— Does anyone know what happened?
— They think it was another CME. All hell’s breaking loose up there again—explosions, fires, panic…
I shook my head and went back to my work. Strangely, this time the power outage had absolutely no effect on me. I told Sara as much.
— Well, I’m glad we’re down here, so we’re missing out on all the drama.
— You know what this means, don’t you?
— No, should I?
— No more electricity—probably forever.
Something in her tone made me look up. I expected to see worry on her face, but instead there was a slight smile.
— No more school, no more institutions, no more running and hiding… We could find a place…
I thought about that for a minute.
— You don’t like living here?
— Yes, but winter’s coming. It’ll be really hard, you know. I’m not sure I’m up to it.
— Maybe the keepers would let us stay with them.
— Maybe… But today they were wondering if it is even worth it anymore. The zoo will never be open again now. The animals are all going to die eventually. They were thinking about letting the herbivores that are left just run free.
— What about the carnivores?
Sara shook her head sadly.
— I don’t know. They kind of avoided that subject altogether.
It was a desolate thought. Before coming to Swope Park, I hadn't liked animals much, not even cats and dogs. But since coming there and helping to care for them for several months, I felt responsible for them, like they were they were my kids or something. I know the keepers felt the same way, so for them to be thinking of abandoning their charges told me how desperate they thought the situation was. I thought about it the entire evening and lay awake that night wondering what was going to become of the animals and of us.
Chapter 21
Attack
I must have fallen asleep sometime during the night because I was suddenly awakened by the rustling of leaves and the sound of an animal sniffing around outside of the tent right beside my head. It took my eyes a few seconds to open and when they did, I was startled to see the shadow of some big animal right outside the tent. Its hulking body was facing the tent head-on with its snout on the ground. It could have been a bear or a mountain lion or even a huge wild man. I could smell its musky scent when the cold breeze blew our way; I was thankful the breeze was blowing that way so the animal couldn’t smell us. I froze, holding my breath so the beast wouldn’t hear me breathe.
After a couple of seconds, it made a series of low grunts, then turned toward the back of the tent. I almost gasped when I saw the silhouette of a very large feline looming over the tent. I was suddenly panicked by the memory of the mangled impala and its dying calf. I fervently prayed that Sara wouldn’t wake up or make any noise in her sleep and that the predator would find something else to prey on. I was to regret that prayer very soon.
The cat seemed to catch a whiff of something as it raised its snout high in the air. It froze for a second then crouched down into stealth mode. It crept off slowly, gingerly picking its way among the dried leaves in virtual silence. Only after several minutes was I able to move again and quietly woke Sara, holding my finger to my lips to warn her into silence. I think Sara must have been able to see the fear in my eyes by the light of the almost-full moon filtering through the tent, because she was immediately on alert. We scurried to arm ourselves with knives and put on our shoes and coats, just in case.
As soon as we were dressed, we heard a distant growl and then a blood-curdling scream. It sounded like a terrified animal, but soon turned into a man’s urgent strangled call for help. Sara jumped up to try to help, but I grabbed her arm and held her back. I was ashamed at my cowardice, but I knew we were no match for a mountain lion or whatever it was out there. Sara didn’t care; she threw my arm off angrily and unzipped the tent, leaping through the opening before I could get a good hold on her again. I had no choice but to follow.
The man’s screams were lessening as we ran toward the sound, and I knew it must be one of the poor lost souls, who still slept in the open despite the cold and our gift of a tent. After we had run a hundred yards or so, the cat let out a roar that sounded like the zoo lion, though not plaintive and lonely this time, but angry and hurt. We stopped in fear and dread. The roar stopped abruptly at the same time as the man’s moans. Cautiously, we approached and what we saw froze us in our tracks.
In a clearing, with the moon shining its ever-smiling face benevolently on the scene, lay the animal, its side heaving with the effort of staying alive. Beside it lay the body of a man, though we couldn’t see who it was quite yet. He started moaning again, so I knew he was still alive, but I was afraid to come near to help him in case the predator still had some fight left in him. As usual, Sara had different ideas and started toward him. I caught her roughly and pulled her back, trying to reason with her.
— We need to get help. We can’t take care of this alone.
— He needs our help now!
— Okay, I’ll help him and you go find the others.
I was able to convince her apparently, because she ran off up the hill to where she knew Aaron was camped. If anyone knew how to help, it would be Aaron. I could hear her yelling for him as she scrambled in the loose leaves. My bravado was short lived, though, as I faced the thought of actually going forward to help the poor man. I hesitated until I saw Patrick raise his head and heard him call my name breathlessly. I swallowed my fear and cautiously moved to his side. My heart leapt into my throat when I saw that the predator was indeed the zoo lion and it almost stopped when the lion weakly raised its head and looked me in the eyes. Gone was the glare of the predator I had experienced the first time I visited the zoo, and in its place was resignation. He lay back down with a grunt.
Patrick was clutching a big knife, the one he had thrown at Sara just weeks before. It was covered with blood, as was he himself. It was hard to see where or how he was hurt since there was so much blood. I grabbed his shredded blankets and pressed them to his wounds, trying to stop the blood. His face seemed to be untouched but the back of his head was a shiny black, sticky mess. Between gasps he told me what happened.
— He got me from behind, Ben. It took me a while to get my knife out to stab him. I got the commie bastard, though! Just like he got Joey.
I wasn’t sure if Patrick knew it was a lion that had attacked him or if he was lost in his memories again, but I tried to calm him down in any case.
— Yeah, you got him, Patrick. He’s dying. You got him good. Now lie still so I can stop your bleeding.
By the time Sara came back, with Aaron, the keepers, and a few of the lost souls, Patrick had given up. He died happy to have finally defeated the enemy that had haunted his dreams for the last forty years of his life. I didn’t cry at his death like I had the baby impala, yet I felt defeated and numb. Patrick was just another life I had failed to save in that miserable year. I wondered when all the death would end. I feared it wasn’t about to anytime soon.
Someone had found a policeman, who somehow had alerted others—they must have figured out a way to communicate when the power was off before—and soon there were several surrounding the lion and Patrick. The lion was still alive, but the keepers and the cops agreed that it should be put down, both because of its condition and the fact that it had killed a man. The keepers seemed sad, but resigned to its fate. Even though Sara believed we would be left alone, we hid while the police were there, just in case.
The next day, several policemen and highway patrolmen came to the zoo to put down the rest of the predators. Everyone knew instinctively that the power might never come back on since all the replacement transformers were destroyed by the second CME and it would take years, maybe even decades to manufacture new ones. The keepers had known the day before that they couldn’t sustain the predators of the zoo much longer and had decided among themselves
to euthanize them soon anyway. It was a sad day in Swope Park, nonetheless.
After the police left, Sara and I went to the zoo to help the keepers tie up some loose ends. We opened the gates of the herbivores’ enclosures. We didn’t think they’d survive for long, but we wanted to give them a fighting chance. We were sad that we were forced to leave the primates locked up because even though they weren’t normally predators, they still posed a grave threat to people. They had a shot at survival, though, because their enclosures had lots of natural foliage and fruit trees. If they could make it through the winter, they might be okay, but that was rather doubtful. We gathered up all the food we could find and stacked it in their inside areas. Jim and Kyle removed the doors so the animals could not be locked in or out.
The keepers, Sara, and I also inspected the lion’s enclosure, trying to figure out how he escaped to carry out his deadly marauding. It took us a while to figure it out, but we finally found a tree limb that had grown a little too long in the direction of the viewing room. He had had to leap a long way, but he was able to span the distance from the limb, over the deep moat that separated his area from the visitor path, landing on top of the viewing room. It made me shutter to think I had been standing there just a few months before, and I had to wonder if my being on the roof had given him the idea to climb the tree and jump over to it.
After the attack on Patrick, Sara and I were afraid to sleep in our tent, even though we knew the lion and all the other predators in the zoo were gone. We couldn’t shake the feeling that, but for a different wind direction, we could have been the lion’s prey. And we knew there were other predators out there, even in the middle of a big city. The keepers let us stay with them for a few days, but then they decided it was time for them to go back to their homes, if they still stood, and move forward in this new, but already sadly familiar, world.
Chapter 22
Searching
We stayed in the building that the keepers had inhabited for a few weeks, but Sara became adamant about finding some kind of house or apartment to live in now that the power was off again. She said even if we could stay in one of the zoo buildings, she really wanted a bed to sleep in. She reasoned that with so many people having died in the first five months after PF Day, there must be lots of empty places to live. I wasn’t sure I wanted to mess with trying to live in a building again; like Aaron and many of the lost souls, I had come to prefer the freedom of living outdoors. Of course, I hadn’t tried it in winter yet, and I had to admit that Midwestern winters could be extremely harsh at times. The weather had already been quite cold for living outside.
In any case, my primary concern was to make Sara happy, so one day, she and I walked to the edge of Swope Park where the nice neighborhoods began and started our search for an empty house. It didn’t take long. Just two blocks from the edge of Swope Park, we found a house whose windows had been boarded up. As we were poking around it, trying to find a way inside, a man from next door confronted us suspiciously.
— Can I help you?
As always, Sara was the one to talk.
— We were just looking for a place to stay.
— Well, you can’t stay here. The couple that owns this house is still alive. They’re just living with their son right now. And anyway, we don’t allow squatters in this neighborhood. It’s bad enough with those crazy homeless people always begging from us.
He shook his head, crossing his arms and staring at us until we left. This was exactly what I’d feared. I was ready to give up and go back to the tent, but Sara had another plan.
— All we have to do is find an empty house with the owners’ names on the mailbox, then make up a story about being their niece and nephew or something. It might take a bit of acting, but I think we could pull it off.
— Maybe you could. I’m terrible at acting.
— Well, you can just stand there and nod your head while I do all the talking.
What she didn’t add, but I’m sure she meant, was “as usual.” We walked around a few neighborhoods, trying to figure out which houses were empty. It was harder than I thought it would be. Without electricity, all the houses looked empty unless we happened to catch a glimpse of someone in a window or outside in their yard. Finally, though, we found another house with the windows boarded up several blocks away from Swope Park.
We cased the house from afar, trying to find out as much as we could about the owners without looking too suspicious. We learned from the mailbox that the owners’ names were Dave and Cathy Arnold. The lawn was quite overgrown and had gone to seed, but then so had everybody else’s since there hadn’t been enough gasoline to waste in lawnmowers since PF Day. We could just barely make out one of those wooden yard decorations featuring the rear end of a plump woman bent over next to a sign. We finally figured out that the sign said Grandkids spoiled here. We figured that meant that Dave and Cathy were at least middle-aged.
On the walk back to the park, Sara and I discussed our plan. We would go to the house and if anyone confronted us, we would say that we were Dave and Cathy’s great niece and nephew instead of their grandkids, in case the neighbors were familiar with the Arnolds’ grandkids. We would tell them that our parents had died and that we had walked 60 miles from St. Joseph to live with the only living relatives we knew of.
That evening when we told Aaron our plan, he shook his head and said,
— I don’t think that’s such a good idea. People are awful jumpy these days with the gangs and all runnin’ loose.
I agreed with Aaron, but Sara said we should at least try. After all, what could they do to us? Since the second CME there were no phones to call the police and even if the neighbors had guns, surely no one had any bullets left after having to hunt to survive for several months. I reluctantly told Sara we could try her plan the next day.
Aaron shook his head again, muttering tsk, tsk. Then all of a sudden he looked up and stared at us intensely over the fire. His eyes looked a little wild in the firelight, maybe angry. When he spoke, he sounded mad.
— You damn kids never listen. You gonna get us all in trouble, ain’t you?
Then he left the fire and went into his tent. Aaron had been acting strange since the night of the attack. That didn’t surprise us, though, as we were all shaken up by it. But now there seemed to be a new dimension to his attitude—anger. Sara felt bad that Aaron was angry with us, but was still determined to try to find a house. She couldn’t imagine how us looking for a place to live could have any effect whatsoever on Aaron and the lost souls.
Late the next afternoon, Sara and I went back to the neighborhood of the Arnolds’ house. It started snowing lightly as we walked along the empty streets. This time, when we got to the house, we went right up to it like we were supposed to be there. While we were knocking on the doors of the house and trying to peer through the cracks of the boarded up windows, a middle-aged woman called to us from the porch of her house next door.
— Hey, what are you kids up to?
We walked over to the low hedge separating the houses and Sara answered,
— We’re trying to find our aunt and uncle.
— They’re not home right now, but they’ll be back later. Aunt and uncle, you say?
— Yeah, great aunt and uncle, actually. Cathy is our grandma’s sister.
— Well, like I said, they’re not home. You better go somewhere else.
— Um, we don’t have anywhere else to go. Our parents died and we’ve walked all the way here from St. Joseph to live with them. We have no one else…
Hearing the sadness in Sara’s voice, the lady came over to where we stood behind the hedge. She looked all around her and said in a hushed tone,
— Look, I’m sorry you lost your parents and all, but the truth is your aunt and uncle are gone and I can’t let you stay in their house without proper legal papers proving you’re their rightful heir. The chief of police lives just down the street and everyone is really anxious right now. There was a home inv
asion last night a couple of streets over and the owners got beat up pretty bad. They said it looked like some homeless person looking for food or something. There’s no way the neighborhood is going to allow anybody new in right now. I’m really sorry, kids.
Sara and I murmured our thanks and walked slowly along the road back to the park. We didn’t talk or touch each other the whole way. We were both a little disappointed and disheartened. I didn’t think I had wanted to live in a house again until the prospect was snatched away from us.
It was getting dark by the time we made it to the park. The snow was beginning to accumulate and made everything look eerily white in the dim, cloud-scattered moonlight. In the twilight we could just make out the shape of a large vehicle ahead as we rounded a curve in the road. We immediately hid in the trees and cautiously crept closer to investigate. The words Police were just visible in iridescent blue letters on the side of the white van. After what we had heard earlier, we knew this could be bad. We also knew we had to warn Aaron and the lost souls as soon as possible, so we headed to the spot that Aaron had pitched his tent for the past few nights.
As we crept toward his campfire, we could hear Aaron talking to someone. Peering from behind a large bush, we saw two cops in uniform standing on either side of Aaron. They didn’t appear to be holding on to him, but looked like they were ready to grab him if the need arose. We could plainly hear what they were saying, especially Aaron, who sounded agitated.
— I haven’t done anything wrong and you can’t commit me again. I’ve got my emancipation papers right here in my pocket.
One of the police officers grabbed Aaron’s hand as he tried to reach into his pocket for the papers.
— We know, Aaron. We’ve seen your papers before. We’re not trying to commit you. We just need information. What do you know about the incident last night?
Time Lost: Teenage Survivalist II Page 11
