The No Where Apocalypse (Book 1): Stranded No Where

by Lake, E. A.

  Day 1 - continued - WOP

  I felt lips twitch, my fingers fluttered slightly above the sticky steering wheel. While it may have been cooler in the cabin, the August morning outside was nowhere near as agreeable. The thin t-shirt I’d thrown on already had rivulets of sweat showing through.

  Why, on God’s green earth, was my Explorer dead? That was problem three. I must have left the dome light on following my hasty bug-forced retreat two nights back. But it was a weird scene that morning. The dome light, nothing. Twisting the key in the ignition, nothing. Not even that ever-present bing bing bing when you insert the key into the switch with the door still opened. Nothing.

  Logic told me two things: the power was out in this remote area (not all that unusual from what I recalled) and I was an idiot for not checking my vehicle over before relaxing inside for two days. One was my fault; the other had nothing to do with me.

  Heading back to the front screen door of the place I paused, listening to the sounds of the woods. Birds still called, an assortment of small rodents — mostly squirrels I assumed — chattered here and there. Even the ever-present insects still swarmed about my body, searching for a convenient avenue to attach themselves to me

  It was peaceful, serene and quiet.

  Considering that morning some years later, that should have been my first hint something different was about. It was quiet — too quiet. If I had paid attention, I would have noticed the absence of the sound of any car approaching. I would have noticed that the pulsing, low hum of the power-lines was missing. But I was a fool.

  Back inside my humble, and hopefully temporary, dwelling, I sat on the couch stunned by the morning’s events. No electricity was explainable. This area was remote; hell, remote made it sound like a sleepy Chicago suburb. You know the type: soccer and dance moms hustling about on their morning walks, chatting about this and that. A number of fools much like me, grudgingly hopping into their low-mileage SUVs, off to work. Kids pounding a basketball into the driveway, occasionally tossing it up, hoping it would go through the hoop.

  This was nothing like that.

  If the wind blew from the north, you lost power. If the wind gusted at all from the east, even at night, radio stations refused to give up their locations. And when it rained, you were stuck inside a place that would eventually begin to smell like rotted wood.

  My vehicle issue was easily explained away as well. I’d left something on and after 48 hours of sucking the life from the battery, everything was shot. But why wasn’t I seeing any other vehicles pass by? There should have been a logging truck screaming past by now. Hell, 30 of them should have flown by, pretending the speed limit was for anyone but themselves.

  But nothing; and that started to gnaw away at my mind.

  Reaching for an opened bottle, I took a swig of liquor. Maybe that would help with my headache. Sure couldn’t hurt, not at a time like this.

  I resolved nothing that morning. Instead of investigating any of these odd occurrences, instead of making my way to the nearest neighbor (some 5 miles south), instead of clearing my head and even attempting to find logic where none seemed to exist, I laid on the couch, clutching the bottle next to my body.

  And I drank until it all disappeared.

  Day 3 WOP

  Two days later, I found myself badly in need of a thorough cleaning. Somewhere in the middle of my drunkenness, I threw up on the couch, the floor and myself. I found my own body odor was offensive, so I knew it was pretty bad. And my teeth felt as if woolen covers lined them. That was all right, I suppose; the inside of my mouth seemed to have hosted the used underwear of a thousand Russian soldiers.

  Except for the liquor, I wasn’t prepared to be this alone for two weeks. While it helped pass the idle time, what I could remember of it, day five told me it wasn’t as good of a friend as I needed.

  Still no power, nothing from the car either. Desperate for something positive, I pulled my cell phone out of my green canvas attaché and pushed the power button. I knew there wouldn’t be a signal; I was too far from any tower for something that luxurious. But it would be nice to know the date and time, I thought.

  Nothing. A formerly fully-charged cell phone failed to come back to life. Perhaps I’d left that on along with the light in my car. It was, after all, the only logical explanation.

  I cleaned up again, using nearly all of the bottled water I had brought. Though I didn’t know it at the time, it was a waste of clean water. Brushing my teeth over the kitchen sink, I watched a pair of grey squirrels play in a large oak tree behind the house. Whatever was going on hadn’t affected their lives at all. Maybe I could learn something from them. Maybe I’d eat them, I joked to myself, if things got bad enough.

  Walking down the edge of the blacktop highly, I kicked at the class-five on the shoulder. Small light brown chunks of rock shot in every direction with each boot. I wondered how often they cleaned these remote highways. Back home, the street sweepers came by every month during the spring and summer. Did they brush these roads once a year? Or did they simply allow the snowplows, pushing mounds of white slushy snow aside, do their work for them?

  Four miles on a hot sticky August afternoon is hell. Especially on foot. And especially when ten billion deer flies want to make you their bitch. I made a mental note to find a head-net or something similar for my next pilgrimage. If there was a next one. Hopefully the power would be back on soon and all of this could be written off as a bad dream.

  As I strolled, closer to the actual highway at times, I wondered what was going on back in Chicago at work. Were they even aware of the power outage some 400 miles away? Most likely not. This was a spot that not many in the office had ever heard of. Sure, some knew where the UP was, but only a handful had ever traveled north of Green Bay, and that was some 160 miles south of here.

  Shelly popped into my mind suddenly. It was Sunday, maybe Monday — I wasn’t sure. That either meant she was lounging on the three-season porch on the rear of the house, reading the Sunday paper — or — she was hard at work. No matter where she was, she certainly wasn’t sweltering in the August heat and humidity like I was. No, a constant stream of cool air surrounded her, whether in the car, or at work, or back home. She was lucky.

  They say a man can walk at a rate of four miles per hour if he hustles. It seemed to me I was going slower than that. I knew I’d been walking for over two hours, and still I knew the house I was headed for was another mile down the road. I guess I wasn’t really hustling. Hung-over meandering better described my gait.

  By the time I reached the neighbor’s front yard, and let’s use that term neighbor loosely here, I was sun burnt, parched, tired, and had drunk the last of my bottled water. I hoped this was the only trip I’d be making like this.

  The mailbox, that had seen better times, stated “Fred Morgan” lived in this spot. Can’t say I ever noticed that before, either as a child or the one time in the area as an adult. All I hoped for now was that Fred was home, friendly and generous with his cold water.

  Day 4 WOP

  “You’re the first person I seen in the past five days,” the old man squawked, sitting in a green-plaid recliner that had to be a few years older than him. And he looked ancient.

  I sucked on my third glass of tepid water, finishing it and pouring myself a fresh one from the plastic jug. He said drink it all and I intended to drink.

  “Say you’re from Chicago, aye?” he shouted, pointing a wooden came at me. I figured he was almost deaf, given the volume he used.

  I nodded, tossing down half a glass of water. I was almost feeling hydrated again. The sun really zapped it out of me; well, that and the four-day bender.

  “Yeah,” I finally got from my dry throat. “Lived down there my whole life.”

  He scowled; probably didn’t like ‘big city folk’ too much. “I guess that makes you a Bears fan then.”

  I got a deep breath out and slid back on his pleather couch. One I’m sure he’d salvaged from the local du
mp, during the Eisenhower administration, no doubt.

  “You bet,” I replied. “Love them Bears.”

  “That’s too bad, that’s too damn bad,” he said, playing with the handle of his cane. “Most folks up here are Lions fans. Or Packer fans. Depending who’s doing better in any given year.” He shot me a crooked smile. “I guess that makes us mostly Packer fans then, since the Lions suck and have for a long time now.”

  Though I found Fred’s conversation tantalizing, I had other needs to address still. Spotting an older cordless handset next his chair, I pointed.

  “Do you mind if I use your phone, Mr. Morgan,” I asked in my most polite tone. “I really need to touch base with my wife.”

  He looked at me with indifference. Maybe he wanted money for the call. “Go ahead.” He shrugged, laying his head back in his chair. “Wouldn’t do you no good, though.”

  I paused mid-reach. “Why’s that?”

  He sighed and pushed his thick-lensed, black horn rim glasses high on his lined face.

  “It don’t work,” he replied. “It hasn’t in almost a week now.”

  I felt my heart begin to race. “Do you think something’s wrong? Or perhaps you didn’t pay your bill?”

  When he smiled this time, I noticed his lack of teeth. There were one or two missing for every tooth present. It was kind of creepy but went along with the theme of my visit.

  “Oh, I paid my bill. Comes right out of my account on the fifth of every month.” He tried to push out of his chair but only made it part way before giving up. “I was gonna show you my bank statement. Proves I paid it.”

  I rose and wandered through his cluttered living room. “Is your wife gone somewhere right now?” I asked, hoping she was.

  “Oh, she’s gone all right,” he answered from behind. “Gone dead and shoved in the ground in the Methodist cemetery down in Amasa. So she won’t be coming home anytime soon. Been dead ten years now.”

  I turned and glanced at the old man. “I’m sorry.” It seemed like the decent thing to say.

  He looked at me with a strange face. “Why should you be sorry? You didn’t kill her, did you?”

  For a moment I froze, not sure how to respond. Soon the smile returned to his face and he laughed until he coughed. It was then he looked at me seriously.

  “We need to talk,” he said, all humor gone from moments before.

  “You got a woman?” he asked in a direct tone.

  “I’ve got a wife back in Chicago.”

  He shook the news away with the toss of his head. “How much you weigh?” he asked, changing directions.

  “About 200, maybe 210.”

  “Muscle or fat?”

  I had no idea where he was headed with this, or what his point was, but I played along. “I’d say half and half. I still hit the gym two or three times a week. But I drink a lot of beer on the weekends.”

  His face turned sour. “You’re gonna want to give that up.”

  Okay, I had played along long enough. “What’s your point, Mr. Morgan?”

  Finally, he grinned. “Call me Fred.”

  “Okay, Fred; what are you getting at?”

  “Sit down.” He motioned for the couch. “This could take me a bit to get out.”

  Fred had me fetch him and myself a fresh glass of water — so much for sitting. Then with a thoughtful, almost nostalgic, gaze he began.

  “A man came by yesterday, on his way from Covington, south to Amasa. You know where Covington is, right?” I nodded.

  “So he claims he was up there when the power went out. Says no one has electricity, no cell phones, no landlines, and,” he peeked over his glasses at me, “practically no running cars.”

  You know the feeling when your body freezes over? Where the hair on the back of your neck stands up straight? Yeah, that times two.

  “A few older things run. Tractors, riding lawn mowers, some old motorcycles. But anything from the 80s ’til now is all dead.”

  To say I was skeptical made it sound like I found everything Fred told me as gospel truth.

  “How’d he get here?” I asked.

  “Bicycle. Must have ridden right past your spot; surprised you didn’t see him pass.”

  Well, that would have been impossible. Mostly because I was drunk. And passed out on the couch, probably in the middle of blowing chunks in my dreams.

  “And that’s not the worst of it,” the old man mused.

  My God, it got worse?

  “Some lady up there has a short wave radio that still works,” he continued. “According to her, the whole country is in the same shape.”

  Stroking an almost week’s worth of beard, I wondered how much of this was true and what portion might be slightly exaggerated.

  He coughed again and spit his phlegm into a near wad of paper towel. “When I was a kid, we used to worry about nuclear war breaking out. The Russians would blow us to kingdom come, and we’d do the same to them. End of the world we said.”

  “This sounds more like an EMP attack,” I interrupted. Looking up at him, his face was more stock than mine. “That’s Electromagnetic —”

  “I know what it means, son. And it ain’t good.” He emphasized his point with a curt nod.

  “No, it’s not,” I stammered, wondering if what he said was true.

  “But it wasn’t that,” he whispered, pulling at his chin. “It wasn’t no EMP attack on the US of A.”

  That confused me. Electricity, cars and phones not working…nationwide? It had all the earmarks of just that kind of attack. But now he claimed it wasn’t. My stare begged for more from him.

  “It’s worldwide,” he added quietly. “That gal told my friend it’s the same in Canada, and Mexico, and South America, and Europe. Even Russia claims to be suffering the same ill-effects of whatever this is.”

  An idea sprang to mind. “Massive solar flares?”

  He shrugged one last time. “Whatever it is, it ain’t good.”

  Day 3 - continued - WOP

  I made it back from Fred’s quicker than the journey down had taken. Besides causing me great anxiety, he had a few nuggets of decent information for me. He had known my grandfather for years; even my dad was a casual acquaintance of his. And that meant he knew about the property surrounding my cabin.

  Though I hadn’t remembered it, there was a hand pump, delivering water from the well, on the north side of the house…just into the woods. Fred told me that my father, and most likely my brother, used the thing each year. Once in the spring and again in the fall when having the water on the inside might lead to frozen pipes. And just so he was clear — frozen pipes meant burst pipes eventually.

  Also, if I did some searching, I’d find a weapon or two that my dad liked to keep stored at the cabin. He told me some places to look, but I didn’t pay that close of attention. I wasn’t a gun guy, and could never picture myself using one against another human. While I might poke around in search of said weapons, I wasn’t going to waste a lot of time doing so.

  He also told me about the pit my grandfather had dug years back. It was lined with cement with a treated board, covered by a tarp. I’d find it somewhere adjacent to the southwest corner of the place, just into the woods.

  In the hole, the pit, I’d find all types of hand tools. Tools that would come in handy if we were in this mess for a while. He claimed my grandfather had built a shed once upon a time, but it got broken into at least once a year. And being a frugal man, he was sick and tired of buying new implements for the cabin.

  The most important tools I would find in the pit, Fred said, were two axes and a splitting maul. And if the power wasn’t back on soon, and he added it wouldn’t be, I needed to get at woodcutting, and soon.

  The moment I saw the roofline of the old place I sprinted to find the pump. If memory served me correct, I had two gallons of extra water I’d brought along. And I had already polished off one. Further consideration told me I needed a liter of water a day to survive. At least that’s w
hat I thought I’d heard once on one of those prepper shows.

  I stared at the old wood stove that took up the center part of the living/dining/kitchen area. Aside from the bedroom next to this area, it was the only room in the cabin.

  My grandfather was a short man; five foot four if I recall what my dad once told me. Even by age ten, I towered over the man. He seemed shorter. Days followed by years followed decades of manual labor (I never did know what he did for work) caused him to be slightly hump-backed. Add the hump to little natural height and you have yourself a mini-grandpa.

  Because of his lack of size, the ceilings in the cabin were unnaturally low. At six-foot even, I cleared most spots by a mere six inches. The doorways were hell; I can’t tell you how many times either Bud or myself damn near knocked ourselves unconscious heading outside when we were teens. Fortunately, there were only two of those to dodge — the bedroom and the main door.

  The low ceiling, so my dad claimed, gave a homey impression of the place. To me, and Shelly the one time she visited the place, it looked like a Gnome house stuck in the middle of the woods. Because my grandfather built most of this place himself, the roof never reached its skyward potential. If the pitch of a normal home’s roof is, say, 30 or 40 degrees, the cabins is a third of that. And it probably needed new shingles to boot.

  The location of the cast-iron stove was central to the main room. Easier to heat everything that way. Well, once upon a time that was true. When LP was added to the cabin back in the late 70s, the wood stove became a relic of a day long gone by.

  Day 4 WOP

  I got right at the water issue the morning after my trip to Fred’s. I had an opened bottle that required my attention that evening. And if the lack of power kept up, I had plenty of time coming up to work on further issues.