by Doug Kelly
“John Sisk was elected,” Jim answered.
“Elected for…”
“President of the Home Owners Association.”
Joel laughed. “Isn’t that nice.” He extended his long arm down toward Dylan and introduced himself. “I’m Joel Hales.”
Dylan shook his hand. “I’m Dylan Smith.” Dylan pointed toward his house at the end of the street. “I live right down there, next door to Jim.” As they shook hands, Dylan noticed, past the glare on the glass storm door, Joel’s wife ushering three children away to another room.
“Sure, Dylan, I remember you.”
Dylan was embarrassed again. He met another person from his own neighborhood and could not remember seeing him before today. He tried to fake his familiarity and said, “That’s right; I think our kids rode the same school bus.”
“Oh, no. My wife has been homeschooling from the beginning.”
Embarrassed again, Dylan decided to say nothing further and let the conversation change topics. It did, and Joel invited them inside.
Dylan followed the others into the home. He looked for a place to set his bow and noticed a trail of dirt across the carpet, marking the path straight ahead. He traced the dirt trail with his eyes, and saw that it ended at the hardwood floor of the kitchen and dining area, across the house. On the far wall, there were four large picture windows. A sliding glass door opened onto the deck. Through the windows and from the deck was a fantastic view of the parkland and stream, all in close proximity to Joel’s back property line. Captivated by the view, Dylan followed the dirt path into the dining room, stood next to the picture windows, and looked out at the tall grass waving in the gentle breeze.
“It’s a nice view.” Startled, Dylan turned around. Joel’s wife, Kim, had walked up behind him, barefoot and silent.
“Dylan, this is my wife, Kim.”
Kim stood behind him, arms crossed. Like her husband, she was tall and had dark, straight hair, but hers was much longer than his was. Her skin was as pale as her husband’s, but her eyes were an almost transparent green. She politely nodded to acknowledge the greeting.
Dylan smiled and said, “Nice to meet you.”
Joel leaned around a corner to look into another room. “I’ve got three boys, Aaron, Jarod, and Levi. They were just down here—”
Kim interrupted, “Oh, the boys, I have them busy with schoolwork. I need to see how they’re doing.”
Kim went back into the family room. Dylan curiously peered into that room to see the children. Continuing their homeschooling, Kim had given the children books to read.
Dylan walked back to the window and noticed what appeared to be a trail through the backyard’s tall grass. He slid the patio door open and asked the other two men to join him. He put his bow on the patio table and leaned forward on the deck railing, looking intently at the trail of worn grass.
“Does that look like a trail to you?” asked Dylan.
“Yes,” said Joel, “it’s a deer trail. When we moved in, the real estate agent told us we would see wildlife in the area. I purchased a salt lick and some field corn to attract the deer, and they created a path through my backyard.”
“Do they still show up?” asked Dylan.
“Yes.”
Joel decided that they would sit at the patio table and talk, hosting an impromptu meeting to get to know his neighbors a letter better. Both Dylan and Jim joined him, shaded by the covered deck. Dylan pulled the bow closer to him, but then he decided to remove it from the table and placed it on the deck, near his feet. Jim put the first-aid kit on the table and crossed his hands on top of it.
“That trail is so close you could hunt from your deck. It’s like a huge deer stand,” Dylan explained.
“I’m no hunter. I don’t know how.”
“It’s as simple as this.” Dylan stood up with his bow and one arrow. At the deck railing, he drew back the arrow and aimed for the tree near the back property line. The blunt arrow landed with a thud. Dylan held up the bow and asked, “If I get you one of these, will you hunt for us? Share the meat?”
Joel contemplated the question briefly before he answered. “Yes, I can do that. I’ve given away lots of food to help others already. So if this helps feed people, I’m all for it.”
“He’s right, Dylan,” said Jim, “he helped me tremendously by sharing and trading food with me.”
“We’ve stored food for years,” said Joel, “and we’ve been sharing it with our neighbors.”
“What?”
“He’s a Mormon. They store food,” answered Jim.
“Yes, we’re taught to store food in case of emergencies, and I followed that to the letter.”
“They’ve been helping me take care of Harold, my business partner,” said Jim. “He lives right next door to them.”
Jim slid the first-aid kit across the table. “Here you go. It’s yours. It doesn’t compare to the way you’ve helped me out, but it’s a start.”
Joel took the first-aid kit in his hands and seemed to stare through it. The kit brought back the memory of where he was when the pulse happened.
Joel had worked as an orthopedic surgeon at a large urban hospital near the city’s downtown. For Joel, the lights went out during his first surgery on that Monday morning, the day of the pulse. He was replacing the knee of a geriatric patient when the operating room fell dark and silent. The backup generator and battery-powered emergency lighting system also failed. Both were computer controlled, and after the pulse destroyed the hospital’s sensitive electronics, the surgical team was effectively in a cave.
The patient was under a general anesthetic, intubated, and relying on a ventilator to breathe for him. Joel had just started to remove the distal portion of the femur when everything stopped. The electric saw was not quite through the bone. The respiratory therapist was quick to respond. She disconnected the ventilator tubing from the patient, and attached a manually-inflatable bag to the tube in his trachea. In the darkness, she began to compress the bag and moved her fingers to the man’s chest so she could feel it rise and fall with each compression of the bag. Joel was still holding the man’s leg with one hand and the electric saw in the other, waiting for the lights to come back on, when he heard screams echo in the hallway, screams for help with the ventilators that had failed simultaneously. All of them failed, and staff needed to manually breathe for all those patients. He realized that something was incredibly wrong and gently placed the leg and the saw back down. His eyes could not adjust to the darkness in the windowless room. It was pitch black. Joel asked everyone to remain still as he slowly felt his way to the doors to the hallway. His right hand was forward, reaching in front of him as he walked in the direction of the exit. He thought he was close to help when he touched the cold stainless steel doors leading into the hallway. He pushed the hinged doors open and stepped into a windowless hallway, just as dark as the operating room.
Orthopedic surgery was located in the basement, and it was all completely dark. He heard voices, people bumping into each other and obstructions in the hallway. Then he saw a reflection of light flickering off the glossy tiled walls, and it was coming from around the corner. He realized that it was a flashlight and began to yell desperately for help. The man with the flashlight followed Joel’s voice and shined the light on him. As the man walked toward Joel, he moved the light around the hallway and saw a person unconscious on the floor and bleeding from the head. Joel saw that the man with the flashlight was wearing a maintenance uniform. He asked him what was happening and told him that he desperately needed power to finish the surgery. The man could not explain what was wrong, and told Joel that he needed to help the injured person lying on the floor. Joel begged for the flashlight. The man agreed and gave it to him, then pulled the injured person away. Joel thanked him, returned to the operating room, and shined the light around the room to see if everyone had stood in place. As he shined the light across each person’s face to verify who was in the room, he saw the panic in
their eyes. He shined the light on the equipment table and located a handsaw. He knew that he could not continue the operation, therefore he decided to cut through the rest of the femur manually, close the patient’s incision, wait for the power to come back on, and finish the job later.
Then he started to remember his training for disaster emergencies. He had read the Continuity of Operation Plan, and although he did not remember all the details, he did remember one protocol. According to that protocol, he needed to stabilize the patient and wait for direction from management.
Blood covered his latex gloves and the flashlight. Joel was contaminated and needed to get sterile gloves to continue. He handed the flashlight to an assistant, washed and gloved again, and began to push and pull the handsaw’s serrated edge through the bone. He packed the wound, wrapped it in sterile dressing, and, with the help of all in the room, slowly moved the patient up the stairs to the recovery area on the floor above. On the first floor, there were windows. All drapes and shades had been opened to allow the morning light inside. He left the patient with the respiratory therapist still compressing the bag, breathing for the old man, one hand still resting on his chest. He remembered how quiet it was as he left that area. Normally, phones would be ringing and the noise from all the electric equipment would be annoying. That was when he realized the truth behind the saying, “You really do not realize what you have until you do not have it anymore.” He removed the surgical gown and began to move through the hospital, looking for any possible way he could help.
He started on the cardiovascular recovery floor, helping to manually breathe for the patients on ventilators. After several hours, the hospital’s disaster recovery plan seemed to start falling into place. People were directed to help according to their skill level, and Joel was quickly relieved from the mundane task of squeezing the bag. A secretary replaced him. He showed her how to use the bag, counting twenty breaths per minute or one squeeze on the bag every three seconds. The electric clocks had stopped working, so they counted silently to time the intervals of compression on the bags. Joel reported to the emergency department and stayed there for days, barely getting any sleep. People ate cold food in the cafeteria when they got a chance. For Joel, that was also sporadic.
Then the water stopped flowing from the faucets. People did the best they could and tried to wash their hands with gelled alcohol sanitizer. The staff distributed bottles of emergency water, but when drinking water got scarce, they started abandoning the hospital. At the same time that the hospital’s staff began to disappear, the remaining patients began to die at a faster rate, and there was no place to store the bodies. The morgue was full, and the bodies began to putrefy.
Throughout the nightmare, patients’ families showed loyalty and dedication to their trapped loved ones, those patients who could not leave. As the few remaining batteries died, the devoted families brought in what batteries they could to help their loved ones, but it was not enough. After the batteries were gone, people used candles. It started with candles stolen from the gift shop, and then those loving family members brought more candles to the hospital. In spite of their best intentions, the final disaster occurred when someone brought a candle too close to a patient under an oxygen tent, which caused an explosion. The mattress ignited. There were no fire alarms and no fire trucks, so the fire quickly spread. It started on a lower floor of the hospital and the smoke trapped everyone on the upper floors as the fire spread, sealing their doom. In acts of desperation, staff and patients jumped out of windows from all floors of the hospital. Remaining volunteers and staff brought the survivors to the emergency department. Joel was an orthopedic surgeon, so all those patients came to him. The parking lot was full of people with smoke inhalation and broken bones. After days without sleep, he still tried to do the best he could. He crudely set fractured bone after fractured bone, but the fatigue caught up with him. He began to hallucinate that he was in a graveyard and the corpses were coming back to life. Then Joel had a panic attack. He had a sudden overwhelming feeling of hopelessness and a crushing pain in his chest. His confused mind told him to run, and he did. He tripped over a body, struck his head on the ground, and lost consciousness. When he awoke, he saw the entire hospital engulfed in flames. He was lying in a plethora of burned flesh and crushed bones. Joel staggered away in a daze, hungry, thirsty, and confused. He turned in the direction that he thought was toward home, and kept walking. He found an abandoned bicycle and took it, then went looking for a familiar road. Joel realized that he was peddling through a bad part of town. He always drove to work on the highway in order to avoid this area, and now he felt trapped, desperate. It was getting dark when he felt himself shoved off the bike, landing on a scruffy front lawn full of refuse. He submitted to the attack by remaining on the ground, and the young thieves took the bicycle from him and laughed at the pain they had caused. He did not get up until they were out of sight. Joel walked for hours through miles of unfamiliar territory in the dark. He ducked for cover every time he thought he heard someone nearby. He heard occasional screams, cries for help, and sometimes glass breaking. He moved as fast as he could, pushing past his physical fatigue and lack of sleep.
Finally, as the sun was rising, he stepped onto his own front lawn. He dropped to his knees in the soft grass and closed his eyes as he began to thank God for his home and family. After he knelt forward and closed his eyes, Joel slipped into unconsciousness from total exhaustion. He woke later to the soft touch of his wife’s hand. When he opened his eyes and found himself lying in the grass of his front yard, he realized that what had just happened was not a dream. He felt a knot of fear replace the pain of hunger in his stomach. His wife had been holding a first-aid kit just like the one Jim had given him.
“You’re a good neighbor, Jim,” Joel said, as he placed the kit under his chair and leaned his long arms forward to rest his elbows on the table. He rubbed his face with his hands and looked away, toward the tall grass of the park, the deer trail, and the tall line of trees hugging the stream as it flowed toward the lake. Joel gestured toward Dylan’s bow and asked, “Is that one for me?”
“No, you’re a tall man. I’ll get you a longer one that’ll be easier for you to handle.” He paused and looked back down at the bow. “On second thought, I’ll leave this one and these arrows with you. You can practice with it while I make yours.”
Joel took an arrow in his hand, touched the blunt tip, and asked, “How does this kill a deer?”
“That won’t, but it will stun a rabbit or squirrel. It’ll be good for target practice. I have some arrows with razor points, and that’s what we’ll use for the big game.” Dylan pointed to the arrow. “I made these from a plant that grows near water. It’s a type of reed. If you could, go down to the stream or the lake and see if you can get more of this kind of plant. Tie it in a bundle and let it dry. But I still have to figure out a way to make sharp arrowheads. What I have now won’t last forever.”
Kim came through the patio door with her oldest son, Aaron, right behind her. Aaron was ten and looked just like his parents, his dark hair contrasting with fair skin.
“Can he shoot your bow?” asked Kim. “He saw your bow and hasn’t stopped asking about it.”
Dylan handed Aaron the bow and two blunt arrows. He pointed toward the shade tree near their back property line and said, “Let’s see what you can do.”
Aaron did not respond. He quickly pulled back the arrow and released it, but it fell short of the tree. He looked back at Dylan.
“Point it a little higher next time,” Dylan advised.
Aaron did not respond. He quickly shot the arrow and it fell short again.
“Higher next time,” said Dylan, trying to speak with greater enthusiasm and encouragement in his voice.
Aaron looked at Dylan strangely when he was speaking, then at both of his parents quickly before he ran down the steps to retrieve the arrows.
Dylan quickly stood up and yelled to Aaron as he was sifting through th
e tall grass for the spent arrows, “There’s another arrow down there. Look for three arrows.”
Aaron did not turn around. Dylan cupped his hands to his mouth and, just as he started to yell, he felt Kim’s hand on his back.
“Dylan, Aaron is deaf. He can’t hear you, and he has trouble reading lips through a beard.”
Aaron had been born deaf. After they realized that he had special needs, they decided that Kim would quit her job as a nurse so she could stay at home with Aaron and homeschool their son. Several years ago, they made the decision to get him cochlear implants. He had already learned sign language and lip reading, but they wanted to give him every opportunity they could. Aaron got the implants and could finally hear the sounds around him. He could also detect the difference in his speech compared to others. He became self-conscious of his voice, how he pronounced words, and told his parents about the way he felt. They encouraged him to continue trying, and he had made improvements in his speech, but he was always uncomfortable speaking unless absolutely necessary.
Aaron had left his implants attached the night before the pulse. That morning, Kim awoke to the sound of her son screaming. As the pulse ruined the sensitive electronics in his implants, they released a terrible screeching noise through his skull and he quickly ripped them off. The pulse destroyed his implants, and he was completely deaf to the world again.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”
“That’s quite alright, Dylan. I think you just made his day.” Kim pointed at her son standing by the tree and waving the three arrows that he just found.”
Dylan smiled and returned the wave. He turned to Joel and said, “It’ll be a few days before I’m done making yours. Practice as much as you can.” Dylan then went to Jim and nudged him on the shoulder, an indication that he was ready to leave. Jim understood this, stood up from his chair, and stretched his tired body.
“One more thing,” said Dylan, “Jim and I were talking about the food we got last night. The food we took back from Michael. He stole and stockpiled a lot of food. I thought that what I should do is give it back to the community, but I wasn’t sure how to go about it. From what Jim told me and from what you’ve said, you’ve given away a lot of food, your own food. After that meeting this morning, I don’t feel like giving it to anybody but you.”