An hour and a half into their conversation Caleb began to stir. Once he was fully awake, Eve walked Vera out to the little family graveyard to show her where she had put her family. Eve told her about Kyle and the baby. Then she led Vera over to where she had buried Brent Cast and told her that brief story.
“Man, I don’t think I would have been strong enough to survive all of that.”
“I don’t think I would have, either, if it hadn’t been for Caleb. He is the sole reason why I’m still alive today.”
Back in the house, Vera went on to tell Eve about the journey she decided to take to D.C.
“It seemed logical to me that if I had survived, then there had to be others who had also survived. I just had to find them. Therefore, I decided that the first place I would look was D.C. It being our nation’s capital and all, I figured someone had to be there. I left my home in Alabama, which is ironically about two hours south of here, around the end of June. If I had come north, straight to the University Hospital, instead of north east, neither one of us would have been alone for as long as we have been. For that, I’m sorry.”
Eve waved her off as if it were nothing, though, they both knew things would have been much better for the both of them if she had.
“When I left home, I had one place and one place only on my mind: the Whitehouse. Don’t get me wrong, I knew the president and vice president were dead. Not that I cared much for seeing that low-life, son of a…well, you know.”
“Yeah, I know exactly what you mean.”
“Well, I wanted so much to believe that someone was in control of this country. Days went by, and I traveled slowly. Mostly I walked. I drove some when the roads were clear. Many places aren’t as cleaned up as the smaller towns that were easier to clear. There are bodies scattered everywhere. Cities smell of decay. I traveled only during the day. The dark was too scary. I saw bodies moving in the dark. About two hours before sun down each night, I’d start looking for a place to stay the night. I met no humans, no animals.
“D.C. looked as if someone had tried and failed miserably to clean it up. I stayed there until winter began to fade. Mostly because of the cold, but a part of me was waiting for someone to come. I toured everything. I even moved into the Whitehouse. Slept in every room. I know that sounds stupid. I don’t care. Yes, I snooped around, a lot. I didn’t find anything directly linking him to this mess, but everyone knows he did it. Well, everyone that is still living that is.
“Daddy said he was behind it. Said he was about to do something else shady and he needed a cover up. He and momma would argue back and forth about him. Mom didn’t, wouldn’t believe that Thornton could be responsible for something this big.” Vera became a little teary eyed at the mention of her parents.
“I’m pretty sure that your father was right about him. Most Americans were just beginning to let themselves see him for what he really was when this all started. It was too late for this to be dawning on them, of course. His term would have been up soon. I think he was making plans to get involved in a war with Korea. He knew that most of us were going to disagree with him. I think he even planned to blame this sickness on them. Either that or it was some act of desperation to get Black into the Whitehouse.”
Vera looked at her with deep interest as she said this.
“My grandfather was a reporter for the World Weekly News. He told me a lot of things about Thornton and Black that most people wouldn’t believe.”
“I always fell in the middle, not knowing what to believe. Both my parents were well-educated, and for them to disagree about something was nearly impossible.
“Well, I spent quite a while in DC trying to cipher through some of what I found. Some of it was in code, most of it was in legal jargon, and I don’t speak that language. In the end, I decided that it was too depressing to try to find out the truth so I left it alone. I spent a good bit of time in the Smithsonian, and being a typical tourist. I did a lot of what it looks like you did here in the way of cleaning up. It bothered me to see our Capital city looking so trashy.
“After cleaning up the town a little, I took my time coming back this way. I went to New York, Boston, Virginia Beach, and many other places I had always wanted to see. Finally, I loaded up my memories and hit the road in search of people.”
“I cannot believe in all of that time Caleb and I are the first people you’ve seen.”
“This country is dead. I felt it. I smelled it. I heard it. There is literally no one out there. Fortunately for both of us, that didn’t stop me from looking.”
“You know you are more than welcome to stay here with us if you would like. I mean, I’ll understand if you choose to continue your journey.”
“No, I think I will stay here. This seems like a nice enough place to live. Unless you want to go on the road in search of more people.”
“Oh no, I want to stay right here. For now, at least. I’m not brave enough to venture out just yet. I think I’m still a little shell shocked.”
“I can understand that. So, I have told you what I have been up to these last few years why don’t you tell me more about you and Caleb and your life here.”
“Well let’s see. What was the last thing I told you?”
“The miscarriage.”
“Oh yes, well our story is nowhere near as fascinating as yours. I, we, have stayed home, obviously. My parents raised me in this house, and I didn’t want to leave. At first, we just piddled around here. I liked the seclusion.”
Eve liked being locked up in her house; it made her feel safe. The whole idea that she had in her head was if she couldn’t see the emptiness outside, then it wasn’t there.
“Unfortunately, being cooped up in here caused me to feel like I was going a little ‘Jack Torrance,’ so I made myself take on projects. I rearranged the house creating Caleb a bedroom and playroom, setting up a wonderful library and scrapbooking room for me.” As Eve spoke, she guided Vera on a tour of the house starting on the third floor.
“The only time I left the house for the better part of the first year I was alone was when I needed supplies. I started the scrapbooking room because I needed a hobby on those days when it was too cold or hot to do anything else.” Eve didn’t mention the other reason she set up the scrapbooking room.
On those few times that she had ventured out of her house, sometimes it wasn’t to get supplies but to visit the homes of her family and friends. Most of their houses had been empty, but a few weren’t.
Eve went to the home of her childhood friend, Crystal, on one of her first trips. There she didn’t find Crystal, but she found Crystal’s father and her husband. On another trip, she found her youngest cousin, Avery, in his father’s parents’ home.
From each home, she collected photos, home videos, and other memorabilia and brought them back to her home. Ninety-percent of those things she brought back ended up in her scrapbooking room where she was slowly but surely putting all of the items that she could into albums.
She had also framed a good number of the pictures and hung them up in the hallways of all three floors. Vera had noticed this the first moment she walked into the house. In a way, she found it creepy, but at the same time oddly comforting, which was exactly how Eve felt about them.
“Plus, I needed a lot of “How To” books, especially while I was pregnant,” Eve said, taking her into the library which was covered nearly floor to ceiling and along every wall with books. “I also love to read.”
“How many of these books have you read?” Vera asked, skimming the titles.
“Nearly half of them. I read aloud to Caleb and myself. He loves to be read to.”
They left the library and went down to the second floor, which mainly consisted of old bedrooms that countless generations of the Pack family had once occupied. Eve’s grandfather had been born a Pack, but when he was old enough, he took on his grandmother’s Cherokee surname, Whitecloud.
“I built the privacy fence, which is why there are two fences aroun
d the front of the house.” They were now back on the front porch drinking tea and watching Caleb play in the yard.
“My grandfather put the chain link up a few years after I was born, and instead of taking it down I just built around it when I built the wooden one. The backyard had already had a privacy fence around it when my grandparents inherited the house from my grandfather’s father who died in seventy six.”
The house had been in Eve’s mother’s family for as far back as the mid-to-late eighteen hundreds. It had gone through countless renovations since it was first built, but it still held its original design.
“After I built the fence, I started the gardens. As time passed and this new world began to grow ever quieter, we began to venture out more. I went back to doing what we did on the cleanup crews. I started in the neighboring houses and have gradually moved out of the neighborhood.”
“What all do you do?” Vera asked, curiously.
“Pretty much the same things as we did on the crew; I go in first searching for bodies.” Eve paused to see if Vera was going to ask her any questions. When she didn’t, Eve went on. “I found a few; fortunately, this area has been combed through.
“After that, I begin searching for anything I might need or want. Anything that is unusable or trashed I burn in the dumpster.” Eve nodded in the direction of the big metal dumpster sitting in front of the house next door. “Everything else I pack up or leave covered in bed sheets. Anytime the fire would begin to die I would go to another house.”
“How do you do it with him?”
“I usually set up a play pen on the front porch of the houses while I go in search of bodies. If there aren’t any bodies, I carry him inside. When he was smaller, he was fairly content with playing in the playpen as long as he could see me. Sometimes I would let him crawl around and play, especially if we happened upon a house that had once housed children.
“Did you find anything interesting in the course of all of that?”
“Hum… Oh, I did find a cow almost a year ago at one of the nearby farms. She is in a fenced in lot next door. She was all by herself grazing in one of the fields.”
Eve spent nearly an entire day trying to round up the cow when she found it. She had thought she was going crazy when she first heard its mooing. They had been going through one of the many farmhouses that sat on the outskirts of town. She had gone out there to get a good work truck and to see how to build a chicken coop to house the chickens that she had found a few weeks before; actually, they had found her. She had been keeping them in the lot next door that her cow now occupied while she tried to decide the best way to take care of them. Her books said they needed a coop and had tried to describe to her how to build one, but she wasn’t getting a good enough mental image to build it.
She had just finished taking pictures of the coop when she heard the first moo, but the cow was nowhere in sight. Thinking she was just hearing the wind, she began packing up their things. Then it came again and that time Caleb noticed it. The pasture behind the house was large and a little overgrown so she was unable to see it at first. Gathering her courage, she took off across the field. She found the cow eating grass beside the back fence.
The cow seemed to be just as shocked to see Eve as Eve was to see it. The cow took a lot of coaxing to herd it back up to the main lot and into the trailer attached to the truck Eve had picked up. Eve hadn’t wanted the trailer but luckily hadn’t unhooked it from the hunter green Chevy Avalanche she had found around the back of the farmhouse. She had begun to feel she would never find a truck she could use, so she was relieved when she found this one with a crew cab.
“I got a few books from the library and taught myself how to milk her. I also had a couple of chickens for a while. I think something killed them or they ran off because one day they were there and the next morning when I went out to get some eggs for breakfast, they were gone.
“It felt good to be able to eat something that didn’t come out of the ground or a can. At first, I couldn’t get Caleb to eat the eggs. He had never had them. And he was very hesitant. Finally, he had to see me eating his and mine before he would try them. Those are the only animals I have seen for a long time.
“Speaking of food, are you two up for some supper?” The sun was beginning to set, and the cool night air was coming upon them.
Caleb looked up quickly at the sound of the word supper and said, “Eat.”
“I will take that as a ‘yes,’” Eve laughed.
“I know this a morbid question to ask as we are cooking, but have you found many bodies?” Eve knew this question was coming. She was surprised when Vera hadn’t asked it earlier.
“Unfortunately, yes. I have found about five hundred or so in this area in the last few years. The further away I get from here the more I know I’m going to find.”
“You can count on that. When I was traveling, I could smell the decay. The smell is stronger in some cities than in others, and Kingston is rank.”
“I assumed as much, but I work slowly. Here, Charleston and Jackson are pretty clean because of the work crews.”
“Are you sure you don’t mind me staying here?”
“I’m positive. As long as you help out, hell even if you don’t, you are more than welcome to stay here forever if you like.”
“Oh, I will help out. It isn’t like I have anything better to do.”
“That was kind of my whole thought process on it in the beginning.”
“I do want to go home in a few days, though. Just to get my things.”
“Do you want us to go with you?” Eve was terrified of the thought.
“You don’t have to, but it would be nice.”
“We’ll take the truck with the trailer. That way we can pretty much go there and back in one day. I get nervous when I get too far from home.”
“I understand. And thank you.”
“You’re welcome, but you should know my reasons for going are purely selfish. I don’t know if I will be able to let you out of my sight for any length of time for a long while.”
“As long as my bathroom time is my time, you are welcome to follow me anywhere.”
“I will try, but I do live with a two year old, and bathroom time hasn’t been private in this house since he learned to walk.”
They laughed as Caleb waddled into the room with an innocent look on his face.
VI – Fire
Nearly a year after Vera had come to live with them more people came. Vera had proven to be a great deal of help to Eve, not only with the cleanup and the gardening, but also with the keeping her sane. Actually, they had been a great deal of help to each other in that department.
Caleb gradually grew to love her. The process was slow for him, but when he realized she was there to stay, and she wasn’t going to hurt him, he took to her like glue.
Eve was beginning to feel as if Vera had always been there with them. They felt good being able to converse with another person. Although, they sometimes scared each other when one spoke too abruptly into the vast quietness of the world.
After Vera came, Eve stopped thinking about the possibility of finding anyone else. Subconsciously, she was satisfied that Vera was there, and she felt as if she didn’t need anyone else. This made it an even bigger shock for her when the Sizemores pulled up.
Eve, Vera, and Caleb had been in Charleston clearing out a small subdivision on the west side of town. It hadn’t been the best section of town. Some of the homes were condemned, or at least should have been, way before the sickness. There was one extremely dilapidated house in particular that had been empty when they did their initial search. It was the only empty one on the block. By the look of the house, someone had lived there before the sickness, but by the time they got to it to search it, the house was empty.
“We should knock it down?” Vera said, wandering through the house with a look of disgust.
“What?” Eve paused, mid-bend, as she was putting a few paperback books down into a box.
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“We should destroy this house.” She was eyeing a crumbling wall that termites had attacked.
“Yeah, okay,” Eve commented, not taking her seriously.
“I mean it. It bothers me to look at it. Besides, it’s falling down. Let’s clear it out, take it apart, and burn it down. For one thing, it will give us plenty of fuel for our fire for all of the bodies we have found on this street. Man, there were so many here.” She muttered this last bit more to herself than to Eve. “I wonder why?”
“No clue.” Eve looked at her skeptical, as she took the woman’s words a little more seriously.
“Come on Eve, it’ll be fun and a change from the norm.” Vera was nearly pleading now.
“All right. But I’m only agreeing out of sheer boredom.”
They emptied the inside of the house the first day, storing any memorabilia they found in one of the neighboring homes. The rest they took to the dump, where they had been taking the bodies, and burned it because none of it was worth keeping. Little by little, each day, the house came down. The roof went first, then the windows, then as much of the walls as they could get. Eventually, they brought in a metal dumpster, when going back and forth to the dump had gotten a little tiring. Once they got it down to where they could safely burn it and control the fire, they set it ablaze.
This worked wonderfully for them because fire equals smoke. Up until the point that Vera came, Eve had tried to keep a good fire going for signaling others. Now, they mostly kept it going out of habit.
Before Vera came, Caleb and Eve had found some fireworks, and for about two weeks, right around dark, they would go up to the top floor of the bank building, which was the tallest building in town, to set them off. Always using the stairs. Eve had been completely terrified of elevators in her old life, along with parking decks, and spiders. She was completely aware of her ridiculous phobias. With the idea that the power would go off at any moment, she refused to get in one and take the chance she might get stuck in it. They set off two a night. Unfortunately, no one ever saw them.
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