by Eli Constant
And it only got worse. People died in multitudes. I could count on two hands and a foot all the living humans I'd encountered on the road to survival.
It was funny how many of those survivors had asked me for a smoke. I didn't smoke. I wondered how anyone could want for something so frivolous in the wake of such destruction.
But we were a species that constantly took our gifts for granted. I shouldn't be surprised that some people would cling doggedly to the ways of before. I, for one, was all about the after. I mourned the loss of my run-of-the-mill life, but I fought to live.
One-thirty a.m. and all is well. The demons must not want their pound of flesh tonight.
New Passenger
The van moved quickly, cutting through the thick darkness with ease.
The world was still quiet.
The night seemed eternal.
I stretched in the driver’s seat, my palms pressed against the carpeted ceiling; my back cracked pleasantly. I used my knee against the steering wheel to hook around a body in the road. My headlights illuminated the dead form, like a bright light chalk line around a crime scene corpse.
Two bodies in one day… more than normal.
But I was always glad to pass corpses at night, rather than in day. In daylight, the girls would notice. Megan’s lip line would harden. Kara wouldn’t understand, not really.
My girls were sleeping soundly, their soft snores a balm against the loneliness of driving. Their brown-haired heads lolled forward in sleep. It’d been over an hour since Megan had woken and asked the time.
My fingers moved to a battery operated radio sitting on the van dash. During tech targeting after the initial invasion wave, the undergrounders had rendered most devices useless. Satellite towers were now just giant statues—odes to a way of life come and gone. I couldn’t just pick up a laptop and email family members or my colleagues, assuming any one I loved and knew was still breathing. Our energy plants were nothing but ash and framework. Burned until they were mangled, distorted shells. Everything that made us advanced and prepared… pried from our fingertips with such ease.
Every now and then though, we’d come in range of a radio signal. A little voice in the dark urging us onward and giving us the smallest sliver of hope.
A painful shard of glass in a world gone mad.
According to the last broadcasted statistics, the United States population was down more than ninety-two percent. We’d been hit harder than any other part of the world. No one knew why, luck of the draw maybe.
Those stats were nearly three months old now. I kept the radio handy though, turning it on whenever I gave a thought to—just in case.
As intelligent as the humanoids were, they hadn’t knocked out individual generators and CB radio communication. They hadn’t ventured onto every single homestead and destroyed off-the-grid equipment. Maybe they hadn’t seen the importance of destroying each little receiver and transmitter and small power source. Maybe they hadn’t seen the importance of the individual.
And that was a mistake.
Because having any ability to communicate, even if it was a few passing words spread over long spaces of time, kept us connected. It linked the vestiges of humanity in such a way that we were unable to lie down and die.
So, the remaining survivors in the U.S. communicated via low grade radio tech. I’d heard from one stranger met on the road that sometimes coordinates of safe zones were broadcasted. He hadn’t heard them himself, and neither had the person who’d given him the information. He could have been lying or suffering from false hope for all I knew.
I took it for truth though. I had to take it for truth.
That stranger had also led me and the girls to a place where we’d spent four months in relative safety. It had been wonderful. Almost normal. I’d made large pots of soup with anything anyone had handy. The girls had blown bubbles with another child named Letty. She’d been small, skittish, wild, and wonderful. That sanctuary was destined to be shattered though and, of course, it had been.
Clicking on the small radio with the squared-off handle, my fingers played with the dials. I scrolled over each channel slowly, pausing hopefully, waiting for a crackle of life. My eyes flicked between it and the road until it was as effortless an action as breathing.
One night, I’d been kept company by a voice—throaty, warm, and feminine—reading. Reading a book I didn’t recognize, but the words were like a lifeline reaching into my heart. It was about a girl who saw her life passing by, as quickly as if she was riding on the subway. She could see all of her mistakes, all of the wonderful things that would happen. She saw even her death. And, in the end, she lived her life without alteration, until she was old and weathered and surrounded by family members.
The story was sorrowful in a way, but also wonderful. We all want to live just another day more. To live until old age—that is the most beautiful dream nowadays.
That night of reading was long passed though. Now I only hoped for the stream of numbers pointing me in a direction or anything that would make me feel anything.
My fingers continued to move fruitlessly, the round knobs rotating easily.
No luck tonight. No stranger’s voice to offer hope.
Sometimes I picked up an AM frequency on the van stereo. I was never very hopeful. Mostly I picked up deadness, but after I’d finished with the handheld, I scrolled through the channels on the van radio. This took less effort, just pressing the scan button.
I let the scanning go on and on until it had passed each channel at least half a dozen times. Ready to give up, I leaned forward to click off the hammer of it pounding against my brain—assuring me that we were alone and without any chance of surviving.
As my fingers made contact with the knob to turn off the useless radio, a crackle set my heart racing. I paused, praying that the crackle would come to life and become a voice.
And it did.
It did.
Pulling over as fast as I was able, I leaned over for the atlas and pencil I kept on the seat beside me. Scrambling, my hands shaking violently, I waited for the numbers to start over, to recycle. The words were punctuated by someone saying ‘repeat, those locations are:’. Then I was writing them down with shaking hands, as fast as I was able while making sure they were legible. More than one location. More than one possibly safe place to take my girls.
On the fifth set of numbers, the radio began to snap, crackle and pop as though I’d poured a gallon of milk upon it. I slammed my first into the dash. “No!” I scream-whispered; angry, but not willing to let my outburst wake the girls.
Still though. Four complete locations.
And one in the direction I was heading.
One that wasn’t so far.
I was already on the correct page for what state we were in, so I let my index finger walk a path until it planted on the spot. An hour away. Maybe a little more.
It was 4 AM when I pulled up a long, overgrown drive.
I shut off the headlights as the van approached the small cabin. It was old and ragged, paint peeling and shutters hanging from singular hinges. It reminded me of a face—the windows the eyes, the door the nose, the full porch the mouth, stairs the tongue. It frightened me for some reason.
Worrying that I must have gotten the location wrong—either on the atlas or while writing—I scanned the map. No, this was right… unless I had indeed written the coordinates down wrong.
I debated reversing back down the dirt road. I was so tired though… and maybe there was a bed.
A movement in the shadows made my breath catch in my throat. It stuck there, a ball of unease that refused to be swallowed. Was something really there or was it a trick of my tired mind?
It was stupid and unsafe to go out in the dark.
Locking the van doors, I adjusted my seat, making sure I wasn’t too reclined. Kara still had plenty of room behind me. Her little hand was hanging limply off the side of her car seat. Her stuffed bunny was staring at me from the floor
boards; the glassy eyes were unsettling.
The early morning was uneventful. I was thankful for the rest—even if I did spend the majority of it with one eye open.
In the bright light of full day, I explored the little cabin. I found evidence of a gathering, but now it was abandoned. The coordinates must have been old. That worried me that the other three would also be duds.
Megan begged to use the actual bathroom, but when she lifted the toilet lid, the inside was shit-brown and crawling with roaches. I had the distinct feeling that Megan would never again complain about using the pee bucket in the van.
The cabin didn’t feel safe enough. We wouldn’t stay there, not even for a single night.
We had one piece of luck though. Behind the cabin, where the overgrown grass met the tree line, was a tumble-down storm shed. And in it was a full, faded-red gas can next to a hidden stash of supplies. Water stored in a bleach container, a few pop-top cans of refried beans, a jar of peanut butter, and even a bag of sporks to eat it with. I didn’t know why other survivors hadn’t already found the food and fuel and taken them, but I was grateful.
The sporks made me chuckle. There was just something funny about the offspring created from a marriage between a fork and a spoon.
The gas nearly filled the tank, which was fortunate. After driving through the night, the gauge needle had been hovering dangerously over the E mark. A tightness in my chest relaxed.
I checked my journal and used my road atlas to find the next location. Northern Virginia. Middle of the mountains. While I had the map handy, I searched the other two full set of coordinates. One was upper New York. One was… Canada.
Canada had possibility. I’d been there once. As a kid. And it would be cold. Wouldn’t it be cold?
I rolled the idea around in my mind.
And then it planted there, like a fast-growing plant with deep-set roots.
We got to the site in Virginia with nearly half a tank to spare. It was a small group. A family of tents was camped on a large rock face, adding punches of color to the stone-gray. It was almost like a painting, bringing to mind Kline’s Orange Outline.
Choosing not to talk to anyone as we parked and explored, I picked a flat area to the right of the fire pit and started putting up our five person tent. It had seen better days. Arms laden with items, Megan and Kara crawled inside when the tent was only half erect. They rolled out the large sleeping bag we all shared and then began sniffing and examining the clothes we had—seeing if any of them were wearable or if we had to find a way to wash again.
When I was nearly finished, wondering how to secure my tent against what was mostly stone decorated with a few brave weeds, an older man approached me and offered to help.
“No, I’ve almost got it, but thanks.” I forced a small smile. He seemed okay, but how do you know who to trust?
“Okay, suit yourself.” He shrugged his shoulders, but he didn’t walk away. I didn’t like him just hanging around, watching me.
Realizing what I could do to secure the tent in place, I walked over to the van and leaned into the rear to remove the storage buckets. I placed all of them inside the tent, one by one, trying to even out where they were. After putting down the last bucket, I looked pointedly at the six other tents. “How many people are here?”
“Eleven.” He replied, shuffling his feet. I’d probably made him feel useless, not wanting his help. Not that I really cared.
“Wow.”
“Yeah. Some of us have been here for a couple months, but others are just drifting through.”
My girls were standing next to me now, staring curiously at the man.
“Girls, this is…” I trailed off, realizing I didn’t know his name.
“Robert.” He grinned and the expression was warm. Like late day sun. He suddenly looked a million times kinder.
“Mr. Robert, this is Megan and Kara.” The girls pushed behind my legs, hiding from the man. I couldn’t blame them. I was the one who’d taught them to be shy of strangers.
He didn’t seem to mind their wariness. “Kids never have cared for me much, no matter how hard I try to put ‘em at ease.” The words were a statement, no malice in his tone. He left us then, but not before telling us that everyone ate as a group. No particular meal time, he’d said, they ate whenever someone decided to stoke the fire. Worked for me. Unless that meant I needed to share the little bit of food we still had…
Kara yawned and Megan’s mouth stretched in weariness not long after. My girls were tired of being on the run. We all were tired of driving and being stuck in the van for hours upon hours. We’d stay in the mountains for a while, I decided. It was cold, secluded, and so far the company here was good. Only one man though, I’d reminded myself. No idea what the others are like. I shivered, a cool breeze seeping through my too-thin clothes.
Undergrounders undeniably preferred warmth. Their population was greatest in the southernmost states and warmer continents. With the summer months coming though, even the mountains would begin to warm dangerously. And, because of the seclusion, we were surrounded by shadows. The forest could hide all manner of things. Not just the beasties we feared.
Maybe this place was not as safe as I was telling myself. Self-deluding is a dangerous, dangerous thing.
We didn’t join the others for dinner on that first night. Instead, my girls had enjoyed peanut butter on sporks and we’d told one another bedtime stories. We couldn’t remember all the words to all the books we’d left behind, but I think we got them mostly right. Except for maybe the one about the princess and the frog. That had veered wildly off course to include aliens and cheesecake and a castle that had trampolines on every surface inside instead of proper floors, walls, and ceilings.
Over the next few weeks, I found sleeping on the expanse of rock nestled in the woods very comforting. Maybe too comforting. I’d been more than a little surprised that the group didn’t have a rotating watch schedule. And it meant that I ended up spending most nights half-awake, sleeping at the mouth of our tent—the flap slightly unzipped so I could keep loose watch on the shadows.
That little detail was easily tolerable though, because the mood of the camp was surprisingly positive. Megan and Kara were especially happy. They chased each other around the campfire—Kara toddling along, falling every now and then. And they played hide-and-seek in the tents, their laughs ringing out like bells. I found it both beautiful and sad, because I knew their careless freedom would come to an end eventually.
It was nice, being a part of some semblance of a community. Before the end of everything, this small community—so rough-hewn and imperfect—would not have been something I found attractive. I could have easily passed every one of these people on the street and not stopped to say so much as ‘hello’. Now, I found their kinship made me sane.
A few of us sat around the campfire one night, maybe a week after our arrival. Our conversation was serious, uncensored; we tried to figure out what really happened to our world. Not that that was possible. Megan and Kara had already been sound asleep, floating in la-la land. I was sat at the entrance to our tent, listening to their snoring anytime the talk lulled enough to hear it.
One of the women in our madcap band was a bit of a bible thumper. She ranted for almost an hour about how humanity had spent centuries destroying the wonderful Eden we’d been given. She’d sworn the undergrounders were created as an Earth-friendly backup plan, a modern day fare-the-well to humans.
That was an interesting thought: Hey! Don’t stress. Just consider the humanoids God’s eco-conscious solution to restoring the planet. Look at it this way—at least we didn’t all have to drown this time.
Not that I wasn’t a God-fearing woman. I was, most definitely. My idea of the Lord Almighty just didn’t include mass homicide. Sure, I guess he’d done it before and might do it again, but if the flood hadn’t cleansed humanity, why should He think murder-by-beastie would do the trick?
Of course, I also couldn’t understand a
beneficent God allowing cancer in children. Mysterious ways is what they say. I’ve always hated that.
In the end, the conversation that night had died down into heady, hopeless silence. Most of the theories we’d spouted had been ludicrous anyway, just straw-grasping crazy.
No, we couldn’t understand why it had happened or what tomorrow would bring. I doubted a single human would be alive in the end.
Every day, the undergrounders seemed like they were getting smarter, more adapted. On the contrast, surviving humans rarely had any helpful information to share and opted for useless theories by firelight. Or silence. Even in silence though, it was just nice to be surrounded by other human beings. If this was how the world ends—waiting on monsters while enjoying warm flame and quiet companionship—then it might not be so bad.
Thinking back to that night, I remembered how several voices had called after me as I’d crawled into my tent. ‘Goodnight, Elise’. ‘Sleep well, Elise’. I hadn’t bothered to learn any names.
I knew Robert and I’d heard the names Grace and Jason spoken aloud. I might even be able to point out the people who matched the names.
It should have been important to me. Memorize every face. Call out every name. It should have helped me cope, re-build faith. I’d never been good with names though and if I remembered the faces, then I’d imagine them later… and my mind would see them dead. So much for building lasting friendships.
It was late again, the stars blinking at us from the faraway sky. We’d been in the mountains just shy of three weeks. Long in terms of our current lifestyle, but very short in terms of passing time.
I peeked in on the girls. They were cuddled together in the sleeping bag. I crouched down, tent flap fully open, and looked at them for a while. My two daughters; they were so beautiful, so peaceful in sleep.
Dinner had been a rare treat tonight: barred owl. The birds were on the large side—over a pound each at least—and they’d been caught by an ingenious contraption. As soon as I’d seen it, I’d wanted to ask the maker to teach me how to construct one myself. I had regretted, in that moment, not becoming better acquainted with the people here.
