FACING UNFAMILIAR GROUND _an EMP survival story

by Connor Mccoy

  “Shut up, will you?” he hissed at her. “We don’t want anyone else to know.”

  That indeed kept her quiet until he had joined her in the hall and they had relocked the door.

  “You’ve got to see this place, Christian,” she said, “It’s wild.”

  They climbed the stairs, bypassing the ballroom, as Mia thought of it, and went all the way to the roof. This door, too, was barred. They opened it and stepped out onto a rooftop garden, the raised beds littered with dead vegetation that looked to have died in the frost. They walked the perimeter, looking down first onto the street, then the space between this building and its neighbor, the rear courtyard, and the driveway that gave street access to the rear of this building and the next.

  “You’d have to be pretty determined to gain access via the roof. There’s no easy way up or over,” Christian said.

  “It helps that the buildings on either side are lower and a good distance away. I don’t think you could even jump from here to there,” Mia pointed to the nearer building. “I couldn’t do it, could you?”

  “Doubtful,” Christian said. “I wouldn’t want to try it.”

  They relocked and barred the door, and Mia took him down to stare in awe at the ballroom.

  “Plenty of natural light,” he said, “but we’d have to haul a lot of furniture and equipment up here.”

  “We don’t really need that much,” she said. “After all, we’re currently treating people on the shallow steps of the library. It would be nice if we had a desk and a bed. Then we could expand from there. I bet there’s plenty of materials in this place to create a private examining room.”

  “Let’s go see,” Christian said.

  Mia followed him from the room. The next floor down looked like it must have been a living museum. The rooms were decorated with furnishings from early Detroit -- bedrooms, kitchen, a living room, servants’ quarters, and a room full of leather harnesses and saddlery from the days before automobiles. The two floors below that were full of display cases, and art was mounted on the walls. One room was devoted to the stuffed carcasses of animals hunted during the early 1700s.

  The floor below that was administrative offices, a large open foyer with a reception desk, and a private residence that took up the entire wing opposite from the side they entered through. The apartment puzzled Mia. It wasn’t dust covered and felt lived in. The cupboards still had cans of food.

  “It’s like someone still lives here,” Mia said.

  “I know,” Christian replied. “I feel like I’m trespassing.”

  They left the apartment and walked down the stairs into the basement. Here they found food storage, museum storage, rooms full of file cabinets, a shop piled with furniture that needed repairing, and partially finished display cases. Under the residence wing, they found a laundry, and past that a furnace room that housed not only a useless modern furnace but also an old-fashioned wood-burning octopus stove with heating ducts leading up into the building.

  “I don’t like that smell,” Christian said, “but I think we need to see what it is.” He pulled his shirt up over his nose.

  They found the former resident of the apartment in a room filled with wood. One wall was lined with stacked timber that had been chopped and split, the other with various parts of trees. A roll-up garage door lead to a truck-sized entry from street level down to the basement. The windows in the door had been boarded over, inside and out, in the fashion of the windows in the upper floors.

  In between the two piles of wood stood a chopping block for quartering wood and crumpled before it was the body of an old man, the ax still in his hand, a rifle not far away. The quartered pieces of a log lay scattered around the room.

  “Looks like our timing is impeccable,” Mia said. “No wonder this building has survived unmolested. He’s been guarding it.”

  “Probably had a heart attack chopping wood,” Christian said. “He hasn’t been here all that long.” He reached down, turning the man over and gently closing his eyes. He laid the man out respectfully, crossing his arms over his chest.

  “It’s cool down here, probably slowed the decay,” she said. Then the smell got to her, and she fled the furnace room.

  Christian walked past her into the laundry, and she followed. He pulled a couple of unadorned white sheets from the makeshift clothesline hung across the room and headed back to the old man. Mia remained in the laundry, breathing the clean air and steadying her stomach.

  Chapter Fifteen

  “I think we should tell people that he’s still alive and has invited us to use the ballroom,” Mia said. “That way no one will challenge our right to be there. Well, maybe not say he’s still alive, that would be fishy, but just that we’re distant cousins or something and he’s invited us to stay. I bet he didn’t go outside much once he had this place boarded up.”

  They hustled back to the library in the late afternoon sunlight. They were excited. They’d found an entire building, untouched by the looting, and with its tenancy recently vacated. The desire to move fast fueled them.

  “We’ll have to bury him by night then,” Christian replied. “Otherwise, someone will be bound to see and comment.”

  “That’s a given,” Mia said. “Look, there they are.”

  Glen and Sally were sitting in the late day sun, chatting with a man who turned out to be Melvin.

  Glen looked up as they approached. “There you are. I hoped you’d show up soon. Melvin just was telling us how his storehouse was raided, and his partner killed.”

  “That’s awful!” Mia exclaimed. “Why would anyone do that? You’re doing humanitarian work.”

  “It’s the Koupe Tribinal,” Melvin said. “It has to be. No one else cuts down people for no reason. Roger was totally blameless. All he did was guard the medical supplies and protect me. He was my friend.” He looked downcast and tired. “I had to bury him. I couldn’t just leave him there.”

  Mia put a hand on his shoulder, “I’m so sorry,” she said. “That must have been awful.”

  “Yeah, it was. And then I had to walk all the way home, avoid a mugging, and barter half my stuff away to get free. It’s been a hell of a night and a day.”

  “We’ve got some good news,” Christian said. “We found a building where we can set up a clinic. It has lots of windows for natural light, plenty of space. And the only catch is that we have to bury the former tenant.” He glanced at Melvin and realized what he’d said. “Sorry, Melvin, I wasn’t thinking.”

  Melvin had his eyes closed and waved away the remark. “No problem,” he said.

  Sally jumped up. “Let’s go see it before the sun goes down,” she said, nearly dancing with excitement.

  They gathered their supplies and Christian led them back the way he and Mia had come, cutting across the park, and taking them around the rear of the building. Christian pulled the key he’d removed from the dead man out of his pocket and opened the door that led into the museum kitchen. When everyone was in the loft and the door barred behind them, Mia skipped up the stairs in her excitement to show the others.

  Glen, Sally, and Melvin were suitably impressed with the ballroom. It was indeed big enough to do everything they needed, the main problem being getting the severely injured up the stairs.

  “Maybe we can use the rooms off the kitchen for people who are really badly hurt,” Mia said. “It’s not like we’re really going to use that kitchen for cooking, there’s one in the apartment for preparing meals.”

  “When we walked through, I noticed everything was antique,” Sally said. “Is this whole place really a museum?”

  “Pretty much,” Christian said. “There’s storage in the basement, and the ground floor of one wing is the apartment, but other than that it’s pretty much a giant-ass museum.”

  “A giant-ass museum,” Melvin echoed and laughed.

  “Come on,” Mia said. “I’ll show it to you.”

  They took a quick tour, skimming through the rooms until they re
ached the apartment, where they spent a little more time. “One of us should move in here,” Melvin said. “To keep an eye on the place.”

  “I think we all should move in here,” Glen said. “There’s plenty of room, and we could take turns keeping watch. You know once we get up and running all those people who come up the stairs to get treated are going to talk. It won’t be long before the undesirables know what’s here.”

  “Maybe we should treat everybody in the rooms off the kitchen,” Sally said, “and leave the ballroom for a hospital ward, or just leave it empty? Maybe we are less of a target that way.”

  “Come on,” Christian said. “It’s time to show you the not very pleasant part. Although, I do think Melvin’s going to be thrilled with the storage. I think there’s enough room that you could use the basement instead of your warehouse, Melvin. That would solve a lot of problems.”

  “Still have to get the supplies into the city,” Melvin said. “That’s the hardest part. The Koupe Tribinal have checkpoints on the major roads in, and they’d simply stop and loot us.”

  “Something to figure out then,” Glen said. “Because Christian’s right, it would solve a lot of problems if our medical supplies were here.”

  They trouped down into the basement, where Melvin reacted as expected. He looked at the storage space and the repair shop, and just about stopped breathing. “If we could get past the roadblocks…” His voice trailed off, and Mia could see he was imagining all the good that could be done. They moved into the laundry room, past the furnace, and into the area Mia thought of as the woodshed. Only it really wasn’t the shed at all, but a kind of garage.

  The man was lying where they’d left him, covered with a sheet. Glen lifted a corner of the cloth and pulled it gently back from the man’s face. “He’s dead alright,” Glen said, “and at first glance, it really does look like natural causes. Not that I suspected Christian or Mia of knocking off the old boy, but somebody else could have.”

  “It really just looked like he was cutting wood and his heart stopped,” Mia said. “It’s not like he was a young guy.”

  “No, well past his prime,” Glen said. “And probably not cut out for such a physically demanding life. Where can we bury him?”

  “I was thinking in the courtyard,” Christian said. We need to do it in the dark, so nobody knows he’s gone.”

  “And that matters why?” Glen asked.

  “Because clearly, he’d been protecting this place,” Mia said. “It’s the only building we’ve seen without the windows all smashed in, vampire-looking people sleeping in it, or just totally trashed. See that shotgun over there? It was right next to his side. I think he carried it everywhere.”

  “I see,” Glen said. “Was this really the only suitable building you came across?”

  “Yeah, and we walked all day. And a couple of times we walked really quickly away,” Christian said dryly.

  “I can’t say it’s not excellent,” Glen said. “More than big enough. Defendable. Easy deliveries.” He pointed to the overhead door in the wall. “It’s well decked out.”

  “That just leaves us to give this man a decent burial,” Melvin said. “And for me to be extremely grateful to him for protecting this building. I think Christian and Mia are correct. If we can get our supplies delivered in town, this will be a more than satisfactory place to store them. I’ll check with my delivery team.”

  They waited for dark in the apartment, heating canned goods on the propane stove. Melvin and Sally went down into the basement to see if they could get the fire going again and to see if there were ways to block off the vent, so they weren’t heating the entire building. The ideal situation would be to warm the examining room near the kitchen, and the apartment. Then if they ever turned the ballroom into the hospital ward to heat that room as well. Although Glen did notice that the sun hitting the windows did create a certain amount of ambient warmth.

  That was the main downfall of the kitchen wing, the sunlight did not hit the windows there, not nearly as long as it did up in the ballroom. It would not be as warm nor as light as the upper floor, but there was no denying it would be easier to contain their patients on the ground floor. He had images of children running through the halls and in and out of all the museum rooms. A lot of the women brought all their children with them, regardless if they needed treating or not. It would be so easy for the mothers to lose track of a child or two on the long climb. No, the kitchens really were a better location, unless they were to build stairs up the front of the house to the balcony. That hardly was feasible. He felt foolish even thinking about it.

  He felt the hot air rising through the vents long before the men arrived back in the room. It had been so long since he’d had any kind of central heating it felt like a luxury. It was a luxury, he realized. In the history of human endeavor, central heating was a blip. Well, it was a blip he would enjoy the heck out of.

  Finally, darkness fell, and they loaded the old man’s body onto a dolly and wheeled him through the big overhead door and up onto the driveway. It was a good thing it was dark because then they had to wheel him around the apartment wing of the building into the courtyard. During daylight, there would have been no way to hide what they were doing.

  Christian and Melvin had taken turns digging the grave in a neglected flower bed in the center of the courtyard. They had not asked Glen to help because he needed to save his hands for practicing medicine. Glen had objected, offering to take his turn, but they had voted him down. They all were relying on his skills to keep them alive, so he was spared the grunt work.

  Christian and Melvin jumped down into the grave. Then Glen, Sally, and Mia handed down the corpse. He wasn’t all that dense, mostly bone and skin, although there was a little bit of muscle there, probably acquired in the effort to maintain the building. Christian and Melvin laid him gently in the dirt and then scrambled up and out of the hole.

  They just were starting to shovel dirt when they heard a noise. Sally spotted the cluster of children first and pointed. They didn’t run when they were discovered but stood there gaping and whispering. Sally walked over to them.

  “Are you spying on us?” she asked. “Because you really shouldn’t spy on people. They may not like it, and something bad could happen to you.”

  “Will you kill us the way you killed him?” a boy of about twelve asked, pointing to where the others still were shoveling dirt.

  “We didn’t…” Sally began, but Melvin came up behind her and touched her shoulder, stopping her speech.

  “Yes,” Melvin said, “we will. We own this building now, and if anybody bothers us, we’ll run them off just like that old fellow did. Only there’s more of us, and we are a lot meaner than him.”

  The group seemed to pull in on itself, shrinking together, becoming more cohesive. They took a few steps back. “What are you going to do here?” asked a high small trembling voice.

  “See that man over there?” Melvin asked. “He’s a doctor. We’re going to use this building as a doctor’s office for people who can’t afford to pay the doctors in the hospitals. So when you get sick, you can come here, and we will try to make you better.”

  “I thought you said you were mean, that you’d run us off,” a child said.

  “And I will,” Melvin said. “If I find you around here at night, or if I find you trying to get in any of the other doors, I will run you off. If I catch you, I’ll beat you to within an inch of your life. Do you understand? You mess with us, we’ll mess you up. But if you’re sick or hurt and need help, you come to that door over there. Understand?”

  There was some nodding and shuffling, and the group disappeared around the side of the building. There was a collective sigh of relief, and they resumed shoveling dirt back into the grave.

  “I thought we weren’t going to let anyone know the old man was dead,” Sally said.

  “That was the plan,” Melvin said, “but we were spotted. Pretty soon everyone in a five-block radius is going to k
now that old man is dead, but they would’ve figured it out anyway. This way they think we killed him, which makes us tougher than him. And they’re all going to hear through the grapevine that we’re practicing medicine here.”

  “But so will the people who run the hospitals, won’t they? We heard some awful stories about what happens to people who don’t obey the Tribinal. At least that’s what they call it. I thought they meant tribunal, but I guess not. It’s Koupe Tribinal. Someone told me it was a Haitian phrase, he was a brown wrinkly old man. Probably Haitian himself, I’d guess.” Sally stopped talking as she took the shovel from Mia to do her twenty shovelfuls.

  “I think someone should stay here tonight,” Mia said as they were finishing up by stamping the dirt down. “In case anyone comes snooping around. We can’t bar the door if we aren’t on the inside.”

  “You have a point,” Glen said. “I can stay here.”

  “We’ll need you to help carry the heavier items back,” Melvin said. “No offense, but the women don’t have the upper body strength that you have.”

  “If it comes to that,” Sally said, “I’m the weakest, so I should stay behind. Now that there aren’t any dead bodies in the house it won’t be so creepy.”

  “Did we close the door into the wood storage area?” Mia asked, suddenly worried about seeing images of marauders running through the museum.

  “It’s closed and locked,” Melvin said. “But we need to go back inside to bar it.”

  “Are we finished here?” Glen asked. “Good. Then let’s go back in and secure the building before we leave. I want Sally to feel safe.”

  They trouped back in through the French doors, locking and barring them before heading to the basement to bar the overhead door. That door was trickier, because not only was the steel bar that ran across the entry long and heavy, there was also a wedge that blocked the top of the door to keep it from sliding upward.

  “I don’t know how that old man did this,” Mia groaned from her perch on the ladder, which appeared to have been left next to the door for this purpose, “I can’t steady myself on the ladder and lift this weight at the same time.” The wedge was solid and really heavy. “Do you think it’s lead?”