More Bedtime Stories for the Apocalypse (16 page)

How could this have happened? In his own
front yard? How long had there been a body out here? And how could
he have gone so long without noticing?

How long had it been since he’d left the
house?

He hurried through the door, locking both
the knob and the deadbolt when he was safely inside. He paid the
media center no attention. The malfunctions and his ridiculous
ideas about ghosts seemed silly now, beyond unimportant.

He had two phones. One in the bedroom and
the other in the kitchen. He ran for the latter, which was closer.
When he pulled the phone from its cradle and pressed it against his
ear, he heard nothing. Not the gurgle of an open line; nothing at
all. Total silence.

He checked the intake valve. Clean. He hung
up the receiver and tried again.

Still nothing.

Glancing toward the front door, expecting
the maniacal killer who hadn’t appeared at the neighbor’s to show
up now, he ran back to the bedroom to try the other phone.

Same deal. Dead line.

Now what was he supposed to do?

He went to the front door and peeked through
the curtained window beside it.

Nobody out there. Still nobody anywhere on
the street, as far as he could tell.

He was about to move away from the window
when he saw headlights in the distance. They turned off a side
street and toward Helm’s property. The vehicle behind them looked
big, like some kind of truck. Or maybe a van.

Helm wondered if he should run out and flag
it down, maybe get a ride to the police station.

He didn’t want to bring anyone else into the
situation, put anyone else in danger if he didn’t have to, but he
wasn’t sure what other options he had. His own car was in the shop.
They’d called him some time ago (weeks? months? he couldn’t
remember for sure) to let him know it was ready to pick up, but he
hadn’t needed it and kept forgetting.

He supposed he could try another house, see
if someone else had a working phone, but after what he’d seen at
801, he wasn’t sure he ever wanted to knock on another neighbor’s
door again.

Better decide now or you’re going to miss
your chance.

The car—or truck, or van, or whatever it
was—was moving slowly, but it would pass him by soon.

Before he could decide one way or the other,
his body made the choice for him. He stood up, opened the front
door, and ran toward the headlights.

He angled away from the overgrown grass and
the body within it, still unable to believe it had been right there
on his own lawn all this time.

As he ran, he waved his arms over his head.
If the driver of the vehicle noticed, he or she didn’t slow.

“
Hey,” Helm screamed. “Help.
Please!”

He ran right into the road, realizing it was
a boneheaded move even as he did it, that the driver might not see
him at all until it was too late.

His loafers smacked the street, and he
stopped in the middle of the lane, legs spread wide, still waving
his arms over his head.

For a second, he was sure the vehicle
wouldn’t stop, that it would plow right into him and smear him
across the next hundred feet of asphalt. The headlights came
closer. The vehicle got bigger and bigger, a shadowy hulk. Then, at
the last possible second, when Helm realized he was going to have
to jump out of the way or die, the vehicle veered away. It angled
across the street, thumped over the curb, and rolled across the
nearest yard and toward a giant oak tree.

As it passed him, Helm saw that the vehicle
was not a truck or a van but a city bus. The rows of giant windows
should have given Helm a clear view inside the vehicle, but the
interior lights were off; he couldn’t see anything more than the
muddied reflection of the moon.

If the bus had been traveling at full speed,
it probably would have folded halfway around the tree before it
stopped moving, but as it was, it only crunched lightly into the
trunk and stalled.

Helm stood there in the street for a moment,
too shocked to move. When he finally took his first steps toward
the crash site, his legs felt rubbery and useless, but they didn’t
give out on him—not quite—and he made it to the bus’s folding
doors.

One of the headlights had cracked and gone
out. The other pulsed a sickly beam of light so dim it was almost
brown.

Helm slapped the glass panels on the door
and yelled, “Is everyone okay? I’m so sorry.”

No response from inside.

He pressed his face against the glass, found
it too dirty to see through, and cleared a spot in the grime with
the side of his hand.

Inside, the driver lay slumped against the
steering wheel. He was a dark shape, barely visible, like the
neighbor in the chair with the spider in his nose.

But that wasn’t the only similarity between
the driver and the skeleton next door.

Jagged, bony fingers gripped the bus’s
steering wheel. The driver’s skull rested between them, fractured
across the forehead. Bits of fragmented bone lay on the floor by
his feet. No flesh. No rotting organs. Just bone and tattered
clothing.

What the hell?

Helm stood on his tiptoes and tried to see
into the rest of the bus, but it was too dark and the windows were
far too grungy. The bus looked like it hadn’t been washed in
centuries.

He pushed at the door, forcing it open. It
took some doing, but he finally managed to squeeze inside and climb
the steps.

The driver’s uniform hung awkwardly on his
fleshless frame. Helm glanced at the navigation panel, saw that the
auto-drive and auto-fill levers had both been thrown. Then he
turned and peered down the aisle.

“
Hello?”

He stepped over the blue line painted on the
floor between the driver and the rest of the bus, squinting at the
seats, looking for life.

A pair of skeletons sat in the second seat
on the left. One wore a sunhat. The brim had come lose and drooped
down across the skull. The other wore some sort of oxygen mask over
his mouth. A rubber tube ran from the mask to a metal canister
between his feet.

On the right, three more seats down, Helm
found a woman with a tiny bundle of bones clutched to her chest.
You could barely see the infant’s skull beneath her interlocked
fingers.

Behind her sat the remains of a man with a
news reader on his lap. Helm wondered if the thing might give him
some kind of clue about what was going on here. He reached for the
power knob, hesitated, and finally leaned forward and gave it a
twist. Nothing. The pressure cartridge looked fine, but when he
tapped it with his fingernail, it gave back a hallow clink.

He thought he had an extra cartridge in the
house. And if not, he could refill this one with the compressor. He
didn’t want to take the reader from the dead man, thought that was
probably the lowest form of robbery, but it wasn’t like it could do
a corpse much good, and Helm needed to know what was happening.

He slipped the device carefully off the
man’s bony lap, cringing, and then backed out of the bus.

The remaining headlight flickered,
sputtered, and finally went out, but the moon still shone brightly
overhead. The neighborhood certainly wasn’t as lit as it should
have been, but Helm was able to make his way back to his house
easily enough.

He let himself in and decided to check the
TV before refilling the reader. He took the power valve from the
table where he’d left it, screwed it back in, and spun the
dial.

The media center’s screens turned on. Helm
went to the lever box and switched it from tape to broadcast.

Static.

He frowned and switched channels.

Nothing on 3. Ditto 4. Channel 5:
static.

He flipped the auto-tune lever and watched
the unit cycle through all 200 channels.

Nada.

He scratched his head, rubbed at his
temples, and finally shut off the TV.

In the kitchen, he found a pressure
cartridge in a junk drawer and screwed it into the news reader.

The screen flickered, went black, then
flickered again and finally came to life.

GABE’S DOG CHOW

give man’s best friend

man’s best dog food

Below this was an image of a man hugging his
retriever. The dog was looking toward the camera and grinning. The
screen was dim and looked as if it had deteriorated somewhat, but
it was still readable.

Helm twisted the page dial, navigated to the
first page.

PLAGUE CONTINUES

flashed across the screen in inch-high
letters. Helm read the article below with growing disbelief.

While Barington’s Disease spreads across the
globe, biologists at the University of Massachusetts continue to
deny claims that they’ve uncovered a cure.

“
I wish I could tell you
it’s true,” said team leader Reginald Fuller, PhD. “With every
fiber of my being. But the truth is that everything we’ve tried has
failed miserably. We’ve got the smartest people in the world
working on this, and we’re looking at a 0% success rate. To be
perfectly honest and probably too blunt, this is the nastiest
goddam plague mankind has ever seen. I think we’re looking at an
extinction event.”

This dire proclamation is the last official
word anyone has heard from the university. And with death tolls
skyrocketing in every corner of civilization, it is this reporter’s
opinion that…

(continued on page 11)

Helm dropped the reader to the kitchen
counter.

Plague?

A plague so bad it killed people on city
buses and sitting in their living room recliners and walking down
their hallways?

How was it possible that he hadn’t heard
about it sooner?

He picked up the reader again, glanced at
the date in the corner: August 14, 1968.

He blinked and stared at the last number for
a long time.

1968.

He looked at the calendar above the
phone.

June 2, 1975.

Almost seven years?

No. It wasn’t possible. He hadn’t been
locked away inside his house for the better part of a decade.

Had he?

He ran back into the living room and turned
on the radio.

Static. Dead air.

He switched through the stations and finally
found something.

The message was faint, barely audible, but
it was set to repeat. After listening to it half a dozen times,
Helm thought he’d gotten most of the message. It said:

Mankind’s time has ended. Call it a good run
if you want. Frankly, we’re not so sure.

We’ve heard rumors of pockets of survivors
[unintelligible]. If you’re alive and hearing this message,
[unintelligible] gathering in St. Louis. Make the trip if you want,
but we advise not getting your hopes up. We’ve [unintelligible]
auto-fillers [unintelligible] to keep this station running and
broadcasting as long as possible, but this will be our final show.
We’re going home to our families. While we still can.

After this, there was a series of
nasty-sounding coughs, followed by more static. And then the
message started again.

Helm shut off the radio and dropped into the
chair on the other side of the room.

Seven years?

He tried to remember the last time he’d gone
outside, searched his memory over and over and came up with
nothing. He’d gone to the hardware store to get a new overhead
light for the bedroom, but hadn’t that been only a month ago?

Obviously not.

He got out of his chair and left the house.
Outside, he listened for distant traffic. Or barking dogs. He
looked up, hoping to see a passing blimp.

He heard nothing. Saw nothing.

Inside, the media center blared.

He hurried in and stared at it.

On the central screen, a pair of twin boys
stood amid a pile of rubble and trash, looking simultaneously
confused and guilty. The camera levered toward an older man—the
boys’ father, Helm remembered, although he couldn’t recall the name
of the show—whose face had gone red and who was clearly about to
give the boys the scolding of a lifetime.

It was one of his old tapes. An episode he
hadn’t watched in years. (Or maybe decades, he realized; he’d
obviously lost all track of time.)

Helm hurried to the power dial and examined
it.

A ring of crud encircled the dial’s bolt. He
couldn’t believe he hadn’t noticed it before. When he cleaned it
off with his fingernail and spun the valve again, it closed the
rest of the way and the tape shut off.

Of course. Just a dirty valve. He’d known
the answer would be simple when he finally found it, and he was
sure he’d find similar problems with the media center’s other
components.

But although he’d been wrong about the
ghosts, Helm thought the media center was haunted. Not by ethereal
spirits, of course, or some spectral bit of flotsam in a bed sheet,
but by reruns, by the words, images, and ideas of a now-extinct
species.

He stood there in silence for a long time.
Then he wondered if he ought to go back to the office and do some
work. An hour or two maybe. Just a bit.

Except…he realized he couldn’t recall what
his job had actually been, or when he’d last done it. And even if
he had been able to remember, would it have made a difference? What
kind of work could possible have mattered in a world running on
vapors?

He went into the kitchen instead, opened the
panel in his belly, and poured a full cup of water into his
reservoir.

How long would he last without humans?

No way to tell. He clearly had some problems
with his memory tapes. What else might be wearing out? A quick scan
of his power system showed at least forty years of operation on the
current load, and that was assuming he didn’t run out of water, but
what about after that? Were there others like him left out there?
Or working repair stations?