<\/p>\n
He felt the world spinning under his feet.\u00a0 It felt like it was finally going his way.\u00a0 Like those moving walkways at the airport.\u00a0 He picked up his pace and got into that spinning groove.\u00a0 Let the walkway carry him down 270.\u00a0 Deer skittered down the narrow paths, leapt over cars, and went every which way to get out of his path.\u00a0 A fox slinked quickly by in front of him, and a few foraging rabbits vanished into the retreating shadows.\u00a0 He thought he saw a black bear in the distance, and a pack of dogs yelped from an overpass.\u00a0 He wasn\u2019t worried.\u00a0 There was enough to go around.\u00a0 And these more urban animals seemed to remember the touch of man.\u00a0 They understood the rifle he had strapped to his back.\u00a0 They knew not to fuck with the king of the apes.<\/p>\n
The big sign saying that 270 was dividing was gone.\u00a0 It was one of those markers whenever he was driving home.\u00a0 Get ready, losers, 270 is about to go insane as it tumbles headlong into the Capitol Beltway.\u00a0 He\u2019d jockey into the left lanes to start heading towards Bethesda and Silver Spring.\u00a0 Home was in White Oak.\u00a0 Upper Silver Spring.\u00a0 Home was about seven miles away.\u00a0 He dropped down onto the surface streets as soon as he hit Bethesda.\u00a0 He spent the night in his old high school, curled up by his senior locker.\u00a0 Leaves had blown in through long destroyed windows and, throughout the night, he was woken by rats and other noises in the big building.\u00a0 Nothing mysterious.\u00a0 Just the sounds of decay.\u00a0\u00a0 He moved through the buildings in the early AM, the new spring moon outside his only light.\u00a0 He\u2019d forgotten where all his old classrooms used to be.\u00a0 He wasn\u2019t even sure if he had picked the right locker.\u00a0 He just remembered the hall.\u00a0 His life was a foggy dream.\u00a0 His memories were sluicing away with the fatigue of the long journey home\u2026and the seemingly endless years since he last walked these halls.\u00a0 They seemed very small now.<\/p>\n
He cooked breakfast right out in the open, on the center lane of East West Highway.\u00a0 The blank-faced buildings of Bethesda stared down at him.\u00a0 Anyone home?\u00a0 No.<\/p>\n
He started walking again around mid-morning.\u00a0 Not far to go, now.\u00a0 Take his time.\u00a0 He crossed Connecticut Avenue, once a mighty intersection, now just burned out cars, crumbling houses, and silence.\u00a0 Everywhere silence.\u00a0 No smoke from cooking fires, nobody moving.\u00a0 He weaved down past Beach Drive, up the hill to Grubb Road, then down again into Silver Spring proper, then he cut up Colesville Road, hiking past the Discovery Building, which looked like something had crashed into its upper levels long ago, and leaving the sprawl of Silver Spring behind him.\u00a0 Now just houses and parkland and strip malls.\u00a0 He took his time.\u00a0 He passed by Blair High School, and, at noon, he lunched on the overpass that took Colesville Road over the Beltway.\u00a0 He could have saved some time, but that night in the halls of BCC helped align him.\u00a0 Helped remind him that a nice life in Clear Spring, or with Parker\u2019s people, or anywhere wasn\u2019t what he wanted.<\/p>\n
We\u2019re always coming home.<\/p>\n
He was close.\u00a0 He moved through the pitted White Oak shopping center parking lot, a portion of it almost swampland.\u00a0 He cut through the vast labyrinth of garden apartments behind the shopping center,\u00a0 wrapping up and around to Stewart Lane and, then, to April Lane.\u00a0 His apartment, on the top floor of a four-storey garden apartment, a series of buildings that were indistinguishable from each other.\u00a0 Before he reached his complex, though, he took a shortcut through the once new townhomes.\u00a0 When he was a kid, the whole area was forest.\u00a0 Paint Branch.\u00a0 Now it was garden apartments and ludicrously overpriced townhomes.<\/p>\n
He moved extra slow.\u00a0 He took it all in.\u00a0 The cheap siding and gutters of the homes was long gone, the paint peeled and the walls blackened by weather, mold, decay.\u00a0 Garage doors had pulled off of rusted chains and broken rails, and there was nothing but silence.\u00a0 He thought of all the times he\u2019d walked past the townhomes, on the way to and from the supermarket.\u00a0 Every Saturday, he\u2019d wake up at 5:30am, winter or summer, rain or shine, and head out to get his shopping done before the crowds came.\u00a0 He savored the apocalyptic fantasy.\u00a0 No sounds from his neighbors, nobody else out and about, no lights on.\u00a0 5:30am Saturday was when he was most at peace in his old life.\u00a0 When he pretended the world had ended.<\/p>\n
Now it was a little after one in the afternoon on a weekday, and the same silence, the same loneliness that had fueled those early morning weekend fantasies was overbearing.\u00a0 He stepped off the sidewalk into the road and stared at one of the townhomes.\u00a0 Two cars sat in the driveway, one just on rims and the flayed remains of a tire.\u00a0 Inside would be corpses.\u00a0 People who died the way he should have.\u00a0 Useless fucking lumps sitting on their couch watching the TV as everything came apart.<\/p>\n
He threw a rock at one of the few intact windows, and the whole casement gave way with a screeching tear and cascaded to the ground.\u00a0 He shuddered as the echo played around him, then he hurried away, inexplicably panicked, and cut through the backyards down to his complex.\u00a0 The parking lot full of cars, three dead bodies still in the playground.\u00a0 Still!\u00a0 He\u2019d passed them, fresh corpses, ten years ago.\u00a0 Had nothing changed?<\/p>\n
11525.\u00a0 His building.\u00a0 He looked up at his balcony.\u00a0 The railing was gone, rusting in the bushes on the ground in front of him.\u00a0 There was nothing but concrete and his ratty patio table, tipped on its side.\u00a0 One side was covered in a mound of leaves.<\/p>\n
He hiked up the stairs and reached in his pocket.\u00a0 For ten years, he\u2019d carried his keys.\u00a0 They were a talisman.\u00a0 The door needed some work, though.\u00a0 He threw himself against it repeatedly until it flew inward with a spray of bugs and a startled flight of wasps.\u00a0 He skittered back to the edge of the landing, brushing dust out of his eyes and creepy crawlies off of his shoulders.\u00a0 Then he stepped inside.\u00a0 Rotting carpet, water in the kitchen, walls covered in black mold, paint and drywall gone in places.\u00a0 He kicked the couch, which looked like it had started to mummify, and pushed down on the cushions with his foot.\u00a0 No rats or mice.\u00a0 Or, at least, none that wanted to announce themselves.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 He dropped his bag, sat down with the dust and mold and insects, and stared at the TV set.\u00a0 The ceiling above had given way,\u00a0 covering the TV with a moldy cake of splintered wood, drywall, and rubble.\u00a0 Water leaked from the hole above, the afternoon sky peeking through.\u00a0 This is where he sat when it all happened.\u00a0 This is where he should have died.<\/p>\n
What was happening up in Finzel?\u00a0 Parker\u2019s people were probably toiling in the fields.\u00a0 Someone perched in the fire tower wistfully hoping for a phantom train.\u00a0 Maybe Parker had launched a proper search of Frostburg after Jacob returned with his story\u2026if the boy had made it.\u00a0 Maybe Jacob was lying out in the woods, never to be discovered.\u00a0 A feast for the animals.\u00a0 Surely Parker would have retraced their steps.\u00a0 No doubt Murray and McGavin were buried on that hill, overlooking Parker\u2019s plantation manor.\u00a0\u00a0 It occurred to him that he didn\u2019t know where McGavin was from.\u00a0 He\u2019d never asked.\u00a0 It never mattered.\u00a0 After the collapse, you weren\u2019t from anywhere.\u00a0 You had no one.<\/p>\n
Gates picked up the remote, the bottom half covered in a grayish goo leaking from the batteries.\u00a0 He clicked the on switch, he put it down next to him, he stared at the blank TV.<\/p>\n
Crowds gathering outside the local rescue stations\u2026the sickness seems to be spreading\u2026reports now from around the world\u2026if you show any of the symptoms, then please hurry to one of the stations listed at the bottom of your screen\u2026experts fear the worst<\/em>\u2026<\/p>\n It starts like the cold.\u00a0 Aches, a cough, runny nose.\u00a0 Perfectly normal for about a week or so.\u00a0 Then the fever starts.\u00a0 Then the mind gets fuzzy.\u00a0 You forget things.\u00a0 You get confused.<\/p>\n \u201cAnd then you fucking die.\u201d Gates said to the TV.\u00a0 \u201cAnd then you get left in your living room, or slumped on the bathroom floor, or trapped in your car, or out on the street, in the playground.\u00a0 You get left and you\u2019re forgotten.\u201d<\/p>\n He pulled out his .45 and put it in his mouth.<\/p>\n The way it was meant to be.<\/p>\n Let the old world die.<\/p>\n There was nobody around to hear the gunshot.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[67],"tags":[126,405],"class_list":["post-499","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-serials","tag-finzel","tag-serials"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/499","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=499"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/499\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1290,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/499\/revisions\/1290"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=499"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=499"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=499"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}