SelectionEvent (2ed) Page 2

  “I never heard mockingbirds till I came here,” the woman said. “They don't live in San Francisco. We only had pigeons and gulls there.”

  They sat quietly, listening for a while, and finished the champagne and phenobarbital. Through the thick sky, the only light now was from the faint band at the horizon. Their faces seemed to be pale disembodied shapes floating above the lawn chairs.

  “My headache's gone,” he said. He clumsily placed his left arm around her shoulders and held her right hand with his. “I've always liked your hair,” he said, his words beginning to slur. “Always liked you. You knew that.”

  “I did,” she murmured, letting her cheek rest on his shoulder. “Always the way, isn't it. Always think of the good things when it's too late. Thank you.” She squeezed his hand a little. “Beautiful night,” she said in a whisper.

  He didn't answer.

  She wouldn't have heard.

  The night grew slowly cooler, and after a while the mockingbird was silent. In the morning, when the sun suddenly flared red through the thick clouds in the east, light sparkled in the dew on their hair and eyelashes. They looked as if they had slept in each other's arms.

  Chapter 4

  The note in the envelope was only two lines long, written in smeary, shaky pencil.

  Stay away from other people till you know what's going on. We hope you are well. Good luck.

  It was signed by Ted — one of the six people working on the project. He re-read the letter and studied the irregular, child-like handwriting. Was this another part of the experiment? Wait for him to come out on his own and then give him puzzling messages — to measure his reactions?

  Martin pushed open the second door and looked up the slanting corridor. The irregularity of the arched walls and ceiling reflected the distant white light that came through the double glass doors at the end. Here, the walls were rough-cut, but beyond the hospital-like doors he remembered there were white walls and tile floors.

  At least he had come up in daylight, he thought. The air in the corridor was cool and plaster-smelling, and for a moment, his eyes felt strange, trying to focus on something further than the thirty feet across his room.

  “Hello?” he said. His voice echoed loudly around him. “Is this a test?”

  There was no response.

  He walked the twenty yards to the end of the corridor and pushed through the glass doors, into the office where the monitoring equipment was kept, expecting Ted, Laura, or some of the others to welcome or chide him for coming out — a little party maybe. But there was no one.

  In fact, it didn't look like anyone had been there in quite a while. The video monitor was turned off. The computer was inoperative. Miscellaneous forms, wadded note papers, and food wrappers littered the counter. Everything had a dry, dusty look. At the far end of the counter was a foot-high stack of newspapers.

  Was everyone out to lunch? Had he been abandoned, down there for months with no one caring enough to tell him? Had they just all walked away? This had to be some kind of test.

  He ran his finger across the seat of one of the swivel chairs. It came away with an oval of gray dust on the tip.

  A quick iciness radiated through his blood. For the first time in more than a year, he was afraid.

  He did a quick check of the adjoining kitchenette, sleeping room, and the restroom. He was definitely alone. Everything was littered, messy, and dusty — it looked as if the people who were supposed to watch him had simply walked away. Everyone was gone, and it was starting to not look like a test.

  Martin turned from the counter and went to the door leading to the outside. He had almost forgotten his anticipation of walking outside, under the open sky. When he opened it, the air washed over him like water — cool, unfiltered, unprocessed air, with all the smells of earth and weeds and orchards — and certainly some of the crew would be out there, smoking cigarettes or playing chess or reading. Holding open the heavy glass door, he started to inhale to the bottom of his lungs, but his breath caught in his throat.

  Twenty yards away, standing in the middle of the facility's driveway, was a giraffe — a slow-moving, immense giraffe — an actual giraffe with angular spots of brown, eating cherries from the top of a cherry tree. Its soft flat lips moved rhythmically as it chewed, and after a moment it turned and gazed at Martin. Then it went back to its foraging.

  It was then that he noticed the silence. There was no noise from the freeway. When he looked over in its direction, he could see a short strip of the four lanes — and they were empty. The only sounds were the whistles of red-wing blackbirds, the chortling of a mockingbird, and across the driveway, the occasional whisking sound of the giraffe moving its muzzle through the top of the cherry tree.

  And the air, for all its newness to him, had a strangeness in its smell: not only was there no trace of car odors, there seemed to be no trace of anything other than the smell of thick green weeds and wet gravel in the driveway.

  Martin stepped out of the doorway and took a few steps onto the cement slab landing. Around the corner, under the mulberry tree, he saw the two lawn chairs, weeds growing high around them, and the two people there. On a small table, the green neck of an opened wine bottle rose above the weeds.

  They sat together in lawn chairs, their heads propped awkwardly together, their hands touching, but from the side of one of their faces, he knew they had been dead for some time. The skin had fallen away and he could see teeth showing through one of their cheeks.

  He wanted to see who they were, suspecting it was Ted and Laura, but he remembered their warning — “Stay away from other people till you know what's going on.” Maybe that included dead people.

  Now the shaky handwriting began to make some sense, the silence around him began to fit into an ominous pattern, and if Ted and Laura had been dying when they wrote him the note, he would obey it to the letter. He would even stay away from them.

  He didn't give the giraffe a second glance as he hurried back inside the office.

  He began with the newspapers. The disease, a new and lethal form of influenza, had apparently begun in the Far East, in Central Asia or, some thought, in Mongolia, though no one knew for sure, so by the time it was identified and given the arbitrary name of Mongolian Influenza Virus, it had established itself throughout China, Southeast Asia, and had begun to spill over into India and the Middle East. With the hundreds of thousands of international travelers around the world and the thousands of airline flights crossing borders every day, the world never had a chance.

  MIV seemed to be everywhere at once. Its incubation period was long, twelve days, during the last days of which the infected person might only feel the mildest discomfort and was at his most contagious. With the immune system ravaged, when distinct symptoms did begin, they were overwhelming. Most fell into unconsciousness within twenty-four hours and death came two or three days later. For those strong enough to withstand the pneumonia, secondary infections would set in and the infected would die for another week. Strength and resistance were mercilessly punished by the virus.

  Several articles that Martin read expressed disbelief that the earth could be subject to a disease more horrifying than AIDS and made reference to what was apparently a popular belief — that MIV was caused by the interaction between AIDS medications and the AIDS virus itself. There were many instances in the last days of homosexuals being hunted down and murdered. IV drug users were also thought to be responsible and were also exterminated by vigilante groups. Eastern Europe saw the return of the pogrom, and in the end, everyone was blamed by someone. Only those with apocalyptic religious beliefs seemed delighted.

  The fatality rate in one paper was given at 87%, but later he read that it was over 98%, and he began to notice that the newspapers had fewer pages, almost no ads, and contained nothing unrelated to the pandemic. Every few minutes, thoughts of Delana and his parents filtered into his consciousness — where were they? Had they survived? Who had survived? Was he alone in the world? T
he one survivor? But he read on.

  Halfway through the stack, numerous articles appeared about preserving law and order and maintaining the government. Then appeared the hare-brained speculations about irrational cures, but within a few weeks, those articles were replaced by editorials of a more philosophical tone that asked questions about what would come after the fall of civilization.

  Martin looked up from the counter where he had been reading. The recording monitors sat in front of his face like tombstones, a layer of dust on the top surfaces.

  “The end of civilization,” he pronounced, listening to the sound of the words.

  Reading further, there were brief articles about the fall of governments, though “fall” did not seem to be the right word: most of them had simply drifted into nonexistence. In the Middle East, a brief nuclear exchange had occurred, though no one knew exactly which countries were involved, the extent of the catastrophe, or if it settled anything. The weather, several articles reported, would change as a result of this brief war and its subsequent fires, though in what ways were open to speculation. This interaction with global warming was interpreted seven different ways. One person wrote, “We won't live long enough to find out. You never see the color of the knife.”

  The final newspapers were only single sheets, folded in half and even then there were blank columns. There were requests for survivors to go house-to-house in their neighborhoods, unplug all appliances and turn off the natural gas at the meter box. One article caught Martin's eye which reported that “zoo squads” were releasing all zoo animals and that several major dams in the central California area had been dynamited. “If we're an unsuccessful species,” said a speaker for the Natural World Liberation Front, “the least we can do before we leave is to undo some of the damage we've done. Let the earth rise out of the ashes of our plague!”

  He dug through to the bottom of the stack. The date on the last newspaper was two months before he was scheduled to come up. It printed a collection of prayers from half a dozen religions. Many of the words were misspelled.

  In an adjoining storage room, the workers had lockers, and before Martin had gone underground, he had been given one where he had put a bottle of champagne, a change of clothes, and his digital wristwatch.

  He dialed the combination from memory. The champagne was missing, but that was nothing now. From the toe of one of his shoes, he shook out his wristwatch. The gray numbers sat neutrally on the watch face, the seconds counting silently into the future. He had been below-ground fourteen months and two weeks. It was May 30, Wednesday, 11:35 AM. Civilization had folded its arms across its breast, closed its eyes, and ceased.

  Chapter 5

  The dog lay in the wadded blankets and thought of food. After a while, she dragged herself off the bed and padded slowly to the back porch. She nosed the floor and licked at a spot where the food-smell was strongest then turned her head in a slow wide sweep to see if she had overlooked anything, but she hadn't. There was nothing else to eat. The food was gone.

  She padded past the pantry where she had pawed out familiar cans in which she knew food was kept, but she had been able to do nothing but scrape off the labels with her teeth.

  The dog went again to the front window and rested her muzzle on the sill. Sometimes she heard loud noises, human noises, but they had always been far away. Each time, though, she had come to the window, because she knew her two people would return. The first things they would do would be to pat and feed her. She had only to be patient and wait. They would return.

  Even now, someplace far away, there was a faint popping noise. She turned her ears forward to hear better and for a moment imagined she could smell the hand of the woman, who always came through the door before the man did. She listened and watched for their car to appear in the street and in the back of her throat she made a brief, high-pitched whine.

  No car appeared. There were no other noises.

  She quietly waited at the window until the tree-shadows were long streaks, and then she returned to the bedroom. She jumped up on the edge of the bed and slid back onto the floor with a soft thump, her legs collapsing under her. She tried to get on the bed again but could not get her back legs up over the edge.

  The dog stood and looked across the rumpled covers. Then, with what strength she had, she pulled at one of the blanket-edges with her teeth until enough of it was on the floor that she could lie down on it.

  The dog waited, sleeping occasionally, sometimes dreaming that they had returned and awakening to phantom noises, and then realizing she was still alone. But she was certain the man and woman would return. They would come back. They would feed her and the pain would go away. She was not worried about this. They always came back.

  Chapter 6

  Martin sat slumped at the counter. He had restacked the pile of newspapers, and he wasn't thinking exactly — it was more that he was waiting and hoping that some of this would start to seem real.

  He had tried to telephone Delana and his parents and then everyone else he could think of, but all batteries were dead and the land line gave nothing but busy signals. For a few minutes this had given him some hope, but then he tried calling the phone in the next room — and this, too, gave him a busy signal. Most of the computers booted up, but there was no Internet connection.

  The first thing he wanted to do was go to his parents' house. Since he was their only child, it seemed reasonable that if they had survived, they would have come to get him or left him a message — but their deaths were inconceivable to him. At this point, everything about the situation was inconceivable, but the first thing was to check on them — this had to be done — and then he would try to find Delana.

  Their house was on the far side of Santa Miranda, which was seven or eight miles away. Even if he walked, he could be there before dark, but he was thinking that with a little luck he could find an operable car. Or, failing that, a bicycle.

  By now, the giraffe had left the driveway and was across the road, lazily grazing in the overgrown vineyard. So people had freed the zoo animals, he thought. If this had happened across the country, who could tell what balance nature would find? Hippopotamuses might bask in the Mississippi, rhinoceroses and lions could populate the Plains, and exotic birds would mingle with the native finches, mockingbirds, and crows.

  As he left the facility, he looked once again at the bodies of Ted and Laura, sitting beneath the hazy midday light that filtered through the mulberry tree. He wondered if they had been lovers. He wondered if they had been happy.

  He would keep in mind their last message to him, their warning.

  Hoping to find a car in the nearby town, he started down the country road that curved toward the freeway and an overpass. As he walked along it, the air buzzed with insects in the vineyard on one side and in the weedy, overgrown alfalfa on the other. Behind the milky sky, the sun hung like a yellow bruise. Late May was usually very warm, but the afternoon air had the chill of an early March.

  As Martin followed the curve of the road toward the overpass, he passed under a leafed-out walnut tree and two blackbirds dived at him and then swooped up to a low branch where they studied him with their black eyes. He slowed his pace, looking at the birds, and was of two minds.

  First, after a year underground, confined in a thirty-by-thirty foot room, the sight of a bird in a tree filled him with joy. The fact of the bird's existence amazed him — its glossy black feathers with highlights of emerald and blue — but more, the fact of the bird's existence in an actual coarse-barked tree that had thick green leaves where pieces of sky showed through — this was astonishing beyond words.

  But second, he was alone. Everything told him everyone was gone, apparently dead, yet this horrifying fact had no reality to it. The only thing that was real right now was the two blackbirds sitting on the low branch waiting to see if he was going to leave them alone. They certainly would not care that there were fewer people around. The giraffe was probably happier too... as would be every o
ther zoo animal, the salmon that could now swim upriver, past the ruins of dams, coyotes that could spread across the country, wolves, mountain lions, all because the number one predator was gone. Who would miss mankind?

  He remembered 99 Highway clearly. In the past he had driven on it from Santa Miranda as far south as San Diego and as far north as Vancouver, Canada. It was a deafening exhaust-exhaling asphalt river of trucks and cars and trailers, and in the quiet evenings, the noise of it could be heard for miles, a mechanical surf. But now as he walked across an overpass, it was empty. No cars, no trucks, and not a sound anywhere except for the birds in the oleanders down the central divider.

  No cars on the freeway.... He hurried on across the downside of the overpass, chilled by a wave of creepiness.

  He came to a mini-mart gas station first. The three pumps had a layer of heavy layer of coarse dust across their tops.

  “Hello? Anybody here?”

  No answer. The birds calling in trees in the nearby yards paused momentarily and then started up again. How soon, he thought, that they get used to having us gone.

  Martin tried the front door, but it was locked. He banged on it with the heel of his fist. The noise seemed unnaturally loud. Still, there was no response from inside.

  He cupped his hands around his face, and through the dirty window in the door he could see that there had been some minor vandalism. Candy bars and bags of potato chips were scattered over the floor, the register was open, and the calendar on the wall showed February.

  Around back, he found a broken window, with all the glass neatly knocked out. Apparently whoever had broken in had not hurried.

  Once inside, he filled his pockets with beef jerky and candy bars... candy bars! He'd been eating healthy food for a year, and he had no idea how much he'd missed sticky, gooey caramel and chocolate melting across his tongue. Sugar-pains cramped the back corners of his mouth in sweet misery.