rachelleneveu | Who doesn't love the apocalypse?

Because I know I do. It's such a fascinating subject to me, figuring out how to get by when everything and everyone you've ever known is gone -- and of course by "fascinating", I mean "keeps me up at night and has me planning how to survive in the empty (and possibly zombie-infested) wasteland that was once human culture." This....fascination....isn't helped in any way by all those documentaries and specials the History Channel and Discovery Channel run really late at night. You know, the ones where all they talk about is the inevitable destruction of the planet by asteroids or aliens or floods or earthquakes or ~~zombies~~ a terrible and highly contagious virus that wipes out almost 98% of humanity? Yeah, those are really going to help me get to sleep tonight, Discovery Channel. Thank you for letting me know that there is no hope for preventing the total and complete decimation of the entire fucking galaxy. Seriously, for as informative as they can be -- I mean, thanks to the After the Apocalypse special on the History Channel, I now know how to start a fire with some steel wool and a car battery and how to properly scavenge supplies from a dead body, which are both incredibly important life skills that I was lacking -- I still find them to be pretty terrifying.

But hopefully this terror has proven to be a good thing, because from my ridiculous fears have come something actually resembling creativity. The original version of this story was written a little over a year ago, and I've been playing around with this idea since then and never really going anywhere with it until the past few days. The ever-lovely Harper "remixed" this idea in her own story a while ago and while we've been working on a collaborative "redux" of that on and off for the past few months, this is something a bit different.

After The End

(or, seven things to do when the world ends by plague)

000

Take off that stupid surgical mask.

You’ve got super mad crazy acne all around your mouth now – which reminds you, ew – and it probably didn’t make much of a difference, anyhow. Look at your friends, look at your family, look at your coworkers and your neighbors and all the strangers around you: they’re all dead from the plague, and you aren’t. It’s just you and your dog and all the thoughts you’ve got rattling around in your brain and it’s going to be like that until the end of forever.

You try to think about why you survived and no one else did, but you can’t really come up with an answer. Obviously, you’ve survived the most devastating thing to ever happen to humanity because you have superior genes.

You must be a mutant, like an X-Man or Superman or Bono or a…something. You were never all that good with comic books. And when it all comes down to it, you’re really just glad that there aren’t any zombies.

000

Break into the Lake Effect Diner over on Main Street and camp out for days.

The diner has this super-ultra-sturdy freezer that seems to have been made with the express purpose of surviving a Cold War-esque nuclear attack, so it surprises you more than anything else when you walk into the kitchen and find everything just sitting there; almost like the food and the cooking utensils have been waiting for you to just come in and pick them up. You make mountains of cheeseburgers and pies and onion rings on the diner’s gas stove and you stay up late playing Elvis and old fifties doo-wop on the tableside jukeboxes. You experiment with milkshake flavors, read all the books you can carry over from the bookstore across the street, and never before have you been so grateful for that wretched three months you spent in high school working at McDonald’s.

That whole first month on your own, you break into houses looking for supplies because the grocery stores might still be stocked, but how long is that going to last? Armed with a rather lazy terrier and a baseball bat, you bust open the windows of houses in neighborhoods close to yours; feasting on the crackers and canned fruit they left behind and stocking up on batteries, candles, and dog treats for Jack, amongst other things. You sleep in people’s beds, eat at their tables, read through their diaries and swim in their pools and look at their porn and reflect on just how fucking weird other people are.

Were, you mean. How weird people were.

You aren’t sure you’ll ever get used to saying that.

000

Take a walk through Delaware Park.

You’ve already been through the Albright-Knox, already taken the paintings that you wanted off of the walls and ransacked the jewelry from the gift shop and sat in the Mirror Room for as long as you wanted, but you walk through Delaware Park before you go back home and miss your friends and family and just seeing other people so much that it physically causes you pain. Most of your friends are dead – you’d say all, but your best friend moved to Florida right before the first outbreak and you’d rather think that Harper is sitting on a beach somewhere, drinking tequila straight from the bottle and reading a Janet Fitch novel while the sun sets, because it’s a thousand times better than the alternative.

You stand on the stage that people used to use for Shakespeare in the Park until you finally feel the mid-October cold, gripping the railing on the balcony and reciting as much of Romeo and Juliet that you can remember. The grassy hill where the audience would sit is depressingly empty, so you close your eyes and pretend that Harper and Mike and Amanda and everyone else you’ve ever known are sitting out there, cheering you on.

You make it through the play before nightfall, but you keep getting stuck on Mercutio’s dying speech because the line “a plague o’ both your houses” made you shake too hard to talk.

000

Try not to think about your ex.

You haven’t even talked to him since you ended everything, but it’s hard not to wonder what things would be like if he was still standing here beside you, because he was sweet and he was funny and motherfuck, it’s been almost a year since you last saw him and you know that you’re not supposed to press on a bruise, but it never lasts more than, oh, fifteen seconds and when you’re done feeling sorry for yourself you can come out of the drink aisle at Wegmans and start filling up your shopping cart again.

Deep down, you know he’s probably dead. Buffalo’s population has gone from over two hundred thousand people to, like, one-point-three, and that’s only if you’re counting your dog. Almost everyone you’ve ever known is gone – has been gone since the second outbreak, and it’s bad enough that anyone who could have made this existence bearable is dead, but that doesn’t change the fact that the silence that fills every passing day makes you lonelier and lonelier.

You think about his laugh, sometimes, pausing in the middle of washing clothes or chopping wood to look up and wait for him to walk out from some hiding place. Sometimes, you could swear that you see him; just catching that bright flash of hair in the sunlight as he ducks out of sight, but by the time you run over there’s nothing there.

You spend a week breaking into every house on his street. Every house, that is, except for his, because…well…you aren’t really sure. It sits there on the corner of Brenridge Circle, with dark windows and his car sitting in the driveway, but you just can’t bring yourself to go inside. Maybe it’s better not to know. At least if you don’t know, you can still think about what you’ll say when he shows up out of nowhere: jokingly demanding that you feed him and holding you so tightly that your ribs hurt.

You aren’t sure which is worse – the fact that you keep pretending that he’ll come find you, or that it actually keeps disappointing you when he doesn’t appear.

000

Wander around the Science Museum for a few days.

You break the glass that holds the animals in the Nature Wing and touch them, because you’ve always wondered what it they would feel like. The bear cub’s fur is stiff underneath your fingers, like shag carpeting, and the stuffed doe stares at you with cold glass eyes as you stroke her short grey coat. You think of the deer that live in the woods behind your house and you cry for an hour when you think of how your dad used to complain about them eating the garden.

It’s not fair; not fair that you’re alive and he’s not, not fair that Harper’s gone, not fair that you’re on your own, it’s not fair not fair not fair. You lie down on the hard wooden bench and for long while, you think about just not getting up at all. But then, your watch beeps and you realize that there’s only an hour until the sun sets, and if you’re going to get home before the town goes pitch-black you need to stop feeling so damn sorry for yourself and get back up.

You’re all that’s left, sugar, you tell yourself. Your head-voice sounds, unsurprisingly, like your dad. So buck up and stop crying. Tears won’t do anything but get you wet.

You don’t go back to the museum, but the next day you set up a karaoke machine in your high school auditorium. There’s no one left to laugh at you, or applaud or suggest songs or boo you off the stage, so you sing your heart out in front of an audience of all the stuffed animals you can find until the sun goes down or the batteries die, whichever one comes first.

You still do a mean “Natural Woman.”

000

Drive down to Washington, D.C.

You drive down to Washington because your uncle lives there and you aren’t sure you can live with yourself if you don’t at least try to see if he and his family are alright. You stock up your dad’s old truck with the food and books and blankets and all the vodka and cranberry juice you can find. You set off with Jack in the seat next to you and try not to wonder if this is the last time you’ll ever see your house, but then the highway is stretched out in front of you and you forget for awhile that there isn’t anyone else on the road.

You drive for three days and when you finally arrive at your uncle’s townhouse, no one is there; no lights, no sounds, no life. Out of habit, you ring the doorbell. Wind rustles through the trees like a death rattle and you stand there with your dog at your feet, waiting for someone who will never open the door, but you keep waiting because even if you didn’t always like them, this is still your family. You have to give them that chance.

Two hours later you finally leave, and you drive through the city looking for monuments you never had a chance to see before. You drive past the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument, but when you circle past 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue the second time, you realize that the gate to the White House is wide open. You creep forward in your truck, moving as slow as you can up the litter-strewn driveway and keeping a sharp eye out for survivors, but it seems like no one is there. Carefully, you walk inside and call out a greeting. No one answers.

After that, you sleep in the Lincoln Bedroom, mess around in the bowling alley, and split most of your time between wandering through the monuments and walking through the rooms that weren’t on the scheduled White House tours. On one afternoon, you find three hidden safes buried into the paneling in the walls of the Oval Office, none of which you can open even after trying all the numbers you found in the near-dead BlackBerry on the President’s desk. Feeling frustrated, you go down to the public library, find a book on safe-cracking, and spend two days trying to get them open.

The first one is stacked floor to ceiling with gold coins.

The second one is stacked floor to ceiling with silver coins.

You expect to find copper coins or bronze coins in the third one, or maybe just Baby Bear, but it is really tiny and holds, weirdly enough, a single photograph of two little girls eating cookies at a kitchen table somewhere.

It’s the third safe that does it, really, because it reminds you that no one will ever bake any sort of cookies again. There is no electricity for the ovens and no refrigerators to keep the dough cold and you get kind of depressed over that. And then you feel even worse, if that’s possible, because millions upon millions of people are dead and you’re fucking worried about cookies? If your father were still alive, he’d laugh at you.

You pick the lock on the bottom desk drawer in a vain effort to distract yourself from how awful a person you are. Inside are individual hanging folders holding naked pictures of Ann Coulter and Hillary Clinton, plus a few really disturbing ones of Barbara Walters. Again, you think of just how fucking weird people could be and how apparently Barack Obama was no exception. From down the hall, Jack barks.

You close the drawer, and when you leave you lock the door behind you.

000

Keep driving.

You take what you want from the White House (and several other museums and homes in the area) and decide to keep on going down the eastern coastline. You’re tired of the cold; tired of the gray and the wet and the general dreariness and decay of the cities when all you want to do is rest someplace that’s warm. You find a map in the glove box of an old Impala after you siphon the gas into your truck and trace the line of the freeway with your finger, connecting the dots between Charlotte and Savannah and a dozen Floridian cities with names that sound like sunshine.

Harper’s grandmother had a little house in West Palm, right on the water and about a ten-minute walk from the marina where they kept their boat. You remember the house from the last spring before everything went to hell: the weather-beaten porch, the bright blue shutters, the white sand that seemed to get everywhere if you left the door open too long. You had never seen the ocean before then and the sight had left you speechless.

You think about Harper as you drive, Harper with her short dark hair and her big green eyes and her bright, easy smile, and you hope that she’s alright. If anyone could survive this, it’s her, and even though it’s a long shot you can’t help but be hopeful to see a friendly face.

You roll down the windows when you finally cross the state line into Florida, laughing a little as Jack sticks his head out of the one on the passenger side, and you can’t help but think that things will be better if you find her alive. You’ll comb your hair and sing bad karaoke and maybe even have fancy dinners. You’ll plant a garden and make sandcastles and swim in the ocean every day. You’ll laugh – really laugh – for the first time in a year. You’ll have someone there with you, and things will only get better.

Just over the horizon, the sun is rising.

You feel like you’re going home.