The Survivor Journals Omnibus [Books 1-3]

by Little, Sean Patrick

  The next time the door opened, the man with the shotgun was there. He wasn’t pointing the gun at me, though. He motioned for me to exit the room. He led me downstairs and into the backyard. Gathered around the fire were five people: the two men who found me, the teenage girl, the older woman, and an older man with a salt-and-pepper beard. All were Latino, but they did not look related. They all had varying skin color shades and facial features. They were dressed in shabby clothes, but they looked well-fed, like they were surviving all right.

  The older man said something to me in Spanish, and I shook my head. “No habla.”

  The teenage girl piped up. “He asked your name.” Her English was heavily accented, but quite good otherwise.

  “Oh, I’m Twist. What’s your name?”

  She translated. The old man nodded. He pointed at himself. “Enrique.” Then, he pointed around the circle. “Paco. Guillermo. Maria. Luciana.”

  “Call me Lucy,” the girl said. The old man spoke again. “He wants to know what you were doing in our neighborhood. He wants to know if you were trying to steal our things, take our food.”

  “Me? Stealing?” I shook my head. “No. Not at all. I didn’t know anyone lived in this neighborhood.”

  Enrique said something else. Lucy translated. “He says, then why were you here?”

  These people seemed like decent folks. Their situation was my situation. We were all just trying to make a go of it in a world where civilized rules no longer mattered. For all they knew, I was armed and could have killed them in their sleep. However, as much as I wanted them to know the truth, with the possibility of forming alliances and perhaps friendships, I did not know them well enough to take that leap of faith at the moment, not with a wife and baby to protect. I tried to walk the fine line between the truth and a lie. “I was just bedding down for the night before getting back on the road. I meant no harm. I did not know anyone else was alive.”

  Enrique said something else. Lucy said, “He wants to know where you live.”

  “Nowhere, really. I move around a lot, looking for other survivors.” That wasn’t quite a lie. I had done that for a while.

  Guillermo, the one holding the shotgun, said something. Enrique nodded. Lucy said, “Then why did you have a cart full of building supplies?”

  “I was trying to find a place to settle down.” It was as good a lie as I could come up with at that moment.

  Lucy translated and Enrique nodded. He spoke again. Lucy asked me, “Where did you get the horse?”

  “Family pet from before the Flu.”

  Enrique nodded as Lucy translated. He seemed to buy that answer. He spoke again. Lucy translated. “Why didn’t you stay on your farm to settle down? Why are you roaming?”

  “Not enough supplies on the farm.”

  Enrique seemed to accept this answer. He sat down in a lawn chair and gestured for me to sit, as well. He said something to Paco. Paco went into the house and came back with cans of beer. He handed them around to everyone, even Lucy. By my estimates, Lucy looked to be fifteen or sixteen. I reminded myself that there was no drinking age anymore. I accepted the offered beer. It was warm, but I did not want to offend.

  Enrique spoke again. Lucy said, “We are not bad people. Enrique worries that you have friends nearby. He worries that you are coming to kill us or enslave us. He has seen other white people in Houston doing that.”

  “There are other people?” It blurted out of me before I could stop myself. “I haven’t seen anyone in months.”

  Lucy nodded. “There are a fair amount of people ranging around Houston. Paco and Geemo have seen them.”

  Guillermo said something. Paco agreed. Lucy translated. “There are at least three main groups of survivors in Houston. One group is made up of mostly white people. One group is mostly black people. The third group is mostly Latino. There may be more.”

  “Why are you separated from the groups, then?”

  Lucy shrugged. “It is dangerous in the city. Those three groups are fighting each other for supplies and territory. We don’t want any part of that.”

  “I don’t, either.” I felt a little dispirited at the news that there was something of a race war still going on inside the city of Houston. I had thought that if there was something that could make us forget the stupidity of lines of division that it would be a massive tragedy like the Flu.

  Enrique rattled off a long monologue. Lucy tried to translate as he spoke. “He says that he doesn’t want to let you go because he thinks you’re holding back information. You could be in league with one of the three groups in Houston. He doesn’t want you reporting back to them. You could bring bad things onto us, and we have been working very hard to stay out of their sights.”

  “I don’t want to harm any of you. Honestly.” I hoped I sounded sincere enough, because I certainly meant it.

  The five people spoke amongst themselves in rapid-fire Spanish. I couldn’t follow any of it. I would snag a word here and there, just basic vocabulary, really. I had no idea what they were debating. It was clear that Maria and Lucy were in one mind, and Paco and Guillermo were of another. Enrique listened to them all. When they were done debating, Enrique turned to me and spoke. Lucy waited until he was done, and then she translated. “He says that he wishes he could trust you, but we have worked really hard to build a life for ourselves here. If you are part of one of those groups in the city, you could bring your people back here and destroy everything we have built.”

  “But, I’m not. I know nothing about those groups. I’m from Wisconsin.”

  When I said Wisconsin, Paco’s face lit up. “Go Packers!”

  “Packer fan?” I asked.

  He nodded. “Aaron Rodgers. El major.”

  Paco was clearly a man of great taste and sophistication. “He was certainly the mayor of Titletown.”

  Enrique said something harsh, and Paco stopped smiling. Enrique said something to Lucy. She, in turn, said to me, “Enrique says he wants to trust you, but he can’t right now. He wants you to stay with us for a day or two so we can survey our perimeter and make sure you don’t have anyone looking for you.”

  I did not want to stay with them. They seemed like nice people, but I had to get back to the farm. If I wasn’t back by noon, I could see Ren going out of her mind with worry. I did not want to tell them that I had a pregnant wife, though. I did not want them to know that I was a day’s travel from them, with a farm, supplies, and fresh water. Until I knew them better, that was a dangerous tightrope to walk. It could go badly. I started playing different scenarios in my head. Part of me wanted to bolt. Part of me wondered if I could leap out of the chair and snatch the gun from Guillermo before he gunned me down. Maybe I would play along with them and just try to sneak out during the night. I did not like feeling like a prisoner, but I didn’t see any other choices for the time being. “I really don’t want to impose on you, I said. You have your own thing going, and I would just like to get my horse and be on my way.”

  Lucy translated and waited for Enrique’s response. Lucy’s face fell as he gave it. She told me, “He says that he has to protect us. He asks that you be patient and understand, because he is certain that if your roles were reversed, you would want to do your homework, too.”

  And like that, I was a prisoner of my new friends. They let me attend to my bodily needs, and then Guillermo walked me back to that bedroom. When the door closed, I heard them fiddling around outside with the handle. After a few minutes, I tried the door and found it wedged shut, probably with a chair. My heart sank. I was on the second-story of a nice house. The window of the room had a screen in it, but it was only about fifteen feet to the ground outside. I could jump it, easily. I would probably not break a leg or turn an ankle if I tucked and rolled. I saw Paco start walking a guard route around the tall fence in the backyard, shotgun on his shoulder. They were going to stand a watch all night. I wondered if they did that regularly, or if this was something special because I was there. Either way, I
was trapped. Granted, it was an almost pleasant sort of trapped. They seemed like decent people who just wanted to protect themselves from an unsavory element. I understood that. Ren knew I might camp, so I still had time to get away in the morning. I would figure things out later.

  I flopped down on the bed and tried to relax. My chest felt tight, my stomach hurt, and I was worried. I had to tell myself that everything would work out for the best. My mom used to say that most people were good people. I felt like these people were good people. They fed me. They didn’t kill me when they had the chance. They were rational. Everything would work out in the light of day.

  Sounds at the door woke me. I sat up in bed and glanced out the window. It was just after dawn. A front had moved in sometime during the night. The clouds were dark and gray, oppressively low in the sky, and the winds had kicked up a fair amount. The trees I could see from my window were being moved considerably by the winds.

  When the door opened, Lucy was there with a plate of fried eggs and some sausage. “It’s not much. We have a few pigs and chickens. That’s about it.”

  “It’s great. Thank you.” I took the plate from her.

  She stood in the doorway and watched me eat it. “Enrique went down the road and inspected your cart. He says you weren’t gathering survival supplies. He says you were gathering housing supplies.”

  He had me there. I lied to her. “I was gathering things so I could settle down and stop roaming. The future is going to be in farming. I was going to find a decent place and fix it up. Plant some crops.”

  Lucy glanced down the hallway. She translated what I said into Spanish. After a moment, Enrique’s face peeked around the frame of the door. He spoke. Lucy said, “He says you already have a place. The cart is not stuff you would normally get when first starting out. He also says you have a baby, because of the diapers.”

  “Just preparing for any emergency,” I said.

  Enrique’s face flared at the translation, and he spat out something harsh in Spanish. I didn’t need Lucy’s translation to know he’d just called me a liar.

  I decided to change my angle and asked him to sit down. Through Lucy, I spent twenty minutes telling Enrique my story. I told him about Wisconsin, about burying my parents and girlfriend, about surviving the winter and bringing the RV south to find a new life. I left out Ren. I felt a need to protect her from this, if I could, which I don’t understand. Ren was half-Venezuelan. I think she spoke some Spanish, at least. I probably should have told them about her.

  When I had Enrique buying into my story, I changed just enough of my tale to throw him off, should he and his people come looking for us. I told him that I found a small commune of ten people about forty or fifty miles northwest of Houston. I figured fifty miles was a daunting enough slog to prevent them from casually wandering out that direction, but it was believable that a man on horseback could ride that distance in less than a day.

  Enrique watched my face carefully and listened to my words. Eventually, he nodded, scratching at his chin. He shrugged and talked to Lucy. They exchanged a few sentences each. Finally Lucy said, “Enrique says he believes you. He wishes you had just told him the truth to start, though.”

  “We all have to do what we can to protect our people, don’t we?”

  Lucy translated. Enrique gave a sad smile. He said something in return. Lucy said, “He says maybe there will come a day, hopefully soon, where we won’t have to lie to each other, and we can all be brothers again.”

  Was he going to let me go? I smiled. “I’d like that.” I stuck out my hand. Enrique smiled and shook it.

  Lucy translated his words. “He says he’s sorry we had to do this.”

  “Me too, but I understand.”

  “He says he would like to come see your commune someday.”

  “I would like that, too.”

  “He also says that he would like it if you took care not to be seen leaving this neighborhood. We have gone to great lengths to hide ourselves outside the interior city. So far, no one has noticed us until you stumbled in here.”

  “I will do my best.” I stood, and Enrique led me to the door of the house. He returned my shotgun unloaded, but handed me some shells. I accepted the weapon and walked out to the road. They shut the door front door, but I knew they were watching.

  As soon as I could, I started jogging down the road, heading back toward the house where I had to leave Hera and my cart. The cart was still there, but the horse was not. My heart fell. I gave a couple of low whistles and called for her. I ran around the houses in the neighborhood looking for her. No dice. I found a pile of her special blend in the street, but it was hours old. She had just meandered away in the night. If there were threats from animals, I could not blame her. I accepted the possibility that she was simply gone for good. It hurt, but what other choice did I have?

  I could walk back to the farm, no problem. It would be a long walk, but it certainly was not impossible. I would not be able to bring my cart, though. It would be too heavy to drag back by myself, and I would have to stay on the roads to even attempt it. The stubborn part of me told myself I could handle the cart on my own. I tossed the saddle and bridle into the wagon, loaded up the five gallon bucket of water, and hooked up the nylon harness to the cart handles. My back to the harness, I strained until I started the cart rolling. It was heavy and awkward, but once it was rolling, I was able to walk at a slow, reasonable pace, dragging the thing with me. For the first mile, I told myself that this was doable. It was reasonable. I could manage this for thirty miles. I kept up that positivity until I hit the first rise in the road. I managed to get the cart halfway up the small rise on the strength of my legs and the cart’s momentum, but once the momentum killed out, it was over. The cart and I reached an impasse, and the cart had a stronger will than I did. It wanted to go back to the bottom of the hill more than I wanted to crest the hill. I walked the thing back down to the bottom of the rise and parked it in the grass on the side of the road. It had taken me almost half an hour to walk a mile pulling the cart. I was sweating, exhausted, and it had been a futile act. Stupid.

  I packed as many things as I could into my rucksack, an old Army surplus duffel, and set off on foot, my bag on my back and my shotgun carried in my hands in front of me. I felt defeated. I had spent more than a day away from Ren and the farm, I had lost our wonderful horse and the hand cart that made life so much easier, and I was walking back empty-handed. The supplies would rot in the cart, we could not get the stockade wall built, and there was nothing I could do about it. I was a failure.

  It would take me at least ten hours of solid walking to get back to the farm, and that was if I could do it all without resting. Best case scenario: I would get there very late in the day. Second best scenario: I would have to camp for the night again, and get home the next day. Ren would be sick with worry, and I had no way to prevent that. The sky above was thick with roiling clouds and a storm was promising to unleash. I could not control the weather. I could not control what happened to Hera. I could control how I dealt with it. I started to jog, a slow, easy lope. I’m coming, Ren. I’m coming.

  The storm hit as hard as a storm can hit. The wall cloud was many miles long, covering most of what I could see to the northwest horizon. It had slowly been approaching for the last hour, and I knew it was going to get very bad. I had only been in Texas for less than a year. I thought I had known summer squalls having lived through a few choice near-miss tornadoes in Wisconsin, but like they say: everything is bigger in Texas. Especially the storms.

  As I jogged along the streets and lawns of the north side suburbs, trying to maintain a steady enough pace to eat up the miles without killing me, all the air seemed to get sucked out of the world. Everything became deathly still. The calm before the storm. I was sweating and out of breath, concentrating on my jog. I barely noticed it. Then, there was a shift in wind direction. The wind suddenly came hard out of the west, a light breeze that picked up into a harsh straight-line win
d to let you know that a storm was definitely coming. It almost bowled me over when the front hit. At least the wind was cool. It felt good. I would have enjoyed it if the western sky was not positively black and foreboding.

  This was not hyperbole, either. The horizon was pitch-black with a Borealis-green overtone in the clouds high above it. A long, dark curtain of dangerous incoming weather. If ever a storm wanted you to know it was dangerous, this was what it would look like. I was in the middle of a parking lot when I stopped to survey my options. I needed shelter in a hurry. If that storm produced tornadoes, which looked likely, those tornadoes had the potential to do a massive amount of damage. Seeking shelter in a large store was not the smartest thing to do. I needed a basement. I needed a tiny interior room. I needed to find a storm shelter. At the very least, I needed to find a culvert in which I could hide. Something. Anything. I paused only long enough to slug back a gulp of water from my canteen to moisten my dry mouth, and I ran for cover.

  Many houses in Texas do not have basements. In Wisconsin, almost all houses have basement because the foundations have to be sunk at least six feet down, below the frost line, to make sure the foundations remain strong during the freeze/thaw cycles of the year. In southern Texas, where it rarely freezes, there are almost no basements. Why spend the money excavating a basement you don’t need? They compromise by building storm shelters below the house, little cement rooms with locking doors low to the ground to keep you safe during such a potential disaster. I was able to find a storm shelter in short order by running into the nearest residential neighborhood. I had to pop the lock on the thing with a hammer and screwdriver, but it came off easily enough. I ducked into the shelter, closed and latched the doors behind me, and settled into the corner of the tiny room to wait out the worst of the storm.