Interesting Weather

You sit, squinting, trying to squeeze out some memory of how the world ended, but you can’t. Not like it matters anyway. What happened, happened. You get up from the couch and pour some more gas into one of your generators. The other, a solar generator, is still charging up by the window. Now full of fuel, you power it up and turn on your tv and DVD player. “What’s next?” you think to yourself, sorting through the stack of movies you and Paul swiped from the abandoned video store down the block. “Why are there so many post-apocalypse ones?” you say staring down at the covers displaying everything from Mad Max to 28 Days Later. You can’t believe how wrong they were. There are no zombies, or leather-clad biker gangs out to set the world ablaze. Those folks died out years ago. It took a long time, but those who thought like that, that the apocalypse should be a lawless land where the strong steal from and kill the weak, either learned to sustain themselves or died when there were no more weaklings to exploit. There still are, of course, those who prefer to live a more destructive life, collapsing small buildings, lighting things on fire, but they mostly keep to themselves and leave others alone. They’re more or less harmless. After all, who could blame them, an empty world was boring, people just choose to entertain themselves in different ways. For some it’s binging an entire store’s worth of DVDs, for others, it’s lighting a gas station on fire and sitting back to watch the resulting explosion.

As you slide a disc into the DVD player, a comedy you decided, you take a look outside and realize that it’s well past noon. Paul should be back by now with the bounty from his hunt. Usually, he kills something by now. You pause the movie and gather up some basics for venturing outside, some food, some water, and a yo-yo in case you get bored. You swing your backpack over your shoulder and head out the door. It isn’t ideal, but at least living on the fourth floor of an old office building gives you a reason to get a good workout in every day by climbing and descending stairs.

Off to the north, an hour or so out is the small farming community that you sometimes trade with. “Maybe they’ve seen Paul around,” you think. You get to their community, a small strip mall made up of six buildings, each with a small farm on the roof, but no one is around. “Chet!” you call out. A small bearded man leans over one of the roofs.

“Oh hey, sorry I can’t talk right now, our weather guys think we might get some serious rain tonight so we gotta cover up our crops before it hits us,” the man calls down.

“No worries, I’m just looking for Paul, he hasn’t come back from hunting yet, you haven’t seen come back this way, have you?”

“No, sorry, we exchanged a wave when he went out this morning but haven’t seen him since.”

“Okay, thanks.”

“No worries. Hope you find him soon before the rain comes.”

You let them get back to their gardening and continue on your way to the hunting grounds. One thing you can remember is the difference in freshness. For the longest time after everything went to shit, the city still smelled terrible, maybe even worse than before, but now, like a dirty mattress left outside to air out, you could take a deep breath anywhere and imagine yourself in an uninhabited forest, never touched by man or machine. Sure, your family and all your friends, except Paul, had died, horribly some of them, but things weren’t all bad. No job, no more worrying about bills, or how much weight you had been gaining, or if you were going to get into that college you had been working towards your entire academic career. Just movies, finding food, and endless conversation about whatever came to our minds. If the world had to end, it was nice that you had somebody to share it with.

You reach the hunting grounds and see no sign of Paul, just a few deer, some rabbits, and other creatures frolicking about the wide-open field that used to be a large highway, surrounded by buildings being swallowed whole by the local vegetation. You and Paul would sometimes come here together, not to hunt, but just to sit, to get out of the office building, and just watch the animals in their new, semi-natural environment. You remember how Paul would always comment about how vibrantly green it is when the sun is out, just like it is now. You like that about it too. Wandering around, you see what looks like a body, lying flat on the ground next to one of the taller buildings on the edge of the field. You run over and don’t even need to turn it over to know it’s Paul. That’s his jacket, the one he got from his dad when he graduated high school. He must have fallen from the window, the one you remember he always talked about wanting to go up to on the fifth floor because that part of the building had crumbled a while back, he always thought it would have a phenomenal view. You do turn him over however, cross his arms, wipe the blood off his broken face, and pluck a few nearby flowers and place them in his hands. They were his favorite kind of flowers in the field. The two of you never bothered to find out what kind they are. He just liked the color and the shape of the petals. The hunting equipment lies next to him, undamaged, thank god.

“Thanks for everything,” you say to his corpse before picking up the gear and head back in the direction you came. Before leaving, you decide to grab bag a couple of rabbits, one for dinner and one for trading.

On your way back, you stop and trade a rabbit for a couple of vegetables from the farmers, now fully set up to keep their crops safe from the impending rain.

About an hour later, back in the fourth-floor office, you prepare the rabbit and the vegetables for dinner. Sitting down, on the old couch that you and Paul had carried up all those stairs a few years back, you un-pause the movie on the DVD player. A loud explosion forces you to pause it once again and move to the windows. In the distance, you see a large plume of smoke and fire reaching towards the few clouds that are sitting in the sky. As the plume grows larger and the fire more intense, you look at the blue sky canopying the explosion and think to yourself, “Huh, those weather guys couldn’t have got it more wrong.”