Ferryman

by Jonathon Wise

  He continued to watch as the current grabbed hold of her burial cocoon and carried her down river. The rolled quilt soaked up the murky waters and sank until only the very top of it was visible above the rippling water. Like the current flowing to the ocean to become a part of something much larger than itself, so too did his wife.

  As he watched her disappear behind the shimmer of the reflecting sun, other bodies began to break into his peripheral vision and something instinctual took over. Without a word or pause, he climbed back in his truck and drove to the house he broke into several days ago—the house where the husband and wife died in each other’s arms on the sofa. He carefully placed them in the bed of his truck, and drove back to the boat ramp and provided them as respectful of a burial as he could. As soon as they floated off, he drove back to the house where he saw the fat man and the dog. Man and animal alike, he gave them both a proper burial.

  Sweating profusely in the summer heat, he climbed in the truck and turned on the air conditioner. While he relaxed under the refreshing breeze, he prepared himself for who he owed the next burial to. A few minutes later he was up the hill and taking a left on Arlington. Everything looked just as it did the other night when he dropped by but didn’t knock. The drapes were still closed and when he tried the door he found it locked.

  The second hard thrust of his foot against the door sent the deadbolt bursting through the jamb. As soon as he was in he headed straight for the basement. Stan had told him that he would shoot anyone that came in uninvited, so Chuck yelled down the stairs just to be safe. “Hey buddy…it’s me…Chuck.” He took a few cautious steps down and yelled again, “Hey don’t go shooting your only friend.” After no answer, he continued down as he yelled once more, “Coming down!”

  Stan’s basement had three small windows along the back of the house and two along the side opposite the garage. Together they provided enough light during the day to see most everything except for the very corners of the room. Out of habit, Chuck took a few steps toward the pool table, half expecting Stan to be standing there with a grin on his face, a cue in one hand, and a Miller in the other. But he wasn’t. The area around the pool table was cleared. The lawn chairs were gone and so was the little refrigerator. His skin began to tingle as he closed his eyes and slowly turned to look under the stairs.

  A felt blanket nailed to the outside runner of the stairs, stood between Chuck and what he would find behind it. After a moment of hesitation, he walked over and slowly pulled it back. Twenty minutes later he was headed back down to the boat ramp with Stan, Margery and two room temperature Millers. He sent Margery off first with a nice prayer and an apology for not getting to know her better. When it came time to say goodbye to his lifelong friend, he said a prayer and then twisted the cap off one of the beers. He drained it under the heat of the sun and then flung the empty into the river. Then he took the other bottle and held it against Stan’s chest for a second before flinging it unopened out into the river. He smiled as he kneeled next to his friend and pushed him into the water. “You won old buddy.”

  After he took his sweat-drenched shirt off and wiped his face, he got back in the truck and headed for the body of a man he saw a block down from his store. This man was different than the rest. He didn’t commit suicide or die from the plague; someone blew the back of his head off. An uneasy feeling started to come over him as he got out of the truck and walked over to where the ants were working feverishly on the remains. Something about the man or the way he died raised the hairs on the back of Chuck’s neck. “Who shot you? Why?” For a reason he couldn’t remember, he started to reach down to touch the asphalt next to the man and suddenly stopped. He looked over at the parking meter across the street. That was as much as he wanted to think about it. He scooped the man up and carried him over to the truck.

  He continued the burial process as the sun swept across the sky. After a few more individual trips, he started picking up as many households as he could fit in the truck. There were so many to seeing too. He labored under the physical strain of loading adults in his truck as well as the mental strain of caring to the bodies of children and infants.

  The plague wasn’t the only cause of death. There were also those who thought it was better to end life on their own terms. Evidence in one home pointed to a mother drowning her children in the bathtub and then laying their bodies out on the bed before taking her own life.

  However life came to an end, everyone deserved a proper burial—or at least as proper as he could give. He continued to work until he started stumbling over furniture in the dark. With his stomach growling he called it a day and headed back up the hill. He was about to pass Arlington when he locked up the brakes and skidded to a stop in the middle of Michigan. The shine of his high-beams over the dark road reminded him that he didn’t have anything at home to see by. Thankfully his old buddy Stan did down in his basement. He backed up, turned down Stan’s street, and a minute later he was fumbling his way through the dark in Stan’s house heading for the basement. He found the soft touch of the felt blanket, pulled it back and tried to remember where he had seen everything in the day. After a few fumbled stabs in the dark he found one of the flashlights.

  Stan had done a good job preparing for the worst, even better than what he had shown Chuck the other day. But that was Stan—he never did anything half-ass. Besides the canned goods, bottled water, and pump shotgun that Chuck knew about, Stan also had two lanterns with plenty of kerosene, and best of all—a brand new generator from the local Sears.

  After he got the lanterns going, he kept one in the basement and set the other on the kitchen table where it lit up both the kitchen and the living room. He backed the Chevy up to the front porch and started loading supplies. The generator was the heaviest so it was the last to load. It would have been a strain for two men to carry up the stairs and was nearly impossible for him alone. But he did.

  Since the garage door at his home was broken he wouldn’t have to worry about carbon monoxide building up in the house. That made it the natural choice for the generator. He dragged it over to the patio door at the rear of the garage, and then ran an extension cord from it through the kitchen door to the refrigerator.

  After a quick read of the instructions, he primed the motor and set the choke. He hit the start button. Nothing happened. He tried again and then checked to make sure the cap was firmly seated on the spark plug. After another try and failure, it dawned on him. He unscrewed the gas cap and looked in the tank. “Shit!” Luckily there was still a gallon left in the can for the lawn mower, so he dumped that in the tank and on the second try the generator kicked over and started up.

  Like an excited child, he ran into the kitchen and swung the refrigerator door open. There was light. A quick smell of the milk told him that he had saved the food from spoiling. But he needed more gas. He threw the empty one-gallon can in the front seat and headed for the gas station at the corner of 62 and Michigan.

  For a few seconds he did nothing as he held the gas nozzle in the small can with the trigger squeezed. He heard nothing, he felt nothing coming out, but still he stood. As if he were afraid that gas would suddenly start shooting out, he slowly pulled the nozzle out of the can and looked at it. He tried resetting the pump, squeezing the trigger, and strangling the nozzle with both hands, and still nothing worked. That’s when it hit him. No electricity to power the pump meant there would be no gas to power the generator. “Damn it!” He slammed the nozzle into the pump slot and thought. A second later a grin flashed across his face and he jumped back in the truck.

  There was a hardware store a couple of blocks down 62 on the left. He broke through the plate glass door and started rummaging through the dark shelves with his flashlight. After a few minutes he hit pay dirt—a hand operated pump. He grabbed two of them and found the largest crowbar and bolt cutter in the store. On his way to throw them in the truck he spotted the display of five-gallon gas cans. He grabbed four before heading back to the gas station.
>
  Access to the buried tank wasn’t going to be easy but with the possibility of ten thousand gallons of gasoline waiting for him, he wasn’t going to be deprived. He put all his weight into the crowbar, and after a long, strenuous pull, the locked cap finally snapped off. A few minutes later gasoline was being drawn up through the hose and pumped into one of the cans. The process, while simple enough, was laborious to perform. The repetitive motion of turning the crank on the pump was getting to him by the time he topped off the first five gallon can. Nonetheless he kept at it until all four cans were full.

  After he filled the tank on the generator, he ran back to the hardware store and got enough electrical cable to wire the generator to the main service panel in the garage. The generator probably couldn’t support the water heater, but it would give him enough power to keep the refrigerator going as well as light most of the house.

  Chapter 20

  Chuck was back at it the next day. Hours turned into days and days into weeks as he spent most of the daylight hours taking those he could find down to the river. It was exhausting, yet it occupied his thoughts and that was what he needed most.

  When it was too dark to care for the departed properly, he collected supplies and cleaned the house. Water wasn’t an immediate issue. The public water tower could be seen above the tree line on the other side of Michigan just a few blocks down. He didn’t know how full it was, but at least he didn’t have to worry about how to get the water out. The tower used gravity and pressure buildup through pipe reduction to supply water to over half the houses in town, including his. So as long as there was water in the tower, his faucets would work just fine.

  After a few frustrating days of continuously running back up to the gas station to refill the 5-gallon cans, he set his mind to finding a solution. Using a gasoline powered transfer pump he took from the Public Works office, he was able to quickly fill several 55-gallon drums he found in one of the local plants. A forklift made it possible to transport the drums down Michigan to his garage. After some rather imaginative plumbing and a little tinkering, he ended up with six drums hooked up in a series that provided the generator a 330-gallon reservoir. That meant it could go for weeks unmanned.

  As soon as he finished improving his fuel storage, he turned his attention to the potential buildup of exhaust gases. He replaced one of the window panes in the patio door with a piece of plywood. Once that was secure, he cut a four-inch round hole and ran a flexible dryer vent hose from that to an insulated coupling he put on the generator’s exhaust port. That would take care of the exhaust gases as long as he didn’t open any of the windows on the back of the house. The only other task left to do was replace the garage door panels.

  Even though most of the stores were ransacked prior to the mass death, everything he needed could be found in the houses around town. Most homes had a cache of supplies similar to what he found in Stan’s basement. There was enough chili, beef stew, tuna, soup, peanut butter and the like to last a couple of years if it didn’t go bad first. To minimize the potential of that happening, he sorted the food by expiration date and began to plan his meals around which expired first.

  The only real problem he had was in finding a long-term supply of drinking water. He had counted well over one hundred cases of bottled water and almost a hundred 5-gallon jugs in various locations around town. But he was still concerned because he had no idea how much water remained in the tower. He could always climb the ladder on the side of the tower and cut off the access lock. But the thought of dangling seventy-five feet above ground kept that option in the ‘when hell freezes over’ category. In any case, he knew the supply wouldn’t last forever. He needed to do two things. First was to conserve water. This meant fewer, more efficient showers and perhaps even a few baths replaced by a dip in one of the neighbor’s swimming pools. The second was that he needed to find a way to increase his potable water supply. That could mean collecting rainwater, finding a farmhouse with a well, learning how to distill water, or even building a purification system. He chose to carefully consider them all.

  The library down on Main was a wealth of information. He read books, magazines and manuals, anything that would help him understand how to do what needed to be done. Hours were spent perusing the Popular Mechanics and Science periodicals. He read how to use windmills for power generation and how batteries stored electricity. He read about water purification and techniques for collecting condensation. He also read up on farming. Crops that were most tolerant to climatic conditions and infestation were of particular interest.

  It occurred to him that he’d never really taken the time to read before, at least not if he could find anything on television. Since the idiot box was no longer an option, reading was the only thing left to keep his mind off being alone. He would take what he learned in the library and apply it to one of his projects in the garage. Along with collecting supplies he also managed to build up quite a collection of tools and machining equipment. He had all the basic woodworking and mechanics tools, as well as an acetylene torch and electrical spot welder.

  The hours just after sunset were used for keeping up the condition of their house. Each time he cleaned something he would stand back and take a look at it. He would squint and evaluate what he had done through her eyes—would it have been clean enough for his Becky. If he shook his head no, he would get back to it and do it all over again. This newfound desire in maintaining the appearance of their house wasn’t limited to just the inside. He set some of the daylight hours aside for keeping the grass mowed and touching up any places where the paint was starting to peel. As the days and weeks continued to pass, the neighbor’s yards grew into a gangly mess of knee high grass and weeds. It wasn’t long before his house started to look more like it was planted smack-dab in the middle of an overgrown field than in a residential neighborhood. But that didn’t bother him. As long as he had a street to park his recently acquired Corvettes, SUVs, Cadillacs, and his Harley on, he didn’t care.

  One day while he was raking autumn leaves in the front yard he was startled by a thundering boom in the distance. He froze and listened to the dissipating echo. It might have been thunder, but it sounded more like an explosion. He threw the rake down and sprinted into the house with his heart pounding. A second later he burst out the door and jumped off the porch with the keys to his Harley, his hunting rifle, and a pistol. In one seamless movement, he straddled the bike, started it up and kicked up the gravel around the drive as he shot out toward Michigan. With a look of panic on his face, he took a left on 421 and buried the needle of the speedometer as he sped north toward Versailles.

  He left in such a hurry that he didn’t bother to grab his backpack. The pack was his lifeline. It held a hand pump, necessary tools and crowbar for popping off locked caps, a flashlight and flares, binoculars, compass, matches and a small revolver with a box of shells. Besides the hunting rifle, it was the one thing he never intended to leave home without.

  A few hours later he motored back into town at half the posted speed limit. The features of his face appeared hard as he stared straight ahead with his lips pressed together. He went with the hope that the sound would lead him to another survivor. But the trip netted nothing. He never found the source of the sound or saw another living soul. All it did was reinforce his belief that he was the only man left alive on the planet.

  He turned down his street unable to shake the heavy weight of dejection. As he hit the end of his driveway, he gave the bike some gas and slid off the back. The Harley squirreled on the gravel shoulder for twenty feet, then flipped over onto its side and slid into the ditch. Chuck didn’t look—didn’t care. In fact at that very moment he didn’t care much about anything as he trudged up the driveway and went inside.

  He stomped through the living room and pulled up in the kitchen. For over a minute he stared at the clean shelves and tidy stacks of canned food. Everything was so damn neat. Everything was so damn clean. A person wouldn’t even realize that everyone was
dead by the looks of his house. Chuck knew different. A quick glance out the window to the overgrown weeds in the neighborhood was quick proof that indeed—everyone else was dead.

  A panic started to creep up from the pit of stomach as his nostrils began to flare. He had to get out of there. He snatched the keys to the Cadillac off the table. A few heavy strides later the front door slammed against the wall.

  There was only one place he could go. He needed a friendly environment where he could relax and get numb. He hadn’t even thought about drinking, let alone setting foot in the Broadway Tavern since it all came to an end. But that was no longer the case. The Cadillac fish-tailed onto Main and then accelerated to sixty-five within two blocks before squealing to a stop in the middle of Broadway. That’s where Chuck left it as he jumped out and kicked the tavern door open.

  Once inside, he spotted the salvation he came for. They were the 750ml bottles behind the bar. He grabbed a bottle of Jack off the shelf and a shot glass off the counter. He plopped down on his regular stool and hurriedly poured a shot of whisky. His fingers eased around the wet glass, but before he could throw his head back and slam down the drink, he looked at his lone reflection in the mirror. The place was dark and lifeless. Stan wasn’t there. None of the regulars that had become friends over the years were there either. No one was.