American Afterlife by Pedro Hoffmeister

Author:Pedro Hoffmeister
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: CROOKED LANE BOOKS

CHAPTER

33

MY FORTRESS

I START BY BARRICADING the front door with two couches, a table, three chairs, and a bookcase. When I’m finished, I climb over the pile of furniture and try the door, but it won’t move even a quarter of an inch. I pull as hard as I can, but it doesn’t budge. Then I go out the back door and around to the front of the house, try the front door again—from the street—really throw my shoulder into it, but still it won’t move. I’m happy with the barricade, so I go back around through the kitchen door and start cleaning.

The refrigerator is on its side, crashed open. The smell of the spilled food and warm freezer contents is terrible, and I wonder why the young woman didn’t clean this up while she was here.

I find garbage bags and gloves under the sink. Pack everything up, close the bags tight, and carry them outside into the backyard. There’s a tall fence between this house’s yard and the downhill neighbor’s. I throw the closed garbage bags far over the fence into the next yard.

Then I go back into the kitchen to search for cleaning supplies. I find bleach, Windex, and Spray ’n Wash. I bleach the kitchen floor and counters. Spray ’n Wash over the little bit of blood that dripped off the cutting board. Then I take the Spray ’n Wash upstairs and pour most of it over the bloodspot behind the couch.

I move on to the bathrooms. Two of them have toilets broken at the bases, dirty water seeping—brown stains across the floors—so I bleach the tiles to get rid of the smells, wipe the floors with towels, then take the towels out back and throw them over the fence as well.

I scavenge the pantry for what the woman left uneaten. There’s a two-liter bottle of Cherry Pepsi, half a box of Wheat Thins, five cans of black beans, half a bag of basmati rice, three empty cereal boxes, miso soup packets, hot chocolate mix, and a bag of chopped walnuts. No bottled water. No canned meat. She probably finished all that while she was here.

I put the remaining food that I’ll keep on the one shelf in the pantry that’s still in place. But it’s not as solid as it seems, and when I turn to get the food out of my backpack, the shelf falls and lands on the two-liter bottle of Cherry Pepsi, puncturing it. Pepsi and foam spray all over me and the floor. I’m covered in stickiness.

I go outside and look for a rain barrel here, a cistern or anything that would hold water I could use. But there’s nothing, and I go back inside. I can’t waste bottled water on cleaning, so I sop up the Pepsi mess with a dishtowel, then spray the floor with bleach. Still, my hands, my legs, and all my food is covered in dried Pepsi, everything sticky, and I don’t want to spray bleach on any of my food, or on myself.

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