But nobody ever answered.

So she crossed off the name and number she had just dialed, and she would say to herself softly, "Now this one is dead, too." She didn't question why the phone lines still functioned, why there was still power, why gas still flowed through pipes. Computers, she assumed, accepted, and held on to her acceptance as a source of hope. Parts of the world still worked, so there had to be people at the dials and keyboards and motors and switches and valves that controlled the lifes blood of the city. At night, though, standing on the balcony and gazing at the city below, she could see that it was dying, going dark and blind, street by street, block by block, piece by piece.

Having reached a stage where she was intentionally trying to trick herself into smiling whenever she could, she wondered what her employees would think of her now...if they could see 'Iron-eyes Cody', sprawled out on the unmade hotel room bed, clad in nothing but the briefest of crotchless panties, dialing numbers of names she had never heard of before...of strangers.

But they weren't there to see and be shocked by her. They mightn't be anywhere at all...

The first day she'd been in Hollywood, she'd taken a taxi to the famous Frederick's of Hollywood, and bought the sexiest, most daring thing she could bring herself to contemplate: A pair of blindingly pink panties, trimmed in black and red lace, with a mouthlike split crotch. She would wear them for her man, James, when she got home.

When she got home...

Her mood was strange today, she realized. Instead of crying again, which she had done so many times, she began to caress and hold her small breasts, trying to see and feel in them what James felt and saw. the soft nipples began to crinkle and rise and grow sensitive. They tingled with her touch, a tingle that reached into her belly. She closed her eyes and squirmed until she could dangle her legs off the edge of the bed and touch the floor with her feet.

James, a confirmed breast man, had spent what felt like hours loving her breasts before he'd moved on...as she did now. Her hand found the slightly damp split in the panties and, thinking of James as him, she masturbated quickly, desperately. Her orgasm turned to sadness and little whimpering noises escaped her throat. They sounded like the noises a newborn kitten, hungry and lonely for its mother, might make in the middle of the night. But for her, a blanket and an alarm clock would not assuage the loneliness of missing another heart beating beside hers.

when it was over, and she had gone to the bathroom and washed, she told herself it was true, she was real, she was still alive.

She didn't know what had happened. She would probably never know. She had flown to Los Angeles from Florida for the annual theatrical supply and design exposition. But the morning after her arrival, when the activities were schedules to get under way, she had awakened to silence. Not a lack of speech and and normal human activity: to a total absence of sound of any kind.

Half asleep, she'd begun wandering the pink, red and gold corridors, calling for someone, anyone, to answer. But all she received in reply were echoes, the soft pad of her own footsteps and bizarre sensations of emptiness and hunger. All her eyes witnessed was an enduring, unendurable look at human bodies. Bodies which, for some reason, had, over time, neither smelled nor rotted...nor moved, nor went away. They just looked peacefully, permanently, silently dead.

She'd gone downstairs, through bodies sitting up, lying down, one or two leaning, as if they were simply pausing before going for a newspaper and coffee and business calls or lap tops. Bodies huddled against one another, on floors where they had fallen, in lobby chairs holding burnt out pipes and crumpled newspapers, flat gin and tonics on dusty tables next to them. Bodies stretched out over the reception desk. There might have been others behind the desk, but she had never looked.

There was one old woman, especially. She had been pressed like a bookend against the hotel's front door. It was half open and the old woman's arm was out-thrust, as if attempting to clutch fragments of outside. Her cheek was flattened against the glass, her lips spread wide in a gasp for air or, possibly, sudden surprise. Dentures were skewed sideways in her mouth. The soft silence of death had left her no pride or dignity.

Right after that, Sarah had grabbed the register from the phone table and run upstairs to her room. For a while, she shook. She didn't cry, didn't scream, just hugged herself and trembled. Then, confused and unbelieving, she called down for a drink. But no one answered in the bar. She'd gone to calling bars, professional associates in the hotel, the Police Department, hospitals, a newspaper and a television station, all the people registered in the hotel and, finally, she just started calling each person listed in the city's phone directories.

It had taken her five weeks to reach the M's in the first, thick book.

"Hello?"

Sarah's eyelids began blinking uncontrollably. Her hands shook and her voice came out, not a whisper, but a quiet shriek. "You...you're somebody!"

For an instant he didn't reply and she thought she might have reached a recorded message, only half played.

Then, "Well, I like to think so."

one hand clutched the phone and the other clutched her breast as she looked at the directory, trying to remember who she had called last. But her eyes were misted with tears and there were so many names.

"I've called and I've called," she said, "and nobody...but now you! You aren't dead like the others."

"Where are you calling from?"

"Why, I'm at..." She hesitated. His voice was calm, and interesting. It sounded cold, or murky. No...smokey, she decided.

"I asked where you are."

Flustered, she had to retrieve her room key from the bedside table, squint at it through a teary cloud of relief and gladness.

"It's the Beverly Hills Hotel. Room 113."

Nothing in reply but a queer, half-stifled breathing. "I'm coming," he said. And then he hung up.