The End of the World as We Knew It

by Nick Cole

  And yet, there is this…

  Consider the unpublished works of Jonah Clement, Post-Plague Reporter for The Los Angeles Times. The story I have chosen to end this piece with, was never filed. It was written toward the end of Mr. Clement’s too-short career, and although records indicate the article was due to be published, it was in actuality, never published. The California Republic - Nevada States War broke out the day before the article was to run. Publication of the article was put on hold, as it was considered a “soft” piece. At almost the same time, Mr. Clement was killed in action reporting from Las Vegas a few weeks later. The Times server, a pre-Plague operating system, was virtually destroyed in the air campaign of the following year. For several years, the damaged server was warehoused. Recently, a graduate student, Kevin Tolles, managed to salvage the hard drive for his master’s thesis, and the documents contained within were summarily stored on a secure Museum of Reconstruction DECA-RAID Vault Server and given special public access.

  I offer Mr. Clement’s article for your final consideration…

  Jonah Clement, Reporter, LA Times, 23 May

  File this under “Whatever became of?” You know you love it when we tell you what really happened to some celebrity during the Plague. Was the President really a zombie? Did that guy from the Star Trek go cannibal? Well, it’s been fifteen years of my infamous “Whatever became of?” pieces. Today I’d like to share with you my own personal “Whatever became of?”

  It’s not about a famous person. But it is about a hero. A man who rescued me from certain death back when things were looking pretty dark for all of us. One of the first pieces I wrote for The Times was an account of how I was rescued. As many of you know, I was trapped in Lake Tahoe when the Plague broke out. I spent eight weeks on an island in the middle of Lake Tahoe with some other survivors, making raids into South and North Shore for supplies. We weren’t very good, and we kept losing people on each raid. In the end, it was just me. A lot of you know how I felt right about then. I was alone, frightened, and very tired. I felt like giving up. I didn’t think it was ever going to get any better. You probably had a similar experience if you lived through that time. In fact, if you’re alive, you’ve probably felt that way at one time or another. Long story short, I was rescued by a guy named Cal Stevens. He was a ranger for the California Parks Department. He was much older than me. He was tall and wiry, lean and hard, a real man from the yesterdays of long ago. The things I remember most about him are his arctic blue eyes and gray hair, shaved over the neck and ears.

  He was a good man.

  With all the rhetoric heating up between LA and Vegas these days, I thought it might be good to check back in with Cal. He’s kind of a compass for me. It might be time for us to remember what good men, and good people, were really like.

  Cal died this morning.

  The nursing home where he’d been living for the last five years, called me a few hours ago. I was his last visitor. I visited him a week ago Tuesday, and I was still working on this piece when I got the call about the man who’d saved my life. For some backstory, here is what I wrote about Cal back then. It was my first piece with the LA Times.

  “The gas needle has fallen to empty, but the ranger knows we have a few more miles left in the tank. The last three gas stations have been too dangerous to stop at. Too many zombies are wandering the streets with dusk coming on.

  We drive through the late fall evening and I look over at the Ranger, seeing his face in the panel lights. His faded blue eyes are watching the highway ahead.

  We are passing through farm country that runs the length of the Central Valley along the Ninety-Nine corridor.

  I wonder if it seems unchanged to Ranger Stevens, no different tonight than all the years of his long life. The fields have grown wild. The harvest had risen and lain all through those last hot days of summer and into fall. Now as we pass these roads in the night, hunting for a gas station, the fields look tangled, unkempt, and full of death to me.

  We have been listening, quietly, to old-school country music. Marty Robbins, Johnny Cash, and even the occasional Johnny Horton. We’re listening to a tape, playing from an actual tape deck in Cal’s old pickup truck. Imagine that.

  Ahead, we approach a Decontamination Command Convoy. Big armored trucks lie idling in plumes of exhaust alongside the highway in the grass next to the off-ramp.

  “We’re buttoning up for the night,” says the watch sergeant when the ranger pulls his old Ford alongside the platoon that will guard the trucks for the night. They seem to know each other from times past when the ranger has come in to report.

  “I think I might drive on to LA tonight. Found this kid up on the Lake and they’re gonna want a report before they send you boys up there,” says Cal.

  “Got coffee?” asks the watch sergeant.

  “Some. Need gas more.”

  “We cleared a station a few miles south of here, one-horse town. Looks like they made a good show of it. We topped off from their pumps and left the power running. Might try there.”

  “Thanks. S’pose I will,” says Ranger Stevens.

  He reaches forward to shift the truck into gear, and for a moment the sergeant backs away. Then he steps forward again.

  “Bad up there on the Lake, Cal?”

  The ranger stares forward.

  He was old before all this started. Long, lean, rangy, he’d worked ranches and livestock for most of his sixty-five years. His hair is gray and cropped, his skin tanned by sun and wind. For all his years, he doesn’t seem so old. Until you look into his eyes. It’s the eyes that make him old. Older than anyone could ever possibly imagine.

  “Bad enough,” answers Ranger Stevens

  The sergeant backs away and we drive off into the night.

  A few miles down the road, we circle the little gas station town that once thrived alongside the highway. There is the gas station, one of those mart and multi-pump food court types. A fast food restaurant sits long abandoned on the other side of the road, a burnt-out vehicle in the intersection that separates them. Farther down, away from the highway, there is an old garage. In the midnight gloom, it looks a source of trouble.

  Corpses litter the street. They are finally dead now.

  After the ranger is sure there aren’t any stragglers about, he pulls up next to the pumps. He turns off the vehicle and we wait.

  If there are any, they’ll come for us now.

  They will be mere cutout figures, people-shaped monsters of nothingness in the foreground of night.

  We sit listening to the small ticks of the old truck and the quiet in-between them. Cal wonders in a whisper, when he might ever hear a bird again. He ruminates that on a night like this, he should have at least heard an owl or a bat.

  We leave the truck and Cal takes his 30.06 hunting rifle with him. He always wears the Colt Forty-Five revolver strapped to his hip. He has since August.

  The Decon team has left the bodies piled in front of the barricade, against the doors and boarded up windows of the gas station. We see the dried blood and dark gore.

  Cal steps gingerly, as though tracking a deer across a forest floor, through and around the pile of bodies.

  Inside, Cal gets the pumps started.

  “They’d held for a while at least,” he says as he inserts the pump nozzle into the tank back at the truck.

  I look at where the zombies had gotten into the gas station. Near the bathrooms, a back door has been forced off its hinges. It must have been a real fight.

  I watch Ranger Stevens study the town.

  The restaurant across the way looks like a hollowed out corpse.

  The burnt vehicle.

  The gas station where someone, or a bunch of someones, had made their last stand.

  I almost hear the ranger’s thoughts. He’s wondering about the survivors, if they’re out there somewhere. Are they infected now, wandering cold fields in the pale blue moonlight? Or are they all lying in front of other gas stations? Or are th
ey alive, still running for their lives out in the wilderness?

  Above the building, a sign reads AmeriCal Gas. Another sign welcomes us to Turleyville.

  When the tank is full, Ranger Stevens replaces the nozzle, climbs back into the truck, and we sit for a while. It will be a long haul to Los Angeles tonight. He tells me he is getting old and doesn’t sleep as well as he used to. He pulls out his paperwork and maps, and notes Turleyville for “Reconstruction”.

  “They can decide what to do with it back in LA,” he adds as an epitaph.

  He starts the old truck and the cassette again. We ease back onto the highway. We are just red tail lights on a dark night. We are alive.”

  So, that’s a piece I wrote fifteen years ago. Here’s what I was working on after my meeting with Cal last week.

  “Cal Stevens retired from the Ranger Service about six years back. Five years ago, he moved into the Verde Pines retirement community. For the last year, he’s been living in the assisted wing.

  He’s got some memory problems, not full-blown Alzheimer’s, no one has that anymore, but let’s just say the past is very real to him. He gets very emotional. Cal is thin, gray, almost shrunken. Only in the eyes do I see the man that rescued me all those years ago. Sometimes.

  I ask Cal what he remembers most about the Plague.

  He has his own story of survival.

  He’s a man who was raised from birth to know how to live off the land. He spent the worst six weeks of the Plague deep in the Sierra Nevadas before he started finding other survivors. He was a quiet man back then. The week we spent together, driving down through the zombie-infested remains of Northern California and into the Reclamation Zone, held very few conversations. In fact, I cannot remember a single conversation in detail.

  I do remember feeling safe around him.

  I tell him that.

  His eyes begin to moisten. I realize I have not heeded the nurse’s warning.

  “Mistah Cal,” as she calls him, “is very sensitive now. So don’t poke around in the past too much. It’s hard on him, child.” She really calls me “child”.

  I’m glad Cal Stevens has her to take care of him. Still, I’ve gone too far. He tells me it’s good to have me there with him. He tells me he’s never missed an article I’ve written. He often used his vacations to catch up on the pieces he’d missed while working in the deep woods.

  He tells me about the years after the Plague he’d spent working in the forests. In those simple bedside conversations, we stumble onto something amazing. It’s a small thing, but it amazes me nonetheless.

  Cal terminated the last recorded Plague zombie.

  For the last ten years of Cal’s career with the Ranger Service, he worked as a sort of animal control officer. Once the big cities were cleared and most of the Iinfected were gone, there were relatively few attacks. But every now and then he’d get a call, usually out in the hinterland, and he’d have to go out and “clean up the remains”. His words.

  “I took care of the last one, oh, about two years before I retired,” he tells me from his bed.

  It’s official and I can look it up if I choose to. I did, and it is.

  I ask him to tell me about the last zombie to walk the earth.

  He watches the window and the garden beyond for a moment. He begins to speak without looking at me, like he’s back on that day.

  “I got a call from local law enforcement that they’d seen a zombie up around Pinecrest Lake, near a little town called Strawberry. We really hadn’t had any sightings that year and it was already well into fall. We didn’t get too many calls in winter as they tended to freeze up. Stay put. Summer was the worst back in those first years after. You’d get a bite, kids playing out in the woods. That was bad. But as the years passed, the ones we found weren’t doing so good. I guess all those years were pretty hard on ‘em.”

  “That entire summer, we hadn’t received one call. I think there was even money down that we might go the whole year without getting called out to put at least one down. But in the end, just toward the last of the good weather, you could tell it was the last of the good days before things got real cold, that was when I got the call.”

  “I’d planned to do something else that weekend. I always got a haircut on Friday afternoon. The barbershop where I went, had a beautiful painting of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Two deer in a meadow. I loved that painting. I know those places inside those pictures. I’ve been there.”

  “So I got my deer rifle, loaded up the truck, and drove on up toward Sonora, which never really recovered from the Plague, then on into the mountains. It was a beautiful day. I remember it now like it was yesterday. The sky was so blue. So startlingly blue. The sun at that altitude felt good and warm coming through the windshield of my old truck.”

  “I pulled up to a general store in Strawberry, which was all there really was of that town. The only other building was a cabin rental place across the road. It was mostly quiet up there in summer. Winter skiing was the thing. I could hear the sound of the wind moving through the pines. I could hear the distant roar of the river nearby.”

  “I talked to a fellow in the store. He told me the reports were coming from some cabin owners over near the south ridge. He showed me where on the map and I took the truck over.”

  “I’ll say this about time. At that moment, I wouldn’t have picked that day out of ten-thousand. But here, now, lying in this bed coughing, I’d give anything for just one more day like that day. To be out in the woods. I could smell the heavy dust of a long, dry summer when I parked the truck. All that summer dust, thick and heavy and almost sweetened by the pines. Winter would come soon and wash all of it away.”

  “It was quiet. Sound traveled that afternoon almost like it was a clear thing all to itself. Even now, lying in this bed, I can hear the sound my old door made on that truck. How it whined for just a second when I opened it. The metallic clang when it closed. I must have heard that sound more times than can be counted, or should be for that matter. But right here, now, I can hear it plain as day and it’s like the voice of a friend I haven’t heard from in some time.”

  “I took my rifle and walked down the mountain. They almost always move downwards, it’s easier for them. There was a river down there and I knew the zombie would be near it. The noise of it attracts ‘em.”

  “I passed cabins that had been closed up for the summer. Like I said, it’s mostly ski cabins up there because of the big slopes farther up the mountain.”

  “But they like to get in and around those cabins. Look for a dog, or a child.”

  “I checked each of the cabins to make sure it hadn’t gotten into one. That might make a nasty surprise for some skiers showing up late one night. Most of the Plague zombies are now so decrepit and falling apart that people can just doge by ‘em. But if they get the jump on you, it can be a little tricky.”

  “I picked up some signs near a cabin at the bottom of the hill, scratch marks on the front door. I found the drag marks. One leg pulling a dragging foot, and after that it wasn’t too long until I found him. Straight line down to the river. I saw him far of. Upstream behind some boulders.”

  “I maneuvered close enough along the big river rocks so I could get a better shot at him. I didn’t want him slipping into the river. Then I’d have to issue a quarantine alert. So I thought I’d get up on one of the big rocks and try to knock him back away from the river when I took the shot.”

  “In the process of doing that, I dropped my rifle. It clattered against a rock and almost went skittering off into the water, but I caught it up just ‘fore it did. Woulda been a tragedy. I took a deer every year with that gun. My nephew has it now. Good boy. Ranger service too. I like that he carries my old rifle. They wouldn’t let me have it in here now.”

  Silence.

  “When I got my rifle up and sighted, I expected him to be scrambling over the rocks to get at me because of the noise my rifle had made. But he didn’t. He was mad, for sure, hissing
at me and all. But he hadn’t moved.”

  “Then I saw the hand come up into my scope, just under the crosshairs.”

  “I had to check my scope, make sure there wasn’t something on it. When I sighted in again, sure enough, she was clutching at him. Holding onto him. There were two of ‘em.”

  “She was torn in half. Years ago probably. But she’d dragged herself along all these years. Here she was now, holding onto him. He was falling apart, hair in scraps, skin in shreds, white bone, long exposed in places. Standard long-term infection.”

  “I knew I had a plan when I took the first shot. I can’t remember exactly what it was, but I had a plan. I think I thought that if I shot the female first, he’d come after me. He’d leave her and start out across the rocks for me. I could take him once I was sure he wouldn’t get into the river and contaminate it.”

  “My first shot put her down. It went right into her skull and she didn’t move after that.”

  Silence.

  Cal wipes at a tear in eyes I have watched fill with memories.

  “Her hand let go of him then. I could hear my shot echoing off the far rim as I snapped the bolt back, ejected the spent shell, and put the bolt forward with a new round. It was that kind of day when everything is so clear... and sky blue and... golden. The deep shade of the forest and the sound of the river is all around me. And I knew summer was over then.”

  Silence. Cal’s eyes are watering. His mouth twitches as he chews at a convulsion within.

  “It’s okay Cal,” I tell him. “We can stop now.”

  He continues to chew. He’s crying when he looks up at me.

  The nurse comes in.

  I’m in trouble.

  “Mistah Cal, what you all upset about now, honey?” she asks, as though we are boys behaving badly and one of us has hurt the other.

  “He loved her. He wouldn’t leave her,” sobs Cal.

  The nurse sits on the bed and holds Cal to her chest. This once strong ranger, frail, now more a child, an infant, sobs into her and she murmurs words of comfort.