My Dead World 3

by Jacqueline Druga

  He had a point; we could always smell them.

  Did they get attacked or simply pull back? Surely, if they’d pulled back they’d have made sure the border was tight.

  “Do you think it’s safe?” I asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  We approached the gate. Fleck slung his rifle on his shoulder and tried to adjust the gate. It scraped loudly against the pavement, making enough noise to draw the dead forward.

  We waited, making noise again, before deciding to step in.

  Papers were scattered on the ground, the sign with the camp rules lay there with what looked like a smear of blood on the corner.

  I reached out and pulled Fleck back, pointing down to the blood.

  “Whatever was here,” Fleck said, “is gone. It’s too quiet.”

  There were two distinctive smells I had come to know when it came to death. The smell of a dead body and the smell of the dead.

  The stench that hit us as we entered the camp wasn’t the latter.

  The sprawled-out refugee center, once filled with life, running children and white tents, had been desecrated.

  Tents were torn, some burned. Bodies were everywhere.

  My hand shot to cover my nose and mouth. Some of the bodies had been attacked, viciously and violently. There were bodies of infected as well, that was evident by the faces.

  There was one thing they all had in common: they all had a bullet to the head. Even those who had died from being ripped apart.

  “They didn’t get attacked and lost,” Fleck said. “This reminds me of the early days of the outbreak. When we fought back. When the soldiers took control.”

  “You think they pulled back?”

  “It’s hard to say, let’s see what we can find.” He took a step toward a tent.

  “Stop,” I told him.

  “What? What’s wrong?”

  “Not that one,” I said softy. I didn’t need to verbally say it was the tent that we were in when Corbin was shot and Lev beaten, I think Fleck knew. He moved beyond it to a bigger tent.

  “This one?” he asked.

  I nodded. “That’s the main check-in tent.”

  He parted the flap with his rifle, peeked inside and then walked in.

  I followed.

  When I had been in there before, the tent consisted of several check-in tables, then at the back was where they handed you the starter package: clothing, food, toiletries.

  The tent appeared to have been cleared in a rush. Not everything had been taken—papers lay sprawled across the floor by the check-in tables creating a carpet of litter.

  Fleck lifted a toppled table then bent down to pick up a clipboard. “Names,” he said. “Looks like people they registered.”

  “How far back does it go?” I asked.

  “This list…a few days.” He set it down, then bent down to the floor. He began gathering the sheets of paper that were there. “Jesus, look at all these.”

  I shouldered my rifle and bent down to help him, glancing at the papers.

  Mary Davidson, Erie Pennsylvania, fifty-seven

  Matthew Diolus, Watertown NY, thirty-two.

  Jennifer Marshman, Huntingdon Pennsylvania, thirty-eight

  The list went on, at least twenty-five people on each sheet of paper, and there were hundreds of sheets left behind. I couldn’t imagine how many sheets they took. Each listed a name and where they were from. But there was not one mention of where they all went, only if they had been transferred before the attack.

  “They had it together,” Fleck said. “Apparently.”

  “The big mistake was opening the borders.”

  “Wouldn’t have mattered. This is just a checkpoint. I highly doubt they had guards posted at every border. Anyone could have gotten in. They tried to help. They tried to stay alive.”

  “Maybe it was just here.”

  “Could be.” Fleck shrugged. “But if the infection made its way into Canada. It won’t be long before it goes down. It’s a matter of time.” He set down his papers and walked across the tent.

  I continued to lift the papers and collect them.

  “What are you doing?” he asked.

  “Taking these. I want to look through and see if I knew anyone. A lot of these people are from Erie, maybe Ben knows them. There are also a lot of sheets. I want to look for Sawyer and Billy. I know it’s a longshot, but I want to see their names. See if they were transferred out before things went south here.”

  “I doubt they’ll be on there.”

  “I know.”

  “But…I do want to look for them. I think as hard as it is going to be, we need to look.”

  I furrowed my brow. “What do you mean?”

  “We need to check this camp,” Fleck said. “There are a lot of bodies out there. We need to look. At least if we don’t see them, we know they stood a chance of surviving this. You said they were protective over the kids, right? Hopefully when things got bad here they moved them out.”

  “Hopefully.” I set down the papers. “I’ll come back for these. Let’s do this.”

  Fleck turned to leave the tent but stopped. I watched him bend down. “Well, I’ll be damned.”

  “What is it?”

  He lifted a brown package. “Meals Ready to Eat. Fried rice.”

  Slowly, I shook my head as he placed it on a table.

  We began our task. The camp was huge, but we checked and looked at every single body, every single face. It took hours. A task that would keep us from returning to the cabin that day. We’d have to find a place safe to camp for the night. It was daunting and sad, so many people. I could see it on Fleck’s face that it was a painful reminder of what he’d gone through early on. An experience Lev, myself and my daughter were spared.

  On the positive side they saved more people than were killed. On the negative we didn’t find Sawyer or Billy. I had to accept the reality that we probably never would find out what happened to them.

  SEVEN

  DIG IN

  September 8

  I could only imagine how upset and worried everyone had been when our radio call failed to make it through the previous day. We had tried every chance we got, but with no luck. Finally, we got through about twenty miles outside of Erie when we were almost home. They didn’t sound relieved.

  Well, Lev didn’t. Ben took the radio from him to calmly tell us that he was glad we were fine—they were a little worried. Of course, Lev was in the background clarifying it was more than just a little.

  Hal had radioed while we were gone. He had narrowly got out of Canada. They were where we had been three months earlier.

  A warning, a little too late.

  It didn’t surprise me Lev was upset; it did shock me to see him walking out of the cabin the second we pulled up.

  “What?” Fleck asked. “He is miraculously healed?”

  “I doubt that. He’s just stubborn.” I got out of the car, and my daughter blasted by Lev on the porch and ran directly to me.

  “Mommy! Lev had us worried.”

  She hugged my legs, and I lifted her to give her an embrace before setting her back down. My stare never left Lev. “I’m fine, sweetie.”

  “Did you find Sawyer?” she asked.

  “No, baby, we didn’t.”

  “I didn’t think you would. Lev said it would be hard.”

  “What?” Lev nearly blasted. “I said no such thing. You asked how big Canada was and I said big. Your daughter draws her own conclusions.”

  “So she is mistaken when she said you had her worried?”

  Ben interjected. “Nope, she’s right on that one. He had us all a nervous wreck. He was very tense.”

  “I was worried,” Lev said.

  “The head injury doesn’t help,” added Ben. “Things tend to be a bit more emotional when you have a head injury.”

  “Lev, you should be resting,” I told him.

  “Nila, I have been resting for two weeks. I think I’ve had enough rest.�
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  “So Canada was bad?” Ben asked.

  Before answering, I told Katie to go back inside the cabin. “It looked as if they were attacked,” I told him. “The soldiers fought back, and it looked like they just packed up and moved out.”

  “In a hurry,” Fleck added as he approached the porch. “There were too many dead to count. I don’t know if the infected came from within or hit the camp. We don’t know if it’s only the borders or all over. I was telling Nila, it looked like it did in the beginning for us. You remember, an area would be hit, they’d kill all the sick and evacuate everyone else.”

  I glanced at Lev. “We missed that.”

  “What now?” Ben asked.

  Lev answered, “We wait. There’s no reason to leave this cabin. We have all we need, fresh water and a means to stay warm.”

  “I agree,” I said. “Winter is coming—not in the, like, Game of Thrones way. Maybe it would be, with all the undead. Anyhow…” I waved out my hand. “I think winter will kill them off. I think it’ll be over after a good freeze. We can figure out what’s next after that. Until then, we get supplies for the baby, anything else we need, start gathering wood, and dig in.”

  EIGHT

  BUZZED

  November 14

  There is a lot to miss when the world comes to a screeching halt. For people like Fleck it was fast food and takeout, for others it was the internet and television. Those, though, are easily remedied or a substitution can be found.

  We used the solar generator to power the television and not only did we have hundreds of DVDs, my father had stashed old VHS tapes as well.

  Fleck found his solution to takeout. Or rather pizza. One day he just up and left, telling us he had a run he needed to do and wanted to do it alone.

  No one condoned him going alone, but there was no arguing with Fleck. He took a trip to Dayton to a survival food warehouse. Not only did he find more of his dehydrated, Chinese survival food, he found survival food pizza kits. The cheese wasn’t real, but it worked. It was awesome.

  I think my biggest ‘miss’ was knowing what the weather was going to be.

  I missed having a weather forecast.

  I made the mistake of telling this to Lev and he immediately started tossing out stuff to me.

  Red sky at night, sailor’s delight…

  Count the chirps of a cricket for fourteen seconds and add forty...

  Winds from the south bring rain in the mouth…

  “What the hell, Lev?”

  “Without relying on the app or television, your body will tell you what the weather will be,” he said.

  He had told me that just after we really started digging in and I didn’t believe him at first.

  Then I got it.

  We made constant supply runs. Lev had finally recovered by the end of September and had started to alternate with us.

  There wasn’t much we didn’t get. We got everything from food and toys to winter clothing.

  Then I could sense the weather was changing.

  The shed was packed.

  We would hold meetings to think of things we would need.

  Ben and I had just gotten back from what I believed would be the last supply run for a while. Everyone helped unload. The entire floorboard storage was packed, as was the shed. We had to play a cleaver game of Tetris with the items to make them fit, and still boxes and supplies lined the walls of every room of the cabin.

  We were like hoarders.

  But we had enough, at least until there was a break in the snow, whenever that came.

  It was going to be hard to predict what the roads would be like after a snowstorm. Without maintenance, would they even be passable? It wasn’t going to be long until the snow would come.

  Once again, Lev was right: I felt it. I didn’t need Bill Montana, the weatherman from the dedicated weather channel, to tell me. And my bones were certainly better than the local station WPXI.

  After Lev had told me to get over missing the weather channel, I had become quite good at predicting what was going to happen. I even had better accuracy tuning into the subtle pings and pain signals my body gave.

  In fact, I marked down my predictions and what the actual weather ended up being.

  But I knew it was coming.

  Snow.

  After dinner, and watching Katie work on her drawings, I went outside to enjoy the porch before the cold and snow would make it impossible. I also wanted to enjoy the quiet. Christian was fussy and crying every fifteen minutes.

  I put a blanket on the top porch step to sit on. I had a bottle of expensive bourbon I’d grabbed on a run, so I poured some into a mug then lit a cigarette.

  It was only a minute or two before I heard the screen porch open. I honestly thought it was going to be Katie until I heard the uneven thump from Lev’s limp.

  Ben had finally given the go ahead to take the cast off. His headaches had taken months to subside, and he was putting some of the weight back on. Those high-calorie Meals Ready to Eat helped and he was using the chopping of wood as his own exercise routine.

  We ended up with a lot of wood. So much so that it made a second barrier to our fence.

  “Aw, Nila,” he said with a scolding whine. “You’re smoking again.”

  “Yeah, I am.”

  “But if you’re going to hold the baby…”

  I just looked at him.

  “That’s right, you don’t like holding babies.”

  “Correction, I don’t like babies. Not until they’re mobile. Christian isn’t bad. He just has his fussy nights. I’ll help when I can, I’m just the last resort.”

  “Yes, we know.”

  I patted the spot next to me. “Did you bring a glass?”

  “I knew you were out here, so yes.” Lev sat down. “I saw that stash you picked up.”

  “Thinking I may need to be Lisa two. You know, my stepmother.”

  “She was funny. She would put that straw in the small bottle of Jack and it was like her own personal juice box.”

  “I know, and she never got drunk.” I poured some booze into Lev’s cup. “I never got that.”

  “She was a professional.”

  “She was.” I smiled.

  “That’s nice to see.” Lev reached out touching my cheek with his index finger. “A smile.”

  “They happen.”

  “Not when we talk about those we lost.”

  “That’s gonna be a little harder. One day at a time.” I hit my cigarette and sipped my drink.

  “So, are you waiting on the snow?” Lev asked

  I glanced at him curiously. “Why would you say that?”

  “You’re sitting out here. It doesn’t look like you came out here for a break. You’re out here for a while. The blanket, the booze, the smokes. You’re waiting on the snow.”

  “I am. It’s gonna happen. The sky is dark. I can’t see the stars or moon. And it’s quiet. It’s always so quiet before it snows.”

  “It’s a dead world, Nila, it’s quiet all the time.”

  “That’s true,” I said.

  “And your feet hurt?”

  “Did I tell you that?” I asked,

  “When we were thirteen. You used to tell me the soles of your feet would hurt right before it started to snow. That’s why I said you don’t need a weatherman.”

  “It’s impressive that you remember that,” I said.

  “I also remember all the times you would sit on your father’s porch, like this, waiting for the first snow.”

  “That’s because I was always hoping it would snow a ton so we didn’t have school. Then when I got older I dreaded the thought of it. Now…it’s okay. I just wish my father was here to yell at me or Katie for causing condensation on the windows while watching the snow. Or seeing my brother, Bobby, who would just run straight out the cabin door and belly flop into it.”

  “I used to love when we got snowed in up here,” Lev said. “And Big Bears Campground annual sled off.”
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  “Days,” I said, crinkling my nose. “Days we would get stuck.”

  “See there is much more to miss than a weatherman.”

  “Yeah, there is. The biggest is my daughter Addy.” I inhaled sharply taking a moment. “Now there…there’s a person who…it’s gonna be a long time before I talk about her…” I felt my throat swell and the words choked me. “Think…” I cleared my throat. “Before I think about her and smile. It’s so difficult.” I sniffed hard and finished my drink, pouring some more.

  “It will come. The day will come.”

  “Promise?” I said with a breaking voice.

  “I promise.”

  I downed another drink.

  “Wow, you are practicing to be Lisa.”

  “Comfortably numb. Just doing a lot of thinking today. Some days it hits me. So I thought I’d drink a little and wait for the snow.”

  “We have nowhere to go.”

  “Not yet.”

  Lev stared out. “I wish all of you would just get that thought out of your minds. Everyone wants to go somewhere. Go where? We have all that we need here, we can make this work.”

  “I think we need to see what’s out there.”

  “We have. So unless everyone plans on going west or really south, there’s not much more to see,” Lev said. “The only problem with going so far away is we’ll just turn around and come back here.”

  “You think?” I asked.

  Lev nodded.

  “I bet that doesn’t happen.”

  “I’ll take that bet,” Lev said extending his hand.

  I shook it.

  “Your hands are cold,” Lev said.

  “Oh, I have gloves.” I tossed my cigarette and pulled my gloves from my coat pockets. “I forgot.”

  “I see you have a new winter coat.”

  “Yes, I do. I didn’t bring one. Obviously it was almost summer when we got here. I grabbed three today. This one will be good when we go hunting next week for turkeys.”

  Lev chuckled. “Nila, it’s thin. Very thin. It’s cold now, you must be freezing.”

  “No, I’m good. Honestly…feel.” I held out my arm.