by Sabina Green
The children’s centre had become a makeshift kindergarten, the wooden cottages our homes, the factory and warehouse were storing most of the supplies from our shelters. The cafeteria became a place of social events and meetings, the surrounding farms and orchards were our new livelihood and food source.
Billy never stopped playing his ukulele. He now had–after emptying his storage space–a wide range of other instruments which, to a great surprise of the community, he could all play. Others who were able to play a few songs on the guitar, violin, flute or harmonica, soon volunteered their skills too. We were able to put together a group of one professional and several amateur musicians, and our evenings were filled with music. It had an incredibly soothing effect, for a moment we could stop thinking about The Collective, the plague, the end of the world and the beginning of hard work in the new community, and focus on other more pleasant things. On the fact that we were all healthy –albeit in a slightly frail mental state– and had each other.
I understood why the survivors included a musician, a painter, a yoga and meditation instructors, a preacher and a writer, a singer and an actor. To remind us apart from work, the company of others, relaxation, a smile also matter…
For now, we had everything that we needed.
Not many of us would admit it out loud, but every day we anxiously awaited the return of the team which went to the blue tree to stand guard. We hoped–maybe I did more than others–, that the missing people had just got the dates wrong and would show up eventually. The sign attached to the blue trunk assured them that this original meeting place was being checked every day at noon. But as days went by and the team kept returning empty-handed, it was becoming less and less likely that anyone was going to come. And so we found ourselves a new topic.
A few people were preoccupied by the idea that there might be other survivors, people who weren’t especially selected by The Collective. Our evenings, spent based on the weather either outside by a bonfire sitting on the ground, on trunks or benches, or in the cafeteria lit by candles, were often filled with discussions on this topic. The questions and answers remained pretty much the same, but that didn’t stop some people from bringing them up over and over.
“Do you think anyone else might have survived, besides the ones chosen by The Collective?” asked Johanka, Slovakian by origin.
It was refreshing to go back to my native language and talk to her and her eight year old son in Czech. Most times I stuck to English, our society was multicultural, everyone came from a different part of the world and English was one of the few things we all shared. French, Spanish, or German was often heard from groups of two or four until another person joined them. That automatically meant switching to English. I liked this respect for others and did the same.
Johanka was still waiting for an answer.
“It’s possible, but very unlikely.” Nelson, a doctor, North America. Any time anyone spoke, I tried to add a name, a profession and a country of origin to their name. Sometimes I got stuck on the name, sometimes I couldn’t even get that far. When it came to names, I was usually useless. It made me feel embarrassed, especially since it seemed that everyone was able to remember mine.
“Why do you think so?” I responded. Somebody had to, for the sake of the eager listeners if nothing else.
“I’m not an epidemiologist and I probably missed a lot of news and information since the beginning of my isolation in the shelter, but I’d say that this infection is probably quite similar to other viruses,” he said thoughtfully. “Take Ebola for example, you’re infectious even after you die. So imagine how many corpses in various stages of decomposition are lying around now. Everyone who’s somehow avoided the virus, even if there is someone like that, would eventually have to venture out to get food. Don’t you think that sooner or later they’d come into contact with…”
I shuddered remembering the few corpses I’d seen on the way from “our” farm to the tree. I always sped up and tried to get away as quickly as possible to protect Ruby from seeing them. The idea of all those dead people in Rotorua and other cities was making my stomach turn.
“But maybe, on some remote farm, they wouldn’t need to leave…” Gerald, Irish. His profession got lost in the onslaught of other information.
“What if animals could be hosts too? Pigs, bats?” Jaana asked, she clearly knew enough about viruses to make the connection. The fact that the infection came from a lab and was spread by people didn’t mean that animals couldn’t get it too.
Nelson hummed in agreement and the questions kept coming; none of them helping to get us out of this cycle.
“What about the ships that were out on the open sea when the plague spread? Far from the shore?”
“Wouldn’t the sailors get sick as soon as they stepped into a port?”
People here were trying to find some crack, a side road they could use to avoid the plague. It was much too late for their loved ones, but I suppose it was only natural to feel compassion for everyone else too, and wish that they survived.
“And anyway, how would we contact them?” Billy said. “There is no other form of communication beyond in-person anymore. No internet, no working machines, no electricity.”
“Forget about finding others,” I agreed, albeit half-heartedly. Our community was everything there was, end of story. “We should focus on setting things up here, and making our own chances of survival the highest they can be. We have no control whatsoever over what happens to others.”
“Don’t you wish that other people survived this too, Frank?”
“Of course I do,” I defended myself. Wasn’t I waiting for the team returning from the tree just as desperately as everyone else? “But we can’t do anything to help them survive, and we most likely won’t ever meet anyone like that anyway. Why dwell on it?”
If anyone really did manage to survive, their life must be truly lonesome now.
Together we were making our way through the surrounding areas, adding real life images to our maps. Those were now taped together and displayed on one of the cafeteria walls. Since we were using it as a conference room and to discuss things about farming and orcharding, it was useful to have it there for reference.
My eyes were always drawn to its blue patches representing nearby rivers, ponds and lakes. Finally I managed to get out Hugh’s–actually, now mine–fishing rod, and persuade Billy to accompany me on a morning trip to a river. We asked Grace who was sharing a cottage with Billy, Jaana, me and our children to look after Ruby and Graham in the morning. The two of us headed northeast before sunrise.
I’d gotten so used to the hum of the community, the children’s shrieking, that the silence of nature suddenly seemed a bit unsettling. I felt strangely exposed, as if there were several pairs of animal eyes watching me from the darkness. It made me think once again about what an almost complete absence of the human population will do to fauna and flora. No doubt it will only bring good things, nature will recover from the wounds caused by people and start to flourish again. But what about, say, wild animals? How will they act? Will they be even more timid than before? Will they still see us as predators that they need to run away from? Or will it be the other way around?
Every crack of a twig, rustle of wings and hoot made me flinch and stare into the shadows for a while. For God’s sake, you are a lumberjack! You’ve spent most of your life among trees, I reminded myself.
“Everything alright?” Billy whispered as if he was also being careful not to disturb anything that might wait in the dark.
“Sure…” I replied. Even so, I felt relieved when the sun finally emerged above the horizon and we could see more clearly. “Billy?”
“Yeah?”
As we were walking, I was leaning on my precious fishing rod and he was using a branch.
“Don’t you think it’s weird that from the medical field, our group has a GP, midwives,
a chiropractor, a physiotherapist, a gynaecologist and a pharmacist,” I was listing them on my fingers, “but no psychologists?”
“Why would we need a psychologist?” he frowned in surprise. “What, are you saying that you think it’s mentally straining to abandon your old life, go to the other side of the world while there is an apocalypse unfolding around you, be stuck in a basement for six months, and then, in the middle of absolute nowhere, start over from scratch, with three hundred and seventy strangers, who by the way constitute the entire human population?”
We exchanged a look and then almost broke down laughing.
“Yeah, I’d say it’s weird,” he said when he could speak again. He stood up and wiped the tears of laughter from his face. “The Collectivers have probably figured that we’d be able to deal with anything, since we have good hearts.”
This good heart, mentioned in so many of our letters, had become something of a motto for our community. The Collective had clearly been very careful about who would get a second chance; they wanted to build a new, perfect society. If we weren’t feeling the best after recent events, supposedly we just had to rely on other people’s good hearts.
“Or, maybe they did choose a psychologist, and they were one of the six adults that didn’t make it to the tree. Hard to say. Why do you ask?” he stopped again, but this time he looked at me quizzically. “Is everything okay?”
I shrugged. How could I explain that to him? “I guess we’re all dealing with the same stuff.”
He started walking again, but didn’t say anything. Maybe he was waiting for me to open up.
“It’s like you said. You’re living your ordinary life, then you fly abroad on holiday, and it’s all turned upside down by a deadly virus, deliberately released by people to wipe out the population. That alone is hard to deal with. But… to watch your daughter die, then have to lock your granddaughter and yourself in an underground prison and listen as strangers come to the house to search for food every five minutes. And be scared that maybe you two are the last ones on Earth.” I stopped and then waved my hand in a would-be nonchalant way. “I guess I’m overreacting, sorry.”
He sighed. “I think we should ask Nelson to go through all the adults and have a little chat with everyone. He must have done some psychology in med school…”
A few minutes passed in silence only interrupted by the sound of whispering leaves and small branches cracking under our feet.
“I have nightmares every night,” Billy confessed. “When I wake up, I don’t know what is worse, the nightmares or reality.”
We left it at that. The end of the forest was almost in sight and the rippling of the river was getting louder and louder. We didn’t even need to bring a map to find this place, I thought as we were getting settled on some boulders. I took a worm dug out of the ground the previous afternoon out of our bucket, put it on the hook and cast the rod. We had several hours of peace and quiet ahead of us.
Luckily, Billy had thought to bring two big plastic bags he’d found, or shall I say almost slipped on in the kitchen when Nadia was taking them out of a cupboard. We lined our backpacks with them, and then filled the bags with our bounty.
“Otherwise we’d be smelling like fish for the next twenty years,” Billy noted, satisfied.
I had longed to go fishing so I could stretch my legs on the hike to the river, and then sit on the bank for a few hours without having to deal with any pressing community matters. The few fish I thought I’d catch were supposed to be taken back in a bucket with a bit of water.
But it turned out that nature had been taking full advantage of six months without any human activity, and since nobody else had been messing with the river, it was overflowing with fish of all kinds and sizes.
“I know an opportunity when I see one,” Billy said after the fifth catch in ten minutes, and that’s when he pulled out the plastic bags. “I guess this is pretty much the end of our idle philosophical debates. You catch, I clean. This here is our dinner, pal.”
And so the morning trip became a mission to feed almost four hundred hungry mouths. At first I watched Billy massacre the fish with my knife, wasting precious meat, although of course unwittingly. He cut the fillets helter-skelter, clearly he’d never cleaned fish before. I suggested we switch and showed him how to use the rod. He was much better at fishing, so I could laugh with relief and then turn it into a joke.
“I’m a musician, Frank,” he said, smiling. “I can strum the strings and play the keys with my eyes closed, that must be a good-enough excuse for being clumsy with a knife, right?”
“Sure, sure,” I waved my hand and took another catch from him. Kill it, cut the head off, slice the sides into fillets, remove the bones, put the meat into bags. Everything else went back into the river. I wanted to come back to this place, so it wasn’t wise to leave a banquet for stray dogs who’d end up hanging around, expecting seconds. Plus, the remains would start reeking after a while and I certainly didn’t want to add anything to the smell carried by the wind.
At first we worked in silence, but in the end we used this opportunity and started chatting again. Soon it became a game of “Don’t you think it’s weird that…”.
Billy was asking about The Collective and the Association and while I was telling him what I knew, a thought occurred to me. “Don’t you think it’s weird that they’d spent so much time advocating against animal cruelty and promoting veganism, and then they went ahead and let us farm here? We have several farmers here and a butcher on top of that.”
Billy tilted his head to one side. “I don’t think they were totally against people eating meat. Given how many of us there used to be, it must have been damn hard to check if all the farm animals lived in good conditions and were killed humanely.”
I nodded. After all, it was natural for carnivores to eat meat. Sure, people could survive on a plant based diet but, all things considered, did it really matter if a sheep was killed by a man or a beast of prey? It was the circle of life. The biggest problem had been the size of the population which the meat and animal product market had to satisfy, and the economical and ethical issues that came with it. Since people wanted things as convenient as possible, they cared less and less about how the animals were treated.
They’re just animals anyway!
How many times had I heard that argument from people?
It used to drive Connie crazy, she would wail: How can they look away from the atrocities they sentenced the animals to? How can they justify that to themselves?
Maybe I wasn’t an activist like she was, but I certainly wasn’t immune to the suffering of animals. That’s why I would drive forty kilometres out of Perth to pick up meat and eggs–and stuff my freezer full while I was at it–on a farm with various certificates ensuring it gave the animals first rate care before humanely killing them and preparing them for the market.
The wheels in my head whirled. I wanted to present a long list of reasons why The Collective and other animal loving people including me had fought against animal cruelty, but in the end I thought: What does it matter now? It’s over! Instead I said: “Well, we should make sure our people do their best.”
“Absolutely,” he mumbled and pulled another fish out. “This should be enough. I don’t think we can fit any more into the bags.”
There wasn’t enough fish to feed everyone in the community, but plenty to make a thick fish soup, and that was sure to be enough to satisfy everyone. It was close to midday when we were walking back to the settlement.
“I’m starving. I hope they left us some breakfast,” I said and slid my fingers under the straps to relieve my shoulders. The backpack grew heavier by the minute.
We headed into the kitchen, but before we had time to put our things down, a bright-eyed María hurried towards us.
“Frank, Billy, you won’t believe this!” she exclaimed, breathless. “We have a v
isitor!”
“Who?” Billy asked, while I was thinking: But there’s no way the group has already returned from the tree? “Somebody came here? Right into the camp?”
María was clearly savouring the moment of our ignorance and deliberately took her time with the answer. Her face bore the classic expression of I know something you don’t!
“Who?” I encouraged her.
She took a breath and I mentally filled the moment of suspense with a drum roll. “A woman from our list, one of the missing ones! Her name is Sanne… Come on!”
She pushed us towards the kitchen which we were headed for anyway. We took off our bags as soon as we came in and searched for Nadia in the group of people standing by a table. All it took was for us to mention the fish and she jumped up with an excited Great! and took over our catch.
The welcoming committee was sitting around the table with a woman I’d never seen before. For a split second I stood there frozen, her face looked so much like Connie’s. But this wasn’t my daughter I reminded myself, it couldn’t be. Anyway, Sanne’s hair was blond and much longer than Connie’s.
She was clearly starving, she and her daughter, an exact copy of her, were stuffing themselves with whatever was in the bowls in front of them, their spoons flicking to their mouths at lightning speed. I had been hungry myself but now I all but forgot about food. Because it was impossible to miss the small bundle tied to Sanne’s chest. It was an old ragged scarf tied behind her dirty neck and under her arm, and in it was–could this be possible? –a baby.
