At some point, though, we’re going to need more food. That’s the only thing that I can see pushing us out of our current living location.
4:49 p.m.
Okay, so slight change of plan…sort of. I guess it’s just more of a revelation than anything.
We’re actually in Indiana, not Illinois as I’d previously thought.
At one point during our afternoon’s journey, the tracks neared a highway. From our position, I could see a sign at the road’s edge indicating that we were 67 miles from Indianapolis.
So much for linking up with the rest of the family in southern Illinois. I didn’t have much faith in succeeding in that anyway, and I doubt they’re even there to begin with, but it was a glimmer of hope and gave me some sense of direction as to where to head. Now I’m back in the same boat I was before and don’t know what the heck to do. As I wrote earlier, I guess we just stay the course and see where it takes us. Maybe Indianapolis will offer something new. Maybe it held out better against the flu than Chicago since it is a smaller city. I wish Chris was here. He watched so much of the news coverage during the flu outbreak. With not being able to go to work, it kind of became his new hobby. He’d probably have known what the situation in Indianapolis was since he was watching the news (back when we still had cable) almost non-stop. I wish I’d paid more attention, but I really thought this whole thing would just kind of play itself out and everything would get back to normal in a week or two. So much for that.
Right now, Dylan’s on watch. He reminds me of a ship’s lookout. He runs around, peering out windows, hand held over his eyes to shield the glare of the sun. Sometimes he darts outside to the railed-catwalk skirting the sides of the locomotive. It worries me when he goes out, but no one’s around, so I let it go. And the train is traveling slowly enough that I’m not too concerned about him falling off the side. He doesn’t go out as often after I told him that I prefer him to stay inside unless he really thinks he sees something. Of course, he says he does more often than I think he REALLY does, just so he has an excuse to go out again.
Oh well. It keeps him occupied and from fighting with his sister who is drawing pictures on a pad of graph paper we found in one of the engine’s storage drawers. Earlier, I taught her to play the “dot game” in which we take turns drawing lines between dots with the person who completes a square putting their initials in the center. The graph paper is perfect for that game. It was a game that I used to play with my own mother when we were on long road trips or when we were bored.
After that, I drew some numbered connect the dot outlines on the graph paper for Violet to complete.
At our current speed, I’d say we’ll make the outskirts of Indianapolis sometime around early morning.
7:13 p.m.
The sunset is beautiful tonight. It’s probably in the mid-60s and the ball of fire in the western sky is casting a lovely array of pinks, purples, oranges, and yellows across the intermittently cloudy sky. Each time I see something like this, I think of Chris and how I wish he was here with us. Sometimes I catch myself thinking that I’m just waiting for him to come back from a lengthy business trip, like his death still isn’t real, even though I know it is.
Dinner was light. I’ve really had to scale back on what we’re consuming. The kids don’t like it. I don’t particularly care for it either, especially considering the piss-poor diet we’ve been limited to lately, but there’s not much I can do about it. I explained our situation to Dylan and Violet, and I told them they’re going to have to try their best not to complain about being hungry, since there’s nothing I can do about it right now. It’s a terrible feeling having to tell one’s children that they can’t fill their bellies. It makes me feel guilty as hell.
Our meal tonight consisted one pack of ramen shared between us, and the last bag of cookies (that were starting to get stale and were mostly cookie crumbles by this point in our arduous journey) – real healthy.
We’re now down to four packs of ramen, a can of baked beans, and two of the candy bars we found on the train. At least we have plenty of water. That’s been a godsend since I really didn’t want us to have to drink unfiltered water.
10:28 p.m.
The kids are asleep and I’m writing by flashlight. I know the locomotive has interior lights, but I don’t want to put them on, fearing that I’ll call unwanted attention to us.
I can see lights in the distance on our southern horizon. It leaves me with some optimism that maybe Indianapolis is a beacon of hope. Maybe they still have electricity and city services – we can only pray.
Earlier in the evening, Dylan and I took a few minutes to secure the locomotive’s entry door with a length of rope we found since we couldn’t find a way to lock it. I want to be safe as we approach a bigger city. Our fix certainly isn’t going to stop someone from getting inside if they really want to, but it’s a deterrent, and it gives me extra time to get the kids to safety and fire a few shots from the .38. I’ve never had the best aim in the world, and I’ve only shot a gun twice in the past (once at the range with Chris and then the other night when I fired into the air to scare off those people). But I’ve never fired directly AT someone. It kind of concerns me. Will I actually be able to do it? I guess that when it comes to the safety of my children, I’ll do just about anything. Hopefully I won’t have to find out.
For now, it’s time to try to catch a few winks. I want to be awake and alert when we approach Indy.
Sunday, September 22 nd
6:04 a.m.
Unfortunately, it appears that Indy is no better than Chicago. And like the Windy City, the lights I saw from afar were not electric powered at all but fires burning across the city. As we roll through the outskirts, from our raised position, we’ve seen entire blocks of homes burned to the ground – some are still burning. As we pass, we can actually feel the flames’ heat coming from some of the more intense blazes.
As we approach the heart of the city, I’ve taken a few minutes to go back and shut and secure the boxcar doors. Then I took a chance and moved the throttle control up from position one to increase our speed to around 15 miles per hour. I’m more comfortable traveling faster now that it’s starting to get light out. I don’t want to leave us a slow-moving target for those looking for the same sort of opportunity to escape their predicament as we were back in Chicago. The thought of giving flu survivors a free lift out of town doesn’t necessarily bother me. But if the type of people still alive in Indianapolis are the same kind we encountered back home (who killed Chris and forced us from our condo), I don’t want anything to do with them.
9:27 a.m.
Well that was certainly an experience. We’re far enough outside the city now for me to feel comfortable writing again.
As we began entering the city earlier this morning, we started to lose our shroud of darkness. We were still cruising along at 15 miles an hour, but it didn’t feel fast enough.
I was just getting ready to increase our speed even more when I saw a guy running alongside the train. He was armed (a rifle slung over his shoulder), and he managed to grab hold of the ladder attached to the engine and start climbing up. I fired a couple warning shots out the window and he let go, dropping to the ground and rolling down the embankment alongside the tracks.
Once I was sure that no one else was around to make a similar attempt, I reloaded the gun. Then I hustled Dylan and Violet into the engine’s tiny bathroom and told them to lock the door and stay there until I told them to come out.
As we got closer to downtown, bullets began hitting the train. I guess people have nothing better to do than take potshots at us. Of course, we were a tad conspicuous. In a world where civilization seems to have crumbled, a train cruising down the line through a major metropolitan area is bound to draw attention. I felt like I was driving the Titanic through a graveyard.
I could hear bullets pinging off the engine’s steel exterior and one came in through a side window. I could see people ahead of us on the tr
acks and it looked like they had pushed some stuff – sofas, wood, some tires and other junk up onto the tracks. There must have been four or five of them and they started firing at us as we approached. More bullets came in through the front windows of the train and I was forced to lie on the floor. This was when I increased our speed even more. I wanted to make sure we were going fast enough to ram through whatever barricade they’d put in place while also keeping anyone else from trying to climb aboard.
By the time we reached the blockade, we were traveling at 23 miles an hour, on our way up to 27. I was afraid the stuff they’d put in our way would derail us, but I didn’t see any other option but to hit it hard and fast.
I barely felt it when we finally plowed through the obstacles. We cut through the debris like a hot knife through butter. Even then, a couple minutes after we’d cleared the mess, I heard the engine’s entry door bang. I found a bearded man trying to get inside. Somehow he must have boarded us back near the blockade. When he saw me, he began to reach behind him, but I remembered reading Chris’ words about it being “him or me”. I shot at the man first, firing three shots from the .38 through the engine door’s glass window. I don’t know if I hit him or not – I think I probably did. All I know is that he quickly gave up trying to get inside and I saw him jump (or fall) off the train and tumble awkwardly down the track embankment.
It’s so hard to know what to do in these situations. These people might be okay individuals. I have no idea. But being a lone woman with two young children makes it extremely difficult to decide whether to give other people a chance, especially when they are men in a post-apocalyptic environment. I mean, who the hell knows what they are after? Sure, they might be willing to help, but what are they going to expect in return? My children have been traumatized enough throughout this whole endeavor. I don’t need them seeing their mother assaulted in front of them – or worse.
Most of all, I’m just thankful we’re out of Indianapolis and back to relative isolation. After our experiences in Chicago and now Indy, I think it’s best to try to stay away from larger urban areas whenever possible. But what does that mean? Are smaller cities or towns any better? And where the hell are we going? We seem to be traveling south and slightly west right now, but our course moves back and forth with the contours of the landscape. Sometimes we’re heading due south, sometimes in a more westerly direction, and sometimes we seem to be traveling southeast. So I really have no idea where we’ll end up.
Now that we’re outside the city, I’ve taken the opportunity to slow us down, but I’ve still left us moving at a nice clip – right around 18 miles an hour. It feels fast enough to keep people from trying to board us and to be able to push through any more obstacles we encounter, but not so fast as to be unsafe or not be able to stop in time should we need to.
After Indy, Dylan has taken a seat in one of the engineer chairs up front to keep watch. Violet joins him from time to time but quickly gets bored. I gave her a small towel I found inside the bathroom, and she’s going around wiping down our living quarters, freeing them from dust. She goes back and forth between doing that, helping Dylan with the watch, and playing with some “toys” she’s found onboard. These include a couple of magnets, her graph paper pad, and her finger puppets (a pair of cloth work gloves that she has used a marker to draw faces on the fingers of). It’s kind of funny. When she plays with them, it reminds me of the old Hamburger Helper mascot.
11:49 a.m.
We’ve been traveling for several hours now without incident. The terrain has gone from mostly flat fields to more rolling hills. It’s actually quite pretty. I’ve never been to this part of Indiana before, and frankly, I hadn’t expected this type of landscape.
Dylan and Violet split a candy bar for lunch. I feel like such a great parent. “Here’s your lunch, kids…candy.” But I don’t have much of a choice. We’re down to almost nothing in our packs. I didn’t even eat. I just drank some water to ensure that I remain hydrated. In this environment, you never know when the water you consume might be your last for who knows how long. As soon as we finish a bottle, I immediately refill it and stash it in my pack so that we’re ready to move at a moment’s notice if necessary.
After seeing the blockade the people had set up back in Indy, I’m more cautious about what lays on the tracks ahead of us now. The thought of some debris doesn’t bother me, but what if people have taken time to dismantle the tracks or have blown up a bridge or something? If we don’t have time to stop, we’re going to have to abandon ship. And in such a situation, we won’t have time to gather many of our belongings, so I need to have a bag ready to grab and go in just seconds.
1:14 p.m.
I’m pretty damn proud of myself. I think Chris would be too if he were here. I figured out how to stop the train. We’ve come to a spot that looks promising and I want to check it out in a more cautious manner than just barreling straight into town on a freight train. I’ve left our fate to the train gods and the will of the rails up to this point, but I think it’s finally time to take the situation by the reins and exercise some control over our future. It’s mildly terrifying, but we have to get more food, and I figure that now is as good a time as any time to take a chance.
Anyway, back to how I stopped the train. Well, I figured that the best way to slow the train down was to do the opposite of how I sped it up. I know…pretty brilliant, right? But I still had no idea what I was doing with this monolithic piece of engineering, and I didn’t want to blow up our only source of transportation. So I moved the throttle control down one notch at a time, slowing the train until it was back in position one. Then I took it down to the “idle” notch until we were barely moving and moved the break from position “Rel” to “Full”. I have no idea how to shut off the train completely, but I don’t really want to since I’d then have to figure out how to restart it.
We stopped about a couple miles outside a town named “Spencer”. I only know this because there was an old mileage sign along the tracks a few miles back. We’re currently nestled in a valley of sorts. There’s a steep hill to our right that’s a couple hundred feet high. A fairly large river sits a dozen or so yards to our left. I took a few minutes to walk up ahead and around a bend in the tracks. From there, I could see a large bridge towering above the tracks that spans the river. I decided to leave the train hidden behind the bend to avoid the possibility of someone seeing us from atop the bridge. Early tomorrow morning, before daybreak (I’m thinking around three or so), I’ll wake the kids and we’ll walk into town and check things out. I don’t really want to take them with me, but I don’t want to leave them by themselves should someone stumble across the train.
We’ll eat a late dinner of noodles and half our last can of baked beans tonight so we can get a quick and early start in the morning. If things look reasonably quiet in town, we might take time to explore. But if it looks like trouble, we’ll hustle back here to the train, get some speed built up, and push through. The hard part these days is differentiating between what is “reasonably quiet” and what looks like “trouble”.
I don’t know if this is a good plan or not. I always left planning up to Chris. But I don’t know what else to do. It’s either keep riding the rails onward to only God knows where, or take a chance in a small town like Spencer, Indiana.
Monday, September 23 rd
8:57 a.m.
We’re back from our adventure. The tracks led us into town and appeared to continue right through the center of downtown Spencer, but we didn’t end up going that far. The place seemed largely deserted, but at the early hour of the morning when we arrived, it was hard to tell for sure.
I guess that’s a good thing. I’m not really sure. Is this what life is now? Wanting to find a place to settle, bouncing from ghost town to ghost town hoping that someone’s there to help us but at the same time hoping that no one’s there to hurt us? What about work? What will I do to support myself and the kids? Before the flu, my work was all done throug
h the internet. Now the internet is gone, and with it, my job.
I guess my work now consists of trying to find safe, secure shelter for me and the kids and scavenging us enough food and water until some semblance of society re-emerges. But what if it never does? What if this is it – a subsistence lifestyle from here to eternity? We might be able to get by while there are still manmade supplies left to be had, but what about after that? I’m not a hunter or a farmer. I had a small herb garden in our condo window sill one summer, but I bought the plants already started and all I had to do was water them and harvest them until they died during the winter. I’d hardly know where to begin trying to grow things myself.
Ugh, this is all very frustrating, but I like being able to get my thoughts down in this diary. I get why Chris was always scribbling in it. It becomes kind of like a friend once you get used to writing in it. It doesn’t necessarily provide answers to my questions and concerns, but sometimes seeing them on paper and reading them over again later gives me a better perspective on where we’re at and where we’re headed…I guess. I don’t know. Something about doing it just feels right, so I think I’ll try to keep up the habit. I remember Chris telling me once when the flu really got going that what was happening was going to be life-altering. He said that he was glad he was documenting it so that one day our grandchildren and great-grandchildren could read about it and get a better understanding of what we went through. He said he wished he had a family diary from times like World War I or II. He thought it would be interesting to be able to read a family member’s ideas and feelings about what was occurring at those times and consider their outlooks after the fact, knowing all the things they didn’t know at the time.
The Pandemic Diaries [Books 1-3] Page 15
