“Don’t be so squeamish,” she laughed. “Seriously, how is the rehab going?”
“Not well.”
“I’m sorry. You seem to function pretty well.”
“Not well enough to stay in Recon. The ax is going to fall in a few weeks.”
“Are you in any pain?”
“Only from the rehab.”
“Well, it was only going to last another year and I understand you want to go out on your own terms. Maybe it just wasn’t meant to be.” She came around the table and hugged him from behind, then sat down again.
After putting Emma to bed, they sat on the ragged old couch they purchased at a consignment shop and watched a romcom on TV, one of the few things that would keep Jill in one place for more than a few minutes. They snuggled together under a blanket, fooling around like a couple of teenagers in the back seat of a car. Finally, she squealed and jumped off the couch. Stryker chased her into the bedroom and closed the door.
While driving to his rehab in San Diego, Stryker noted there were an unusual number of ambulance and police sirens sounding in the distance, but figured it was probably one of the frequent pile-ups that occur on clogged Southern California freeways. He pulled over on the shoulder of the freeway, along with other drivers, and let two ambulances and a fire truck pass by, then continued. As he was about to park, he noticed two police officers blocking the entrance to the hospital, standing behind a strip of yellow tape that extended across the entrance. As he approached, one of the officers held up one hand, palm facing Stryker, and said, “The hospital is quarantined. If you need medical assistance, you’ll have to go to a different hospital.”
“What’s going on? Is it the flu?”
“I have no idea. We’ve just been told to not let anybody in.” Stryker shrugged, headed back to his car, and made his way back to the base, where he called Jill and left a message. An hour later, he called again. No answer. Finally, he texted her and, 10 minutes later she replied that she would call him as soon as she could. His phone rang an hour later.
“Hi, honey.”
“Hi. Look I only have a minute. One of the Marines that came in yesterday has died. The other is not going to make it, either. The hospital is quarantined so I can’t leave. We’re getting calls from hospitals all over the city. We have some kind of epidemic on our hands and nobody has been diagnosed yet. Can you get Emma out of day care and make sure she doesn’t leave the house?”
“I’m on my way. I’ll call you when I get back home.”
“Love you.” She hung up before he could reply. Stryker hurried out the door, and drove to the day care center and entered the room where Emma usually played with the other kids. The room was empty and there were no teachers present. He felt the panic well up, fought it down, and thought about the situation. Wherever they went, they went as a group. Obviously, not every parent would get here ahead of him. They were too young for field trips. He puzzled at it for a long moment, then decided to go looking for a school bus or some other appropriate vehicle. He called Jill again and left a message. As he was crisscrossing the base, slowing the vehicle at every corner and looking around, his phone rang.
“She was at the clinic,” Jill said. “I just got a call. Some of the kids were exhibiting fevers and vomiting. They took them there to see who needed to be moved here.” She was sobbing softly and was clearly trying not to be overheard. “They’re moving Emma here now.” The sobbing increased in volume.
“Is she going to be okay?”
“I don’t know. We have another dead. The other Marine. Hospitals all over town are starting to perform autopsies to try to figure out what the illness is. Until we know that, we really can only try to keep patients alive.”
“What should I do?” he asked. “How can I help?”
“Go home and stay away from other people. I’ll call you later.”
“Can’t I come there?”
“Absolutely not. The last thing we need is for you to get infected as well.”
“But I want to be with you and Emma,” he protested.
“Listen to me. This killed two perfectly healthy Marines in their twenties within twenty-four hours of presenting symptoms. Are you listening?”
“Yes.”
“It’s possible that Emma is not ill with the virus and will be fine. I’ve been exposed to both fatalities and am at risk. That leaves you as a possible single parent in the future.” Stryker realized he was no longer speaking to his wife, but a professional health care worker who was coldly assessing the situation.
“You really want me to go home and sit around while the two of you might be dying?”
“That’s exactly it.”
“I can’t do that.”
“You have to. There is no other choice that makes sense, and they won’t let you in anyway. There are close to 100 armed Marines out there guarding the hospital and every other one is facing out. Nobody is coming in, unless it’s by ambulance, and nobody is leaving. That’s the hard, cold fact. Now, I need you to deal with that and accept the fact that exposing yourself to this does not help me and it could hurt Emma. Go home. I love you.”
“I love you, too.”
“Stryker. You’ve been a good husband and father. I’m not asking you to do this for your own good. You understand that, right?”
“I guess,” Stryker replied, feeling as though he were a helpless four-year-old. “Do you think you and Emma are going to die?” There was a long pause.
“I think Emma has a better chance than I do. But, there’s no way to know. That’s why you have to try to stay alive. Please do this for Emma. I can’t even function if you don’t take this off my back.”
“Okay,” he replied, angry with himself for his inability to help them. “I’ll go home; but please call me whenever you can.”
“Will do. I gotta go.”
“I love you,” he repeated to the phone.
He spent the rest of the day in his own special brand of hell. He was furious about the situation and fought the temptation to call Jill again, to hear her voice for what might be the last time. The TV was on CNN and the news was not good anywhere. The journalists checked in from all over the globe, but the video was virtually the same: scenes from outside hospitals where extra ERs were set up. The number of dead reported in each location was in the thousands. He switched to a San Diego station and saw the same thing being reported from virtually every hospital in the city. He watched TV all night. Finally, the following morning, he gave in and left messages every hour. He sent a text every hour as well. Nothing came back at him. Throughout the rest of the afternoon and evening, he listened to traffic leaving the base.
The following morning, he again heard multiple vehicles. He set an extension ladder against his house and climbed to the rooftop. There was a traffic jam of pickups and cars leaving the base in all directions, most fully loaded. By afternoon, it was totally silent.
He left more messages and sent more texts. Still nothing. Throwing his phone against the wall in frustration, he screamed curse words and jogged through the house, punching his fists through the drywall in several places and roaring in frustration. He continued until exhausted, then slumped onto his couch and cried for an hour. Every time the sobbing would subside, he looked up and stared at the TV through sightless eyes. He finally stopped and went to bed, where he thrashed around, trying to hope his wife and child were alive, but knowing in his heart they were not.
The next morning, he turned on the TV and sat down to drink his coffee. He flipped through the station and found nothing but static. The world really seemed to have ended. He walked to the back patio, glanced around the back yard, and started weeping as his eyes swept over Emma’s toys and Jill’s garden. It was one of her many passions. His weeping grew increasingly loud and soon he was sobbing again. He didn’t remember the last time he ate, and didn’t really care. Stryker considered his situation and realized that everything he was had been ripped away from him.
“I can’t do this anymore,”
he whispered to himself. “I have to know for sure.” He got up and showered, shaved for the first time in days, put on his battledress uniform, and walked into the garage. He started the Jeep and backed out of his driveway, then headed toward the hospital.
Stryker was expecting to see corpses everywhere as he passed through the ghostly remains of the base. The traffic lights still worked, and he saw the occasional body on a street corner or slumped over the wheel of a parked car. He pulled into the parking lot of the hospital still full of cars, then walked toward the main entrance of the building.
As he approached, he saw three concentric lines of death surrounding the building. He walked through the first line and saw people who obviously died from gunshots. Their bodies were riddled with bullet holes, and they had fallen in the direction of the hospital. He passed through that circle and approached the second. This one was comprised of fallen Marines who had no wounds on their bodies. But they all lay in pools of what appeared to be their own blood. As he approached the third line, he encountered corpses that were again gunshot victims. They had fallen trying to leave the hospital. He remembered his last conversation with Jill and saw a tale that told itself well. The Marines had remained true to their orders: they shot anyone leaving or trying to enter the hospital and held their positions until them, one by one, succumbed to the disease.
He walked to the open entrance of the hospital and was assaulted by the coppery smell of blood and rot. The air conditioning was still running, so it wasn’t unbearable; but it bad enough. Covering his nose with one hand, he walked through corridors lined with corpses lying on gurneys in hallways, and then entered what appeared to be a morgue. After opening several sliding drawers in a concrete and steel wall, he found Jill and Emma. Emma was wrapped in Jill’s arms and appeared to be sleeping. Jill’s face was frozen in a rictus of pain.
He was numb with grief, and in an odd way, relieved he had found their bodies. He had accepted their death already and at least now could bury them properly. He went and got his Jeep, backed it to the entrance, and rolled an empty gurney to the morgue. Lifting them as one, he placed them on the gurney. After rolling the gurney to the entrance, he loaded his loved ones into the rear of the Jeep, touching each of their faces, and then drove home.
After digging a single grave, he lowered them carefully into the ground and was about to fill the grave. He hesitated. He couldn’t bring himself to throw dirt on their faces, so he went inside and got a blanket that he placed over them carefully, then refilled the grave. He went inside the garage and made two crude crosses from leftover lumber, and drove them into the ground with a maul. He stood over them, desperately wanting to pray, wanting to find peace with his god. He broke down, fell to his knees, and sobbed and wailed for close to an hour. That night, he heard a single gunshot from somewhere on the base, and concluded it must have been some desperate survivor committing suicide.
He spent the next few weeks sitting in a lawn chair at the foot of the grave, reading books and eating meals from cans and pouches that he took from other houses. He also got MREs from a logistics warehouse. Sometimes he read aloud to them, occasionally having entire conversations about what they would do on the weekend, or vacations that they never took. Part of him understood that he was making his situation worse, not better, by allowing himself to slip into these reveries. Another part understood that what he went through was of little importance when faced with the massive die off that had occurred. The last news show he watched had estimated the population of the world was reduced to two to three percent of the previous population.
He walked around the camp almost daily and witnessed the overgrowth of nature. Grass on lawns remained unclipped and weeds sprouted everywhere, even in cracks in the roadbeds. Hedges and bushes, once neatly maintained, grew shaggy and much larger. Palm tree fronds drooped sadly in neat circles around the trees. It was like watching one of those slow-motion nature videos of a flower opening, only in reverse.
There were other signs of abandonment. Many doors on housing units were left open due to the haste of departures. Paper garbage danced merrily in many streets, apparently from tipped-over garbage cans. Cars sat empty in the middle of the street. A thin layer of dust covered everything.
Occasionally, he turned on the TV or radio, but was met by empty air. He called every number in his cell phones directory, and sometimes the phones would actually ring; but nobody answered. So he kept the phone charged, but stopped trying to call anyone. He started taking walks through the camp. One day, he left the house in the morning and parked the Jeep next to the final hill of the Crucible course. He looked up and imagined his class of recruits chugging down the hill with expressions of anguish and grim determination etched on their faces.
Stryker walked to the top of the hill and turned toward the city of San Diego. He could see fires dotting the landscape and dark, billowing smoke ascending toward a bright sun. He realized that he was no longer anything he was before. He had been a husband to the most wonderful human being he ever knew. He loved her with a profound, eternal love that would endure a lifetime and beyond. That she had been taken from him was something he would never get over and wasn’t sure he wanted to try. The hurt sometimes was the only thing that told him he was still alive.
He had been a loving father and placed every hope he had for the future on his daughter. She was a grudging composite of him and Jill, forged by their characters and affection. Emma was the living symbol of their love for each other and their future together. Now she was with her mother forever, and would live in his memory until he died, always present but just out of reach.
He had been a Marine, and more. He had been forged into a different man by the demands and challenges he faced in combat, in training, and in upholding the Force Recon creed with his every thought and action. It had helped get a fix on the ever-blurry fissure between right and wrong, good and evil.
He was none of those things now.
Stryker thought about a conversation he had with Sarge following the Crucible, and how he had told Sarge that he was “unbreakable.” He foolishly believed it at the time. He knew better now. He looked again at the city and realized it wasn’t just him. The whole world was broken. It was time for him to put himself back together. He walked down the hill and went to the health club. It was open and lifted weights for close to three hours.
The following three months were spent getting into peak condition. He took two four-mile runs a day and spent three hours daily in the weight room. He knew he was getting close to the condition he was in prior to his second injury, but continued his daily workouts. Hard muscle grew denser and his wind improved as time went on. The runs got longer and the weights heavier. Still, he continued.
One day, he decided to visit the cafeteria and armory. He was startled to find the lights on in the former. The base power plants still ran, although he knew that couldn’t last much longer. Eventually, something would break. He passed through the empty mess area and walked to the kitchen. At the far end was a large walk-in freezer. He entered the freezer and found a box of frozen steaks and unbaked rolls. He carried them to the Jeep and proceeded to the armory.
Amazingly, it was open. He took a ring of keys, each labeled with a warehouse number, and walked through several of the warehouses before finding one that contained M-4s. He took two of them with spare mags and loaded them into his vehicle. He returned and grabbed three ammo cans of the 5.56X45mm ammo. Setting them down by the Jeep, he returned and took four more cans. After loading everything, he returned to his house and had a steak for dinner.
The following morning, he decided to take a trip to San Diego and see what was left of the city. He left his house with an M-4 on the passenger’s seat and drove down Highway 5 to the freeway without seeing a soul. As he approached the city, what had been a bad smell quickly grew into an unbearable stench. He got off at the next exit and started back to his house.
Stryker noticed a gun store on a corner and pulled over. He grabbed th
e M-4 and walked up to the front door. It was locked from inside, so he got his tire iron and broke the glass. Reaching though the now-empty frame, he turned the deadbolt and walked to the glass countertop where the pistols were displayed. He brought the tire iron down and plucked an XD from the display, grabbed extra mags and ammo boxes, and left the store with the pistol in a paddle holster. He returned home and continued his workout regime for another month.
Finally, it was time to leave. Stryker knew he couldn’t spend the rest of his life working out and reading books. He needed to go somewhere and start something new, so he sat in his lawn chair and thought aloud about where to go and what to do. He tried to remember his favorite places and thought of the ranch where his grandparents raised him. He had been happy there. He last saw it when he returned for his grandmother’s funeral. His grandfather had died three years earlier from a stroke. His grandmother just gave up after that, according to a distant cousin, Frank, who still lived in the area. The ranch was left to Stryker in the will, and Frank agreed to keep the place up and bill Stryker for his time. Every month he sent a paltry bill, and Jill paid it.
Stryker hadn’t heard from Frank since the die off. He decided to leave the following day.
CHAPTER SIX
DIE OFF PLUS TWO YEARS
Sarge and Jenna were loading the Jeep when Stryker came out of the house. He found a half-full, freshly brewed pot of coffee when he walked into the kitchen, poured a cup, and walked out the front door.
“Guess you’re headed to San Antonio,” he said, sipping coffee before he spoke.
“Yeah, I’m going with her,” Sarge replied.
“We probably should have talked about that.”
“I don’t need permission to go day-tripping.”
“Make sure you’re not a one-way driver.” Both men chuckled at the reference to a Beatles song from the ‘60s. “Seriously, you guys have a plan?”
“We reviewed the route this morning and it seems pretty straightforward. I don’t think we’ll have a problem getting to the house.”
Stryker: A Post-Apocalyptic Tale Page 10
