Coyote by David L. Foster

all torn up and bloody.
    I ran over there, thinking maybe he needed help, but when I got close enough, I could see he was beyond that. He was just covered in these ragged tears, on his face, his arms, his torso. I could see blood streaking from where he was on the porch, back along the boards and inside the front door. I figured, well, I don’t know what I thought.
    I guess I thought maybe his partner was inside or something, and needed help. It wasn’t until I was stepping through the door, stepping over a big pool of blood on the floor, that I thought maybe whoever did this to him was still inside. I stopped, looking around, but the house didn’t feel occupied, you know?
    Maybe it was stupid, but I went on in. I figured I’d call the police or something. But as you probably know, when I picked up the phone there was no dial tone. I found a cell phone on the kitchen counter, probably belonged to the guy out front, but it was dead, too.
    I got pretty freaked out then, I guess, because all I could think of was that I had to get out of there. I had to get home. I don’t know why, I just did. I got myself out of that house and ran all the way home, ran inside, and locked the door behind me. I called out a few times, to see if my parents had come home yet, but nobody answered. I walked through the house real quick, checking upstairs too, but nobody was home.
    My room was in the basement of our house, so that’s where I went. I mean, what else could I do? I tried the phone every once in a while, with no luck, and the power never came back on, of course. So I sat. I sat and I wondered where everybody was—what had happened to that guy down the street.
    Next thing I knew, it was morning. I’d fallen asleep sometime in the evening, and slept right through the night. I was still wearing my clothes. I went upstairs to see if anyone was home yet, but they weren’t. I looked out the living room window, and everything was still as it had been yesterday—no lights, no people, cars still abandoned in the street. I thought about going outside, but I didn’t want to find any more dead people. Even worse, I didn’t want to find whoever had killed that one guy.
    So I stayed. I ate food from the pantry, the water still worked, so I was OK there. I stayed, and I waited. I guess I was kind of stuck, looking back at it now. Not stuck like anything was really preventing me from going out, moving on, but, like, stuck in my own head, in my own self, not wanting to move on. It was a type of denial, I guess—denying that all this was real, was permanent.
    Anyways, nobody came home, I never saw anyone go by, and the power never came back on.  I read books, I stared out the window, I ate what I could find in the kitchen.
    I lost track of the days after a while, but I’d guess it was more than one week but less than two that I lived that way. It was green beans that got me going again.
    I hate green beans. I don’t have a real reason, but they have always disgusted me. It’s more than disgust, really. Something about them repels me, disturbs me. It’s almost a phobia, I guess. Just those long, green little things sitting on the plate… Ugh. So one day I opened up the pantry, and there they were. Three cans of green beans, staring at me.
    Of course they’d been there the whole time, but now I’d eaten pretty much everything around them. I’d spent most of the last day eating from a bag of flour and crunching on dried lasagna noodles, and my stomach wasn’t feeling great about that. I opened the pantry, and the only things there were some spices, the rest of the box of lasagna noodles, and the green beans.
    Somehow that made me realize this was permanent. The power wasn’t coming back on. Wherever my parents and everyone else in the neighborhood had gone, they weren’t coming back. I knew the only thing to do if I stayed was to open the beans and eat them. To me, that was more frightening than going outside, where everybody had