But how long do we wait? A week? Two weeks? A month? Will we have enough food and water to survive that long, especially when having to supplement our neighbors? Do we try to take them along? There’s no way we can take Ms. Murphy. She’d never make such a trek. She’s too old. And she’d probably never agree to leave her home anyway. So what do we do, just leave her here to die?
These are horrible questions, and right now, I’m not finding any answers.
Oh no, I hear people again outside.
6:14 a.m.
I’m writing this as the early-morning sky begins to brighten. I got very little sleep last night. Hardly any of us did. None of us ate well last night either, but no one seems to be hungry.
The gunfire and number of structures burning around us have continued to grow throughout the pre-dawn hours, and unlike before, the people responsible for wreaking such havoc did not recede into the shadows come daybreak. In fact, it seems like things outside have gotten worse, and continue to grow worse (if that’s even possible) as I write this.
Bullets have been hitting the side of our building all night long. We continually hear the thumps, thuds, zips, and zings of various impacts with our building’s brick façade interspersed with the occasional crack or crash of glass as a round comes in through a window. We crawl on our hands and knees whenever one of us has to use the bathroom, and we always make it a quick trip, ensuring that we keep our heads down.
Poor Violet has been crying almost non-stop throughout the night. She’s absolutely terrified.
Kate and I keep telling both her and Dylan that it’s going to be okay, but it’s hard to sound convincing with the amount of gunfire and structural fires raging around us. I wish these animals outside would just take their loot and go, but it’s almost like they want more than just stuff. It’s as though they’re rabid beasts that are wild with bloodlust. They want to shoot, to kill, and to destroy just for the thrill of it, just because they have nothing better to do and they have the opportunity to exercise their destructive prowess without restraint…just because they CAN. At this point, I’d be willing to give them everything we have if they’d just go away, but I know that wouldn’t end it. They’d take us prisoner and use us to do their bidding or just kill us outright.
I’m going to make a quick trip downstairs to check on Ms. Murphy as soon as it’s totally light outside. I’m going to take her some food and water – enough for the entire day so that I don’t have to make another trip. With the bullets flying the way they are, it’s not worth taking chances, although with the exception of the skylight at its top, the main stairwell of our condo stack is probably one of the safest and most secure spots in our entire building due to its interior location. If things get too bad, we might be forced to relocate there for tonight to reduce the chances of being struck by a stray bullet or someone seeing us.
7:47 a.m.
Ms. Murphy is no longer with us.
I went down to her unit about 10 minutes ago during a slight lull in the shooting outside. I found the poor gal in her rocking chair, set before the living room window. She’d been shot in head. There was a bullet hole in the window. I’m guessing that the stubborn woman just wouldn’t hear what I was telling her about staying away from the windows. She probably wanted to let Felix watch his birds this morning and decided these assholes outside weren’t going to deter them from their regular routine. Then, either someone saw her moving through the window or it was a ricochet or a bullet fired haphazardly that just happened to have her name on it.
There was an open jar of green olives (the same jar I had brought down to her the other day) set on the table beside her rocking chair. I’m guessing that she was feeding Felix his treats while they watched the birds. Poor thing. She didn’t deserve this. I guess none of us deserve this, but it’s what we got.
As much as it pains me to say it, Ms. Murphy’s passing does unburden me from one of those nagging questions I’d been asking myself earlier. Now I don’t have to worry about what to do with her should we try to escape the Chicagoland area. However, I find myself now being straddled with new responsibilities. I have to deal with Ms. Murphy’s remains.
While I was in her condo, I pulled the comforter from her bed and laid it out on the living room floor. Then I lifted her amazingly light body from the rocking chair and bound her inside the blanket. I’ll deal with taking her outside later, hopefully once things calm down.
I also found Felix. He was hiding under her bed. Using a few olives, I was able to coax him out and into his cat carrier that I discovered in the bedroom closet. I brought him and his cat box up to our condo. The old fellow is currently sniffing around, exploring his new digs. Dylan and Violet are super excited to have him here. I hope he will be a nice distraction in what otherwise has become a very shitty situation for them. Other than a few gold fish that died last year, they’ve never had a real pet, and it makes me feel good to see them happy again. I still need to go back downstairs and get the rest of Felix’s cat litter, but I think I’ll save that for later.
Right now, I’m going to cook up one of our cans of corned beef hash to go with our cereal this morning. We haven’t had much meat lately, and I think everyone is craving a little protein in their diet.
I find it somewhat hard to believe I’m thinking about food at a time like this. I just dealt with the dead body of one of our neighbors. Sadly, I think I’m beginning to become hardened to this new life and way of living.
We’re starting to run into another issue now that we’ve been without utility services for some time now – clean clothes. Because we’ve been unable to shower regularly, and we’ve been left to the whim of the warm summer temperatures, our clothing (especially socks and underwear) are becoming soiled faster than normal. I’m not sure exactly what we’re going to do about it. I guess we could take some of the water we drained from our hot water tank, fill a couple buckets like we do for our bathing, and wash our clothes. We can open the window and hang them up to dry in the kitchen once things calm down outside. But I really don’t want to use our valuable water resources for such non-essential purposes. I’ve asked everyone to try to extend their clothing wear for as long as possible, but at some point, we’re going to have to break down and wash at least some socks and underwear once we run out of clean replacements. For right now, we’re left just putting the worst of our soiled items into several big garbage bags that we keep tied shut.
And now I’m off to play chef for the family (and Brenda and Bradley). Dylan and Violet want to help me since they’re going bat-shit crazy looking for things to do, but I think I’ll leave them to play with Felix. It’s not much, but I’m willing to give about anything a chance to distract them from what’s going on outside. We’ve been doing our best to find activities to take their minds off things, but it’s kind of hard to concentrate when the world is falling apart around you.
11:03 a.m.
Something is going on outside. I can’t tell exactly what it is, but it’s occurring on the other side of the building. We heard a large bang over there a few minutes ago, and now we can see smoke rising from the alley on that side of the building. There’s also some smoke starting to filter out the broken window of a third floor unit across the courtyard from us. This is very disconcerting because if a fire has started over there, it could spread and threaten to consume the entire building. I really don’t want to go over there, but I can’t see that I have much of a choice. If I don’t, we could face being burned out of our home and lose not just our safe haven but all our supplies. Plus, then where will we go? We’ll be forced into the midst of the chaos currently swirling around us.
12:14 p.m.
Kate is working on my leg as I write this. I’ll try to provide a brief rundown of what I just went through while she cleans and bandages my injuries. Hopefully the writing will help keep my mind off the pain.
After seeing the smoke coming from third-floor unit across the courtyard from us, I decided I needed to put out any potenti
al fire brewing within. I grabbed the small fire extinguisher from under our kitchen sink, got my .38 (that I’m now keeping on top of the bookshelf in our main corridor so that it’s away from the kids but readily available), and gave Bradley the loaded shotgun. I told him to cover me from the window and explained that I was going to make a mad dash from our front entrance, out across the courtyard, and over to the front entrance of the stack that contained the smoking unit. There, I planned to shoot through the glass entry door, make my way upstairs, and hopefully put out the fire. Writing it down now on paper, it looks like a pretty piss-poor plan, so I’m not surprised it didn’t work.
The first obstacle I encountered was our stairwell entry door that I’d covered with plywood. I had Kate come down and help me temporarily unseal it. After we got the plywood off, I sent Kate back upstairs to barricade herself and the rest of the family inside our condo.
The next problem I came up against was making it unnoticed across the courtyard and to the other side of the building. After unlocking our foyer door, I hadn’t taken more than a few steps outside before I was met with gunfire from the street. I heard Bradley fire the shotgun, but it was no use. The shooting from the street kept up, stopping my progress and driving me back inside our entry foyer.
Once inside, I quickly relocked the foyer door and made my way back to the stairwell. Kate hadn’t even made it all the way upstairs by the time I’d returned, so she came back down and helped me get the piece of plywood screwed back in place.
I was then faced with finding a new way to get over to that side of the building. It was then that it hit me – the roof access.
I feel like such an idiot now. I should have thought of it first thing. The roof access is comprised of a steel rung ladder built into the bricks that form one wall of our rear stairwell. The ladder is found almost directly outside our back door. It leads to an unlocked hatch in the ceiling with have access to the entire rooftop that is completely flat.
Kate and I headed back upstairs where Brenda (who we’d left to watch the kids) and Bradley let us back inside the condo. Once back inside, Dylan helped me hurriedly un-barricaded the rear door while Kate, Brenda, and Bradley re-barricaded the front. I was up on the roof in probably less than two minutes. The hardest part of climbing up the steel-rung ladder was hauling the fire extinguisher along with me. I had to pull myself up the ladder with one hand while holding the fire extinguisher with the other. At the top of the ladder, I had to balance the extinguisher on the rung I was standing on, leaning it against the wall, while I unlatched the roof access hatch and pushed it open.
Once I was on the rooftop, I did a crouched run across the back end of our building and around to the street-facing tip of our U-shaped structure. There, I had to figure out a way back inside the building. My first thought was to climb down the side of the building and go in through a window. But I figured that could be time consuming and dangerous, plus, I would expose myself to gunfire from the street. It was then that I noticed the central stairwell skylight belonging to this particular stack of condo units. I made my way over to the skylight and peeked down through the glass to make sure no one was beneath it in the stairwell below. There was smoke in the stairwell but not so much that I couldn’t see. Other than that, it appeared empty. At first, I tried to break the skylight’s glass with the fire extinguisher. But after a few failed attempts at bashing it, I quickly realized the glass was harder to smash than I anticipated. It was then that I thought of the .38 pistol I had shoved into my waistband while climbing to the roof.
OUCH! Oh man, that really hurt. Kate just dabbed at the cut on my leg with an alcohol-soaked cotton ball. I haven’t felt pain like that since I broke my leg playing high school football.
Anyway, back to the skylight. Before I did anything else, I went to the building’s edge and checked the alley by the trash receptacles. It looked as though someone had blasted open one of the entry doors to the building. The area around the door was still smoldering. But otherwise, the alley was devoid of people. I was hoping that this meant the interior of this portion of the building was clear as well, but I wasn’t taking it for granted. I then hustled back to the skylight where I aimed my gun, pulled the trigger once, then moved my aim about a foot to the right of the first bullet impact and squeezed off another round. The rounds passed easily through, cracking the glass but not shattering it. Then I stuck the gun back in my waistband, picked up the fire extinguisher, and used it to smash out the skylight’s glass. With the skylight clear, I dropped the fire extinguisher through the open hole. It landed with a heavy thud on the stairwell landing below. I landed with a thud just beside it, but that’s not how I hurt my leg. In fact, I was feeling pretty pleased with myself by this point in my little adventure. I’d gotten to the site of the fire unnoticed and successfully made my way back inside the building. And I had the means to fight whatever was burning with a larger fire extinguisher that I had commandeered from the stairwell wall.
The door to the unit with the suspected fire was closed. I could see dark gray smoke seeping from around it, but I remained confident. It wasn’t until I entered the unit – the door to which was unlocked – my .38 in one hand, a fire extinguisher in the other, that I realized my folly. I had assumed that since something was burning inside, the unit would be devoid of people.
It wasn’t.
As soon as I entered the condo’s living room, I saw a couch smoldering against the far wall. It was the only thing that was burning. But it wasn’t the smoking couch that grabbed my attention as much as the person coming toward me from the kitchen. He looked to be in his mid-20s and was carrying a cardboard box that was filled with canned goods. At first, I thought it was the unit owner, but the automatic rifle slung over his shoulder said otherwise.
We both stopped dead in our tracks, me in the center of the living room, him near the exit of the kitchen about 15 feet from me. We eyed each other for a fraction of a second before we each went for our weapons. He made the first move, but it took him longer because he was still holding the box of food. He also had to maneuver his gun, which was slung part way around his back, around in front of him, get a grip on it, and fire. He tried doing this while at the same time not dropping the box of supplies he held. Meanwhile I already had my .38 out and in hand.
I only fired twice because I’d already used two bullets to shoot out the skylight and just had four left in the gun. One of my shots went wide, but the other one hit the guy in the arm, causing him to fumble his assault rifle. Apparently it did enough damage so that he gave up any further attempt at firing back at me. Instead, he threw the box of food at me. It hit me in the chest causing me to drop the fire extinguisher as I tried to half catch, half block it. Meanwhile, the guy made a break for it, bolting past me and through the front door. There was no way I was going to go after him. I was just relieved to see him disappear into the hallway and down the front stairs.
With the intruder gone, I recovered the fire extinguisher and quickly put out the smoldering sofa. Once the fire was out, I had no desire to remain in the unit any longer than necessary. I briefly contemplated gathering the box of food that the guy had thrown at me. But I was afraid that if he or any of the people that might be with him came back for the items and found them missing, rather than just taking them and leaving, they’d instead come looking for whoever had removed them – ME! Therefore, I left them there.
I then realized the new dilemma facing me – how to safely get out of the stack of condo units I was in and back to my own. I certainly didn’t want to follow the guy I’d shot, since not only might I meet up with him again, but I’d have to cross the courtyard. Plus, even if I did make it back across the courtyard without being shot, I’d be locked out of my own unit stack and would have to break through the barriers I’d put in place. Otherwise, I had the option of going down the rear stairway, but that would lead me out to the exposed side alley. Then I’d have to go around to the alley behind our building to get to our own stack’s rear en
trance. And even though I hadn’t seen anyone down there, it didn’t mean they weren’t lurking somewhere. This left me with what I felt was my best option – going back up and out the skylight through which I’d entered. The problem was, the skylight was a good 12 feet above the stairwell landing. It wasn’t hard to drop down through it, but getting back up and out of it was another story. However, after some quick thinking, I came up with a plan.
I pushed a desk inside the unit out into the hallway. It wasn’t high enough to get me as far up as I needed to be to climb through the skylight, so I got a wooden chair and put it on top. This was my error. The chair wasn’t as balanced as I thought, and it kicked out from under me as I reached for the skylight opening. I landed awkwardly on the stairwell landing, right on top of the toppled chair, smashing it. In so doing, part of the jagged broken chair stabbed me in the leg like a spear.
While it was a bad injury, it wasn’t so debilitating that I couldn’t re-attempt my escape. This time around, I found a sturdier, more stable step stool that gave me the elevation I needed to pull myself up through the skylight and make it (albeit limping badly) back down to our condo.
And now, Kate has my leg cleaned and wrapped. She put plenty of antibiotic ointment on it to reduce the chance of it getting infected. With the way things are now, and not having the ability to get medical attention or even see a doctor, the last thing I need is an infection. In this sort of environment, I now realize that even a simple scratch, left without proper care, could be a death sentence. Violet is sitting here with me, holding my free hand while I write (little sweetheart, she’s so worried about her Daddy).
The Pandemic Diaries [Books 1-3] Page 10