It had started somewhere in Africa and moved quickly. Heat crept into Spain, Italy and Portugal as Belarus, Ukraine and the rest of Eastern Europe disappeared under vast glaciers. Blizzards and thunderstorms swept Scandinavia and the United Kingdom while Turkey, Syria and Greece suffered terrible floods. Yet Europe appears oddly intact – its numbers merely decreased as if its people just upped and left, which of course they didn’t. Panic reigned. Where people could they ran for the coasts or the mountains, the highways and railroads quickly clogging. Some got on flights that didn’t make it. The Dutch didn’t notice. Civilization’s last words went unnoticed in a flood of busy dial tones and white noise and everywhere people cried out for reason, but the terrible truth escaped most of them; that the earth had only drawn a breath – and coughed.
Things were decent in Canada though. But David Adams didn’t know this. He would never find out. He was left, by everyone, standing in the middle of it all, silently wondering, what the fuck happened?
Peculiar, how routine takes over everyday life even though it’s changed completely. David Adams would get up every morning, hang the kettle on the hook above the fireplace, make coffee when it whistled, heat up some tins of tomatoes and beans on the tripod above the flames and eat breakfast silently, alone, in the morning sun. Incredible, he thought, how this world can look so similar to the world I’m slowly forgetting.
He would read, always subconsciously scavenging for books, skipping over anything that wasn’t fiction or manuals. It’s all gone anyway. He’d gathered quite the collection by now. Volumes in all sizes and colors occupying the makeshift shelves he’d hung on the thin plaster walls on every surface of his house that he could spare, even in the kitchen. The house was wholly unremarkable, or it would have been some thirty years earlier. Now it was remarkable only because it was somewhat clean and livable. People were living in houses like this all over the world though, just nowhere near David Adams.
He’d poured a tremendous amount of work and himself into that house. Every room served a purpose. Not a vital purpose, though sometimes his books and wind-up record player were just as vital to David Adams as food and water. The living room was filled with books and vinyl records, candles and a Barcalounger. The kitchen was all reliant on gas or wood and coals when supplies were low. It was also on the second floor because he didn’t feel like running a chimney through the second story floor. He’d turned the former kitchen into a work room with benches forming a horseshoe around the center of the room and tools occupying the walls. He even had power tools that ran on car batteries when he was working on bigger projects, like the bathtub he’d finished in May. He’d started in February. But he had all the time in the world. The world may have ended for all I know but shoot me if I can’t get a hot bath every once in a while! So he started looking for car batteries to power his modded power drill. By the time he’d dug an 80 by 40 inch square in the foundation he’d drained 142 car batteries. It had been an ongoing and exhausting project. But after he’d built the ramps for the stairs, pushed his 300 pound, bronze, Italian bathtub down two flights and positioned the bathtub above the smoldering coals in the square and took his first scorching, hot bath in 30 years, two words crossed his mind. Worth it!
He’d poured a tremendous amount of work and himself into that house. Every room served a purpose. Not a vital purpose, though sometimes his books and wind-up record player were just as vital to David Adams as food and water. The living room was filled with books and vinyl records, candles and a Barcalounger. The kitchen was all reliant on gas or wood and coals when supplies were low. It was also on the second floor because he didn’t feel like running a chimney through the second story floor. He’d turned the former kitchen into a work room with benches forming a horseshoe around the center of the room and tools occupying the walls. He even had power tools that ran on car batteries when he was working on bigger projects, like the bathtub he’d finished in May. He’d started in February. But he had all the time in the world. The world may have ended for all I know but shoot me if I can’t get a hot bath every once in a while! So he started looking for car batteries to power his modded power drill. By the time he’d dug an 80 by 40 inch square in the foundation he’d drained 142 car batteries. It had been an ongoing and exhausting project. But after he’d built the ramps for the stairs, pushed his 300 pound, bronze, Italian bathtub down two flights and positioned the bathtub above the smoldering coals in the square and took his first scorching, hot bath in 30 years, two words crossed his mind. Worth it!
Inevitably he would get bored. You would think that there was always some work to be done. But there were no zombies. No vampires or mutants to put a dent in his non-existent defenses. Sometimes, when supplies were plentiful, David Adams wish there would be. It was during one of these moments of insanity that something horrible but very sane occurred to David Adams. He was standing in the midst of his tiny, sheltered world, regarding the modified power tools, the numerous, elaborate water collectors in his backyard, the ridiculous bathtub, when a tiny but very loud voice spoke in his mind. I’ve been so busy trying to survive that I completely forgot to live. So David Adams left.
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