Harold spent the night lying in the dark, ears ringing.

~

"Harold, didn't you call in sick?" Sally at the front desk smiled at him as he stumbled by. "Jonas's been on your shift three hours."

"A bug, but I'm better now," Harold mumbled. He stepped quick down the corridor to the locker rooms. How long before Sally phoned Levi and the little prick came snooping around for him?

In the echoing tile-floored locker room he tugged on his vest and pulled the Mossberg from its brackets, thumbing the red cartridges into the magazine. In his locker door's seam he had tucked a photo of Val and Stephen, taken some twenty years before at Lake Powell. They both wore goofy, sunburned grins, squinting into the camera lens, framed by placid blue water and smooth sandstone cliffs.

"It'll be okay," he slipped the photo into his shirt pocket.

Would this make any real difference? Deep down he had the answer. One man can't shift the world's balance. But people needed to know---to remember what happened. He couldn't be the only one who thought like that.

He pressed the Mossberg along his leg as he left the locker room, turning right toward the control center rather then left to the hydraulic push doors into the plant itself.

Harold didn't know the technician inside the control room, which was just as well. The man slouched in a rolling desk chair, a slight cowlick sticking up as he sipped from an insulated coffee mug. Video monitors stretched across the wall far wall, tiny black and white images of the plant jerking back and forth. To the left a flat screen monitor displayed a rapid cycling of numbers and digits, each culminating with tiny green dot, F237, M24, M458, F17.

The technician turned his head, catching Harold's reflection in the screens as he stood with door propped open by one foot. "Hey you know the rules, buddy. Nobody but management or control crews in here."

"Yeah, I know the protocol," Harold stepped into the room, keeping the door open with the barrel of the Mossberg. "This door's supposed to be locked down too, isn't it?"

"Hey," the technician's eyes darted to the shotgun, and he leaned to put his coffee cup on the desk. Harold stretched his free hand forward, clamping down on the bird-thin bones of the technician's shoulder, his thumb pressed against the seat back. He jerked and the man rolled backward, past Harold and through the open doorway. The chair bounced hard over the threshold and the technician spilled into the corridor. Harold kicked the chair out after him and slammed the door. On the inside was a thick bolt. The control room was designed as a refuge of last resort. He threw the bolt and turned his back on the technician's pounding and indignant squawking, narrowing the sounds from his consciousness.

The control board was clearly labeled and no great shakes to cipher out. Harold thumbed off the override controlling the plant's electronic doors. Every door would swing free and easy until he turned it back on. A flurry of activity in one of the monitors caught his eye, Levi barking into his radio, rustlers running haphazardly before the camera. Maybe they'd all leave the work rooms, come thundering into the corridor.

Harold removed the photo of Val and Stephen and propped it beside the screens. All he had held dear in one faded scrap of paper.

"I guess this'll about do it," his voice was a cracked whisper. This might shock them back into reality, make them remember what everyone had so easily forgotten.

Something heavy hit the control room door and it shook in its frame but he paid it little mind. The technician's radio squalled over and over. Harold cycled up the regulator controls and began shutting them down, one hundred to a screen. Five screens filled with urgently winking amber pinpoints when he was done.

On the video monitors the Z-crews stopped their methodical movements, heads twisted back and forth, hands jerked, clawing at the air as they looked for something, anything to quell their hunger.

Harold shut the monitors off one after another. This wasn't something he wanted to see. Thin screams seeped through the walls, between static bursts of the radio. On the last monitor Levi and half dozen rustlers were in the corridor outside. They stopped pounding at the control room as, from the far end of the hall, a pack of Barneys and Betties surged through the swinging doors, coveralls stained dark, gloved hands and mouths smeared and clotted.

They'd soon be out of the plant, lumbering into the city.

Harold laid the shotgun up across his knees. When the noise died down he'd throw the bolt open and go out.

He'd go out and see if he couldn't get his family together again.

The Last Supper (The Anatomy Of Addiction)

JOHN CLAUDE SMITH

"...yes, my friends, there is nothing new to report on this, the 300th day of... of infestation. As if there will ever be anything new to report. No, the turmoil that prevails is quite obviously terminal: the attrition of humanity... Just take a look out your windows... that's if you haven't already boarded them up. Otherwise, take my word, oh yes, yes. The horrors are real... and relentless..."

~

The drug haze swells in his head as Razor tries to wake (WAKE UP!), but the effort is more akin to wading through mud. It feels like a turgid, convoluted descent into someone else's 'no longer private' hell; someone's corrupt imagination. Surely these images of decay and extinction cannot be nourished into fruition by the unconscious reels that project from the back of his brain and onto the white cranial screen he now views. It is a wasteland, a grainy, gray and rust-hued visual documentary cataloging the demise of civilization as we know it. Holocaust to the nth !Only it is much worse than an exclamation point, for there is no finality.

The landscape is littered with dead people; walking dead people; feasting dead people. The morbid, leering eye----the prime reaction culled by the masses since the onset of the disease being cathode ray addiction, voyeurs of the visceral----gleans every bit of perversion, presenting in excruciating detail, the aimless gaze. The savage quest for anything meat: rats, cats, dogs... people; the horrendous corrosion and disorder. In one fell swoop the world changes; this is the way it is destined to be, there is nothing to be done about it. It is the blatant intrusion of grade Z cannibal films as Headline News (5, 6 and 11). The eye constantly scours the desolation, peering with clinical ( carnivorous) curiosity as the final days unravel. It is a painstakingly slow process. Like picking a scab off a dying race, repeatedly prying it off to search underneath for the reasons why, prolonging the moments ( seconds into minutes into hours into days...) before The End (my friend). Leaving the grave unoccupied...

Razor twitches, realizing the scenes he witnessed are external, not internal. Cathode ray addiction indeed, amongst many other addictions ingested, snorted or shot into eager veins. He slams his eyelids shut, incinerating the light with the precious cool darkness, canceling the TV's brutal exhibition. He immediately nods off. There are no dreams. There is no reason for them anymore.

~

When he wakes his eyes feel like they are throbbing, not enough room in the sockets. As he shoved the throb to the back of his head, to the abandoned place where dreams once roamed free, he hones in on Sara. She's still, lying still. Ribbons of blood trickles from her mouth into a pool of saliva, creating patterns that seem vaguely familiar. He remembers nothing ( hitting, pummeling---this is my ride , senorita--- Go away !),remembers something ( sorry, I'm sorry, babe ),and, as usual, denies everything, even his existence; this existence. She is face down on the hardwood floor: flat and smooth, the floor. The baby---- what was her name?----is her miniature twin. Razor notices a slight rise in Sara's torso, a slight ripple in the ever-expanding pool. He is uncertain if he can notice any discernable indication that the baby is breathing. Then again, his vision is tweaked, seeing doublouble and even tripripiple.