Page 28 of The End of the World As We Know It

Less than a week ago, his formerly hale and hearty father started sniffling and sneezing. A summer cold, he called it. Not the superflu. Three days later, he was in his death throes, moaning and squirming miserably on sweat-soaked sheets, muttering and hallucinating, sayingthings to people who weren’t there, some of whom had been dead for years.

Then, shockingly fast, he was gone.

Corey’s stepmother, Linda, succumbed to the same symptoms just two days later, less than twenty-four hours after transporting her husband over to Baptist Hospital, where he’d been treated like a disposable piece of meat, shunted aside with the rest of the sick and dying.

The family of four was reduced by half, leaving just Corey and his older sister, Angie. The siblings were distraught, reeling with grief and terrified by the lack of options available to them. There was nowhere to turn to for help, no one they could ask for guidance, because by then all the adults in their world were sick. Or already dead.

They sat and watched news reports on the Zenith. The government was trying hard to reassure people, but it was evident something really fucked up was going down, some heavy truth the powers that be desperately wanted to keep hidden. A vaccine was being promised, but Corey believed in that about as much as he believed in Santa Claus.

“They think we’re blind,” Angie had said two days ago while they sat in the living room and smoked weed. “Blind and stupid.”

Then today his sister was gone. Not dead. Just gone.

She left a note, and that’s all it said.

I’m gone.

She didn’t even sign it.

He spent some miserable time wondering how she could do that, just walk away without a proper goodbye, without inviting him along, leaving him alone with the corpse of their stepmother moldering away in the master bedroom upstairs. An ungenerous person would describe what she’d done as a supremely selfish act, and for a time he was exactly that type of ungenerous. He was pissed at her, but he also understood. Their home was a tomb, a tainted repository of broken dreams and sullied memories.

The circumstances were almost unspeakably bleak, but even so, he thought he might have been able to bear up a while longer with Bluto at his side.

But the dog was gone, too, departed to points unknown.

Against his will, his thoughts again became laser-focused on his beloved missing pet, particularly in regard to how he hadn’t even realized the animal had disappeared until probably hours after he was gone. A little while ago, he’d emerged from the mental fog engulfing him long enough to go into the bathroom and take a piss, and on his way back into the living room he happened to glance over at the sliding glass door that led out to the patio and the backyard. Instead of returning to the sofa and resuming his impersonation of a person in a vegetative coma, he stopped and stared out at the yard, feeling like something was wrong without quite being able to put his finger on what it was.

Then it came to him and he felt that twist in his guts.

No. Nonono.

Corey ran outside and glanced around. Seeing no sign of the dog, he dashed around to the side of the house, pulling up short at the gut-wrenching sight of the gate that went out to the front yard standing open.

Right away, he understood what must have happened. He’d let Bluto out in the morning, mere minutes before discovering Angie’s earth-shattering note. Reeling from his sister’s act of desertion, that loss of his final remaining anchor to normality and sanity, he’d become mired in self-pity, spending the whole damn day glued to that stupid fucking sofa, stunned into insensibility by all he’d lost. At some point during the day, while he smoked the last of his weed and wallowed in misery and depression, maybe nodding off now and then, someone had come along and let the dog out of the yard. Why? Who knew? It might have been a malicious act. Or some well-meaning animal lover might have spotted Bluto through the chain-link fence and set him free, perhaps on the assumption that his owners were as dead aspractically everyone else in the city. What troubled him most was the lack of a knock at the door that surely would’ve come from anyone with good intentions.

Maybe they did, a voice from a traitorous part of his mind ventured, taunting him, twisting that metaphorical knife.Maybe someone knocked and you were too out of it because you’re too much of a stoner loser to cope with what’s happening like a normal person.

“Shut up,” he muttered, digging his nails into his palms. “Just shut the fuck up.”

Either way, his best buddy was gone, a fact confirmed by his subsequent dash out into the street to check for him. He walked up and down the street, calling for Bluto at the top of his lungs, until he was hoarse from screaming, until all he could think to do was return to the house and collapse into immobile self-pitying misery all over again.

Goddammit. I’m sorry, Bluto, he thought, tears welling in his eyes.I’m an asshole. A worthless piece of shit. I might as well eat a goddamned bullet.

That same voice cried out yet again, loud enough and close enough now to finally snag Corey’s attention and snap him back to the present moment. Glimpsing a blur of rapid movement in his peripheral vision, he came to an abrupt halt, glancing to his left with an immediate jolt of apprehension.

A girl he recognized was running straight at him.

He knew her in the sense that he saw her around from time to time in the neighborhood, but he didn’t actuallyknowher. She was pretty, but that wasn’t why she’d made enough of an impression for her face to stick in his memory. He thought he’d sometimes seen her in the company of a grade A piece of shit named Jared Montgomery, one of a group of older kids from the neighborhood who’d tormented him when he was younger. That was years ago, back before he even had hair on his balls, but the memory of those times was still a deep wound.

The girl was out of breath as she lurched to a stop a few feet away from him. “Damn, dude…” She inhaled and exhaled a few times,making quite the show of being winded. “Jesus… Are you deaf or something, Corey?”

He frowned. “Um…”

After a moment of befuddlement, it came to him that this girl was either a friend or former friend of his sister. That was the other reason she was familiar. She and Angie were classmates, and he used to see her at their house now and then, but that’d been a while ago. A few years, at least.

She smiled. “What’s the matter? Cat got your tongue?”

He shrugged. “I fucking hope not. That would hurt.”