The Systemic Series - Box Set

by K. W. Callahan

  “Good idea,” he perked up. “I think I’ll do the same.”

  “Definitely helped pass the time,” I said, kind of regretting mentioning it. I didn’t really like the idea of Will doing the job without me since I was worried he’d miss something of value and also because I actually kind of enjoyed the process. It was like a treasure hunt, and with few forms of entertainment left in our current world, the thrill of the search and the excitement of the find was somewhat exhilarating. But I kept my mouth shut, realizing that it was a good activity to help keep Will awake and alert and that it was for the benefit of the group. I didn’t want to be selfish in my desire to be seeker and finder of all things useful.

  I told him which apartments I’d already gone through so that he wouldn’t overlap my search areas. Then, after he’d left, I pushed the sofa back up against the front door and crept to the bedroom where I slid into bed alongside Claire and Jason. There I slept soundly until just after seven when I heard Will jingle-jangle his way in through the front door.

  I got up, curious to see what he’d found.

  Will brought with him several steel frying pans, a big cooking pot, an assortment of dried pasta that he’d poured into one big box, some salt and pepper, a tube of antibacterial ointment, a half full bottle of hand sanitizer, several boxes of soap, two partially-used sticks of deodorant, a box of adhesive bandages, and a bag that contained lots of toilet paper, three boxes of tissue, and several rolls of paper towels.

  “Good job,” I nodded at the supplies.

  “Thanks,” he said. “You were right, definitely helped pass the time.”

  “Good,” I said. “We should probably start getting things set up around here.”

  “How long you think we’ll stay?” he asked.

  “Hopefully not long,” I said. “But I can’t say for sure. Depends upon how quickly we can find a boat and get the supplies we need, as well as what we have to do to get them.”

  “How long do you hope we’re here?” he asked, an eyebrow raised.

  “No more than a week,” I shrugged. “That would be my best-case scenario. But considering we had to ditch the SUVs and have gone through most of our supplies, we don’t have much bartering leverage. We might have to spend a while scavenging to come up with everything we need.”

  Will nodded. “Well, we can split up today. Some of the group can get things arranged here while the rest of us search the apartment building for more stuff. I made it through four more apartments up here on the third floor. That means we still have about half the floor left and then the first and second floors. Hopefully we’ll come up with more items to barter, and then we can search the buildings around us.”

  “Assuming they’re unoccupied,” I said. “Remember, we’re in unfamiliar territory and we have to watch our step.”

  We spent the rest of the day settling in and continuing our scavenging. We began by getting the kitchen cook area set up. We used the big pot that Will had come across to create a small cooking spot. We set the pot atop the unusable stove and ripped out the enclosed fan area above the stovetop to expose the exhaust vent that led up through the roof. In this way, we could put some of the fuel we hoped to collect – wood or charcoal left around the building as well as any driftwood found on the beach – in the bottom of the pot and set it ablaze, keeping the burn as low and as steady as we could. Then we set the grated rack of a small but rusted out grill that I’d found in another apartment on the top of our cooking contraption. That way we could spread our items out to cook. It wasn’t a perfect solution, but we felt it would work for our needs. We decided to cook only at night to disguise any smoke that might give away our presence to others in the area.

  I decided that later, also under the cover of darkness, Will and I would try some night fishing. Sharron and Emily said they’d join us to do some laundry in the ocean since we had found a plethora of laundry soap in the supplies left behind in the neighboring apartments. It appeared that soap was one thing that was not in heavy demand after the fall of civilization.

  Dad, Sharron, Paul, and Sarah continued searching apartments while we worked in the kitchen. They did a nice job of collecting a variety of useable items. There wasn’t much food among their goodies, but there were plenty of toiletries, paper products, some nice knives that I hoped might be tradable, a collection of batteries that hadn’t expired yet, numerous candles, a few flashlights, several cigarette lighters, a couple bottles of sunscreen and bug spray, some dry cat food for Cashmere, more fishing supplies, and unfortunately, some remains of previous occupants.

  The initial discovery of the corpses came as a shock to the kids, but thankfully, the carcasses had rotted away (or been eaten by rodents, maggots, and other creatures) over the past year to little more than bones covered in clothing or bed sheets. It was a sad reality of our post-flu world, and we realized that such encounters would likely continue for years to come. There were far more previous residents than there were remaining ones, and those who had survived the flu had been so busy just trying to survive that little had been done to provide proper burials for the deceased. None of us wanted the kids to encounter these sorts of finds if at all possible. As soon as the bodies were discovered, the adults would hustle the kids out of the area, quickly wrapping up or covering the remains as best they could in sheets or other bedding before continuing the search.

  As the lukewarm morning slid into the balmy afternoon, we took a break from our searching and renovating our new home for a brief lunch created from some of the items we’d managed to scavenge. The canned meat we’d found had gone bad and smelled terrible so we tossed it out, but the other items were still good.

  Our biggest concern once again became water.

  With the vast Atlantic Ocean just outside our doorstep, the problem of finding drinkable water seemed somewhat absurd, but it was there nonetheless. While we were eating, I asked the group for volunteers to go up to the rooftop after lunch and set out some pots, pans, buckets, and any other water-catching objects they could lay their hands on. Will and his family happily volunteered as it would get the kids away from what had become the macabre work of apartment scavenging.

  Claire and I had been so busy getting other things set up that we hadn’t had time to even go through and lay out our own packs of belongings that we had lugged to the apartment building. Therefore, after lunch, getting ourselves personally organized in our new home became our next order of business.

  The apartment Claire, Jason, and I had selected, and in which my father and Claire’s mother stayed in the adjoining bedroom, had previously been occupied by a middle-aged Hispanic couple. Judging by the pictures that they had adorned several of the apartment walls and tables with, they had one daughter. The daughter had definitely graduated high school, and by the scrub work attire she was wearing in later pictures, had apparently been employed within the healthcare industry or at least in a healthcare-related field.

  I sat down on the edge of the bed in the bedroom we had selected and picked up a picture that sat on the nightstand. It was a snapshot of the family together in better days. The parents looked young, maybe in their mid-30s, and I guessed the daughter to be age six or seven. It was a photo of them smiling on the beach, a picnic lunch laid out on a blanket behind them. I wondered who had taken the picture – a friend maybe or a passerby.

  I sat, thinking about what had become of them. They certainly hadn’t died in the apartment. I pondered whether any of them had survived the flu, and if so, where they were now and what they were doing. The thoughts made me sad. I set the picture frame face down on the nightstand. I didn’t want to see them and find myself constantly rehashing the same depressing questions.

  Claire was rummaging in a bag behind me, setting stuff out on the floor, trying to put some order to the mess our supplies had become.

  I continued staring at the overturned picture on the nightstand. I realized that just seeing the frame – even with the picture face down – would have me revisiting
those same sad thoughts regarding the family’s fate. Therefore, I picked up the picture, opened the nightstand drawer, placed it inside, and closed the drawer.

  I knew that we needed to get away from the aftermath of the flu and that while some of the others in our group had questioned our coming to Miami, our plan was justified and necessary. Our children – our families – needed to escape this horribly depressing and dangerous world, at least for a while. In a year or two, maybe society would begin to reorganize and even begin to thrive. Or maybe it would continue to eat itself alive. But I wanted no part of it right now; if not for myself and Claire, at least for Jason. Our little boy had done nothing to deserve all this, and I wanted better for him…for all of us.

  “Oh my god,” I heard Claire breath behind me. “Oh no…no…no…no.”

  I knew instantly that something was wrong; not just wrong, but terribly wrong.

  “What?” I said, sternly, wanting, no, needing an immediate answer. I swiveled on the bed so that I could see her. She couldn’t use that tone and then leave me hanging. Those few words left my stomach churning, my chest tight, my breath short and panicked. I knew instantly, not from the words, but from the way Claire had said them, that something was very wrong. And I had a feeling – a gut-wrenching foresight – that I knew exactly what her words related to.

  “My insulin,” she said, confirming my worst fears.

  I exhaled, angry that I was right, angry at her for letting something happen to this critical supply, angry at myself for letting her let something happen to the one thing that kept her alive and with us and that we couldn’t easily replace. Food was attainable, water was attainable, shelter and clothing were attainable, but manufacturing insulin for her was the one thing we couldn’t do.

  “How many vials broke?” I asked, and then waited.

  Her silence was driving me crazy. It infuriated me because it scared me.

  “HOW…MANY…BROKE?” I urged forcefully, standing and walking around to where she knelt on the floor.

  She looked up at me, tears in her eyes, her bottom lip quivering. “I think…all of them,” she cried, holding up the small padded bag in which she had placed her vials of insulin. There was the sound of tinkling glass inside as she did so.

  “How?” I asked incredulously. “How did you manage to break all of them? Christ, were you trying to break them?”

  She shook her head, tears running down her checks, “I…I don’t know,” she gasped, starting to panic at the realization of what had happened. “I thought they were fine. I was so careful with them the whole trip. They were fine when we left the house back in Hialeah. I just don’t…don’t know what happened,” she sobbed, dropping the bag to the floor and covering her eyes. “I must have set the pack down wrong or dropped it too hard or something,” she continued. “I don’t know. Maybe I put something heavy on top of them. I’m not sure.” She hung her head, uncovering her eyes as tears dropped onto the floor beside the bag of hopelessly broken glass vials.

  The anger that I felt at this horrifying realization faded as I watched my wife, and it quickly turned to compassionate sympathy and determination to somehow resolve the situation. I instantly flipped from fear to emergency mode where I channeled this fear and converted it into a honed focus on the problem at hand.

  “Okay,” I knelt and wrapped my arm around her, pulling her close. Jason toddled in from the living room where the others where finishing lunch. “Not now!” I barked at him, a little more harshly than I’d meant to. He quickly scuttled back into the living room.

  Everything had changed in a blink of an eye, and I was rapidly trying to process what it all meant and how best to deal with this new and extremely dire situation that we now faced.

  I took a minute to shut my angry mouth and instead just comforted Claire. If anyone should have a reason to be upset, it should be her; and I felt I’d been selfish in my initial reaction. But I wanted to keep my wife alive, not just for her sake, but for mine, and Jason’s, and Emily’s, and everyone else’s in the group. So yes, I was being selfish, but I felt somewhat justified in my self-centered motives.

  “Don’t worry. It’ll be okay,” I soothed, rubbing her back softly. “So what about reserves?” I asked.

  “What reserves?” she said in frustration. “These were my reserves.”

  “Yeah…but what about shots?” I said, not completely getting it.

  “Those syringes don’t come fully loaded with insulin,” Claire shook her head. “I have to load them…with that,” she gestured at the bag of broken vials. “Without insulin, the syringes are useless, they’re just empty syringes.”

  I took a deep breath, processing the magnitude of what she was saying. “Shit,” I breathed. “So what about your blue bag?”

  Claire always kept a tiny blue zipper-bag close at hand with a vial of insulin, her blood tester, some test strips, and a couple syringes. It was her “daily use” bag.

  “How long do you have with the insulin that’s in there?” I prodded.

  “A week or two,” she said, wiping the tears away.

  “Okay,” I nodded, feeling some slight relief at our growing timeline.

  “When it’s full,” she added.

  I took another deep breath, concerned again. “When did you refill it last?”

  “Last week,” she answered.

  I tilted my head back. “So we’ve got, what, a week, right?”

  “Yes,” she nodded sullenly.

  I pulled her up closed to me and hugged her tight. “Okay,” I said. “It’ll be alright.”

  I couldn’t help questioning the words as they came out of my mouth, but I had to say them, for both of us.

  “Your job from this second forward is to regulate your blood sugar levels as best you can and maximize what little insulin you have left,” I told her.

  “That’s what I’ve been doing,” she said, the fear evident in her voice.

  “I know,” I said calmly. “But now you have to push it to the max. Buy me a little more time. Okay?”

  “Okay,” she agreed.

  “Now I’ve got to go get some stuff ready. We’re going to the market downtown tomorrow and I need to gather as many things as possible to barter with.”

  She nodded. “You stay here and take a nap or eat a snack. Whatever you need to do to keep your blood sugars stable, you do it or you let someone know what you need. Got it?”

  “Okay,” she said somewhat meekly.

  “No,” I shook my head. “Not okay. You do it. Don’t be afraid to ask…whatever it is. There’s no feeling guilty about putting someone out with a request or being a burden. You ask. Okay?”

  She nodded with vigor and looked at me with a sweet smile, pulling me close and giving me a big hug. “Thank you,” she said softly into my ear. “I love you.”

  I pulled away, not because I wanted to but because I was in a hurry to get started. I didn’t need words to tell her that I loved her too, I wanted to do so with actions, but I said the words anyway as I stood up to get started.

  I gave the rest of the group a quick rundown of the situation and then recruited everyone who wasn’t assigned to getting our water supply set up – since without water, none of us would be able to help Claire – to assist me.

  By nightfall, we’d collected a nice stash of items from the surrounding third-floor apartments. We continued working, taking shifts throughout the night, using flashlights as we moved our search down to the second floor. By morning, while exhausted, I felt better about our prospects of being able to trade for certain supplies we needed, which I prayed would include insulin for Claire.

  As morning broke, Dad and I began to bag up some of the items we hoped to trade at the market. We had several trash bags full of stuff. We put everything we thought might be tradable into them as we had no idea what the hot items at market might be. From sets of knives, cigarette lighters, candles, and batteries, to certain clothing items, toiletries, medicine, pain relievers, ammunition, guns, fishi
ng poles, and more, we tried to pull together everything that might be worth something to someone – with the exception of food and water – to take with us.

  I asked Dad to accompany me downtown. I wanted Will to stay with the family just in case something happened while we were away. I had no idea what the environment downtown would be like, and I was aware of the prospects that we might not return from our trip.

  We decided to take half the stuff we’d accumulated to trade. This way we could hedge our bets. If we got robbed or something happened, we wouldn’t be completely out of luck and there’d still be things to barter for a chance to save Claire, even if Dad and I weren’t around.

  The next step in our efforts to get downtown involved finding a vehicle. With all the abandoned cars in the area, the task at first seemed simple; however, it took a bit more work than I initially expected. Since we weren’t car thieves, and we didn’t know how to hotwire a vehicle, we needed to find keys and match them up with a corresponding vehicle, so we started casing apartments.

  We decided to start with the apartments that still had occupants – albeit dead ones – figuring the odds were better that their vehicles were likely still parked somewhere nearby. I had seen a row of garages behind the apartment building that were painted the same color as the building itself, so I assumed they served as parking for the property.

  After going through six apartments, we came up with three sets of keys. We took them outside and around back and started going from garage to garage in an effort to match the manufacturer logos on the key rings with the correct vehicles. As we did so, we checked the vehicles for fuel. Unfortunately, it appeared as though someone had beaten us to the punch and siphoned nearly all the vehicles empty. After about 20 minutes of searching, we managed to locate two vehicles that corresponded to the keys we had. The problem was that after nearly a year of sitting unused in a garage, the batteries to both were completely dead and we had no way to recharge or jumpstart them.

  “Looks like we’re walking,” said Dad.