Grants Pass

by Cherie Priest

  He shared a FEMA trailer with several other single men for a few weeks. Once he had managed to liquidate his assets, he paid cash and rented a vacation chateau outside Maggie Valley. In those last days, watching the news became an obsession for some; bleak images played out while monotone news anchors read what would become an epitaph for a nation. Every day seemed to bring another upheaval and new tales of tragedy.

  When word of the plagues came, Ethan reluctantly abandoned the comforts of civilization and headed into the wilderness. A trilogy of epidemics arrived to trounce humanity, causing excruciating deaths in city after city across the globe. And it was all done by terrorists.

  He settled in an abandoned cabin built by the Civilian Conservation Corps deep in the heart of the Smoky Mountains. Situated along a spur connecting to the Appalachian Trail, the place had long been frequented by hikers and was by no means a secret. Ethan expected others to join him, woke up daily expecting to see another survivor staggering up the mountainside eyeing the ribbon of smoke spilling from the chimney.

  None came.

  Beginning in July, he hiked to Newfound Gap weekly. He had once told Hannah to look for him there should anything happen to separate them — in reality, it was more a joke than a plan: He teased her that if bill collectors became too demanding or litigious, he would have to stage his own death.

  Like everyone else born in the second half of the 20th century, when confrontational superpowers waged an unending war of words bolstered by enough nuclear warheads to reduce the planet to a smoldering cinder, Ethan had dreamed of a global holocaust. Though he had imagined end-of-the-world scenarios, he never really expected any of his wild, apocalyptic nightmares to unfold. Unlike his recent acquaintance Lamar, he was no survivalist. He simply knew how to effectively remove himself from society — and he had good enough sense to know when it was time to leave.

  “Ethan,” Lamar called to him from the market. “Hey, Ethan — what do you want for lunch?”

  “Not hungry.” Ethan shambled along the sidewalk, peering through store windows. Some windows had been shattered, merchandise strewn across the floor inside the shop. Looters had carried off goods after law enforcement failed, too short-sighted to realize they would have little time to enjoy the acquisitions. “I’d like to go ahead and find a couple vehicles.”

  He had found Lamar at Newfound Gap. Actually, Lamar found him. Ethan had left notes posted on the wall of the Rockefeller Memorial in hopes of reuniting with Hannah. The notes read:

  Hannah: I’m alive. Wait for me here. Build a fire if you can — I’ll see the smoke. I’ll be back in less than seven days. I miss you. Ethan.

  Lamar found the note and waited four days for Ethan to return.

  “We’ll find something at that dealership I told you about in Sevierville.” Lamar emerged from the market with pockets packed. He carried a bottle of water in one hand and several packs of beef jerky in the other. “We’ve got a long haul ahead of us. You should grab some grub, boy.”

  Although Ethan was a good 25 years younger than Lamar, he still winced at being called ‘boy’.

  “I’ll get something later. No sense leaving ‘til morning,” Ethan said, watching as the sun drifted low over the ridge embracing the city. “I’d like to clean up, get a good night’s sleep in a comfortable bed.”

  “Sure, sure. There are plenty of vacant hotel rooms. But the service at the restaurants is lousy.” Lamar caught up with Ethan and handed him a bottle of water. “Drink something at least. We’ll hunker down for the night and head out in the morning, just in case your girlfriend shows up. We’d see the smoke from here, I reckon.”

  “Yeah,” he nodded. He looked over his shoulder to the southeast, back toward Mount LeConte and Newfound Gap. “I know it’s crazy to think she’s still out there. It’s just hard for me to convince myself I won’t see her again.”

  “You never know. We might find her out west.”

  Lamar had convinced Ethan to join him in a cross-country trek. Someone else had been up on Newfound Gap recently; and, like Ethan, they had left a message. The mystery survivors provided no indication of their identity, no note to specify their point of origin or the number travelling in their party. They left a road map, highlighting their destination — like a beacon for stragglers, a welcome objective for the vestiges of humanity.

  The map pointed them toward Grants Pass, Oregon.

  JOURNAL ENTRY, TUESDAY, OCT. 17, 0001 AE:

  Goodbye, Gatlinburg. Goodbye, Newfound Gap. Goodbye, Hannah.

  JOURNAL ENTRY, THURSDAY, OCT. 19, 0001 AE:

  Spent today exploring Nashville. We arrived just before dawn and Lamar thought he saw lights in one of the buildings downtown. We searched for hours but found no one. The smell is awful — sewage, bodies, rotten food. One thing Nashville is not, though, is dead. There are packs of wild dogs, feral cats and rodents everywhere. Lamar had to kill a dog that came after him in a store. If he hadn’t been fast enough, he’d probably be dead. We’ll be more careful.

  ****

  Ethan, driving a late model SUV filled with supplies, watched Lamar in his rear-view mirror. Trailing him on the Interstate, his companion had appropriated an ambulance in St. Louis. Filled with pharmaceuticals and life-saving equipment, Lamar had picked it up outside a hospital emergency room, keys in the ignition and gas tank filled. He even found sodas floating in stagnant water in a portable cooler.

  A mile separated them as they raced toward the setting sun.

  “How are you doing, Theresa?”

  “I want to go home,” the young woman said, her gaze focused on the passing pavement. “I want to go home and see David.”

  “David isn’t there anymore, Theresa.” They had found her wandering around a shopping mall in St. Louis, dehydrated, emaciated and gibbering incoherently. The 29-year-old woman tried to elude them initially, panicking at the sight of strangers and screaming as she fled down the mall’s central corridor. They caught up with her in a darkened department store, convinced her they meant her no harm. “You remember, we went to the house to get him, but he was dead. We buried him in the backyard.”

  “David is my friend,” she said, choking back tears. Whether her delicate mental state existed prior to or resulted from the end of the world did not really matter. They could not leave her to die. So they adopted her. “When will we stop?”

  “Pretty soon,” Ethan said. He preferred to stay off the road at night. He did not want to chance falling asleep at the wheel, particularly with a passenger. “Are you getting tired?”

  “Little bit. Where did everyone go?” Theresa noticed a number of cars parked along the road; shadowy figures slumped over steering wheels or huddled in bony heaps in the weedy scrub. Ethan had already grown used to seeing carcasses, so much so that even the most grisly display of human mortality scarcely fazed him. “Why did they go away?”

  “Well,” Ethan looked at her, trying to find the right words to make the situation clear, trying to summon up a suitable explanation that would not simply serve to inflate her confusion. “Did anyone tell you about the plague when it first happened — about people getting very sick? Lots of people?”

  “David said it was a virus. He said it was like a cold, only worse.”

  “That’s right — it was a virus. Actually, several different ones, all at once.” Ethan remembered the last few days he had lingered in Maggie Valley, watching as the horror spread like wildfire, burning through the population. Governments vowed to contain it, scientists frantically tried to calm the masses. Cities were quarantined. Bulldozers pushed the dead into vast landfills where flames consumed their diseased bodies. Fires burned incessantly, smoke blackened the skies. Seeing no reason to share such unpleasant memories, Ethan tried to change the subject. “Did you have a family? Parents?”

  “Everyone has parents,” she snapped. “Mine couldn’t take care of me and let me go when I was little. I don’t remember them.” Theresa turned toward Ethan, a look of sudden puzzlement in
her eyes. “Are they dead now, too?”

  “Probably,” Ethan nodded. “There are very few people left, Theresa. Very few.”

  Ethan momentarily turned his attention to a fast-approaching road sign. In another thirty minutes, they would be in Kansas City. Ethan flashed the interior lights a few times to catch Lamar’s attention. “Ever been to Kansas City?”

  “No.”

  “Well, looks like we’ll be staying there tonight.”

  “Okay.”

  Twilight finally caught up with them. As they continued, the land on either side of Interstate 70 blossomed with housing developments, apartment buildings, shopping plazas and tall offices. They slowed to a crawl when they neared the city limits, finding the roadway littered with abandoned vehicles of every make and model. Weaving through the maze of cars, vans, buses and trucks, Ethan paused and waited for Lamar to catch up.

  “How long were you by yourself?”

  “I wasn’t alone. I had David. He took care of me.”

  “But,” Ethan started, unable to settle on the least upsetting way to phrase his question. “When did David stop taking care of you?”

  “When we played the drinking game.”

  “What’s that?”

  “One morning when I woke up he said he might have the virus. He said that he might not be able to take care of me anymore, and that made him sad.” She hesitated, stared at her lap and rubbed her forehead with her right hand as she recalled the event. “He said he had a special drink — he said it was magic, like a potion. He said if we both drank it, he could still take care of me.” Theresa wept openly now, her lower lip fluttering as she continued. “We picked up the glasses. He drank his right away. I took a pretend sip, and I promised I would finish it later, when I was thirsty.”

  “And then?”

  “When I came back later, David was asleep.” Theresa smeared her tears on her sleeve. “He never woke up.”

  Ethan shuddered. He felt rage and sympathy, resentment and compassion. That David had attempted to poison Theresa sickened him. Still, her caregiver must have realized that alone she would fall victim to either starvation or madness. Faced with this tragic decision, Ethan believed that David had shown courage and strength of will by taking a course of action that would otherwise have been considered criminal and immoral.

  “Where to, guys?” Lamar called out, startling them both. He had walked up along side the SUV, tapping on Ethan’s window. “Sun’s down, and it’s just gonna get darker. Better find a place to rest our heads, right?”

  “Yeah,” Ethan said, fiddling with the button panel on his door until the window sank. Cold air rushed into the vehicle. Theresa shivered, pressed her head against her window and stared at the ground. “Sign says there’re three or four motels at the next exit. Let’s pull off and have a look.”

  “Sounds good. Let me lead — I’ve got a searchlight on that thing. May as well put it to use.”

  “I’ll follow.”

  As Lamar walked back to the ambulance, Ethan rolled up his window. His eyes scanned the darkened metropolis that had been Kansas City. It had outlived its builders and its most recent residents. Its vacant streets no longer surged with streaming rush hour traffic; its homes no longer lit up each evening as families gathered for meals or seceded into various rooms to watch television, complete homework assignments or surf the web. Church bells had been silenced. In libraries, the collected wisdom of humanity gathered dust.

  “Why didn’t you drink it,” Ethan abruptly asked. He doubted she realized what David had attempted to do, even now. “Why didn’t you drink the magic potion, Theresa?”

  “Because there’s no such thing as magic.”

  JOURNAL ENTRY, FRIDAY, OCT. 27, 0001 AE:

  Only the dead know what really happened in Denver — but having spent the better part of a day searching the ruins for survivors, I think we have a pretty good idea. Unlike other cities, Denver appears to have somehow avoided the original outbreak. While most places were failing, while the federal government was collapsing, at least a portion of Denver continued to function and remained untouched by the pandemic. Something happened, though, in late July, if the final newspaper accounts can be trusted. Martial law had been declared. Paranoia ran rampant. A self-appointed tyrant adopted a policy of “preservation through elimination,” identifying prospective plague victims and targeting them for eradication. Death squads swept the streets, rounding up those members of society perceived to be a threat. When we went through the city, we saw hundreds of bodies strung up on streetlamps, victims butchered by machine gun fire in their vehicles as they tried to flee. We found the centre of operations in a shelter beneath the airport, where a small group of the elite apparently tried to find sanctuary from the plague. They tried to create a buffer zone by commanding paramilitary groups wearing biohazard gear to commit genocide on the surrounding community. Their plan evidently failed. We found no survivors. If we had, I cannot honestly say what we would have done with them.

  ****

  Ethan sat in a secluded booth in an abandoned Reno casino bar room plucking roasted peanuts from a bowl on the table. One by one, he chucked the emptied shells onto the carpeted floor. With no cleaning crew to sweep up after the establishment’s infrequent and unexpected patrons, Ethan wondered if mice would pickup the slack.

  Lamar stood behind the bar, marveling at the variety of liquors. Like a kid in a candy store, he harvested bottles from their shelves, lining them up neatly along the bar.

  Each booth in the lounge featured a high-resolution plasma screen and surround sound system. When the place had been crowded, Ethan imagined music videos ran nonstop while guests frittered away their modest winnings on exotic drinks. He prodded the controls unsuccessfully, not expecting a response.

  Ethan had sent Theresa off with Alice, a 62-year-old widow they discovered in Cheyenne. The casino boasted several clothing stores, and Theresa only had the clothes she had been wearing when they found her. She needed a new wardrobe, and Ethan thought Alice could help her make the appropriate selections.

  “Not far now, my friend.” Lamar sat down across from Ethan, cradling a bottle of whisky and two shot glasses. “We’ll be in Sacramento tomorrow night. Only another half day from there.”

  “It will be weird to stop; we’ve been going for so long.” Ethan downed his first shot solemnly, winced as the whisky burned the back of his throat and settled in his gut. “So many desolate cities behind us, so many nightmares. I’ve been so focused on reaching Grants Pass; everything else seems like a blur.”

  “Keep drinking this and things will get even blurrier.”

  “I’m serious, Lamar,” Ethan said, running his finger along the rim of the glass. “We’ve been so preoccupied with getting there; we haven’t stopped to ask if it’s what we really want.”

  “Of course it’s what we want.” Lamar lit a cigarette, pushed the pack across the table toward Ethan. Ethan shook his head. “If there’s only a handful of people left, don’t you think that it’s to their benefit to band together? There’s safety in numbers, right?”

  “Sure,” Ethan agreed, pouring himself a second shot. “But what if these people are something other than we expect?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t know.” Ethan rubbed his eyes. In his head, a dull ache that had taken root days earlier now burgeoned. “What if they have expectations…beliefs that differ from ours?”

  “You’ve just gotten use to being alone, kid. When you see all those smiling faces welcoming us home for the first time, I’m sure all your worries will evaporate.” Lamar waved, his gaze redirected to the far side of the room where Theresa and Alice had appeared. The two of them had evidently cleaned out every sales floor in the place. They each carried bulging bags overflowing with designer clothes. “Leave the stuff there and join us for a drink,” Lamar said, howling across the sprawling nightclub.

  “We’ll be right there,” Alice said. Brimming with maternal instincts, sh
e had taken an instant liking to Theresa, and Theresa seemed to enjoy the attention. “We need to make a pit stop, first.”

  “We’ll be here.” Lamar’s broad smile momentarily displaced Ethan’s anxiety. To possess such blind optimism in the face of catastrophic adversity and terrifying uncertainty seemed an enviable gift. If ignorance substituted for bliss, Lamar’s unsubstantiated confidence and childlike hopefulness might well bring them all much-deserved peace and security. “Don’t you worry about Grants Pass,” Lamar said, reassuring his companion. He poured two more shots and held up his glass to Ethan. “I’m sure they’ll take us in, especially you young folks. If we’re going to rebuild society, there’ll have to be plenty of young women able to bear children.”

  As Ethan’s fleeting delusion of contentment faded, he downed one last shot of whisky.

  JOURNAL ENTRY, TUESDAY, OCT. 31, 0001 AE:

  Civilization is winding down. The species has survived previous bottlenecks, but from what I’ve seen, there’s far too few of us left now to reorganize, to rebuild and to repopulate the planet. Even if pockets of survivors manage to establish small colonies, they probably won’t last for more than a few generations. Too much has been lost, too much sacrificed. Some of those left behind will assign spiritual significance to this event, chalk it up to God’s will. Some may believe earth and the environment conspired to eliminate humanity before humanity managed to destroy the planet. Maybe mankind simply outstayed its moment in the spotlight. No matter what, whether our endangered species manages to avoid extinction or not, one this is certain: Life will go on.

  ****

  “Do you want to stay with us while Lamar and the boys go check things out?” Ethan sat perched on the edge of a picnic table at a rest stop along Interstate 5 south of Grants Pass. Lamar and the two teenage boys who had joined their convoy in Sacramento busied themselves ransacking a vending machine. Theresa sat next to Ethan and Alice paced back and forth beneath a sycamore. “You’re welcome to wait here until we see what they find.”