Marshall, like Sun Prairie, was desolate. Already grass in yards was getting unsightly. It made me twitch a little. My dad had been a total lawn Nazi. He didn’t do a lot of landscaping, but the grass always had to be a certain length. I’d seen him cancel plans to go out golfing or something because the lawn was too long and he needed to deal with it, lest the neighbors think he was trying to lower their property values by keeping his yard less than perfect.
I drove to the center of town, a little four-way stop where Highways 19 and 73 crossed. I rolled down the windows and honked the horn three times. I listened. I heard nothing. I honked three more times. After hearing nothing, I moved on to Waterloo.
In Waterloo, I repeated my honking and listening process several times as I drifted slowly through town. I saw some cats milling around in tall grasses and a few thin, sad dogs emerge from porches to watch me with mournful eyes. My heart went out to those dogs. I broke into a Kwik Trip and liberated all the dry dog food I could, pouring a good mound onto the sidewalk nearest wherever I saw a dog. Some of them immediately ran out and ate. Some waited until I was back in the car and rolling away. Some dogs only watched until I was out of sight, distrustful of the humans that seemingly abandoned them. It felt like they were starting to become feral again, wild. They would have to remember that instinct inside themselves if they were going to survive. They were going to have to hunt and stalk prey. They were going to have to form packs. It was part of the reclamation process, I guess. They were going to have to relearn from that bit of ancient DNA that was stored in their bodies what it meant to be a wild beast. I couldn’t be there for all of them. They would have to adapt to this new world just as I would have to adapt to it.
From Waterloo, I drove to Hubbleton, a tiny little hamlet that was dead silent, and then to Watertown, a good-sized small city. I drove around Watertown for an hour, honking the horn occasionally, feeding roaming dogs occasionally, and seeing no signs of life. I continued on to Ixonia, to Oconomowoc, and then to the Interstate. I drove on to Delafield, Pewaukee, and West Allis before arriving in Milwaukee and stopping at the shore of Lake Michigan.
At no point did I see any sign of human life past week four of the Flu. There seemed to be no fires burning anywhere. I saw no signs of anyone attempting to live anywhere. I honked the horn often and listened for responses, but heard only the wind.
I drove back to Sun Prairie on a road that ran along the interstate to the south. I drove through Waukesha, Waterville, Dousman, and Sullivan, and then on to Jefferson and Cambridge. Nothing. Nothing in any of them. I drove back into Madison on Highway 18 and circled through McFarland and Monona, then drifted north to Windsor before returning back to Sun Prairie, arriving after dark. I saw only silence, heard only ghosts.
I rethought my math. If Stephen King’s .6 percent held true, I should have found at least one other person. Eighteen people per municipality was a high number. I was confident there was no one else alive in Sun Prairie. They would have seen me if there was, and maybe I would have seen them. I’ve made no attempt to hide. I could have missed people in the other towns, sure. I don’t know Watertown or Delafield well. I don’t know where someone might have gone to hide themselves away. Milwaukee is massive--someone could have been anywhere. The likelihood of them hearing my feeble car horn was low, but the smaller towns, if someone was still alive, they should have heard me. It was a big state, though. I had tens of thousands miles of roads to patrol, and thousands of towns to visit before winter.
It was going to be a long summer.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The Long Road
With my leg healing well and my hand sort of healing, I settled into a routine. Before the Flu, I used to watch a lot of those MSNBC documentaries about prisons. I found them fascinating, and they always seemed to be on after 10:00 pm when there wasn’t much else on and I was still awake. The narrators of those shows always talked about how prison was a series of routines. Routines were comforting. People were less likely to rebel if they knew what was coming to them every second of the day. In a strange way, despite having an unparalleled sense of freedom where I could literally do whatever I wanted to do, I sought out the familiarity of routine to keep me from losing my mind.
I broke my routine into three-day segments. On the first day, I took the U-Haul, scavenging and siphoning gas when the tank got low, and drove around the area farms looking for wood and other supplies that I might need for the winter. I freed animals from pastures whenever possible. This was a familiar, busy task that kept my body occupied and kept me active enough to not dwell on horrible thoughts.
On the second day, I would stay around the library. I would do little chores such as completing the storage shed or rigging up a smoker I liberated from a guy’s garage, or working on more ways to collect and store water, such as my rain gutter troughs. I took grow lights from the garden section at Walmart and set up a small, indoor seed garden in the library where I could grow lettuce and potatoes and a few other things. I figured fresh veggies over the winter wouldn’t be too bad to have, if I could make them grow. When I could, I would spend part of the afternoon shooting baskets at the park across the street or riding my bike. Some days, I would just lounge in my Adirondack chairs and read, but I found it getting more and more difficult to read. I felt distracted and frustrated for no reason.
On the third day, I would hit the road again. I would fill the Cruze with gas, load up my guns, tools, and a lunch (sometimes a dinner or other snacks if I knew I might be out very late), and Rowdy and I would go looking for other survivors. I would pick a direction and start driving, tooling through every city, town, village, and unincorporated hamlet I could find on a map. I would drive country roads, figuring that if someone survived the Flu, it would be because they were able to avoid other people and be self-sufficient on a farm. I continued to free pastured animals whenever possible. I was starting to see small herds of cows and flocks of sheep grazing in fields all around Sun Prairie and walking through fields of corn that had been planted before the Flu got really bad, and I wanted to do that for as many pastured animals as I could.
I went to Cabela's and took, and then installed, a CB radio in the Cruze, and I would flip through the channels incessantly, using the mic to make desponding appeals for human contact. I listened to a lot of static. The radio stations were silent, nothing more than the hiss of the car speakers. When the silence became unbearable, I might slip a CD into the player for a while, but the music felt sacrilegious somehow, like I was profaning the silence by attempting to mimic joy. I used to be the sort of guy who played CDs constantly when driving. Now, I listened to the wind and occasionally spoke to Rowdy as though he might answer me. I thought a lot about the arbitrary nature of life. Why me? Why was I still alive? I never came to an answer about that.
That was my life for the summer and well into the fall. I was wholly a creature of habit. I did it automatically. I never wrote down the schedule, I never made a mental decision to follow it; I just did. It became an unconscious gesture.
I don’t know if I can explain the melancholy that settled on me in those early weeks and months. It was as if a black wool blanket was smothering me. I didn’t laugh. I didn’t smile. I didn’t feel joy. I just was. My heart hurt. I was existing, but not living.
When this state of mind became problematic and I started to shut down, retreating to my bed to do nothing for long sections of my day, I tried to medicate. At first, I took some Prozac from the pharmacy. I had no doctor to monitor me or guide my medication, so I tried to do a lot of research into what a 'normal' dosage for someone my size would be. I guessed. The only problem with antidepressants is that they just made me numb. Well, numb-er. I was already numb. I was numb to the world. I stopped taking the Prozac. It wasn’t for me.
One night after returning in the early afternoon with a load of wood that I took from a farm near Stoughton, I decided that I would try to do something that I’d seen adults do to deal with their pain: drinking!
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I rode my bike to the nearest liquor store and found it was pretty well picked over. The shelves were bare. The coolers were empty and dark. I know this might seem like a shock to you, but apparently when people are faced with not only their own deaths, but the deaths of all their loved ones and everyone one they know, have ever known, or will ever know, people apparently will want to indulge in a few drinks to dull the pain. I went to Fuzzy’s Liquor and found its warehouse-like space to be nearly empty. Cans of beer, bottles of wine, and all the liquor were nearly gone. I managed to secure a few things from the back of the store: a dusty six-pack of Miller Lite, a liter bottle of Southern Comfort, and two bottles of a local vineyard’s wine.
I loaded all that stuff into my backpack and rode my bike back to the library. Then, that night, in front of my fire, I tried beer for the first time in my life. It was awful. Maybe if it had been cold, it would have been better, but it was room-temperature and tasted like battery acid. The wine was also not my cup of tea. I have no idea how people drink this stuff at parties. It was vinegary and gross. The Southern Comfort smelled all right, but burned like fire when I drank it. I had to mix it with Coke to make it serviceable. Once I did that, though--it wasn’t bad. I drank half the bottle. It made me feel light-headed and disconnected. I liked it. I felt something other than sadness or nothing for the first time in weeks.
My head flopped around on my neck, and I talked loudly to Rowdy. Words flowed out of me like a river. I told the dog about my life in high school. I told him about Emily. I told him about my parents. I talked about football, baseball, and chess. Why chess? I have no idea. It just tumbled out of me. Once I started talking to the dog, I couldn’t stop. In my head, the dog started asking questions, and I answered them. I told jokes and laughed. I talked about my mom and got teary-eyed. I kept drinking until the entire bottle of Southern Comfort was gone. Toward the end, I didn’t even bother to cut it with Coke. I didn’t even notice its burn any longer. The night evaporated into an alcohol haze and circular, empty talk.
I woke up late the next morning in the tall grass near the brazier and my chair. The sun was already high in the sky. I was dotted with mosquito bites. Apparently, I was a buffet for them. I was also woozy as hell.
I had never drank before, not one sip. I never really wanted to drink, either. I had attended a few parties where people were boozing and I thought they were stupid. I didn’t like how loud they were, or how immature they acted. I just stayed away from it. So, given that I had never drank before, I had also never experienced a hangover before. That was a punishment I did not care to duplicate. How and why did people do this? Was this supposed to be fun? My head pounded. I felt sick to my stomach. The light made my headache worse. I was groggy and confused. I saw a few dried pools of vomit near the brazier. Apparently, I’d tossed my cookies a few times. I limped inside to the blessed darkness of the library and drank a liter of water in two breaths. I swallowed three naproxen tablets. I drank some Coke--without liquor, this time. I tried to eat some granola bars, but the mere thought of chewing and swallowing made me feel ill. I had to spit out the crumbly mash. No food just then. Maybe no food ever again.
I slummed to my bed, but I didn’t feel any better lying down. I sat in a comfy chair and rested the back of my head flat against it, staring up at the ceiling and occasionally taking sips of Coke from a two-liter bottle. It took a good hour for me to get back to a place where I felt like moving again. I was lethargic and sick the rest of the day, alternating between feeling like I’d been hit by a truck and napping. I accomplished nothing, not even reading.
Drinking and I do not get along. This was something I noted for future reference. Never again.
The day after my hangover, I got back on the road. I had been systematically exploring areas, trying to cover as many roads in those areas as I could before moving to the next section. I found a large map of Wisconsin roads at a gas station, and I used a red Sharpie to keep track of what roads I had driven. Slowly, the roads around Sun Prairie were beginning to become filled with red lines. I started in the west, and kept moving in a clockwork pattern, hitting every place I could find. I always sought evidence that someone survived by going through the grocery stores or Walgreens stores and trying to find telltale signs that someone was using them to loot goods, but more often than not, I found nothing, just a few dusty bottles of water and coolers filled with spoiled milk and rotted, dried meat.
I was heading southwest of Sun Prairie by this point. Thinking back, if I had to put a month to it, it must have been late August or early September. It was still hot, but I could tell the daylight was changing. It was moving from the full, lush light of summer to the more wan, washed-out light of autumn. I had been all over the greater Milwaukee area, gone down to Racine and Kenosha, over to Lake Geneva and Burlington, and through Whitewater and Janesville. I had freed countless cows and horses, a few flocks of sheep, goats, and pigs, and the odd handful of llamas and alpacas. Even a couple of ostrich and emu, and a trio of bison!. Most of the grazing herd animals didn’t seem to be worse for wear. I was starting to catch sight of small packs of dogs, too; I would see cadres of dogs at the edge of a field or skulking through a town; they were pack animals reverting to their natural selves.
I called these jaunts the Long Road. It was a never-ending journey, it seemed. I was desperate to find another survivor, but every time I went out, it seemed harder to maintain my optimism. All I saw was a stark, barren land of overgrown lawns and houses already beginning to show the early signs of their eventual entropy. When storms came through, high winds would knock down trees branches and no one removed them. A few times I had to reroute my course because of a fallen bough on a roadway. With each empty, dead town my heart would break a little more. I spent a lot of this time on the road alternately feeling detached and then devastated by my situation. Why me? Why did I live? These questions were becoming a mantra for me, a puzzle I couldn’t decipher. It was slowly driving me insane. I wanted answers. I wanted proof that I wasn’t alone.
I moved toward Monroe, Wisconsin. I’d been to Monroe a couple of times because they have this major cheese festival every other year. It’s a nice little town with an impressive courthouse and town square. Monroe was just as dead as anything else, but I found some cellar rooms with cheese wheels in them. The cheese was aging, and hadn’t spoiled. I took a few wheels and put them in the back of my car. It would be a nice treat. Even Rowdy seemed excited by the prospect of a nice cheddar wheel. On the way back to Sun Prairie from Monroe, I took some side roads and tooled around the farms in the area. I cut wires and loosed the cattle. If I saw something that might be useful, I investigated it.
I was somewhere a few miles outside of Monroe and Rowdy started to do his pee-pee dance. I saw a building at the top of a hill and decided to pull over there. Rowdy could do his business, and I could investigate the building.
The building turned out to be a bowling alley in the middle of nowhere. It was a strange steel-sided box with a bar in the front and lanes in the rear. It was situated on the conjunction of two minor highways and surrounded by rolling pastureland and cornfields. It looked out of place. It was literally miles from anything, yet there it was. The building was aged and weathered, as though it hadn’t been used for years, but judging by the new volleyball nets in the sandpit in front of it, I doubted that was the case. I pulled into the empty parking lot and got out of the car. The dog bounded out after me and began sniffing the ground, looking for the best spot to relieve himself.
I walked toward the door of the building and stopped. Something was different, wrong almost. I couldn’t put my finger on it. I looked around, trying to figure out what it was. I listened for a sound of something different, but only heard wind. The hair on the back of my neck stood up, even though I wasn’t sure why. Maybe it was the remote location of the bowling alley, or the loneliness getting to me. Something wasn’t right. Whatever part of my brain whose job it was to keep me alive was telling me something. It n
oticed something I couldn’t or just didn’t. I can’t explain how or why.
I went back to the car and pulled out the revolver I’d brought along. The gun felt absurdly heavy in my hand. Keep in mind, I’m not a hunter. My father didn’t own a gun, remember. At that point, I had never even held a BB gun, let alone a .38 Smith & Wesson. I wasn’t from one of those sorts of hunting families where guns were commonplace. My parents were borderline vegetarian hippies. I was brought up to believe in nonviolence. I broke my mother’s heart when I went out for football and wrestling in seventh grade, and she lectured me about unchecked male aggression being the root of all evil. I felt stupid holding the gun, but at the same time it was reassuring, comforting.
I walked toward the door again and realized what had set my spider-sense to tingling: The large cement slab in front of the door had been covered by sand that had blown off the volleyball pits. This wasn’t unusual in and of itself. I’d seen that a lot--with no traffic, with no use, a lot of stuff was getting covered with sand and dirt. However, this was strange in that there was a curved track in the sand from the door, as if someone had opened the door somewhat recently.
My heart leapt into my throat and started hammering. I wasn’t alone. Someone else had survived the Flu! I knelt to inspect the track. The edges were worn by wind somewhat, but the track couldn’t have been more than three or four days old, or the wind would have swept it clean.
I pulled the door handle on the glass door of the alley and it opened without issue. The air inside the alley smelled musty, like stale beer and mold. It was dark; the only light came from a narrow window along the front of the building and the glass doors of the entry. There was a bar in the front of the alley, a pretty typical dark slab fronted with wood panels. The rest of the building was twelve long lanes, seating for players, and a small grill area. The bar was completely clean save for three things: an empty bottle of Jack Daniels, an empty shot glass, and an empty Miller Lite bottle. Someone had been here to drown their sorrows. They drank alone, and then left. I wasn’t alone!
The Survivor Journals Omnibus [Books 1-3] Page 7