Grief: Five Stories of Apocalyptic Loss Read Online Free Page A

and Heidi -- in the hall.
    And he'd gone on existing, with even less thought than previously.
    But then the lights had gone out.
    Carson stood and walked to the old man's bookcase. It was too dark to see, really, but that didn't matter. He knew that the answers the old man had -- his perspective -- had to be somewhere in one of these books. In their gestalt, perhaps.
    He took a book and carried it with him to the window, where the moon's full light cast brightly enough that he could make out that the cover lacked a title, too brightly to see the cosmic killer approaching his fragile planet.
    He flipped to the book's title page. Candide: or, Optimism
    Carson smiled. There were worse ways to spend the rest of eternity.

Bargaining
     
    The worn soles of Wendy's sneakers slapped against the asphalt as she ran down the street, but the sound of her pursuers' own footfalls seemed all the louder in her ears. It seemed to her as if almost overnight the character of the rioters and looters on the street had taken a turn for the darker. In the early days of the disaster there had been an almost desperate unity in the mob's vandalism, a common bond. They were all doomed, they were all fucked, they were all blowing off steam and lashing out at a world that had failed them.
    As the days passed, however, the character of the crowd had changed. The desperation had grown steadily, and many rioters ran through their steam, losing a taste for wanton violence, their statements made, and they'd moved on. Those that remained were those who took advantage of society's crumbling to whet their darker appetites. The violence had turned its focus from shop windows and parked cars to those who couldn't protect themselves, to those who were weak, to those who couldn't get away. The deaths in the first days of rioting had been the unfortunate results of accidental trampling. The poor souls caught by the current mobs were beaten, violated, torn apart.
    Seeing it was bad enough. Wendy was quick. Wendy was quiet. Wendy was fast, but she couldn't run forever. She didn't even recognize where she was anymore, somewhere on the south side of the city, amid the burnt-out shells of corner grocery stores and tract housing.
    Her lungs burned. Her feet ached. Her sides stitched. She kept running.
    Wendy caught sight of a culvert out of the corner of her eye and diverted down the concrete slope towards it, practically diving into its sheltering darkness. It was barely big enough to fit her, her sweat-soaked back pressed against the cold ridged metal of its side, rasping breaths echoing along its length. She forced herself to calm, to try and breathe more slowly, more carefully, but her body seemed starved for the tunnel's stale oxygen. The sludge slowly filtering through it soaked through her sneakers and came up to her ankles.
    Her breath was still coming hard when she heard the pounding feet outside above the pounding of the blood behind her ears. She took another half-step into the darkness, glancing down its depths to the bright circle of light on the other side, wondering if she could make it all the way down if some predator's instinct sent her pursuers down after her. Could she make it across to the other side before they did above? Did she have the strength to keep running?
    She was so tired. Maybe it'd be easier to let them catch her. They'd kill her, but so what? She'd die a few days before everyone else.
    The vivid reminder of what she'd seen of the remains of the mob's past victims drove that possibility from her mind. She'd drown herself in the sewage before she let herself fall into their hands. It'd be more dignified.
    She could hear them above somewhere, talking, laughing, and mercifully could not make out their words. They didn't sound hurried, didn't sound worried. They weren't running for their lives. This was a game to them. Recreation. Cruelty as sport. She hated them then, not for what they wanted to do to her, what they'd done to others, but for