Selection Event (16 page)

With people gone, the animal population would increase dramatically, and a single cow could ruin months of work in an unprotected garden.

The black manx wandered into the living room and began nuzzling Martin's ankle.

“And you,” he said, putting the cat on his lap. He felt its ribs when he handled it. “Eventually you'll have to learn to hunt when the canned food is gone.” The cat climbed off his lap and stood in the floor, looking back at him and mewing.

“Now that you mention it, we're probably all hungry.”

The pantry was a shambles where Isha had pawed through it, and on the back porch he saw the bag of food she had brought in. Next to it was a can of condensed milk she had bitten a hole into with one of her canines. The milk that had leaked out had been lapped up. He turned and looked at her in amazement.

“You did all this? For your pet?”

Isha came and stood next to him.

Martin hoped he could be as resourceful.

....

After their breakfast, Martin and Isha got in the car and drove through the outlying neighborhoods, searching for a new home. Several times they saw full-racked tule elk grazing in front lawns, along with the inevitable cows, three and four in a group, growing full-bellied on their forage. Isha perked up her ears at a dog pack that crossed in front of them, and Martin noted another reason for finding a place with an enclosed yard.

 At one intersection they saw where some days earlier a cow had been brought down and torn apart, probably by dogs. Only a few brown ribs rose above the strewn gore. A buzzard picked at the remains. Isha lifted her nose to catch the smell as they drove around it.

It was remarkably easy to find an appropriate house. They found it in one of the older unincorporated neighborhoods where the houses were built with twenty-foot-wide separations between them. Thick pyracantha bushes hid the adobe wall across the front, and a black wrought-iron gate was closed across the front walk. The house on Lone Palm Avenue had been remodeled in the not-too-distant past and was not large — five rooms and a basement — but it had a new six-foot adobe wall surrounding the entire backyard, which was at least a hundred feet deep and seventy-five wide.

Planted in the back were two mature peach trees, a cherry, a plum, and an apricot tree, a short row of grapes, and an area that had been intended for a garden but that now was overgrown with weeds, as was everything else.

The pump house was at the corner of the lot, and there was enough space inside to locate a generator.

The inside of the house was, predictably, neat and tidy. Like his parents, the owners had cleaned and straightened everything before going someplace else to die. Except for the layer of dust that covered everything, it was a model home. The well-stocked pantry remained rodent-free, but the refrigerator and freezer were filled with warm rotting food. Those he would take care of tomorrow.

On impulse, he brought in one of their wheeled garbage cans and dumped into it all their personal effects — clothes, shoes, jewelry, all papers and files, anything that would tell him who they were. He didn't want to know the names of who had made this place their home. When he finished, it looked like one of the furnished apartments he had once moved into — the furniture was there, along with a few generic pictures on the walls, but there was nothing personal about the place. Another beginning.

“This is it,” he said to Isha, who had conducted her own private tour. “Think you can manage to live here?”

She looked at him, panting happily after spending an hour nosing through the weeds in the backyard.

In the late afternoon, Martin left the Lone Palm house with Isha and the cat to go back to his parents' and to collect supplies. As he closed the wrought-iron gate behind him, he looked back and said, “Home.” Then he thought, No, not home yet. A place to live.

Chapter 27

Diaz lowered his head over the handlebars to cut the wind resistance and twisted the throttle till it wouldn't twist anymore. Wind screamed past his ears and his hair vibrated against his skull. Bugs hit his face like bullets.

Around the turn, down the freeway, the speedometer needle welded against the peg — four lanes of freedom heading east, out of Reno, and into the desert.

Diaz grinned and an insect exploded against his huge teeth. He spit sideways, into the hurricane blow-by, and kept grinning. This was life, and he was alive, at the top of his manic cycle, never faster, never more alive than now. All past, all future irrelevant, because he was here, now, blazing into the desert, rounding wide freeway turns at such a speed that his knee nearly scraped the paint off the white line.

What if he hit a pebble? What if there were a few grains of sand on the asphalt? What would he do?

Whatever! He would do it!

Was he afraid to die, with that list in his pocket? Ha! He wasn't a euth artist for nothing, and if he went out now, he'd go out in a blur of fenders, handlebars, hamburger, and heavy-link chain. His death would be an art form, a collage of meat and steel, a monument to the freeway, a marriage of flesh and technology. Afraid to die? Diaz? A cosmic oxymoron!

Diaz was no longer a human being, no mere cog in the wheels of existence: he
was
existence, showing up at this particular warpage in time as a human-vehicular concatenation of electro-mechanical forces.  

Onward! Into the desert! Past all human habitation! Past the Passion Flower Brothel, past the Last Chance Gas Station, past McDonalds, beyond all human chicken scratches on the void and into the wilderness!

Chapter 28

Martin straightened up his parents' home so it would look the way it had when they left it, leaving the two coffee cups on the counter untouched. He took his mother's bottle of Ivoire perfume to remember her by, his father's pocketknife that he had for some reason left behind, and a picture from an album of all three of them standing out in the backyard by a mulberry tree they had planted in the spring ten or so years ago.

Martin then left a note in the mailbox telling Diaz his new address and directions, in case he ever rode back through, loaded Isha and her pet in the car and drove to the western edge of town, to their new house.

On the way over, the cat crawled into Martin's lap and closed its eyes.

“We have to have a name for you,” Martin said as he drove. “Any member of my family has to have a name.” It occurred to him that he didn't know if it was a male or female, so he picked it up and checked, not being too worried about endangering other drivers. “A girl! How about Mona? Isha, tell me you approve.”

Isha snuffled and pushed her nose over the top of his shoulder and licked his neck.

“Got it. Now, little black one, you are Mona.” And he could almost have predicted it if he had thought of it: once he named her, he felt more protective of her. There were, after all, so few living things in the world that knew he was alive or cared. In fact, of all those who cared, two-thirds were right there in the front seat of the car with him.

Martin drove to several supermarkets and filled up the back of the station wagon with dog and cat food and canned goods for himself. What undamaged bags of flour, pastas, and packaged baking mixes he could find, he took. These, he figured, would be out of production for the next hundred years or more.

As he gathered and loaded food, he tried to calculate how much he and the animals might need for a month. Later, he thought, when he was more settled, he would sit down with a calculator to seriously work on the problem.... A calculator! He stopped in mid-step, holding a 25-pound bag of rice in his hands, and laughed at himself. A calculator! Most calculators needed tiny steel-sheathed alkaline batteries.

It would be a long time before batteries would be manufactured. A hundred years? Two hundred?

Only those things with solar cells would continue to work after a few years. When they broke down, it would be back to pencil and paper and learning to use a slide rule, if he could find one.

But how much else was he taking for granted? Pencils? Ballpoints? Paper? Even the simplest things like these required factories and electricity and huge numbers of people to support those doing the specialized labor. Just how long would it take for the population to grow large enough to support an industry as trivial as pencil-making?

As he went from market to market, passing by the endless racks of plastic dishpans, thermometers, cigarettes, magazines, detergents, cleaners, and the ten thousand other things, he wondered how much of this would last as much as twenty years. Would there even be anyone to miss it?

Well, he thought, if I don't die, I'll find out.

Since the electricity had gone off the night before, a few store freezers were still cold, and hanging slabs of meat had not begun to thaw. Skinned carcasses hung around him in the dark freezers like bodies in a horror film. Several of them that he had touched rocked slowly on their hooks. They still had the upper sections of their legs and looked very much like the animals they had been.

Like that of other carnivores, human life was built on the death of slower species, except humans had been clever enough to hide the slaughter from their peaceful lives by paying a certain class of workers to be slaughterers and butchers. In Martin's own family, there was a relative by marriage who had been a butcher. He remembered the man laughing as he told about “Those old hogs, they'd be hanging upside down with their throats cut, and if they wasn't dead yet, they'd be screamin' when they dropped 'em in the boiling water.”

The tragedy, and perhaps in some ways the triumph, of human nature was that a person could become accustomed to anything.

But the carcasses, the corpses, hanging around him were finished suffering and one or two could still be salvaged if he moved quickly. After they were gone, Martin wasn't sure he'd be doing any butchering for himself. He was pretty sure, in fact, that he wouldn't. Necessity would tell.

He went back to his new house, unloaded the station wagon and opened a few cans and had an early dinner with Isha and Mona while he thought out new plans. The market freezers were too big for any portable generator he could deal with, so he would have to move the meat to some other location — an appliance store, for example, where he could hook up three or four chest freezers to a generator, conceivably even find a battery-started generator that he could put on a timer so it wouldn't have to run twenty-four hours a day — but what did he know about such things?

Again, he was reminded of how ignorant he was and how much he was depending on batteries, generators, gasoline, and freezers, to get by.

Well, he thought, first things first. When it stops working, I'll do something else.

....

When he returned home late that evening, he was exhausted and covered with grease from first loading and then unloading the sides of meat. His body ached and his fingers were cut and sore from cutting and splicing wire. But it was done. He had nearly fallen asleep in the floor of the appliance store as the generator plugged away and the two freezers hummed and steadily grew colder. Only when he was sure everything was working as it should did he leave. Since the noise of the generator advertised that something was going on inside, he thought briefly about trying to lock the glass doors of the store, but then what was the point? Any survivor who passed by could throw something through the glass and walk in. He had been thinking the old way again, wanting to protect his investment of time and effort.

On his way home, he stopped at the dark house where Curtiz had created his self delusion of civilization. Martin dragged one of his generators around to the front of the house. This one he would hook up to the pump in his back yard, but he would do that tomorrow.

For now he was contented to rest. He had got a nylon-webbed lawn chair and put it in his new back yard and lay back and simply breathed. The hazy sky hid the stars and the nearly full moon showed only as a ruddy glow above the southeast horizon.

Isha trotted around the perimeter of the yard, a dark, white-collared shape, her nose alternately in the air and down in the weeds. Here and there across the yard, Mona's compact black shape would spring from one clump of grass to another, chasing imaginary enemies. In nearby trees, mockingbirds erratically chirped, squawked, imitated the harsh calls of jays, and then warbled melodiously. Between their calls, there was utter silence. Martin lay under the sky and heard the world before mankind had arrived — the arching dome of atmosphere echoed with no voices, no machinery, and if he paused in his breathing, he heard no trace of mankind anywhere, at all.

And yet in none of these past days had he paused long enough to feel his isolation and solitude. At first, in his grief and loss he had only heard himself trying to deny what had happened, and then, if there was any good to come out of his encounter with Curtiz, it was that his concentration on self-preservation had allowed the realization of the death of civilization to become emotionally real. Now, under the starless sky, beneath the ruddy moon, he both understood and felt that whatever he wanted done, he would have to do. If he survived, it would be by his own effort.

These hands, he thought, holding them up in front of his face, these hands are the only hands that will do the work.

And, he thought, what if I break a finger? a wrist? an arm? Well, then, I'll hurt for a while. And if I get appendicitis, I suppose I'll die and the picnic will be over, but that will be no worse than what's happened to everyone else. This and the rest of his life, he realized, was a gift, a bonus. As it always had been — but he had never quite understood it.