by Riley Flynn
“That’s all well and good. And I agree with you. But what were we told? Stay indoors. Definitely don’t break curfew. Absolutely don’t cross state lines once the deadline passes.”
“So, we’ve still got time to get there. Twelve hours, I make it. Get on the road to Virginia by then and who’s going to stop us? This is only a short-term thing anyway. They’re just working on some sort of vaccine, need people to stay still so they can hand it out when it’s ready.” Alex wasn’t sure how much he believed this but continued anyway. “Like I said, we’ll get creative.”
“Creative how?”
“Creative like–what have you got in your basement?”
Alex knew he had his friend in the right position. It was the way his eyebrow twitched. One small, slight pulse of the muscle. It was the same when they played poker.
“What do we need? What can we carry? What can we fit in my car?”
“We’ll take my car. The Chevy. Runs quieter. Uses less gas.”
“But it’s so much smaller.”
“We’re trying to not get caught.”
“But what can we take? We can hardly fit everything inside.”
“The essentials.”
“They’re all essential.”
“The essentials, Timmy. Just enough to survive.”
The sun was setting. The last of the light crept in through the kitchen window. It didn’t matter. Both men were down in the basement, poring over maps and itineraries. A gas light burned for hours above the pool table. The green felt glowed. The red pen circled Virginia. Outside, the rest of the world began to collapse.
12
Alexander Early began sorting through his friend’s possessions. There were the guns–best left to the knowledgeable parties–but there was so much more. Timmy must have gone through thousands of dollars assembling this collection.
God knew where he’d got it all from. SkyMall for survivalist types. He had tents, animal traps, more knives than Alex could count, walkie talkies, and jerry cans. But it was something smaller that turned out to be the most useful.
It was a wind-up generator. Not the huge, gas-guzzling monster which lived out back. This was a smaller affair. It was pretty much just a handle. Turn the handle, generate power. Charge whatever electrical device needed charging. With Detroit still at the mercy of the rolling blackouts, Alex breathed a bit of life into his dying, unreliable phone.
It wasn’t much good for calling, though. Just like trying to order a pizza the night before, every line seemed dead. Landlines, cell connections. Nothing was getting through. Timmy thought it was just society collapsing but Alex had his own theory. In his opinion, there were just too many people trying to get through. An overload.
It was easier to demonstrate this with Internet connections. The signal was just as spotty, just as unreliable. But every now and again–if he kept checking and encouraging the phone–it would bring up a web page. It was like trying to connect to a distant planet. Requests took hours to send. But when they did, they brought back stories from another world.
Every now and then, after cranking the handle on the charger, Alex would check the phone. If there was a new story loaded, he’d read it aloud. For the first time in years, his attention was focusing on one article at a time. There wasn’t much else to do. But he read it aloud anyway.
These were the times when Timmy would fall silent. He’d stop and listen as Alex read about illness across the west coast. San Francisco, it said, had its hospitals overwhelmed. Portland, too. Up and down the coast, this Eko virus had been spotted everywhere. So far, fifty people had died, but thousands were showing symptoms.
The rest of the time, Timmy could not stop talking. Every time he pulled a new toy out of a basement cabinet or a bedroom wardrobe, he’d walk through the technical specs.
“P-12 tactical flashlight, by Nitecore,” he’d announce to an audience of one. “A thousand lumens of the brightest light you’ll see and it can take a beating. A pure classic. Never bettered. Throws light nearly 800 feet. Got three of these, knew I’d need them one day.”
They went in the bag. Alex had to intervene every now and then. The Leatherman multi-tools were an excellent addition, but would they really need a full tool set to accompany them? Surely there wasn’t a need for fifty different screwdriver heads on the drive between Detroit and Virginia? Though he acquiesced, Timmy put the screwdrivers close to the bag. Just in case there was space at the end.
“Hey, man, you know, I’ve been thinking something,” Timmy announced, sorting through a collection of water purification tablets. “If all these people are getting sick on the west coast, then why was the President on Air Force One? Why did he look… like… like he did?”
It was a reasonable question. Alex was still gleaning as much information as he could, loading up a new article every hour. But finding information seemed tougher than he’d expected. Even when he could reach out to a company or a news outlet, they didn’t have any new stories. Nothing published in the last twelve hours. And no one was calling him. Parents, obviously, weren’t going to be an issue. But friends. Colleagues. Doctors. Government officials, maybe. Perhaps even Sammy. No one seemed to have reached out. Something was broken and data they had didn’t explain the malaise.
“You said you’d heard about this virus? Eko, they called it?”
“Oh, yeah, man. It’s a doozie. Not a nice thing to think about. Comes from a jungle somewhere. Can’t remember where.”
“But they’d shut down an entire country for it?”
“That’s the thing. Last time I heard, it was just a couple of hospitals here and there. Like, it’d come up on the news, man, and you’d see these horrible pictures of the kids and stuff. Nasty National Geographic type stuff. But it always went away real quick.”
“Didn’t seem like they thought it was going to go away real quick.”
“Right? That’s what I’ve been saying. Something’s going on here, man. Something they’re not telling us.”
Timmy was one to jump the gun on almost anything like this. The traffic cops, they gave him a ticket because of some government war against gas vehicles. The bosses at work overlooked him for a promotion because he knew too much about them. Or he worked too hard. Timmy always had his excuses. But Alex didn’t have any answers. An excuse, right now, was close enough.
The longer they thought about these kinds of questions, the more they realized that they knew nothing. So they went back to packing. There was a reassurance in action. An immediate problem.
This bag has a certain volume. Inside, they could place x amount of ammunition, plus a fishing rod, a shovel, two sheets of tarpaulin, and a tourniquet. It meant they couldn’t fit the crossbow or the signaling mirror. Sacrifices must be made.
But packing everything up neat and tidy–and making sure they had enough room in the trunk of the car–was a problem they could handle. Even though neither man mentioned it, there was an unspoken agreement not to dwell too much on the bigger questions. To do so only made them feel small.
Late into the night, it was time to eat again. Deciding to save the canned food for the road–a treat–they started again on the MRE. If they could learn to love them now, Timmy reasoned, then they might be able to save a lot of trouble by the time they got out on the road.
So they tried another. There was no cooking required, so Alex unpacked the contents and laid them all out across the table. They were sitting in the kitchen, the gas lamp suspended from the ceiling between them. It was almost like a restaurant. Not a nice restaurant.
The language on the individual packets was difficult to decipher. Each was labelled by its course. Entrée. Dessert. One item was labelled ‘cracker’ and another was labelled ‘spread for cracker’. A pale imitation of peanut butter.
Under the names were the calorie contents of each part of the meal and allergy advice. Neither man suffered an allergy, but that didn’t stop the meals from turning the stomach. Mixing the packet pound cake with the apple c
obbler, stirring the mixture with the plastic spoon, Alex could taste it before it even entered his mouth.
“This stuff,” he said, chewing his food, “is not great.”
Timmy was still eating, staring determinedly at the information emblazoned down the side of the box. He spoke up but didn’t move his eyes away.
“I know. I’d always expected much better. I got it from a friend of mine. Military guy. Said they ate this kind of stuff in Iraq. He gave me a decent price.”
“How long ago was this, Timmy?”
They checked the expiration date on the packaging. Three years ago. They spat out the food. They opened the cans of stolen chili. It tasted much better.
Later, the bags were packed. They’d eaten what they could and saved some for the journey. At the bottom of the MRE pallet, they found a few more recent meals which tasted better. These new meals even had flammable tablets to heat up food. Luxury.
Both men enjoyed a cold shower and changed. Alex was wearing one of Timmy’s old T-shirts, taken from a gun range, and a sweater from the inside of his car. It had spent some time buried in the footwell and smelled like it. But, after airing it out, the familiarity had been more than welcome.
They sat with the map between them. It was a ten-hour trip on a good day. The deadline for crossing over the state lines was barely twelve hours away and it was the early hours of the morning already. They had to sleep but decided that they’d be able to leave at first light. It had a certain ring to it: Leave at dawn.
The theory was that, once they were on the road, any cops they encountered would just tell them to go home. If that home was in Virginia, then they would just have to keep driving. It wasn’t a complicated plan. It wasn’t a good plan. But it was all the plan they had. Even sticking their heads out the front door, they could hear sirens in the distance. And not just in the city. They were in the suburbs. There were helicopters overhead. It was dark and something was happening.
“There’s one more thing I need to get,” said Alex. “From my place.”
“We got the time for that?”
“It’s the keys to the farm house. We’ll make time for it.”
Alex wanted to collect far more than just the keys. But he didn’t want to tell Timmy that.
“I’ll duck out, first thing. Take my car. It’ll be twenty minutes there and back. I’ll do it in record time. Last thing we want is to be arrested breaking into my parents’ old farm.”
Nodding along, happy to listen to his friend’s sage advice, Timmy turned a plastic spoon around over his fingers. He twirled it, rotating the spoon as it proceeded from the first finger to the last and then back again. “I just wanted to say,” he began, “that I have no idea what is happening. I don’t think you do either. But I’m glad you’re much better at not knowing than I am. I don’t know what I’d be doing right now if I’d been stuck here on my own.”
At that, Alex realized that he had never asked Timmy about his family. Whether he had loved ones. A brother. A sister. An uncle, a girlfriend, or even a dog. Alex didn’t really know much about his friend at all. When he asked, Timmy just sat there, shaking his head.
“Story for another time, man. But it’s just me and you now. You’re stuck with me now, brother. Better make the most of it.”
Alex laughed. Somehow, they’d managed to find a couple of unopened beers and a bottle of something which might have been rum, once. Bags packed, they drank and talked. Not about anything in particular. About nothing at all, in fact. But enough to take their minds off everything.
The hours rolled on at Castle Ratz. Tomorrow was another day. Sleeping on the couch in the basement, Alex bade goodnight to his friend. As he went to bed, he tried one more time to get any information out of his phone.
There was nothing. Not just no response, but no information about the state of the world. It was more worrying than if there had been stories about cities on fire or decimated populations. Just a vacuum of information and, as he fell asleep, he knew that his dreams would fill in the empty space with the worst outcomes imaginable.
When he woke up, he thought, it might be to an improvement.
He would be wrong.
13
Dawn had hardly broken before Alex was up, dressed, and in his car. He had not slept well. His dreams had been full of fire and fury. As the key entered the Chevy ignition, turned, and got the engine running, the images were still fastened to the inside of his eyelids. Every time he blinked, he was reminded.
The street lamps were dim. These should have been the solar-powered types. But, after long hours of darkness, they fell back on the grid. Without that, they were struggling. Keeping the beams low, keeping his speed down, and glancing occasionally across to the pistol he’d been unable to leave behind, Alex drove through the suburbs out of Grosse Pointe.
It was a simple route. On the right night, with the wind behind him, he’d make the trip in twenty minutes. That meant accounting for the traffic, the stops, the little annoyances which slowed down the drive during the day-to-day.
But this was different. The roads were empty. Not just empty. Alex had driven places on Christmas day, had worked night shifts on New Year’s Eve. He knew what empty streets looked like. This was different. As he drew closer and closer to the heart of the city, it became impossible to shake the feeling of unease which crept out of every storm drain, which lurked around every corner.
There was no other car on the road. But there were people. Alex could see them, in front of their houses. Not many. Scattered from place to place. When they heard his car coming, they ducked inside their doorways. As he drove past, it was clear that they were loading up their own cars. One man was holding a crying baby. He covered the baby’s mouth as the Chevy rolled past.
With the sun only just arriving over the horizon, Alex understood why the streets seemed so strange. One of the reasons, at least. Every now and then – at least once a block – the sunrise caught the edges of the glass shards which lay across the asphalt. They twinkled sharp in the morning sun. Windows smashed the night before had now been boarded up, but there was no one to sweep the streets.
Parking in front of his apartment block, Alex locked the car. He didn’t want to be stranded in the city. He let himself in, through the three locks, not pausing to feign the third. Practically running through the hallway, his feet hardly touched the stairs as he ran up each step. Arriving in his home, he looked around.
It was exactly as he had left it. Even if the looters had got in, there wasn’t much to steal. A broken television? Maybe they could do the laundry. Shoving the keys in his pocket, Alex began to search furiously through his home. Through every drawer and every box. Every place something small might hide.
The farmhouse keys were easy enough to find. He hadn’t touched them in years. The other thing, though, that was more difficult. In certain moments, he’d take it down from a shelf or out from a bag, find it hidden in his jeans pocket or stuck down the side of a couch cushion. When that happened, he’d have to pause and take a look.
It was important. It was the pivot around which his life had turned. A round, metallic object which had dictated the course of his very existence. And it was so small. And empty. Just a golden circle, empty of everything except meaning. It was always appearing around the house, in the places he’d least expect. When that happened, he’d have to sit and think about everything for a while. Even now, it was altering his life.
He found it. Beside the coffee maker in the kitchen. It was cold and lonely. Alex’s searching fingers turned it in familiar circles. He knew every single atom of it. Every dimple and imperfection. No one in the universe knew anything as well as Alexander Early knew this ring. He shoved it into his pocket with the keys, grabbed a couple of clothing items, and then headed for the door. He’d be happy never seeing the apartment again. There wasn’t much to leave behind.
It was still dark and dawn struggled on to the scene. The lights in the apartment block were off, the house straining
like the rest of the city to stay awake and functioning. But the creak in the stairs never slept. Every footstep called out through the hallway. Alex was worried that he was waking someone.
The stairs sang like the larks in a morning cornfield. Already, Alex was remembering the birdsong he’d heard in his youth. He hadn’t thought about Virginia for years. Not since he’d handed everything over to Eames. But the thought had knocked him, hit him hard like a freight train, and wouldn’t stop running through his mind. He had to go back. If something was happening, then Virginia was the only place in the world he needed to be. It was a place where he knew how to survive.
Reaching the ground floor, Alex thought he had left the singing stairs behind. But as he stepped across the entrance hall, he heard a long, high-pitched sound. A howl. It wasn’t the stairs. It was a person. They were in pain.
Searching around the hallway, Alex knew there was no one else. No animal caught in a trap. No person beckoning him into a place he shouldn’t go. He was alone. But the voice kept calling out.
Trying to find the source, Alex crept around the hallway. It wasn’t a big space. But he pressed his ear to the wall, listened at the door down to the basement, and even tiptoed up to his neighbor’s welcome mat to see if there was anyone inside. There was. The sound was coming from inside.
Glancing to the front door, Alex knew that his car was on the other side. Timmy would be waiting. The Chevy was only a few feet from the front step. He’d be out and ready to leave in no time. But there was no way to mistake the pain in the voice. The person called again, a longing, desperate howl directed at anyone passing by.
With his fingers pressed up against the door, the latch rattled. It was closed but not locked. The calling from inside grew louder, stronger. They knew someone was outside. Alex couldn’t remember the last time he had seen his neighbors. They wouldn’t have any idea that he’d been there. There was nothing they could hold against him if he decided to just leave. He’d be in Virginia by this time tomorrow. He’d have new neighbors.