Fiction Fragment - The End of the World

Since I had a request for more stories, and since it is still Halloween for the next 8 minutes, and since I like posting stuff and getting people's feedback on it, here's something I wrote in 2000.  I know, it's cheating to pull things from the archives, but it has been a busy day.  Lemme know what you think:
 

I'm looking at these notes and wondering why I'm bothering.  Bothering to write, and bothering to go through the motions of living.  I mean, I know I'm emotionally screwed up.  That rather goes without saying.  I maintain my air of "detached amusement," and it's served me well throughout my life, but now there's nobody around to even notice that I'm not falling to pieces.

Everyone is dead.

That's inconceivable.  Okay, how about this:  My entire family is dead.  That's a little more believable.  I always knew that I might outlive some of the people I care about.  But not EVERYBODY.

The entire city of San Jose is dead.  Well, I didn't know most of the people in the city.

The entire United States is dead.  Nations fall.  But traditionally it's the idea of the nation, not all the people in it...

The entire world is dead.  That means all the other nations are dead.  Every city is dead.  Every family is dead.

Nope, still isn't registering.

In the days during and immediately after the plague, I wandered around in a fugue.  For the first few days I was waiting to die myself.  Because everybody was dying.  I saw a co-worker crash and burn out in the office.  Theo.  He died right there in the lab, bled out all over the new o-scope.  We called 911, but the implosion of infrastructure had already started.  We left him where he fell, and didn't even turn out the lights on our way out.  It didn't matter.  The power failed the next afternoon.

I kept not dying, and then I got hungry.

El Camino was mostly clear, with only a few cars piled along the sides where they'd come to a rest even as their driver's expired.  I realized after driving past 4 miles of strip malls that I was looking for an open burger joint.  Every McDonanld's in the South Bay was closed.  That took a little while to get a grasp on.  So finally I turned down Lawrence expressway, and went to Costco.  I went looking for a snack.  I found a home.

What more could the last man on earth want, besides 582 gallons of Cran-Raspberry?  Or 5200 cans of Campbell's soup?  I also found a total of $14,000 and change in cash, and decided that I was now a communist.  To celebrate my political conversion, I piled the bonfire up in a wastebasket and used it to roast marshmallows to make s'mores.  I discovered that while food cooked over money may sound impressive, it tastes awful.