The Survivor Journals Omnibus

by Sean Patrick Little

  I had to talk myself down. I had to tell myself that Bigfoot wasn’t real. It was a deer, I told myself. Or an elk. A moose. Maybe even a bear. It could have been any of a dozen or more animals, each infinitely a more logical possibility than Bigfoot. It could have been my imagination. It could have been a hallucination. I repeated this to myself over and over. It could have been anything except Bigfoot. My heart was pounding. I hadn’t ever worried about anything like Bigfoot. It was silly that I was doing it now. Ludicrous, even. I could worry about any of a dozen other things, serious things that had a likely chance of happening, like a bear attack, but at that moment, the only thing that played through my head was pulling one of those curtains around the RV and seeing the roughly humanoid face of an ape-man staring back at me. I didn’t want to ever have that happen. At that moment, I felt extremely vulnerable, extremely alone, and I wanted more guns, bigger guns. I wanted an assault rifle with a fully automatic setting. I wanted knives, machetes, swords. I wanted anything that would give me even a false sense of security. I wanted to be back in the safety of my little library back in Sun Prairie where Bigfoot would never, ever visit.

  I could feel the paranoia creeping through my brain like a tarantula, light, hairy-footed steps just spreading more and more fear. I pulled the fleece blanket from my bed in the back and covered myself with it. I lay down on the floor in the center of the RV, scared to go back to the bed area where windows were so close to the mattress. The floor felt safer. No one could see me on the floor. I held my shotgun in my hands, my right hand resting on the stock, fingers brushing the metal trigger-guard. Fear was making me tremble. My head started to ache from being on alert. A new fear pulsed down my spine at that moment, one that I had not considered before. I started to worry that fear could drive me insane. I couldn’t be on alert at all times. I had to sleep. The thoughts of what might happen while I was sleeping began to claw at my mind with long, sharp talons. I tried to breathe. I tried to push all thoughts of anything scary out of my head. I tried to visualize pleasant things. Nothing was working. My heart was in my throat. I thought of how much people depended on each other for things other than simple companionship. I thought about how people depended on each other for protection, for safety. I might never have another person to watch my back. If I couldn’t gather myself and get a grip on my fears, I might never sleep again. I didn’t know much about sleep, but I knew that going without it for a long time would lead to further paranoia, and uncontrolled paranoia would lead to insanity.

  The most terrifying picture of all forced itself into my brain at that second. I saw myself crouched in the corner of a filthy house. My skin was unwashed. My hair was wild and matted. I was holding guns and muttering to myself, eyes wide and darting. I saw myself going insane. Alone. In a wasteland devoid of human contact and protection.

  I didn’t want to live in that world.

  I didn’t sleep that night. I lay on the floor, every muscle tense, until dawn came. Even when the sun rose and banished any demons or monsters from outside the RV, I was scared to pull the curtains and look outside. In the end, my bladder forced my hand. I had to piss like a racehorse, and I’d never gotten around to rigging up the tiny little camper toilet in the Greyhawk. Why have an indoor toilet in a moving vehicle that you’d have to clean and empty when the world was your toilet?

  Even with the sun providing ample light, I was terrified to open the side door to my RV. I unlocked it, took a deep breath, and then slammed it open, banging the door to the side of the RV’s body, hoping any creatures within a half-mile would hear the noise and run. I stuck my head out just far enough to look to the right and left and see that Sasquatch wasn’t hanging around. I stepped onto the road and circled the RV, shotgun at the ready. After one full revolution, I even dropped to my knees and looked under the vehicle just to make sure there wasn’t some sort of monster circling around the Greyhawk. Only then did I venture to the edge of the road to relieve my straining bladder.

  When I got back into the RV and opened all the curtains, I felt a flood of relief. A surge of dopamine and endorphins calmed me. I was able to laugh at myself a little. I had been stressing out over the highly improbable chance that I was going to meet a Bigfoot. In the safety of the light of day, it seemed ridiculous. However, I knew that night would come again soon. I knew that night would return, and with it the fear would return, as well. I didn’t know how to alleviate that fear. It was so absurd that it made me angry while I performed my morning rituals. The more I thought about the fear, the angrier I got with myself. Part of it might have been lack of sleep. I hated the fact that I was getting angry, and that only made me angrier. I was so angry that I couldn’t eat.

  I put a Coke in the drink holder in the front of the Greyhawk for the road. I took a couple of bottles of water and some soap and gave myself a quick, chilly shower in the middle of the road. I dried off, dressed, and got ready to drive. Fester was on the passenger seat waiting for me. He sat and regarded me with his dark green eyes. I looked back at him. “Fester, am I losing my mind?”

  Fester gave a meow and flopped on his side. He rolled to his back and looked at me expectantly. I reached over and gave his belly a couple of scratches. He immediately curled into a ball and bit my wrist gently, holding it in place to make sure I didn’t stop rubbing his belly. His eyes closed and he started his husky purring. I turned the key to the RV with my left hand and the engine roared to life. It scared him, and he relinquished my arm.

  We continued east on Highway 80. I had no desire to explore towns or homes out in the rural areas of Pennsylvania. The hills and vales that I had enjoyed so much the day before were now areas of suspicion and required frequent scans for roaming cryptid monsters.

  I crossed most of Pennsylvania over the next five hours. I didn’t stop. I didn’t leave the highway. While I was moving, I felt safe, protected. It wasn’t until the middle of the afternoon, when I ran low on gas, and I needed to pee again, that I consented to stop.

  I pulled off the highway at a gas station near the exit for highway 380 north. There were signs for the Poconos everywhere. The sun was still high in the sky. It was only mid-summer. The sun wouldn’t be setting until at least nine. I figured I had a good five hours of daylight, maybe a bit more. I wanted to see the Poconos. I wanted to check out the fabled mountain resorts. If nothing else, I thought that maybe forcing my way into a solid building for the night. Being able to curtain the windows and bar the door might make me feel safe enough to sleep. I wasn’t certain I’d sleep in the RV that night. I knew I would have to get over the fear at some point, but for the moment, it felt like an impossibility.

  After I’d done everything I needed to do at the gas station, I got back in the RV and headed north into the Poconos. My gut got tight. My skin got itchy. The fear was crawling back into me. Thinking about staying somewhere overnight made me remember that the dark was coming back. I didn’t feel safe in large cities. I didn’t feel safe in the woods. I didn’t know how to get through the night, anymore. I didn’t have much of a choice, though. Time and tide wait for no man. I think Chaucer said that. The sun was falling toward the western horizon. The light was beginning to wane, changing from the clear, white light of day to the hazy, yellowed afternoon light. Time certainly wasn’t waiting for me.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The Pocono Resorts

  There were resorts aplenty in the Poconos. The rolling mountains were dotted with unbelievable castle-like hotels filled with hundreds of luxury rooms. There were also amazing homes dotting the countryside, palatial mansions and cute little weekend cabins—places for which my mother would have cut off her right leg to own. The whole area reeked of money and prestige. I pulled off the road at the first massive mega-hotel I saw, a place called the Buckskill Lodge and Conference Center. In the light of day, it didn’t look too intimidating. At night, with every window dark, I imagined the place would look like a haunted asylum, the kind a group of dumb teens would visit, and six of the seven of them
would be dead by dawn. It did not feel, at first glance, like the type of place where I wanted to spend the night.

  I drove up to the covered entry. At least if it stormed, the RV wouldn’t suffer more hail damage. Gripping the shotgun, I left the Greyhawk and approached the front doors of the hotel. The lobby was lit through the side windows by the afternoon sun. When I cracked the door, the smell of old death was thick. People had died in this hotel. A lot of people. That struck me as strange. The world is ending, people are dying left and right, and some people decided to spend their last days in a luxury hotel. I suppose I couldn’t fault them: If you’re going to go anyway, you might as well go in style.

  The lobby was expansive and done up in a faux-rustic style. It was supposed to look like a rugged mountain cabin, but the decoration didn’t look anything like what I knew of mountain cabins. It looked like someone had some snooty New York designer remake a cabin in what they thought a rustic cabin should be. There were expensive pieces of art on the walls and a large marble sculpture near the expansive front desk. Where were the taxidermied animal heads and the mounted trophy fish? If a rustic cabin doesn’t have a singing plastic fish on the wall, can we really call it a rustic cabin?

  The lobby squelched all sound. The wood timbers along the walls swallowed any noise and the carpeting and acoustic ceiling tiles created a very quiet room. It was very strange to find a place that was even quieter than the hushed, ambient world. I’d grown used to the noise of nature and winds, but this room lacked either. It was the kind of quiet that pressed on my eardrums. I found myself coughing occasionally just to hear something, to break the silence.

  There was an office behind the lobby desk, so I figured I’d start exploring there. The door was slightly ajar. The smell of decay increased slightly as I moved toward the door. I’d like to say that I was prepared for the corpse in the office, but in reality, even after encountering numerous corpses, even after living amongst the houses-turned-mausoleums, I was never prepared to see another body. I doubted I ever would be. I didn’t get sick to my stomach when I saw them anymore, but I certainly didn’t enjoy finding them. They were just an unpleasant part of life, like mold or mosquitoes.

  The corpse in the office was still dressed in an employee’s uniform, white shirt with frilly lace at the neck and a maroon skirt. A gold-bar name tag on the shirt read Kayla. She was curled up in a corner of the office on the floor, a jacket balled up under her head as a pillow. Why had she stayed at work to die? I would have gone home. Sorry, boss—everyone in the world is dying. I quit.

  Kayla had mummified well. Insects had their way with her eyes, unfortunately. Her skin had shrunk and pulled back around her mouth, giving her a ghastly, leering grin. The skin on her fingers had dried, too. Her fingernails protruded like talons. It was pretty easy to see how vampire myths started. Her hair was around her face in stringy, matted locks. It was probably nice hair at one point in her life, but the last hours of her life had been spent on a hard floor in feverish misery. My heart went out to her. I hoped she’d at least ben able to call her family and say a final good-bye. She looked like she had been young, maybe early twenties. It was hard to judge age on dried corpses.

  I found a set of master keys in the office, and then closed the door, letting it click shut behind me. Kayla deserved to rest undisturbed. It was a lousy place to die, but the whole situation was pretty lousy.

  The rest of the hotel was largely dark. The long hallways had small windows at the far ends of them, but the light they gave was barely enough to see the shape of the hall. Long stretches of the corridors were left in complete darkness. I needed a flashlight, and if I was carrying a flashlight, I couldn’t carry a shotgun, too. I had to ditch the comforting weight of the shotgun and rely on the pistol on my hip. I actually had to take a moment to tell myself that Bigfoot hadn’t taken up residence in the lodge, and shotguns would not be effective against ghosts, either. I went back to the RV, ditched the shotgun, and got my police-style MagLite. The MagLite wasn’t quite as comforting as a shotgun, but its long handle filled with six D batteries was heavy enough to knock a man unconscious with a single, well-placed swing. It definitely helped give me a fortitude boost. It also had 178 lumens. A normal flashlight runs around 20-80 lumens, depending on quality. This thing was basically a portable spotlight. The MagLite helped put my mind at ease. With its blinding beam splayed out ahead of me, there was no way Bigfoot could jump out and surprise me inside a several-hundred million dollar hotel.

  I walked the first-floor hallway. It was a long corridor with rooms on either side. All the room locks were key-card locks, those new-fangled locks that required a plastic key like a credit card. You’d think that they wouldn’t work, but I tried the master card in the first lock. The little red and green lights on the top of the lock glowed, and I was able to open it. Apparently, the locks were powered with a few AA batteries and if no one was using them, they had the ability to last a long time. They would eventually fizzle out, I was sure, but it was a testament to their quality that the doors still worked after a year and a half.

  The first room I tried had a body in it, a single corpse, and it looked like a man’s corpse. It was lying in the king-sized bed in the center of the room. The covers were pulled up to his chest, and his arms were lying on either side of his body. He looked peaceful, like he’d died in his sleep instead of gasping for air. I saw an empty bottle of painkillers and an empty vodka bottle next to the bed. I couldn’t be sure, but I felt it was safe to assume he’d committed suicide. The writing was on the wall pretty quickly during the Flu, and a lot of people, upon coming down with symptoms, chose a fast, painless death instead of drowning in their own fluids. I backed out of his room and let his door close behind me. After that, I didn’t bother with any more rooms. I was certain that I did not want to spend the night in that hotel.

  I did explore a bit more of the hotel, going through some of the convention center and the restaurants therein. I found the pool, but the pool was unbelievably gross. There was still water in it, but that water had grown green and slimy. Despite the stagnant chemical smell in the air, black mold was sprouting on all the walls in the pool area. I didn’t even waste time unlocking the door. I immediately felt dirty just being there, and I tucked my mouth and nose into my shirt to prevent inhaling any more of that mess than I already had. I backed out of the pool area, found my way to the nearest exit, and went back to the RV.

  That hotel had probably cost at least $100 million to build. It was massive, five stories, with a convention center that could have hosted a regulation college basketball game. It was a monument to American excess, a beautiful structure in a beautiful area, and it had probably provided tens of thousands of people with a fun vacation over its lifetime. Now it was just a dark, multi-room tomb. The rot in the pool area would probably speed its decay. In another five years, storms and weather would take their toll and the siding would be coming off, some of the windows would be broken due to the building shifting and settling as it deteriorated, and animals might try to build homes in the areas they could access. The building would continue to fall to rack and ruin. Eventually, it would collapse in on itself, and the earth would send up weeds and trees to try to reclaim it. In fifty years, maybe a hundred, it would be a pile of rubble in the midst of a burgeoning wood—the same sort of wood someone had probably had to chop down just to build the damn thing. In the end, everything dies; nothing lasts forever. That is just the way it has to be. That’s the way it will always be.

  While I pulled away from the hotel, I told Fester about the bodies inside, and the black mold. He was curled up on the passenger seat with his paws tucked underneath him, a pose I liked to think of as furry bread loaf with a head. He squeezed his eyes and looked unimpressed.

  I pulled off the main highway onto a private road and saw large, expensive houses mostly hidden by trees and brick walls. Big money homes. Million-dollar places with million-dollar views of the mountains around them. Most of the driveways had
large iron gates in front of them, the kind that were powered by keypads or remotes. My dad always hated solicitors, be they religious or commercial. He would have loved to have had a gate like these. I had to park the RV on the road in order to go into the homes. I needed to see inside these places. I needed to know what sort of secrets they held.

  I picked the biggest one I could see, a sprawling, three-story job with a log-cabin look to the exterior. It had a few windows across the front of the main section that allowed me to see through the interior to the rooms at the rear where massive panes of glass provided a view of the expansive valley beyond.

  I climbed the eight-foot stone wall in front of the house and landed on the other side. There, in the yard, was garbage. A staggering amount of garbage, actually. In one corner of the yard was a mountain of black 55-gallon garbage bags, each crammed with cans and bottles and other odds and ends. When whoever did this ran out of bags, he or she (or they, judging from the amount of debris) just started dumping trash in piles near the garbage bag mountain. The stench was powerful. Flies and hornets buzzed thickly around the waste piles. I had no doubt that vermin were about, as well. I could not see any, but I knew they were there. I hadn’t expected to find this sort of thing behind the wall of a multi-million dollar home. However, this amount of garbage meant that someone, or several someones, had survived the Flu. There was enough garbage there to account for months of living, maybe even a year’s worth.