2. Angie

                I used to think that they were hungry, but that’s not it. They’re angry. I was hungry. I'd always been a fat guy. It was only two months into this, the All-Fucked Era, and I’d lost a lot of weight. I was running a lot, fighting a lot, and not eating hot food, which I already mentioned. I started to look a little better, though I was sad as a dead crocodile when the Cheetos everywhere turned stale. Can you imagine, walking into a store and bags and bags of Cheetos are spilling off the shelves, and you open one up, shove a Cheeto in your mouth: Styrofoam. I still ate them.

                The point is, I was thin, and a little scruffy, but not too much. I lived with a couple of people back then. There were more people. They were older and I was sort of their kid. One guy was this fifty year old mechanic named Jim. He used these big wrenches. The other was Kwanesha, she was only twenty five, but she and Jim were a couple. Back then we used to joke about me being the kid, and how they had to make some babies to replenish the earth. But even then, we couldn’t imagine bringing a kid into this place. Much less being pregnant. Anyway, we were at a different market, getting cans, when this girl scampered down an aisle. She was really little, like four foot ten, and dirty, but clearly not a VB, because she was looking over her shoulder, not forward. VBs always look forward, at where they’re going, at what they hate.

                “They’re coming,” she said.

                “How many,” said Jim.

                “I don’t know.”

                “Estimate.”

                “Twenty? A lot.”

                “Fuck.” This was the way we all felt.

                “Why’d you lead them to us,” I said.

                “I didn’t know you were here.” In her hand, which was little, was a Little League Bat. The sound of crashing, of shelves being knocked over, of food stuffs flying everywhere, echoed through the store.

                Kwanesha said, “Back entrance.”

                We followed her, with Jim taking the rear. The mini-girl got out in front. We made it into the stock room without making too much noise. I was checking out her butt as we walked along, but it was really her face that I was excited about. Maybe any female would have looked amazing to me right then. I don’t know. I thought she had the fullest, most perfectly shaped lips, bright eyes. She was small, not young. I mean, she was my age- I was sixteen then.

               So back to fat. Being fat sometimes is a symptom. It’s funny, it being All-Fucked Era, there is a lot of time to think about your life. I don’t have any social life to think about now, it’s me and them. But I think I was fat because I didn’t care. I didn’t care because I didn’t think I had a chance. I didn’t think I had a chance because I didn’t know anything about girls. So, fat, afraid, and with no social skills I wasn’t exactly going to be bagging like a ShopRite employee. Fact, girls didn’t see me.

                That was a ShopRite we escaped. And the girl, her name was Angie, came back with us. We lived in a row home. We stayed on the second floor, and it seemed pretty safe. For two months she thought I was really annoying, because I was. I said mean things to her all the time, like how she led the VBs to us, or like, what good would a ninety pound girl be in a fight with VBs. She mostly ignored these comments. Eventually I figured out that she didn’t care what I thought, and that my technique of pretending that I believed I was better than her wasn’t working.

                 We had a lot of time together. Jim and Kwanesha said that it was near the end and they had to get in what fun they could. They had triple boarded the back room windows, but I still worried about Kwanesha’s noise. Anyway, they spent a lot of time together. I had some comics and old magazines but I’d read them all so many times and new reading material was something you had to risk your life for. So Angie and I were together a lot. So I decided to ask her where she was when it happened.

                 Angie said, “I don’t want to talk about that.”

                 I said, “We’ve got to do something.” She was re-reading a magazine for girls and didn’t respond. I added, “It’s not like you’re ever going to be able to get that make-up.”

                She looked up at me. “True,” she said. 

                “You don’t need it,” I said.

                “You know that if I was Eve, and you were Adam, which is just about what it is, the human race would die?” This was no revelation to me. 

                “So we’re stuck here with nothing to do. You might as well tell me how you survived.”

                She had been home alone. She had three older brothers, and her mom. Her dad wasn’t home much. She was watching the news, which was talking about violent outbreaks, in prisons and hospitals. She had looked out the window, and saw the street. She saw there eight large people tear into an old couple who used to sit on their stoop. It had disturbed her and she called 911 but there was no answer. Suddenly she’d sensed that it was all coming apart at the seams, that this wasn’t incidents, but everything, and she had scampered out her back window, and up a drainpipe onto the roof. There she had huddled in a corner, and, in the warm August air, listening to screams, fell asleep. 

                In the morning, she could see that people wandered the streets in groups, that their eyes were vigilant, their ears attentive. They jogged and sometimes sprinted. They chased after noise, kicked in car windows. No-one was acting normal. They didn’t drive. Always on foot. Vehicles were smashed into others.  

                For most of us survivors, it was accidents like this. If you were in an institution, a school, at that moment, you didn’t make it. 

                She went back in the house. One of her brothers was there. It was her favorite brother, the oldest, I forget his name, but he was the one that taught her to catch and told her to watch out for assholes but wasn’t paranoid about her dating, except when she needed it. He would make meals for her when she was little. But it wasn’t him, if you know what I mean. He looked at her and came for her. She ran back the way she came, shoving her little body back out that window, and shimmying that drain so fast. When he came for her, she was ready.

                This is another thing about survivors. We didn’t think that long. We adapted. I’m just saying, if you spent a lot of time getting your bearings, you didn’t have any. 

                She broke a brick off a chimney. She stove her brother’s face in as he clambered up. The first hit, he stopped climbing. The second hit, he went down.

                Another thing about survivors. None of us spent too much time trying to meditate on the things that had passed away. No time for sentiment. Realism. Toughness. You would think North Philly would have done better. Maybe we did. Maybe I’m the last human. 

                But yeah, I liked Angie. And I wasn’t fat. That gave me hope.