I go back to work in a couple of days, which I still find rather difficult to believe. I haven’t been in the office since December 14, which on the one hand seems like just yesterday. It’s going to be a strange transition going back.
But that’s not until Wednesday, a whole new year from now. Today, I mostly just did the crossword puzzle, went with my father to Lowe’s to pick up a couple of space heaters — dear lord do they work — and joined my weekly writing group. This is what three short prompts, two of which I didn’t even work in, netted me:
I don’t remember where I was the day the world first ended. I’m lucky I even remember who I was.
I couldn’t have been too close to the blast radius. Scientists, the few that are left, say the epicenter was somewhere a few miles north of Moscow, where most of the changed men have been found, where most of the dead were first risen. I woke up, after it first happened, someplace in Finland. I didn’t remember how I’d got there, or much of anything, really; I only knew I wasn’t Finnish myself, judging by my inability to read any of the road signs, or decipher the map I found folded in my jacket pocket, or make sense of the panicked shouts that accompanied my stumbling approach to the nearest town. The townspeople hadn’t been changed, not from what I could tell, but we must have still been well within the path of the first shockwaves, since they seemed even more disoriented than me.
There are symptoms of the blast, telltale signs. Those of us who have, as it were, survived have been warned in the year or two since the event that we must always be watchful. The changed men and the dead who walk are not the only dangers in this new world, and there are few places, if any, that are still safe. The closer you get to the blast radius, where the worst of those things first fell to Earth, the more you have to watch.
I didn’t know that in Finland. That was still only just days, or for all I know just hours, since the event, and I’d been close enough to still feel shaky on my feet. I knew my name, and what seemed like a few central facts, even if none of those involved how I’d got there, or what exactly had happened to us all since. I didn’t know about the change then, or about the dead, and wouldn’t still for days, but if I’d known even half of what I do now, even guessed at it, I’d have turned and run from that town without a second thought.
It’s not quite a story, but there could be something there.
Then tonight, I watched (or re-watched, actually) the surprisingly well-executed Tomorrow Never Dies. It’s absolutely ridiculous, but in the ways that a Bond movie should be. I wasn’t expecting it to be quite that much fun, even if I did remember liking the scene with the remote-controlled car.
And that was Sunday.