Fortunately, someone did see the house. They had made sure the day they set the blaze was a day when the wind was calm. This insured that the smoke and flames would go straight up. Almost two blocks from the blaze, they stood, watching and praying it wouldn’t spread. If it did, they were up a creek because they would never be able to stop it.
How they never heard the engine of the RV, Eve would never know. She assumed they were too engrossed in watching the flames to notice. Never the less, the RV had pulled up and parked along the other side of the street from them before they noticed it.
“E, truck.” Caleb was the first one to see them.
“What did you say, baby?” She was holding him on her left hip. When she turned to look at him, she saw a medium size camper, not a truck. Caleb wouldn’t have known the difference.
“Truck.” Caleb pointed, answering her question even though she had seen what he was talking about. Her right hand instinctively went to her pistol. Before she could draw it from its holster, though, Vera covered Eve’s hand to stop her.
“Hold on there a minute, Hellfire,” Vera said in a low voice to Eve. “Let’s wait and see who they are before you scare the shit out of them.”
A man got out of the driver’s side of the camper, walked to the passenger’s side, and began to help a very pregnant woman out of the vehicle. He shut the door and turned to look at them. The couple made no movement toward Eve and Vera. Each of them stood on their own separate sides of the street, staring at the other. Vera stepped up and in natural Vera style began to ramble.
“We are harmless despite what the fire says. It…well, it did what it was supposed to do I guess. Although, it worked a lot faster than we would have thought it would. My name is Vera Gasque. This is Eve McPeters and little man here is Caleb Forbs.”
The woman shrank back as far behind the man as she could possibly get, wrapping her arms protectively around her belly. A pain of sadness seeped through Eve’s heart as she nodded a hello to them. The man grabbed the woman’s hand, whispered softly to her, though it didn’t seem to ease her worry.
“William and Lydia Sizemore. It is a great pleasure to meet you,” he said, stepping toward them a little and sticking out his hand.
Vera met him in the middle of the road as he silently coaxed his wife along. They shook hands politely. Vera turned and waved Eve and Caleb over. Eve took the tiniest steps toward them. She still felt very uneasy about all of this. She shook William’s hand. Lydia never offered hers. Not that Eve blamed her.
“What happened here?” William asked, watching the flames dance in the fading afternoon light.
“We had been working in the neighborhood,” Eve began.
“Working? What do you mean by working?” He looked around at the houses that surrounded them then looked at her puzzled.
Eve proceeded with a quick summary of what they were doing and why they were doing it.
“You actually do that. Handling the bodies and everything?” Lydia asked with a look of disgust.
“Yeah.” Eve nodded as if there was nothing strange about what they did.
“With him?”
“Well, we try to keep the actual bodies out of his sight, but yeah, he has been working right along with me since he was almost five months old. He has been around death literally since birth. His mother died giving birth to him.” Lydia flinched at Eve’s words. “Oh shit. Sorry. Sometimes my foot likes to live in my mouth.”
Eve mentally kicked herself for saying such a thing, especially since she could see how scared the woman looked embracing her stomach protectively.
“It’s all right. We weighed all the possibilities before we started,” Vera explained, switching the topic back to the burning house. “Like Eve was saying, we were working the neighborhood, and the work was becoming very mundane and boring. Therefore, when we got to that house,” she pointed to the one in flames, “we decided to tear it down and burn it. It was already falling in. We just helped it out. We knew it would make one hell of a signal fire. And, well, seeing how you are here, it obviously worked.”
“You know, I think I remember some government officials trying to start up a program like that back home. Not the house burning, but the cleaning up of bodies,” William said, referring to the crew Eve had talked about working on, as he recalled hearing the rumors of such a program.
“As far I can tell, they tried to set that program up everywhere. We had it here. I worked on it for a while. Vera also had it where she is from. It is where we got the idea from.”
“Eve, do you think it is time to turn the hoses on it?” Vera asked, watching the flames and the fading sun.
“Yeah, I guess we should.” Eve pulled the backpack carrier out of the truck and began to strap it to her back. Caleb was actually a little too old for it. Therefore, it was a good thing he was a long, skinny child. If he’d been a chunky baby, he wouldn’t have fit in it.
“Hoses? Do you mean to tell me you have running water?” William asked.
“Yes. Well, most of the area does.”
“How?”
“Richardson has one of the new electric systems. We got it because of the new hydro-damn. It is supposed to be automatic. It is supposed to withstand almost anything; and so far, it has. Most of the northern half of the state gets its power from the station.”
“It didn’t reach us. We’ve been carting water up from the river and purifying it for all of our needs. How many other areas have your system?”
“Not many. No more than twenty or so. Other counties have more and others have none. I guess they worked the way they should, at least that’s what Ryherd said.”
“Who?”
“A military officer I once knew.”
“Eve,” Vera interrupted.
“Okay,” she said, turning toward the fire and situating Caleb firmly on her back.
“I could watch him if you want?” Lydia asked, taking a step toward them.
“Uh. No, thanks,” Eve returned, gripping him a little too tight, causing him to whine.
“It wouldn’t be any trouble,” Lydia continued, not noticing the way Eve was slowly turning from friendly to overprotective.
“No offense, ma’am, but I don’t know you. Whereas you two seem like nice people, and because the world is empty you are welcome in my home. Nevertheless, I have found out that even apparently sane people lose their minds. It will be a long, long time before I leave him alone with either of you. While we are on the subject, if you try anything, and I mean anything, I will hunt you down and murder you without a moment of remorse.”
“Eve, that’s enough,” Vera snapped.
Eve said no more as she started to make her way back up the road.
“I’m sorry about all of that, but she has been through some pretty harsh things these last few years.”
“Haven’t we all,” Lydia said, sounding scared and remorseful.
“I guess so.”
“Don’t worry about it. She has every right to feel that way. Unfortunately, for now that is just how the world is going to operate. People can’t and will not be able to trust each other, not for a long time, if ever. Come on, I’ll help you put out this fire,” Will said, motioning toward the fire truck at the other end of the block.
“If it makes you feel any better, she threatened to shoot me the first time we met.”
“Oddly enough, it does. Thanks,” Lydia said. “William, I’m going to wait in the camper. My back hurts.”
“All right. This shouldn’t take long.” He kissed her on the head and followed Vera down the block.
Earlier that day, Eve and Vera had gotten a hose off a fire truck. This meant that when Vera and Will finally caught up to Eve, she was securing it to the hydrant across the street from the burning house. The hose was a little hard to handle, but Will and Vera held onto it fairly well. They waited a few minutes, after they doused the fire, to make sure it was completely out.
“We live in the next town over. I have a big house. As
I have already said, you are more than welcome to stay with us,” Eve said as they walked back to their vehicles.
“That would be nice. Thank you,” William replied.
Will and Lydia followed Eve and Vera in their camper back to Eve’s house. At the house, Vera helped them settle into a room while Eve started dinner. As they ate, Eve began to feel terrible about the way she reacted earlier toward the couple.
“William, Lydia, I want to apologize for how I behaved earlier. I know it was a bit harsh and frightening. I really don’t want to give you a bad impression about me. In my defense, someone tried once to kidnap him, and plenty of other people have looked at him with that idea in their eyes. Also, if it will make you feel better, I threatened to shoot Vera the day she showed up here.” She didn’t tell them that she had actually killed someone.
“See, I told you. She’s not crazy. At least not completely. I guess if you have survived what we have you would have to be a little crazy,” Vera said.
After the meal, the four of them sat around the living room swapping stories and watching Caleb play. William and Lydia told them that they were from a town called Florence, which is almost a day’s drive south from Richardson. William had been a twenty-eight year old high school English teacher in the old world.
“I had just graduated from College with a double degree in English and Education, and wasn’t even half way through my first school year when… I was unmarried, but I had a girlfriend. She died in a car wreck caused by the sickness. The woman in the other car had cut her hand at work. She was on her way to the hospital, but she was anemic and fainted at the wheel from the blood loss.
“My parents lived in Georgia. My brother called me in late February to tell me our parents had also died in a wreck. A man who died behind the wheel of his car hit them. The man came swerving through a red light, practically hit them head on. No one ever told me what he had died from.
“A few weeks later, my brother called back to tell me he had pneumonia. I asked him if he wanted me to come home, but he said no. I could do nothing for him. Except maybe watch him die, and he didn’t want me to see that. He did make me promise that when it was all over, if I survived, to come visit his grave, if he had one.
“Things got real crazy after that. I only heard rumors about the cleanup crew. It apparently didn’t last long where we lived. I never saw them. Lydia and I met that May in a Wal-Mart.”
Lydia was a thirty-year-old car insurance agent at the time the sickness started. She was married and had a five-year-old son. Her husband died first, in January, of the flu. Her son died of the same thing in February.
“I was going to the Wal–Mart to use the last of my vouchers. When I got there, no one was there but him. We talked and shopped. A week later, he moved into a house on my block. A year later, we swapped a few vows. By October of the following year we were pregnant.”
“How did you end up here?” Eve asked.
“The decision to have a baby was hard. We ran through all the scenarios, weighed all of the risks, although we weren’t actually trying to get pregnant when we got pregnant.”
“Yeah, neither were Kyle and I,” Eve said without thinking. Lydia paused, waiting to see if Eve was going to elaborate, when she didn’t, Lydia continued.
“Once we felt sure the baby was going to survive, we decided to load up the camper and set out to look for survivors.”
“We were hoping to find an open hospital or military base to deliver at,” William told them. “Somewhere sterile with people who knew what they were doing.”
“We would have started searching sooner but we figured…hoped someone would find us first,” Lydia inserted. “It really didn’t dawn on us that we were that alone until we left town.”
“I think that was how I felt. At least until Vera came and told me her story,” Eve said.
William asked, and Vera told them of the nothingness that she had seen during her journey up and down the east coast.
“It is hard to believe that there was no one in the capital,” he said in a low voice.
“That is what I was baffled over. So why were you in Charleston?” Vera asked.
“We were headed here to Richardson, to the college. We went to Georgetown to the military base first. There was no one. Seeing a military base so vacant was scarier than seeing the empty towns we had to drive through to get here. Then we went to Lewisburg, you know because it is the capital city. Richardson was the last place in this state we were going to try. If we found nothing here, we were going to do what Vera did and head for the nation’s capital or some of the larger military bases.”
“Now that we know what we will find there, and we trust you with that truth, we won’t be going.”
“Trust me, no offense to Eve, but if there’d been anyone there, I wouldn’t be here.”
“Since there is no one there, and you are here may we stay with you?” William asked.
“Well, not literally here, but maybe in a house nearby,” Lydia corrected him.
“I think that is a wonderful idea,” Vera blurted, not waiting for a reply from Eve. When she realized how presumptuous she had been, she looked sheepishly at Eve, but Eve wasn’t bothered by what she had said.
Eve was leery about having new people. Afraid that if the woman miscarried or if the baby died of the sickness, she might be so desperate for a child she kidnaps Caleb, but she had to trust, for now. She couldn’t turn them away when there were so few people in the world. “So do I. The more people, the less creepy it will be around here,” she finally said, trying to give the couple a friendly smile.
That night, and for two weeks after the Sizemores arrival, Vera slept with Eve in her room. Eve and Caleb’s bedroom doors had dead bolts on them. They both liked the idea that there were new people in town, but that didn’t mean that they trusted them. Eve had done this for a long while after Vera had arrived, though she had never told her that. Vera had made herself a place in the room across from Eve’s, which was on the third floor, once they had gotten used to each other.
William and Lydia had no idea of this, of course. Since Vera had put them in a room on the second floor, they were unable to hear the four clicks as each individual lock was turned.
VII – Delia
During the first month that the Sizemores lived in Richardson, they stayed with Eve and Vera while they redecorated the house to the left of Eve’s. Lydia wanted to completely change everything in the house, eliminating all remnants of its old inhabitants. Even though Lydia had never met the Lisby family, who had lived in the house for a number of generations, all of their stuff was still in the house, and they could still feel their presence, so to speak. No one could blame her for wanting it all gone. Well, no one except for Eve. She had known the family well. Seeing Will and Vera haul the Lisbys things out of the house opened a path for old memories to crawl to the forefront of her mind.
She had grown up playing with the Lisbys grandchildren. She had climbed the trees in the backyard. Had sleepovers. She knew the house almost as well as she knew her own. A part of her wanted to scream at them to put everything back where it was, but she knew she couldn’t. She had to bite her tongue and hide in her bedroom until the shock of it wore off.
Considering that they didn’t have anything else to do, and all the supplies were at their fingertips, the little group put all their energy into the house. Lydia picked out the paint, wallpaper, and furniture while Vera and Will did the work and Eve stayed busy ignoring it all and working on her own home.
In one month’s time, she had turned her family room into a delivery room upon the request of Lydia. The request had come as a surprise to Eve, and it had flooded her with memories. A part of her had also felt annoyed by this as well. She didn’t like the idea of having to rearrange her home and her life for others. But she knew she was being selfish and ridiculous, and easily agreed to the change.
“Eve, can I talk to you for a minute?” Lydia had asked her nearly a week after they arriv
ed. Eve, Vera, Lydia, and Caleb were cruising the Lowe’s, picking out paint for Lydia’s new living room.
“Yeah, sure,” Eve answered with trepidation, she had been trying not to sulk over what was happening, and had been afraid she had been caught doing it anyway.
Eve gave Vera a questioning look as she followed Lydia up the aisle a little ways out of ear shot of Vera. Vera shrugged her shoulders and went back to trying to match the color of the curtains Lydia had picked out to the strips of colored squares on the paint aisle’s sample rack.
“Will and I were over at the hospital earlier today. It is really creepy in there,” Lydia said, shivering as tiny little white bumps spread across her arm. Eve watched in amazement. She had never actually seen someone break out into chill bumps over the thought of something. It was amazing.
“I know. Luckily, it was one of the first places the crew had cleaned up,” Eve said, weary now about the direction the conversation was going.
Eve watched as Lydia rubbed her hands back and forth and up and down her arms trying to make the tiny bumps disappear.
“I wondered why it was so clean.” She paused for a second gathering her courage, then continued, “What I wanted to talk to you about is your pregnancy.” Lydia refused to look Eve in the face. She hated to even think about what Eve had gone through, let alone actually talk about it with her.
As her mind quickly changed off the subject of Lydia’s chill bumps, Eve asked, “How did you know I had been pregnant?”
“Vera mostly. Don’t be upset with her. I remembered a comment you made that first night we were here. Then I saw the um…outback…”
“You saw his grave,” she nearly whispered, willing herself not to think about it. She never went out there anymore. She felt guilty for not doing so, but it was just too hard to make herself go, and it was too hard to make herself leave.
“Yes.”
Alone Page 19
