He slapped me on the shoulder, and his face – for just a moment – broke out into a wide affable smile. He drew me towards the others who were waiting in the middle of the road, and the circle opened up reluctantly: the awkward way that a close-knit community begrudgingly accepts someone new to their group.
Larry introduced me to a blur of faces and names that I will never remember. The people were largely aged in their thirties and forties – couples who had forged a friendship through the arduous struggle to survive in a post-apocalyptic world filled with danger and hardships. I shook hands with everyone and then the group gradually began to break apart as each of them returned to the tasks they had been allocated. Finally it was just Larry Phelps, standing in the middle of a quiet suburban street, and me.
“What’s going on here?” I asked, turning myself in a slow circle and reaching into my pocket for my notebook at the same time. The site looked a little like a bush land estate of new homes, nestled beyond the outskirts of Siloam Springs.
“We’re building a compound,” Larry made a wide sweeping gesture with his arms that encompassed several homes on each side of the quiet, isolated street. “A fence that will encircle these three homes, and those three homes,” he turned to include houses on each side of the road. “With a gate at the end of the street.”
I frowned, trying to visualize the plan. Already I could see high wire fence running behind the three houses on the opposite side of the street, and there was more fence that had been erected to barricade off one end of the road. “So when it’s finished, these six houses will be isolated?”
“Fenced off,” Larry said precisely. “With a gate across the road. No one gets in and no one gets out… unless we want them to.”
I walked slowly between two of the homes. At the rear of each building the high chain link fence ran in a straight line, each post concreted deeply into the ground. The posts and wire looked brand new.
“Which house is yours?” I asked.
“None of them,” Larry said.
I did a double-take and stared into the man’s face. “What do you mean?”
He shrugged his shoulders. “These homes were all abandoned when the ‘Affliction’ came through Arkansas,” he explained. “No one came back for them… so we took them.”
“What about your own home?”
“It was on the other side of town,” Larry said. “The whole suburb was burned down when the Army fought back against the ‘Afflicted’. We went back there about six months ago. There’s nothing left – nothing at all that could be salvaged.”
“So you just chose these houses?”
“Yes,” Larry said simply. “We selected them because of their isolated location… and we took them.” He shrugged his shoulders again innocently. “They were abandoned, Mr. Culver. The owners aren’t coming back… if they’re even alive.”
I nodded, and then thought back to the moment when I met the group of people who were the basis of this new community. “I only counted five families.”
“Yes, that’s right. There is a home for each family, and one house spare.”
“Are you expecting someone else to join you?”
“No,” Larry’s face turned dark suddenly. “We don’t want anyone else. We have everyone we need to start again.”
“Then why an extra house?”
“When we have the fence finished and the gate across the road, we will convert one of the houses into a church, a meeting place… somewhere to store food supplies, water and weapons.”
I found this all quite fascinating and I spent several minutes writing in my notepad, and then committing the plan of the compound to a sketched map so I would recall the details later. When I had finished, I looked up and found Larry still watching me, his expression unfathomable. He looked like he was waiting patiently for me to ask him questions, the way traditional reporters interviewed people. I wasn’t really that kind of writer. Observation often told me a lot more than the people themselves could.
“Did you stay in Siloam Springs throughout the Apocalypse?” I asked dutifully.
“Hell no!” his voice almost sounded scandalized. “The whole place was on fire, and the Air Force was flying bombing missions right through this part of the world at the height of the ‘Affliction’.” He shook his head. “No. We got the hell out of town as soon as we could.”
“And went where?”
“My in-law’s house,” Larry said. “It’s in the backwoods of Northwest Arkansas. It’s a good hour drive from here.”
“The ‘Affliction’ never reached you?”
“Not way out there,” the man’s expression became a mixture of a smile and a grimace. “We spent a whole year in the backwoods, waiting for the dust to settle, listening to any of the news reports we could pick up on the radio. We only came back to Siloam Springs at the end of winter.”
“And then found this place?”
“Yes. After some searching…”
I jotted more notes and then threw a gesture at the other people working around the houses within the compound. “What about these other families? How did you select them?”
“They’re friends… former neighbors,” Larry’s expression became serious. “They’re good people – hard workers. They’re people that can be trusted. And right now, trust and hard work are all that’s stopping what’s left of America sliding into more chaos.”
I said nothing. Larry’s view of the world was reduced to the space around him. I had crisscrossed the ruins of America writing interviews. I had seen little of the trust Larry had spoken of. Beyond his isolated view, the nation was on its knees, divided, still smoldering.
Fractured.
But I didn’t tell Larry that. He was almost evangelical in his determination to rebuild this little corner of America – to lift it up out of the ashes and begin again with a small community of hardy supporters who wanted nothing more than to sustain and survive the aftermath of the Apocalypse in peace and simple prosperity. I admired his vision. I wished I had not been so cynical, so that I too could have been swept up in the man’s willful determination to endure.
We walked a slow circuit of the compound, and Larry pointed out the areas of ground behind each house that were already being carefully cultivated and nurtured into vegetable gardens. He was justifiably proud of the little community’s accomplishments.
“We had one shot at a raiding mission into Siloam Springs,” he recalled when we were back near the site for the gateposts. “That was soon after we found this place and decided to make it our new home. We took four trucks into town. The city is in ruins. The gangs that followed in the vacuum had looted whatever the Army hadn’t already destroyed as they fought against the ‘Afflicted’. The city has become a dark and dangerous place. We knew we had to risk one trip under the cover of night… but only one trip.”
“Like a covert smash and grab?”
Larry almost laughed. Perhaps the memories of that night forestalled him.
He nodded his head. “We took all the fencing wire, posts and concrete we could load up. We also took bags of seeds for the garden and any canned food we could find. There wasn’t much. The gangs had been there well before us. The building supplies were easy – no one was thinking about a future. Survival for everyone else was a minute-by-minute proposition.”
“So that’s how you got everything you needed to start here?”
“Yes.”
I narrowed my eyes. “Have you, or any of the others in the community ever been back into Siloam Springs?”
“No,” he looked suddenly crestfallen, almost to the point of pain. “It was a beautiful city once. But it’s not that place any more. I saw enough on the streets that one night we went for supplies. It’s lawless, dark and dangerous now.”
I thought about that, and once again, I looked around, trying to recall what I had read on the maps as I had travelled here. The compound was maybe ten or twelve miles from the heart of the city. I looked at Larry, my expression
betraying some of my concern.
“What happens if you’re ever discovered?” I tried to ask the question with as much innocence as I could muster. “You can’t stay unnoticed forever…”
He swatted the question away. “We’re small fish,” he laughed hollowly. “No one has any reason to want what we have, because we don’t have enough to take. But if they do try…” there was an edge of menace in the way he muttered the last few words.
“Yes…?”
His expression became secretive, as though he had already revealed too much. He shook his head. “We won’t give up without a fight.”
It was all he would say.
For a long while we just stood in awkward silence. I was taking in my surroundings, trying to recall all those elements that were impossible to note on paper. Larry kicked his boots in the dirt, waiting.
“Okay. Take me back,” I asked at last. “Tell me how you survived those first hours of the Apocalypse. Were you at work when you first heard about the ‘Affliction’?”
Larry seemed almost relieved at the change of subject. He nodded his head. “I was working as a security guard for a trucking firm. I was watching the news websites as well as listening to a police scanner radio. Suddenly the airwaves just lit up. It was bizarre. One minute the cops were attending to routine traffic dramas and the next they were mobilizing every black and white they could towards the regional hospital. That’s when I started to get a bad feeling. I could hear the far away sound of helicopters coming closer. Not one, or two… a shit-load of them.”
“What did you do?”
“I knew about the ‘Affliction’ of course. The spread of the infection had been on the news for days leading up to this. I just never expected it to reach us… and certainly not so fast. As soon as I heard the burst of activity on the police scanner and then the sounds of the helicopters, I put two and two together and left work immediately. I knew what was coming.
“On the way home I called my wife and told her to leave work too. I needed her to start moving our emergency supplies into the living room.”
“So you knew – even before you arrived home – that you were going to evacuate?”
“Yes,” Larry said emphatically. “Mr. Culver, I have a wife and son. Taking chances with their lives was not an option.”
I nodded, understanding and respecting his decision. “What was the scene like when you came through the front door of your home?”
“Stacy – my wife was already packing,” Larry explained. “She is a nurse, and I was worried that she might get called into work. To be sure that didn’t happen, I took her phone and threw it out the window. My son, Richard Alec, was a high school student. Thankfully he was home that day. He was bringing the last of our supplies out from the bedrooms when I got home.”
“Did you know where you were going to go to?”
“Yes,” he said again. Larry Phelps was like that; not once during our interview did I hear or see any sign of hesitation. He was decisive and clear-minded. “We were heading to my in-laws. That was a decision Stacy and I had made several years before when we were playing through several ‘what if’ scenarios. I never thought it would actually happen…”
“You said earlier the drive there was about an hour, right?”
“Right,” he said. “We had to be on the road quickly. I knew traffic would get chaotic if we were delayed. I was sure the whole town would start to evacuate. I wanted to be ahead of them, not caught in the midst of a gridlock.”
“So what exactly was in the supplies that you packed and took with you? Was it just a matter of grabbing anything you could… or was it more organized than that?”
“Organized, of course,” Larry sounded almost offended at the suggestion that his plan had been anything but a model of efficiency. “My wife and I both have get-home bags in our cars, and we all have a bug out bag ready in the garage as well as food stored to last us two weeks. It was all there, ready to go.”
“And that was all you took with you?”
“We had weapons,” Larry added. “My wife and I both have concealed carry permits, so I had a pistol on me. There was another in a locked box beside the bed. Apart from the essentials, I snatched up some things that have significance to me – an old bank bag that was my father’s. In it was packed a small bible that had been passed down from my great grandfather, to my grandfather, to my father, on to me. I had also packed my father’s Mason ring, our marriage license, birth certificates and some photos.”
We watched one of the women walk past us, carrying a woven cane basket filled with washed clothes. She was a tall blonde woman with Scandinavian features. She had a calm purposeful poise about the way she walked that seemed to typify everything about this bustling little compound. I watched the woman until she disappeared through the door of one of the houses.
“Were you prepared for this, Larry?”
“This?”
“The Apocalypse?”
He shook his head solemnly. “No,” he admitted. “I don’t think anyone was prepared for what happened. We all thought about it from time to time, but it’s never imminent. It’s never in the context of ‘about to happen’. Before the ‘Affliction’ I made sure we were as ready as we could be. I had taken a number of bush craft classes that covered the identification of wild edibles, shelter making, fire building and trapping and water purification. I was also a former animal control officer and a volunteer police officer. But for all that… I still wasn’t prepared beyond the practical.”
“Can you explain that?” I stood with my pen poised while Larry looked away as though he were searching for words.
“Gathering skills is just one kind of preparedness,” he said, making a face that suggested he was struggling to explain himself. “But it’s the psychological aspects that catch you off guard. It’s the fear – fear for your family, fear for friends… the country,” his voice became quiet for a moment. “As individuals we can be ready, but that’s really only half the survival story. The rest is how you adapt, deal with the stress and horror.”
I sensed the interview coming to an end. It was early afternoon. Several of the men were gathered at the end of the street, preparing to pour the concrete that would hold the gate posts upright. Slowly we began to walk towards the work site.
“One last question,” I paused in mid stride. “From the moment you heard about the ‘Affliction’ right up until the moment I arrived here to interview you… did you ever actually encounter anyone infected with the contagion?”
“No,” Larry sounded relieved. “We got through to the in-laws place before the traffic snarled. For a few days after that the sky was thick with helicopters and aircraft… and far away on the horizon we could see the smoke along the skyline. It was as close as we ever came, and I’m glad about that.” He looked me in the eye like he was staring right through me and then went on, speaking slowly and calmly.
“A man can tell himself that in a crisis he will turn into some efficient killing machine, Mr. Culver… but the reality is often very different. I for one, am glad I was never put to the test. For me, the real test was to get my family to safety unharmed… and I passed.”
* * *
Eagle, Wisconsin:
When I thought about the ‘Affliction’, I always thought in terms of the big cities; New York, Chicago, Los Angeles… I imagined those massive areas of population being overrun with the undead, and the nightmarish horror that would have crashed through America’s areas of dense population.
But the ‘Affliction’ was an indiscriminant plague that swept right across the country, infecting the young and old, the rich and poor… the massive cities and the smallest of towns.
Including Eagle, Wisconsin; a sleepy little village tucked away in the south east corner of the state – current population 2.
Eagle had once been home to a couple of thousand fiercely proud locals that had banded together in good times and bad, and had come through the tornado of 2010 relatively unscathed
. But the ‘Affliction’ had been something else entirely; an inhumane force of unstoppable power that had infected everyone in the village.
Except for Laura Ellen, and her fifteen-year-old daughter, Emily.
Laura and I were standing in front of a run-down factory on the outskirts of town. Grass and weeds had grown up through the cracked concrete, and pieces of heavy machinery stood forlorn and abandoned in the yard, like the ancient carcasses of farm machinery that once littered America’s rural landscape. They were broken down hulks, spotted with rust, covered in cobwebs and dust. The factory building beyond the yard was abandoned. It had the feeling of a derelict barn. The doors were wide open, yawning like a cavernous mouth.
I turned to Laura, bewildered.
“I was expecting something… grander,” I said.
Laura looked a little surprised. “Why?”
“Well you told me you were a machinist before the Apocalypse, and that you worked in a factory that manufactured Hellfire missile parts for Lockheed. When we arrived here, I was expecting to see something more like a military base,” I shrugged my shoulders. “You know – high wire fences, checkpoints at the gates… that kind of thing.”
Laura shook her head. She was a slim woman in her late thirties with a kind of elegant economical grace, and a quirky sense of humor – despite all that she and her daughter had endured. Superficially, she seemed well adjusted, but I had seen small signs; a nerved tick at the corner of her eye and the way she clenched her hands into white-knuckled fists when we had first arrived here.
Laura was like the graceful swan that people admired as it glided across a calm lake… never quite understanding that below the surface she was silently thrashing to stay afloat…
“The company I worked for supplied the parts to Lockheed,” Laura explained. “Our factory was like a sub-contractor. There was no fence, no armed guards… although I wished there had been on the day the ‘Affliction’ broke out.”
The Enduring: Stories of Surviving the Apocalypse Page 11