The Hell Season

by Ray Wallace

  There was some scattered mumbling.

  “What I propose,” Ron continued as the noise died down, “is that we head out in groups of three and four, each group to a different section of the barrier, so that we can inspect it much more thoroughly and efficiently.”

  “Who died and left this guy in charge?” Thomas heard someone say under his breath. He looked around and saw the guy in the John Deere cap who met his gaze, an angry expression on his face.

  “Now I’m not telling anyone they have to do this,” said Ron as if he’d heard the complaint although Thomas didn’t think that he could from where he was standing. “I’m just hoping that everyone would be willing to assist in trying to find a way out of town and hopefully out of our current situation, no matter how small the odds might be.”

  More murmuring, the general tone of which seemed a positive one to Thomas’s

  ears. “Guy’s got a point,” he heard someone say.

  And: “He’s right, not like we’ve got anything better to do.”

  Thomas also heard some comments along the lines of: “Sounds like a waste of time, you ask me.”

  But in the end Ron’s idea won out and an hour later about fifty of the people who had these past few days called that sprawling megastore “home” had split up into groups just as Ron had suggested and drove off in different directions. Each group took a map of the town—Ron had found a stack of them at a nearby gas station—along with red posts and a post hole digger. Areas of the maps had been marked with red ink for different groups to inspect.

  “The most important lesson I learned in the military,” said Ron as he watched some of the vehicles leave the parking lot, “is that without organization you have practically no chance for success.”

  Just then Tanya came pulling up in the SUV they had used the day before. “Everybody in,” she said through the open driver’s side window. Today, Dana and Gerald had been added to the group, the SUV big enough to carry them all.

  The day promised to be another hot one. Not a cloud in the sky. The sun an evil, molten ball ascending over the horizon.

  “Over ninety degrees already,” said Tanya, consulting the vehicle’s digital thermometer. By mid-afternoon those numbers would hit triple digits.

  *

  I have always had a bit of a problem with authority. Especially as a teenager. Not all that surprising, really. Pretty much comes with the territory, I suppose. Even as I got older, though, the idea of someone trying to tell me what to do always managed to rub me the wrong way. I don’t know where it came from. My father was a military man. A sergeant in the Army. Did a brief stint in Viet Nam at the height of the conflict. Took some shrapnel in the leg and was sent home. Nothing life threatening but it slowed him down enough to make him a liability to his fellow soldiers. He walked with a slight limp ever since. Out of high school I thought briefly about joining the military myself. Very briefly. Because there it was, that inability to respond well to orders, that bristling at the thought of someone telling me what to do, when and how to do it. Probably one of the reasons I was never much for team sports, either. Or possibly that just had something to do with a lack of any real athletic talent. My father was disappointed that I didn’t follow in his footsteps. I hated to let him down but it would have been too big a price to pay, as far as I was concerned, just to appease him. I assume he got over it at some point. It’s one of those subjects that managed to never come up, that we happened to avoid whenever we spoke to one another. Maybe I’ll ask him about it if and when I ever see him again.

  All that being said, it seems a bit out of character the way I was able to just fall in line and let Ron—with more than a little help from Tanya—take command of the situation, to follow his lead. Especially as he was several years younger than me. But ever since the day when my family was taken from me, when everything I thought I knew about the world changed so completely… Something in me changed too. I think we all changed. I felt untethered. Disconnected. The world I had grown up in, that I thought I understood, had been taken from me. I had no idea how to deal with this new and disturbing reality in which I found myself. It came as a relief to see someone who did or at least acted like he did. I was glad to let Ron take the lead. I think most of us were, despite the complaints.

  Fort the first time that I could remember I was ready to follow orders.

  *

  The next few days fell into the same routine. Wake up. Walk over to one of the store’s bathrooms with a bottle of water and wash up. Grab something to eat. Then head out to test the perimeter. With the same results. Nausea. Headache. Disorientation. No one got through. It was discovered, though, that inanimate objects did not have this problem. Rocks. Tennis balls. Throw them at the barrier and they continued along their trajectory as if nothing stood in their way. Once, an umanned car with a brick on the accelerator was sent through the barrier, kept going until it finally veered off the road and plunged into a ditch. Put a person in a car, however, and it always turned around and came back.

  Two groups were assembled to retrieve supplies from other stores. Within the barrier, it was determined that there were five supermarkets—a Publix and two Sweet Bays among them and it was estimated that there were four times that many convenience stores. Thomas went along on these missions. He just couldn’t handle entering the barrier as well as the others. As a child he’d suffered from severe motion sickness. If he was going to be in a car for more than twenty minutes he would have to take some form of medication—Dramamine, usually—or he would become ill to the point of vomiting. It had something to do with a slight inner ear imbalance. As he grew older the symptoms became less severe, gradually disappeared altogether. But now he had to wonder if this imbalance had something to do with the way the barrier made him feel.

  By the end of that day, it was determined that they were trapped within a circle about six and two-thirds miles in diameter. Another thirty-seven survivors had been discovered along the way. Fifteen were found at one of the supermarkets. Twelve at another. The rest were encountered at or near the various convenience stores. These additions brought the total of those who remained in the town, so far as Thomas knew, to ninety people. Not one of them was a child. The youngest was a woman of nineteen years and two months named Melissa. The oldest among them—now that Gerald and some of the others had been made young again through resurrection—was a man named Isaac who was sixty-five years old. There could always be others hiding in their homes or any number of other locations. Hopefully more would be discovered. Only time would tell. Of the thirty-seven new survivors, twenty-five of them chose to come live at the Wal-Mart where Thomas and the others had been staying. Those who did not join them were part of a group that had been staying at one of the supermarkets. They had plenty of supplies there and were quite comfortable, said a big guy named Mack who was built like the truck of the same name and apparently the group’s leader. Another reason he and his group decided to stay where they were was the little problem they had with being so close to “That God forsaken hole in the ground.” No amount of arguing or persuasion from Ron or anyone else could change his mind nor, apparently, the minds of anyone with him. So they were left alone with the agreement that they would keep in regular contact.

  The rest of the day was spent getting the newcomers settled in at the Wal-Mart. Groups were splintering off and creating their own living areas throughout the store. At first, the comfort of being around a crowd of fellow human beings had helped make many of the people there, including Thomas, feel secure. But now the need for more privacy was setting in especially among those who found themselves in relationships of a more physical variety. Yes, it had happened already, more noticeably among the younger survivors. People who had only just met a couple of days ago could be seen holding hands or even kissing at times in public. Thomas couldn’t blame them. In fact, he envied them in a way. If only Julia was there… These were stressful times, to say the least. It was only natural that people would find comfort wherev
er they could.

  The days passed and the heat outside continued to rise. Thank God for the generators, the fans they powered and the relatively cool interior of the building, thought Thomas on several occasions. By the first of July, thermometers were hitting one-hundred and three degrees. Everyone hoped and some even prayed—those who hadn’t lost their faith in a higher power—that it wouldn’t get much hotter.

  On July the second, Thomas awoke to hear a woman singing “Happy Birthday" to herself. He, Dana and Gerald had claimed an area in the electronics section where they’d been sleeping of late. A woman’s voice, sweet and lilting, came to him from a few aisles away in the pre-generator darkness of the early morning: “Happy birthday to me… Happy birthday to me…”

  A fleeting thought: How about that, it’s somebody’s birthday.

  And then he realized what day it was. July the second. It was somebody’s birthday alright.

  His.

  *

  Birthdays were always a big deal around our household. Especially after the children

  were born. It seemed that the kids, once they’d gotten a little older, enjoyed celebrating mine and Julia’s birthdays almost as much as they enjoyed their own. I remember the year before everything went so crazy, the year before my family was taken from me, the year of my thirty-seventh birthday. My wife insisted that I take the day off work. It was a Thursday. The alarm beeped early like it did every workday morning. I rolled over and turned it off, started to get out of bed when I felt Julia’s hand on my shoulder and heard her voice near my ear saying, “Where do you think you’re going?”

  “To work,” I said and tried to pull away but not too strenuously.

  She tightened her grip on me and said, “Oh, no you don’t.”

  “But the children,” I said. “I need to make money so they can eat. So they have clothes to wear. Do you want them to starve? To run around naked?”

  She laughed and so did I and by then I was lying back down and Julia was kissing the side of my face. “The children are fine,” she said and I rolled onto my side so that I could look at her, pull her closer to me.

  “Then work be damned,” I told her and kissed her back.

  We lay there like that until the kids came bounding through the bedroom door and jumped onto the bed and I sat up and said, “Now what do you think you’re doing? Why aren’t you getting ready for school?”

  Robert, serious little Robert, gave me a forlorn look but Jenny just smiled and said, “Silly Daddy. It’s your birthday!”

  I couldn’t help it, I smiled back and said, “Is it? No, no it can’t be.”

  “But it is! It is!” Jenny was clapping her hands and by now Robert was smiling too.

  An hour later found us in the SUV driving to the beach. We headed south for about forty-five minutes down to Sarasota where the water was just a bit more clear, the sand a touch finer, the beach a little less crowded than the ones closer to home. It was a beautiful day, slightly overcast with a hint of a breeze so it wasn’t too unbearably hot. We played in the water and built a sand castle and collected seashells and sand dollars. Sometime past noon we got cleaned up and put on some more clothes then had lunch at a nearby seafood restaurant. We ate out on the patio beneath a huge umbrella that shaded the table amid the sounds of the waves lapping the shore nearby and the seagulls calling out as they hovered out over the water, occasionally swooping down when they spied food.

  It was about four o’clock when we got home. Everyone was a little tired from all the fun in the sun so we all lay down and took a nap. Later on, when the day started to give way to nighttime, we ordered pizza and had cake and ice cream and my family sang “Happy Birthday” to me, Jenny a bit more raucously than the others. Afterward, we watched a movie and the kids eventually fell asleep on the couch. I took Robert in my arms and Julia lifted Jenny and we carried them off to bed. We stood there for a while, my arm around Julia’s shoulders, hers around my waist, and just looked at our children, our beautiful children.

  “We’re so lucky,” Julia said at some point.

  “Oh, don’t I know it,” I told her.

  Then we went to our bedroom and made love. Afterward, as I drifted off to sleep, I told myself that all in all it was a good birthday. A year later, with the world a drastically different place, I would tell myself that it had actually been a wonderful birthday. The best a man could ever hope for.

  *

  That night there was a party. It turned out that thirty-four of those living there at the Wal-Mart had been born on that day, July the second. Nearly that many, it was discovered, shared a birthday on July the nineteenth. The rest on August the twenty-third. Everyone present had been born on one of three days. How was such a thing possible? And what was the significance of the dates? Was there any significance? The conspiracy theories ran rampant all over again. The government was responsible, surely. But even the most avid believers in this explanation were having a hard time putting a workable theory together. Where was the pattern? How did it all fit together? Maybe aliens had something to do with it after all. To what end though? For what possible purpose? Certainly the idea that God or the Devil was behind it all had its share of supporters. And there were those who didn’t care about any of that, who just wanted to party. “Can’t we stop with all the pointless questions for a couple of hours and have a little fun? Is that asking too much?” It turned out that, no, it wasn’t asking too much because by the time the sun had drifted below the horizon and darkness had claimed the land, a birthday party of epic proportions was well under way.

  Afterward, Thomas would wonder how he managed to stay sober through it all. A nearby liquor store had been raided and the alcohol was flowing in copious amounts. Thomas stood with Gerald and Dana near the edge of the throng. More shelves had been pushed out of the way and a couple of ping pong tables had been set up that were being used for enthusiastic games of beer pong. A stereo system blared everything from Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers to the Doors to Metallica. From out in front of the store gun shots could be heard which startled many of those present until it was discovered that it was only a few drunken revelers firing handguns indiscriminately towards the hole. Big screen TV’s were carried over and set up which enabled some intense Xbox and PlayStation competitions to take place.

  “Those generators are getting a workout tonight,” said Thomas to his two companions.

  “Cheers to that!” said Gerald and raised his red plastic cup filled with punch and vodka before taking a long drink. The sight of it made Thomas want a drink of his own badly but he was resolved to stick to his promise. No more alcohol. Not until he found his wife and his children. Not until he figured out what it was that had gone so terribly wrong with the world. And maybe not then either. Maybe never again.

  At some point Ron and Tanya showed up. They weren’t drinking either. “Quite the celebration,” said Ron.

  “People getting a little rowdy out front,” said Tanya. As if to accent her point there came the small pop! of a gun going off outside, barely audible over the interior din.

  “Yeah, well,” said Gerald with a shrug, “it’s been a while since anyone here’s had a reason to have fun. Shit, seems like forever. They’re just letting off some steam. It’ll be good for them. Good for all of us. You should get yourselves something to drink. Join the fun. You too, Thomas. Who knows when the next time will come along when everyone’s in such a jovial mood.”

  “I’m enjoying myself just fine,” said Ron.

  Gerald laughed, took another drink. “Yeah, the life of the party, that’s what you are.”

  Ron smiled and Dana sipped at the cup she held in her hand. The five of them watched the revelry unfolding around them for a while. Eventually Ron leaned in close to Thomas and said, “We need to talk.” Then he walked away toward the back of the store. Thomas followed him over to the automotive section where the noise was a bit more subdued.

  “What’s up?” asked Thomas.

  “Your friend t
here…”

  “Gerald?”

  Ron nodded. “Noticed anything… strange… in his behavior lately?”

  “Strange? No. Can’t say that I have. Nothing besides what you’d expect from a guy who’s been recently killed and resurrected, brought back in the prime of his health.”

  Ron nodded his head. “Alright. That’s good, I suppose.”

  “Why? What’s this all about?”

  “It’s just that… I did fourteen months in Iraq then seven more in Afghanistan a couple years back. Worked a checkpoint outside Baghdad for a while. Inspected any cars that seemed suspicious coming in. Used these mirrors on the ends of metal poles to look underneath them. Had to look in the trunk. Let the dogs take a sniff. Really stressful shit, let me tell you. I mean, any one of those vehicles could have been packed with explosives. You just never knew.”

  “Sounds pretty damned stressful,” said Thomas.

  “One time, there’s this big yellow car coming toward us. One of our guys goes out and signals for it to slow down. But it doesn’t slow down. Eventually… Well, we had no choice. We opened fire on it. Half a dozen semi-autos just giving it the business. It finally came to a stop about ten meters in front of the checkpoint. Steam pouring up from under the hood. Windshield all shot to hell. And what did we find inside? No explosives, that’s for sure. A woman. Middle aged. Three kids. All dead. Multiple gunshot wounds. I still wonder why she came racing up at us like that. Why she didn’t slow down, you know? Maybe she was crazy. Or just scared. Just freaked out for some reason and did the wrong thing. And paid for it with her life. And the lives of her children…”