When I finally got my senses back, I had been deposited at the side of the crowd and I looked frantically around for Dad. I finally spotted him in the middle of the gang of thugs who were pushing him back and forth between them, each taking a crack at his face or body as he passed. I started screaming for help, suddenly realizing that the water tanker, along with the accompanying soldiers, were driving away, leaving us to fend for ourselves. After what seemed like hours of me standing by helplessly watching Dad get beat up, my nose bleeding and swelling so much I could barely see, some police officers showed up and with guns, billy clubs, and riot gear, and chased everybody off. Everybody but the few of us who were injured, that is. Dad was on his back, gasping for air like a fish out of water. An officer stooped down to check on him, but he couldn’t talk to say if he was okay or not. It took a few minutes for Dad to recover enough to painfully sit up and speak again. He said he was alright, but I worried that he might have had some ribs broken because he moved gingerly for weeks afterward.
Chapter 4
Spiraling Down
Day by day, things got progressively worse. After the first few days of almost constant sirens, fewer and fewer could be heard each day. This wasn’t because there were any fewer emergencies or less crime; it was because the police, fire departments, and ambulances were running out of fuel to run their vehicles. The military still had fuel in reserve, but they conserved it as much as possible. It was odd to see nothing but an occasional army Hummer on the once-busy downtown streets. Instead of sirens, more and more often we’d hear people screaming in terror or anguish, yelling for help, or crying in pain.
One old man in our building, Mr. Westcott, who had been without his oxygen for several days, collapsed and died of a heart attack—at least that’s what we thought he probably died of. Dad and some of the other residents had been checking on him every day, but one morning when someone checked on him, they found him dead in his ratty, old armchair, clutching his chest but, incongruously, with a peaceful expression on his face. When I got there with Dad, the smell made my stomach heave. Dad and some of the other men took his body, wrapped it in a blanket, and carried it to the children’s hospital, where at least they would have a morgue. When Dad came back, he was visibly shaken and wouldn’t talk the rest of the afternoon. It made me sick to think of what he saw there, so I didn’t even want to know.
I began to have nightmares at night and even some hallucinations during the day. Dad said it was probably because of the lack of adequate food and water, but I thought there was a lot more to it than that. I couldn’t stop thinking about old Mr. Westcott and all the children at the children’s hospital. As much as I tried to avoid it, I kept thinking about Mom and wondering how she was doing. At least she had Lyle to take care of her. I kept trying to bury thoughts of Mom, so I wouldn’t have to face my growing worry and loneliness for her.
One night I had a particularly vivid nightmare that made me wake up panting in fear. I was outside somewhere in a field, on a beautiful summer day. As I looked up at the sky, I noticed that the sun seemed to be getting bigger and bigger, closer and closer. I don’t know how, but I was able to look directly at the sun, as it loomed closer toward me. As it neared, I could see bright storms raging on its surface, and occasionally it would spit flares out the side. It grew hotter, and I began to sweat, then my skin felt like it was burning. When it got so big and close that I could almost reach out to touch it, the grass around me started catching on fire. I could hear my dad yelling at me to run, but I couldn’t move my feet.
Suddenly there was an explosion, and I woke up, panting and sweating. I wasn’t sure if it was a real-life explosion that had woken me up or if I had just dreamed it, but a few seconds later a second explosion rocked our building. I jumped out of bed and ran to the living room where Dad was looking out the window toward the west. A huge fire raged across town, probably five or ten miles away, and the light from it lit up the entire western sky. All night long the fire burned, first gaining in area, then finally burning down by late morning. The oddest thing about the whole night was the absence of sirens. It was strange that in the past year that I’d lived downtown, I’d gotten so used to sleeping through sirens, but now I found the absence of them oddly unnerving. I never did go back to sleep, but just laid there thinking about the nightmare and the real fire just a few miles away.
By December—at least according to one of our neighbors who kept track of the days religiously—almost everyone was out of their stockpile of food and the stores were empty, too. The military could only bring in water trucks every other day and rioting around them became more common and more intense. Dad and I started collecting rainwater in buckets on our little balcony, but it wasn’t nearly enough to quench our thirst, let alone to use it for bathing and flushing the toilet. People began having to go to the bathroom outside, in parks and alleys. They were collecting rainwater that had pooled in the city’s two hundred fountains, but the water in those were fouled from animals who were starving and dying from thirst, sometimes in the fountains themselves, and people who bathed in them. Kansas City used to be famous for its beautiful fountains, but now those same fountains were making people sick with dysentery and other awful stomach diseases that I’d never even heard of before. I got used to being hungry, but I couldn’t get over the thirst that choked me and made me feel weaker every day.
At some point, the military began bringing in grain from grain elevators that had been taken over under martial law and handing it out to people with the water rations. Anyone who rioted was not allowed any water or grain and if the situation got too out of hand, the truck would simply leave that neighborhood and go somewhere else, so people started being more peaceful during the handouts. I think we all were getting too weak to fight anyway. The grain that was handed out was whole, hard, and straight from the field—not ground up or refined in any way. In order to eat it and digest it, you had to grind it and, especially in the case of soybeans, cook it. We mostly got corn, so to grind it, Dad broke one of his old bowling trophies off its marble base, and we used a piece of a broken concrete sidewalk to crack and grind the kernels against the marble. Then we’d mix a few drops of water with it, just so we could choke it down.
One day Dad and I noticed a pigeon hopping around on our balcony and we started thinking about how great it’d be to have some meat to eat. All that afternoon we worked on making a trap out of a box, a stick, and some string, just like Wile E. Coyote would do. When we finally got it perfected, we set it out on the balcony with a few precious grains of corn inside and waited for the pigeon to come back. And waited. And waited. And waited some more. Finally, two days later, we came home from getting our water and grain ration to find the trap had been sprung, and a pigeon was inside. We cheered and did a little victory dance, but then reality set in, and we realized we had no idea what to do with it now. Dad finally killed it with a knife, and we spent the next hour trying to pluck feathers out of it. Then Dad stuck a serving fork in it and held it over an oil lamp we had made out of some cooking oil in a jar with string for a wick, until it was cooked. We devoured that thing, and it seemed like the most delicious thing I’d ever eaten. We were still hungry afterward, but we felt more hope and more in control of the situation than we’d had in a long time and we set up more traps on the balcony and the roof of our building.
For the rest of that year, we lived off whatever animal we could trap, including mice and rats, and the water we collected off our balcony. People who only relied on the military rations didn’t fare so well and many died from dehydration and starvation. Lots of people died from diseases, too, so Dad and I stayed in our apartment most of the time to avoid getting exposed to them, but we couldn’t stay away from people completely.
Christmas came and went without much fanfare. Some people got together and prayed, but most people were too weak and depressed to feel like rejoicing. For the first time in my life, I couldn’t care less that I didn’t get any presents; I was just thankful
to be alive, with a home, a little bit of food and water, and my Dad to take care of me.
Chapter 5
Fire and Loss
Just as I was beginning to think that Dad and I were going to pull through this crisis, Time decided to rear its spiteful face to play a horrible trick on me. In January, it became bitterly cold, and without heat in the apartment, we were miserable, along with everyone else in the city. Try as we might to avoid catching any diseases, Dad and I came down with the flu. While mine just made me tired and achy, Dad’s became much worse, with fever, chills, and raspy breathing. I wondered if the possible broken ribs from the riot at the water tanker weeks before might have allowed pneumonia to settle in his lungs. I did what I could to help ease his pain. Dad didn’t want me going alone to get our water and grain ration, so we tried to get by without it. But by the end of the week, Dad was becoming so dehydrated, I knew I had to go. I slipped out of the apartment while he was asleep.
I knew that Dad hadn’t been eating as much as me—he would always take a few bites then say he was full and push the rest toward me—but I was shocked with how much weight he had lost in the last month. Since it had been so cold, we’d been wearing several layers of clothes to keep warm. It wasn’t until Dad pulled off his layers of sweatshirts in one of his feverish fits, that I saw that he had been reduced to skin and bones, almost literally. I wanted to take him to the hospital, but after what he had seen there when he took old Mr. Westcott, he begged me to promise that I wouldn’t take him.
—They have nothing to help me there, son. No medicine, no sanitation, no power. The hospitals have become morgues. I’ll be okay; I just need some sleep. I’m so tired…
I promised, but I vowed to go back on it if he got much worse. At least I could go and try to find a doctor to come help him.
The day I left him alone at home to get our water and grain ration from the military truck, it was colder and grayer than ever, with the wind howling around every corner of the buildings downtown. Flurries started to fall and quickly developed into sleet. I thought about turning back and just letting my bucket fill with snow, which I could melt for water over our homemade oil lamp, but after seeing how thin Dad had become, I decided that he needed the grain to survive. So I stood, along with about a hundred other starving, freezing people in line for two or three hours. When I was nearing the front of the line, I started smelling smoke. At first it was a pleasant smell, bringing back memories of roasting marshmallows around the little metal fire pit in our backyard at home when I was a kid. Even as I tried to push those treasured memories back down inside, the smell of the fire became stronger and more acrid. Because I was between tall buildings, I couldn’t see where it was coming from, but the smoke was now curling around the buildings on both sides of me. I decided to stay to get the rations since I was so close to getting it, but after I got it, I hurried back toward our apartment.
About three blocks away, I couldn’t even see anything anymore, the smoke was so thick. It was choking me and panic was quickly rising in my chest—not just because I couldn’t breathe, but because I knew Dad was lying helpless back there in one of those buildings. It was almost certain that even if our building weren’t the one on fire now, it would be by the time it was all over. I dropped my rations and ran around the buildings the other way, trying to come from the opposite direction so I could get into our building to get Dad out. People were swarming from the direction of the fire, covered in black soot, choking and coughing. I tried to stop some of the people I recognized from my building, asking them if they’d seen Dad, but they just shook their heads and struggled on.
I could only get within two blocks of the building before the smoke overcame me. I’m not sure whom, but someone dragged me out by my arm into the clear air and then ran on without a word. I was crying by then; I didn’t care who saw me. When I finally caught my breath, I tried to beg bystanders to help me go in to get dad, but they all said it was impossible. I’d never felt so helpless and furious in my life. Just because I had left Dad to get the food and water he needed to survive, just at that precise moment in time, just in the amount of time I stood in that line—all those things Time used against me to take away the most important person in my life. I cried and yelled, but my voice was only one of the many, crying out over the loss of home, worldly goods, and loved ones.
At one point, I found Officer Ortiz helping an older woman who was sitting on the curb get to her feet so she could move on to safety. I pestered him about going in to try to save my dad until he just came out and told me the unavoidable, crushing truth.
—Kid, I’m sorry. If he got out you might find him wandering around, but if he’s not out by now, he ain’t comin’ out.
Officer Ortiz looked at me with sadness and pity in his eyes. He started to say something else, then changed his mind and told me I’d better find someplace to spend the night because it looked like this snowstorm was going to get worse. I spent the rest of the afternoon there anyway, looking through the throngs of people for Dad. Mobs of people were standing as close to the fire as they could without being choked by the smoke because at least it was warm. We kept having to move back as the fire spread from building to building, devouring whole blocks as it went. It was incredible that it could still be burning so ferociously with all the snow that was falling.
As I was standing there, I couldn’t help thinking about the nightmare I had had about the sun burning my skin and wondered if that was how it had been for Dad. Even though a tiny place in me still held out hope that he got out somehow, I knew he wasn’t strong enough to even yell at anyone to come help him, let alone get out of bed. I couldn’t get the image of Dad’s skin on fire out of my head, and that spurred me to keep looking for him.
When darkness began to fall and it was too dark to clearly see the faces of the people around me, I dazedly followed some people I had been standing next to as they wandered away from downtown. I was numb by that time, numb with cold and numb with emptiness. Somehow we wound up at the old Union Station building and found a place that had been broken into, where hundreds of people were setting up for the night. It was apparent that some of the people had been there for a while, but most of them were newcomers displaced by the fire. Everyone was exhausted, cold, hungry, and depressed. Desperation showed in their eyes, even though we were all too tired to do anything about it. There were a few children among us, though not as many as I would have thought—a depressing thought in itself—and they were crying quietly or just staring listlessly with big, round eyes. It was as if the life inside of all of us had died in that fire.
I slept fitfully that night on the cold marble floor and kept waking up with a start to the sound of people screaming or crying out in their sleep. Other times I’d dream I was suffocating and I’d wake up crying, agonized about the thought of Dad gasping for air. Even though the pain of my loss was unimaginably immense, I knew that everyone else was feeling the same way, and that was oddly comforting.
In the morning, the snow had finally stopped blowing, and some of us trekked through the shin-deep snow back downtown. From quite a distance, we could see huge plumes of billowing smoke, but no flames. We could also see two of the tallest buildings, one of which was where Dad used to work, were still standing, although covered in black soot almost to the top. When we got closer, we could see that many of the buildings that made up downtown had been burned, some to the ground. Those that were left had heavy smoke damage, and some were still smoldering. It reminded me of the pictures I’d seen of Hiroshima after it was nuked in World War II.
A nice woman next to me asked me what I planned to do now, and I just looked at her vacantly for a minute. I knew that I had to move on, to figure out some kind of plan, but I couldn’t make my mind work just yet.
—Don’t you have any family or friends you can go to?
It took me several more seconds to think of Mom; I’m not sure why. I think my mind was just numb, and I didn’t want to associate the horror of what I ha
d gone through with her. I think I was also a little scared that if I thought about her, I might lose her, too, so I shook my head at the lady. She smiled and gently took my hand.
—You come with me then. I have a brother that lives just across the river. I’m sure he’d let you stay for a while until you find someplace.
The lady tried to talk to me at first, told me her name was Lydia, but I just walked on in silence. I think she probably realized that I was in shock, or maybe she thought I was mute, but in either case, she quit trying and we just walked on through the dirty, soot-covered snow.
I followed the lady, making a wide arc around the burned out section of downtown and across one of the bridges over the Missouri river. I remember looking down at that river as we crossed, noticing how peacefully it was flowing, even with the thick blanket of snow covering its banks, and thinking that it had no clue about the suffering that was happening all across the land that it flowed through. I kept thinking that if I could just float down that river, eventually I’d find a warm place that was unaffected by all this despair. It was so tempting to just let myself fall in and be taken by the river, but something stirred inside me—life, I guess—and I kept on following the lady, who didn’t even know my name.
Teenage Survivalist Series [Books 1-3] Page 17
