The Future

The Village Store at the End of the World

Excerpt from the new short story collection "Box of Lies"

It was two days after the world ended when the old van rumbled up Route 4, coming from the south. It was still a mile off but I could hear the Chevy groaning and sputtering like an old dog with a gastric problem. Royston Daigle’s rig.

My eyes blinked open and my mind swam up from sleep. It was the first sign there had been that I was not the only one left alive.

I sat in my rocker near the beer coolers, right where I’d been since climbing out of the basement. Right where I planned to spend the rest of my days.

After a minute or two, the van shuddered to a stop near the gas pumps, its green snout splattered with mud and bug guts. A moment later, the bell above the door jangled and in stumbled Royston Daigle, a lean man with gray grizzle on his cheeks and a flannel shirt half tucked into his jeans.

It didn’t take an apocalypse to reduce Royston to the grubbiness of a homeless man. He looked that way every day I’d known him.

He stood just beyond the chips rack, eyes trying to look everywhere at once. I was sitting in shadow away from sunlight slanting through the door. It took his eyes a few moments to find me. When they did, Royston jumped like he had been goosed with a hair brush.

“Bert! Holy Jesus! You made it!”

It was hard to tell if he was happy or disappointed.

“Guess I did. You got Janey with you?”

Royston nodded. I could see his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down.

“And Stevie, yup. I got ’em right down into the root cellar soon as we started hearing about what happened over in Europe. Had that sucker nailed down pretty good. When we came up, everyone was dead. I mean everyone, Bert. Terrible shit to look at. Not burned but sort of... roasted. There’s blackened birds all over the place and dead dogs with the hair burned off ’em. You been out?”

I had not been out. My closest neighbors were a quarter mile away. They were a yuppie couple from Boston trying to make a go at farming. I didn’t expect them to be alive. It had happened too fast. Yuppie couples from Boston are not known for the survival instinct.

“Haven’t been anywhere,” I told Royston. “I’m good where I am.”

He nodded as if he understood perfectly. He was still looking everywhere. He glanced outside to check on his family. He shot looks up and down the aisles stocked with food. He looked beyond me at the beer cooler.

“We’re heading up to Canada, see if there might be something left up there. In case it was... I don’t know. Political or something.”

He looked at me hard when he said it. Almost pleading. He wanted me to tell him that, sure. Canada runs a clean country. Maybe they were spared. Maybe the big pulse or wave or whatever the hell it was had passed right by our brothers to the north.

I didn’t say anything.

Outside, a horn blared. Royston jumped and spun like an alley cat. He trotted back to the door and began making wild hand gestures toward his wife outside. It was comical to watch, like an argument between mutes.

Then he scampered back.

“Say Bert,” he said, Adam’s apple going crazy again. “I wasn’t coming in here to rip off your place or nothing like that. I figured you were long gone by now. You know...”

“Yeah,” I said. “I know.”

He scratched the back of his head and tried to grin a little. Back before the world ended, he was a chimney sweep. Made a killing at it, too. Which made the clunky van that much more inexplicable.