Famine: The Quiet Apocalypse

by T M Edwards

  If it weren’t for the egg waiting for us in Minot, I would have been content to wait the spores out here. There was a well, and a solar-powered pump. A giant rack of wood was stacked against the back of the house. The basement was well-stocked with all sorts of dried and canned foods, and if all else failed, there was always the chickens.

  But now, none of it mattered. All I cared about was Sam, lying pale and still and burning up in that bed. Sometimes I wandered around the buildings for a few brief moments. During the times his fever was lowered and when slept more peacefully, I’d find my limbs aching with the need to be anywhere but in that room, and I’d retreat to the hay-stuffed loft where I could snuggle into the stalks that smelled of summer, and bury myself deep enough in it that it kept out the ever-present chill. Sometimes I could make it for a whole half hour before the need to be with Sam became too strong.

  I could close my eyes and listen to the pony whuffing through the dust on the floor, and the gentle clucking of the chickens. For a few minutes I could forget how my entire life clung to life at the mercy of an infection I could do nothing to fight beside feed him old antibiotics and drip water on his lips and just hope he was stronger than the bacteria.

  Finally, on the evening of the fourth day, his fever broke for the last time. When I returned to the bedroom after my latest excursion to the barn, I found him sitting up in the bed with much of the haze gone from his eyes.

  Heart soaring, I ran to the bed and jumped on it, pressing him to me in the strongest hug I dared to give him. “Oh, Sam. Sam.”

  “I’m okay.” He held me at arms’ length, his smile obviously meant to reassure me. “Just needed a nap.”

  I was so torn between laughter and crying that I ended up punching him in his good shoulder. “It’s not funny. I thought you were dying.” You almost died. But telling him that last part wouldn’t do either of us any good. He was too weak to comfort me, and I wasn’t strong enough to relive the experience without breaking down.

  “It takes more than a germ to take me out, Deidre. I’m okay.” He passed a hand over his face. “How long as it been?”

  “Four days.” I stared at him like I was wandering in a parched desert and he was the oasis. Reaching out, I gently pushed hair away from his eyes, the strands almost crunchy with days’ worth of sweat and grime soaked into them. Sam reached up to press my hand to his cheek for a moment before he let it go. He sighed.

  “Damn. We’ve wasted so much time. You should have gone without me.”

  I grimaced at him. “I’m the one that would have ended up lost in Montana, remember?”

  “Right.” He winced as he threw the blankets back and swung his legs down to the floor. “I’m going to the bathroom--by myself.” This last part got added when I jumped up to help him.

  “Be careful.” I pretended I didn’t feel my cheeks flushing. He’d been way too out of it to do much walking the past few days. After all I’d done to help him, I doubted there were many secrets left between us.

  “If a cannibal can’t kill me, I doubt a 10-foot walk can.”

  “Whatever.” I wrinkled my nose at him then flopped back on the bed as he shuffled into the hallway. The sheets stank of sweat, but I was too exhausted to care. Sam’s going to be okay. We’re going to be okay. Tears of gratitude leaked from beneath my eyelids as I let my eyes closed. I’d hardly slept any more than I’d eaten. My whole body ached, more from exhaustion than my healing injuries. My stomach was a gnawing black hole in my body.

  Sam soon returned, and lowered himself to the mattress next to me. I pushed myself up to sit next to him. “I should go get some food.”

  “That sounds good. But first…” he reached out with his good hand and wound cold fingers around the back of my neck to pull my head toward him. I let myself fall into the sensation of the kiss, even though his breath was bad and he smelled like a homeless person. When he finally pulled back, I was breathless. His gentle eyes searched mine, and he wiped away the tears from my cheek with his thumb. “Have I ever told you I love you, Deidre Scott?”

  “Once or twice.”

  “Well, I’m telling you again. I love you, Deidre. Thank you for keeping me alive.”

  I wanted to shrug my shoulders and tell him it was no big deal. But his eyes on mine were serious, and I was too tired and too hungry to make anything into a joke. “You’re welcome. I love you too.” With that, I forced myself into motion. If I didn’t get food now, I’d just fall back on the bed and go to sleep. I was almost dizzy with fatigue. “Be back soon.”

  When I returned moments later with a serving tray covered in an assortment of food from the basement pantry, I didn’t miss how Sam’s eyes lit up. I set the tray on the bed between us.

  “And here, we have stewed peach slices in a sweet syrup reduction. This was once beef, that’s now been dehydrated and salted to perfection.” I had no idea what I was talking about, but Sam chuckled anyway.

  “It looks amazing. Where did you find all this?”

  I’d already stuffed a cracker topped with hard cheese in my mouth, so all I could do was point downward. When I’d managed to swallow it, I explained about the basement pantry. “I guess when you live a mile from the nearest paved road, you don’t feel like going to the store every couple days.”

  “Well, their loss is our gain.” Slowly but surely, we ate our way through the various cans and rustling packages, all while Honey Badger looked on with her ears pricked, waiting for any crumbs to fall.

  Once the food was gone, I returned the tray to the kitchen. When I came back to the bedroom, Sam was laying on the bed with his eyes closed. Slowly, so as not to wake him, I lowered myself down next to him. I rolled onto my side facing him and propped my head up on one elbow to watch him.

  He cracked one eyelid open. “What?”

  “Nothing.” That was a lie. I could watch him sleep forever, especially now. His every breath was precious to me after days spent wondering whether the life was leaving his body. The tremble of his pulse in this throat reminded me he was alive even in those microseconds between exhale and inhaling fresh oxygen. No, this wasn’t nothing. This was everything.

  Somehow, I was managing to fall even deeper in love with this man every day we spent together. Maybe we’d reach the end of the apocalypse and find we didn’t have enough in common to sustain a relationship...but for now, I loved him and he loved me, and that was enough.

  Once his breath evened out and his muscles relaxed, I snuck my arm around his waist and scooted up to rest my head on his good shoulder.

  Don’t you ever do this to me again, Sam. My heart can’t handle it. I need you to get strong and stay that way. No more almost dying, no more infections, no more running off to explode buildings while I wait and worry about you.

  17: Don't You Dare Die On Me

  I woke to howling wind outside the window, and a room much colder than it should have been. The darkness was so complete I had to fumble for a good minute before I found the flashlight I’d left on the nightstand. Shivering, I made my way to the living room and found I’d let the fire die. It was so cold the glass of water I’d left on the coffee table had a thin rim of ice on the surface of the liquid.

  Turning the flashlight upside down so it pointed at the ceiling, I set it on top of the stove and set about starting a new fire. Drafts of frigid air whispered their way down the chimney. My hands were so cold they trembled as I struck match after match until I got one to catch the wadded up newspaper on fire.

  Once I was fairly confident the fire wouldn’t go out as soon as I closed the door, I heaved myself to my feet and switched the fan on. Using it would mean no shower, but I could live with that. The solar panels had obviously been meant to serve as a supplement or backup to grid power, not the home’s primary electricity source. Some trial and error had showed me how I could either run the well pump or the circulating fan on the battery charge...not both. With the storm outside, it was unlikely the panels would see much sun once the it rose, so war
ming the house took precedence.

  I didn’t want to admit it, but I was enjoying the luxury of sleeping in a real bed inside an actual house. I didn’t want to have to resort to sleeping on couches or the floor if the bedrooms got too cold. At this point, I’d forgo almost anything not to wake up sore and stiff every morning from laying on a rigid cot.

  Fire started, I whistled for Honey Badger and when she came dashing through the house, I picked up the coat and scarf I’d laid over the arm of the sofa by the door and the two of us headed outside.

  This was a decision I soon regretted as the wind hit us full force. The snowflakes felt like tiny particles of glass trying to embed themselves in my skin. Even when I stumbled around to the back of the house, Honey Badger in my wake and my hand trailing along the wall to help me navigate in the darkness, the break from the howling wind did little to take away the sting of the cold.

  I piled firewood into my arms as quickly as I could and hurried back inside. As the door slammed shut on my heels, something on the sofa caught my eye and I jumped so hard all the firewood went tumbling to the floor.

  “Holy crap, Sam. You scared me.”

  “Sorry.” Sam was sitting on the sofa all wrapped up in the quilt from the bed. He started to get up, but I waved at him to sit down.

  “No, you sit. I’ll get it.” I crouched and re-stacked the wood in my arms, then dumped it all by the fireplace and joined Sam on the couch. “How are you feeling?”

  “We’re not leaving any time soon, are we?” His eyes stared, only half focused, at the window next to the door.

  “Depends on how much snow gets dumped on us.”

  “And meanwhile, the people in the bunker get ever closer to starvation.”

  His quiet words hit me like a ton of bricks. These past few days, I’d been so focused on keeping Sam alive that I’d never taken a moment to think about the other people depending on us. The realization weighed like a rock in my chest. “It’s not your fault.”

  “Yes, I know that. I doubt the fact means anything to them, though.”

  Sighing, I curled up next to him and sat with my side against the back of the couch and my drawn-up knees between me and his comforter. “We’ll leave as soon as we can. Even if you’re too weak to drive, I just need you to tell me where to go. If we’d kept going…” I let the sentence trail off.

  “I know. I wish I would have spent more time making sure you knew the whole route. I thought we would be there by now. I’ve been out here before, but never in the winter, and I know enough about the area to know this is an unusual amount of snowstorms. We couldn’t have known, but we could have planned better.”

  Propping my elbow on the back of the couch, I leaned my head on it. “I don’t see how. You aren’t Superman, Sam. We just have to keep going as soon as we can manage it. As soon as the snow stops, unless we can’t get to the road, we’ll be on our way.”

  I so badly wished I could convince him, but he sat there with his sad eyes never meeting mine. I couldn’t blame him for not letting me convince him. After all, I wasn’t convincing myself either.

  ***

  Contrary to both of our hopes, the storm didn’t let up that day. It was well into the next when the wind finally died and the snow stopped falling. Sam had all sorts of theories about climate change brought on by the world and all its cities suddenly no longer producing heat. Some of them were so far-fetched I wondered if he was still a little feverish.

  By the time visibility returned and the sun came out, there was a good foot of snow on the ground. I let Sam convince me we should head out, even though we only had half a day of light left and we were both still exhausted.

  We loaded the truck--or rather, I loaded the truck. Sam tried, bless him, but about two minutes in I saw him go ghostly white and slump against the truck. He tried valiantly to recover before I saw him, but it was too late. I marched (or limped, rather) over to him and removed the crate of canned food from his arms. “Go.” I pointed a firm finger at the steps by the door. When he opened his mouth to argue, I fixed him with my best raised-eyebrow glare until he threw his hands up in surrender and shuffled over to sit on the stair.

  I was panting and out of breath by the time everything was loaded. However, this little side trip had the unexpected benefit of allowing me to find a bit more fuel and enough shelf-stable food to last us quite a while. If we drove straight through, we could be in Minot sometime that night, but who knew what would happen beyond that.

  Once everything was settled, the three of us climbed into the truck and I reversed it out of the carport.

  We got about fifty feet from the house before the truck’s wheels hit the ruts on the gravel road, and we managed to get hopelessly stuck. The center part of the vehicle sat on top of packed snow while the wheels spun uselessly, unable to gain enough purchase to pull us free.

  I put the truck in park and glanced at Sam. “Now what?”

  He groaned, and let his head fall back against the headrest of his chair. “Damn it.”

  After waiting a few more seconds to see if he had any ideas, I opened my door and hopped down. I realized my miscalculation when I immediately sank into snow as deep as my knees. I turned back to look up at Sam with a grimace. “It didn’t look this deep from the house.”

  Walking through snow this deep was hard enough in the best of circumstances, let alone with an ankle injury that made it painful to put all my weight on one leg. I high-stepped around the door to look at the wheel. It was deep in a well of snow, and from the looks of things, it would be hours worth of work to get it to the point where we could drive. Of course, beyond that point it was just a question of whether we’d slide all the way down the hill, or get stuck halfway to the bottom. Either way, we’d likely end up too far from the house to walk back, and hardly any closer to our destination.

  I pushed back through the mass of powdery white until I could climb back up into my seat. “I’m sorry, I don’t think we’re making it out today.”

  “Fine.” Sam’s tone made it abundantly obvious this was not the f-word he wanted to say. He threw his door open and slid down into the snow, not waiting for me to start trudging back toward the house. I grabbed our backpacks and followed. Honey Badger looked ridiculous doing a sort of bunny-hop through the white, but I was too tired and frustrated to laugh. My hands were frozen from pulling snow back to see the wheel, and I was feeling lightheaded from lack of sleep and exertion.

  By the time I’d struggled through the snow with our backpacks and reached the house, Sam was already inside. He wasn’t in the living room, so he must have headed back to bed. I followed his example and crashed onto the couch as soon as I’d tossed the backpacks in the corner.

  ***

  It took four days for the air and ground to warm up enough for the snow to melt. Sam was going stir-crazy, and I wasn’t much better. At least it had given him enough time to recover enough strength that he could drive, which was small consolation to both of us. We were facing down the clock and the calendar, knowing it was likely all the people we cared about had started running out of food and could soon be starving. We had to hope they’d found a way to bring in more. With only one car and one Resistant who could drive, though, it wasn’t much of a hope.

  The first rays of sunlight were still pale in the sky when we loaded into the truck and headed through the mud and ice toward the road.

  We managed to make it to the bottom of the hill unscathed, though not without white-knuckling our way through a couple of slippery spots. When we finally passed from gravel to asphalt, I could swear Sam instantly looked happier. We were on-mission again, and roadblocks be damned, we were on our way.

  18: A Walk in the Park

  “What is it about this damn apocalypse and vehicles breaking down?” Sam added a few more swear words in for good measure as he tossed the wrench at the engine. At least, that’s what it sounded like--it was well after sundown and the only light came from the moon.

  “I’m pretty sure
throwing things at it doesn’t help.”

  “Nothing is going to help short of an auto parts store, and I don’t remember seeing any of those in the past two hundred miles.”

  Sighing, I let my head rest on the steering wheel for just a second before I coaxed Honey Badger out of the seat and pulled out our packs. “Well, at least it shouldn’t take more than a couple days of walking. We’re almost there.”

  “Forty miles. Forty damn miles!” Sam growled, and kicked the front tire of the truck. “You couldn’t have held on that long?” This question was directed at the truck.