It almost looked like a cross between one of the Dante's Inferno series, and a Norman Rockwell painting. Stretching fields behind a little brick Drug Co-op, the kind with the soda bar and a 20sesque sign still reading 'Cherry Coke! 5c!'

Next door to the Drug Co-op was a little brick barbershop, complete with swirling pole that was, at the moment, still. One could almost imagine a boy in knickers and golf cap trotting down the road with a tatty dog on his heels, holding a stick and guiding a hoop along, laughing as his schoolbooks hanging from a strap on his back bumped along after him.

That, however, was where Normal Rockwell ended.

The sky was a torture of black and gray, one window of the drug co-op was shattered and tendrils of frost had fogged it out. The barbershop pole wasn't running and probably never would again. Its windows were completely gone, save a few jagged teeth of glass. The street was littered with debris quickly vanishing under a sheet of snow that ached its way out of the sky.

No one moved out in that desolate world. Ben had told them all to stay inside the moment it had begun to snow. Snow, he had said, was as deadly as the most corrosive acid had been, thanks to the chemical soup that was now the sky.

She could believe it. She could see where the flakes had already pitted the tin roof on the Co-op.

The window was frosting over again. Leaning forward, she breathed against the chill glass, watching as the encroaching work of old wintery Jack was melted away in a spreading circle, almost immediately beginning to reform.

She let it, turning away back into her small motel room.

She caught sight of herself momentarily in the mirror over the bureau. The sores around her mouth had gone, leaving only faint scars. Her eyes were deep and haggard, however, and her skin was pale...everyone'sskin was pale nowadays. Her black hair looked like straw. She fingered a lock of it.

Her hair had always been her best feature. People tended not to notice that her nose was slightly offside, that her eyebrows were a tad too thick, that her chin was just a skosh too square...when they saw her hair. It had been glossy, falling in long waves nearly to her waist. She never restrained it, only occasionally tying it back from her face to keep it out of the way.

She had started to lose it when Ben had found her. Thanks to whatever medicine he'd pumped her full of it had stopped falling out, but now it was no longer glamorous, no longer gloss. It was tattered, ragged, rough, and dull. He had given her a pair of scissors to clean it up a bit, to hide the patches that had thinned, and she had done her best. Now instead of reaching her waist it barely reached her shoulders, and looked like someone had gone after it with a dull lawn mower. Lifting her hand, she tugged a lock of it sadly.

She could still feel her other arm. It had been gone months now, but she could feel her hand and fingers whenever she moved it. She delighted in it sometimes. It gave her satisfaction to flip some of the degenerates around here the finger when they smarted off, with them unable to see it.

Still, it was a nuisance. If she had picked something up and wanted to pick something else up as well, she had to either balance both things in one hand or else make two trips. The first few times, without thought, she had merely tried to pass the first object over to her other hand. That had left her nothing but blinking stupidly at the item on the ground. Ben had seen her do that once. The look of sympathetic pity had ticked her off. It'd have been better if he had laughed at her.

The bandages were gone, which was kind of a help. Now she could tie the end of her shirt sleeve together to hide the angry red twists of scar tissue. It was less noticeable that way, less dramatic than a swath of brilliant white bandages.

Turning away from the mirror she went and sat on the bed, leaning forward a bit and resting her forehead in her hand. Once, in high school, the Political Science class had talked about nuclear war. The teacher had said that, in a war vast enough, the ones who survived would be the worst off. They would wish they had been killed like the others. She had never understood that. Why on Earth would someone who had lived through something so terrible want to be one of the dead? She had envisioned a world with no rules, no government. Doing whatever she wanted, eating whatever and whenever she wished. Using money as toilet paper...thathad been her favorite daydream.

Now she truly understood what he had meant. The dead at least had a chanceof Heaven.

This was only Hell.


One of the spooks wandering around the inn was a greasy fortyish something piece of human phlegm named Edward. He looked something like Peter Jackson on a bad hair day...and she personally had never seen Peter Jackson on a good hair day. He was a mouth breather who delighted in tormenting everyone else's waking moments by rattling off how everyone from Aliens to the Amish were responsible for the unexpected, seemingly unprovoked attack that left their lives in ruins. He was a fan of the conspiracy theory, of pork rinds, and of Bermuda shirts. He'd lifted the former and latter from every store in town he could find that had them, and ate them by the greasy handfuls. The rinds, that was. Not the shirts.

Though, she half expected if someone spilled ketchup on them, he'd eat those as well.

"Freemasons," he declared now, his bulk overflowing one of the hotel kitchen's steel chairs. He had the remnants of four different types of greasy chips in his beard, and his glasses caught the fluorescents in a way that made it seem his eyes were glowing with demonic glee. "They, and the Illuminati, I'll bet you. President was one, did you know that? If they told him to push the button, boom...that's all it would have taken."

"Would you please shut up?" Another of the fortunate few asked. This was Daniel. He had the jittery fingers of a junkie...or perhaps someone with Parkinson's. He was a fan of the smokes, one of which she'd bummed off of him. He'd already gone through four to her one, and now he glared at Edward with blue curlicues of smoke tracing up past his dingy hair.

"You just don't want to see the truth," Edward snorted, and crushed another handful of heart attack waiting to happen into his mouth.

"Way I see it, asshole," another fellow named Poker pointed out, "is the world is fucked. At this point, it really doesn't matter who fucked it or why, it's still fucked. And you keep stuffing your fat face like that, and you're going to be the first one we eat when the food runs out."

She coughed a laugh at that, from her perch on one of the stainless steel counters, and Edward shot her a glare. "What are you laughing at, girlie?" he asked. She shook her head slightly and said nothing, only putting the end of her smoke back in her mouth. He grinned.

"Yeah, that's one bonus about what's happened," he said, winking toward Poker. "Things'll go back to the way they should. Men telling and women obeying. Shit, for all we know, she's the last gal alive. None others we've seen, right? What do you say, baby? You're gonna help us propagate the species."

She said nothing, as if she hadn't heard, drawing on the cigarette until the end glowed bright red.

"Man, you're an idiot," Poker shook his head, stumping one of his out and lighting another.

"No, think about it," Edward got to his feet, setting the foil bag aside and raining crumbs around his feet as he rose. He wiped a hand over his beard and grinned, leaning on the counter next to where she sat. "She's the only woman here, right? She can't tell us no. We outnumber her. She's our own personal little toy, aren't you baby?"

He put his meaty hand on her knee, running it up her thigh. She looked at him, then with casual ease, plucked the cigarette out of her mouth and smiled, leaning close.

"What do I say?" she purred. She jammed the lit end of the butt into the back of his hand. He shouted in surprise, whipping it away from her. Dropping the butt, she rocked back on the counter and lifted her feet, mule-kicking him dead in the face. He fell to the ground howling, blood spurting madly from his shattered nose. He pressed his hands to it and howled even more as the motion caused the pain to renew.

Sliding off the counter, she walked over and straddled him, sitting on his ponderous gut as she grabbed him by the beard, yanking his head up.

"You see this?" she snarled, lifting her stump in front of his face and waving it around. "There are parts of you just as diseased that I will find far more pleasure in chopping off if you dare touch me with your sweaty hands again, understand?"

"Bitch!" he whined, still trying to hold his nose. She grinned and released him, rising.

"Love you too," she purred, and kicked him right in the nuts. He howled again, his hands going from his face to his crotch as he whimpered like a fat, spoiled baby. She dumped the remainder of his chips all over him as he lay there, then shot him her 'ghost birdie' before leaving the kitchen. Poker, who hadn't flinched or even paused in his smoking during the events, half leaned over and glanced at Edward groaning on the ground.

"Don't worry man," he said evenly. "You can always say the mafia did it."

YYY

"What's wrong with you?" Ben demanded as the door slammed open. She whipped around, eyes wide.

"Don't you even fucking knock?" she asked. Immediately he colored in embarrassment, rubbing his hand back over his hair.

"Sorry," he said automatically, then seemed to remember he was supposed to be angry. "But what the hell is wrong with you?"

"Well, let's see. The world is in ruins, poisonous snow is raining down on us, we could starve to death in a few months...or freeze to death. I cut off my own arm with a hatchet and nearly bled to death...oh, and Disneyland is gone. The rest I can deal with but I really, really liked Disneyland. That's a lot to be wrong with me, Ben, but somehow I don't think that's what you meant. So please, specify the particular ill you are ranting about, hmm?"

"I meant Edward," he said. "You broke his nose!"

"Two boots to the face generally does that," she said amiably.

"But why?" he asked. "Didn't you think I had enough work to do without having to nail his nose back together? I can't have you going around and beating up people..."

"Can't have me?" she asked. "You can't have me...? Sorry, Ben, but I missed the part where you were made King of the world."

"Stop it," he said. "You know what I meant."

"Yes, I know what you meant," she snapped. "You don't want to nail him back together, you tell Meathead to keep his lewd innuendos to himself. I don't care what he thinks, I'm not some sort of breeding sow left at the beck and call of you men."

He blanched, paling a bit. "Is...that what he said?"

"Well, more specifically I believe his exact words were, 'We outnumber her. She's our own personal little toy.'"

"Jesus," he muttered, closing his eyes.

"I'll tell you Ben, I'm in a shitty position here. It's all well and good for you fellows, but being a woman at the end of the world is not a barrel of laughs, lemme tell ya. And I warn you right now. If any of you guys get that thought into your head I'll serve them like I did Edward, and a lot more. Understand?"

"No, no..." he made a helpless gesture. "I understand perfectly. I'm sorry. No one thinks that way, I promise, and…I think what you did to Edward will deter them from trying anything even if they did think that. You really wailed him good."

She shook her head, turning toward the frosty window. "He's a fat tub of lard who couldn't fight his way out of a bag of chips," she said stiffly. "That'll work only so often before they decide coming after me in a group will yield better results."

"I won't let that happen," he said.

"And if you're one of the group?" she demanded. She didn't need to look around to know he paled at that.

"What?" he asked. "I would never..."

"Yeah? Never?" she looked back at him. "A year from now? Six months? Hell, three months? After all this has driven you mad will you still think that way?"

"I don't..." he said helplessly.

"Yeah, that's what I thought," she muttered, looking at him sternly. Then suddenly she sighed, her shoulders slumping a bit. "I'm sorry, Ben. You didn't deserve that. It's just..."

"Yeah, I know," he said just as softly. "I'm sorry. The world really has turned upside down, hasn't it?"

"Yeah, you could say that."

He nodded. "I'll make sure Edward minds his P's and Q's from now on, as much as I can," he said. "And I don't think I'll give him any pain medication. Maybe being kept awake a few nights will remind him of his stupidity."

"I doubt it, but thanks."

"Yeah, any time," he managed a smile, and slipped out again, closing her door behind him.


Twitching with an urgency, the hands, once settled to their canvas, seemed to still with a surgical precision. The lines extended from his fingertips like rays of energy, arcs of power that forced the space into new configurations in the way that one would imagine God shaping all life. The slender man, too skinny for most to view as healthy, danced to a music only he could hear; a song that played within his mind.

His energy soared as he slid back from the wall and viewed his work so far. Every portion of the grand collage was shaped by his every waking moment, his latest experience. Unlike the others he was not so troubled over this new existence. It was not much different than that life which he had already been leading. The only thing that had changed was that he wasn't sitting in a park hoping to make a dime or two off of some commercial piece of shit. Now he could fully indulge in what he loved, in what he lived.

Art was now just the act of doing something more than surviving. He had been unable to do that before...do more than survive. But now, now everyone else was on his playing field. Now he had a power that they didn't...freedom of the mind. While assholes like Edward stuffed their face and rued the day that their guilty pleasures ran out, Daniel could keep indulging. His only pleasure was creating...and he could do that - would do that until the day he died and he now had the freedom to do justthat.

Two stepping with a giddiness he hadn't felt in a while he sucked on the chewed edges of the pencil in his mouth and reached out at the wall with color stained hands. As one followed the pictures around the room, it was evident when this revelation had occurred to Daniel, about his freedom. The first images of his mural were of moaning souls and deformed creatures like those of Dante's Hell and slowly these morphed into mutated humans struggling and rutting like pigs through the earth. But somewhere in this painted history he had that idea. The idea that he was free now. That idea was what allowed him to stand up to people like Edward, people that he would have cowered to before.

But this woman, this woman was even morefree than Daniel. She had strength and power, a will of steel, unbreakable as the Gods'. Not that Daniel had a tendency to over embellish or dramatize things.

Shimmying his hips as he hummed a few bars of song and attacked the bare white wall with fingers and thumbs, he formed from the void the shape of a woman, one no less woman than goddess. In one hand she held a basket over flowing with fruits and pleasures like cigarettes and wine- damn Daniel missed wine and cigarettes- and in the other she held up the sun. Beneath her beautiful bare feet was pinned a beast ,its mouth stuffed with its own tail.

No one had seen Daniel's room. No one except Ben, but Ben knew better than to talk to anyone about it. Ben was cool. So when Daniel heard the door open he thought it was Ben. That is until he heard the awkward silence rather than the pleasant, 'hey man.'

Turning Daniel faced the woman in the doorway and held his arms out at her as if waving her back from a fire.

"No...wrong room! Wrong room! This is my room...gotta go...you need to...you need to go now..." He chattered nervously. So much for that freedom he felt. It was still mostly in his head but he was getting bolder. Someday he'd be as brave as she'd been. For now he kicked the can of pencils and pens and highlighters that he'd liberated from the hotel office aside. "No...you shouldn't be in here...you need...you need to go..."


She hadn't realized anyone was staying in that room. She was just killing time, poking around the hotel, feeling a bit of cabin fever and still pissed at Edward and his filthy mentality. The door wasn't locked. There was no indication anyone was within, so she was surprised when she opened the door and saw Daniel dancing around and then shooing her out as if she had caught him jerking off.

"I'm sorry," she said, but she only took one step back. Her eyes had lifted, and caught on the walls...or more importantly, what was painted on them. The pictures were beautiful, stark and harsh but then…so was their content. Her eyes followed them along until the end...until she saw what he had been painting when she walked in. Perhaps it was her own ego that put her features on the woman's face, but then...perhaps he had meantit that way. Whichever the case, it took her by surprise.

He almost felt bad for chasing her off so quickly now. "It's just that this is for me...not, not for sharing. I...this is my room..." he explained as if she'd stolen his diary and read it, which in some sense she had by looking up at his inner most thoughts painted upon the walls, including the portrait of her.

"This is beautiful," she said, ignoring his shooing and coming further into the room, taking a closer look at the pictures. "Did you do all this? You're talented. It's incredible."

"It's..." he raised a trembling hand to his hair and rocked on his feet, losing his nerve to kick her out as she stepped past him to view his mural. She walked around the bed which had been slid into an odd position near the bathroom door to make the full length of his walls available for painting.

"No..." he sighed. "I mean...yes, yes I did paint them but...no I'm not and no it isn't...it's just...this is...these are mine...my private works...I can...I can sketch something for you...I do it for the guys when things get real boring around here. They like to watch...but theeeeeese...these are just...uh...just mine..." His hands gesticulated some sign language for the emotionally depraved as he let a raised, extended hand fall back to rest on the top of his head.

"Please don't...don't tell anyone you saw...them..."

His manner of speaking, a spontaneous and hesitant dialect of lingering, constipated thought was both nerve racking and endearing. His voice was soft like powdered milk and his eyes were large and round like those of a sad eyed puppy, set into a face that to most was the pasty complexion of a computer geek or a videogame addict. Daniel was neither. Rather, he was the product of malnourishment and emotional intensity.

She half glanced at him before returning her eyes back to the mural. It really bothered him that she had seen this. She felt bad about that, but at the same time, she was too fascinated to look away. "I won't tell, I swear," she said, wondering who she'd tell anyway. The only other person she really talked to was Ben...more than two words, at least.

Nearly tripping, but managing to side step around the can of pens he'd knocked over, the young man moved to the door and closed it, making sure no one else saw. Turning back to her he licked his lips thoughtfully.

His shutting the door…had that been anyone else it would have bothered her some. Closing her in, trapping her, perhaps, with a mind to be less than genteel. But this was Daniel. Man could hardly stand still on his own, she doubted it would take any effort at all to put him in his place. Certainly not even as much as it had to shit-kick Edward. Heck, a sneezewould blow him over.

"You know...no one's really ever put Edward in his place like that before...that was...um...well, I don't know what that was...it was...awesome." He fumbled stupidly for a word that worked. Daniel had always sounded far more eloquent when writing than he did when attempting to speak. Maybe he would write her a letter?

She smirked bitterly. "Thanks, but anyone could have done it. It was like hitting dough. I doubt he's got a single muscle anywhere but in his jaws from all his eating."

"You know he's an idiot...right? I mean...none of us would..." he blanched and reddened some. "No one would do something that stupid...except for maybe Fat Eddie...but...you know no one would let him..."

Yeah, maybe, but it was as she had told Ben. To say that was all well and good now, but what about a couple of months down the road? When all this got to them and they lost what grip on their sanity they had left? When they got stupid and horny enough that it didn't matter to them anymore? She'd be fucked over then...and in more ways than one.

Hopping as if electrocuted he darted toward the little desk. "Oh hey..." he said with an enthusiasm that mirrored that of a young child showing off to their parents' friends. "I um...I drew some flowers...best I can remember them anyway...you might...you might like these...um...better..." He hoped she'd like anything better, just so long as she didn't look at the mural long enough to notice her face upon it more than once. After all, it was Ben's finding her that had started off the third wall.

Glancing away from the frozen agony and trapped angst spewed upon the wall, she went over to his side as he pulled out some sheets of paper. He passed a few over and she looked at them. Flowers indeed...his memory served him better than most artists who had the buds right in front of them. Each petal was drawn in detail, each vein of each leaf. It almost looked like she could pull them off the paper.

She looked up at him from one of a rose. "Is this what you did before the end?" she asked. "You were an artist?"

"Tried...I tried to be..." he corrected her. Daniel's trembling hand shimmied its way through his hair, while the other slid nonchalantly in his back pocket. "No one...um...no one took my work seriously...I wasn't um...I wasn't outrageous enough to draw attention, you know? I mean you have to be a Chihuly or a Warhol to get people's attention...I just...well. Most of my work is gone now, actually all of it really. I lived in the city...just got lucky enough to be visiting my sister out here." He chewed on the inside of his lip and let his eyes roam over his flowers. "Yeeeah..."

"I wrote too...nothing really spectacular but...um...a poem I wrote ended up in that movie...uh...what was it called...um...the one with Julia Roberts and uh...that Aussie guy, Russell something..." Shaking his head dismissively he looked at the floor. "Some fluffy love flick...made some $60 million dollars and I got paid $20 grand." He chuckled as if he had made out better than they had.

"It was Sophia really...Sophia paid my way...I wasn't, not really, I wasn't making any money...but..." he grinned like a pleased child, "...money doesn't really matter anymore so...so I can just paint and create and write and nothing else has to matter...not really."

He lifted the flower drawings and handed them to her. "Here...you can have them. Please..." His hands weren't shaking so much as darting like nervous fish. "...it will make your room less...cell like...hotels aren't really known for...their um...decorating savoir-faire..." he joked.

"Take them...and I can make you more..." His eagerness was like that of a child who had developed a crush on the teacher. Daniel admired her, her strength and beauty, but if he had a crush he would never admit to it. Love was not a topic for the young man whose sister had raised him after their parents 'split.' His only memories of them was a phone call from his dad on his fifth birthday, from prison. It was 'love' that had driven his father to kill the woman who would leave him. So Daniel didn't love anyone. Love was not a good thing. But he couldadmire her as any artist would a muse.

"Thank you," she smiled, tucking the pictures carefully under her stump. Again her eyes lifted to regard the murals ringing his room.

"Would you mind if I came and talked to you sometimes while you paint?" she asked. "There's little else to do around this dump than sit about and go mad. I promise I won't bother you."

Heat flashed along the creases of Daniel's ears. With shoulders hunched slightly, as his height made him even ganglier than his slight weight, the young man bobbed his head thoughtfully.

"Yes...yes that would be good. I would like that. Sophia liked to watch me paint too...I'd like that..." He seemed somewhat distant, but his smile was very genuine and certainly sweet.

"I...um...I don't know if you like Mello Yellow...uh...soda...but...I um...salvaged most of it from the machine. Apparently Edward is not fond of it and no one else cared so...so I have lots...and I'll share if you want some..."

He gestured to the small mountain of sodas built in the corner. "I mean...it's not beer or wine but...we can still have a drink together...right?" he chuckled and grinned, his eyes casting toward the gnarled old carpet. The man wasn't a Casanova, but his earnest more than made up for his lack of smooth charm.

"Right...I think we can have a drink together," she smiled back, one of the first genuine smiles she'd had since...well, a very long time.


"So, your girlfriend radio back yet?" Catherine asked as she leaned against the console, a small bottled water in hand. John cast her a look.

"She's not my girlfriend," he defended.

"Right," she smiled back at him. "You two talked for...what was it? Four hours last night? And two and a half the night before? Miss Conroy certainly has a lot to say."

"She's a sergeant," he replied. "And we didn't talk all that long..."

"You did," she said calmly. "I timed you."

"You timed me?" he blinked at her, then grinned. "Catherine Brewster, you aren't jealous are you?"

"Don't flatter yourself," she replied with a sniff. "I just wish you'd remember that while you're chatting away with the Sergeant, I have no one to talk to, that's all. She's with what...nearly two hundred other people? She's got all the company she needs, whereas I'm...well, sadly...stuck only with you."