Coyote by David L. Foster Page A

disappeared and there was a dead man down the street.
    So I put a few of my favorite books, as well as a sweatshirt, in a backpack, opened the door, and walked away.
    It was like I had cut myself free, or something. My former life, closed up in that little house, ended and this new life began. I guess that’s how I put it all behind me, maybe. Probably not the healthiest way of dealing with things, psychologically, but I had to put it behind me to be able to move ahead. But where’s ahead? That’s the next big question, I guess.
     
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    At the end of his tale he paused, thinking, and seemed to come out of the eloquent trance he’d been in, quickly becoming the tongue-tied teenage boy again.
    “So, well, that’s it, really. Since then, I’ve just been walking along, and then I got here a couple of days ago.”
    “You never saw what happened to your neighborhood?” asked Shawna.
    “Nope.”
    “Never saw what killed that man?”
    “No,” replied Mark looking down. “I never did. I came across a few other dead bodies as I walked, and I saw a few people go by in the distance, so I knew I wasn’t alone, but that’s it until I got here.”
    “Wait,” said Owen, his eyes growing big, “You haven’t seen any of the other crap we’ve all been talking about? Monsters and shit eating people, end of the world, all that?”
    “Nope.”
    “You just missed it?”
    He shrugged again, looking uncomfortable under the scrutiny. “I guess so.”
    Owen paused, looking at Mark suspiciously.
    “But you believe us though, right? The things we’ve seen? Our stories?”
    Mark looked even more uncomfortable. “Well, something sure happened. I mean, I’ve seen all the destruction and all.”
    “But you believe we saw what we say we saw?” pushed Owen.
    Mark blew air from his cheeks in a long sigh, obviously stalling for time as he marshalled his words.
    “I gotta say, seeing is believing. Or, the opposite.” Mark looked down as he made the awkward admission. Owen frowned, looking unsatisfied, and the others looked equally doubtful.
    For her part, she understood. She would not have believed the things she’d seen if they were told to her by others. Not, at least, until she had seen similar things herself.
    The questioning went on in that vein for a few minutes, with Mark still trying to avoid offending everyone around the circle without having to out-and-out lie and say he believed their stories whole-heartedly, but there was no real hope for a resolution. A person couldn’t truly believe that his world had gone through such a fundamental shift until they saw it with their own eyes.
    She wondered, briefly, what future generations would think. Would they believe what their elders told them had happened? Would everything she was seeing be thought of as nothing more than fairy tales in some distant future? Come to think of it, she wondered if there would be future generations at all.
    For her part, she was not concerned with what one teenager believed or didn’t believe. She did find one point of interest in listening to these tales, though. As each of them told their story, she noticed that they differed only in the details. Each began with a description of their past life, dwelling on how good things had been. Each spoke of the confused first days, glossing over the details of friends and family that were lost. They spoke of the horrors they had run from, and the disasters they had seen in recent weeks, all making their aimless way to this warehouse. She wondered how many similar tales there were, out there beyond the walls of the warehouse.
    Once Mark had finished, all the stories but one had been told.
    Owen looked at her, “Well? It’s your turn now.”
    She gazed at him for a moment. It really was of little interest to her, what had come before. But she could see that something was expected.
    “On the first day, she was in class, at her school…”
     
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    It had been an AP Physics lesson, she