by D Krauss
Take me.
The cloud descended, the black oily one that seeped through his pores and rolled around his heart, muddying it. Oh, man, just leave me alone, will ya?
But no, no, it urged him to forget dinner and chores and calling Collier and plod up the stairs and sit on the bed and draw the .357 and stare at it, glint some light off the bluing, look at the bright, white Silvertips gleaming from the cylinder. Now, cock it, place it against your temple.
Hold, and let the debate begin. Go ahead, pull it. What’s the point of all this struggle? What’s the friggin’ point? It’ll be two or three generations before anyone gets back inside here, and you’ll be dust. So will the country, some bastardized socialist state or a series of confederations or maybe just one big medieval fiefdom. The casualties outnumbered the untouched, so who would know, who would blame you, if you just became another? Go. Go find Theresa. Go find God. And with just a little pressure on the trigger...
Stop. Because Collier is the future, Collier is the future.
That stayed his hand. Every time. One bit of positive evidence trumped the preponderance of negative. Besides, what would Coll think of him, if he succumbed, if he put a little pressure on the trigger? Not much, of course.
John didn’t think much of people who just gave up, unless they’re swallowing a cyanide tablet as the enemy breaks into their last stronghold, something like that. Giving up, no matter the odds, is weakness. And if it’s your dad? God, imagine that. Imagine what a crater that would drill in your soul.
Collier had plenty of soul holes to fill without John making another one. Besides, he didn’t want to establish a precedent for Coll’s own future date with a heavy-caliber exit. So he always eased back the hammer and, gently, laid the revolver on his lap.
Didn’t mean he wouldn’t, eventually, do it.
Despair was insidious, can’t be forestalled forever. Maybe when John had a sense that Collier was okay, that, no matter what happens, he could handle himself and this Brave New World, then, yeah, okay, eat the barrel. Especially if, by that point, John’d stopped wondering what would happen next.
Experiencing more than his share of disasters growing up had imbued John with a real morbid curiosity about how things played out. Like, when his high school girlfriend (the one before Theresa, June, yeah, that was her name) told John she was pregnant, instead of freaking out and jumping off a bridge, he got curious about what came next. In her case, an abortion, with all the attendant mortification and embarrassments for both of them.
He got through that, and even got through her standing in the middle of a crowded school hallway screaming and slapping his face over and over. “Let’s see what happens next,” he kept thinking between slaps. Pariah status for the rest of the school year, of course, but he was even curious how that would go, so he stuck around.
Several disasters later, he was still curious. Life had a geometric capacity to get worse; only a linear ability to get better. Watching it do so, though, had a certain appeal, like standing on a beach as the tsunami looms. Right now, it’s anarchy, but how much lower can we go? John didn’t have an inkling. But he would stick around and see.
He shook himself and shook off the cloud. Not tonight, bub. Time for dinner.
John was in the basement eating a bowl of chili, courtesy of Hormel, and watching the news. He felt relaxed. He shouldn’t, because Hairbag and Lupus were missing. He’d placed the bowls in the carport and even encouraged Snuffy to give off a bark or two, but nothing. He’d dropped the NVGs and walked out to the street and peered around and then turned them off because it was bright outside, moon bright. Didn’t see anything, didn’t hear anything, either, after he gave a low whistle. Where are those damned dogs?
No idea.
Maybe they’d tangled with a pack. He frowned. Unlikely. They always came back to the house whenever they found one. They weren’t stupid. So, maybe they got cut off, but he still should have heard it, even if they were way down Greeley. You can hear everything now. Snuffy should have heard it, too, dogs being attuned to each other on some subsonic level. But, no.
They might just be taking him for granted, gallivanting down some side street off towards the golf course, and weren’t worried about dinner ’cause it’d be there when they returned. Or they’d fed on a deer carcass and weren’t particularly hungry right now. Maybe. But it was just one more odd occurrence in an evening of them, and John wondered if he should move to one of his blockhouses and wait out the night.
Nah.
Really, why? Whatever’s going to happen, will. Most likely, this was just a series of false warnings, innocuous things that he was constructing into a threat because Mrs. Alexandria had so rattled him.
The surveillance, now the missing dogs, all had reasonable and unreasonable explanations. Trying to handle either would drive him crazy, so just let things play out. In the morning, you can laugh at yourself. Absolutely the wrong reaction, he knew, but sudden violent death eventually becomes a friend. And it wasn’t as if he couldn’t meet it well. He went back inside.
Dinner was always cans and supplements. Might as well use the bounty of the grocery stores as long as the bounty lasts, which would probably be well past his demise. The cans might even be the cause of his demise, what with spoilage or botulism or whatever happens to canned food over time.
He figured that a bad can would telegraph itself with weird colors or odors but, you never knew, so he stayed away from raw stuff, like sardines and oysters. Not Spam, though, which had a shelf life measured in centuries. Processed food, filled with salts and preservatives and microbe-killing chemicals, yessir. And spicy, too.
His homegrown vegetables offset the poisons. Whether that was true or not, eh, ’twas the thought that counted. Wash it all down with a bottle of something cold, well, quasi-cold. The refrigerator held temperature all day and John always looked forward to that cool bottle of Sam Adams. The several cases in the basement had already skunked but the flavor came through, especially when you followed up with a shot of Laphroaig.
Sometimes John got ambitious and cooked something from scratch, like a very thick spaghetti sauce out of the summer tomatoes, mixing in canned meat he figured was still good or leaving it all vegetarian, depending on the mood. He had bread, too, homemade, courtesy of the bread machine and the never-ending supply of flour he had locked up in a couple of freezers he’d lugged inside the neighbor’s and which ran when the Magnum ran. Ice-cold flour seemed to keep the mold away. He’d stored several hundred bags of flour as backup inside one of Giant’s now useless meat lockers and that kept the rats away, but not the mold. Still, the number of bags outstripped the mold’s progress, and he figured he had about ten years’ worth. That is, until all the flour went rancid.
He microwaved and crock-potted, saving the crock for the weekends when he had more power. Theresa had loved crocking, the working couple’s best dinner strategy. She used it more than him but, every once in a while, John would throw in a pork roast smothered in apples, sauerkraut, onions, potatoes and carrots, and crock it for about twelve-eighteen hours until the meat just fell off the bone. Man, could eat the whole thing himself. John smacked his lips thinking about it.
He should go hunting, pick up a pork roast, or an equivalent. There were wild pigs about, feral farm animals, not the javelina type. They’d formed packs like the dogs and moved into the suburbs because that’s where all the food was. Pigs broke into the houses and feasted on the mummified bodies and whatever else was lying around.
They got into it with the wild dogs but held their own and prospered because they avoided live people. Not all the time, though. Pigs were actually pretty bold and there was a group of them in the parklands down Foxhall that, every once in a while, John had to warn off with a shot or two. Pigs hunt. They’d go after an unwary target, which John wasn’t.
So maybe he should go after them, prove that he was still man and master, you little bastards. But he didn’t want to butcher the meat. John never liked
doing that. Dad was quite the avid hunter and always had a deer or two strung up from a tree during the season and John had done his share of bloodletting and evisceration and skinning but hated it. Messy, stinky, pointless work when there were cans and trays of prepared meats of all type and grade available in the shining rows of the commissary. “Wotjewdo if there weren’t no more commissaries?” Dad asked.
Geez, those Depression-era types and John wouldn’t say anything because, c’mon, that wasn’t going to happen. And it hadn’t. “Commissary’s still there, Dad,” John pointed out, “still lots of cans. Difference is, no lines.” John grinned. Humor.
John did shoot deer, but not to eat. Damn things, tearing up the bushes and having a go at the garden whenever they could. John had put up a deer fence and used the wolf spray liberally, but they were persistent bastards. John left them where they fell, except when they were too close to the house; those he dragged off to the woods. If he thought putting their little deer skulls up on pikes would warn the others off, he would. Lupus and Hairbag had at the carcasses, which was fine, because that bound them to him even more and gave them a taste for deer meat.
Deer may have lost their fear of man, but a couple of crazy dogs chasing them through the woods helped keep them at bay.
John was maintaining his weight, which was surprising, given how much he burned getting back and forth to work. The advantages of empty calories.
There was a distinct shift, though, from the portly belly of Before to an After six-pack. He was stronger, he knew, and felt good, having regained just about all his youthful speed and endurance. He could go mano a mano with any number of punks and prevail. He seemed as fast and hard as in his younger days. Bring it on, mofos. Hmm, maybe the CDC started the Flu to combat the national epidemic of obesity, get everyone back in shape.
Kidding.
John took vitamins and his Before prescriptions, blood pressure and cholesterol medicine, the inevitable result of a Type A personality. “You’ll be dead by 55,” Dr. Kim had warned as he handed John three or four continuing scripts. “Stroke or cardiac arrest.”
Ha, now, he would hope to die from that, or anything natural, for that matter. Given his fat loss and very active lifestyle, he probably didn’t need the daily dosage anymore, but, hey, maintain. You never knew. He had a couple of years supply of the medicine stored in the back bedroom and he’d keep popping the pills until gone or some doctor told him he could stop, which meant he’d end up finishing them because the only doctors left were CDC and there was no way they were getting hold of him. Didn’t really need a doc, anyway. He hadn’t been sick since the Event, not even a cold. The upside of depopulation. He did get hurt, pulled muscles and cuts and sprains because he was a clumsy oaf, but those were easily fixed, especially with his restored youthful healing powers.
The benefits of catastrophe.
John spooned another mouthful of chili and idly watched the anchor. News, what a joke. No one was fooled. The government took over the networks almost faster than they declared the Zone off limits, and even though the talking heads went to great lengths to declare how independent they were, c’mon. The biggest giveaway was the other programming, ’60s sitcoms and ’50s movies, all the bright and cheerfully brainless crap that passed for TV back then. John loved The Partridge Family when he was twelve, had a thing for Susan Dey, but now?
Independent networks, hahaha. The anchors looked too nervous and their phraseology was too neutral. So, you listened to what they said and figured out why the government let them say it, deducing what was really going on. An art form.
Like, right now, Nervous Nellie, the little pasty-faced white boy reading the news (“Live from Chicago!”) was trying to sound stern about some new registration effort, our beloved junta requiring all US citizens to prove they were so by gathering at designated locations with their documents in hand. Nellie was failing.
John wondered how many people were stupid enough to actually comply. Draft Gangs would be there with little regard for the exemptions allowed married men or men with families or men not quite eighteen. John’d tell Collier to ignore this decree, like he ignored all the previous ones.
Pasty-face switched to some fighting in Arizona and New Mexico, isolated, arising from the Chiapas Revolution, easily contained by US forces and probably over by tomorrow, so don’t worry about it.
John frowned. That was odd. Supposedly, we’d kicked the crap out of Castro a few weeks after he got on his high horse and sent an army to Chiapas, causing Mexico to implode. Supposedly, we had Havana and Castro himself and, supposedly, we stopped the Chiapans somewhere in the Sonoran Desert just south of the Rio Grande. Yet, fighting continued. Hmm.
Maybe we weren’t as successful as previously portrayed. Maybe we didn’t actually have Castro and maybe there’s some real serious crap going on down there. Castro in Mexico? Double hmmm. That would explain the increased Draft Gang activity, although the Middle East meat grinder seemed motive enough. Better warn Collier to watch his ass.
And, like clockwork, Pasty turned to the Zone. You always got some commentary about it, usually some encouraging word or the other. Irritating. Tonight, the usual CDC hogwash about cleaning up the Zone soon and vaccine advances and the encouraging results of “trials” (read “experiments”) on the poor bastards still in CDC labs. A little twist this time, though: the CDC was predicting a clear Zone in two years.
Now, that’s different. Either the crapheads were expecting everyone to be dead by then or they just might be on to something. John blinked, his little core of perpetual hope twitching, but he shook that off quick. More likely the CDC will nuke the Zone in two years and burn out the virus, when they were sure doing so wouldn’t turn it Andromeda Strain or something.
John glanced at his watch. 9:00 p.m. Half hour to go. Good. He really needed to talk to Collier. Settle down, ease the day’s concerns, find out what was happening at Fishburne.
Best decision he and Theresa ever made, sending Collier there, about a month before September 11, some four to six months before the Event. That’s why he’s still alive. John wasn’t prescient or anything; he’d just had it with Fairfax County Public Schools. Collier was floundering and the school wanted to stick him in Basic Skills and label him Learning Disabled and drug him up. They encouraged his loser skateboard social life because he wasn’t going to make it in college anyway, so he might as well have some fun.
John got a little upset with that so, off to Fishburne, kicking and screaming, of course. In as little as two months, complete turnaround. Collier made honor roll. Honor roll! Take THAT up your Ritalin-prescribing asses, Fairfax County! He made cadet company first sergeant. Even more amazing, Collier loved it. Instead of being a loser, he was somebody.
Fishburne saved his life After, too. Collier came up with some harebrained idea of going home in the middle of everything. He tried to sneak out by going down a sheet rope, but the knots came apart and he broke his heel in the fall. They put him in the infirmary and literally handcuffed him to the bed. John was so grateful. A few cadets did sneak out and were never heard from again. No doubt their rotted corpses now decorate a few side roads just inside the Zone.
“What if you had gotten away?” John breathed in the phone the first time he recovered enough to call. “What if you had? You’d be dead now! You get it? Dead!” He’d been so upset.
All Collier could do was cry, upset himself, his mother gone, his world gone but here, from the grave, Dad’s voice. “You’d have missed this call, Collier. I’d have missed this call.” His only son, John’s only link to a future, gone. “Don’t ever do anything like that again!” Because you just don’t know what’s going to happen.
You just don’t know.
Like planes that come from a clear summer sky and incinerate buildings, death unlooked for, unnecessary, cruel, fanatical death. A bolt from the blue, unanticipated, Pearl Harbor, Nagasaki, Hue.
The letters.
Those first deaths, in that newspaper offic
e down in Florida. Odd. John and everyone else furrowed a collective brow and wondered what the heck was going on. Then five or six died in New Jersey and DC and New York, and everybody looked at each other with the still-furrowed brows. What the hell? It looked like someone was going after Senators, but clumsily, killing bystanders instead. Collateral damage. Eh, no big deal. Unfurrow the brow, shuffle off to work, shovel out Ground Zero.
Oh, of course, some panicked. Some always do, the superficial, the self-centered who somehow believe everything is about them, but, overall, there was more puzzlement than fear. It was too personal, too small, too weird. A single madman, a Ted Koscinski catalyzed by the Towers and the Pentagon, lashing out from some twisted revenge epic and sending anthrax through the mail, imagining, somehow, he was bringing about some needed apocalypse.
Small and weird and personal. Just that. Nothing bigger.
A couple of odd news stories about crop dusters showing up at odd times and letting loose some kind of aerosol the farmers or housewives or field hands being interviewed had not ordered, “Colsarnit, ’cause hit wuz waaaay past tahme fer dustin’,” spit. Was that true? Were the farmers and housewives and field hands reporting Bigfoot? John thought so, even when he watched some climatologist telling a barely credulous fluffy-headed morning news anchor that the release points described by the farmers and housewives and field hands coincided with prevailing winds that wafted over very big population centers. Yeah. Right. Time for work.
When the first few people got sick, no big deal. Winter cold and flu season. Take your Alka-Seltzer and cough your way onto the Metro and the buses and off to the job. Gather at the lunch counters and McDonald’s and cough some more, your leavings on trays and cups and doorknobs and paper towel dispensers. No one minded.