I addressed Fester before leaving. “Don’t drain the battery playing CDs the whole time I’m gone, okay?” The cat was curled up on the secondary bunk, the one situated over the driver and passenger seat in front. He squeezed his eyes shut at me. I worried about him in the RV. In the heat, it could get dangerously hot inside the RV. I opened every window, save the ones without screens on them. It was enough to get a thick, sludgy breeze moving through the cabin. I made sure he had a big bowl of water. I was parked under a large, leafy oak. Between the shade and the breeze, it shouldn’t be dangerous. At least, I hoped. I’d buried one pet already since the Flu struck. I’d only had Fester two days, but he’d been a welcome companion. I didn’t want to lose him, too.
I shut the door behind me, locking it. I know that’s probably a stupid superstition. I always locked doors when everyone was alive, and now that everyone was dead, it seemed needless. I think it had something to do with my own sense of paranoia. I somehow still assumed that someone is nearby despite all evidence to the contrary, and if I don’t lock the doors, that person will come and steal my RV. I also don’t want to ever open the door and find someone rummaging through my stuff. I don’t know how that scenario would play out. Would I shoot them? Hug them? I just don’t know. If I lock the doors, my mind rests easier.
Notre Dame’s campus was everything I hoped it would be, save for the sidewalks and grassy areas teeming with students and faculty. There was a darkness to the campus now. All the buildings stood silent and empty. The residence halls were probably littered with the moldering bones of the dead. (The Flu began in early May, before most campuses were done for the year. Many students never made it home, too sick to travel.) As I walked, I kept expecting a face to be peering at me from one of the windows. I tried not to look at the windows because of that. It gave me that weird, hollow feeling in my gut and groin, that same feeling you get when you’re in a haunted house at the amusement park and know you’re about to be scared out of your pants but you just don’t know when the costumed worker is going to jump out at you.
The planet was working hard to reclaim the buildings. The grass was thigh-high everywhere. Ivy growing up the sides of some buildings was unchecked and swallowing the buildings in green leaves.
I had no desire to loot any of the buildings. I knew from the experience of going through the campuses at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, UW-Oshkosh, UW-Milwaukee, UW-Platteville, Marquette, and UW-Whitewater that I wasn’t going to find much worth taking. The residence halls might have some food (plenty of ramen noodles) and water, but I wasn’t desperate at the moment, and there would be more food and water in other places down the road. I just wanted to see the stadium.
When I was in Madison, I broke into Camp Randall once. I walked out to the fifty-yard line and pretended to run a fly route to the north end zone. In my mind’s eye, I caught the pass and scored the touchdown. I ran to the student section and started to celebrate it (everybody Jump Around!), but stopped when only the empty aluminum benches stared back and the cheers in my mind gave way to overwhelming silence. There would be no pass patterns today. Just memories.
The stadium was locked well. There were thick, heavy padlocks on the gates, but I could climb over those. The double-doors to the stadium were bolted. I used a lock-pick master key to jimmy the lock and open one of the doors.
Beneath the stadium was utter darkness. I had to use the small LED light I kept in the rucksack to light my way to the field. Once I got to the field, though, it was all worth it. The stadium that I’d seen so many times on TV loomed larger than life. The field turf field was still green, still looked like a field should look, despite the weeds beginning to grow around the edges from cracks in the concrete. The painted field lines were still faintly visible. For a second, I wondered if I should root around in the locker rooms and storage rooms and take a helmet with me as a souvenir. I decided against that. I had no use for it, and it would be a pointless trophy.
I walked to the middle of the field and stared at Touchdown Jesus on the building behind the stadium, memorizing every detail. I climbed the stairs to the press box and sat on the benches on the fifty-yard line. From the stands, I could see the golden dome of the Notre Dame administration building and the Basilica of the Sacred Heart looming over the edges of the stadium. My heart swelled. My dad would have loved to have seen a game here. He went to the occasional Badger game when he needed to entertain a client for his work, but it was only one or two a year at best, and usually one of those pre-conference tune-up games where the Badgers would pay a half-million for some sacrificial lamb school like Akron or Western Illinois to come to the Camp and then decimate them 70-13. If we had lived in South Bend instead of Madison, I think he would have splurged on a pair of season tickets. No—I know he would have.
Reminiscing about my dad hurt. I didn’t cry, though. Part of my brain thought about it, maybe even wanted to cry. My dad should have been here, but it was over a year since I buried him and my mom in the backyard of our house in Wisconsin. I think I had grieved him enough in the past year. Now, I just wished he’d been here with me to see the stadium he loved. If I closed my eyes, I could almost imagine my dad next to me. It was a sad, melancholy day, but I like to think that it helped me heal, helped me put memories of my family to rest so that I could concentrate on my future. In a way, I left my dad in that stadium.
Eighteen months ago, I would have snapped off thirty cell phone photos of this and then never looked at them again except to show friends as proof that I was there. Now, I appreciated the moment. I lived in the present and committed the experience hard into my memory. I breathed in the smell of the stadium and the thick South Bend summer air. I stared at Touchdown Jesus until I was certain I would never forget what it looked like from the stands. I spent at least an hour thinking about watching Notre Dame playing games. I tried to replay some of my favorite plays in my head. When I exhausted my mental reserve of key big-game plays, I strolled around the stadium once more and left.
It was a silly little side trip. I wasn’t expecting to find anyone hiding on campus. I wasn’t expecting to find supplies. This was a stop just for me. It made me remember my dad. That was enough. It was the final stop of my farewell to the past. I had spent my tears and grief, and now I had to look to my future. Whatever life I have left in front of me, I had to plan for the possibility that I might be hacking it alone. These were my memories for the years ahead.
CHAPTER TWO
The Small Towns
I made a lackadaisical stroll around campus, letting the summer heat dictate my pace. By the time the sun was directly overhead, I was ready for some water and some food. I walked back to the RV and found a sleepy cat waiting for a treat.
I made canned tuna for lunch. I added some salt and pepper to mine, and then mixed it with a few fast-food packages of mayo. The fast-food squirt packs could keep a long time. I scavenged a whole box of them from a McDonald’s where I used to have an after school job. I don’t know if I trusted any of the stuff still on the shelves in stores anymore. Fester liked his tuna plain.
I missed bread. All the bread in the world was spoiled now. I could learn to make some, I suppose. There had to be flour somewhere in the world that wasn’t spoiled, but it seemed like a lot of work to try that in the tiny RV kitchen. It was easier to go the prepackaged route while I was traveling. Still, a big stack of hot French toast with cinnamon butter and syrup would really have hit the spot. Once I got to Louisiana, bread would be high on my list of things to make. In my head, I had an on-going checklist of plans for things that I would have learn once I settled Down South. Learning to cultivate, harvest, and mill wheat would have to be one of them. I don’t know if I could live the rest of my life without bread.
I was kind of proud of myself for living without a lot of things for the past year. If the Flu hadn’t happened, if life was still proceeding as normal, I would never have given up TV, pizza, the Internet, cell phones, or hanging out with friends. In the
face of having no other alternative, it was easy enough to do all of those things. It wouldn’t have done any good to cry or throw a fit about it (although to be honest with you, I often felt like doing both of those things), so I just put my head down and muddled through, pressed on. Like the Wisconsin State Motto says: “Forward!”
When I was younger, if I got upset about something and started to freak out about it, my dad would always step in and ask me a question: “Can you control this?” This was his way of centering me. If I couldn’t control it, then no amount of throwing a fit would change it, therefore throwing a fit was a waste of time and energy. If I could control it, then it was my fault it wasn’t working and instead of throwing a fit, he would tell me to channel my energy into fixing the problem that was upsetting me. If I got upset at Super Mario because I wasn’t good at the game, I could practice and get better. If I got upset at the TV because a show I wanted to watch was preempted by the local TV station because a severe thunderstorm was rolling in, then I needed to redirect my anger.
I was still grieving the world even though I tried to think I was not. It was impossible to not do it. I couldn’t control the Flu. I had no say over who lived and who died. I could control my life, in theory, and that was where my energies needed to focus. It was easier said than done. Often, especially in the evenings after I stopped for the day and I’d eaten, I’d be trying to get comfortable with a book or writing, and I would get overcome with a wave of nostalgia or depression that would just deflate me. It was those moments where the “why me” would start, and the “why bother” would follow it. The self-doubt would creep in. Little voices in my head would remind me that I didn’t have to be alone. I could choose the easy way out. It would be fast and painless. I would try to ignore them, but those voices were pretty persistent.
Why was I still alive? Why me? I asked myself this a lot in the past year. It made me think of a scene in the movie Grumpier Old Men, when Burgess Meredith tells Jack Lemmon that God forgot him. In a way, that’s how I felt. I could find no sane reason for why I was still alive, why I was still on the Earth. I won the worst possible prize in the genetic lottery. I was an abomination, still alive in pure defiance of the Earth’s plans. My parents created a being with a unique combination of cells that, for whatever reason, granted him an unusually healthy immune system and kept him from contracting the worst virus the world ever created. You might call it luck, but it sure as hell hasn’t felt like luck to me. That’s why I tried to fill my days with routines. The routines kept me on a schedule. The schedule prevented downtime. The downtime was when the voices began to whisper. Don’t think about them, I had to tell myself. Ignore the existential dread. Keep moving. Keep ignoring. Just keep being.
The highways, while the fastest and most convenient way to move through the country, were also one of the biggest reminders of what happened to the planet. The roads stretched out before me to infinity, a lifetime of endless space converging to points on the horizon. Barren spaces filled with a lot of no one and nothing. Four lanes of ghosts going nowhere. I moved on the highways to get from point to point, but I made sure to deviate from those as often as I could.
Each morning, I looked at a map. Before I left Wisconsin, I’d taken a travel atlas of the United States and Canada from what was left of the local Walmart. I used that map to figure out where I would go for that day. I would figure out where I wanted to be by nightfall, and then I would circle a few small towns along the way that I wanted to visit and search. I like small towns. The town where I grew up was technically a city. It had a population of more than 30,000 people before the Flu, moving closer to 40,000 actually. It felt like a town, though. It was small enough that you could walk from one end to the other if you wanted to, and many of the people knew each other. It was friendly. I always wanted to live in a really small town, though. When I read the Little House books by Laura Ingalls Wilder as a kid, I thought that living in a town such as De Smet, South Dakota in the late 1880s would have been cool. There were maybe fifty or sixty people in town, tops—men, women, and children. Everyone knew everyone and they all depended on each other to some degree. They looked out for each other. I liked that idea.
When I deviated from the highway, I wanted to find the little towns that were isolated out in the countryside. I didn’t want those towns that made up part of a megalopolis, where you could go through three suburbs without realizing one ended and another began. I wanted to find towns that were little bastions of civilization surrounded by fields and forest. In central Indiana, it was easy to find the towns surrounded by fields--but forests, not so much. I chose the towns by names, not locations. I liked to find the towns with the silly or unusual names. Names that popped up on my radar were places like Wakarusa (which made me laugh because I thought it sounded like the name of a Pokémon), New Paris (which was astonishingly nothing like old Paris), and Shipshewana (which I liked because it sounded like what the back-up singers sang during the chorus in a 50s pop song).
The thing I liked most about the small towns was the sameness. The houses were all similar to the houses in every other small town. You could tell the different eras of the town’s growth by looking at the construction of the homes. Every small town had a nucleus of houses built around the turn of the 20th Century, large boxes with simple designs and giant porches. The homes of the 30s, 40s, and 50s bookended the big homes. The post-Depression Era homes were smaller and more humble. They had one-car garages and postage-stamp lawns. Beyond that were the homes of the late 60s and early 70s. The design became more ostentatious, and the garages expanded to two cars. The newer homes, the ones built in the 80s, 90s, and early 2000s were all stamped out of the same design playbook, cookie-cutter construction, aluminum-sided beiges and grays, big lawns, and large windows.
The main streets were all lined with old buildings that once housed stores and services like barbers and dentists. Maybe the old local diners or cafes were still there. Maybe they were long shuttered. There were always gas stations in these towns. Some newer, some older. There was a Subway in most of the towns. Some of the larger ones might have a McDonald’s or a Hardee’s, or even a Culver’s (if they were lucky).
Outside town, farmhouses stood like dark sentries against the coming entropy. They couldn’t stop the march of time. They were all two-story and square, built in the National style that was so popular. Some had added garages or porches, but many stood untouched from their original construction. Next to the blocky farmhouses, weathered wooden barns were in disrepair. Some of the older barns were gone entirely, replaced by modern dairy operations with corrugated steel finished in a factory red that would never blister or peel.
Every small town in Iowa or Illinois looked just like every small town in Wisconsin. There were subtle differences, but at their core they were just alternate-dimension versions of each other. This trope was continuing in Indiana, so far. There might be fewer trees in some of the towns. There might be more grain silos in some of them, but at their heart, small towns were small towns. I enjoyed that sameness. It was comforting.
In every town, I cruised along the streets slowly letting the impulse power of the engine creep me along the streets. I would occasionally honk the horn of my RV. I was hoping the noise would draw survivors, if there were any. In the post-apocalyptic landscape of America, the lack of industrial noise was deafening. Without cars providing a constant din of engine noise and rubber-on-road, without the semis pulling trailers, without drivers having the occasional fit of road rage, a pristine silence lay heavily over the countryside like a wet blanket. If you have ever had the chance to go camping somewhere fifty miles away from any sense of civilization, you get a sense of what I mean. If you haven’t, then I’m not sure I have the words to do the silence justice. If there’s a wind, then that fills your ears with static. If there are crickets, grasshoppers, or locusts, then you hear chirps and a buzzy drone. If there are birds, you hear the occasional birdsong or chirp. However, in between those noises is a profound la
ck of anything. In that lack of anything, something different, like the noise of an RV horn, was as good as a tornado siren. It was a bomb going off. It was someone screaming at the top of her lungs in the middle of a funeral mass. Before the Flu, I’d grown deaf to the sound of humanity. There were always cars on the highway that ran through Sun Prairie, and there was always the sound of tires on pavement. I grew so numb to it that I stopped hearing it unless someone suddenly jacked his brakes and the squeal of rubber pierced the hum and reminded me that it was there. Now, there was only silence.
I would drive to the center of whatever town I was in, creep the main street, and blow the horn often. Sometimes I would do long on-off blasts. Sometimes I’d do three short blasts and then listen for a reply. Sometimes I would just lay on the horn for a solid ten or twenty-second burst. After I blasted the horn, I would shut off the engine of the RV and stand in the street waiting for a response. I would strain my ears trying to pick up any sound no matter how faint. I would wait there at least a half hour.
I would spend that whole time hoping.
When I was satisfied that no one was going to respond to my calls, I would take an empty rucksack with my tool kit in it and a shotgun. Then I would go to the town grocery store and pharmacy. In the grocery store, I would plunder any bottled water that was still available. Given how much I needed to drink in a day, not to mention a need to bathe occasionally, I was going through a lot of water. In many of the stores, the shelves were cleared of anything like water or non-perishable canned goods. Sometimes I could find secret stashes in the back, hidden from the prying, desperate eyes of customers. It took the Flu about a month to render the planet dead. In that time, most stores succumbed to the panic of those who had not yet gotten sick. I knew that I was going to eventually break down and start going into private homes to restock. I didn’t want to do that. I knew I’d have to deal with the decaying corpses of those who passed on the year before. I had already seen enough desiccated corpses to know that I wanted to avoid them, if at all possible. They didn’t faze me anymore. I just did not like seeing them.
The Survivor Journals (Book 2): Long Empty Roads Page 2
