Dead Reckoning

by Tom Wright

“Can I see her?”

  Tommy glanced into the room, then back at me, and then back to the floor.

  “I don’t know. She don’t like company.”

  I had only met his grandmother in passing at the beach. Charlie and Tommy had been friends for years and were practically inseparable during the summers when Charlie visited. The few times I’d seen his grandmother she had always been nice, and I sensed that she liked me.

  “I think it will be all right Tommy. I just want to see if she needs some help.”

  “Ok,” Tommy said reluctantly as he stepped aside.

  I instructed Charlie and Kelly to wait outside and then wedged into the dank, moist room. The cinder block walls enclosed a space barely large enough for two beds and a table. A bucket sat alone in a corner. The room smelled of sickness.

  I approached his grandmother and immediately heard the rattle of her shallow breaths. The skin on her face had drawn tight from dehydration. She struggled for breath through her agape mouth. I reluctantly placed the inside of my wrist across her sweaty forehead. She was on fire and quite near the end. My best guess was pneumonia. At her age and with no possibility of medical attention, whatever the illness, it was going to be fatal.

  “How long has she been like this?”

  “A couple of days,” Tommy said.

  “Tommy?” I said, intentionally furrowing my brow.

  Tommy kicked hesitantly at the dirt.

  “I need to know. It’s ok.”

  “Maybe a week….or two,” he said quietly. “But she only started sweating yesterday!” he exclaimed, before I had a chance to speak.

  I noticed a prescription bottle on the floor next to the bed. I picked it up and shook it. Pills rattled around inside. I turned the bottle toward the candlelight and read the label: amoxicillin. The expiration date was eighteen months ago. I pushed down and twisted off the cap. Only five capsules remained.

  “She can’t take those no more,” Tommy said. “She only chokes.”

  “Can she take water?”

  “Yes.”

  “We can open these capsules and put it in the water. She’ll get it then.”

  “I’ll get some water,” Tommy said, buoyed by the new development.

  “Tommy,” I said.

  He stopped at the door. There was no longer any point in sugar coating things with children. The world was different, and they knew it.

  “You’ve got to know that she is very sick,” I said. “This probably won’t work.”

  “I know,” he said as he turned and slipped through the door.

  After we administered a few ounces of water laced with the powder from two amoxicillin capsules, I left Tommy to tend to his grandmother. I felt confident that what she had was no longer catching; otherwise, I would have forced Tommy to come with us.

  . . .

  I awoke at first light, and for the briefest of moments, I hadn’t a care in the world. No matter what the situation, sleep is an anesthetic and the fog of waking a brief, lovely narcotic.

  Then I felt two bags of bones wedged in on either side of me and reality returned with a blunt force. A knot formed in my stomach as I considered the plan of the day. I had to find food, develop some basic defenses, and prepare for a journey that we would be taking whether or not the RY and its crew ever returned. If we had to walk, I would give the children a couple of weeks to build strength, but the trip might still kill them. Something would eventually kill us all if we stayed, so I set my mind on the only alternative that gave us a chance.

  I arose to find several inches of snow outside, which didn’t please me. The children rested peacefully, so I let them sleep and went out to survey my first project for the day. I grabbed an axe and headed up to where the road curved and began to climb the hill. About a quarter mile up the hill I found the perfect spot. Several medium sized trees grew close to the road on both sides. The banks rose sharply from the edge of the pavement to create a bottleneck in the road.

  The feeling of being watched had been with me since I left the house, but it suddenly became overwhelming. I jumped and drew my gun as a heard a sound in the woods on the other side of the road. Because of its density and darkness, the forest in the Pacific Northwest could always be spooky, but this was different. I crossed over the road to investigate. I followed a natural animal path about twenty yards up the trail to where I thought the sound had come from. There were no prints in the light snow cover, so it was impossible that anyone had been there. Understandably, my mind was starting to play tricks on me.

  “Is there somebody out there?” I yelled. “I am armed and not afraid to use it.” I listened but no one replied. In fact, the forest was silent.

  The feeling left me, so I returned to the bottleneck in the road. I chose a tree at random and began to chop. I found the going easy through the soft, wet wood and kept at it. Before long I had felled a half-dozen eight- to ten-inch-thick trees across the road, but I remained unsatisfied. A big truck could have pushed those trees out of the way. Then I selected the biggest tree I thought I could manage—a nice sixteen-inch thick hemlock—and tried to decide how best to make it fall where I wanted.

  Felling a big tree in a particular spot isn’t as easy as most people think. Having grown up in the Pacific Northwest, I knew a little about chopping down trees. I eye-balled up the tree, and it was fairly straight, so it didn’t provide me with any insight as to which way it naturally wanted to fall. I walked back down to the house and dug around in my father-in-law’s garage and found two wedges in a drawer. I couldn’t imagine what I’d need more than one wedge for, so I selected the thickest one and went back to the tree. I began chopping a wedge out of the side of the tree in the direction I wanted it to fall. I chopped out a pie-shaped piece roughly one-third of the tree’s diameter.

  Now, the bases of big trees tend to kick quite unpredictably when they fall. There are lots of physics involved and little of it is easily discerned just by looking at the tree. It depends on the weight distribution through the tree, its dimensions, what it strikes on the way down, and chaos. There it is again: chaos. Just as the butterfly spawns the typhoon, random processes, interactions, and torques will affect the path of the falling tree. My only escape route was downhill, and I couldn’t chop left-handed. I had to chop on the uphill side and escape downhill, past the tree, just as it began to go. I considered for a moment abandoning that tree for the danger, but trees take time to fall, and I figured I could get downhill pretty quickly.

  I began to chop out the back side of the tree, about six inches above the center of the wedge I took out on the fall side. After I had opened a pretty good gash in the backside, I put in the metal wedge and began to pound it in. I pounded the wedge all the way in, and the tree never moved. I cursed myself for not realizing that the metal wedge was supposed to keep the tree from pinching down on a chainsaw and not to tip over the tree by pounding. Now I had a wedge in the way, so I couldn’t chop any more.

  I considered whether to try to get the wedge out but decided instead to go back for the other wedge. I pounded the other wedge in below the first wedge. About half way in, I heard a loud crack and ran down the hill. The tree held. I waited a half minute and went back up and pounded some more. I became discouraged when the wedge was nearly all the way in. Just when I was about to quit and go to a nonexistent plan-B, the tree snapped at me again and began to shake. I scrambled out of the way, and the giant tree thrashed amongst its neighbors as it descended through the trees. It bounced off the opposite bank with a loud, dull thud, and the ground under my feet vibrated. A series of lesser thuds and vibrations followed as it settled into its final resting place. A brief shutter of fear rattled through me from the violent spectacle.

  The tree came to rest in a perfect position, wedged in between trees on both sides of the road and suspended about a foot off the ground. I felt confident that no vehicles could get into the neighborhood without making a lot of noise.

  The children were still asleep when I returne
d. I rebuilt the fire and started to cook up three of the MREs—two biscuits and gravy and one Salisbury steak. After the three meals I had given to the Blackmans, the ones we ate the previous day, the two I gave to Tommy, and the three I prepared that morning, we only had nineteen left. Nineteen meals for a walk that might take a week or more. I suddenly wished I hadn’t used the three that morning. I had to find other food to eat while we waited. After breakfast, I explained my plan for the day to the children. I could tell by Kelly’s expression that she didn’t like it.

  “I'm just going out to check the beach houses, honey. I set up a barricade at the bottom of the hill. Nobody can get in here. If you see anybody or anything that scares you, you just have to pull this rope.” I had hooked up a rope to a small bell on the roof. A sort of panic bell.

  Kelly sat silently rocking back and forth.

  “Honey, I need to search for food.”

  Silence, rocking.

  I sat down beside her and put my arm around her. I considered telling her not to smile which always made her smile, but thought better of it.

  “I wish you would tell me what’s wrong,” I said. “I can’t help you if I don’t know what’s the matter.”

  She didn’t respond.

  “I heard about the bad guys,” I said.

  A pained look spread across her face. She tried to fight it, but the tears suddenly burst through. I held her tight and rocked with her.

  “Honey, I am so sorry I wasn’t here to stop that. But I am here now and I will die before I let anyone hurt you again. Ok.”

  The crying ebbed, and she looked up and nodded.

  I really would have been hobbled if I had to take her with me on my neighborhood search, but after two months of not knowing if she were dead or alive, and after all that she’d been through, how could I have left her, even for a moment? And what about my recent strange feelings? I suppressed those thoughts and decided that she was safer there in the house than with me. I didn't know what I would find out there, and there was no choice. I had already boarded up the broken windows, so I locked the doors and told Kelly to ring the bell for any reason.

  I checked on Tommy and his grandmother. Her fever seemed less to me; otherwise, she hadn't changed much, despite the two additional doses of amoxicillin that Tommy had given her. There were only two pills left. Then I noticed that her breaths were more spaced out—maybe eight to ten seconds between them—and still through a gaping mouth, like a fish out of water. That was bad. It was only a matter of time.

  On my way out of the house, I noticed what had eluded me in the darkness of the previous night: two crosses on mounds in Tommy's yard as well. I thought about the millions of crosses that had probably been erected the world over by then.

  After the snow had melted, I sent the boys out fishing again since they seemed good at it. Fish would be helpful, but we couldn't live on protein alone. We needed energy—carbohydrates. I realized why they were all so skinny—not because of a lack of food but because they'd been living almost exclusively on fish. In essence, they had been doing the low carbohydrate diet. It obviously worked as a weight-loss diet, but it was just slow starvation.

  I started my search at the far end of the beach. I kept my pistol at the ready at all times. The boys told me that, except for us and an imaginary friend they called little bear, the beach was deserted. But I suspected different and took no chances. The first house I checked was an old cabin. Since the family did not inhabit it year-round, it did not have a lot of the amenities normally found in the houses at Shadow Beach. It had been ransacked, nevertheless. I found a can of green beans on a high shelf, but no other food. I left the house and placed the green beans in the wheel barrow I had so optimistically brought with me, and pushed it to the next house.

  I found nothing in the second or third houses except a lot of damage and a general lack of valuable items. In fact, I hadn't seen one television set or computer in any house I'd been in since my friend Paul's.

  I entered the fourth house with some trepidation since its residents were—had been—friends of ours. Every house on the beach was known by the last name of the family who originally owned it—not its current occupant, but its original owner. A family named Spencer could move into the Brown's house, but it would remain the Brown's house. The fourth house was known as the Hellenberg house. Our friends, the Hellenbergs, were a beautiful family of four. Eric, the man of the house, was an airline pilot for Alaska Airlines and Jenny, his wife, was a flight attendant. Their two young daughters, Amy and Kathryn, were beautiful children. So beautiful, in fact, that they modeled clothes for department store catalogues. My trepidation was well founded as I was greeted just inside the door by a grizzly scene, and an even worse smell.

  Two adult bodies laid on the living room floor in an advanced stage of decomposition. They were so far gone that I could not tell the sex of the victims—not that I wanted to get close anyway. I instinctively held my gun out in front of me as I moved through the house—which seems ridiculous in hindsight, but you can't fight instinct. I quickly searched the kitchen and found nothing of use.

  I should have left it at that, but I did not. I moved down the hall and found two small bodies in one of the children's room. I suddenly felt light headed and nauseas and began to leave when I noticed a foot in the doorway of the master bedroom. I took a quick look and saw the rest of an adult body, bound and gagged, decomposing at the foot of the bed. It wore navy blue pants with a stripe up the side of the leg. Eric. My eyes moved up to the bed. A nude, unmistakably female corpse was melting into the bed, its bones still tied to it. I vomited on the floor then ran toward the door. I only hoped that it hadn't gone on long.

  Suddenly, I heard the panic bell in the distance.

  I tore out of the Hellenbergs and burst onto the road. I ran with every ounce of energy I had toward the house. My heart thumped in my chest as the bell continued to ring. I scrambled around the corner into the yard and nearly fell in the gravel. I gained speed as I approached the house and flung my weight into the door. The locks gave way and I tumbled into the house, gun drawn.

  I waved my gun around the house. Kelly sat in the middle of the room crying and pulling on the rope.

  I rushed over to her. “What’s the matter?”

  “I’m scared.”

  Suddenly very rattled, I picked her up and headed for the boys' fishing spot. When I arrived, the boys dropped their poles and raced over to me. They had caught one small fish but also had a chunk of some sort of dark flesh. It looked like a large chicken thigh, but its size and dark skin were not fowl-like. I thought maybe it was a chunk of seal leftover from a shark or whale attack that washed up on the beach. They said they had eaten some of it before. I told them that they shouldn’t eat dead things they find on the beach, but they boisterously informed me that it had been given to them by little bear. I didn’t argue with them about their imaginary friend, since I questioned even my own sanity at that point.

  “Boys, look,” I said. “Have you searched any of the houses for food?”

  “No, we're scared to go in any of them.”

  “Are there any that haven't been broken in to?”

  “Yes, the Mercer house,” said Tommy.

  “Which one is that?”

  “Three houses from the end,” he pointed to the end opposite that of which I had just been.

  “Come with me. I don't think we should split up any more.”

  We proceeded to the Mercer house. It was locked up tight, just as the boys had indicated. The Mercer house and the two further down were walk-ins. Nothing but a narrow sidewalk along the bulkhead connected them to civilization, which served as a reasonable explanation as to why they had not been touched.

  “Are you boys sure there is no one here?”

  “The Mercer's were on vacation when The Red Plague started,” Tommy said. “I never saw them again.”

  We knocked on the door anyway. No answer. We walked around and looked in the windows. There was n
o sign of anyone or anything unusual. I knocked on the large beach side window. Nothing moved.

  I went around to a side door. I put Kelly down and kicked the door firmly near the knob. It popped right open. Once again, a storm front of death stench blew out of the door. By that point, I had gotten somewhat used to it, but I was also tired of what it meant: that nothing but dead people would be found. This time, however, there were other familiar odors mixed in, but I couldn’t unravel the smells to identify them.

  I resigned myself to the facts, steeled myself against what I would find, and entered, restricting the children to the outside. The door accessed the kitchen, and I noticed that, while the house had not been gone through, there were numerous piles of feces on the floor. The unusual odors materialized in my mind as urine and feces—probably cat. I stepped carefully around the piles and opened one of the cupboard doors. Boxes of food neatly lined the shelves and my heart jumped. I opened the next cupboard, and it was filled with canned goods.

  I moved excitedly into the darkened pantry where I stepped on something squishy and nearly fell. I heard a dull pop, and what followed can only be described as the most horrific smell that exists. A decaying body puts out a fair amount of odor, but what most people don't know is that the vast majority remains trapped within. If you leave it alone, it stinks, but if you meddle with it, the smell could gag a maggot, as my grandfather used to say. The only good news was that the smell came from Smiley, the Mercer's cat, and not one of the Mercers. The bad news is that my shoes were never the same.

  After I disposed of the cat and opened the doors for a while, we took four wheel barrows full of boxed and canned food out of the Mercer house. I also went through their closets and found a pair of hiking boots for me—a little tight but doable—and a pair of boys sneakers that were too big for Charlie. I gave them to Tommy. I checked the two houses further down, and they were also undisturbed. I found several more cupboards full of food but decided to get it all later.

  The four of us enjoyed a dinner of Au Gratin potatoes, green beans, and salmon—not a bad meal after the end of the world. I forced them to throw away the seal though. The children ate all they were served which struck me odd, since those were three items that my children wouldn't have touched just a few months prior. Even children eventually discover that when you are hungry—really hungry—any food always tastes better than no food.