Georgia picked up the piece of paper that Lola had slid across the table. ‘Any idea how far this is?’
Lola was looking very pleased with herself. ‘Yes that’s the best part, I found it on the map and I reckon it’s not more than two or three miles back up the waterway. Here, I’ll show you.’
A few minutes later, having topped up her coffee, she went to sit with Josh; her excitement rising, as she thought of all the possibilities. There might be bicycles, even though an automotive shop dealt with car engines, and there would be tools, definitely tools, and…, well who knew what she would find!
Josh was awake, wriggling all around on the bed, as he tried to find relief from the itching. No wonder they called it being in bed with a troop of monkeys. He gave her a big smile as she pulled up a chair next to the bed. ‘You really don’t need to be doing this,’ he said.
‘I know, and after tonight, I promise you, you will be on your own.’ He was, she noted, looking remarkably well. The bruising had faded away to practically nothing, the blisters flaking away with the rest of his peeling skin, and the cut across his forehead was healing well. It wouldn’t be much longer and they would be able to take the stitches out.
Josh stopped his scratching. ‘On my own? Did you want me to leave?’
Georgia looked at him in surprise. ‘Leave? No, of course not, I meant that you can finally sleep undisturbed. Unless, you want to leave, that is. I mean, we never did ask, but do you have family, or people to go to?’
His features went very still and he did not reply at first.
‘You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.’ Georgia said, keeping her voice gentle.
‘Nah, it’s okay.’ He paused as though gathering his thoughts, then went on, ‘you know, July 11th was my mums 40th birthday, and we all drove up to St Louis, me, my mum and dad, one of my aunts, and my baby sister.’
‘July 11th, that was…,’
Josh nodded. ‘Yeah, Three-eighteen.’
Georgia’s felt sick, she knew this was not going to be anything good.
Josh continued, ‘we were going to stay for a couple of days with my grandma. Everyone was going to be there, the aunts had been planning it for months. On the way up I had to go to the bathroom, and my mum was mad at me because we had all stopped at a gas station not three miles back. But I hadn’t needed to go then. Anyways, my dad said, ‘if he has to go, he has to go’, and pulled over, parking just off the road. I got out and had climbed over the outer barrier and was heading for some trees when suddenly all hell broke loose.’ Josh broke off, closing his eyes at the memory, and clenching his fists.
Georgia wanted to reach out and take his hands in hers but he drew in a deep breath, and went on, his voice shaking. ‘I looked up at the sound of screeching brakes, to see cars crashing into each other all over the place. There was nothing I could do! I caught sight of my sister, staring out of the back window, her mouth open in a scream. A semi-truck and trailer, completely out of control crashed along the barrier, smashing into our car, crushing it to nothing beneath its wheels.
This time Georgia moved over and sat on the bed next to him, pulling him into her arms. ‘Oh Josh, I am so sorry.’
They sat in quiet contemplation for a moment, as his body heaved with silent anguished sobs. ‘I haven’t allowed myself to think about it,’ he went on in a choked up voice, ‘you are the first person I have told. I ran to that mountain of wreckage, amidst air horns honking and people screaming, but my family…, they were all dead. And it was my fault, if I hadn’t needed to go pee…,’
‘You don’t know that Josh, if your dad hadn’t stopped, you would probably be dead as well.’
‘That would have been easier.’
Georgia nodded, not knowing what to say, she couldn’t even begin to imagine how it would be, to watch your entire family killed before you. Josh then went on to tell her how he had sat on the side of the road for hours, his hands over his head, not thinking at all, not knowing what to do.
Then as it had been growing dark a woman had come up to him and asked if he wanted to walk with them. So he did, though he hadn’t known where they were going, and home was in the opposite direction. No one had any idea what had happened. Mostly there was talk of a major power outage, but no explanation as to why the cars wouldn’t start up.
For days they passed people sitting with their cars, people still trying to use their phones, and other people just staring at nothing. When arguments started erupting within the group, he left. Surviving after that solely from what he could scrounge along the motorway; going from car to car, searching for food and drink, sleeping on back seats at night. No wonder he was so underweight. Best place to find food, he had told her, were the motor homes.
He had slowly gathered a knapsack of useful stuff together, and two weeks ago, had met up with three men. Mercenary soldier types, as he described them, who invited him to walk with them. Carrying backpacks and heavily armed, they were joining up with a militia group that was being formed somewhere in the Ozarks, he couldn’t remember where. They had tried to convince him to become part of it as well, but he had told them he needed to get home, and the next day, much to his relief, he had woken to find them gone.
Georgia let him talk on into the night, knowing it would be cathartic. Occasionally she interrupted him to ask a question or to sympathize, growing ill at ease, when she learned about the Militia that was being formed.
Life had settled into a pattern of self-reliance, and she was not sure she liked the idea of some self-elected individual forming an army and imposing their own idea of law upon the land. It smacked of dictatorship. One only had to read the news (when there had still been newspapers), to know that never ended well. And the thought of the brutality, abuse of power and inevitable prison camps that would arise from such unopposed power, sent shivers up her spine.
But then she thought of Warsaw, and the more she turned it over in her mind, the more it seemed to her that Josh may have misinterpreted what the men had been saying. For it seemed more likely that the men that Josh had met up, with would be headed there, or somewhere similar. It made far more sense that they would be going as reinforcements for a community.
Even so, when she set off at daybreak, enroute to Jenkin’s Automotive Repairs, she could not get that part of the conversation out of her mind. What if Josh was right? And if he was, just how organized could they be? Logically she doubted there could be that many people joining. Either way she reasoned it wouldn’t affect them. They didn’t plan to stay here much longer.
She reached the cove she had been searching for, noticing for the first time the chill that still hung in the air, the river mist that still clung to the shoreline. Fall was getting closer!
She had hoped this cove would be uninhabited, but very quickly came to realize that there were quite a few people still living in this heavily built up area. For despite the early hour, people were already fishing from their covered jetties, but while they waved and occasionally asked what she had heard, no one invited her to come in close.
She passed a woman scrubbing clothes on a rock, knee deep in the water. She paused to stare at her, her scrubbing brush in her hand, soapy scum pouring off the rock and spreading around her legs.
‘Hi there,’ Georgia called.
‘Howdy,’ the woman called back. Her tone had not been particularly friendly, but undaunted Georgia turned her canoe, paddling slowly towards her as she suddenly scrambled for the bank.
‘Don’t come any closer,’ she said.
‘Okay I won’t,’ Georgia said, digging in the paddle and then back paddling, moving a little further away.
‘It’s not that I don’t trust you or anything,’ the woman continued, ‘just that you might be carrying that disease.’
‘Oh,’ Georgia said, suddenly on full alert. ‘So have you had any deaths then from it?’
‘No, but they say a lot have died further up. We had a public meeting yesterday and we have quarantin
ed our area, just so we won’t have any. The committee have closed the Niangua Bridge and route seven to the south. My husband is with the group setting out warning sign posts.’
‘I see.’
‘How come you weren’t there?’ the woman suddenly asked, ‘I’m sure I would have remembered seeing you.’ She hadn’t been particularly friendly to start with, but now she was staring at her suspiciously.
‘Um, we are not from around here, at the moment we are staying about two miles that way,’ she said, waving vaguely in the opposite direction from Stolen Canoe Point, on the other side.’
‘So what you doing down here then?’
For a moment Georgia didn’t know what to say, then she had a brainwave. ‘Looking for my uncle’s house, you might know where it is. He has the automotive repair shop.’
‘The Jenkins place, you mean, yeah I know it, it’s further up the bay, you can’t miss it, yards full of old cars and stuff.’ Then she hesitated, narrowing her eyes at her. ‘You sure he’s your uncle, because I never heard him talk of no foreign sounding niece.’
‘I um lived abroad for a few years and we…,’ Georgia stammered, desperately trying to think of what else to say. How could she have been so stupid? In a small community like this, it was obvious the woman would have known this Mr Jenkins character. Just her bad luck that she apparently knew him so well.
But before she could say anything else the woman went on, ‘but I ain’t seen him in a whiles, thinking he’s gone to Texas, to his unmarried sister’s house. Hey, that wouldn’t be your mother by any chance?’
Georgia shook her head, not daring to get in any deeper.
Fortunately the woman did not seem to notice her reticence. ‘Can’t say I blame them for leaving, not a lot of call for auto repairs these days.’ The woman laughed, a horrible sound more like a donkey braying than a laugh.
‘Too true,’ Georgia said politely, then added, ‘well I best be on my way.’
As she turned the canoe, the woman called after her, ‘if you’re planning to stay, mind you register with the committee.’
Georgia paused in her paddling, turning to look back. ‘The committee?’
‘Yeah, they have to authorize your presence here, you got seven days to do it, or else. If your good uncle is still there, he’ll tell you all about it.’
The way she said, ‘your uncle’ made it obvious that she didn’t believe a word she had said.
As Georgia waved goodbye and paddled further up the narrowing cove, she pondered this, wondering what the ‘or else’ entailed.
Now feeling thoroughly unnerved, she would have preferred to have turned the canoe and made for home, but with the woman still watching her, she had to keep going, keeping up the pretense of searching for her uncle. Who hopefully was in Texas! It would be a wasted trip otherwise.
She reached the spot that the woman had told her about; a scattering of farm buildings, rusting vehicles and trucks that had obviously been there for years. Georgia smiled to herself as she drifted closer. Were those all his disasters? Or perhaps spare parts. She paddle past a small dock, a couple of upturned canoes laying across the planking. Of course, now that we no longer need a canoe, there are three of them.
The place had an abandoned feel. Weeds grew in abundance across the pathway leading to the porch of the two story house, with no sound of activity or voices coming from within.
She knocked loudly on the front door, wondering what she would say if Mr Jenkins opened the door. What would she say if someone turned up on her doorstep asking for bicycles? After a few moments, heart pounding she tried the handle, finding it unlocked. Hesitantly she pushed it open.
The good Mr Jenkins had not gone to Texas after all. She realized this the moment she stepped inside as the gag inducing smell, sweet and sickly, filled her nostrils. The stench was overwhelming, invasive and clinging, and the room was filled with blowflies, literally hundreds of them. Many were dead and dying, their revolting fat black and green bodies scattered across the floor, while hundreds more rose in a cloud above a body.
The late Mr Jenkins, she presumed. He had shot himself. At some point he had decided that he didn’t want to be part of this new life and he had taken his handgun, sat himself down in a comfortable armchair and blown his brains out.
The blast had half thrown him over the arm rest, the gun had slid a ways across the polished wooden floor. An upturned box of cartridges lay on the table next to him. There wasn’t a lot left of him. He seemed to have liquefied and soaked into the floral cushions of the chair; leaving his bones, still partially covered by bits of discolored flannel fabric and skin, and thick lumpy grayish yellow deposits. Her stomach rose as she took in the constant undulant movement of larvae moving around beneath the rotting flesh. She dragged her eyes away, focusing on something dried and disgusting sprayed over the wall and the framed painting that hung behind him. The coagulated lumpy debris partially covered a cottage scene, with two children playing next to a well.
As Georgia stood paralyzed, scarcely able to take it all in, she had the oddest thought that it didn’t even look real. More like fake props for a horror movie, all a little over gaudy and ghastly; designed so that the camera footage would have impact.
A blowfly tangled in her hair, vibrating as she frantically tried to brush it away. Unable to help herself she gave a little scream and fled for the door. Shuddering with the absolute revulsion of it all as she practically fell onto the porch, attempting to pull the door closed behind her but failing as she began violently retching.
She wiped her mouth on her t-shirt as she staggered down the steps, sweating profusely. Reaching for her precious packet of smokes, she walked unsteadily to a low brick wall and sat down.
‘At least,’ she thought, as she blew out a cloud of smoke, ‘he hadn’t died from cholera.’
She sat staring down into the water, waiting for her hands to stop trembling. She would not be sharing this detail with Lola or Josh or…. She had to go back in. They could use the gun. They needed more weapons, especially with all this talk of militia and committees and what had happened to Josh. Her stomach tightened. No way could she go back in there. She simply wasn’t going to do it.
But even as she decided this, she knew she had no choice. She didn’t know if Josh could handle a gun, but he could learn. Rebecca would have to learn as well. They had managed to survive so far with the shotgun, and the bows, but that had been more luck than anything. And there had been less of them.
Now they were seven, they were a lot more visible. But the advantage of that was they were a lot less approachable, especially if they were all armed. What had happened to Josh had brought home to her more than any other event, just how vulnerable they really were. If they came across a marauding gang of men, their pathetic collection of weaponry was not going to be enough. No, they all had to be armed, armed to the teeth and ready for anything.
She would finish her cigarette, she decided, and then she would go back into that house. After all, she reasoned, Mr Jenkins’s rotting corpse could not harm her and no one ever died from revulsion.
Chapter Sixty One
When she had finished the cigarette, she stood up and made her way back to the house. She stood staring at it for a long moment, steeling herself to go inside.
Sunlight caught the facets of a crystal wind chime, hanging above the top of the steps, sending pinks and purples and turquoise blues, shimmering across the whitewashed walls. A sturdily built swing seat swayed gently back and forth, in the light breeze. While orange and brown butterflies, spiraled up and round each; darting amongst the tall Verbena bushes that grew in abundance along the railings of the porch. It looked all very ordinary really, and yet she knew it was nothing but a façade, hiding the horror within.
She found the back door unlocked as well. She made her mind up to search the rest of the house first. That way she might not even need to go back into front room, for if the man had owned a handgun, chances were he had other weapons too
.
The back door opened into a neat and tidy kitchen. Dishes from the last meal washed and stacked on a drying rack. A green and yellow striped dishcloth draped over them. Two apples beginning to shrivel and lose their shine, sat in a bowl on the homely Formica table. A single fly whined incessantly, caught in a gossamer of spider’s web hanging loosely from the ceiling.
The smell here was minimal, just a hint of what lay in the front room. She slung her shotgun back over her shoulder, and pulling up the bottom of her t-shirt, covered her nose with it.
She opened the pantry door, somewhat surprised to find it well stocked with cans, dried goods and a large bag of flour leaning against the back wall.
‘Good to know this is here,’ she thought, then closed the pantry door and left the kitchen, shutting off the sound of the fly as she pulled the door shut behind her.
She found a gun safe in a back room, this was obviously the room where the accounts were done. An outdated yellowing monitor sat amidst dockets and bills, papers clipped together with bulldog clips, a desk pad covered with notes and phone numbers and scrawled handwriting and doodles. The filing cabinet drawer half open, crammed full of folders, threatening to spill out onto the floor.
In the corner, behind the door, stood what she had been searching for, but the metal doors hung open and the safe was empty. There had to be more than the handgun though, she decided, who bought a huge gun safe like this just for one handgun?
The smell grew worse as she reached the bottom of the staircase. She guessed that somehow the stench had seeped under the hall door and probably through the walls. She held the cloth against her nose a little more firmly, wishing she had perfume or something, anything, to sprinkle on it, to disguise it.
It was unbearably hot upstairs. With all the windows closed, the stairwell acted as a heat sink. As she reached the landing she heard the flies again, like a far off droning of planes. She pushed open the first door she came to, finding the flies. The smell in here was even worse, if that was possible, than the front room below.
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