by J. F. Krause
Walking down the hall, she knocked on the first door she came to, but there was no answer. She tried this all along the first three floors before she got a response halfway down the top regular hotel room floor. A tiny whimper seemed to reply to her knock. The door was locked and Lori had no way to gain entry, so she memorized the room number and ran down to the lobby once again to get the key or a master key for the hotel room that held some sign of life. She feared she was rescuing an orphaned baby, but she knew she had no choice but to learn who was waiting behind the door.
Finding an electronic key that seemed to be something like a master key, Lori ran back up only to learn that it didn’t work on any door she tried. Back at the front desk she slowly and methodically tried working out the system for unlocking the guest rooms. In the end, she resorted to rummaging through the pockets of the head housekeeper whom she found on the very top floor in the entry to one of the honeymoon suites on the top floor. The suite was empty except for the cleaning woman and her cart blocking the door.
Running back to the room where she heard the whimpering sounds, she carefully inserted the key in the door. There, scampering away from the door as it opened, was a tiny ball of champagne colored curls. Surprised, Lori found herself staring into the soft, sad eyes of a poodle puppy. The puppy, who was wearing no collar was so eager to be picked up that it didn’t wait for her to put her hands down to pick it up. It leapt into her extended hands and tried to climb her arms to her face. Behind it, on the large double bed of the room was the body of an older man. The puppy had been on the floor when it’s owner died and had been forever separated by a mere twenty insurmountable inches from the man it loved. There in Lori’s open palms, it shivered and burrowed, looking for safety and comfort from a human stranger.
Something about this little bit of frightened need touched Lori, and she found herself crying uncontrollably as the shock of what was happening gave way to horrified understanding. She stepped back out into the hallway and slid down the wall next to the room she had just entered and now vacated. Holding the puppy, she cried until there were no tears left to wet her eyes. The puppy burrowed its way into her lap and her heart over the next hour. It wanted only to be nestled in the arms of its newfound rescuer.
After her hour of grief, she tried to call her mom, her dad, her fiancé, her best friend, her brother in Tampa. She called everyone she knew and got no takers. Her heart was breaking and she slowly came to realize that she had might have just been chosen a winner of the worst lottery in history.
She picked herself up, lifted the puppy to her chest, and went down to the employee kitchen once more. As she entered, the puppy whimpered, recognizing the smell of death that had filled its little lungs for so long now. Lori decided to find out if she were holding a little girl or a little dog. And that’s how Lori came to be the new owner of little Rocky, named in honor of the school mascot for her university.
Lori grabbed a bag and loaded it with some snacks, lots of water, and a little cord to tie around Rocky’s neck in case she wanted to let him walk. She wondered for a moment if he was actually an adult of very tiny size or a puppy, but after a few seconds of inspection, she decided he was, in fact, still just a puppy. His puppyhood status was strengthened when he peed almost as soon as she put him on the floor. He either wasn’t house trained yet, or he was very ready to pee. The fact that he didn’t lift his leg when he peed added to the mounting evidence that he was still quite young, that and his teeth. He really wanted to chew on Lori or whatever was near his mouth. She figured her mom would know as soon as she got him home. She was only about two miles and should be there in an hour or so. Thinking about Rocky had been a nice diversion but thinking about her mom brought it all back to her.
The walk was surreal. On almost every block she saw cars that had come to rest at odd angles, or dead bodies in or out of cars. There were a couple of minor pile ups that must have formed when someone lost control of their car as they felt the first moments of pain associated with The Sickness.
Lori got home about three in the afternoon, and her worst fears were confirmed. Her mother was sitting in front of the television which was now broadcasting only static. Looking around, she found her father’s car in the ditch just outside on the street, just seconds from the garage. The garage door was already open and waiting for him. He was half in and half out of the driver’s seat, probably trying to lean out of the car as he felt the urge to vomit. For a few moments, Lori sat on the back steps and wept for her loved ones. Now she knew why no one was answering their cell phones. She was alone.
Over the next hour, she brought her dad onto the back porch and moved her mom beside him. She wondered about her brother in Tampa, but decided that if he were alive he would come to the family home. She also came to accept that Ron, her fiancé, was most likely dead and that she might never find him. She managed to get her dad’s car into the garage and closed the door. Then she cleaned up the mess that had surrounded her parents where they fell victim to The Sickness. Realizing she was alone now, and wondering if anyone anywhere was alive, she decided to bury them both in the family backyard. She had never done anything like burying any someone and didn’t have a clear idea how to go about it, but she set to work anyway. It was exhausting work, even in the moist soil in the backyard, but she got a large hole dug. She wasn’t ready to just give up on finding help so she decided to put off the actual burial until tomorrow. Right now, it was late and Lori made the decision to take a shower, get some sleep, and worry about what to do next when she woke up the next morning.
As Lori awakened the next morning to puppy noises, she realized that something else was different this morning. Instead of just the birds and cicadas, she heard a siren in the distance. The sound was faint, but she heard it and knew it hadn’t been there yesterday. There hadn’t been any sirens since the day the emergency calls came through. This was new, and it had to mean there was someone else alive and not too far away. Even as she listened, she heard another sound that seemed much closer. It sounded like an ice cream truck, the kind that came round the neighborhoods in the summer and sold ice cream to kids in the neighborhoods. She had just begun to think about how to get to the siren that seemed to be coming from downtown Asheville, but now that she heard the ice cream truck, she decided to look for it first. Why would there be an ice cream truck? Where were the police!
Holding Rocky gently, Lori quietly ran to where she could see the ice cream truck driving slowly up the block just to the east of her street. There, sitting in the driver’s seat was a woman and next to her was a little boy. Lori recognized the boy’s face but didn’t know his name. She didn’t know which house was his, but she knew he was from the neighborhood. He seemed fine so she called to the driver. After a few seconds, she saw the truck’s brake lights so she ran up to the little van. The woman smiled and extended her hand. Without any hesitation Lori hugged the driver and then the boy, a bright red haired eight year-old named Tyler. The driver was about Lori’s age and appeared just as happy to see Lori as Lori was to see her.
Within moments, Kenya was on the radio to someone at Pack Square Park in downtown Asheville telling them about Lori. Lori spoke to a very young man who turned out to be 14. He was one of the organizers for their group!
Lori stayed with Kenya as they made their rounds and thanks to Tyler’s sharp eyes and ears, they found a little girl waving and crying from the balcony of a third floor apartment. They were now about a mile from Lori’s home that was farther up the hills.
By noon, Lori was meeting some other survivors from Asheville. She also met the 14 year-old who was responsible for almost everything that was going on in town so far. During the afternoon of the day before, Keith had made contact with another teenager from California who was talking a group of internet savvy young people and a few older adults through the steps they needed to take in order to get survivors together.
The California kid, Todd, was following directions from someone named Robert or Bobby.
Todd used ‘Bobby’ and ‘Robert’ interchangeably. Robert was setting up some sort of self-help rescue operation in Los Angeles or Orange County. Again, it was impossible to tell which was which since Todd used ‘LA’, ‘Los Angeles’, ‘Orange County’, ‘The OC’ and even a place called ‘the library’ interchangeably, too. Keith had started things off by finding and setting up a search light the previous evening and aiming it in the sky. It was easy enough to find since, just a couple of nights before, he had been to a concert there, and there had been several searchlights crisscrossing each other all through the performance.
Bobby told people, through Todd, to find some HAM radios and they did. He told them to get searchlights up in the night sky so they did that, too. By following Bobby’s directions that night and in the days that followed, the Asheville group found people in their own city and in the towns all around them. According to Bobby, isolation would mean certain death for young children and there was no time to lose. By concentrating on children, though, the Asheville group ended up finding people of all ages all around them. There weren’t many survivors, so every single one of them made a difference.
Lori spent the rest of the day with the group helping out; then she told them she wanted to go home to bury her parents. She wanted to get it taken care of before their bodies began to deteriorate much further. Kenya offered to go with her, and Lori gratefully accepted.
During the first days, a man named Monzell who had been a construction foreman on one of the big building projects downtown became the natural leader of the still small group of survivors. Effortlessly, Monzell became the go to guy for the growing little community, much to Keith’s evident relief. As soon as Keith heard anything from Todd he relayed it to Monzell. Soon, the group was organized enough to start checking out surrounding towns for survivors. Over the next few days, just like communities all over the world, they found people who could do what needed to be done and they began to feel like they might survive.
They made a move to the neighborhood adjacent to the university and set up salvage, repair, child care, education, sanitation and other ad hoc committees very similar to what SLO was doing.
Then Lori got very personal. She had tears in her eyes as she told me the rest. “Bobby, we were scared to death when all this happened. We were paralyzed by grief and fear and we weren’t going to be able to do anything useful for days, maybe weeks, if it hadn’t been for you telling us what to do next. By the time we would have got around to doing anything, we were probably going to be without electricity and even running water, and who knows how many children would have been lost. Without water and electricity, we might never have gotten organized and certainly not to the extent we are now. While all of us were waiting for the government to do something, the government was already gone. But then, out of the blue, we had a government again, and it was you, Bobby. If you want to know why we saved your house, and why people toast ‘to Bobby’ everywhere, it’s because you took charge. You may not have known what you were doing, but you did something when no one else could.
I still remember the first time I saw your face on that screen. Keith and his little band of nerds had set up a big screen for all of us to see you as you talked about what we could expect. I remember thinking at first that you were Todd, the 16 year old boy who connected everyone up over the Internet. Then, when I realized that very young man on the screen was responsible for most of us being together and for us starting to plan for the future, I couldn’t help but smile. Some of our group even laughed. You couldn’t hear us, thank goodness. I know it sounds disrespectful, but there you are. I suspect most groups had the same reaction. Then, when you started talking, I realized that it didn’t matter how old you were, and honestly Bobby, you do look young. You’re only a couple of years older than I am, and you look even younger. So, I hope you can forgive us for laughing. It was sort of cathartic, maybe. Here we were, and the person we were all sort of obeying was this sweet young man who looked like a high school senior. But, once you started talking the laughter died down fast.
I remember you told us that we had to voluntarily keep our communities going because there wasn’t any money to pay us, and that if we offered people money to work, it wouldn’t mean anything anyway since all the money now was worthless. Most of us hadn’t thought of anything like that. You told us things that seem so obvious now, but they were all new then. I remember you telling us we were all like millionaires on a desert island with nothing to spend our money on because everything was free.
You told us that we had to stay connected because among all the American, Canadian, and Mexican surviving communities, we had enough doctors, engineers, teachers, and all the other professions we needed if we were to rebuild civilization, but that all of us would have to stay connected. From the very beginning you were talking to us about rebuilding and preserving. I was just sort of living day by day, and you were not only talking about what to do right then, but also what to do next. I started to feel just a little less dead inside as you talked.
You advised us not pass too many laws because no one had to stick around to obey them, and that all we could realistically do was pass ‘suggestions’. You told us we were either going to be our own saviors or our own tormentors. A lot of us woke up during that speech, and we’ve never been the same. Who knows how long it would have taken if you hadn’t laid it all out for us. From that moment on, no one cared about how young you were, or how innocent you looked. You were the man, Bobby. We weren’t alone anymore. We finally had a government again, but this time it was us. Really us!
I’m glad you decided you’re okay with us preserving your home. We’ve earned the right to have our own heroes, and to pick our own heroes. The other day, on the radio, when we heard you tell those men from Iran and Egypt that women were always going to be treated equally to men in the Coalition, every woman I know smiled, because we knew you meant it. Listening to you talk to them, it was so obvious what we could have become, but we didn’t. And we didn’t because you became our leader.
No, I’m not sure leader is the word I want to use. You’re more like a navigator. You give us all the information you can, all the advice you have, and you leave it to us to steer our own courses. You’re our navigator, and we’re all on board with everyone who’s just as lost and scared as we are. That’s the brutal truth. But the truth was what we needed to hear. Right then we might have liked for someone to just take over and give us orders, but we got someone who helped us take care of ourselves, instead. You told us that day that we don’t have a safety net, and there’s not going to be any do-overs. The only way to survive this catastrophe was to be kind to each other and to help each other and to figure out a plan. Asheville’s doing okay now, but we’re okay in spite of being scared out of our minds. I was confident before The Sickness. I thought I knew what I was going to do with my life. Confidence isn’t enough, though.
This world isn’t anything like what it was before. Now, we don’t have hunger or poverty. For the first time, and I hope for a long time to come, we have, at least here in the Coalition, not just the hope, but the expectation that we can do this and do it right.
She paused for a long moment, and since I couldn’t think of a thing to say in response, the driver said it for us all. “Preach on, Sister!”
We laughed, but then Lori added, “A year and a half ago, I wouldn’t have known what I was talking about just now. Now, it’s everyday conversation. I still wake up scared, but I do my part. I think everyone is scared every day when they wake up, and they do their parts, too. I remember something the effect that courage was being afraid and doing what had to be done anyway. If that’s what courage is, we’re all courageous. And so are you, Bobby. I’m not sure anyone even thinks to tell you that. You’re brave and you’re the navigator, reluctant or not, for a lot of brave people. And while I wake up afraid and brave every morning, I’m also glad I’m alive. I didn’t feel that way for a long time, but I feel that way now. You’re a big part of tha
t, Bobby. I hope you’ll let us show our thanks with a few little gestures like preserving your childhood home for the future. Like you said, money is useless. This is one of the only ways we can say thank you. ”
The front seat gave a hearty round of agreement to what Lori had just said. I started to tear up, right along with Lori, but before I could work up a genuine blubber, we pulled onto my old Main Street. Twelve people live in my hometown now. None of them are natives. Out of about three or four thousand residents when I lived here, it appears that only I survived.
All of the people who choose to live there now do so because they were doing something almost no one ever did when I was a kid. They breed and manage a good sized, and growing, area-wide goat herd whose sole purpose was to help control kudzu, along with a lot of carefully applied herbicide, of course. They also produce goat cheese: Kudzu fed goat cheese. I made a note to myself to look into this as an occupation when I quit being the Executive Director of the Coalition.
A couple of blocks off Main Street, my house wasn’t new or big. There weren’t that many new ones because my hometown wasn’t growing much when the end came. New kids at school were a novelty, and most of them came from nearby counties.
Most of the time we lived in that house, it was just Mom and me. She taught school at one of the two fairly small elementary schools in town. As I walked through the house, it was really surprising how well they had done getting the house back to the way it was. We didn’t own it, of course. We rented. I think Mom always thought she would leave when I graduated from high school, and we did. In a lot of ways I’m a lot like her; she tended to think long term and I guess I took after her in that. She managed to become an assistant principal at an elementary school in a suburb just north of Atlanta, and we moved to Sandy Springs so I could go to Georgia State. Money was always tight, and in the beginning, I took MARTA to school every day. MARTA was the light rail and subway system in Atlanta. A couple of years later into college, I was able to buy a car, but I still took MARTA most days. On Saturdays, I groomed dogs just down the street from our house, and I worked at the college bookstore during the day between classes. Before I even graduated, I had a job offer to teach in Orange County, California. I know Mom hated to see me go, but she wanted me to spread my wings. I think she knew I wasn’t going to get married and settle down in Georgia.