“I still can’t believe Phil did that,” said Ben. “Any other time, he would have experienced the fire and said something like, ‘It’s God’s will.’
“Yeah, well fuck God!” exclaimed Lila. “I’m so tired of hearing about God.”
Suddenly Ben came to life. He realized that Lila was on the verge of losing all hope. God or no God, they both knew they were together for a reason. He somehow had to remind Lila of that.
“Do you remember when we first started on this trip?” asked Ben. “We knew instinctively that we had to fall into survival mode or we’d be lost. We knew it wasn’t going to be easy and we suspected there would be a lot of ugliness in front of us. We could have ended up like George and Bunny, or like the two we ran into at the gun shop, but we didn’t. We didn’t because our will to live was too strong. There will be beauty again. I’m looking down at beauty right now.”
“I don’t think I have your strength,” said Lila. “I think of the night you saved me from the coyotes. You were strong. I wasn’t.”
“I was waiting to tell you this when you were ready to hear the whole story of that night,” said Ben, “but I have to tell you now. Yeah, I carried you away from that scene, but I couldn’t have done it alone. You were almost unconscious, and yet you found the strength to keep moving. And in the battle itself, you calmly shot and shot and shot. You didn’t panic. When the coyote jumped on you, you fought him off until I could help. Lila, you’re just as much my hero. We’re going to miss Phil, but we have to go on.”
Lila lifted her head and looked at Ben. “You’re right … again. We have too much ahead of us. We have to keep going.” Tears returned to her eyes. “This is so hard though.”
“It is. I know. But I think we just need to pack our things and go. Like we did when we left home. There’s nothing left for us here, so we have to keep going.”
Lila sat up, sniffed, and wiped her eyes with her sleeve, then looked down at Ben’s lap. It was soaked from her tears. “Did you wet your pants?”
Ben smiled and stood up, helping Lila to her feet. “We have our love for each other,” he said. “We’ve got to let that carry us through these things, as hard as they are.”
Lila put her arms around his neck and kissed him deeply. “It will.”
They got their backpacks ready for travel. When they were at the sports store the day before, they had picked up a couple of good canteens each. They poured some of the bottles of water into the canteens, stuffed as many extra bottles into the packs as they could, then started on their way. The entrance to the trail was about four miles outside of town. They reached it in a little more than an hour.
There it was in front of us. The trail south. Nothing had looked so inviting. I felt as if we were stepping onto the yellow-brick road on our journey to Oz. Originally we thought we could make it here in two days by bike. How long was it? Nine days? Ten? It could’ve been more. All I know is that it was a long time coming. It felt like we had already lived a lifetime. We had found love. We had found a lot of death. We were hoping this would be the start of a new chapter in our new life. A good chapter, we hoped.
After the first mile, it was heaven. Near the entrance were more bodies than Ben and Lila had counted on, but once they started on their way, the bodies thinned out and eventually disappeared altogether. When they did run across remains, they looked the other way. Even with a few bodies, the difference between the trail and the highway was beyond words. Ben looked over at Lila. She was smiling and looking up at the sun, the rays reflecting off her raven hair.
Was she more beautiful than when we first met, or was it just my perception? Didn’t matter. She was beautiful to me. Kind of funny, really. Less than two weeks earlier I didn’t know when I was ever going to have my first date. Then the world fell apart and suddenly I was in love.
“What are you laughing at?” asked Lila.
“That I didn’t have my first date until I was the last available man on earth,” answered Ben.
Lila laughed. “What if I had said to you in the freezer that I wouldn’t date you even ‘if’ you were the last man on earth?”
“That would stink.”
“Yeah, for me too.”
She changed the subject. “Were you scared when you pointed your gun at that crazy guy?”
“Big time,” replied Ben. “I’ve thought about it a few times since then. What would I do if I ever had to fire it at someone? I don’t know if I could. I take that back. I could if it meant saving your life.”
Lila put her hand in his. “And I think that’s what being in survival mode is all about. We don’t live in the same society we did before. Everything and everyone we run across presents a potential danger. There is no 9-1-1. There’s no police. It’s just us. When you say that you could shoot someone if my life was in danger, I hope you also meant if your life was in danger too. We’re a pair. We need each other. Let’s hope we never have to worry about it.”
The day passed quietly. The shock of losing Phil had hit them hard, and they lapsed into long periods of silence and reflection. By noon, a deep loneliness had set in.
Up to this point, it had been a process of getting used to our new world; dealing with the fear, the upheaval, and the sickening carnage all around us. Everything was new, and warranted our constant and wary attention. We had been alone since that day in the freezer, but not like this. The solitude of the trail forced us to confront the reality that we were IT. Just us. We would walk around a bend knowing that there would be no hikers to run into, no families out for a day’s walk, no one at all. We began to look at the forest around us differently. At times, the trees, which had grown larger and starker in our minds, scared us. I felt more insignificant than I had ever felt in my life. There were aspects of this odyssey that we appreciated, including the silence. We were survivors. We embraced the strength to live with the hand we were dealt, and in many ways we could recognize—and even look forward to—the excitement of the adventure. But we couldn’t deny the fact that there were times when we desperately missed the sounds of civilization.
That night they stayed in one of the shelters that appeared from time to time along the trail. Three sides of the shelter were made of stone, the fourth side open, and with a wooden roof over the whole structure. They felt more comfortable now using their flashlights. They decided part of that was because they were tucked away in the woods, but the other part was that they were more confident in their ability to take care of themselves.
They were ravenous. They hadn’t eaten much of anything that day out of grief, and had only picked at their meal the night before with memories of the fly-encrusted bodies stuck in their brain. Lila said it was her turn to make dinner and opened a couple of freeze-dried meals.
“I was craving a burger, but this looks good,” said Ben.
“Yeah, that’s one of the many things we’ll probably never eat again,” said Lila sadly. “Let’s not think about it.”
Ben zipped the two sleeping bags together to make one.
They had settled themselves comfortably when Lila said, “I hear thunder.”
“Again?” Ben heard it too. A flash of lightning appeared in the sky. “What’s with all the storms?”
“I don’t know, but I’m glad we’re in here. I think we should use these shelters whenever possible.”
They moved themselves further back into the shelter as the rain started. Just like the night before, and the night on the road, the rain came down in buckets. The thunder and lightning were violent and they heard some close strikes. Luckily, none started a fire.
The rain subsided a couple of hours later. Ben and Lila hadn’t been able to sleep, but had used that time constructively—intimately getting to know each other better.
Suddenly they heard a dog barking, then a second. Soon a cacophony of barking filled the air.
“Dog pack,” said Ben quietly, strapping on his holster and reaching for his rifle. Lila did the same and they sat near the entrance with th
eir weapons ready.
The barking got closer, but with it came screams. They looked at each other. “There’s someone out there,” shouted Lila. Now they heard more than one voice screaming.
“Let’s go,” said Ben. Lila needed no prompting and the two made their way out into the now gentle rain. They ran back down the trail in the direction they’d come. Suddenly their lights picked up a gruesome scene. A small group of girls was surrounded by a pack of about six snarling dogs. A woman was lying on the ground bleeding from numerous wounds, and the three girls—Ben figured about nine or ten years old—were huddled around the inert form.
A German Shepherd was lunging toward the figure on the ground when Lila coolly took aim with her rifle and shot the dog. It died on the spot. The other dogs hesitated. Ben shot and missed, and the dogs dispersed.
They ran over to the group. Ben asked the girls if they were hurt, but got no response. Lila, meanwhile, checked on the wounded adult.
“She’s alive, but she’s in bad shape,” said Lila. “We need to get her to the shelter.”
They slung their rifles over their shoulders and picked up the woman. Ben took her upper body and Lila grabbed her feet.
“Follow us,” called Ben to the girls. At first they didn’t move, but some growling from the woods shook the inertia from them and they quickly followed behind.
Carrying the dead weight was hard, especially since the woman was fairly overweight, and they had to set her down once. But they had just done the same thing that morning with Phil, so the weight came as no surprise. They made it to the shelter and laid the woman on top of their sleeping bag. Lila pulled some first-aid supplies from her backpack and used her flashlight to assess the situation. Meanwhile, Ben herded the girls into a corner and reached into his pack for some bottles of water, which he handed to them. They drank like they had been dying of thirst, but still said nothing.
He heard movement in the woods and went over to the shelter opening with his rifle and flashlight. He held the flashlight against the barrel of the gun, like he had seen in cop shows, so that the rifle was pointed in the same direction as the light. He heard a growl about twenty feet away and swung the rifle barrel in its direction. He caught sight of some fur and fired. He heard a yelp and the animal scurried away. Over the course of the next fifteen minutes, he fired twice more—missing both times, but scaring the dogs away.
“How’s the woman?” he asked at one point.
“I don’t know what to do here,” replied Lila in a panic. “She’s bleeding in so many places. She’s had whole hunks of skin ripped off. I’m trying my best.”
“That’s all you can do. I’ll come help you. I think we’ve scared them away.”
A couple of minutes later, Ben moved over to where Lila was trying to put bandages on some of the flowing wounds. It was an awful sight. An ear was missing, as were some fingers, and there were numerous bites all over her body. But Lila was right. They weren’t just bites. Whole areas of flesh had been torn away.
Already we had changed. Just a few days earlier, we would have been heaving all over the place at the sight of her. But compared to what we had been witnessing, this wasn’t even enough to make us gag. That was one way we were measuring our progression—if that’s what you could call it—the things that still bothered us and those that didn’t.
The woman suddenly started shaking.
“I think she’s having a heart attack,” shouted Lila.
“I don’t know CPR,” said Ben.
“I do,” replied Lila. She knelt over the woman and pushed hard and fast on her chest. The woman stopped moving and Ben checked her neck for a pulse while Lila worked on her.
“No pulse,” said Ben
Lila kept at it. Five minutes later, Ben touched her arm.
“Lila, there’s still no pulse. She’s gone.” Lila stopped and looked at Ben. There was no emotion in her face. This wasn’t like Phil, or her parents. She didn’t know this woman. She refused to let herself get emotional over her. They had seen too much death for that.
“You have blood all over your hands,” said Ben. “I’m going to heat up some water for you to wash with.” Lila nodded wearily.
The three girls were still quietly huddled in a corner, so Ben and Lila moved the woman’s body out of the shelter, then took the time to clean up. When they had washed the blood off as best they could and disposed of the dirty water, they turned their attention to the girls.
“Are you hungry?” asked Lila. Two of them nodded their heads. Lila pulled out some meals from her pack and heated up more water. “What are your names?”
There was only silence.
“You’re safe now,” Lila said gently. “Was that your mother? I’m sorry she died.”
“Our teacher,” one of them whispered.
Lila wanted to keep them talking so they would be less scared. “Where are you from?”
“Williamstown,” the same girl replied, in a little more than a whisper this time.
Lila knew now who to focus her attention on. “What’s your name?”
“Caitlyn.”
“Nice to meet you Caitlyn. I’m Lila and this is Ben. We’re from Newton.”
She finally got the names of the other two girls—Megan and Brooke—and some semblance of their story, mostly from Caitlyn. Like Lila and Ben, they were saved by a freezer. The apocalypse happened on a Sunday, but they were with their teacher at school, preparing for a bake sale. They had gone into the walk-in freezer in the school’s kitchen. There were two other girls in the group at first. One went crazy and ran away the next day—they spent hours looking, but never found her. The second girl was dragged away by dogs when they were first attacked, a few miles back. That was where the teacher received most of her wounds.
They were still in shock, but were also famished, and wolfed down the meal Lila served. Ben separated the sleeping bags and threw away the bloody one that had been on top. Dawn was still a couple of hours away and it was cold. They opened up the remaining sleeping bag and covered the three girls.
“You’re safe here,” Lila told them again, “so try to get some sleep.” She moved over to the shelter entrance and put her arm around Ben, who was guarding against dogs.
“I don’t think they’ve slept in days,” she whispered. “What a horrible thing to see one of their friends dragged away by dogs.”
“So what do we do with them?” asked Ben. “I know. Stupid question. Obviously we have to take them with us. But it’s going to be a lot harder with them. We don’t have the food and water we need for that many people. And we’re going to have to find a town to get them some warmer clothes, sleeping bags, and other things.”
“This wasn’t how I envisioned our trip south,” said Lila. “But I guess we really don’t have any choice, do we?”
We didn’t have any choice at all. They had to come with us. It really sucked. It made the journey far more dangerous for us, and it was going to slow us down a lot. And the fact is, I couldn’t stand kids. On the other hand, it was pretty selfish of us to want to avoid people altogether. If in fact there was some purpose in our living when so many others died, what possible difference could we make by traveling alone? On the other hand, maybe we didn’t want to make a difference. Maybe we just wanted to create our own little world.
Chapter 8
We learned two things that night. First, with roving packs of dogs—and who knows what other animals—we had been pretty naïve to think that we could just fall asleep together. Did it mean we were going to have to take turns standing guard while the other slept? The second thing was that it was already starting to get cold at night. We needed to stay ahead of the winter, and we were still only in Massachusetts. We had been hoping to pick up the pace. Now with the girls, that wouldn’t happen.
Morning came and Caitlyn was still the only girl doing any talking. The other two would mumble comments from time to time, or add a word or a phrase to a story Caitlyn was telling, but for the most part, they
just stared into space. Each girl had a small, dirty backpack—the kind used for schoolbooks—something Ben and Lila hadn’t noticed the night before.
“They can carry some of their own food and water in their packs,” said Ben.
“If we can find some,” replied Lila.
Ben was looking at a map. “The trail crosses a road soon, before we hit some bigger hills. Maybe there will be a convenience store or something.”
There was. Ben and Lila had the girls sit outside while they went in to raid what they could.
They were able to stock up on water bottles, some canned food, granola bars, and lots of cans of nuts. They brought out sodas, chips, and packaged cupcakes to the girls. It wasn’t nutritious, but it was filling, and that’s all they could count on for now. They hadn't yet found a looted store, and while comforting that they wouldn't starve, it added to their fear that they were almost completely alone in the world.
There were no dead customers in this store, but the clerk behind the counter was covered in bugs, and his body had seemed to collapse into itself.
They helped the girls fill their packs.
“I know these are heavy now,” Lila explained to them, “but you’re going to have to carry them.”
Ben was impressed with Lila’s gentle, but firm touch with the girls. They did whatever she said without question. He felt sorry for them. As much as his own life had been turned upside down, it must’ve been so much harder for kids their age.
When they were back on the trail, Lila asked Caitlyn how they chose to come this way.
“My teacher decided. Everyone was dead and my teacher said she had a brother in Connecticut. She said we wouldn’t see so many dead people if we took the trail. So that’s what we did. I think they’re going to be dead in Connecticut too, aren’t they?”
Eden Rising (Eden Rising Trilogy Book 1) Page 7
