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He dragged the last body into room 14c, the room closest to thefront desk. Over the last 13 days, since he’d recovered from theblackout, he’d been pulling bodies from all over the neighbourhoodinto the abandoned motel. He’d known it was freshly emptied forrenovations because he drove by it every day on the way to work.Make that, he used to drive by it every day on the way to work. There was no work anymore. There wasn’t much of anything. Therewas existence and scavenging. There was finding shelter, but therewasn’t much of anything else that made a life, a life.In fact, he’d thought early on that maybe he’d just call it quits,shuffle off this mortal coil and be done with it. But that was beforehe’d hatched his plan to do what he could, for whomever he could, toturn what looked like a death sentence into, at the very least, anexistence. One that he hoped would eventually turn into a life again.Lives again.He placed the body on the bed he’d prepared earlier in the day.It had taken him three days to bring all the bodies into the motel fromthe various places he’d retrieved them. He chose a motel instead of alarger hotel so he’d have easier access and because he knew hewouldn’t need all that space. He’d only be able to care for a dozen ortwo.Some rooms had two bodies, some had one. He mostly doubled
 
up for the children. He didn’t think there was going to be any wakingup, but he wanted to make sure the children were not alone in theevent of some miracle. The children, he thought, were the saddest of all. The children, who hadn’t had much of a life to begin with weredoomed to die or live the life of a vegetable. Yet, he kept them alive. Why?Because he kept hoping for that miracle, that remote chancethat maybe, just maybe if he kept them breathing long enough,whatever happened would reverse itself. After all,
he
was awake, sothere was hope yet. Hope that humanity would rise once again anddominate the world it had ruled for hundreds of millennia.He used to think that with so enormous a universe, intelligent lifemust have developed on countless planets. Now, he thought the sameabout his own planet, his poor lonely planet. With a world so large, 57million square miles he once remembered reading, others must havewoken up early as he had.In the first few days after his re-awakening, he tried various waysto get news of the world, of survivors. The internet was still runningand so his first thought was to check Twitter, where so much of theworld’s news had broken. Nothing. He googled by date but foundnothing in the last week for the myriad of search terms he had tried.
 
He turned on the radio. Much of the AM and FM dials were static.He did find two stations still broadcasting: one religious and one purelycommercial, both clearly running radio automation software. Hewondered how long in advance they were programmed. They wouldprobably run until the program ended or until the electricity winkedout. Still they were voices. Human voices. Company. And he switchedbetween them throughout the day, pretending that there really wassomeone at the other end.His situation reminded him of an old movie with Vincent Pricethat he’d seen years ago. Something about zombies, or was itvampires. Price was the last human in a world that had turned into awasteland for the undead. Pretty cheesy, even for those days. Thechief difference, of course, was that while the movie vampires sleptduring the day and woke up at night, his vampires slept during the dayand the night. They couldn’t rightly be called vampires, he knew, butthat’s how he was starting to think of them.He had twenty-three warm bodies in his motel. Twenty-threenot-quite vampires. Twenty-three lives that depended solely andtotally on him for survival. He was saddened that he couldn’t savemore, but he knew he’d barely be able to deal with these. His firstthought had been feeding. He knew from the body in room 3a, hisfirst, that these bodies could ingest liquids. When he first tried it 12
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