“I lost count. Close to a thousand now,” he said. “When the evacuation happened, we had triple that amount. Right after the bombs a lot of people left. Maybe to look for family, to see if their homes were still there. A week later, a lot of people returned. Sick. Now that seems to be the majority of what we get. Those sick with radiation and injuries.”
“So, you’re helping the sick?” Joan asked.
Edward sarcastically laughed. “If that’s what you want to call it.” He pointed to the main entrance behind him. “Right through there is where the sick are. Unfortunately, we don’t have enough hands to help everyone. We do what we can. They keep coming, but we really aren’t equipped to help. We aren’t a medical set up.”
Mark asked. “Have you heard anything about the government? Are they still operational? Are things getting back on their feet?”
He shook his head. “I haven’t heard anything. That’s not to say something isn’t in the works. Just we haven’t heard anything. It’s only been three weeks. If you folks don’t need space, why are you here?”
It was a strange question we weren’t expecting to be asked. I know I didn’t have an answer. None of us did. We set out to find a place where we could all go. None of us really thought of what that entailed.
We radioed back to Level Three, then opted to stop, see what the camp was about, maybe come up with the next course of action.
The evacuation camp was still running, others would be, too.
We decided to stay in the family section, even if it was only for the night.
There was a play area for children, and the kids there ran around playing and laughing. A new normalcy I suppose. The parents set up homes in the stores. We set down our belongings in a former phone store.
Joan and Ted offered to stay with Macy as she joined the other children, and I sought out Mark.
He didn’t come with us to find a place.
I’m glad that I did look for him.
I got to see first hand what the mall had been transformed into.
In the family wing, or the north section of the mall, stores had turned into mini homes. Some people looked as if they took the three weeks to set up a permanent place, using furniture from stores or curtains. There weren’t as many people as I expected or hoped.
Like Edward said, the majority were sick, and he wasn’t exaggerating, in fact he downplayed it.
It was heartbreaking.
Ted had told me Mark was with the truck. I walked through the mall to get to that exit.
The closer I got to the center, I started seeing people in the corridors, laying there, sitting there. It was like a stream that led to a river and the river to an ocean. That ocean was the center of the mall.
The food court and event area were filled with people. Tables moved aside to make room for the makeshift beds on the floor.
There were a lot of those blue mattresses, but more so people slept on the floor. They lined the halls. Sick and coughing, the smell was there as well.
Sounds in tenfold that were reminiscent of the basement. Only there were more crying children. The most gut wrenching victims of the entire event.
When I was younger, I had watched a documentary on Hiroshima. One of the pictures that had stuck in my mind was one of a large building filled with victims of the bombs.
The mall reminded me of that.
I didn’t see a single health care worker. One or two people walking around, maybe checking on the ill. No one really attending to anyone. Nobody administering care. No IVs, no medication, just suffering.
It was far too much.
My mind started spinning and I started thinking.
This was our world now.
Dying. Like the people in the mall.
They had a big beautiful safe structure, but they didn’t stand a chance.
Kevin stood a chance because we helped him out of that squad car. Adina, Van and the others, they stood a chance because we brought them to the basement. I stood a chance because Devon and the others helped me.
The sick, mall people ... didn’t stand a chance. No one was there that could help.
Stepping outside was a welcome relief.
Mark was organizing things in the back of the station wagon when I found him.
“Hey,” I said on my approach.
“Hey.” He shut the hatch. “Come to get some fresh radiated air.”
“Something like that.” I Inched closer. “So, is there a reason you aren’t inside?”
“Yeah, I um, just don’t feel comfortable leaving our only means of transportation out here and vulnerable. Too many people.”
“Most of them are coming here because they are sick and have nowhere else to go.”
“I still don’t trust it.”
“What are we doing?” I asked.
“What do you mean?”
“What are we doing? We packed up, we left to do what?”
“Is that sarcastic?”
“No, I’m serious. I just don’t know what it is exactly we’re doing?”
He leaned against the back of the wagon. “My understanding is that we were leaving to find a place to go. But I’ll tell you Henny, this mall isn’t it. Right now, everything seems fine, because everyone is still shell shocked. They’re rising from the ashes, sick and worn down. But in a few weeks’ time, it won’t be that way. There is very little organization, people are left pretty much to run in packs.”
My ridiculing laugh interrupted. “Packs, like animals?”
“Yes, like animals. No authority in there. It’s like a prison without guards. It will erupt.”
“Wow.” I blinked a few times.
“Look, okay that’s harsh and I don’t blame Edward or any of the other four people that are working here. What can they do? Maybe if they had help, things would be different. They aren’t. They don’t have the hands.”
“What if they did?”
Mark looked down at me curiously. “Are you suggesting we stay?”
“Not entirely,” I said. “I’m suggesting we make a difference.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
Mark wasn’t onboard, not at first, until I really explained things to him.
We were missing it. It was right there, and we missed it.
I asked him what we were doing.
When deep inside I knew the answer.
Nothing. We were doing nothing major.
Despite our efforts, nothing we did mattered because we didn’t have a purpose other than surviving, for doing it.
Was surviving enough?
Little by little we took steps to live. From the bridge, to the bus, to the basement.
Baby steps.
We left the basement to go to the hospital, then set our sights on leaving the area.
To do what? Find a place? What kind of place? Would we know when we found it?
Nothing that we did was long term visionary. It was all immediate, next step things.
There was a reason for that. There really wasn’t a big picture. The big picture was wiped out by a few thousand nukes that left a devastated, yet clean slate.
The world before defined who we were because of what we did in society.
No longer did I wait tables, Mark didn’t do his retired cop stuff, Joan didn’t counsel.
Each and every day before the bombs, we woke up with a purpose. One outlined to us by our daily regimented lives.
That was gone.
The was no bigger picture because there was no bigger story.
We were living in an anticlimactic world now. The bombs fell. End of story. We weren’t running from danger, hurrying for a cure or looking for Utopia.
It was total nuclear annihilation. Any way you slice and diced it there was never going to be a happy ending.
We were just a group of people out there looking …. again, for only the next step.
Whether that next step was the mall or an empty camp site, it was going to be the same thing.
> Day by day, getting though, surviving, looking for something, not knowing what.
All we had left in the world was our ability to make a difference. And maybe in making a difference, we would find the purpose we desperately needed.
THIRTY-FOUR – THE PURPOSE
EPILOGUE
I remember Edward’s face when I asked him if the bus was operational and if it would make a difference if twenty-five medical professionals came to the mall to help.
He thought I was joking, when he found out I wasn’t, his was overjoyed.
So much so, that when Devon and the others arrived, Edward disappeared somewhere in the mall for three days.
He took a little post-apocalypse vacation.
Mark argued his case, he really wanted us to leave. We all wanted to leave, but there was a human obligation to help. We were fortunate, we were able-bodied.
Joan placed the radio call to Devon and told him about the mall situation.
They were happy not only to get out of the garage and have some place to go, but Devon used the word, ‘purpose’
There were reasons for all those medical personnel to be saved, one of them was to help those people in the mall.
And the people that kept coming. They didn’t stop for another week. After that it was a person a day.
I was smart about keeping Macy away from everything. She stayed in the family section, which was relatively calm. Daily she would go outside and play, but she was kept far from the sick.
I am ever grateful to God for my child’s health. In a world where parents lost children, my baby was alive and healthy.
It was the one thing I knew for sure I did right.
Despite my sudden surge of care and compassion for the human race, I still was unable to bring myself to care for the sick. That was just me. Then again, they didn’t need my help.
We didn’t stay long at the camp. I was pleasantly surprised that Ted and Joan came with me, Mark and Macy.
One month exactly after the bombs fell, we left the Mills Mall.
We followed a map someone had made during the crisis. While the internet was still up and running, he had marked every supposed safe place in the United States. Places that weren’t near targets.
The poor man was dying, he never made it to any of the safe locations.
He gave us the map asking that if we found his daughter, he had sent her to Laguardo, Tennessee, we'd tell her he tried to find her.
It was a destination, but we knew it wouldn’t be our final one.
Though once again, we didn’t know what we were going to do, we aimed for West Texas. It was fifty-five degrees and mid-July, we didn’t want to be north when Winter set in.
Maybe along the way, we could serve more of a purpose.
We didn’t find his daughter, I’d keep looking, I wrote about her in my log book.
Somewhere around that little Tennessee town we saw signs that the government was starting to re-emerge.
They wanted people to check in, do a census, find out who needed help.
Surprisingly, there were a lot of communities and towns on our journey that were doing well. Surviving and building to one day thrive.
No one really mentioned wanting the government’s help. Who can blame them? We didn’t want their help. I wasn’t even sure I wanted the government to be up and running ever again.
Only twice did we run into trouble on the road. We handled it. The minimal trouble wasn’t because there wasn’t any bad, there was. We just were able to successfully avoid it. We were always given a heads up when we’d stop in a town on what roads and places to avoid.
There was a lot of destruction and death on the road, but there was a lot of life. We stopped at a lot of small towns. Most of them welcomed us, shared a meal with us and told us their stories and they heard ours.
With no rush to get anywhere, we finally arrived in Texas around September.
We holed up in a trailer at a KOA campsite and were there a week when someone from a neighboring community called Woodruff spotted our campfire.
They checked on us several times before inviting us to their town.
At that point a light snow had started to fall, and it became a dreary, gray world.
Ted was a Godsend to the town, their greenhouses were failing, and he was able to successfully save their hydroponic crops.
We dug in for the winter in Woodruff, making it our home.
A temporary one.
We had no plans to stay there forever, not that it wasn’t a great place, it was. Just not ours. In the end that’s what we wanted, a place to call our own.
Eventually we’d find a permanent home. A good location, one to settle in, maybe start a community like Ted suggested, growing our own food.
Eventually we would do that.
After all, we survived the odds. We were alive.
Macy was a big deciding factor on what we did and when. I needed to make a life for her. A safe one in a world that wasn’t dark with death, but light with hope.
I would get there. We would get there.
Not with help from the government, or some leader by default.
Us. The survivors that remained.
We would do it.
We left the world in someone else’s hands once before and they messed it up. Now it was up to us and it was time to do things right.
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Thank you so much for reading this book. I had fun writing it and hope enjoyed it, as well.
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Nine Minutes Page 16
