The Beginning at the End of the World: A Post-Apocalyptic, Dystopian Series (The Survivor Diaries Book 2)

by Lynn Lamb

  For the next twenty minutes, we passed around the photographs of what had been historic Monterey and the beautiful cities that had once surrounded it. During that time, Adam explained how he had been collecting soil and water samples, as well as photographing and studying different areas that would work as a resettlement site for the Village.

  My gut started to ache like it always did when things were about to go wrong. In this case, everything was about to go horribly wrong. I wanted to jump up and stop the entire meeting, stop Adam as he acted as Jackson’s unwitting pawn, but it was too late.

  When Rolette rose, I knew that there was no stopping it. It started as a snowball, and was going to end in an avalanche, if I may take a note from our current weather conditions.

  Rolette began speaking, voice deep, like rich velvet. “Today, I represent God’s Warriors. We have lost too many of our members due to your leadership.” He pointed at me, and allowed his ridge finger to run across the rest of the speakers sitting in chairs on the stage, ending on Adam. “You have brought in a plague from the outside. If you had not gone out there, into Sodom and Gomorrah, we would not be suffering from God’s wrath,” he said.

  I couldn’t read the Villagers anymore. I felt a distance from them that I had never felt before. I didn’t know how important my connection with them was until that very moment.

  I wished that Jackson would handle this scene, find a way to make it better, but my gut told me he couldn’t. He had never built a rapport with these people.

  I stood and went to the podium, mostly because I needed something to lean against. I grasped it and took a breath to slow my pulse and gather my thoughts. The proverbial pin could have dropped with a resounding boom; it was absolutely silent in the ballroom.

  “As you all know, I have been out of the loop. However, like most of you, I have seen the writing on the wall,” I stopped talking to see if I was getting through to them. Nope, not a thing. “No, not the graffiti on the Village wall.” There was a polite chuckle in response, and a few of the faces started to relax.

  “Mr. Rolette, I do not believe that a good and caring God would bring this on us,” I said, slamming head first into my point. There were a few gasps, all from the GW’s, but I didn’t care. This needed to be decided on, in one way or another.

  “I do believe that we need to leave here. This has been my home for most of my life, and for me to say this is extremely hard. But I don’t want to die, and I don’t want any of you to die, either. That includes you, Mr. Rolette.”

  And then I dropped a bombshell. “I also don’t believe that we should leave this to a vote. It isn’t a case of all of us needing to agree unanimously. We each need to make this decision for ourselves based on everything we have heard. Just to let you know, I am leaving.”

  I went back to my seat and Rolette stood in the front of the crowd and burst into a rant that was “sent to him by God.” It went on for about ten minutes, and it was so ridiculous that I don’t feel the need to write it into this record.

  Deciding that it was time to stop this madman, Mark stood and went directly in front of where the man exuding the ire stood. He rose above him on the stage, and stared down at him. I didn’t even know what he was going to do next.

  “Muslim, you are not going to block the word of God. You can stand there as long as you like. The Holy Spirit needs for His flock to hear Him,” said the red-faced man.

  “If anyone else feels this way, come and stand with your leader,” Mark said. It was simple and to the point. It worked.

  No one came to stand beside Rolette. He waited, though. After several uncomfortable moments, he walked out of the building, slamming the door behind him.

  ∞

  Completely drained, we headed home. I glared angrily at Jackson as everyone exited, but he just made his signature “heh” and headed toward the security at the wall.

  I took the photos that Adam and his team had collected as proof. When I got home, I went into my bedroom alone and got under the covers. I spent the next hour staring at every detail in every one of the photos.

  The pictures of Cannery Row, a popular tourist attraction thanks to the classic books of John Steinbeck, were the hardest to look at. So many of my memories took place on that street.

  I remember when many of the historic buildings that had housed the sardine factories and even the Monterey Jack Cheese building on the strip were “mysteriously” burned to the ground. Developers swooped in and bought up the beach front properties to build restaurants, hotels and souvenir shops.

  The Brothel that stood at the end of the street, a protected historic landmark, was home to many businesses over the years, but none more notorious than what Steinbeck wrote of. When I was in high school, it was a small restaurant that had almost no food on the menu. People would come in to listen to live music and watch belly dancers while they drank wine. It was where I met my first boyfriend and where I had my first kiss. I loved to shock people over the years by telling them I met my boyfriend in a brothel.

  I closed my eyes, and I could see the image of the building as it appeared during Steinbeck’s time. A leg adorned with a fishnet stocking swung from the window. The face of the leg’s owner peered out over the ocean view, wistfully, as the woman with bright red rouge took a swig from a bottle of booze. She whistled at one of the sardine canners who passed by.

  I fast forwarded to before the Last War, when the aquarium, built in the 1980’s, stood in all of its glory. The photograph of the famed attraction showed fractured buildings that now floated beneath the ocean’s surface, like the Lost City of Atlantis. I guess that’s appropriate.

  My mind continued down the street to another of Steinbeck’s haunts, Doc Ricketts’ Lab. Steinbeck used the real life Marine Biologist, Ed Ricketts, as a model for one of his greatest characters. Doc Ricketts’ Lab was made a historic landmark, and the building stood until the Last War. I looked at the splinters that now were the only traces of the old Lab. I wondered if the ghosts of Mr. Steinbeck and Dr. Ricketts were there now, heartbroken over the loss of their beloved dwelling. I know I was, and that I always will be.

  The iconic, above-street walkways that announced your arrival to Cannery Row had been shattered in the middle, now heading straight into the heavily damaged streets below rather than the building on the other side. It didn’t matter though, because that building was smashed beyond recognition.

  One of the photos wasn’t taken on Cannery Row. It was of an adobe boarding house that had stood in the heart of downtown Monterey, where Robert Louis Stevenson wrote novels and became inspired to pen Treasure Island. Only a corner of the building now stood, and I could rewind again, to blurry black and white images of Stevenson at a desk in that very corner, pen in hand. It was strange that Adam took this particular picture, because it wasn’t a very well-known site to out-of-towners. I was not sure how he was able to find it, especially in the chaos of the destruction.

  I continued to look at the photos for hours, allowing them, almost willing them, to crush my soul. A part of me is Monterey. I needed to see it destroyed in order to really let go of it. I guess that was the purpose of the photos in the first place.

  ∞

  “Sorry, I told everyone I was leaving before we had a chance to talk about it,” I told Mark when he finally came into our room.

  “That’s okay. The family talked a lot about it when you were in the Hotel, and we decided the same thing,” said Mark.

  He sat next to me on the bed, trying not to scatter the photos I had arranged in geographical order on the blanket. He glanced down at them and then back at me, compassionately.

  “This means that we are going to the Valley to become farmers, doesn’t it?” I asked him.

  He nodded.

  “I never imagined us as farmers, with cows and chickens and crops. We will have to find you some overalls,” I told him.

  We chuckled.

  “I have trouble imagining our lives like that, but we have to do this f
or Bailey, Ammie and Bri,” he said.

  “E.I.E.I.O.”

  Part II: The Deception

  December 12

  I had just read what Bri had written for “the records,” and I decided that I had had enough of Jackson’s shenanigans. I grabbed Mark by his arm and my video camera, and we took the golf cart up to Jackson’s house. Mark tried to ask me what was happening, but I was too angry to speak. He must have recognized that, because he stopped asking.

  With video camera on and recording, I barged in through the unlocked front door with Mark on my heels. Since Jackson had no reluctance to violate my privacy, I was not too concerned about his. When I didn’t see him immediately, I decided to take a self-guided tour of the rooms that I had never seen. It was an eye-opener, to say the least.

  “We can’t do this,” said Mark.

  The first room I found was Jackson’s bedroom. I panned the room with the camera and noticed a motion on the ceiling. I did a tilt up and jumped when I saw myself. Eww… mirrors above the bed. Why was I not surprised? Mark burst in after me, pleading with me not to violate Jackson’s privacy. He looked at me and followed the camera’s gaze to the ceiling mirrors. He chuckled.

  “That’s not what I am looking for,” I told him.

  I heard the sound of a machine running down the hall, and I followed it. Expecting to find a generator, I opened the door. To my surprise, it was a washer and dryer, and the dryer was running. I opened the lid to find a set of sheets tumbling to a halt. While we all took cold sponge baths and washed our clothes by hand and dried them in front of a fire, he was using up our precious gas supplies. I turned the knob off so his sheets wouldn’t dry and would hopefully stink from mildew. It was not much as far as punishment goes, but it would have to do for the moment.

  I turned on my heels to look for the room Bri described in her diary entries. I ran through the house like a crazy person; swinging open every door I found until I came to one of the upstairs doors that held behind it the prize I was looking for.

  The dark room buzzed blue with the light of several monitors, each with picture in picture. You could see practically every “public building” in the Village. People were going about their business, walking through the ballroom, checking supplies and walking the corridors of the hospital. I wanted to scream when I saw Annie, Jill and Mrs. Ingram working on canning in Annie’s kitchen.

  Mark came in behind me, and I saw his jaw drop. We spent several minutes just standing there and staring at the screens, watching our unwitting neighbors.

  “What is this?” Mark asked, as if I could tell him something beyond the obvious.

  “I bet this is not all,” I said.

  I ran down the staircase into the “wine cellar.” I had been down there before, but this time I wasn’t looking for a nice cabernet, although a big swig of alcohol was sounding good around then. I ran up and down the rows of floor to ceiling wine racks until I found a door in the far back of the room. I hadn’t noticed it before, but this time it stood out like a big, sore thumb.

  It led down a cold, blue corridor that was lit with florescent lights that buzzed loudly above us. I opened a door to my right and found another surprise. Jackson was sitting behind a desk, a laptop in front of him.

  As much as we were surprised, he obviously wasn’t. His arms were folded over his chest and his eyes were on the door, watching our every step. I moved into the room, just enough to allow Mark in behind me.

  “I don’t believe you made an appointment with my secretary,” he said without hesitation.

  “Don’t act cute, Phillip,” I said, seething. “What do you think you are doing?”

  I got another burst of bravery and walked over and turned his laptop to face me. As I had guessed, it showed the now still wine cellar.

  I slapped the lid down and was about to do the same to Jackson’s smug face, but Mark pulled me back.

  “You have been spying on us this whole time?” Mark asked, disgusted.

  “And you’ve been using our gasoline to run this entire set up,” I added.

  “I haven’t used ‘our’ anything,” he countered our angry voices with his calm one. “I have only used my own resources here.”

  I looked around the room that was filled with radios, maps, computers, and five large metal gun vaults. They had brass turn handles like you see at banks, or in old movies. They also had numbered keypads. I walked over and tried one of the handles, but it was locked.

  Jackson came to my side and entered a number sequence into the keypad, spun the turn handle, and pulled open the thick, metal door.

  “Aren’t you the brave one,” he said. His voice sounded completely different, like he had been hiding his militant, colonel-side the whole time. I have been so naïve, just like he had accused me of. But then again, he hadn’t been talking about being naïve about him.

  Inside the vault, there was an arsenal of automatic-machine guns, boxes of bullets, and even grenades. I got it all on video, not knowing what I was going to use the footage for, but knowing I needed it.

  Mark just stood there, his mouth agape, eyes fixed on Jackson. Impulsively, he flew forward, and his fist flung into Jackson’s jaw with a loud crunch.

  I had never seen any violence in my husband, not even the potential for it. I sat down, letting out the little air I still had in my lungs. I began to cough, hard.

  Jackson looked at me, concerned. Who was this man? One minute he was fierce and intense, the next thoughtful and caring. I wanted to run from the room, but I couldn’t stop wheezing. Mark came to my side and rubbed my back, while Jackson reached under his desk and pulled out a water bottle.

  “Drink,” he commanded. “And then you come with me, both of you.”

  He waited for me to regain my breath. I wasn’t well enough yet to be going through this. And had I known then what I know now, I hadn’t seen nothin’ yet.

  “Let’s go,” he said as he led us up the stairs and to the front door. He put on his jacket and gloves and walked out the door and straight to the golf cart. He sat in the driver’s seat and waited for us to get in. I almost took off on foot to my house, but Mark led me to the cart and helped me into the back. He took a seat next to Jackson. He put his hands in his lap and I could see his fists were clenched.

  Jackson didn’t head down the driveway as I expected, but instead he chugged the golf cart up the hillside. It was slow going, even with the snow melting. About ten minutes later, he stopped at a tall fence with barbed wire on top. He got out and unlatched the lock and waved for us to follow him on foot.

  Mark held my hand as we entered through the gate that Jackson immediately closed behind us. I looked at the concrete building with tons of solar panels surrounding it. On one side of the building there was a shiny gasoline tanker.

  The shock must have shown on my face. “I have my own supplies,” Jackson said. “Are you going to film this whole thing?”

  I felt a shot of bravery pulse through my veins. I looked Jackson in the eye. “Yes. Does Bri know about this place?”

  “No.”

  He shrugged and pointed at the building. “In there is my personal power plant, but we don’t have time for that now. Come on.”

  I don’t know why, but we followed him, and we loaded back in the golf cart after he relocked the gate. Jackson’s plant operation was far enough back in the hills that no one would find it.

  For the second time, he started to drive us in the opposite direction from what I had expected.

  “Now where are we going?” asked Mark.

  “You want to know everything, right?” said Jackson. His jaw was red and beginning to swell.

  I wanted to jump out of the golf cart. I wouldn’t have gotten hurt with how slowly we were going, but I trusted that if Mark wasn’t protesting, neither should I. I hung on and hoped that Mark wasn’t going along with all of this because he thought the same thing of me.

  It was in the twenty degree range out, and I was cold. I sunk my head into my zipp
ed up, faux-fur lined ski jacket. Mark looked back at me and didn’t say a word.

  We drove for at least forty more minutes, going slowly upward and further back in the hills. I had always thought there was nothing back there but forest, but I soon found that I was very wrong.

  The snow thickened on the hillside the further up we climbed. I could tell that the chains on the small tires were never meant to be used on this particular mode of transportation. I really wanted to ask how he found snow chains for a golf cart, but I suspected that the reveal that was coming was much bigger than that. I opted not to ask.

  After all of those days in my house and then in the Hotel, it was actually nice to be outside, in a really cold sort of way. I closed my eyes and let the wind rush over me.

  “Are you okay, Laura?” asked Mark. “I should never have let you come up here. Where are you taking us, Jackson? And what’s taking so long?”

  I opened my eyes to see Mark’s concerned face, and I started to get nervous, too. What if Jackson wanted to get rid of us because we knew about his secret? I pictured Jackson pulling his pistol off his hip and ordering us to get down on our knees. My imagination started to get away from me.

  “Don’t get your panties in a wad. We’re almost there,” he said to Mark. Mark glared back at him. “What are you gonna do, hit me again?”

  “If it takes much longer, I’ll rip your head off,” Mark said. I wished I could go over to him and shove those words back into his mouth. I didn’t like this side of my husband.

  “If you hadn’t noticed, she’s been pretty sick. I would never have let her come if I had known you were going to take us this far. I thought that if you cared about anyone besides yourself, it was her,” said Mark.

  “And if you hadn’t burst into my home, we wouldn’t be here right now,” said Jackson. As far as logic goes, Jackson was correct.

  We finally came to a stop at another fortress. This one looked like it had an electronic fence and barb wire, too.