“I don’t know,” she said, clenching her jaws. “And I don’t care.” Her eyes had a dull sheen to them. They were insipid and bovine, exactly the color of the dirt at her feet. And her lips — thin and stingy, collapsed in a riot of vertical lines like a dried-up mud puddle. I hated her in that moment, godsend or no. Oh, how I hated her.
“What are you doing?” she demanded as I loaded the last of the groceries into the car, settled into the driver’s seat and turned the engine over. She was ten feet from me, caught midway between the moribund phone booth and the living car. One of the coyotes lifted its head at the vehemence of her tone and gave her a sleepy, yellow-eyed look.
“Going back to the cabin,” I said.
“You’re what?” Her face was pained. She’d been through agonies. I was a devil and a madman.
“Listen, Sarai, it’s all over. I’ve told you time and again. You don’t have a job anymore. You don’t have to pay rent, utility bills, don’t have to make car payments or remember your mother’s birthday. It’s over. Don’t you get it?”
“You’re insane! You’re a shithead! I hate you!”
The engine was purring beneath my feet, fuel awasting, but there was infinite fuel now, and though I realized the gas pumps would no longer work, there were millions upon millions of cars and trucks out there in the world with full tanks to siphon, and no one around to protest. I could drive a Ferrari if I wanted, a Rolls, a Jag, anything. I could sleep on a bed of jewels, stuff the mattress with hundred-dollar bills, prance through the streets in a new pair of Italian loafers and throw them into the gutter each night and get a new pair in the morning. But I was afraid. Afraid of the infection, the silence, the bones rattling in the wind. “I know it,” I said. “I’m insane. I’m a shithead. I admit it. But I’m going back to the cabin and you can do anything you want — it’s a free country. Or at least it used to be.”
I wanted to add that it was a free world now, a free universe, and that God was in the details, the biblical God, the God of famine, flood and pestilence, but I never got the chance. Before I could open my mouth she bent for a stone and heaved it into the windshield, splintering me with flecks and shards of safety glass. “Die!” she shrieked. “You die, you shit!”
That night we slept together for the first time. In the morning, we packed up a few things and drove down the snaking mountain road to the charnel house of the world.
I have to confess that I’ve never been much of a fan of the apocalyptic potboiler, the doomsday film shot through with special effects and asinine dialogue or the cyberpunk version of a grim and relentless future. What these entertainments had led us to expect — the roving gangs, the inhumanity, the ascendancy of machines and the redoubled pollution and ravaging of the earth — wasn’t at all what it was like. There were no roving gangs — they were all dead, to a man, woman and tattooed punk — and the only machines still functioning were the automobiles and weed whippers and such that we the survivors chose to put into prosaic action. And a further irony was that the survivors were the least likely and least qualified to organize anything, either for better or worse. We were the fugitive, the misfit, the recluse, and we were so widely scattered we’d never come into contact with one another, anyway — and that was just the way we liked it. There wasn’t even any looting of the supermarkets — there was no need. There was more than enough for everybody who ever was or would be.
Sarai and I drove down the mountain road, through the deserted small town of Springville and the deserted larger town of Porterville, and then we turned south for Bakersfield, the Grapevine and Southern California. She wanted to go back to her apartment, to Los Angeles, and see if her parents and her sisters were alive still — she became increasingly vociferous on that score as the reality of what had happened began to seep through to her — but I was driving and I wanted to avoid Los Angeles at all costs. To my mind, the place had been a pit before the scourge hit, and now it was a pit heaped with seven million moldering corpses. She carped and moaned and whined and threatened, but she was in shock too and couldn’t quite work herself up to her usual pitch, and so we turned west and north on Route 126 and headed toward Montecito, where for the past ten years I’d lived in a cottage on one of the big estates there — the DuPompier place, Mírame.
By the way, when I mentioned earlier that the freeways were clear, I was speaking metaphorically — they were free of traffic, but cluttered with abandoned vehicles of all sorts, take your pick, from gleaming choppers with thousand-dollar gold-fleck paint jobs to sensible family cars, Corvettes, Winnebagos, eighteen-wheelers and even fire engines and police cruisers. Twice, when Sarai became especially insistent, I pulled alongside one or another of these abandoned cars, swung open her door and said, “Go ahead. Take this Cadillac”—or BMW or whatever—“and drive yourself any damn place you please. Go on. What are you waiting for?” But her face shrank till it was as small as a doll’s and her eyes went stony with fear: those cars were catacombs, each and every one of them, and the horror of that was more than anybody could bear.
So we drove on, through a preternatural silence and a world that already seemed primeval, up the Coast Highway and along the frothing bright boatless sea and into Montecito. It was evening when we arrived, and there wasn’t a soul in sight. If it weren’t for that — and a certain creeping untended look to the lawns, shrubs and trees — you wouldn’t have noticed anything out of the ordinary. My cottage, built in the twenties of local sandstone and draped in wisteria till it was all but invisible, was exactly as I’d left it. We pulled into the silent drive with the great house looming in the near distance, a field of dark reflective glass that held the blood of the declining sun in it, and Sarai barely glanced up. Her thin shoulders were hunched and she was staring at a worn place on the mat between her feet.
“We’re here,” I announced, and I got out of the car.
She turned her eyes to me, stricken, suffering, a waif. “Where?”
“Home.”
It took her a moment, but when she responded she spoke slowly and carefully, as if she were just learning the language. “I have no home,” she said. “Not anymore.”
So. What to tell you? We didn’t last long, Sarai and I, though we were pioneers, though we were the last hope of the race, drawn together by the tenacious glue of fear and loneliness. I knew there wouldn’t be much opportunity for dating in the near future, but we just weren’t suited to each other. In fact, we were as unsuited as any two people could ever be, and our sex was tedious and obligatory, a ballet of mutual need and loathing, but to my mind at least, there was a bright side — here was the chance to go forth and be fruitful and do what we could to repopulate the vast and aching sphere of the planet. Within the month, however, Sarai had disabused me of that notion.
It was a silky, fog-hung morning, the day deepening around us, and we’d just gone through the mechanics of sex and were lying exhausted and unsatisfied in the rumple of my gritty sheets (water was a problem and we did what laundry we could with what we were able to haul down from the estate’s swimming pool). Sarai was breathing through her mouth, an irritating snort and burble that got on my nerves, but before I could say anything, she spoke in a hard shriveled little nugget of a voice. “You’re no Howard,” she said.