The Survivor Journals (Book 1): After Everyone Died

by Sean Little

  I had turned my eyes to the skies above. I’d been reading a lot of books on astronomy lately, and I quickly located the Summer Triangle: Deneb, Altair, and Vega. From there, it was a quick leap to Hercules, Libra, and the Serpent’s Head. Somewhere nearby, though it was a little tricker to pick out, was Scorpius and Sagittarius, and somewhere in their midst lurked Pluto, but I could never tell which dot of light Pluto was. They all blurred together and winked in and out of my vision like everything else. I yawned and stretched. Part of me considered just sleeping in the chair that night. For a hard wooden chair, it was strangely comfortable. The rational part of me reminded the lazy part of me that sleeping in the chair would result in being covered in itchy welts the next morning. The mosquitos were only held at bay by my slaps. If I lowered those defenses, I would become a smorgasbord.

  With my hands on the armrests, I moved to pull myself out of the chair and I head a distinctive clicking sound. There are certain sounds that require no debate, no argument, and the sound of a semi-automatic pistol being racked was certainly one of them. Then, from the darkness, I heard something I’d nearly given up on hearing again: a human voice. A female human voice. She spoke with the hint of a strange accent that I couldn’t place, but her English was nearly perfect. “Don’t move.”

  I froze in my chair. I fought the urge to jump out of my chair and scream for joy. I fought the urge to even turn and look at the person behind me. “I’m unarmed,” I said. My voice felt weird and choked to my ears, like it wasn’t me speaking.

  “I am,” said the woman behind me. It had to be a woman. Her voice was definitely female, but it had the smooth tone of a woman, at least in her late 20’s or early 30’s, maybe older. “I have a gun pointed at your back. If you try anything, I will kill you. I will kill you dead. Do we have an understanding?”

  Rowdy heard the voices and raised his head. He saw the woman with the gun and saw my discomfort. He pushed himself to his feet much faster than I’d seen him do lately, and he started to move toward us. I held my hand out at him. “Rowdy, stay!” I said. “I’m okay. Stay. Be a good boy.” Uneasily, the dog stopped, but he watched the woman with a critical eye. He looked tense, ready to spring into action.

  “I wouldn’t try anything,” I said. “I’m just glad to hear another person’s voice. I’ve been alone for a year.”

  There was a long pause after that. Out of the corner of my eye, I caught movement. She was inching past me in a semicircle, well out of my arm’s reach, still very much hidden by shadow and night. “What is your name?”

  “Twist,” I said. “Call me Twist.”

  “That is not a name.”

  “I know,” I said. “It’s my nickname. People called me Twist.”

  “What is your real name?”

  “Barnabus. Barney.”

  “I like Twist better.”

  “So do I,” I said. “What is your name?”

  “Meri,” she said. “Short for Meriweather. We both have bad names.” When she said her name, I she slurred her ‘th’ sound to something approximating a ‘z’ sound. It sounded like a French accent.

  “Are you French?”

  “Canadian,” she said. “Québécois. Are you the one who was putting up the messages in the windows of all the stores?” She held out a sheet of notebook paper, well bleached from sun and cold, but still readable. It was one of the notes I’d left taped to a store window somewhere.

  “I am,” I said. “I meant it, too. I have supplies. I’m willing to share. I’m willing to help.”

  I saw Meri move closer to me, and suddenly she dropped the arm that was holding the gun and began to laugh. “You’re a child,” she said.

  Granted, I had recently shaved, so my patchy beard was not present to prove my years, but that still smarted a bit. I wasn’t a child; I was a man. I was a man who’d spent a year surviving on his own. “I’m eighteen,” I said. “Almost nineteen.”

  “A baby,” she said.

  For the first time, I dared to move. I raised my head and looked at her face. She wasn’t old by any stretch of the imagination. I placed her at maybe thirty, thirty-two at best. She looked a bit haggard, though. She was tired, with dark circles beneath her eyes, and she looked pale and sick. Her hair was unkempt, long, stringy, tangled auburn tresses. “You’re not ready for the nursing home yourself,” I said.

  “You don’t have a gun?” She wore a black leather jacket, stylishly cut, and a pair of jeans. The jeans looked new, like she’d stolen them from a store in the last day or two, and hadn’t gotten the creases out of them yet.

  “Not with me at the moment,” I said. “But I wouldn’t use the ones I have on you, anyhow. I meant what I said on that note. I have supplies. I’m going to head south and build a new life there. You’re more than welcome to join me. I’d welcome the company.”

  She swayed for a moment, and then dropped to her knees with a clenched-teeth grunt of pain.

  “Are you alright?” I moved to leave my chair and she raised her gun again, freezing me in my tracks.

  “I’ve been shot.”

  “Well, put your gun down and let me help you.” I stood, my arms raised, and the thought dawned on me: Who shot her?

  “Do you have medicine?”

  “I do. I have a large stock of supplies in the library,” I said. “Let me help. Did you accidentally shoot yourself?”

  She lowered her gun again, dropping it this time. I quickly knelt by her side. Rowdy took my motion as a signal and he jogged over to us, wagging his tail happily. He pushed his head under the woman’s right arm, eager for pats from someone new, and she winced. As she knelt, I pulled the leather jacket she wore to one side and saw her shirt and the top of her pants were matted with blood.

  I slipped my head under her left arm and helped her to her feet. She was sweating profusely, burning with fever. I was amazed she’d been able to sneak up on me and hold a gun as long as she had. It was clear she was in a bad way.

  I half-supported, half-carried her into the library. Every step was painful for her, I could tell. Rowdy led the way to the annex, and I carefully sat her on my bed, helped her slip her jacket off, laid her down. Her arms were bruised and showed some cuts, nothing severe, but it was clear she’d been through something. Both of her wrists were red and raw, one of them showed missing skin that had badly scabbed.

  I lifted her t-shirt and it peeled with a lot of resistance and cracking, blood clinging to fabric. She’d put another piece of cloth, strips of another t-shirt most likely, over the wound to try to staunch the bleeding. Those bits seemed to be wanting to merge with her flesh. When I pulled them back, she screamed out and the wound began to bleed anew. There was a dime-sized hole in her right side, about two inches to the right of her bellybutton. When the fabric of her shirt and the She licked at her lips. “It’s bad, no?”

  I’m not doctor. I’m not even trained. All the gunshot wounds I’d ever seen had been on movies and TV, but this looked bad. I had no idea where to even start. I wasn’t about to lie to her. “It’s bad,” I said.

  I got clean bandages and told her to hold them on the wound. I rooted through my supplies and dragged out the medical stuff I’d stolen from the UW Clinic. I found my big Rubbermaid container of pharmacy pills. I found some hydrocodone and gave her two with water. I found some of my Lidocaine and used it to take pain away from the wound site. Then, I rushed into the library and found a book called The Worst Case Scenario Survival Handbook. I’d flipped through it a couple of times over the winter, but never thought I’d really need most of the things in there. That book had a chapter on how to treat a gunshot wound. Hooray for books!

  Surprisingly, there was very little I could do. It was a deep puncture wound. If it had pierced anything major, she would be dead within a day or two, and I wouldn’t be able to stop it. I wasn’t a doctor. I wasn’t a surgeon. If the bullet was lodged in tissue, her body would adapt to it. The most important thing was making sure the bleeding was stopped, which judging
by the amount of dried blood on her shirt and pants had already happened until I pulled the bandages off the wound.

  I cleaned the area as best I could with warm water. Meri moaned through clenched teeth and writhed as she tried to deal with the pain. There was blood under the skin in that area, as evidenced by a brutal-looking purple-black bruise. The bullet hole seemed to be fairly clean, although looks could be deceiving. There was no exit wound, so I had to imagine that the bullet was lodged inside of her abdomen someplace. If she was lucky, it was still in one piece. I knew from my TV watching and reading that sometimes bullets could break up inside a body and cause a lot of problems. I hoped it wasn’t that sort of bullet.

  “How long ago were you shot?”

  “A day, I guess. Maybe a little more. I feel asleep in my truck for a bit and lost track of time.”

  “Where’s your truck now? Who shot you?”

  Meri’s eyes drifted away from me and my ministrations. She didn’t respond. She seemed to close down in a way, as if she was removing herself from the moment. I took that to mean that whatever she wasn’t saying was going to be bad. Very bad.

  “I don’t feel good,” she said. Her voice was barely audible. I grabbed an empty Rubbermaid container and put it by the side of the bed. She seemed to know what I meant because she rolled to her side and vomited several times. There was very little in her stomach, so most of what she did was heave dryly and painfully. The tension in her abs made the bullet wound bleed freely again. I had to mop up blood with more bandages.

  I knew she had lost a lot of blood. If I’d had the supplies, it would be worth trying to give her some sort of IV. However, I didn’t have any supplies like that. Any saline solutions had weathered a hard winter, I didn’t feel very good about jabbing her with a needle and forcing that stuff into her. I know I wouldn’t have wanted it. I also didn’t know how to type and match blood. I know that giving her the wrong blood could make her sicker, so I held off on trying to be valiant and giving her some of my own blood. Instead, I gently raised her shoulders and tried to get her to sip some water. She drank tentatively at first, and then with more gusto as she realized she could keep it down. When I laid her down again and slipped my arm from behind her shoulders, she exhaled loudly and went still, her head lolled to one side and her eyes closed.

  I checked her pulse. She was alive, but there was only a gentle blip of a pulse, rather than a strong, vibrant beat. She was unconscious. I thought that might be for the best. She would certainly feel less stress being unconscious. I bandaged her wound again, then covered her with blankets. Rowdy slept by the side of her bed. I suspect he would have liked to have leapt onto the mattress with her, but his old hips no longer allowed that motion. If I’d been a thinking man, I would have crafted a series of steps for him, but I didn’t.

  I performed my nightly ablutions, cleaning my teeth with an obsessive bend that would have made my dentist gleeful and making sure the door to the library was barred well.

  I didn’t really go to sleep that night. The worry of Meri’s injuries helped keep me awake, but also the sheer joy of finding someone else alive after a year and change was amazing. I was no longer alone. I’d dreamt of that time. Hell, I’d hallucinated other people out of a grieving desperation to no longer be alone, but now it was actually real. I was with someone else, a living person. At that moment, seeing another living human was just as surreal as not seeing any living humans was a year ago.

  During the night, I sat in my chair and read a book by the light of an LED camp lantern. I watched over Meri, too. I took her temperature with a battery-powered ear thermometer, it wasn’t very good. She was around 103.5, at 104, brain damage was a very real possibility. I popped a couple of the cold packs that I’d scavenged. I put one on her forehead and two more on her neck, hoping that would cool her down somewhat. It was clear that the wound in her side was badly infected. Somewhere before dawn, I cleaned and bandaged the wound again. It had stopped bleeding, so I hoped that was a good sign. She called out occasionally during her sleep. Once, she clearly shouted someone’s name, but I could not place it. It was a French name. Henri? Andy? Another time, she clearly screamed out the word “No.” When she did that, the tone in her voice gave me chills. It was horrific. I inspected her wrists again while she slept. Judging from the marking and chafing around them, I suspected she’d been handcuffed for a long while. Had someone held her prisoner recently?

  Given her bullet wound and handcuff marks, it didn’t take a genius-level intellect to make the leap to there being a third person alive in the world, but just where that person was, I didn’t know. I didn’t know who the person was. Was he or she coming this way? Why did he or she have Meri handcuffed like a hostage? I felt an urge to check my guns. I only had a shotgun and a revolver in the library now; the other guns were in the RV. In the middle of the night, I slipped out of the library and made sure to lock the doors to the RV. I didn’t need someone stealing my guns from me and using them against me. I listened hard to the darkness from my chair, the guns on the table near me.

  At some point, I must have drifted off because it was suddenly just past dawn and the dog was waking me by jabbing his muzzle under my hand like he does when he wants attention. For split-second, I’d forgotten about Meri and the whole night before, but it rushed back like a wave and I was out of my chair in an instant. Meri was still unconscious, but sleeping fitfully. The world was still quiet. The library was still secured. I took the pistol and secured the gun belt around my waist before moving to take the dog outside.

  The dawn was warm. The air was humid. I found the gun that Meri dropped in the grass the night before and checked it. Empty. She’d held me up with an empty gun. There was a smell of burned powder in the barrel. She’d fired it recently. Maybe she’d killed whoever shot her.

  Or maybe not.

  I suddenly felt very exposed. It was like being out in the cold with the dog pack again. Somewhere in the nearby houses or trees, someone might be watching me that very moment. Meri had found me because I’d put fliers in hundreds of towns around the area. I wasn’t exactly hiding from the world. It would be simple enough for anyone else to find me, and there established that paradox that I could call Schrodinger’s Apocalypse Survivor: Until a person’s motive was clearly established, that person could be considered harmful and harmless at the same moment. It put a tingly feeling in my gut that made me queasy.

  I had to wake Meri to get her to eat some breakfast. I made an oatmeal gruel that I found in a recipe book. I cooked it over a low fire in the hearth that made the annex much too warm. I fed it to her a small spoonful at a time. The first bite she rejected for its blandness, so I spiced it with a little brown sugar and she ate more steadily. She kept her eyes closed though, and she said nothing. I was able to get her to take Tylenol for her fever and an antibiotic for her infection. It was all I could do. After she ate, she rested again. I checked her temperature. She was still hovering in the 103 area. The ice packs might have helped a little, and the lack of stress might have helped a little, but she was still long from being out of danger.

  I didn’t go about my routine that day. Normally, that day would have been a day that I would take the Cruze out and explore. Instead, I stayed inside by Meri’s bed, and tended to her as best I could. At one point, she asked to use the bathroom. I helped her out of bed and half-carried her to the restrooms. She moved toward the women’s restroom, but I redirected her, telling her it was my shower area. Her fever-dulled eyes lit up at the mention of a shower. I helped her into a stall and gave her privacy to do what she had to do. When she called for me, I helped her back to bed. Throughout the day, I gave her sips of water and bites of gruel. Predominately, she slept. I listened as she breathed the heavy breaths of someone who was closer to coma than sleep. She cried out occasionally, but it was unintelligible noise.

  After dark, Meri seemed to rouse slightly. I helped her to the bathroom again, and helped her back to bed. I gave her water. She was showing si
gns of dehydration. I propped her up in bed with pillows and she drank a full liter of water. I said nothing, but watched as she sipped. She stared into the middle distance, seeing nothing, as she did. She had the haunted gaze of someone who had seen too much, a survivor’s stare. After she finished the water, I gave her some food, chicken soup. She ate slowly and dispassionately, barely seeing her food. When she finished, I helped her to lay down again, covering her with blankets as I did.

  I returned to my chair and the book I was reading, a Young Adult novel by Geoff Herbach about a high school kid who hit puberty and almost overnight became a jock. It took place in southern Wisconsin, near Platteville. I liked the locality of it. After reading over two pages, I was aware that I was being watched. I peeked over the top of my book and saw Meri laying on her side, curled fetal beneath the covers. She was watching me with her dark eyes.

  “You’re very kind,” she said. Her voice was thin, but clear.

  “Thank you,” I said. “I try to be. My mother was very big on kindness.”

  “You didn’t have to be,” she said. “I held a gun on you.”

  I shrugged. “That’s in the past. I’m okay with it. If I’d seen you first, I might have done the same.”

  She reached up and wiped her eye. I couldn’t tell if she was tearing up, or if her eye just itched. “This world,” she said. “It’s all screwed up now. It’s a mess.”

  I said nothing. I just nodded slowly and set my book aside.

  She paused and licked her lips. “Why do you think you survived?”

  I shrugged again. Lucky wasn’t a word I wanted to use, but neither was cursed. “Immunity. I’m just immune to that virus. Like in The Stand.”