Nazi Flower Power wrote:It's been a while since I posted any actual writing in this thread...
I wrote this as the opening of a short story, and I like some of the imagery, but I wasn't sure exactly where I was going with it -- and then when I did think of a plot for this setting it wasn't one that went well with this opening. I'm not sure what, if anything, I am going to do with it at this point.It was cold and drizzling in the ruins of New York. The sky overhead was as dead and gray as the pavement of the deserted streets, and the empty skyscrapers had the look of giant gravestones. John and his children picked their way across their vegetable garden in what had once been Central Park. All the vegetables had been harvested and the remaining stalks of the plants were brown and withered. Winter was coming, and it was too cold to grow anything else until the spring, but they still had to feed their pigs and chickens and collect the eggs from the chicken coop. The children scattered chicken feed on the ground and playfully ran around throwing handfuls at each other while the chickens scrambled to eat. "Don't hurt each other, okay?" said John.
"We won't!" said his daughter, Sheri. Answering John distracted her for a moment, and her brother, Joshua, took advantage of the opportunity to splatter the side of her head with chicken feed. Sheri shrieked and ran after him throwing chicken feed at his back. The chickens went scurrying every which way to avoid getting stepped on, and to snatch up the food.
John left the children to their play-fighting and went over to the pig pen to fill the feeding trough. The pigs rushed over to eat. John sighed. This was not the life he had planned when he came to New York as a young man. To the children, it was more or less normal. It was the only life they had ever known. But John could never get used to it. He still remembered the city the way it had been in its glory days, before the Qinhuangdao virus, and he remembered watching the city die. He remembered his first wife and his first daughter, who the virus had killed. He remembered cremating bodies and turning abandoned subway tunnels into mass graves. He remembered catching the virus himself and becoming so delirious that he lost all sense of how long he lay sick in bed. When he finally regained his senses, he found himself wrapped in filthy soiled sheets, ravenously hungry, and so thirty it burned. There was an overwhelming stench in the air, and flies buzzed around the room. He was in a hospital, but nobody came when he pushed the nurse call button. He managed to stagger over to the bathroom to drink and wash himself, then went stumbling and crawling around the hospital looking for food and help. He found a refrigerator that still had some sandwiches in it, but there was no one else alive in the entire building. The hallways and the rooms were filled with the dead -- some in their sick beds and others sprawled on the floor wherever they had collapsed. Some of the bodies had started to decompose, and they had attracted a large number of flies and rats. Even if John hadn't already been sick, the sight and the smell would still have made him gag.
Since that day, John had tried to put his life back together. He had remarried and started a new family and planted his vegetable garden in Central Park, but it was impossible to ignore everything he had lost. It still looked wrong to see the streets deserted during the day and dark at night. He still felt a twinge of guilt for the landscaping he had torn up when he made his farm and the doors of grocery stores that he had broken down to get at the food inside, and he wondered if he had really done the right thing by bringing Sheri and Joshua into a world that was so damaged. They sometimes asked questions about what the world was like before the Qinhuangdao virus, but they didn't seem to really understand the horror of what had happened. John worried about what it would be like for them when they were old enough to understand -- if they even lived that long. He had seen so many people die already, there was no telling when someone else might die. Within a year after the epidemic began, the few surviving news outlets stopped reporting the number of people the virus had killed and switched to reporting the number of people who were still left in the world. The number was down to around two million, and it was still dropping.
They collected the eggs from the chicken coop and started back toward their apartment on the Upper East Side. Sheri chattered excitedly and sometimes skipped ahead of her father and brother, but then stopped and waited impatiently for them to catch up. "Why do you guys always walk so slow?" she said. Joshua complained that he was cold, and John told him to button his jacket. He coughed a little as they walked the last block to their apartment, and John couldn't help but immediately worry about his health. After witnessing so much sickness and death, even the slightest hint of an illness was terrifying. He took off his hat and put it on Joshua's little head to keep the drizzle off while they walked the last short way to the building where they lived.
They lived in an elegant building. It was the same building that John had lived in before the epidemic, and he had worked hard to be able to afford it in those days, but it didn't feel like such a privilege to live there now that the neighborhood was mostly abandoned. The architecture was still as beautiful as ever, but there was a coldness about it now that the doorman was gone and half the light bulbs were burnt out. The marble floor in the front hall had become dull and dingy since no one polished it anymore, and spider webs hung from the tops of the pillasters.
This is creepy! Legit chills! Are they supposed to be the last family on earth, or something?
