When February was its coldest, I realized that I could not continue to live in Wisconsin. It would be too difficult, too demanding. I needed to worry about a constant supply of food, and the ocean all but guaranteed that for me. I needed to not have to worry about chopping down a forest’s worth of burning lumber before every winter hit. As much as I hated to realize it, I was going to have to move south.
After I made that decision, I started planning my move. I would need a vehicle that would get me there. I decided to take a small RV from a local dealer’s lot. It was still a new, never-used ride and I hoped that with a minimum of effort, I could get the thing running again even though it would have been sitting for a year and change by the time I got around to making that move.
I began pouring over maps and travelogues trying to find the right place to move to, someplace warm, near the ocean, and adjacent to decent land, in addition to near some major towns and cities for scavenging purposes. I looked at Panama City, Florida; New Orleans, Louisiana; and Beaumont and Port Arthur, Texas. I thought about places along the Atlantic Coast like Jacksonville, Savannah, Charleston, or Myrtle Beach. I contemplated the desert areas like Phoenix and Los Angeles, but fresh, potable water might be too difficult to come by. I weighed my options and decided that the Gulf Coast region would probably be my best bet. I told myself that if I didn’t like it, I would have an RV and I could just move on to the next spot. I wouldn’t have to make any sort of carved-in-stone decisions in the cold of February.
Dreaming of the future kept me occupied pretty well. It helped keep my mind off the dreariness of the cold, gray days. At some point in that late winter, the sun seemed to go on vacation. A thick cloud cover rolled in and blocked out all direct rays, illuminating the world with a bleak, hazy filter. The cold seemed to intensify during that period. It was as if Old Man Winter knew that young upstart, Spring, was coming to dethrone him, and he wasn’t willing to go without a fight. I remember feeling terribly blah during that time. I ate, read books, slept, and occasionally played a game of Tug the Rope with Rowdy, but other than that I was just drifting through a walking sleep. Existing, but not living.
I estimate that I was probably sleeping fourteen or sixteen hours a day. I would wake just after dawn and eat breakfast, maybe read a book for a while, and then go cut meat for the evening’s meal and bring it inside to thaw, and then bring in snow to melt. I would eat something small for lunch, and then pass out for a good portion of the afternoon. Sometimes I would actually make it back into my bed for a formal nap, pulling up the covers and indulging in that daytime napping that would leave me groggy and displaced for the rest of the day. Other times I would lean my head back on my chair in front of the fire and be snoring away before I knew it. Those naps tended to be shorter than my bed-naps, but no less grog-inducing and displacing. Plus, those naps often gave me a crick in my neck like you wouldn’t believe and made my lower back hurt from slouching. Either way, I was sleeping more than I had since I was a toddler, and it was purely out of ennui. I literally had nothing better to do. I think part of this was the cold, part of it was depression, and part of it was that malaise. Regardless, it didn’t feel very good.
I was still being haunted by the voices too, but it was getting worse. I was starting to see things. Or were they ghosts? At this point, I couldn’t tell. Winter madness, maybe? I’m sure some psychologist could tell me what was happening. Maybe the part of my brain that felt guilt for surviving while all my friends and family died was trying to manifest itself in my consciousness. Maybe I was just going insane. I couldn’t tell.
One night, in a sleep-addled half-coma, I sat up in my bed and saw Emily in my chair before the fire. I knew she was a hallucination because the dog was still sleeping. There was no way he would have let a new person enter the annex without some form of attention being paid to him.
Em looked great, as she always did. She was in the plain red dress, sleeveless, that she wore to a Christmas party we had attended at a friend’s house last year. Her hair was pulled back in a simple ponytail. She was paler than I remembered, almost too white. She was an Irish redhead, with smooth skin that showed her veins too clearly for her own tastes, but now she was a smooth alabaster with no visible flaws in her skin, just endless smooth edges. She looked surreal, actually. I tried to blink her away, but I couldn’t. She sat in the chair, facing the fire and humming a strange little melody. I couldn’t place the song, at first. She was singing her own rendition of it. It was familiar to me, probably one of those ‘80s songs she always listened to when we drove around in her car. I finally recognized the song. It was Tears for Fears, “Everybody Wants to Rule the World.”
“You rule the world now, Twist.” Her voice was haunting, as if she was speaking through a tunnel. It was a hollow voice, but maintained a slight shimmer, like jangling keys. “How does it feel?”
I paused for the longest time, expecting the apparition to clear from vision, but when she didn’t, I forced myself to answer. “Fine, I guess. I didn’t expect it to be so...dull.”
She didn’t answer. She didn’t look back at me. The fact that I couldn’t see her face was starting to worry me. I’d seen enough horror movies to know that in moments like this, the ghost-vision would suddenly spin around and there’d be black voids where the eyes should be, or she’d be a skull-faced demon or something. She was humming her song again, idly rubbing her fingertips on the arm of my comfy chair. “I miss you, Twist.”
“I miss you, too.” I wrapped one of my blankets around me and left my bed, half-blind from sleep and darkness. I stumbled toward the fire, keeping a respectable distance from the vision. “Everyone is gone.”
“I know. Some of them are here.”
“Some of them?”
“I’ve only seen a few,” she said. “It’s a big place.”
“Where is it?”
“Where you go when you leave. It’s nice, if a little dull. You should be here.”
Those words hit me like a brick to the teeth. I should be there. Why am I not there? Why am I still in Sun Prairie? Alone? I circled around Emily, seeing her face. I breathed a sigh of relief when it noticed it was her face, her real face, albeit a smoothed like her arms and neck were, and extremely pale. She didn’t look at me. She stared downward, toward the base of the flames. There was a sadness to her that I’d never seen before, an aura of melancholy. It made me want to hug her, hold her to my chest. I was scared, though. I was confused and worried. I finally broke the silence. “Are you alright?”
She didn’t flinch or turn. Her eyes remained focused on the flames. I looked closer and realized that her green eyes weren’t normal. They were dulled, almost black. The flames reflected in her eyes like they were mirrors. “I’m neither alright, nor not alright.” For the briefest of moments, the corners of her mouth curled ever so slightly, almost a smirk. “And neither are you.”
I picked up a pair of logs to toss into the flames and when I turned back, the chair was empty. She had vanished. The humming stopped as suddenly as a thunderclap and whatever sleep-induced spirit I had summoned was gone. I felt cold inside and no heat could reach this cold. I wasn’t scared anymore, so to speak, but I didn’t feel right about how things were. I felt like I was being watched again, but this time it was by the eyes of my parents, of Emily and her family, of my friends and teachers from high school. I went back to bed and settled uneasily under the covers, tucking them around my head and eyes so that only my mouth and nose were visible.
I didn’t sleep. I laid awake and listened to the pop and crackle of the logs in the hearth, my ears straining for any sound that could be deemed out of the ordinary. At some point I must have drifted off, though. I was awoken by a dog full-on licking my mouth with a flat, wide tongue. Which is gross. He has breath that can only be described as Dog Breath, but with extra ass and a hint of stale, dry food.
The visions continued though. It wasn’t every night. It might only be once in a while, and most of the time it was fleeting, th
e merest of glimpses. It was rarely as pronounced as it was when I saw Em in the chair. I would see her standing at the edge of the trees watching me from a distance. When I squinted to see her clearer, she wasn’t there. I would see my parents out of the corner of my eye in the library, my dad with his arm around my mom’s shoulders, mom with her hands clasped to her chest in that way she did when she was proud of me for something. When I turned to face them, there was only a stack of containers and a bag of garbage that was waiting to be carried to a dumpster somewhere. Once, I saw my English teacher, Mr. Varney. He was wearing his red-and-white Sun Prairie polo. He had about thirty polo shirts, all of which were SP gear in some way, and he wore a different one every day, rotating through the stack until it was time to start over. Varney was chewing on the end of a pen, like how he did when he was helping a student with a paper. He looked up at me and said, “You’re doin’ fine, B. Keep it up!” He called everyone by their first initial. When I tried to answer him, he was gone.
Honestly, I started to think I had snapped. I tried to make sense of what was happening. I read books on psychology and schizophrenia (just in case that’s what it was). I even considered seeking out some antipsychotic medications to level me off and treat the hallucinations. I found a passage in an older book about the psychology of grief that said it was perfectly natural for someone who hadn’t quite come to terms with the passing of a loved one to see the said loved one in glimpses, or even to hold conversations with them as if they were in the room. That made me feel better, somewhat. I felt less like I was losing my marbles and more like the month of February was starting to get to me.
I was still grieving. I knew that. It was hard to stop. Check that--it was impossible to stop. I had no real way of moving past it. Every day was a constant reminder that everyone I knew was dead, I wasn’t, and everything I did was only a distraction. I couldn’t talk out my feelings with anyone, save Rowdy, and the Lab’s only means of responding constructively was to thump his tail on the furniture and knock over anything sitting too close to the edge of a coffee table. I realized that moving away from Wisconsin might help me move on with whatever sort of life I was going to have. It would be a clean break, a new beginning. I also knew (thanks to the books) that I was going to have to get some closure on the situation before I left, or else I might not be able to move past the situation and it would complicate my life in the South.
The weather wasn’t helping, mind you. I hate the cold; I believe this has been established definitively previously to this. I always did hate the cold. Growing up in Wisco as I did, I was well acquainted with a wide variety of cold weather warriors who delighted in winter sports and ice fishing. I never understood that mindset. Why would anyone wrap up in overalls and sit on a frozen lake in sub-zero temps in order to auger through foot-thick ice to yank unsuspecting trout to their doom? Even worse were the cross-country skiing people. If you’ve never been skiing, picture something strenuous like marathons or long-distance cycling, and then add freezing temperatures and full-on body sweating. Who gets up in the morning and thinks, Gee, I’d like to be sweating a jungle waterfall down my back and freezing my nuts off at the same time!
I’m a fan of heat. If you get trapped outside on the hottest day of the summer in Wisconsin, you can find shade in a tree, chill out, and you’ll live. You might not be comfortable, but you’ll be alive. Get trapped outside in Wisconsin on the coldest day of the year and you die. End of story. Summer wins. I’ve never walked outside in the middle of Summer, had the hair in my nose freeze, and gritted my teeth so hard that my temples felt like they might explode. In the worst of summer, you walk out and think, “Geez, it’s hot.” In the worst of the winter, you go outside and that wind cuts through your clothes like a razor and you pray for a quick death.
I think I’ve made my point. Winter sucks balls.
I walked out to the shed the morning after my Emily hallucination and carved off a thick cut of beef for my dinner that night. I made mental notes of the dog tracks around the yard. There were a lot of them. The pack was coming out at night, and they were still trying to break into my beef storage unit. I could see a lot of scratches in the wood. The shed was made out of good plywood, but it was still just plywood. Dog claws, especially claws that hadn’t been trimmed in months, were wearing it away. They had been working at the wood at night. I couldn’t see the shed from my little annex nook, and although I could hear them when they barked and howled, I hadn’t known how badly they were working the wood. They smelled the meat and wanted it. It wasn’t going to run from them. It wasn’t going to attack them. Dogs were pack hunters, yes--but they are also scavengers and scavenging was much, much easier. Another day or three, and the dogs would easily wear some sort of hole through the door. I had to do something.
Hunting the pack, or shooting a few of them was the first answer in my head. That’s what the post-apocalyptic era was going to mean, wasn’t it? Survival of the fittest. Kill or be killed. If someone was threatening my food supply, and therefore my future and my life, I had to act. However, the prospect of sniping dogs made me queasy. I didn’t want to kill them if I didn’t have to kill them.
I could reinforce the plywood where they were wearing it away, but that was only a temporary fix. Maybe they’d get bored and give up if they continually worked the wood and never go through. Maybe they could take up hunting animals like they were supposed to, rather than trying to rely on humans like they had. If I’d had the time and energy, I would have fed every dog I could, but I knew that would be a losing proposition in the end. I could barely take care of Rowdy and myself, let alone adding a full pack of large-breed dogs to the mix. They were going to have to be self-sufficient without putting my stores of food in jeopardy.
I put on my cold-weather gear and prepared to do some work to prepare for the coming night. I went to two nearby houses and removed an aluminum storm door from its hinges from each and brought them back to the library. I used a thick coil of climbing rope to tie the doors over the original shed doors--the part of the shed that had been worn away the most. That aluminum wouldn’t give as easily as the wood. They could claw that door until their hearts were content.
I wished I’d had the foresight to build a fence that summer. A good fence could have helped matters. Instead, I got a shovel from a nearby garage and shoveled snow around three sides of the shed, piling it as high as I could and patting it down to discourage the dogs from going after the wood. I banked the snow and smoothed it out, with a plan to try to get it to near roof level. It was hard, backbreaking work, though. The weeks of cold-weather isolation and downtime had weakened me. I was sweating a lot in my arctic gear, but given the temperatures, I didn’t dare remove anything. I knew I would freeze in short order. After two hours of work, I needed a break. I went inside, took off my gear, and had a leisurely lunch with the dog. After lunch, it was only around minus-five degrees, so I brought Rowdy out with me to finish the snow walls.
Creating good walls was slow-going. The top layers of snow were powder-fine and more apt to catch wind and blow as I threw it than land where I wanted it to land. The bottom layers were heavy and dense, almost as much ice as snow. After an hour, it was clear that I wasn’t getting nearly as much done as I had initially hoped, and Rowdy was desperate to go back inside. I let him into the annex so he could warm his old bones by the fire, and I returned to the project at hand. The physical work helped to alleviate my tensions, and it felt good to be doing something other than staring at a fire and hearing the voices of the dead in the back of my mind. I was turning my shed into a well-fortified little snow hut.
As the sun dipped lower in the sky, I felt the temperature start to descend with it. There was a significant change in the air as the temperatures crawled into the negative double-digits. The wind began to pick up as well, blowing that cold through my expensive parka and snow pants. Anywhere there was the slightest chink in my cold weather armor, I felt the sting of icy bitterness. I had to hurry to finish. I hustled
to throw more snow on the left side of the shed. It was nearly to the roof line. I’d scraped a considerable area around the hut bare, exposing the frozen ground.
Somewhere behind me, I heard a short, stifled yip, a half-bark. I froze in place, a spade of snow hefted in my hands. I slowly turned and looked over my shoulder. There was a dog pack watching me. They milled around in a group, but they were concentrating on what I was doing. I saw Labs, Retrievers, a few Pits, a Saint Bernard, and handful of mutts, some showing coats that designated them having Husky or Malamute lineage. My heart rate elevated drastically. I had no idea how these dogs might react, if they would react at all. They might be friendly. They might not. I’d left the shotgun in the library. I was weaponless, save for the shovel. Casually, I tossed the snow I had in my shovel onto the sloping mound and planted the shovelhead in the snow. Without turning my back on the dogs, I started moving toward the library at a leisurely pace. Show no fear, I thought. Be an alpha.
Be an alpha. What a stupid phrase. In my life before everyone died, I was a pretty milquetoast dude. I wrestled, sure, but I wasn’t very good. I lost more than I won. I played football, sure, but I sat the bench for most of the games. I was a natural beta. I was never one to complain at a restaurant. I didn’t get into stupid arguments if there was a chance punches might be thrown. Was I supposed to suddenly turn into a Jason Bourne-type superhero just because I was forging a life for myself while alone in the frozen north? I could pretend to be an alpha all I wanted, but it wouldn’t change who I was at heart.
The dogs, as though sensing my internal panic, began moving toward me, toward the shed. They trotted through the snow as a unit, a particularly large Staffordshire Terrier at the lead. I couldn’t read their mentality. I didn’t sense threat from them, but I didn’t sense curiosity or joy, either. With a subtle shift, I quickened my pace slightly. The dogs did not seem to adjust. They were closing in though. They’d had roughly a hundred yards to cover. I had only about thirty to get back to the main door of the library, but they moved through the snow easily. With about ten yards to go, I dropped all pretense of being casual and I sprinted for all I was worth to the door. I flung it open to step inside, but a bolt of barking yellow fur blasted past me.
The Survivor Journals Omnibus Page 13