Читаем Dead Sea полностью

    When I'm working outside, I keep an eye out for ships on the horizon or planes in the sky. I've yet to see one. Doubt now that I ever will. Maybe we're the last humans. I don't know. Like I've always said, survival instinct is a motherfucker. It still is. We'll go on living, go on fighting to survive. We have to. If we are the last humans left alive, then God has a pretty fucked-up sense of humor. How are we going to re-populate the planet once the zombies all rot away? Tasha and Malik are brother and sister. I'm a gay man. And even if I wasn't gay, it turns out that Carol has already been through menopause. So much for that idea. The future falls to Tasha and Malik. They are the next generation. They have to survive. I have to be their hero.

    We found some bags of marshmallows in the dry goods storage room. Sometimes at night we build a fire in an empty oil drum, using broken up skids for kindling. Then we roast marshmallows. The smoke drifts up into the sky. I like to pretend that somebody up there can see it. Maybe not an airplane, and certainly not God-God is dead. I know that now. God is one of them. But maybe someone else can see it. There are astronauts onboard the international space station, right? They were there when the disease first started, and they're still up there. Like us, they have no way to get home. So I pretend that they can see our smoke, and that they no longer feel so alone. They know that someone else is still alive, that humanity survives, that life prevails.

    But it's just pretend.

    I found a Bible among the personal belongings the crew left behind. The spine is cracked and the pages marked and worn. Whoever it belonged to read it an awful lot. I've flipped through it a few times, reading passages at random, looking for solace and comfort. I haven't found either. But 1 did find a verse that spoke to me. Jeremiah, chapter eight, verse twenty: "The summer is over, the harvest is in, and we are not saved."

    The summer is over and death's harvest is in. It was a bumper crop this year. And here we are, safe on this oil rig-safe, but not saved.

    We've been careful to ration our food supply. The fresh water tank is full. I found an instruction manual that told me how to siphon water up out of the ocean in case of an emergency, but I won't. That's just asking to be infected with Hamelin's Revenge. No sense taking chances. We've cut back on showers, only taking them every few days. We've got plenty of diesel fuel though, so there's no chance of running out of power for a long time, unless the generator dies. On our second day here, we discovered a walk-in freezer filled with meat and frozen vegetables. Twice a week, we get something out of the freezer and defrost it. Otherwise, we stick to the dry stuff and canned goods, and even those are rationed. We've been supplementing our food with the birds. There are certainly enough of them. Rather than wasting ammunition, we hunt them with Alka-Seltzer tablets. We go out onto the platform and scatter a mixture of table scraps and Alka-Seltzer tablets that we found in the medical supplies. The birds gobble it up. But their digestive system is different than a human's. Since they can't burp or fart, the Alka-Seltzer sits in their stomach, fizzing away, until the gas and foam builds up to the point where it has nowhere to go. Then the birds' stomachs pop. Once they're dead, we have to gut and clean them pretty quickly. Otherwise, their burst stomachs leak into the rest of the body, ruining the meat. It's pretty fucking gruesome, but necessary. We've got to save our food supply for as long as we can, and we can't use up the rest of our bullets on seagulls.

    Of course, when we run out of Alka-Seltzer, we'll have to come up with another way to hunt them. Maybe nets or nooses or something…

    Shit. Who the fuck am I kidding, anyway? That doesn't matter now.

    Nothing matters.

    I told Carol and the kids that we could survive a long time on birds. And we could have. With all of their natural predators either gone or dead-or living dead-there are lots of birds now. Fuck the meek. The birds have inherited the earth.

    Yeah, we could have survived by eating them.

    But…

    Tomorrow, when the kids wake up, I'll have to tell them that they can't go outside anymore. I already told Carol. I waited until after Tasha and Malik had gone to sleep, so that they wouldn't hear. When I'd finished, Carol started crying. She retreated to her room and asked to be left alone for a while. I let her go. Nothing I could have done or said would change the situation. I felt like crying, too.