Chapter 22
Peggy knew
more about what was going than Mark, even though she hadn’t left the building
all day.
They’d
starting getting reports in the grocery store early in the morning. Rampaging pigs. They turned on the radio, not believing it,
despite the continuing reports. Peggy
had tried calling him, to tell him about the joke, but cellphone service had
died at around the same time. Not much
later, a customer had come in to say that the one cellphone tower in town had
toppled over.
“Gophers,”
the customer had said, knowingly, and again they had laughed at the absurdity
of it.
They’d
laughed about it, that is, until a customer came in bleeding from the
thigh. The tusks had hit her femoral
artery, and the old woman had died in an aisle of the grocery.
They’d closed
for business after that, but kept the doors unlocked in case anyone needed
shelter.
“I tried to
talk Justin and Brian into staying,” she said, sounding worried. “They wanted to get home to their
girlfriends. I hope they made it.”
Mark hugged
her, and didn’t tell her what he thought.
Without a .30--06, he doubted they had made it very far.
“What about
Mrs. Andrews?” he asked.
“She didn’t
show up for work.”
Mark didn’t
say anything. Both of them knew how
unusual that was. In fact, Mark didn’t
think that anything less than the End of the World would keep the woman from
showing up. Which just meant the End of
the World had indeed arrived.
About that
time, they heard crashing down below them.
“Someone’s
in the store,” Peggy whispered.
Mark was
pretty sure what was in the store, but didn’t say anything. He looked around the apartment. It was pretty sparse. They hadn’t been able to bring anything with
them from Idaho, so they’d scrounged from friends and relatives. Cast-offs, like what Mark imagined a hippie
apartment must have looked at in the sixties.
A wooden wire spool table, a broken down lawn chair, a black and white
TV, which was probably the last one in the entire country.
“We ought to
sell it on eBay as an antique,” he’d joked.
“Perfect for Humphrey Bogart movies.”
There were a
couple of solid pieces. A nice table
Peggy’s mom had given them. Four nice
chairs. A sofa that wasn’t too
disgusting.
“Help me
out,” he said, dragging the sofa to the door.
She didn’t question him, but put her slender little body to pushing
while he dragged. They got it to the top
of the stairs and let go. It slid
rattling down the steps, and banged into the door.
“That’s good
start,” he said.
“Not the
table!” she exclaimed, when he went over to it.
“The wire spool,”
he said, turning at the last second as though that had always been his
plan. She willingly helped him roll it
out the door and pushed it crashing onto the sofa below.
By the time
they finished, all that was left in the apartment was their bed and the nice
table and chairs, and the refrigerator, which was too heavy to move.
“What more
do we need?” she asked.
Food? He
wanted to say. More ammo?
She hugged
him, and suddenly her body was racking with sobs. “They’re dead, aren’t they?” she said.
Mark didn’t
answer. He’d only told her that he’d
been chased by the javelinas. He hadn’t
told her what a close call it had been.
But she’d managed to intuit it anyway.
“We’re safe
now,” he said. “Unless the damn pigs
have scaling ladders.”
They lay in
bed, feeling like the last people on earth.
Most of the residents lived outside of town. There was a motel at the edge of downtown,
but it was pretty much the abode of the near homeless, paying most of their
paychecks in weekly installments.
Mark hugged
the girl he knew he’d spend the rest of his life with. She was skinny, with small but delectable
breasts. Her incredibly thin waist. When she put on full make-up she was as
pretty as a model, and indeed, she’d been approached by scouts. She’d laughed it off, certain it was just
dirty old men, but Mark wasn’t so sure.
But she
loved art. She loved comics and Doctor
Who and Adventure Time as much as he did.
He had never imagined that was possible.
A beautiful girl with a kind heart who loved Doctor Who. It had seemed very unlikely.
So he’d
waited for the dark side to emerge. Or
the phoniness
But she was
exactly how she appeared on the surface.
Only deeper.
He
envisioned a nice middle class life.
Buying a house, working until they were sixty-six. Maybe returning to Moscow some day. Maybe some day, he’d have time to do his
art. A nice modest life.
Without
pigs. Just the normal deer and bears and
such. Wild pigs seemed un-American.
She snuggled
up to him, in that way that he knew would lead to the next thing, and he ran
his hand down to the indentation above her ass, which she knew would lead to
the next thing, and the next thing led to the next thing and they fell to sleep
in each other’s arm, spent.
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