Like his long night at Murckle's, the end of the world came too fast to know what to do.
The city burned. Raymond and Mia stayed indoors, curtains drawn, and followed the news on their laptops. When that grew exhausting they watched horror movies over the Xbox with the lights turned off and the sound low enough to hear footsteps in the driveway. When they went to bed Raymond placed the revolver in the dresser and locked the bedroom door. Sirens dopplered down the PCH night and day.
Ambulances and cop cars came to their formerly quiet street as well, double parking in front of Cape Cod manors and haciendoid mansions while the paramedics gathered up the bodies and piled them in back.
Raymond's email overflowed with mass-mailed funeral notices, with scared and sentimental goodbyes from friends he hadn't seen since high school, with strange, fevered queries from total strangers. At first he read each one; later, he skimmed; later yet, he deleted them unread. Mia's parents pleaded for them to come back to Washington, but nonessential flights had been grounded to try to limit the spread of the disease. Trying to drive the thousand-plus miles struck Raymond as beyond suicidal.
Anyway, it looked like there might be hope. The power stayed on. The water stayed on. The garbage collectors missed their pickup, which Raymond was glad for; he pulled the empty juice and soda bottles from the recycling and filled them with water and stored them in the basement. He and Mia began rationing food, shifting most of their meat to the freezer and eating crumbled bacon over rice they fried in the bacon grease. On the news, reports of cures shriveled away, replaced by increasingly vague international death counts presented with little commentary and by federal advice to stay indoors, minimize contact with the infected, and to report household deaths immediately.
"I don't think it's going to get better," Mia said softly during the end credits of A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge.
"I don't know, I'd say the credits are a big step up from the rest of the movie."
"Not that." She sat in the recliner with her knees to her chest, eyes bright in the TV-washed darkness, staring at the wall as if a cryptic threat were written on the dirty pink paint they'd never gotten around to redoing. "The world."
"Oh. That." He leaned forward, shoulders hunched, room tilting. "Just the world we know, right? Not the Earth itself."
She drummed her bare feet against the floor. "Yep. Still there."
"And so are we."
Mia smiled through the shadows. "Don't say that's all that matters."
"Isn't it?"
"Will life be worth living without ice cream?"
"Who says it's the end of ice cream? We'll still have cows. We'll still have snow." He stood, crossed to his laptop. "Guess we'd better start downloading survival guides before the internet disappears, huh?"
"See if there's anything about how to sew tires into coats."
He smiled. The days passed same and strange; locked in the house, he could almost pretend he was in the midst of a long weekend, happily isolated, with and wanting no one but his wife.
The moment they made plans, that illusion was shattered. They decided they would wait for the Panhandler to die down, only leaving the house to forage when they were down to a few days' food. They'd take the car, grab canned food, water, pasta, rice, and anything else that could be cooked simply over a fire or in boiling water. Longer-term, they'd find out whether any of their neighbors were still alive and in residence. Try to find walkie-talkies, as many batteries as they could carry, establish some sort of neighborhood watch. Keep the radio tuned to emergency channels. Put together a couple survival packs and be ready to move in minutes if things got worse.
The sirens thinned day by day. Within a week, they stopped altogether.
Raymond woke one night to the beeping keen of the smoke detector. He burst from bed and grabbed the revolver; but it was useless against the smoke and fire beyond the door.