I ran back out to the parking lot. Rowdy had finished his business and was sitting patiently by the car. I opened the door, and he leapt into the passenger side and stuck his head out the open window. I honked the horn of the car several times and listened. Only wind replied. I dug in the car for something to write with and came up empty. I didn’t even have scrap paper.
I ran back into the bar and found a few notebooks in a little office. I tore out a sheet of blank paper and used a Bic pen to scrawl a note to whomever was drinking at the Country Lanes.
I survived, too. Am living in Sun Prairie at the library. I will check back here every third day for your reply.
I taped that note to the inside of the door. If the person who drank at this bar came back, he would have to see it. I assumed the person had to live in the area, somewhere nearby. He likely bowled leagues at this alley and spent a lot of time here. Why else would he come to this place?
I drove all the roads around the alley slowly, honking the horn occasionally and looking for some sort of reaction. I saw none. It was well after dark when I turned back toward Sun Prairie and drove home.
I stuck to my routines, but I was hopeful. I kept an extra eye on the roads around Sun Prairie while I drove on my duties, constantly scanning for a car or a motorcycle, anything that might be someone who had gotten my note.
On the next patrolling day, I woke before dawn and drove back to Country Lanes. My note was still on the door, and the dust in front of it looked undisturbed since my last visit. Whoever it was, he hadn’t seen my letter. I got out and spread a new, thin layer of pit sand over the door slab. If someone came, I would know.
I drove around more roads in that area, honking the horn frequently. I went to Hollandale and investigated homes. Hollandale was small enough that I was able to crack the doors in every home there and discover whether the homes were empty or held desiccated bodies. In a few homes, I found dead dogs, and signs that they had starved to death, trapped inside with their dead owners. I wondered why some of the dogs, like Rowdy, had actually taken bites of their owners when starvation got to them, and others chose simply to die. Was it their grieving process?
In each of the homes, I always started by calling out a hello. It always felt strange, like laughing in church. My voice, despite my occasional reading aloud to the dog, still sounded foreign to me. It didn’t feel right that I should speak and ruin the obstinate silence of the world. After I called out my greeting, I would wait in half-hope, half-fear, both wanting to hear someone return my greeting and being terrified to have them do so. I had no idea what to expect from someone else, someone who has been alone for months as I had.
I wore the revolver on my hip now in a holster on a gun belt. It was reassuring to have it there as a tool if I needed it, but I hoped I would never have to draw it on someone else. I didn’t even know if I would be physically and mentally able to draw it on someone else. As I drove the roads around the bowling alley, I played out possible scenarios in my head of what might happen if I found this person. I envisioned this stranger as a man, for some reason--the bowling alley, the Jack Daniels--it seemed to fit. Would he be kind? Would he run up and embrace me as a brother would, grateful to see another living person? Would he be wary? What if he carried a gun, too? Would he go for it? Would I have to draw mine immediately if he drew his? There were so many variables to an encounter. My mind relentlessly played out endless different scenarios.
From Hollandale, I moved to Blanchardville and started going through the streets there. I honked the horn of the car frequently, and searched through random homes on each block. I continued to come up snake-eyes on any signs of another person’s existence.
I returned to the Country Lanes three more times, each time on the third day as my routine dictated, but I spent the other two days of my routine constantly wondering about who else might have drank at the bar. Sometimes, they were happy dreams about a father-like figure who would be of guidance to me in this post-apocalyptic world, and other times they were frightening dreams where this man had been driven insane by isolation and he and I would engage in a life-or-death shootout.
On my last visit to Country Lanes, the fifth time I’d been there overall, I pulled to the door and saw that no one had been back. The note was still in the window. The sand was undisturbed. I started adjusting my thoughts on the man who came through and stopped at this bar for shots and a beer. Maybe he was a traveler, someone who was just searching the world for others. Maybe he wasn’t from this area. Maybe he’d moved on, heading in any of the major directions to seek out other towns, other chances for life. Maybe he’d never be back here.
I waited in the parking lot of the Country Lanes for an hour listening to the wind and idly stroking Rowdy’s head. Eventually, I got out of the car and tore down my old note. I replaced it with a new note.
I am still alive. I survived the Flu. I’m at the library in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin. I have ample supplies and would welcome company. Join me.
--Twist
I taped that note back in the window. I couldn’t keep returning to this little nowhere spot in the country and waiting for someone who may or may not ever return to this place. I had to move on. I hoped the note would be sufficient if they ever came back to get another drink.
I left the Country Lanes for the last time feeling dejected and defeated. I checked my map and found roads I had yet to take. I continued to explore around the area, driving every little farm road I could find. If a farm had a long driveway, I would drive up to the house, honk, and then slowly turn around and leave.
Just past noon, I turned down a road I’d never been on, a simple country lane barely big enough for two cars to pass each other, and I saw a house with a lawn that wasn’t as overgrown as other lawns. It was shaggy, but it was abundantly clear that someone had mown it within the last month. An older Ford pickup was parked in the driveway and it wasn’t as dusty as the other cars I’d been seeing in my travels.
I slammed on the brakes and froze. This had to be the house of that man. It made sense. It was a few miles from the alley, an old National-style farmhouse where there were cows in the barnyard and a mown lawn. Someone had to still be alive there!
My pulse jumped to racing. I wanted to scream with joy and roll up on this man honking the horn. I chose a more sedate approach, though. I drove up at a coast and parked a safe, non-threatening distance from the house. I got of my car with my hands up, to show that I meant no harm.
“Hello?” I called. A few cows gathered near the fence and looked at me curiously. I walked toward the house. “Hello?” I called again. Rowdy followed closely behind me. He gave a small, cautious whine.
I stepped onto a porch that was in dire need of painting and approached the front door. 'Hello?' I called again, rapping on the wooden door with my knuckles. The knock was louder than I had expected; it was startling. I waited for a response, but heard nothing. I said loudly, “My name is Twist. I survived the Flu, too. Hello?”
I reached for the door handle and turned it. It was locked. I walked around the backside of the house and tried the other door. It was an aluminum storm door, one made for a little more wear and tear than the ornate wooden door on the front side of the house. It was unlocked. The second I cracked the seal, Rowdy whined again and a smell of fresh death assaulted my nostrils.
I had just been getting to the point where I no longer noticed the rotting smell, whether it was because the smell was going away or I had just become nose-blind to it I wasn’t certain, but this was a fresh smell, recent. I remembered this.
I walked into the house and called, “Hello?” There was no sound. The kitchen was mostly clean. There were a few washed dishes in a drying rack next to the sink, and there was a five-gallon bucket of clean water next to the stove. He’d been hauling water from someplace. The kitchen was simple, older in style and fashion. It had almond-colored appliances that had seen their fair share of use and light oak cabinets with a yellow tile floor.
&nbs
p; The kitchen opened into a living room. The rank smell of rot grew stronger. The second I stepped into the living room, I could tell why. A man’s corpse sat in a recliner, a bullet-wound in his temple and blood trails down the side of his face that curled backward under his ear. His eyes were shut, and his mouth sagged open. He looked older, but not elderly, maybe sixty, sixty-five tops. His arm hung off the side of the recliner, a snub-nosed pistol on the ground next to it. I would have guessed his age somewhere around sixty. A dog, some sort of Shepherd mix, lay on the floor in front of the recliner, two bullet wounds in its side. Rowdy sniffed the poor old dog and retreated back to the kitchen door, wanting to leave. On a coffee table that was otherwise clean and empty was a hand-scrawled note:
Wife is dead. Daughter is dead. I didn’t die.
God forgot me, so I had to remind Him.
That’s all it said.
In my mind, I pieced together this man’s life in the last few months. He survived the Flu, but not the isolation. He’d seen his wife and child pass, and he’d kept going until he decided not to anymore. That Jack Daniels at the bar must have been his wake, for lack of a better term. He’d gone there to drink away his sorrows, and when the sorrows didn’t go away, he’d ended it all.
If I’d somehow found him two or three weeks ago, maybe he wouldn’t have killed himself. Or maybe still he would have. I didn’t know.
I walked out of that man’s house, sat down on his front porch, and cried. I never bothered to learn his name.
PART TWO
Winter
CHAPTER EIGHT
Snowfall
Winter came in late October or early November. I couldn’t tell what month it was anymore. I only had a general idea of the calendar because of my familiarity with the typical pattern of the seasons in Wisconsin. Looking back, I wish I had kept better track of time, although time was largely irrelevant now.
From the time that I’d found the old man and his dog, I changed my approach when it came it came to looking for other survivors: I decided that they needed to find me. I spent some time every night hand-writing flyers in my most legible printing. The flyers all said pretty much what I put in the window of the Country Lanes: I was still alive in Sun Prairie.
I posted my signs in every town I searched. I even had to go back to all the towns on to the east, southeast, and south--the places I’d visited for weeks before finding the Country Lanes. In each town, I tried to find the most likely place, or places-plural-in the bigger towns, where someone would be likely to see my note. I taped those notes inside of convenience store windows or grocery store windows, and sometimes in the windows of hardware stores. I figured if any survivor was like me, he or she would be looking for supplies and tools.
I took water when I found it, because you can never have too much water. I also made notes of decent supplies of non-perishable goods. In a couple of the really small towns, I found grocery stores that hadn’t been looted, stores that were still mostly intact. I circled these towns on my map and knew that if I needed to go back, I could. I didn’t need to loot them on my own, given that I had a dragon’s horde of canned goods and just-add-water foodstuffs at the library, but it would never hurt to know where there was more. I was looking at living another sixty years, remember. I was going to need all the help and supplies I could get.
I continued to explore Wisconsin. I drove southwest to Dubuque, Iowa, and then drove up the Mississippi River to Prairie du Chien and La Crosse and Pepin. I even started to take some two-day trips, moving throughout the state, driving six or seven hours north on the first day, exploring towns like Rhinelander, Ashland, and Bayport, camping in the car, and six or seven hours back the next, stopping to cut pasture fences and explore anything that seemed like it might have bottled water or something useful to me.
I found no other signs of life in the state. My .6 percent hypothesis from Mr. King’s The Stand shrunk to .1 percent or less. Maybe even .01 percent. Or .001 percent. I went through a broad majority of towns in Wisconsin, and even ventured to Hudson and crossed the border into Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota one day. The sheer devastation of the big cities was amazing to me. I saw signs of bodies of people who had died in the streets, leaning against buildings or huddled with others as they drowned in their own tissues, but I didn’t see signs of existing human life.
Animals had begun to gentrify the cities, though. As I left St. Paul, I caught sight of what I thought initially was a dog, but I realized that by its size, it had to be a wolf. That was a sobering realization. It was another nail in the coffin of reality that I was dealing with daily. If the wild animals, especially predators, were taking refuge in the cities, that meant that people were not.
I woke up one morning in the library, and I was actually cold. I had installed a big thermometer outside of one of the windows in the little annex I called home and it was reading a brisk 29 degrees Fahrenheit. Winter was approaching. That was the first morning where I felt the pressing need to start a fire in the hearth for something other than cooking.
Fall was heavily installed in southern Wisconsin. Most of the trees had turned from green to red or yellow, and the streets and grasses were littered with a solid layer of leaves. It was surprising to see exactly how many leaves there were when people aren’t around to deal with the shedding. The days were getting shorter and the nights were getting colder. I was still living off of canned goods and Ramen noodles. I still hadn’t hunted anything. The community garden in Sun Prairie, which was near the library, hadn’t been planted, obviously, but I was able to scrounge a few ears of sweet corn and some zucchini from last year’s plants that had stubbornly regrown. I don’t even like zucchini, but it was nice to taste something fresh. The corn was wonderful. I was able to find a few boxes of those sealed, single-serving butter tabs in one of the diners in town, so I had plenty of butter for my corn. I salted them well and gorged on those ears. After six months of prepackaged processed blech, nothing was as good as that fresh food. I even enjoyed having the yellow shells stuck in my teeth and gums.
My own efforts at growing food in earthenware pots under grow lights in the library had been far less successful. I had a handful of meager potatoes and some weak lettuce from that experiment. I ate them, and they were good for what they were, but clearly I was not blessed with a green thumb. Perhaps in the spring, if I stuck it out in Wisconsin, I could try again outdoors, plant a proper garden. I would read up on gardening and learn how and when to do it. I would learn what plants would get me the best yields. Maybe I would have better luck then.
I knew I’d need more protein to get through the winter. And there was a reason I constructed that hateful shed earlier in the year. I was going to have to hunt something soon. I didn’t look forward to taking an animal’s life to sustain my own, but I was never a vegetarian or an animal rights person. I didn’t mind eating meat when it was processed for me and put on a bun or a pizza. Now, those options were no longer valid: I had to hunt. The drop in temperature let me know that it was getting to be the right time to do it. I could freeze meat in the shed all winter. I could smoke some to make jerky. I could even cure some in salt to save it for warmer months. If I was going to keep surviving, hunting would have to be part of that life.
Every fall in Wisconsin, deer season was the height of the social calendars. It happened right around Thanksgiving, usually. Legions of blaze orange-clad hunters took to the hills and vales, to the forests and plains of Wisconsin to claim their trophy bucks. Boys and girls skipped school to go to deer camps with their families. Men and women took vacation time during that week. It was always a big deal. When people were around before the Flu, the hunting season was a necessary practice to cull the herds, otherwise the deer population would have exploded. I wondered about that now. What would the deer population look like next summer? Or the year after that? Would the wolf packs have to return to the area to bring back the natural order? And how would I, alone, fit into that plan? The more I thought about it, the more I
dreaded to discover the answer to it. I began to picture a future where I was trapped in a cave, surrounded by slavering wolf packs, swinging branches of fire to keep them at bay.
I decided to wait another few weeks for the hard freeze before I would try to take a deer. I spent that time reading old issues of Field & Stream to learn how to properly field dress a deer and how to hang one for cleaning. I learned about proper butchery. I was going to need good knives. That meant another trip to Cabela’s, or maybe Bed, Bath & Beyond.
I was getting used to being alone at this point. It had been over six months of isolation for me, and other than the occasional words I spoke at Rowdy, I was somewhat used to the silence. I was used to there being no other sounds other than wind and the occasional mournful howl of dogs in the night. I found I was actually starting to enjoy the silence. When I was just a regular teenager in the pre-apocalypse, I had television and an iPod and my laptop computer and a tablet and my cell phone and a Playstation. I had a constant stream of noise and distraction. I got at least fifty texts a day, many of them from Emily. I had Netflix and Hulu. I had television and movies streaming on demand, anything I wanted to watch. I was kept stupid and blind from the world around me, concentrating on the virtual worlds on my screens. Now, there was only the real world. The very real world. I found myself becoming very acute to its changes. I noticed when the wind changed direction, or swelled or died. I observed clouds to tell me what the weather would be like the next day. I listened for sounds, anything out of the ordinary, with bat-like hearing. I began to note places where I saw animals on my trips--I might need to remember those places for hunting later in my life. I felt connected to the Earth for the first time in my life, and I found it more rewarding than being connected to the screens. However, I still missed those screens. I am grateful for the chance to learn about life without screens, but I would take back all those movies and television options in a heartbeat. If given the choice between the two, I would take stupid, blind, and entertained over alone and without technology without even giving it a second thought. I had been spoiled by technology, but I enjoyed being spoiled.
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