The Last Tribe

by Brad Manuel

  Hank undressed from the morning expedition. “Well then, let’s switch our efforts from where to go to how to get there.” He hung his fleece lined flannel shirt on a hook next to the door. “If you say Kauai is where we need to go, let’s figure out how we can get there. If you tell me we can’t get there after research, I’ll believe you and we’ll focus on California or Virginia. Let’s give the Hawaii plan a good try.”

  “Another project?” Rebecca asked.

  “Another project.” Hank agreed. “Let’s have some lunch first. Greg has exciting news.”

  Paul walked in the room from the kitchen. He looked at Greg with anticipation. Greg sat on the floor pulling off his socks. Despite his waterproof and insulated boots, his socks always seemed to get wet. “Oh man does that feel good. I can’t wait to not wear two pair of socks.”

  “Well?” Paul asked. “What’s the news?”

  Greg smiled and looked at Hank, then back at Paul and Rebecca. “We saw the highway through the snow. We saw road down the valley. The snow is clearing. We can leave if we need to.” He paused. “More importantly, people can come here if they try.”

  Smiles crept across the four faces. They beamed in silence, reveling in the news for a few moments.

  “I say it’s business as usual, but we prepare for other people to arrive during our spare time.” Hank suggested.

  The comment elicited a chuckle from Paul. “Yeah, all of our free time.”

  Hank brought the fish into the kitchen. He used olive oil, herbs, and seasoning on three of the trout before placing them in the oven for lunch. He packed the largest two in snow on the porch for dinner.

  Hank found several indoor herb kits at the hardware store when he first arrived, and grew dill, basil, thyme, cilantro, and parsley on a kitchen window sill. He used the herbs sparingly. They added a great dimension to fish and other foods. He typically used the abundance of dried herbs, but some things, like trout, called for fresh. Hank opened two cans of mixed vegetables and placed them in a pot on the stove.

  Fifteen minutes later the fish and vegetables were ready. The extreme heat of the wood stove oven and burners meant food was finished quickly. The group sat around the kitchen table. They tore bread from a large loaf baked that morning, ate their fish and vegetables, and drank water.

  “We have at least a couple of weeks before John and Todd arrive.” Paul began. “We’ve had a great few months, living as a little family here, but it’s time to plan for our next phase.” He put some of the fish in his mouth and let out an audible ‘mmm.’ “You’ve outdone yourself, Hank. The flavoring and preparation of the fish is getting better every day.”

  “Thank you, sir.” Hank replied. “And I agree. We should clear the upstairs bedrooms of wood, sweep them, get them ready for occupants.”

  “We’ve used all of the wood upstairs. Paul and I have been filling the wood bins from the van supply for a few days. We do need to clean the upstairs. We have clothes and boots for newcomers. Let’s focus on acquiring all the food we can find. Dried food, canned food, boxed food, anything we can move.” Rebecca added.

  Greg ate his fish, bread, and vegetables in silence as the other three made plans. It was too much for him to hope. He was a few weeks from seeing his father and brothers. It had been seven months since he heard his father’s voice. Eight months since he joked with his brothers, or threw a baseball to Matt. Eight months since he sat around a table with his family and shared a meal. If he thought about it too much, he was overwhelmed. ‘Focus on the day to day.’ He often told himself.

  Greg felt a hand bump his leg under the table. It was Rebecca’s. She squeezed his knee, and he looked up from his food to smile at her. She gave him a knowing look. They talked about his family all the time. She knew how excited he was to see his father and brothers. Greg slipped his hand under the table and placed it over hers.

  Hank and Paul laughed about some old story from their childhood in Hanover while the teens held hands under the table.

  33

  Kelly was shy and reserved at their camp, but a few minutes into the drive to Chelsea, she would not stop talking. All John, Craig, Solange, and Peter could do was nod and said “okay” and “sure.”

  “Obviously the racetracks were closed right after Raleigh, and I wasn’t needed there, so I went to the SPCA to see if I could help, but all those animals died. One after another, they just got sick and died, faster than people did. And I’m sitting there saying, ‘what am I going to do with my life? Horse racing is gone, domestic animals are dead, great career you’ve picked.’ But then, everyone started to die.”

  Kelly stopped to drink a swig of water from a bottle given to her by John. “Thank you for the water. You have no idea. We started rationing water four months ago, unless you wanted to boil water from the river, and I am not drinking water from the Hudson or East River, no matter how long you boil it.” She drank another swig. “Anyway, I was living on the upper West side with a girlfriend from college. We had this TINY one bedroom, but we were never there, except now we were always there, because neither of us had jobs to go to, and it’s not like you wanted to go out into crowds or anything, so there we were in this tiny room together. My family was in Kentucky, which is why I love horses, and her family was out in Colorado, and neither one of us had a car, because we live in New York City, so we had no way to get home, not that we wanted to go home, because everyone was sick anyway. Then Sarah, my roommate, gets sick, and I have to try and keep it together, and I stay with her, and we cry and she dies, and I’m like ‘what do I do now?.’ So I call the morgue, and they actually picked up her body, like, the next day, it was amazing, nothing is running in New York, not the subways or the cabs, but the morgue service comes in 24 hrs? Insane, right? I’d heard the stories, about people who aren’t sick, you know, disappearing, so before the morgue people come, I run up and down the stairs of our apartment building a bunch of times, get a good sweat going, get all flushed, and then I cough a few times. There was a woman with them, she was in fatigues, and she had a pocket thermometer, and I guess she’s supposes to take my temp. She takes one look at me and decides I’m sick already.” Kelly took another swig of water. “And the woman says to me, ‘If you have the faculties, and can call us when you get close to the end, we’ll come by to see what we can do. God bless.’ See what they can do? She meant she’d pick up my body. Then she puts a big red sharpie marker ‘X’ on my door, and I look up and down the hall and see that all the doors have a red X and a black X too. I hadn’t left the apartment in over a week, since Sarah got sick, so I had heard doors open and shut, but had not paid attention. Sarah was Korean, or half Korean and half American. She was a Ramen noodle and pasta nut, and she had cases of the stuff laying around, literally, this high end Ramen Noodle she ate, that you couldn’t find in the bodegas, and if you did it cost like $2 a pack, she would buy a case of it at warehouse stores and live off the stuff. Well, I lived off that during the week she was sick. So the lady is walking down the hall, and I cough and ask her, ‘I get the red X, but what is the black X?’ and she looks back and says, ‘The black X means we’ve made a second visit. Those apartments are empty.’ Then she steps in the elevator and is gone. That’s when I realized I was the only one left alive in my building. I go up and down each floor, it’s a ten floor building, 65 apartments, every single door has a black ‘X’ on it. Well, the good news was, there weren’t any bodies left in my building, the bad news was, I was alone in a big scary building.”

  “Oh my gosh, what did you do?” Craig sat behind Kelly, enthralled by her story. At 10 years old, he was following it like it was fiction. He hoped there would be a ghost or vampire responsible for the deaths.

  Kelly turned around to speak directly to Craig. She seemed to speak a thousand words a second. “Well, I went to my apartment and thought for a while. I was a little tired of eating ramen noodles, but I didn’t have any other food, so I went to the basement apartment, where my super lived. Sure enough, there wa
s a black ‘X’ on her door. She was this sweet, hardworking, wonder woman named Sylvana, who took care of everyone in the building like we were her children. Anyway, Sylvana kept a hidden key to her apartment in a magnet box in the laundry room down the hall. Only a few tenants knew about it. She kept UPS and FedEx deliveries in the apartment for everyone, and she trusted a few of us to have the key to help out if she was not around and people wanted their packages. So I knock on the door for a while, then I get the key and open the apartment. Everything is there, but no Sylvana. I was looking for her master key, so I could scavenge for food in the rest of the building. I scour her place and find some great dried sausages, tuna fish, and a big ring of keys.”

  Craig couldn’t help himself. “Did you find any bodies?”

  “No. The black ‘X’s’ were accurate. My building was empty. Bizarre that I would luck out and get an empty building. Anyway, I found as much food as I could. I moved into the top floor penthouse, and I waited.”

  It was John’s turn to ask. “Waited for what, Kelly?”

  “For it to end.” Kelly said quietly.

  Peter, Solange, and John knew what she was talking about. Craig looked at her curiously and asked. “For what to end?”

  Kelly looked out the window at the passing buildings. “The world.”

  Craig looked at Solange. The story was not over, and he wanted answers. He opened his mouth to ask another question, but Solange held up her hand and shook her head.

  Several seconds passed. Kelly snapped out of her trance. “There used to be people in all of these buildings. Now there are just red and black ‘X’s’ on the apartment doors. It’s so sad.” She paused again, looked at Craig, took a quick drink of water, and started. “Seriously, this water is so delicious.” She screwed the cap back on and turned to Solange. “I’m sorry that I ramble on, but I don’t talk much within our group. It felt good to get it all out. I’m okay now, I can’t promise I won’t slip into more ranting, but I hope to keep it together.”

  They drove slowly down the avenue. The ice and snow made it hard to control the SUV. John pointed to Madison Square Garden as they turned onto 21st Street.

  “That’s was where the Knicks and the Rangers played. A lot of the big bands played.” John said to his uninterested son. Craig wanted to hear more of Kelly’s story.

  “How did you meet the other people in New York?” Craig asked Kelly. The boy ignored Solange’s head shaking.

  “We’ll have plenty of time to talk about that.” Kelly told him “I don’t know for sure, but from what I could see in the few minutes I was with ya’ll,” Kelly’s Kentucky accent came through strongly as she said ‘ya’ll.’ “You have a cohesive unit, working together and making good decisions. My group is not as unified. We want to stay alive, but we don’t work well together. It’s one of the reasons we didn’t leave New York when we should have. I work best with Bernie and Jamie. We take care of the younger kids. There are three of them. I would include Meredith, an eleven year old girl, but she usually stays close to Avery, a 17 year old girl, and they are pretty much self sufficient. The teens do some chores, but not too much. They’ll help if we ask. Anyway, Ahmed was a hot shot banker, and while he and Bernie are close, he keeps coming up with ‘plans.’ He works hard, but I can tell he wants to be somewhere else and with other people. He isn’t happy, but he does his work. I’m okay with him, we’re just not close. We have two people who are useless. Sal is a big man who could be a great asset, but he’s addicted to pills. He sleeps and drinks most of the time. He scares me more than a little, and we try to keep the kids away from him, not get him angry. He shows up to eat, talks about doing a bunch of stuff, starts a project, then gets high and leaves us alone for a few days. The last person is Antonio. He was in a gang in the Bronx, and he can’t let it go. He wears his colors, keeps a gun and knife with him all the time, calls me ‘bitch’ a lot.” Kelly stopped and looked at Craig and then at John. “I’m sorry.”

  Craig replied quickly, “It’s okay, I know what bitch means. I don’t say it, but I know what it means.” Everyone had a quick chuckle.

  “Anyway, he tries to hang out with Avery, the older teen girl, but she won’t have anything to do with him. Antonio takes food, walks around muttering Spanish about all of us, and doesn’t help.”

  John looked over at Peter. Peter nodded back at him. They paid close attention to Kelly’s descriptions. John looked in his rearview mirror at Solange. She was looking back at him and nodded. Solange turned to Kelly and said, “I joined this group a week or so ago. They welcome everyone.”

  “Craig told me you are headed to New Hampshire to meet his uncles and brother?” Kelly asked innocently. “Did your entire family survive?”

  John nodded. “That’s the plan. We met Solange and Peter in Washington. We have to go to New Hampshire. It’s not an option for most of us. We are inviting anyone who wants to come. We can’t stay in New York. I have a 14 year old son who is alone in New Hampshire.”

  “Greg is 15 now, Dad. His birthday was in January.” Craig chimed in.

  John shook his head. “You’re right, damn, I missed his birthday. I have a 15 year old son in New Hampshire. Wow. Anyway, after New Hampshire we are open to suggestions about places to settle, but we have to go to New Hampshire first.”

  “I’ll talk to my people, which doesn’t include the entire 11, and see what they think. The fact that you have so many young kids is inviting.” Kelly sat back in her seat, taking one last sip of her water. “That’s the seminary up there on your right. The red brick building. See the smoke coming out of the chimney?”

  “Is there a place to pull in, or should I just park on the street?” John asked. “I don’t want to freak anyone out by showing up unannounced.”

  “Just park by the hydrant. I doubt anyone is looking. The car noise will be strange, but we’re not as with it as your group. Sal is probably sleeping one off or has disappeared. If the kids are screaming, no one will hear us.” She wore a smile as wide as a child at Christmas. “This is going to be exciting. I went out to find food, and I find food AND people. Heck, if you show the bottled water, most of us will follow you to Canada.”

  John pulled up next to a red brick complex of buildings with a black iron fence running along the street. A gate led to a large grassy common area in the middle of the buildings. John turned around to face the rest of his group. “Everyone ready to make some friends?”

  They opened their car doors and stepped out. It was cold. The sun was sinking off to the west, and the large skyscrapers of Manhattan blocked the sunlight that remained. John looked north to see if his signal fire was visible, but the skyscrapers blocked the black smoke. If Kelly had not stumbled upon the group, John doubted the tribes would have met.

  Kelly walked to the gate.

  “I’ll call everyone. As I said, half of us will be friendly, the teens will be indifferent, and I don’t know if Sal and Antonio will come out or are even around.”

  She walked into the center of four buildings. It was a beautiful arboretum with stone benches and walkways connecting the buildings. The paths were shoveled and the courtyard was maintained. As John stood in the common area of the buildings, he could almost imagine nothing was wrong with the world.

  They entered one of the buildings through a coat room. Kelly held the door to the main area, which was warm but not comfortable in temperature. The veterinarian walked across the room to a door. She opened it and yelled. “Jamie! Bernie! Kids! Everyone! I found survivors! Come out and meet them!” Kelly yelled for her groups. “Come on out, they are great people. They have food for us, food and water.”

  John held Craig by the shoulders. The boy stood in front of him. Solange and Peter flanked John on either side. They smiled warmly. John pointed Craig towards the door where Kelly yelled. Three small faces appeared in a window next to the door. A little girl waved to Craig. Craig waved back to her. All of the kids smiled and began to talk to each other. A woman in her late 30’s or ear
ly 40’s appeared in the window above the kids. She was shocked to see other people, and she moved the kids behind her.

  Kelly saw the woman and waved. “Bernie, it’s okay. I met these people up on 59th. They are from North Carolina. It’s a group of survivors.” The woman waved to Kelly, and made a gesture as if she was wiping sweat from her brow and mouthed ‘whew.’

  The door opened and the woman entered. She wore a hooded sweatshirt with the hood pulled up to cover her head. “It’s still cold in here.” She said as she walked across the room to greet the new people. “The kids will be here in a second, I told them they needed shoes and jackets.” She finished zipping her jacket.

  “You brought visitors. That’s great. It’s wonderful to meet new people.” She hugged Kelly, and walked towards John. “My name is Bernadette Evans, but everyone calls me Bernie.” She held out her hand to Craig.

  Bernie was an attractive African American woman. She was 5 foot 8 inches with a kind face and trusting brown eyes. She did not have gray hair yet, and her curly locks grew out of control and stuck out of the front of her hood. She was noticeably thin. Gaunt was the best description. She was thinner than Kelly.

  “My name is Craig Dixon. I’m from South Carolina.” Craig shook her hand. He looked down as he spoke. He was not as bold as his younger cousin, Jay, and shied away from new people.

  Bernie gave Craig her attention until the introduction was done. She moved to John, Solange, and Peter. “Hello.” She said enthusiastically and genuinely. “You are a sight for sore eyes. Please, come inside by the fire. We don’t have much food, but what we have we will share.”

  “John Dixon, Craig’s father.” John said, shaking Bernie’s outstretched hand. “Great to meet you too.”

  “Solange Wright.” Solange said, ignoring the handshake and instead giving Bernie an informal hug.

  “Peter Reinhart.” The last of the new group said. “Very pleased to meet you.”