He sat in the darkness indian-style in front of the open pantry door. His flashlight lay next to him shining its light under the bottom shelf illuminating cans of vegetables. He had picked out five of them and was carefully writing words on the bottom side with a black sharpie.
The can in hand was spinach, the worst of the bunch in his estimation. It was the kind that sloshes out when you pour it into a pan to warm it up on the stove, a gooey dark green clump, almost black, that his mother sometimes made for dinner. It was so repulsive that he would douse each bite in salt, hold his nose closed with his free hand, then swallow it in one gulp quickly followed by enough water to thoroughly rinse his mouth of the taste. Those nights it was almost guaranteed he would wet the bed.
He put the finishing touches on the last can and carefully put them in the back of the pantry where they were likely to be chosen last or maybe even forgotten. The sharpie fit snugly into a loop stitched into the cargo pocket of his pants. He grabbed the flashlight while standing to his feet and its light washed over some family vacation photos taped to the side of the refrigerator. He paused to look at them and found himself transported to the beach, feeling sand under his feet and between his toes. The mom's warm smile drew him in and he could almost feel her arms pulling him into a hug, the smell of coconut and bananas mixing in a salty breeze.
A noise from upstairs jarred him free from the sunny scene and froze him in his spot, straining to listen for movement of any kind in the darkness. When he was satisfied that he had not been discovered he slipped back into the mudroom and through the open window into the backyard, closing it behind him.
It was his third house of the evening and all the tension of sneaking about had exhausted him. It was some time after midnight and his mom and dad were still not back from wherever they'd gone to enjoy themselves on a Saturday night. He was tired, but couldn't sleep, his brain still buzzing from the break-ins. He decided to go through his Army pack to make sure there were no glaring omissions of what he might need if... the sound of a car brought him quickly to his window.
It was coming down the street slower than one would expect and then pulled too quickly to the curb with one tire actually coming up onto the grass. He watched his mom stumble out of the driver's side and make her way slowly around to the passenger side. When she got the door open his dad slumped out onto the grass "like spinach from a can", he thought. After a failed attempt or two she was able to get him upright and lurching towards the front door in the darkness. Carl felt like the lone survivor of a parental apocalypse.
***
He sat under the stairwell at his Middle School half hidden in shadows, a sixth grader with precious few friends reading his favorite comic book. School had let out and the kids had cleared out leaving him alone in the old building. It was quiet here and an opportunity for him to visit his friends in the world of The Walking Dead. Where he'd left off, the band of survivors were piled into an old RV and had just pulled up to an abandoned prison complex. Through the fence topped by barbed wire they could see a large number of zombies wandering the grounds. They needed to clear them out if they were going to be able to make this their new home.
The idea that they could find refuge inside of a prison fascinated Carl. A prison is a place to isolate people who are a danger to the world, he reasoned, but in this story it was a place to protect the people from the world outside its walls. Things had been turned upside down here and he felt a kind of kinship with those caught in such a situation. The thought occurred to him that his own mind was like a prison where he could isolate himself from the dangers of the world around him.
"HEY!"
He had not noticed the boy getting so close and was caught completely off guard. The comic book flew up out of his hands in an involuntary motion and landed between them.
"Dude! I totally scared the shit out of you!" He recognized the boy as an eighth grader who from the looks of him was there for basketball practice. The much larger boy scooped up the comic book and flipped it open. "What kind of weird shit is this? You must be some kind of geek freak zombie lover."
Carl stood up slowly and reached out to retrieve his comic, but the boy lifted it over his head out of his reach. "No way, dude. This is going in the trash."
"Give it back."
"Give it back or what? What are ya gonna do? Shoot me in the head?" He continued to hold the comic aloft and headed towards the bathroom with Carl close behind. In the bathroom the boy stopped by a toilet. "Wait, I think this is where it belongs" and dropped it into the toilet bowl.
As echoes of the boy's laughter receded down the hallway, Carl fished his comic book out of the toilet water and dried it as best he could with paper towels, then finished the job with the hand dryer on the wall. It can be a cruel world, he thought, zombies or no zombies.
***
Tonight was the big night. Carl had been thinking about it all week long since the idea first popped into his head while riding his bike home from school. With the recent chaos surrounding the presidential election he was sure the time was quickly approaching when his work would necessarily come to an end as would many other things. He was sowing seeds of hope that had yet to be planted and he needed to up his game.
The only cars left in the ALDI parking lot were those of the employees who were eager to close up and go home for the evening. Carl was familiar with this place and its routines from his regular stops on the way home from school. He was always on the lookout for stray carts that someone had not bothered to return and lock to reclaim their quarter. It was part of a trickling revenue stream that included finding and returning empty bottles to another grocery store for refunds. He had never resorted to stealing, though he had been tempted to plenty of times. His parents did not know of his morbid comic book collection and would not likely approve as there was so little he liked that they found acceptable or even understood. It was up to him to find ways to acquire and hide them.
When it looked like there was no one in the front of the store he made his way through the sliding doors and quickly began to look for an empty box. He found one on top of other boxes filled with bags of potato chips and he pulled the middle column out into the aisle. The overhead music suddenly quieted and he heard a voice coming from the next aisle over.
"Did you hear someone come in? I thought I heard the doors open."
Another voice farther away, "I don't know. I've been in the back. Can you check it out? I wanna get the heck out of here."
As quietly as possible Carl slipped in behind the boxes and attempted to pull them back in as far as he could while putting the empty box over his head. He heard footsteps coming around the corner of his aisle and he stopped pulling.
"Hey! Did you pull these boxes out? They're halfway out in the aisle."
There had not been enough time to pull the boxes back in flush and he felt himself getting too hot and breathing too fast. The man approached and began pushing the boxes in on him. He pulled his knees to his chest as far as he could but it was not enough. He heard the man mumbling angrily to himself and felt the box thumping against him with each push and kick.
The empty box over his head suddenly disappeared as the man snatched it off of him. Right as the man was starting to look down at Carl in his hideaway the voice from the back yelled, "What are you doing up there? Leave it and let's go!"
The man dropped the box back onto Carl's head without looking down and headed back into the store. A few minutes later the lights went out and he was left alone.
He had come prepared with his flashlight, a few extra batteries, and two sharpies this time. He planned to work through the night and be gone before anyone arrived to open the store in the morning. He pulled each flat of cans off of a pallet and laid them along the side of the aisle. One by one he began writing on the bottoms of the cans and replacing them until an entire pallet's worth was done and could be rebuilt before moving on to another. He was meticulous in his work and would not rush it, though time tapped on his head like a physical sensation. The longer he was there the greater the risk, but the work had to be done. This was no time to wimp out.
Several hours later he felt completely spent. His hands, arms, and back were cramping up from all of the lifting, moving, and writing. He allowed himself a break as the early morning sun began to wash in over the tops of the aisles. He knew he still had at least an hour or two before anyone would show up and so allowed himself to lean back onto a box to catch a breather before putting the finishing touches on the last batch of cans still left in the aisle. He'd done more than he'd thought he could do and relaxed just enough to be pulled quickly down into slumber against his will.
He awoke in a brilliant orange glow that filled every nook and cranny of the store bringing him quickly to his feet. How long had he slept? He had forgotten where he was or why he had come here and was disoriented by the light that continued to grow in intensity until suddenly flashing out. When his eyes had readjusted to a relative darkness they were drawn to the front windows where a monstrous red fireball could be seen swirling upwards on the horizon and a noise like a thousand stampeding buffalo was growing as the earth began to quiver beneath his feet. Before he could react or make sense of it, the plate glass windows exploded inward and knocked him off of his feet.
He crawled to the store entrance through broken glass with surprisingly little pain, his bloodied palms making tracks on the floor. In the parking lot black ash was falling softly through a thick dusty haze, the blackened outline of trees like giant spiders frozen in the dead silence. Carl absent-mindedly wiped his hands on his shirt as he moved towards the bushes to find his bike, still dazed from the blast. His head cocked to the side at a noise coming from overhead. A grouping of what appeared to be fireballs were arcing towards him. They cried out in a flutter of wings and flames, burning crows landing all around him, one on his head setting his hair on fire and singeing his eyes...
The light was so bright it sent a sliver of pain into his skull.
"What are you doing here kid?"
Carl rubbed his eyes vigorously and then lifted his hand to block the piercing beam of the flashlight. He was still lying back against the box where he'd fallen asleep. A police officer stood over him with a thumb hooked into his utility belt and the other training a flashlight on the young trespasser.
***
The detective observed him through the two-way mirror sitting at a table looking small and lost to the world. The boy's eyes were focused somewhere far away and he correctly surmised that this one was prone to daydreaming. He'd just talked with the boy's parents and it made the scene that much more poignant for him. They were self-consumed assholes and they had almost no clue as to the boy's routines, interests, or whereabouts. It seemed to him that they were simply pissed that the boy had had the audacity to inconvenience them in this way. He would deal with them again later, but for now it was time to speak with the boy. He shifted the box in his lap to his hip as he stood to enter the room from a side door.
As the door swung open Carl's eyes returned from their far journey and focused on the man entering the room. He was wearing a dark suit, white shirt, and tie with a bit of a paunch hanging over his belt. A badge hung from his jacket pocket, but what most worried him was the cardboard box he was carrying. The man placed the box on the table with a clank and sat down facing Carl across the table.
"Do you know what I have here, young man?"
"No, sir."
"You have been a very busy boy and we've been able to connect you to several home break-ins."
Carl lowered his eyes to the table. The detective reached into the box and pulled out five cans of foodstuffs, one at a time, and lined them up on the table forming a small wall between him and the boy.
"Do you recognize these?"
Carl shook his head "no" and continued to stare at the table. The detective tipped one of the cans towards himself and laid it down so that the bottom faced the boy.
Carl looked up and saw writing on the round metal surface. The detective laid them all down to reveal the messages written there. Reading some of them, he intoned, "Don't give up hope. This too shall pass. Live one day at a time."
"Do you recognize the writing on these cans, Carl?" Carl Remained silent.
"Can you at least tell me why you are doing this?" His question was met with silence, the boy's eyes looking somewhere over the detective's left shoulder. In that look he understood the boy was someplace that he could not follow.
***
It had been several days since he'd last ate and the man was beginning to wonder if his luck had finally run out. He was holed up in a house that only had half a roof, but the fireplace was functional and he needed heat to compensate for all of the weight he'd dropped with only sporadic access to food and so much damn walking. He tossed a coffee table leg into the fire and then pulled out his service revolver, absent-mindedly spinning the cylinder with the hammer pulled back. He still had his badge as well, but no one cared about that anymore. He kept it mostly as a reminder that he'd once been one of the good guys. His last bullet had been spent several months ago to thwart an attack by some scavengers on the road and now the gun was just a prop of sorts in this sordid post-apocalyptic play.
The warmth of the fire tempted him with sleep, but his empty stomach would not allow it. He snatched up a stick from the pile of kindling and wrapped a strip of curtain cloth around the end, tied it off, then dipped it in a tin of motor oil he'd drained from a car in the yard. It burst into flame over the fire. As he carried it down a hallway the light from the sputtering flame played over his heavily bearded face and the wall paper patterns like cave paintings from some ancient time. The kitchen appeared relatively untouched except for a coating of dust and ash. He was sure it had been emptied long before he'd arrived, but there was still an ember of hope buried deep inside him smoldering.
He methodically opened all of the cabinets and probed with his free hand to check every nook and cranny without success. That ember had dimmed as of late and he did not know how much longer he could keep it going. He felt he'd become a ghost of a man, but now he wondered if that might not become literally true, by his own hand or not. He checked the pantry closet next and found it empty. He laid on the floor and let the light play in under the bottom shelf, a space that appeared to be empty as well. His probing hand hit what he thought was the back wall, but it was a bit too shallow for that. It moved at his touch and then fell over. He realized it was a cut piece of cardboard standing on end. Behind it his hand closed on a hard cylindrical object which he pulled out into the light. It was a can, but more importantly, it was an unopened can.
Back in the living room he scraped the last of the beans from the warmed pan to eat, and then reclined back in the seat of a legless chair that still had enough stuffing to provide some comfort. Now that he had a little energy he wondered if this was the time to call it quits. The world had gone to shit and he was tired of trudging through it. He placed his hand on his chest and felt the pouch hanging there under his layers of ratty clothes. He pulled it out and emptied its contents into his palm, a rolled wad of oil cloth. Inside its layers he extracted the last "last" bullet and chambered it.
He tried not to think too much about it; pull back the hammer, place it against your head, pull the trigger. His eyes focused beyond the fire until the flames were just a shimmering curtain of light. As he felt the pressure of the trigger against his finger begin to grow his eyes dropped to the floor and lit on the empty bean can. Something about it in the fire light caught his attention and he immediately lowered the revolver to his lap and leaned forward to pick it up.
On the bottom in precise handwritten letters was a message, "Don't give up hope." He stared at it giving a few hard blinks before the room suddenly blurred out as his eyes welled up with tears. "Good God Almighty... that kid," he choked out to the empty room. The memory was as clear as spring water. He couldn't remember the last time he'd cried or that his heart hadn't been anything other than a dry husk of an organ.
He flopped back onto the chair clinging to the metal talisman, laid the revolver on his chest, and closed his eyes letting the tears stream down into his beard. For a while longer he muttered to himself sleepily and even chuckled a time or two, "live one day at a time... this too shall pass," as the fire crackled in response. Sleep crept in and claimed the raggedy man.
***
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