Black Autumn Travelers

by Jeff Kirkham

  Could she wear the ugly dresses and the eighties hair? Would she bail on him, taking the boys, even if it meant she had to bang an old dude? He could see that happening. Hell, he could even imagine it. It made him sick.

  It didn’t have anything to do with Julie. She was a good woman, maybe better than he deserved. It was him. He hadn’t been man enough to protect them. Even in the middle of Anaheim in good times, he had plenty of doubts about himself. Now, with America in the middle of Planet of the Apes, would she bail on him?

  Even if he knew for sure she didn’t want to be rescued by him, Cameron still felt just fine about killing pilgrims. They could take his wife and his boys, but he would charge hefty interest. Drilling them, one at a time, felt pretty good right now. Popping holes in the old geezers who ran this place… that would feel even better.

  Looking down at the town from high above on the hill, Cameron realized that this town never planned on being besieged by some super-pissed dude with nothing to lose. Part of him was curious to see what the town would try next. He supposed he would keep killing pilgrims until they ran out of plans. He didn’t hold out much hope for getting his wife and boys back, but he was flying high on confidence that he could kill a pile of them in the process of working it out.

  Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.

  Old State Highway 22, Wrinkley Branch Creek, Tennessee

  With the return of the driving rain, everything had gone to shit. The most direct route west had taken them to a two-lane bridge crossing the Cumberland River in the Land Between the Lakes National Recreation Area. As Mat had feared, weekend crusaders—probably refugees from Nashville who owned cabins surrounding the lake―had closed the bridge with a formidable barricade. He had worried about this happening. Every middle-class family with a cabin had retreated to their “bug-out location,” previously their vacation home, and walled off all ingress from the outside world. It was what Mat would have done if he had been a middle-class family man and not just a coochi cowboy on a mission to bed as many ladies as possible.

  Unfortunately, the roadblock across the Cumberland forced Mat and his team to detour farther south around the recreation area to find a bridge that nobody cared to barricade. They finally found a lonesome bridge without a roadblock, and they motored across the Tennessee River unmolested. Mat had been concerned about finding such a bridge across the mighty Mississippi. There would be fewer larger, bridges, and odds of crossing without conflict would be zero.

  His more immediate concern was Caroline. They had only covered about sixty miles that day, her fatigue becoming a game stopper for the group. Because of the detour, Mat figured they had only made about twenty miles of westward progress. When he had stopped for a break, her eyes had been glassy, and she had struggled to get the kickstand in place, wobbling a little when she climbed off the bike.

  Mat called it a day right then, and had her follow him in search of a hideout. Some nameless asshole had shot at his group outside the town of Bruceton Township. The attack had been ineffective, but still unnerving. Mat had no idea why anyone would want to shoot at them. He took it as a dark omen and decided to keep his group close from then on.

  Finally finding a dark chunk of forest outside McKenzie, Tennessee, Mat led the group down a dirt road between a field and another dirt water creek. At least the cursed motorcycles made it easy to ride off-road, well away from pavement.

  He simply did not have enough medical experience to know how concerned he should be about Caroline’s wound. He examined the wound carefully once camp had been set, staring intently at the jellied scab that refused to dry. He had already burned through their bottled water and alcohol towelettes, and Mat didn’t know if the white marbling of the wound was normal or a sign of infection. He had never seen a wound moist for so many days. Nothing smelled amiss, but several smells, including their four days without a bath, made it hard to tell. He couldn’t get a lock on the question that terrified him most: was the wound infected?

  Caroline’s forehead felt clammy, but so did William’s. They had been riding in the rain for three days, and the temperature had been dropping the whole time. Everyone shivered, and all their clothes were wet. They had cycled through everything dry in their backpacks. In the night, they strung their clothes inside the steeple of the tarp, but nothing actually dried. Every morning they put on the same, damp clothes from the day before.

  Mat wondered if he should remove the gelatinous scab just to get another shot at cleaning the wound. He knew that scabs were good medicine and that the body knew how to heal itself. Mat didn’t know anything about wet scabs. Would they do the trick?

  Mat split the difference and scrubbed the surface of the scab with filtered creek water and a T-shirt he had set aside for wound care. At this point, he didn’t think there was a square inch of cloth in either backpack that was clean or dry by any reasonable standard. Again, Mat lamented the loss of his Raptor and the clean, dry space it would have provided.

  He sighed and thought about knocking on the doors of the homes along the country road. It was a crapshoot. Every door would be a chance of death by shotgun. Roll an eleven, they send you away empty-handed. Roll a six, maybe they give you a clean T-shirt and a place to spend the night. Roll a seven, they give you a belly full of buckshot.

  He decided to give it another night. Hopefully Caroline would feel okay after a chance to warm up and get a good night’s sleep.

  Mat dug out the little shortwave radio from his backpack and flipped it on, scanning through channels for anything to distract the group from their sodden misery. Somewhere in the shortwave bands, a voice crackled with farcical banter, a tone Mat hadn’t heard on the radio in two weeks.

  “…Kelley Barracks in Stuttgart, Germany is still holding out. They killed a bunch of ISIS fighters trying to rush the base gate. But they’re running out of food now, so keep them in your prayers if you’re into that.

  Here’s a weird story: Jennifer Watts, a Drinkin’ Bro-ette, off of Galveston, Texas radioed in from a flotilla of boats all tied together in the Gulf of Mexico. They can’t make landfall because of the gangs out of Houston, so they’re just drifting around, eating whatever fish they can catch. A cargo ship carrying produce out of Brazil called in yesterday and I think I’ve got it on a rendezvous course with the flotilla. I’m like the Tinder of hungry people now, using ham radio to hook up grub to girls and girls to grub.

  Strange days. This is not what I thought I’d be doing when I grew up…”

  “Hey,” Mat laughed, “I think I know this guy. It sounds like JT Taylor, this one dude I met overseas. We became pretty good friends.”

  Caroline eked out a wan smile, enjoying Mat’s moment of happiness. “Tell me all about JT Taylor,” she asked as she snuggled up to Mat, closing her eyes.

  Worried, but without anything he could do at the moment, Mat started telling funny stories about JT, the radio quietly mumbling in the background. As her breath deepened, Mat turned off the shortwave and brushed back her dark hair and prayed silently to a God he barely knew.

  In the middle of the night, something awoke Mat. He knew instantly it was a threat, and his Glock was in his hand before he fully gained consciousness. He listened intently, hearing nothing.

  As he sat up and disturbed the sleeping bag, he realized with a sickening drop in his stomach what had awakened him. He slid the Glock back into its holster.

  The smell floating out from under the sleeping bag was undeniable. His beautiful girl’s wound had rejected his first aid and he knew he faced an adversary more malignant, more relentless than any Al Qaeda fanatic.

  Infection.

  13

  “No more petty crimes, nickel sacks

  Rap shows or raves, sunshine or bullshit holidays

  Just radiation and tidal waves

  Death to the modern-day slaves

  Running down the streets without arms raised,

  atheists now give praise.”

  Earthcrusher, Mr. Lif, I Phantom
, 2002

  Old State Highway 22, Wrinkley Branch Creek, Tennessee

  Mat stared into Caroline’s wound in the morning light, and a wave of despondency washed over him. He had never seen anything like it. The flesh in and around Caroline’s wound had puffed up and turned white around the edges, and small dark bubbles had begun to form under her skin. When he touched the skin around the wound, it crackled. He looked carefully for a red line leading from the wound to her heart, but he saw nothing like that. He might have held out hope that it wasn’t an infection except for the smell: a sulfurous stench, like the worst foot odor he had ever encountered. He could barely stand to be under the Paratarp.

  There was no doubt; she was running a fever and her heart rate seemed high. He struggled to believe that something as simple as road rash could take down a healthy adult in just three days. Even factoring in fatigue, cold and wet, it seemed impossible in this day and age.

  He reminded himself that they now lived in another “day and age” and he vaguely recalled stories about Civil War and First World War men dying within days due to minor infections.

  “William,” he turned to the boy. “I’m not sure what to do here. If we start knocking on doors, we might get shot. We didn’t see anyone outside yesterday.”

  “Because of the rain, right?” William asked.

  Caroline turned over and looked at them both. “I’m really sorry about the smell,” she smiled. “This isn’t the way a lady likes to greet her gentleman callers.”

  “Well, the human body is good at dealing with injury on its own, and I’m hoping this wound is something your body can handle. How are you feeling?”

  “I’m okay,” she said. “I’m a little tired and I think I have a fever.”

  “That’s your body fighting the infection. I’m pretty sure think we need to get you inside a real shelter, sooner rather than later.”

  “Couldn’t that be dangerous?” she asked.

  “It’s nothing I can’t handle.” Mat gathered his things.

  In Mat’s mind, he had accounted for being turned down, and he had even accounted for being shot. He hadn’t accounted for nothing.

  It was almost noon, the rain was coming down in sheets, and Mat hadn’t spoken to a living soul. He figured he had walked three miles and knocked on twenty doors, all of them farmhouses. Not a single door opened, no matter how hard he hammered.

  He would approach a door, step to the side of the frame where he might have some cover from incoming fire, and knock, gritting his teeth and preparing for the worst. Then… nothing. Twenty times he had knocked on doors and not a single sound had come from a single farmhouse. The rain pounded on the porches, so he couldn’t hear small sounds, but no one had answered any door. That was for certain.

  Mat considered going back to camp, but he didn’t think it would help. He could once again clean Caroline’s wound, but after three days he knew his ministrations weren’t making it better. If anything, cleaning the wound made it worse.

  In one of his loops down the local farm roads, he had come close enough to the town of McKenzie to see the fringes of the city. He hadn’t completed any actual recon, but heading into town might be his next best choice. Knocking on farmhouse doors wasn’t getting him anywhere.

  The town looked small― maybe a few thousand people―from his vantage point off the highway in the pouring rain. Mat hoped that a town this small might have kept its humanity intact. Without actually deciding, Mat turned toward McKenzie, looking for the best approach.

  If he hoped for trust from the townspeople, he figured the direct approach might work best—walking straight into town and making his intentions immediately known. Mat carried his Glock and it was tucked inside his waistband in a concealed holster. He had left his rifle and his military kit back at camp, thinking the weapons would make people less willing to talk to him, if that was even possible.

  As Highway 22 reached the edge of town, a five- or six-story grain elevator appeared out of the rainy haze with a roadblock near the base, a harbinger of the town’s inevitable fortification. Mat had expected as much. He put his hands in the air and continued walking toward the concrete barriers. Behind the roadblock, twin police cruisers came into view, parked nose to nose.

  “Stop right there and state your business,” a disembodied voice shouted through the rain.

  “My traveling companion crashed her motorcycle and has an infection. She needs medical attention.”

  “Are you armed?” the voice demanded.

  Mat recalled his intention to play this “open kimono,” but telling these guys—probably cops—that he had a handgun wasn’t going to help Caroline get into a hospital.

  “No,” Mat replied.

  “You have to take her to the medical center in the big town, Paris. They can help her there.”

  Mat noticed the cop hadn’t claimed this town had no hospital, which meant it probably did. Otherwise, the cop would have ended the conversation by telling Mat they didn’t have a hospital.

  Mat pressed. “She can’t travel. I’m worried that she might have gangrene.”

  “Son, like I said, you’re going to have to take her to the medical center. We can’t help you here.”

  “I have money. I have gold,” Mat tempted them.

  “You could be the goose that lays the golden eggs and it wouldn’t make no difference, son. We can’t help you.”

  Mat turned and walked back the way he had come, flipping through his options. He couldn’t afford to spend the rest of the afternoon walking half a mile between farmhouses, hoping someone would answer the door, and he wasn’t desperate enough to kick in a door and risk a gunfight with a family.

  Going into the town of McKenzie might make the most sense. The cops had barricaded the big roads, but they hadn’t built a moat around the town. There were still a thousand ways in.

  Mat cut northeast through a field of sodden grass and headed toward a grove of trees, then turned east, certain he would intersect the town proper in a few hundred yards. As he had guessed, the trees opened up and he walked onto a shaggy grass backyard and a street dotted with small, single-story brick homes. Not a soul was in sight.

  He knocked on the first door and nobody answered. After knocking on ten doors without a sound in any of the houses, Mat stopped to think. They could all be dead, but that made no sense short of some kind of biological attack, and even then he would be able to smell it. The people could have left the region, but then why would the cops barricade the roads? The pounding rain limited Mat’s five senses, giving him less information than he would normally have in a situation like this.

  Frustrated and feeling like he had to do something for Caroline soon, Mat walked down the middle of the street, making his way toward what felt like the center of town. As he worked his way west, the roads grew larger and more defined, and the homes became older and statelier—as though he were moving back in time from the 1970s to the 1900s. Nothing about the town resembled the destruction of Louisville. Everything seemed in place.

  Turning a corner onto Georgia Avenue, Mat saw his first human being, a middle-aged woman walking purposefully down the sidewalk. She noticed Mat from a distance and they exchanged waves, which struck Mat as odd until he considered that he was in a Midwestern town of less than five thousand people. Everyone probably waved, even if they didn’t know one another. The middle-aged woman looked like a “normal” American out for a walk in her rural town. An observer would never think Armageddon had come.

  Mat fell in behind the woman, keeping his distance in case she realized that she didn’t recognize him. Also, he was concerned with his state of hygiene after four days riding in the rain. His hair was matted, his clothes were dank, and he had no idea if his face was dirty or clean. He had wiped up that morning, but didn’t have a mirror to check himself.

  After a couple turns, the woman walked up the front steps of McKenzie Middle School and ducked inside. Mat followed her, acting like he belonged. As soon as he opened the g
lass doors of the school, the mystery of the empty homes and empty town instantly resolved itself. Somewhere inside the school, a P.A. system blared.

  “Folks, quiet down. I’ll take your questions one at a time. Now, I believe Mr. Burton stood first. What’s your question, Willy?”

  Another voice echoed through the halls of the school, presumably “Willy.”

  “Mayor Tennyson, you mentioned that we will be gettin’ water from the well, but how do you plan to run the pump? I mean, we ain’t got electricity no more.”

  Mat followed the woman into an auditorium bursting with people. Approximately two thousand townsfolk sat crammed into the school auditorium, and at least another thousand stood around the edges and into the hallway. Mat could barely see inside, craning to look over the top of the thirty or so people standing in the hallway with him. He became conscious of his body odor, noticing that the townsfolk didn’t seem to have missed any showers.

  “Good question, Willy,” the mayor said over the P.A.. “The energy committee gave its report last night to the City Council, and they have collected eighty-five solar panels from McKenzie and the surrounding farms. We think it’s enough to run a small back-up pump. We can recharge the water tower once every two days, give or take. That means we’ll have to ration water. Showers twice a week, folks.” The townsfolk broke into side conversations. “Next question. Quiet down, please. Let’s keep going. MaryAnne, I believe you were next…”

  Mat listened as the town went through its critical systems: water, food, sanitation, trash collection, winter heat, electricity, law enforcement, protection, firearms, medical care, snow removal, governance, care for the elderly, care for drug addicts, care for criminals… the list went on and on. Mat could imagine this meeting continuing for days. It had required centuries of planning and implementation of hundreds of systems to allow people to live in towns without getting each other sick; sharing responsibilities, and striking conventions that kept violence and disease at bay. Within a week, all those systems had been thrown up in the air. In small towns all over the world, people were having this same conversation, Mat surmised, rushing to preserve as much of modern civilization as they could.