat, and my apartment. For five months, nearly half a year, I had been in that apartment without electricity or any other amenity. In the beginning I would see people on the street and talk to them about what was happening, what we were going to do, how we would survive. But that got old and people started to leave, and now there was no one. So I stayed inside. I stayed inside and I read. And I wrote. And I read some more. About a year before the plague broke out, my wife and I had written up a list of every book that we owned. We organized it on the computer, by author’s name, and noted which books each of us had read. Once the electricity went out, and I still had a little life left in my computer, I opened that list and copied down every book on it. I filled page after page with titles and authors and whether or not I had read it. When I was done, I had the following:

1,711 books
854 read by me

The first thing I set out to do was read the remaining 857 books that I had not read before. With all of my “free” time and with nothing else to do, I thought it would be an easy task. For the most part it was, however there were some books that we owned that neither of us had read—and for good reason. The Complete Works of Milton—that was a bitch and a half. But I powered through it. With nothing else to do, no one else to see, it was pretty much all I had. Even if it was at times a slow and somewhat painful process.
I started by reading the books that my wife had read before she died. I had had months to deal with the grief, anger, and confusion that I felt following her death. The reading of “her” books was a final, cathartic release; a long goodbye. I had watched her suffer, along with the hundreds of millions of others throughout the country, as her body slowed down, gave up, and wasted away. The stench of death inundated our apartment, even overpowering the sharp, tangy scent of cat urine from the dirty litter box that I didn’t bother to clean out during my wife’s final weeks. After she died, 28 and beautiful and in incredible pain, I lay next to her on the bed and slept one final night alongside her. In the morning, I wrapped her in a sheet and carried her down the four flights of stairs to the street. By that time, the world had shrugged off all the old rules and laws of proper society and reduced itself to the worst of behaviors: there were muggings and beatings and rapes, all unreported, all out in the open. And there was no one to stop them, no one who cared. Either you were too sick to notice or taking care of someone you loved who was dying and had problems of your own.
I carried my wife down the street until I found a suitable car and broke its passenger-side window with a rock. After a little work, I hotwired the car and drove the both of us south down Flatbush Avenue until we hit the Brooklyn Marine Park. There, I lifted my wife out of the back of the car and walked out into a large bay. When I reached a point where the water was up to my chest, I carefully lay my wife on top of the water, said a short prayer, and let her body drift and sink away, disappearing below the level of the water in front of me. Wet, cold, and crying, I turned back to the shore, restarted the car, and drove back home. When I got back, I stripped the sheets, pillowcases, and duvet cover from the bed and threw them into a black plastic trash bag. Still in my wet clothes, I took the bag outside and threw it into a large, nearly overflowing trash bin that sat in the parking lot of the supermarket across the street. Once back inside, I scrubbed the apartment clean. Beginning with the litter box, which had reasserted itself as the foulest odor in the apartment, I cleaned and cleaned and cleaned. Mopping, vacuuming, sweeping, dusting, scrubbing. I did it all. I even got down on my hands and knees and scraped the small rug in our living room with a cat-hair brush, picking pieces of fur, hair, food, and cellulite up from deep within the carpet. Cleaned up after the disease, after the death.
When I was done, and had filled three more black garbage bags with paper towels, crumbs, hairballs, dust bunnies, and spoiled food, I took it all downstairs and out to the garbage bin across the street. When I returned to the apartment I locked the door behind me and didn’t leave for nearly a month, except to occasionally venture out on a quest to stockpile weapons or steal more canned food from the supermarket. Sitting in the apartment, alone, surrounded by darkness and silence, I only had time. Time to think, time to sleep, time to read and eat and shit. Time to wait for something to happen, something that would give all of this death, all of this poison, some meaning. But nothing ever happened. Not until the people started coming into the city from the hills. And then the Movement began, ran its course, and ended. Then it was all silence and reading again. Until that afternoon when I heard the Beatles coming through my window. That day that I put a gun in my pocket and went down the stairs.
“Why don’t we do it in the road?” Paul McCartney said.
“No one will be watching us.” Paul McCartney said.
“Why don’t we do it in the road?” Paul McCartney said.
I followed Paul’s voice out behind my building and came across a wooden fence. The voice was singing from behind the fence, loudly. I tried to peek over the fence but it was too tall. I tried to look through the wooden slats, but there was a green plastic tarp behind the fence that blocked my view. Screwing up my courage, I called out to Paul, who had moved on to “I Will” and was serenading me lovingly from behind the fence.
“Hello!” I called out, listening as the White Album responded.
“I didn’t catch your name,” Paul answered.
“Anyone there?” I asked. “I live around the corner and heard your music playing. I didn’t think there were many people left around here.”
“Sing it loud so I can hear you,” Paul said.
“I haven’t seen anyone around here in weeks or maybe a month,” I said. “Who knows how long for sure."
“And you know I will,” Paul quipped.
“Anyone there?”
Only Paul.
Patting my right front pocket to make sure that my gun was still there, I began to climb the wooden fence with the green tarp backing to investigate what was on the other side. Before I had even managed to boost myself up, a loud bang rang out from the other side of the fence, splintering the wood beside me and causing my hands to release from the top of the fence and my bladder to release in my pants. I fell down to the ground, picked myself up as fast as I could, and ran back to my apartment, warm piss dripping down the front of my legs. I threw myself inside the front door to my building and slammed the door shut behind me. Panting heavily, my hands shaking and my heart beating quickly, I collapsed to the ground behind the door.
“Fuck,” I said to the empty mailboxes that occupied the small corridor between the two doors that marked the entrance to my building. “What the fuck?”
I sat there for a while, making sure that I hadn’t been followed by the crazy asshole who had shot at me. Or near me, at least. I didn’t move until the urine began drying on my legs and pants, leaving an unpleasant chill and stickiness at my crotch. I stood up, unlocked the second door, and walked slowly back upstairs to my apartment, not caring to hurry past the decaying smell of cabbage and cat shit that flooded out of 2R.
Upstairs, I undressed, threw my jeans, boxers, and socks into the tub, and lay down naked on the bed. I was tired. It was quiet again. The music had been silenced, leaving only the sound of the wind to keep me company. I fell asleep a little while later, not waking up again until the next morning when the cat came by to rub her face on mine and ask for breakfast. After feeding her, I stood by the kitchen window, listening for the sounds of John, Paul, George, and Ringo. None of them said a word.