The Survivor Journals Omnibus [Books 1-3]

by Little, Sean Patrick

  …if Twist never…

  I hated thinking like that. He was only a day late, and suddenly he was dead to me. How morbid was I? It also made me angry that I felt so dependent on him. I used to be one of those women who wore the A Woman Without a Man is Like a Fish Without a Bicycle t-shirts. I was an ardent feminist. I enjoyed the company of men, but I did not need to be married. I did not need a man in my life. I was strong and independent. After the Flu, after my sister died, I was alone. I was alone, and I was surviving. I proved I was strong and independent. Then, the Last Man on Earth showed up with his proverbial White Charger of an RV, and he escorted me to the magical kingdom of Lake Houston. In the year that Twist and I have been together, I have taken advantage of him. I know it. I think he knows it, but he’s too good of a man to care. I used him to get free of New York. I have depended on him for food and shelter. I convinced myself that we had a partnership, but I think he has done most of the heavy lifting, and I have let him. Could I go back to being alone and independent? Could I raise a baby in this world without him? If he never came back, would I have a choice? I remembered how emotional I got that morning after I told him I was pregnant and for that split-second I thought he’d abandoned me. I was ready to tackle the world head-on alone. And I would have. I had to get back to that sort of alpha-female tigress-mentality. Things happened. People died. It did not mean the world stopped. If Twist was dead, the sun would still rise tomorrow. This baby would need a mother. Life went on. Nothing had taught me that lesson more than the Flu. Nothing stopped when everyone died. The sun still rose. The sun still set. The seasons changed. The world kept turning. I needed to stop worrying about the What If… and concentrate on the What Is.

  I gave myself a proverbial kick in the rear. Get up. Get moving. The farm is one of those What Is. It existed. It was real. It was present. It was a never-ending chore. It needed me at that moment. Twist or no Twist, baby or no baby, the farm existed at that moment. It would exist that night, and the next morning, too. The animals needed me. The garden needed me. I needed them. End of story. There was work to do. I put my hair up to keep it off my neck. I got a pair of leather work gloves out of the hall closet. I hitched up my maternity jeans, put on a comfy t-shirt that was two sizes too large for me. I laced up my hiking boots over my swollen feet and got to it.

  The late afternoon sun was less brutal than the early afternoon sun, but the heat was still miserable. I could get some work done without sweating myself to death, at least. I kept a tall bottle of water near me at all times, and when it was empty, I refilled it from the clean water supply.

  I went back to work in the garden. Fresh food, while not a pressing need at the moment, given our colossal stores of canned goods, was definitely a want. It would eventually be a very important need, but for now, we were still learning how to be farmers. I know that Twist had been reading about how to plant certain things, and when to plant them. I know he said something about rotating plants in areas because some of them used up all the particular minerals in the soil, and how other plants would return some of those minerals. We used cow manure (of which we had a plentiful supply thanks to the Thing sisters) as fertilizer. We mixed it into the soil when we tilled, and it seemed to work well. We also had our own compost, but that was still breaking down in the composting piles we started on the far edge of the property line, as far from the house as we could make it without making it too great a chore to get to it.

  When my mom planted stuff in window boxes or pots in Brooklyn, it was simple: get a few seeds from the hardware store, drop them in some potting soil, put it in the sun, water it occasionally, and a few months later we had herbs or tomatoes. Simple. Now, the seeds were still in the hardware stores, but I had no idea if two years in the dark had harmed them. Twist said they were still good, so we planted a field of various veggies and berry plants. We planted rows of apple trees, avocado trees, peach trees, and orange trees. It would be years before they would bear fruit, and they would only be able to do that if we could keep the deer, rabbits, and other critters from munching them to nothingness before they had a chance to get started. We planted asparagus (yuck), spinach (good in salad, but otherwise, not my favorite), cabbage and lettuce, and blueberries, blackberries, and strawberries (yum). But, it wasn’t enough to have one or two of any of these plants. In order for the berry plants to bear fruit, they had to be cross-pollinated. That meant you needed a lot of those particular plants. And then you had to hope that bees and other bugs found those plants interesting enough to crawl around in, and then take their pollen to other plants.

  The plants had to be watered a lot because Texas can be very dry in the late summer. The plants had to get enough sun, but some needed shade. Cucumbers can actually get sunburned. Who knew? Weeds outgrew the plants we actually wanted to keep at an alarming rate, so they had to be culled almost daily. You don’t want weeds competing for water, sun, and minerals with your more delicate food-bearing plants. We could not guard the garden around the clock, so we had to put up waist-high fencing to try to keep the varmints out. The rabbits could dig under fencing, though. The mice, voles, and shrews could easily fit through the gaps. The deer could jump over the fence if they really wanted to get to the growing goodies beyond. Luckily, the abundance of plant life across the plains kept some of the critters from antagonizing the garden, but it was still a game where the odds were stacked against us. We were learning by doing, but it might still be a long time before we were accomplished enough to feel secure in our food acquisition abilities. And the truly annoying thing about gardening and farming is that you never “win.” It never ends. Congratulations, you survived a couple of lean months in the winter. Now get back out there and do it all over again.

  Some days, I was amazed that human beings had been able to live as long as they had. It felt like the balance between Life and Death was definitely slanted in Death’s favor. It felt like everything in the world was trying to kill us either directly or indirectly, and we were just thumbing our noses at the long odds against us every day we chose to get out of bed. Every single day was just another day where we had to battle Fate. That might be the best metaphor for humanity that I can come up with: we’re too stubborn to just die. We have the tenacity of a cockroach.

  I struggled to right the wrongs the storm perpetrated on the farm. I used wooden Popsicle sticks and twine to repair and support broken stems, I clipped leaves that were too battered to self-repair, and I cleaned the debris from the garden. I kept myself so busy that I didn’t think about time passing, or the lack of Twist, or the missing cow and pigs. I wasn’t completely absorbed in my chores, though. Having seen a fully-grown lion up close and knowing it was still roaming around, you couldn’t afford to be oblivious to that fact. I entered a strange hyper-alert state where I did not notice things like time or weather, but I flinched at every movement I spotted out of my peripheral gaze, and I heard every noise around me. I constantly looked over my shoulder to make sure nothing was sneaking up on me. When I finally thought to look up from my work, I realized it was near dusk. The sun was low in the western sky, a great orange ball touching the horizon.

  I stopped working and straightened up. The muscles in my lower back, stretched out of whack from the watermelon-sized lump in my abdomen, felt like a pair of bungee cords about to snap. The back of my legs were sore, too. There was nothing I could do about that. I needed to go back to doing yoga. Working out was the first thing I quit doing after the Flu. No reason to go to the gym when there was no one to impress. Besides, scavenging for food and clean water was enough of a workout, and the added side benefit of having to ration your food was washboard abs. Remember: abs are made in the gym, but revealed while you slowly starved to death after everyone else on the planet died in a viral apocalypse.

  A strange noise floated over the din of bugs and breeze, a weird, repetitive dirge, long and low. I glanced toward the barn and saw Thing 1 dancing at the door. The noise was clearly triggering her. When I saw Thing 1 in the b
arn, I somehow knew the noise was being made by Thing 2. Once I figured out a cow was making the noise, it made perfect sense. It was a long, miserable lowing of a scared or confused animal, maybe even one that was injured.

  I sighed. I would have to go after her, no matter how much my legs and back wanted to disagree. It was the responsible thing to do. I walked back to the house, grabbed a backpack with two water bottles, my pistol, extra ammo, and a halter and lead rope. I also grabbed a walking stick because I would need the extra support.

  When I walked the edges of the property around the farm, I fell more in love with Texas as a state. Living in New York, the only real images of Texas I saw were always in Westerns. Everything was flat, empty, dusty plains to me, a stray barn and windmill here and there. In actuality, the east Texas plains, while still fairly flat, were grassy with plenty of trees. Twist said it didn’t look too different from some parts of Wisconsin. That wasn’t a helpful reference to me, but I took it to mean that it looked like it was supposed to, and TV had lied to me.

  There were plenty of gentle rolling hills around our plot of land. There were a lot of empty houses, too. Most of the houses were still waiting to be scavenged. It would be months, if not years of work to get to all of them. I enjoyed strolling the hills, even with the threat of apex predators roaming through the valleys. In New York, there’s no such thing as taking a lonely stroll. There are always people around you. You are never alone, no matter how much you try to be. After the Flu, I got to be truly alone for the first time in my life. No sister in the next room, no mom in the kitchen downstairs, no Mrs. Escobar in the row house next door watching telenovelas all day at full volume because she’s too stubborn to admit she’s going deaf. At first, I hated it. I was scared all the time. I hid in my crappy, dirty little flat that I secured for myself. As time went on, and I adjusted to the pressing silence, I grew to enjoy the solitude to a degree. I didn’t love being alone, but it was a nice change of pace.

  On the farm, under that broad Texas sky, not only did I feel alone, but I felt insignificant. I gained a real sense of exactly how tiny and useless I was in the universe, especially on the nights when Twist and I took a blanket to the little hill behind the barn and looked at the stars. We were nothing but cosmic dust in the grand scheme of things, as forgettable as a mote of dust in a sunbeam. Whenever I walked around the property, or went scavenging in nearby houses, I was reminded of that fact. No matter how important we thought we were as people before the Flu, we were going back to being nothing at some point. That was an inarguable point. We would all be dust eventually. It was humbling. And frustrating. And sad.

  I walked through the hills and grass toward the sound of the lowing cow. As miserable as the sound of her cries were, as long as she was making that noise, she was alive. That was enough to keep me going.

  The baby fidgeted in my tummy, a reminder that I hadn’t eaten dinner, yet. I slugged some water in a weak attempt to appease His Royal Highness, but I knew that wouldn’t work for long. I needed to get the cow and get back.

  I hiked through a small grove of trees. The cow was getting louder. When I broke through the edge of the grove into another field, I saw her. Thing 2 was standing in what used to be someone’s backyard, her head stuck in the triangle made by the legs and cross-bar of a child’s swing set. How she got stuck there, I have no idea.

  More interesting than that, when I stumbled through the edge of the trees and saw her, I felt almost like a parent walking in on their child fooling around with a boyfriend. A large gray bull was in the middle of mounting poor, stuck Thing 2.

  “Well, well, well…you little hussy.” I couldn’t help but smile. Is it weird that I was proud of her, to some degree? Probably. I know that’s a weird thing to be proud of, but she was like my pet, almost family. No, she was family. And I was able to witness an important milestone in her life. Granted, it’s a sort of strange milestone to witness, but there I was. Today, my girl…you become a woman.

  I stood in the shade of the trees and let the bull finish having his way with my heifer. It didn’t take long. As someone from the city who has never seen anything mating beyond cats, rats, dogs, and the occasional drunk couple in an alley, it was quite an eye-opening experience. I won’t go into detail on it, but…wow. When he finished, the bull dropped off the back of Thing 2 and wandered away to graze.

  I stole up to my cow, who had resumed her lowing, and helped her angle her head out of the tiny hole where she had gotten it stuck. It took some effort, but we managed to bust her out. I slipped the halter over her broad head and fastened the buckle. I patted her neck. She looked no worse for wear. “C’mon, babe. Let’s go home.”

  Thing 2 tucked her head low and pressed into my chest. She seemed grateful to see me again. I’m sure she was confused and scared. I would have been, if I was her. It had been a big day for her.

  I started strolling back to the farm, and Thing 2 followed me willingly like a large dog. She seemed to know she was going back someplace safe. I couldn’t blame her. I wanted to be someplace safe, myself.

  We walked halfway home when my hyper-alert senses cued me to movement in the tall grass far to the left. I stopped walking and focused on where I’d last seen something move. I squinted into the setting sun. I couldn’t make anything out in the shadows of the hill below the sun. I could barely make out anything. The sun was still bright enough to blind me. I started to walk again, but froze after a thought occurred to me. Something from one of the stupid magazines Twist was always reading. He would point out articles in them. Sometimes I read them. Sometimes I just looked at the pictures. This one, though—I had glanced at it. It said something about how big cats on the African plains would often attack at dusk from the west because the setting sun would obscure them from their prey and let them sneak up on them more effectively. The moment I remembered that, I broke out into a cold sweat. Was I being stalked by a big cat?

  After the Flu, I learned to trust my gut. If my “Spidey-Sense” was tingling, I had to believe something was off-kilter somewhere. I crouched low next to Thing 2 and shielded my eyes, trying to block the sun enough to get a better view into the shadows on the east side of the hills. All the grass was at least waist high. A big cat would make a lot of grass ripple if it was moving through it, but if it was crouched and waiting, it could nearly disappear. I had the ice-cold sensation that I was being watched at that very moment, and I could not tell from where. Danger, Will Robinson.

  I held my breath and listened. Wind and crickets. I saw Thing 2 twist her head to the west, ears going into alert mode. She felt it, too. I tried to follow her gaze, but her big, dark eyes seemed to focus on the whole field at once. She turned her body so that she was facing west. I could sense anxiety from her. She was taut, ready to run. I could not even see the house or barn from where we were. The nearest shelter was a small, dark ranch-style house about three hundred yards north of us. I could hide the cow in the garage there. I could take shelter in the house. Eventually, whatever was tracking us, probably the lion, would move on. It was not the best of plans, but it was all I had at the moment. I just needed to keep an eye on the fields to the west.

  I gripped my pistol hard in my right hand and started walking with the lead rope in my left. Thing 2 did not want to turn her side to the field where the big cat was hiding, but she reluctantly did at my urging. I think she trusted me to protect her. I hoped I was up to the task. I kept my trigger finger outside the trigger guard, but ready to slide into it at the first sign of trouble. I thumbed the safety button compulsively, as if I wanted to make sure it somehow did not just pop back to render my gun useless the second I needed it. I kept my eyes on the field to the left, squinting into the setting sun. I was getting spot-blind. The sun would leave large, dark afterimages in my sight, and those would blot out large swathes of the field. If I was a predatory animal, that is exactly what I would want to happen to my prey. Spot-blinded animals would never notice a big cat prowling right in front of them. My heart s
tarted to race, and my mouth became dry. I did not dare go for the water in my bag. Focus.

  Thing 2 started to dance sideways, wanting to move farther away from the field. I caught the scent of something thick and musky on the wind, like old yeast, dried urine, and blood. It had to be the lion. For a second, I wished that Thing 2 was a horse so I could just climb on her back and ride her. I felt like I was slowing the poor cow down, that she might have a chance to outrun the lion if I wasn’t slowing her down. If she wanted to bolt, there was no way I could hold onto the rope to stop her. It would strip out of my hands and give me the worst rope-burn of my life. She was an eight-hundred-and-fifty pound animal. I was going to lose that tug-of-war every day of the week.

  I tried to not to keep my pace slow and even, because I knew that cats are excited by faster motion. If they think their prey is bolting, they might burst out of hiding to try to take their prey down, lest they don’t get a meal that day. This cat was probably a former zoo cat, though. It was likely born in captivity. It was socialized to humans, to some degree. It had been fed by humans its whole life, but only in this post-Flu world did it have to learn to be a real lion and hunt. Did it see me as a food source? If so, would it attack me, or would it see what was around me as a food source? Either way, I did not particularly want to find out. It was probably the same lion I had shot earlier. Was it angry at me for hurting it? Did it want to seek revenge?

  I had zero desire to kill this lion, oddly enough. I was prepared to do it, if I had to, but I did not want to see it dead. It was not the lion’s fault it ate our pig. It was not the lion’s fault it was feeding on caged animals. It saw easy meals. Humans are the same way. Why make food when McDonald’s is easier? Microwavable meals, fast-food, pre-packaged goods—that’s how we lived. Why? Because it was simple and required very little planning. This lion probably lacked a lot of the necessary hunting skills a big cat would have acquired in the wild. It was moving purely on instinct, probably scavenging rotting corpses more often than not. It was not the lion’s fault it was trying to act like a lion. In a lot of ways, I felt badly for it. That cat, like some many of us, was just trying to play the bad hand he got dealt the best he could.