Alone

by Jennifer Reynolds

  Letting go of the curtain, she stepped back, away from the tub. Time stopped. The air seemed to cease circulating. Eve’s eyes found the woman’s wrist again. She couldn’t see the instrument Gladice had used to butcher herself, not that her mind really cared about it. She was focused on the wounds. Gladice cut herself deep. The skin on either side of the wound had folded over revealing a fissure. Eve stared into the cavern.

  Images of herself in the woman’s position swam into her head. She imagined the loneliness Gladice must have felt. Imagined the sorrow of losing every person she had ever known. These things weren’t very hard for Eve to imagine. She had lost everyone. Everyone but Caleb. In her mind, Eve put herself in Gladice’s shoes. She watched her go down into the basement to flip the breaker box. It would be easier to do in the dark. Easier to pretend it is all a nightmare she is about to wake up from.

  After that was done, she walked back upstairs, wandering her way in the dark through a house she has lived in since birth. A house that she knows better than she knows herself. She enters the tiny little bathroom that was all hers when she was growing up. One lonely candle sits on the sink. She strips, letting the clothes fall wherever they want.

  The water is steaming, and her skin immediately turns bright red when she sinks into it. Slowly, she lowers herself down, until she is completely submerged. She could do it this way, she thinks. Just stay under water until she quits breathing. No, she couldn’t. Her instincts take over and after a long while, she lets her body float back to the surface. The tool is on the toilet. It lies there glinting in the fire light, begging her to get it over with.

  At first, she can’t do it. When the blade touches her skin, it is cold, and she jerks it away. She makes herself remember, remember all the bodies, the blood, the smell, the digging, the ash, all of it. This gives her the motivation she needs, and without thinking, she digs in.

  Kyle was the one to find Eve, lost in her head, staring motionless at the body in the tub. He had to get Andrea and Ella to help him carry/drag her out of the room. Eve stayed in that shock-induced-coma-like-state for almost an hour.

  When she woke, she was sitting on the floor in a strange living room crying so hard her head was pounding and her eyes were burning. How and why she was on the floor, she never found out.

  “Andrea’s outside trying to keep Caleb entertained,” Ella said in a low voice when she realized Eve was aware of her surroundings. The tiny, mouse of a girl bent down in front of her to get attention, thinking that Eve would be wondering where the baby was.

  “I…I can’t go to him right now,” she whispered back. She could hear him screaming at the top of his baby lungs for her, but she couldn’t get herself under control enough to go to him.

  “That’s okay,” Ella said and smiled at Kyle who was sitting on the floor behind Eve, slowly rubbing her back.

  “I don’t want him to see me this way,” Eve continued as if the other woman hadn’t spoken.

  Ella nodded, said, “I’ll go see if I can help calm him down,” and went back outside.

  Eve’s knuckles were turning blue from all of the unconscious twisting and turning she had been doing on the rag she hadn’t even known she had been gripping. Eve could feel Kyle trying to stop her hand, trying to pull her off the floor and into a chair, but her mind was so focused on the images in her head that she couldn’t submit to him. She was trying desperately to not think about what she had just seen, what she had imagined.

  “Eve…Stop…Eve. Stop.” The next thing she knew he had her arms pinned to her side and he was carrying her across the room.

  “Okay…All Right,” she screamed. “Thud” was the next sound she made when he dropped her on her ass in a chair at the other end of the room.

  “All right. I’m over it,” she said again not looking at him. Tears were still rolling down her cheeks, but her thoughts were clearing.

  He knelt down before her, took the washcloth from her hand, and began to wipe away her tears. “You have to calm down and tell me what happened to you.”

  “I…I can’t.”

  “Something happened. I’ve never seen you react that way to a body before.”

  “Nothing happened. I just…for a second there, I imagined that was me lying in that tub, and I…”

  “Hush. You are stronger than she was. Come on let’s get out of here.”

  Andrea asked Kyle to drop the three of them off at Eve’s house before the group went on to their normal rounds. Apparently, they had already informed the officer in charge of what had happened, and everyone agreed that Eve would take the rest of the day off, and Andrea had volunteered to stay with them.

  The first thing Eve did when they got home was shower—she swore that she would never let herself sink into a tub of water again. Her skinned crawled with an invisible film of filth just thinking about it.

  Kyle came by after work, per his usual routine. After dinner, the three of them sat out on the front porch. No one brought up the events of the day, though both Andrea and Kyle wanted to know how she was really handling things. Eve had said near nothing since she had gotten out of the bathroom, and they were beginning to worry about her.

  As soon as she felt that Caleb was sound asleep, she started her diatribe, relieving them both. “I understand the fear. The loneliness. The knowledge that one of these days, very soon, I’m not going to wake up. The knowledge that Caleb is the only living soul on this planet that has any blood relation to me, and when he dies my entire family will be gone. The emptiness that the world holds, the vast quietness that fills my ears, I feel. I understand the helplessness, and all the other emotions that had crawled their way to the surface of her mind.

  “What I don’t understand is why a person would do that to themselves. She wasn’t sick yesterday when I saw her. She and Katie were talking and laughing.” Katie was another random survivor that Eve didn’t know well, but saw every day. “They seemed to have found kindred souls in one another. It seemed they would have given each other a reason to live.”

  Before Andrea or Kyle could say anything, she continued. “She scared me. For the first time, I truly felt terrified. To think that there are people out there actually helping this thing wipe us out. Seeing her made me want to hit her for being so selfish for leaving the rest of us to clean up after her. Leaving us alone. The others couldn’t help it, but she could. She could have stayed to help the rest of us survive. But no, she gave up. I wonder how many others just gave up and left the rest of us caring for the world.”

  Kyle and Andrea didn’t comment. They just let her rant. This wasn’t the first suicide for either one of them. Suicides made up at least twenty percent of the bodies they found. Murder was about another twenty percent. Eve didn’t see it because for the most part she didn’t have house duty.

  What they couldn’t understand, and what she refused to tell them was that her anger was a front. Yes, she was angry over what the woman had done. Yes, she did feel all the things she was ranting over, but what she was really thinking, really feeling was horror over how much she could relate to the woman’s situation and fear over how easily that could have been her in that tub.

  -----

  Sunday was a much better day. No one worked. They all packed some food and went over to the house Captain Ryherd had made home for a cookout. Eve received some funny looks when she pulled out a camera. In her other life, she had been somewhat of an amateur photographer. She had never taken a class and hadn’t owned a professional camera, but she had an eye and was rarely seen without a camera.

  Understandably, she had rarely taken a picture since the day her sister had passed away. It was a little spine tingling for her at first looking through the eye of the camera at everyone. The people around her almost looked like fictional characters in a movie. All of them were wandering around playing their parts and saying their lines, but the story they were acting out wasn’t real. She had come close to putting away the camera, but after a few shots she began to feel better, more
comfortable, more normal with it in her hand.

  VIII – Beer and Raviolis

  The next week the cleanup crew’s roster was down to a little over twenty-five people. On Wednesday, both of Kyle’s roommates had passed away. One of the guys had gotten a bad staph infection in his leg that had spread throughout his body in less than twenty-four hours. Where and how he had gotten it they never found out. Russ, the one who had been Kyle’s best friend nearly all of his life, had gotten a simple summer cold a few days before he died.

  Kyle said they had met in first grade fighting over a Nerf football, and had been inseparable from that day forward. They had reminded Eve of Hannah, and how the two of them had been. She missed Hannah more than she had words for. The only reassuring thought she had concerning her roommate was that she didn’t know for sure if Hannah was dead. She could be like Eve spending her days working and her nights helping take care of survivors. These were the thoughts she carried with her whenever her mind wandered Hannah’s way or even wandered in Doyle’s direction.

  Eve offered to help Kyle bury Russ, but he declined, needing, wanting to do it on his own. Ryherd even offered to give him the day off, but he wouldn’t take it.

  Thinking of Kyle and his friend got Eve and Andrea discussing and thinking of their own friends and family. “It was funny how things and people tend to slip your mind when the world is coming to an end,” she told Andrea as they discussed all the people and friends they had grown up with and hadn’t checked on since the sickness.

  Thinking of old acquaintances made her deeply regret not trying to stay in some sort of contact with them all. She knew that they were or had been just as busy with their families as she had been with hers, but that justification didn’t feel very convincing. There was supposed to be a database that had a listing of all the deceased in the area. Captain Ryherd told them they could search it if they wanted, but she could never bring herself to do it. She told herself that she was content living in blissful ignorance of the truth.

  After their shift that Wednesday, Kyle planned to bury his friend. Eve arranged for Andrea to sit with Caleb while she spent a little alone time with Kyle. The desire to comfort him had come as a shock to her, but she had been unable to shake it.

  “What are you going to do for him?” Andrea asked, watching Eve try on clothes. The man was grieving and wouldn’t care what she looked like, though, this didn’t stop her from wanting to look good when she saw him. She wasn’t sure when she had started caring what he thought of her. She just knew that one afternoon she had rushed home to shower and change clothes before he came over. During the day, she couldn’t help the sweat and dirt, but at night, she wanted to be clean and pretty when he showed up.

  “I don’t know. You are closer to him than I am. What should I say or do?”

  “If I knew the answer, I would be there myself. I thought you had a plan.”

  “Nope. There’s not much I can really do, but I feel I should do something,” Eve said, trying on another shirt.

  “I can think of a little something you can do to make him feel better.” Andrea’s voice held a hint of amused mischief.

  “What? No… Well, maybe. Probably not.”

  Andrea gave her a knowing smile that Eve ignored.

  “I just don’t know what to say to him. I mean we have all lost people, and we have all been left to pretty much grieve on our own. If he hadn’t been there for me these last couple of weeks, I probably wouldn’t be going to him now,” Eve said, discarding another piece of clothing.

  “Cold.”

  “Well, there is no comfort in any of this. I cannot tell him that everything will be all right because it will never be all right. Things are never going to get better, so I cannot tell him that the pain will ease with time.” Eve tried another shirt.

  “Then why go over there? I feel the same way which is why I’m not rushing off to help him. We are friends, yes, but that doesn’t mean I know what to say or do or how to help.”

  “I have to go because I feel like I should do something for him. In my other life, if one of my friends was hurting emotionally, we would get them drunk, high, laid, fat, or all of the above. But now.”

  “You can still get him laid, drunk, and fat. I wish I could say high, but I’ve never smoked and wouldn’t know where to get anything like that.”

  “Prude… All my contacts are dead. Trust me, I have tried to find them.” That was kind of a lie. She had looked up one of her contacts back in March. He said he could get her a little something, but she had never heard back from him.

  “Eve, our little stoner, I would have never guessed.”

  “That was a different life. It is weird thinking of things as being in a past or in a different life. Even if that life was just six months ago… Sorry, things are just a little crazy in my head.”

  “I know what you mean. Thoughts like that are constantly popping up in my head. The only thing I can think of for you to do is go down to the liquor store and pray that they have something and carry him some food. I bet he hasn’t eaten. No one thinks to do that anymore.”

  “I guess some beer and Raviolis will do. The last time I went to the supermarket they were out of meat of any kind, and I didn’t lay out anything this morning to cook for dinner.”

  “I overheard Candace telling Annah that Ryherd was assigning their group a new job. She said that now that the trucks have stopped delivering, their job is to clear out and dispose of all the ruined food. People are going into the stores so desperate for something to eat that they are eating anything they can get their hands on and getting food poisoning. No one has worked in this town besides us in weeks. So there hasn’t been anyone to take the bad stuff off the shelves, and God knows we don’t need people dying from eating bad food on top of everything else.”

  “I hadn’t even thought of that,” Eve said, making a mental note to check the dates on the food she had in storage. Changing the subject, she said, “Are you sure you don’t mind watching Caleb while I go and check on Kyle? He’s asleep and should stay that way for the rest of the night. I’m going to try to convince Kyle to come here and stay. No one needs to be alone right now.”

  “No, I really don’t mind. Besides, it probably wouldn’t be a bad idea to have a male around the house. One that doesn’t drool and spit up, that is. Perhaps having him here will deter any crazies who might have their eyes on this place from acting on any insane ideas.”

  “Do you really think that someone is scoping this place?”

  “Oh, don’t act like you haven’t thought about it. I see you walking around here looking all paranoid, locking and relocking doors and windows.”

  “You’ve noticed that, huh,” I said, and she nodded. “I guess I would feel safer with more people around here.”

  “Go on and check on Kyle. You give him anything he needs. Caleb and I will be safe, I promise.”

  “How does this look?” Eve said, motioning to the jeans and top she was wearing.

  “I still say you should wear one of those nighties you have in the top drawer of your dresser.”

  Eve gave her a horrified look.

  “You look fine. Everything you have tried on has looked fine.

  -----

  The drive to Kyle’s apartment was a short but creepy one. Eve hadn’t been out of her house at night alone in nearly six months. The night was a little noisier than she thought it would be. More people seemed to come out at night. Calling them people might be overstepping it a bit. What they really were, were carbon-based life forms that wander around in a drug- or-alcohol-induced fits of hysteria.

  The walk from the car to his building was the most heart-pounding walk she had ever taken. Kyle met her at the door. Even through all of the ruckus the shell-shocked made, the sound of a car could be heard for blocks.

  “Eve, what are you doing here?” He looked horrible. His hair was in a matted, wet mess, and his clothes barely hung on his body. His skin color, which was normally a nice shade of brown
, was now a dull shade of ashy white. He looked almost through her to the night behind her with dark, blood-red eyes.

  “I thought you could use a drink and maybe some food, so I brought you some Coors Light and Raviolis. I also thought that, maybe, you could use a little company,” she said in a cheery tone that he could tell was forced.

  “I don’t feel much like drinking or eating, but the company would be nice,” he said, opening the door wider for her to enter his apartment.

  “That’s fair. Do you mind if I have a beer? My nerves are shot from the drive over,” she said and carried her items into his kitchen.

  “Don’t take this the wrong way. It’s not that I’m not grateful that you came, but you shouldn’t have taken the chance of driving over here in the dark.” He closed the door and followed her into his home.

  “The drive wasn’t really all that bad,” she lied. “Besides I had a little protection.” She pulled her father’s pistol from the back of her jeans and showed it to him.

  “Where the hell did you get a gun?” he asked, looking at her then down at the gun and back again.

  “It’s…was my dad’s,” she said, handing the gun to him. She walked passed him and into the living room.

  “Do you even know how to use this thing?”

  “Sort of. I have seen my dad shoot it a few times. I’m a good faker. I had you guys believing I could use that shot gun the day we met.”

  He laughed at her then gave her the gun back.

  “Remind me to teach you. So how about that beer?” He had changed his mind and thought a little mind-numbing refreshment might do him good.

  “You want to watch a movie?” Kyle asked.