Sam Tauber was five and a half years old. His mother had died on June the twenty-fourth in the Murfreesboro, Georgia, General Hospital. On the twenty-fifth, his father and younger sister, two-year-old April, had died. On June the twenty-seventh, his older brother Mike died, leaving Sam to shift for himself.
Sam had been in shock ever since the death of his mother. He wandered carelessly up and down the streets of Murfreesboro, eating when he was hungry, sometimes crying. After a while he stopped crying, because crying did no good. It didn't bring the people back. At night his sleep was broken by horrible nightmares in which Papa and April and Mike died over and over, their faces swollen black, a terrible rattling sound in their chests as they strangled on their own snot.
At quarter of ten on the morning of July 2, Sam wandered into a field of wild blackberries behind Hattie Reynolds's house. Bemused and vacant-eyed, he zigzagged among blackberry bushes that were almost twice as tall as he was, picking the berries and eating them until his lips and chin were smeared black. The thorns ripped at his clothes and sometimes at his bare flesh, but he barely noticed. Bees hummed drowsily around him. He never saw the old and rotted well-cover half buried in tall grass and blackberry creepers. It gave under his weight with a grinding, splintering crash, and Sam plunged twenty feet down the rock-lined shaft to the dry bottom, where he broke both legs. He died twenty hours later, as much from fear and misery as from shock and hunger and dehydration.
Irma Fayette lived in Lodi, California. She was a lady of twenty-six, a virgin, morbidly afraid of rape. Her life had been one long nightmare since June twenty-third, when looting had broken out in town and there had been no police to stop the looters. Irma had a small house on a side street; her mother had lived there with her until she had died of a stroke in 1985. When the looting began, and the gunshots, and the horrifying sound of drunken men roaring up and down the streets of the main business section on motorcycles, Irma had locked all the doors and then had hidden in the spare room downstairs. Since then she had crept upstairs periodically, quiet as a mouse, to get food or to relieve herself.
Irma didn't like people. If everyone on earth had died but her, she would have been perfectly happy. But that wasn't the case, Only yesterday, after she had begun cautiously to hope that no one was left in Lodi but her, she had seen a gross and drunken man, a hippie man in a T-shirt that said I GAVE UP SEX AND DRINKING AND IT WAS THE SCARIEST 20 MINUTES OF MY LIFE, wandering up the street with a bottle of whiskey in his hand. He had long blond hair which cascaded out from under the gimme cap he was wearing and all the way down to his shoulders. Tucked into the waistband of his tight bluejeans was a pistol. Irma had peeked around the bedroom curtain at him until he was out of sight and then had scurried downstairs to the barricaded spare room as if she had been released from a malign spell.
They were not all dead. If there was one hippie man left, there would be other hippie men. And they would all be rapers. They would rape her. Sooner or later they would find her and rape her.
This morning, before first light, she had crept up to the attic, where her father's few possessions were stored in cardboard boxes. Her father had been a merchant seaman. He had deserted Irma's mother in the late sixties. Irma's mother had told Irma all about it. She had been perfectly frank. Her father had been a beast who got drunk and then wanted to rape her. They all did. When you got married, that gave a man the right to rape you anytime he wanted. Even in the daytime. Irma's mother always summed up her husband's desertion in three words, the same words Irma could have applied to the death of almost every man, woman, and child on the face of the earth: "No great loss."
Most of the boxes contained nothing but cheap trinkets bought in foreign ports-Souvenir of Hong Kong, Souvenir of Saigon, Souvenir of Copenhagen. There was a scrapbook of photographs. Most of them showed her father on ship, sometimes smiling into the camera with his arms about the shoulders of his fellow beasts. Well, probably the disease that they were calling Captain Trips out here had struck him down in whatever place he had run off to. No great loss.
But there was one wooden box with small gold hinges on it, and in this box was a gun. A .45 caliber pistol. It lay on red velvet, and in a secret compartment below the red velvet were some bullets. They were green and mossy-looking, but Irma thought they would work all right. Bullets were metal. They didn't spoil like milk or cheese.
She loaded the gun under the single cobwebby attic bulb, and then went down to eat her breakfast at her own kitchen table. She would not hide like a mouse in a hole any longer. She was armed. Let the rapers beware.
That afternoon she went out on the front porch to read her book. The name of the book was Satan Is Alive and Well on the Planet Earth. It was grim and joyful stuff. The sinners and the ingrates had gotten their just deserts, just as the book said they would. They were all gone. Except for a few hippie rapers, and she guessed she could handle them. The gun was by her side.
At two o'clock the man with the blond hair came back. He was so drunk he could hardly stand up. He saw Irma and his face lighted, no doubt thinking of how lucky he had been to finally discover some "pussy."
"Hey, baby!" he cried. "It's just you and me! How long-" Then terror clouded his face as he saw Irma put down her book and raise the .45.
"Hey, listen, put that thing down … is it loaded? Hey-! "
Irma pulled the trigger. The pistol exploded, killing her instantly. No great loss.
George McDougall lived in Nyack, New York. He had been a teacher of high school mathematics, specializing in remedial work. He and his wife had been practicing Catholics, and Harriett McDougall had borne him eleven children, nine boys and two girls. So between June 22, when his nine-year-old son Jeff had succumbed to what was then diagnosed as "flu-related pneumonia," and June 29, when his sixteen-year-old daughter Patricia (and oh God she had been so young and so achingly beautiful) had succumbed to what everyone-those that were left-was then calling tube-neck, he had seen the twelve people he loved best in the world pass away while he himself remained healthy and feeling fine. He had joked at school about not being able to remember all his kids' names, but the order of their passing was engraved on his memory: Jeff on the twenty-second, Marty and Helen on the twenty-third, his wife Harriett and Bill and George, Jr., and Robert and Stan on the twenty-fourth, Richard on the twenty-fifth, Danny on the twenty-seventh, three-year-old Frank on the twenty-eighth, and finally Pat-and Pat had seemed to be getting better, right up to the end.
George thought he would go mad.
He had begun jogging ten years before, on his doctor's advice. He didn't play tennis or handball, paid a kid (one of his, of course) to mow the lawn, and usually drove to the corner store when Harriett needed a loaf of bread. You're putting on weight, Dr. Warner had said. Lead in the seat. No good for your heart. Try jogging.
So he had gotten a sweatsuit and had gone jogging every night, for short distances at the start, then longer and longer ones. At first he'd felt self-conscious, sure that the neighbors must be tapping their foreheads and rolling their eyes, and then a couple of the men that he had only known to wave to when they were out watering their lawns came and asked if they could join him-probably there was safety in numbers. By that time, George's two oldest boys had also joined in. It became a sort of neighborhood thing, and although the membership was always evolving as people dropped in and dropped out, it stayed a neighborhood thing.
Now that everyone was gone, he still jogged. Every day. For hours. It was only when he was jogging, concentrating on nothing more than the thud of his tennis shoes on the sidewalk and the swing of his arms and his steady harsh respiration, that he lost that feeling of impending madness. He could not commit suicide because as a practicing Catholic he knew that suicide was a mortal sin and God must be saving him for something, so he jogged. Yesterday he had jogged for almost six hours, until he was completely out of breath and almost retching with exhaustion. He was fifty-one, not a young man anymore, and he supposed that so much running was not good for him, but in another, more important way, it was the only thing that was any good.
So he had gotten up this morning at first light after a mostly sleepless night (the thought that played over and over in his mind was: Jeff-Marty-Helen-Harriett-Bill-George-Junior-Robert-Stanley-Richard-Danny-Frank-Patty-and-I-thought-she-was-getting-better) and put on his sweatsuit. He went out and began to jog up and down the deserted streets of Nyack, his feet sometimes gritting on broken glass, once leaping over a TV set that lay shattered on the pavement, taking him past residential streets where the shades were drawn and also past the horrible three-car crash at the Main Street intersection.
He jogged at first, but it became necessary to run faster and faster to keep the thoughts behind him. He jogged and then he trotted and then he ran and finally he sprinted, a fifty-one-year-old man with gray hair in a gray sweatsuit and white tennis shoes, fleeing up and down empty streets as if all the devils of hell were after him. At quarter past eleven he suffered a massive coronary thrombosis and fell down dead on the corner of Oak and Pine, near a fire plug. The expression on his face was very like gratitude.
Mrs. Eileen Drummond of Clewiston, Florida, got very drunk on DeKuyper crème de menthe on the afternoon of July 2. She wanted to get drunk because if she was drunk she wouldn't have to think about her family, and crème de menthe was the only kind of alcohol she could stand. She had found a baggie filled with marijuana in her sixteen-year-old's room the day before and had succeeded in getting stoned, but being stoned only seemed to make things worse. She had sat in her living room all afternoon, stoned and crying over photographs in her scrapbook.