Read Online Prospero's Half-Life by Trevor Zaple - Free Book Online Page A

he’d always known and just seemed like the
place that it was. He wasn’t sure what she was talking about, in
any event; he hadn’t spent much time in small towns and had very
little familiarity with what their downtowns looked like.
    There were
corpses, here; people whom had been unwilling or unable to hide
inside when they felt their time coming and had chosen instead to
bleed out of their main orifices in the final, pitiless glare of
the public eye. Cars were strewn about, equally as liberally.
Parking laws had given way when all other law and order had broken
down in the final, desperate last days of civilization.
    Richard, for
his part, was horrified. He had remained fairly isolated, he
realized; he had lived in a nice condo in one of the newer
buildings out on the other end of town, where the city petered out
into the surrounding countryside. He had seen nothing like this in
the last few weeks, even though he’d followed the story on the
available news sources. It had all seemed so unreal, viewing it
through the thick filter of his various LCD screens. People were
dying but they weren’t people he knew. He didn’t have to see them,
or touch them. His neighbours began disappearing and he hadn’t
really noticed. They’d played a role in his life in only a very
minor, peripheral way, and so he’d dismissed it out of hand when he
no longer saw them. When people from the store had begun getting
sick and not showing up, he’d connected it to what was going on but
not in any real, tangible way. He hadn’t seen them die, and that
was really the key thing. He hadn’t seen any of his neighbours
dead, he hadn’t watched Mohammed die (although his demise was
certain, from what Richard had witnessed), the dead bodies outside
of Samantha’s apartment had seemed like a mocked-up television set,
even the few corpses he’d spied here and there since leaving the
apartment had been nothing more noteworthy to him than the roadkill
he’d occasionally seen on the highways in the time before. This,
however, was too blatant to ignore. There were dozens of them in
sight, blood-soaked bodies sprawled in contorting positions from
their final, phlegmatic spasms. They had died in the street, with
no one to collect and bury them. They would lie there until the
rains and the predations of animals took them away. Their bones
would bleach in the sun and finally crumble away into dust, years
from now. They would still be lying in the street years from now.
Decades from now. Richard fell to his knees. His hands found his
face without a shred of conscious thought, and he began to weep
heavily.
    Presently,
Samantha knelt beside him and put a comforting hand on the back of
his head. She stroked his hair gently and whispered gentle nonsense
into his ear. His sobbing eventually grew less, and tapered off
into hitching breaths here and there. Finally, he was calm again,
and rose to his feet.
    The bodies
were still there, visible through a crazed lens of remaining tears,
but he felt as though he could deal with it now. He could see them
and not immediately want to vomit everything in his stomach onto
the street. The sight didn’t seem quite as delirious – it was still
insane, beyond any real, instantaneous comprehension, but he could
look at it without feeling his mind begin to disengage and float
away.
    In clearing
his mind of this, he began noticing the little details that he’d
been refusing to acknowledge before. The smell, that was the big
one. In addition to the strengthening scent of wood smoke hanging
on the air, he realized that there was an underlying redolence to
the breeze that he’d refused to admit. To put it crudely, he could
smell the sour tang of blood and the deeper, earthier smell of shit
everywhere. Once he detected it, he could smell it in everything.
It was such an overwhelming force that he wondered how he’d been
able to ignore it the entire time.
    He noticed the
broken windows, as well, and the glittering carpet of