The End Has Come

There was a girl about Elijah’s age sitting frozen in the back, a woman motionless in the passenger seat.

“Climb in.”

She eyed the back of the SUV, packed tight with supplies. “How is my family going to fit? There are three of them.”

“I’ll leave some of this stuff behind.” He shrugged. “It’s not like there’s a shortage of food and supplies. At least not yet.”

Teale climbed into the seat beside the preteen girl. That was true. You could go into most any house — if you could stand the smell — and help yourself to canned food, tools, bedding, guns. Not to mention jewelry, home furnishings, DVDs, toilet paper. The whole house if you wanted it, and were willing to move the bodies.

“Where are you headed?” the man asked. “I’m Gill, by the way. This is Season,” he gestured at the woman in the passenger seat, “and our daughter Arial.”

Teale smiled and nodded at Arial. “Teale. We’re looking for a town to settle in for a while. We’re coming from Denver.”

“Too many bodies in Denver?”

“You got it. Maybe I could deal with it once they’re just bones, but right now it’s too much.”

“Plus there’s disease to think about. Same story with us.” He had a gravelly voice; his sleeves were pulled up to the elbow, revealing tattoos of eyes shedding teardrops.

They exchanged snippets of information they’d picked up on the radio, or from other survivors they’d met in the months since the fall. The President still made radio addresses, but nearly everyone was convinced it was an impersonator. The voice just wasn’t quite right.

“You think the world will ever look anything like it did before?” Teale asked.

Gill slowed as Teale’s minivan appeared around a curve. “Sure. Sooner or later things will get back to normal.”

It seemed a wildly optimistic assessment. Teale wondered if Gill had said it because his family was listening. That’s what Teale would have done if her family was in the car.

It felt strange, leaving food on the side of the road to rot. Then again, there was food spoiling everywhere. All the fresh food rotted in the weeks after the outbreak. Now all the boxes of cereal and bags of chips were going stale. In a few years there’d only be canned food left. There would be plenty of that, though. They had time to get their act together and learn how to plant crops, to corral all the livestock running free.

Teale reached over and patted Chantilly’s knee. She touched her family a lot now, much more than before.

“So what did you used to do, Teale?”

“I was a lobbyist for the Marijuana Policy Project. It was a group working to legalize marijuana nationwide.”

Gill burst out laughing. “Well, it looks like you succeeded. People are free to smoke as much weed as they want.”

It had seemed important work back when things were normal. She’d believed in it. Now it seemed meaningless, like so many other aspects of pre-plague life. When ninety-seven percent of the population was dead or in a catatonic state, a lot of things that had once been important became meaningless.

“How about you? What did you do?”

“Most recently I was a stay-at-home dad. Before that I was a high school substitute teacher and girl’s tennis coach, and before that I worked for a cable company. I’ve had a lot of jobs.”

The sign welcoming them to Gunnison, Colorado proclaimed it the home of Western State College, which must have been a tiny college given the size of the town. As they cruised down Main Street, which would have been quaint if not for all the broken windows and the nodding virus victims in white body bags stacked along the curb, Teale stopped scanning for a replacement vehicle, and instead studied the town itself. It was the epitome of small-town USA. Maybe this was far enough from Denver.

An old woman in a blue tracksuit walking along the sidewalk paused to watch them pass. Teale waved; the woman raised her hand before turning to continue.

She spotted a Holiday Inn up ahead, on the left. “You know what, Gill? Why don’t you drop us at that Holiday Inn? I can find a new car later.” Gill, who’d been cruising slowly while taking in the town, put on his turn signal.

“You letting the squirrels know you’re turning left?” Teale asked.

Gill chuckled. “Habit.” He pulled up to the front doors of the hotel and twisted to look at Teale. “I’m wondering if you’re thinking the same thing as me, that this would be a good place to settle down for a while.”

“Great minds think alike, I guess.”

“Cool. It would be nice to know at least one of my neighbors.”

“One of your four neighbors, probably,” Teale joked as she climbed out of the SUV.

The door into the lobby was unlocked. Teale looked around in the dark lobby until she spotted a luggage cart.

“You going to find a place and move in right away?” Teale asked as Gill helped her load Wilson onto the luggage cart. She would have to wheel her family to a room one at a time.

“We’ll probably do the same as you: crash somewhere for the night, and scout for a permanent location tomorrow.”

“Why don’t you stay here, then?”