The Enduring: Stories of Surviving the Apocalypse

by Nicholas Ryan

  I climbed wearily behind the wheel and started the engine. Kate came out through the front door, waving her hand for me to wait. She reached the driver’s side door and smiled down at me. “Here,” she handed me the piece of paper she had torn from my notebook and had folded into the pocket of her pants. “Here’s your answer, Mr. Culver. This is how we survived the Apocalypse. I hope it helps you with your interview.”

  I tucked the piece of paper into my shirt pocket, waved goodbye and drove to the end of the street, past the burned out shell of a vehicle crashed against a power pole. I didn’t look back.

  When I got around the corner I stopped the car in the middle of the road, left the engine idling, and reached into my pocket for the piece of paper Kate Sellar had handed me, my curiosity burning like a fire.

  She had written just three words.

  Dumb.

  Fucking.

  Luck.

  At the bottom of the page she had drawn a smiley face.

  I stared at the piece of paper for a long time, shaking my head with slow wonder. I had travelled the length and breadth of America searching for answers – trying to understand those indomitable characteristics that separated those who had survived the ‘Affliction’ from the many, many millions who had perished. Each person’s story I had heard had been a tale of painstaking preparation or determination – quiet stoic heroism in the face of impossible odds. Now, I had another intangible factor to ponder.

  Some people had just been dumb fucking lucky.

  * * *

  Laurel Fork, Virginia:

  Hard eyes: a hard man.

  Mike Jackson greeted me with a grunt, a shake of the hand – and then turned his head away, staring out across the tree-studded land that surrounded us.

  He had his balled fists thrust deep into the pockets of his jacket, his heavy jaw set in a determined thrust, his chin and cheeks stubbled with a couple of days growth. He said nothing more, and I spent a couple of moments taking in the view of the Virginia countryside, sneaking glances at him from out of the corner of my eye. He was a man in his late forties, his hair brown turning grey, cropped close to his skull. His eyes were set in a web of fine wrinkles, his face tanned to the color of mahogany.

  We stayed that way – standing in utter silence – until it became almost awkward. I felt unwelcome; like a stranger who had encroached on some private place that was somehow sacred.

  I drew a deep breath, kicked my feet around in the dead grass.

  “How much land do you have here?” I made a wide sweeping gesture with the flat of my hand.

  Mike Jackson turned his head and stared at me for a full five seconds, his eyes narrowed warily before he finally answered.

  “Twenty-one acres,” he said.

  I nodded. If he wasn’t outright hostile towards me, he was at the very least guarded.

  Mike Jackson was a man of few words.

  I tried to engage him. “That’s a lot of space. Do you have neighbors?”

  “We did have,” Mike muttered. He let out a sigh. “Before we fled Virginia at the outbreak of the ‘Affliction’, we had neighbors on either side. I don’t know if they’re still living or not.”

  “You haven’t checked?”

  The man glared at me. “No,” he said bluntly. “Not my business and not my problem.”

  We were standing on a fold of low-lying ground, with the family’s single story modular home at our back. The house was nestled under the shade of nearby trees, and I could hear the sound of female voices coming from somewhere inside. It seemed to me to be an ideal place for a family to sit out the sweeping death of the ‘Affliction’; the home was concealed from the passing road by groves of trees, and the Laurel Fork region is no more than a clustered small community about ninety minutes from Roanoke, and just a twenty minute drive from the North Carolina state line. It was rural land – quiet, isolated, and crisscrossed with a meandering lacework of babbling creeks that wound their way along the folds and contours of the property.

  It made me wonder why this man had abandoned the home when the ‘Affliction’ had first broken out – and why he had taken his family on a perilous journey full of hazards in search of somewhere safer – more isolated.

  I asked him.

  “See the land?” he snatched one of his hands from out of the pocket of his jacket and pointed.

  “Yes.” I looked away through the trees to a low lying series of undulations, studded with woods. The trees were brown, the grass a patchwork of dying grass and dirt. It was as if the earth had been scorched with acid.

  “Does that answer your question?” Mike pressed his lips into a thin contemptible line, like the question annoyed him.

  I shook my head. Okay. Jackson was a man of few words and clearly I wasn’t the person he wanted to waste those words on. But I was here for a reason, dammit – and that was to give him the opportunity to share his harrowing survival story with what was left of the world. I turned on him, feeling my face darken with frustration.

  I had my notebook in my hand, my pen poised. I stuffed them into my pocket. “Listen, Mr. Jackson,” I said with restraint. “I came all the way here to Virginia so you could share your story – so you could tell me how you and your family endured the ‘Affliction’ and survived the Apocalypse. I’m not a local; I don’t have your life experiences. It’s not going to help if you treat me like an outsider. I’m not trying to pry… I’m trying to understand.”

  Mike Jackson turned his face to mine and it was like swinging the double barrels of a shotgun on to a target. I could see a flash of temper in his face. I went on belligerently. “So you either use this opportunity to talk to me and share your experience, or I’ll just drive away. There are other people I can speak to. I came to visit you because I thought your situation was unique and worthy of sharing with those who endured.”

  We glared at each other across the short space that separated us for a long moment of crackling tension. Mike Jackson’s face stayed hard as granite, but something in his eyes altered. He nodded his head slowly, as if I had passed some unspoken test.

  “Fair enough,” he said.

  I let out a breath that had been seized in my chest, suffocating me. Mike turned away again and fixed his gaze on the nearest line of tall trees.

  When he spoke at last, there was something haunted and strained in his voice. “Before the ‘Affliction’ I worked maintenance at a truck stop,” he began talking in stilted words. “At about three o’clock in the afternoon, a police car pulled up out front of the workshop. It was a friend of mine. He came running at me, with his gun drawn. He was shouting. At first I thought he had been called to a robbery inside the building. His face was flushed, his features all wrenched up so he looked like he was in pain. I threw down my spanners and went towards him.”

  “At that time you still didn’t know why the policeman was there?”

  “No.”

  “But you knew about the spread of the ‘Affliction’, right?”

  “Sure,” Mike grimaced. “It had been all over the television for days. I saw the news reports as it started to spread from the south. But the media was full of those fear-mongering reports; Ebola, Zika,” he shrugged his broad shoulders. “I didn’t pay much attention.”

  “And then?”

  “And then my law enforcement buddy came into the workshop. He told me what was happening. The local police forces were all over the streets, lights flashing and sirens wailing. Two other black and whites pulled up and they evacuated the entire truck stop.”

  “The infection had spread that close?”

  Again, Mike shrugged his shoulders. “No one knew. My buddy said Danville had already reported its first cases. That was when shit got real.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I paused,” Mike said. I widened my eyes in surprise. He didn’t seem like the kind of guy who would hesitate in the face of a crisis.

  “What?”

  “I paused,” he said again, and the shape
and line of his mouth turned down at the corners. His gaze became clouded.

  “Why?”

  “I had served in the Air Force, working law enforcement, and I had military training – a week at M60 School, eight weeks as an infantry grunt, another eight weeks of security at the police academy. I was trained to use an M203 grenade launcher… and a bunch of other stuff the military taught me. I was torn between my duty to my country and my responsibility to my family. I could have stayed; I could have volunteered to help the police and military.”

  “But you didn’t?”

  “No.”

  “Can I ask why?”

  Mike sniffed, then straightened his back and drew his shoulders square like he was bracing himself. “Because I have a wife and two daughters,” his voice softened with compassion. “One of my girls is sixteen, the other just twelve years old.”

  I nodded, understanding. Then my eyes narrowed curiously and I played Devil’s Advocate. I suspected I already knew the answer to my next question but I threw it out there.

  “Given different circumstances… if you had no family. Would you have stayed?”

  “In a heartbeat,” Mike Jackson smashed back his reply. His answer was so passionate and adamant that it sounded to me as though he almost regretted not being on the front line of the fight.

  I drew my notebook out of my pocket and jotted a couple of pages of notes. I realized suddenly he still hadn’t answered my first question. I doubled back over what we had spoken about so far.

  “So… why did you pack up and leave?” I re-asked the question. “Why didn’t you try to wait out the ‘Affliction’?”

  He made another irritated face and stabbed his hand at those nearby trees once more. “I knew the ‘Afflicted’ were going to sweep through here,” he said in slow words as though he were talking to a child. “Because Laurel Fork straddles the Danville Pike, and besides that we’re basically in the path of a line between Winston-Salem and Roanoke. To the west of us is a barrier of national parks and forests. I saw this tide of infection and death coming up from the south, heading right for us. I knew we weren’t safe here.”

  “And you were right?”

  Mike inclined his head grimly. “Those trees… the land… it’s all evidence,” he said softly. “The ‘Afflicted’ came sweeping through this area, killing the ground, killing the plants, even poisoning one of the creeks that run through the property.”

  “The water?” That shocked me. I had seen the scorched dead earth left behind by the virulent contagion, but I had never heard of a water supply being contaminated. If this shocking revelation were true, it would mean the ultimate death of everyone who had endured.

  “There were bodies in the creeks,” Mike explained. “I saw a dozen or more of them in a stream down by the bottom of the property. They had all been headshot,” he shrugged his shoulders like he didn’t have an explanation. “Maybe the military got them in an ambush, or maybe it was a few vigilante fighters who fled up into the mountains when the ‘Affliction’ broke out. I don’t know. But they were decomposed.”

  “Have you tested the water from any of the other creeks?”

  “It’s fine,” Mike said. “It was just that one stream where the infected had been killed. The water was the color of rust and all the plants along the bank were covered in a frothy scum, like detergent.”

  “Fish?”

  “They were all dead, floating belly up. I followed the stream for miles. It was the same.”

  We lapsed into another silence, although this one wasn’t fraught with the same bristling tension that had greeted me on my arrival. Now we were both contemplative. Maybe Mike was thinking about how his life would have turned out if he had stayed behind and joined the fight against the ‘Afflicted’. His expression became dark for a while and then he sighed like a man about to start on a long weary journey.

  “I have a journal,” he said. “It’s my wife’s actually. She wrote it.”

  “A journal? You mean a diary?”

  Mike shrugged like they were the same thing and why bother arguing the point. “It’s her record of what happened to us from the time we left here two years ago, up until yesterday. I thought it might be helpful to you. I’m not a great talker. If you find anything in it you want to know about, I’ll tell you what happened.”

  I smiled with a mixture of relief and a prickle of anticipation. A written record of a family’s escape from the ‘Affliction’ might offer a completely different insight into the nightmare. “I’d like to see it,” I tried to keep my voice level, dispassionate.

  Mike nodded. He turned on his heel and started striding back towards the house. I began to follow him but he stopped suddenly and turned on me. “No,” he said bluntly. “My wife and my children don’t want to be part of the interview. This is just you and me. I’d ask you to respect their decision.”

  There was a warning in the tenor of his voice. He didn’t say, “or else…” but he didn’t need to. It was implied by his expression and his tone. I stayed where I was.

  Mike went to the back door of the house and I heard the low murmur of voices, followed by a fit of short sharp barking. A little pug dog came scampering through the open door. It was brown with the mushed up face that typified its breed. It was a puppy. It circled around me, found nothing of interest, and went back into the house. Mike came out through the door holding a little book, the size of a pocket Bible.

  Mike handed me the journal. It was tattered; the spine creased and frayed, the front and back covers dog-eared. I flicked quickly through the pages. They were dirty with dust and grimy fingerprints. Several of the pages were crusted with spots of candlewax. The first pages were written in ink by a shaky hand. As I delved deeper into the little book, the writing changed to pencil but the wording was neater, more assured. I closed the book for a moment and looked sideways at Mike.

  “Were you armed when you left here?”

  “Yes,” he said. “I had an automatic rifle and a 40 cal handgun. Lots of ammunition, lots of water… and not much else.”

  “What was the plan when you drove away?”

  “To work my way towards the coastal areas of North Carolina, using back roads and keeping away from the heavily populated towns. I planned on finding a boat and navigating my way down the coast.”

  “Do you have boating skills?”

  “Some,” Mike was vague and said no more. “We planned on staying close to shore until we reached an island I thought we could defend.”

  It sounded like an ambitious plan. “Without food, and only an automatic rifle and a handgun?”

  Mike’s body posture changed. He shifted his weight, hooked one thumb into the pocket of his jeans, and his gaze became a kind of defiant challenge. He was assured, confident. Not arrogant. This was a man who had survived a harrowing journey of several hundred miles and kept his family safe against the swarming tide of the ‘Afflicted’.

  “It worked,” he said simply. “We foraged food along the way. We stumbled upon a couple of abandoned Army vehicles near a town called St. Pauls. One of the trucks had explosives and weapons, the other was loaded with basic supplies.”

  “No sign of the military?”

  “No, they were long gone,” Mike said. “We saw blood – lots of it. My guess is the ‘Afflicted’ swept over the convoy – like an ambush. But the tracks were a day old, and the blood spatters were dry. By then I think we were in behind the first wave.”

  I couldn’t resist the temptation any longer. I looked into the man’s deeply tanned face. “Where was the island?”

  Mike’s face turned into an icy cold smile without humor and the friendliness in his eyes became hidden behind steel shutters. “Off the coast,” he said.

  “Far away from here?”

  He said nothing.

  “Somewhere off Florida?”

  Mike’s irritation began to show. The press of his lips became thin, and his mouth hooked down. “Somewhere off the coast.”

  I tri
ed one last time, flirting with the prospect of incensing him into violence. “The Gulf of Mexico?”

  He folded his arms across his chest and stared at me with a menacing expression. His body stood rigid, the tension strung along the nerves of his neck and shoulders so the veins showed through the flesh like cords of rope.

  “It’s confidential,” he rumbled.

  “Why?”

  “In case the ‘Affliction’ ever comes back… in case some evil fucking world power decides America is on its knees, and now is the time to attack and invade. It was an island. A small, tiny little island, Mr. Culver. That’s all I’m telling you in case I ever need to take my family back there to safety. It’s a secret… and it’s going to stay that way.”

  I held my hands up in a parody of surrender and tried to look apologetic. I wasn’t, in reality. I wanted to know, but it was clear that Mike Jackson had lines that he would not cross. One was revealing his family for the interview. The other was revealing the location he had escaped to when the ‘Afflicted’ had cut a swathe of death through his slice of Virginia.

  The sun hit its zenith in the sky and I crawled under the shade of a nearby tree with the precious journal. A breath of wind came down through the valley, the air tainted by the smell of smoke. The breeze rattled the dead leaves from the tree and they fell like gentle rain.

  Mike disappeared inside the house and I heard the lilting tinkle of women’s voices, followed by the sounds of furniture being moved, and windows being thrown open. He came back twenty minutes later. He had a couple of bottles of water in his hand. He tossed me one.

  I looked at the bottle quizzically. “It’s not from the poisoned stream, is it?”

  Mike didn’t laugh. He wasn’t that kind of man.

  I drank the water. It was blood warm, sweet and fresh. I had the journal opened to a page that was sprinkled with dry candle wax. I pointed at the first entry that had been written in scratchy ink and I read it out loud.

  ‘Car almost stolen. Michaela and Andrea bruised but okay. Mike had to kill again.’

  Mike’s face flickered, like a split-second break in a television transmission, before the wall of stone that was his normal expression reset itself.