The Robertson’s Labrador practically bowled me over at the door, desperate for attention. I noticed his muzzle was red with dried blood. He’d eaten some of his family when they didn’t feed him. I felt sick. I started thinking about all the other dogs and cats in the neighborhood, in town--everywhere. All over this country, all over the world there were dogs and cats locked in their homes and they were going to starve to death, confused and scared. Not to mention the zoos where animals were going to starve and die. So much death. That set off a fresh round of tears for me. I was powerless to do much about any of it. I hadn’t even thought about it until Rowdy bolted at me, begging for love.
I pulled my t-shirt over my nose and stepped into the house. The stench made my eyes water. I tried to breathe as little as possible, taking quick breaths through clenched teeth and holding it as long as I could. I knew that Mr. Robertson kept his guns in the den. His son, David, and I hung out a lot before David went to college last August, and Dave showed me where the guns were kept and where the keys were kept. He liked to show them off when his parents weren’t home.
I got the key from the little china bowl on their hutch cabinet, unlocked the gun safe, and took out a 9mm Glock. I knew nothing about guns, but I figured that Glocks were pretty simple. I knew it would be loaded. There was a magazine in the handle. Carefully, I put the gun in its holster. I stopped and got a couple of cans of wet dog food from the pantry and carried all three things back to my house. Rowdy followed closely, unwilling to let a still-living human out of his sight.
I opened both cans of food and poured them into my mom’s best china serving bowl. I laughed a little as I did it. She was so uptight about that china set, but it seemed ridiculous now. “Eat up, Rowdy,” I said. “After all, you’re my guest!” I laughed at my joke. Mom only ever used that china set for guests.
I set the gun on the kitchen table and spent the rest of the day riding my bike through the neighborhoods around my house. Rowdy went with me, not wanting to let me out of his sight. I opened a door in every house, most often the sliding glass patio doors, because they were easy to break and leave open. Every house had the same story: heavy, fetid, rotting stench. Some of the houses had dogs that were waiting at the doors, desperate to be away from the smell of death. Some of the dogs bolted out past me and kept running. Some of the dogs followed me, looking for attention. In a few houses, I saw cats leave after I opened the doors. Some houses had birds, and if I saw them, I released them, if they were still alive. Most of the birds had died, though. I knew that parakeets and cockatoos wouldn’t last forever in Wisconsin, especially once Fall arrived and the temperatures dropped, but a fighting chance was better than no chance. I went to hundreds of houses that day. I knew it was only a microscopic drop in a very large bucket, but it was the best I could do at that time.
In almost every house, I saw death. By the second week of the Flu, the hospitals were overcrowded. The CDC actually had to issue a statement telling people to just stay home, that there was nothing that could be done for them. I saw the corpses of little kids bundled up on couches, with parents who died trying to care for them. I saw elderly men and women dead in recliners in front of the TV, cold cups of Theraflu half-drunk on the TV stands next them. I didn’t go into people’s bedrooms. It was too tomb-like and sad. I just wanted to free trapped pets if I could.
I spent most of that day with wet eyes. I wasn’t crying, but I wasn’t not crying, either. The depression that had settled on me only got stronger. In every home I saw kids that would never get a first kiss, or parents who would never know what it was like to be grandparents. I saw people who had a rich, full life a month ago, and now they were all dead.
Dead.
Stone dead.
And there wasn’t a thing I could do.
I kept opening doors well past dark. The sun set around eight or eight-thirty. The lack of streetlights made it seem darker than usual. There were clouds to the west, dark, ominous clouds. As the sun was setting, it was impossible not to notice the sky. The colors contorted from its normal pinks and oranges to a sickly pale green. I could see rain falling. A major storm was coming.
I gave up opening doors and retreated home. Rowdy came with me. I ducked back to the Robertson’s to get more dog food. A can of wet for Rowdy, and the rest of the bag of dry for the small phalanx of dogs still following me. I only let Rowdy into my house when we got there. I couldn’t care for a pack of dogs. They had to get used to being on their own. A bunch of them lounged on my deck, confused as to why I wasn’t letting them inside. I poured the whole bag of dry food onto the deck and the dogs feasted. I gave Rowdy another can of wet food in my mom’s china bowl. When he finished it, I sat on the floor, washed the dried blood from his muzzle with wet paper towels, and gave him a thorough petting. He wriggled with joy like a puppy. I cried. Then, I shooed him outside. I wanted him to have a chance, not to be locked up again. He needed a fighting chance to survive.
I had to kill myself.
I sat at the table and looked at the gun, dark and heavy. I picked it up and hefted it for weight. I curled my fingers around the grip, putting my finger on the trigger lightly. It would be easy, I thought. Really easy. And fast.
I lifted the gun toward my chin, but my hand wobbled. I was crying too hard to do it then. I set the gun down and wandered through my house, lighting my way with a heavy flashlight. I looked through my room one last time, my childhood toys in the closet, and my books. I looked at the computer on my desk one last time, now a $1200 paperweight. I remembered long nights of Skyping with Emily, Facebook messages, emails, silly picture memes. It all seemed so far away and pointless now. I went through my parents’ bedroom one last time, smelling my mom’s perfume and laughing at my dad’s silly tie collection. His Marvin the Martian tie was always my favorite. I flipped through our family photo albums for hours, well into the small hours of the morning and beyond. I looked at their wedding photos. Mom and Dad had a hippy wedding, Mom in a short white dress and bare feet, Dad in a flowy white pirate shirt, jeans, and bare feet. They got married on some mountainside in Colorado, near where they went to college. The tour of the house continued, and I went through the basement opening old boxes. I sorted through a bunch of stuff Mom was saving for whatever reason--baby clothes, some of my stuffed animals from when I was a kid, including my beloved stuffed elephant, Tusker. I cried when I saw him again. My heart was broken, and discovering that my elephant, once my best friend and confidant, had been cast to a cardboard box in my basement had broken it again. I hugged that stupid elephant to my chest and collapsed on the basement floor, wailing and screaming. I kept asking, Why? No one answered. No one was ever going to answer. Not anymore.
Death was the only logical answer. Tusker and I went upstairs, and I took the gun in my hand again. This time I was going to do it. I raised the weapon to my temple and took a few deep breaths. My hand shook. I couldn’t make my finger touch the trigger. My body didn’t want to go, even if my mind did. I tried to tell myself that this was the only answer. If the Flu wouldn’t take me, then I would take myself.
Call it God, or Fate, or Karma, or whatever--I don’t know what to call it, actually--but, as I stood there with the gun at my temple, ready to pull the trigger, that storm that was on the horizon earlier struck with dangerous, almost animalistic fury. Wind rocked the house. Boards squeaked and the windows flexed. It sounded like the Gates of Hell had been opened.
I glanced out the patio door and saw patio furniture from the neighbor’s decks windmilling through my backyard like tumbleweeds. Thunder cracked directly overhead; it sounded like the roof had broken in half. I threw the gun on the kitchen table and started pacing through the house, looking out the windows for a tornado. I wished that good ol’ Bob Lindmeier was on Channel 27 telling me about the storm. With no TV and no radio, I was alone in the house, and the house was an island in the storm. The sky was lit almost constantly by lightning. I looked for tornadoes. In the storm light, I could see the clouds chu
rning and swirling overhead. My pulse quickened. I got that weird feeling in my balls that happens when I get scared, or go over the crest of a hill on a rollercoaster. Hair stood on my neck. I started to sweat, partially because it was hot as hell in the house, and partially from panic.
The tornado hit my neighborhood with everything that you’ve ever heard some rube on television say when a tornado hits: there was a ton of wind and it sounded like a freight train. Honestly, it really did sound like a freight train. I looked out the big picture window in our living room and saw the house on the corner get decimated. I sprinted for the basement, detouring through the kitchen to grab Tusker. The elephant and I made it to the relative security of the cement-walled basement just in time to hear the roof of the garage get ripped off. There was a good sixty seconds of pure terror where I thought for sure the roof above my head would get torn away and cast to the sky, but it didn’t. Another minute later, and the winds quieted. After twenty minutes, the storm became just rain and distant thunder. I ventured back upstairs.
I could see houses damaged. I could see debris scattered everywhere like pick-up sticks. Across the street, the neighbor’s Toyota had been flipped upside-down. In the flashes of lightning, I could also see a few of the corpses from the other houses had been torn from their resting spots and cast into the street, partially skeletal wrecks of decaying tissue. It was horrible.
In the kitchen, I could see the other side of the house, and the receding storm clouds. I stared out at the rain and the quieting storm, and in the east, I could see the palest pink light trying to edge its way to the horizon. It was nearly dawn. I walked out onto the deck. The dogs were all gone. Who could blame them? I stood on the deck getting slowly drenched by the rain. It was nice. I hadn’t had a proper shower in weeks. As I watched the pink light grow, I heard snuffling and scraping under the deck. In a moment, Rowdy emerged and took his place by my side, thumping his tail against the deck, leaning hard into my thigh for comfort. He had somehow scrounged beneath the latticework below the deck for cover when the tornado hit.
Together in the rain, Rowdy and I watched the dawn arrive. It started as pastel pinks, but grew into a fiery, vibrant orange. It was the light of a new day, but more than that, I was still alive to see it. I almost wasn’t. I cried then, but it was tears of joy, maybe tears of hope. It was the first tears I’d shed in weeks that didn’t include pity or sadness. I savored those tears. And then I laughed. I laughed at the dawn and at the dog next to me. I laughed at myself and the horrible situation I was thrown into without care or concern. I didn’t ask to keep living, but there I was. I don’t know why I didn’t die when everyone else did, and I don’t know why I didn’t squeeze hat trigger, but as I stood there on that deck, I realized I was still alive. The Flu didn’t get me. I didn’t kill myself. The tornado left me alive. The storm was past. I was still alive.
For whatever reason, I was still alive.
I decided then and there that I was going to remain alive. Screw you, World. If you can’t let me die with everyone else, then you’re going to have to deal with me for the rest of my natural life. I didn’t know if there was a rhyme or reason of why I was still alive, and I didn’t care. This was me. I was alive.
CHAPTER THREE
Plan to Survive
Andy Weir wrote my favorite book, The Martian. In that book, a man gets stranded on Mars with no way to get off the Red Planet. Mark Watney, a scientist and astronaut, survives by using his mind to stay alive until his crew could get back to rescue him. I knew that I was just like Watney, but there was no rescue mission coming for me, just me by myself for the time being, maybe for the next sixty years and change. If I was going to stay alive, I was going to have to science the shit out of my life.
I needed a plan, and I needed a place to live. The tornado had damaged my parents’ house badly. The whole neighborhood, actually. I couldn’t stay where I was. I needed supplies. I needed food. I needed water. I needed medicine. I would eventually need guns for hunting, and maybe hand tools for planting a garden. I needed a lot of stuff. My mind started working overtime, trying to think of ever scenario, to plan for every contingency. For the time being, I could use cars and batteries. Eventually, gas and oil would dry up or go bad and batteries would lose charge. The bright side of this was that for the time being I could use any car I wanted. Who was going to stop me?
I would need a place that had a fireplace, that was obvious. I would have to have fires for heat and light. I would have to cook over fires. I started thinking about my friends’ houses. Who among them had a fireplace? But then I started thinking about moving their bodies, and I realized I didn’t want to do that. The very idea of trying to make a home in a building that had been a mausoleum held zero appeal to me. I wasn’t going to do that.
In a fit of brilliance, I remembered that the Sun Prairie Public Library had a fireplace. The library also had books. In one fell swoop, I was securing both my entertainment and a fireplace for heat. The library was also a really cool building that looked like a one-story castle. It was fairly new and solidly built. It would serve.
Stuffing clothes into a bag, and gathering what few tools my family owned, I took Tusker and Rowdy and the three of us took my Dad’s Escalade to the library. The big SUV had suffered some minor surface damage when the garage roof was torn away, but that was it. I put my mountain bike on the bike rack and backed the truck out of the garage. Storm damage was liberal throughout the town, and until I got there, I was worried that the library might have been hit, but it stood strong against the storm and suffered no damage.
The front door of the library was locked. I didn’t want to break a window to get in, so I knew I would need alternate methods of entry. I used a cordless drill whose battery was still mostly charged to scope the lock, and then it was a small matter of clearing the debris and unlocking the door manually by pushing the bolt aside with my Swiss army knife. Jackpot. I decided that I would eventually need to figure out a way to bar the door once I was inside just in case, but for now I wouldn’t need to worry about that.
The library was deathly still. No one had been inside in weeks. The air inside the building was thick and stilted. I walked into the foyer, then the lobby. Rowdy pushed past me, smelling here and there, trying to process the new scents. There was the Friends of the Library room on the right, and the bathrooms and a big community center on the left. I would investigate those places later. I pushed into the main library, drilling the lock on the second set of doors. It gave way easily and I was inside in moments. The air in the main part of the library was even heavier than it was in the lobby. There was a funerary pall in the library. The silence was profound, disturbing actually. It was library quiet times a million. I was going to have to get used to that.
The main office and the check-out area was to my right. Ahead was the quiet reading annex where the fireplace was. There was a set of doors that could be closed to seal off the quiet area from the rest of the library. That was where I was going to make my new home. The rest of the library had ample space for storage, even if I had to move some stuff around. It had a lot of windows, good light, and I could see a lot of land out of them. There was a wide yard down to the road, and a nice park across the street. It would be a good place to live. The real appeal though, were the stacks upon stacks of books, fiction to the left, non-fiction to the right. I’ve always heard that a library has more books than you can read in a lifetime. I was going to get a chance to put that theory to the test.
I cleared space in the annex, moving out some of the tables and chairs to create space. I would need a bed. I would need candles. Now that I had a place to be, I needed to supply that place.
I remember that I spoke aloud, to the stillness, to the quiet, “This is my new home. This is where I will live.” No one answered. Somewhere, in the back of my mind, I had kind of hoped someone would.
I went back to the Escalade and drove to the grocery store. Sun Prairie had three grocery stores: two Copp’s and
one Woodman’s. There was also a Costco, a Super Walmart, and a Super Target, not to mention at least a dozen various convenience stores and drug stores--there was a lot of places I would need to go. I went to Woodman’s first, because that’s where my mom traditionally shopped.
There are no words to describe the weird feeling I got driving down empty streets and parking in an empty lot. Woodman’s overlooked Highway 151, a usually busy four-lane road that runs straight to the capitol square of Madison. It was empty. Prior to the Flu, it was never empty, not in all my memories of it. Even late at night, even during bad snowstorms, there was always a car coming or going. Now--it was just a strip of empty asphalt, barren of movement. When I stepped out of the SUV, I listened hard. I only heard wind. Usually, the dull roar of tires was constant, an omnipresent drone, white noise that you could never escape so you became oblivious to it. Now, nothing. It was unsettling, eerie, really. It was hard to process, actually. It made my skin crawl and gave me a feeling that I was being watched, or that I was in a dream. I looked all around before approaching the door of the store. There was no sound, no movement. Just me.
And I should mention the smell. No matter which way the wind blew, the sickly-sweet stench of rot was constant. Sometimes it would be faint, but it was there. When I was very young, my parents had a house that bordered a field of tall grass. One summer, that rot smell became very powerful. My dad and I walked through the grass following the smell until we found the carcass of a deer. Its stomach had swelled and ruptured from decay. Maggots squirmed across its flesh. Flies buzzed around it in a thick cloud. Eventually, my dad said, it would either dry out and stop smelling, or coyotes would drag it away. A few days later, he was right. The smell went away. Now, with the sheer volume of dead bodies, it was going to take some time for the smell to go away. Just thinking about it made my knees weak. It was just something I was going to have to endure. I had a feeling there would be a lot of things I’d just have to endure.
The Survivor Journals Omnibus [Books 1-3] Page 2