Publication date: December 2nd, 2024
Synopsis:
Everyone in town has dropped dead. Maybe everywhere has. Surviving the flash extinction was easy. The hard part--living alone--starts now.
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Excerpt
I walked over to the 76 gas station to grab some food for the afternoon drive. The fact that I now had a four-legged companion in the truck had me feeling extravagant. I filled my basket with packaged apple turnovers, potato chips and Gummy Bears, three important food groups when you decide to junk it up at the end of the world. At the drink fridge, I grabbed some water. The contents of the open-faced sandwich fridge were caked with a uniformly gray fuzz that seemed to have migrated from the corpses on the floor. The smell was bad but bearable.
I grabbed some cash from my wallet, tossing it onto the front counter, and said to the withering stiff behind the register, "Keep the change, my friend."
Before I closed the wallet, I caught a glimpse of a card inside, my gym membership card. I stared at the photo on it, a me from before the fall, a me who had no idea. My pre-extinction cluelessness felt naive. I grabbed the card and--flick--scissored it through the air without watching where it went.
Behind the gym card was my driver's license--more cluelessness. Flick. And behind that a debit card and a Costco card for the store in Bozeman--flick, flick. By the last of the flicks, a sense of loss had wormed its way into my mood like a fast-acting germ.
On the other side of the wallet, I pulled the cards out slowly, paused over each of them: two gas-station points cards, a MasterCard, my AAA card. There was also a prepaid Visa gift card I'd received as a rebate when buying a Christmas trip to Puerto Vallarta. I'd forgotten about it, had never used it. And I'd forgotten much of the trip, too, at an all-inclusive place where Ronnie and I sipped syrupy margaritas and made sand castles with Evan.
Behind all the cards, in the last fold, were mini-portraits of Ronnie and Evan, all smiles and contentment. I ran my thumb over the shot of Ronnie, tried to free her, to sense her, but she was just a glossy image, wasn't real, never would be again. And she could be harmful, her there in my pocket, always available, calling out to me now that I'd discovered her. I flicked both photos away, dropped my wallet onto the counter, and turned and started toward the door.
Then promptly ran back, gathering up the photos, and slid them gingerly into my shirt pocket as if they were the most valuable things on Earth.
"I'm sorry," I said with a crack in my voice. "I won't ever do that again."
I walked out of the shop trying hard to keep it together. When I reached Flannie, she wagged her tail and licked my face. I couldn't return the love. I was empty--no hope there to drum up. Corpses, gluey apple turnovers and yellow labs: this was as good as it would ever get in the new world. I couldn't even find an operable CB radio, and if I did find one, what was I going to do, raise Elvis?
Flannie lapped at my face, nudged me with her nose. Get over yourself, she said in her canine way. We have to go back to surviving.
"Just give me a minute," I told her. "This one's gonna take me a while."
STEVEN OWAD is an award-winning writer and editor living in Calgary, Canada. His novels have been praised in publications such as Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine and Kirkus Reviews, and his stage plays have been produced in theaters throughout North America. In his previous life as a newspaper editor, Steven lived in Thailand and Poland, where he begged journalists not to use "impact" as a verb. Before that, there was a degree in English, with a lot of thousand-page Victorian novels. These days shorter modern novels and plays are more his speed. Steven loves the outdoors when there's no risk of frostbite. Connect with him on Facebook or on his website.
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