The Enduring: Stories of Surviving the Apocalypse

by Nicholas Ryan

  “That’s my daughter, Danni,” she said. There was pride in her voice, underlying a sad smile. Kate’s lips trembled and the expression on her face became a mix of happiness and tears.

  “And the man?”

  “My husband, Mike.”

  “How old was Danni?” It was only immediately after I had asked the question that I realized what I had said. For some unknown reason I had referred to her daughter in past tense.

  Kate looked at me like maybe I was psychic.

  “How did you know…?” her voice dropped to a whisper of shock.

  I said nothing. I felt my face flushing with color and suddenly the room became very small and very quiet. I could hear a clock ticking somewhere in the background, the sound almost ominous.

  For long moments Kate said nothing. She turned away from me and ran her eyes distractedly over a bookcase filled with horror novels and old movies. When she turned back, she had composed herself. The tears were gone, but so was the laughter. Her face was ashen, and her eyes had lost their sheen.

  “Danni died in the Apocalypse,” Kate said like she was reciting the words in a monologue.

  “I’m truly sorry,” I said.

  Kate nodded. “That’s why we have her photos on the wall.”

  “And the other children?”

  “My other kids – Dena and John.”

  “They survived?”

  “Yes. John is sixteen. He was attending junior high school and had just finished a college course in Criminal Justice at Mid Maine Tech. It was just a few blocks from our house. The building is still standing… John made it home before the world went to hell.”

  “And your daughter, Dena?”

  “She is a freshman at the University of Orono in Maine… or at least she was before the Apocalypse. She was getting her degree in Biochemistry.”

  I furrowed my brow. “Where is the University?”

  “About forty-five minutes away from Waterville. Dena hid out at a friend’s house for two days when the outbreak first spread across Maine, and then my husband went to fetch her.”

  “Where is she now?”

  “She’s back with her friends from the University,” Kate said, disapproving. “A couple of her girlfriends. They’re making their own way through this new world,” she shrugged with a perplexed expression on her face. “Kids, right?”

  I smiled in sympathy. I had no children, but I could imagine a parent’s frustration.

  “You must worry about her.”

  “Every damned day,” Kate said bluntly. “But what can you do except give them the space they need to be independent and at the same time offer a safety net of support to catch them… when they fall.”

  “But Danni…? Can you tell me what happened?”

  Kate lowered herself into a chair by the bookcase and took a long time to collect herself. Through the window behind her I could see the devastated ruin of the neighboring house. It looked as though it had been demolished. The roof had collapsed in upon the structure and only part of one wall remained.

  “Danni got caught up in the chaos when the ‘Afflicted’ suddenly appeared at the end of our street,” Kate said. She wasn’t looking at me. Her eyes were on the wall of photographs as if seeing them made the memory of her daughter more vivid. “She was at a neighbors house. There was an explosion – one of the homes somewhere past the intersection,” Kate pointed vaguely. “Danni went out onto the street to investigate.”

  “You saw this, Kate?”

  “Yes. I was standing on the porch. The sound of the explosion shook the old house down to its foundations. Mike and I went out to investigate and that was when we saw Danni. She was standing in the middle of the road. Her back was turned to us. She was looking off into the distance where smoke was rising. She had one hand up to her face – I remember it so clearly.”

  I wrote down Kate’s recollection in the notebook, keeping my head bowed over the pages as if it might somehow make it easier for Kate if she felt like I was not in the room. Her voice became remote as though she were narrating some event that was disconnected from her emotionally.

  I said nothing. I just waited. The ticking clock filled in the long silence until Kate spoke again.

  “I called out to her as loudly as I could, but she didn’t seem to hear. By then there were more explosions and we heard gunfire. It might have been the military. It might have been local folks defending their homes. Mike shouted out to her.”

  “Did she hear?”

  “Yes,” Kate whispered. “She turned and started to run towards home. She was running as fast as she could. Her face. I remember her face. It was filled with panic and fear. Her mouth was open. Maybe she was screaming,” Kate shook her head and wrung her hands in her lap. “I’ll never know,” she muttered. “Because suddenly a car came around the corner, skidding out of control. It slid across the road, smashed into someone’s front fence and then ran Danni down.”

  I gaped in silent shock. I stopped writing and slowly lifted my face. Kate’s eyes were waiting for me. We stared at each other.

  “She was killed instantly?” I asked in a small compassionate voice of sympathy.

  “Yes.” Kate nodded. “The driver never stopped. His car ran out of control and he swerved into the house right beside us. The car exploded and the house caught fire.”

  “Were there people inside the home?”

  Kate shook her head and blew out her cheeks with a long exhalation of breath. “No. The Kings had left the day before. Stephen took his wife and kids and fled to Canada.”

  “What about your other neighbors?” I remembered the ruined houses on both sides.

  Kate looked suddenly scornful. “Never spoke to the other couple that lived on that side of us,” her voice filled with acrimony. “They weren’t the socializing kind. Kept to themselves.”

  “And Danni?” I tried to bring the conversation back to the sensitive issue of her daughter. Kate sniffed and gnawed on her bottom lip like she was chewing up words. “Mike went out and brought her home.”

  It was all she would say. Her eyes glazed over and though I waited for more, Kate would utter not a single other word about what happened to her youngest child. After a long tense silence I folded my notebook and tucked it into my pocket. Kate saw me, and some of the strain went out of her. She got up out of the chair and led me through the downstairs of the house. A breath of crisp morning air came through the back door, stirring the curtains across the windows.

  A cat scurried under my feet, and then another one. Kate scooped up one of the cats into her arms and scratched the animal under its chin. “This is actually what I was doing when we first heard about the Apocalypse,” Kate smiled wistfully. “I was feeding my cats.”

  “How many do you have?”

  “Five.”

  “That’s a lot of extra mouths to feed, isn’t it, especially given the food shortages?”

  Kate shrugged her shoulders like it was a question she never considered before. “We grow a few vegetables, and Mike is a hunter,” Kate said. “And the cats…? Well they feed themselves. Rats, Mr. Culver,” she gave me a mirthless little smile that almost looked menacing. “There are lots of them since the Apocalypse.”

  I said nothing. Kate put the cat back on the floor and it disappeared into a dark corner beneath a piece of furniture.

  “I was in the kitchen when I heard a terrible pounding on the front door,” Kate picked up the retelling of her story without missing a beat.

  “And you went to investigate?”

  “Yes. Mike was upstairs, and so were the kids. I went to the front door suspiciously because I thought it might have been someone trying to break in. It was, in a way.”

  “What do you mean?” I became curious.

  “It was our mailman. He was hammering on the front door with his fist. He was screaming. Not in pain, and not in anger. He was screaming in fear. I could see him through the side window.”

  “So you let him inside?”

&nbs
p; “No,” Kate shook her head like I was crazy. “I pulled the door open and he was screaming that the ‘Afflicted’ were coming. He was bleeding and there was a terrible gash on one of his forearms.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I called Mike downstairs. He checked the news on the internet.”

  “That wasn’t the first you heard of the Apocalypse – was it?”

  “No,” Kate’s tone turned scornful. “We get the news, Mr. Culver – even all the way up here in Maine. We knew what was happening. We had been following the updates for days. We just never thought it would spread this far, or into Canada. We thought we were safe.”

  “What happened when you realized that Maine was being overrun? Where did you flee to?”

  Again Kate’s face went through a myriad of expressions; puzzlement, confusion and then finally settled into bemusement.

  “We didn’t flee anywhere, Mr. Culver,” her voice lifted into a lilt of mocking derision. “We stayed right here. We defended our home.”

  “Just you, your husband and your two teenage children?”

  Kate nodded her head. “My husband is a retired police officer for the city of Waterville. He is also retired Navy; a sonar man and a diver on a nuclear submarine for six years. He knows how to fight and make it hurt against the living. The undead were easier.”

  I stood back from Kate a little to give myself some time and space to process this. The Sellar home was the only one standing on the entire block – in the entire suburb, for that matter. They had lost their young daughter, Danni, but had fought off the ‘Afflicted’. All this without any apparent preparation, stockpile of weapons or food supplies.

  It was almost unbelievable.

  “Is your husband home?” I asked Kate. “I’d like to meet him.”

  She shook her head. “I don’t expect him back until sometime tomorrow,” she explained. “He left with John, my son, at sunrise. They’ve gone hunting.”

  I was disappointed. Mike Sellar sounded like a formidable character.

  I turned on my heel and went back through the house, out the front door, and stood on the sidewalk, trying to see the Sellar home from an objective viewpoint. The home was unremarkable. The doors were not reinforced. The windows at the front and side of the home were unusually high off the ground but as I walked around to the back of the property I saw two full size windows of glass panes that were unbroken. There was only a front and back exit to the home. I stood with my hands on my hips, utterly disbelieving. Kate came out through the rear door of the house and stood beside me.

  “Did you have guns in the home?” I scratched my head.

  Kate almost laughed. “All Mainers are gun owners, Mr. Culver,” she said elusively. “We’re no exception.”

  I nodded. “So you had guns and what? Knives?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you need to use the knives?”

  “No.”

  Kate was being deliberately vague suddenly, keeping the details of her family’s remarkable tale of survival shrouded in mystery. I went back to the side of the house and saw black scorch marks on the walls where fire had licked at the siding but never caught hold. “Okay,” I shrugged in defeat. I could see no apparent reasoning why this Maine family had survived the ravages of the ‘Affliction’ when so many others had not. “Then please tell me how you did it. How did you and your husband protect your kids and keep your home safe?”

  Kate took my notepad out of my hand and flipped through the sheath of pages until she found a blank space. She wrote in the book, then tore a separate page out and wrote something else. I looked down at the notebook.

  There were just three letters, capitalized.

  ‘DFL’.

  I looked up at Kate, perplexed. “DFL? What does that mean? Is it a code – something military?”

  Kate said nothing. She finished writing the note on the page she had torn from my book and then stuffed the piece of paper deep into the pocket of the pants she wore.

  “Are you hungry, Mr. Culver?” she changed the subject. “We have a couple of tins of tomatoes in the cupboard.”

  I followed Kate back inside the house, frustrated. She opened the tins of tomato and poured them into a saucepan. On the sink was a tarnished gas burner. She lit the gas and heated up the meager meal.

  We sat at the table together and ate in silence. Two of the cats came from the shadows, winding themselves around my legs, purring. Kate applied herself to her food with studious dedication. She didn’t once look up at me until her fork was clattering on the bottom of her plate. “Better?”

  I nodded. “Yes. Thanks.” I appreciated the hospitality. It was just two cans of tomatoes, but in a world of food shortages it was a veritable banquet. I forgave Kate some of her frustrating obstruction for just a few minutes. I sensed she was a kind and decent person. I sensed she loved her family and her town. Maybe she was being vague because I was an outsider. Perhaps that’s how Mainers did things; kept their secrets close to their chests.

  My instincts told me I would learn little else from continuing the interview.

  I glanced out through the window. It was still morning. I sat back in the chair, weary from the long drive north to Maine and reluctant to start back south with only half an interview.

  Kate was watching me from across the table with a veiled expression on her face. She would have made a fine poker player.

  “What else would you like to know?” she clasped her hands in front of her and set them on the tabletop like an attentive student in a classroom.

  “Apart from how you survived?”

  Kate inclined her head.

  I thought for a moment and then threw out a question without any expectation of an answer. “Did the ‘Afflicted’ actually reach your home? Did you come in contact with any of the undead?”

  “Yes,” Kate nodded. She snatched off her glasses and polished the lenses on the tail of her shirt. She was frowning. She set the spectacles back on the end of her nose and sighed.

  “It was on that first day – the day that Danni was run over and killed,” her voice suddenly became dread filled. “They came in the afternoon – a horde of them – a mass of wild bodies moving without co-ordination, rampaging down the street.”

  “How many?”

  Kate shrugged and shook her head. “I don’t know. Twenty? Maybe thirty? They were shrieking, covered in filth and gore and blood. They were disfigured, bleeding from wounds or dragging broken limbs.”

  “And they came to the house?” suddenly the world seemed very hushed. Kate stared at me from across the table.

  “No,” she said. “Further along the road, a car pulled out of the driveway from one of the houses. It reversed in a screech of rubber and smoke, and then hurtled towards the intersection. It crashed into the ‘Afflicted’. I saw several of them thrown over the hood of the car, one went under the wheels.”

  “It was a neighbor driving?”

  “With his family,” Kate nodded and clarified. “I don’t know who they were. They had only moved to Waterville a few weeks before the ‘Affliction’ began to spread. The car went up onto the sidewalk and then crashed into the front yard of a house on the corner. The undead went after it. They were baying like wild animals, thrashing to get to the people inside the vehicle.”

  “What did you do?”

  “Mike had his hunting rifle,” Kate made a pained face. She was uncomfortable talking about this. I could see the tension creep into her body, starting with her hands and tightening in her shoulders. I sat back in the chair and lowered my voice.

  “Did he go outside?”

  “No, he stayed upstairs. From one of the bedroom windows he had a view of the whole road. We watched the ‘Afflicted’ drag the people in that car out through the smashed windows and the broken windshield. They were screaming, but I only know that because I saw their terrified faces. The sound of the undead was louder. And over the top of all the noise was the crash of houses burning, explosions… the chaos
and clamor of Armageddon.”

  “What happened after the family was attacked?” I nudged Kate carefully. She was on the verge of falling silent again. I knew if she did, the interview would be over. She stared at me for a long moment, then began to murmur.

  “They killed the people in the car – dismembered them. They tore the arms and legs from the bodies and feasted on their guts,” Kate’s voice was like the whisper of someone sitting around a campfire, reciting a horror story: it was hushed, yet filled with the agony of the telling. “Mike had them in his sights. Each time one of the ‘Afflicted’ turned and looked towards our house, he shot them.”

  “And they never reacted?”

  “There was too much noise,” Kate breathed in relief. “It was like a war zone. He killed three of them with head shots. They never knew where the firing came from.”

  “And then…?”

  Kate pushed her chair back and stood up slowly from the table. She carried the plates across to the sink and wiped her hands carefully on a dishcloth. “And then they just went away, Mr. Culver,” she said in a steady voice, like suddenly she could breathe again. “Something drew their attention – it might have been another car, or maybe one of the explosions. They went back to the intersection and disappeared behind the smoke and wreckage of all these burning houses.”

  “Was that the last you saw of the ‘Afflicted’, Kate?”

  “Yes. In a few days the fires stopped burning and the smoke became just a black smudge on the skyline. The Apocalypse swept over us like a wildfire. We never saw any more infected. We started to rebuild.”

  When the interview was over I went out through the front door and stood on the sidewalk again, imagining the scene on that day the ‘Affliction’ came to this sleepy Maine suburb. I could see it all in my mind’s-eye: the car screeching out from a garage, the collision… the ‘Afflicted’ swarming all over the vehicle, tearing at the terrified people inside.