Whispers From The Dark by Bryan Hall

was back at home cracking open another beer.  He slid the mask onto his head and swallowed half the beer in one long gulp then walked back into the living room. 
    Cody plopped back into his recliner with his beer and took another sip, considering all of the implications of what was happening.  Everyone, it seemed was gone.  Except for him, of course.  There wasn't a chance in hell that he'd ever be able to figure out why, either.  And the more that he thought about it the more he realized that he honestly didn't give much of a shit.
    By the time he rose to get his next beer, he was smiling. 
     
    ***
     
    When Cody made it home Pecker was sitting in the driveway, wagging his tail in a silent greeting.  The only friend Cody had ever had, Pecker had simply shown up three weeks ago and never left.  He had no clue where the German Sheppard had come from, but the companionship it provided made him wonder why in the hell he had waited until the apocalypse to get a dog.  There were dozens of dogs and cats roaming the town, and Cody usually made it a point to dump a few bags of food out onto the Wal-Mart parking lot whenever he was there.  He'd even taken pity on all of the town's doomed prisoners and freed them whenever he saw one of them struggling to escape.  They didn't deserve to starve to death, after all.  
    “Hey good boy,” Cody said as he climbed out of the truck, rubbing the dog’s head. 
    He checked the fuel levels on the generators and started them.  Then he stripped naked before going into the house, fearful that the stink of the burnt corpses would permeate the house. 
    The end of the world had been good for Cody, and a hell of a lot easier to deal with than movies made it seem.  The electrical grid had indeed died a week after Thanksgiving, but generators were an easy alternative, especially since he'd stockpiled so much gas.  Cody was even becoming moderately sure that he could rig up a generator to power up a filling station so that the pumps would work again if it came to it, letting him keep getting fuel as needed. 
    He'd loaded up the biggest generator Lowe's had, then two more just like it.  He'd had to figure out how to use the forklift in order to lift the heavy bastards onto the truck by himself, and had nearly killed himself unloading the first one before he decided just to leave the others in the truck and park it on the lawn near the house, running them from there.  It wasn't like there was a shortage of vehicles waiting for him to choose from, after all.
    Once he'd taken care of his power situation Cody had set about making himself comfortable.  There was no point letting all of mankind's technology go to waste, he figured. 
    He'd returned to the Wal-Mart and nearly cleaned out its electronics section that day, making two trips in a full-size pickup and hauling back a massive flat screen television for the bedroom and for the living room of his new house along with new Blu-Ray players, X-Boxes, PlayStations, and one of every game and movie in the store.  He'd never been taken with MP3 players, so he snagged a good sound system with a CD player along with all of the good CDs the store stocked. 
    The beer department had been next, and Cody had even been sure to salvage as much meat and frozen seafood as he could, storing them in a pair of deep freezers he'd moved with another truck and left hooked to a generator full time.  One day the meat would run out, he knew, and he'd be stuck with canned foods from there on out.  Until then, however, there was no point not enjoying steak and lobster as much as possible. 
    After that, he'd paid a visit to the beer store.  Then the liquor store.  He had a bar that would have made him drool before the end came, all for his enjoyment.  He'd taken a special liking to the eighteen year old Glenfiddich. 
    Cody scarcely had time to pour himself a glass of the scotch when the rain began to fall, pounding like thunder on the metal roof.  It