At that point, they paused in their trek southward to scan the area until they detected movement on our balcony.
It’s an important note to self. After I get done writing, I’m going to close the hurricane shutters all the way. I know it will cut off our fresh air flow, something that is sorely needed with this heat. But I’d rather be hot than dead should the wrong people see us moving about up here.
I took it upon myself to offer Matt and his family some of our food, but I also told them that my offerings were the extent of my assistance until I could discuss other options with the rest of the group. I mean, they seemed like good people, but who knows what even good people are capable of in this sort of environment.
Therefore, I went back upstairs, leaving the forlorn James family on the lawn below. There, I made them a basket of food while I discussed the situation with the others.
I thought we might allow the family an empty condo in the building, but John was strongly against such a move. Finally, I got him to concede to a condo on the ground floor (Dan and Angie’s unit), which would limit the family’s access to the rest of the building. When I brought them their food, I told Matt that we might be able to move them up to a higher floor later, but for now, this was the best we could do. He told me that he understood and was exceedingly grateful for the room and board we’d provided.
Okay, enough writing for now. I have work to do. I’m going to take a little more food down to the James family and then close our hurricane shutters. I hate the thought of losing our fresh air, but I hate the thought of being dead even more.
11:35 a.m.
Okay, hurricane shutters are closed. AJ helped me with them. I’m trying to find anything he can help me do just to keep him occupied and from complaining about how bored he is. I don’t blame him; I’m bored as hell too. But I get tired of hearing it every two minutes, especially in this heat. I think we’re all getting somewhat twitchy in this environment. Who can blame us? I guess it’s to be expected that we’re going to become a tad agitated in the apocalypse.
The James family is doing their best to get settled downstairs. I took AJ and Liz down with me to visit them. The new arrivals again expressed their intense gratitude to me saying that not many people would have done what I’d done for them. It felt so good. I told them that it was no big deal, but I know that it is. They’re right. I don’t think many people WOULD have done what I did for them, but sometimes you have to take a chance on people.
While we were down there, they asked if we had extra water for cleaning up. I didn’t want to waste too much of what has become a precious commodity, so I gave them a gallon of purified rain water and explained that they could use the pool to bathe in, but to be extremely careful and quiet. I explained that the evening hours, once it was dark, would be the best time for bathing, to which they agreed.
For as good as I feel about helping them, I’m also worried that I’m now their keeper. And with my own family to care for, I don’t know how long I’ll be able to balance both. What happens when I tell them I have to cut them off from our supplies? Will they balk? Will they demand more? Will they threaten me? Or will they just be on their way again?
I have no idea, but they don’t seem like the threatening type. Hopefully we’ll figure something out before it comes to that anyway.
4:02 p.m.
I’m taking Liz and AJ with me downstairs for a visit to the James family again. AJ is dying for some kid time, and the girls haven’t really been cutting it lately. They came to the shindig the other night, but didn’t seem to be in the greatest of spirits. Who can blame them? But it wasn’t exactly a great time for AJ.
We’re going to take a couple beers (warm, unfortunately), and a bottle of wine down with us as housewarming gifts. Hopefully this will loosen up the newcomers and I’ll be able to glean a little more information from them about their history.
6:15 p.m.
That was nice. We enjoyed several hours visiting with the James family. We enjoyed our beers and wine, and I just took them down some hamburger patties we grilled yesterday, along with some potato chips and a can of corn for dinner. They invited us to stay, but we politely declined. I don’t want to overdo the good thing we have going with them.
They are very pleasant people and they kept saying how thankful they were to have found us. They had the patio door facing the ocean open to allow in a nice breeze (that particular unit doesn’t have hurricane shutters, so I don’t blame them). Matt and I sat on the ground-level patio drinking beers and talking while Liz and Jessica prepared dinner and the kids played.
Their family reminds me a lot of our own – with the exception of the extra child. Liz and I once debated a second, but we just never could pin down whether we wanted to try again or not. AJ was so easy. We knew we wanted him and there was never a doubt in our mind about having him. But after seeing what a great kid he turned out to be, it was hard risking a second. The first time around, we were so clueless to all the risks. But the older we got, the more we learned, and the more we saw first hand. From learning disabilities to physical detriments and early deaths from things like cancer, your eyes start to be opened to all the potential outcomes and hazards. It’s not that we wouldn’t love a child with a physical or mental issue. That’s probably the problem – we WOULD. And the fear of bringing something we loved so much into a world that could be extremely trying for them was very frightening to us. So we hemmed, and we hawed, and the longer the debate when on, the more we talked ourselves out of it. If we had just done it a year or two after AJ, thoughts of such terrible outcomes probably wouldn’t even have entered our minds. But we did wait. And we didn’t have a second. I can’t imagine any child better than AJ. Still, sometimes I wonder what might have been.
Anyway, back to our time with the James family. I have to say, it was nice to spend some time with people closer to our own age. While I love being the “youngsters” here at the condo, sometimes it gets a little depressing being surrounded by senior citizens all the time.
Matt explained that before the flu, he had worked as a restaurant supervisor. He had been laid off at the end of the busy season. He said in hindsight, the layoff had probably saved his life.
His wife Jessica was a massage therapist who worked from home so she could handle the at-home parenting side of things while the kids were young. As more people got sick, they’d forgone massages and business had gotten extremely slow for her. While they had worried about money at the time, both were now thankful for the drop-off in business since it meant little person-to-person interaction. And without steady income, the family had been forced to forgo things like dinners out as the flu struck, which again, had been a blessing in disguise. Matt said that with the exception of the past few days, the time he’d spent at home with his family since the flu began was probably some of the most quality time he’d ever spent with them.
After thinking about it, I guess he’s kind of right. This time with Liz and AJ, while certainly stressful, has also been kind of nice in a strange way. I think we’ve spent more time actually doing stuff together – cooking, playing games, eating meals, and talking – over the past week than we would have done together in several months or more in our hectic lives back home. Without all the distractions of school, work, television, electronic devices, and all the rest, we’ve been forced to actually interact with one another.
God, I don’t know how we’re going to sleep tonight. This place feels like a sauna. I wish we just had a fan to circulate the stagnant air. I have a feeling it’s going to be another long night.
11:55 p.m.
I can’t sleep. The heat is just too much. I’m sitting here in the living room writing by candlelight. AJ is asleep. Liz is reading a book here beside me. We’re just trying to make ourselves tired enough that we’ll be able to sleep for at least a few hours in this heat. It really is intolerable. I feel like taking a blanket and sleeping on the beach. The sand fleas and mosquitoes would probably eat me alive. At this point,
I’m not sure what’s worse.
I think I’m going to read to Liz from her book. Reading aloud always made me tired, and doing it by candlelight might be enough to put me down for the count.
We’ll see.
September 14th
1:29 a.m.
So much for sleep. There are some loud banging noises going on downstairs. I can’t tell exactly what they are, but they are definitely loud. Maybe someone else can’t sleep and they’re making some adjustments to their condo to make it cooler or something. God only knows.
1:36 a.m.
Okay, whatever’s going on is more than just some work on a condo. There are now multiple points of banging. I can hear raised voices…and I think I just heard gunshots!
I have no idea what’s happening, but it doesn’t sound good. Hold on…someone is pounding on our door.
1:52 a.m.
The pounding on the door was Catherine and the girls. They said that they saw people breaking into condos downstairs and got scared. They didn’t want to be alone under such circumstances.
I’ve re-barred the front door with the sofa chair in front of it and have ushered the family, along with Catherine and the girls, into the back bedroom. We’ve locked the bedroom door, pushed the writing desk up in front of it, and closed the window blinds.
I’m writing by flashlight.
Crap! I think someone is pounding on our front door again. I guess I have to check it out. I don’t want to, but it might be someone we know in need of help.
2:04 a.m.
It appears that someone was trying to break into our condo, but it looks like our chair barricade worked. Whoever it was, they managed to get the door open a couple inches before the chair was pushed against the opposing wall, deterring further movement. I guess they found the effort at getting inside too difficult and moved on.
It seems quiet out there now. I’ll give it a little while longer, and then I’ll take a look around.
6:28 a.m.
It’s just starting to get light out. It was a long, hot, sleepless night. The girls ended up crying themselves to sleep after about an hour. At least SOMEONE got some rest.
I decided not to do an inspection of the condo building once things quieted down because we had no idea whether the people ransacking the place had left or not. It sounded like they had, but there was no guarantee. There is STILL no guarantee. They might just be sleeping.
It was horrible hiding here in the dark just waiting. I felt so defenseless, so exposed, so utterly useless. But I know better than to try some hero-type shit. This isn’t the movies. This is life and death – LITERALLY!!! And by going out unarmed, potentially against the type of people like those who attacked the aid convoy, would only be inviting a quick death, and likely not just for me, but for Liz, AJ, Catherine, and her daughters.
No, trying to play the hero was not the move last night. There is far too much at stake. If it was just me, that would be different. But I have other lives to consider. And for as much as I care about the other condo residents, my own family comes first.
I really do hate this, though. I feel like such a coward. But if feeling like a coward is the cost of keeping my family safe, I’ll take it any day over the alternative.
Right now, the kids are sleeping. The morning hours cool off enough to make it almost feel comfortable (I said, “almost”).
Liz and Catherine have just started working to put together some sort of breakfast while I finish writing. Meal options are getting slimmer by the day. More than likely, it will be peanut butter crackers or cookies or something like that.
We’re officially out of cereal, and milk is a distant memory. Everything that had to be refrigerated has already been eaten or tossed out because it was going bad or was bad already. Some of it might still have been good, but we didn’t want to chance getting sick.
Okay, while they’re working, I think it is light enough (and quiet enough) to go out and take a look around.
7:52 a.m. (INSERTED PAGES)
I’m sitting down in Dan and Angie’s old condo that was the living quarters for the recently arrived James family…I guess I should now say “recently DECEASED” James family. I found a notepad on which to write since I didn’t feel like going back upstairs to get my journal. I’ll just tuck this page inside my journal later. But I need a few minutes to regain my composure and get a grip on myself. I’m finding that writing my thoughts down really helps with that. I’m not sure why exactly, but it does.
So everyone’s gone…Christ, EVERYONE’S GONE! I can’t believe it. I just can’t believe it. It’s like I’m in some sort of nightmare and I can’t wake up. How am I ever going to tell Liz? AJ? Catherine and the girls? Jesus, how do you explain something like this? But I have to tell them. They’ll find out eventually. And I really don’t want to have them unwittingly stumble onto the bodies.
Shit! The bodies! How the hell am I going to deal with those? I’ll have to do it myself. I can’t ask Liz or AJ to help. It’s going to be a real bitch, not to mention horrifically painful having to bury some of my closest friends here in Cocoa Beach.
Whoever was here last night did a real number on this joint, and not just this particular condo but the building as a whole. It’s a scene of death, destruction, and looting. Doors kicked in, condos looted, dead bodies of our friends sprawled around their homes.
What a mess. And I don’t just mean the destruction around the building. I mean all of this – the flu, the death, the heat, the killing, the living like damn trolls up there in our condo. This is turning into a real shit-show. I guess it’s BEEN a real shit-show.
I don’t know how to deal with this. I’ve been trying to keep things as normal feeling as possible, but this is about as far from normal as things could get. I think it’s time to admit that that the world as we once knew it is gone. It’s been replaced by something altogether terrible. How in the hell am I supposed to keep my family safe in a situation like this? How am I supposed to raise a son? What’s the point? What will he have to look forward to in a world like this? What will ANY of us have to look forward to? It’s just all too much. It seemed real before, but now it’s ultra real. It was hard enough losing Dan and Angie and seeing the aid convoy destroyed, but this, well, this is just…overwhelming.
Okay…enough of that. Time to pull it together…or at least TRY to pull it together. That’s far, FAR easier said than done these days.
It seems that the people who did this went largely for the condo units that had open hurricane shutters. I guess they figured that those units were occupied and therefore might be the best shot for having useful supplies inside them.
Sadly, it’s kind of interesting when I stop and think about how this all played out. We saved the James family from their beach wandering, only for them to die here. But in a way, they saved US by telling us about our hurricane shutters and how having them open can be a red flag to others. And now I feel guilty as hell because I didn’t tell the others to close their shutters. WHY didn’t I tell the others? Stupid, stupid, STUPID!!! I should have made people aware of the dangers. We knew, but we took them too lightly even after the Dan and Angie incident and the aid convoy attack. We thought we were protected here. We were wrong.
I think that these people must have scaled the lower level balconies to get into the building initially. Once they got past the ground floor and were able to open the stairwell doors, the floodgates were open and there was no stopping them.
Thank god for the chair we put in place before our front door. That and the hurricane shutters being closed were likely the only things that stopped us from being added to the list of dead here. It’s terrifying thinking about just how close we came.
I don’t know why they had to kill them. Why couldn’t they just take our stuff and go? Humans can be such heartless creatures. It just doesn’t compute. I don’t get it. I’m glad I don’t get it. I don’t care what the situation is. This isn’t the way for people to deal with it.
Well, I�
�ve burned enough time down here. It’s time to break the news to the others. It’s not going to be easy, but I have to do it. Then I have to get to work collecting all our dead. I’m not sure what I’m going to do with the bodies yet. It’s going to be a difficult job – both mentally and physically. There is Ed and Ira Levine. There’s Gerald and Maggie Philips. There is John and June Reynolds. And of course, there is Ruth Benson. They were friends of ours for years, now they’re all gone in one horrific night.
It’s almost too much to bear, but I have to. For as terrible as it all is, I have to remind myself, there is still Liz, still AJ, still Catherine, and still Carrie and Carly. I have to be strong for them. And we have to persevere for one another. But they don’t need to see what I’ve seen. That’s why I need to get started on body removal ASAP!
6:27 p.m.
This is the first chance I’ve had to write in my journal since the inserted pages I wrote this morning. God, what a long, hot, miserable day it’s been.
I spent most of the day, first binding the bodies of our fallen friends in sheets, and then dragging them downstairs (literally, since the elevator no longer runs), to the breezeway gate that leads out to the front lawn. I also spent several hours secretively digging shallow graves in a secluded portion of the dunes where the sea grapes provided some cover. Every few minutes, I’d break from my work to ensure sure I was still alone. I didn’t want the people who were here last night returning to find me at work.
I’ll wait until it gets dark, then I’ll haul the wrapped bodies out to bury. It’s not the best option, but considering the circumstances, it’s the best I could come up with. I considered just hauling the bodies out to the ocean to let the sea take them. It would certainly have been easier than digging seven body-sized holes in the sand in the sweltering Florida sun, but I was afraid the current would just wash them back to shore. The thought of our good friends lying, beached on the sand like bloated dead fish was enough to dissuade me from following through with the idea.
The Dystopian Diaries Page 69