The Populace

by Patterson, Aaron M.

  And the wet. Oh yes, it began in earnest almost from the start. Around noon that first day of walking a raucous thunderstorm came plowing across the landscape. Rain as heavy as I’ve ever seen; winds that could topple an elephant; lightning brighter than the sun; thunder louder than the loudest speakers on earth. And it lasted two hours. We’d found a campground with shelters in the woods, keeping slightly dry from the wrath of Mother Nature.

  This would not be a one-and-done situation. More than half of our trip was spent in rain, almost always in the form of thunderstorms. So be it, we both said. It was already going to be a wildly dangerous journey, so a little rain to increase the challenge didn’t really affect us.

  So we’d marched about 18 miles when we reached the remnants of a town called Kimball. We found the little high school there and entered, abandoned and very badly dilapidated, quite fitting for the way the world was now. With power completely removed from all areas not labeled CA developments, the school was darker than dark. We had only the lights of our solar lights and the occasional flash of lightning to guide us.

  I settled in on a dusty couch in the teacher’s lounge. The room carried quite the foul stench, akin to badly rotten potatoes and wet dog. I pushed open the window, its badly rusted hinges making the task harder than usual. The breeze from the storm was refreshing and indeed stench-lessening.

  “Did you find a section?” I asked Gene over the cell.

  “Yep,” he said. “It has to be the gym because I’m lying on a wrestling mat. Dine?”

  “Dine.”

  I squeezed on a tube of veggie paste. I had only eaten a handful of crackers all day, so I was incredibly hungry. However, I hardly recognized my hunger thanks to my exhaustion. I would have found a way to shower if I thought for any reason the showers in the high school were functional. They weren’t, naturally. Besides, we had already decided to bathe in a small river or lake the next day.

  “Thoughts, Gene?”

  “Hold on.” He swallowed what he was dining on, some strange meat-looking food, and looked back at the screen on his cell. “Thoughts on what?”

  “The day, the beginning of this thing you’re dragging me on.”

  “Wallace, I didn’t drag you here. You didn’t have to come.”

  Apparently, Gene was aptly forgetting the many times he nearly cried trying to convince me to stick with the plan amongst the many conversations we had when I expressed my doubts. So convenient.

  “I did have to come, Gene. You begged. But let’s not go there, shall we? What are your thoughts?”

  “Well, I’ll be honest. As we walked I expected it to be harder. I thought the tension of leaving my cabin would make me regret things easier. I thought the thought of my sister wouldn’t compare to the fear of the unknown ahead. I was wrong. It’s been easy and her thought carries me along.”

  I knew better. While the first day was void of much trouble or obstacles in our way, I realized we had many weeks of this ahead. Reason demanded we would have far worse days, days where nothing went right, danger approached, we got lost, we lost our connections, or any unfortunate combination of the lot. But I needed to ensure he was not discouraged by my negativity of the reality. He was, after all, my only friend.

  “A breeze, Gene. Hopefully it all goes like this in the many miles to come.”

  “I found something for you, Wallace. Look outside the lounge door.”

  “What is it?”

  “Just look. You’ll need it.”

  My cell in hand, I got up from the couch and went to the door. I opened it and found three rolls of toilet paper, coarse and thin, sitting casually before me for the taking. “You found some?”

  “I did. Ladies room here in this gym. I guess not all places were so thoroughly pillaged.”

  Toilet paper had been in high demand since the Ire. There was an ample world supply in 2030. That all but dried up by 2042, thus we needed more. Enter the Waste Build Initiative, a CA plan to continue our use of toilet paper. Each development eventually had functioning sewage systems to each cabin, well maintained and certainly sturdier than most sewage systems pre-Ire. Upon realizing our paper supplies were thinning, the people in Bern found a way to recycle used toilet tissue. Not sure how they did it, but what we got was a separate canister for tissue, not for the waste itself. It was flushed to a factory in the development apart from the sewage, somehow cleaned, somehow kept in-tact, and somehow recycled for new rolls. Thin, rough, and flimsy, this toilet paper was no comparison to the good old days of Charmin and White Cloud. But it worked. Throwing the used paper into another hole was a very small price to pay for having an everlasting supply of the good stuff.

  But every once in a while, a roll from the past would sneak into our existence. Most places out in the world had been picked clean of the commodity, so when Gene found a windfall of toilet paper in the ladies room, all things suddenly felt good and comfortable. At least for a brief window of time, and at least for my ass.

  I was done chatting with Gene for the night. I needed sleep. So what came next was expected—I couldn’t sleep. The flashes of lightning from the damn storm that wouldn’t die flailed through the windows of the school, illuminating the walls for brief spats on the teacher’s lounge.

  I discovered I had not been the only person in the room since the Ire. In fact, somebody had made it something of a home for a while. The sight this evening, though, was a terrifying one. On the walls written in black charcoal were countless phrases by somebody named Olaf, presumably a man with little of his mind left. Ire strays, becomes me was perhaps the softest of the phrases, which he’d written probably twenty times, each in different fonts and sizes. There were others that grew darker: I am death becoz I kill; I am the husbind of the hellhounds; My sky is the blood that porrs; See these hands and know hait; My grave is the sole of all those hu know me. The worst one, and the biggest of all on the big, otherwise blank wall, was Olaf drinks from you hu reeds this.

  I can’t be sure if he enjoyed shorthand or if he was simply a bad speller, but Olaf had issues. We all had issues at the beginning of the Ire, so it was completely excusable. Creepy, nonetheless.

  So my first night spent away from my cabin in nearly a decade was an orgy of violent light crashes shining on the morbid statements and continuing doubts about why I had agreed to it at all. And I slept like a goddamn baby.

  ~~~~

  Chapter 9

  Human

  What better way to greet the morning than with a cracker embraced by the green-gray glow of veggie gel and rain splattering against the walls of a gloomy abandoned school? It was what it was and I made no complaints about it. I had a job to do.

  I met up, from a distance down the hall, with Gene on the ground floor of the school. The acoustics were right. I could finally talk to the man. Loudly.

  “Have you eaten?” I roared.

  “Two meat cans!” he ear-piercingly shot back. “I may have to shit first though! Do you think the toilets here work?”

  “No way in hell they work! Outdoors, like I just did!”

  It was a riveting and disgusting conversation. Basic, yes, but more importantly it was needed. Banality worked in our favor during these times of too many questions. We didn’t have to truly think during mundane conversation about everyday things. The diversion worked, making the road to Oklahoma just a little easier. Quietly, we both knew a very rough road lay ahead of us.

  I’d mapped out our next path from Kimball. Looked like Cosmos, some thirty miles away, would be a good stopping point. Wait, thirty miles? Could we make that? We would try. Gene enjoyed the idea—anything to get us to Oklahoma quicker.

  We would take fields and woods the entire way there. With such flat land, it was easy to remain within eye-view for the most part. We saw no automobile, no lights, no people, and no signs apart from the black sign reading Minnesota Number-8 Development, Montevideo, 70 Miles. We must have been trudging on at lightning pace because we reached Cosmos before the sunset.
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br />   “What do you say?” I asked Gene. “Want to find a school again or hit up one of these houses?”

  It was a small town, nothing special at all. Cool name, though. Very modest ranch and Cape Cod houses lined the few streets of the town.

  “That one there,” Gene said, pointing to the one-story tan brick house with brown trim. Ultra-modest. Perfect.

  We’d forgotten something. It was a small house. Too damn small. As I approached, my head began to hurt and I felt uneasy. The sensation of rage was starting to build. I caught it. I caught that Ire before it could consume me! I quickly ran in the other direction and pulled my cell up to my face.

  “What the fuck were we thinking?” I asked Gene.

  He was hunched over on the filthy floor of the tan brick house with his arms over his head, much like a mentally ill child would do when agitated.”

  “Gene?”

  He swayed back and forth.

  “Answer me, Gene. I’m far away now.”

  “I wanted to kill you!” he shouted, his face still buried in the grungy carpet. “You were going to die, Wallace! I had to end you. I felt it!”

  “Calm down. I stopped it.”

  Although we reacted differently, we were feeling the same thing. One peculiar aspect of the Ire that we often overlooked was the dreadful sense of hopelessness, plus the agonizing knife-jab of incompleteness. When the Ire came close yet failed, it took the human down for a while.

  “Please answer me, Gene.”

  “One day,” he said. He was weeping. “I need a day to recover, Wallace. I’m sorry. We came too close and I’m destroyed now. Please, let us stay apart for two nights. When I’m ready I’ll contact you, not you contact me. Bye.”

  Apparently, the Ire hurt Gene worse than it did me. Its effects were studied all these years and it had become known that some people were more susceptible to the Ire than others, although to what degree remained unknown. The general proximity remained the same, but sometimes it fluctuated. Overall, the Ire was a finicky bitch and often just wanted to toy with us, or at least it seemed that way much of the time.

  I remained in a little green house a few blocks away that night. I honored Gene’s wishes and avoided chatting with him. He would lose it if he saw my face, perhaps residual Ire pains creeping in to hurt his brain once more. I wasn’t bothered by not talking with him, but I was bothered by his reaction. He was overwhelmed, as though he couldn’t control himself at all. Everybody loses all control as some point with the Ire, but there is a window. Gene’s window was tiny and it was frightening. It made me wonder if we should adjust our tactics as we ventured forth in the coming days.

  The night was lonely. Once more, a thunderstorm readied itself to come down on us. I liked it—the storm, not the loneliness. My second night away from my home in the development and I was already missing my way of life back there. Everyday and commonplace it may have been, but it was comfortable and easy. This, though, this was hard.

  I was exhausted from the very long march to Cosmos. The time had come to take it easy in the house. But first reality had a surprise in store for me. My story to this point had been of my own doings with the Ire—the four people I had killed, my acceptance of the CA, my curiosity to live. What had completely been lost on me was what occurred outside of me, my cozy existence with the Ire. What lay inside the house opened my eyes. I couldn’t unsee it.

  On the sofa in the house was a skeleton in man’s clothes. It sat upright, the jaw fallen to the ground. On the cushion beside the skeleton was a shotgun. Behind the skeleton on the wall was a big black stain. The need to deduce was brief. Suicide, presumably at the beginning of the Ire. I was mortified beyond belief, not seeing anything like this before. I dry heaved briefly.

  I would not spend the night in that room, so I headed back deeper in the house. The rest came. A small skeleton, likely one of a child, lay in a dirty child’s bed. No gunshot signs. The right arm was badly twisted, mangled, obviously broken. In the skull was a gaping hole the size of a slice of bread. This kid was a victim of the Ire, and probably what prompted the person in the living room to end it all. In the far back room was another skeleton, this one of a larger person. It told the same story, beaten to death by the one with the gunshot wound.

  It hurt. The pain came from knowing around the planet on that day in 2030 this scene was repeating itself over and over and over. It was extremely common, only it was now, nineteen years later, when I was finally seeing it. Death took the world. I was alive. I was fortunate, somehow. I killed, of course, to remain alive. But I was in the great minority.

  Reality pummeled me with sadness, so much so that I had to leave the house. I walked over to the next house and it was almost the same situation, a skeleton slumped over the kitchen table with a pistol in its boney hands and four small skeletons in the back. I could not stay. There was no telling what demons the other houses in the neighborhood held, so I opted not to lie down in a house. Instead, I found a gas station down the street. No bodies inside, no sign of death. I made a bed from a comforter I found in the back and fell asleep.

  Seeing the bones of once-living people gave me nightmares. Ugly ones. I leapt from my sleeping spot on several occasions, keeping me awake long spells. Not even the smell in the gas station, akin to dust mixed with sewage and B.O., could compete with my own mind as the winner of the keeping me uncomfortable game.

  I roamed the town of Cosmos the next day, every once in a while checking my cell to see if Gene had called. The town had to contain something special in it, be it food, cell batteries, toilet paper, whatever. The gas station I temporarily called home was picked dry. The supermarket, Big Tre’s Premium Grocers, was just the same. I found a line of very small doctor’s offices. After searching all five buildings, I came out with a half-roll of the good stuff. Better than nothing.

  I found one unopened can of brown beans in a storage closet in a drug store. That was it. Cosmos had no commodities left. I could certainly attempt to search more houses, but I could not stand the thought of seeing all the tragedy that likely crept around each one. I went back to the gas station.

  The day and start of the night had been remarkably rain-free. Not even a cloud in the sky. It was refreshing. What remained stagnant was the absence of Gene’s voice and his face on my cell’s screen. I began to ponder the idea that he would not have the fortitude to make it all the way to Oklahoma. An instance like this was sure to happen again. Would the next words out of his mouth be ‘You can go home, I’m not going any further’? The answer came around midnight. It woke me up.

  “Hey,” Gene said. “Are you awake?”

  “I am now.”

  “I don’t know if you tried calling me today. I had the cell off. Couldn’t take it. You understand, right?”

  “I understand you completely lost it, Gene. I was able to turn around. Why was it so hard on you?” All the while I knew it just simply was harder on him. Still, I was angry at him, unreasonably so.

  “Wallace, I can’t believe you. What do you expect me to do? I’m human. Humans get the Ire. Do you not remember the story of me killing all those people? The Ire became a part of me in those few short days. It never left. It’s stayed and makes it harder for me to ignore it. You killed five people. Big fucking deal. Fuck you, Wallace. Fuck you and your fucking Ire-ignoring shitty attitude. Go to hell, asshole.”

  Well I was not going to Oklahoma now. He could eat those words, I didn’t care. A friend doesn’t speak like that to a friend. It just doesn’t happen. He drew a line in the sand and crossed it himself, meaning it was done.

  That lasted an hour, of course. Gene called me back; I was a minute away from calling him anyway.

  “Wallace,” he solemnly said. “Listen—“

  “No, it’s alright, Gene. I get it. I do.”

  “But I’m really sorry. Let me apologize.”

  “You don’t need to.”

  “Please.”

  The exchange lasted another five minutes. It somehow
settled down and we began talking again.

  “When the Ire comes, I want to die,” Gene said. “I want my life to end because no good comes of it. That’s how I felt yesterday.”

  “You don’t need to explain yourself, Gene. I know there are those who can walk away from the first signs of the Ire and those who fall into it head-first.”

  “I’m the latter, of course. Anyway, please don’t hate me. I need you to get me to Oklahoma.”

  Gene was plenty capable of reaching Oklahoma on his own. The man was sturdy, healthy, powerful, and able. It was his brain that needed me to help him reach his sister. His brain occupied a space away from his able body, and I got the feeling it was getting lonely, much like mine was at the gas station. It made sense.

  We formed the plan. We would take flight the next morning. Our next target was a town called Redwood Falls. Another thirty miles or so. It was still within the boundaries of Minnesota, very much within them in fact, so our progress was not happening very fast. And even after waking the next morning, walking all the way to Redwood Falls, sleeping in what was an old factory, and waking the following morning to leave, we realized how slow this was going to be. A new tactic was needed.

  A soothing facet of our slow walking was that we had not come across anything in the way of other people. It was completely baron. The trip was easy because of it. We knew it was luck, however, and that we would not stay lucky. In many ways, we anticipated the worst with each step forward. It had to be waiting around the corner. Process of elimination deemed it to be that way. We were on-guard, on the lookout for anything. And we didn’t find it.

  At Tracy, our next overnight stop, things got different. Very different. The game we’d played up until now was completely foreign compared to what came next.

  ~~~~

  Chapter 10

  Common Interest

  We’d arrived at Tracy with a little light to spare, and indeed another seemingly endless thunderstorm. The first large building we came upon was a Catholic church in the middle of town. Lovely structure, still looked intact.