14 My debt 1 (1/2)

'They haven't touched this part of the city yet...'

The surroundings were very different from what he had seen in other parts of Boston. No cars abandoned in the middle of the road, no smell of dried blood coming to attack his nostrils.

Lazar was walking on a street devoid of any trace of the passage of any monster, but to say that the Apocalypse hadn't left its imprint in this place would be a mistake.

Many people had fled, as suggested by the absence of cars in garages that no one had bothered to close before leaving.

Other houses were barricaded from the outside, which meant that fools had decided to stay.

'Monsters aren't stupid, barricades are more likely to attract them than anything else.'

The sign he had just passed indicated 'Fenno Street'.

It was a residential area for people with high incomes.

When Lana got a big promotion a few years ago, he and she had moved from her apartment to get closer to her place of work and to escape the anxiety that living in the city center entailed.

With the 5-figure salary she had just earned, they could largely afford to live in a beautiful house in a quiet area of ​​Boston.

The Apocalypse had taken Lana from him and prevented him from leaving the United States. But when he went up to his neighborhood and began to observe more closely the surrounding houses, he couldn't help but think that there were good sides to it.

Take his neighbors for example. They never failed to display their wealth condescendingly when the smallest opportunity arose, believing that it made them superior to others.

Now they were reduced to spying on Lazar through the boards of their barricades while he was walking up the street.

'We can see their window curtains wiggling from here, a bunch of retarded... If I was a monster, I would already be scratching at their door.'

With an event such as the Apocalypse, one shouldn't even ask himself the question of whether the world economic system had collapsed. Obviously, it was the case.

Now that money is worthless, neither do they.

'Nothing has changed in substance. The world will always be dominated by those who have the most power, what has changed is the way it's obtained. The only ones who will really count in the future will be those who get their hands dirty. Obviously these people will not be among them.'

When he arrived in front of a two-story house with a cubic appearance, he stopped.

The shutters and the roof were light green in color and the facade completely beige. An unforgivable lack of taste, but Lana insisted on the pretext that she wanted her house to look like her favorite duo of ice cream, vanilla, and pistachio.

He climbed a dozen steps that separated him from the door and opened it.

'I hadn't missed that.'

As soon as he walked out the door, his eyes were attacked by the very kitsch decoration of the house, once again. Lana was an eccentric and this was very evident in her decoration.

The best thing she had found to make the interior of the house more pleasant was to display a dozen stuffed animals everywhere and photos of shirtless male actors on whom she fantasized.

Feeling constantly watched by dead animals and not fully dressed guys who bite their lips... for Lazar it's anything but pleasant.

He went to the door to the garage because he wanted to check the condition of the electrical panel there.

The switches were all in the OFF position which meant that the power had tripped. Putting them back in the ON position was useless, he saw that the electricity didn't turn on when he tried to turn on one of the lights.

The freezer 5 yards from him was surrounded by a puddle of water and when he went to open it he noticed that there was no ice inside at all.

He had no way of knowing when the power was cut, but it must have been shortly after the announcement of the Apocalypse.

'Maybe even from the start. Seeing the street it's obvious that my neighbors were warned, but how? Probably one of them who saw what happened elsewhere in town and who warned them.'

A logical but false deduction...

It was 5:00 p.m and because of the power outage, the sun was the only source of light available.

However, one would have to be stupid to leave the inside of his house visible from the outside given the circumstances. He went to close the window shutters… all except those in his room, he needed daylight for something.

There is always one or more elements that make each teenager's room have a special atmosphere.

This wasn't the case in Lazar's room. No particular smell, no particular mess, no posters of his favorite music group. Even his wallpaper couldn't be described as anything other than neutral.