Prospero's Half-Life by Trevor Zaple

oppressive silence
was a testament to the lack of anyone coming back to reclaim any of
it. The sounds that he could hear could be counted on one hand: a
car alarm, insistent in the distance; a dog barking from a few
blocks to their right; their own, overloud footfalls; and something
that sounded like a collapsing building from a long way behind
them. He eyed the boarded-up houses speculatively. There were
likely more supplies and better bags in some of those houses,
especially if the families in question had fled with whatever they
could carry. Things would have had to have been left behind, it was
only logical. He thought about proposing a few break-ins to
Samantha but remembered her issue with his “dancing on the grave of
everyone”. He continued to eye the sealed-up houses with interest,
but kept his mouth shut.
    After a time
they passed a small workshop that purported to repair commercial
food equipment. After that point the landscape began to change.
Empty fields lay on both sides for a block, and then there was a
large U-Haul storage complex. The chain-link fence was locked
tightly at the entry point and Richard saw that the doors and
windows on the visible entry points in the complex were boarded up
as well.
    “ Think of all the stuff in that place,” Richard mused. “All of
it, just ready to be taken by anyone. Chances are, the person who
owned it is dead by now. Who owns it now?”
    “ Let it stay in there,” Samantha replied sharply. “I’m not
spending God knows how long peeking through every last little pile
of junk in there”.
    Richard
shrugged his shoulders as they passed it. “It was more of a
philosophical question, really,” he said, somewhat grandiosely.
“Who owns what dead people leave behind, when you can’t find a
court to settle the matter?”
    “ Who cares?” Samantha answered acidly. Richard let it drop and
they passed by the rest of the storage compound in silence. After
the storage center there was a large industrial building, named
“Trensept Automation” by the no-nonsense lettering on its side. The
wind blew a ragged cardboard box along the empty, cracked cement
parking lot that alongside it, on the other side of the fence. To
their left, across the street, a small substation hummed with
high-intensity electricity. The sound was comforting to Richard,
refreshingly normal.
    There was a
dog lurking by the locked gate into the Trensept parking lot. It
had a scrawny, starved look to it; Richard thought this immediately
odd, since there was plenty of food lying around. He wondered, on
the heels of this thought, if the dogs ate plague victims. Did they
smell appetizing, to dogs? Richard thought that they might; he had
once witnessed a friend’s dog vomit, and then happily lap up the
steaming brown pile not even two seconds later. Still, he thought,
the plague victims might have an off-smell to them, even for
creatures that would eat practically anything.
    This
particular dog certainly looked as though it were willing to eat
practically anything; Richard noted that he could count its ribs
quite easily and the dog’s tongue slathered at its muzzle in a
restless movement. Neither of them commented on it as they passed
it. A block later, however, as they were passing a strip of
automotive repair and parts shops, Richard turned back and saw that
the dog was following them. Its pace was brisk, and it was only a
half-block behind them.
    “ Watch out,” Richard warned Samantha in a low tone of voice.
Samantha turned her head to look at what he was talking about and
gave a start. Then she began to look around.
    “ There aren’t any others, are there?” she asked nervously.
Richard began looking around as well, suddenly paranoid. Dogs were
pack animals, after all. It didn’t seem like there were others,
however; the cheap buildings with the filthy white vinyl siding
that they passed were as quiet as graves.
    They
approached an intersection and Richard noted with small amusement
that the