by Dixon, Chuck
“You think the TV, the government, is going to all this trouble for some goddamn flu? They took down ESPN, dumbass. How do you explain that?” Fuller said.
“Don’t know. Maybe this is some bug the government came up with, and all this is a distraction to make us all run around like chickens while they cover it up.” Bill Tom shrugged. “But no way in hell are people eating each other. That’s just pure D stupid, that is.”
Doe was across the trailer in a step and smacked the beer from Bill Tom’s hand. The can struck the paneling in a shower of froth. “You gonna talk like that you ain’t gonna do it on my beer,” Doe said, knuckles white at his side. Bill Tom sat goggling up at him. Doe turned and slammed out of the trailer, letting the screen door shut with a bang.
Mercy found him standing in the lane under the light of a splinter of moon. They stood a while, not speaking, just looking out across Sleepy Hollow at the dark trailers and sharing his can of Miller. There were more empty pads than there were earlier. More people had come and got their RVs and took off. A few trailers with windows cast azure light from televisions within. The laughter of an audience reached them, faint and muted. Someone was shutting out the world by watching DVDs.
“He’s just a moron. Mom’ll get tired of him. All her men have a shelf life, you know,” Mercy said at last.
“It ain’t him, Mercy child.” His name for her since she was so tall.
“Then what?”
“This whole goddamn shitpot is what. This end of times shit. Look at your ma praying and fussing. Damn, Raquel looks like she’s seen her own grave. I never saw either of them like that. Never.”
“It was bad, Doe.”
“Bad as that guy I did with the shovel?”
“Worse.”
“So how come you’re all right? Why aren’t you scrubbing your skin off with lye or begging on your knees to Jesus?” Doe turned to her, searching her eyes.
“Maybe I’m just not feeling it yet. Like when you cut yourself with a sharp blade and don’t even know it till you see the blood.” She shrugged.
“It shook me up. I’d be drunk now if we had any hard liquor.”
“We wait it out. It has to get better,” she said.
“We can hold onto that,” he said, then crushed the empty and flung it into the black.
6
They were there a week or more when they woke up to find the water and electric shut off. The manager’s trailer was gone, left in the night.
Doe found the breaker box and flipped the power back on.
Same for the water.
“We’re living here free then,” Uncle Fuller said.
“For as long as we can hold out or stand it,” Doe said.
“For as long as they’ll let us,” Mercy said.
A few days before, a county deputy stopped by and addressed the residents of Sleepy Hollow through a bullhorn. He told them to clear out, bring their trailers west to the intersection of Highway Eighty-one and the river drive. The government had a station there with food and medical supplies. A few retirees stood to listen. They watched the deputy get back in his cruiser and drive away. He’d done his job. He’d read them the evacuation order.
That was the last they heard from any kind of authority except for flights of military cargo planes high overhead on a western course. For two weeks solid the planes flew west in threes and fours and always in the early evening.
An Air Force veteran five pads over told Doe that there was a radio beacon only a few miles away.
“Military transports use it as a guide. National Guard. Air Force. It’s like a highway in the sky above us,” the vet said when he saw Doe looking up at the long strings of cottony contrails one evening.
“They’re only going one way. What’s that mean?” Doe said.
“Damned if I know, son.” The old man shrugged.
“Not even a guess?”
“If I had to guess, I’d say they were repositioning all air transport.”
“What’s that mean in plain English?”
“Means they’re hauling ass. Means we’re on our own,” the old man said.
“So, for me, nothing’s changed,” Doe said and handed the old man a beer from his last six-pack.
7
They promised each other they’d leave when the cable went. They counted down as one channel after another went to a static graphic, promising to return soon, followed after a few days by a black screen reading “feed not found.”
Internet service died a day later.
The last days of the few remaining channels were filled with hour after hour of B-roll footage showing the chaos around the world. They could have looked out a window of their condo and seen the same thing in any direction.
When the last channel went dark, they changed their promise.
They’d stay until the electric went.
They spent their days watching Blu-rays and playing epic duels on the Xbox. They wore headphones because the last warnings from the TV told them that any sound would draw the infected. Sound and movement were things to be avoided. Stay in place and stay quiet were the watchwords. Help was on the way.
The headphones cut out the sounds from outside. Gunfire. Car alarms. Sirens. Screams for help. Day by day, those sounds were dying away to be replaced by an unsettling silence.
On Day 61, the electric went. “We can’t stay here,” Smash said.
“Sure we can,” Jim Kim said.
They lounged on either side of the expansive IKEA sofa and looked at their reflections in the dark screen of their seventy-inch television.
“Think about it. We already raided all the other condos for food. With the electric out, the water’s gonna go, too,” Smash said.
“Maybe it’s a blackout. Maybe it’ll come back on,” Jim Kim said.
“Yah. And maybe the cable will come back on and we can watch the rest of this season of Game of Thrones. And maybe all those assholes wandering around out there will be cured. And maybe Megan Fox will knock on the door and offer me a hummer. Jesus, Kim!”
“Do we have a plan?” Jim Kim said to their reflection.
“In fact, we do,” Smash said.
“I already hate it,” Jim Kim said. But he set aside the dead Xbox control pad to listen to Smash’s plan.
8
The condo building was secure against the infected. The two entryways and basement entrance were locked tight and stout enough. They’d hold against the desultory attempts by the infected to get inside. Though they’d never hold against a more determined attempt by survivors looking to make trouble.
And trouble was out there. They heard the sounds of vehicle convoys prowling the nearby streets. Those trucks and cars rolled quiet. Not like the government vehicles with their PA systems blaring instructions for those still forted up in their homes. A couple of times, brilliant search lamps swept over their condo building.
Smash and Jim Kim lived in a twenty-unit building, in what was described as a “garden complex,” along with twelve more identical buildings fronted by parking spaces.
Their unit belonged to Smash, purchased for him by his late grandmother. Granma was his last surviving relative. His parents died together in a car crash when he was twelve. Granma raised him the rest of the way and paid for him to go for college as well as for the off-campus condo. It was in his name, which was not Smash.
“You’ll have an investment you can sell when you graduate,” she’d told him. “Better than wasting money on rent for a dorm that you’ll never see back. And that way, you can concentrate on your studies without being disturbed by roommates.”
Great theory. But he flunked out freshman year anyway. The condo itself was the main distraction; a sanctuary of video games, cable TV, and a community pool in the summer. Granma passed away before the grades for his last semester came out. Massive coronary. Smash and two of her neighbors were the only ones at the funeral.
Jim Kim moved in as roommate and helped Smash with the utilities; a cheaper
deal for Jim Kim than boarding. They met in Introduction to Business Administration. Jim Kim passed with an A. Smash took a pass with an Incomplete. Since flunking out, Smash worked a series of minimum wage jobs that he quickly grew bored with. He owned the condo outright and only needed to work enough to pay utilities and the condo fee. He rarely saw a future beyond the newest game releases. Now even that meager future looked bleak.
Jim Kim, on the other hand, was a serious student and, in his junior year, spent most days at classes and most nights studying. He was living the stereotypical Asian life. His dad and mom expected great things from him. He had to work hard to justify their faith in him. A B grade was a sign that he wasn’t applying himself enough. A C grade would not be tolerated. Worse grades were unthinkable.
All that was off once Shit Happened.
Jim Kim had not heard from his family since just before the infection broke wide. His parents, his sister, and two younger brothers were visiting relatives in Seoul. According to the news report, Korea was part of the world pandemic.
In the first days, the remaining tenants of the building took off to be with their families. Almost all of the building’s occupants were students or faculty from the college. And most of them were already gone on Spring Break when martial law was declared.
Only one resident remained. One of Jim Kim’s professors lived in a two-bedroom on the floor below. Donna McKinney shared the condo with her life partner, Karen. The pair decided to stay put, convinced that the government would sort it all out in a week or so.
Jim Kim checked on them every few days to see how they were doing. Smash referred to them as Jim Kim’s “pet lesbians.” On his next-to-last visit, Ms. McKinney assured Jim Kim that they were both doing fine, though Karen was feeling a bit under the weather. Flu, maybe. A couple of days after, Jim Kim found Karen crouched on the living room floor, chewing on what was left of the professor’s large intestine.
He and Smash nailed the condo door shut. They could still hear occasional noises from within. The sounds of someone stumbling into furniture in a search for a way out.
9
They stayed on through the end of the month and the end of the next and the next. Summer went by slow, but now the leaves were changing. All the remaining residents left except the Air Force vet and his wife. There were still almost forty empty trailers and RVs left behind. They stripped them of anything useful. Propane, gasoline, tools, food, and in a trailer named Daddy’s Home, a well-stocked liquor cabinet.
Inside a camp trailer, Mercy found two full boxes of double ought shells for her Ithaca pump. Doe found a Browning 9mm locked in a glove compartment and a .44 Bulldog inside a console. He kept the Browning and gave the .44 to Fuller. Bill Tom resented not being offered a piece but hushed up at Mom’s urging.
In the surrounding woods, the occasional sound of sirens could be heard far away for the first few weeks and then not at all. The furious flurries of gunshots echoing through the trees died away to the infrequent potshot and finally to silence. Even the skies quieted down as summer stretched on. No overflights of military planes. No flocks of helicopters streaming west. The soundscape damped down to the soft rush of leaves in the trees and the hypnotic susurration of cicadas.
The TV stations died by inches until there was no feed at all. After that, the electric went, and with it, the water pump.
Uncle Fuller held a meeting, and the family agreed to hang on right where they were. There were plenty of motors and fuel in Sleepy Hollow to generate any electric they’d need. They had food enough to see them through for another month or so. The variety was lacking, but there was enough Tabasco and Dewar’s to make it palatable. Doe said there was game in the woods. They could boil any water they collected. It was nothing they hadn’t done before, though never for this long a period of time.
The most powerful argument for sticking where they were came from the last broadcasts on the television. They were recorded directives from an unnamed government agency that ran in loops on three channels for six full days before the signal cut off.
An announcer, a woman with an arid, toneless delivery, urged anyone hearing her to make their way to the nearest regional convergence point. From there, they would be transported to fortified camps where they would be cared for. The notice stressed that families would not be separated, and even pets were welcome. The woman assured anyone listening that there would be abundant food and adequate medical care.
The woman’s words appeared on the screen over video of smiling kids being lifted into the back of Army trucks by smiling soldiers followed by families eating what looked like a limitless feast at long tables in a community setting. There were shots of kids swimming in a pool and old folks lounging in the shade of trees. The effect of the footage was meant to be reassuring. The result was deeply unsettling and creepy.
After the announcement, a scrolling screen listed locations of the sites where citizens could rendezvous for transport. The first few appearances it played over a syrupy instrumental version of Bridge Over Troubled Water. After a day or so, the music was gone, and the words appeared in silence.
Two weeks into their blackout, Fuller knocked on the Air Force vet’s door to see if he and his wife would like some barbecue made from a deer Doe had brought down with Mercy’s shotgun.
There was no answer, so Fuller let himself in. He found the vet and his wife lying side by side on their bed. They’d died together after taking an overdose of pain medication. The bottles on the floor were clear evidence of that. Perhaps they envisioned falling into a peaceful slumber, holding hands into eternity.
They had convulsed in the final moments before falling into fatal comas. The vet’s lips were shredded and flecked with dried bloody foam where he bit his own lips in the grip of a seizure. His wife’s face was locked in an expression of extreme and unpleasant surprise, her eyes red and swollen like over-ripe cherry tomatoes. Both had pissed and shit themselves.
Fuller felt nothing but pity for them.
Fuller told the rest what he found. Doe made for the vet’s trailer with his Browning drawn.
“You need to do that?” Fuller said, his hand on Doe’s arm.
“You think I would do it if I didn’t think I needed to?” Doe said, waiting for Fuller to release his arm.
Two muffled shots from within the trailer and Doe returned with a six-pack of Heineken under his arm.
“Old man was holding out,” he said and set the beer down on the picnic table.
10
Smash and Jim Kim couldn’t settle on what to call the infected. Though they both agreed that the “Z” word was out. Too tired. They rejected deadheads, deaders, walkers, ghouls, mopes, mooks, chompers, wastoids, biters, and a checklist of other terms. In the last days, the experts on TV were uncertain about how to refer to the infected. Even as hordes of reanimated cannibal cadavers roamed the highways and byways, the talking heads and government wonks stayed away from any pejorative terms.
“We must remember that these were loved ones. Mothers, fathers, children, and friends. We can’t dismiss them, or their previous lives, with ugly terminology because of what is, essentially, a medical condition,” opined one member of the many panel discussions that filled the airwaves between warnings to stay indoors and reporting incidents with the formerly living.
Smash and Jim Kim referred to them as “the dead” by default.
“I’m thinking of all the places I’ve worked,” Smash said.
They were at the kitchenette table eating frozen pizzas that had thawed. They’d only go bad anyway with the electric out. They ate by the light of an LED flashlight. It was dark within the condo, even though it was afternoon outside. The month before, they had nailed plywood over the windows to prevent any leakage of light that might be seen from the parking lot.
“You worked a lot of places,” Jim Kim said, wetting his finger to pick up some specks of cheese from the box.
“I never found a place that suited me.” Smash shrugged. “Yo
ur bosses all expected you to work.”
“Anyhow, I made a list of our priorities,” Smash said and turned a legal pad on the table so Jim Kim could read it.
Defensible shelter Food
Water Electric Weapons
Standalone structure with sightlines 360 Sustainable environment
“You know, if you put this much thought into your studies, you’d still be enrolled,” Jim Kim said.
“And that would make a difference how? I mean, in the light of things? How would a degree in business help me now?”
“I’m only saying.”
“I need achievable short-term goals. That’s my strength. This whole global fuck-up is more suited to my skill sets, okay?”
Jim Kim nodded. That was true.
“So, of all the donkey jobs, I’ve had only one in a place that fits this profile. Tool Town,” Smash said and took a sip of lukewarm Dr. Pepper.
“The one on Western, right? Isn’t there a Best Buy and a Game Stop there, too?”
“And a Bogo-mart and Toys ‘R’ Us, too. What’s your point?”
“Why not one of them?”
“Because any place with food and pharmaceuticals is already going to be busted out. And TRU and Game Stop have zero food anyway unless you want to live on Gummi Bears.”
“There’s food at Tool Town?” Jim Kim said.
“A shit ton! There’s case lots of energy bars they stock at the checkouts. And stuff for the vending machines. Chips, nuts, candy bars and soda, juice, and bottled water. And with supplies from the garden center, we can grow our own food for forever. Plus, they have a rainwater collection system. It’s a survivalist’s wet dream.”
“So, why will it not be busted out like the other places?”