Short Story / Untitled
We passed a little boy, dead, on the side of the road just outside of Auburn, New Hampshire. We had seen our share of bodies on our way, some fresh kills, some not. This one was different. Enough of the old ways still persisted that someone, a father or an adopted aunt, usually took the time to bury a dead child. . . even if they wouldn’t take the time to bury anyone else. Stan looked him over, from a distance of a few feet. He couldn’t find a mark on the boy but that didn’t make me feel any better. I feared for the boy’s mother. I feared what ever made whomever he had been with leave him here like a piece of litter on the side of the car strewn highway.
You would think we’d have fallen numb to such things in the year since it, whatever it was, happened. In the past year we had all seen things, had things done to us, and done things ourselves that would have been unimaginable to us before. Such an insignificant word, that suddenly took on a whole new importance- before. Everything was before, who you were, and what you had planned, and where you’d come from. You can say we only did what we had to, to survive but it doesn’t help anyone sleep better at night. So much of . . .before . . .persisted with us.
We were in Boston, most of us college students, when the end of the world came. You would think that if you had to be in a major city at the apocalypse Boston would be the safest one to be in. People tend to view Boston as a little more civilized then other cities. As if that line between society and wildness is somehow thicker there. But the people, the few people left, flocked in from Dorchester, from Roxbury, Medford, and Lynn. They smashed windows on Newbury Street and walked off with six thousand dollar Armani jackets. MIT and Harvard were pulled down brick by brick, and then burned as if in someway they were to blame for how things were. In those uncertain days just after everyone died, those who were left still covered their faces and ran from the scenes of devastation as if they expected the police or the channel 13 news to show up.
We took refuge in the backstage area of one of the smaller theaters, the Majestic. We thought no one would bother us there. We really expected the National Guard to show up soon, the Red Cross laden down with medicine and boxes of food, the president circling overhead in a helicopter. No one came.
There were ten of us to start with a few from this college, a few from that, and Jimmy who wasn’t a student but supplied drugs to the campuses so everyone knew him. We lost a poli sci major to suicide almost immediately, he catching on to what was happening a lot sooner then the rest of us. We never even learned his name. Jenni ran out one night when she heard a baby crying in the alley out back. We never saw her again. Mac was lost when we fled the city. Jimmy passed it off. Seven was supposed to be a lucky number by all accounts. It was hard to think of ourselves as blessed.
This is what happened. One morning I woke up in my dorm room and found the power out and my room mate dead. In the eight hours while I was asleep she had died and turned into a bloated purplish thing. I screamed, expecting the whole floor to come running. I tried the phone. Dead. I tried my cell phone, computer, and laptop. All dead. I started banging on doors and no one answered. I found two more dead bruised bodies in the hallway. I tried using my lighter to set off the sprinklers. But no matter how close the flame got the alarm I couldn’t set the damn thing off. I ran downstairs screaming and there was no one to come and see what was a matter.
As far as any of us have been able to tell there’s no rhyme or reason to it. It’s as if all the machines and appliances decided as one mid to stop working. A good rule of thumb is that if it takes electricity or a battery it’s gone now. We have yet to find any type of vehicle that works. Jimmy use to work as a mechanic, he’s looked over quite a few things now that he swears he could fix if they were broken. But they aren’t broken. At least not in anyway that you can tell. Things just don’t work anymore. And somehow everyone is dead. With no signs of illness, no violence that we could detect, it’s as if 80% of the population exploded one night and died. We thought it was just us, just Boston, but as the weeks ticked by into months and no one came we knew it had to be bigger then that.
It was fall when it happened. We lasted through one frigid impossible winter, miserable damp spring, and then the most hellish summer you could imagine. The heat was palpable. It was like a living adversary. Its hot breath swept out from the ocean, moist as a steam vent coming directly from the ninth level of hell. That’s when things got real bad. The bodies laying everywhere fruited strange molds and insects. Things we’d never seen before, the stuff of nightmares. Food rotted into nothingness and the fighting began. Nightly we talked of leaving, voting again and again, but the truth is we were afraid to go. I don’t know what was worst, the fear that by leaving we were giving up hope that things would ever return to normal, or the fear of what staying would bring. The higher the tempeture rose the more tempers flared. Inside the theater and out.
There was an old man, luxuriously fat, who capitalized on the scarcity of food Every few days he would come through the theater district with a shopping cart laden with food stuffs, all in varying degrees of edibility, and trade it to us for sex. We took turns every week on who had to go, boys and girls, it didn’t matter. It seemed a small price to pay to survive. We got news from him, and for no reason at all, considered him a reliable source. He had no competition, I suppose. He told us of terrible things. As the summer slid back into fall he suddenly stopped coming and we knew the worst had befallen him. We wondered if he had told anyone we were here.
One night the strangest sound woke me from dreams of home. It was the loudest whooshing and crackling I had ever heard. I lay there, deliriously, for some time before realizing the theater was on fire. I managed to wake everyone else and we fled, dragging Mac who was overcome with smoke behind us. Outside there was a crowd of men. They held torches and were chanting something unintelligible. Half the block was on fire at this point. They reached for us with skeletal fingers, plucked at our clothes ineffectually. Somehow they latched onto Macs prone body. Like animals they descended and tore at his clothes and flesh. A few of the braver ones ran into the theater, searching I guess, for stores of food. I wished we could tell them we didn’t have much. Not anything worth killing over.
The seven of us left with nothing but the clothes on our backs. Somehow we ended up near Fenway. The stadium, though dotted with graffiti was strangely untouched. It was like a shrine. Yankees suck t-shirts and banners had been nailed haphazardly all over the outside of the stadium. Somehow music poured out from inside. There was a smell of roasting meat, but I couldn’t have told you what kind. My mouth started to water even though I feared what animal might be supplying this meal. We huddled on the sidewalk and tried to figure out our best option. I was relieved no one mentioned entering the stadium. Lansdowne Street was a gutted mess. The clubs had been broken into and the street glittered with smashed diamonds of liquor bottles. It was a startlingly pretty effect. We fled north and hoped the Tobin was still intact.
With no real place to go we decided to head north for the winter. In the spring we would find maps and chart a course across the US, stopping in each of our hometowns so we could check on our families. Suki was from Japan and was out of luck. With no planes or motors to run a boat we had no way to get her home. Our plans were vague at best. We’d look for people we knew. We stop in any towns along the way that seemed to have their shit together. We’d pick up like minded people as we went. There was an almost insatiable need to regroup. With so few people left individualism was no longer a thing to aspire to. We would arm ourselves and aim for California. Our pasts were all behind us, our futures uncertain and short. We just wanted to feel the sun.
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An interesting post-apocalypse story. The narrative here seems a little glossed-over. I think that you could use more exposition and less explanation in your tale. I get very little feeling of the supportiong characters. Only the narrator has a voice. The fat food merchant could be fleshed out, give him some interaction with the principals of the story. I was also a little puzzled that the group heads north for the winter. It seems that in New England that that would be counter-intuitive. I think that you intend for them to be looking for family, but the line confuses that issue. The end is also not really an ending. The problem here is that there is nothing to resolve. Your characters need some sort of interplay that has some bearing on the direction that they are heading. If this is part of a larger work, then it is a good start, needing only more story to fill it out. But as a free-standing piece this will need much work.
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I absolutely loved this. The immagery is wonderful. Granted I haven’t completed many reviews here on Urbis but this is the first time I’ve been disappointed in the brevity of a piece. I love a good doomsday story but unfortunately most stories have doomsday endings not beginnings. Please continue with this. I’d love to read more.
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