CHAPTER SIX
Nighttime Visitor
The rest of Ohio was uneventful and, to be honest, extremely dull. Western Ohio was flat, almost as bad as Indiana was. There were empty, flat moonscapes of green fields and unending views of nothing, interrupted only by the occasional town. Eastern Ohio got to be a little more interesting, but still—not much going on there.
I went to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland. It was destroyed. It looked like at some point during the end of the Flu, someone, or a group of someones, figured it was time to live out all their wildest Keith Moon fantasies. Most of the display cases had been smashed. Guitars had been broken. Drum kits had been smashed. Stage outfits were scattered. It was depressing. I walked around and used my flashlight to look at some of the photos of bands I’d liked. Genesis. Cheap Trick. Queen. I had some CDs in the RV, but I never listened to them anymore. It felt blasphemous to play them. Silence felt more appropriate, or the sound of the wind in the window. That was my world now. I didn’t play any instruments. I couldn’t read sheet music. I would be too busy farming, or whatever the hell I was going to do in the south, to learn to play. Maybe it was right that the Hall of Fame was trashed out and wrecked. It was a fitting end to those instruments. Music was dead.
I spent almost two weeks in Ohio. You wouldn’t think you could spend two weeks in Ohio, but if you spent enough time driving through the cities and scavenging, two weeks goes by in a hurry. An hour here. Four hours there. Another hour of driving. Four more hours scavenging. It added up quickly.
I spent a couple of nights sleeping inside the city limits of Sandusky and Cleveland. That was a lot different than sleeping on the outskirts. If someone had survived the Flu and was roaming around the cities, they could easily have found me while I was sleeping. I wouldn’t have known if they were friend or foe. I didn’t sleep well those days. It was nerve-wracking. I kept two guns in my bedroom in the back of the RV those nights. I also kept most of the windows closed and locked despite the humidity. I pulled all the curtains, even the big one that blocked out the cab windows. I hadn’t pulled that one at all until that first night in Sandusky. Turns out, I didn’t need to worry; no one found me, and I didn’t find anyone.
The whole time I was in Ohio, I didn’t see one sign of anyone surviving. Many of the stores had been ransacked before the final week of the Flu, but they were undisturbed since then. Dust was settled thickly on everything in the stores, and I could see the footprints and scat of various vermin. Mold was starting to grow on walls that had suffered water damage. I could smell rot. For as much optimism that meeting Doug had put into me, Ohio was sucking it back out of me.
Ohio: The Pessimism State. That probably would not look good on their license plates.
I crossed into Pennsylvania and headed east on Highway 80. Almost immediately, things started to get better. It didn’t take long for the relatively flat prairie of Ohio to give way to tree-covered hills and vales of northern Pennsylvania. It was a wonderful change of scenery. The hills and vales didn’t hold onto humidity as the prairie did, either. The weather became more pleasant. Still warm and humid, but not unbearably so, just standard summer weather. I started to gain optimism again. I went into the little towns and villages off the highway hopeful that I would see signs of life.
My first night in Pennsylvania was spent in a tiny town off the interstate called Clintonville. It was a nice, simple little town, nothing fancy. I parked outside of a local supermarket in the late afternoon. The market looked like an old house converted to be a small convenience store. It was primitive, but I liked it. There was a small parking lot where I could park the RV. I was getting burned out on the scavenging grind. Just by glancing around the town, the dark windows and overgrown lawns, I knew no one here had survived. I didn’t even feel like looking for signs of life. I just wanted to spend a night relaxing and goofing off. Maybe it was because of what Doug said about actually living, or maybe it’s because I had a burst of teenage slovenliness. Despite the desperate, driving need to survive, I was still eighteen; I had more than my fair share of laziness and lack of motivation.
I found a nice deck chair on the porch of a nearby house and set it up near the RV. I built a fire on a nice, sandy place next to the parking lot of the little mart. There was plenty of wood to be found around the town. Many of the residents had their own stores of cords of wood for their potbelly wood heaters or fireplaces. It only took twenty minutes of work to gather enough wood to last me the whole night. After I had enough wood for the fire, I took a walk. Fester wasn’t really a hiking cat, so he stayed with the RV.
I don’t know what got into me that night. Maybe I was possessed by a demon of curiosity or something. Up until that night in Clintonville, I hadn’t wanted to go into anyone’s home. I’d done it in Wisconsin a few times, but I didn’t like it. I never knew which houses were completely empty, or which ones might have decaying corpses. Either way, going into private homes always felt a little like grave robbing. I ignored that sensation that day, though. I started walking up to random homes and trying the doors. Most were locked. Any locked doors, I let be. I wanted to find one that was empty and unlocked. There was a simple, nothing-special home along the main street, just a plain white box with a postage stamp yard and an open-air carport off the side of the house. It looked exactly like the house of the woman who used to babysit me when I was a little kid in Colorado. My parents both worked a lot when I was first born, so I spent a ton of time in that woman’s house. Her name was Mary, but I called her Aunt Mimi because I couldn’t pronounce Mary correctly for some reason. She was a sweet old lady, very no-nonsense and old school, but very loving. Seeing that house made me feel nostalgic. I decided I wanted to know what that house was like on the inside. I wanted to know if it had the same interior layout of Aunt Mimi’s home.
I trudged through the overgrown grass and tried the door handle. The door was unlocked, but it was clear that no one had disturbed the home in some time. When I cracked the seal on the door, I sniffed the air. I’d learned that houses tended to have a funk to them when there were decaying corpses inside. A year of drying had mummified many of the dead. The effluence and vital organs had dehydrated and most of the really bad smells you’d associate with a recently dead corpse had gone with it. However, those nasty, nose-wrinkling smells would work their way into drywall and carpet padding, sheets and blankets, and just taint the house forever. You could tell the second you walked into a house if there were bodies inside. This house didn’t have any rot smells, though. The fact that there wasn’t a car in the carport or driveway hinted that whoever had lived here had gone to a hospital and died there, perhaps. Maybe they’d gone to the home of a relative to die. It didn’t matter. They were gone, and they hadn’t died in the house. The lack of a body in the home made me feel better about trespassing.
The house held its own smells, though. Ever notice when you go over to someone else’s house the first time that it has a weird smell? Like, my buddy David—his house always smelled like soup. I never once saw anyone in his family eat soup, but the house had that smell of chicken stock, chopped vegetables, and bay leaves. I don’t know why. I was smell-blind to my own house, so I couldn’t tell you what it smelled like. My mom liked a particular scent of potpourri called Nightmist and there were little satchels and bowls of it everywhere, so I think it probably smelled like that. This little house had a stale smell. I could tell there had been standing water in the basement at some point in the past year. Might still be standing water. It had that scummy water funk.
The house was laid out exactly like Aunt Mimi’s house. There was a large living room at the front door, a little kitchen and dining area just beyond it through an archway. There were two bedrooms to the right of the living room and kitchen and an old, cramped bathroom. I figured the house had to have been built in the late 1930s or early 1940s. Post-depression, there wasn’t a lot of heavy spending, and houses were built small and tight. Easier to heat, that way. Effi
cient.
The decor in the house was nondescript. Simple. Brown. Dark woods and fabrics. Nothing noteworthy. The living room was clean. The kitchen was completely clean, scoured even. No dishes around the sink. No scraps anywhere. The fridge was full of spoiled food, but that could hardly have been the owner’s fault. Clearly, the owner had been a neat freak. Either that or he/she had known something was up before they went to the hospital or wherever they went, and had cleaned thoroughly—sort of the home-based equivalent of making sure you’re wearing clean undies in case you’re in a car accident.
There were no pictures of humans on the walls. I found that a little strange. In every house I’d been in—every one—there were always pictures on the walls. Wedding photos, kids’ school pictures, family reunion photos, and vacation shots, there were always images to give me insight into the people who lived there. This house had none. There wasn’t even art on the walls. The living room had a strange, ornamental metal sculpture that looked like a double helix accented with squares and lines, but that was about it. Not even a crucifix or other religious symbols. The walls were perfectly bare. Or so I believed until I walked into the spare bedroom.
The master bedroom was as simple as the rest of the house. The bed was made with crisp corners and the top coverlet folded over and around the pillows like a hotel does. The closet was arranged neatly, men’s clothes hanging from hangers and stacked in squared piles. There were no women’s clothes. It was a bachelor’s home. Judging from the style of the clothes and the few DVDs scattered around the TV, the owner was more likely a younger man. Outdoorsy.
I went into the second bedroom and froze. I hadn’t expected what I found in there. All over the walls, as complete as any wallpaper would be, were newspaper clippings, articles printed from the Internet, and dozens and dozens of photographs. There were two six-foot bookshelves and every shelf was stuffed with books and binders. Everything had the same topic. Everything in the whole room concerned Bigfoot.
Sasquatch. Bigfoot. The Old Man of the Hills. Swamp-Ape. The Ohio Grassman. All the various names for the creature were represented on the walls. A dusty laptop computer was open on a desk in the room, the owner’s research station. I made a casual survey of the articles. Many of them had to do with sightings in Pennsylvania. Whoever lived here had been a Bigfoot hunter, that much was clear. I played Dungeons & Dragons and spent a lot of time reading fantasy novels, so I couldn’t fault his hobby; at least he went outdoors and did some hiking.
It was fascinating to go over the articles. Many of the articles had highlighted lines marking sightings by police officers or multiple witnesses at the same time. There was a map of Pennsylvania on the desk with the spots where there had been Bigfoot sightings marked with an X. There were two marks just outside of Clintonville.
Great. I had to fear feral dogs, escaped apex predators, any gun-wielding psychos who watched Mad Max too many times, and now Bigfoot. The Flu had affected all primates the same. Man, monkey, and ape were all eradicated—myself and perhaps a few select others being the exception. If there were any apes with the virus immunity, they might have been freed from their zoos or even escaped on their own, and they might be building a life in the woods or plains around America. I like that idea. I liked the idea of the apes being given a chance to build their own community in the plains of Texas or something. It would be like Planet of the Apes, but hopefully without me being chased down by some apes on horseback and netted like a fish. I could not do a decent Charlton Heston impression, so if that did happen, I feel like a potential great moment would be wasted. Damned, dirty apes.
After finding the Bigfoot hunter’s headquarters, I didn’t feel like being in that house anymore. It didn’t feel like Aunt Mimi’s house anymore. I didn’t even go check out the basement. I just continued my walk through town. As much as I tried to laugh off that guy’s Bigfoot room, I found myself looking into the hills around town more than I would have otherwise.
When dark came, I had a good-sized bonfire roaring. I usually only burned enough wood to ensure I could cook a decent evening meal. Anything more felt wasteful. This was a vacation day, though. I was trying to have fun. I racked up a pile of dried hardwoods and stacked it in a pyramid shape. It went up quickly, the flames growing exponentially until the blaze was shooting ten feet into the air. Tongues of flame and ember leapt into the sky and fizzled to nothingness in the night wind. The heat and the smoke helped to keep the ravenous mosquitoes at bay. I rooted through the shelves of the grocery store and found marshmallows. They were a little hard, but still toasted nicely. I also found a few bars of chocolate and some graham crackers. Outside of being alone, it was fun to be a little irresponsible with my fire, and it was also fun to eat fifteen S’mores for dinner, but I imagined I’d regret that in the future. I still brushed and flossed obsessively after dinner, but giving in to some base impulses for a little while was incredibly enjoyable.
When I felt sick from hogging on S’mores, and the fire had died down to a respectable level, I sat in the deck chair with my feet propped on a log in front of me warming in the heat of the flames. The warmth of the fire was causing me to drowse. My eyelids were heavy. The book I’d been reading was forgotten on the pavement of the store parking lot next to my chair. I was halfway asleep, hovering in that twilight state where part of my brain just wanted to sleep and the other part wanted me to get up and do responsible things like making sure the fire was extinguished and putting on pajamas for bed. The Fall Asleep-part of my brain was winning the battle.
And then I heard the crack of a branch.
Nothing propels you from sleep to wakefulness like having had a snootful of Bigfoot articles earlier in the day, and then hearing the sound of a nearby branch breaking. A branch breaking meant someone or something stepped on it. A branch breaking meant that an excessively hairy ape-man with size 27 ground-pounders was rounding the corner to feast on man-flesh. I launched out of my chair and had the shotgun in my hands. My heart went from a sedate, sleepy-time slow-bongo rhythm to the opening drum solo of Sing, Sing, Sing by Benny Goodman.
When I get scared, I tend to freeze. I tend to not want to hide. I think it’s the same fight or flight response that rabbits have. They hope the coyote won’t see them if they don’t move at all, and when they know for certain that they’re seen, they bolt and hope their speed can carry them faster than the predator. I was standing, half-blind from staring into the flames of the fire, with my senses on overdrive. The crack sounded like it had come from behind me, from somewhere near the grocery store. I didn’t want to check it out, but I knew I had to. I knew that was part of being an adult, of defending myself and my possessions. No matter how much I didn’t want to do it, no one else was going to do it.
I made a wide arc around the corner of the store. Whatever was there, I didn’t want it to get an easy jump on me. I kept the shotgun at hip level. If it was a Bigfoot, I didn’t want to scare it. If it wasn’t, I didn’t want to kill whoever or whatever it might be, but I certainly didn’t want it to kill me, either. I moved well outside the circle of light made by the fire. My night-sight returned slowly. I was spot-blind for a while, blinking away afterimages of the flames.
I moved to the side of the grocery store and saw nothing. I froze again and listened hard to the night. There were no sounds outside of crickets and the spitting crackle of flames on wood. I continued around the store, moving behind it. Highway 280 ran along the side of the little mart. I walked down the middle of the street, moving as quietly as I could manage with a slow heel-to-toe step. I couldn’t hear anything fleeing. I couldn’t hear any footsteps.
I relaxed. I must have imagined the branch. Or maybe in my drowsy state, one of the logs in the fire cracked and echoed off the building behind me and threw me off. I was just about to turn around and go back to the RV when I heard something moving through the grass behind one of the houses.
My heart began to race again, and I felt a cold sweat break out across my body. I moved toward the
sound. There was definitely something moving through the grass, something big, something heavy. My throat felt tight. I moved across the asphalt and toward the sound. Whatever was moving started to pick up speed. It must have heard me. I ran after it for a few steps, but stopped. Whatever had broken the stick was moving away from me at speed. I wasn’t going to catch it, whatever it was, and I was certain that I didn’t want to. It was moving faster than any human person would or could outside of an Olympic sprinter.
I backed away from the houses to the road. I didn’t want to stay in Clintonville anymore. I didn’t want to stay anywhere anymore. I hate to say it, but at that moment my eighteen-year-old burgeoning man/adult-self wanted my mommy. I wanted to be safe and warm and protected. I ran back to the RV, made sure Fester was inside, and got the hell out of Dodge. I hated driving through the dark, especially when the quality of the roads were in constant question. I was on edge, my eyes straining to watch for animals along the roads, sweeping constantly for buckles and upended chunks of highway. I drove as fast as I could to the next town, a place called Emlenton. There, I stayed on the highway and shut down the RV.
The second the RV was shut down, I pulled every curtain in the thing. I’d never done that away from the city before, but I was shaken. Badly. It felt like the night had eyes. The skin on my body was creeping. What little hair I had on my head was standing on end. I sat down at the table of the RV and turned on a little LED lantern. I didn’t want to be in the dark. I couldn’t find Fester. He was hiding. He only did that when he was scared. Did I scare him, or was it something else? Was he picking up on my fear? I would never know.
The Survivor Journals Omnibus Page 28