by Sergio Gomez
He pulled the trigger. The bullet tore through the middle of the can and sent it flying off the tree.
“Good.” Alejandro said. “That’s enough, put the safety back on.”
“There’s still two more cans.” Charlie said, focusing in on the other two. “Can I shoot them?”
“Fine.”
He readied his stance and shot both of them off with the first try. The bullets didn’t hit the cans dead center the way the first can had been hit, and he had to concede that that had been a little bit of luck, but he was satisfied with his handiwork either way.
He clicked the safety on and handed the gun over to Alejandro.
“How’s it feel, Charlie?” Alejandro asked, putting the gun back in his holster.
Charlie shrugged, not quite sure how to describe the sensation of shooting the gun.
“It was scary at first.” Alejandro said, and although it wasn’t a question Charlie nodded his head. “But it got less scary the more shots you took.”
“Yeah.”
“And then it started to get kind of fun, after you accept that you have the power to kill in your hands.”
Charlie nodded.
“You’ll eventually have to shoot live things, you know that right, Charlie?”
“I don’t want to.”
“Doesn’t matter, you’ll have to.”
Charlie looked down at his shoes. “Dad, you won’t leave me, will you?”
Alejandro raised Charlie’s head up by the chin. “No, Mijo. Never ever, we’re in this together.”
“Good, so then you can shoot all of the bad things for me, can’t you?”
Alejandro put his arms around Charlie and hugged him close. “I’ll try, for as long as I can. I promise you that.”
They fell into silence, and just held each other for a few moments. The stillness of the forest returned, and the birds that had been scared off by the noise of the gun going off returned to perch atop the trees.
“Papi, can we go find Bill now?”
“Yeah, let’s go.”
With their arms around each other, they headed back to the truck, leaving the last traces of Charlie’s innocence behind them.
3
The tires shrieked as Alejandro slammed the brakes on the truck.
He took the map splayed out on the dashboard and re-read it for the thousandth time. The address Bill Goldenburg was giving through the radio was scribbled on the border of it. Looking at where they were on the map, he confirmed that this was the location of the address.
And he was right, although what was in front of him and what was on the map were vastly different. The map showed a small town, but what was in its place instead was a bare plot of dirt. There were makeshift shelters that looked to be made of salvaged pieces of other buildings surrounding an actual building. The front of the building was charred black, the roof had holes all over it and pieces of the siding were hanging off or had already dropped to the dirt, like ripe fruit from a tree. The windows were all smashed and the front door looked like a replacement for the original door. A casualty of The Chaos, if Alejandro ever saw one. And he did, he saw many of them.
“Where is everyone?” Charlie asked.
Charlie’s voice was far away to Alejandro, because he was still captivated by the odd beauty of the shanty town. It would have taken the people who built these structures months to do, and that’s without counting the time it would take to find the different parts that comprised them.
Yeah, it wasn’t a place anyone would be dying to live in given other options, but there were no other options. That was the beauty, or at least some of the beauty, behind the rundown town, that the people who had dedicated their time and energy to build this had known that this was what they had to do for survival. This was as close to civilization as they would get. They would have to reconstruct the damaged building and then find materials to build a makeshift town to surround it.
In his head he had a number of how many survivors were with Bill Goldenburg, and it had been somewhere between five and ten others, for no particular reason that was the number that had been floating in his head. But now, he knew that the number had to be at least double that.
“Do you think they’re out getting food?” Charlie stacked another question when his first one didn’t get an answer.
“I don’t know, mijo.” Alejandro took his seatbelt off and got out.
The fence surrounding the town was an engineered patchwork of pieces of different fences held together by wire. At the front of it was a door with a rusty padlock that was unlocked. He wasn’t sure why, but it seemed to be a bad omen, and his hope flickered.
“Quedate en el carro.” Alejandro said to Charlie as he walked toward town.
“No, Pa, last time we split up—“
“Callate!”
Charlie hushed up and watched his dad walk away. Coldness chilled the pit of his stomach.
Alejandro pushed past the fence, and like everything else seemed to do nowadays, it squeaked on its hinges. If there were survivors—or monsters—they had been alerted of their presence twice by now. Once when the tires had screeched and just now when the hinges wailed out into the still air.
The “roads” of the town were a mixture of dirt and trash. Alejandro stayed on the main one that led straight down to the actual building that stood at the other end of the town.
It was like walking through a ghost town, and not just in the sense of the expression, it looked the part too. He peered through the “windows” of the structures, which were just holes cut out on the walls with a slanted piece of wood on their sills meant to keep out the rain during the storms (Alejandro didn’t think they worked well, evidenced by the water stained ground inside the structures).
The people had tried their best to turn this into a town, alright. There was a saloon made up of mostly sidings from different houses and a tin roof with holes in it. The bar table inside was nothing more than a long dinner tabletop sitting on a pile of rubble. Some computer chairs that had been converted to barstools by nailing some pieces of wood to the seats lined up against the bar table.
Walking past the saloon, he looked into a structure that was a butcher shop. A counter made in similar fashion as the bar table, but with stacks of phone books sandwiched in between the cement blocks to even them out, filled most of the space. Behind the counter was a wooden table stained brown with old blood and stained red with newer blood. What had once been used to cut slabs of meat by the town butcher was now being used by flying insects as a helipad. They buzzed and dined in excitement, jumping on and off the table with glee. On the wall behind it was a rack where knives and other cutting tools were put when they weren’t being used, but all of the tools were missing.
Next to the butcher shop was a smaller enclosure with only one chair in it. This was an office chair that had been tinkered with and extra pieces of metal had been bolted on to it to make it go up higher than it was designed to do. The chair was sitting in the middle of a moat of clumps of hair. There was an assortment of colors; black, brown, blonde. Some curly, some straight, some long, some short. Across from the chair was a small bureau with a cracked mirror bolted overtop of it so that the two combined made a parlor. And next to this, to complete the look of the place, was a small sink, a sink so small that it would have been difficult to bathe even a kitten in it.
The two other structures that made up the small town didn’t have defining features like the rest. They were just rectangles made up of scraps of metal (Alejandro thought he saw something that looked like it belonged to a car on the side of one of them) and sheets of wood.
Guided by curiosity once again, Alejandro veered off the main road and went into the closest of these structures. Inside he found barrels and crates lined up on the far wall. He walked over to one of the barrels and lifted the lid.
It was empty, but he caught a whiff of alcohol.
He checked the crate that was next to it, and in this one he saw crumbs of bread a
t the bottom of it, but that was all.
He checked all of the other containers, but they were just as empty, so he left the storage room.
Walking down the rest of the dirt road with his gun pointed in front of him, he got to the building. Up close the damage done to it was more prominent. The blackened parts of the building looked like they would crumble underneath the slightest pressure. Obviously that wasn’t true, because the storms hadn’t disintegrated the building, but the damage was worse than he could tell from afar.
Alejandro pulled the door open, which let a stench that had been brewing up in there come blasting out at him. He pushed past the odor, trying not to cough and walked in.
The last of his hope sank like a ship hit with a torpedo. The browning blood on the wall, the upturned furniture, the smashed out receptionist desk window, all told the story of the struggle that had occurred.
Maybe days ago, maybe hours ago, who knew, the point was that Los Noches had invaded the town. The survivors had used this building as a means to barricade themselves from harm, but it had been no use as suggested by the pieces of wood and nails that lay at each window. Blood ran along the floor, some of it splashed on the walls and ceiling. Not all of the blood shed had been by the humans though, because there were some clumps of black hair stuck in some of the blood stains.
“Dios mio.” Alejandro said under his breath.
The room seemed to sit still, like a river after a bad storm.
Alejandro could hear his own heart beating in his chest. It was so loud that it seemed to hum.
Except it wasn’t his heart humming, there was an actual hum coming from upstairs.
His mind turned back to the task at hand, and he raced up the set of stairs to his left.
Halfway up he could make out a human’s voice, but it wasn’t what he hoped. No, because from here he could tell the voice was coming from an electronic device. His ship of hope had already been shot down, but now it had sunk to the bottom depths of the ocean.
He got to the top of the stairs and then turned right where the voice was coming from, going past two empty offices (what remained of them looked like a tornado had hit them) and an open janitor’s closet covered in blood.
He rounded the corner and entered the room where the voice came from. In the center, somehow remaining untouched was a microphone attached to a radio. Inches away from the microphone was the source of the voice; an old tape recorder playing Bill Goldenburg’s message on repeat.
He fell to his knees, not caring about the impact of his bones crashing into concrete. He stared at the broadcast setup, he thought he had already accepted it, but he hadn’t. Deep inside of him he had had hope that they would have found survivors here, even after seeing how empty the shanty town was, even after seeing the blood on the first floor, even after hearing the message coming from a machine, he thought he would find Bill Goldenburg alive and everything would be alright for them.
That wasn’t the case, and it was a lot harder to accept than he ever imagined. He fell flat on his stomach and buried his face in his arms. Lying in the middle of the floor coated with dust and mouse droppings, he wanted to cry, but he was empty. And that somehow was worse.
The message kept playing, filling the room with the sound of his crushed hopes.
“My name is Bill H. Goldenburg…”
It meant nothing to him. Not anymore.
*
He had no concept of how long he was wallowing for, but he knew he had to pull himself up and go back to Charlie. The thought of telling Charlie that their rescue plan turned out to be a dud made him want to lie back down on the ground, but he couldn’t. Now that the safe haven turned out to be nothing but scraps of metal sitting on a plot of dirt, daytime became valuable once again.
The food he had found in John’s bags had only been a week’s worth. Their own supply—twelve cans of beans—would be depleted in less than a week. The water John had would last them a month, and with the map he found in the pizza shop attic he could locate rivers to restock, so their water supply wasn’t a concern anymore.
It was food they needed to find. The truck would make maneuvering around easier, but that would eventually run out of gas or break down, whichever came first.
He picked himself off the floor and brushed some droppings off the front of his shirt. Then he went back the way he came.
Halfway down the staircase he stopped to look at the aftermath once more, and the scene tugged on his heart like it hadn’t before.
Maybe if we would have gotten here earlier, they would have survived.
Or they would have been one of the dead, one or the other, really.
4
He expected the day to be dark and gloomy, but the opposite was true, the sun was out in full force, shining down with the blaze of a desert sun. It was so bright that he was squinting the entire time he walked back to the truck.
Charlie was sitting in the passenger seat, watching a couple of birds perched on the fence, pecking dirt out of their feathers.
Alejandro leaned by the passenger door and looked over at the birds. He felt some form of envy course through him because birds didn’t have to worry about disappointing their children when they needed them most. They wouldn’t ever have to tell their young that their hope for the past day turned out to be nothing but a recording in an empty room. No, all they had to worry about was feeding their babies until they were old enough to be kicked out of the nest.
His mind turned to the cigarette in his shirt pocket. He had taken it from John’s bags, and for some reason had stuffed it into his shirt and now he had an urge to smoke it. An urge he hadn’t had since his college days. “Charlie, hand me the lighter.”
Charlie grabbed the lighter from the middle console and handed it to him without a word.
Alejandro lit the cigarette and took a drag. Unfamiliar with the burn of the smoke he winced and almost coughed. He held it in for a minute, letting the heat inflate his lungs, and then he exhaled the cloud of smoke. The second drag went down more smoothly, and he could already feel the nicotine calming his nerves.
“I thought you told mom you’d never smoke again.” Charlie said.
“It’s just one.”
“For now.” Charlie retorted.
Alejandro glared at him, and Charlie shrank down in his seat. “It’s the only one I have.”
He blew out another cloud of smoke and watched it fly out into the summer breeze. “We’re too late Charlie.”
Charlie had his legs up on the seat and he was hugging his knees to his chest. “I know, that’s why you’re smoking.”
Alejandro exhaled more smoke. “Yeah Mijo…The message we heard was a recording.”
Charlie nodded and as if he knew all along that they wouldn’t find people. “So now what?”
“I don’t—” he stopped himself. The weight of his words was magnified tenfold in this instance, because Charlie was feeling like he had felt lying in the middle of the dusty floor moments ago. Only he still had hope that Dad would know what to do. “I don’t know right now. But we’ll drive until we find someone.”
He didn’t want the cigarette anymore. It was stinky and his throat was beginning to numb. He flicked it on the ground and stomped on it. It would be his last one, for good. He made his way around the truck and slid into the driver’s seat.
“Do you think there’s anyone else out there?” Charlie asked.
“Yeah, there has to be.” Alejandro said.
“What if they try to kill us?”
“Then we’ll have to kill them first.”
Charlie squeezed his knees closer to his body. “Dad, I’m scared.”
Alejandro put his hand on his back. “We’ll be okay, Mijo.”
Charlie nodded, but Alejandro knew behind his eyes there was still worry. And nothing he could have said would have changed that.
He stuck the key into the ignition and turned the truck on. Just like he told Charlie, he wasn’t sure what their plan was goin
g to be from here on out, but he’d drive around until something popped into his head. As long as they could keep finding food and surviving, opportunities would present themselves. He hoped, anyway.
Alejandro backed the truck up a bit and then maneuvered around the fence. They drove past the makeshift town and Charlie looked into the shelters the way Alejandro had done, realizing for the first time what these thrown together shelters were supposed to be.
Nudging his head toward the town, he asked, “Los Noches got to them, right?”
“Yeah, Charlie.”
“Did you see any dead bodies?”
“No, actually.” This got Alejandro thinking, there had only been blood and bullet holes left behind.
“Other Noches must’ve came back and taken the dead bodies, then.” Charlie suggested.
“Yeah, I guess so. They must eat anything.”
Charlie put his head against the window. “Dad, can I go to sleep?”
Alejandro nodded. “Go ahead.”
Charlie closed his eyes and muttered “I love you”.
Alejandro whispered it back to him, but Charlie was asleep before he could hear him.
5
The whir of the tires and Charlie’s small snores were the only sounds that filled the silence. After a few minutes of this, Alejandro pulled out the map underneath the car seat and spread it out in his lap. In his frustration, he had somehow forgotten that he did have a plan B. There was a river up ahead that he had circled. It wasn’t much of a plan, but at least it was direction for now.
He hit the brakes and put the truck in park to look over the map. The sudden stop of the vehicle woke Charlie up.
He looked out the window and saw nothing but lines of trees surrounding the road they were on. Turning to Alejandro he said, “Why’d we stop?”
Without taking his eyes off the map he said, “I’m trying to figure out where we are.”
“Oh,” Charlie said, sitting up and rubbing his puffy eyes. “You figured out where we’re going?”
“Sort of.”
“What do you mean?” Charlie leaned over the console to look at the map.