And with that credo playing in my head, I took off for the house. While not scared, I became somewhat apprehensive about moving another street further away from Nadine. But I had to know if the light gazed into the night on its own accord, or if someone remained in the house to turn it off and on.
I hit the darkened part of the street and bumped into a zombie. It growled - or at least I thought it was a growl - and its hands gripped my shirt and pulled me in its direction. I easily punched the arms away and continued over the front yard and up the porch.
I rang the doorbell. I didn't know why I rang the doorbell. Out of courtesy perhaps? I heard a muffled ding-dong and footsteps from somewhere in the bowels of the house. One person was definitely in the house. Maybe more than one. I rang the bell again and followed that up with pounding on the front door. Behind me, the zombies became curious. And closer.
I slid to the first window on my left. The white, lacy curtains revealed a foggy front room with a piano off to the side. I heard bumps behind me. Zombies were making their way up the stairs.
I couldn't see anything of interest through this window, so I leapt over the side railing and sprinted to the rear of the house. Two cellar doors angled up from the ground, but a padlock secured them shut. I bent over and gave the chain a tug, but it was secure as secure could be. With more of an effort, someone could actually pull the doors from the hinges as three small ones on each side were fastened by weak screws.
The back door grabbed my attention. It stood ajar by the smallest amounts. I hopped up the stone steps, pushed the door open, and slipped inside. I figured the door was broken in some way, but when I shut it, the bolt clicked in as it should. I twisted the lock, and it secured the door. A perfectly working door. But why open then?
As far as I could tell, the house provided good shelter from everything outside.
I turned. Ahead of me was a small mud room leading into the kitchen. Boots, both clean and muddy, lied chaotically under a wooden bench. A couple pairs looked recently worn, with fresh soil on them. Coats hung on hooks. An opening on the right led to a basement emitting a chilly draft.
The kitchen had cleaned dishes on the drying rack and a couple of dirty glasses in the other sink. Both glasses had water in them. I went to smell the water, and my hand touched cold glass, as if recently removed from the fridge. And speaking of, I opened the freezer and a poof of cold air blasted me. Ice crystals lined all sides of the freezer, and inside were meat and frozen pizza and bags of vegetables. But currently, the refrigerator wasn't on as far as I could tell.
Someone lived here. Someone still lived here.
As I crossed the kitchen into the central hallway, I smelled it. Light cedar and smoke. The more I moved into the hallway the warmer it got. On my left was the front room I saw from the window on the front porch. On my right, a larger living room, the fireplace throwing an orange glow around the room.
This room also had a window looking out, but it was boarded up with planks so no light could get in. Or firelight could get out. A very ornate room, with plenty of pictures of sons, daughters, and grandchildren participating in events and parties; a tall in-wall bookcase stuffed to the gill with books; two rockers and lamps to accommodate each one; another, smaller piano tucked away in the corner; and a L-couch and two recliners. A cozy, relaxing room. I wanted to lay down on the couch and take a quick nap.
I stood by the fire, letting the warmth caress me. I closed my eyes and imagined Nadine standing next to me, our bodies inches apart. I stare into her eyes. She smiles and wraps her arms around my waist and jerks me into her. I already have a slight erection, and it jabs her. She doesn't protest. She knows. She grinds a little to tease me. She takes one of my hands and puts it on her breast, and I automatically start massaging, occasionally squeezing the nipple a tiny bit, like she this. A moan. My lips go to work on her neck, and I flick my tongue on the skin, and this gets her more excited. Her hands reach for my belt, and we skip any other foreplay and kneel to the ground...
The floor suddenly vibrated beneath my feet. A low rumbling emanated from below me, and I tried to forget about my daydream. It took a few seconds because, let's face it, it was about sex. Or almost-sex.
Where was that coming from? Must be coming from below.
Back in the central hallway, I listened. A motor of some sort. A small one. In the kitchen, I listened more. Yes, some kind of engine. And it came from the basement.
I assumed the opening off the mud room was entry to the basement, so I went there. The noise undeniably originated from down there. But it was dark. If someone was down there...
I pulled out my flashlight but left it off. I could see three steps and took the first one. A tiny creak but nothing alarming. I took the second one. Quieter, and I felt a strong draft moving up my pant leg. On the third step I stopped. Did I hear a foot scrap down there?
SKIIIRRRRRIT!
And then light erupted. Small, concentrated. A match.
A yellow sphere gradually took shape, spotlighting the area at the bottom of the steps. A wall, a floor. And a face.
“Damn!” I inadvertently screamed. I shuffled back up the steps and dove into the kitchen out of sight from whoever was down there. I whipped out the gun. “Who are you?” I asked.
“The owner of this house.” A man. His voice shaky. Fear? Nervousness? “I should ask who you are.” No, not scared. Old.
“I didn't know anyone was here,” I said.
“Well, I'm here. Look, I don't have much. But I can spare some water, if that will suit you.”
“I already saw in your fridge.” Now that I mentioned the fridge again, a new sound came from the kitchen. I looked towards the fridge and heard it running, the fans underneath rotating to keep cool what was inside.
Caught in a lie, the man below kept silent.
“I would have no use for that stuff anyway,” I said.
“Can I come up? I've been afraid of the dark since I was five.”
What a weird thing to say. Especially to an intruder. He didn't know if I wanted to steal things or hurt him. Which was neither, of course.
“Come up. But know I have a gun,” I said.
“Understood.” Feet softly took the stairs one at a time. A step, then a pause. Another step, another pause. After about four of these sequences, they stopped. “Can I have your word you won't hurt me?”
Why was this man placing so much trust in me being a good person? It perplexed me. I mean, I didn't plan on doing anything but talking with the man. “I'm not going to hurt you. There's nothing to worry about.”
“That's what someone said a few days ago,” a morose voice responded.
“Sir, I'm your neighbor. I live two streets over, and I've been there since everything started. I'm not going to hurt you. I've got no reason to. My wife is back home, waiting for me.”
The footsteps started again and seconds later, a shadow entered the kitchen. I took a few backward steps out of harm's way in case the man thought he could get away with some violent action against me. Using my trust in his innocence against me. After the shadow, heavy, labored breathing followed. The man sucked in air as if it were his last breath and let it out like a tension-relieved exhale. At the tail-end of it, a tiny, almost inaudible wheeze.
“Are you okay?” I asked before he fully emerged.
“Those stairs aren't as easy as they used to be.”
What came from the basement matched the age of who I thought was down there. The man was old, about seventy, and hunched over as if a weight were pushing down on his back to a near forty-five-degree angle. Half glasses hung on the end of his nose, and a chain hung around his neck to hold them in case they fell off his face. I expected him have a cane, but he entered the kitchen from below like he probably had a thousand times: with no assistance. White hair orbited his pale, bald head, stick out like spikes as if it hadn't been washed in a while. Ratty clothes hung off the man's body like drapes on a skeleton. And what was on his feet? I swore the old m
an wore slippers.
He looked at me with genuine fear, and I felt bad for standing here in his kitchen with a gun limply pointed at him. I broke into his house after all. “My name's David Wilcox.”
“I'm Ed Brick.” He relaxed.
“Well, Ed, I'm sorry I startled you,” I said. “But I was checking out the apartments across the street and saw your porch light on. I got curious.”
“I thought I was the only one left around here.”
“Had a couple people stay for a bit earlier today, but yeah. I've thought the same thing for days.” I returned the gun to the waistband. “Is it just you?”
Ed nodded. “My wife - rest her soul - passed away two years ago. So glad she didn't have to see the mess out there.”
“Seems those who died before are the blessed ones,” I said. Never had been a religious man, but I think that statement seemed appropriate for this conversation, for this moment in the world.
“Amen, David. Amen to that.” He hobbled over to fridge and opened it. “Good, good.”
“Everything okay?”
“My generator went out an hour ago, and I've been in the basement fixing it. Wires fried, and it wasn't getting any gas. That's what I was doing when you came in.” He pulled out a package of Carl Budding lunch meat. “Can I offer you half a sandwich? With ham?”
On the word ham, my mouth dripped with saliva, as if a geyser went off. Ham. It was the process and preserved version, but it was still ham. I could already feel the salty meat hitting my taste buds. My stomach pressured the common-sense part of my brain. I should say yes. “I can't. Wouldn't be fair to my wife.”
“What's your wife's name?” Ed started preparing a sandwich. He ripped the package open and slid out the thin slices of heaven.
“Nadine.”
He peeled off half the ham from the stack and slapped it on some bread. He did the same with the remaining meat. The two sandwiches went into a plastic grocery bag, and he handed them to me. “Here,” he said.
“What's this?”
“Take them.”
“I can't.”
Ed thrust the sack at me. “Please. You kept your word. You didn't hurt me. I'd like to repay that. A man's word should be revered these days.”
“You might need the food.”
“Ha!” He opened a cabinet over the counter and removed two bottles of water. These he set at the end of the counter near me. “Look at me. I'm an old man. Do you think I eat like a horse? Morsels, my friend, morsels. I know how much my body needs these days, and it's not much. You are young, your wife is young. Both of you need more food if you are to survive.”
“Thanks for the biology knowledge, but we've been doing fine.”
“Have you? What were you doing in those apartments? What really made you come in here?” He pointed to the fridge. “Once you saw what was inside, did your stomach rebel and tell you to take all this food?”
“At first -”
“Yes, at first. You need food. Otherwise you'd be home playing Tiddlywinks.”
“Fine, we need food. Ours was taken.”
Ed nodded. “Let me guess: by the people who stayed with you.”
I lowered my head. “I was stupid. They seemed so nice. I helped them.”
“Man and woman? One named - uh - Gabe?”
“Abe!” I shouted. “Abe and Susan.”
“They came here. The generator noise drew them to the house. I wouldn't let them in. Didn't like their eyes.” Ed started moving toward the room with the fireplace. “You can tell the heart of a man through his eyes. That Abe's eyes weren't friendly. They were fake, mean.”
Now that Ed said this stuff, my stomach lurched. They were in my house, I trusted them while I slept. “They could have done so much worse to Nadine and me.”
“Abe probably would have. But that Susan. She is the balance.” When we reached the fire, Ed added, “One day, both will turn mean or genial. The other will influence the other so much. I fear that Abe will win out.”
“But they're gone now. They left earlier. Took my food and ditched.”
“And you believe they are completely gone?”
Ed suddenly threw doubt in my mind. And with Nadine alone... “I'm not sure. They said they were headed to Rend City.”
“Ah. Rend City.”
“You know it?” The fire crackled when Ed threw a log in with the rest.
“It's the new rumored Safety Zone for the Midwest.”
“Illinois you mean, right?”
“No, the Midwest.”
“But each state has at least one.”
“That was true in the beginning. But now -” He grasped my shoulder and turned me towards a set of stairs. “Come with me. Let me show you something.”
“Uh - I should really get back to Nadine.”
“She'll be fine. I'm sure those two are well on their way to Rend City.” He started up the steps. “I take it your information pipes are limited, maybe even nil.”
Ed had a strange way of speaking. Tiddlywinks? Information Pipes? “What Abe told me was the newest thing I had heard about anything.” I resigned myself to follow Ed to what he needed to show me.
From the bottom of the stairs to the top landing, the walls were covered in pictures of all sizes and in frames of various ages and types. Wooden, metal, all glass. The pictures themselves were from different eras and started - from bottom to top - the past (before Tiddlywinks was invented by the looks of them) as faded and cracked memories and moved towards the future as glossy and vibrant lives. Around the middle of the wall, I saw an infant Ed with his parents and grandparents. Pictures gradually showed Ed as a teenager, then a young man with a bride. Grandchildren, great-grandchildren, nieces, nephews.
“A large family you have,” I said.
“Have? Most, if not all, may be in the past tense. But yes, my family is, or was, robust.”
“Any of them try to contact you since the start?”
“No. But I don't expect them to. They've got to take care of themselves.” Ed walked to a room at the end of the hall. “In here.”
Ed turned on a small desk lamp, and the room lit up with pale white light.
The small room gave me claustrophobia. It had just enough room for a small desk, a book case, and a long folding table that was shoved far into the corner. On the table were different radios, one of which looked like a ham radio: lots of dials, and a large analog needle with small numbers running left to right. I had seen ham radios on TV, and this looked like that. A red light told me it was powered on.
On the walls were maps. A map of the neighborhood, a map of the town, a map of the county, a map of the state, and a map of the country. Terrain maps, satellite maps, road maps. Types of maps I'd never seen before. And all the maps had different markings and push-pins on them. Red pins, blue pins, purple pins; red marks, blue marks, yellow marks; some maps had circles on them, others had the letter X. A map of Illinois took center stage in all of this, mounted on the wall directly above the ham radio.
“Quite a setup you have,” I said.
“I was a navigator in the Navy,” Ed said. “Maps were important to the job. As they are important to what's going on now.”
I took a closer look at the Illinois map. Freeport had been crossed out in red. “Red X means?”
“Gone.”
“Gone? Gone how?
“Could mean many things, right? It was an active community, now it's not. That's what my red X means.”
My eyes followed a path to a more central location. Rend City was circled in blue. “I take it Abe's rumor of Rend City was true.”
“As of six hours ago.”
When I fiddled with a dial on the ham radio, Ed rushed over and slapped my hand away. “Don't mess with that. It's tuned in to the National Guard band.”
“Sorry.” I stood back. “I didn't know they had one. Is that how you're getting all this information?”
“After the internet went down, yes.”
Ed sat down
and flipped a switch on the ham radio. More lights came on, and he put one side of a pair of headphones up to one ear. The backlight on the dial flickered as Ed turned another dial surrounded by a bunch of numbers. But I heard nothing from the headphones.
“Nothing,” he said. “Nothing for three hours. They've been putting out messages every ten minutes on different bands.”
“I haven't picked up anything on my transistor for some time now.”
Ed shook his head. “You wouldn't. These frequencies are subtle, more refined. They are bands specially allocated by the FCC for amateur ham radio operators to use. A transistor wouldn't pick them up.”
“So, is this what you've been doing since that Tuesday?”
“Pretty much. I wanted information, and let's face it, I'm not really going anywhere. I figured I could share what I learned to those I meet.”
“Why don't you go to Rend City?” I asked.
“It won't stand long. Freeport fell eighteen hours after declared a Safety Zone. Rend City won't last even that long.” Ed stood. “I'm too old anyway. The trip would exhaust me. I doubt I would make it.”
An idea struck me. “What if we go together? You, Nadine, me? There's got to be a working car around here somewhere.”
“You sure are an optimistic one, aren't you?”
“I just want to be safe, feel safe. I want the same for Nadine. And you're not a bad person. That much I've gathered since meeting you. You should be safe too.”
“This old man would be a hindrance.”
“My wife would think - does think the same thing.”
“Come back downstairs with me.”
Back in the kitchen, Ed grabbed another sack and started filling it with canned goods, packaged goods, and other non-perishables. I watched him do this like a dutiful worker, as if it was his job to pack up a sack of food for strangers. Satisfied his cabinets were properly self-raided, he went to a door next to the fridge and removed a cloth cooler. He stuffed it with items from the fridge. I couldn't tell what exactly he put in there. Ed put the cooler next to the sack on the kitchen table.
Not Enough To Live By Page 6