Long Empty Roads

by Sean Little

  I climbed down after him. By the time I got to the bottom, he’d turned on some sort of battery-powered lighting system. There were two slim rooms buried ten feet below the ground, probably made out of industrial shipping containers. One was a basic shelter with a kitchen, complete with a hand-pump well water system, a working latrine and shower, a large room for dining and relaxing, and a series of bed-racks in the rear reminiscent of the racks in a submarine. The other container was there for storage. There were large plastic shelves on both sides and two sets of the same shelves down the center, back-to-back. All the shelves were stocked with cans and boxes, or toilet paper and feminine products, or bottles of water and cans of soda. It looked like the most boring grocery store in the world, a subterranean CostCo where everything was in bulk. At the rear of the storage container was a water purification system, and what looked like a hot water heater.

  “’Bout a week after I figured I was supposed to be dead, I thought about Jim. Figured he was hiding in his shelter with his family. I came out here, punched in the code, and came down. No Jim. No nobody.” Doug sat on the couch in the main area of the shelter. It was a small, but functional piece. No frills. It didn’t look very comfortable.

  “He put in all that work for this shelter and didn’t use it?” I was staring at the shelves of supplies. It looked like three years of food and supplies. “Seems wasteful.”

  “That’s what I thought, too.” Doug walked back to the ladder and dragged himself out of the shelter. He climbed faster than he’d descended. “Then I found him.”

  I climbed out after him. Doug pointed to the garage. “Lined his wife and two kids up in the garage and shot ‘em all in the head. Then, he did himself in.”

  I was a little dumbfounded. No, a lot dumbfounded. All that, the digging, the rigging, the supplies—and he chose to kill himself. All I could think to say was, “Why?”

  Doug shrugged. “Tells you something, doesn’t it? Here’s a man who was prepared for the apocalypse, dead-on, one-hundred percent prepared. He knew it was coming when we all laughed at him, and yet when it showed up on his doorstep, he chose to end himself and his family. Only thing I can think, they were all showing signs of the Flu before they could retreat to the shelter, and rather than poison the shelter with their germs, Jim and his wife exited in the fastest method possible. Once you see your neighbors gasping to death and choking on their own fluids, it’s pretty easy to not want to go out that way.”

  “Why did you bring me to see this?”

  Doug looked at his feet. After a moment, he looked up again. “Twist—Barnabas—” it was weird hearing him invoke my given name. “I like you,” he continued. “You seem like a good boy. You remind me a lot of my youngest son, Clark. He was a good boy, too. Sweet natured, kind, a good father. You strike me as being just like him. I’ve known you less than a day and I can tell your heart is in the right place.”

  “Thanks.”

  “I brought you here because I just wanted you to see it. I wanted you to remember it. You have—God willing—another sixty years on this planet, maybe seventy or eighty, if you get lucky. You’re going to go through a lot of ups and downs. I just wanted you to see that even the best laid plans of mice and men can go awry. I wanted you to see what Jim and Nancy did, and know that sometimes, even in the best case scenarios, even when you think you’ve covered all your bases, you haven’t.”

  “I know that,” I said. And I did, or at least I thought I did.

  Doug held out his hands defensively. “I’m not saying you don’t. I’m just reminding you of that.”

  We started to walk back to Doug’s house. “I spent a lot of time thinking in the past year. I suspect you did, too.”

  “It was all I did, really.”

  “Well then, there you go. Did you come up to any realizations? Any truths?” He looked at me out of the corner of his eye.

  I had to shake my head. I hadn’t. I knew less now than I did a year ago.

  “Well, I came up with one truth. Only one.”

  “What’s that?”

  Doug sucked in a big breath of air. “When it comes to life and how to live it, none of us know shit-all about it. However, I learned that when it comes to life, all the planning in the world can’t save us from dumb luck and chance. Jim and Nancy, they were a nice enough couple. They had two nice kids. They were active in the school. I liked them, liked them a lot.” Doug paused. He looked over his shoulder at their house. “But they got so wrapped up in preparing for doom, I think they forgot to enjoy being alive. Don’t do that. Whatever happens, whatever you do with yourself after I’m gone, promise me that you’ll enjoy being alive. If not for yourself, for me. My time is up, but you can fit a lot of enjoying life into the next sixty years. Do that for me.”

  It seemed like a small thing to ask. I started to tell him that yes, I would, but I stopped myself. Did I even remember what joy was anymore? I couldn’t lie to a dying man. “I don’t know if I know how.”

  “You’re young. You’ll figure it out, I’m sure. Just promise me that you’ll find a moment or two where you can look around and think to yourself, ‘I’m glad I’m here. This has all been worth it.’”

  “I’m glad I’m here now,” I said.

  “Not really what I meant.” Doug stopped crutching forward. “Look…I look around here, and I see my life. My kids played on these streets. I celebrated Christmases, birthdays, and baptisms in my house. This is where I’m glad to be. You need to go out and find your own place to be happy.”

  “My own happy place.”

  Doug started walking again. “You say it like that, and it sounds stupid…but, yeah. You need to find your own happy place. Keep that in mind, Twist. Don’t get so caught up in surviving that you forget how to live. There isn’t much point to surviving in this world if you’re not actually living.”

  We spent the rest of the day talking, eating, and drinking in Doug’s backyard. He killed another hen (“Not like I’m gonna need them,” he joked), and we made fried chicken with oil in the cast iron skillet and a bag of flour he had sealed in Tupperware. Doug’s fried chicken was amazing. The Colonel wished he could do what Doug did with a simple piece of chicken. I ate most of the chicken at Doug’s insistence. He wasn’t very hungry anymore, he said, and it’s not as if he had a fridge to keep them from going bad afterward. I easily destroyed most of the bird in a single sitting. It was the most food I’d had since last winter, when I’d had to put a cow out of its misery and feasted on the beef afterward. My stomach bowed pleasantly. Fester laid beneath my chair, his own belly full, as well. That night, we turned in earlier than we had the previous night. It had been fun, Doug told me, but he was tired. He looked tired, too. The dark circles around his eyes were thick and heavy.

  The next morning, I ventured to the patio to greet the sun with Doug, but he wasn’t there. I crept into the house and found him in his bed. He was propped up with an extra pillow behind his head and shoulders, and only a sheet covered his legs. His eyes were baggy and swollen. “I think my clock is winding down, now,” he said. I saw a set of Rosary beads in his fist.

  “I could get you some pills,” I said moving toward the bathroom.

  “No! Please, I’m ready to go now. I’m ready.” He sighed. “I don’t know what kept me alive this long, but I figure it’s because I was just waiting for you. Maybe you needed to know other people are out there somewhere. Maybe this is all part of some grand cosmic plan. Maybe it’s not. I wasn’t going to get better, either way. It’s time for me to go, Twist.”

  The bedroom was cluttered with clothes, magazines, and books from a year of living with no thought to company or cleanliness. The smell of time and age was thick in there. The light in Doug’s room was colored to a pale blue by thin curtains over the two windows. I opened the curtains and cranked open the windows to get some light and cross-breeze in the room. Doug blinked a bit at first, but quickly accustomed himself to the light. He looked around the room and smiled. “I haven�
��t pulled those curtains since last year. I forgot how this place looked in the light.”

  He looked even older than he had the day before. His hair was still wild from sleep. His eyes looked even more tired. He grimaced and clutched low on his stomach. “Find me some painkillers, would you?”

  I grabbed pill bottles from the small pile on the nightstand. Most of them were empty. I plucked them by the lids and shook them until one rattled. Hydrocodone. That would work. I opened the bottle and gave him a pill. He held it in his hand and looked at me with a raised eyebrow. “I look like a baby to you? I’ve been taking this crap daily for half of the past year. Let’s pretend we’re playing blackjack, and maybe you hit me again. Pretend I’ve got a three and five showing. I’m gonna need a few more cards, dealer.”

  I shook two more pills into his hand. He popped the pills into his mouth and crunched down on them. I passed over a half-full glass of water he’d had on his nightstand. He drank and swallowed the pills. He grimaced again. “It’s getting worse. It takes about twenty or thirty minutes for those pills to kick in. I considered shooting this stuff, but I hate needles.”

  “Liquid medicine spoils faster than pills,” I said. “Liquid stuff might be bad by now. Maybe lethal.”

  His head fell back against the pillows, and he inhaled slowly through his nose. “You won’t go anywhere, right?” He closed his eyes. “I don’t know how long this takes, but I can promise you that it won’t be too long.”

  “Hey, somebody has to bury you, right?”

  Doug smiled at that. His eyes popped open again. “You have no idea how much it means to me that you showed up.” He reached out a hand and patted my forearm.

  How do you respond to a comment like that? Thanks doesn’t cut it.

  Once the pills kicked in, Doug slept. I brought Fester in from the RV. He immediately found a sunbeam crossing Doug’s legs and made it his own. I brought a chair from the kitchen to the corner of Doug’s bedroom. I picked up a book from Doug’s floor, a pulp spy thriller from the 1960s, sort of like James Bond, but not nearly as slick.

  Doug woke around noon. I made us a lunch of eggs from the hen house. Doug only ate a few bites. “Waiting to die isn’t fun, man.” He stretched his arms over his head and arched his back. I could see the hollows of the gaps between his ribs through his shirt. “The worst about dying slow is the pain. It’s not like a cut, where there’s a localized pain, it’s all just a constant dull ache that slowly intensifies until you can’t handle it. I’m tired of the pain, man. I guess it’s just a matter of deciding what’s worse: the pain or the fear of death.” He was quiet for a moment. “What do you think happens when we go?”

  I’d considered this many times over the past year. I vacillated between the two extremes of Nothing and a classical version of Heaven complete with angels, harps, and all my dead relatives waiting for me to arrive. I envisioned every sort of thing in between, too. I even considered different concepts of Hell, but I didn’t like to think about what could be worse than being left alive after the apocalypse killed everyone I knew. “I don’t know,” I finally said. “I hope, whatever happens, we get to see the people we loved that died before us and make up for lost time.”

  “Miranda. I miss her. A lot.” Doug reached out an arm and stroked a picture of a woman next to his bed. “Do you know how I knew she was the one?”

  “Tell me,” I said.

  “She had huge boobs.” He held his hands in front of his chest. Then he broke out laughing. “Nah, just kidding. I loved her because she wouldn’t let me get away with anything. If I fed her an empty line, she just rolled her eyes. She was immune to stupid romantic gestures. She wanted honesty and openness. She wanted an equal partner. I bought her roses. She liked them, but it didn’t impress her. I took her for a walk in the hills near our college, and while we were walking, I told her a story about my childhood. That she liked. I’d dated girls in college. She was a woman.” He smiled at the memory. Then he winked at me. “The boobs helped, though.”

  Fester woke up and crawled up Doug’s legs to demand attention. Doug idly stroked the cat’s head. The cat twisted under his touch. “I miss my kids, too. They better be waiting for me on the Other Side. And my grandbabies.” He reached for a handkerchief on his nightstand and wiped away his tears. “My oldest grandchild, Serena.” He pointed at a small picture on the wall. “She was only eleven. She was the first of my family to pass. Died at a hospital in Indianapolis during the first week of the Flu.” His voice cracked. “None of them got to grow up. They didn’t get to have dates, or fall in love, or marry, or…” He trailed off. A sob wracked his body, but he bit back any others. He sniffed and wiped his nose with his wrist.

  After a prolonged silence, I asked, “What do you think happens after we…” I couldn’t say the last word. It felt too heavy for the small room.

  “After we die? You can say it. It’s not news to me.” Doug mopped at his eyes with the handkerchief.

  “Where do we go when we die?” I asked him.

  “Heaven.” Doug said it in a plain, matter-of-fact voice. “We go to Heaven.” I started to open my mouth to ask him why he was scared to go if we go to Heaven, but he continued. “Maybe if I keep saying it, I’ll start believing it. We go to Heaven.”

  “What’s your version of Heaven?”

  Doug thought for a second. “Oh, I don’t know. I want to see my family. A perfect Heaven has a golf course and a movie theater. How about you?”

  “I’d like to see my parents again. And Rowdy, my dog. I’d like there to be an awesome roller coaster, too. One with no line that you can ride over and over again.”

  “Oh, that’s good. Can I put your roller coaster in my Heaven, too?”

  I smiled. “Go nuts. Maybe I’ll take a vacation from my Heaven, come over to yours, and we can ride your roller coaster together.”

  “I’d like that. I’d like that a lot. You do that. When you get to your Heaven, you come find mine.” Doug groaned and breathed through gritted teeth. “Find me some more pills, would you?” I handed him four more hydrocodone pills. He tossed them back and drank more water. He nestled into his pillows. Fester curled up on his chest. “Tell me something.”

  “Like what?”

  He shrugged. “Doesn’t matter. I just want to hear someone’s voice. Read to me from those journals you say you’re writing. Tell me your story, Twist. I want to hear your story in your words.”

  “They’re in the RV.”

  “Go get ‘em.”

  By the time I got back in from the Greyhawk, Doug was asleep. I read from the journals, anyhow. I figured he just wanted to know someone was in the room.

  We were both waiting for the inevitable. For Doug, it was a slow journey from constant pain to constant, debilitating pain, and further on to pain that reduced him to a barely-conscious, pill-dependent husk of a former human. For me, I was stuck in a limbo between waiting for him to finally give up the ghost and pass away so I could bury him as he asked, and getting back on the road to continue my journey to the South. I wasn’t going to abandon him; I didn’t have that sort of cruelty in me. However, after three days of reading to him in the ever-shrinking moments of his lucidity, I sort of felt the way I did when I visited my grandma’s house—there’s a sort of comfort of being there, but I couldn’t get comfortable the way I wanted to be comfortable. I didn’t want to venture too far from Doug’s side in case he passed, but I was quickly growing tired of sitting in a chair in his room. Geez, I feel guilty about even thinking that.

  It was the truth, though. He was a fellow human being, a good guy. A family man. He was suffering. I wasn’t going to just ditch him, but at the same time, I wanted him to move on. I hated seeing how much he hurt when he was awake. I had to help him to the toilet, which was in the backyard. I eventually broke down, went to the hospital in nearby LaGrange, and got a bedpan to make his life easier. I had to help him clean himself. It was humiliating for him. He hated his dependence, I could tell. His moments of w
akefulness were becoming shorter and shorter. When he did wake, it was usually because he was in pain. We’d chat for a bit, I’d help him in any way I could, and then he would dope himself into a narcotic coma again.

  The Flu was horrible, but the period from health to symptoms to death was usually less than five days. It was an efficient, brutal killer. Cancer, on the other hand, was sloppy and lazy. It murdered people in increments, robbing them of seconds of their life instead of leveling a single, painless blow. I hated Cancer before the Flu, and I hated it even more now. Watching Doug waste to nothingness was making me realize that if I ever got to a point where I was stuck in bed dying slowly, I was going to have to somehow end it quickly, take as many pills as I could and hope I never woke up again. As much as I didn’t feel like dying, I really did not feel like dying slowly.

  In the middle of the night halfway through my second week with Doug, I heard him gasping. I was sleeping on an inflatable camping mattress in the hallway outside his door. I woke up immediately and rushed to his side, flipping on the small camping lamp at his bedside.

  The light made him blink his eyes. They were wide open, scared. He was gulping for air, his mouth opening and closing like a fish. His hand twitched. He tried to raise an arm off the bed, but didn’t have the strength. I gripped his hand. “I’m here.” I saw his face relax slightly, but he couldn’t breathe. He was going, and there was nothing I could do about it. There was nothing I wanted to do about it, either. It was time. He needed to go for his own sake.

  I put a hand on his forehead. I put my head near his so he could feel my presence. I whispered into his ear. “Relax, Doug. Relax. It’s natural.” That didn’t seem to help. He was still panicked, still tense. “Think of your kids. Think of your wife.” I plucked Miranda’s picture from the bedside table and held it in front of his face. He instantly went slack, his stress breathing reduced. He rested his head back against the pillow, and the tension fled from his neck. His eyes closed halfway. His head lolled to the side and we looked at each other. I heard a strained gurgle in his throat, as if he was trying to say something, but he was too weak to form words.