by J. F. Krause
Caleb’s smiling face was enough to reassure her that all was well. Falah noticed that he, too, had yet another bag that matched Leila’s expensive looking luggage collection. Of course, Falah also took in the three rifles slung over Samir’s shoulder as well as the belts of ammunition he carried. Samir had a backpack of his own, but Falah doubted it carried much in the way of clothing.
As soon as they could manage, they made it into Ari’s apartment where Magda immediately insisted on hearing everyone’s story. Sadly, everyone had the same experiences only with different names and places.
By the time Ari arrived a couple of hours later, everyone was sorted out and Magda was ready to drop Leila over the veranda wall. She complained about having to drag her bags all the way from the government shelter where she’d spent the night with people who died in the most disgusting ways; she complained that she didn’t have a room of her own; she complained she was expected to help with getting dinner prepared and served.
When Ari walked into the room and saw the new additions, he was both relieved and alarmed. It was good to have more adults, but he was starting to worry that there were children who were not going to be found and who would die if they were left alone. He needed to form a plan, but he hardly knew how to begin. Also, they really needed to be gone from Beirut as soon as possible. Already, he could smell the rising stench of the corpses that were literally everywhere.
“Ari, let me introduce you to Caleb’s brother, Samir. He went to the hospital after he saw Caleb’s note, just as we hoped. He also brought Leila Moussa, the widow of our former assistant minister of transportation, or something, and young Khalil Saab. Samir has an interesting story to tell. Will you tell us all again so my son can here it, too? Do you mind?” Magda, as always was very polite, but Ari could tell there had to be more, just from the way she was conducting herself. He suspected it had to do with Leila.
“Of course, I’ll be happy to. I was pulled from my usual job guarding the offices of the president when the government received word that a manufactured virus had been released across the globe. This was at least five hours before the curfew was ordered. The government knew before anyone else because the people responsible sent out a boastful warning. As a precaution, the government gathered up high level officials and their families and sheltered them in the bunkers under the Department of Justice. There were over 800 of them there, and my unit was stationed outside. There were over two hundred of us soldiers. We only found out what was happening after we were in place around the perimeter. For several hours, we waited but nothing happened. Then, one by one, my fellow soldiers, including the officers, began collapsing. We all know what that looked like. At first I tried to stand my ground, but then the shelter sort of erupted as people began to stream out, only to collapse within a few minutes. Finally, I was the last one standing so I went into the shelter to see if I could find anyone to tell me what I should do. That’s when I met Leila. At first, I was inclined to help her and do as she asked, but then I realized that with everyone dead, I didn’t have any officers to answer to. I told Leila she could come with me, but I needed to check on my family. She insisted on bringing all her luggage and her two dogs. I don’t mind the dogs; they’re actually very well behaved. But the luggage got to be too much. I was just about to put a stop to it when Khalil showed up and I had other things to think about. Khalil lives down the street from my parents’ home. He was looking out the window of his house when he saw me and thought the Army was coming to the rescue. Well, maybe I did, sort of, but he came running out to us, and I realized I couldn’t leave him alone right now. So I said he could come with me, too, but he would need to get some clothes and some family pictures because I didn’t know if we would be coming back again. It took him only a few minutes and as soon as he was ready, we took off again for my parents’ apartment which was only a few hundred meters ahead. Leila commandeered his help with her luggage, and I only had one bag to carry for her after that.
Once I saw my apartment, I hurried inside where I found my parents and my grandmother. After I put their bodies at rest, I looked for Caleb and Hana. It was too much to bear, though. I was very weary from being up all night and from all that has happened since this all began. When I sat down to think about what to do next, I fell asleep for what turned out to be several hours. Leila fell asleep, too, and Khalil was reluctant to wake us. Anyway, I didn’t find Caleb’s note until after I woke up. Actually, it was Khalil who found it and gave it to me. He‘d found it while I was sleeping and knew I would want to read it. That’s when I went straight to the hospital where I found Caleb waiting for me, just as he said in his note. I want to say, now, and again, that I am not Leila’s servant or her steward and neither is Caleb or Hana or Khalil. Caleb and Hana like it here with you, Dr. Haddad, but I am no one’s servant. I will help and do my part, but …”
Ari interrupted him. “Understood, Samir. And I agree. No one is anyone else’s servant. We all carry our own weight, no matter how small we may be. We are equals. Do you agree to that?”
“Yes, sir. I agree.”
“While we’re at it, do you all agree to do your part and to be equals together as we try to survive this terrible experience?”
Ari saw every head nod except for Leila, who gave him a cold stare in reply.
“Leila, are you alright with everyone doing their share of work and to treating each other as equals?”
For a moment, it looked like Leila was going to disagree. But finally, she smiled her best princess-like smile and agreed to the little covenant they had all just made to each other. He wasn’t too concerned whether she agreed with him or not since right now, he had other things on his mind.
“But when the government emerges from…” Leila paused to find the right word “seclusion, what then? I will not be abused. My husband will not be pleased if I am… treated with disrespect.”
“Leila, no one will treat you with disrespect, or, as you put it, abuse you. But I’m pretty sure that the government, probably all of them, died when everyone else died. And I’m terribly sorry to have to say this, but I think your husband may be…” Ari was looking for words, too. How do you tell a woman in denial that her husband is dead? So he decided to just say it: “I believe your husband is dead. I’m sorry, but there isn’t going to be a government to save us. And the only Army coming to our rescue is already here.” Ari nodded at Samir when he said that.
Ari would have said more, but Leila looked as if she had been slapped. An intake of breath later and her pent up fear, grief, and loss manifested itself as a sharp wail of pain. The baby started crying in Magda’s arms, Helene ran to grab Ari around his left leg, and the older children withdrew into a small knot behind Samir. Dietrich, however, reached out to pat her on the shoulder knowing very well himself the pain she was feeling. For a moment, Ari was afraid she would push him away, or worse, but then, unexpectedly, Leila pulled little Dietrich into her bosom like a security pillow. Then, for a brief moment, Ari was afraid she might break his small body in her crushing embrace, and he instinctively reached out to disentangle Dietrich from her arms as she broke into great waves of sobbing. Just before removing him from Leila’s arms, Ari could clearly see that Dietrich was safe and that he was giving her the only consolation she could accept at the moment.
The room collectively sighed. But immediately, Falah came running in from the veranda where she had been on watch. “Ari, there are three people on the other side of the park. It looks like two of them are soldiers. The other is a woman, but I don’t think the woman is with the men, or at least she’s not a soldier.”
Upon hearing this, Samir grabbed one of the rifles and took a position on the veranda where he could see the small group of people about halfway across the park. Magda reflexively sent the children, including the baby into the kitchen where it was a bit more protected. Hana held the baby, and Leila, now somewhat under control, corralled Dietrich and Helene. Magda and Falah returned to the veranda to help keep watch on
the newcomers.
While this was going on, Samir had summoned Caleb over to take his place and was quickly exiting the apartment. His last words before descending the stairwell were simply “United Nations”. As Ari digested that last bit of information, all he could think of was that they had been saved. But he still maintained his vigil from the veranda.
In very short order, Samir was back at the building with the three people in tow and asking to be buzzed into the building. Upon hearing him ask for ‘Magd, their safe word, they relaxed only slightly. But Ari was having difficulty understanding why the United Nations was sending two soldiers only. Surely they would have come with loud-speakers or trucks.
As soon as he saw the soldiers, though, Ari knew he had misinterpreted Samir’s words. These UN soldiers were survivors like the rest of the people in Ari’s apartment, and they were accompanied by a very pregnant young woman.
With Falah, Caleb, and Khalil now on watch and the smallest children settled in the den with Hana, Ari and the other adults got right to work making sense of what was happening.
They quickly learned that the young woman’s name was Tara, who, in very broken Arabic explained that she was due to give birth in less than two months and that she was from a small Yazidi refugee compound on the south side of Beirut. Her family, including her husband, had died the night before. She recognized the UN soldiers by their colors when they drove past her home a few hours before and had flagged them down. Since then, they had been able to communicate only by using hand signals since her Arabic was poor and theirs was even worse. The soldiers had managed to communicate with each other somewhat better since Portuguese and Italian are both
Romance languages. While no one in the apartment spoke either of those languages, Magda, who grew up speaking French, another Romance language, provided a convoluted interpretion. Between broken language translations, they all learned each others’ stories.
Emilio and Joao had been assigned to the UN base in Naqoura in extreme southern Lebanon. When everyone died, they had stumbled across each other and decided to find a safer location in a Christian quarter of Beirut. Achrafieh was the only place both of them had been to previously so they more or less arbitrarily decided to arrive here hoping to find more survivors. At this point, they wanted to go home and knew they needed help. The death toll everywhere had been much worse than they expected when they set off, and now they were at a loss as to what to do. They were both very young and Ari couldn’t help but feel badly for them. All he could do was offer them a place with the group, and hope they could get them to a place where they could find their way home.
With that, Ari made watch assignments and they all found places to sleep for the night. With so many people in his apartment, actual beds were double and even triple occupied. Ari’s bed was given over to three boys, and Ari was relegated to one of the large recliners that sat in what had been a sitting area of his good-sized master bedroom. The other recliner was occupied by Samir. The floor was assigned to Emilio and Joao.
The other two smaller bedrooms were parceled out to the various females of the group. But with everyone on a watch assignment of three hours, and with three people per watch, none of the rooms were fully occupied during the night. Ari was scheduled for the middle watch with Caleb and Hana, but when he woke up, he discovered his watch rotation had been taken by his mother and Tara. Neither of them had been on the schedule and both felt capable and wanted to give Ari a bit more rest.
Ari had slept right through the night, including his watch waking up only when Helene came in to give him her usual good morning kiss. For a moment he forgot what had happened and stretched happily, wondering why he was fully clothed and sleeping on the recliner. His moment of forgetfulness was short-lived as he abruptly remembered the new world order.
Coming out to the den, he discovered he’d slept through his watch and instantly felt like he’d let everyone down until his mother explained what had happened.
“Tara and I took your place since you left us off the watch list. We want you to be at your best today. You have a lot of responsibility on your shoulders. Don’t worry, no one is unhappy. Even Leila was happy to let you sleep in. She’s a changed woman, by the way. I was ready to give her the boot, but she’s actually a very nice woman. And she’s taken over with Noelle, and Dietrich won’t leave her side. That’s good for everyone since little Helene is quite enough for me right now.“
“Has anyone checked the internet lately? Is there anything going on, anywhere?”
“Actually I think you should talk to Falah. She says there’s someone in California who’s helping people get organized. She’s in the office. I think Caleb’s there, too.”
As Ari soon found out, all the older survivors who weren’t on watch or on childcare duty were in the office. They were all listening to someone named Todd who was giving instructions on what they should be doing. Ari quickly learned that Todd was actually passing along directions from someone named Bobby who was the leader of a good-sized group in Los Angeles. After looking at the list of things he was recommending the do, Ari realized that some of them weren’t practical in such a fractured city as Beirut, but he had to agree with the need to quickly gather as many survivors together as possible. He felt a little remiss when Todd kept stressing that children and infants would have to sought out since they wouldn’t be out and about on their own. He hadn’t thought of dogs getting hungry and becoming dangerous, nor had he thought about most of the other things the Californians were doing. In Beirut it was just too dangerous.
Even as he was starting to think about what he was hearing from this Bobby person, the power went out. It wasn’t wholly unexpected, but it was a major disappointment nevertheless. Fortunately, Falah had been on the internet long enough to know that the California people were going to relocate to someplace not as impacted by rotting corpses. They were already setting up schools and were working on keeping power going. For the first time since this had all started, Ari was beginning to think there might be hope. But they wouldn’t be able to turn on sirens and point searchlights into the sky. There were too many people out and about who might not be safe to his small group of survivors. Even as he was thinking about what they should be doing, he realized that his group might be one of the larger ones in existence in Beirut right now. Like it or not, they were going to have to get better organized and start finding other survivors. In the end, there was safety in numbers.
Ari asked Caleb to gather every one on the veranda for a group meeting. The apartment, without electricity and water, was going to be an impossible place to stay before long. They needed to find survivors even while they were making the transfer to the yacht. As he thought about the yacht, he wondered if it was going to be large enough to safely transport all of them all the way to Cypress. If something went wrong there was no hope of rescue. Maybe he needed to find a larger yacht. There were plenty of them to choose from. Unfortunately, as far as he could tell, he was the only one in the group with any boating experience, aside from his mother, of course. But Magda didn’t really inspire confidence when it came to the smallish family yacht, let alone a larger and more complicated later model yacht. It couldn’t be helped. Beirut wouldn’t be safe for much longer and they had to get out. In the short term, he though about relocating to St. Sophia’s, the family church a few streets past the park. They shouldn’t have to contend with many dead bodies there. He’d bring it all up at the veranda meeting.
As everyone assembled on the rather large veranda, Magda brought him an egg sandwich. Seeing it he realized he was ravenous and for the first time since he was a boy, he actually talked while he was eating.
“The power has gone out in our building. I suspect it’s out all over Beirut. We need to consider relocating to someplace nearby so that we can have some room to gather supplies for the trip to Cypress. I’m going to suggest St. Sophia’s Church on the other side of the park. You can see the dome from here if you look to the east past the first row of apar
tment buildings. I don’t think we’ll encounter many of the dead there, and they have an enclosed courtyard so we can create a latrine. Does anyone have anything to add or ask?”
“Will it be safe there? As safe as it is here?” Hana was only nine but she clearly had a head on her shoulder?
“I honestly don’t know. Samir or Emilio or Joao might know better, but I’m pretty sure that nowhere really is safe anymore. Right now, I think we are sitting ducks for any bad people. And I know that soon, everywhere in Beirut will become unbearable because of the dead bodies everywhere.”
No one seemed to have anything to say about the move so Ari asked Emilio and Joao to check it out when the meeting was over.
“We need to seriously gather supplies for our trip to Cypress. Mother, uh, Magda, will you work with Falah, Leila, and Hana to start getting that going? I’m going to leave it up to you to figure out how and what. And Tara, you’re going to be here all the time to look after the three little ones. Can you do that?” Everyone seemed okay with their jobs so far so he plowed ahead.
“Next, we need to look for more survivors. Samir, you and Caleb know the area. We just have to go door to door and see if we can identify anyone who might be hiding out, and be very aware that we need to look for children. Some of them may actually hide from you. I don’t know what to do about that, but do your best and be careful. People might shoot intruders, but we have to do what we can.
“Finally, I’m going to take Khalil and head down to the marina again to look for a bigger boat. I don’t think my dad’s yacht is going to be big enough for all of us. There are 14 of us, including baby Noelle. And the dogs, of course. Anybody have anything the want to say?”