Prospero's Half-Life (6 page)

He held up his
hands in defence. “I know, I know. They’re all people and there are
lots of them that I’m going to miss. But there are a lot that I’m
not going to miss, at the same time. People that I think we’ll all
be much better off without”.

Samantha
whipped her head around and stared at him incredulously.

“
That’s the worst thing I’ve ever heard anyone say,” she said,
her voice chilled, and she abruptly got out of bed. Richard watched
her walk out of the room, unable to stop himself from admiring the
form of her hips even when he vaguely knew that he’d done something
wrong. He put his head back against the headboard of her bed and
sighed heavily.

After a moment
or so he got out of bed and followed her out into the hall. It was
silent there, so he walked into the kitchen. When he found this to
be empty as well, he began to worry. The morning had been so bright
and warm; that dischordant instrument chiming moronically away in
the background was getting louder, now, and irritation welled up to
take it’s place beside the quicksilver slip of fear. He went out of
the kitchen by the opposite door, which lead into a little mudroom
that stood as antechamber to the outside world. There were a few
pairs of boots in there, and a couple of them were man-sized;
Samantha’s dead boyfriend, he realized. He started to feel a little
guilty, looking at those imposing black boots with their thick,
muddy laces and their roughly scuffed toes.

The door to
the outside was open and Richard peeked his head around the corner.
Samantha was leaning against the hard steel railing that lined the
wide balcony jutting off of the back of the building. The sky was
blue and blameless; a fresh wind whipped cyclically through the
cul-de-sac formed by the buildings centered around the parking lot
below. There were a few cars in the lot, their exteriors twinkling
here and there where the sun could strike through the layer of dust
on them.

Richard moved
beside Samantha but refrained from putting his arm around her. He
leaned against the rail in a similar fashion and stared out into
the lot, wanting to be near her but unsure of what to say. They
stood like that, silent in the hot summer sun, for what seemed like
hours but was probably only five minutes.

“
He used to say this would be the best place to be,” Samantha
said. The sudden break of silence was jarring for Richard, and he
had to carefully restrain himself from looking too shocked. He grit
his teeth and waited for her to finish with this particular
thought. The dead boyfriend again, risen from the grave to haunt
their conversation. He felt suddenly restless.

“
This would be the perfect place to ride out a zombie movie
scenario,” she mused in a deeper voice, mimicking that vanished man
she’d shared a life with until just recently. “Break down the
stairs leading up and you’ve taken out the only entrance to the
apartment. Zombies could wander around down there and they’d never
get up at you”. She smiled, bitterly. “Well, it wasn’t a zombie
thing we had to worry about, was it?”

Richard opened
his mouth to reply but swiftly realized that the question was
rhetorical. She was looking up into the sky now, and from her tone
she could very well have been simply talking to herself.

“
Now he’s dead, and everyone else is dead, but none of them are
rising up. They’re just lying there, rotting and becoming food for
the raccoons, and the maggots. They’re not getting up to bite us,
or grab us, they’re not doing anything”. She turned her head to
look at Richard and her eyes were agate-hard, and rimmed with
tears. “They’re dead, but they’re still here. Their
memory
is still here.
They were people. They meant something. So if you want to dance on
everyone’s grave, do it somewhere else”.

Richard felt bad and battered down the flare of irritation he
felt about the emotion.
Let her
finish
, he thought.
Let her get it all out
.

“
I miss
everyone
,” she said, and her voice shook. “Except for you, and Mark I
guess, every single person I know is dead. I’ve watched them die,
in their homes, on the street. I...” she trailed off for a moment,
blinking into the hot sun. “I don’t know. I don’t know when I
stopped noticing. When it all became business as usual. Last week?
I can’t even remember. I remember calling my father and getting no
answer. I remember that he’d said my mom was really sick, and that
I should come see them as soon as possible. That was before
everything went crazy, before...anyway, I went over there a week
later, when the papers were all delirious and no one was talking
about anything else. I had to, at that point. I couldn’t avoid it
anymore. I’d been putting my father off by telling him that I was
busy working, that I couldn’t get any time off. It was true too,
which made it even worse”.

“
You could have gotten all sorts of time off,” Richard
bristled. “It’s not like you were enslaved”.

Samantha
sneered at him, and the quickness of it made him recoil a
little.

“
Right. I’m sure I could have had a few days off – and then I
would have lost my apartment, or starved for two weeks, or worse.
You guys didn’t exactly pay a living wage, you know”.

“
It was competitive to the marketplace,” Richard replied
stiffly, feeling put-upon. “What did you expect us to do, suddenly
pay double what everyone else was paying?”

“
Oh, fuck you,” she seethed, and Richard’s shoulders
slumped.

“
Sorry,” he apologized contritely, or at least as contritely as
he could manage. He wanted to dampen down that anger; he had no
desire to be completely alone in this world, and the look in
Samantha’s eyes made him think that she might be considering
throwing him down the stairs. “You’re right, it wasn’t a job you
could really live on. What about your boyfriend, though?” He asked
carefully, not wanting to set her off into a spiral of anger
again.

“
Doug?” she asked dully. “He’d lost his job three months ago.
He installed cabinets, but there was no work anymore. People
couldn’t afford the extravagances like they used to be able to. All
the good jobs were drying up, and he had to sign on to one of those
manpower agencies, the ones that find you temp work doing something
a monkey could do. In Doug’s case it was manual labour, but there
still wasn’t much out there. We were one stumble away from finding
a flophouse”. She snorted, caught up in a storm. “I guess you’re
right, Richard. Maybe it is all a good thing. At least I don’t have
to work my ass off to starve, anymore”.

Richard let
this pass and tried to think of something soothing to say. Nothing
was coming to mind, however, so he simply said the first thing that
came to his mind.

“
What do we do next?” he asked. She shook her head slowly, and
Richard thought that her anger might be dissipating.

“
We could stay here, there’s food. I don’t feel safe with that
hospital full of shooters on the other side. Sometimes when I’m
walking around, I think that at any second a bullet will come
whizzing through the window and I’ll just be another dead body to
litter up everything. Even though the drapes and blinds are closed
tightly, I feel this constantly. I don’t think that it’s a healthy
way to live”.

She put a
long-nailed hand to her face to wipe away the sweat. “I need to get
out of here. It’s not just the hospital, either. Everywhere I go in
here I see Doug. If I stay here, I’ll just end up crying in the
corners all the time. I need to go somewhere else. Anywhere
else”.

Doug
, he thought morosely,
you may not have been able to hold a job but she
sure has a problem with letting you go
. He
wondered sourly if the smug cheer he felt over Doug’s lack of
employment was a mark against his character.

Instead of
voicing his inner debate, he asked her if there was anywhere in
particular she wanted to go. She appeared to think about this for a
while, and then finally shrugged her shoulders.

“
I don’t care,” she said, and in the finality of her tone it
seemed that she meant it. Richard let it hang in the heated air for
a moment before scrambling for a place to go. A suggestion to make,
anyway.

“
Well, let’s go downtown, then,” he said blindly. “We should
probably go find other people, before they find us, I mean. Maybe
someone knows what’s going on”.

“
We already know what’s going on,” she replied sullenly, “and
that’s the problem”. He let that go.

“
We can at least find a safer place to sleep in further away
from here. We may as well head downtown, anyway”.

“
Sure,” she shrugged again, and she seemed deflated. “Let’s
pack up and go downtown.
Someone
must be down there”. From the other side of the
building, muffled by the mass of brick, there was the dry, brittle
snap of a rifle shot. Richard jumped a little and his heart raced
away. Samantha nodded, continuing to stare off into the parking
lot. The sun shone through her fair hair and the sight of the rich
yellow light filtering through her golden strands and the way it
shone on her bare, smooth skin made him stir.

“
Maybe before we go...” he whispered, advancing on her, but she
spun around and held him off.

“
No,” she said, and Richard thought he heard a note of contempt
in her voice. He stepped back, wilting. He put his hands behind
him, on his buttocks, to show that he wasn’t going to try anything.
She looked him up and down, lingering here and there. “Maybe,” she
amended, although she still seemed doubtful. She walked by him into
the apartment, not waiting for a reply. Richard watched her go and
let out an explosive breath.

SIX

They ended up
leaving the apartment a short half-hour later. There ended up being
no time for any sort of physical interlude, as once inside Samantha
began a whirlwind of gathering and packing. She laid out a
messenger bag and a tattered old denim knapsack. She packed the
canned portion of her cupboards into the knapsack, as well as four
bottles of water. On top of this she packed a towel, and two
changes of clothes – casual wear, jeans, t-shirts, sturdy
textiles.

“
I don’t really have anything for you,” she semi-apologized.
“Doug was a bit bigger than you, so nothing would really fit”.
Richard shrugged and said that it was alright, he would survive,
but he bristled inside at the perceived dig.

Into the
messenger bag she packed a map of the city and a couple of her
sharper kitchen knives. She fished her plastic identification cards
out of her purse and placed them inside the bag as well, along with
her battered old blue birth certificate. Richard nodded approvingly
at this but balked when she retrieved her tablet from the
bedroom.

“
Do you really think that’s even necessary?” he asked. She eyed
him coolly and slipped the thin, oddly heavy device into the
bag.

“
Do you have any idea how much I had to pay for that?” she
asked levelly. “Maybe it doesn’t mean anything to you, but that
doesn’t mean that it doesn’t mean anything to me”.

“
I just think it seems like a waste of space”

“
You’re
a waste of space,”

“
That’s not very nice,” he recoiled, stung. “I just don’t think
we should pack things we won’t have a use for”.

“
We might have a use for it,” she replied. “Or we might be able
to trade it to someone. I’m not leaving it behind, anyway. This was
a lot of money for us”.

“
It was your choice to buy it,” he said. “No one forced you to
do it”.

She eyed him
oddly until he felt acutely uncomfortable with it. He shrugged his
shoulders slightly.

“
Alright,” he amended, “you’re right, it probably has some
trade value”. Samantha did not speak to him again until they had
hoisted up the supplies and left the apartment. They paused on the
balcony to listen to the sounds of the city before they departed.
From far off there was a bevy of car alarms braying; there was a
pop that might have been gunfire, or really anything. Richard
realized that he’d never really taken the time to stand still and
listen to the sounds of the city he lived in. He would never again
get the chance to hear it as it had originally been intended, and
this saddened him in a way that brushed at something nameless
buried deep within him. He suddenly felt very lonely and looked to
Samantha. She was staring off into the parking lot, watching for
any movement. Richard did not see any, but he let her take as long
as she needed.

Finally she looked at him and her look was flinty.
I’ve really pissed her off
he thought suddenly, and tried to think of what it might have
been that had set her off.

“
Shall we?” she asked, and her tone, at least, was warm. He
smiled with some confidence and gestured ahead.
After you
.

They descended
the staircase and crossed through the parking lot briskly, keeping
a careful and tense eye on their surroundings. The wind freshened
past them and they caught the scent of burning lumber on it, but it
was gone as quickly as it had come. They turned left, away from
Queenston Street and the hospital. There was another parking lot
across the street, serving a spillover building from the hospital,
and they crept by it with no small sense of paranoia. They were
soon surrounded by quiet fifty-year-old houses, and they allowed
themselves to relax. There was a strange, hushed beauty to the
street; the blown wind was the only immediate sound. Most of the
windows on the street were intact, and the blinds were open in some
of them. Richard felt odd walking past the houses where the blinds
were shit; he felt as though the blinds had been drawn so that the
occupants could bleed out in peace.