I slipped in the side door of the Greyhawk. I retreated to the back bedroom with my shotgun and semi-auto pistol, and I lay down on the bed, shotgun barrel pointed toward the narrow door. I didn’t sleep, though. I laid awake and listened to the night, my heart in my throat, until dawn.
Was I doing the right thing? I couldn’t know. I wouldn’t know. Renata had given me no reason to doubt her, but I didn’t know her. I had no way of seeing down the road, as it were. Was she using me? Would she steal my RV later on? Could I trust her? In everything, there comes a time in every relationship where both parties have to make a leap of faith. Sometimes, it comes back to bite one of the parties in the ass, and sometimes it pays off for both parties. I had to hope this was one of those times where it was the latter.
Minutes after dawn broke, I was crouched low behind an old delivery truck. All four tires on the thing were flat as crepes. I positioned myself so that I could see clearly in the direction of Ren’s bar. I wanted to be able to see her approaching. I had a foil-wrapped breakfast bar in my hand, but no desire to eat it. I only brought it in case Renata was late, and I got bored. I also had my shotgun on my shoulder on a sling. I wasn’t going to draw it unless necessary, and I wanted to trust in Renata, but I couldn’t risk losing my RV now. If she tried to rob me of it, I’d be stuck in New York. I didn’t think I would be able to get another vehicle running, so that left trying to walk or bicycle all the way to the South.
I didn’t have to wait long. Ren showed up a few minutes later. She was carrying a large duffel, something like a hockey bag, and the unloaded police-issue shotgun. She had her head on a swivel, scanning the cars for trouble. When she ducked under the chain-fence at the edge of the overpass, she paused and squinted into the shadows. She looked cleaner than she did the night before, like she’d bathed herself since then. She was wearing different clothes, a pair of green cargo-style Capri pants and an Iron Maiden concert t-shirt. She was wearing the hiking boots she’d worn the previous night.
Leap of faith. Ignore the fear. Point of no return. I took a deep breath and made a conscious choice to trust Renata. I stood up and walked around the corner of the delivery truck. “Over here!” I called. The sound of my voice echoed off the concrete overhead. It was very loud against the stillness of a summer morning.
Ren jumped when she heard my voice, but when she spotted me, I saw her visibly relax. She hustled through the maze of cars. “I was worried you might have left without me.”
“Nope. I waited.” I tried to give a genuine smile. I don’t know if it worked. I was never good at smiling. Every photograph I’ve ever taken where I had to force a smile ends up with me looking slightly constipated. “Are you ready to go?”
Ren held up the bag and the shotgun. “This is all I need, I guess. Anything else, we can pick up on our way south. Do you want to stop and try to find some food? I know plenty of buildings that no one has gotten into, yet.”
“I’ve got food. C’mon.” I started to walk toward the RV.
“Wait.” Ren didn’t follow. “Can we talk for just a minute?”
“Sure.” I turned to face her.
Ren bit her lip. She looked me up and down. “You’re not a psycho or anything, are you?”
“What do you mean?” I knew what she meant. I was thinking the same things about her.
“Like, you’re not a rapist or a murderer, are you?”
It’s a little strange to be asked that. Would I be honest and tell her that I was a rapist or murderer? I shook my head. “No, not in the least. I’m just a guy from Wisconsin who didn’t get to die when the rest of the world did.”
“Wisconsin doesn’t have the best reputation when it comes to serial killers, you know.”
“That’s true, but I’m not one. Honest.” I held up my right hand in a Cub Scout salute.
Ren bit her lower lip. “We’re going to be together for a long time, aren’t we?”
I nodded. “If neither of us ends up being a psycho, I guess. I need a friend. We,” I corrected myself, “need friends.”
“I’m putting a lot of trust in you. You seem like an okay guy. Just…don’t disappoint me, right?”
“I’ll try not to.”
“Just be honest with me, okay?” She smiled and rolled her eyes. “Christ, this sounds like we’re starting to date or something.”
“In a way, we are. It’s a partnership, right? We don’t know what else is out there, or who else is out there. We have to look out for each other. I get your back, you get mine.”
“Trust is earned, though.” She adjusted the hockey bag and slung it over her shoulder.
She had a point. I said, “I will try to earn your trust. You try to earn mine.”
She looked me up and down again. “Deal. Now, let’s go, eh? We got a long way to walk. Maybe we can find some bikes?”
“I can do you one better than that.” We walked to the RV. I held out an arm toward it. “We travel in style.”
Ren’s mouth dropped open. “Oh, my god. That’s amazing. It runs? I thought you said it broke down?”
“I didn’t know you last night. I was protecting myself.”
Ren approached the RV and pulled the side door. She squealed. “Oh, you have a kitty!”
In that moment, she sounded like a teenage girl, her voice lost any grit or edge. She clambered into the Greyhawk, dropped her bag and gun, and scooped Fester into her arms. Attention hog that he is, he let her hold him, instantly going into super-purr mode. She buried her face into the fur of his neck. “Oh, what a sweetie.”
“His name is Fester.” I pulled the curtains in the cab and climbed into the driver’s seat.
“Like, Fester Addams?”
“Exactly like.”
“I love him.” Ren cradled the cat in her arms belly-up like a baby. When I did that to him, he would flip himself around and climb up my chest to perch his front paws on my shoulder. When she did it, he purred louder, the furry traitor.
I started the RV, pulled back to the street, and slapped it in drive. I had no desire to stay in New York any longer. I took the Brooklyn Bridge back to New Jersey as fast as I could. The tunnels would have been better, less chance of being seen, but the bridge was faster. I was operating on what Ren had said about the Patriots sleeping late.
Ren slipped through the gap between the seats and plopped into the passenger seat. She was still holding her weapon. “Look! I’m riding shotgun! Literally!” She seemed different than she had the night before, more alive, more vibrant. I hoped it was because she was feeling good about finding someone alive, someone whom she might learn to trust. That’s what I was feeling, too. After a year of near isolation, it was surreal to turn my head and see an actual, living, breathing person in the RV next to me.
After a few moments of riding shotgun, she hopped up and went into the back of the RV. She started poking through the drawers and cupboards. “I hope you don’t mind. I just wanted to see what sort of supplies you have.”
“I don’t mind,” I said. “When I stop for gas, I usually hit up any stores or shops in the area and scavenge.”
“Smart thinking.” Ren found a box of Rice Krispies Treats. “Mind if I have one?”
“Ren, this is your home now, too. Just help yourself. Don’t even ask.” I glanced over my shoulder. She was smiling.
“You mean that?”
“Partners, right? We ride together. What’s mine is yours.”
Ren came back to the passenger seat with her snack. She put her bare feet on the dash. “What’s the plan, boss?” She unwrapped the treat and took a bite. Her eyes rolled upward with joy. “I love these things.”
I shrugged. “I guess I was just going to continue doing what I was going to do, even if I hadn’t found anyone else. I was going to head down to Washington D.C. If anyone is still alive, I have a feeling they would go there. New York and D.C. were my two likeliest scenarios for finding people. Oh, and Disney World. On the way, I find small towns and look for signs of life.”
“Wouldn’t major cities give better odds?”
“Yes, and no. Statistically speaking, I think they would. But I was in a small town, and I went through all the major cities in Wisconsin and didn’t find a single person. I’ve been through Chicago and Minneapolis, and I didn’t find anyone. I might have missed them. In a small town, it’s easier to find someone if they’re still alive, I guess. Fewer places to hide, more chances to cross paths.”
Ren considered that and bobbed her head. “Makes sense, I suppose.”
We lapsed into silence and I found the highway heading south through New Jersey. When Ren was able to get out of her microcosm of New York City, she was able to see the desolation and entropy of the rest of the country. She gave a low whistle as we hit an elevated section of the highway and she was able to look down and see some of the suburbs with their overgrown lawns, fallen tree branches, and houses with siding coming off them in sheets. “Looks rough out there.”
“It is.” I wanted to hold back, but I figured she knew already. “Almost all of those houses have decaying bodies in them.”
“Just like the apartments in Brooklyn,” Ren said. “I was in the hospital, sort of being a CNA to help out my sister. I cleaned up a lot of puke, changed a lot of bed sheets. Then, there were just too many people. People lying on beds, slumped in chairs, sitting on the floors, lying on the floors. People everywhere. And they started dying, right? I couldn’t….we, my sister and me, we couldn’t do anything, man. They just died. All the doctors, all the nurses, everyone. Toward the end, we just went home. We’d been working for days. There wasn’t nothing else could be done. We just went home because Carlos came in and said our parents were gone. We had to abandon people. We just left them to die. I still feel horrible about it, but there wasn’t any other choice.”
“I can’t imagine.” I told her I’d been sequestered in my family’s house watching my parents die.
“In the first couple days, Elena, Carlos, and I, we had to break into our neighbors’ places to find food, water, and wood to burn. We found them lying in their beds, on the couches. It was tragic. Some of them, their pets were dead. Some, the pets were still alive and we released them to the wild. What else could we do, you know?”
“I did the same thing. Well, as much as I could.”
Ren looked out the window at garbage on the side of the road. She heaved a heavy sigh. “I’m tired of death, man.”
Washington D.C. looked like a war zone. I don’t know what happened after television went dark midway through the third week of the Flu, but it was apparently not good. Many buildings were destroyed around the outskirts of town. In the distance, I could see a chunk of the Washington Monument was missing, like someone had hacked at it with a gigantic ax. The obelisk was still standing, but it didn’t look structurally safe. Tanks, honest-to-god Army tanks littered the streets. The cold, charred wreckage of a fighter jet was scattered around the soot-black, crumbled remains of the apartment building it hit when it crashed. There were remnants of bodies in the streets, skulls with spines still attached, pelvic bones with femurs lying nearby. The capitol city looked cold and dark, even with a sky full of sunshine.
“What the hell went down here?” Ren was leaning forward in the cab, her face almost pressed to the front windshield. “Last I saw, everything in the capitol was copacetic, you know?”
The last time I’d seen Washington on TV, the president had been telling us that everything in the country was being taken offline. He was admitting that the Flu was unstoppable. He’d called it the “end of Mankind.” His face was stern and stoic. Presidential. He’d wished any who might survive good luck, and God bless. He asked any who might survive to rebuild the country and remember the principles for which America has always stood. Then, he got into Marine 1 and helicoptered away from the White House, probably to the secret base in Virginia to see if he could survive the Flu with the most advanced medical treatment that could be found.
“What do you think happened?” Ren pointed toward a toppled apartment building. “Looks like a war happened.”
“Might have. Probably once the president abandoned the White House, anyone still alive got mad that he was abandoning us. Maybe a mob mobilized against the White House. Maybe some foreign enemy attacked us?” That seemed unlikely. All the tanks were US Army. I didn’t know, though. Riots or attacks were the only likely possibilities.
Ren had my book of maps spread out on her lap. She directed me through the streets of the capitol to the White House. There, we saw more evidence that there had been some sort of disturbance. A tank had been driven through the tall iron fence in front of the White House and was now a permanent monument on the lawn. There were more skeletal bodies on the roads and the sidewalks. Neither Ren nor I could speak. Everywhere we looked were the remnants of chaos.
Ren sniffed. “Some of the neighborhoods where I lived in Brooklyn, some of the survivors went crazy with the looting during the second and third week. There were a lot of fights, gunshots. Pure panic. Think this is something like that?”
I couldn’t tell her, so I just shrugged. I knew some looting had gone down around Madison. I think it was just a natural response to impending death. Mostly, it’d been pharmacies and gun stores that had taken the brunt of the looting. People had been desperate for any sort of cure, and should they survive, they were desperate for weapons to protect themselves from any possible roving bands of marauders.
“Pull over here.” Ren pointed to a clear spot on the sidewalk in front of the south face of the White House. I did as she asked. We got ready to explore. I showed her my ruck with tools. I told her how I equipped to scavenge. She raised her eyebrows. “You were way more prepared for this crap than I was.”
“I had more time to prepare. I also didn’t have to contend with the Patriots.”
“True enough.” She held up her shotgun. “You got anything that will go in here?”
“Probably.” I had no idea if I did or not. I’m not a gun guy. I figured out most of what worked and what didn’t by reading guides. I figured most shotgun ammo was similar, though. I handed her a box of the same stuff I was putting in my shotgun, and she loaded it. The shells look like they fit. I looked like I knew what I was doing. I did not know for certain if they would work, but we would only have to worry about that if we needed to shoot the thing.
We walked through the fallen gate toward the White House. We started out a few feet apart, but Ren drifted to her right, away from me. “Stay far away. If there’s someone with a gun, give him two targets, not one.” I figured that was sound advice. We parted, each of us taking one side of the expansive, overgrown lawn.
The White House was impressive, even in entropy. According to history, it had been built to intimidate visiting dignitaries and instill confidence in the American people. Even with the lack of upkeep, it still held true to those ideas. It loomed like a beacon of brilliant white. It was, perhaps, a little more worn than any pictures I’d seen of it, but time hadn’t started to beat it down yet. The windows, all bullet-proof glass, were lasting a little better than the standard plate-glass in most homes.
I kept scanning the roof. I know that before the Flu, Secret Service snipers would sit on the roof, ready to take down any encroaching threat. If we were going to be in danger, I assumed it would be from that. After a year, I doubted that anyone was still in the White House, though. There wasn’t anywhere to get supplies nearby. There were better homes with more practical access to wood and food. The White House was too big to maintain, too. Smaller homes were more practical, more viable. I thought about the log cabins of the pioneers; most were the size of a master bedroom in a really nice house. Easier to heat and weatherproof. The White House, the great American icon, was impractical and it was going to rot just like everything else.
We approached the front door. It was open. Ren had her shotgun in her hands. She held a finger to her lips and motioned for me to halt. She slipped in the door like we were sneaking into
a building to arrest a serial killer. After a second, I heard her hiss. I peeked in the gap in the door. She was motioning for me to enter. I shoved the door and walked in, shotgun still hanging on my shoulder.
“Really, dude?” Ren shouldered her own weapon. She gave me a look of disgust. “We could have gone all Serpico on this place, secret agent-style.”
“Just listen for a second.” I craned my neck to listen to the stillness in the house. “You hear anything that would suggest anyone is here?”
Ren listened and shook her head. “Quiet.”
“Do you smell death?” I inhaled. There was a slight funk. Someone had died in the Whitehouse, maybe a couple of people. Not many, though.
“I think so.”
I was pretty confident the White House was empty. “Anyone here?” I shouted just enough for my voice to carry to adjacent rooms. I didn’t want to scream out my presence, but a small announcement felt safe. No one responded. I shrugged at Ren. “Empty.”
We walked through the initial foyer to the reception room, a large, round room where visitors would have been greeted. That led to the Center Hall, a wide corridor that ran the length of the house. I tilted my head toward the left hallway. “Let’s see what we can see.”
In moments, it was clear that what we could see wasn’t great. The White House had been ransacked. Plates were smashed, portraits were torn from the walls, holes had been kicked in the walls. It looked like someone had a major rager and the old building couldn’t keep up with the party. It was more damage than one person could have done. It had to have been a mob of some sort.
We meandered to the East Wing where the President and his family would have lived. It was trashed out, as well. There were three stories above ground, a basement, and a subbasement. As we walked through the house, it became more and more evident that no one was there. People had lived there for a time, though. We found evidence of food wrappers, clothes, and dried human waste, as gross as that sounds. People had been content to turn the corners of rooms into private latrines.
The Survivor Journals Omnibus Page 33