A&W
“Fear is the Mind Killer”
It was June 10th, day 100 in lockdown, and what Alex really wanted was a root beer. Root beer is not something you can easily get where Alex is from, that being Guatemala City, Guatemala, and the lockdown just made it significantly harder. That fine Wednesday morning, Alex resolved that today he would leave his apartment and get himself one. He was, however, terrified and unable to move.
He kept thinking how much alike to The Stand or all those zombie movies this whole situation was, making him even more scared and paranoid. In early April, a tiger had tested positive, and since then four more had also been infected, as well as three lions and two cats. In Alex’s mind, this surely meant that all animals would soon get sick and probably die, just like Captain Trips had killed most dogs in the book. Actually, they were recovering just fine. By mid-June, around 250 thousand people had died, it was not anything close to how the Superflu had decimated the planet, but it was still staggering, and to Alex it signaled the end of humanity as we know it.
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He finally mustered the courage to leave the apartment thanks to a memory that floated to the top of his mind of him drinking a root beer a few years ago with his dad one Sunday afternoon while they watched football and how delicious it had tasted, and by pretending that it was just a regular day, another commute on his bike to work.
Terror exploded inside of him as he reached for the door to the hallway of his building and opened it. It continued mounting as he speed-walked down the hallway, almost tripping over an appliance left outside his neighbors’ apartment, down the stairs and finally out of the building.
Once outside, what he saw confirmed most of his fears that humanity was at an end. Empty streets except for an uncharacteristic number of animals, as if they had been let out of their cages at the zoo; the filthy sidewalk, as if it had not been cleaned in months; a crow on top of a dumpster rummaging its feather, taking a break from chumming at a carrot in the trash.
Not able to take it anymore, he ran back up to his apartment and locked the doors. A root beer wasn’t worth risking your life for, he concluded, as delicious as it may be.
He hadn’t realized, however, that fear and paranoia had tricked him into not seeing the other people walking on the sidewalk, the cars going down the street outside. That the lockdown had ended a few weeks ago and that life was almost back to normal in Guatemala City, except for a curfew that started at six pm and ended at five am, schools still being closed and some people still working from home. That a supermarket a few blocks from his apartment carried A&W.
