All We Have (The Survivor Journals Book 3)

by Sean Little

  I knew next-to-nothing about computers, so I just nodded like I understood.

  Chet continued. “He’s really insistent, though. Says they were testing this aerosolized virus that could be administered to a primate, and then it basically turned that ape into a walking infection agent for a month before killing it. I guess they had a cure for it at first, but the chemically-altered virus mutated beyond the cure in about a month’s time. Then, the guy disappears from the chatroom for a week. When he comes back, he says that he’s been infected, that everyone in the lab has been infected, and that the virus is unstoppable.”

  “Unless you’re immune.”

  Chet’s eyebrows raised. He gave a low whistle. “You’re immune?”

  “I guess. I never really got sick in my life, and when everyone else died, I stayed alive. That sounds like immunity to me.”

  “Man, I get sick a lot. Bad allergies. Frequent colds. My mom threated to make me live in a plastic bubble when I was a kid.”

  “So, how did you survive?”

  “Luck, mostly.” Chet’s gaze jumped to the window behind the couch where I sat. For the first time, I noticed that it was covered with a thick sheet of plastic, the kind of heavy-duty plastic people in Wisconsin used to cover windows and patio doors for the winter to help with heating bills. “I figured this guy was on the level. His story seemed too real to be completely B.S. He had data. He had specifics. He had a few video clips of dead apes. It was either real, or one of the greatest hoaxes ever made. I figured something bad was coming, so I quit my job. I cashed in all my investments, sold my car—the works. I liquidated everything I could, and then I converted my house in about a month. Paid top dollar for companies to come in a drop everything to get my house off the grid. Solar. Water. Sewer. The works, really. I had them all bill me later, knowing full well I’d never have to pay them. That’s sort of a bad trick, but I figured I was saving my life, right?”

  “What if the Flu hadn’t hit?”

  Chet laughed. “I was prepared to jump off that bridge when I came to it. I was really good with computers, worse came to worst, I would have sold the house to pay my bills and rebuilt my nut in the dot-coms somehow. Everyone needed a coder, you know. If you can program, you can work. That’s the way of the computer world. I would have been okay one way or another.”

  “So, you built a bunker, essentially.”

  “I did. Made the house as virus-proof as I could, and then I prepared it for the collapse of society. I stocked this place with all the food and water that it could hold. I bought extra freezers and loaded them with frozen pizzas and other things that would be easy to make. I sealed the doors and windows, cut myself off to the outside world. Then, I just waited. I read the news out of China, Hong Kong, and Singapore every day. I waited to see reports of epidemics. Once they started, I knew the world was done for. It was about a two-month bleed from the initial reports of the first deaths to the Big Empty we have now.”

  Something horrifying occurred to me. I clapped a hand to my mouth. “And I just infected you, didn’t I?”

  Chet waved off my concern. “Nah. Virus had a real short life. It either killed its host or died inside it in about thirty days. With no more primates to kill, the virus died. The Flu is gone from this world, I’m pretty sure. Anyone born now will survive. I’m not worried anymore. I’ve been out and about a bunch now. I lived. So did you, apparently. There are a few more of us out there, too.”

  “I found some nice Latinos a few streets over—”

  “Enrique and his people? They do some trading with me occasionally. Good folks.”

  “Yeah. They were nice. Fair.”

  “There are a couple of rogue factions in Houston. You might want to steer clear of the downtown areas. From what Enrique and his crew tell me, I hear it’s a minor war zone.”

  “Thanks for the advice.”

  “More people are coming, too. Houston is about to become a civilization hub. People are moving south. They’re heading for metropolitan areas with land, access to the ocean, access to freshwater inland, a long growing season, and high potential for solar energy.”

  “How do you know this?”

  Chet stood. He held out a hand to help me to my feet. “Are you well enough to limp?”

  I could see blood staining the bandage on my hip, but the pain was minimal. I wasn’t in great shape, but I could deal with it. “Yeah. I can make it.”

  Chet walked me to a small, cluttered study down the hall. Where once a computer would have taken the center-spot on a desk, there was instead a small contraption of wires and diodes and dials. A large, old-timey radio-style microphone sat in front of it. “Ham radio. About the only thing that works anymore. It was my old man’s. After he died, it was in a box in the basement. I found it when I started stockpiling food. Figured it might come in handy. There are other people out there with radios, Twist. Not a ton of ‘em, but enough that it gives me some hope that humanity might recover someday. Someday well into the future.”

  Chet sat down at the radio and pressed his face to the microphone. He flipped some switches and the radio hummed to life. “Attention out there in Radio Land. Who is listening tonight? This is Captain Kirk coming to you from the great state of Texas. If you can hear me, come back.”

  Chet fiddled with the dials for a moment. I heard the familiar hiss and pop of radio static. Then, a voice wafted out of the speakers, thin and distant, but definitely human. “Hey, Cap’n Kirk! Good to hear someone’s voice again. This is Special Wilderness Agent Jethro Tully out of Cook City, Montana.”

  “Hey, Mr. Tully! Good to hear you’re still alive. You ain’t been made into bear food, yet.”

  “Not for lack of trying. Them sumbitches are getting’ ornery. What’s the good word out of Houston tonight?”

  Chet gestured for me to get closer to the mic. “Found another brave soul in the night. Tully, this is Twist.” Chet motioned for me to talk.

  I cleared my throat. “Uh…hello. Nice to hear your voice, Mr. Tully.”

  “Call me Jethro. What kind of a name is Twist? Did your parents not like you?”

  “It’s a nickname,” I said. “What kind of a name is Jethro Tully? Do you have an Aqualung?”

  “It’s just a radio handle, m’boy. Real name is Marty Tambour.”

  Chet took over the mic again. “Any news from the north?”

  “Nothing new, no. Saw a couple of Canadians riding south on horseback a few weeks ago, loaded with gear. They said they were heading to where it was warm. I told them to head for Houston and to look you up when they got there.”

  “I’ll keep an eye out for them. Hopefully, they don’t run into the idiots shooting each other downtown.”

  Tully sighed. “Pretty sad, that. Only a few thousand of us left, and those idiots got to shoot each other over nothing.”

  “Well, keep me posted, J.T. I think me and Twist are gonna watch some DVDs or something.”

  “Sounds like a plan. Wish I could join you. Jethro, out.”

  “Captain Kirk, out.” Chet signed off the radio. He clicked the microphone switch to off. “There you go. People are still alive.”

  “He’s in Montana?”

  “Yeah. I told him he should come south, but he’s elderly. Says he’ll stay where he is until he dies.”

  “I moved away from Wisconsin because the winters are too harsh.”

  Chet nodded sagely. “That’s why people are moving south. Houston is going to become a new hotbed of civilization. A couple of the cities in central Florida have some growth. A couple of California cities, too. Los Angeles and San Francisco, of course, but also a few smaller cities in the north are getting populated.”

  “Do you have any idea how many people survived?”

  Chet shook his head. “Not an accurate count, no. Only a really rough guess. I figure, given the people I’ve been able to communicate with on the radio, and the people I’ve been able to track around Houston, using a rough mathematical estimate, I figure
somewhere around twenty-thousand people survived. Maybe as high as thirty or forty. But that’s a really, really rough guess, mind you. I might be way off.”

  “Twenty-thousand? Maybe thirty or forty? In the US?”

  Chet’s face looked sad. He shook his head again. “Twenty-thousand worldwide. In the US, it’s probably less than ten thousand, best guess. The math gets sketchy overseas. I have not talked to too many people around the world. There’s a guy in Brisbane, Australia who said that the major cities were wiped out, but a bunch of those crazy guys in the Outback were still alive, thanks to a lack of human contact. That might be true for some of the more remote parts of the world, too. I imagine there might be entire villages in Laos or Vietnam or something like that where no one in the village ever left, and no one visited the major metropolitan areas to get infected. As long as migrating monkeys didn’t bring the virus into their village, there might be entire villages that survived unscathed, but most of those towns are probably pretty Third-World, so they aren’t exactly contacting people by radio.” Chet patted the microphone of his ham radio. “I doubt too many people left in the world thought to bust out this old tech. I’m amazed by the number who did, though. This system still works, even though everything else doesn’t. Marconi knew what he was doing with this stuff, didn’t he?”

  I wasn’t sure who Marconi was, so I just nodded again. “True.”

  “Crazy stuff, ain’t it?” Chet slumped in a chair. “One day, we’re all in the rat race, just tryin’ to make some cheddar, and the next, the race is over, we’ve lost, and we’re scrappin’ for crumbs.”

  I was amazed that Chet had been so far ahead of everyone on the Flu. I wondered how many other “prepper” types out there had been on the same chat rooms. My head was also swimming with the notion of Houston becoming a new Cradle of Civilization. There were already people in the city, dozens apparently, and more were coming. I thought of the farm. Would people want to live there? Could I afford to let them? Could I afford to turn them away? Should I stay hidden as best I could?

  “People think you’re crazy when you start broadcasting gloom-and-doom forecasts, until those forecasts come true, I guess.” Chet shook his head. “Usually, by then, the shit has hit the fan, and we’re all screwed-blue and tattooed. Game over.”

  “I need to get home.” I tried to stand, but my hip still didn’t want to work. Around the wound site, the skin and muscle was swelling badly.

  Chet gave a low whistle again. “You ain’t goin’ anywhere for a while, mon frer. Let me get you a Cold-pak for that hip.” He retreated from the radio room and returned with one of those dry-storage cold packs. He popped the chemical pack inside and shook the bag for a few seconds. When he handed it to me, it was already pleasantly cold. I set it on my hip, just below the wound-site.

  “I have a wife.”

  Chet’s eyebrows raised. “You do? Rock on. You look awfully young to be married, but I guess that don’t matter much anymore, eh? Age is nothin’ but a number, right?”

  “She was expecting me back yesterday. I need to get back to her. I need to get home.”

  “That’s rough, man. I sympathize. You ain’t going to be up for traveling for a few days, though. There’s not much I can do about it, either. You’re going to be fine, but you need to rest. You can hang out here, though. Least I can do after I shot you and all. And I’ll be glad for the company.”

  I shook my head. “No. I appreciate the offer, but I really need to get back there. Do you have a bike I can ride?”

  “You ain’t ridin’ no bikes for a while. Think about it. You can’t even stand on that leg, let alone push down on a pedal.”

  He was right. My plan to cycle back home was now null and void. “Crutches, then? Do you have crutches?”

  “How far away do you live from here?”

  I told him the truth and a lie. “About twenty-five, thirty miles northwest of here.”

  “And you think you’re going to crutch there? Dude, your armpits would be hash by the time you get there.”

  They would be. I knew this. I sprained my ankle wrestling during my sophomore year, and I was on crutches for three weeks. Limping around on sticks like that is hard on your tender parts under your arms. You need time to toughen the skin and build up callouses. That did not matter, though. Ren was at home worrying. I knew I had a duty to get there anyway I could. My arms might be sore for a few days, but they would heal. I had to try. “It doesn’t matter. My wife is waiting. She’s pregnant.”

  “Pregnant? Right on, brother. Congrats. I guess ‘Jurassic Park’ was right: Life finds a way. Nice to know the human race is continuing against all odds.”

  “Thanks. Now you understand why I need to get there.”

  “I get it, man. I do.” Chet chewed on his lower lip for a moment. “I think I might be able to help you, but I’m not going back out there until morning. The feral dog packs are bad around here. They tend to be more active at night. In the morning, I’ll get you situated properly.”

  “Thanks. I appreciate it.”

  “Like I said, though—until then, me casa es su casa, brother. I’ll let you bed down here for the night. In the morning, we can change those bandages, get you some new pants, and I’ll see about getting you on your way.”

  He had a point. Ren would want me to be smart about getting home. I was safe, warm, and dry for the moment. Things would be better when the sun was in the sky. “Fair enough.”

  “Cool, brother. You want to watch some TV, then?”

  “Sure. Sounds good.”

  Chet’s face broke into a broad smile. “Outstanding, man.” He held out his arm for me to pull myself to a standing position again. He walked me to a large den where he had a full home theater system set up, seventy-inch flat screen, Blu-ray, surround sound—the works. Chet led me to a wall-sized rack full of DVDs of all sorts of entertainment options. “Dealer’s choice, brother.”

  I glanced through the selection. I found a complete collection of ‘Blackadder’ DVDs. I plucked them from the rack and held them out for Chet. “Here, Baldrick.”

  Chet lit up like Christmas. “Excellent choice, my brother. Absolutely excellent.” He clapped me on the shoulder. “You and me, we’re gonna be friends. I can tell.”

  Chet helped me settle on the couch. He made us some cheeseless pizza, nachos with a jar of goopy cheese-like processed sauce, and brought in cold Cokes from his fridge. We spent the next couple of hours watching the riotous adventures of Sir Edmund Blackadder and his dimwitted manservant, Baldrick. He laughed. We talked. It was a legitimate good time.

  Despite my constant worry for Ren and the baby, I hated to admit that it was actually fun to hang out with a guy again. It reminded me of hanging out with my friends in high school. We shot the breeze about British comedies, sci-fi, survival stuff, and life in general. I probably would have been friends with Chet before the Flu, if we had known each other. We had a lot of shared interests and similar senses of humor. He was much more gregarious than I was, though. I envied that about him.

  Eventually, we both passed out on the couch. A long day had finally come to an end. I would go home after a good night’s sleep.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  The Guardian

  I made myself to clean up the storm damage. It probably was not a smart thing to do, given how pregnant I was, but I reminded myself of those women throughout history who worked until the moment of giving birth. Just because I was currently housing a dependent parasite was no excuse for me to slack. I told myself that I was doing it to be responsible, that the farm depended on me. But mostly, I was doing it to keep myself busy. If I was busy, I did not have time to worry. If I did not worry, the baby seemed to be placated, and he rested comfortably.

  It was difficult work, though. After the first twenty minutes, I realized that my days of squatting and bending over were coming to a close until after the kid was born. My lower back hurt. My feet were swelling. My knees were killing me. My calves hurt and the ve
ins at the back of my knees were starting to puff out like an old lady’s. I started using more tools like rakes and shovels to pick up debris and clear it from the yard. What I could burn, I burned. What couldn’t burn, I moved into a pile to fix later. The missing door to the barn would have to wait until Twist got home, or I was no longer pregnant, whichever came first. My makeshift fence boards would have to hold out until then.

  I forced myself to stop and eat around midday. I built up the fire in the center of the yard. I heated a large pot of water to kill any possible bacteria left over from the filtration system, and covered it to let it cool away from the fire.

  After lunch, the day became unbearably hot, one of those early autumn days when it felt more like mid-summer than fall. It was too hot to work. Just trying to move around the yard was making me pour sweat from every inch of my body and was making me dizzy. I retreated into the house to enjoy shade and the breeze from a box fan. I cranked that thing to high and sat in front of it to let it cool the sweat prickling on my forehead and chest. After a while, though, the fan suddenly died. A quick check of a nearby light told me that the house did not have enough power to run anything electric. The damage to the solar panels must have been more extensive than I thought. I had exhausted everything the batteries had stored, and the house was back to being devoid of power.

  Twist had done all the solar work himself. He had read books and magazines, figured out how to wire the panels together, to run them to an inverter for the house, to wire the inverter into the house’s grid, and then make a battery supply for backup. How he did it was something I could not fathom. The man was very smart. He tried to tell me that it had nothing to do with smarts. He claimed that he was only following directions, and that the people who invented all this stuff were the real geniuses. That might be true, but I know that I would never have thought to figure out how to make solar panels power a house’s electrical grid. I would have just accepted a future without electricity and worked around that. I wondered if I would be able to make the solar panels work again if Twist never returned.