Remnants: A Record of Our Survival

by Daniel Powell

  “Are you infected?” John called down at us. “Do you have the blight? Be honest now, or I will cut you down where you stand!”

  It wasn’t the usual test, but this wasn’t the usual encounter. John had to keep his distance, and asking us to eat isn’t exactly the first thing on anyone’s mind when the hammers are cocked, if you know what I mean.

  “No,” Dad replied. He shook his head slowly from side to side. “We’re clean—I promise. We’ve been drinking from a well and wearing gloves.”

  I wiggled my fingers in support of his point; they were sheathed in plastic. We’d been lucky in that regard. Mom had had six boxes of disposables at home—an occupational necessity with some of the labs that she taught—and we wore them whenever we went into Sandy.

  John lowered the pistols, and that’s when Ben drew the curtain and we saw poor Carrie and her tiny daughter. Marianne couldn’t have been much more than a few weeks old. Carrie had tears on her cheeks. I can’t imagine how scared she must have been, holding her child like that and never knowing if we were blighted—or if we had come to take her baby girl away.

  And that’s how we stumbled across another group of survivors. I don’t mind mentioning it here that we discovered each other at the Elks Lodge, because they’re long gone now. We all walked out of that place together. They were heading east (or were they? ha, ha!), where Carrie thought she might still have some family.

  But before they departed, we shared a meal together. Ben’s a bow-hunter, you see, and he had managed to kill a pair of seagulls just a few hours before we showed up. We built a little fire out behind the lodge, too overcome with hunger to care much about whether the blighted might notice the smoke.

  Besides, it was nice just being with others for a change. Having a cookout felt—I don’t know, it just felt like the right thing to do. Maybe it was dangerous, but it was pretty clear to me that we all needed it.

  And we had weapons. If the blighted came, we would deal with it.

  So we roasted the gulls, and Dad shared around the crumbled remains of the last three protein bars that he’d been holding onto for a special occasion. We ate the candy too. My stomach has shrunk over these last few months and, even though I only had a couple of ounces of food, I can’t remember the last time I felt that full.

  It was sooo nice, let me tell you. We sat near the fire, warming our hands in the drizzle, and we ate and we talked.

  Billy and me put the fire out when we were finished and we helped them get their things together. That’s when the talk turned to the blighted.

  “They actually have a market now up in Seattle,” John said, the disgust plain in his voice. He had a little tin of tobacco—Lord only knows where he managed to get that, what with all of the grocery stores and gas stations as empty as they are—and he put a pinch in his cheek. He offered some to Dad and Billy, but Dad refused. Billy looked like he wanted some, but one look from Dad changed those plans pretty quickly.

  “I’m serious,” John continued. “They’re…they’re selling it right out there in the open.”

  Carrie never looked up from her infant daughter while her husband spoke. The rest of us looked elsewhere—overcome with revulsion by what he’d said.

  A market? Holy sheesh. That meant they were processing it…

  “It’s true,” Ben added. “I was there just a few months back. Heck, I barely made it out of Olympia alive. The blighted were going door to door. They were processing whole groups of survivors. I caught a ride with some carrot munchers down to Vancouver, but I walked the rest of the way to Salem to meet up with Carrie and John. I’ve seen a total of four vehicles on the road since, but I haven’t had the guts to put a thumb in the air. Heck, I hide every single time.”

  Dad nodded. “We had to leave too. We had a house in Portland—up near the zoo—but we’ve been on the mountain here since April.”

  “It seems quiet,” John said. He spat on the smoldering coals. John has a slight build, but he looks pretty tough to me. Things weren’t going to end well for any blighted trying to get to his little girl—I can tell you that. “You folks…are you actually safe here?”

  Dad shrugged. “We’ve managed, so far at least. You’re the first person I’ve spoken with in about three weeks, John. The last one was an old man I met in a hardware store. He was binding a nasty puncture wound in his foot with electrical tape.

  “Sandy’s been pretty much picked over, but we’ve had some luck around Eagle Creek. Allie, you want to show him what we found?”

  I pulled out the laptop, smiling as I gave my confession. “I hope you don’t mind,” I told him, “but I’ve been recording all of this—at least everything since you let my Dad and brother pick up their guns. I’m…well, I’m keeping a record.”

  John grinned at me. “A record? What do you mean?”

  I explained it to him, and I told him about the X-NET. He just shook his head in amazement while I spoke. “Be careful,” he warned me, eyes wide. “You just be careful about how you use that thing, Allie. If the grid comes back on to stay, then you can be pretty certain of just who got it up and running. There are just so many more of them then there are of us right now. And I hate the thought of that thing leading them straight to your doorstep.”

  I nodded. “I’m careful. It’s encrypted, and I never log on from the cabin. Can I…can I please take your picture, John? I mean, for the journal?”

  “Nah, I’m sorry, kid,” John said. “We’d rather not. We want to stay under the radar—as far under it as we can. In fact, I’ll be honest with you folks. This situation that we’re in? I’m thinking it’s pretty much permanent. There was some talk of medical testing, supposedly coming out of Bethesda or the Pentagon or someplace back east. These were medical trials coming out of the military—some kind of vaccine that was supposed to stop the blight dead in its tracks. But I can’t be sure. Nobody can. It’s all a bunch of hearsay now, folks. Just whispers on the wind, and most of it probably dead wrong to boot.”

  We helped Ben and John shrug into their packs. Carrie, who hadn’t said much of anything to us at all, had the baby secured in a sling against her chest, bundled beneath a waterproof jacket. We were walking with them, heading east, when we heard the roar of the convoy.

  “Go!” Dad hissed at Billy and me—pointing to the fire-blackened shell of an old pop-up camper. “Get behind that camper—now, kids! Go!”

  We did as we were told, and Ben and Carrie came with us. I peeked out from beneath the camper’s wheels and caught sight of them. Dad and John knelt behind a thick juniper shrub. Just twenty feet beyond their position, a series of military vehicles rumbled right down the center of the Mt. Hood Highway. Trucks and hummers. They were decked out in tan camouflage, but each bore an odd insignia on its side—sprayed there with red paint.

  If the power holds up, I might try my hand at drawing it and posting it here later on.

  I got down on my tummy and counted tires. Nine vehicles later, the convoy had passed.

  Dad and John met up with us behind the camper. “We’ve got to get straight home, kids,” he said to us. There was fear in his voice, and it kicked my pulse up another notch.

  Carrie and John shared a glance. It was heartbreaking. I could tell that she wanted to come with us. But John…I’m not sure what it was I saw in his face. Pride, maybe? Anger? Willfulness?

  I’d like to think that Dad would help them, but I’m glad that they never asked. I know it sounds selfish, but we were barely holding on as it was. How could we take on a baby? The cabin already feels cramped, and what would happen when Mom comes home?

  “No, honey,” John said. He reached over and tucked a wisp of Carrie’s hair behind her ear. “No. We need to stick to the plan. Let’s just get out to your dad’s place and see how things look from there, okay?”

  Carrie was crying again, and John pulled her close and wrapped his arms around her. He let her cry for a long moment before whispering something in her ear. She stiffened, nodded her head, and
wiped her eyes—her resolve replenished.

  I’m pretty hopeful for these folks.

  Dad pressed the tattered copy of our only map into their hands. It had notes all over it, and it was coming apart along the seams, but still—it was a danged map.

  “Thank you,” John said. He shook Dad’s hand and tucked it into his jacket. “God be with you and your family, Clifford. You take good care of these kids.”

  “Will do,” Dad said. “Be safe.”

  We watched them go, and then we came home and spent the last three days munching on salmonberries, ferns, and the last of our canned goods. The battery died—drained by my recording—and we were too scared to do anything much more than sit around and read and play scrabble and gin rummy. Dad went out for firewood a few times, but the pickings are slim with all of this wet weather.

  Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that it’s rained every day. A lot.

  And so now you know what we know which, having typed all this out here, really doesn’t feel like an awful lot.

  But still—something seems to be happening here. There are others out there, and they’re on the move. They have vehicles, and they seem organized.

  I guess the real question is, whose side are they on?

  Chapter three: How did we get here?

  Dad says that any record worth its salt should cover everything from the very start, so please accept my apologies if I’ve skipped over some important stuff here. Sometimes, you get down to writing and any thoughts about a plan just fly right out the window.

  Sooo…I’ll just take a few minutes here and try to go back to the start of this whole mess. The X-NET seems to be gathering a little bit more momentum every time I log back on. Dad and Billy have helped me make a timeline, and we’ve even been able to find some of the original news stories that covered the blight through the years. The social networks are still in shambles (and we haven’t found any new evidence of Mom out there, although we did run across one of her old PSU profiles, and I saw Dad tear up a little bit when he saw her picture there), but some sites are coming back online. Just this morning, in fact, a skeletal version of the old U.S. Government website showed up. It was pretty neat to be able to go back in there and search through some of the old archives. I even found a satellite map of Portland’s West Hills—it was a trip seeing the old neighborhood again, and utterly without the fires that had knocked the place down into a pile of ashes!

  Dad says that whoever’s responsible for the X-NET must have some serious techie chops, and access to some big-time computing firepower. The Internet got pretty spotty when the blight walloped Europe, but it simply disappeared altogether when the big server farms in California and Oregon bit the dust.

  We’re talking the ultimate Error 404 here, folks.

  Part of it was the splintered workforce (I mean, who cares about keeping the servers running when your co-worker’s looking at you like you’re a pork chop, right?), but the naturalists also played a big role.

  The naturalists, by the way, had really destructive factions on both sides. I suppose that was one area where people could find some common ground: the dissolution of society as we had come to know it.

  So, how can I describe what’s left? Well, Sandy is utterly deserted, as far as we can tell. That’s pretty much par for the course.

  There is no society.

  There are homes, of course. They’re filled with dishes, pictures, furniture, televisions—all the usual stuff that people had before, but have no need for now. Heck, without a working telecom network, there isn’t even any use for phones. Mine’s somewhere back in the cabin, but wrap your brain around that one—future anthropologists and current ( I guess nonexistent) readers of this here X-NET.

  Those little things were practically surgically attached to us. I mean, you couldn’t go anywhere without seeing people checking their phones all the time. There was this great video of this lady that walked right into a fountain at the mall while checking something on her phone (I looked for it but, alas, that little gem hasn’t yet been restored to the X-NET).

  But all of that is gone now. In less than a year, the telephone became a quaint relic. Dad says it’s about as useful as a pet rock, whatever that is.

  The same thing happened to society. In just less than a year, Sandy went from a cute little town of 10,000 people to a looted husk with maybe a few hundred refugees hiding out and subsisting on whatever they could scavenge. We don’t have it much better up here on the mountain, but at least we have protection. We’ll know if somebody’s close, and Dad got the juice running, so at least there’s that, right?

  But let me get back to the naturalists. Sorry about that. In the worst months of the dieback (can’t not use that word now, can I?), people weren’t just at each other’s throats—they were unraveling the very threads of what it meant to live together in a society. Billy said he once saw a full-grown man push a little girl out of her spot at one of the Mt. Tabor food lines. This was back when there was still a regional response—back when ordinary citizens showed up to swap germs and war stories while standing in line for a few loaves of sourdough.

  Holy sheesh, were we ever stupid.

  The unrest took many forms, and the naturalists just loved it. They were mostly anarchists. Dad said that they wanted a complete return, all the way back to square one—to a notion that the physically strong, and not the wealthiest, would survive. There were these brutal attacks in New York, Atlanta, and Houston. They burned down the CNN studios and they pulled J.P. Morgan’s headquarters apart, brick by brick, to hear Dad tell it.

  At the same time, they were marshaling their efforts in computing. When the world’s leading security systems fell, hackers drained the Royal Bank of Canada and evenly redistributed billions among the world’s population.

  But who needed it? It was a symbolic gesture, but one that was powerful, according to Dad.

  Money wasn’t worth anything by then. The naturalists, both blighted and healthy, had seen to that.

  And this isn’t to say that there aren’t places out there that aren’t trying to hold things together. When we took the truck into Portland to get Dad’s leg treated, we saw just such a place. I won’t get into it here, but there are pockets of healthy people, good old remnants, living with each other, defending each other, and trying to carve out a life amidst the rubble.

  Wow. This is getting long, and I haven’t even really started. I think this is where Mrs. Cranston would grab that trusty red pen of hers and scribble Get on with it! in the margins of my rough draft.

  So I need to warn you: some of these stories are disturbing. How could they be anything but that though, right? Dad and me went through a bunch of sites and, after sifting through some of the content that’s been restored, we tried to pick the stuff that seemed most credible.

  I was really small when the first signs that something was happening started to show up in the news. Not that I’m much more than a kid now, but situations like ours have a way of…well, of hastening the old maturation process, I guess. The truth is that I kind of went from playing with Barbies to hiding from cannibals, and there really hasn’t been much time in between to enjoy just being a kid.

  I was in elementary school when that story first aired on the news. I don’t remember it, but Billy and Dad both do. They knew about this one, and this one, too. There were tons of different theories on why all of this crazy stuff might be happening, but get a load of this one (the callout below is from the story, if you don’t want to click through):

  What caused this recent outbreak of attacks? Some have blamed the drug “bath salts,” others have claimed it was caused by the LBQ-79 virus. The girlfriend of the Miami cannibal said he was under the control of a voodoo curse.

  I guess it got to the point where the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention even built their own site.

  But the thing I want you to pay close attention to is that virus listed above: LBQ-79. That’s not the virus that causes the blight, but it was the b
light’s precursor—an ancestor that mutated at least six times before scientists couldn’t keep up with their jobs and had to, like the rest of us, take to the hills, so to speak (Dad calls it “going to the mattresses,” although I don’t really get that one).

  Here’s a picture of what the LBQ-79 became. It looks pretty innocent, right? Like a couple of jellyfish, or maybe some kid’s Photoshop homework from school…

  Maybe the virologists have named it. Maybe it’s got some long, scientific name with a bunch of numbers and letters and dashes, and the big brains in the white coats have petri dishes stuffed with the thing, just sitting on freezer shelves in secret underground laboratories.

  Maybe they do, but really…who cares?

  To us, it’s just the blight.

  It starts with a low-grade fever before manifesting as nausea, vomiting, excessive salivation, and uncontrollable weeping. I remember standing in line at Safeway, back at the beginning, and being stunned because all around me, people were crying. And it wasn’t just a little sniffle here and there—we’re talking crocodile tears. Blubbering, is how Billy put it.

  But the poor blighted person’s temperature climbs and climbs. Rupturing is not uncommon (Mom had a pretty bad nosebleed right before she left). Delirium is usually the last stop on the way to a temporary coma state. The blighted lose consciousness for a period of about forty-eight hours or so. And when they wake up, their appetites have changed.

  That’s how you know it’s in you, you see. People used to call it the carrot test. Just put a veggie in front of one of the blighted and wait for the reaction. If they made it through the coma, you pretty much knew, but if they couldn’t choke down a vegetable, then it was time to leave the area.

  There were stories coming out of Europe and Asia about some terrible stuff happening, but we were so insulated from all of that in America that it didn’t really register. Dad says Americans were too busy with trivial things to adequately prepare for what was coming, and after all—it was pretty tough to believe.