Page 66 of The End of the World As We Know It

Sandra walks the beach again. She remembers Baby Angie’s pink bathing suit with its circle of tiny blue fish. She thinks about grabbing the gun, walking into water until it reaches her waist, and then blowing her brains out. She thinks about her body sinking, becoming one with the ocean, turning into sand, her particles living forever in this gorgeous place.

4:43 p.m.

Desperation sets in.

5:12 p.m.

You messed up.The voice doesn’t sound like her mother now. It sounds like an angry demon.You killed a man.

6:02 p.m.

Sandra is sitting again. Midday, no matter how you think of it, is gone. The sun has started moving down. The beach is not so big that Sandra would have missed a boat, especially not one with a motor.

It all makes sense. There is no boat. Of course there is no boat. There never was.

Mercedes’s mother didn’t buy a ticket for her daughter; she bought a ticket to a dream.

There is no boat because people are dead everywhere. There is no boat because it was all a lie someone told Mercedes’s mom. Because people can be good to each other when things go bad, like she and Mercedes had been to each other. But people can also be awful when things go bad. Like now.

The sunset is an explosion of neon orange splashed with purple at its edges. The ocean keeps singing its endless song, the waves worrying about nothing as their unceasing rhythm caresses the shore.

In the Caribbean, night comes at you fast, almost aggressively. Like a warning.

Sandra drinks the last of her water and eats the last stale cracker. She has two options now. She can turn around and try to walk back home. There’s nothing waiting for her there except the rotting bodies of her daughter and her husband. But home is always home. Maybeshe can wait and see where things go. Maybe enough people survive, and they start again. Maybe the government finds a cure soon. She can wait. She can scavenge. She still has a few bullets left. She can put duct tape around Baby Angie’s door and her bedroom door to keep the smell under control.

The second option is to walk into the ocean. Maybe at the bottom of the ocean, away from people, she can find some hope.

Sandra stands up and starts walking.

WRONG FUCKING PLACE, WRONG FUCKING TIME

C. Robert Cargill

Derek Cerny and Alan Mahr had always joked that Roosevelt, Texas, would be a great town if it weren’t for all the people, and as it turned out, they were pretty much right.

Gone was the busybody Baptist mother of four, whose children had all long since found their way to Fredericksburg or Austin—as far as they could reasonably get from her. Gone was the bully of a sheriff’s deputy, Willy Boggs, who sat outside of McCready’s Bar on Friday and Saturday nights, ready to write a citation if anyone so much as looked drunk—only for Sheriff Dean to let them out the next morning without a fuss or ticket. Gone was Sheriff Dean, who, while not a bad guy, was still the law in a place that didn’t really need it and spent a little too much time trying to justify his position.

Gone was the local rancher, Spike McInroy, who, while giving Derek and Alan their longtime gainful employment, paid them as little as he could get away with while keeping them both from quitting and finding something better. Gone was pretty much everyone who thought little of two ranch hands who believed the best part of theweek was sitting down with a twelve-pack of Budweiser to watch a double feature of horror movies rented from Old Gil’s video store.

They were by no stretch two of life’s winners, but they weren’t without their charms.

Roosevelt was a certified ghost town long before Captain Trips paid it a visit. It was one of the places you would expect to see Trips last, if at all. Just shy of one hundred people lived on the swaths of land that flanked both sides of Interstate 10 on the long, flat stretch of road smack in the middle of an eight-hour drive from San Antonio to El Paso. What had started as a mining community had faltered, contracted, and become more of a glorified truck stop than a town. It was home to two sorts of people—those that owned or worked the handful of vast ranches, and those that served the highway and its myriad of travelers.

In a way, the highway was far more important to the town than the ranchers, and thus it was folks like Violet May, Terrence McCready, and Old Gil who were in the chief seats of power in the town. Violet owned the combination gas station/diner, the single most frequented business fifty miles either way—she served a mean Salisbury steak with the best cheddar grits anywhere in Texas. Terrence owned the bar, which arguably brought in more money than Violet, though much of that was from locals, which did less for the economy overall. And Gil owned both motels along the highway, the first being the one he inherited from his father, the other bought from Garrett Meyer upon his retirement.

The reception this far out for anything resembling a television station was pretty much terrible. On a clear night, you could get a good atmospheric bounce and pick up a handful of fuzzy Austin stations, but for the most part, it was a wasteland of mind-numbing UHF television from a variety of smaller towns. You know, lots of preacher talk andMayberry R.F.D.reruns.

Tired of complaints from travelers just wanting to relax in front of the TV after a long drive, Old Gil made a deal with a trucker for acouple dozen VHS players to fall off the back of his truck. Gil installed each room with a player and combed stores all over Central Texas to amass a collection of tapes unrivaled anywhere outside of the big cities.

Truckers had taken to putting combination TV/VHS players in the back of their cabs and so Gil started a video-swap service, which not only kept a steady traffic coming through his shop, but also kept it full of strange and exotic films from all over. Soon after opening, the video store—Moonrise Video—was taking in more revenue than its sister businesses, the Moonrise Motel and the Friendly 8 Roadside Inn, combined.

And for two ranch hands like Alan and Derek, it meant despite living this far out in the middle of nowhere, they had access to all the movies they could ever want. And it took only one visit from Captain Trips to the video store to make it such that they were two of its last remaining customers.

It took less than a week for Trips to clear out the rest of town.

There was a lot that could be said about Alan and Derek, and even as small as the town had been, a lot had been. But when people stopped showing up for their shifts, when the diner failed to open and the Roosevelt Food Mart didn’t flick its neon on, the boys went to work. They checked in on folks, cared for who they found still breathing, and one by one buried almost every single person in Roosevelt. There were no authorities to come and claim bodies, no ambulances willing to drive this far out in a pandemic. No, it was up to the last remaining people of Roosevelt to care for themselves and their kin.

“I reckon we should wear masks or something,” said Derek as he shoveled a pile of vomit from beside the Widow Harper’s bed.