by Sean Little
“It’s okay,” I told him. “You can go. Rest now.”
He exhaled, a long, slow breath that must have been every last molecule of oxygen in his chest. He sniffed a slight inhale, and then that was it. Doug Fisk left this world. I was alone again.
The next morning, just as dawn was breaking, I carried the skin-and-bones body of Douglas Raymond Fisk to his grave. I took time to wrap him in the sheets of his bed like a shroud. I made sure his Rosary beads were wrapped around his fist as I had seen at Catholic funerals in the past. I didn’t want to drop him haphazardly into the grave, although he’d told me once that I could just drop him at the edge and kick him in with my heel; he wouldn’t mind. Instead, I laid him on the edge of his grave, right next to his wife’s grave, and then climbed down into the grave so I could drag him down with me. It was awkward, trying to get him situated in a narrow grave while my big feet were in it with him, but I managed to do it. I had to grab the edge of the grave, pull myself up as far as I could, and then brace my feet on either side of the hole to keep from falling back into it.
I used Doug’s shovel to toss the whole pile of dirt back on top of him a shovelful at a time. It took a good hour and change to fill in his grave. Then, I placed a pile of fieldstone over the grave to prevent scavengers from digging into it, not that they would with him being so deep. I just wanted it to match his wife’s grave. I made a crude cross out of wood in Doug’s garage and hammered it into the head of his grave to match Miranda’s. Then, I sat back at the foot of the graves to rest. The sun was over the neighbor’s roof and the backyard was bathed in light. It was going to be unbearably humid that day, as it had been since I’d first entered Indiana.
I didn’t know what to say. Doug had been so easy to talk to when he was alive. Now that he was finally gone, I was speechless. I stabbed the shovel into the dirt and left it standing. I wasn’t raised in a religious house, so I didn’t know anything Catholic to say over the grave. I stood there for twenty, maybe thirty minutes just staring at the dirt. I hoped Heaven was real, and that Doug had found Miranda. Anything less would an injustice to a man who deserved eternal peace with his family.
I was alone in the world again, but I was glad to have had company for the last week and a half, even if that company was barely awake for most of the last five days. It was comforting to have had human contact again. I felt complete again, or at least as complete as I could feel. I thought about what he’d told me about there being a difference between living and surviving. I was definitely surviving. I don’t think I was sure how to live anymore.
I opened the chicken coop and released the remaining hens to the wild. I couldn’t take them with me, but I hoped they’d be okay. They could return to their coop at any time, if they wanted. I made a mental note to raise chickens when I finally settled. Having eggs would be a good thing. I didn’t know how to catch wild chickens, but I’d have to figure it out. I plucked the few eggs from the nests in the coop for my own supply. I didn’t have refrigeration (I’d unplugged the tiny RV fridge because it took too much power to maintain), so I’d have to eat them soon.
I took the RV over to neighbor Jim’s house and raided his shelves of water, food, and toilet paper. (You can never have too much, am I right?) It took forever to carry cases of bottled water one-at-a-time up a 12 foot ladder. I filled the Greyhawk’s storage holds and stored extra in the overhead bunk.
I started to consider the future. At some point, would I run out of toilet paper? What then? Corncobs? Newsprint? People like Jim and Nancy, these “Doomsday Preppers”—what were they actually preparing for? So they survive the apocalypse. What then? They bought themselves an extra ten, twenty years? So what? What do they do, next? What’s the point? Do they just live like pioneers for the rest of time? Do they ever start to try to rebuild civilization? If so, how? There is an existing blueprint, sure. But where do they start? If a toilet paper factory wasn’t high on the list, I’d want to know why.
I wasn’t hungry, so I skipped lunch. I treated myself to a Coke from Jim’s stash. There is nothing better than an ice-cold Coke. A lukewarm Coke is acceptable, but not nearly as life affirming. Right after the toilet paper factory, I’d want someone to bring back refrigeration.
CHAPTER FIVE
Days into Days
I put Shipshewana in my review mirror and continued east. I tried not to look in the side mirror too often as the little town dwindled behind me, but I did. I could not stop seeing it. It’s hard to describe my feelings leaving there. On one hand, I was terribly excited to get back on the road. It felt good to feel the air moving through the window of the Greyhawk again. It felt good to see Fester sleeping on the top of the dashboard again, his furry body wedged against the glass. I felt more optimistic again. I had found four people who had survived the Flu in my travels. Granted, all were dead now, but the sheer odds meant there had to be more. I was more optimistic that I would find them, too. On the other hand, I was alone again and the tiny taste of companionship left a deep and painful want for more of it. Fester was great and all, but it wasn’t the same as someone actually responding to my stories. I just hoped the next person or people I found would be younger and last longer than thirteen days.
While I drove east winding through the small communities looking for signs of life, I tried to piece likelihoods together. Where would there be people? Where would I want to go? Obviously Disney World was the first place that I thought of because it made perfect sense. I could hear the announcer’s voice on the TV commercial: Hey, Twist! You’ve just survived the apocalypse! What are you going to do now? And I would look at the TV camera with my biggest, cheesiest grin and tug on my Apocalypse Survivor Championship ball cap and say, “I’m going to Disney World!” Just the thought of that image made me smile. Disney World might be the happiest place on Earth, but I’ll bet in the post-apocalypse landscape, it was creepy as hell.
I thought about New York City. I wanted to go there. There would be cool buildings to go through. There was a massive population of people. If someone was going to survive in an urban setting, I had to believe it would be in New York. I also thought that if survivors were going to conglomerate after something like the apocalypse, it would be in places like New York City or Washington, D.C.
Thinking of D.C. made me think of the White House. I had to go there. I could sleep in the Lincoln Bedroom and steal a portrait of Martin Van Buren from the wall. I had no reason to want a portrait of Van Buren, but I just thought it would the most illogical choice. Most people would go for Washington, Adams, Jefferson, or Lincoln. The pranksters would probably go for Nixon. I’d go for Van Buren because the dude had some awesome windswept hair.
I know there’s a secret bunker somewhere in Virginia beneath a mountain where the Secret Service will hide the President of the United States during a crisis like the Flu or a nuclear attack. I wondered if he was in there. A lot of the conspiracy nuts went crazy during the first days of the Flu, claiming it was a government plot to erase humanity so they could start over, and that the best and brightest of Americans were being hidden in bunkers around the United States and were given anti-virus shots to counteract the Flu. It was so far-fetched that it might even be plausible. I decided to go looking for the bunker, but then changed my mind. I was content to let politicians stay underground as long as possible. They could do less damage that way.
I thought about the major landmarks and cities I wanted to see. As far as I knew, calendar-wise, it was late July. I had at least two or three months to hit them all, no problem. Four months if I wanted to stretch it. That was plenty of time to get around to everything and still be in Louisiana before snow flew in the north, typically late November or December.
In the meantime, I was still struggling over the decaying roads, hunting supplies and survivors along the road, and keeping the RV running.
Filling up with gas was a chore. I had a bicycle pump that I’d rigged to tubes so that it could be used to siphon gasoline from holding tanks outside o
f stations, but it was always a chore that could take a half-hour of pumping to fill the RV, and it was always a chore to get into the holding tanks in the first place. There was a heavy-duty metal lid that had to be pried away, and then I’d have to get past a secondary seal. Sometimes, I’d find the tank was dry. That happened more than you’d think. There was no shipping the final two weeks of the Flu. A lot of gas stations ran dry. When I did find gas, I’d have to put a filter on the end of my siphon hose. The gasoline in the storage tanks was slowly starting to break down, and it was starting to get slightly gelatinous as the liquids evaporated over time. The filters helped keep the engine of the RV from gumming up too badly, but I still worried about it. How much longer would I have gas? It made me more aware that there wouldn’t be any coming back from this trip. When I made it down south, I wouldn’t be visiting Wisconsin again. That part of the world would be dead to me.
After I pumped gas, I was always exhausted. My arms would be tired. My back would hurt. The RV wasn’t the most fuel-efficient vehicle on the planet, either. It drank gas pretty well. Too well. I was filling up at least once a day, minimum. It was just part of the routine, an unavoidable inconvenience like shaving or using the bathroom. It just had to be done. I would always go into the gas stations and poke around when I finished. If their doors were locked, I’d just let myself through the glass with a brick or something. In almost all of the stores, almost everything was picked clean. Smokes, booze, and adult magazines were always gone. Most of the candy, too. I could understand the smokes, booze, and candy—but why the adult magazines? I couldn’t see people actually breaking into these stores thinking, Welp, I’ll be dead in a few weeks. Better see what Miss February’s likes and dislikes were before I go, but that must be what happened. I couldn’t imagine being horny in a dying world. I’m eighteen and virile, but I have not had a single bodily urge like that since the Flu hit. And just thinking about that now made me worry about myself. Was I okay?
I shook off that thought and reminded myself that all previous definitions of “normal” and “okay” were no longer applicable in the apocalypse. I was dealing with undiscovered country now. Any rules were rules I would set myself, and I decided that people in the apocalypse didn’t have sex. This was easy for me to do because there was no one with whom to have sex.
I hit the Ohio border and prepared to move through the three jewels of Ohio’s north side: Toledo, Sandusky, and Cleveland. I’d been through Ohio with my parents years ago. It took about three-and-a-half hours to drive through the state at highway speeds. However, I was estimating that it would take me a few days to get to Cleveland because of the gas, because of searching towns, and because of the condition of the roads. The humid, summer days just kept melting into more humid, summer days. I hardly noticed the nights because I would lapse into uneasy, exhausted sleep. I just kept myself going, though. What else was there to do? Survive. Just keep surviving.
Outside of Toledo, I was exploring the suburbs around Maumee. I turned down a road and followed it out of town for a while. I hit a stretch of road where to the left was a wide, flat plain of tall grasses. There, I saw something so amazing that I was forced to simply stop the Greyhawk and gawk. There, in the wild countryside, just wandering as natural as you please, was a small herd of elephants, I kid you not. A large bull was leading four cows, and at least one of them had a small baby elephant trailing after her. They were wandering near a grove of trees, stripping leaves from branches with their trunks.
A family herd of elephants was not something I anticipated seeing in Ohio. I was amazed they’d survived the Ohio winter, first of all. I guess they’re a pretty hearty beast. They must have been released by a zookeeper at the Toledo Zoo when that keeper realized the writing was on the wall for primates. I wonder if he/she had been able to release other animals, too. Were there lions and tigers roaming the countryside right now? Were there hippopotamuses in the Mississippi River? If other zookeepers across the country had followed the same lead, it meant that there was a strong possibility that a whole mess of introduced critters were now roaming around the countryside. I could come face to face with a fully-grown male lion. There could be camels, ostriches, emus, and who knows what else scavenging over the countryside. In that instant, the world suddenly got more interesting. I always carried a gun when I went scavenging, even back when I was in familiar territory. It was never to kill, though. It was a tool, like any other tool. I anticipated using the gun to scare, mostly. Maybe use it to wound. My biggest fear wasn’t even animals. I knew there were bears and wolves in Wisconsin—mostly in the northern half, but they had been starting to move south after the threat of man diminished. I knew there were a few cougars and bobcats, too, but most animals weren’t keen to attack. If I’d made enough noise, most animals would have run scared. Now, I had to consider the chance that there were strange predators in the country, zoo-raised African and Asian predatory animals that might not have ever developed the skills to hunt. They would be hungry. They would be highly opportunistic feeders. A gawky young man with big feet who couldn’t run too fast would be a lot easier to eat than something that might fight back.
I made a mental note to always have a weapon nearby.
I spent a full day roaming through Toledo. I didn’t find anything worth noting, but it was worth noting the weather. Oppressive was the only word for it. The humidity, even that close to Lake Erie, was a sauna. It felt like there was something physical about it, something tangible. It felt like if I’d tried, I could have cut out a donut of moisture from the very air and eaten it.
With no more television and no more weather forecasters, I’d had to become very good at reading clouds and noticing slight changes to the winds. For days, the winds had been pushing up from the south, from the Gulf Coast. It was bringing excessive heat and humidity. That day in Toledo was the worst of it. Sweltering, miserable heat. Even that night, when I was camped outside a rest stop along the interstate on the eastern edge of the city, it was too hot to sleep. The RV was stifling. I considered letting the engine idle for the air conditioning, but decided against it. It was too hard on the engine, not to mention the wasteful gas consumption. If I was moving to the Deep South, I was going to have to learn to live with heat and humidity.
It was too hot to build a fire. It was too hot to be in the RV. It was too hot to sleep. I stripped naked and sprayed myself down with mosquito repellent. I busted out my battery-powered clippers and buzzed my hair down to the scalp. I ate a can of tuna and slugged back bottles of water before pouring several bottles over my head and body to help the faint breeze cool me. I didn’t necessarily enjoy being naked. It felt very exposed, and I always got that creepy sensation that someone was watching me even though I was certain there wasn’t anyone for miles. I’d looked for signs, hammered the RV horn, and traipsed over the city for hours. No response. I was certain I was alone.
I thought that maybe ghosts were watching me. I didn’t know if I believed in ghosts, but I was willing to entertain the idea of them. I’m sure that two years ago, the idea of ghosts would have scared me. Now, I found it somewhat comforting. I imagined the ghosts were my parents watching over me, or maybe the ghosts of all my dead friends coming to see how I was doing. I was standing naked in a pair of Adidas flip-flops, dripping wet, at a rest stop in Toledo, Ohio. I don’t think that’s quite the wild, glamorous, party-all-the-time lifestyle my friends would have hoped I would have adopted in a world free of rules. If I were them, I’d probably be disappointed in me, too.
I have developed strange habits being alone. One of the strangest is that in these moments where I’m exposed and uncomfortable, I start to sing “Under Pressure” by Queen and David Bowie. I don’t know why. It just fits moments where I’m stressing out where I have no reason to stress out. I hope you have the whole image in your head now: naked, sweaty, wet teenage boy in flip-flops singing “Under Pressure” to a darkened Burger King sign. I’m not proud of it. Things like this just happen. This was not Hollyw
ood’s big-budget version of the Apocalypse, clearly.
While I was belting out that second verse, the wind shifted ever so slightly. Looking back, I should have noticed it. However, I was really feeling the Freddie Mercury jazz fills that night, so I ignored the shift. The air cooled slightly. A low-pressure system was dropping out of the north and colliding with the high pressure from the south. You don’t have to be a meteorologist to know what that means.
My parents weren’t big outdoors people. I went through that phase as a kid where I wanted to go camping. I went through outdoor magazines in the school library and looked at outdoor goods ad circulars and catalogs when they came to the house. I talked incessantly about going camping as a family. Eventually, I wore my parents down. We borrowed a big tent from a guy my dad worked with and headed up to Devil’s Lake State Park in Wisconsin for two days of hiking and cooking over a campfire. The first night was fine. I was having fun. The second night, a thunderstorm swept through the region, and I thought we were all going to die. We had to abandon the tent in the early stages of the storm. We had to rush back to my dad’s SUV and just watch as lightning struck so often that we could have read a novel by the incessant blasts of light. Hail pelted the campsite. Dad’s SUV suffered a few dents. The tent was leveled. After that night, I’d had my fill of camping. So had my parents. We never went again.
I was in an RV now, but RV’s aren’t armored trucks. The material that makes up the shell of one has to be durable, but lightweight. Ever see what a tornado does to a trailer park? Same materials, more or less. When I was back in Wisconsin, I used to watch for storms with diligence. It helped me plan my days. I never thought about watching for them while on the road. It hadn’t occurred to me.
