When I realized I wasn’t going to catch the Flu and die, I’d chosen to go live in a library. Plenty of reading material, and I was able to make a small annex of the library into my home. A small fire could heat the annex completely, and I was able to survive a Wisconsin winter there. The opposite sort of mentality for a survivor was to claim the biggest, best house they could find and make a go of it there, which is what these people had chosen to do. It was not efficient, but it was stylish.
Apprehension seized my gut and wound its way around my groin. Would these people be friendly? Scary? I didn’t know. I did know that I had to take my chances on finding them, though. I rushed to the front door of the house and knocked hard. I listened. Nothing. I knocked again, this time using the stock of the shotgun to make heavy, ringing knocks. Still nothing. I tried the handle of the front door. Unlocked. The door swung open easily. I sniffed the air out of habit. There was a stale, warm smell, but no decay. No rot. Someone had at least given basic maintenance to that place over the past year.
The interior of the home had once been very nice. I could tell, just looking around, that it had been, at one time, like one of those Better Homes & Gardens houses, a showpiece worthy of being an interior design magazine centerfold. Ritzy. Extravagant. However, whoever had been living there had treated the place with less than kid gloves and where once had been a wonderful home, it now looked like a hoarder had been keeping residence. I’m not pointing fingers, though. I tried my best to keep my small annex living area somewhat neat and clean, but the rest of the library had taken a bit of a beating. I’d used the community center room to store wood for burning, and I’d used a lot of the main area for storing supplies. I had tried to keep my living area from succumbing to filth, though. I bagged my garbage and threw it into dumpsters around town in the winter. In the spring and summer, when the weather was nice, I drove sacks of trash to the Dane County landfill south of my hometown and dumped them there. Judging from the variety of clothes and assorted boxes of supplies, several people had lived in this house. It looked like at least two women and at least one man, maybe more. They had just stored whatever they found along the walls and piled it into spare rooms. There was a living area near the fireplace that was somewhat free of debris, but there were soot stains and wood bark all over the place.
I called out a greeting and listened, but no one responded. The ashes in the fireplace were ice cold. No fire had been built in that hearth for weeks, maybe months. Whoever had lived in this house had moved somewhere else. Maybe another house nearby. Maybe they had moved south like I was going to do. Maybe they went west to California. People had been in this house, though. They had survived the Flu. This discovery bolstered my hopes of finding more people. It was a needed breath of optimism. I would never know where the people who lived here had gone, but I at least knew they were out there somewhere.
I wasn’t about to stay in the disaster the unknown people had left, though. I walked around until I found a very nice house that was relatively untouched. Supplies had been ransacked from the kitchen, but I didn’t need supplies. I brought Fester, his food dish, and his necessary box from the RV and prepared to spend a night holed up on the third floor of a million-dollar home.
I started by hauling in all the supplies I’d need for the night from the Greyhawk: a change of clothes, towel, soap, two whole cases of water, some food for me and the cat, lanterns, and weapons. I made a survey of the house and locked all the doors I could find. I secured everything on the first floor, doors and windows, and made sure there was no easy access in the basement. There was an extensive deck with a sliding door on the second floor. I made sure that was locked. Sure, someone could smash the glass on either of the two sliding doors on the floors below, but I would hear that. I’d have time to wake up, get my bearings, and arm myself.
I stationed myself in the third story of the home. The master bedroom was clean and neat, albeit dusty from disuse. Dusty was just the way the world was now, though. I was used to dusty. There was a king-sized bed along the left wall, and a master bathroom to the right. Two matching oak bureaus were along the same wall as the bathroom door. To the left of the bedroom was a large walk-in closet. Men’s and women’s clothes hung on hangers in it, although most of the women’s clothes had been picked over, probably by the two women in the hoarder house. To the right of the bed was another sliding glass door that led outside to a small observation deck, hardly big enough for two people. The view from the deck was stunning. A wide valley of green trees lay spread out before me like a carpet. I could see the glint of windows in other homes through the leaves of some of the trees, homes hidden from view otherwise. I watched the valley for some time, looking for telltale wisps of smoke. I inhaled the clean air, trying to taste the scent of a wood fire on my tongue. I only smelled the clean, tasteless scent of woods and winds.
I went through the house and collected several glass knick-knacks and some metal trinkets. Later that night, I would scatter them on the floor behind the closed bedroom door like caltrops, a final line of defense. It made me feel like the kid from Home Alone. Then, and only then, did I feel myself start to relax.
I went through the house thoroughly. The family photos on the walls made it look like it had been owned by a successful, middle-aged couple. No kids. From the pictures, I could see they’d been all over the world. Egypt, Tokyo, some island shots, maybe Hawaii, maybe the Bahamas; I couldn’t tell. There were pictures of them at Penn State football games in one of the luxury suites. These people had been high rollers and big spenders, no paltry stadium seating for them. The basement was every bit as expansive as the rest of the house. It was a total man-cave, too. One room held a very nice study that looked more like it was for decoration than something that got used. There were bookshelves lined with those showpiece leather-bound tomes that you see in old movies, but not one of them had a single crack in the spine. I doubted that any of them had ever been opened. The rest of the basement was like a man-child’s playroom. There was a gorgeous pool table, a full bar, a tiny theater room with an eighty-inch flat-screen and a fully loaded sound system. There was another room with some vintage video games, the kind in the upright cabinets like an old-style arcade. It made me want to go scavenge up a generator and play a few rounds of Galaga. Instead, I racked up the balls on the pool table and spent a couple of hours playing pool. It wasn’t as much fun as it would have been with someone else, but it was still a good way to spend the night. It took my mind off Bigfoot, at least.
I went to bed in the third floor bedroom. I hauled up my cases of water and stood in the shower. I poured a couple bottles on myself. I soaped up, washed myself well, making sure to hit every crevice, even my toenails, and then I used about two dozen bottles to rinse. It wasn’t the best use of good drinking water, but it felt good to be really clean instead of just using a washcloth and Wet Wipes to maintain a passable level of hygiene. I picked up a towel to dry myself, but stopped. Instead, I switched off the lantern in the bathroom and walked across the bedroom to the balcony. I stood naked in the night and let the warm, summer wind dry me.
The moon was full that night. It was perched high in the sky and illuminated the whole valley with dull yellow light. Far below me, insects chirped their symphony. I heard an owl in the distance. I leaned on the edge of the balcony three stories above the ground and felt safe. The door was barricaded. My cat was chilling on my bed. I was fed and clean. I had every right to feel good. I was planning to start reading a new book. I was looking forward to getting on to New York City. I was less than a day’s journey away from the Big Apple; I could probably make it there before noon if the roads weren’t too bad. I was confident that none of the boogiemen of my fear-wrought nightmares would scale the exterior of the house and get me while I slept. I had found more proof that others had survived the Flu, and I knew that they were still out there, probably on the road like I was. I had every reason to feel good, but I didn’t. I looked at the moon, and my heart fell into my stomach.
When I was a sophomore, I asked Jillian Wright to Homecoming. She looked me up and down and laughed. Then she walked away. At that moment on the balcony, I felt exactly the same way I did back then. I don’t know why.
I went back into the room, dressed in a pair of shorts and a t-shirt, and climbed into bed. I looked at the book and the lantern by the bed and couldn’t muster the energy to read them. I pulled the blankets of that fine, dusty king-sized bed over my head and cried myself to sleep.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The Big Rotten Apple
I left the Poconos just after dawn, the sun barely cresting the edge of the horizon. Any enchantment I had with life on the road was dwindling. It was three weeks since I had left my hometown. I was getting tired of being on the move. I was getting tired of sleeping in a cramped RV and eating canned tuna and endless bowls of salty ramen. I was just tired, period. I was processing too much information every day. Before the Flu, I had spent the majority of my life in a small town; I rarely traveled, and I had rarely slept anywhere but my own bed. I started the trip with the best of intentions, but now the travel was starting to grate on me. I have to think that it was because I was scared.
Fear is draining. It does things to the mind and body. During the day, I was not scared. I was a man in control of my own life and destiny. I was overcoming obstacles. I was blazing new ground in a brave new frontier. The second the sun went down, every noise demanded investigation. When I closed my eyes, thoughts of waking up to someone—or something—charging me down would play havoc with my mind. I wanted to find other people, people I could trust, just so I could stop feeling so alone against the world. I had to keep reminding myself that this whole situation was not something I could control. I had to keep reminding myself that when I settled in the south, that was it. I wouldn’t be moving; I’d be working hard to eke out some sort of existence until I died, and if I was lucky, it would be a happy, fulfilling existence.
Searching for others started feeling as if I was looking for needles in a haystack. It began to feel pointless and tedious. I’d been stupidly lucky to stumble across Doug. If he’d been bedridden, I would not have found him. If I had decided not to go into the pharmacy that day, I never would have known someone in that town was still alive. If I arrived a week later, who knows if he would even still be alive? I knew people were out there—they had to be out there--but I had no reliable method of finding them. It was a near-impossible task. I felt like Sisyphus.
I crossed New Jersey quickly. I didn’t bother searching any of the little towns along the way. If anyone in Jersey was still alive, I figured they would have gone to New York, or they would be out in the country. A large part of New Jersey felt like never-ending suburb. There was probably plenty to scavenge, but I just didn’t feel like survivors would be hanging out in Toms River or Princeton with the big city and all its bounty so close. New York had a multitude of hospitals with medicine, stores rich with canned goods, and many, many apartments that could all be raided for whatever supplies they held. If nothing else, there would be tables and chairs that could be broken up and burned for heat. I didn’t know where people would be in New York, though. Brooklyn? Manhattan? I had no idea.
I started in Manhattan because it was the first place I ran into when I crossed the Lincoln Tunnel from Jersey. Remember that I grew up near Madison, Wisconsin, a town of about 300,000. The county it was in had maybe 500,000 people. I had been to Milwaukee a handful of times and Chicago twice in my life. I was always impressed by their size compared to Madison. Even with the experiences of those big cities, I wasn’t prepared for New York. Even before I hit the tunnel, when New York was looming on the horizon, it felt like I was transporting to another world. Everywhere I looked were towering buildings. I was dwarfed. I was an ant. I’d been through cities on my way to New York, but New York was its own separate entity. Just in Manhattan alone, I felt like I could spend the next decade exploring and scavenging and still not breach all the apartments, grocery stores, restaurants, and every other place that might have held supplies. Throw in the rest of the boroughs, and all the surrounding suburbs in New Jersey and New York, and someone could live a good, long life just scavenging. The winters would still be cold, but there were trees to harvest and furniture to burn. Central Park alone could be turned into a tree farm and you could easily set aside a couple of acres for planting vegetables. New York overwhelmed me. I knew I should explore. I knew I should search for survivors or signs of life. I knew that there had to be someone, probably many people still alive in New York, but I didn’t know where to start looking. I stopped the Greyhawk and tried to sort through the crisscross maze of streets. Everything was in a grid system and that helped, but for someone from Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, population 35,000, the maps I had might as well have been written with hieroglyphics.
I drove to the tallest building I saw and pulled the Greyhawk onto the sidewalk in front of it. I gathered weapons, my flashlight, and my ruck of tools and spare ammo. I closed the curtains on the RV and told Fester to hang loose. I’d be back as soon as I could. Fester yawned and sprawled on his side on the padded bench at the little table. Clearly, he was unimpressed by my big city daring.
The doors to the office building were locked. I used the butt of the shotgun to smash one of the doors. It took a couple of shots, but caved eventually. The glass was safety glass. It didn’t shatter so much as it webbed and bowed until I could push it clear of the door and slip past.
I couldn’t smell death in the building. I didn’t know if that was because no one had died in there, or because the bodies were far above me and the smell wasn’t carrying to the lower levels. The building smelled clean enough, but stale. There was a thick stillness that settled on the tongue like heavy cream. There was a faint scent of ammonia and institutional cleanser mixed with time and age. The air was warm and dry in the building, but given the sheer amount of windows and the excessive heat that day, that wasn’t unexpected. The air was so dry that only a few seconds in the lobby made me thirsty and made my nose itch. I had to go back to the RV and get a bottle of water.
The elevators were obviously not going to take me to the top floor; I had to go by stairs. I climbed seventy stories in a darkened stairwell illuminated only by my MagLite. Each flight of stairs was nine steps to a landing, and then another nine steps to the next floor. Eighteen steps per floor. The first five or six flights were easy. No problem, even. I was giddy. It was exciting. Then, I started to lag. I was still moving quickly, but I lost any sort of bounce in my step. By the twentieth floor, my thighs were burning and I was trudging. By the thirtieth, I was dragging myself from step to step, and I still had thirty-nine flights to go! I could have bailed early. The fortieth floor was still a good view. I could have stopped, but I wanted to make it to the top. I wanted the reward of seeing the massive city spread out before me like a carpet. By the fiftieth floor, climbing the steps became a war of attrition. I would not let the stairs beat me. I was rationing my water because I had only brought one bottle, just a tiny sip every five floors to moisten my tongue. I was breathing hard. I started dreading the next day because I knew my legs would feel like I had gravel in all my leg muscles. The last ten flights, I was dragging myself with my arms on the railing as much as I was trying to lift my legs. For the first time in my life, I truly understood why StairMasters worked.
When I got to the door at the top floor, I was spent. I flopped on my back on the stairwell landing and gasped for air. I wiped a thick sheen of sweat off my forehead with my wrist. Rivulets of sweat were dripping down my body. The notion that I would have to go back down all the steps flitted through my mind. It would be easier, but it was still going to be a chore.
The door to the top floor was locked, of course. It was one of those big, solid steel fire doors, with a narrow window enmeshed with wire. I dropped my ruck and shotgun. I propped the flashlight on its end so it pointed straight up and lit the area. I tried the lock-pick kit but learned quickly the lock was outside of my rang
e of talent. I had a small sledgehammer in the bag, a little 12-pounder with a short handle. I picked that up and began to lay into the door handle with gusto. The noise of each shot exploded down the stairwell and echoed. It was loud, sacrilegiously loud. The world felt like a church funeral service, and any loud noises felt like someone belching in the middle of Mass. I hammered and hacked at the door handle. It bent, but did not break. I decided to work on the narrow window in the door. These things were made to be difficult to break. You can shatter the glass pretty easily, but the wire in the middle was surprisingly tough. I had to get out a pair of tin-snips and cut through the wire. Once I did that, it was easy enough to reach my arm through the door and open it from the inside simply by pulling the handle. Interior doors leading to stairwells can never lock on the inside. Fire codes, and all.
The top story of the office building was a collection of cubicles and small offices enclosed with glass panels. On the far end of the office were three executive offices. You could tell the executive offices because they had Venetian blinds covering their windows for privacy and big wooden doors instead of swinging glass doors. It looked like nothing special. If anything, it reminded me of the set of The Office, but it was ten times as large. All around the office were windows overlooking the city. The view was breathtaking and astonishing for a kid from Wisconsin; it was everything I hoped it would be. I wondered how anyone in that office got anything done. I was always the kind of kid who could not sit next to the windows in class because something outdoors would always distract me and I would have to spend ten minutes watching it. Here, seventy stories above Manhattan, I could see down into a myriad of streets and alleys, each more interesting than the last. They were interesting in an empty city seemingly devoid of life. When everyone was alive, it must have been a hypnotic swirl of things to see. I did a slow lap around the office looking at the city. I was supposed to be looking for signs of life, but I was entranced by the different buildings. I pulled binoculars out of my ruck and started to look into windows of other buildings. If I’d ever been able to have a job in a tall office building, I would have been fired--I just know it. I would have spent every moment that I could spying on other people.
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