Morning rises. My
consciousness goes to work checking for sounds that don't belong. From
habit, it listens for shuffling, scraping, grunting, anything that shouldn’t be
there. There's only quiet. As my
waking unfolds itself, my memory reminds me that we now have two dogs in the
bunker who are quite adept at notifying us if there's anything outside. Like
a zombie. Or a squirrel. Or a
possum. A rat. A mouse. A bird on the ground. A bird over head. Flying insects. A falling
twig. The neighbor. The other neighbor.
The other neighbor. The neighbor's dog. The neighbor's
kid. The sun, the moon, air, the point is, the dogs are silent so there’s
nothing in the yard that doesn’t belong there; my morning survey is from nervousness,
not of necessity.
During cereal, the vidwall
news is going over contagion stats. The number of cases
in the U.S. is now 6500. Two weeks
ago it was 124. That can’t be right. How
fast is it doubling? I grab a calculator
and punch in the numbers. This can’t
be. I do it again. And again. And the truth of it hits me. The number of known infections has doubled 5
times in 14 days. That’s once every 3
days. Testing just recently began and
that throws off the curve but, if that rate holds, there will be a quarter
million infected by the end of March; 8 million four weeks from now; and 260
million in the U.S. by the end of April. And if the trend continues, sometime
in May, the entire population will be…
Ho-lee shit.
The importance of
following the Social Distancing protocol hits me. We have to ‘flatten the curve’
as they say. If we fail at this, we
could all be zombies in two months.
I swallow my shock and walk into the
sleeping quarters. My woman is beautiful
when she sleeps. I throw protocol
in the trash and put my lips on her forehead. She
moves. The slightest beginning of a
smile shows itself and then melts away.
“What
time is it?”, she asks. I tell her and
she drifts off again.
“I’ll see you tonight,”
I say, but, with the world falling apart, I’m not certain I can keep the
promise. I want to say, ‘Don’t turn on
the news’, but if I tell her not to, she’ll do it immediately.
The street is quiet. Nothing strange about that but… something is
off. I can’t nail it down. I take in the whole 360 degrees as I round the rear bumper, climb
into the Rav4, and pull out of the drive.
The calm is… too calm.
As I slowly drive away, I get it: My neighbors’ cars are all still parked in their driveways. Every one of them. They’re usually gone by this time. Not today. I don’t blame them for staying put with the world coming apart. As I pull up the ramp onto a nearly empty freeway, my thoughts go to my woman, asleep in bed, and I wish I’d stayed home, too.
The calm is… too calm.
As I slowly drive away, I get it: My neighbors’ cars are all still parked in their driveways. Every one of them. They’re usually gone by this time. Not today. I don’t blame them for staying put with the world coming apart. As I pull up the ramp onto a nearly empty freeway, my thoughts go to my woman, asleep in bed, and I wish I’d stayed home, too.
Be careful out
there. The zombies are coming.
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