Chapter 1 — Henry
First Light
At 7:30 a.m. the alarm clock started belting out “Last Caress,” hoping to roust anyone nearby out of the deep sleep that was only possible with everyone else gone. Danzig’s drunken Elvis voice rang throughout the room that Henry Morris slept in, bouncing off the surfaces and rebounding into his ears until he stirred. Henry reached out with his eyes still closed and slapped down on the snooze button with a motion that had been practiced daily for the last month or so, thinking to himself, Sure was lucky to find this little baby intact. Not to mention the fact that it’s iPod compatible. That was a nice surprise.
With the song now cut short, Henry noticed the way the empty room seemed to expand in its silence and sat there for a few minutes while his eyes adjusted to the morning light drifting in through the windows. Better get on with the morning routine. Of course, he thought while standing up and stretching, with his back responding in a chorus of pops, it’s not like I have any appointments with the ’ole daily grindstone, and he laughed. His laughter sounded out of place in the unnatural hush of the room but it was still too early for Henry to notice or care.
He walked over to the bathroom to relieve himself of the pressure that had built up in his bladder overnight. He nearly tripped over the long, hardware orange extension cord that led to a couple of power strips, plugged into a generator. As he urinated he thought to himself about what kind of chores that needed doing today. Need to stop by the grocery and pick up some bread, check around for more water too, I’m almost out, he thought, while pulling up his underwear and grabbing the bucket of water he kept next to the toilet. He lifted it up and poured it into the bowl, flushing his waste down the pipes that were no longer maintained by a steady stream of plumbers, all surely named Bob or Earl, most of them with the cracks of their butts showing while they toiled away.
Henry looked into the mirror while brushing his teeth, and noticed how long his charcoal colored hair had gotten. He was beginning to look like Kurt Russell in the Thing. Henry leaned closer to the mirror in order to better examine his eyes. A few days ago he had been walking around and decided, for no particular reason, to smash in one of the front windows of a bakery he often walked by.
Henry had picked up a chunk of concrete that laid near his foot and admired the solid feel of it in his hands. Raising it over his head, Henry smiled and threw it as hard as he could. Of course, the glass shattered in a satisfying crash, but the force of the concrete blew some of it into his face, and frighteningly enough, into his eyes. Henry had semi-blindly walked back to the apartment building cursing god, himself, and whatever else came to mind. Thankfully, he could see his blue green eyes were the same as ever. That’d be the icing on the Twilight Zone cake, being all alone and blind.
After washing himself with water from a bucket, a different bucket from the bathroom one, Henry wasn’t a savage after all, he went to his closet to decide what to wear. “Hmmmm....” Henry wondered aloud, “what should I wear today? Business casual? Formal? Something from the spring collection?” Henry went with the old standby, a pair of jeans and a t-shirt. Outside the day was promising to be a nice one. Henry could see through the window that the sun was already poking out over the buildings surrounding his apartment. The light cast down onto the street and began another day of its illustrious and billions of years old career - warming the ground and sending out its own universal wake up signal.
“Yeah, today’s gonna be a nice sunshine-y kind of day,” Henry proclaimed to the empty room while pulling up his jeans and slipping on an old green shirt, that had once been the color of evergreen, and was now more like an old spinach. He walked over into the kitchen and made himself some breakfast. Once he was finished eating and putting the dirty dishes in the sink, he put on his messenger bag and stepped over the threshold of his squatter’s home.
“Whelp, here we go.” he said.
