Derek picked up the PA again “People of station 5, the air filtration has detected a contaminate in the air vents of the facility. We were not able to prevent the virus from escaping the laboratories and our facility has been exposed. Please do not panic and remain in your rooms. We will be coming door to door to determine who has become sick and to move them to a quarantined area.”
As Derek made his statement, he knew that pandemonium had already erupted in the living quarters upstairs. By now the virus had made it into all of the air vents and those that were susceptible to it would be dropping like flies. He stood slowly and began to mentally prepare himself for what was to come. The questions, the tears, the anger.
He turned to find John waiting in the doorway. John and Maya were now the only other people alive that knew of his plan. The two lab assistants that had created the concentrated form of the virus had been carefully chosen because they were not immune and could be quickly disposed of to prevent any possible rumors from being started in the aftermath.
“Sir, Maya was in the basement.”
Derek looked at him questioningly. “What was she doing down there?”
“Well Sir, I followed her but stayed hidden. She escaped out of a hidden door in the garden room. Do you want me to go after her?”
Derek closed his eyes and took a deep, steadying breath before answering.
“No. Let’s go upstairs and deal with this crisis first. I have an idea of where she’s going and maybe by the time we cross paths again, she will have come to her senses and will want to be a part of us again.”
Derek’s mind swirled with anger as he and John made their way up the stair well. How could she just leave him here and all of her supposed friends? She had seemed so attached to all of these individuals, he never would have imagined that she could just turn her back on everyone.
He could hear the screams even before getting to the top of the stairs. Loud, agonizing cries of despair and desperate wails for help filled his ears.
He knew that more than half of their group would have perished by now and those left behind could now all mourn together and provide the support that was needed to get past this point in the transition that much quicker.
It was time to herd the masses and begin their journey back to the outside world and the promise of a new life.
Chapter 4 – Mountains! – Present Day
Maya had been driving for a solid 6 days. The trip would have taken 2 days before but now the highways were filled with broken down vehicles, mummified corpses and overgrown trees and plants. The mountains loomed in the distance, a shimmery white along their tips signaling that the winter was coming fast here. The trees had already lost all of their leaves and overnight frosting had begun to kill off the remaining grasses and seasonal plants.
The best thing about Colorado in the winter was the pine trees. They stayed green and bushy all winter long and provided some sanity and break in the constant white that would soon blanket the landscape. She breathed in the crisp mountain air and finally felt home.
Her trip had been brutal and arduous. So many times she was forced to stop for the day when she came across an impossible crush of vehicles blocking her path. A few times she had been able to get them into neutral and push them far enough out of the way so she could wind her way through but most times she was forced to instead spend hours winding her way around side roads and alleyways to find a different way around and back to the highway. Having a four wheel drive, off-road vehicle had come in handy way too often and she knew that she would very soon need to find some better tires to outfit the jeep with. The part of the state that she would be living in was unforgiving and large, meaty tires were a must have in the winter time.
After coming across the small town meant just for the employees of the pharmaceutical company, she had been able to pinpoint her location in Virginia. She had never ventured that far east before so her trip back west despite being extremely exhausting, was incredibly beautiful and scenic. At each gas station along the way, she filled as many gas cans as she could find and strapped them in every possible spot on the jeep until there was no longer any room left. She knew that her supplies would need to be very robust by the time the first real snow hit in the mountains. She remembered how brutal and unforgiving the winters in Colorado could be and the chances were high that she would get stuck inside for long periods of time.
Memories of her first full winter in the cabin flooded back to her and she was filled with such a warm happy light in her heart. Matt had moved into the cabin with her right before the snow began to fall that year. He had worried about her safety there all alone during the winter and even though she knew his concern was sincere, she also knew that neither of them could bear to be kept apart by the snow. They had spent weeks preparing their food and wood supply and when the snow barricaded them inside for a month, it was the best month either of them had ever had.
By all comparison, they would have been considered such a boring couple. The card games, board games, long talks and hours of laying on the couch together watching the crackling fire would have been considered deathly boring by many but it had provided her with the memories that had helped her get through these last few years with her sanity.
She knew that going back to the town where she had met Matt and living in the house where they had experienced so many wonderful moments and one ultimately horrifying moment would be extremely difficult for her but the good memories so outweighed the bad and she was looking forward to remembering all of those forgotten moments with him.
Maya had inherited the cabin from her grandma and had spent so much time there as a kid. Her grandma had been a hearty woman and had continued to live in the cabin for many years after her grandpa’s death and had taken delight in teaching Maya all that she knew about surviving in the mountains. When Maya was 17, her parents had been killed in a car accident caused by a drunk driver. She went to live with her grandma for the rest of the year until she went off to college and the time spent with her grandmother had been a truly healing time period for her.
She had been so angry after the car accident and her grandma had endured much heartache from Maya’s ensuing behavior. The settlement from the car accident along with her parent’s insurance policies had left Maya with enough money to never have to work if she was careful with her spending. Angry and bitter about her loss, she spent the money frivolously in her first year at college. Wasting it on nights out with friends, expensive clothing and gifts for people that were only nice to her because of her money. At the end of her first year in college, she had done so poorly that her scholarship had been taken away. Faced with the choice of either paying for her college education outright or dropping out altogether, she chose to drop out and headed back to Colorado and her grandmas waiting arms.
There she spent a wonderfully healing and renewing summer with her grandma. Her grandma taught her how to plant a garden and they grew so many wonderful vegetables and herbs together. Harvesting their lot at the end of the summer, they then created the most wonderful soups to freeze for the winter. It had been such an incredible summer and after 4 months of healing, she decided to re-enroll in college and this time she would go where she had really wanted to go and pursue her degree in genetics mapping.
Her grandma had spent so many nights sitting on the porch in the rocking chairs with her just listening to her cry and talk about her losses. Maya never once thought about how her grandma must have felt about losing her son. She knew grandma and her dad had been very close but she was young and selfish and only later in her life did she reflect on how her grandma had dealt with that loss. Never once did Maya see her grandma cry and she finally realized that her grandma had thrown herself into helping Maya recover because seeing Maya flourish in life was the only thing that could truly heal her grandma’s pain.
Maya returned to college with a refreshed take on life and she excelled in her program. Each summer she returned to her grandma’s cabin and they would spen
d a few glorious months together gardening and canning soups. In her last year of schooling, she had not yet decided whether she wanted to immediately pursue her master’s degree or if she wanted to try her hand at getting a job. She had seriously depleted her inheritance with college and her earlier immature habits so she decided to find a job and save up for her master’s degree. Her grandma asked her to come and stay with her until Maya found something in the city and they could have one last summer together gardening and canning. But that summer never happened. Her grandma passed away peacefully in her sleep a couple of weeks before Maya graduated from college.
Maya fulfilled her grandma’s wishes of being cremated and having her ashes spread on her mountain property. Several of her grandmas close friends came over to mourn with her and help spread the ashes. It was a beautiful day with many shared memories of her grandma. Her grandma’s friends all told Maya that her grandma had only stayed on the earth all of these years because of Maya. She knew that Maya needed her and she couldn’t leave until she felt that Maya could face the world on her own. Now her grandma could finally be with her true love again.
Her grandma left her the property along with a significant amount of money which once again put her in the position of never having to work again if she was wise with her spending.
Maya finished her schooling with high honors and returned to the mountain cabin to figure out her next step in life. Even though she didn’t need to work, she had become passionate about genetics during her college years and felt that she needed to find a job where she could help people.
She spent the summer repeating the steps of summers past and planted a large vegetable and herb garden. Her evenings were spent sitting on the front porch in her rocking chair, talking quietly to the night sky and telling her grandma all about her day. Her plan was to get an apartment in the city before winter had fully set in so she could start her search for a job. The cabin would be her weekend and summer get-away until she felt that she had fulfilled her burning desire to help the world.
But the day that she walked into the towns tiny café, her world changed.
Maya watched the café pass on her right as she drove through the tiny town remembering her first venture into the café and how it had changed the course of her life.
The town looked unchanged since her last trip there some 10 years ago. Her original plan of spending weekends and vacations at the cabin had changed after her relationship with Matt had fallen apart. She could no longer face the town and be reminded again of her failure and of the loss of her soul mate. She had been the one to walk away and it took her several years to realize how foolish she had been. But she felt that it was too late by then and never sought him out despite the burning within her heart that consistently told her that it needed him.
Now all of these years later, her only thought was that she had wasted what little time they had had left in this world to be together. Now he was most likely gone and his skeleton was laying somewhere and she would never know where or what his life had been like since they had parted.
Pulling off the pavement and onto the gravel road that ultimately led to her grandma’s place, she felt the familiar thrill in the pit of her stomach at coming home. Her grandma’s cabin was several miles and several gravel roads off the main stretch. Not easy to find if you didn’t know what you were looking for and for her that meant safety and freedom.
The roads there were just as she had remembered with giant pine trees looming overhead and large rocks adorning the sides. Amazingly, she was able to make her way around the fallen rocks and trees without having to stop and pull anything with the jeep.
The driveway to her grandma’s cabin veered off the right side of the road down a little ways and to the little red and white cabin sitting nestled against the hillside. A stream ran the length of the property off to the right and barely missed the driveway before going under the bridge of the road.
When she had last seen the cabin in her rear view mirror as she drove away from her pain, it had been in slight disrepair. Matt had been helping her slowly fix it back up as there had been a lot of things that her grandma had let go over the years. But now as she stepped out of the jeep and walked up onto the front covered porch, she realized that the cabin was in surprisingly better shape than when she had left it. The roofs old flaky shingles had been replaced with gray metal sheets, the siding and trim had been scraped and repainted and looked how she remembered it as a small child. The deck had been fixed in several places where some boards had been rotted and it no longer squeaked and flexed under her weight. Had someone moved into the cabin after she left and it had been abandoned for awhile?
Realizing that she no longer had a key, she searched where she had left the spare key and amazingly found it under the ceramic frog off to the right of the porch. But this was a newer frog than what she remembered. Definitely not the cracked and faded frog that was there more than 10 years ago!
The house stood silent as she slipped the key in the door and heard the tumbler clunk. Pushing the door open, her eyes swept around the living area that sat at the front of the house and she detected no movement. The fading sunlight flooded in through the living room window next to the couch and she could see the old wood burning fireplace in the corner with the ratty, comfortable couch in front of it. A beautifully lacquered round table sat off to the side of the couch next to the window, one of the Matts earlier works of carpentry that still gleamed with swirls of the blue stained pine. There had been an infestation of bugs that had eaten and killed miles of pine in Colorado and Matt would find a dead tree standing in the forest, chop it down and make a beautiful piece of furniture out of it.
Next to the couch sat a piece of furniture that hadn’t been here before, a miniature version of the porches rocking chairs, also lacquered and swirling with blue stain. She placed her hand on the top of it and gently rocked it back and forth. Matt had been here after she left and had built this as a reminder of what they had both lost that day their world fell apart. Was it Matt that had fixed up the cabin and kept it from falling into total disrepair? She had honestly not even expected the cabin would still be standing after all of this time but had held out a little hope that she could repair it enough to make it livable.
The original part of the cabin had been built in the 1800s and it had only been the front portion, one big room with a living area on the left and a kitchen with a sitting nook on the right. The back half of the house had been added on some years later by her grandpa before she was born. A door sat not too far behind the old couch and led to a hallway with three doors. The first was the bathroom and the other two were similarly shaped and sized bedrooms.
The kitchen was old-fashioned as her grandma had refused to give up her familiar surroundings. Maya had insisted on installing an electric stove as her grandmas antique stove required building a wood fire inside to heat up and that always made Maya nervous. She also had brought in an electric refrigerator to replace the propane fridge her grandma had still been using. But her grandma had refused to part with either of her old, sturdy appliances and now the kitchen was a mix of old and new. Maya realized how useless the fancy electric appliances were now and began to laugh at the foolishness of it. Her laughing turned into a full belly laugh with tears running down her face and then degraded into hysterical sobbing as she sunk to the floor; exhaustion and relief all at once flooding her body.
Maya managed to make it to the couch as the last light of the evening faded outside and she pulled one of her grandma’s colorful afghans over her before falling into a deep slumber.
Chapter 5 – The pain can finally end - A little more than three years ago
He banged on the door for the second time, yelling for his brother. “Ryan, I know you’re in there, open up the damn door!”
Silence met his yells and he was startled as a man ran past him in the apartment buildings hallway yelling and flailing his arms with flames crawling up his legs and back. The man smashed headfirst
into the window at the end of the hallway and catapulted out and down to the sidewalk some 5 floors below with a sickening crack. Sheer panic had taken over the city and people had become a more intimidating enemy than the virus which now held Matt in its death throes.
He coughed hard into his arm and saw blood there when he could finally breath again. He didn’t have much longer. Searching the hallway, he saw the ax behind glass at the other end next to the fire alarm that had already been pulled and was sounding loudly throughout the building. He smashed in the glass with his elbow, creating a gushing cut on his arm. Grabbing the ax, he ran back down the hallway and began hacking at his brother’s door until it finally came loose from the door jamb. His brother stood inside stricken silent until he saw it was his brother that had bashed in his door. His brother began to scream at him “You’re sick, don’t come near me, you’ll get me sick and I’ll die”, he shoved Matt hard in the chest, knocking him to the floor in his weakened state and ran past him into the hallway. Matt struggled to get to his feet, the burning in his chest making it difficult to breath and the room swimming around him like he was in a fishbowl.
“Ryan, come back! I have somewhere safe for you to go, Please, listen to me!”
But Ryan was already running down the stairs, not realizing that if he was going to get sick, it would have happened already.
Matt ran after him, his joints screaming with fire and his eyesight becoming so cloudy that he could barely see in front of him.
Pushing through the exit door at the bottom, he saw his brother round the corner to the building and head towards the parking lot. As he rounded the corner of the building, he saw his brother fumbling at his car to get the keys in the door. A man came out of nowhere wielding a baseball bat and swung it at Ryan’s head with a loud scream.
“NO RYAN!” Matt screamed as he struggled towards his brother, falling to the ground and crawling on all fours towards him. His brother crumpled to the ground and the man with the bat picked up the keys and kicked Ryan out of the way. Unlocking the car door, the assailant jumped inside revving the engine and peeled rubber as he backed out over one of Ryan’s legs, taking off out of the parking lot. Matt, dragging his now useless legs, finally made it to Ryan and placed his hand on Ryan’s head. “Ryan, can you hear me? Ryan!” A gurgled choke emitted from Ryan along with a bubbling river of blood. Matt grabbed the door handle of the vehicle on his other side and dragged himself upright until he could pull Ryan into his lap. Everything in his body screamed with pain and he knew he was close to death. Cradling Ryan’s head in his lap, he began to cry as he heard Ryan take his last breath.
After Days Page 3