After the Plague by T. C. Boyle

like house slippers. I watched her glide through the dead world on the flowing stalks of her legs, a spoiled pouty chalk-cheeked sweetness to her face, and it moved something in me, something long buried beneath a mountain of grainy little yellow-white rocks. Maybe she was just coming in for an examination, I thought, maybe that was it. Or she’d just become sexually active—or was thinking of it—and her mother was one step ahead of her. Either way, that was what I wanted to believe. With this girl, with her quick fluid step and downcast eyes and all the hope and misery they implied, I didn’t want to think of “procedures.”
    They’d almost reached the building when the zombies began to stir. From where I was standing I couldn’t see the front of the building, and the Jesus-thumpers had already begun to fade out of my consciousness, dim as it was. But they came crashing back into the picture now, right there at the corner of the building, shoulders and heads and placards, and one in particular. A shadow that separated itself from the mass and was instantly transformed into a hulking bearded zealot with snapping teeth and eyes like hardboiled eggs. He came right up to the girl and her mother, rushing at them like a torpedo, and you could see how they shied away from him and how his head raged back on his shoulders, and then they ducked past the corner of the building and out of my line of sight.
    I was stunned. This wasn’t right, I was thinking, and I didn’t want to get angry or depressed or emotional—keep on an even keel, that’s what they tell you in rehab—but I couldn’t help snuffing the cigarette and stepping quietly out into the hallway that ran the length of the building and gave me an unobstructed view of the front door. I moved forward almost against my will, my feet like toy cars on a track, and I hadn’t got halfway down the hall before the door opened on the dwindling day and the dead sticks of the trees, and suddenly there she was, pale in a pale coat and her face two shades paler. We exchanged a look. I don’t know what she saw in my eyes—weakness, hunger, fear—but I know what I saw inhers, and it was so poignant and so everlastingly sad I knew I’d never have another moment’s rest till I took hold of it.
    In the car on the way home Philip was so relaxed I wondered if he wasn’t prescribing something for himself. Here was the antithesis of the ice man who’d picked me up at the airport, watched me eat pork chops, read to his children, and brush my teeth in the guest bathroom, and then thrown me to the wolves at the clinic. “Sorry about all that commotion this morning,” he said, glancing at me in the glowing cubicle of the car. “I would have warned you, but you can never tell when they’re going to pull something like that.”
    â€œSo it gets better, is that what you’re saying?”
    â€œNot much,” he said. “There’s always a couple of them out there, the real hard-core nuts. But the whole crew of the walking dead like you saw today, that’s maybe only once a week. Unless they go on one of their campaigns, and I can’t figure out what provokes them—the weather, the tides in the lake, the phases of the moon—but then they go all out, theater in the street, schoolchildren, the works. They throw themselves under the wheels, handcuff themselves to the front door—it’s a real zoo.”
    â€œBut what about the cops? Can’t you get a restraining order or something?”
    He shrugged, fiddled with the tape player—opera, he was listening to opera, a thin screech of it in the night—and turned to me again, his gloved hands rigid on the wheel. “The cops are a bunch of pro-lifers, and they have no objection to those people out there harassing my patients and abridging their civil rights, and even the women just coming in for an exam have