MY FANART AND OTHER DOODLES - GIGA MASTERPOST
(…)but I find that being threatened with a deadly weapon severely limits my capacity for sparkling repartee, so here’s a suggestion: if you put the gun down, I’ll tell you pretty much anything you want to know. How does that sound?”
John blinks, slowly trying to parse that. It takes him a second to figure out why it’s so much harder than it should be, until he remembers how long it’s been since he’s had to understand and respond to human speech.
Very slowly, John says, “I’m putting the gun down.”
Plaid Shirt nods his enthusiastic approval. “That’s good, that’s great, you do that.”
John flicks the gun’s safety back on and tucks it back into his belt. Then he holds his empty hands out from his sides, palms open. The guy nods again, but he doesn’t relax at all.
The Hard Prayer by Rheanna
Plaid Shirt looks at the gun, then John, then back at the gun, and then very obviously decides that his best strategy is to try to answer the question, no matter how nonsensical it is. “Uh, Portland, Albany, Rochester and a number of other places and…” He trails off and swallows. Then he starts talking again, words tumbling out faster than John would have thought possible. “Hey, look, believe me when I say nothing would make me happier than to have an actual conversation with another human being, (…)
The Hard Prayer by Rheanna
His aim is locked on a guy who is about the same age as John, but a few inches shorter and of stockier build. He’s wearing an ugly plaid shirt. The instant he sees the gun in John’s hand, the exultant grin on the guy’s face disappears, replaced by wide-eyed fear.
“Um,” says the guy. “Please don’t kill me?”
John opens his mouth to say something, which is a great plan, because saying something is exactly what this situation requires, preferably something reassuring, contrite or, at the very least, coherent. Unfortunately, what actually comes out falls firmly into the ‘none of the above’ category: in a voice rusty with lack of use, John hears himself demand, “Where the fuck have you been?”
The Hard Prayer by Rheanna
“My God, it works,” a voice announces triumphantly behind John. “Ha. I knew it. I told them there were real-world applications; if those morons hadn’t had the imaginations of retarded fruit-flies —”
Rational thought entirely fails to provide a response, and John’s military training steps up to bat. He whips around, the gun coming up as he turns, his finger tightening around the trigger.
He doesn’t — quite — pull it.
He turns around slowly, half-convinced he’s imagining it. He’s not: at the far end of the parking lot, he can see — Jesus, is that someone waving?
“Hey!” John shouts. “Hey!” he calls again, and then he’s running across the parking lot, his pounding feet echoing weirdly in the silence. He’s been mistaken before, of course; it happened a lot at the beginning, when he’d woken every morning certain that today would be the day he found other survivors. As weeks had become months, he’d trained himself not to jump at every door knocking against its frame or loose billboard flapping in the wind; it was too exhausting, having his hopes raised only to be dashed a dozen or more times a day. Lately, he’s been trying not to hope at all. It’s been increasingly easy.
He’s terrified the silhouette of the waving man will vanish as he nears it, dissolving into a jigsaw of inanimate objects conspiring to imitate life. But it doesn’t; it becomes more incontrovertibly person-shaped. It’s another survivor; after all this time, another living human being, just leaning casually against the base of a streetlight, there and real and alive and…
…And not alive at all.
The corpse twists slowly, the toes of its graying Nikes scraping the ground. It isn’t leaning against the pole, it’s suspended by the rope wound tightly around its neck. A suicide, John realizes; it hadn’t been uncommon, near the end. The rope must have loosened over the course of months, lowering the remains back toward the ground. In the process, one of the corpse’s hands has become tangled with the trailing end of the rope, so that its arm is half-raised, swaying in a constant, mocking wave that no one is left to see.
No one except John.
John stands there for several minutes, watching the body swinging gently from side to side. He pictures Laverne, or whatever her name really was, lying down to die in the canned goods aisle at her local WalMart. He pictures this guy, cutting himself a length of rope with fingers already half-numb from the Creep, walking along the street looking for a place to hang himself and stopping right here and thinking, High enough.
Distantly, John realizes he’s taken the gun from his belt and is holding it in his hands. It feels solid and cold in his grip, like it’s the only real thing in the whole world. His fingers aren’t numb at all; it would be easy to pull the trigger.
The Hard Prayer by Rheanna
He drives up to the WalMart and parks the SUV right outside. He grunts as he levers open the door he wedged shut to keep out rats, although the precaution has been less necessary lately. John’s glad the rat population explosion is over. The furry little fuckers gorged themselves on the all-you-can-eat buffet left behind in the wake of the Creep; they’d bred in their millions and then they’d died as swiftly and universally as they’d lived, like some bizarre piece of performance art designed to satirize humanity’s fate by mimicking it at high speed. Nature’s last joke at homo sapiens’ expense, John thinks. Ha fucking ha.
Inside the store, he takes a cart and works the aisles as quickly and efficiently as possible, shaking the cockroaches off the cans and packets he throws in the cart. The regulars are all here: Mike, lying face down by the checkout lanes, one bony hand still clutching a single can of beans in spicy tomato sauce; Pete, who’s doomed to spend eternity with his head in a freezer case; and Bob, whose name John can at least be sure of, since it’s printed in friendly lettering on his employee name badge (‘Hi, I’m Bob and I’m here to help!’). And, of course, there’s always Laverne.
Laverne disturbs John, more and more every time he comes back here. He can’t avoid her, because her final resting place is in the dried and canned goods aisle, where he gets most of his supplies. He could move her, of course, but although he always means to, somehow he never does. Laverne is lying on her back, her legs straight, her arms folded across her stomach, as neat as if an undertaker had laid her out, and what gets to John is that he knows no undertaker did: Laverne arranged herself that way.
The Hard Prayer by Rheanna
