Las Vegas Boulevard is dark and still. Nevertheless, I can’t make myself walk on the blacktop, even though the cars there are unmoving, bumper to bumper for all eternity. The Strip’s last traffic jam.
There might be bodies in the cars. I don’t look.
I don’t want to know.
I don’t think there’s going to be anybody alive, but that might be worse. More dangerous, anyway.
I mean, I think I’m the last. But I don’t know.
That was also the reason I couldn’t make myself walk along the sidewalk. It was too exposed. The tall casinos were mostly designed so that their windows had views of something more interesting than hordes of pedestrians—hordes of pedestrians now long gone—but somebody might be up there, and somebody up there might spot me. A lone moving dot on a sea of silent asphalt.
Lord, where have all the people gone?
So I stick to the median. With its crape myrtle hedges and doomed palm trees already drooping in the failed irrigation to break up my outline. With the now pointless crowd control barriers to discourage jaywalkers from darting into traffic.
Two more things:
• Traffic.
• Jaywalkers.
Hey, and one more:
• Assholes.
I am half hoping to find people. And I am 90% terrified of what they might do if I find them. Or if they find me first.
I’m pretty sure this wasn’t actually the Rapture.
Pretty sure.
I keep trying to tell myself that there’s not a single damned person from the old world that I really miss. That it’s time I had some time alone, as the song used to go. It is nice not to be on anybody else’s schedule, or subject to anybody else’s expectations or demands. At least my ex-husband is almost certainly among the evaporated. That’s a load off my mind.
I moved to Vegas, changed my name by sealed court order, abandoned a career I worked for ten years to get, and became a casino dealer in order to hide from him. Considering that, it’s not a surprise to find myself relieved that whatever ends up causing me to look over my shoulder from now on, it won’t be Paul.
I got the cozy apocalypse that was supposed to be the best-case-apocalypse-scenario—wish fulfillment—complete with the feral dogs that howl in the night.
But it doesn’t feel like wish fulfillment. It feels like… being alone on the beach in winter. I’m lonely, and I miss… well, I already left behind everybody I loved. But leaving somebody behind is not the same thing as knowing they are gone.
There’s potential space, and there’s empty space.
Maybe that’s why I’m still here. Nobody thought to tap me on the shoulder and say, “Hey, Izzy, let’s go,” because I’d already abandoned all of them to save my own life one time.
Hah. There I go again. Making things about me that aren’t.
I thought I was used to being lonely, but this is a whole new level of alone. I feel like I should be paralyzed by survivor guilt. But I am a rock. I am an island.
• Simon
• Garfunkel
Lying to yourself is, however, still alive and well.
The gun is heavy. Cold, blue metal. It feels about twice its size.
I find it under the seat of a cop car with the driver’s door left open. The keys are in the ignition. The dome light has long since burned out, and the open-door dinger has dinged itself into silence.
It’s a handgun. A revolver. Old School. There is a holster to go with it, but no gunbelt. There are six bullets in the cylinder.
• The Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department.
• Crooked cops.
• Throwaway guns.
I unbuckle my belt, thread it through the loops on the holster, and hang it at my hip.
There are plenty of rattlesnakes, still.
• Antivenin.
• Emergency rooms.
There are plenty of antibiotics. And pain medication. And canned peaches.
And a nice ten-speed mountain bike that I liberate from a sporting goods place, along with one of those trailers designed for pulling your kid or dog along. I’ve never been much of an urban biker, preferring trails, but it wasn’t like I would have to contend with traffic. And it seems like the right tool for weaving in and out of rows of abandoned cars.
I pick up a book on bike repair too, and some tire patches and spare tubes and so on. Plus saddlebags and baskets. And a lot of water bottles.
It turns out that one thing the zombie apocalypse movies got really wrong was the abundance of stockpiled resources available after a population of more than seven billion people just… ceases to exist.
There’s plenty of stuff to go around when there’s no “around” for it to go. Until the stuff goes bad, anyway.
That’s the reason I want to get out of the desert before summer comes. Things will last longer in colder places, with less murderous UV.
Things that apparently do still exist: at least one other human being.
And he is following me.
He picks me up at a Von’s. I’m in the pasta aisle. The rats have started gnawing into boxes, but the canned goods are relatively fine. And if you can ignore the silence of the gaming machines and the smell of fermenting fruit, rotten meat, and rodent urine, it’s not that different than if I were shopping at 2 am in the old world.
I’m crouched down, filling my backpack with Beefaroni and D batteries from the endcap, when I hear footsteps. It’s daylight outside, but it’s dark inside the store. I turn off my LED flashlight. My heart contracts inside me, shuddering jolts of blood through my arteries. The rush and thump fills my ears. I strain through them for the sounds that mean life or death: the scrape or squeak of boot sole on tile, the rattle of packages.
My hands shake as I zip the backpack inch by silent inch. I stand. The straps creak. I can’t be sure if I have managed not to tremble the bag into a betraying clink. One step, then another. Sideways, slipping, setting each foot down carefully so it doesn’t make a sound.
As I get closer to the front of the store (good) the ambiance grows brighter (bad). I hunker by the side of a dead slot machine, shivering. From where I crouch, I can peek around and see a clear path to the door.
The whole way is silhouetted against the plate glass windows. The pack weighs on my shoulders. If I leave it, I’m not really leaving anything. I can get another, and all the Chef Boyardee I want. But it’s hard to abandon resources.
And hey, the cans might stop a bullet.
Don’t hyperventilate.
Easier said than done.
Sliding doors stopped working when the store lights did. Too late, I realize there’s probably a fire door in the back I could have slipped out of more easily. In the old world, that would have been alarmed… but would the alarm even work anymore?
There is a panic bar on the front doors. I crane over my shoulder, straining for motion, color, any sign of the person I am certain I heard.
Nothing.
Maybe I’m hallucinating.
Maybe he’s gone to the back of the store.
I nerve myself and hit the door running. I got it open on the way in, so I know it isn’t locked. It flies away from the crash bar—no subtlety there—and I plunge through, sneakers slapping the pavement. The parking lot outside is flat and baking, even in September. The sun hits my ballcap like a slap. Rose bushes and trees scattered in the islands are already dead from lack of water. The rosemary bushes and crape myrtles look a little sad, but they are holding on.
I sprint toward them. Now the pack makes noise, the cans within clanking and thumping on each other—and clanking and thumping against my ribs and spine. I’ll have a suite of bruises because of them. But I left my bike on the kickstand in the fire lane, and—wonder of wonders—it’s still there. I throw myself at it and swing a leg through, pushing off with my feet before I ever touch the pedals. I miss my first push and skin the back of my calf bloody on the serrated grip.