Jorge didn’t answer. With the trauma from the day taking its toll, he crossed his legs and bowed his head to his knees. He began to silently pray as he gently sobbed. The last week had been hard, but the past 24 hours had been too much. His mind gave in and his brain finally crashed. First, Tammy and Wayne killed at the ambush, then the trip through neighborhoods where man and dog had tried to take his life. Now a dead child and three more close to it, and Maria still missing.
He felt a hand on his shoulder and looking up, he could make out the silhouette of the girl from the hallway. She bent down and hugged him, putting her arms around his shoulders, each holding the other tightly.
The other two continued to struggle as Jorge and the mystery woman slowly gathered themselves and put their grief away. There would be time later to feel the pain of their loss.
“Thank you,” the girl said. “You saved our lives.”
Jorge pulled the front of his shirt up to his face and wiped his nose and eyes. He took a deep breath and grunted, rising up to check on the other two. Finding them recovering, he walked back into the apartment and turning down the hall, he went into the dimly lit bathroom. He briefly scanned the small room, noting that it was empty. He thought of Maria and felt a deep foreboding. Nothing he had seen since travelling downtown had been positive. Nothing had given him any hope for his love’s future. Nothing seemed promising, only a future filled with pain. He grimaced and thought of the dead child. Finally, bending over, he reached to the side of the propane tank and twisting the knob, turned off the flame, extinguishing their only source of light. His final thought as darkness reclaimed the room was for his dear Maria; and for the first time since the lights had gone off, he now felt that he was truly and utterly alone.
Chapter 8
“Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes”
— Oscar Wilde
Several hours passed while I watched the sun slowly creeping back into our world. I couldn’t stop thinking of little Brie. The light filtered through the semi-sheer drapery panels that covered the picture windows of the apartment where the three of us had nearly died, and where we had lost our tiny companion. Harsh, painfully bright streams of the sunrise blazed into the east-facing room. Specs of airborne detritus hung immobile in the atmosphere around me, making it feel as if time were standing still. The beige, blank walls were streaked with the long shadows cast from the early morning sun. Lacking any pictures, nor adorned with any sign of life, the room gave off a morbid vibe of stagnation and lifelessness.
Jorge had cleaned up Janice’s vomit in the hallway and then taken the small girl’s body into another room where he covered her corpse with a sheet that had been folded and placed on the foot-end of the mattress. Every room had been prepared this way. It was deathly quiet without electricity; and with an absence of outside activity, it created the illusion that the structure was a sleeping giant waiting to be awakened. But, that didn’t quite describe the atmosphere of this thing, this soul-sucking edifice we had been hiding in. The whole building felt like a giant sarcophagus prepared for its eventual occupants to be entombed. Brie’s body simply cemented this sensation in my heart. In my mind, she was the first, and we were next. I couldn’t wait to get out of there.
Garrett and Janice had taken refuge in another apartment nearby. Janice was still recovering from her near-death experience; and as the reality of Brie’s death began to sink in, I could hear her pitiful sobs coming from the adjacent room. The open doors and stagnant air amplified the sounds each of us made, making privacy impossible.
I know Janice felt responsible for the little girl’s death. She had recommended that we leave the flame lit to provide the terrified child some measure of comfort less than twelve hours after her own mother and sister had been killed. Now, Brie had joined them, completing the total destruction of her family, all due to a loss of power and the savage brutality of her fellow man. I felt utterly drained emotionally. I just didn’t want to think anymore. I sat on the floor of the living room, facing away from the window. I pulled my knees up to my chest and leaned my head against my thighs. I closed my eyes, hoping for some measure of peace.
“Charlie?” A man’s voice whispered.
I was confused. I sat up with a start and noted that the sun had risen quite a bit further, its light having become more white, and less ominous. I stretched my legs out in front of me and searched for the source of my name.
I listened for sounds, but didn’t hear any coming from the hallway. My new companion stood to my side, hands in pockets, looking over my head out the living room window.
“Hey, Jorge,” I said quietly. “Everything alright?”
“Yeah,” he replied. “But we need to do something about the girl’s body. We’ll probably be O.K. for the rest of the day, but she needs to be buried or something.”
I caught his drift. We didn’t want to be around Brie as she began to decompose.
“I don’t know what to do,” I admitted. “I guess we could put her on another floor and shut the door.”
“That’s fine for you,” he stated. “I don’t plan on being here after tonight.”
Earlier, after we had recovered enough of our senses, Janice and Garrett had left to find another room giving them a place to grieve. Jorge and I stayed together and I told him a brief synopsis about what we had seen and about the things we had learned from John. The new government was corrupt. Having watched them use a gang to enforce its will on innocent citizens, made them our enemy; and their desire to put us all in camps where they could control us wasn’t acceptable. Sure, there was food and some security, but those could be found out here on our own. I guess my independent streak, the one that made me run daily to stay in shape, and the one that drives me to be the best in everything I do, was screaming at me to stay away from those “cattle pens.”
Jorge had only mentioned that his girlfriend lived in the apartment next door and that he was here to find her.
“I have to look for Maria,” he stated emphatically. “I won’t leave the city without her!”
“Look,” I replied. “Let me get a hold of John today. He can let us know how to take care of Brie’s body, and I can ask him to look into where they may have taken Maria. At least you would know where to start.”
“How can you contact him?”
“We worked out a way to leave him a message when we need to talk. I can leave a mark under the overpass in the parking lot across from DHS headquarters. I’ll put up our sign and let him contact us. He’ll get to us tonight. You can’t leave before then anyway… at least, leave and get very far.”
“How far away is the parking lot?” He asked.
“A couple of blocks west,” I replied. “I can get there and back in no time.”
“What about the agents and patrols around here?” He asked.
“I think they’ve cleared the downtown area and figured it won’t need patrolling. We didn’t notice anything before we fell asleep last…” My voice trailed off as I thought of tucking Brie into the tub, with the propane stove on the closed toilet lid beside her. She looked content as she snuggled down into the blankets with which we had lined the porcelain bathtub. I saw her staring back at me, the flickering torch casting dancing dark orange flames of light on her eyes. She smiled and closed her lids. She seemed at peace for the first time that day. She seemed content and safe. She drifted off and I remember stepping over Janice’s sleeping form. The child trusted us. She had her life put into our hands, and we did our best. Or did we? I thought.
“Hey!” Jorge said. “Don’t zone out on me.”
“Oh, sorry!” I replied. “I guess I’m struggling with everything right now.”
“Yeah,” he replied with a solemn sigh, “I get that too.”
“Anyway,” I continued. “John can give us an idea where you should start. I mean, if you’re pl
anning on getting her out of wherever she is now, you don’t want to be caught and shoved in there with her. At least make a plan.”
“Makes sense,” he said.
Jorge grew contemplative, and I let him stand there with his thoughts. Finally, after a minute or two of reflection, he turned to me.
“You know,” He started. “This reminds me of something I learned from one of my teachers, a part-timer that taught us a night class on leadership. Those classes were the best!” He stated thoughtfully.
“Weren’t your full-time teachers any good?” I asked.
“Oh, they were good enough!” He quickly replied. “But I got a lot more from the ones that taught at night. They were in the trenches of the business world every day.”
“I’ll bet they dealt with Disney and Universal. They probably had a lot of experience with big corporations.”
“That’s only the half of it.” He replied quietly.
“I remember one time we had a presentation given by the president of a regional bank. He talked about the stress and strain of day-to-day finance. He said to be successful, we had to be punctilious, precise and passionate. I guess he liked to make it easy for us to remember things. Either that, or he liked the letter p and used it whenever he could.” He grinned.
“What the heck does that mean?” I asked.
“It means, that when you take on a challenge, you need to be punctilious, or methodical and precise or very attentive to details. I think, that applies to us now. We have to be punctilious and precise. We have to think through every detail and plan every contingency that we might face before we act. And we have to plan and execute our decisions methodically so we don’t make any fatal errors. Finally, when we make a decision, we need to act passionately or with force. Do it like you mean it and not half-heartedly.”
I sobered at his words. He was right. If we had thought through letting the propane flame burn, Brie would still be alive. We were tired. We wanted to make her happy. She had been through so much and it was such an easy fix.
And there it was. When I tunneled down to the nitty gritty of it all, we did it to make her happy and it was a quick way of placating her. I was crestfallen. We were the adults and we let a child make a decision for us that cost us her life and almost cost us ours.
I thought back to my college days and the hours spent training. Countless days in the weight room, building my muscles and conditioning my body to the stresses of intercollegiate athletics. We spent untold hours practicing flip turns to shave tenths of a second off of our time. Yet, here we are, in a life and death situation, acting on the whim of a child.
Jorge must have seen my face fall as I thought all these things. He squatted down next to me and put his hand on my slumped shoulder.
“Hey,” he quietly said. “You can’t let this stop you. You have to move forward.”
I slowly nodded my head and agreed. Then I looked up at him, my jaws clenched and determination in my eyes.
“I’m moving forward. But I won’t forget.”
“You shouldn’t forget!” He stated. “But learn. You can’t change the past, but you can learn from it for the future.”
No truer words. I stood up and straightened my shirt.
“Let’s plan my trip to the parking lot,” I said.
“I thought you said it was only a few blocks,” he replied with a grin.
“Exactly!” I shot back.
Once I began to plan my foray to the parking lot, I realized that even the simplest tasks needed intimate planning when you have a survival situation. You have to make every chore, every action, purposeful. Each step, each action needs your full attention, or any mistake or misfortune that slips by could kill you.
Beyond the planning of our next hour or two, I thought of the big picture. Not only do you need to intimately plan your steps, but you need to put your life in the hands of a select few people that can watch your back and give advice and counsel.
And who can I trust? Before I could even plan the trip, I realized that there were no friends in a collapse other than the companions you forge relationships with. Fear changes people. Knowing what a person is made of before all this occurred would have been a blessing. I had been lucky to be with a group of caring souls when the lights went out. I had the ability to see them in action during the worst of times. Now, I wish I had known the future so I could have formed a group of friends with the skills and temperament to complement my strengths and weaknesses. That would have been ideal.
As it stands, everyone I meet has an automatic pall of suspicion over them. I realized that everything had changed and that I couldn’t assume that all the people I met were honorable, or even tolerable. Who were the people that now occupied our failing society? Who had they become? With the thin veneer of civilizations torn away, people stopped being neighbors, and became survivors. I knew how my neighbors behaved during normal times, but not when they became fellow survivors.
I remembered my American history class in high school. My teacher was a closet conservative, at least when he was talking about the constitution and some of his favorite presidents. During the 80’s, as the Soviet Union began its inevitable demise, President Reagan had a famous quote about the Soviet empire and out government’s ability to believe anything they said. It was a survival situation for the country with tens of thousands of nuclear warheads pointed at each other. “Trust… but verify,” was how he described how to deal with the failing communist nation state. Sitting on the floor of the apartment, with Jorge having taken to the couch to deal with his own thoughts, I realized that even the first part of that statement, “trust,” was not something I was willing to commit to. The only people I could really trust at this point were Janice and Garrett. Well, Dr. Kramer I could trust; but I doubt I will ever hear from him again.
If that’s the case, then who is this guy sitting in the room with me? All I really knew about him was that he said he was here to find his girlfriend. I had told him about our journey from Dr. Kramer’s office but he hadn’t mentioned anything about where he had come from. I only knew him by his first name and I had no idea what he did before all this madness began. He could be anyone and done anything, a lot of it not good. How can I know him and trust him in such a short time? God! I thought. This is maddening!
“What are you thinking about?” Jorge (if that’s his real name) asked.
“I’m overwhelmed,” I replied cautiously. “There’s too much to think about.”
“The more heads that can tackle a problem, the better,” he replied. “Are you thinking about your trip to the parking lot?”
“Not really,” I replied. I got up from the laminate wood floor and sat on an adjoining chair. I studied the man for the first time since he saved our lives. Just who is he? Can I trust him? I thought again.
After a minute of self-doubt and a jumbled argument with myself, I realized that I was way overthinking the situation. Well, of course I can trust him, dumbass. I told myself, He saved our lives.
Jorge sat watching me struggle, as I sat contemplatively on the chair to his left. He was patient. I appreciate that in someone. Being patient means being considerate and that counts a lot.
Finally, he broke the silence. “Are you alright?”
“Yeah,” I replied. “It’s just so much to take in. I don’t have a frame of reference for where I am now.”
“No way you could,” he replied. “But you had a funny look on your face. Just wondered what you were thinking.”
“Believe it or not,” I smiled. “I was wondering if I could trust you.”
His eyes flared.
“Well,” he shot back, “I guess I could have waited a few more minutes to let you all die so I could steal your stuff. I guess that makes me one stupid crook.”
“No, please.” I said. “I got past that. I
guess my mind still isn’t working right.”
“Sure,” he softened. “You had carbon monoxide poisoning. Your brain may still not be working right. And anyway, you… we’ve all been through a lot.”
“Yeah,” I replied sadly. “A lot.”
“Tell me what are you afraid of,” he asked.
I suppose it was the way he asked, softly while looking at me and with genuine concern, that let me open up to him.
“I guess,” I concluded. “I don’t know who to trust. I don’t know where to go.”
Jorge then began to tell me about his journey from the southeast suburbs. He spoke of the two hikers he watched captured and killed. The fear of the journey through neighborhoods with guns and dogs a constant threat, and finally about his commitment to find Maria and take her back south to the cattle ranch in Osceola county where his brother assured him that there would be a place for the two of them.
“Well, when I have a big problem to tackle, it helps to break it down into little pieces.” He calmly replied. “You need to have a plan. What is your goal? Where do you want to go to wait this out?”
“I don’t know,” I honestly replied. “We were going to go with Janice and move in with her sister in the country.”
“And do what?” He asked poignantly. “How will you survive out there?”
“I don’t know,” I thoughtfully replied.
“Does she have enough food? Do they have a farm?”
“I don’t know!” I said louder.
“Is the house big enough?” He shot back.
“I Don’t Know!” I pushed back louder still.
“Do they have weapons? Can you defend yourself while you go there?”
“I DON’T KNOW!” I exclaimed loudly.
Jorge leaned in closely to me and took my right hand. He looked into my eyes.
Charlie's Requiem: Democide Page 8
