Routines
Paranoids Survive
I jumped at every noise, even the familiar ones like the cracking of wood-frames on the roof, or a gentle breeze rustling tree branches. Almost each time, a dog howled.
The dog. Was there more than one? In the complete eerie silence, I believed I detected two different barks, lamenting their desperation to the night. I would have looked for those dogs in the morning.
At times, Mary and I whispered a few words to each other. She'd had an agitated night herself, and we both checked on Annah often. She whined at times, or had some jerky leg movements that kept us awake. Apart from that, Annah had a full night of sleep, thank God. The resilience of children...
We all needed to become resilient now. Dawn came; I heard birds sing as they used to do every morning since the temperature had risen again. I was tired, but happy we were still alive.
Life! The world wasn't dead. Nature assimilated the apparent extermination of the human race with a shrug of her shoulders. In a few decades, if humans disappeared as the dominant species on Earth, Mother Nature, no longer pushed back by countless human opponents, would absorb many of our artifacts. Vegetation would take its place and plant new roots. It would be weird to watch this transformation happen.
I got up slowly, trying not to wake Annah... or Mary, who appeared to have at last found some peace in her sleep. I went to our home office and, with trepidation, opened the Facebook ads management page.
"Yes!" I pumped my fists. The ad campaign status had finally turned active! Our message in a bottle had already reached some fourteen thousand home pages. Fourteen thousand. Didn't seem such a good start when I needed to reach hundred of millions. This would take years!
Maybe ads began slowly; maybe their rate would pick up soon. Dear God! The Internet will not last that long.
I prayed for those across the world who were in our same situation; those whose lives had turned into the equivalent of a tiny island of pseudo-normality in an infinite ocean of human vacuum and deaths. I prayed they had access to their Facebook pages, too.
I took the binoculars, and scanned outside through the two windows. Empty roads in the distance and, further away, a couple of villages perched on low hilltops. Nothing moved, and the same truck that ended its run on a field. Like yesterday. Too distant to distinguish any details, but I was sure a body rested in that truck's cab.
I could see nearby houses. No vital signs from roofs, no white smoke from chimneys, no one preparing breakfast. And only the sounds of nature.
It must have been that way thousands of years ago, when human colonization of the planet was still confined to small groups of huts. A bunch of frail humans helping each other, fending off daily dangers and surviving. Year after year.
I sighed; we had no human co