Son: Random Phone Number, 7-7-08

We could dine for days off the meat in a single human. She had made the suggestion when we were hungriest and the first baby had died, of malnutrition as far as she knew.

She had been out and I was watching our sick, starving child -- Adam, we had named him, the first child of Earth. He was just crying and crying and my temper was short that day. Adam had not been fed for days, her breasts to dry to feed, and I took a pillow and smothered my son.

He cried, and then he was silent. And then he was gone.

She took it well, at first, accepting the inevitable death, but I saw the insanity growing in her eyes. Crazed fear behind dim brown. I imagined they were beautiful once, and I closed my eyes and thought of what they might have been whenever we fucked -- cold, meticulous, save the race sort of fucking.

We could dine for days off the meat in a single human, she had said after we had buried Adam in a small park down the street. We had imagined that, growing up, our son would love this park and play there.

I allowed the perversity, thought I know now the brief glimmer in her eyes was not hope but her growing insanity. It was practical enough -- dead bodies littered the landscape and we were able to salvage the occasional body that had not become carrion or decay-ridden.

Sometimes, with the right cooking and the right spices, we could almost believe that the hard, sinewy meat or a stew of innards came from the finest of chefs. But it was all we could eat, as neither of us excelled at the basic arts of survival we needed so desperately now.

I had vomited after the first time we ate -- hard, painful retching out of my own disgust. That's when I began to walk.

The first payphone I scratched the walls of was no further than two blooks up from where we were squatting. I held my breath when I reached it and picked up the receiver. I heard the comforting crackling dialtone. It gave me hope.

I scratched a note with a key on the wall of the booth -- STILL ALIVE, WHERE R U? -- and then dated it, scratching away the blue paint to expose the metal beneath with crude, large, capitalized letters.

It became an obsession after that and part of my daily routine. After we ate, I would wander the empty streets, seeking out working payphones. Cell phones had virtually wiped out the technology, and my range widened every day. I would wander well into the night along dead streets, empty except for the occasional individual invading wild life.

Since the miscarriage -- Adam II or, perhaps, Eve -- our attempts at repopulating the Earth were all but abandoned. My growing dependence on bottles of whisky -- found by breaking into bars and liquor stores at night -- was not helping the growing dystopia.

Months passed, and I varied my nights between carving new queries and checking the old ones. Sometimes, she would be up when I stumbled in. She would be fiercely cleaning something in their little house, her eyes blazing with obsession and fear, and I would take her from behind, wondering if she even noticed. Others, she would be gone -- at one stretch, she was gone for three days, and that was when I began the brutal work of feeding the two of us. I didn't know where she went, but we had long since stopped talking. I was never awake for the day -- rousing at dinner time and then walking away.

It was a silent existence. I would scream sometimes while I walked, believing that the echo off the empty buildings were other people screaming back. I knew my eyes were beginning to show the crazed fear I was seeing take her completely.

And I had developed a taste for human flesh, to the exception of all others. We had given up our half-hearted attempts at hunting or fishing or growing food. But the supply was dwindling, and the growing hunger was feeding our own dilapidation. Enough months had passed to reduce the supply to little more than insect ridden flecks left on now sun-bleached bones.

Some nights, that was enough.

I had given up hope. I stopped looking at old carvings. STILL ALIVE, WHERE R U? became STILL ALIVE became just the date, hatchmarks on a prisoner's cell wall. It was habit, nothing more. Thus, when a new date appeared on the first phone booth that I had carved, my heart jumped.

Two days before, two blocks from where we stayed, a new date. I felt hope surge, and I saw a light. There are others out there. My mind was beating back the insanity because someone else was out there. There was a phone number and time to be in the booth for me to call.

CALL ON... two days from that day.

Hope.

I was there that day, waiting for that exact moment. Reaching up, I shook as the receiver clicked off the rack and I heard the crackling dialtone. I had found two quarters in the drawer of a liquor store to make the call, and, taking a swig of the whisky I had swiped, I dialed.

Ring.

Ring.

Click. It took a moment to register in my head, to believe that a human voice was answering, and I fought off his first response of just screaming into the receiver. Then I heard a familiar voice:

"Hello?" It was her.

Hope died and the fear returned. It took me completely. I was finally, undoubtedly, alone and hungry.

And I wondered then what the taste of fresh human flesh was like.