AWFUL LONELY ALL OF A SUDDEN

Phil checked his e-mail. Nothing at spankmymonkey69 at hotmail. Wait, there was nothing...at all. Yesterday, Phil noticed that he couldn't get onto any of his adult entertainment sites, for a moment he'd wondered if Alice had sneaked some anti-porn thing on his computer...but his little sister of course, was dead, as was her husband and their kids who lived on the upper floors of the house.

That was sad. Phil was just living with Alice and her husband temporarily, until he-well it had been almost four years. His brother-in-law kept going on as if Phil had been in their basement a goddamn DECADE, but technically, no...

It had been twenty-nine months, and then Mom had agreed to send Phil a check to go to tree surgery academy in Missoula, Montana, and Phil had moved OUT of Alice and Doug's, gone UP to Montana, discovered the Western Larch (popularly called Tamarack) tree provoked his eczema, and then had moved BACK to Tucson, and into Alice and Doug's again.

Phil had been at the pruning school for three weeks. And then he'd left again sixteen months later...when he and the married lady he'd met at traffic school had gone to the writer's colony in Phoenix. That had only lasted fifty-two days...

And so it had been four years since Phil had moved BACK in, thank you Doug...what a nagging asshole. But Doug had died of the plague, along with Alice, and little Douglas the Third, and Laurel and little Constance.

So now they were dead upstairs, and Phil's boss Candace at Manpower had died, though she'd not sent Phil many assignments before she'd gone. (When you learn a swell program like WordPerfect, you want to SPECIALIZE, not pick up all these other things...it was funny, in interviews, when Phil said "I don't do Windows" Get it?)

Phil looked over to where Chet was sleeping. Hiding out from his child support payments Chet had blown in about a week ago, right after the hearse had taken Doug away (kinda good thing, since Doug didn't like Chet) and Phil and Chet had had a party like they'd not had since that totally ridiculous, overblown deal when they got accused of burning down the Omega Nu House at Arizona State...

So funny. back then, Chuck was just mad that the Omegas had rejected him, and Phil of course wasn't even a student at ASU...just been psychovacked out of the Navy. But twenty years later, they were still wild men! But now there was no one to hang out with...everyone had perished.

"Chester!" Phil called. "Chester O'Connor...Chet, wake up. C'mon, we got in early last night, remember? After we left Sid coughing up his lungs at the E.R...we came home about twelve, right? All the bars in town are closed now...but we could go to 7-Eleven, it looked closed too...we could break in and get some beer...no one is out, whole town's dead. It's just you and me, man."

"C'mon, wake up. We can drive around...I know you don't have a license anymore, but there are no cops! I don't have to do my community service, washing police cars, for that incident I was telling you about, either. There's no such thing as shoplifting anymore...it's all free. Chet?"

Phil walked over and began gently kicking Chet, who had hogged the waterbed.

"Wake up, you didn't have more than three Long Island Iced Teas...Chet? Oh, shit."

Phil looked down at Chet's body, saw the familiar empurpled tongue hanging out...all the plague-ees seemed to have it at the end.

"Chet, I have a secret to tell you now...you can't blab it, can ya? My middle name? I told you (sob) and Johnny Reimer back when we (sob) were in Cub Scouts that it was Dakota...but it's really (sob) Tandy."

Crying bitterly, Phillip Tandy Miller exited Doug and Alice's basement forever.