Love in the Age of Reptiles

The Big Empty-2

We worked well together, that much was clear; it was evidenced by how we swept and cleared the house so efficiently, Amelia opening the curtains (to let in more light) even as I scrambled to quick-check the rooms and closet spaces—finding a radio with batteries in it as well as some flashlights; not to mention a pantry full of food (mainly jars and jars of canned fish—salmon and snapper, according to the labels). Still, what I didn’t find was any evidence of a non-electric power source for the lantern; something which seemed impossible—given the grid had failed shortly after the Flashback and the house itself was completely inert. Nor would this have gone unexamined—that is, if not for the discovery of the door; by which I mean the padlocked door to the tower itself, which we stumbled across at virtually the same instant—or so it seemed—having found it tucked away in a kind of antechamber in the furthermost section of the home.

“But, why the hell would he lock it?” I confess I was flummoxed.

Amelia frowned. “Why wouldn’t he? He probably felt as though he were the only one that—I don’t know, could be trusted with it. To maintain it. Especially after the Flashback.” She fingered a small hook next to the door. “That’s odd—don’t you think?”

I stared at the hook. It was the only thing that wasn’t.

“It’s probably on that corpse; the key, I mean.”

She looked up at me fetchingly, her brown eyes—she said they were green—flicking up and down my body, once, twice.

“Now wait just a damn minute,”

“Now you wouldn’t promise me a lighthouse and then fail to deliver, would you?” She ran her hands over my shirt and up the sides of my neck, cupping my face in her palms, tilting her head. “I mean, we are on our honeymoon—aren’t we? And who knows what a girl might do if escorted to the top of that beautiful beacon with the waves crashing all around her and the seabirds—”

“Pterodactyls,” I corrected her. “They’re pterodactyls. And they’ll peck your eyes out.”

“Whatever,” she rasped, and brushed my lips with her own. “What are you afraid of? That you’ll catch the Ebola virus? Or maybe smallpox? The 1918 flu?”

“What I’m afraid of,” I lowered her hands gently. “Is that we’re going to lose the light and get stuck here. Like, all night.” I looked at her sternly. “And I don’t think you want that.”

She picked at and adjusted my shirt collar, undeterred. “Why not? I mean, where else should we go? Back to Walmart? Back to those little settees in Home Furnishings, with their hard, hard little cushions—where you were such a gentleman, I might add, to just talk to me and assuage my doubts, and to not try so much as a—”

There was a sound, a kind of warbling yowl, a drawn-out, caterwauling, doleful cry, which rose up from the nearby trees and reverberated along the shoreline—where it was promptly answered by another, and yet another.

Neither of us moved.

At last I said: “That was a pit raptor.”

Nobody said anything as the waves crashed against the rocks and the pterodactyls squawked.

“Out on the point? That’s impossible.”

“No, it’s not. They’re night hunters. They’re just beginning their workday.”

“But—”

“Shhh. Listen.”

The sound came again—briefer, this time, more succinct, as though the animal was moving.

I looked around the room—my heart pounding, but there were no windows, no way to tell what was going on outside. “We’ve got to go. Like, now. Before—”

“But, don’t you see? That’s what I was trying to tell you. We took the top down.”

I froze, feeling as though the walls were closing in—like I might actually pass out. But then—then it just passed, I can’t really explain it, and I was myself again (the “cool cucumber,” as Amelia had described me), and what’s more, I’d accepted it. Accepted that I had led us blunderingly into a bad situation because I had hoped, in some dim quarter of my mind—and this despite it being the end of the world itself—to make time with her.

Amelia. The girl I’d met in a ruined Walmart in Coos Bay while scrounging for a pair of shoes—again, while the sun was going down—as well as something to eat. I guess one didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry. Either way, one thing had become clear. And that was that, for this night, anyway—we weren’t going anywhere.

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