American Apocalypse

by Nova

  “Oh, yeah. This is Donna.” Donna sat on the edge of the bed and undid the tourniquet. She set a bag down next to me that she had brought in and began taking out bandages, dressings, and glass vials. She lined them all up neatly. “This guy is Max. The guy on the bed is Gardener.”

  “Hi, Gardener. Hi, Max—Tommy get me some hot water, really hot water, a couple towels, and scissors.” She smiled at me; it was a nice smile. “Don’t worry—I’ve seen worse.”

  Tommy’s sister-in-law was Asian, or maybe Eurasian, around five feet four and probably not much over a hundred pounds. She was also attractive, a plus in the medical professional, I always thought.

  Tommy headed for the door. Max said, “I am going to go help Tommy. I’ll be back to see you before I go.” As they left I heard Max ask Tommy, “You got any coffee?” and they were gone.

  “Okay, Gardener. What bit your leg?”

  I laughed. “A rake.”

  “Hmmm . . . you had a tetanus shot lately?”

  Good question. “Yeah, about six years ago.”

  “Then you’re okay for that.” She didn’t say anymore. She took off my old compresses and disappeared. She reappeared with a towel. “Here,”—handing me the towel—“put this under you for now.” Tommy came back, carrying a steaming hot bowl, which he cradled with towels. He set it down carefully by Donna. “Thank you, Tommy.”

  “You’re welcome. The scissors are there, too.” He backed up a couple steps. “How are you feeling, Bub?”

  “Tommy?”

  “Yes?”

  “Don’t call me Bub; call me by my name, okay?”

  “Sure,” he held up his hands. “No offense, just a habit.”

  “None taken.”

  “Okay, Tommy. I think you’re done here.” She fished around in her bag and then stood up. “Why don’t you run to the store and get some sandwich stuff for us and Mr. Gardener. The refrigerator still work in here?”

  “Not the big one,” Tommy replied. “The little one on top of the cabinet does.”

  “Good. Pick up some water and the sandwich stuff. We can put some in the refrigerator here. That way he doesn’t have to come over to the house for now. Thanks.” She handed him some folded paper notes. He was turning to leave when she called out, “And Tommy, pick up a sixpack of decent beer. Not that cut-rate soda water you’ve been drinking.” He laughed and left. “Do you drink beer, Mr. Gardener?”

  “No, and please, call me Gardener.”

  “Well, you are going to wish you had a few after I start cleaning these out. We are going to take care of the leg, then I am going to look at those hands and knees.” She had me lift up enough so she could slide another towel under me. “Okay, good. Let’s get these boots off. Then I need you to disrobe below the waist. Please cover yourself with this towel.”

  She turned around while I did what she had asked. When I was done I said, “Okay ma’am you can turn around.” First she cleaned my bloody, grubby flesh with the hot water. That was quite soothing. The pain was like radio static while the hot water was the music that made it through.

  “You okay?” she asked. I nodded.

  It was almost, not quite, worth it to have fallen on the rake. She ignored the tent that somehow had appeared. As she worked she explained to me that she used a lot of homeopathic remedies, which I found interesting. “Okay, now this might sting. The antiseptic that she poured liberally over the puncture wounds stung enough that I arched my back and bit my tongue. “You still all right?”

  “I’m fine,” I told her.

  “Now I need you to take these. It is hypericum. This will help prevent tetanus, stop bacteria from forming, and help any nerve damage.” She opened a small vial. “This is tea tree oil. I am going to put it on the punctures to prevent infection.” She then did the same thing to my knees and hands. “That gravel will fall out on its own over time.” She then bandaged the puncture wounds. “I am going to leave the hands and knees open. Fresh air will help them more than bandages at this point. Do you have any clothes?”

  “No, not really.”

  “Okay, I will talk to Tommy.” She began packing up her kit. “I will be back in a few days to take a look at it. If we can avoid infection, then you should be fine. Pour some tea oil on it twice a day and change the bandages. I will leave what you need in the kitchen.” Then she was gone.

  I went to sleep. I woke up briefly when Tommy came and filled the refrigerator. He didn’t look in on me, and I drifted back to sleep. I woke up late the next morning. The trailer was stuffy, hot, and smelled of tea oil. My thigh, where the puncture wounds were, was turning pink. I was not a doctor but I knew what that meant. Hopefully, the tea oil would get ahead of it. I hobbled out to the kitchen and slapped some baloney between a couple slices of white bread and wolfed it down. I took a bottle of water and drained it. Damn, I needed coffee. I was going to have to talk to Tommy about that.

  I looked around and started opening windows. Little Styrofoam peanuts crunched under my feet. I wandered into the living room, found the remote, and clicked on the TV, wishing that I had a laptop. Instead, I was going to have to make do with satellite news. The feed was from DirecTV. What was left of American media news channels was and had been a joke for quite a while. CNN might have made a difference but the passing of the National Communications Act had muzzled them. Actually, it had worked against the authorities in some ways. Now, when CNN said they were going to air a hard-hitting exposé of college terrorism, you knew that Homeland Security was beginning an operation to crack down on student dissidents.

  The major European and Asian countries that produced news shows in English were sometimes a good source of information. You had to filter out the home country’s agenda, which was often America bashing, to get to the truth. At one time Homeland Security had tried to block their broadcasts, but it had not worked. Instead, someone had a better idea. The approved channels, especially the network alphabet ones, had sexed up the news. Now, it was soft news and porn. They knew how to keep Joe Six-Pack’s eyes focused on their message.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  POETRY

  Two weeks later I was sitting on the wooden steps outside my front door soaking up a little bit of sun. I was watching the kids play. It was my first time outside since I had arrived here. The infection had spread fast, and I had ended up on my back for over a week as Donna took care of me. I had an IV drip of antibiotics for five days, plus injections of them. The skin had rotted around each puncture, each hole combined into one long strip of rotted flesh. The smell was not unlike that of a decomposing body. For the last two days, medical maggots had been busy in the wound, cleaning it up. I gave Donna one of my gold coins to pay for the IV and medications. When she told me it was too much, I told her to buy food for everyone at the house. Gold went a long way now. Once upon a time there had been a credit price and a cash price. Now there was a cash price and a gold price.

  The kids were funny. The boy was seven; the girl was six. They were both cute. They had their mom’s dark hair and eyes and their father’s features. One day they were running back and forth on the grass in front of me, gradually working their way closer to me despite their father shouting, “Leave him alone!” I thought it would be the boy who would make first contact. I was wrong. Somehow the ball they were playing with ended up rolling to a stop five feet away from me.

  “Hey, mister! Throw it to us, please!” This was the little girl.

  “I can’t,” I replied. They both edged closer.

  “Why can’t you?” asked the little girl.

  “Because I can’t walk that good.”

  “He hurt his leg,” announced the boy.

  “Yes, I did.” Then I went on to field, oh, at least fifty questions.

  They didn’t notice their dad walking up to us. We made eye contact. I nodded to let him know I was okay with it.

  “Daddy, can he eat dinner with us?”

  The girl asked this. He nodded his assent, and I began eating d
inner with them each night. I also started weeding the garden, and I learned how to find eggs and chop firewood. Tommy explained how you could never have enough firewood when you had wood heat. Sometimes Donna would come eat with us. Afterward we would sit out on the porch and talk while the kids ran around and the dogs chased each other, or their tails. It was a good time for me. Maybe the best time in my life up to that point. Sometimes Donna would teach me how to identify common weeds, and then teach me what they could be used for. I learned that, as with people, there was really no common weed.

  I convinced Tommy to give me a ride into town. I needed to use the local library computers to send and check e-mail. I didn’t want to send mail too often from a static IP address. Tommy had a computer, but he kept it in his office. I had used it to do some research, and there had been no news about any deaths at the colonel’s. I thought hard about convincing Tommy to let me move the computer into the trailer but I decided against it. In the brief time I had used it, I had discovered that it was his sex life. He already had one woman run off. I didn’t want to ask him to give up another.

  I did find a couple local blogs that had posts about how the colonel’s retreat was one of the bright spots in the local economy. They were buying farm tractors from anyone who would sell. They were also buying old equipment—old, as in horse-drawn antiques—and they were doing a lot of building. Nothing big or fancy: underground fuel tanks, small inexpensive houses with solar heating, windmills. They were open about it, and they were getting good publicity as a result.

  I was also hoping to find a used bookstore in town. I wanted the rest of the Decline of Rome series. I had never read much before but the desire was now burning inside me. I read everything that Tommy had. Most of the books he had dug out of boxes in his basement. From the printing dates inside they must have been his grandfather’s or grandmother’s. I asked him, but he didn’t have a clue.

  My guess, based on the mix, was that it was both of them. Some were also from his mother’s time, but not anywhere near as many. There was a fair amount of poetry, some of which I found impossible to read. Others, well, some of the verses were like flares going off inside my head. I really liked Frost. Then there was T. S. Eliot. There were a couple anthologies of poetry that were great—mainly because I got to taste a wide selection of poets. One I liked especially: It had poems written by Sassoon, Graves, Brooke, and Owen. From the anthologies I began to make a mental list of who I wanted to read more of. Shakespeare was well represented in the selection of books. I really tried but found I did not care that much for him. Some of the lines he wrote were great, but I found it to be too much work to get to them. Then I found Steinbeck. He totally enthralled me with his descriptions of his character’s worlds. The Sword in the Stone was also an incredible book. I read that in one sitting. Sometimes after reading a passage or a great verse I would sit outside, look at the stars, and wonder about things.

  I had always known I was weird—maybe even a “freak.” It had bothered me a lot, once upon a time. Now, well, I found I just didn’t care. I never knew how other people seemed to know certain things. It was as if the entire human race had been issued an instruction book at some point in their lives. I imagined that it was called Handbook for Humans and that it was bound in red leather with the title in gold lettering. It would have chapters like “How to Have a Conversation” or “How to Get a Date” or even “How to Really Care.” I never found a copy, and no one ever admitted to having one. I was still looking though.

  Riding into town with Tommy was interesting. Just to see new sights was a nice change. It had only been three months but the changes were startling. Maybe it was because it had been so long since I’d spent any time outside my little world. My mind held images of what a small town in Virginia looked like, but they were all a few years out of date. Reading what was happening on the blogs, seeing the news coverage, and even experiencing the changes where I had lived had not prepared me for the reality that confronted me. I knew I was in America, but whose America?

  I lived and survived by sensing emotional undercurrents, in individuals and in groups. If I had any gift at all, that was it. I found that there were always multiple realities happening on every street and in every conversation. Together they would make up the one major current for that place. The currents I was feeling, especially when I got out of the car and left Tommy to go find the library, were not good ones: This was not a happy town. It was a very stressed, confused, angry town.

  I did not feel comfortable and I was glad I was carrying visibly. At least 30 percent of the people I passed were also, and most of them were males. A lot of people were out on foot or bicycle. A man and a woman passed me on horseback. I was on the sidewalk; they were on the street. I thought about what it would be like to have them come at me at full speed while shooting or waving a saber, and I understood a lot more why being a peasant sucked back in the day.

  The common areas were unkempt: Street signs had been hit and were either mangled or snapped off at their base. They had not been replaced. Trash was scattered on both sides of the road. The gutters had not been cleared of the past winter’s sand and oak leaves. Graffiti had been spray-painted on empty buildings and had not been cleaned off. The business district looked as though it had gotten ready for the arrival of a hurricane and then decided not to take down the plywood once the storm passed. People were drinking in public and not bothering to hide it. On one corner a black man, dressed in clean clothes and otherwise normal looking, was screaming “God Bless You!” over and over. This was punctuated by fits of laughter and wide grins. He was probably the happiest guy in town.

  The town had not given up entirely. Many of the cars may have been getting old and had unrepaired dents, but they had been washed. Some of the houses looked untouched by what was happening. They were well kept, with flower gardens and fences in good repair. If you switched your vision to selective, you might even be able to convince yourself all was well. But it wasn’t, and to think otherwise was a very dangerous thing to do.

  We had checked before leaving to make sure the library was open. The town once had had three libraries. Now it had one, and it was open only three days a week. It had not bought anything in two years and the librarians were volunteers. My plan was to check for e-mail at the library and then walk over to the used bookstore.

  The library had a crowd around it, waiting for it to open. They charged for Internet access: one paper U.S. dollar for fifteen minutes and a thirty-minute maximum usage policy. I had arrived fifteen minutes before opening thinking that would be sufficient, but I was wrong. I was the tenth person in line. Everyone stared at me when I got in line and only a few responded to my cheery “Hello.”

  One person, a young girl, was talking on a cell phone; two other people read paperbacks; and the rest of us just stood there—all sullen but me. The librarian, an older woman with gray hair and a haggard face, opened exactly on time. We flooded in, everyone except for me having a clue about the procedure. A large sign that read Internet Access was suspended by string over the desk. Everyone was in line to sign up, so I got in line. Most of the people not only signed up, but also had brief conversations with the librarian. Her assistant would disappear occasionally, reappearing with official-looking mail. The people would grab it eagerly, dash to the Internet access waiting line, and rip it open. Nobody seemed happy about what they received. One person cried right there, and an old man began cussing the government and went off on a short tirade before stomping out the door. That was fine with me—one less person in front of me.

  It took me an hour before I was able to sit down where six Dell computers were set up. Two were broken and turned off. I got the machine that was beside them, so I didn’t have anyone next to me. The county must have bought new machines right before the Crash, as these were not that bad. The keyboards had seen better days, and I felt like running some hand sanitizer over the mouse, but hey, they worked. The other machines were being used by two old people and a prett
y girl of about seventeen. I’d smiled at her when I sat down and she had returned it shyly. I logged into my latest e-mail account and checked for messages. I had one from Max. It was short and I liked what it said:

  “Come home now!”

  I let out an exuberant “Yahoo!” It silenced the place for a second. The old farts scowled at me. Happiness was not allowed in their world.

  The young girl whispered to me, “Good news?”

  I nodded my head. “Yes, it sure is.” I was just starting to compose an e-mail to Night. I wanted to avoid any drama upon my homecoming, and I also wanted to make sure my room was available.

  That’s when I heard the voices: loud, obnoxious voices with an edge that sounded like alcohol. I didn’t even have to turn around to dislike them. Once I did turn around, I found I liked them even less. There were three of them, the minimum size for a gang, but they were making maximum use of the power they thought it bestowed on them. They walked up to the Internet sign-up desk. The few people in line visibly cringed at their arrival. All three were white males, in their early twenties at most, and the leader was a big kid. He had long hair and a handful of metal attachments embedded in his face. He also had all the right tattoos. His followers had been cloned at the same factory. One had a really nice Confederate flag tattoo on his biceps. Two of them had the old-school wallet chains, and they were all carrying handguns.

  The leader said loudly, “Hello, auntie! We’ve come to use the Internet.”

  She told him, using a tone that had about as much steel in it as my underwear, “You know you need to sign in, Lucas.”

  They all laughed. He leaned over the desk and lightly patted her face. Well, he tried to; she flinched before his hand reached her.

  “We’ll do that, Auntie M.”

  He laughed and they turned to survey the table. One of the old people who was seated at a computer began gathering her stuff. She knew what was going to happen. The old guy next to her muttered something and began typing faster.