The Survivor Journals Omnibus [Books 1-3]

by Little, Sean Patrick

  It was the rest of the time that I confronted the oppressive, depressive, and stark reality of being constantly alone.

  It has been a year and a few months since the Flu struck and killed everyone. Already the Earth was beginning a vast reclamation project by slowly erasing human existence. The highways, without constant traffic, were given over to frost heaves in winter and heat buckles in the summer. What was once a smooth blacktop highway became a mostly semi-smooth highway with the occasional bump that would jar my suspension and knock the teeth out of my head. (I only had to hit one of those before I started really concentrating on the road.) Weeds were beginning to grow rampant from the weather-made cracks in the asphalt. The more they grew, the faster the asphalt began to break down. The occasional highway signpost, uprooted by weather and time, lay across the highway like roadblocks. Wind-blown debris from homes and dumpsters was scattered in the ditches slowly being swallowed by a choking growth of unchecked weeds.

  The highways were devoid of human existence, though. The Flu hadn’t hit suddenly. It was fast, but it had waylaid people for a few days before claiming them. There were no cars along the sides of the road. No one outran the Flu. People died at home alone or with their families, or they died crammed into standing-room-only hospitals that couldn’t help them, that couldn’t even make them feel comfortable as they died. It had culled the primate genus from the face of the Earth with wicked efficiency, save for a few lucky schlubs like myself who somehow had a genetic immunity to the virus.

  In the year I was alone, I was struck by how much I’d taken for granted. When I drove my parents’ car before the Flu and I hit a stretch of bumpy road, I used to curse the government and the lazy road crews that couldn’t keep that tiny section of highway in decent working order. Now, I understood the scope and gravity of their job and marveled that they were able to do as much as they did.

  Entropy was an ugly, daily reality in my world. I was confronted with it constantly. I was fighting a losing battle against time. Just because I dodged a bullet by being somehow immune to the Flu doesn’t mean that I was immortal. Eventually, something would get me, I would die, and then I would break down just like the roads. I was alone and fending off Death until the Grim Reaper decided it was my time. I refused to lie down and die, but I also had to wonder what the point of being so stubborn was. I was alive, and I told myself that I had to go on living for the sake of those that died, but why?

  When I tried to find a reason for why I continued to live, I could never come up with a decent answer. I felt like I was having a mid-life crisis, and I was only eighteen. I was in constant battle with feelings of futility. I knew what lay at the end of my road because it was the same as everyone else’s road. I just wondered why I had to keep driving it. Like Jim Morrison said: No one gets out alive.

  Depression and breakfast: a winning combination!

  Fester and I set off for South Bend after we finished eating. I made sure to dress myself in a presentable fashion. This was important. Getting dressed everyday forced upon me a meager sense of normalcy. It also would help if I happened to stumble upon another survivor. I knew for certain that three other people besides me had survived the Flu, even though all three were dead now. The Laws of Probability would say that there had to be others. It wasn’t a matter of if I would find other survivors; it was a matter of when. I was always actively looking for any signs of life. If I happened to find another person, I certainly didn’t want to look like a deranged lunatic or something, unshorn, wearing three-day-old boxer shorts and a single sock because my right foot tended to get cold while I was driving the RV. It’s not a good look. I kept my hair scalp-short and practical with battery-powered clippers, giving myself a boot camp buzz every two weeks or so. I shaved every four days to stay neat. I made sure I dressed every day as though I were going out amongst living people in a regular society. I forced myself into these routines. Routines were how I kept from losing my mind and giving up.

  During my first day on the road, I made up a rigid schedule in my head and vowed to stick to it. I had a wind-up alarm clock in the RV. It went off at what I assumed was around seven every morning, just in case my tuna-breathed traveling companion chose not to wake me at dawn. (At this point, Greenwich Mean Time was non-existent. I set the clock by guessing dawn was somewhere around 5:30 AM.) By eight, I was fed, dressed, and on the road. I only stopped for the day at dark. No point in trying to go on hucking through the night and getting sleepy. That was just dangerous and stupid. I had a queen-sized bed literally twelve feet behind the driver’s seat. Moreover, in the dark I might miss some tiny sign that someone was still alive in the area.

  I’d gone through the northeast corner of Illinois and crossed into Indiana. I’d found no signs of life in the areas of Rockford, Des Plaines, Chicago, or Gary, Indiana. It didn’t mean there weren’t people alive in those cities; it only meant I hadn’t found them. I worried about that. How many people was I missing? There was no way I could ever know. I’d ventured into smaller towns along the way, using the highway as a guide, but exiting frequently to roll through the smaller burghs and villages five or ten miles off the main path. It was difficult to assume where some living person might be hiding. Would they stay in the city because the looting for supplies was easy? Would they retreat to the country because it would be easier to grow food and harvest wood for burning? Are they traveling around, like me, looking for other people? Would I never find them because they’re busy looking for me? I shoved those thoughts out of my head and exited the highway at the signs pointing the way to the University of Notre Dame.

  I wasn’t a huge sports fan. I’m awkward and relatively nonathletic. I was a decent wrestler, but I lost as often as I won. That was about the extent of my physical abilities. I couldn’t hit or throw well. I wasn’t particularly fast. Wrestling was a good sport for me. My dad wasn’t athletic, either. He had been an accountant. He played golf maybe once a month when clients insisted. He wasn’t good at it. He didn’t have a team loyalty outside our general proximity to the Wisconsin Badgers, Milwaukee Brewers, and Green Bay Packers. However, my dad was a Notre Dame fan. He wasn’t Irish or Catholic, and his own alma mater was Colorado State, so I have no idea why. He said it was a throwback to his dad. I didn’t know my grandfather too well; he died when I was young. Apparently, when my dad was a kid, they’d always watched Notre Dame on Saturdays, so the tradition just continued. Saturday afternoons in the fall at my house were reserved for Golden Domer football. When I was a kid, I had a Fightin’ Irish jacket. I had been steeped in the lore and glory of ND football since I was a fetus. I just wanted to see the stadium in person once before I settled in the south. Just once. Just once before travel possibilities reverted to pre-internal combustion engine times.

  That was the most haunting part of this journey: I knew that gasoline wouldn’t stay viable forever. Already I was starting to see breakdowns in the fuel reserves I was finding. I was operating wholly on the knowledge that I would never venture back to the north again. I would never see my old hometown of Sun Prairie again. I would never see any of the towns I was driving through again. Once I made it Louisiana, that was it; I would be done traveling. Forever. I would build my life there. I would die there, eventually. The rest of the country, the rest of the great open space of America would be dead to me. My whole world would be the little bubble of land where I carved out a daily existence. Everything I passed, I tried to make sure I locked it deep into my memory banks. It would be all I would have in terms of knowledge of the world for the remainder of my life.

  I rolled the RV slowly through the streets toward the campus of Notre Dame. Cars were parked haphazardly on the sides of the roads. I occasionally glimpsed some dogs. Most of the dogs that were surviving had gone feral and become dangerous, returning to that necessary pack-hunter mentality that they had locked away in the back of the wolf-part of their brains. Maybe some of them would welcome a human master again, but it was hard to trust a pack of them when they
growled and barked at your arrival. A single blast of the shotgun into the air would send them scattering. Silly dogs. Still scared of the boom of fireworks.

  I parked the RV on the edge of campus, the stadium in sight. I geared up: a mostly-empty Army-issue rucksack for hauling back anything worth taking (I also carried a couple of tools in the bottom of the bag for breaking locks when necessary), a Remington shotgun on a shoulder sling that I threw across my back apocalypse warrior-style, a slim, black semi-automatic handgun in a leather holster on my right hip secured with a tactical gun belt that I’d taken from Cabela’s back in Wisconsin. Please do not think for an instant that I’m some sort of badass post-apocalyptic warrior god. I am not. I’m rather the opposite. I don’t like guns; I barely touch them. I just know their value in this world-gone-wild. The shotgun is there to scare away the dogs should they start to think about attacking me. The SIG Sauer is there for my own mental health. I don’t want to use it, but I don’t want to not have it there if I have to use it. Prior to the apocalypse, I wasn’t anti-gun, but I wasn’t pro-gun, either. I was gun indifferent. Now, I am all for guns. Totally pro-weapon. I know they have their place. They are tools. They are insurance. I both fear and respect them. I just do not like them or enjoy them, and I wish I did not have to carry them.

  I addressed Fester before leaving. “Don’t drain the battery playing CDs the whole time I’m gone, okay?” The cat was curled up on the secondary bunk, the one situated over the driver and passenger seat in front. He squeezed his eyes shut at me. I worried about him in the RV. In the heat, it could get dangerously hot inside the RV. I opened every window, save the ones without screens on them. It was enough to get a thick, sludgy breeze moving through the cabin. I made sure he had a big bowl of water. I was parked under a large, leafy oak. Between the shade and the breeze, it shouldn’t be dangerous. At least, I hoped. I’d buried one pet already since the Flu struck. I’d only had Fester two days, but he’d been a welcome companion. I didn’t want to lose him, too.

  I shut the door behind me, locking it. I know that’s probably a stupid superstition. I always locked doors when everyone was alive, and now that everyone was dead, it seemed needless. I think it had something to do with my own sense of paranoia. I somehow still assumed that someone is nearby despite all evidence to the contrary, and if I don’t lock the doors, that person will come and steal my RV. I also don’t want to ever open the door and find someone rummaging through my stuff. I don’t know how that scenario would play out. Would I shoot them? Hug them? I just don’t know. If I lock the doors, my mind rests easier.

  Notre Dame’s campus was everything I hoped it would be, save for the sidewalks and grassy areas teeming with students and faculty. There was a darkness to the campus now. All the buildings stood silent and empty. The residence halls were probably littered with the moldering bones of the dead. (The Flu began in early May, before most campuses were done for the year. Many students never made it home, too sick to travel.) As I walked, I kept expecting a face to be peering at me from one of the windows. I tried not to look at the windows because of that. It gave me that weird, hollow feeling in my gut and groin, that same feeling you get when you’re in a haunted house at the amusement park and know you’re about to be scared out of your pants but you just don’t know when the costumed worker is going to jump out at you.

  The planet was working hard to reclaim the buildings. The grass was thigh-high everywhere. Ivy growing up the sides of some buildings was unchecked and swallowing the buildings in green leaves.

  I had no desire to loot any of the buildings. I knew from the experience of going through the campuses at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, UW-Oshkosh, UW-Milwaukee, UW-Platteville, Marquette, and UW-Whitewater that I wasn’t going to find much worth taking. The residence halls might have some food (plenty of ramen noodle packets, I’m sure) and water, but I wasn’t desperate at the moment, and there would be more food and water in other places down the road. I just wanted to see the stadium.

  When I was in Madison, I broke into Camp Randall once. I walked out to the fifty-yard line and pretended to run a fly route to the north end zone. In my mind’s eye, I caught the pass and scored the touchdown. I ran to the student section and started to celebrate (everybody Jump Around!), but stopped when only the empty aluminum benches stared back and the cheers in my mind gave way to overwhelming silence. There would be no pass patterns today. Just memories.

  The stadium was locked well. There were thick, heavy padlocks on the gates, but I could climb over those. The double-doors to the stadium were bolted. I used a lock-pick master key to jimmy the lock and open one of the doors.

  Beneath the stadium was utter darkness. I had to use the small LED light I kept in the rucksack to light my way to the field. Once I got to the field, though, it was all worth it. The stadium that I’d seen so many times on TV loomed larger than life. The field turf field was still green, still looked like a field should look, despite the weeds beginning to grow around the edges from cracks in the concrete. The painted field lines were still faintly visible. For a second, I wondered if I should root around in the locker rooms and storage rooms and take a helmet with me as a souvenir. I decided against that. I had no use for it, and it would be a pointless trophy.

  I walked to the middle of the field and stared at Touchdown Jesus on the building behind the stadium, memorizing every detail. I climbed the stairs to the press box and sat on the benches on the fifty-yard line. From the stands, I could see the golden dome of the Notre Dame administration building and the Basilica of the Sacred Heart looming over the edges of the stadium. My heart swelled. My dad would have loved to have seen a game here. He went to the occasional Badger game when he needed to entertain a client for his work, but it was only one or two a year at best, and usually one of those pre-conference tune-up games where the Badgers would pay a half-million for some sacrificial lamb school like Akron or Western Illinois to come to the Camp and then decimate them 70-13. If we had lived in South Bend instead of Madison, I think he would have splurged on a pair of season tickets. No—I know he would have.

  Reminiscing about my dad hurt. I didn’t cry, though. Part of my brain thought about it, maybe even wanted to cry. My dad should have been here, but it was over a year since I buried him and my mom in the backyard of our house in Wisconsin. I think I had grieved him enough in the past year. Now, I just wished he’d been here with me to see the stadium he loved. If I closed my eyes, I could almost imagine my dad next to me. It was a sad, melancholy day, but I like to think that it helped me heal, helped me put memories of my family to rest so that I could concentrate on my future. In a way, I left my dad in that stadium.

  Eighteen months ago, I would have snapped off thirty cell phone photos of this and then never looked at them again except to show friends as proof that I was there. Now, I appreciated the moment. I lived in the present and committed the experience hard into my memory. I breathed in the smell of the stadium and the thick South Bend summer air. I stared at Touchdown Jesus until I was certain I would never forget what it looked like from the stands. I spent at least an hour thinking about watching Notre Dame playing games. I tried to replay some of my favorite plays in my head. When I exhausted my mental reserve of key big-game plays, I strolled around the stadium once more and left.

  It was a silly little side trip. I wasn’t expecting to find anyone hiding on campus. I wasn’t expecting to find supplies. This was a stop just for me. It made me remember my dad. That was enough. It was the final stop of my farewell to the past. I had spent my tears and grief, and now I had to look to my future. Whatever life I have left in front of me, I had to plan for the possibility that I might be hacking it alone. These were my memories for the years ahead.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The Small Towns

  I made a lackadaisical stroll around campus, letting the summer heat dictate my pace. By the time the sun was directly overhead, I was ready for some water and some food. I walked back to the RV and found a s
leepy cat waiting for a treat.

  I made canned tuna for lunch. I added some salt and pepper to mine, and then mixed it with a few fast-food packages of mayo. The fast-food squirt packs could keep a long time. I scavenged a whole box of them from a McDonald’s where I used to have an after school job. I don’t know if I trusted any of the stuff still on the shelves in stores anymore. Fester liked his tuna plain.

  I missed bread. All the bread in the world was spoiled now. I could learn to make some, I suppose. There had to be flour somewhere in the world that wasn’t spoiled, but it seemed like a lot of work to try that in the tiny RV kitchen. It was easier to go the prepackaged route while I was traveling. Still, a big stack of hot French toast with cinnamon butter and syrup would really have hit the spot. Once I got to Louisiana, bread would be high on my list of things to make. In my head, I had an on-going checklist of plans for things that I would have learn once I settled Down South. Learning to cultivate, harvest, and mill wheat would have to be one of them. I don’t know if I could live the rest of my life without bread.

  I was kind of proud of myself for living without a lot of things for the past year. If the Flu hadn’t happened, if life was still proceeding as normal, I would never have given up TV, pizza, the Internet, cell phones, or hanging out with friends. In the face of having no other alternative, it was easy enough to do all of those things. It wouldn’t have done any good to cry or throw a fit about it (although to be honest with you, I often felt like doing both of those things), so I just put my head down and muddled through, pressed on. Like the Wisconsin State Motto says: Forward!