I moved my mattress back to my bedstead. I used the snowmobile to run back to Walmart to loot the dog a new, unbloodied dog bed. I carried out the bags of garbage I’d been saving in the foyer of the library and carted them a half-mile to a dumpster that was only half-full. It was a paltry version of Spring Cleaning, but it felt good. I went outside with only jeans and my winter coat and I was plenty warm. It felt good.
There was a profound sense of victory that day. My dog was getting better. Winter was nearly over. I was still alive. I felt strong. I felt like I had earned something amazing, something rare. I had done something that not a lot of suburban kids had ever done: I had survived a brutal Wisconsin winter alone. I was thinner than I’d been last May, true. I probably smelled like seven miles of ass. I was unkempt. The annex smelled like wood smoke and general teenage boy and old dog stank, but it had been my bunker against the winter. In another couple months, I would move south and establish myself a new base, one where extreme cold would never be a possibility. I would survive.
Part Three
Spring
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Spring Dawning
Winter gave way to Spring in give-and-take fashion, as if often does in Wisco. One day the thermometer would climb above freezing and the sun would melt large swathes of snow, and the next day clouds out of the north would bring another blast of chilly air and a good seven inches of annoying white flake would get dumped in a heavy, wet mess. As all things must end though, eventually Winter was forced to relinquish its grip on the weather and Spring plowed its way fully into the mix.
My drinking water supply was low, but still doing well. As soon as the snows were cleared from the roads, I began doing the thing that I had resisted for a long time: looting homes. I had avoided it last summer for two reasons: the smell and the feeling that I was desecrating tombs. Now I had enough fear of the future and a need to stock water for my trip south, so I broke my own rule about looting private homes and started doing it.
After the first three homes, I realized that I was probably going after a hopeless cause. Most of the homes had frozen through and through. I found bottles of water cracked and broken from the swelling ice. I found caps forced off the bottles as they froze and forced water upward. I found homes in serious disrepair as the pipes had frozen and cracked over the winter, and now as the thaws came, water was starting to seep into homes around the plumbing and around the foundation. I hated to admit it, but I was going to have to rely on what I’d found and make it last longer. I think most of the bottles of water in Wisconsin were cashed.
In the fourth home, I went straight to the basement hoping that the basement had maintained more of a common temperature and I might find water in a pantry that had survived the cold. The house was a pretty standard suburban house from the 80’s on the outside, but on the inside it was clear that an older gentleman had owned the home. Judging from the pictures on the walls, he enjoyed camping and fishing, and was a deer hunter in the fall. The house distinctly lacked a woman’s touch, but I could see in some of the pictures that there had been a wife to the homeowner maybe twenty years ago. In one picture, I saw the woman with a scarf wrapped around her head, clearly trying to hide the effects of chemotherapy. In another picture on the wall, she was lying in a hospital bed and, though she was smiling an angelic smile at the camera, it was clear she wasn’t long for the world in that photo. She looked to be maybe forty in that picture, and the man looked to be eighty in some of his fishing pictures. I instantly felt badly for being in his home.
The house was a split-level ranch. I descended the half-flight of stairs and walked into a beautiful study. The room was surrounded by bookcases, each stacked with beautiful hardcovers and assorted knick-knacks. He had U.S. Army decorations. Judging from the designations on some of the plaques, he’d served during that lull between Korea and Vietnam. There was a thick, handmade oak desk along one wall, situated below a small window. The desk was neat and organized. Where on my old desk in my old house there had been a laptop computer, this man had a beautifully intact typewriter, a dull brown Royal De Luxe with well-worn green keys. A sheet of paper was in the carriage. I leaned forward and inspected it. He’d written a brief statement before retiring to his bed, I guessed.
I don’t know what happened. Everyone’s getting sick and the hospitals are turning people away. Go home and die, they told me. I told them a veteran and deserved answers, and they just told me that they had none. The country failed. The world failed. I guess this is the Rapture. I can feel myself getting sick, and I know I won’t be long for this world. I will be glad to see Rachel, again. And I will glad to see my oldest boy, Jeff. He’s been gone from me for almost sixty years. Heaven had better be real.
It was a poignant message. I don’t know if Heaven is real or not, but I hoped that man found whatever it was he was looking for when he left the physical plane. I almost wanted to go upstairs to see if the man was in his bed. I imagined he was. I didn’t want to see whatever remained of him, though. It was hard enough knowing he was dead without the image of his possibly skeletal rictus leering at me for eternity.
Out of a genuine curiosity though, I pulled the paper from the typewriter and rolled a new sheet into the carriage. I’d always been fascinated by typewriters. The computers with which I’d learned to type seemed too sleek sometimes, too slick. You barely had to touch the keys to make letters appear. The typewriter, though--that was a different animal. I centered a page and hit a key. Over the course of nearly a year, the ribbon had dried out and the letter bar left no impression on the page. I was immediately disappointed, but I rooted through the man’s desk drawers and found several spools of typewriter ribbons, all sealed in plastic. The notion of having a typewriter to write down my journey after the Flu was suddenly appealing to me, and I decided to take the typewriter back to the library. It would give me something to do besides reading and staring at the fire, and it was much more intriguing to me than handwriting my thoughts on a legal pad with a ballpoint.
That’s how I acquired the typewriter that’s allowed me to hack up these journal entries that you’ve been reading. I hope the old man who owned it before me is glad that I’m taking care of it. I put typewriter ribbons in the back of my head as something to scavenge when I could. If I entered a home of an older person, I would always check drawers for extraneous ribbons. Most of them have moved past that tech by now, but on rare occasions I might find some. At one point, I went and looted the tech stores on the east side of Madison and actually found a good-sized cache of plastic-sealed typewriter ribbons. It was enough to keep me writing for an extended amount of time.
I found that being able to put down on paper all the loneliness and isolation I’d been experiencing has been good for me. It helped me come to terms with a lot of stuff. I was able to process a lot of my pent-up emotions just getting them on paper. It’s all fine and dandy to have ghost-voices and a dog to talk to, but it wasn’t nearly as helpful as writing down what I’ve been subjected to in my winter of discontent.
I continued to plan my eventual trip south. I would need a vehicle of some sort that would allow me to carry an abundance of gear as well as a place to live. I knew I needed some an RV, but I had to find one I liked, first. The snow had melted to a point where the Arctic Cat was no longer a viable mode of transportation, so I had to get the Chevy Cruze Eco running again. After a winter of sitting idle in the library parking lot, it was dead as the proverbial doornail and the tires were mostly flat. I had to loot one of the auto parts stores in town for a new battery, and then I found out the winter hadn’t done that battery any favors, either. I had to hook up the generator to a battery charger device and defib the Eco back to life. It took me a good part of the morning just to get fresh gas and oil into it, and then get it to turn over and run. I was consulting mechanical manuals from the library to do this, and I’d had to loot auto tools from the Midas service station down the street from the library. It was a much larger pain in the tuchis
than I hoped it would be. Have you ever had to hand-pump car tires, by the way? I do not recommend it. After I got the tires sort of pumped up, I hauled the generator back to Napa and found an electric pump to finish the job.
There were a few RV dealerships not too far from Sun Prairie. I drove to the nearest one, a few miles outside of town just off of Highway 51. There, I found a nice Jayco Greyhawk that I liked. I thought about upgrading to a Class A motorhome, but I second-guessed myself and opted to get the smaller, easier to maneuver, and more classically designed Greyhawk. It was more compact and better suited to my immediate needs. I wasn’t hauling a family, nor was I expecting it to become my permanent home. It was plenty big enough for the dog and me, and it had a considerable amount of extra space for storage.
The difficulty came in learning that the Greyhawk, despite it being brand-new, never-driven-off-the-lot, was in much the same condition as almost every other vehicle in the thawing northlands: dead and on semi-flat tires. I liberated a new battery from Napa, jumped it off the generator-powered battery charger, and managed to get the Greyhawk rolling again. I hauled the electric tire pump to the dealership and inflated all six tires. I went to a Ford dealership and found a manual for a full-ton pickup, and I gleaned enough from that to figure out how the Greyhawk worked. They were essentially the same engine, a Triton. I put the Greyhawk up on blocks and changed the oil. I topped off its fluids. A year of sitting does no favors to an engine, but I got it purring again. Then, I drove the Greyhawk back to the library, got my bike, and rode the bike back to the dealership to reclaim the Eco, bringing that thing back to the library with my bike wedged in the hatchback.
Spring was definitely in full force. The snow was almost entirely melted, the deepest drifts protected by thick shadows during the days were still visible, and they were melted down to small mounds of ice. I heard and saw more birds. The robins returned in full voice. The trees began to bud. The fires I built at night started to feel almost too warm. I stripped the heavier blankets from my bed to balance out the discomfort. In the mornings, I would need a coat, but by lunchtime, the sun would warm the earth to a pleasant enough temperature that I would only need a hooded sweatshirt. If I was actually doing some work in the afternoons, I could get so hot that I would sweat and I could shed the hoodie and just work in a t-shirt. It was wonderful to feel warm outdoors again. Even Rowdy, who had been moving slowly since the pack attack, started to seem more like himself. He was still moving slowly, but the tail was wagging again. The eyes were bright again. He was more excited about going outside and going on short walks.
I still had a fair amount of the cow left in the shed. It was getting warm enough that it was thawing, so I had to bring out the smoker and smoke down the rest of it to jerky. I found recipes in cookbooks in the library and made a passable feast of teriyaki and Georgia mustard jerky strips. I stored them in a plastic container. What I couldn’t smoke, I abandoned. The cow had served me very well. It had kept me from dying over the winter, and I was grateful to its spirit. I left the remainder in the shed, a good quarter-slab of it, and I left the doors open when I went inside for the night. In the morning, the slab was gone and there were dog tracks in the mud around the shed.
I spent my days alternating between going on scavenging runs with the Eco and preparing the Greyhawk for the eventual trip south. I scavenged new sheets and comforters for the queen-sized bed in the rear of the motorhome. I started to equip it with the tools I thought I would need: chainsaw, my toolbox I’d amassed in the library, ammunition, knives, silverware, camping gear--the works. I even stole a few books out of the library that were on the mile-long list of books I wanted to read and put them in the camper. They would sustain me on my journey, wherever that would end up, whenever I decided to go there.
In the Eco, I continued to hit up the byways of Wisconsin, winging through small towns and rooting through the grocery stores, pharmacies, and convenience stores for things that winter’s cruelty hadn’t damaged. I knew I could get more supplies from practically any town along the way down south, but I figured that I wouldn’t risk not having something if I didn’t have to. In a lot of the stores, the glass doors had been broken long before people died away, and the raccoons and possums had made feasts of the goods inside. The raccoons had become quite adept at gnawing through the cardboard packaging and ripping open the plastic wraps to get at the Twinkees or Swiss Cake Rolls inside.
Rowdy rode shotgun on my excursions away from the library, as always. I noticed small changes in him from the previous summer. No longer did he hang his head out the window to be buffeted by the wind. He curled up on the seat next to me and was content to lay his head on my lap. When we stopped, he no longer bounded around and sniffed everything. He was more cautious, more reserved. He would get out of the car, stretch, and sniff the ground around the car. He would then sit and watch, keeping an eye on the terrain around us. I knew that he was still hurting from the wounds he’d taken, but I started to wonder how much of it was wounds and how much of it was age or something worse? In the back of mind, I thought about that vial of pentobarbital and that needle still sitting in the back of my bedside table drawer. I wondered if he would actually even make the journey south with me. The winter had hardened him even before he tried to sacrifice himself for me. Now, he was no longer as happy-go-lucky as he had been. He seemed like a dog that was finally showing his years.
The winter had done no favors to the world. As I drove, I was quickly struck by how much rougher the roads seemed. In some places, frost heaves had broken the asphalt, and I was forced to slow down and creep the Eco over them, lest I scrape the entire bottom of the car all to hell. There was debris from storms and fallen trees everywhere. Usually, that sort of stuff gets dealt with in some way before it becomes a problem. If a tree falls, usually a Department of Transportation crew is on the scene within an hour and they make the road passable again. Now, with no one out there, some of the roads were simply ruined. There were trees downed in several places and while I might be able to creep around one on the shoulder of the road, another one farther down would block me from passing entirely.
I also noticed that the homes around the area were looking worse for wear. It was nearly a year ago that everyone had stopped the upkeep on their properties. I guess I naively thought that maybe time would just sort of stop, that all the homes would be frozen in place permanently, forever looking like monuments to the families that had lived in them, but a single winter of entropy and decay had done a fair amount of damage. Homes were kept heated not only for comfort for the residents living inside, but it also prevented the houses from contracting too much in the cold. Now, I could see damage around almost every window and door wherever I looked. Some homes lost hunks of siding when walls contracted too much. The lawns were terrible. I missed that manicured look that small towns tended to possess in the spring, where everyone’s grass was clipped short like a military haircut. Now, lawns were full of tall, matted grass, and all the scrub bushes and plants were growing out of control. Near one house, I saw a dogwood bush that had exploded over the previous summer. Unchecked, it had grown appendages that stretched up at least twelve feet. Where once it had been a little plant, it was now an ungainly twist of leaves and green boughs. Trees that were usually trimmed neatly by homeowners had rebelled against that shaping by becoming bloated and rough. Another warm, moist summer would give the grass, the trees, and the bushes all the impetus they would need to reclaim their areas again. The suburban lawnscapes would be wild once again.
I still saw no signs of anyone else living. I drove past Blue Mounds one day. There was a state park there, and I remembered visiting it as a child. There were observation towers at either end of the towering mound, which was the highest point in Dane County. On a clear day, you could see to Iowa and Illinois from those towers. I climbed the steps. Rowdy chose to lay near the base of the tower in some grass. At the observation deck, I was awarded with an incredible view of the landscape around it. I looked h
ard for any signs that someone might have a fire going somewhere. I scanned carefully for a thin stream of smoke. There was nothing. I was still alone in the world.
At the library, I continued my preparations for the journey south, including looking at maps. I wasn’t certain where I was going to live, but I knew that once I got there, I would likely be stuck there for a good long while, possibly the rest of my natural life. Gasoline breaks down over time, and I knew that the clock was ticking on whatever fuel sources were still out there. Eventually, all the gas would go bad, turn into gelatinous goo, and would no longer be capable of starting an engine. Then I would be stuck wherever I was when that happened.
I looked at maps of the entire United States. If I was going to go south, I realized that I didn’t have to go directly south. Maybe I could take a detour. I had always wanted to go to the Smithsonian. Maybe I could venture to Washington D.C. for a few days. I thought that maybe I should plan a winding, circuitous route southward so that I could hit as many major cities as possible, increase my odds of finding other survivors. The thought of this undertaking was both terrifying and titillating. I was excited about getting out of Wisconsin, about seeing more of the country, but given the variables for disaster, the problems that could come up at a moment’s notice, and the thought of seeing other people again, I got scared. It felt like that moment on a roller coaster, just after the lap bar and shoulder restraints snap into place, but before it starts rolling. I felt trapped, but I knew that if I absolutely began to convulse and scream to get free, I probably could. I just had to keep reminding myself that the winter in Wisconsin is too long and too cold to go through again. I needed to find someplace warmer, someplace where I could go to the bathroom outdoors if necessary. I know that’s probably a gross thought, but so be it. We all have those needs.
The Survivor Journals Omnibus Page 15