The Ones Who Lived

by Ashley Nemer

  Sam smiled, “Well, you’re a girl and they are literally all girl cousins. One of my aunts had four girls. I think one is a little older than our age and the other are younger than fifteen. Not sure. Thought maybe we could bring them here.”

  “In this house?” Amelia asked with a gasp.

  He shook his head back and forth, “No not in this house but what about the neighbor’s house? Sam told me the couple next door was old. Thought if we found my cousins we could bring them back and I could help them clean out the house next door. Maybe it would help Sunny too.”

  “They were related to her as well?”

  “No, she’s from my dad’s side, but my Aunt Frieda’s kids some are near her age.”

  “Oh that makes sense. Okay, when would you want to go looking?” Amelia had finished her examination of the freezers and now started working on packing the vegetables in the brown bags she retrieved from the store. After sorting them she began putting them in crates. Eventually Sam knelt down and joined her in this tedious chore.

  “I’d like to go today. If that’s okay. It’s been a couple days and I don’t know if they are okay. I’m worried.”

  “Sure Sam. We can go. I’m done with this stuff now, let’s tell Anthony where we are off too.”

  “Thank you for understanding.” Sam leaned over and kissed her cheek lightly pressing his lips against her skin.

  Amelia’s face flushed and she smiled a little larger this time. “My pleasure.”

  The two of them walked out of the den and saw Sunny and Anthony playing cards in the living room. Sam told them what his plans were and at first Anthony wasn’t okay with letting his sister take the lead on this. He wanted to be the one out there with his friend, but he could see she was gun-ho set on making this quest with Sam, so Anthony didn’t push the issue.

  “Maybe why you two are gone I can start cleaning the house next door. Sunny could help.” Anthony said, looking at Sunny for confirmation.

  “Sure.” She shrugged, the little girl in her showing more and more today.

  “Thanks you guys, we will call once we get to my cousin’s. See you soon.”

  Sam and Amelia took his uncle’s truck, they backed out of the driveway and left the neighborhood. More kids were starting to show up around the streets, they noticed as they drove across Saint Pete. Amelia had made the mistake of looking into a couple of the stalled cars on the road, the dead bodies beginning to rot made her stomach churn on sight.

  “You can’t think about it.” Sam said in a stoic tone.

  “About what?” She replied.

  “The death, you just can’t think about it. You have to put it to the back of your mind.”

  “How can you do that when it is literally all around us? Everywhere we look there is either lost kids, lost teens or dead adults.”

  “I know but Amelia, we don’t know what is happening and we certainly do not know if there will be anything else coming up. You can’t focus on the death. You have just got to think about the future and the positive. My dad always told me, if you focus on the good than bad will stay away.”

  “Well we know that didn’t exactly work out well for your dad now did it?” Amelia retorted, her tone angrier than she intended.

  “Fair enough. But I don’t see how focusing on death will help anyone.”

  The two didn’t say another word for the rest of the drive. When Sam pulled into the house that his aunt owned he noticed that there were no lights on. It didn’t seem like anyone was home.

  Amelia looked up at the house through the windshield and made the observation, “Something’s happened here, you can see the windows are broken.” She pointed her right arm up and extended her hand to where her right pointer finger aimed at the front window on both the first and second floors. “I should have brought Daddy’s gun.”

  “I did grab a gun, but I don’t want to have to use it. I hope they are okay.” Sam’s voice was panicked.

  Sam jumped out of the truck and motioned with his hands for Amelia to stay in her seat. He moved around the side of the house in a stealth mode, something he learned off playing video games. He had the gun pointed up in the air and was tip toeing around to the front door when he heard.

  “You don’t even know what you’re doing holding the gun like that, here give it to me.” Amelia’s curt tone scared Sam. He jumped straight up in the air and then grabbed his chest.

  “What the hell Amy I told you to stay in the truck.”

  “When have you known me to listen, now give me the pistol?”

  “No, now quiet.”

  She shrugged her shoulders and the two of them proceeded to explore the house. There had been obvious signs of a fight. The furniture was turned over and items were thrown around the house. The smell that permeated the air let them know there was for sure at least one dead body.

  It was when they entered the kitchen that the found the source of the stench. “Oh my god.” Sam said. “It’s Aunt Frieda and her daughter Cassie. She was the one I told you was a little older than us.”

  “How much older Sam?” Amelia asked.

  He shrugged, “I don’t know maybe like nineteen, twenty max.”

  “So an adult, weird.” Amelia looked around, “Where are the other ones, your younger cousins?”

  “I don’t know?” Sam started calling out for them but after a full search of the house it was clear they were nowhere to be found.

  “I’m sorry Sam, I know you were wanting to find them.” Amelia put her arm around him to try and offer some comfort.

  “I just don’t know where they would have gone. I mean they are kinda young to be on their own.” Sam had moved to the couch and put a cushion back on to sit down.

  “Do you want to leave them a note, maybe they will come back?” Amelia took the seat beside him.

  “Yes, but first I need to burry my aunt and cousin. I wonder where my uncle is, he must not have been home when this all happened.” Sam wiped tears from his eyes and then left the couch and went out to the garage. He returned with two shovels in hands and one set of work gloves. “I brought you some gloves that way you don’t get blisters.”

  Amelia took the gloves without comment as they moved to the back yard and began to dig one large hole.

  ANTHONY AND SUNNY HAD spent the better part of the afternoon cleaning the house next door. They removed all the items that they thought would be useful to store in the den that Amelia had started. Sunny was grateful that Anthony took it upon himself to remove the elderly couple from their home. She didn’t want to be a part of that process at all. While going through the kitchen she discovered a honey trove of candles. She grabbed as many as she could and raced home to store them in her bedroom. Something told her she was going to need it.

  As she left her room she heard a cell phone going off in Amelia’s room. She walked inside to see the iPhone that Amelia used was sitting on her bed. It was now ringing. She walked across the room and picked up the device and slid the call to accept.

  “Hello?”

  “Amelia, are you okay?” A frantic woman’s voice said on the other line.

  “No I’m sorry she isn’t home right now may I take a message?”

  “Yeah can you tell her Susie called? Where is she?”

  “She’s just not here right now and yeah I will tell her you called thanks.” Sunny hung the phone up without giving the voice on the other end a second thought. She didn’t like the idea of more people joining their group even if they were Sam’s family, let alone friends of Amelia’s from school. That would just make the place more crowded.

  With no second consideration given she erased the memory of answering the phone and went back to work over at the neighbors’ with Anthony.

  Chapter Four - The New Reality

  A LITTLE OVER A MONTH passed since the four formed a new family. They seemed to settle into a grove that worked for all of them. Amelia maintained the house, whether it involved the cleaning or food issues she ran the home. Sunny
followed Amelia like a puppy all over the house, and Amelia didn't seem to mind. She taught Sunny simple tasks to follow that would help everyone out, but keep her out of trouble too.

  The house itself became a fortress thanks to the upgrades Sam constructed. The windows on the first floor now had boards on them to keep people in the front yard from being able to penetrate into them. Sam believed that the risk of the other teenagers looting homes inside the neighborhood could increase as time went on. They didn't want to give any opportunity for that to happen at their house. He and Anthony took trips to the hardware store and obtained enough ply wood to build a boat with. He boarded up the front side of the window and the inside portion. The double layer made everyone feel more secure.

  Sometime into the second week their house lost power. The solar panels that Anthony and Amelia's father installed worked for the most time but with the cloud coverage they weren't able to store enough energy with the panels. This gave them only enough power to run the house at night.

  Anthony made the argument that since everyone pilfered items from one store or the other they might as well find a heavy duty solar generator. They managed to find a solar generator at Costco that was large enough to run a house. Their project for the last two days became installing and hooking that generator up to the house's main circuit. Luckily, the circuit to the house was inside of the fenced area so that made everyone more comfortable with it not being stolen.

  The appearance that the adults all vanished intensified as days passed and their paths never crossed any other adults, aside from the one Amelia saw driving that first day. The internet seemed to still be up and running. Sam and Anthony searched on YouTube how to install the solar panels and connect the generator. Amelia worried the house would burn down, but the boys assured her it would be okay.

  "Ready to flip the switch" Anthony called out as Sam finished the last wiring issue. Amelia and Sunny stood back a few feet in the designated safe zone watching their guys work.

  The suspense of the moment left everyone with overwhelming dread. They heard Anthony giving a backwards three count to Sam and as the number one was hit all of them held their breaths as they watched the house light up with energy. It worked and now they possessed one less worry. With power restored it gave their group another victory in the win column.

  "It worked!" Sunny yelled as she ran up to her cousin and wrapped her tiny arms around his neck.

  All four of them were glad and celebrating. A small victory in the long run, but in so many ways it was their first steps to survival.

  Amelia felt it best to kill two birds with one stone, so while they had their mission of confiscating the generator Amelia also asked them grab two window AC units. She'd been working all week to finish converting the downstairs den into a food storage room and needed to find a way to get the room to stay between forty and sixty degrees, while maintaining normal temperature in the rest of the house. Her and Anthony went out and found barrels and storage containers that way all their food could last as long as possible.

  Sam had come up with the idea that instead of organizing everything by type organize by date acquired that way they could eat the oldest items first. Everyone was contributing to the success.

  Sunny was in charge of laundry which she loved. The group had decided that they did not want to run the washer and dryer because of the amount of resources that would require. They went back to Sunny's home and retrieved her kiddie pool from the garage. They set something up in the back yard with clothes hangers and a make shift wash board. Every morning Sunny took the clothes from the day before out to the back yard and washed them by hand and hung them to dry and by dinner time she was able to fold them up and bring them in.

  The four of them really had found a way to make it all work.

  "I think we should find a way to extend our fence." Sam said at dinner that night.

  "Extend what way?" Anthony asked.

  "To cover the front yard too, that way the girls can get out of the house more and feel safe."

  "I think we get out just fine." Amelia declared.

  "Yeah!" Sunny chimed in.

  "Okay, okay, I just wanted to make sure you two were safe."

  "I don't think it is worth arguing with both of them, Sam." Anthony laughed as he consumed another bite of the soup his sister had made.

  The girls had ventured back to the Publix Grocery store every day that week collecting more items to stock pile. Upstairs each person maintained their own room. Inside each room was a stock pile of toiletries and toilet paper for each person along with extra socks and shoes. They grabbed items in future sizes for each person too, that way when they grew out of something they replaced the item. Anthony insisted on that.

  The teenagers worried about their water supply vanishing one day. Sam always wanted to be an engineer. He said he was going to attempt to make the collection and filtration unit for the back yard, for when it rained, based on the survival guide Anthony’s dad provided, but that was a project for next week. In the mean time, they collected cases of water. Each bedroom held two cases stored in there along with a box of canned goods in the event of an emergency.

  Amelia claimed she came up with a lot of her ideas from The Walking Dead, but Anthony said it was because she was always the overzealous one of the two of them. Especially since she had been reading her father’s survival books every night before bedtime. She claimed it gave literal step by step instructions on how to live through anything.

  "I have something to talk about." Anthony stated as they were finishing dinner.

  "What's up?" Sam asked.

  "Has anyone noticed that it’s only other teens or young kids we see around?" Everyone nodded their head as Anthony continued. "It makes me think that the adults must have been targeted on a mass scale."

  "What are you thinking, some kind of new age weapons of mass destruction?" Amelia asked.

  "I'm not sure but there has to be a cause."

  "Anthony is right, something caused a whole slew of people to just up and die."

  "If it was a WMD then wouldn't some government have invaded us by now? I mean we live right near the coast." Amelia protested.

  "Amelia has a point," Sam said looking at her and smiling.

  "I didn't say I thought it was some mass weapon, I just think something killed on a mass scale." Anthony interjected.

  "Why did we live?" Sunny inquired.

  The other three in the room remained silent. No one knew the answer to the one question everyone wanted to ask this whole time. Why had they lived?

  "I don't think we will ever know what happened." Anthony said. "But that doesn't mean I don't want to try and find out. I would like to go out and look for some sorts of clues."

  "By yourself?" Amelia objected.

  "No, all four of us, I think we should stay together and not separate."

  "I don't know how I feel about that." Sam declared looking down at his cousin. "Sunny is so young."

  "Not that young." She retaliated.

  "Yes, that young." Sam said more forceful.

  "Well the thing is I don't think that anyone should be alone right now, and if we go out looking for answers we should all go together."

  "We can talk about this later." Sam sternly said.

  They finished their dinner in silence with a lot of tension. Amelia knew her brother wouldn't let this go and she did understand it. She needed to know why her parents died too, she just wasn't sure if she wanted to venture out past their small neighborhood to find out.

  Sam sat on the edge of his bed looking around the room at his items he managed to bring over from his home. Parts of his old life were still evident. He had the most treasured of his possessions, but he also had items of his parents. Sam and his father wore almost the same size clothing, and he took most of his dad's clothing. Sam also loved how his mother smelled so he brought over her perfume, just to take a sniff occasionally. At the last visit to his home he saw the family bible, he hesitated when lo
oking at it. Anthony was right, something killed all the adults or at least most of them in this world. That wasn't godly something that could kill on that massive level. He decided to bring it anyway, if nothing else it did contain the family lineage.

  "Knock knock," Amelia said from his doorway.

  "You can come in." He smiled as he spoke and quickly put down the photograph he was holding.

  "I didn't mean to disturb you, but I wanted to talk to you about something." Amelia paced around his room and after a few seconds he motioned for her to take a seat on his bed.

  "What's up Amy?"

  "You see, eventually the water is going to stop, you know that, right?"

  He indicated agreement with his head moving up and down, "I do, that's why we have different water catches around the back yard, so we won't be SOL."

  Amelia was moving her head up and down but not saying anything else.

  "Something tells me you want to expand on this." Sam grinned as he spoke to her. She really was the prettiest girl they had in school.

  "I do, see, I was thinking."

  Sam interrupted her, "Careful now, if Anthony hears that you were thinking he may put a thinking gag on you."

  "Quiet you," she smirked and leaned into his shoulder. "As I was saying. I've been thinking, we should find a way to have an irrigation system rigged so we can get water into the house without having to go outside. Maybe have it pool into a location in the kitchen or something, so we can stay in the protection of the house because what happens when hurricane weather hits."

  "We will have plenty of water then Amy."

  She shook her head back and forth, "No we won't Sam. That hurricane weather will not only contaminate our current water supply, but it will over saturate everything with more of a salt water-based liquid which isn't good for us to drink. You know how much water we will lose? And this isn't like the old days where we will get a warning from the news that a hurricane is on the way."

  "I hadn't thought about that." Sam sat there silently pondering what Amelia had just told him. He was up for the challenge but didn't know how to execute a solution just yet. "When is hurricane season?"