When I was younger, if I got upset about something and started to freak out about it, my dad would always step in and ask me a question: Can you control this? This was his way of centering me. If I couldn’t control it, then no amount of throwing a fit would change it, therefore throwing a fit was a waste of time and energy. If I could control it, then it was my fault it wasn’t working and instead of throwing a fit, he would tell me to channel my energy into fixing the problem that was upsetting me. If I got upset at Super Mario because I wasn’t good at the game, I could practice and get better. If I got upset at the TV because a show I wanted to watch was preempted by the local TV station because a severe thunderstorm was rolling in, then I needed to redirect my anger.
I was still grieving the world even though I tried to think I was not. It was impossible to not do it. I couldn’t control the Flu. I had no say over who lived and who died. I could control my life, in theory, and that was where my energies needed to focus. It was easier said than done. Often, especially in the evenings after I stopped for the day and I’d eaten, I’d be trying to get comfortable with a book or writing, and I would get overcome with a wave of nostalgia or depression that would just deflate me. It was those moments where the “why me” would start, and the “why bother” would follow it. The self-doubt would creep in. Little voices in my head would remind me that I didn’t have to be alone. I could choose the easy way out. It would be fast and painless. I would try to ignore them, but those voices were pretty persistent.
Why was I still alive? Why me? I asked myself this a lot in the past year. It made me think of a scene in the movie Grumpier Old Men, when Burgess Meredith tells Jack Lemmon that God forgot him. In a way, that’s how I felt. I could find no sane reason for why I was still alive, why I was still on the Earth. I won the worst possible prize in the genetic lottery. I was an abomination, still alive in pure defiance of the Earth’s plans. My parents created a being with a unique combination of cells that, for whatever reason, granted him an unusually healthy immune system and kept him from contracting the worst virus the world ever created. You might call it luck, but it sure as hell hasn’t felt like luck to me. That’s why I tried to fill my days with routines. The routines kept me on a schedule. The schedule prevented downtime. The downtime was when the voices began to whisper. Don’t think about them, I had to tell myself. Ignore the existential dread. Keep moving. Keep ignoring. Just keep being.
The highways, while the fastest and most convenient way to move through the country, were also one of the biggest reminders of what happened to the planet. The roads stretched out before me to infinity, a lifetime of endless space converging to points on the horizon. Barren spaces filled with a lot of no one and nothing. Four lanes of ghosts going nowhere. I moved on the highways to get from point to point, but I made sure to deviate from those as often as I could.
Each morning, I looked at a map. Before I left Wisconsin, I’d taken a travel atlas of the United States and Canada from what was left of the local Walmart. I used that map to figure out where I would go for that day. I would figure out where I wanted to be by nightfall, and then I would circle a few small towns along the way that I wanted to visit and search. I like small towns. The town where I grew up was technically a city. It had a population of more than 30,000 people before the Flu, moving closer to 40,000 actually. It felt like a town, though. It was small enough that you could walk from one end to the other if you wanted to, and many of the people knew each other. It was friendly. I always wanted to live in a really small town, though. When I read the Little House books by Laura Ingalls Wilder as a kid, I thought that living in a town such as De Smet, South Dakota in the late 1880s would have been cool. There were maybe fifty or sixty people in town, tops—men, women, and children. Everyone knew everyone and they all depended on each other to some degree. They looked out for each other. I liked that idea.
When I deviated from the highway, I wanted to find the little towns that were isolated out in the countryside. I didn’t want those towns that made up part of a megalopolis, where you could go through three suburbs without realizing one ended and another began. I wanted to find towns that were little bastions of civilization surrounded by fields and forest. In central Indiana, it was easy to find the towns surrounded by fields--but forests, not so much. I chose the towns by names, not locations. I liked to find the towns with the silly or unusual names. Names that popped up on my radar were places like Wakarusa (which made me laugh because I thought it sounded like the name of a Pokémon), New Paris (which was astonishingly nothing like old Paris), and Shipshewana (which I liked because it sounded like what the back-up singers sang during the chorus in a 50s pop song).
The thing I liked most about the small towns was the sameness. The houses were all similar to the houses in every other small town. You could tell the different eras of the town’s growth by looking at the construction of the homes. Every small town had a nucleus of houses built around the turn of the 20th Century, large boxes with simple designs and giant porches. The homes of the 30s, 40s, and 50s bookended the big homes. The post-Depression Era homes were smaller and more humble. They had one-car garages and postage-stamp lawns. Beyond that were the homes of the late 60s and early 70s. The design became more ostentatious, and the garages expanded to two cars. The newer homes, the ones built in the 80s, 90s, and early 2000s were all stamped out of the same design playbook, cookie-cutter construction, aluminum-sided beiges and grays, big lawns, and large windows.
The main streets were all lined with old buildings that once housed stores and services like barbers and dentists. Maybe the old local diners or cafes were still there. Maybe they were long shuttered. There were always gas stations in these towns. Some newer, some older. There was a Subway in most of the towns. Some of the larger ones might have a McDonald’s or a Hardee’s, or even a Culver’s (if they were lucky).
Outside town, farmhouses stood like dark sentries against the coming entropy. They couldn’t stop the march of time. They were all two-story and square, built in the National style that was so popular. Some had added garages or porches, but many stood untouched from their original construction. Next to the blocky farmhouses, weathered wooden barns were in disrepair. Some of the older barns were gone entirely, replaced by modern dairy operations with corrugated steel finished in a factory red that would never blister or peel.
Every small town in Iowa or Illinois looked just like every small town in Wisconsin. There were subtle differences, but at their core they were just alternate-dimension versions of each other. This trope was continuing in Indiana, so far. There might be fewer trees in some of the towns. There might be more grain silos in some of them, but at their heart, small towns were small towns. I enjoyed that sameness. It was comforting.
In every town, I cruised along the streets slowly letting the impulse power of the engine creep me along the streets. I would occasionally honk the horn of my RV. I was hoping the noise would draw survivors, if there were any. In the post-apocalyptic landscape of America, the lack of industrial noise was deafening. Without cars providing a constant din of engine noise and rubber-on-road, without the semis pulling trailers, without drivers having the occasional fit of road rage, a pristine silence lay heavily over the countryside like a wet blanket. If you have ever had the chance to go camping somewhere fifty miles away from any sense of civilization, you get a sense of what I mean. If you haven’t, then I’m not sure I have the words to do the silence justice. If there’s a wind, then that fills your ears with static. If there are crickets, grasshoppers, or locusts, then you hear chirps and a buzzy drone. If there are birds, you hear the occasional birdsong or chirp. However, in between those noises is a profound lack of anything. In that lack of anything, something different, like the noise of an RV horn, was as good as a tornado siren. It was a bomb going off. It was someone screaming at the top of her lungs in the middle of a funeral mass. Before the Flu, I’d grown deaf to the sound of humanity. There were always cars on the highway that ran throug
h Sun Prairie, and there was always the sound of tires on pavement. I grew so numb to it that I stopped hearing it unless someone suddenly jacked his brakes and the squeal of rubber pierced the hum and reminded me that it was there. Now, there was only silence.
I would drive to the center of whatever town I was in, creep the main street, and blow the horn often. Sometimes I would do long on-off blasts. Sometimes I’d do three short blasts and then listen for a reply. Sometimes I would just lay on the horn for a solid ten or twenty-second burst. After I blasted the horn, I would shut off the engine of the RV and stand in the street waiting for a response. I would strain my ears trying to pick up any sound no matter how faint. I would wait there at least a half hour.
I would spend that whole time hoping.
When I was satisfied that no one was going to respond to my calls, I would take an empty rucksack with my tool kit in it and a shotgun. Then I would go to the town grocery store and pharmacy. In the grocery store, I would plunder any bottled water that was still available. Given how much I needed to drink in a day, not to mention a need to bathe occasionally, I was going through a lot of water. In many of the stores, the shelves were cleared of anything like water or non-perishable canned goods. Sometimes I could find secret stashes in the back, hidden from the prying, desperate eyes of customers. It took the Flu about a month to render the planet dead. In that time, most stores succumbed to the panic of those who had not yet gotten sick. I knew that I was going to eventually break down and start going into private homes to restock. I didn’t want to do that. I knew I’d have to deal with the decaying corpses of those who passed on the year before. I had already seen enough desiccated corpses to know that I wanted to avoid them, if at all possible. They didn’t faze me anymore. I just did not like seeing them.
In the pharmacies, I took drugs. --Wait, that doesn’t sound right. I didn’t take drugs like a junkie. I mean I put drugs like antibiotics and similar pills into a bag and took them back to my RV in case I needed them later. I wasn’t a pharmacist, but I knew that antibiotics and painkillers had their uses. At the very least, an industrial bottle of ibuprofen could go a long way. I also went to the pharmacies because I figured that if someone had been there recently, it would show. I figured that pharmacies and grocery stores would be the places most likely for survivors to stop and try to resupply. I went to those places hoping to find signs that someone else was still alive.
One of my hidden fears was that the drugs that currently existed would all go bad and I’d have nothing. I know that pharmaceuticals have expiration dates, but I didn’t know if those were just a safety thing, or if that was a hardline “take-this-and-you-will-die” warning. I survived the Flu, but I knew I wasn’t immortal. Infection could kill me. A good virus could kill me. Stupidity could kill me. How many people died because of a stupid accident in the days before antibiotics were commonplace? I made a mental note to plunder a book of natural remedies from a library before too long.
Shipshewana, Indiana was a town of about 700 people before the Flu struck. As I entered the town limits now, it was abundantly clear that none of them made it. Grass towered in every lawn. Branches had fallen in storms. A thin patina of dust coated every surface. I slowed the Greyhawk to a crawl and crept through the empty streets.
There was a single, tiny pharmacy in town. I pulled to a stop in front of it. A plain sign over the door read “The Shipshewana Pharmacy.” It was a small building, an old-timey looking little place. It was a rural pharmacy, no real frills, but still quite nice and quite necessary. The store’s name was emblazoned on the building on a vinyl sign made to look like a red-and-blue pill. A tattered OPEN flag hung in front of the store. The door was still intact. I hoped there would be adequate stores of medicine inside.
I slipped out of the Greyhawk, grabbing the Remington shotgun and my rucksack with supplies as I did. “Stay,” I told Fester. This was another private joke. I knew he wasn’t going anywhere. He knew how good he had it.
I walked to the door and pulled the handle. It wasn’t locked. It swung open easily, and I strode inside. Light from the glass door provided decent illumination in front of the store. The rear was dark. The store was narrow, the shelves still relatively stocked. The cold and flu medicine aisle was decimated, of course. I had yet to find a pharmacy with a well-stocked supply of Tylenol Cold & Flu. The first couple weeks of the Flu had caused a massive run on anything that might alleviate any symptoms. I slipped behind the counter and pulled my LED flashlight from the bag. I scanned the rear for any drugs that I might recognize or take for later. The antibiotic Z-packs were easy enough to find. The painkillers, too. Most medicine, though--I had no idea about what it was or what it did. The technical names were long and confusing and meant nothing to me.
I did notice that one section of the store was picked over. Bleomycin. Cisplatin. Etoposide. Ifosfamide. In each of the spots labeled for those particular drugs, the shelves had been picked clean. No idea what those things were. It seemed strange, too. Why that one section of the store? I found a guide to pharmaceuticals and looked them up; they were all cancer drugs—specifically, testicular cancer. I checked the shelf again. In the light of my LED, I noticed marks in the dust. Fingers had left trails. Boxes had been moved after the dust had settled.
AFTER the dust had settled.
My stomach immediately twisted into a weird knot of hope and fear. Someone had been in here relatively recently. Maybe yesterday. Maybe not this week. Maybe not last week. But at some point in the last month at least, someone had been in this pharmacy. Someone was still alive and they were in or near Shipshewana, of all places. Forgetting the need to pilfer proscriptions, I ran out of the pharmacy. Part of me was elated that someone else was alive. Part of me was terrified that they’d be deranged and might shoot at me.
I ran back to the RV and started it. Should I lay on the horn? Should I hide the truck? I had no idea what to do. I wanted to laugh, cry, and scream all at the same time. I pulled the RV down a street next to the pharmacy and threw it in park. I leapt out with the shotgun. I went back to the pharmacy and tried to find clues. There were faint footprints in the dust around the store. There was no record of whom, obviously. The footprints were faintly visible in front of the store, now that I knew to look. They looked like they left the store and headed slightly to the left. I guess that was as good a place to try as any. I started walking in that direction.
I only made it half a dozen steps when I saw him. He was walking toward the pharmacy leaning heavily on a pair of metal canes, the kind with the braces that ran up the forearms. He was elderly, at least early 70s, maybe a little older. He was stick-thin, a slow-moving skeleton in green runner’s shorts and a black t-shirt with the rainbow prism from Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon album cover on it. His head was bald, fringed by a shock of wiry, white hair, and complemented with a long, stringy white beard.
I couldn’t help myself. Joy welled up in my chest like a spring. All sense of cool or concern left me. I started waving like a maniac. I yelled out, “Hey! Hey there!” I started to jog toward him.
The man froze, his head whipping up. His jaw dropped open, and he looked at me with wide, terrified eyes.
I realized I was holding a gun. “Oh. No, man. I’m...sorry.” Stopped, dropped to a knee, and laid the gun on the ground. I held up my hands to show I wasn’t armed. “I’m not going to shoot you. I’m a friend!”
The man sank to his knees, slowly, painfully. He covered his face with his hands. I could see his shoulders twitching. He was weeping.
I ran to him, stopping three paces back to give him space. “Sir? I’m sorry about that. I wasn’t going to shoot you. Honest. I’m not a violent guy.”
The old man wheezed and sobbed. He looked at me with watery eyes. He couldn’t speak. Sobs wracked through his body. I don’t know why, but I started crying too. I stepped forward and sank to my knees in front of him. He reached spindly skeleton arms toward me, and we embraced. His arms felt like sticks around me
, as if a strong wind would snap them in half, but there was a desperate strength in them. We held each other and sobbed for several moments. Neither of us could find words.
When we finally separated, the man’s trembling hands grasped my shoulders. His fingers kneaded my flesh as if to make sure I was real. He held me at arm’s length. He blinked away tears and swallowed hard. Then, in a thin voice he asked, “Are you him? Are you the angel I’ve been praying for? Did you come to finally let me die?”
CHAPTER THREE
The Hermit of Shipshewana
What do you say to something like that? I had no witty comebacks. I did not even have anything comforting to say. I was stunned. My mouth opened and closed several times as I fought for words. Finally, I was able to muster, “I’m Twist.” I didn’t know what else to say. “I’m just a kid.” Technically, I was an adult, but I still felt like a kid. I didn’t know that I would ever feel like an adult, really. I stood frozen like a deer in headlights waiting for the old man to stop crying. Each second took an eternity.
The old man wiped his eyes with trembling fingers, and he gave a coughing laugh. “Well, it’s good to see you, Twist. Damn good to see you. Good to see anyone, really.” He pulled me in for another hug, and we both started laughing. He clapped my back several times. The dull, hollow thumps felt good. It made me feel like I was real, like I wasn’t dreaming anymore. I returned the favor for him, careful not to hit too hard for fear of breaking him.
When we finally separated, I got to my feet and helped him to his feet. Standing, he drew me in for another hug. I let him because it felt good to have friendly human contact again. I could feel his ribs with my forearms. I could feel his vertebra poking out in the skin on his back. It was abundantly clear that he was not well at all, and probably not long for this world. It had to be cancer.
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