“What did the bandits do?”
“They tried to ram the fence with one of their cars. It was a big black four-wheel drive. I couldn’t tell what type it was in the darkness. They smashed it into a section of the wire fence near the trees and at the same time they all opened fire.”
“It turned into an actual shootout?”
“Yes,” Tara said. “We hit them with everything we had.”
“And the fence?”
“It held – luckily,” Tara said. “Joe and the men had been reinforcing the fence line ever since we had arrived at the Armory. That back section near the treeline was the first area they reinforced. The fence held.”
“And…?” I sensed there was more.
“And we filled their damned car full of holes.”
“What did the bandits do?”
“Their vehicle was a wreck. They couldn’t drive it away. It didn’t blow up. The guy behind the wheel scrambled out through the driver’s side door. Joe shot and killed him.”
“And what about the other vehicle? You said they had a couple…”
Tara shook her head. “I guess they’d had enough by that time,” she smiled then – an expression of bleak satisfaction. “They just melted back into the night. We heard them drive slowly away. We thought it might be a trick – that they would test the perimeter somewhere else along the fence line, so we stood guard until morning.”
“They didn’t attack again?”
“No. In the morning, our men went out into the woods where they had been. They stripped their car of everything they could salvage. Joe figured there might have been as many as twenty of them. They followed the tire tracks back onto the road west from here.”
“And the body? The driver?”
Tara shrugged. “In the morning it was gone.”
“Animals?”
“Probably.”
I wrote everything down that Tara told me. “What about the man who was injured? The one who was shot in the thigh. Did he survive?”
“Yes,” Tara said. “I worked as a secretary in a Women’s center and x-ray department before the Apocalypse. Normally I would check in patients and help the techs. I went to school for medical assisting and have my degree. I attended to the man who was shot. He’s perfectly fine. You can meet him when we head out to the Armory, if you like.”
I nodded my head. I sensed Tara was impatient, wanting to be away from this place. She was uneasy, restless. It was in her voice, and the way her eyes were always moving; scouring the surrounding countryside for the first signs of anything out of the ordinary.
“Before we go,” I held up my finger and smiled a kind of lop-sided apology. “Can you tell me where you were when you first heard about the Apocalypse?”
Tara inclined her head graciously, but there was strain at the corners of her mouth.
“I was at work.”
“At the Women’s center?”
“Yes.”
“And how did you find out about the news of the Apocalypse spreading through Indiana?”
Tara folded her arms across her chest. She glared at me balefully. “It was about ten o’clock in the morning,” the tone of her voice made it clear that she was unhappy. She glanced down the hill to where her car was parked and then fixed me with a cool stare. “I was checking in patients. An emergency alert came on the television, and around the same time we actually had a patient come through our ER. It was a woman. She had an extremely high fever and she was acting irrationally…”
“What was your first reaction when you heard the alert?”
“To get to my family, Mr. Culver,” Tara’s tone bordered on open hostility. “I knew I needed to leave the hospital before they called Code Black and I got stuck. I knew I had to get home, gather our supplies, and get to our special spot we had chosen in case of such an emergency.”
I looked up, a little surprised. “Wait. You’re telling me you had the Armory location pre-selected?”
“Yes,” Tara said. “The Armory was always our escape destination. It’s just five miles from here and it’s about the same distance from a local superstore. It has a bunker on the grounds. We had supplies stockpiled, and we had six other families coordinated to join us. The Armory is fenced, kind of like a prison, with several small outbuildings we could use.”
“So were you and your husband preppers?”
“Preppers?”
“Yes,” I frowned. “You know. Were you the kind of people who spent their lives preparing for the kind of Apocalypse that swept America?”
Tara didn’t laugh. Her expression stayed stony, impassive. “We weren’t preppers, Mr. Culver. You make it sound like we were crazy fanatics,” she shook her head like I should be ashamed of myself. “No. We were prepared, not preppers. My husband and I have some survival skills training and so do my sons. That doesn’t make us crazies… or if it does, it makes us the best kind. We survived, Mr. Culver. We endured because we were prepared. We had a plan, we gave the eventuality some thought. Most Americans do at some stage or another. A lot of people wonder what might happen in the event of an Apocalypse or a war… and they do nothing about it. We acted. We stored food and essential items. It was because of that preparation and planning that we’re alive today,” Tara’s voice became sharply edged.
My question had offended her. I smiled an innocent apology. “I’m sorry,” I held up my hand. “I didn’t mean to upset you. I’m just trying my best to tell your story.”
Tara’s expression stayed icy, but some of the tension seeped from her body. She let out a long sigh. “It’s okay,” the pinched expression softened into something that was not quite a smile. “It’s not you. It’s this place,” she looked around us for the thousandth time like she expected to see one of the ‘Afflicted’ come bursting through the front door of the house.
I had one last question before leaving. I decided to compromise. I asked it as we were walking back down the hill towards our cars.
“What did you take with you when you left here? Apart from your stockpile of supplies and weapons.”
Tara glanced sideways at me. She was walking fast, eager to be away. “Photo albums,” she shrugged her shoulders. “Just some small keepsakes. I had a box of memories set aside but in the panic I forgot to gather them. Joe found them when we came back to the house.”
We got to the cars and Tara seemed visibly to relax. She slid in behind the wheel and wound down the window. I could see the tension drain away from her. She started up the engine. “Follow me to the Armory,” she said.
I nodded – and then froze as something troubling came back to me – something Tara had not explained. I leaned against the side of the car.
“You told me you were living on the compound as one of four families.”
“That’s right,” Tara was staring out through the windshield like she was eager to be away.
“But you also said six families were part of your survival plan…”
“That’s right.” Now she looked at me, her expression unfathomable.
“What happened to the other families?”
“They died, Mr. Culver. One of the families never made it to the compound. We don’t know what happened to them. We can only presume they were ‘Afflicted’.”
“And the other family?”
“They made it…” Tara’s voice faded. Her gaze seemed to turn in upon itself in memory or reflection. “But when they arrived at the gates the woman and one of her children were showing the same symptoms as the patient at the Medical Center had.”
“What did you do?”
There was a long stony silence and for a time I wondered whether Tara would even answer the question. She turned her head away and fixed her gaze on the road. “We wouldn’t let them in to the compound,” she said at last.
“You left them outside?”
“Yes.”
“Who decided that?”
“We all did,” Tara said stiffly. “We voted.”
I stood back
from the car and thought about that. I imagined Tara, her husband and the other families staring through a chain wire fence at a family of friends, denying them the safety of the compound because a woman – maybe one of Tara’s own close friends – was showing symptoms of the ‘Affliction’. I wondered about the struggle between compassion and the instinct to survive… and where we each drew the line.
“What happened to the family, Tara?” I asked softly.
She was weeping. I saw the trickle of a tear run down her dusty cheek. She cuffed it away. She trapped her bottom lip between her teeth. Her hands on the steering wheel were suddenly white-knuckled. She never looked at me, never took her eyes off the road.
“They all became ‘Afflicted’,” she said in a whisper. “It happened in the afternoon. They were clawing at the wire, screaming for us to let them in. The woman was lying in the grass, curled up and shaking. Her husband… he pleaded for us to help them. The sound of his voice still haunts me to this day. He begged us for mercy, Mr. Culver. He appealed to us as friends and parents. He dropped to his knees and cried…”
“And then?”
“And then his wife suddenly got to her feet, swaying like she was drunk. Her arms went stiff, her hands seized into claws. She had her back to us and when she turned around, her eyes were yellow with the madness and she vomited blood. She attacked the others. She killed her children and then her husband. They all turned. The insanity of the ‘Affliction’ consumed them.”
“They tried to get into the Armory?”
“Yes. Joe and I shot them,” Tara’s voice broke at last into a tremulous fit of grief-stricken sobbing. “It was the only humane thing left to do.”
The drive to the Indiana National Guard Armory was five miles of abandoned road. The ground was like a brown wasteland. Nothing grew. The trees were gnarled stumps as though they had been poisoned. It was a landscape of desolation and dust.
As we topped a gentle rise in the road I pulled over suddenly and stopped my car. I watched Tara’s vehicle drive on towards a set of high chain wire gates, kicking up a plume of hazy dust behind it. I got out of my vehicle.
In the midst of the arid wasteland, the grounds of the Armory compound stood like a desert oasis; a green fertile patch of land surrounded by fence line and sprinkled with small white outbuildings. There were internal roads laced across the compound grounds and I could see three vehicles parked in front of a low brick building that seemed to be the heart of the base. Away on the far side of the high fence was a dense stand of trees, losing the green of their leaves as though the poisoned ground was slowly strangling the life from them.
I drove down to the compound gates. Tara was waiting for me, the engine of her car still idling. A young man in his early teens with a rifle slung over his shoulder swung one of the gates open and we drove through.
I was inside the Indiana National Guard Armory compound.
The gates clattered closed behind me and I heard the distinctive ‘snick’ of a heavy lock.
A cluster of curious people came from different parts of the grounds to meet us. Some carried gardening tools, others weapons. Tara introduced me to them all. I shook hands, smiled the obligatory smile and tried to remember faces. The men looked drawn and haggard, the women weary and fatigued with brave exhaustion. The children were thin and somber.
We left our cars inside the gates and she led me towards a cluster of crosses.
“This is the cemetery,” she said. Set into the ground were small rows of brass plaques. “It was here before we arrived. We tend to it, maintain it.”
I stood for a silent moment with my head bowed respectfully. These were not people who had died during the Apocalypse – they were soldiers who had served their country in the years before the ‘Affliction’ spread. It said something about the people who lived here that they would dedicate some of the precious time that could have been used on growing crops to instead tending the graves of fallen soldiers.
At last I stood back and swept my eyes around the compound. There was an ugly scar of dirt the size of a baseball diamond near one wall of the brick compound building. Two of the children were standing in the dirt, their backs bent, bowed and digging at the brown earth. I pointed. Tara waved for me to follow her.
“It’s our garden,” she explained and now we were away from the house and safe from the outside world cheer had crept into her voice and sparkle in her eyes. “We’re just planting the next season’s crops.”
I was impressed. The children looked up at me – grubby faced urchins with curious expressions and big wide eyes. They said nothing. Tara swept her hands, explaining.
“Lettuce, carrots, potatoes… We brought some seeds with us. For the first twelve months it was a struggle, but now we’re finally beginning to see the fruits of our labors.”
“Is there enough to sustain you all?”
“Not yet,” Tara admitted. “We’re supplementing what we grow with the food we stockpiled and brought with us. Each month we use a little more of what we grow, and a little left of our supplies.”
“And water?”
“Look around,” Tara propped her hands on her hips, satisfied. There were buckets to catch rain water, plastic bottles, and a contraption that ran from the storm water pipes along the roofline of the brick building down into a kind of canvas bladder. It looked like a kind of primitive water tank that farmers on the land might use to water crops.
“It’s enough?”
She shrugged. “There’s never too much,” she countered my question. “But we get by.” She glanced up at the wide blue sky. “Days like today don’t help. But when the storms come we make up for it.”
We walked a slow circuit of the compound, pausing in the shade of the giant dying trees that fringed the far fence line.
And suddenly I couldn’t resist the temptation a moment longer. I dropped down into the green soft ground and kicked off my boots. I sat there, looking up at the sunlight filtering through the dense canopy of leaves, grateful for the cool shade. I wiggled my toes. It was the first time I had felt green grass under my feet since the Apocalypse.
Tara smiled, bemused. “Makes you feel like a kid again, doesn’t it.”
I smiled sheepishly. She stood over me and sighed. “It’s therapeutic. It reminds us, Mr. Culver. It reminds us of when the world wasn’t such an awful, godless place; when life was simpler and we clung to the last of our nation’s innocence. It’s only grass, but it means a lot more than that.”
I wished I had written her words down. Inadvertently Tara Copsy had summed up all we had lost – everything we would forever regret and lament. When I got back to the car, I tried to recall her expression and what she had said down on the grassy field. I fear it’s not word-for-word… but the sentiment is hers.
– and that of all Americans who endured.
We hadn’t just lost over two hundred million lives during the terror of the ‘Affliction’. We had lost the last shreds of our nation’s innocence.
I sat in my car for a long time with the engine running, the gates of the compound open for me. Tara and the other survivors were gathered around the vehicle – and suddenly I didn’t want to leave. Here was the genesis of the new America; a band of hardy self-sufficient survivors who were scratching out a living, laying the foundations of a new world for future generations. Some part of me wanted to remain – to be a part of this.
I realized it was because I was just like everyone else who had endured. We were drawn towards hope.
I drove slowly out through the gates and turned west. I watched the compound in my rearview mirror until it eventually disappeared from sight.
* * *
Waterville, Maine:
I sat in my car for five full minutes, shaking my head, flicking through the pages of my notebook. I was checking the address for the tenth time in disbelief. “It wasn’t possible, was it?”
I was parked on what was left of a suburban street in Waterville, Maine, staring at a single two story
house that stood at the apex of a dead end. There was nothing else left of the entire street apart from the broken burned bones of other homes. It was as if a tornado had swept through the area, indiscriminately cleaving a swathe of destruction – tearing everything in its path to pieces, but miraculously leaving one home untouched.
This was like that house – the single building in the entire neighborhood that remained standing.
I got out of the car, pushed the driver’s door closed and approached the front door. The home was old and wooden; ordinary in every way. A woman came striding out onto the porch like maybe she had been standing at the window with the curtains twitched aside, watching me.
“Mr. Culver?”
“Yes.” I dusted off my friendly grin and hung it from the corner of my mouth. I hadn’t had much use for the expression in recent months.
“Kate? Kate Sellar?”
“That’s right.” I went up the porch steps and we shook hands. She was a woman in her forties or fifties with short cut no-nonsense hair and bright intelligent eyes behind a pair of spectacles. She had the robust healthy complexion that came from living so far north, color on her cheeks and a smile on her lips. “Glad you could make it,” she stood back and took a moment to study the morning sky. “Looks like we might get rain later.”
I turned and looked at the same scene Kate was viewing. All I saw was a street of broken, ruined houses. There was rubble and upended cars on the front lawns of the neighboring houses. Everything was blackened with fire or grey with dust. A crisscross of downed power lines and charred power poles were strung across the rubble. Kate didn’t even seem to notice.
I followed Kate inside and we stood in a wide living room filled with an eclectic assortment of furniture. There were framed photographs of family members on one wall. I went towards the images curiously. The floorboards squeaked.
Of the dozen or so photographs hung on the wall, more than half of them were of the same girl. She was a teenager with identical features to Kate; the family resemblance was unmistakable. In many of the photos, the girl’s hair color was different. I stared at an image of the girl showing her with a blue scarf around her neck and an older, stern-faced man, sitting beside her. The man had steely eyes and a stubble of white beard. I turned back to Kate and looked a question.
The Enduring: Stories of Surviving the Apocalypse Page 4
