by Sean Little
Jump ahead to four hours later. I am passed out on the bed in the back of the RV, Fester curled up next to my head. We are not touching because it’s too hot to have a furry mammal on any part of my body. I have every window in the RV open, the roof vent open full. It was miserably warm, but I was also exhausted. I’d had to fight the Sandman to give up the magic dust that night, and I was just touching the edge of Dreamland.
The storm started with lightning in the distance, but I was out. I didn’t see it. The first rumbles of thunder were low and distant. They weren’t going to bother me, either. I woke up when there was a crack of thunder near enough to rattle the RV from tires to roof. It made me jump out of sleep. Winds had picked up to alarming speeds and were whistling through the screens of the Greyhawk with force. The air had cooled thirty or forty degrees. Before I could pull on a pair of shorts, hail started pelting my home; thick, heavy balls of ice smashed into the RV. One of the plastic side windows cracked. A swell of panic rose into my gorge.
I leapt to the driver’s seat and started the engine. It had barely roared to life when I slammed it into Drive and stepped hard on the gas. The RV lurched, spun its tires on a few chunks of hail, and then caught pavement and launched ahead. I ripped the RV onto the highway, but then realized that was a stupid move. What was I going to do? Outrun the storm in a bulky RV? Not likely.
Lightning dotted the sky with frightening frequency. All around me were streaks of angry, blue-white light. The thunderclaps slammed above, each one sounding like it was just outside my car. I used the electric window controls to roll up the driver and passenger windows, but the side windows and the roof vent were still open. Nothing was muffled, nothing lessened. The winds were getting stronger. If you’ve never driven what is, in essence, a gigantic box with zero aerodynamics during a windstorm, you can count yourself lucky. I don’t know how semi drivers deal with it. The wind was surging off the driver side of the RV. It was a constant fight to keep it on the road. Every blast of the wind would push me at least a foot or two to the right, and I would have to yank the wheel left to compensate.
I knew that being on the wide-open highway in the middle of a painfully flat prairie area was probably the worst place to have the RV at that moment. I needed to get off the highway and find shelter. I needed to be away from the hail and wind. I had no idea how much longer the next exit along the highway would be, and I wasn’t going to turn around and drive the RV into the storm. Hail continued to pelt the Greyhawk. It sounded like someone was attacking me with baseball bats and crowbars, just sharp, hard cracking noises. I saw a highway overpass ahead. I remembered seeing television footage of people hiding from a tornado in the ribs of an overpass bridge once. I also remembered seeing many articles afterward telling people not to do that. I didn’t see a lot of other choices, though. I needed protection from the wind and the lightning. I brought the RV to a stop under the overpass. The noise from the hail decreased immediately, although the rear panel was still being touched-up pretty good. I grabbed Fester, but he freaked out. He clawed and kicked at me, struggling to get away. He slashed my wrist badly with his rear claws, and I dropped him. He bounced to the table, and then leapt to the overhead bunk and hid behind the wall of water bottles. I couldn’t get to him. I didn’t want to leave him, but I didn’t see any other choice. I sprinted out the side door of the RV and charged up the paved hill to the underside of the bridge. I clambered to a spot where I was protected from winds and rain, and braced myself against the concrete to wait out the storm.
When a storm hit back when I lived sheltered in a house, and had TV weathermen to tell me how fast the storm was moving and a helpful radar image to show me where the storm was, it was almost disappointing how fast a good storm clipped along. Often, before I could really get to a point of enjoying the lightning and thunder, the storm had passed by leaving a curtain of dull, gentle rain behind it. Now that I was pressed against concrete slabs and hearing wind howling only feet from my head, the storm seemed to last forever. In the frequent lightning, I could see the hailstones piling up like snowfall, a carpet of lethal, icy chunks ranging from quarter-sized to softball-sized. I was at Nature’s mercy. There was nothing to do but ride it out and hope it didn’t get worse.
I could hear the winds surging in the distance. A familiar freight-train noise was building. Tornado. I’d survived a tornado over a year ago in Wisconsin. I remembered it too well. It sounded far away, but I knew how a tornado could travel. I knew how it could dance through the countryside beholden to no one, save its own whims. I closed my eyes and hunkered down. A tornado coming close to the bridge would likely destroy the RV.
An eternity passed. The winds eventually died down and a simple rain followed the storm front. I was still alive. The RV was still intact. I left my hiding spot and returned to the RV. In my haste to find shelter, I’d left the stupid thing running. I walked around the Greyhawk and inspected the damage. The right side and the roof were dimpled like a golf ball from hail damage. The rear side had taken a dozen direct hits from large chunks of ice and the large plastic window in the rear was cracked in a corner, but not broken. All in all, I got off lucky. It could have been much, much worse.
I slept in the Greyhawk under the overpass the rest of the night. In the morning, my wind-up alarm dragged me from my bed. I considered sleeping in that day, but I was anxious to see if the countryside had suffered damage. I wanted to see if I could find a tornado’s path and judge how close I’d come to serious misfortune.
I fed Fester dry cat food and skipped breakfast myself. I had no appetite. The temperature had cooled somewhat, but it was still summer, still hot, and with the new rainfall the humidity was going to rise even higher.
I found the path of the tornado. It had come pretty close to getting me, geographically speaking. The twister had touched down in the middle of an overgrown field just outside of a little blip of a town called Stony Ridge. There was a wide swath of turned-up grasses and fallen trees leading into the collection of houses that made up the town. I drove into town to survey the damage.
What is it about human nature that makes us love and fear images of destruction? Any time there was a storm that destroyed a barn or took down a tree, my friends who lived near the fallen object would post pictures on Facebook. If there was a flood in Florida, we’d all be glued to video footage of people kayaking through streets. When I was a kid, a tornado took out a single house just north of Sun Prairie. My mom and I got into a car to drive out to see the splintered wreckage for ourselves. Even in a world of entropy, I was still drawn to the majestic damage of storms.
I drove into Stony Ridge. It was one of those loose collections of older houses that was entirely forgettable, even more so now because most of the houses in town were obliterated. The tornado had done its best to erase the town from the map. Nothing remained except wild piles of splintered two-by-fours and concrete footings. Home goods and assorted debris were scattered across the streets. I spied at least two desiccated corpses tossed among the wreckage. They looked like thin, gray-green paper pulled over a skeleton frame, hollow skull-eyes staring and vacant.
The rain was little more than a drizzle, and curiosity got the better of me. I shut down the RV, got out, and started poking through some of the wreckage. Whenever I entered someone’s home, it made me feel like an archaeologist. I was learning things about people, people who had lived and died before me. I could learn about their religious practices, what they ate, what they did for fun, and sometimes, if I opened the wrong drawer in a bedroom, I could learn about their sexual practices. I didn’t really enjoy that part of it. It always felt a little skeezy.
In one of the homes, in what remained of the basement, I found a horde of bottled water and canned goods on a bunch of steel racking. On one of the shelves, I found twenty small, thin bars of pressed gold in a steel lock-box. No lie. I suppose it would have been something like $100,000 back when society still functioned, maybe more. I could only imagine the guy who had the gold a
nticipated the collapse of the markets and dissolution of currency. He must have invested in it well before the Flu, though. Judging from his basement stores, he looked like one of those guys who had been preparing for the fall of society. Fat lot of good it did him. He was dead. The gold was worthless. I left it where it lay and got back on the road, heading east into the rising sun.
CHAPTER SIX
Nighttime Visitor
The rest of Ohio was uneventful and, to be honest, extremely dull. Western Ohio was flat, almost as bad as Indiana was. There were empty, flat moonscapes of green fields and unending views of nothing, interrupted only by the occasional town. Eastern Ohio got to be a little more interesting, but still—not much going on there.
I went to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland. It was destroyed. It looked like at some point during the end of the Flu, someone, or a group of someones, figured it was time to live out all their wildest Keith Moon fantasies. Most of the display cases had been smashed. Guitars had been broken. Drum kits had been smashed. Stage outfits were scattered. It was depressing. I walked around and used my flashlight to look at some of the photos of bands I’d liked. Genesis. Cheap Trick. Queen. I had some CDs in the RV, but I never listened to them anymore. It felt blasphemous to play them. Silence felt more appropriate, or the sound of the wind in the window. That was my world now. I didn’t play any instruments. I couldn’t read sheet music. I would be too busy farming, or whatever the hell I was going to do in the south, to learn to play. Maybe it was right that the Hall of Fame was trashed out and wrecked. It was a fitting end to those instruments. Music was dead.
I spent almost two weeks in Ohio. You wouldn’t think you could spend two weeks in Ohio, but if you spent enough time driving through the cities and scavenging, two weeks goes by in a hurry. An hour here. Four hours there. Another hour of driving. Four more hours scavenging. It added up quickly.
I spent a couple of nights sleeping inside the city limits of Sandusky and Cleveland. That was a lot different than sleeping on the outskirts. If someone had survived the Flu and was roaming around the cities, they could easily have found me while I was sleeping. I wouldn’t have known if they were friend or foe. I didn’t sleep well those days. It was nerve-wracking. I kept two guns in my bedroom in the back of the RV those nights. I also kept most of the windows closed and locked despite the humidity. I also pulled all the curtains, even the big one that blocked out the cab windows. I hadn’t pulled that one at all until that first night in Sandusky. Turns out, I didn’t need to worry; no one found me, and I didn’t find anyone.
The whole time I was in Ohio, I didn’t see one sign of anyone surviving. Many of the stores had been ransacked before the final week of the Flu, but they were undisturbed since then. Dust was settled on everything in the stores, and I could see the footprints and scat of various vermin. Mold was starting to grow on walls that had suffered water damage. I could smell rot. For as much optimism that meeting Doug had put into me, Ohio was sucking back out of me.
Ohio: The Pessimism State. That probably would not look good on their license plates.
I crossed into Pennsylvania and headed east on Highway 80. Almost immediately, things started to get better. It didn’t take long for the relatively flat prairie of Ohio to give way to tree-covered hills and vales of northern Pennsylvania. It was a wonderful change of scenery. The hills and vales didn’t hold onto humidity as the prairie did, either. The weather became more pleasant. Still warm and humid, but not unbearably so, just standard summer weather. I started to gain optimism again. I went into the little towns and villages off the highway hopeful that I would see signs of life.
My first night in Pennsylvania was spent in a tiny town off the interstate called Clintonville. It was a nice, simple little town, nothing fancy. I parked outside of a local supermarket in the late afternoon. The market looked like an old house converted to be a small convenience store. It was primitive, but I liked it. There was a small parking lot where I could park the RV. I was getting burned out on the scavenging grind. Just by glancing around the town, the dark windows and overgrown lawns, I knew no one here had survived. I didn’t even feel like looking for signs of life. I just wanted to spend a night relaxing and goofing off. Maybe it was because of what Doug said about actually living, or maybe it’s because I had a burst of teenage slovenliness. Despite the desperate, driving need to survive, I was still eighteen; I had more than my fair share of laziness and lack of motivation.
I found a nice deck chair on the porch of a nearby house and set it up near the RV. I built a fire on a nice, sandy place next to the parking lot of the little mart. There was plenty of wood to be found around the town. Many of the residents had their own stores of cords of wood for their potbelly wood heaters or fireplaces. It only took twenty minutes of work to gather enough wood to last me the whole night. After I had enough wood for the fire, I took a walk. Fester wasn’t really a hiking cat, so he stayed with the RV.
I don’t know what got into me that night. Maybe I was possessed by a demon of curiosity or something. Up until that night in Clintonville, I hadn’t wanted to go into anyone’s home. I’d done it in Wisconsin a few times, but I didn’t like it. I never knew which houses were completely empty, or which ones might have decaying corpses. Either way, going into private homes always felt a little like grave robbing. I ignored that sensation that day, though. I started walking up to random homes and trying the doors. Most were locked. Any locked doors, I let be. I wanted to find one that was empty and unlocked. There was a simple, nothing-special home along the main street, just a plain white box with a postage stamp yard and an open-air carport off the side of the house. It looked exactly like the house of the woman who used to babysit me when I was a little kid in Colorado. My parents both worked a lot when I was first born, so I spent a ton of time in that woman’s house. Her name was Mary, but I called her Aunt Mimi because I couldn’t pronounce Mary correctly for some reason. She was a sweet old lady, very no-nonsense and old school, but very loving. Seeing that house made me feel nostalgic. I decided I wanted to know what that house was like on the inside. I wanted to know if it had the same interior layout of Aunt Mimi’s home.
I trudged through the overgrown grass and tried the door handle. The door was unlocked, but it was clear that no one had disturbed the home in some time. When I cracked the seal on the door, I sniffed the air. I’d learned that houses tended to have a funk to them when there were decaying corpses inside. A year of drying had mummified many of the dead. The effluence and vital organs had dehydrated and most of the really bad smells you’d associate with a recently dead corpse had gone with it. However, those nasty, nose-wrinkling smells would work their way into drywall and carpet padding, sheets and blankets, and just taint the house forever. You could tell the second you walked into a house if there were bodies inside. This house didn’t have any rot smells, though. The fact that there wasn’t a car in the carport or driveway hinted that whoever had lived here had gone to a hospital and died there, perhaps. Maybe they’d gone to the home of a relative to die. It didn’t matter. They were gone, and they hadn’t died in the house. The lack of a body in the home made me feel better about trespassing.
The house held its own smells, though. Ever notice when you go over to someone else’s house the first time that it has a weird smell? Like, my buddy David—his house always smelled like soup. I never once saw anyone in his family eat soup, but the house had that smell of chicken stock, chopped vegetables, and bay leaves. I don’t know why. I was smell-blind to my own house, so I couldn’t tell you what it smelled like. My mom liked a particular scent of potpourri called Nightmist and there were little satchels and bowls of it everywhere, so I think it probably smelled like that. This little house had a stale smell. I could tell there had been standing water in the basement at some point in the past year. Might still be standing water. It had that scummy water funk.
The house was laid out exactly like Aunt Mimi’s house. There was a large living room at the
front door, a little kitchen and dining area just beyond it through an archway. There were two bedrooms to the right of the living room and kitchen and an old, cramped bathroom. I figured the house had to have been built in the late 1930s or early 1940s. Post-depression, there wasn’t a lot of heavy spending, and houses were built small and tight. Easier to heat, that way. Efficient.
The decor in the house was nondescript. Simple. Brown. Dark woods and fabrics. Nothing noteworthy. The living room was clean. The kitchen was completely clean, scoured even. No dishes around the sink. No scraps anywhere. The fridge was full of spoiled food, but that could hardly have been the owner’s fault. Clearly, the owner had been a neat freak. Either that or he/she had known something was up before they went to the hospital or wherever they went, and had cleaned thoroughly—sort of the home-based equivalent of making sure you’re wearing clean undies in case you’re in a car accident.
There were no pictures of humans on the walls. I found that a little strange. In every house I’d been in—every one—there were always pictures on the walls. Wedding photos, kids’ school pictures, family reunion photos, and vacation shots, there were always images to give me insight into the people who lived there. This house had none. There wasn’t even art on the walls. The living room had a strange, ornamental metal sculpture that looked like a double helix accented with squares and lines, but that was about it. Not even a crucifix or other religious symbols. The walls were perfectly bare. Or so I believed until I walked into the spare bedroom.
The master bedroom was as simple as the rest of the house. The bed was made with crisp corners and the top coverlet folded over and around the pillows like a hotel does. The closet was arranged neatly, men’s clothes hanging from hangers and stacked in squared piles. There were no women’s clothes. It was a bachelor’s home. Judging from the style of the clothes and the few DVDs scattered around the TV, the owner was more likely a younger man. Outdoorsy.