Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalipse

Back at the house, Wyndham washed up and made himself a drink from the liquor cabinet he found in the kitchen. He’d never been much of a drinker before the world ended, but he didn’t see any reason not to give it a try now. His experiment proved such a success that he began sitting out on the porch nights, drinking gin and watching the sky. One night he thought he saw a plane, lights blinking as it arced high overhead. Later, sober, he concluded that it must have been a satellite, still whipping around the planet, beaming down telemetry to empty listening stations and abandoned command posts.

A day or two later the power went out. And a few days after that, Wyndham ran out of liquor. Using the Volvo, he set off in search of a town. Characters in end-of-the-world stories commonly drive vehicles of two types: The jaded sophisticates tend to drive souped up sports cars, often racing them along the Australian coast line because what else do they have to live for; everyone else drives rugged SUVs. Since the 1991 Persian Gulf War—in which some 23,000 people died, most of them Iraqi conscripts killed by American smart bombs-military-style Humvees have been especially coveted. Wyndham, however, found the Volvo entirely adequate to his needs.

No one shot at him.

He was not assaulted by a roving pack of feral dogs.

He found a town after only fifteen minutes on the road. He didn’t see any evidence of looting. Everybody was too dead to loot; that’s the way it is at the end of the world.

On the way, Wyndham passed a sporting goods store where he did not stop to stock up on weapons or survival equipment. He passed numerous abandoned vehicles, but he did not stop to siphon off some gas. He did stop at the liquor store, where he smashed a window with a rock and helped himself to several cases of gin, whiskey, and vodka. He also stopped at the grocery store, where he found the reeking bodies of the night crew sprawled out beside carts of supplies that would never make it onto the shelves. Holding a handkerchief over his nose, Wyndham loaded up on tonic water and a variety of other mixers. He also got some canned goods, though he didn’t feel any imperative to stock up beyond his immediate needs. He ignored the bottled water.

In the book section, he did pick up a bartender’s guide.

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Some end-of-the-world stories present us with two post-apocalypse survivors, one male and one female. These two survivors take it upon themselves to Re-Populate the Earth, part of their larger effort to Re-Establish Western Civilization without the Bad Old Ways. Their names are always artfully withheld until the end of the story, at which point they are invariably revealed to be Adam and Eve.

The truth is, almost all end-of-the-world stories are at some level Adam-and-Eve stories. That may be why they enjoy such popularity. In the interests of total disclosure, I will admit that in fallow periods of my own sexual life-and, alas, these periods have been more frequent than I’d care to admit-I’ve often found Adam-and-Eve post-holocaust fantasies strangely comforting. Being the only man alive significantly reduces the potential for rejection in my view. And it cuts performance anxiety practically to nothing.

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There’s a woman in this story, too. Don’t get your hopes up.

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By this time, Wyndham has been living in the brick house for almost two weeks. He sleeps in the old couple’s bedroom, and he sleeps pretty well, but maybe that’s the gin. Some mornings he wakes up disoriented, wondering where his wife is and how he came to be in a strange place. Other mornings he wakes up feeling like he dreamed everything else and this has always been his bedroom.

One day, though, he wakes up early, to gray pre-dawn light. Someone is moving around downstairs. Wyndham’s curious, but he’s not afraid. He doesn’t wish he’d stopped at the sporting goods store and gotten a gun. Wyndham has never shot a gun in his life. If he did shoot someone-even a post-apocalyptic punk with cannibalism on his mind-he’d probably have a breakdown.

Wyndham doesn’t try to disguise his presence as he goes downstairs. There’s a woman in the living room. She’s not bad looking, this woman blonde in a washed-out kind of way, trim, and young, twenty-five, thirty at the most. She doesn’t look extremely clean, and she doesn’t smell much better, but hygiene hasn’t been uppermost on Wyndham’s mind lately, either. Who is he to judge?

"I was looking for a place to sleep," the woman says.

"There’s a spare bedroom upstairs," Wyndham tells her.

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The next morning-it’s really almost noon, but Wyndham has gotten into the habit of sleeping late-they eat breakfast together: a Pop Tart for the woman, a bowl of dry Cheerios for Wyndham.

They compare notes, but we don’t need to get into that. It’s the end of the world and the woman doesn’t know how it happened any more than Wyndham does or you do or anybody ever does. She does most of the talking, though. Wyndham’s never been much of a talker, even at the best of times.