They just couldn't...One
"Mass murder, suicides. It was all the rage in the first few weeks and months of the plague. People couldn’t handle the idea of what they were seeing on the news, others couldn’t handle the loss of loved ones, or the hardships of life on the other side of an open McDonalds and a safe place to sleep. Some just checked out, others said fuck it and decided to take some people with them on the way out."
"As opening day scenarios went, this was far from uncommon. There was a reason I slowed everyone down once I noticed how lived in and stayed everything already looked. We were the first visitors in nearly a decade. These folks had their fill of watching hell unfold on the boob tube and decided that all the herbal oils and cleansing crystals in the world wouldn’t get them out of this jam. They got everything ready, probably had a tearful goodbye dinner with the few who decided to drive out and cast their lot with the wind, then they tucked themselves in and called it a night, letting the sandman with the .357 who probably drew the short straw come around and pump them full of little lead sleeping pills."
"I opened the door to the nursery and temporarily lost the nerve to keep walking in. The room had two cribs in it and I thought about those blackened baby bottles in the sink downstairs. It made a twisted sort of sense. No one was going to draw a straw short enough to shoot them, killing the kids laying in the bed in the master bedroom must have been hard enough. They didn’t know enough about the plague, no one did back then, not really. They fed the two babies one last bottle of sleeping pills and considered it the humane thing to do."
"I looked over at Paul and he was white as a sheet. I pulled out my knife and he put a hand up, “Let’s just leave.”
"I pushed past him. There was no point in considering him cowardly. No point in arguing with him about the finer things. I walked into that nursery and heard a version of a babies cry that simply cannot be unheard. It wasn’t the humane thing to do. There was no adherence to humanity as I used the knife to silence those miserable, hungry cries. Nihilism pushed me across that finish line of that empty transcendence."