At a table, on a scrap of paper, I did some quick math. At the time of the Flu, the United States’ population was close to 312 million people. If the Flu was anything like Captain Trips, that means that 310,128,000 people died. Men, women, children. Gone. However, also meant that there might be 1,872,000 people still alive in the United States. Wisconsin had a population around 5.75 million. If that whole .6 percent notion was true, then that meant there might be 34,500 people still alive in Wisconsin. That was about the size of Sun Prairie before the Flu. There were about 1900 cities, towns, and villages in Wisconsin. That meant that there should be 18 people alive per municipality. I hadn’t seen anyone since my parents died.
I had no idea if this was accurate or not. I was only putting together a hypothesis based on stats from Stephen King’s novel. It could be more. It could be less. I might be the only person still alive. I just didn’t know. I couldn’t know. Given that I hadn’t seen anyone, maybe .6 percent was too great an estimate. Maybe the actual percentage of people still alive was much smaller; there was no way to tell. However, the notion of having company, of being able to start some sort of civilization with the survivors, was very appealing. And equally terrifying.
Randall Flagg, the villain of The Stand, wasn’t exactly a stand-up guy. I knew that a catastrophe on the scale of the Flu could change a person’s very nature. If a person was hungry, thirsty, or sick, they could be persuaded to do some horrible things in the name of self-preservation. In a time of crisis, it was impossible to know how someone else might act. I was willing to share supplies and shelter with someone, with a number of people if need be, but a power struggle or even outright theft and violence wasn’t something I wanted to engage in with others. I looked at this moment as a chance to restart civilization the right way, to be kind and aid others. I knew that others might see it differently, though.
My own purposes and direction had to change. I had to think bigger than myself, yet continue to care for myself. Step one was going to be providing for myself and making certain I would survive. This was obvious. If I died, then everything I was doing was pointless. Step two would be to be to start looking for other survivors, and possibly banding together with them. If I was going to rebuild civilization, it had to start by finding others with whom I could be civil. These people needed to share in my belief that rebuilding this world would take the efforts of many. Selfishness and fear had no place in the new world. We had to be willing to share with each other, but there also had to be self-preservation at its core. It was a thin wire to tightrope.
The realization that there might be thousands of people still left in Wisconsin reorganized my daily preparations. I began taking a few extra bottles of water and food, just in case I ran into someone. I put the pump shotgun into the U-Haul. I resolved to carry a sidearm whenever I was going to be away from the library in the event that I might meet someone who didn’t share my ideals and sought violence instead. I thought about locking the library door with a padlock when I left each day, but I realized that anyone who really wanted anything would just smash a window and go in that way. A padlock wasn’t really going to stop them; it would only mean I’d have to replace a window before winter.
I don’t know what time I fell asleep. I had no clocks in the library. There didn’t seem much point to clocks, really. There were no appointments I could be late to or school classes that I could oversleep. I slept when my body told me to, and I woke when my body told me to. I noticed that I started getting tired at dark, and I would routinely wake when the sun was still quite low in the eastern sky. I also noticed that I stopped being tired. When I woke, it was because my body wanted to, and I slept when my eyes began to droop. I was finding benefits to being alone in the apocalypse. Waking up every morning and feeling refreshed and ready for the day was certainly a benefit that I hadn’t counted on discovering. I guess I was used to years of having to get up at dawn to get to school far too early for my growing body, and going to bed far too late after a day of school, work, homework, and trying to relax and unwind for a bit. I could get used to not having any sort of set schedule. I worked when I wanted to work, rested when I wanted to rest, and relied on no man-made precepts of time to tell me otherwise. There are always silver linings, friend. You just have to look for them.
When I woke the next day, aside from having an itchy, stinging mosquito-bite welt in the middle of my wang, I felt a new sense of apprehension about leaving my library fortress. I felt like someone was going to come and take all my water and food, and I’d be left with a pile of wood and not much to do. It was a silly fear, I know. I had plenty of real fears: the future, food, water, just continuing to exist--but it plagued me. I no longer felt like I was totally alone. I felt like people were out there watching me. I felt like they were coming to find me.
I had enough wood for a while and months until winter to gather more. I had to address my need for water. I had plenty of bottled drinking water, but I was hesitant to waste more clean drinking water on showers or flushing the toilet. I had no idea what I was going to do about that, though. In the winter, there would be snow. No worries, there. In the meantime, Sun Prairie was not exactly flush with lakes and rivers. There were a few small pond areas, like Patrick Marsh, and Breeze Lake northeast of town. Madison was the city of the lakes, but I wasn’t about to run irrigation pipes from Mendota or Monona to Sun Prairie. I hadn’t the knowledge, materials, or abilities there. I wouldn’t have trucks forever, so hauling water would only be a temporary fix. I thought about digging a well, but I didn’t know if it was even going to be a possibility. I would hate to spend a lot of time digging a well and find no aquifer to tap. Even if there was water, how would I get it into the building and keep it from freezing in the winter? I was going to have to address the need for water, but I was clueless how to do it.
I thought about moving again. Maybe I should find someplace that already had a well, or someplace near a lake or river. I had lived in Sun Prairie most of my life, though. I didn’t know anywhere else. Despite the difficulties of living there in the apocalypse, it was still home and I felt comfortable. That meant something. I figured I would give one winter a shot, and if i couldn’t make a go, I’d either freeze to death and die or move on south before the next winter. For tens of thousands of years, people survived with a lot less materials than I possessed. If I couldn’t get through a winter with the head start that I had, then maybe I deserved to die. I certainly wouldn’t last long in the post-apocalyptic wasteland without a bit of hardening.
I took the truck out and drove out of town to the north looking for wood and any other supplies I might need. At the various farms where I stopped, I would check the houses and the barns (if there were any to be found) for anything that I might need that I hadn’t thought about yet. I amassed a small, but useful toolkit: screwdrivers, hammers, screws, nails, wrenches--the works. I took yards and yards of rope. I had no idea what I’d need rope for, but I’d rather have it than not need it, and by God I had me some rope! In a lot of movies about the apocalypse, there would be these strange hoarder characters who lived amongst their treasure trove of odds and ends. I started to realize how easily that sort of thing can happen. I don’t know what I’ll need, but I know that if I need it, I might need it quickly, so there might not be time to go get it from a store, or seek it out in someone’s garage, I would just need it right then, right there. I had to be prepared for that situation.
If I saw cows in a pasture, or sheep or goats--any outdoor grazing animal, really--I would pull over, cut the fencing with my cable-cutters, and give those animals a place to leave their pastures if they wished. They would need water and new food. They had to learn to become self-sufficient again. They had to become wild again. Already, I was starting to see results of that effort. The cows were moving from the short-cropped grass of their pastures to the longer grasses along the roadsides and in the adjacent fields. I would occasionally spy small herds of black-and-white Holsteins roaming through the unchecked gr
owth in the fields. They seemed happy.
On my third major wood stop of the morning, I came across a house with a garage that had these weird plastic containers in the garage. They were heavy-duty white plastic barrels and came up to my chest. They had thick lids that snapped down on the bodies with heavy clamps, like some sort of industrial storage container. The family that had them had been using them to store winter clothes and blankets. It certainly kept mice and bugs from finding them.
Something about those barrels gave me an idea about how to store water. I emptied the eight containers in that garage and rolled them to the truck, tossing them in the back. Those were going to be my water storage vessels. I drove a few more roads, but headed back to the library early to put my water collection plan in place.
First, I stopped at the hardware store to get a few rolls of thin metal mesh, the kind with really tiny holes. While I was there, I got a jigsaw to speed up my cutting. I’d use one of the generators to power it. It wouldn’t use up too much power or time. I also took a Sawzall while I was there, a few metal-cutting blades for it, and some industrial adhesives. At the library, I trimmed off the bottom of some of the gutter downspouts, leaving enough to reach into the barrels a little way. Then, I cut a chunk out of the barrel lids, just enough to get the downspouts into them. I used the mesh inside the open downspouts as a filter, to keep as many bugs and dirt out as I could. I used two layers of mesh, slightly offset, for maximum filtering. Then, I used the adhesives to glue the mesh into place and jammed the containers underneath the downspouts. It wasn’t perfect, but it didn’t have to be perfect. The lids would help prevent some evaporation of the water, and the rainwater that fell on the library’s sloped roof wouldn’t go to waste.
I went back to the hardware store to get an aluminum extension ladder, and I spent the late afternoon cleaning and washing the gutters of the library to allow for maximum flow, and for getting rid of anything objectionable that might have been growing in the gutters. Once I was done with it, all I needed was for it to start raining.
Unfortunately, a crystal-clear blue sky told me that there was no rain in the immediate future. It was at that moment that I realized I was going to miss weather forecasts. I used to love watching Bob Lindmeier or Charlie Shortino spit out the dew points or wind chills. I loved watching the radar on the Weather Channel because I could see how the future incoming weather was developing. Cold in western North Dakota today? It would be cold in southern Wisconsin by tomorrow. Now, as I looked at the sky, I had no clue what tomorrow would bring. I made a mental note to get a book about weather from the library stacks to learn as much as I could. Knowing if a storm was going to develop might be important.
After I finished that, I decided to make my life more comfortable. It was still too hot to start a fire indoors, so I procured a nice outdoor copper brazier from a house near the library and dragged it back to the library. I went back to the house where I got the brazier and dragged back a pair of sweet Adirondack chairs that had been next to the brazier. I know that dragging a pair was sort of silly, but I held out hope that maybe someone might join me.
I burned a couple of logs on the brazier and used my fancy cast iron cookware from Cabela’s to make some canned chili with some packaged garlic croutons for texture; it wasn’t too bad. I sat in on of the chairs and read about weather in the early evening sun while Rowdy camped curled up nearby, occasionally waking to make sure I was still in my chair and thump his tail against the grass when he saw that I was.
When it got too dark to read, I closed my book and stared at the fire, the dance of the flames hypnotic. I cooked a few marshmallows on a stick. I thought again about my preparations. I could always use more wood. I would have months to amass it, though. I thought about other things I might need. Fresh food would be good. I might be able to cobble together some sort of garden, but I’d never even planted a flower. I had no idea what to plant, or how to grow it, or when I’d need to plant it to harvest it before winter, and even if I did, I had no way of creating any sort of long-term storage for fresh food. I could pickle things, that’s what pioneers used to do, but I hated pickles. I didn’t like pickled beets or pickled onions. Maybe canning? Could I can my own meat? Where would I get canning supplies? Was it even possible? I could dry fruits, I thought. No real trouble there. A little heat, a little air--done. That might be something to sustain me. In the winter, it would be no problem to freeze meat in a shed. I would need to get a shed, but after I had one--no challenge at all.
The wind shifted and I was suddenly in the smoke-path from the fire. I coughed and switched to the other Adirondack chair. Smoke, I thought. For centuries before refrigeration, people were smoking meat to preserve it. That wouldn’t be too difficult, I thought. I would need a smoker. I would need someplace to store the meat after I smoked it. If I had a shed, I would have a place. That was a done deal. I would get a shed the next day and go find a smoker.
Somewhere nearby, a dog lifted a long, mournful howl to the night sky. It sent chills up my back. Rowdy lifted his head in the direction of the howl and snuffled worriedly. He moved closer to me and put his wide Labrador head in my lap for petting. I ran my hand down his head and tried to soothe him. He responded by thumping that tail on the ground. Somewhere in the distance, a few more dogs echoed the cries. A moment later, even farther away, a couple more joined the discordant yowling. Rowdy gave a pained whine and he looked toward the library, almost as if he was telling me that we needed to hide. I took that to be the cue to head in for the night.
I brushed and flossed my teeth obsessively. I rinsed with Listerine, gritting out the burning as long as I could. I wiped myself down with Wet-wipes. I went to bed. I listened to the night through a screened window. The silence was intense. Before everything fell apart, I slept with a fan on in my room every night. The white-noise drone of it comforted me, made it easier to sleep. Now, that was the biggest challenge--getting used to the silence. Every so often, a chorus of howls and yips would go up somewhere in the night. Coyotes, maybe, or dogs exploring their newfound freedom from domestication. That was the only noise, though. No planes. No cars. No one yelling randomly as they walked on the sidewalk late at night (which used to happen a lot more than you’d think in a small town). I had grown up in a world that inundated me with communication and sensory input at every given chance--TV, radio, the internet, text messages, constant droning of engines and people and semi-trucks on Highway 151--and now, there was just crickets and wind.
I hated it.
CHAPTER SIX
A Shed, A Mistake, and Patrolling
The first thing on my agenda the next day was to rig up a shed. No problem, right? I went to a house near the library where I’d seen a good bike and I rode it six miles to Home Depot. I was going to just abandon the bike, so I didn’t want to use my beloved Cannondale--that bike was a keeper. At Home Depot, I walked into the store through the broken glass doors. I found a built-it-yourself shed kit and, with great struggle and much cursing, I loaded it onto a forklift that had just enough juice in its battery to get the stupid box to the doors before dying.
I hadn’t planned on driving the forklift back to Sun Prairie; that would have been ludicrous. I had planned on using the forklift to load the ridiculously heavy kit onto the flatbed rental truck in Home Depot’s lot, and then driving that truck back to the library. I went to the customer service desk in the store and used a hammer to open a lockbox caveman-style. I found the keys for the truck and climbed into the cab. The engine did not want to start at first. At this point, the truck had been sitting for a good five weeks, minimum. I didn’t know when the last time the truck was used prior to the Flu, so it might have been longer. It didn’t want to start. I was lucky that the battery was still trying to give sparks, though. I had to pump the gas and curse the engine back into existence. The truck sputtered and coughed. It backfired once, belching black smoke from its rear pipes, and then somehow, against all hope, it sputtered back to life. The gas tank was low,
but it was enough. I was able to back the truck up to the forklift and make a difficult transition to tug and push and sailor-swear the kit onto the flatbed. I drove back to Sun Prairie knowing full well that I wouldn’t be able to get the kit off the truck. I was going to have to take everything out piece-by-piece. And that’s what I did.
Have you ever built a shed from a kit? I don’t recommend it. It took the rest of that day, really. And I recall a fairly liberal use of a word that implied the kit had frequent sex with its own mother being involved in a great bit of it. I realized quickly that I could have used another person there to help me, and I would have benefitted greatly from having some sort of skill and talent for hand tools. I am not a carpenter. I am not meant to be a carpenter, not even an Ikea-level carpenter where all I had to do was put tab A into slot B and drill a screw to hold them in place. This was not even that challenging of a shed, either. It was a simple six-by-six with a few angled rafters and four ceiling joists. The manual said building time required to complete it was four hours. Sure, maybe for someone who had a clue. It took me the rest of the day. Just getting the A-frames to the top of the walls was an arduous, backbreaking, hour-long process.
If someone asks you to help them build a shed, don’t even hesitate to punch them square in their stupid damn throat.
The fatigue and frustration from the horrible struggle in the heat were getting to me. I was getting short-tempered and miserable. Rowdy seemed to sense this and was torn between wanting to cuddle to comfort me and wanting to stay the hell away as I launched into verbal tirades well-peppered with creative obscenity. I was nearing the end of the build when it all got to me and I made a mistake. A bad one.
Before I go into detail on this, let me remind you that I did not go crazy when I realized I had no rules, no structure. There’s an overwhelming, almost intoxicating sense of freedom when you realize you’re all alone and the highways and byways of America are nothing but big empty racetracks without cops. After I decided to live, one of the first things I considered doing was getting a motorcycle and learning to ride. I’d always wanted to, but my mother was vehemently anti-motorcycle. My grandfather had been in a bad wreck when she was a teenager, and he’d never really physically recovered to what he had been after that. He walked with a limp until he died. Since Mom was scared of them, I was never even allowed to entertain the thought of getting one. Now, with the world as my oyster, I could have chosen the choicest Softail from the Harley-Davidson store in Madison and just let my Easy Rider-self fly. However, I knew that any injury could be lethal. If I crashed, who would save me? If I broke a bone, how would I set it and plaster it? Despite all my desires to do otherwise, safety had to become my foremost concern. I drove well below the speed limits, I took corners like a grandma, and I didn’t take risks. Survival would depend on me not screwing up the simple fact that I was going to have to live cautiously.
The Survivor Journals Omnibus [Books 1-3] Page 5