by J. B. Beatty
“Well, it’s one of the great classics…”
“That’s hardly a recommendation,” she yawns the last word. Blinking, she adds, “If classics are so damn good then people would want to read them.”
“It’s good,” I say defensively. “But I’m struggling with how to read it. I mean, I think I’m enjoying it too much in the wrong way. I’ve never heard anyone refer to this as anything but difficult and boring, but I actually find a lot of it funny. I’m starting to think Herman Melville was one of the great satirists. And to think I almost checked out without reading it.”
She stares at me. “Checked out.”
I redirect. “I mean, I figured I would save it till I was in college. That’s when all the English majors read it. But with the end of the world and all, I don’t think I’m ever going to get around to enrolling in a four-year school.”
“Maybe community college,” she snorts.
“Yeah, if we can find a community…”
“So… whales?”
I close the book, realizing that Maggie needs the conversation more than I need the reading. “Whales,” I say. “I’m learning a hell of a lot about whale biology. 100 years ago, people who wanted to know about whales didn’t need Wikipedia. They just needed this book.”
“Because you never know when you might run into a whale. It’s the Great Lake State, after all.”
“Exactly,” I agree. She closes her eyes for a moment. She’s still beautiful. I could still look at her all day if I thought she wouldn’t catch me.
She catches me, but instead of a scowl she gives a faint smile. “So, you know now. About me. And checking out.”
“Um, yeah… Justin told me.”
“Though you’re probably smart enough that you would have caught on anyway after your first trip to a cancer center.”
“Maybe. I’m kind of slow sometimes, though…. How are you doing?”
“Well, I guess I’m past the anger stage. I burned that out in the first weekend of zombie hell. Shooting at moving targets helps. The doctor gave me my test results about a week earlier. Fuckin… I don’t know, I guess I was hell on everyone around me that week. Only family knew; I didn’t tell anybody else. I feel bad now that I was such a bitch in the last days I had with them.”
“I think you’re allowed to get bitchy in circumstances like that.”
“Maybe in normal real life, but we’re in zombie apocalypse life now. I wish I wasn’t such a bitch to my mom. I was so damned angry. I mean, I got stitches after I crashed my ATV once, but I have never had a health problem. Not a damn thing. And then leukemia? It seemed like some sickass joke. I was supposed to start chemo that Monday, but on Saturday, the world went crazy. And a part of me was glad. I was glad to be gunning people down.”
She pauses and looks at me. “Is that weird to say?”
I swallow. “No, that’s perfectly normal.”
“So, I figured I would keep going, keep shooting every frickin’ crazy-ass cannibal I see. Because that gave me power, and cancer was making me powerless. I would keep going until I couldn’t anymore.”
“Where are you with it now?”
“I’m good. I feel like I’m in good hands. I mean, you guys aren’t doctors, but you’d risk your lives trying to save me. A frickin’ country club doctor never would.… But I’m tired. So completely tired that part of me just wants to fucking go to sleep and never wake up.”
My expression must have betrayed my feelings. She half laughs. “Don’t worry. I’m hanging in there. I’ve got to take care of Homer. And if I die, I don’t get to see how this ends.”
“I’m not sure any of us can count on happy endings anymore.”
“True that. The world is fucked up. Maybe even a little more than it was fucked up before.” She sighs and adds, “But it’s so much more interesting than bonfires and mudbogging and getting wasted.”
38→PROMISED TO YIELD SAFETY
Two things:
1)After a planning session, Justin and RIP decide that the next place we have to visit for the chemo meds is a hospital in Traverse City. There are closer places: Muskegon and Grand Rapids, but each might present bigger risks. Traverse City we can get most of the way there on back roads, and we don’t have to travel through a lot of population to get to the cancer center, which is an outbuilding on the hospital grounds.
We leave tomorrow: RIP and I. Justin just wasn’t feeling like another near-death experience so soon.
2)After countless hours of fucking with the wires controlling the mystery door in the basement, RIP decides that there’s no power going to the console and he rigs up a car battery to it. After countless more hours (but if we were counting, it would be about 17), a tiny green light flashes, he hears a click, and the door pops open an inch.
He calls us down. We get flashlights, guns. He slowly opens the door and steps past the threshold. Overhead lights start popping on. We gape in astonishment.
Honestly, we expected dungeons and rats. We get sparkling linoleum, white walls, and a passageway that stretches deep into our little mountain. Doors every 20 feet or so. Justin turns back. “Guys, shouldn’t we block this open? We don’t want to get locked in.” So we do.
Then we venture down the passageway in earnest, opening each door we come to. Offices—with no paperwork in sight, no clues. Bedrooms—bunks with military blankets, enough capacity for at least 10 people. Kitchen—and the appliances are plugged in and ready to go. No food in the fridge, though. At the end of the hall beyond another metal door is a spiral metal staircase. It goes down a long way. The floor immediately below has a control room. I can’t make heads or tails of what it might be for. I look to RIP, who is now our default electronics man. “What is this?” I ask.
“Buttons, switches, screens. Two rolly chairs.”
“Thanks, ‘cause I was confused about that.”
“No problem, bud.”
We head down the staircase together to the bottom. It feels like we descend 10 stories. There are no more doors until we reach the bottom and that’s a huge heavy door with a big steering wheel sort of handle. And another electronic console featuring a number pad. “Oh hell,” says RIP. “I’ll be retired in Florida before I get that damn thing open.”
But me, I don’t worry about the lock, because I am already developing a lively theory about what we have found. It’s based on a label that is stenciled at the top of the door: “Silo A.”
“Guys,” I say. “I think what we have here is a nuclear missile.”
“Just when you think you know a place,” remarks RIP.
“Are you shitting me?!” says Justin.
“Probably the missile’s gone. They decommissioned a lot of these, I think. And the facility is deserted. If there were a live missile in there, there would be soldiers here. At least a couple.”
“Unless the flu got them.”
“We’d see a sign of that. We’d at least see food in the fridge. This place has been empty for a while.”
“Well, how the hell is it so clean?” asks Justin.
RIP says, “It must be sealed against radiation. No dust gets in. Scrubbers and state-of-the-art filters so that the personnel inside can survive anything. I tell you, if we wanted a fortress to survive the apocalypse, we’ve hit the jackpot.”
We head back upstairs—Justin wants to check on Maggie. RIP wants to explore some more. I wander through the top level with him. We discover quite a supply of MREs. We feel the heat—it must have automatically turned on when we came in. The place is already starting to get warmer. RIP studies the inside of the mystery door. Levers and bolts—manually operated.
“You know what this means?” he says. “This means we can lock this from the inside and no one outside can override it electronically. It means if we were attacked sometime, we could hide in this bunker, be safe, warm and comfortable, and it would take a direct hit from a nuke to get to us.”
“And who’s going to nuke a little college radio station?” I say.
>
“Exactly.”
When we head up we tell Justin and Maggie. It’s time to start moving all kinds of supplies into the bunker. RIP starts putting together a shopping list. Tomorrow, he and I head to Traverse City.
“Good breweries up there,” he says brightly.
I smile. Because sometimes it almost works to pretend that everything’s alright.
39→PUSHING THEIR QUEST ALONG SOLITARY LATITUDES
We stick to the smaller dirt roads. From the truck we still occasionally see wandering zombies. Mostly they just gaze dumbly as we pass by. One chased us, like a furious farm dog. He was still running full blast when we finally lost sight of him. Curiously, almost all of the zombies we see now are men. Maybe that’s simply a strength/speed thing. They’ve already consumed most of the women, I suspect.
Inevitably, we have to cross paved roads. We check them out very carefully before we stick out our necks. At one point, we know we have to drive a 6-mile stretch of pavement. We will be exposed—any of those flyovers will be able to see us. We keep our eyes on the sky as well as everywhere else while we blast that stretch. RIP sits at the wheel.
He makes small talk like this is nothing. He likes his conspiracy theories. “This is no accident,” he insists. “This is all a direct result of that election. They thought they fooled everybody. They got every redneck moron and his uncle to vote for them, and what they planned all along was just to rob us blind and make the rich richer. I told people this before the election and they thought I was crazy. There are something like 823 voters in my precinct, and I was one of 17 who voted against that man. Jesus H. Christ!
“And then when the shit hit the fan and we found out he was just a Russian pawn, I celebrated along with everyone else. And all sorts of folks who I know damn well voted for him were celebrating like they were part of the resistance. They acted like it was their idea all along to throw water on the Wicked Witch.”
“The Wicked Witch?”
“I’m using metaphors, bud. And I’m telling you, those rich assholes, they weren’t done. They might have lost their grip on power, but they weren’t anywhere close to being goddamn done, I promise you.”
He has a toothpick in his mouth and he’s clenching his jaw in a fury. I don’t do politics, so I just let him ramble on. “This whole damn zombie apocalypse thing, I wouldn’t be surprised…”
“Maybe it’s just the flu,” I say.
“Yeah, and maybe I’m goddamn Muhammad Ali.”
Above, a jet streaks low. “Dammit!” RIP says. He takes us off the road at nearly full speed and we pull alongside some pines where we are mostly concealed from above. We are about 30 yards off the road and we get out of the truck so we can better listen and see.
We would have heard the explosion even if we had earplugs. Flames and smoke billow above the forest not more than a mile north of where we stand.
All RIP says is, “Someone’s having a bad day.”
We stay where we are, and I help RIP to cut brush and conceal our truck further. Soon we hear automatic weapons fire and small explosions. “Let’s see what’s going on,” he says.
“Because what? You have a deathwish? Are you nuts? I don’t see the point in getting any closer just to satisfy our curiosity. We could get our heads blown off.”
“Bud, open up the map in your head and take a look at it. Whatever is happening there is between us and Maggie’s cancer drugs. There is no good way around, which is why we’re taking the risk of a paved highway in the first place. Now, I’m not saying we go join the fight. I’m saying we just sneak through the woods on this side of the road until we can get close enough to see what’s going on and whether it means we have to postpone this trip—or come up with an entirely new route.”
And that’s why we are creeping through all kinds of forest to get closer to the sound of death. RIP leads, about 20 feet ahead of me. He put dirt on his face and mine. I guess that’s commando make-up. The shooting continues, but while we get closer to it, it also starts to settle down. I hear a branch crack and see a zombie coming at RIP from the right. RIP doesn’t notice it, and doesn’t hear my whispered warnings. I pull out the knife I’ve never used and run toward the zombie. I aim for his back but he hears me and starts turning around. I instead slash him in the side. He throws himself at me and I stab repeatedly. Finally, he stops moving. I lay there, kind of at a loss.
RIP stands over me. “You okay?”
I blow leaves out of my mouth and shove the corpse away. “Good to go.”
We continue our creep through the flora of Northern Michigan. Eventually we see a dirt driveway that intersects the highway from the west. There is—or was—a heavy gate across it, but it has been tossed aside like it weighed nothing. A lone gunman stands perhaps 50 yards down the driveway. We hear a single shot and slowly lay down so that we are concealed but can keep watch.
A black vehicle—a Humvee—emerges and the gunman climbs in. It is followed by two others, and the caravan makes its way to the highway and turns north. Once on the pavement, they accelerate and are quickly out of sight.
“The men in black,” RIP mutters. “So there’s that. And they took someone or something out.”
“We should see who.”
“We’ve already got a mission and we’ve got 30 miles to go into dangerous territory,” he says. “Let’s do that first. If we have time on the way back, we check this out.” I slowly nod in agreement. We head back to our truck. The mood has somehow lifted. We now have a better idea of the kind of risks we might be facing, but we also know they have moved on. Our path is clear for now.
The rest of the way, we stay away from Highway 31 and approach the hospital from smaller roads to the west. The last few miles, we have to hop on Long Lake Road and zip past some of the suburbs. No signs of life anywhere. When we make the final turn, we spot the cancer center. It’s actually a couple blocks north of the hospital proper. We park under the overhanging awning of the neighboring building—no reason to expose ourselves any more than we need to.
We sit in the car for several minutes, packing up our ammo, readying our backpacks, and watching the area. Not only does it appear to be completely deserted, but we notice it is lacking the errant corpses that are a constant reminder of our apocalyptical situation. Nothing: no shredded children, no stripped spines, no packs of dogs dining on the less fortunate.
RIP stares at our target, a shiny new building, all brick with comfort-inspiring redwood trim. “Oncology,” he says slowly, with a sad smile on his face.
Sometimes he says odd things like that. The word isn’t on any sign that I see. It just happened in his head. No response necessary. Half the time, when I ask him what the heck he’s talking about, he just looks confused and tells me it’s nothing.
“Ready?” I say. He opens his door. We dash across the lot. The sliding main door isn’t working, nor is the revolving door. Above, we hear a helicopter approaching. We duck down under the cover of the awning, behind a garbage can. It comes over and seems to hover for a while nearby before moving on. When the noise evaporates away, we make our way around the building, trying various service entrances. Nothing is unlocked. We circle back to what looks like an employee entrance with a tall, narrow window next to it.
“Here’s Johnny!” he says as he brandishes his beloved crowbar. He whacks at the glass. The first blow sends a spider web of cracks across it. The second pushes part of it inward. With the third he pokes a hole and then he starts whaling on it, creating an opening big enough for us to squeeze through. As soon as we get in, we are next to a stairwell. “Second floor,” he says. “Infusion services.”
When we get to that level we walk along an internal balcony. “Nice place,” he says, gazing around in genuine admiration as we check rooms looking for the big drug stash. When we find it, the door is of course locked. And it’s a metal door. He starts hammering on it with his crowbar. In the drawer of the nearest receptionist desk is a key card. I swipe it through the reader and the d
oor unlocks.
“I see what you did there,” he says.
“Not as fun, but quieter,” I explain. We step in and see the shelves are loaded with all kinds of boxes of pharmaceuticals. We have a list of several: Xolair, Rituxan, Marinol, Benlysta, etc. But Justin said he was just guessing, and to grab everything we could. We start consolidating boxes and stacking the full ones near the door. There’s a lot here, far more than we can carry in our backpacks. I tell RIP to keep going; I will find a dolly or something. In a closet near the back I locate a janitors’ cart, but that’s not going to do the trick. Instead I just start moving the boxes into the elevator, and from there to an emergency exit near the main doorway area. We stack them there, and figure it will take at least 5-6 trips to get them all into the truck. I stay by the boxes, and RIP pushes his way out, listens for a moment, then dashes across the parking lot to the truck. He squeals out and pulls up just past the door. We load the boxes as fast as we can.
I can’t help looking at the sky constantly and I keep imagining hearing helicopters. Nothing, though. I leap in the car, and RIP is burning rubber before I even have a seat belt on. We tear out of town the way we came. I have the window open and am scanning the sky. As soon as we get to a forested area, he slows and leaves the road, putting our truck tightly between two trees. He shuts off the engine.
This makes me nervous. “Shouldn’t we be getting as far away as we can as fast as we can?” I ask.
“In theory, yes. But this area gives me the creeps. And that helicopter dawdling over our parking lot back there seemed a little more than coincidental. And then there’s the fact that whoever these people are, they have missiles and they’re not afraid to use them. What I’m doing is suggesting we just sit tight for a half hour or so and see if all of our rushing around might have attracted any attention.”