Prospero's Half-Life by Trevor Zaple Read Free Book Online

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scenario,” she mused in a deeper voice, mimicking that vanished man
she’d shared a life with until just recently. “Break down the
stairs leading up and you’ve taken out the only entrance to the
apartment. Zombies could wander around down there and they’d never
get up at you”. She smiled, bitterly. “Well, it wasn’t a zombie
thing we had to worry about, was it?”
    Richard opened
his mouth to reply but swiftly realized that the question was
rhetorical. She was looking up into the sky now, and from her tone
she could very well have been simply talking to herself.
    “ Now he’s dead, and everyone else is dead, but none of them are
rising up. They’re just lying there, rotting and becoming food for
the raccoons, and the maggots. They’re not getting up to bite us,
or grab us, they’re not doing anything”. She turned her head to
look at Richard and her eyes were agate-hard, and rimmed with
tears. “They’re dead, but they’re still here. Their memory is still here.
They were people. They meant something. So if you want to dance on
everyone’s grave, do it somewhere else”.
    Richard felt bad and battered down the flare of irritation he
felt about the emotion. Let her
finish , he thought. Let her get it all out .
    “ I miss everyone ,” she said, and her voice shook. “Except for you, and Mark I
guess, every single person I know is dead. I’ve watched them die,
in their homes, on the street. I...” she trailed off for a moment,
blinking into the hot sun. “I don’t know. I don’t know when I
stopped noticing. When it all became business as usual. Last week?
I can’t even remember. I remember calling my father and getting no
answer. I remember that he’d said my mom was really sick, and that
I should come see them as soon as possible. That was before
everything went crazy, before...anyway, I went over there a week
later, when the papers were all delirious and no one was talking
about anything else. I had to, at that point. I couldn’t avoid it
anymore. I’d been putting my father off by telling him that I was
busy working, that I couldn’t get any time off. It was true too,
which made it even worse”.
    “ You could have gotten all sorts of time off,” Richard
bristled. “It’s not like you were enslaved”.
    Samantha
sneered at him, and the quickness of it made him recoil a
little.
    “ Right. I’m sure I could have had a few days off – and then I
would have lost my apartment, or starved for two weeks, or worse.
You guys didn’t exactly pay a living wage, you know”.
    “ It was competitive to the marketplace,” Richard replied
stiffly, feeling put-upon. “What did you expect us to do, suddenly
pay double what everyone else was paying?”
    “ Oh, fuck you,” she seethed, and Richard’s shoulders
slumped.
    “ Sorry,” he apologized contritely, or at least as contritely as
he could manage. He wanted to dampen down that anger; he had no
desire to be completely alone in this world, and the look in
Samantha’s eyes made him think that she might be considering
throwing him down the stairs. “You’re right, it wasn’t a job you
could really live on. What about your boyfriend, though?” He asked
carefully, not wanting to set her off into a spiral of anger
again.
    “ Doug?” she asked dully. “He’d lost his job three months ago.
He installed cabinets, but there was no work anymore. People
couldn’t afford the extravagances like they used to be able to. All
the good jobs were drying up, and he had to sign on to one of those
manpower agencies, the ones that find you temp work doing something
a monkey could do. In Doug’s case it was manual labour, but there
still wasn’t much out there. We were one stumble away from finding
a flophouse”. She snorted, caught up in a storm. “I guess you’re
right, Richard. Maybe it is all a good thing. At least I don’t have
to work my ass off to starve, anymore”.
    Richard let
this pass and tried to think of something soothing to