Mr. Wheeler tightened his grip on the shotgun.
“We’ll go the other way.” Uncle Ray nodded at me. He wore thin cowhide gloves and he tugged on the cuff of the one hand which held the 9mm automatic.
“Be careful. And take your time.” Mr. Hansel cautioned. “And look before you shoot.”
At that, I swallowed hard; a metallic taste was in my mouth.
I moved behind Uncle Ray, peeking in windows as we traveled along the back of the house. Through the first window was the kitchen. Next was a double-sliding screen door, which gave a view of what was once a dining room. In the dim light and the gauziness of the screen door, I saw the dining room table overturned, the legs missing and the simple gold and glass plate chandelier lay shattered on the floor. Bare wires hung from a round hole in the ceiling.
Reaching the end of the house Uncle Ray paused, looking first to the neighboring house and then slowly around the corner, the automatic held in front, but pointed downward.
I gazed beyond him and studied the house next door and the gazebo. Snow drifted on the wind. Branches creaked with the breeze, but there were no other sounds.
Uncle Ray slipped around the corner. I stayed close behind, moving down a gentle grade as the house sat on a low rise, which descended to the road.
“Damn it!” he muttered, losing his balance, having slipped on the snow covered gravel running along the foundation of the house.
I crouched and gazed into a basement window, Uncle Ray stumbled by. The shaft of morning light pierced the dark, illuminating a patch of yellow linoleum and the front of a washer and dryer.
“Okay, let’s go,” he said and began moving again, but faster as if he’d somehow lost the element of surprise.
At the next corner, he stopped and looked around to the front of the house.
A stretch of road ran east and west in front of the houses. No sign of people. Just winter and wind, and deserted land. The telephone poles didn’t give the idea that anyone ever lived there. The poles resembled dead branchless trees. A bird peeped once, but the twitter seemed to echo from far away.
“Ah, there’s Dan,” Uncle Ray slipped around to the front.
Mr. Hansel and Mr. Wheeler stood on either side of the front door, which was difficult because the front door landing was narrow and was reached by climbing an ‘L’ shaped set of concrete stairs, three steps to the first land and three more to the top.
Standing on the side of the landing near us, Mr. Hansel peered back at Uncle Ray and said, “The tracks led right up.” He turned to Mr. Wheeler. “You open the door.”
Mr. Wheeler pursed his lips and then said, “I don’t care for this SWAT team crap, but fine. You ready?”
Dan Hansel nodded and Mr. Wheeler twisted the brass knob and swung the door open. Mr. Hansel turned into the doorway, his rifle leveled and eased inside. A moment later, Mr. Wheeler entered.
I followed Uncle Ray up the snow covered steps, the tracks of the raider partly obliterated by our tread.
Mr. Wheeler stayed on the inside landing, at the top of a set of carpeted stairs leading to the lower floor of the bi-level house.
A dusty odor filled the cold stale air.
In the darkness at the bottom of the stairs, Mr. Hansel stood, knees slightly bent, peering around a corner to the right. Uncle Ray stopped halfway down.
I turned to Mr. Wheeler.
“Snow was on the steps going down,” he said. “He’s got to be down there.”
Mr. Hansel darted around the corner.
The rattle of a doorknob came up out of the dark, and then the whisper of a door rapidly swinging open.
“Okay,” Mr. Hansel called, but softly. “You can come down if you want.”
“I’m not interested,” Mr. Wheeler said, but gestured me down with a quick wave of a hand.
At the bottom of the stairs, I rounded the corner and passed through a doorway into a small storage room. Metal shelves against one wall held paint cans, an empty tool box and a scattered collection of loose nails and screws. On the floor opposite the door sat a young woman. The hazy light from the window high on the wall deepened her shadowy form. Her long dark hair, sticky with perspiration, clung to her neck and face. Her low, labored breathing wheezed. Her open coat revealed a large bloody patch staining the right side of her white sweatshirt and down below the belt line of her denim pants.
Mr. Hansel knelt next to her, touching her forehead. “She’s not doing good . . .” Slowly, shaking his head, he murmured, “It won’t be long.” Because of the woman’s impending death, something in Mr. Hansel’s voice, his manner and the deep lines of his frown, seemed to override the past, the fight, the chase, canceling out everything.
I holstered my revolver. I couldn’t find any anger in me either, and I couldn’t escape the notion that I fired the bullet that slowly killed her. In my mind’s eye, I saw myself firing out the window—blindly. I shot the man. Killed him. And the young woman, too? They were together, weren’t they? As always, forcing myself to think—understand that they would’ve killed me. I left the basement room and went out the front door. Mr. Wheeler asked if anything was wrong, I shook my head.
I went to the bottom of the front steps and waited. The chill of the wind stung my face. I pulled up the collar of my jacket, crossed my arms, and thought of how the death of some unknown young woman, brought back, in full force, my parents, their faces and voices. Everything about them was vivid. Now, with the valley and the town being miles behind, the thought of going on became more immediate and raging.
Gazing down the windswept road running past vacant houses as the remaining power lines bellied in the wind, I wanted to go on for a few more days.
Chapter 23
One of those periodic snow flurries that marked the day’s weather rushed out of a gray cloudy sky then weakened. The wind died down some, but the temperature dropped causing a face numbing cold. I tugged up my collar and kept walking.
The decision to keep going hadn’t been unanimous. Mr. Hansel gave in, went with us, but complained. Strangely enough it was Mr. Wheeler who told him to go home. “Just follow our trail back.”
“I don’t need to follow a trail—I’ve lived around here all my life,” Mr. Hansel said.
“Well, how far have we walked?” I asked.
“Oh, about . . . well over five miles by now. About that,” he said.
“We haven’t gone that far then,” Uncle Ray said.
“No, not really, but the cold sure makes it feel that way,” he said, rubbing his gloved hands together for emphasis.
“So, why not a few more miles,” Mr. Wheeler said.
Mr. Hansel looked around, pointed to a house on the other side of the road. “I think I used to know who lived there.”
The decision to go on seemed like a trap I laid days ago, when I discussed the journey with Uncle Ray. But in truth, it was the day I found the atlas and began working on the map. Still, I was the one that started walking east down that road, once Mr. Hansel left the house and the dead raider behind. I wanted to keep moving forward. I’d planned for that with Uncle Ray who looked at me, shook his head, and said, “You sure about this?”
I wasn’t. I didn’t plan on having Mr. Hansel and Mr. Wheeler going along. Not with the cold desolate snow in front of us and all those people I left behind. Sara was back there. And the thought of going on and getting back to the house on Thatcher Road wasn’t as strong.
My uncle set his hand on my shoulder, and said, “Just a little more.”
I grinned, but I wasn’t sure now.
He could see I was indecisive, and tired, but he grinned reassuringly. “We’ll go just a little more.”
He told the others that we wanted to take a further look, to see what or who may be out there. He pulled the walkie-talkie from the holster on his belt, turned it on and triggered the thumb switch. Distance won’t allow him to reach the valley, but someone monitoring the town’s radio took the message that we’d be going on for a few more mi
les, doing a little scouting.
Mr. Wheeler signed on with us with no more than a simple, “I’ll go, too.” He shouldered his shotgun and stepped alongside. Not being the one to “cop out,” Dan Hansel joined us.
Four abreast, we walked down the road like cowboys in a wintry version of High Noon, but there were no citizens scurrying off the streets, no distraught faces peering out windows. There were no footprints in the snow; only the mark of a scampering rabbit, but not one shoeprint. Only the trail we left in our wake marred the white surface.
“Where the hell is everybody?” Mr. Hansel finally uttered what was preying on my mind.
“It doesn’t even seem like the raiders came out this far.” Mr. Wheeler let out a big puff of mist into the cold. “Scary isn’t it?”
Uncle Ray grunted an agreement.
But scary wasn’t the word for me. Paranoid was. With the wind beginning to whip up again, tossing curls of snow down from over the trees and along the country road. We passed houses, which appeared singularly or in twos or threes, and off in the distance, a house stood like a lonely, lost oasis. Shapes shifted in the woods, from behind trees and shrubs. Phantom faces appeared at the darkened windows of homes long abandoned.
I stopped expecting people to come out to surprise us—I wanted them to come out. I wanted to know that I wasn’t entering some foreign and forgotten land.
But no one came.
We discussed the idea of exploring houses, going from one to the next, but Mr. Wheeler said, “There’s no point to that. If someone wants to talk to us, they will, but I won’t lay any bets.”
How far to keep going was the question, but Mr. Hansel, pushing back the bill of his cap wanted to know about eating. It was well after noon. We’d only put a few miles behind us and we prepared to dig into the food Uncle Ray and I had packed.
A hard and stinging wind brought down snow, which piled up on our shoulders and hats. We continually swept off the thick slabs of snows and stomped white crust from our boots.
“Okay, let’s get out of this weather,” Uncle Ray said.
“That’s fine with me,” Mr. Hansel said. “I’ve had my fill of walking.”
A string of houses on both sides of the road formed out of the swirling snow. The first house, on the left, was two stories with light-tan siding and surrounded by a waist high chain link fence.
“We’ll go there,” said Uncle Ray.
“Sure,” Mr. Hansel said. “I’ll check the back of the house. You head inside.”
Cold and hunger ached in the hollowness of my stomach, but I wasn’t in a hurry. I’d been in abandoned houses before. It wasn’t that empty houses made me think of ghosts, but the people who had lived in them were somehow still alive. I thought of them and how they never came back.
Snow dropped from the links of the fence as Uncle Ray opened the gate, pulling hard against a stubborn drift of snow. He went right for the front door and Mr. Wheeler followed. Mr. Hansel slipped his rifle off his shoulder and started to the right corner of the house. I went with him, with a hand on the butt of my revolver.
I stepped on something bulging in the snow and kicked at it. A ball with a red and blue pattern of train tracks and a smiling train engine, rolled loose. The smiling face of the engine spun round and round, and stopped when the ball hit the fence.
Mr. Hansel had already gone to the back of the house.
The cold sting of wind and loneliness caught me. My shadow showed dark and narrow. Moving fast around the corner of the house, I headed to the backyard.
In the middle of the yard, Mr. Hansel knelt in front of three mounds of snow, a wood board at the head of each. He’d wiped snow from the first board on the left and moved onto the center marker. He leaned forward to see better, but I didn’t want to see any of it. I knew what they were. I knew what graves looked like when people dug them by hand. I remembered burying my brother.
“I’m gonna go in the house to be with Uncle Ray and Mr. Wheeler,” I said, being quiet like in a cemetery.
Mr. Hansel didn’t look around or say a word. He simply nodded and kept looking at the grave makers. Maybe he was thinking of his two kids and wondering what happened, that was my only guess, but it was enough. I left him to the silence.
At the front, the door stood ajar. The frame where the bolt entered the lock was splintered when the door was forced open. But the forced entry happened some time ago and was done by someone else. New snow filled the crevices of the broken wood and a spray of snow lay fanned out on the entryway carpet.
I stepped in and something in the air slowed me. Even in the cold of the house, I could smell something was dead. I shook my head reflexively as if to shake off the stink, but from the strength of the stench, I knew the odor was everywhere. A simple breeze wouldn’t take the unpleasantness away.
The narrow hall in front of me led to what looked like a sunroom occupied by a collapsed pine kitchen table. To the left a living room, dominated by an overturned entertainment center and smashed television. Big chunks of thick glass littered the white carpet. In the small dining room to the right, a missing table left an open space filled by shattered figures and commemorative plates from the overturned curio cabinet. On the right of the narrow corridor, a stairway led to the second floor.
I rubbed my nose with the back of my gloved hand, trying to dampen the stench of rotted flesh.
Muffled voices came from upstairs. I gripped the banister and went up. From the top step I heard Uncle Ray asking, “Well, Ken, what do you think?”
“I don’t know . . . but I’ve done my best to control my imagination. This is sad enough.”
Mr. Wheeler stood inside the doorway of a room at the end of the hall.
“Your guess is as good as mine,” Mr. Wheeler said. “But does it matter anyway?”
“Well . . .”
On the way down the hall, I passed a bathroom on one side and stopped to look into a bedroom on the other. A curtain rod dangled loose by one end, and the blue flowered curtain hung to the floor like a forgotten pennant, letting in yellow hazy light. A mattress lay askew, tilted off the frame. Plush animals and foam stuffing were scattered across the floor.
Thoughts of the graves in the backyard and the smell in the air struck hard, I turned away. Going on, I passed one more room. A cold rush brought snow into the hall. With a quick glance, I saw the overturned dresser, the bare mattress and the jagged fragments of window glass on the carpet. Wind blew in covering the floor with a thin shroud of snow.
At the end of the hall, I stopped next to Mr. Wheeler. Uncle Ray stood on the opposite side of a double bed. A dead woman lay on the mattress. No blanket or sheet covered the body.
Dressed only in a light, blue nightgown, her legs and feet were bare. Her decayed body had sunk into the mattress. Long, deep brown hair hung down around her head, framing a leering face, her lips drawn back in a toothy death’s head grin. Sunken black holes marked what was left of her eyes. Her hands lay on her chest, one on top of the other, as if she waited.
A small table stood by the head of the bed. A brown medicine bottle stood, open. The white cap was on the floor.
“I guess she couldn’t handle things.” Uncle Ray shrugged.
“There’s graves in the backyard,” I said.
“What?” Mr. Wheeler turned to me.
“Three graves are in the backyard.”
“Ah . . . .” Uncle Ray made a motion with his lips as if chewing over the information.
“Let’s get out of here,” Mr. Wheeler said. “There’re other places.”
“Yeah.” Uncle Ray nodded.
I left first. Mr. Wheeler followed. The creak of door closing came next as Uncle Ray left the dead woman’s room. When I reached the stairs, Mr. Hansel stood in the entryway, leaning back against the door.
“We’re not staying here, are we?” His nose wrinkled as he sniffed.
“No,” I said.
He nodded and pulled the door open, and we went out into the front yard.
“We’re gonna try next door?” Mr. Hansel asked. “I don’t know about anyone else but hunger is really getting me down.”
The wind gusted and rolled a cloud of snow, and then paused.
“What’s that?” I asked, sniffing the air.
“What’s what?” Uncle Ray asked.
“Smell that?” I sniffed again and looked around.
The faint tang of wood smoke hung in the air.
“There.” Mr. Wheeler pointed.
Further down the snow covered road, above the trees to the east, a wispy ribbon of smoke wound its way into the sky.
Chapter 24
With the occasional glance to the rising smoke, I divvied out some of the provisions from my supply, which we ate cold. I crouched with my pack on the snow-covered road, handed the plastic-wrapped turkey meat to Mr. Wheeler, then taking a piece for myself, I zipped my pack closed, brushed the snow off the bottom, and slung it onto my back. The weight of the pack was less, but so was the chance of making a longer journey east. The cold snowy landscape was not inviting, especially with the haunting lifelessness of the abandoned homes, but now that changed with the rising smoke.
“I figure we’ve got another mile, mile and a half before we get there,” Mr. Hansel said, chewing. “Thanks for the food, Stanley, but it’s like eating cold lard.”
I grinned and chuckled. The cold made the turkey tougher and more sinewy. The taste was like jellied fat; still I ate. The chill, which ached in my bones, made the need to eat imperative.
“It’s like we’re at the edge of the freaking world,” Dan Hansel said.
“Yeah,” Mr. Wheeler said. “I use to drive this road and now . . .”
My Uncle nodded, and having finished his food portion, he stuffed the plastic wrap into his jacket pocket. “It’s like we’re in a foreign land,” my uncle said. “Another planet.”
What Uncle Ray said already occurred to me, and reverberated again and again. But for my uncle, Mr. Wheeler and Dan Hansel living near here and having passed these houses every day, knowing the people who lived in them, seeing them walk out and in, or taking out the garbage, and then not seeing them anymore . . . . The lights that used to go on at night became fewer and fewer and then stopped. No one lived here anymore. All that was left was a lone trail of smoke in the distance.
Dark Land: An Apocalyptic Novel Page 16