Fifty Falling Stars

by Wesley Higginbotham

  Will continued the chest compressions on his father for several minutes. Eventually Jenny grabbed him and tried to pull him away. He fought her. He couldn’t, wouldn’t let his dad go without a fight. Joey grabbed him in a headlock and pulled him away. He tried to fight, tried to strike the man holding him, but Joey held him in a tight grip. Exhaustion and despair washed over him. The will to fight left him. Joey released his grip, and Will turned around, burying his head into his buddy’s chest. He cried harder than he had ever cried before. Moments later, it was his mother he was crying against. They held each other for a while and wept.

  The sound of a racking cough distracted Will from his pain long enough to look up and see Sarah shivering on the ATV. Everyone looked away from him and his mother, respecting their privacy as best they could. Pam took a step toward them; Will gave a nod of his head. He passed his still hysterical mother to her sister and stepped away to wipe his eyes. He had no idea how long they had been there. He saw Chuck cough again. “We have to keep going.” He said.

  George walked up and put his arm around him. “What about your dad, Will?”

  “What about him?”

  George swallowed. He had no idea how difficult this would be to say. “Are we just going to leave him here?”

  “Of course we’re not!” Barry said, stepping over to the two men. “We can’t just do that.”

  “We can’t take him with us.” Will said.

  “Sure we can.” Jenny said.

  “What? Tie him onto one of the ATV’s? They’re already full of shit. Drag him behind one of them? Just how are we going to do this? We don’t even know how far we’re going to have to go before we find someplace to settle for even a few days. How long are we going to drag a body around with us?” Will hated the anger he felt but couldn’t suppress it.

  “We could bury him.” Pam said.

  “With what? Did you bring a fucking shovel along?” Will snapped. Fresh tears sprang to his eyes.

  “So, what are we going to do?” Jenny asked.

  “I… I don’t know.” Will said. “I… guess we just have to… leave him here.” He broke down, tears falling as he held Jenny.

  After tense moments of silence, a hoarse voice spoke up. “Will’s right. As much as I hate to do it, Will’s right.” Betty said. She wiped the tears from her eyes. Everyone knew she was right, that Will was right. They had no means or time to dig a grave. They couldn’t strap him on the ATV’s like some dead animal from a hunting trip and take him God-only-knew where to be buried, whenever that would be. The only thing they could do was leave him.

  Barry and George reverently picked Jim up and placed him at the base of an old pine tree. Jenny gathered some pine straw and made a little pillow next to the trunk. The men straightened his legs and folded his hands over his belly. By the time they were finished, Jim looked to be taking a nap under the tree, resting in the comfort of a well-worn flannel shirt, faded blue jeans, and the spring breeze. The gathered around and said a prayer for their fallen friend, uncle, husband, and father.

  Two hours after Jim had collapsed, the family redistributed the gear and supplies that Jim had carried and continued their journey. Will walked beside his Aunt Pam. “I’m sorry for what I said earlier. Can you please forgive me?”

  “Of course I do, honey. Of course I do. We all loved your dad very much. I know that it was just this bad situation talking and not really you.”

  “Thank you.” Will said as he hugged her. They took a few more steps and Will stopped. He turned and looked back at his father seemingly asleep under the tree. It wasn’t much for the man he had loved and idolized his entire life. He thought about what his father would have said about it, about the kind of man he had been. Will smiled. He knew that it was enough.

  By midafternoon, the family stopped in front of the first house that they found along the road. The single story, brick house sat back fifty yards from the road. Will directed everyone to wait while he, George, and Barry went to check it out and see if anyone was home. The house lay on a crawlspace, steps leading up three feet from the ground level to the porch. The door hung ajar, opening into the house. The screen door teetered in the breeze. Will looked at the sky, which threatened to rain again. They needed someplace dry before the rain came.

  George and Barry covered him as he stepped onto the porch and yelled into the house. “Hello! Anyone home?” No response. Will pulled open the screen door, rusted latches creaking in defiance. “We’re travelers in need of assistance! We don’t mean any trouble or harm!” Again, nothing. Will motioned for Barry and George to come up on the porch. Once they were in position, Will stepped into the house.

  The front room was orderly and neat. He saw a fireplace to his right and a wood-paneled hallway leading from the left. He scanned the hallway. The first opening on the right led to the kitchen. Pots, pans, and empty cans lay scattered around the counters, interspersed with dirty dishes. The room was empty. Across from the hallway entrance, the back door hung ajar, revealing steps leading down to a covered porch before giving way to a spacious back yard. Will motioned Barry closer. “You stay here and make sure no one surprises us from the rear.” He signed to George to follow him down the hall. None of the doors down the hallway were closed. If anyone was home, they should have heard his greetings; but it never hurt to be careful.

  Three steps down the hall brought them to two doors facing each other. The one on the left was a laundry room. A mixture of dirty men and women’s clothes littered the floor. The other room was a bathroom. Two tooth brushes sat in an empty glass next to a tube of denture cream on the sink counter. “This looks like it may have been and elderly couple’s home.” Will said. The pictures on the hall wall showed dozens of different people of varying ages, but all the pictures looked to be at least ten or twenty years old.

  The last two rooms at the end of the hall proved to be bedrooms. The one on the right seemed to be the master. The bed had been slept in, the sheets in disorder and nightclothes littered around. A Bible lay open on a dresser by the window, an overturned box of twenty gauge shotgun shells beside it. The other room appeared to be an unused guest room. Nothing seemed out of place. “Looks like no one’s home.” George said.

  “Yeah, looks that way. Let’s head back up, get your dad, and do a sweep of the back side of the house. Someone who lived here had a shotgun. I’m not gonna be able to sleep well here until I know that person is gone or doesn’t care if we stay here.”

  The three men walked through the tall grass in the back yard. The riding lawnmower pulled under the back porch looked unused and neglected. They made a sweep to the back right of the yard. Will stopped when he saw something behind a large bush, something underneath the flowering pear tree behind it. He raised his pistol and stepped around the tall bush. Two bodies lay between a decorative bench and a birdbath. They had been there for weeks. Will saw that one corpse wore the remains of a large blue dress and the other a disintegrating pair of overalls. A single-shot shotgun lay beside the remains of the old man. Will picked up the weapon. “Uncle Barry, go get everyone inside. Have them pull the four wheelers in the back under the porch. George and I will meet you in the house.”

  “So, what do you think happened back there?” Gorge asked as they walked back to the house.

  “You know as much as I do, bro.”

  George shook his head. “It looks like the old man did his wife and then himself.”

  “Old and alone, out here with everything gone to shit, maybe they just decided they couldn’t take it. Maybe they had health issues. Who knows?”

  George looked at him and smiled, a smile more of condolence that of mirth. “Maybe they figured they had lived a good long life, saw where the world was heading, and decided that they’d rather not see it all go to shit.”

  Will sat by the fireplace as the thunderstorm beat against the house and raged into the night. A cold front had moved in and given a chill to the recent nights. He was thankful that Chuck had insisted on
bringing in some of the firewood when they first arrived at the house. The firelight danced on Sarah, Kerry, and Chuck as they lay covered and shivering on the mattress in front of the fireplace. George and Barry had moved the mattress from the guest bedroom and placed it by the fireplace so that they could be close to the warmth of the fire.

  In the three days that they had lived in the house, Sarah’s condition had deteriorated. Jenny suspected that Sarah had developed some form of pneumonia. Chuck and Kerry had become infected and were sick with a fever and coughing fits. George had developed a slight fever and runny nose but displayed none of the hacking coughs the others had.

  Will got up and sat by Jenny on the couch. The rest of the family slept in the back rooms, partly from a need to sleep without someone coughing all the time and partly out of fear of contraction. With no immediate medical care available, something as benign as the common cold garnered serious concern. A search of the elderly couple’s medicine cabinet resulted in Tylenol PM, some aspiring, and a few expired prescription drugs: heart medications and high-blood pressure pills. As for their own supplies, they had plenty of gauze, stitching, and bandage materials but little actual medicine. Will would have liked to be sleeping with the rest of the family in the back of the house but couldn’t leave Jenny. She had staged a near constant vigil over her parents and Sarah, who she regarded as a little sister. She needed him to comfort and support her.

  As he sat down, she leaned over and snuggled against him. Her eyes never left the bed of sick people on the floor. “How long do you think we can stay here?” Jenny asked.

  “I’m not sure. We have less food than we thought. Maybe two weeks’ worth on meager rations. We need to be eating more with the sick people around. They need extra strength to fight off the bronchitis, and we need it to not come down with it. We’re going to have to move in the next few days or come up with some food.

  “I also don’t want to be right off the road like this. We just pulled up and happened to be lucky that no one was living here. The only reason we were able to stay at the cabin for so long is because no one had really come to look for us. We were pretty hidden. The longer we stay here, the more likely it is that someone will find us. If the folks from Spring City just take a short drive up this way, they’ll be sure to find us. Then where would we be?”

  Jenny sighed and nodded. “I just hope we can stay a few days until they get a little better.”

  “Is there anything we can do for them?” Will asked.

  “Not that I know of. I just keep giving them aspirin for the fever and a little wbushiskey for the cough. Besides making them eat and keeping them in plenty of water, which we are running out of, I just don’t know what else to do.”

  “Me and George will make another run over to the pond and get some more water tomorrow. Maybe the rain buckets we set out will give us some better quality water after tonight. We’d be truly boned if Joey’s survival stuff didn’t have the iodine tablets in it.” Will said.

  “Thank you.” She said.

  “It’s just water, honey. We all need it.”

  “No, thank you for all that you’ve done for me and my parents. If it hadn’t been for you, we would probably all be dead in Knoxville or back at the cabin or…” she trailed off. “And for helping me take care of them now. I’d be lost without you.” He hugged her tight and kissed her forehead.

  As he kissed his wife, something in the room changed. The mood of the room took a more ominous, oppressive feeling. The change manifested not in the fire or ambiance, but in the breathing of the little girl lying on the floor. Her breathing went from an irregular, raspy, struggled thing to an erratic, weak gurgle. Jenny got up and knelt beside the sick girl. Will followed. Jenny reached down and touched the girl’s head. A burning heat assailed her hand. Jenny tried to rouse Sarah, but the girl wouldn’t respond. She lay motionless as Jenny shook her. The commotion awoke Chuck and Kerry.

  “What’s going on?” Chuck asked after a coughing fit and spitting a chunk of phlegm into a cup.

  “Sarah’s not responsive, dad.”

  “Is there anything we can do?” Kerry asked.

  “No.” Jenny said.

  For the next fifteen minutes, Will watched Jenny cradle the girl and sing soft lullabies to her. Will felt helpless. The tragedy of losing his father only days before replayed in his mind. His mother wouldn’t eat what little food they had. Sarah stood at death’s door and Chuck and Kerry seemed to be following her path. It was too much to take. Before, all the tragedies they had seen on TV and in the town had not touched them. Affected them, yes; but not touched them. Some part of him had disconnected from all of the bad things happening and shielded him. Not now. This was in his face, looming too big to ignore. He felt himself breaking inside.

  A sudden jolt from Sarah broke Will from his depressing train of thought. The girl shook for a few seconds before she lay back against Jenny’s lap. Her eyes opened in a look of stark terror as the last gurgling sounds rolled from her lips. Jenny wept as she ran a hand over the young girl’s face and closed her eyes. Will let Jenny hold the girl and cry over her for a while before he put his arms under Sarah and lifted her from Jenny’s lap.

  Will carried Sarah’s body through the kitchen and out the back door. He didn’t know what to do with her but knew that the others didn’t need a reminder of the seriousness of their condition. Without thinking, Will carried her through the rain to the back of the garden where the bodies of the elderly couple rested. He laid her out under the pear tree like they had done with his father. He straightened her dress, brushed her blond hair from her face, and laid her hands over her stomach. He turned and walked away, feeling the chill of the rain seeping deeper and deeper.

  Chapter 17

  Scott opened the door and walked into Dr. Davidson’s office in Seneca. The small waiting room contained two other people that Scott didn’t know. The little bell on the door rang again when Scott shut the door. He looked at the battery-powered clock mounted above the check-in counter. It read ten after ten in the morning. As he walked up to the desk, Lucy ran out to meet him. “Hey Grandpa.” She said as she gave him a big hug.

  The day after they had arrived two weeks ago, Lucy began volunteering here or in the classroom across the street in the middle school where the town’s other three doctors practiced their craft. Scott felt pride that his granddaughter hadn’t given in to the recent hardships but had thrown herself into soaking up as much medical knowledge as she could. It had taken a little push back in the Lombard compound, but once Lucy had attached herself to Mrs. Gray, she had developed an insatiable appetite for medical training. With schools being shut, he was glad that she had picked out a trade to study. He wondered if this would be how education would be now, formal education replaced by apprenticeships. He was thankful that the medical staff here in Seneca had agreed to teach her. He made a mental note to thank Dr. Davidson. Scott knew it was no small task for a sixty-year old doctor to take a thirteen-year old girl as an assistant, no matter how mature she acted.

  “Hey, sweetheart. What have you been learning about today?” Scott asked.

  “Dr. Davidson has been teaching me about the brain today. We have a….”

  “Where is she? It’s that little red-headed bitch isn’t it! She turned me in! I fucking knew it!” A man’s voice coming from one of the exam rooms cut Lucy off.

  Another voice called out, “Charlie, Tommy, get in here!”

  The two men who had been sitting in the lobby got up and ran behind the front desk and down the hall to the exam room. Seconds later, sounds of a struggle reached the waiting room. Dr. Davidson and the two men came into the hallway. Dr. Davidson turned down the hall away from the waiting room as the man who had been in the exam room escaped his captors and almost made it to the lobby before the men restrained him. “There she is! I’ll kill you for this you little cunt!”

  Scott put himself between the three men and Lucy, his hand reaching for his little three eighty pistol in
his pocket. “Hold him still!” Dr. Davidson commanded as he walked up behind the struggling men, syringe in hand. The two men held the man, who began to scream. Dr. Davidson injected the needle in the man’s neck. The two men kept a firm grip on the man until he stopped screaming some thirty seconds later. After the screaming stopped, the patient relaxed and almost lost consciousness. Everyone breathed a little easier. “Get him back home, fellas. Keep him in his room. That tranquilizer should keep him down for the next eight hours or so. Tell his folks that I’ll come by tonight to talk about possible solutions.”

  “Thank you, doc.” One of the men said as they left.

  After the men left, Scott looked around to check on Lucy. She was a little rattled, but was, for the most part, fine. She had grown from the young girl who would have broken down in tears at such an attack just a month ago. Scott guessed they had all been forced to grow up and face some hard issues in the last month. “What the hell was that about, doc?”

  “Yes… I’m terribly sorry about that. You ok, Lucyloo?” Dr. Davidson asked. She shrugged her shoulders and nodded. The doctor continued. “Again, sorry about that. That unfortunate young man is Daniel Barron. He’s a mild paranoid schizophrenic who ran out of medication a few days before you and your family arrived.”

  “Isn’t that psychiatrist stuff, doc?” Scott asked.

  “Normally, yes. However, Danny’s dad is on the city council and a good friend of mine. He was seeking treatment from a psychiatrist up in Aurora and I was working with him by monitoring Danny on a local level to keep it quiet. He was going to be switched to a new medication right before everything broke down.” Dr. Davidson said.

  “Should you really be telling us all of this, doc?” Scott asked.

  “Again, normally, no. However, given that Danny is out of meds and not likely to get any anytime soon and the stress that the breakdown of the country has put on everyone, Danny is starting to become something of problem around town. He was in here because he assaulted a young woman yesterday. Nothing too graphic, mind you, just shoved her around, yelled at her, threatened to kill her. It was all very similar to what just happened with Lucy. I’m going to have a heart-to-heart with his parents and the mayor tonight to try to find a solution.”