The Last Tribe

by Brad Manuel

  The Last Tribe

  Brad Manuel

  Text copyright © 2014 Brad W. Manuel

  All Rights Reserved

  All thanks to my wife for her love, unwavering confidence, editing, and support.

  Table of Contents

  Book One

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  Book Two

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  Book Three

  40

  41

  42

  43

  44

  45

  46

  47

  48

  49

  50

  51

  52

  53

  54

  55

  56

  57

  58

  59

  60

  61

  Book One

  1

  “I don’t feel good.” Jay stood in the doorway of the bedroom. His face was red, flushed with a fever, and his hair was stuck to his forehead with sweat. He wore a white short-sleeved pajama shirt with teal sleeves. A brown baseball mitt was in the center of his shirt catching an oversized baseball. His orange pajama shorts were from a different set. Jay seldom matched his clothes. The white shirt and orange pants were soaked with sweat, clinging to his thin five year old frame.

  Todd and Emily were packing to leave Raleigh. It was early in the morning, 6am. The sun was already up. Emily put her arm around Jay, and gave him some soothing words. She talked to him about going to the couch downstairs, and watching a movie. Jay nodded. Todd looked at the television in their room. It showed an exodus, a traffic jam of cars fleeing their city. Dozens of news helicopters cast black shadows on the ground while filming the government checkpoints on every road. Workers in yellow hazmat suits examined people before letting cars pass.

  Todd walked downstairs. He told Jay to feel better, and went into the kitchen to pour his son a dose of cherry flavored medicine to curb his fever and make him comfortable. Emily tucked Jay into a snuggly bed of blankets and pillows on the couch in front of their living room television. She checked the kids’ networks for cartoons, but even those channels showed images of cars stuck in traffic with the scroll “Residents Flee Raleigh, North Carolina.” Emily switched to their DVR recordings and started a movie.

  Todd wanted to be one of the cars being filmed on the road. His plan was ruined. Jay was sick. They would not make it through the checkpoints out of Raleigh. The helicopters showed infected people being ushered to government vehicles, separated from their families.

  Todd would not risk Jay being taken from them.

  He handed Emily the red syrupy medicine before stepping outside onto their deck. Todd was in a daze. He sat down on the extra wide steps their contractor built two summers before. The steps were stadium sized, and took up an entire corner. They flowed into the yard, allowing anyone to sit on the steps comfortably. The contractor sold them on the idea of a “party deck,” with the stairs doubling as extra seating for guests.

  Todd and Emily watched the kids play in the yard from the steps. The kids ate their lunch on them too. It was a great deck.

  He heard the door open and close. Emily sat next to him, and put her arm around him, the same way she soothed their son a few minutes ago. “What now?” She whispered.

  “I guess we wait.” He told her as she rested her head on his shoulder. “And hope.”

  Matthew Boone, Todd’s neighbor, was a road warrior salesman for a technology company. Boone travelled everywhere and all the time. The Boone children were similar in age to Todd’s, and played together almost every day. Two weeks ago the Boones came down with a summer flu. They had fevers, were lethargic, and had no appetite. It was not unusual to have a flu in the summer, but after what happened in Sao Paulo, Brazil, people were on edge.

  Matthew Boone died three days ago.

  The people in the yellow Hazmat suits removed the rest of the Boone bodies yesterday, one mother and four children.

  The Boones were part of a growing number of dead in Raleigh, more than 1,500 bodies in three days. Panic was everywhere. People fled the city. Todd and Emily planned to take their two children to New Hampshire, riding out the epidemic at their family cottage. Now that Jay was sick, they needed a new plan.

  “You don’t think we can get through?” Emily asked her husband. They began to sweat under the strong Carolina sun. It was already 80 degrees at 6:15 in the morning.

  “You saw the T.V. They have checkpoints on every road. If you’re sick, they want you to stay in Raleigh. It’s not a recommendation. They are going to keep us here, or worse, they’ll take Jay and send us away.” Todd shut his eyes. “Dammit.” They sat on the steps together trying to make sense out of their situation.

  He turned and looked at his wife. “How much food do we have?”

  “Why?”

  “How much food do we have? The stores are closed, there won’t be any more food coming into Raleigh. We need to make sure we have enough to last a few weeks, maybe a few months. Let’s take an inventory.” Todd got up. “I’m not going to die, and neither are you or the kids. Let’s plan on making it through this plague, whatever it is. The first thing we need to do is make sure we have food.”

  Two hours later Emily and Todd stood in the kitchen with all of their food categorized on the counters and table. They had short term perishables and long term non-perishables. Todd assumed the power would go off if enough people left Raleigh. He suggested they eat everything in the fridge immediately.

  “Meals are going to get smaller and more interesting. We waste nothing. If the kids don’t finish something, it gets bagged and they have it at the next meal, or for a snack. Same goes for us.” Todd paused. “I’m going to sneak over to the Boone’s later and see what they have in the fridge. I’ll go behind the houses, not on the street.”

  “Are you crazy? Why are you going to steal their food?”

  “They’re dead, Emily, they aren’t going to eat it. If this gets any worse, I’m going to steal everyone’s food, but I’ll start with the Boone’s before someone else gets the same idea.” Todd surveyed the counter and looked at Emily. “This is bad. Look at the news reports out of Brazil, and China, and Germany, and Australia. This isn’t a passing flu that happened to kill our friends. We’re in it, and the best way to survive is to plan to survive.”

  Todd took Emily’s trembling hands. She was scared, and he could see despair in her eyes.

  “We have to plan to survive, and our first step is to get as much food as we can. The Boones are gone. I’m taking their food, today. We have two rain barrels. I’ll clean them out, sanitize them with bleach, and we can collect rain water.”

  “You really think we’re okay?” Emily asked hopefully.

  “I have to, and so do you.”

  2

  The last neighbors in their cul de sac, the Williams, pulled out at noon. Todd waited an hour before he walked behind the two houses between his home and the Boone’s. There were woods in each backyard running for fifty to one hundred yards, k
eeping Todd well hidden from the main road. He heard cars honking and frustrated drivers screaming, panicked and impatient people stuck in traffic.

  It was oppressively hot, as North Carolina is every July. Todd was dripping by the time he arrived at the Boone’s sliding glass backdoor. He cupped his hands and peaked through the glass, spying a dark kitchen and apparently empty house. His sweaty hands and nose left an odd print on the clean glass, like a comma inside of parenthesis. He wondered if the symbol represented something, if teens used it on their phones to signify a sweaty burglar or peeping tom.

  Todd tried to slide the door. It was locked.

  “So much for easy.” He mumbled. Todd walked off the deck and around the house to a side door leading into the garage. It was also locked. He paused, took a deep breath and walked as casually as he could to the front door. He turned the handle and went inside. The hazmat people had left the door unlocked after removing the bodies.

  Todd shut the door quickly. Instinctively he called out, “hello?” He waited a second, but there was no response. “Hello?” He yelled again loudly.

  The house was empty. Todd moved down a hallway to the kitchen and went to work. He had been in the Boone’s house for a few parties over the years, but he was not completely familiar with their layout. He was going to have to search for the food stores.

  Like most houses built in the neighborhood, the Boone’s kitchen included a walk-in pantry. Todd stacked the food next to the sliding glass back door. He would use one of his kid’s wagons to retrieve the supplies after the sun went down, moving them under the cover of darkness.

  Todd paused again. “Hello?” He called out. He could not shake the feeling that someone else was in the house. It was just a feeling. He was alone. The Boones were dead. No one was on their street. Everyone was gone. He ignored the eerie feelings and began to search through the kitchen for food not kept in the pantry. He opened the fridge. “Let’s see what we have here…”

  3

  A white van pulled into the cul-de-sac and parked. Four people in yellow Hazmat suits got out of the vehicle. They split up and worked in pairs, two people approaching each house. One of the people carried a clipboard, the other an automatic weapon.

  The rifleman stood guard as the clipboard person knocked on the front door. If no one answered, the case in all four of the other houses on the street, the clipboard person walked to the top of the house’s driveway touching the street and spray painted a black symbol before moving to the next residence.

  Todd watched the van from his upstairs bedroom window. He saw the four people split into pairs and begin their door to door search on the other side of the street. He nodded to Emily, and she took Brian, their oldest son, to the attic. Jay was asleep in his bedroom. Todd followed his wife and son.

  The attic was unfinished and sweltering hot, the temperature increased as Todd trudged up the stairs. He walked to the lone window overlooking the driveway where he could watch the front doors of the two houses next to him. After a few minutes he saw the yellow puffy suits approaching the front of each home.

  “They look like teletubbies. You remember teletubbies?” Todd asked Emily.

  “Not the time.” She said, trying to entertain Brian and keep his mind off the uncomfortable room. “And why are we up here again?”

  The four yellow suited people met at Todd’s house, the fifth on the street. One of them walked up the steps and rang the doorbell. Todd opened the front door. He was red faced and sweating from his time in the attic. The yellow suit stepped back quickly, shocked to find a person at home and answering the door. The two armed people gripped their rifles in a ready position.

  “Sir, are you aware there is a mandatory evacuation of Raleigh? You need to leave.” Todd was unable to determine the sex of the people until now. An elderly woman spoke to him through a clear plastic face shield. She looked hot and uncomfortable, her face was flushed and her forehead glistened.

  “My son is sick.” Todd told them solemnly. “He has…”

  The woman cut him off, raising her arm into the air and showing her palm. “We need to see him.”

  “Please, come in, help us if you can.” Todd pleaded.

  The woman took another step away, backing down the stairs. “Just bring your son to the door, and put this in his mouth.” She tossed him a white box with a thermometer. “Is there anyone else home?” The woman looked at her clipboard. Todd guessed it was a census description. “Your wife and other child?”

  “Do you need to see them too?” Todd tried to act lethargic and groggy.

  “We need to see everyone.” The woman was not polite.

  Todd shut the glass storm door and went inside to get his family. He walked slowly and deliberately to the top of the stairs, knowing the woman and the three other people were watching him. He turned left and opened the attic door. “Emily, you need to come down and stand in the doorway.”

  “I’m dripping from head to toe. It’s a sauna up here.” She came down the attic stairs with their seven year old. Mother and child were sweating and red faced.

  “I’ll get Jay.” Todd went into Jay’s room and lifted his son. Jay was suffering through an actual bought of the flu, one Todd hoped was a benign version rather than the one that killed the Boones. Jay continued to sleep. He was flushed, and soaking from night sweats. Todd put the thermometer in his mouth, and carried him down the stairs. Sweaty Brian and Emily followed.

  The Hazmat woman stood in the doorway, observing everything through the glass storm door. When she saw Todd and the three seemingly ill people, she backed down the front steps and into the yard.

  Todd turned the handle and pushed the front door open with Jay’s feet. “Please, what should I do? Our neighbors died a few days ago. Does he have it?” Todd was a horrible actor, but the situation was so real the four yellow suits did not realize the ruse.

  The clipboard people spoke to each as they wrote. “This area is supposed to be cleared. I’m not a doctor, I don’t get paid to deal with this stuff.” The other hazmat person was upset to find the Dixons home.

  “Have you had any contact with the Boone family in the last month?” The woman asked Todd.

  “Yes, a lot, Jay played with them almost every day. Why? Is that bad? Does he have it?” Todd took a step forward. The men with rifles pointed the guns toward him.

  “Why didn’t you call the mandatory medical hotline?” The other person asked. Part of the television scroll below the videos of Raleigh was a phone number to self report fevers and other flu like symptoms.

  “I don’t know what you’re…” Todd continued his lie.

  “Sir, stay on your porch. You are officially quarantined. I am going to mark your house as such. Do not leave your residence or attempt to leave Raleigh. Do you understand?”

  “I, I do. Can’t you help us? Can’t you help my son?” Todd took a step back towards his house.

  “A medical team will be through soon.” The woman pointed to the van, motioning the guards and her associate to go back to it.

  “Don’t you want the thermometer?” Todd asked, begging her for help.

  “Please stay in your house. Your actions may save the rest of us.” She started towards the van before stopping and walking back to Todd. “Mr. Dixon? God bless you and your family. Good luck.” Her voice was kind and full of sympathy.

  Behind her, the other clipboard person was arguing with the riflemen. “I don’t have orange paint, I’m not a doctor. They only gave me black paint. What the hell am I supposed to do? They aren’t dead or gone.”

  The woman approached the end of the driveway, and Todd saw her head shake back and forth.

  The four people got in their van and drove to the next cul-de-sac. Todd stood on the front porch holding Jay until the van left his street. He looked at the four other driveways in his cul-de-sac. Three of the driveways had black “V’s”, probably indicating “vacant.” The new paint ran down the slopes. The Boone’s driveway had two symbols, the firs
t was an orange circle with a line, given to them after a visit from government health officials. Painted over that symbol two days ago, when their bodies were removed, was a black circle with a line.

  Todd went inside. He carried Jay to his bedroom, and kissed him on the forehead, “feel better buddy.” Car horns continued in the distance as the last residents of Raleigh sat on nearby roads, waiting to join the slow moving river of fleeing cars on the highway.

  Todd came downstairs and into the kitchen to speak with Emily and Brian. “Well,” he told them. “It looks like they bought it.”

  The Boone’s, warehouse shoppers and a family of six, tripled Todd and Emily’s food inventory. Cases sat on the floor as Emily decided how and where to store the excess.

  Todd’s phone rang. His brother Hank’s picture flashed on the screen.

  “What the hell is happening down there?” Todd heard screaming from the cell before he could bring the phone to his ear.

  “Hey.” Todd said. “I don’t know. Jay is sick.”

  Hank was silent.

  “I know,” Todd acknowledged the gravity of the situation, “but I think it’s just the flu, not the bad flu, the real flu. Maybe I’m delusional. I gotta believe, right?”

  “Jesus.” Was all Hank could muster.

  “Seriously, I think he’s going to be fine.” Todd replayed the government interaction from the morning. “I don’t know why, I just don’t trust the disease people right now. This thing killed my neighbors in a week, and there is still a message to be calm. Calm is not an option.”

  “What are you going to do?” Hank was a world away in Dayton, Ohio. There were no confirmed cases in the U.S. outside of Raleigh. The government was praising itself for containing the disease.

  “I’m going to spray paint our driveway with a symbol that says we’re dead. We are loading up on food, and laying low. This is going to go one of two ways for me. Either Jay is fine, or the four of us will be dead very soon.”

  “Jesus.” Hank muttered again. “What do you mean spray paint your driveway? The girls want to stay home from school, and I’m telling them it’s okay.”