I know the term “freaks” doesn’t sound like a very politically correct way of referring to your former friends, co-workers, and fellow citizens, but it’s what we had taken to calling them. I know, I know, they were just sick and had become infected with an extraterrestrial killer virus through no fault of their own individually or collectively, but what else could we call them? They weren’t us, and that’s all it really boiled down to at this point. Us versus the freaks. Me and my gal against the whole wide world in the post-apocalyptic free-for-all.
Granted, all the infrastructure went to shit right away, so there hadn’t been any television, radio, internet, cell phones, or any of that high-tech glue-of-society stuff for over a month, but here’s the deal as I understand it: take an already massively over-populated world, introduce some space virus off an interstellar meteorite that causes complete irreversible insanity in all but less than one percent of the population—and yes, Virginia, I do mean bouncing-off-the-walls, drooling-on-yourself, now-I-know-what-the-little-green-men-want-me-to-do kind of crazy—and then you do the math. Yeah, it’s bad. Our odds of survival were even worse than the already massively long odds that a happy suburban couple like ourselves would both turn out to be immune to the space bug.
Okay, it was worse than bad. We were doomed. But that didn’t mean we were giving up. Hell, no! Like Chuck Heston said, you can have my gun when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers. Once upon a time, I would only have used those words in a self-conscious post-modern, snarky/sarcastic kind of way while making fun of gun nuts. Now it’s my religion.
I went over to the far window and used the claw on the hammer to finish prying up a two-by-four where the freaks had gotten up to the house and started tearing at our barricade. The nails were pretty much useless, but I did what I could to straighten them out and pound the board back into place. The last box of long nails was just about gone. While holding the board in place and driving the nails back into the window frame, I spotted a little girl in a long yellow coat standing across the street. We’d seen her before. Quite a lot, in fact. She just stood there across the street and stared at us, which sketched us out. Or at least it sketched me out. Kat thought she was weird but mostly scared and harmless. Whenever we called out to her or tried to approach her, she would run away. Sketchy, I’m telling you.
“That little girl is back,” I said.
“Maybe I should try offering her some food,” she said. “She’s probably hungry.”
“Maybe you should shoot her,” I said. “She’s probably leading the freaks to our house.”
That got me a dirty look. Even without looking around I could feel it through the back of my skull.
“I know you don’t mean that,” she said.
“Sure, I don’t,” I said. I re-attached another board to the window frame. The nails at one end had really gotten twisted so this was not an easy task, but I was able to work the nails into the pre-existing holes and pound it home.
“We’re not freaks, Todd. We’re not going to start killing innocent children just because they look at us funny.”
“But you know she is one of them.”
I stepped back from hammering up a final board. “We’re going to have to venture out,” I said. “We need more weapons.”
In the old days, she would have made some comment about how more guns would just lead to more killing and how that never solved anything, but that was back when Kat was an office manager in a dentist’s office and I was a financial analyst for an insurance company. Now we weren’t those people any more. We were survivors. So instead, she gave me a wry smile and said, “And if we’re lucky enough to stay alive much longer we’re going to need more food.”
“Right,” I said. “Where do we go?”
“The grocery store?”
I shook my head. “Probably already looted and trashed.”
She made a face. “All of them you think?” This was what we continually struggled with, coming to terms that the “real world,” the world we had grown up in and learned to take for granted for over thirty years of our lives, was now utterly and totally gone. We still just couldn’t ever quite fathom it. Everything was just gone. The buildings and houses and bridges and such that hadn’t been burned or torn down in the initial violent waves of insanity that left three-quarters of the world population dead and dying, those few outlying structures of what we were learning to think of as the Old World, they were all just very young ruins now. Over time they would fall apart and rot into the same nothingness from which they had been constructed.
“I think so,” I said. “There’s nothing left anymore.”
“Then what are we waiting for?” she asked.
“We’ve already been through this, babe,” I said. “It doesn’t seem right for us to just kill ourselves. I mean, we’ve survived this long. There must be a reason.” Truth be told, I was mostly still afraid of dying, even after all that had happened. Besides, I didn’t think I had whatever it took to pull off the whole murder-suicide thing. I’d leave that to the freaks—they were the ones who had proven remarkably good at it over the past few weeks. In the few days before the virus reached all around the globe and the news media up and died, you should have seen the crazy shit people were doing to themselves and other people. It boggled the mind. Really truly.
“No,” she said. “I mean, why don’t we find a car that still runs—if we can—load it up with all the provisions and gear we can find and go camping?”
“Go camping?”
“Yeah,” she said. “Like forever. You know, back to nature and all that. It’s not like we’re going to be any worse off facing lions and tigers and bears.”
“Oh my,” I said. I couldn’t help myself—it just came out.
“What do you say?” she asked. “I think it’s our best shot.”
“How shallow would I be if I said I hated camping?”
She shrugged. “I know you hate camping, babe. That’s why we’ve never been. But I don’t see how we have any other choice if you really think about it.”
“How will we survive?” I asked. “I mean, how will we eat?”
“We’ll fish and hunt and forage for nuts and berries.”
“I don’t know how to do any of those things,” I said.
“So before we leave town we’ll find ourselves a wilderness survival book, a boy scout manual or something.”
A shiver went down my spine. I’d been in the boy scouts for like a month, I think. I hated it. “I’m sure all the bookstores are burned down,” I said.
“Yeah, but we’re not consumers anymore,” she said. “We’re scavengers now. We need to start thinking like it.”
“Hey,” I said. “When you went on that spirit quest thing, wasn’t your power animal a buzzard?”
She nodded. “Pretty cool, huh?”
“Spooky,” I said. “I wonder what mine would have been. Probably a squirrel or something.”
“Well, at least squirrels know how to survive the winter,” she said. “In the forest. I think we’ve got to go for it.”
I thought for a minute. “Hey, wasn’t that kid who lived down the block a boy scout before he went off to college?”
“The one who used to mow our lawn?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Him.”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I thought he was a pothead.”
“Maybe that too, but I think we should run down and check out that house. See if we can find a boy scout survival manual.”
She smiled. “So, we’re going to go for it?”
I shrugged. “I guess so. What the hell else are we going to do?”
Sure, we didn’t know for sure that the freaks wouldn’t pursue us into the woods, but from what little we could gather most of the evil kept to the cities and towns rather than wandering into the wilderness. Crazy loves company.
We didn’t wait. In the old days, any sort of plan this major would have taken us days and weeks to think through and map out and prepare, but
in the brave new world there wasn’t any future and barely any past, just an extended immediate present. Being what used to pass for normal civilized humans, living on the fly went against our better judgment, but we were learning to live in the extreme moment because ultimately that was all you had anymore. We grabbed our already-packed bug-out backpacks and went for it.
The little girl across the street ran away and hid as soon as we opened the door. Guess she figured we were coming after her, the nutty brat. Maybe we should have been. Kat thought she was harmless, but I still wasn’t sure. The days of innocent kids had gone the way of electronic banking and Facebook accounts. Bye bye.
Being outdoors was more than a tad spooky and the stench of the bodies rotting in our yard was way worse than it had been from inside, but at least we had each other on this crazy adventure. Kat carried our fully-loaded rifle, locked and loaded as they say, eyes searching the hedges for any suspicious movements. I tightened my grip on the axe as we went out the walk and started down the sidewalk. My heart raced in my chest and nervous sweat leaked from every pore. I was terrified we were going to meet a mob of freaks. Or worse yet, stumble into a nest of them. Going exploring, there was always the distinct chance we’d wander into a roomful of wild-eyed freaks waiting to tear us apart with their bare hands and eat our brains or whatever, but realistically the lurking possibility of imminent attack was already everywhere. We were completely shell-shocked from our month of little-to-no-sleep and learning to routinely murder our fellow creatures, so what else was new? Talk about social anxiety disorder!
We started poking into houses as we got near the end of the block. It wasn’t hard—most of them had their doors and windows wide open, so you could just wander in off the street and look around. We were looking for anything useful—provisions, camping gear, survival books. We were also hoping to find a viable mode of transport to get us out into a national park or other wilderness area. Our own car along with just about every other vehicle around had been totaled in the early days by a roving pack of teenagers, smashing and burning anything and everything they could find. We’d had to gun down three or four of them to run them off and keep them from torching our house. In true paranoid fashion, I watched for them for weeks, expecting them to come back and avenge their fallen buddies, but they never returned and I was glad for that.
Pretty much all of the places we ventured into were totally deserted, though we did find a few scenes where some bad craziness had gone down. One house had a living room piled high with human heads. No joke. There had to be over a hundred human heads in various stages of decay just shoved into a huge mound at the far end of the room, and flies everywhere. Another house seemed to have had all its interior walls repainted with human feces, but we could barely venture in because of the stench. Crazy people are disgusting. Yet another house featured the whole family, including three housecats, all swinging from ropes in the basement. This particular tableau struck me as odd, not because they’d hanged themselves, but because by doing it in the basement which had a very low ceiling, they’d limited their drop distance. The feet of the guy I took to be the head of the family dangled only a few inches from the cement floor. Must have been miserable deaths all around. Aside from the miscellaneous murder and bloody mayhem, we also spotted plenty of evidence of cannibalism. Human hands and other parts in frying pans and cooked on plates, jars of ears and eyes on kitchen shelves, you name it. Real charming stuff.
The first big score as far as I was concerned happened when we discovered an old suicide in a home office. The scene must have happened in the early days of the apocalypse—there was a newspaper nearby with the big, horrible headline “Everybody, Do the Apocalypse”—but nobody had run across it or tried to clean it up, so it was a rotten old corpse in a recliner with its now well-dried head blown open and a handgun lying on the floor next to an outstretched, shriveled-up hand. The gun was an automatic, and besides the rounds still in the clip, I found a whole box of shells on the side table. I kept the axe in hand as my primary option, but it sure felt nice to have a pistol tucked into the back of my jeans for backup while we continued exploring.
Of course we encountered a few living people as well. All freaks, but ones who the virus took to a quieter more introspective space than it took most of its victims. In one house, we found a guy in bed with the covers pulled up to his chin, just watching us with big wide eyes and lying there. Maybe he went there and hid when he heard us coming, but we just left him there. In another, an elderly woman in a bathrobe sat at an upright piano playing the same sequence of six notes over and over again. Like forever, she was just going to keep playing these same notes. She didn’t even notice us come in or leave. We thought about shooting her just to put her out of her misery, but it seemed a bit too much like playing God, and besides, with ammunition running short we didn’t want to waste the bullet.
We struck pay dirt when we found a garage with not only camping gear, but also with a couple skinny green dirt bikes with knobby tires. Filling the tanks to the brim from a nearby gas can, we bungied tents and sleeping bags and whatever other outdoorsy stuff we could find and fit onto the backs of the bikes and set out for camping country. As it turned out, we were lucky to have motorbikes, though it took us some time to get used to riding them, because most of the streets and highways were clogged with wrecked and abandoned vehicles. The bikes allowed us to weave our way through the tangled wreckage of the old world and get the hell out of Dodge. We played Mad Max a couple times along the way, siphoning fresh tanks of gas from forgotten old cars built before mechanisms were introduced to prevent the wicked practice.
Once we hit dirt roads, life felt happier and lighter again. We rode till our gasoline ran out and the bikes died.
We set up a more or less permanent camp next to a clear stream in the deep wilderness. I barely miss our so-called civilization anymore. We never did find a boy scout manual, but we’re learning how to do things ourselves. Turns out camping is great, especially when it means no more being attacked by raving human monsters and worrying about where your next can of tuna is coming from. Yeah, we’ve lost a lot of weight and we’ve had to get used to being dirty all the time, but life is fine.
I caught a fish yesterday.
And guess what? Kat thinks she might be pregnant.
About the author:
John C. Caruso lives in an old farmhouse in the Pacific Northwest with his wife Petra and their two girls. A 19th-century Americanist, he teaches literature and cultural studies at Marylhurst University. His short fiction has appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies. You can visit him online at the Portland Mayhem Co. - http://pdxmayhem.wordpress.com/ - a blog he co-writes with several other authors of dark fiction.
Finding the Sky
by Waite Jorin
Riddo strained to hear his wingman, Fitz, over the smacking currents of wind, which was difficult even with the implanted inner-ear transmitter. The laser display contact lenses fed him numbers to keep his jetglider kite’s altitude steady, but did little else for visibility up in the thick gray nuclear ash clouds that had covered the snowy Earth for two decades after the Mega-Bombs exploded.
Riddo and Fitz flew twenty meters apart, far enough to avoid collision during unexpected gusts, close enough for a quick rescue if one of the kites was torn or if either of their jet propulsion boots malfunctioned. They knew too well that safety in numbers was essential in what used to be the sky. Single fliers, like pilots of antiquity over the old-world Bermuda Triangle, were often lost to the torrents of smokey gray, blips that disappeared suddenly from a radar in one of the remaining scattered, human camps.
Riddo saw no part of Fitz or Fitz’s kite through the rushing pewter haze, except the heat signature displayed electronically across his eyes. He could barely see his own body suspended prone from the jetglider kite, his legs wrapped in fitted titanium splints to keep his knees from breaking under the pressure of the jet boots’ torque, his gloved fingers grasping the control bar below.
He struggled to make out Fitz’s staticky words projecting into the right side of his skull.
“How does it feel to save the world?” Fitz shouted.
The only thing Riddo felt was the rough grind of hurricane-strength winds across the spots of his face not covered by the oxygen mask. The cold of unending winter had taken his father—he had no idea where his mother was—his sister, his daughter Sarah, and Sarah’s mother, his ex-wife. It took his Australian Shepherd Hailey, who was the last friend he’d had. That was ten years before he joined the camp in northern Texas and met Fitz. He considered Fitz a partner but he would never be a friend, because Riddo could no longer experience affection for other human beings. That part of his brain had become frostbitten and crumbled to black during the darker times of his life, which he could no longer remember, and he knew he was better for it. Death couldn’t hurt him because he was numb to it.
2013: The Aftermath Page 19