Prospero's Half-Life Read Online Free PDF Page A

vegetables and stuff while I go get changed”. She
squeezed past him without looking and left him alone in the
kitchen.
    The fridge was
getting bare, Richard noted, but it did have a lone green pepper
and some likely-looking mushrooms. He put those beside the pile of
pasta ingredients and leaned against the stove. After what seemed
like forever Samantha came back into the kitchen, having changed
into a white halter top and a pair of jeans. Richard’s eyes widened
and then he immediately began scratching his nose, trying to cover
it up. Samantha apparently had some curves, underneath that green
uniform.
    “ So, do you want to chop these while I get water boiling?” she
asked, her voice tired and uncaring.
    “ Sure”, Richard replied, and sought out a largish knife from
the block on the counter.
    They made
dinner in silence, with Richard doing all of the prep work and
Samantha the actual cooking. There was no meat, but the sauce that
she had chosen was a four-cheese blend and sounded like heaven to
Richard, who had spent the last few weeks eating his mother’s store
of frozen dinners. He’d stuck to crackers and biscuits for the
first few days after she’d disappeared, and then, after slowly
realizing that she was in all likelihood not returning, began to
dig into her stores.
    After
everything was finished cooking they combined it into a large steel
pot and brought it out into the living room. Samantha left and
returned shortly with plates and utensils. She sat back in the
loveseat and Richard reclaimed his spot on the couch.
    “ Do you want to watch a movie?” Samantha asked. “I’ve got a
bunch of DVDs kicking around here”.
    “ Sure, that sounds fine” Richard replied. She gestured towards
the pile of cases that lay beside the TV and then began dishing
herself up a plate of food.
    Richard pored through the DVDs for a few minutes, not really
caring what was there. It seemed strange, after the events of the
past few weeks, to be doing something as mundane as sitting down to
eat and watch a movie with a pretty co-worker. Then again,
he had tried to go
about his business running the store as if nothing had changed in
the world. As he chose a random DVD he concluded wryly that perhaps
he didn’t have the right to determine what was strange anymore.
Maybe everything was strange now.
    “ Sex and the City?” Samantha asked, half-confused and
half-amused. Richard looked down at his hand and cursed
silently.
    “ Sure, why not?” he covered. “I haven’t seen it yet, and
there’s no time like the present, right?” Samantha just smiled
mysteriously, nodded, and proceeded to feed the disc into the
player.
    They ate and
watched the movie in silence. Outside, the sun set and darkness
slowly replaced the light filtering through the curtains. About
halfway through the movie, at a seemingly arbitrary point, Samantha
pressed the pause button.
    “ Quietly”, she whispered to him. “To the window. Don’t move too
much. Pull the curtains aside a little bit”.
    Richard did as
he was told. He crept up to the curtains and pulled them aside ever
so slightly. Momentarily he wished that he had not.
    The
streetlight still shone out on the street, illuminating a varied
collection of bloodied corpses. It was immediately apparent, even
in the strange artificial light thrown off by the streetlamp, that
not all of the blood was from the hemmhoraging that accompanied the
sickness. Bullet wounds were evident on several of the corpses,
especially those on the other side of the street. Some had only
ragged, pulped remains where much of their heads had been. Some
were missing their heads entirely.
    The hospital
that many of these gunshot corpses lay in front of was not the
hospital that Richard remembered from the few times that he had
been forced to go there. That hospital had been a mundane, almost
boring place, rundown and needing a modern retrofit. This hospital
was a jury-rigged fortress, barricaded and boarded with whatever
must