“And you would be right. No phones.”
“Is it weird that he has his home phone number on here? I don’t imagine doctors would want patients to have their home numbers.”
“I really wouldn’t know.” Cole shrugged his shoulders.
“I got it!” Anna jumped up off of the arm of the sofa and went into her office. When she emerged, she held a large book with yellow pages. “I’ll look him up in the phone book. There’s probably a million Morenos in here, but I can match his name with his phone number and get an address.”
She sat on the sofa and began to flip through the M’s.
“Holy shit…” Cole said, reading the names over her shoulder.
“What?”
“All those names… there’s so many. And they’re all gone. They’re all dead.”
Anna ignored him as she continued to search for the doctor’s name. “Got it. Merriman Road… the high rent district.”
“You know where that is?”
“Not exactly, but I’m sure I can find it.” Anna stood up and dropped the phone book on the floor. “Alright, let’s hit the road.”
“Now?”
“Sure. I’m not tired or anything. If we leave now we can get there before dark.”
“Yeah, but I am. Can’t we stay here for the night and go tomorrow morning?”
Anna looked out the window at the fading sun and agreed that they could leave early the next morning.
As it began to get dark, Anna and Cole gathered all of the candles and lit them where they sat around the Christmas tree. They drank warm bottles of Diet Coke and ate stale cereal by handfuls out of the box
“Do you remember any Christmases?” Anna asked.
“Sure, I remember a few. The last real Christmas that I remember I got a remote-control boat that looked like a smaller model of my grandpa’s boat. I used to love to ride on his boat so much.” His voice trailed off as he looked through one of the candles. Then he shook his head as if being awoken from a trance. “It really sucks, the number of Christmas presents that require power. For a while I would wander from house to house and open everyone’s presents.”
“Really?”
“It’s not like they were going to open them or anything. Some houses I would even open them up in front of their corpses. I figured they went through all the time of shopping and wrapping them… the least I could do is make sure they got opened. And most of the time it was just a phone or a video game or a coffee maker. And so much women’s clothing. It was rare I find that I would find any men’s clothes.”
“Men don’t really like getting clothes for Christmas. I know that Rick didn’t.”
“If you had presents under your tree--- which you don’t--- what would be under there?”
Anna smiled at the thought of past Christmas presents. “Let’s see. I bought him an old 8-bit Nintendo from an auction one year. And then I got him a bomber jacket…” She walked over to the couch and picked up the jacket. “This jacket, actually. He wore it all the time.” She smelled it, but it just smelled of mold and dust.
“And what would he get you?”
Anna laughed. “Clothes that I didn’t like or clothes that didn’t fit. He’d buy me movies that he wanted me to see because he liked them. Or he’d buy me kitchen tools… and I hated that he bought me kitchen tools.”
“Why?”
“Because I felt like it was his way of saying ‘you should cook me something.’”
“Did you like cooking?”
“I did. Well, you know… actually I didn’t. I just liked eating. And if I didn’t cook we would just eat pizza all the time.”
“I miss pizza. That was my favorite food.”
Anna paused and carefully worded her next question in her head, speaking softly and carefully as she asked, “Did they serve you good food in the… the… you know, the camp?”
“No.” His tone was cold and sharp. It was the first time that Cole- a virtual stranger who Anna let stay in her house- had made her feel uncomfortable.
“Do you want another syrupy Diet Coke?” She jumped to her feet and rubbed her hands together.
“Do you believe in hell, Anna?” He ignored her question and looked up at her from where he sat on the living room floor. It was the first time that Anna was able to see his eyes that evening from under the brim of his baseball cap. They looked glassy and swollen.
“Well…” Anna slowly sat back down on the floor.
“My mother took me to church every Sunday.” Cole interrupted her before she could answer. “It was a Protestant church… I’m almost positive. After we would sing, and after the collection plate would come around, and after we would ‘hug our neighbors’, they would send the kids to Sunday school in the back of the church. I have such a clear memory of singing ‘Jesus loves me’. You know that song?”
Anna nodded.
“They never really talked about hell, just about how much you were loved. Hell was a place for really, really bad people. On days that I didn’t feel like going to church my mom would remind me that ‘where many congregate God is found.’ But what happens when I’m alone because everyone else is dead? What happens when I abandon my family and leave them to die because I’m scared? Where was God in that camp? We would pray every single morning but they would still torture us. They’d still kill us. I just… I just have this unshakeable feeling that this is hell.” He searched Anna’s face for answers but she just stared into the carpet.
“Sometimes the solitude just hurts.” He continued. “It makes my whole body hurt. I hung a noose where I sleep at the library… the ones that they have in all those medieval paintings. There have been so many times that I have climbed up on that chair like it’s the shining golden archway out of this hell… but I can’t do it.”
“Why not?”
He looked at her with wild eyes, with tears building but never falling. “Because what if I’m wrong?”
Chapter 8
They left early the following morning. Anna had offered Cole her bed after his painful admission, but he insisted on sleeping on the couch. They sat in an uncomfortable silence for the rest of the evening, with the exception of idle small talk and comments on the warm weather. Anna eventually retired to her bedroom where she lay all evening staring at the ceiling and remembering all of the warm summer nights with Rick next to her in bed. She thought about Cole and wondered how it would feel to grow up alone. Her mind would drift to the possibility of Rick buried under the maple tree in the backyard or Jackie and her students in the basement of the school. She worried about fainting in the basement of her house, and wondered if it had anything to do with her missing memories. All night, her brain ran circles from one thing to the next until orange and pink beams of morning light shone through the mini blinds. When she got up and went into the living room, Cole was sitting on the couch reading a book and ready to head out.
“So, you said you know how to get there?” Cole asked as he headed towards the truck.
“Hey, where are you going?”
Cole stopped and turned around. “Huh?”
“Why the hell would we take that hunk of junk when we could take this?” She lifted the garage door with a smile.
“Is that your car?”
“Yup. It took me 6 years to pay her off, 10 if you count the four years it took me to save up the down payment. What do you think?”
“It’s nice.” He shrugged as he began to walk over to the car.
Anna stepped in front of the garage. “Just nice?”
“Yeah.”
“Why just nice?”
Cole paused. “It’s a hatchback.”
“So?”
“I don’t like hatchbacks.”
“Well maybe I don’t like passengers in my car.” She said, climbing inside.
The drive to Merriman Road started out silent with the only noise filling the car being the wind catching in the open windows when the road was clear enough for her to drive pick up speed.
> “Look. I’m sorry about last night,” Cole said, breaking the silence.
“Last night? Oh, right, last night” Anna made a pff sound with her lips. “You don’t have to apologize for anything.”
“No, I do. I don’t want you to get the wrong impression about me. After you went to bed I tried to imagine what it must be like for someone like you to meet someone like me.”
“What do you mean, someone like me?”
“To you, everything is still normal.”
“Uh… no it isn’t.”
“What I mean is you woke up to the final product of the epidemic that killed off humanity- which is complete silence. I watched it flail and fight for its life. And then I watched it decay.” He grabbed her hand that was resting on the gearshift, and she instinctively pulled away. “I don’t want you to think that I’m crazy. And, I mean… it would make sense if you did. I would understand if you thought I was crazy. I admitted that I have conversations with lamps.”
Anna briefly took her eyes off the road to find him smiling. “The only thing I find strange about you is that Cleveland Indians baseball cap.”
“You’re not an Indians fan?”
Anna chuckled. “Even I know that you can’t live in Northeast Ohio and not be an Indians fan. But that hat is so gross and dirty.”
“That’s what I like about it. It’s just now broken in.”
“Broken in and moldy.”
“You know what the best part of this hat is?”
“What’s that?”
He hesitated. “I took it out of a player's locker.”
Anna raised her eyebrows. “One of their lockers at Jacob’s Field?”
He blurted out a laugh. “I’ve always wanted to tell someone that. It was such a good day when I stumbled across the stadium. I went into all of the expensive box seats and the dugout and the locker rooms. I took a bucket of balls and a bat a hit a few that barely made it across the pitcher’s mound. But stuff like that isn’t nearly as cool if you don’t have anyone to tell.”
“I still can’t believe that everyone is just gone. I mean, look at all of this- these buildings and roads and traffic signs… we built up this town out of trees and dirt.”
“After the things that I saw humans do to each other, I don’t think it’s a bad thing that they’re gone.”
Many of the houses along Merriman Road were still completely intact, although all the windows were tightly boarded and many of the driveways had blockades. A few looked as if they had burned down. There was no way to tell the correct address, with the exception of the numbers that were painted on the curb.
“We’re going to have to get out and brush away all the debris so I can see what the numbers are,” she said.
Without saying a word, they both worked at tracking down the right house under the bright summer sun.
“Got it… this is the house, Anna.” Cole pointed up a long, wooded driveway that was swallowed up by dense mid-summer greenery.
As they walked down the long and narrow asphalt driveway that was lined with purple hostas and ivy, the outline of brick mansion began to come into view. As they reached the end, a large spiked gate blocked their path.
“You go down that side and I’ll go down this side to see if there’s a way past this.” Anna pointed to Cole as she stepped over the hostas and ivy. She shook each bar of the fence, hoping to find one that was loose. There had to be a gate, or a broken section, or a spot where the dirt had eroded away. As she circled back around to the front, Cole looked up at her and shrugged his shoulders.
“Should we try and climb it?” he asked.
“I know this may come as a shock to you, but I’m not very athletic.”
Cole gripped the bars in his hands and shifted his weight back and forth on the balls of his feet. Letting out a puff of air, he jumped and grabbed the top horizontal iron bar, lifted himself up and hurled his legs over the other side. After he carefully navigated his torso over the spikes at the top, he jumped down and hit the ground on his left side.
“Are you ok?” Anna asked, pressing her face through the bars.
He stood up, brushed the dirt off of his clothes and groaned. “I really botched that landing,” he joked, rubbing his shoulder. “Ok, your turn.”
“Very funny… go open the gate,” she laughed.
Once inside, she could admire the grandeur of the old brick colonial from a new vantage point. The boarded windows were long and slender and tightly spaced. The old slate roof had tall peaks and stone gargoyles at each corner. The driveway lead to a large stone porch that was covered in ivy and overgrown potted plants.
“It’s boarded up pretty tight,” Anna noted.
“Yeah, but we could probably pry the wood off of the front door.” Cole dug his fingers under the bottom corner of the wood board and pulled back. “This shouldn’t be too hard. Come help pull on the other corner.”
Anna crouched down and pulled up at the bottom corner in tandem with Cole. Her arms burned as she used every ounce of her strength to pull on the board. The nails made a popping sound as they pulled away from the doorframe.
Behind the board was a set of old mahogany doors with a brass lion head door knocker and ornate handles.
“I’m going to try and kick it in.” Cole said taking a few steps back.
“Hold your horses… let me try something.” Anna held up a hand as she scanned the porch. She lifted up the base to one of the potted plants that was closed to the door and pulled up a silver key.
Cole raised his eyebrows. “How the hell did you know that was there?”
Anna smiled in satisfaction. “Because that’s where everyone keeps their spare key. People are stupid… myself included. I keep mine under the welcome mat.” she popped the key into the keyhole and turned. “Some people buy this special rock that opens up where they--- oh my God.”
The door creaked on its hinges as golden artificial light flooded the dark front porch.
“Whaaaat…” Cole gasped as he pushed his way past Anna and stood in the middle of the two-story foyer.
Hanging above them was a crystal chandelier with intricate lights. Every table had small lamp that was turned on, and bright lights came from the rooms to their left and to their right. In the distance was the sound of music coming from somewhere deep from within the house.
“How… How does this house have power?”
“It’s been so long...” Cole flicked one of the lights off and on again. Then, as if he was bludgeoned with a thought, he shot upright and took Anna by the shoulders. “Do you think… is it possible that…” He released his grasp of her shoulders and ran into the next room. Anna followed his as he bolted from one room to the next like a dog who had just been let out of a car, until he finally stopped in the kitchen.
The fluorescent light flickered above and emitted a loud hum. There were a few dishes slacked in the sink and an open newspaper on the kitchen table. Anna picked up one of the yellowed pages and read the headline of one of the articles.
Cost to cure Harlow: $200,000+
The company accountable for dispensing the treatment for HR-0 is a company called Allegany LLC based out of Texas. The projected cost for the initial injection is $200,000, with 4 supplementary injections (administered throughout 1 full calendar year) costing $25,000 each. “It’s like the Titanic is going down and instead of helping women and children, they’re saving the people with the most money. [They are] leaving us all to die,” comments Margaret Simon of East Akron. The president of Allegany LLC, J.J. Carmen, declined to comment at the time. However, a tweet by the 28-year-old president (2 days before the release of the cure) stated “The cost of living is about to go up”. And a tweet later that evening stating, “You should have gone to college. Go Wolverines!” As of the publication of this article, law enforcement officials claim that Carmen has not broken any laws and the sale of the drug, although unethical, is completely legal.
Anna placed the article back on the table and began to
thumb through the remaining pages. “Hey, come here and look at this newspaper, Cole.”
Cole had ignored her and stood in front of the kitchen sink with his hands tapping eagerly along its porcelain base. Slowly, he lifted his hand and turned on the faucet. The sound of water falling into the sink was something that he longed for often, but was certain he would never hear again. He turned around to look at Anna, slid down the front of the cabinet and onto the floor, holding his face in his hands.
“How is there running water?” Anna walked over to the faucet and held her hands under the cool water. She looked down at Cole and put her hand on his shoulder. “Are you crying?”
Rubber City Ruins Page 6