by A. American
The rest of the evening was spent setting up camp for the night and prepping the comm gear. While they wouldn’t transmit tonight, Sarge wanted it ready for the morning. Mike volunteered to stand the first watch and went outside and moved off into the tree line. Inside, the rest of the guys sorted out their gear and broke out some MREs. Sarge dug around in the bed of the truck looking for his stove; he was out of coffee and getting damn irritable. Ted came over and liberated it from under the camo nets and handed it over. “Here, before you go completely insane.”
Sarge grabbed the stove and set it on the tailgate. “Believe me, you don’t want to see me without coffee.”
Ted leaned on the top of the bed. “You know that day’s coming, right?”
Sarge was busy priming the stove and didn’t look up. “What day?”
“The day when there’s no more coffee.”
Sarge stopped in midstroke, his thumb still over the end of the plunger in the tank of the stove. He looked over at Ted with his teeth gritted. “You watch your mouth! Don’t start no shit; there won’t be no shit!”
Ted laughed and turned away. “I’m jus’ sayin’.”
• • •
I had to go Mark’s house after leaving Danny’s. It was on the way anyway, so I stopped and dropped off the boxes. When I set them out at the little shed in his front yard, I opened them to take a look. There were two cans of beans and half a bag of flour and some hygiene products. In the second box there was a can of salt and a box of pepper. Seeing how little the guy had struck me. If these two boxes were any indication of how the others around there were doing, then people were about to get damn desperate. I admired Lance for never having said a word about how thin things were at home, but I knew most people weren’t as stoic.
Mark was still at the barricade when I pulled up on my way to get Don. I told him I had left the boxes in front of his shed. He gave me a look then said, “Thanks, I’ll have to get Marie over to open her lock.” He shook his head and said, “Putting two locks on there was a good idea at the time, but she is a real pain in the ass.”
“What do you have left in there?”
“Not much. We’re down to the mush that was in those humanitarian aid boxes. I guess it’ll keep you alive, but it tastes like shit.”
“What is it?” I asked and suppressed a smile.
He thought for a minute. “Kinda like plain oatmeal and Cream of Wheat. It’s hard to explain; the package has all the nutritional info on it, and it’s got everything in it, except for taste.”
I couldn’t hide my grin anymore. Mark noticed it and said, “What?”
“I was just thinking of all those commercials we used to see on TV that had those kids with bloated bellies eating slop from a bowl with flies buzzing around it.”
“And you find that funny?” He kinda glared at me, like I was crazy for saying that.
“No, no, it’s just that it reminded me of the South Park episode where they made fun of Sally Struthers. Remember how she used to always be on those commercials?”
Slowly, a big smile spread across his face. “What was that character’s name, the little Ethiopian kid that they brought over?”
I started to laugh and so did he. “I don’t remember his name, I just remember him chasing shit down trying to get some food and her fat ass eating everything that wasn’t nailed down.”
Rick looked over. “What’s so damn funny?”
Mark looked at him with tears in his eyes. “South Park.”
“South Park?” Rick asked.
“Never mind,” Mark said with a wave, still laughing.
We both recovered and talked for a minute about some things in the neighborhood, Miss Janice for one, and how we needed to check on her. He asked again about the raiders that were still lying in the road, if I was serious about not helping to bury them. I assured him I was, but that I would still help haul them off into the woods or the field across the road and dump them. The look on his face made it pretty clear that he wasn’t happy with my position. He said, “I’ll let you know when you get back.”
I drove out the barricade and headed down to the doc’s place. Parking in front of the office, I walked around back to the house. It was connected but the doc was usually in the house and not the office. I knocked on the door and a woman opened it. I introduced myself and told her I was there to pick up Don. She introduced herself as Nancy Peters, the doc’s wife, and invited me in. She told me Howard was doing well and was more than ready to go home. I gave a little laugh and said I was sure he was. She led me out to the Florida room, where Howard was sitting in a wicker chair with his good leg up on a stool.
“Hey, old man, you ready to go?” I asked as I came in.
He looked up and said, “More than ready. What took so dang long?”
“If you were in a hurry, you coulda called a cab.”
Don laughed as the doc walked in. “Is this your ride?”
“Yeah, his chariot is outside,” I replied.
“Nancy, can you gather up Howard’s stuff while I go over some things with—” The doc paused and looked at me. “Sorry, I don’t know your name.”
“Oh, I’m Morgan,” I said and stuck out my hand. He took it and we shook.
“Follow me, Morgan, I need to go over Howard’s aftercare.”
We went out to his office, where he pulled a few items from a cabinet and put them in a box. There were rolls of gauze, gauze pads, a bottle of antibiotics and some pain-killers. He gave me a concerned look. “Howard doesn’t like the pain-killers, but take them with you; he may need them. Make sure he takes his antibiotics three times a day.”
“How about the wound? Does it still need cleaned, or is it closed up?”
“The staples are still in, and yes, it needs cleaned and the dressing changed once a day. I’m putting a bottle of Betadine in the box too.”
“You have any saline? I like to mix the two for wound irrigation.”
He looked up at me, a little surprised. “Yeah,” he said and he took a quart bottle from a shelf and dropped it in the box along with a big irrigation syringe.
“You have training?”
“Just OJT.”
“Well, if you need anything, just let me know. If he develops a fever or anything, bring him in.”
We went back to the Florida room where Howard was still sitting. There wasn’t a wheelchair for him, so he had to use a pair of crutches to get out to the truck. I helped Don in and put his crutches in the back along with the box Doc packed for us. Doc and Nancy were standing in the driveway waving as we pulled out. The ride back to our road was short, less than a mile, and Don sat quietly as we drove. When we passed a family walking down the side of the road pushing a shopping cart, he finally spoke up. “We’re fucked, aren’t we?”
I looked at the family in the rearview mirror. They had moved to the side of the road when we passed them. “Things sure are different now.”
He stared out the window in silence for a moment. “Just think of all the lost knowledge, things that everyone used to know how to do that now no one knows anymore.”
“It’s all still out there, in books. We’ll just have to learn it all again.” I looked over at him and smiled.
He was still looking out the window. “What good is an old one-legged man going to be? I can’t even collect firewood to heat my home or shoot limb rats for food.”
“You can still shoot limb rats. Phyllis will just have to go get them for you. As for firewood, I’ll keep you stocked, and there is one thing you can do that is very important.”
Howard looked over at me, trying not to look too interested in what I had to say.
“You have your ham rig, right? You need to spend your time listening and making notes. We need to know what is out there and what is coming our way. You can do that, can’t you?”
“I guess e
ven with only one leg I can do that.”
“I know it doesn’t look too good today, but think about the future. You can still stand guard at the barricade, can’t you? If you’re doing that, it means some of the younger guys will be freed up to plant when spring comes, stuff like that. Hell, at some point we’re gonna need a school, and a teacher. Maybe you’ll do that. Point is, we don’t know everything we’re gonna need, but we know that we’re gonna need everyone. You hear me?”
He looked over and nodded. “I hear you.”
I smiled, and he smiled back at me and asked me to stop at the barricade. Mark came up to the truck when I stopped. He said, “How ya feelin’, Howard?”
“Pretty good for someone who lost half a leg. I wanted to say thank you to you and Morgan. You guys saved my life.”
“Shoot, all I did was drive you down to the old sawbones.” Mark pointed at me and said, “He’s the one who really saved your hide.”
“It was just some first aid. I couldn’t let you lie there and bleed out.”
“Well, it saved my ass,” Howard said.
Rick called out, “There’s a motorcycle coming.”
I stepped out of the Suburban, put the sling of my carbine over my head and walked out to the road. The scooter was coming out of Altoona and was loud as hell. I’ve always heard bikers say that loud pipes save lives, but damn. The bike slowed as it got closer and coasted to a stop in the road in front of the barricade. The man sitting on it was wearing a pair of clean jeans and a leather jacket. His boots looked like Hi-Tecs or something like them. There was a rough-looking scabbard strapped to the right side of the bike with a rifle butt jutting out of it.
He sat on the bike for a moment then put the kickstand down and stepped off. He was wearing a helmet, one of the little skullcap kind, and took it off. “You guys have any clean water?” he called out.
I was standing in front of the barricade with my carbine at low ready. He wasn’t holding a firearm and was standing there with his hands on his hips. After a moment I told him we did and waved him over to the barricade and the keg kept behind it. He opened one of the hard boxes on the side of the bike and pulled out a couple of one-liter water bottles. When he was about halfway to the barricade, I asked him if he had any other weapons on him. He said that he did and opened his jacket to show a Glock in a high-ride holster on his belt.
“Is that the only one?” I asked him.
He smiled and replied, “No, there’s another one on the bike too.”
“Just keep it in the holster and we’ll be fine,” I replied.
He held his hands up in mock surrender. “No problem, man, all I want is some water. Besides, from the looks of you guys, I don’t have enough guns.”
He went over to the keg and filled his bottles. Mark came up to me as he was filling them and said he didn’t like the looks of him. I told him his cop was sticking out and laughed when he looked down at his zipper. That got me a hearty “Fuck you.” As biker dude was screwing the cap on the second bottle, I walked over to him and asked where he was coming from. He told me he had been down in Miami, but he was from Phoenix. He had come down to pick up the bike he was riding, bought online from an old Cuban dude and had come down with his truck and a trailer to pick it up when things “went to shit,” as he put it.
“How’s Miami?” I asked.
He just laughed. “Worse than ever, if you can imagine. Liberty City was on fire when I pulled out, Alpha 66 was trying to put together a navy so they could invade Cuba, and the Cubans and Haitians were in the business of wholesale murder of one another.” He said to hang on, then went to his bike and came back with a black case. When he opened it I suddenly thought I was dealing with someone a few sandwiches short of a picnic. He pulled an iPad out of the case. I kind of raised my eyebrows at him and he just smiled and hit the POWER button. To my complete astonishment, the damn thing came on. He winked and said, “Check this out.”
He played a video taken with the iPad. It was the skyline of Miami and it was burning. The view panned down and there were bodies on the road. The vantage point appeared to be from across a large canal and from at least the second floor of a building. I watched the video in total amazement as the thick black smoke billowed into the sky, and the crackle of gunfire could be heard in the background. He explained that what we were seeing was Overtown in Miami. He had been on the roof of a building watching the chaos. Miami was a cesspool; mounds of uncollected garbage were piled everywhere. Many of the residents of the city and suburbs of Miami came from third-world countries, and when the power failed and the country started to slide backward, they naturally went back to what they knew. Sewage was simply dumped into the street along with the carcasses of animals killed for food. The latter included everything from cats and dogs to chickens and iguanas.
He told me how he had watched three Haitians try to kill a donkey with a machete. The donkey had brayed and screamed when they struck it with the big blade. They had the poor creature tied to a palm tree and it fought against the rope but couldn’t escape. He said he would never forget the look on that animal’s face, how big its eyes were, wide in abject terror. At that point it was the worst thing he had ever seen in his life. He couldn’t take it and used his Mosin—he nodded his chin at the rifle on his bike—to put the animal down. He said when he shot the damn donkey, the Haitian with the machete stopped with the blade poised over his head for another strike. The man was covered in blood from his face to feet. Hearing the shot and seeing the animal drop, they simply began to cut it up.
He finished up by saying, “Hell, I’m a hunter, but that was just awful.”
I pointed as the iPad and asked, “How?”
He smiled real big and waved me over to the bike. Opening one of the boxes, he pulled away the felt from the top to reveal a copper wire mesh. I guess the look on my face was enough of a question so he went on to explain how he had some of his stuff in a Faraday cage he built. When he had had to downsize to fit everything on the bike, he took it apart and lined the box on the bike with it. I shook my head. He was pretty sharp. “Hey, what’s your name?”
He stuck his hand out and replied, “Jeff. Jeff Collins.”
I introduced myself to him and asked about his trip up. He walked over to the bike and I followed him as he spoke. I was curious why he was no farther from Miami than he was, since I had walked from Tallahassee in far less time. He told me he didn’t have any family and wasn’t in a rush to get anywhere. He was just cruising around, finding fuel where he could and getting a feel for things. He opened the box on the bike, put the iPad in and pulled out a big bag of Bazooka bubble gum, reached in and grabbed a handful and then offered it to me.
“I don’t want any, but can I take some for my kids?”
“Sure, man, help yourself,” he replied as he unwrapped a piece and stuck in his mouth, then unfolded the little comic.
I reached in, grabbed a few pieces and stuck them in my pocket. He read the comic and laughed to himself then proceeded to open four more pieces and stuff them in his mouth as well. I laughed when he looked up with a mouthful of the hard squares, trying to get them all mashed up.
“Like bubble gum?” I asked.
He swatted at a gnat that was harassing his ear and replied, “You gotta enjoy the little things in life, especially nowadays.”
“Yeah, I guess so.”
He swatted at the gnat again. “What the hell’s with these damn flies?” He said as he was trying to draw a bead on one in front of his face.
“Gotta love dog-peter gnats.”
He stopped with his fist clenched tight in front of his face, an unsuccessful attempt at capturing the pest and looked at me with one eye half-squinted. “What’d you call em?”
With that huge wad of gum lodged in his jaw, he looked like the cartoon baseball player on the bag of Big League Chew bubble gum.
“Dog-peter gn
ats. Where do you usually see the damn things?”
He folded at the waist and began to laugh. He said, “That’s funny as hell. I’ve never heard that before.”
“There’s only one surefire way to get rid of ’em.”
He chewed the wad for a moment, then asked, “How?” with more than a hint of suspicion.
“Cut a hole in the seat of your pants. Buzzing around your face is only their second choice.”
The gnats were buzzing around his head when it rolled back and he began to laugh. I watched as one of the little bastards flew right up his left nostril, like a Goldfish crumb caught in the suction of a Kirby vacuum.
What happened next startled me. He stopped in midlaugh and went to take a breath to try to snot-rocket the pest out, but the sound that came from his throat was like a half-full bathtub draining, when the little vortex of water forms and that deep-throated slurp comes up from the drain. That sound was followed immediately by the sound the little rubber stopper would make when, caught in that vortex, it found its way over the hole and plugged the flow of water.
Jeff reached up and grabbed his neck. His eyes were wide, and his mouth hung agape. I looked at him for a second before I realized he couldn’t breathe; his face was growing progressively redder, and the veins in his neck and forehead bulged. I ran around him and tried to perform the Heimlich maneuver on him to no effect. I had my arms around his midsection, jerking upward against his sternum, trying to dislodge the wad of gum in his throat. After a couple of attempts, his knees buckled and with all his weight on me, he slumped to the ground. He was still trying to get a breath, but it just wasn’t happening.
I knelt down and pounded on his back: nothing. After another brief moment, he fell to the side. Tears were dripping from his nose as he lay there on the road. Opening his mouth and holding his tongue down with my thumb, I stuck my right index finger into the back of his throat to try and get the pink mass out. All I managed was to pull a long sticky string out of his mouth. He was motionless by then. I tried a sternum rub to see if he would respond, but he was gone. I heard a scuffing sound and looked up to see Howard hobbling over. He stopped at my side looking down at the body. “Why’d you kill ’im?”