When Zeb was young, he skateboarded barefoot down the main road with a hunting rifle over his shoulder, every other day, looking for something to eat. It was Summer and it was hot as hell and when he got tired, he sat at the side of the gravel and he drank from re-used waterbottles. He brought dunkaroos with him which he told me were little cookies in a blue container with icing he could dip them in.
When he found people, he shot at them. They were slow, hungry, and diseased. He shot a few children crumpled in the streets that were crying for their mothers, just to put them out of their misery. Everyone wanted a saviour, he said to me countless times. But Zeb was not a saviour. Zeb was a boy who had survived, and who would continue to survive without them. He told me he shot people out of fear, but after a while, a year at best, he could skateboard to the town and back without seeing a soul for weeks. Down highway 24 along the weather cracked pavement, underneath the full and hazy summer sun, he would pass by the untamed fields of a hundred homes abandoned. Only the crows could be heard and the patter of wings in the rotted crops. The world was still. As still then as it is now. Like a pond so untouched it's surface looks like it's hardened to a thin glass.
People were gone. The strange machines they left behind sat under a blanket of dust that fell from the sky and would remain unmoved for the rest of eternity. Their old houses, stores, gas stations, streets signs, bicycles, trucks, lawn furniture and picket fences, became wilted with neglect, rusted over and rotted out.
When I was young, Zeb told me it had happened fast. The world had died in a matter of days. Like an apocalypse, the spirits had descended from the skies on celestial horses, black as the space they had come from. Judgement day was upon the human race. There was fire, then ash, then bitter cold and rain for weeks.
But now I know it had taken time. Years. Decades. Everyone had known for a long time it would happen. Anarchy. Disease. Murder. Towns were forcefully evacuated and people were mercilessly executed. There had been five influenzas. By the forth, anyone showing symptoms was shot on sight to stop the spread.
Zeb had been born in a camp, a whole country away from where we lived together as a family throughout my childhood. His mother had died giving birth. Zeb had never known a world without chaos. He had been raised in it; Never knowing his birthparents, never knowing his real name until he chose one for himself. He was a frail child. He lived alone in his teenage years. His friends had left for the southern world. Everyone he had ever known was gone. And he skateboarded, up and down the road aimlessly, trying to find a hint from god to continue living.
When I asked him why he thought he had survived, he told me it was God's will.
God sent him a wife like he had sent Adam his Eve. He found her in the basement of an old grocery store, living with the rats. She was dirty and young and terrified to the point she would not speak to him, but she was alive and as human as he was. She had never been sick. And when he dragged her out into the sunlight away from her cellar of hoarded food and water, he held her hand and spoke to another human being for the first time in four years. She didn't speak but she nodded aimlessly. And when he walked away, beckoning her with the barrel of his gun, she followed like a scared child with little other option would.
