I went to bed after another Wet-wipe sponge bath and some canned tuna for dinner. I slept well. Rowdy had firmly established his part of the mattress, I had the other half.
The next morning, I became Master of Wood. I say it like that because I am never, ever going to mature as a human being and jokes about boners will always be funny to me.
I dressed in the clothes I’d worn the day before (save for new socks--take care of your feet!), and went out in the U-Haul with my dog. I geared up for the unknown. I was going out farther than just the stores in Sun Prairie and east Madison. I didn’t know what I would need. I strapped a gun belt to my waist and took the Browning semiauto (safety engaged--shooting myself in the leg would definitely hamper me). I got some food and water for lunch. Then, I tooled to the hardware store in town. I got cable-cutters, an axe, a hatchet, and a chainsaw. I loaded the saw with gas and oil and made sure I knew how to use start it before I left the store. I siphoned gas from a few cars that were on the streets of a nearby apartment complex. I filled two two-gallon containers and loaded them into the back of the U-Haul. I left town, driving south toward some farms. I had a friend who lived in a small housing development south of town, and when I used to cycle out to see him, I’d have to pass farms where I knew there would large wood piles or fallen trees. The first farm I came to, I saw a stack of wood alongside the garage. It wasn’t a standard farm, just a National-style farmhouse with a single outbuilding, an old shed converted to a garage. I pulled the truck close to it and tossed all the wood into the back. I wasn’t neat about it like I’d been the day before; I just chucked wood.
It felt strange, you know? It felt like I was stealing. It felt like at any second, a black-and-white squad car with flashing lights would pull up and some stern-faced officer of the law would get out and ask me what I was doing, or the owners of the house were going to rush out and start screaming and waving a gun around. It put me on edge. It made me sweat more than normal. Even when I’d been doing it for almost an hour, I still felt like I was going to get busted. When I’d loaded the wood, I went to the house and broke open a glass sliding door. No dog rushed out. No cat seemed interested in what I was doing. And there was no smell of rot, just a dusty, flat smell, a smell of emptiness, vacancy.
I had refrained from going into homes so far because it felt intrusive, and I didn’t want to see the bodies. It felt sacrilegious actually, like I was robbing tombs. I know that’s sort of a silly thing to say. And maybe, in time, I would need to get over that feeling, but I was in no hurry to do so. This house was different, though. It felt empty. It smelled empty. It didn’t feel like it was someone’s final resting place.
With Rowdy at my heels, I stepped inside. Crossing the threshold still felt intrusive, though. The house smelled dry and close. The windows hadn’t been opened in some time. The air was dull, like the library was when I first opened it. Fat motes of dust hung in the light.
I wandered into the kitchen. I made the mistake of opening the refrigerator. Everything inside had definitely turned. The smell choked the air with putrescence. I closed it. I checked the cabinets and a pantry. There were a few things that I might have taken, but I didn’t since I knew I could come back if I really needed them.
I wandered through the lower level: a bathroom, a study, a living area with an old, well-worn couch, a dusty recliner, and a wood-burning stove for heat. I found the door to the basement. It was an old basement and smelled like mildew. There was nothing there but old junk and storage. I wandered upstairs, feeling like the steps were an insurmountable challenge. It was weird enough being in someone else’s home, someone who I did not know and would never know, but to ascend into their private world like I was, it made every step feel taller and harder to reach. Even Rowdy stayed at the base of the stairs watching me nervously, perhaps because of previous training, or perhaps he just didn’t like stairs. I went alone.
The upstairs held a small bathroom, a small closet, and three small bedrooms. Very small bedrooms. There weren’t any bodies in any of them. The house had been vacated prior to the hospitals closing, I guessed. Two of the bedrooms looked like guest rooms, like they hadn’t been used in a long time. I checked the closets of those rooms and found old boxes. In the boxes were things that looked like they’d been in a teenager’s room at one point, pennants from Sun Prairie High, yearbooks, old cassette tapes of 80’s rock and pop albums. It was clear that the children who’d lived in those rooms had grown up, moved out, and their parents had put away their things into storage. In the master bedroom I found an unmade queen-sized bed. On the nightstand next to it was a pile of used Kleenex, a half-empty Kleenex box, and a half-empty bottle of NyQuil Cold and Flu. It didn’t take rocket science to realize that this house had been empty since the beginning of the Flu. Likely, one half of the older couple that lived here had come down with symptoms and the other had taken them to the hospital. Even more likely, whichever one had driven the other never left the hospital as well.
There were pictures all over the house, but I tried not to look at them. It was spooky. I hated seeing those eyes looking back at me, knowing full well that whoever was in those pictures was dead. As I backed out of the room, I caught sight of an old family photo. The mother and father, a daughter and a son. The picture was clearly from the late 80’s. They looked happy, even though it was an awkwardly posed Olan Mills studio photo. All of them had big, fake smiles. The two women had big hair. The son had a mullet. They were wearing dated clothes in front of a generic, washed-blue background--the same hideous background that was in every studio photo in the 80’s. The family in it was still a family, though. They lived, laughed, and loved. They suffered joys and heartaches. They were all someone once, and now they were nothing. All of them were dead. There was no one to mourn them, either. There was no one to tell stories about them. There was no one to visit their graves. They, like so many others in the world, were simply gone.
I burst into tears. I don’t know why. I didn’t know them. I shouldn’t have even cared. But there in that house of quiet stillness, of a family that was dead, I started weeping. No, bawling. Like a child. Like an infant. I slumped to the floor and bawled my head off, and I couldn’t stop.
At the base of the stairs, I could hear Rowdy getting anxious. I heard him whine. I knew he was worried, but I couldn’t help him at the moment. Hell, he was a dog. He could survive on his own better than I could. I kept crying. I had full-body, shuddering, wracking sobs. I felt decimated. I was nothing, a speck of forgotten microdust adrift and rudderless in the cosmos. I was utterly, totally alone and in that stupid, horrible moment, I was fully aware of it. I couldn’t lie to myself about it. I couldn’t distract myself with tasks and activity to make myself blind to it. It was, in that instant, grotesquely and impossibly real.
Weeks later, I would find a book on grief in the library stacks. It helped me process that moment, and the dozens like it I experienced in the year following everyone’s death. I was grieving. Grief is a weird thing, and it likes to come out of nowhere. It attacks you when you least expect it and leaves you emotionally slaughtered, but it’s a strange phenomena. You can’t predict when it will hit. You can’t even predict what it will do to you when it does hit. Sometimes seeing the tiniest thing will trigger an attack, and other times you can look directly at the most traumatic scene you can imagine and you won’t even blink. Even as I write this journal entry a year later, I’m not recovered from my grief. I don’t think “recovery” is even possibly at this point. There is only becoming accustomed to the new normal. Grief is always in the back of my mind. It’s like a constant buzz in the back of my mind, a fly that won’t leave me alone.
Rowdy became concerned when I didn’t stop. He barked and whined. I tried to stop crying to comfort him, but I couldn’t. I choked on my sobs. I hugged my knees to my chest and wept. At that moment, I didn’t think I could survive on my own. No one else lived, right? What makes me so different from them? Eventually, I was able to pull myself togeth
er to a degree, and I stumbled down the stairs, mopping my eyes with the back of my wrists. Rowdy practically hurt himself trying to press his head into my leg for attention. I gave him some pats, thumping my hand lightly off his ribs. It felt good feeling his solidity beneath my hand, reassuring. It was as if everything would be okay. I don’t think I stopped crying for another twenty minutes after that. Eventually, the tidal wave of grief passed and I got on with my day, moving into that mode where I lied to myself and told myself that everything was going to be fine as long as I stayed busy.
I drove down the road to another farm, this one a proper farm with a barn and cows wandering around a pasture. The cows were all huddled by the door of the barn. They looked confused. They were used to their routines of being milked and fed in the safety and comfort of the barn, but it was obvious that no one had opened that door in some time. I wondered how long it would take the cows to figure out that no one was ever coming again.
I took out the cable-cutters from the truck and spent a few minutes snipping the barbed-wire fence of the pasture. I cleared out a few lengths of wire, then used a push-pull method to loosen a few stakes and uproot them. I figured giving the cows a path to freedom was the least I could do. The cows could have the whole world to graze upon, and I figured that in a few months maybe I’d be able to hunt them for food if it became necessary. Cows move slower than deer and are less skittish. It might be a wise move. I even thought about trying to milk one, but I’m as city as they come. I had no clue how to strip udders, other than what I’d seen on TV, and I doubted that it was as easy as it looked.
The farm had several stacks of wood, and I spent at least two hours chucking wood into the truck. After that, the clock on the U-haul told me it was noon. I sat in the grass with Rowdy and ate a can of tuna. Rowdy had some wet dog food served to him on a fancy tin plate I found by the back of the house. I’d stopped crying. Really, the physical labor took any urge to cry out of me. It was therapeutic. It was peaceful sitting in that yard with Rowdy. The cows were moving around, jostling each other slightly for position as if I was going to open the barn door at any moment.
It was moments like that, when the air was calm, and Rowdy was calm, and the world was quiet that I transitioned into the emotional plane that was the polar opposite from grief. I felt like I might be better off this way, that this new life I was going to have to lead was actually beneficial for me. It was hard to ping-pong between emotions like that. I was going from a serious low to a comfortable high. I’m not bipolar, but swinging emotions that fast and that far was difficult to process. I tried not to think about it. I tried to focus on tasks ahead of me. Wood, wood, and more wood. Stay busy. Stay distracted. It will be all right, Twist.
I went to two more farms, loading all the wood I could find. I didn’t have to use the chainsaw. The wood was there, ready for the taking. When I drove back to the library, I stopped long enough to take a wheelbarrow from someone’s open garage to help me unload the wood. Even still, I was carrying wood from the U-Haul to the community room until well after dark. I ended up hooking up the generators to run a pair of Black & Decker work lights so that I could see. When the truck was finally empty, the community room was starting to look like a woodpile of epic proportions. I was sure that probably had enough wood to make it through the winter, but I wanted more--just in case. I had no idea how fast this stuff would burn or how much I might go through. More was always better. It’s like my mom used to say about frosting on birthday cakes: too much was just about enough.
That night, I was sweaty and dirty. It was too hot outside for a fire, so I had to use the generator to heat five gallons of water in a large aluminum pot that I had claimed from Walmart, the kind of pot in which you might make sauce for a massive church spaghetti dinner. Even with a cover on it, it took forever to heat up. I didn’t need it boiling, just warm. I ate some more tuna while I waited. Rowdy ate dry dog food.
When the water was warm, I carried the pot to the women’s bathroom and dipped the two-gallon holding bag for the camp shower into the pot, filling it. I suspended the bag from the ceiling and proceeded to wet myself down with the camp shower. It was grossly lacking from a standard shower, but for a guy who was covered with bark dust and sweat, it was wonderful. I soaped myself, shampooed my hair, and started to rinse myself. I ended up using all five gallons of water. That’s no good for someone who needs to conserve drinking water. I was going to have to figure out a better way to find water for bathing and using the toilet. That would have to happen the next day. For that night, I was too tired to do much else.
I brushed my teeth and stalked naked through the library, air-drying in the warm night air.
As an aside, when you have zero fear of anyone seeing you, nudity is not so bad. I know there were people in the world who didn’t mind nudity even if people saw them, but I wasn’t one of those people. My mom was pretty immodest and was kind of a hippie with my upbringing--free expression and all--but I never took to it. I was always a little paranoid about having to change for gym classes, and as much my seventeen-year-old hormones had desired sex before the Flu, I was always a little wary about it because I knew it would involve nakedness. Knowing full well that there wasn’t another living soul in Sun Prairie made me relax pretty well. Nudity was very comfortable on a very warm night.
I gathered my gear for the next day. Rowdy was becoming more comfortable with me leaving his sight for a bit, and he was already stretched out on the bed. I climbed into bed and extinguished the two candles I’d been using for light.
The dark was profound that night. I remember being struck by precisely how dark it was. I’d known that it was dark without the street lights, but the moon helped. That night, there was a new moon and it was absolutely black outside. I laid in bed and stared out the windows. Suddenly, I wasn’t as tired as I’d thought I was moments ago.
The darkness eventually gave way to what little bit of light that existed. I could see the top of the line of trees in the park across the street. I could tell that there was a lighter sky above them, two different shades of black. In the lighter strip of black, the sky, stars became visible as faint, tiny dots of pale light. Usually, you can’t see the stars along the horizon because of the harsh glow of city lights. I don’t know what compelled me to get out of bed, but I did. I went to the window and looked up at the sky. The sky was plastered with stars, hundreds of billions of them, a broad canvas of pointillism the likes of which I’d never really seen. There were so many stars that even the usual northern hemisphere constellations, Orion, Ursa Minor, Draco, were obscured to the point of being washed away in the sea of stars.
Still nude, I slipped my bare feet into my hiking boots and jogged back through the library. I unbarred the door and walked to the parking lot where the U-Haul was sitting. Rowdy was at my heels. We walked to the west side of the library. There was a little stretch of a prairie regrowth project there, something some sort of 4H group or Brownie troop was doing to encourage Monarch butterflies to breed. Rowdy romped through the tall grasses and I followed. The June night was comfortably warm outside, and a slow, quiet breeze cooled my skin. I looked up at the night sky and felt my jaw absolutely drop.
When I was twelve, I’d gone on a camping trip to northern Wisconsin with my Cub Scout troop. There, we’d been near a small village, but it was far enough from the village that the light pollution had been minimal. The sky had been amazing up there, but that night in Sun Prairie, without a single light for thousands of miles, without a single light anywhere on the planet really, the sky was incredible. Indescribable, really. I could only marvel at it with an open mouth like a dog that had been shown a card trick. I saw stars that I’d never seen. The whole of the cosmos was suddenly visible. That’s probably a poetic exaggeration, but that is what it felt like.
I stood under those stars and simply marveled. I was the sole pilot on Spaceship Earth, for all I knew. I stood triumphant on that soil and shouted at the night. I was buoyed by feelings of victory
, swelling with pride that I was alive, that I had a plan, and that I intended to keep living. If I’d killed myself two nights ago, I would not have seen this sky, and that would have been a tragedy. This was now my sky.
My sky.
CHAPTER FIVE
Math, More Wood, and Water
I don’t remember when I dragged myself back inside. I think it was when I felt a mosquito land on my penis and sink its mean little stingy proboscis into my flesh. Let me give you a piece of advice: if you have testicles, never swat a mosquito on your penis. Holy balls, that was stupid.
From the time that I stood under the stars marveling at my power as the final survivor, to the time that I limped back inside nearly crippled by my own stupidity, I started to rethink my high-and-mighty position as the last living human being. It’s amazing how jungle-punching yourself in the nards will make you reevaluate your own sense of intelligence and purpose. If there was one thing that looking out at the stars taught me, it’s that I’m insignificant. I’m nothing. I’m a speck of dust. I’m an not even an atom in the organism that is the cosmos. My mind went back to The Stand. Even if I was immune to the Flu, I highly doubted that I was so gosh darn special that I was the only person who was still alive. There had to be others. Statistically speaking, rationally speaking, I couldn’t be alone on the planet. That creeped me out a bit. At that moment, all I could be certain of is that I was the only person still alive in Sun Prairie, and I was fairly certain that I was the only person still alive in the greater Madison area. The amount of death, the way the Flu spread--I didn’t see how it could be any different. In The Stand, 99.4 percent of the world was killed off by Captain Trips, the mutant influenza strain that was released from a military base.
The Survivor Journals Omnibus [Books 1-3] Page 4