Left Alive 1

by Jeremy Laszlo

  At one point I walk through what looks like a warzone. Woodward Avenue for half a mile is nothing but rotting bodies scattered among demolished cars and walls riddled with bullet holes. Brass casings scatter from beneath the ash with my every step. The stench of death hangs heavy over Detroit, but here, it’s the worst. Words cannot describe the horrors of what I see, praying I won’t remember later. There are thousands of bodies, all of them strewn across the streets and inside of the first and second floors of every building. There are tanks rammed into buildings, Hummers flipped over, and helicopters crashed a dozen stories above the street. I see evidence that women, children, and the elderly had been caught in the crossfire and their emaciated bodies remain as evidence amidst the chaos, motionless and haunting. Fat, lazy dogs cling to their packs as they lounge in the shade and watch me pass with apathetic eyes. The broken windows of offices high above are home to thousands of birds that have turned to the rotting carrion below for food. Here, where once they would have starved, the animals have found a thriving source of food. I throw up my beans and what’s left of my tomato sauce during my passage through the heart of the city. Three times I spot others like myself, travelers, each in their own various stages of starvation, staring at the corpses that litter Detroit. The dead are all that inhabit downtown. No sane person would linger long.

  I hope to find a gun, but other than heavy machine guns that were mounted and fused to the Hummers and tanks, there is nothing to be had. Hundreds of survivors must have crossed this part of the city to loot whatever hadn’t been scavenged by the victors of this abattoir over the last few weeks. I find another knife strapped to the corpse of someone who was trying very much to look like a soldier, but looked more like some sort of mercenary or gun for hire. I have little pity for him as I collect his blade. There is a bombed out area of West Adams Street where I stumble across a food truck that had been ripped in two by a long silenced blast. I scavenge up seven bottles of water and quickly down two of them before packing the other five into my bag and moving on quietly. I contemplate a bottle of mustard for a moment before opening it, holding it to my mouth and taking a pull. It is disgusting, but I’m not picky anymore.

  Leaving the carnage behind doesn’t mean I’m leaving the dead behind. Those who did not die in battle have died of hunger on these streets. Death walks the roads like an old citizen. There are piles of men, women, and children heaped in the intersections, dragged out of buildings and left for the packs of dogs that show me little interest. They watch me with vacant expressions, their tongues hanging out as they pant in the shade of the buildings. Flies are as thick as clouds, swarming over the dead as their maggots wiggle and worm their way through the bodies. I look over the dead with only enough attention to avoid them. It becomes very clear that there is no one living in the heart of Detroit. No one can stand it. There is no food to be found. Everything had been looted during the Panic. I walk freely, avoiding those like me who are on their various pilgrimages. Some are heading west, others are going north. I spot a family of five heading south along alleys and smaller roads while I keep to Michigan Avenue. Eventually they are forced to fall in line behind me. I can hear their voices and keep my hand on my cleaver and rebar staff as I continue walking ahead of them.

  When a scream fills the air not far away, instead of curiosity, dread fills my entire being and I bolt for the nearest building. I worm through the buildings, panicking as I place an entire business between me and where I had been when I heard the scream. Panting and gasping for breath, I feel my heartbeat in my festering face as beads of sweat roll down my forehead and cheeks. I no longer care about what might have caused the screams or if I might be able to help. The only thing I care about in that moment is surviving. Avoiding danger is the only weapon I have in my arsenal at the moment. Survival is all that matters. I whisper my children’s names under my breath as I hear another bloodcurdling scream fill the air. A woman is shrieking for help, pleading for anyone in hearing distance to help her. She’s a ways off, so I decide it is time to get moving, before she starts searching for saviors.

  After countless detours from traffic jams and collisions, I spend the majority of my afternoon making my way south until I find myself standing on a bridge over the fetid Huron River. I discover an unlocked SUV with tinted windows and crawl inside. Setting up a tiny camp in the back, I drink two more bottles of water and it seems like a gift from the gods. Food, though, would have to wait. I need to find something soon if I had any hope of improving my health. I am left fearful for the gash on my face. I lock the doors and settle into the nest I have assembled for myself. Slowly, I succumb to sleep.

  I awake to the sound of a hand hitting the window of my SUV. I stir with such a startle that I don’t have the mind to scream. I look outside and see that the last vestiges of sunlight is sinking away, but there is another light source. To the north, I witness as one of the skyscrapers in Detroit has turned into a biblical pillar of fire and other buildings are following. I watch the starved-looking band of survivors move on from my SUV, unaware that I am even inside. I thank God that they hadn’t discovered me. As they move, I can hear them talking loudly about needing to keep ahead of the others. Without a question, I know exactly what they are talking about. Everyone else inside of the city will be fleeing in every direction they can. With a wall of fire and army of pillagers in the north and the lake to the east I am going to have legions of starving, fanatical survivors heading my direction.

  I curse my current string of luck and pack my supplies up, stuffing my sleeping bag into its sack and throwing open the back of the SUV before taking to the street. I am amazed at how quickly the fire is spreading, and between the haze from just waking up and the fatigue from my wounds, I am even more surprised I am capable of fleeing at all. I grip my rebar staff tightly and keep moving, looking back to see the extent of the damage. The flames reflect off the underbellies of the clouds of smoke that are rolling up into the sky. Another of the skyscrapers has caught fire and is rapidly being consumed. I overtake the gaunt, starving pack that had awakened me though am careful to keep obstacles between us. I see their cheekbones sticking out like blades from their faces and their emaciated cheeks and sunken eye sockets. They stare at me with bitter envy.

  “Keeping fed?” one asks in a bitter, dangerous voice.

  I don’t answer, keeping my head down as I try my best to pick up the pace. Slipping one of my headphones into my ear, I wind the crank on my radio and listen desperately for the Preacher. When I finally catch his transmission, he is reporting that Warren has deteriorated into a warzone at the moment and that nothing but chaos remains in the heart of Detroit. Looters and fleeing survivors ignited the fires in midtown that are now threatening to consume the entire city. Hunters had taken to the streets and once more, I hear the ominous word that chill my blood.

  “Be safe, folks,” the Preacher says in his wise, sage voice. “Zombies have come out to feed. Protect your loved ones and may God be with you.”

  God? God had left Detroit long ago. I can’t help but think with bitter hatred that God had left the entire damned planet behind. Hell, hadn’t he been talking about that for the past month? Salvation was our only hope. Repent! That sort of shit had been filling the airwaves since the whole thing went down.

  I watch Detroit burn as I make passage through the night. I can hear screams in the distance and on the breeze when it picks up. I keep my head down and avoid those around me who had caught on as well. We would exchange glances and nods, but that is it. Each of us has our hands on our various weapons, just waiting for the others to draw. But surprisingly, no one draws. In the end, it always comes down to survival. As the morning hours whittle on, I begin to see less and less of those who are fleeing Detroit. It’s sad to think that I am in better shape than they. It is more sad that, injured and sick, I am still able to move faster than those I do my best to avoid.

  I know in my gut that when the sun comes up, it will be the same game that we have been p
laying all along. Once more, I’ll be forced to take refuge and try my best to hide from sneaks and killers in the light of day. This is just a moment of rest from all of that. For these few hours, we have all been on the same level. We all see Detroit as a reminder in the distance. I watch the whole damned thing burn. By dawn, half the skyline is missing.

  I stop when I reached Monroe. I search out the Red Roofed Inn and kick in door 108 and spend the night on a bed with a chair jammed up against the door. It is nice to have a bed for the first time in a very long time. The sun is just coming up as I lay down and close my eyes. I don’t remember a single dream I had on the journey to this point and I’m okay with that. It is okay not to dream in a world of horrors.

  Chapter Six

  It has been days since Detroit burned and ash continues to rain from the sky as a grim reminder. I have stayed in the room for a few days while I watch the mass migration of people fleeing Detroit. They trickle down the 75 in bands of threes and even upwards of ten. Most of the stragglers are more heavily armed and when night falls, the most malicious and feral of them spill out into the streets. I watch them with wary eyes, peeking between the curtains. These are the men that look like hunters, the kinds of men that I want to keep as far away from as possible. I don’t dare yet venture out.

  Several people have stopped at the Inn over the last days, breaking into rooms and holing up for the night before moving on. Fortunately any who had eyed this room gave up when realizing it was secure. There was no energy left to waste among people. Everyone looks weak and starved, even the hunters. But even they have passed now.

  My first instinct is to get up and start heading south as quickly as possible. I can’t help but fear that the girls are in perpetual danger, that they need me. I constantly have to remind myself of the fact that they are not helpless children. Val and Lexi can take care of themselves. They know how to survive. After all, they had been there with me the first time my world crumbled.

  When Tiffany died, I was lost. I tried the support groups where they’re supposed to help you cope and accept what has come to happen in your life, but the reality is that you never cope. There is a giant hole in your life that will never be healed, never seal up, and never be full again. Like the gash in my face, it is a void that only causes suffering in however long your misery-stricken life lasts. I remember sitting in the basements or conference rooms of churches listening to other men weep about missing their wives. The stone-faced guys were the worst. They didn’t have anything left. Their wives took all of it with them to the grave. As for me, I was silent most of the time, just listening. It was good to know that I wasn’t alone in the way I felt, but at the same time, I wasn’t alone. There were others out there who were pierced with as much agony as I felt at the loss of Tiffany. Breast cancer, why did such a thing even exist?

  Suicide was never an option, so endurance was all that I had left for me on this lonely road. The girls were stricken with as much grief as I was, but they had help in recovering. They were young and had friends and grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins. To me, all of their words just felt hollow and pointless. Tiffany was gone. There was nothing left to talk about.

  Someone then told me that I might try getting out more, displacing myself from the physical world of my suffering. I can’t to this day recall who had kindled that fire within me, but if all I was to have left was survival, then I needed to learn how to survive. I looked up the best campsites in Michigan and visited each of them over the course of the year with my girls. My sorrow sought me out. I was never free of it, but when I was alone with the kids in the wilderness, I felt closer to Tiffany or God or whatever it was that roamed the unseen world. It ignited a hunger inside of me—a long dormant instinct. I read books on survivalists and tracking. I started experimenting with how to survive on my own with nothing but my bare hands. Eventually I found myself going to sporting goods shops and knowing more than the proprietors. One man even wanted to hire me. I would talk to park rangers and even went to expos for outdoorsmen. I even once flirted with the notion of going up to Alaska, moving there and starting fresh. They say that Alaska is nothing but wilderness and bears, that outlaws and criminals fled there to live in the frontier. But every time I thought about that, I thought of how miserable the girls would be if I took them away from all they knew.

  Every time I learned something new, the girls were the ones I shared it with. They were all I had. I showed them how to trap, gut, and skin an animal, how to make an oven out of a can, or what to do if they were lost. I taught them everything I had come to know. We would go to the rock climbing facilities, master their walls. We’d go camping and fishing together. Three times Lexi and I would go bow hunting. We would go rafting and share in a multitude of outdoor adventures. It was what we had, what we shared with one another.

  As the girls left me behind, learning eventually became my drug. I would take free classes at the YMCA or the local library on all sorts of things. I took classes on home maintenance, auto mechanics, and even one on interior decorating. My unhealthy craving for knowledge kept my mind preoccupied with materials other than wallowing in my own loneliness and confronting my own sense of abandonment. I taught them everything I learned when they came home.

  I could only pray now that everything I had taught them was coming into use. They knew how to forage, how to board up and fortify a house, they knew how to ration, and they knew how to keep safe. I had trained them all of that. They knew self-defense and how to work a gun properly. I picture them on the coast, on a beach house in Florida, alone with their group of friends, holed up and waiting for me. Alone, I try to recall anything I might have heard of Florida on the news before heading for my father’s cabin. A tidbit. Something. “We’ll be safe, Daddy,” Val had said. “Don’t worry about us. Get somewhere safe.” It was so laughable that she was the one telling me to be safe. Sometimes, it was hard to tell who was in charge with those two.

  I try to remind myself how strong they are, how independent they’d grown up after Tiffany had died. They knew that I was hurting just as much as I knew they were. We understood each other and we were there to help one another. I don’t think we were as much of a family as we were a team. There was no living after Tiffany died. There was only survival. So all this desolation was familiar to us. I had to remember they weren’t helpless and as such I couldn’t be careless in my trek to them.

  When I don’t think of them, my mind wanders to the Girl in the road. My hand trembles every time I think about the fact that I had killed her. From all the blood that had pooled under her head and neck, it hadn’t been an immediate kill. She’d bled out from the wounds I’d given her and that boy, suffering for only a few more miles down the road before they tossed him out like an empty soda cup. I ended those two people. I caused their lives to abruptly cease forever. They had come this far, endured so much, and I had ended them with four bullets total. There was something about that which sickened me. I was not a killer. I had hunted before, but I had never once been violent toward another person.

  My thoughts then drift toward the Kid. I can see him walking down the street while I watched, paralyzed with fear. The sight of him fleeing the liquor store, stumbling into the street as the three attackers honed in on him like wolves over a rabbit; it burns in my mind. The fact that I had done nothing haunts me more than killing the Girl and my attacker in the road. They had harmed me. I can justify their deaths. I can sleep with that on my conscience. But this one, watching as three men killed the Kid, that is hard for me to justify. Sure, I tell myself that my daughters are all that matters. Getting to them is the number one priority and that no one else ranks up there with making sure I make it to them. I can recite that speech to myself word for word, but that doesn’t help the horrible implications of what that means. Even the two of us standing together against those three probably would have meant that I would have ended up dead with the Kid, but it would have been the good thing to do. The right thing to do.


  But there isn’t anything right about the world we live in anymore. The entire fucking planet has given up on us. You’ve got to be pretty damn low for a whirling, celestial object to abandon you. What does that say about us as a people? I think it’s pretty clear.

  I remember taking Survey of World Religions in my sophomore year of college. I remember when we were studying Christianity and we were reading passages that distinguished Heaven and Hell. I don’t know what the original language meant by this or what it truly says, but I remember reading the passage about the Devil and his fallen angels being cast down to Earth, condemned to walk in separation of God. There was no Hell written in that passage, only Earth. I remember looking around and realizing that I was living in Hell. I remember reading that Hell was a Norse concept and that ancient Christians believed only in Paradise and Earth. It made the evils of the world make sense. I remembered liking that. I remember genuinely understanding that. I remember when the doctor mentioned lymph nodes years later—fuck lymph nodes! When the hell are lymph nodes used for anything other than cancer? Nothing good comes from fucking lymph nodes!—I remember that I never once questioned the powers that be. Like I said, it made sense. I didn’t like it. But it made sense.