“Gun.”
“Simple. Quick. Smart. Why didn’t you?”
“Because a tornado almost killed me. I was getting ready to do it, and a tornado swept through my neighborhood. It destroyed several houses, but left mine standing. I figured it must have missed me for a reason, and who was I to argue why. I guess I wanted to know why I was still standing after surviving a tornado and the Flu.”
Doug smiled. “Yeah, that’s as good a reason as any, I guess.”
I crossed the patio and sat in a second weather-beaten chair facing Doug. “After the tornado missed me, I figured I owed it to all my friends and family who died to keep on living, for their sakes. Maybe part of me considered it a big middle finger to Fate or something.”
“I like that. A big middle finger to the universe. Did you go stand in the storm and yell at the sky? Really let God have a piece of your mind?”
“Not really, no.” I thought for a second. “I should have.”
“Me too.” Doug gestured at his yard. “Instead, I just sat back here waiting for my clock to run out.” He sniffed. “I’m ready to go now, Twist. I didn’t want to die alone, and I prayed to every god I could think of to send an angel to watch over me. God, Allah, Zeus, Yahweh, Odin—I begged them all for someone. And then you came. I don’t know which one of those crazy bastards sent you, but Twist, I’m begging you: Please, please stay. Please bury me after I’m gone. Can you please grant a dying man a last request?”
How could I say no to that?
CHAPTER FOUR
Waiting for the Inevitable
We had a fine dinner that night. Doug killed one of his hens and roasted it spatchcocked in a cast-iron pan over the fire pit at the edge of his patio. Fresh meat was a treat. It was the first time I’d had non-canned chicken since before the Flu. Doug had a can of fingerling potatoes, and we made that our side dish along with some baked beans from my own stores. After dinner, we sat in the cooling summer night slapping mosquitoes and talking about life before and after the Flu. In the few hours I’d known him, and despite our age differences, Doug had quickly become one of the best friends I’d ever had. Maybe it was because of the situation. Maybe if there were still people on the planet, there would have been no reason for us to bond that quickly. I couldn’t tell you. I was just glad to be there.
Doug was a great talker, one of those guys who could just talk, not ramble—talk. Conversation, true conversation, was a dying art form before the Flu, and now it was almost deceased permanently. It was nice to be in his presence and absorb some of his gift. I suppose a career in sales had helped him, or perhaps that’s why he sought out a career in sales. He spoke easily of his wife and three children, of life in Shipshewana, of selling houses. He didn’t dominate the conversation, and he knew well the intricacies of give and take when two people are speaking. I could never be as slick as he was when talking to people. When I told him about Sun Prairie, and what I’d done before the Flu, he listened intently, asking questions and nodding along. I felt important when I talked to him. I felt like he was valuing me as a person, maybe even as a fellow adult. In high school, I was never one who really joined into conversations. I preferred to sit around the edges and listen. It was easier. Maybe it was because I was worried about what other people might think. With Doug, there was none of that fear. We sat by the fire, joked, and told stories for hours, well into the dark of night. I even let Fester out of the RV and he hung out with us in the backyard, picking meat out of the leftover chicken bones while doing that oddly charming threat-growling narm, narm, narm noise that cats do when they think you’re about to steal their food.
When we finally decided to call it a night, Doug tried to offer me a bed in his house, but I declined. I had a bed. Even though I’d only been in the RV for a couple of nights, it was my home. He understood and told me that his doors would be unlocked if I needed anything.
In the morning, I walked into his house and found it quiet. My stomach plunged. I hoped he hadn’t died that night. I walked down the hall toward the bedrooms and found his room empty. I felt relieved in that moment.
Doug was on the patio with a pot of coffee. He was still wearing the Pink Floyd t-shirt, but the green shorts had been replaced with khaki cargo shorts that were too big on his decaying body, so he’d belted them tightly at his waist with a thick, black belt. The sun was rising, flooding his yard with morning light. There were houses in the neighborhood blocking the view of the sun at daybreak, but after an hour or two it climbed above the offending homes. He offered me coffee. I declined, never acquired the taste for it.
“I like to come out here in the mornings when the weather lets me. The sun feels good on these old bones.” Doug refreshed his mug from an insulated plastic thermos.
We talked more. I told him about driving through most of Wisconsin looking for other survivors. I told him about trying to free as much livestock as I could by cutting down fences and opening barns. I told him about the dog packs that started roaming Sun Prairie by the time I’d left. He listened and nodded along.
When I finished my stories, he got to his feet. He stretched and coughed. “I don’t have long now.” He rolled his shoulders forward. “I can feel it, Twist. Getting old is hell. You know the bitch of it? I never felt old until the last couple of weeks. That way you feel in your head right now? That never went away for me. In my head, I’m still seventeen, eighteen years old. I look in the mirror and think, who the hell is this old man looking back at me?”
“At least you made it to old age,” I said. “A lot of people didn’t get to. Hell, I might not get to. Think positive!”
Doug chuckled. He scratched at his wiry beard. “I suppose that’s true. I always figured if you made it to fifty, that was a good life. Anything past that was a gift. Then, I turned fifty and thought, I want another fifty years. We never get enough time, do we?” He picked up his canes. “Hey, I want to show you something. It’s just down the road. I could use the walk.” We strolled to the end of his block. There was a cross-street at the end of it, and then there was a large cul-de-sac with only three houses on it beyond the cross-street. Doug walked toward the middle house, crutching along on wobbling legs. “That house there was my neighbor’s. Fella named Jim. Good guy, but he was one of those conspiracy guys, you know? Always thinking the government was coming for him. Always thinking that the sky was falling. He was always talking about aliens and the Illuminati and the Bilderberg Group.”
“I’ll bet he had a field day when the Flu started.” I rolled my eyes. There were a couple of guys in my school always going on about conspiracies. That kind of talk was fun, at first, but it quickly got exhausting.
“Oh god, yes. Said it was a government conspiracy, some sort of a manufactured virus to purge the poor and save the resources for the wealthy. The first week of it, he was on his porch shouting to the heavens that we were all doomed. For the first time in his life, he was right, I guess.” Doug walked to the front door and opened it.
The house had a lingering smell of decay. It wasn’t unpleasant, though. No one had died in this house. It was just the start of the house’s eventual collapse, water stagnating in the basement, walls taking on mold, and support timbers rotting behind the drywall. The house was messy, as though it had been abandoned mid-task. I could see a lot of survival gear scattered around the living room and kitchen. Doug pushed through the main floor of the one-story rambler and out a sliding patio door at the rear of the house. The backyard was overgrown. A garden shed stood in one corner of the fenced-off yard.
“Jim was one of them—what you call ‘em? The guys who think the world’s ending tomorrow?”
“Preppers?”
“That’s it.” Doug limped toward the garden shed. “He’s been talking for years about economic collapse, Russian nukes, and the super-volcano under Yellowstone. About eight years ago, he and his wife went whole hog and had a military-style bomb shelter installed beneath their backyard. Oh, it was a whole thing with the city. Took h
im two years just to get the permits. No one wanted him to do it, but he did it anyway.” Doug opened the garden shed, and instead of a lawn mower and some tools, there was nothing. The shed was empty, save for a metal cover on the floor of the shed. Doug cast the cover aside and revealed a heavy steel hatch with a push-button combination door.
“I don’t know why, but Jim decided he liked me. Gave me the combo to that door just in case. That’s how he said it: Here, Doug—just in case. Then, he winked like he was letting me in on some grand secret.”
I knew why Jim liked him. It was probably because Doug listened to Jim’s stories of the apocalypse like he’d listened to me. You gravitate toward people that make you feel important.
“Combo’s six, three, six, eight, nine, zero, zero. Punch that in for me, would you?”
I did as Doug asked, and the door clicked. I twisted the handle and the latch gave way. I pulled it open and a metal ladder awaited me.
“Go on down.”
I arched an eyebrow. Something in my gut said it was a trap. Doug must have known. He chuckled. “Don’t worry about it. I’m not going to lock you in there. Here, if you don’t mind waiting up here for my crippled self to get down there, you can come down after me.” It took him about five minutes to climb down the twelve steps, but he did it. “Trust me now? C’mon down.”
I climbed down after him. By the time I got to the bottom, he’d turned on some sort of battery-powered lighting system. There were two slim rooms buried ten feet below the ground, probably made out of industrial shipping containers. One was a basic shelter with a kitchen, complete with a hand-pump well water system, a working latrine and shower, a large room for dining and relaxing, and a series of bed-racks in the rear reminiscent of the racks in a submarine. The other container was there for storage. There were large plastic shelves on both sides and two sets of the same shelves down the center, back-to-back. All the shelves were stocked with cans and boxes, or toilet paper and feminine products, or bottles of water and cans of soda. It looked like the most boring grocery store in the world, a subterranean CostCo where everything was in bulk. At the rear of the storage container was a water purification system, and what looked like a hot water heater.
“’Bout a week after I figured I was supposed to be dead, I thought about Jim. Figured he was hiding in his shelter with his family. I came out here, punched in the code, and came down. No Jim. No nobody.” Doug sat on the couch in the main area of the shelter. It was a small, but functional piece. No frills. It didn’t look very comfortable.
“He put in all that work for this shelter and didn’t use it?” I was staring at the shelves of supplies. It looked like three years of food and supplies. “Seems wasteful.”
“That’s what I thought, too.” Doug walked back to the ladder and dragged himself out of the shelter. He climbed faster than he’d descended. “Then I found him.”
I climbed out after him. Doug pointed to the garage. “Lined his wife and two kids up in the garage and shot ‘em all in the head. Then, he did himself in.”
I was a little dumbfounded. No, a lot dumbfounded. All that, the digging, the rigging, the supplies—and he chose to kill himself. All I could think to say was, “Why?”
Doug shrugged. “Tells you something, doesn’t it? Here’s a man who was prepared for the apocalypse, dead-on, one-hundred percent prepared. He knew it was coming when we all laughed at him, and yet when it showed up on his doorstep, he chose to end himself and his family. Only thing I can think, they were all showing signs of the Flu before they could retreat to the shelter, and rather than poison the shelter with their germs, Jim and his wife exited in the fastest method possible. Once you see your neighbors gasping to death and choking on their own fluids, it’s pretty easy to not want to go out that way.”
“Why did you bring me to see this?”
Doug looked at his feet. After a moment, he looked up again. “Twist—Barnabas—” It was weird hearing him invoke my given name. “I like you,” he continued. “You seem like a good boy. You remind me a lot of my youngest son, Clark. He was a good boy, too. Sweet natured, kind, a good father. You strike me as being just like him. I’ve known you less than a day and I can tell your heart is in the right place.”
“Thanks.”
“I brought you here because I just wanted you to see it. I wanted you to remember it. You have—God willing—another sixty years on this planet, maybe seventy or eighty, if you get lucky. You’re going to go through a lot of ups and downs. I just wanted you to see that even the best laid plans of mice and men can go awry. I wanted you to see what Jim and Nancy did, and know that sometimes, even in the best case scenarios, even when you think you’ve covered all your bases, you haven’t.”
“I know that,” I said. And I did, or at least I thought I did.
Doug held out his hands defensively. “I’m not saying you don’t. I’m just reminding you of that.”
We started to walk back to Doug’s house. “I spent a lot of time thinking in the past year. I suspect you did, too.”
“It was all I did, really.”
“Well then, there you go. Did you come up to any realizations? Any truths?” He looked at me out of the corner of his eye.
I had to shake my head. I hadn’t. I knew less now than I did a year ago.
“Well, I came up with one truth. Only one.”
“What’s that?”
Doug sucked in a big breath of air. “When it comes to life and how to live it, none of us know shit-all about it. However, I learned that when it comes to life, all the planning in the world can’t save us from dumb luck and chance. Jim and Nancy, they were a nice enough couple. They had two nice kids. They were active in the school. All their conspiracy weirdness aside--I liked them, liked them a lot.” Doug paused. He looked over his shoulder at their house. “But they got so wrapped up in preparing for doom, I think they forgot to enjoy being alive. Don’t do that. Whatever happens, whatever you do with yourself after I’m gone, promise me that you’ll enjoy being alive. If not for yourself, for me. My time is up, but you can fit a lot of enjoying life into the next sixty years. Do that for me.”
It seemed like a small thing to ask. I started to tell him that yes, I would, but I stopped myself. Did I even remember what joy was anymore? I couldn’t lie to a dying man. “I don’t know if I know how.”
“You’re young. You’ll figure it out, I’m sure. Just promise me that you’ll find a moment or two where you can look around and think to yourself, ‘I’m glad I’m here. This has all been worth it.’”
“I’m glad I’m here now.”
“Not really what I meant.” Doug stopped crutching forward. “Look…I look around here, and I see my life. My kids played on these streets. I celebrated Christmases, birthdays, and baptisms in my house. This is where I’m glad to be. You need to go out and find your own place to be happy.”
“My own happy place.”
Doug started walking again. “You say it like that, and it sounds stupid…but, yeah. You need to find your own happy place. Keep that in mind, Twist. Don’t get so caught up in surviving that you forget how to live. There isn’t much point to surviving in this world if you’re not actually living.”
We spent the rest of the day talking, eating, and drinking in Doug’s backyard. He killed another hen (“Not like I’m gonna need them,” he joked), and we made fried chicken with oil in the cast iron skillet and a bag of flour he had sealed in Tupperware. Doug’s fried chicken was amazing. The Colonel wished he could do what Doug did with a simple piece of chicken. I ate most of the chicken at Doug’s insistence. He wasn’t very hungry anymore, he said, and it’s not as if he had a fridge to keep them from going bad afterward. I easily destroyed most of the bird in a single sitting. It was the most food I’d had since last winter, when I’d had to put a cow out of its misery and feasted on the beef afterward. My stomach bowed pleasantly. Fester laid beneath my chair, his own belly full, as well. That night, we turned in earlier than we had the prev
ious night. It had been fun, Doug told me, but he was tired. He looked tired, too. The dark circles around his eyes were thick and heavy.
The next morning, I ventured to the patio to greet the sun with Doug, but he wasn’t there. I crept into the house and found him in his bed. He was propped up with an extra pillow behind his head and shoulders, and only a sheet covered his legs. His eyes were baggy and swollen. He coughed dryly and gave me a sad look. “I think my clock is winding down, now.” I saw a set of Rosary beads in his fist.
“I’ll get you some pills.” I moved toward the bathroom.
“No! Please, I’m ready to go now. It’s time. I’m ready.” He sighed heavily, like he was exhaling his will to live. “I don’t know what kept me alive this long, but I figure it’s because I was just waiting for you. Maybe you needed to know other people are out there somewhere. Maybe this is all part of some grand cosmic plan. Maybe it’s not. I wasn’t going to get better, either way. It’s time for me to go, Twist.”
The bedroom was cluttered with clothes, magazines, and books from a year of living with no thought to company or cleanliness. The smell of time and age was thick in there. The light in Doug’s room was colored to a pale blue by thin curtains over the two windows. I opened the curtains and cranked open the windows to get some light and cross-breeze in the room. Doug blinked a bit at first, but quickly accustomed himself to the light. He looked around the room and smiled. “I haven’t pulled those curtains since last year. I forgot how this place looked in the light.”
The Survivor Journals Omnibus [Books 1-3] Page 25