Squinting hard as he tries to make out details in the murky interior of the shop, Lowell picks his way carefully forward through the piles of discarded merchandise littering the floor. Stopping at random, he picks a small box from a shelf and wipes away the thick layer of dust that obscures the top to reveal a black label advertising an upmarket men’s cologne. Lowell sighs and replaces the box on the ledge - at least that explains why this shop shows signs of only the most half-hearted looting. Continuing to the back of the room, he checks behind the counter for any of the staff’s personal effects, and then in a small store room that leads off the back of the store, and in both places he comes up empty. Returning to the front, he kneels down at the window, wipes a small square of grime away from the corner of the pane and settles down to watch for the dogs’ return.
Some three hours later he can still be found in the same position. There has been no sign of the dogs, and he had continued to stare out until the sun had set, darkness had spread across the street, and his teeth had begun to chatter ceaselessly from the cold. Only then does he feel for his bag in the darkness, retrieve his blanket and sink down to the floor to sleep where he falls.
In the morning, Lowell wakes with a start at first light and instantly resumes his vigil. He is unsure of how to play his position. After breakfasting he takes stock of his remaining small supply of water – one small plastic bottle with a dribble at the bottom, and a canteen half-full - and calculates that he has at best a twenty-four hour supply remaining, and whilst he is sure that there will be more clean-ish water to be found within the town, he has no way of knowing how far away the dogs will be by now, or if they are even still searching for him at all. At length he resigns himself to remaining for at least a further day before heading out, and settles in to wait.
Before the outbreak, he had been the sort of person who was incapable of spending any amount of time without a distraction of some kind, be it work, TV, golf, golf on TV or as often as not glued to his computer screen watching for the slightest movements in the share price of his companies stock, and jumping on his telephone to berate those responsible as soon as there was the first sign of any activity that would upset the value of his personal portfolio. During the last few years however, he has developed the ability to sit and wait to an intense, almost Zen Master like state of meditation. Perhaps above all else this is the secret to his continued survival. He had come to learn very quickly that boredom is a construct of man, and a luxury that he and all of the other beasts engaged in the Darwinian fight for survival can ill afford. His days are spent doing his utmost to acquire those items necessary to the continuation of life, and when he has exhausted his ability to achieve that aim on any given day, he will eat, sleep or merely sit down and conserve his energy by doing nothing but living, or rather, not living so much as staying alive.
He repeats that pattern now, seeing out the rest of the day and the next morning in a state of minimal consciousness before gathering his possessions together once more and then steeling himself to leave in search of food. Once prepared, he stands at the window for a final few moments, checking and rechecking in all directions, before heading to the door. There he eases back the bolt, depresses the handle and pulls the door open, screwing his face as the hinges let out another long painful whine. Shuffling forward to where he can see to the end of the street in both directions, he hesitates, and looks for the slightest movement: all is deathly quiet. After the third attempt to gather his courage he steps out into the street and immediately scuttles around to the alleyway at the rear of the shop that runs perpendicular to the main road. There he pauses for a moment, to get his bearings. By his calculation, he is about three blocks away from his old house, on Elizabeth Street, but to get there he will have to cross Main Street, and that is something he decides that he would rather avoid for as long as possible. Removing and cocking his gun, he holds it uncertainly at his side as he continues up the alleyway, ducking behind any obstacle at the slightest uncertain sound. In this way, he makes slow progress, stopping at each point where the alleyway leads back up to Main Street and occasionally sneaking up to check for any sign of the dogs. At length he makes it to the intersection of Elizabeth and Main.
All of the way here he has been mentally running through a multitude of checks and precautions that he should adhere to before crossing Main Street, but at the sight of the first street sign for his old road these drift instantaneously from his mind. At the sight of the familiar, the dangerous nostalgia has returned to him at once, transforming him from a fine-tuned creature of instinct and survival into one of emotion and reflective sentiment. Without any caution whatsoever, he finds himself drifting away from the entrance to the alleyway and striding ever more misty-eyed down the center of the road towards his old neighborhood. The closer he gets, the more of the buildings he recognizes, and he finds himself running through a list of former residents as he goes; the Adams, the Renwicks, the Harpers, old Ma and Junior Braithwaite; their former windows still adorned with the various liberal political posters he had once so despised. Although there is peeled paint, wildlife encroachment, broken windows and other minor vandalism, the street seems to have avoided the wide-scale destruction and looting that has befallen the town center. He is so lost in reveries about the way things once were that he does not notice what slight damage there is, but rather stumbles along, a broad smile on his face, emitting small noises of nostalgic appreciation as he goes. A short while later he comes to with a start, and finds himself standing directly in front of his old house: no 26 Elizabeth Street. At once a new and far more painful flood of memories envelope him, a combination of happy times experienced while living there and the terrible events that forced him away, and he realizes how difficult it will be to undergo the homecoming that awaits him now.
Chapter Eighteen
The house is a handsome detached four bedroom built in the classic Victorian style, it is larger and stands alone with more space than the other houses surrounding it, and is also set back further from the street. Privet hedges further maintain the privacy, and line a garden that had once been a neat arrangement of hardy perennials maintained by a company staffed by a succession of anonymous minimum wagers, but has now been thoroughly consumed by nature. The gate hangs open on one hinge, and he steps quickly through and picks his way down the path, squeezing through two ornamental bushes that formerly flanked the path on either side but now almost meet in the middle. As he approaches the front door, Lowell instinctively thrusts his right hand into his trouser pocket for the key, feels into his left pocket and then pats both in consternation until he finally comes too and realized he had lost his key and all of his other possessions many years ago. He can see by the rough hole that has been struck just above the doorknob that he won’t need one anyway. For a moment he is mildly irritated by the damage that someone has done to his property, and then he remembers just how many houses he has broken into over the last few years without any thought for the former owners. With a rueful smile he reflects that the whole concept of property is pretty much done for given the whole downfall of society and everything. Not for the first time, he catches himself mid thought and realizes that he has been standing in front of his door for several minutes. Cursing himself for his lack of caution, he bends down and peers into the hallway, searching for any evidence of intruders. Seeing nothing obviously amiss, he reaches in and gropes around for a moment before he finds the latch, flicks it open and steps into the house.
Inside, he is confronted by a state of disarray that had not been evident from the outside. It is clear that the entire house has been ransacked, many of his former possessions lay scattered across the hallway, intermingled with a profusion of waste, broken glass, and filth dragged in from outside. Water drips steadily from a gaping hole in the ceiling, steadily infusing the whole with the deep fungal odor of rampant damp, and even as he watches a chunk of plaster breaks free and drops with a dull thud onto the sodden carpet below. Skirting around the wall below t
he hole, and glancing up with some irritation into the second floor bathroom, he passes through the door leading away to the left of the hallway and into the living room. Whilst still a mess, it is clear that someone has at one stage attempted to instill some sense of order into the room, and the waste here has for the most part been piled into one corner, whilst in two of the others mattresses have been placed, covered over with an abundance of soiled and moldy bedding. All of the antique wooden furniture is gone - he assumes it has been broken down and fed into the fireplace - and many of the ornaments and curios that had formerly adorned shelves and mantelpieces can be seen lying here and there in the mass of junk heaped in the corner. Moving closer, he recognizes many of the minor trinkets that he and Beth had accumulated over the course of a lifetime, and that he had not missed for even a second in the new life that followed. As he turns away, a slender black, furry object poking out from the edge of the pile catches his attention. Crouching down, he grips hold and pulls it free, to reveal the sodden, half rotten remains of what was once a plush toy panda that he had purchased many years earlier on a business trip to China. He rocks backwards onto his heels, and his face wavers for a second as he battles with a surge of emotions that threaten to overcome him before he recovers himself, sets his jaw, bites his teeth together sternly, roughly wipes his eyes with pinched fingers and concentrates on submerging the memories he has for so long repressed. After a moment he straightens up and turns away, letting the toy drop from his hand, and strides stiffly out of the living room and into the large, open plan kitchen that adjoins it.
He knows better than to open the fridge and risk unleashing the rancid smells within, and instead has a cursory look in the cupboards, despite knowing full well that any produce will have spoiled or been taken long ago. Coming up empty handed as expected, he has a quick rifle through the drawers for any other items of value, but is again disappointed. Just about the only items still in place are the appliances, which sit redundant in the same spots that they had been left all of those years before. Continuing through the doorway on the far side, he descends a short flight of steps and through the entrance to the garage. For a moment, he is surprised to see that his expensive coupe is still where he had left it, and then he realizes that the garage doors were electronic, thus scuppering anyone who had intended to take it. In truth, there is no shortage of cars to take in the new world anyway, and with the roads clogged with abandoned vehicles anything other than a motorbike will struggle to make much headway. He had briefly considered trying to find a bike himself at one point, and then figured that weaving slowly and noisily through the stilled traffic, vulnerable to attack from all sides would be sure to end in tears at the very least. Approaching the car, he runs one hand through the dust that covers the bonnet, revealing a metallic glint of racing green paint. Stepping around to the side, he notes that the fuel cap cover hangs open, probably siphoned long ago. He holds his hand for a few seconds on the car, allowing himself another brief burst of nostalgia and then continues towards the panel doors at the back of the garage.
As he walks he slowly scans the room in all directions, absolutely nothing of survival value remains. Whilst there is nothing strange about any of these items having been taken, he is surprised as to just how thoroughly the house has been stripped, this indicates to him that whoever has been through the place has really taken their time. Whenever he searches a building he will first focus on food, water and medicine, and then look for weaponry, bedding and any other superfluous extras that might come in handy. No matter how many of the essentials he has found though, he is always limited by the amount that he can physically carry, and it is obvious that even a few people wouldn’t have been able to carry off so much from this house with ease. He reasons therefore that either they must have set up a base here, or somewhere nearby. Continuing to the rear, he notices that two water butts had been placed in one corner, one fed by a pipe that runs in through a hole cut into the top of the garage door, and another tube connecting this butt to the second. Checking the first, he discovers with joy that it is almost full, the water level just coming up short of the point at which the overflow pipe had been placed that feeds the second. Immediately, Lowell thrusts his face into the cool, clear water and drinks deeply. He feels that familiar, delicious moment of calm relief, as if his brain is physically soaking through like a sponge, restoring his mental faculty, bringing clarity of thought and sharpening the focus of the world. Looking into the other butt, he frowns as he notes that this second is almost empty. An arrangement like this is too complicated for anyone to set up in a temporary base, and the low level has to indicate that it has been used recently, or it would be close to overflowing itself.
Passing back through the kitchen and into the living room, he now notices a succession of telling signs that he had missed on his initial, more distracted walkthrough. Firstly, he sees the state of the bedding; even in this new world, in which cleanliness and hygiene are both reasonably abstract and flexible concepts, these beds are in a particularly bad state, and are stained near black in places from continued use and little care over at the very least many months if not years of service. Casting his eye back over the rubbish piled in the corner, he notes that the vast majority of the empty food tins and packets there are nothing that he would have had in his larder, and so would have had to be brought in from elsewhere. Carrying on through to the hallway, he pauses to listen for any sounds that would indicate a presence within the house, but the silence is broken only by the occasional drip of water from the ceiling. Across the hall, a door leads through into another room for which he and Beth had had little need, and which had eventually been repurposed as a library of sorts, with a collection of expensive leather bound books lining the walls, which had been purchased as much for decoration as anything else. Now, to his considerable chagrin, the bookshelves are empty. He had came late to the joy of reading, as a result of his enforced years of solitude, and had been looking forward to at last having an opportunity to read the books that he had neglected in his former life. He tries to hope at least that someone else has enjoyed some of them, but inwardly resigns himself to the likelihood that they have gone the way of the furniture and merely provided fuel for the fire instead. Now, the room has been pressed into service as yet another bedroom, and three distinct piles of bedding are arranged in the room. It is clear that this house has once played host, and potentially still does so, to a not insubstantial group of people. He finds himself bristling, both with an increasing fear that the unknown people will return to discover him ostensibly trespassing on their property, and also with a continuing sense of propriety for this hulking ruin that was once his home. Daydreams are of great importance to Lowell, representing his only opportunity to escape the harsh reality of his existence, and one of his favorites has for many years been that of his eventual return to this place, and the reclamation of at least some small part of his erstwhile life. Only his fear, of the dogs that stalk the town, as well as the painful memories connected to the place, have kept him from returning sooner, and now that he finally has he faces the reality that he must leave so soon. He resolves that he will at the very least discover their food stores before he does so, and help himself to a considerable portion as a form of rent for their use of his property.
Stalking cautiously up the stairs, he takes great care to place each foot to the very side of each step to reduce the chance of the boards creaking and advertising his presence to anyone who might yet be hiding in the house. At the top of the stairs, he takes stock of the situation. The doors to the master bedroom and the two spare rooms are open, and he carefully shifts his position to peer in to each until he is satisfied that they are presently unoccupied. The two spare bedrooms appear to still be employed as such, but the master seems to be in use as a store of some kind. Stepping inside, he finds a substantial hoard of weapons, including a decent selection of rifles, and he decides he will come back when he has found the food and select one or two to take with him as wel
l. Aside from the weaponry, there is a pile of clothing in one corner, three drums in another containing more water, and a selection of useful tools and other odds and ends, but no food. Moving into the two open spare rooms, he finds several more piles of bedding but little else apart from a few personal effects hidden beneath one of the mattresses. He leaves it all there, with the exception of a silver-handled cut throat razor, which he slips into his pocket before returning to the hallway. The door to the upstairs bathroom he ignores. Situated as it is directly above the hole in the ceiling, he decides he would rather not know what has happened to cause such damage. On the other side of the passageway are two closed doors. He approaches the first, stops and reaches out slowly for the doorknob, and then pauses with one hand resting in place, not knowing if he is ready, even after all this time, to go inside. After a long moment, he shakes his head, then pulls his hand away and continues on to the other closed room.
At the next doorway, he reaches for the handle and then waits and listens carefully for any sounds from within. He can hear nothing, but just to be safe he reaches back with his right hand, removes his gun and grips it tightly. He counts to three in his head and then swings the handle down, steps into the room and sweeps his gun from side to side, scanning quickly for any occupants. There are none, but he is surprised to see that his former study has been left relatively untouched. All of the furniture is still in position, and many of the ornaments and signed sports memorabilia that had been there long before still frame the walls. Moving further into the room, he notices that all of his files have been removed from the shelves, and have been replaced by neatly folded clothes, several good quality bottles of scotch and drinking glasses, and pictures of people he doesn’t recognize. On another shelf, a dozen or so of the books that had lined the bookshelves downstairs have been saved from the fire and are neatly lined up in a row. A bedroll has been placed below the window, and arranged in a tidy pile next to it is another book - bookmark visible poking out between the pages - a pair of reading glasses in a leather case, and a framed photograph. It is clear that not only is the person living in this room the leader of the group, but also that judging by the comparative squalor the others live in this is no egalitarian society that he has stumbled upon. Lowell kneels down, reaches out for the photograph next to the bedroll and tilts it close to the light streaming in from the window. The picture shows a happy family, a man, a woman and three children, all smiling broadly as they pose outside of the entrance to a Florida theme park. Lowell stares at the face of the man in the photograph; the man is not physically blessed – standing somewhere around five foot odd with a bulk that would average out more kindly on a man much taller – and not handsome: thinning hair, a horizontally-stretched and ill-proportioned face, but the faint accent of a rakish smile turning up the corner of his mouth and ruddy cheeks hints at a man of good humor. Lowell starts, startled. The hand that holds the photograph begins to shake. For a moment his expression is blank, and then he bites his bottom lip, and a range of emotions follow, flitting one after the other across his face. First comes a slack-jawed, blank-smiled confusion, then he shakes his head as if refusing to believe the image in front of his eyes and refocuses as best as he can through the film of moisture that suddenly clouds his vision. Finally his brow furrows and he begins to shake as a spark of remembrance surges through him, he staggers backwards in disbelief, his mouth opens and closes and he lets out a long, rasping croak of uncertain intent as he makes out the face of someone he had known long ago.
The Darkness and Dogs Page 8