The Apocalypse Seven

by Gene Doucette

  She put the saddle down next to Elton, showed him the brush—​he sniffed it, then looked at her to determine if she was expecting him to taste it next—​and then started brushing him down.

  It was clear immediately that (1) he had never been brushed down before, and (2) he liked it enormously. Win was pretty sure this was a universal truth for horses.

  She spent a good hour on him, cleaning out the nettles in his mane and checking for any cuts or irritation from bugs. There was an old bite mark on his leg, but it was scarred over; it was definitely a wound incurred more than a week ago, meaning before all the madness happened. This contributed to the theory that he was indeed a horse who had been roaming wild for a while. The theory’s counterpoint was that this was entirely ridiculous, which was admittedly also a good argument.

  Win talked while she brushed, telling Elton about Max, and her mom, and what she’d had to do to survive. Then she covered what her life was like in Providence, and before that, when she was an Olympic hopeful.

  Elton didn’t share any of his own history, but that was because he stubbornly remained a horse. He was a very good listener, though.

  Once the brush-down was done, she got him a bucket of well water and another apple. Then it was time for The Talk. She pulled up a stool and sat in his line of sight.

  “Here’s the situation, Elton,” she said. “I think everybody else might be dead.”

  He snorted.

  “I know! It sounds crazy, and hey, maybe I’m wrong. I really hope I am, because, you know. Who wants to be right with those kinds of stakes? You get me. But I think I’m right. I’ve been out and about for a week now, and there’s nobody, and okay, this isn’t a big area, fine. But I haven’t seen any airplanes, either. Not once. And no cars.”

  Elton stared at her.

  “Yeah, I tried driving. I’ve found a bunch of abandoned cars, with the keys in the house. None of them would start. Just as well, probably, since the tires were mostly flat, like, every time. Your guess is as good as mine why that is. That’s why I need your help. I want to figure this out and you don’t have any flat tires. We talked about this before, but you probably didn’t appreciate what I meant.”

  She picked up the saddle, and held it out for him to examine. It was old, worn brown leather and suede. It probably smelled like someone else’s horse, which Elton surely didn’t appreciate.

  “What I want to do is, I want to put this on your back. Would that be okay?”

  He voiced no objection. He didn’t even look particularly concerned, opting to drink more water as his only response.

  She lifted the saddle onto his back. He raised his head and twitched his ears, and if he could speak, what he’d probably say was Hello, what’s this? But he didn’t kick her to death, which made this a success automatically. He did glare at her, and snort, two clear expressions of disapproval.

  She brushed his neck with her hand.

  “It’s okay. Let me buckle it down; you won’t even know it’s there.”

  He stood still and let her tie down the saddle. So far so good.

  “See, it’s not so bad,” she said. “It’s like a big purse . . . that you wear. Okay, not a purse, but . . . Here, I’ll show you.”

  She hung her bags on one side of the saddle and attached her compound bow and quiver to the other side. She kept up the patter as she did this; Elton responded well to the sound of her voice.

  “Okay, next is the bridle. Noooo big deal, okay? It goes on your head, like this.”

  She demonstrated on herself first, then slipped it on him.

  This did not go well, but also could have gone worse.

  He tried to bite her. He didn’t, but he tried to. This was an ominous development considering she hadn’t even tried to get the bit into his mouth yet.

  Max rode without a bit, but Max was older, and was well trained. Elton had either no training or very little. On one hand, he seemed really calm, but on the other, there was no evidence that this horse had been tended to by human hands before meeting Win.

  She got the bridle on. He wasn’t happy with it, but once she started rubbing the spot between his eyes, he calmed right down.

  The bit didn’t happen, though. She tried for something like twenty minutes and nearly lost a finger twice. If the world was still normal, she’d probably have gone online before then to look up how to get a stubborn horse to take the bit, but that wasn’t an option. Her choices were get bitten, or stop trying.

  “Okay, we’ll try it later,” she said. “Let’s get used to having a human on your back and we’ll see where that leads us.”

  Win walked him to the meadow behind the stable. It was a fine afternoon, the kind of day the younger version of Win would have used as an excuse to take Max down the trail until nightfall. And when she climbed onto Elton’s back, for a full two seconds it felt like that again.

  But only for two seconds.

  Win kept a shortlist of the very worst ideas she’d had in her life. They included such chestnuts as piercing her own nose, trying to reconnect with her dad, and a wide range of drastic hairstyle choices.

  Climbing onto the back of an unfamiliar horse who wouldn’t take a bit, and possibly never wore a saddle before, moved to the top of the list pretty fast.

  Elton took off. It was fortunate that she had one hand wrapped up in the bridle, as otherwise she would have ended up on her back right away. That would have been all sorts of devastating, considering Elton was wearing her weapons, food, and water. He still nearly swung her off in transit; she was able to get her other hand around some rope, and then her arms around his neck.

  “It’s okay, boy, it’s okay,” she shouted into his ear. “It’s me, Win. It’s okay.”

  It appeared her voice was no longer soothing when she was using it to shout at him. Elton didn’t have much to say in return, but she imagined if he could speak, he would say, Get off get off get offffff.

  Her efforts to rein him in or even steer him in one direction or another proved fruitless, so she opted to just hold on tight and wait until he calmed down. And also until he stopped trying to knock her off with tree limbs.

  This didn’t happen often, mainly because the speed Elton needed to obtain in order to scrape her off didn’t blend well with the available trails. She noticed this when she first set out from home; all the trails in the woods were overgrown. They would have given a competent team—​like her and Max—​a real problem above anything faster than a trot.

  Elton mostly stuck to open fields and roads instead, thankfully not so panicked about having her on his back that he risked harming himself. Although that might have been because there was simply a dearth of cliffs to run off.

  It took him about an hour to calm down. By then they were who knows how far from where they started. She didn’t know which direction he ran, even. Not until she saw the on-ramp for the highway.

  “I had no idea I’d gotten so close,” she muttered, patting Elton on the neck.

  She climbed down. He huffed in her face, so she gave him another apple and apologized for a few minutes.

  “It wasn’t so bad, though, right?”

  He didn’t seem convinced, so she pulled the stiff-bristle brush from her bag and used it on him for a few minutes.

  “Are you speaking to me now?” she asked.

  He huffed some more, which she decided to interpret as a yes.

  They spent a little while in the field behind a vacant gas station, stretching and eating, before she took ahold of his lead again.

  “No, it’s okay,” she said, because he looked concerned. “We’re just walking. Come on, let’s go see if we can find signs of life.”

  She led him—​not all that reluctantly, so she thought maybe real progress had been made—​across the street and up the ramp to the Massachusetts Turnpike.

  “Would you look at that,” she said.

  Elton whinnied.

  “That’s what I’m saying.”

  The scene told an i
nteresting story. There were hundreds of cars on the road, stretching all the way over a hill on one side and around the bend on the other. But they were only on the outbound side. The inbound half was completely empty. Evidently, on the same night Win was climbing into bed in her childhood home after a long day of travel, the entire commonwealth was actively fleeing the Boston area.

  Why hardly mattered. She was well beyond putting her experiences against a logical litmus test. Evidence first, understanding later. Maybe. She was also well beyond expecting any of this to make sense. Plus, after a week of this, she wasn’t sure if she was even the best judge of what did and didn’t make sense anymore.

  She walked up to the nearest car: a subcompact with open windows and no apparent occupant. The interior looked about like one would expect the interior to look for a car with windows open during a rainstorm a few days earlier. Just a lot of mud and dirt.

  The car behind it had its windows up, so she went to check it out next. The window glass and windshield were both dirty enough—​due to something going on inside the car, not outside—​that they were difficult to see through. She held her hands up to peek in, but it wasn’t any help.

  She drew her hunting knife. Elton snorted.

  “It’s okay,” she said. “Hang tight. Loud noise coming.”

  She choked up on the knife handle and smashed the pommel down against the passenger window. It shattered, and a puff of dust escaped the interior.

  There was another couple of piles of clothes inside: one in each of the two front seats. They sat amid a lot of dust and . . . shoes.

  There were shoes on the floor. That changed the dynamic entirely.

  She reached through the broken window and picked up the blouse in the passenger seat.

  A jawbone holding a full set of teeth fell out of it.

  Win screamed and jumped back, startling Elton.

  “It’s okay, it’s okay,” she said, trying to calm him. “It’s okay. Oh, my God, it’s not okay. No, no, it is okay. Shhh.”

  She brushed his neck to calm him down, although really, this time she was the one in need of calming. Her eyes kept drifting up and down the highway at the vast chain of cars stuck in eternal gridlock.

  “This is a graveyard,” she said.

  Wandering the countryside alone, she had imagined that everyone was dead already. But it was one thing to come to that conclusion after looking at circumstantial evidence. It was another to find the bodies.

  What were you all running from? she wondered.

  She reached back in through the window and grabbed the jawbone, holding it up.

  “What does this to a person?”

  Elton sniffed the bone and looked away. Win shoved it in her bag and looked up the highway again. There were answers to be had, and now she knew which way to go.

  “You ever been to Boston?” she asked Elton.

  He had not.

  “Me neither.”

  She walked Elton across the median to the inbound side of the turnpike and pointed his nose inbound.

  “Well, here’s our chance,” she said. “If you still want to run when I’m on your back, go ahead. Just do it in that direction.”

  She climbed onto his back, and held on tight.

  Four

  Robbie

  1

  If there was one thing the team consisting of a computer programmer, a biology major, a probably econ major, and a thirteen-year-old juvenile delinquent named Bethany could agree on, it was that none of them possessed the survival skills necessary to last for long in a world without stocked supermarkets or the supply chain that stocked them.

  It was a harsh discovery, made shortly after Robbie and Carol left the dorm to reunite with Touré and meet Bethany: Between the four of them, nobody had once gone hunting, skinned a rabbit, deboned a fish, or plucked a chicken. The only knives any of them were familiar with were steak knives. And not one member of the party had fired a gun or even picked one up.

  On the last point, Touré had at least some knowledge, except that it all came from a role-playing game, so what he knew didn’t extend beyond familiarity with guns that were used in the Wild West. He likewise knew the difference between a katana and a wakizashi—​also from role-playing, albeit from a different game—​which was still useless information, as he could neither use one of them nor get his hands on one.

  They couldn’t get their hands on any guns either, because nobody sold guns in Cambridge.

  The only reason they were still alive after a week was because of the fortuitous discovery of the many, many bricks of “nutrient bars” they’d stumbled upon in the supermarket. They were on a pallet in the middle of the otherwise nearly picked-clean store, which was interesting for a lot of reasons. It implied that nobody wanted the nutrient bars and went for the regular food first. A counterpoint to this observation—​made by Carol, who was quickly turning into the closest thing they had to an adult—​was the suggestion that the bricks were put out only after the shelves had been stripped, and possibly because they were. A supporting point in favor of this argument was that there were three empty pallets next to the one with the nutrient bricks.

  The sign in front of the supply was only nominally helpful. It read:

  NOOT BARS

  MAX 2 PER CUSTOMER

  Beneath the message was a company logo—​a triangle with an off-center rectangle inside of it—​that matched the logo stamped on the bricks.

  According to the Noot bar packaging, one brick was the equivalent of six to eight meals for an adult. Doing a little math, this meant the four of them had between sixty and seventy days to figure out how to feed themselves off the land, find someone who could teach them how to survive, find more Noot bars, or discover where everyone else in the world was hiding and move there.

  The two problems with the Noot bar were (1) none of them had ever heard of it, even though the in-store advertising suggested a ubiquity on par with certain brands of soda, and (2) it tasted kind of blah. Not awful, not great, just somewhere between sawdust and unseasoned tofu.

  They ate the bricks anyway, washed down with water from whatever source was available. Both the dormitory in which Carol and Robbie had hidden on the first night and the grocery store that kept Touré and Bethany safe had tap water that tasted just fine. Whether or not it was actually contaminated with some tasteless and odorless terrible, awful thing was the subject of occasional discussion, but everyone agreed it was preferable to getting water from the Charles.

  On this point, they could pull water from the river, but they didn’t have many receptacles to carry water in, so it would make for a lot of trips. There was also an open question as to whether the Charles River was a better option than tap water. Carol and Robbie seemed to think it had to be, by default, but they weren’t raised in the area. Touré had been, and so had Bethany, and they’d both been told that falling in the river meant a tetanus shot. Nobody was sure if this was true or if it was just something people said, but given the evident health of the animals living on and around the river, it seemed the latter was closer to being correct.

  The real problem was the same as it had been from day one: If they wanted to know whether the water in the Charles was safe, they had to look up the answer in some kind of online resource, which they couldn’t access. They lacked electricity, and because of that they lacked information. To get information, they had to find another way to communicate with the outside world.

  They were all staying in the dormitory, because it had plenty of beds, whereas the grocery store had none. Conversely, the store had the pallet of Noot bars, which was too large and heavy to take everywhere, so they wanted to stay close. It wasn’t as if one of them had suggested they simply stay put because the dorm was safe and was near their only food source. It was more that nobody offered an alternative and they were already there.

  Staying at the dorm contributed to the sense that all of this was temporary. Why find a long-term solution when surely people who knew
more about surviving were out there, just waiting to be discovered?

  Consequently, every plan they made was a short-term answer to an immediate need. When it was clear their isolation was going to last more than a day or two, Robbie and Touré went out on the bikes and filled up backpacks with clothes for all four of them, but it was clothing meant to last through the next two weeks: T-shirts, jeans, socks and underwear, and a couple of jackets. Toothbrushes, toothpaste, and deodorant took three days to discover, and they were still looking for shampoo.

  Soap they had plenty of, because the janitor’s closet was well stocked. Likewise, they had lots of towels and toilet paper. Most personal grooming had to involve cold water, so nobody was taking proper showers so much as sponging and toweling off before they froze to death—​because the building had no heat. Inevitably, when their rescuers arrived, they would find four living people who smelled awful, had too much hair in too many of the wrong places, with bad breath, and who were suffering from a vitamin C deficiency.

  But they would be alive.

  Making contact with these hypothetical rescuers continued to be Robbie and Touré’s primary focus. This manifested both in harmless ways and in less harmless ways—​meaning, they could be doing something better with their time.

  A harmless example was the day Robbie took another look at the display case Carol had found back on their first night in the dormitory. Inside the case was a device called a field phone, from the Second World War.

  The fact that it was a portable phone wasn’t the interesting part. The interesting part was that it had a lever on the side that could be used to charge it before making a call. Maybe, Robbie reasoned, if they hooked it up and charged it, they could make a phone call somewhere. Whose number to try remained an open question.

  They broke it out of the case and spent the evening attaching the landline wires to the back of the field phone. (This was some work, because they needed to strip the wires first, which meant finding a knife, and it took them three hours to find a knife.) Then they cranked it, and listened for a dial tone that never came.