by Sean Little
“Where’s your sister now?”
Ren didn’t reply. I had an inkling of what happened. Ren took a deep breath. “Patriots got her. Found her scavenging and tried to take her back to their little fortress. I was up on a roof looking for an entrance to an apartment. I heard her screaming, and then she somehow pulled her gun and shot and killed one of them. The other two responded in kind to her. I saw her die on the sidewalk.”
“I’m sorry.” Condolences for something like that felt hollow, but it was the only thing I could think to say.
Ren shrugged. “Thanks, but it is better that way. I’d hate to think about what those misogynist assholes might have done to her if she was still alive. I know that other women survived the Flu, but I have never, ever seen them out with Patriot patrols. A few months ago, I run into this dude while I was combing through an office building, right? I got the drop on him, but he turns out to be an okay dude. He tells me he’s been spying on the Patriot encampment for weeks. Says he’s seen women in the encampment. Some are washing clothes. Some are cooking. Some are cleaning. The guy tells me that the Patriots want to ‘breed a new America.’ Sounds like a code word for rape to me. There are men with guns guarding the encampment at all times, and if one of the women stops doing whatever they’re told or tries to rebel, they die.” Ren was quiet for a moment, and then she said, “Some of them figure it’s better to die, and they take that bus, you know?” Renata stopped talking. She looked down at her hands. In the firelight, I could see scars and callouses. She was a fighter. A survivor.
I didn’t know how to respond.
“Why do men think they can just do that?”
I didn’t know how to respond to that, either. “I don’t know.” I was a weak representative for my gender.
“Elena was smart. She was an ER nurse. She was tough. It sounds sick, but I’m glad they killed her. She didn’t deserve to be a slave. She would have hated it.” After a moment, she shook off thoughts of her sister. “What about you? Brothers? Sisters?”
“Only child,” I said. “Buried my parents and my girlfriend after they died.”
“You said you were going south. Why?”
“Because I spent a winter in Wisconsin and decided I did not want to do that again. Too cold. Too brutal.”
“But why the South?” Ren turned to face me. “It’s so far away. And hot.”
“You never thought about leaving New York?”
“No. Not once. It’s my home, you know? It’s where I was born.” Ren got up from her bed and went to the window. She pulled back the curtain and what little moonlight there was outside helped illuminate the apartment. “It ain’t great, but I understand it. It makes sense to me.”
“You could probably survive here for years. Plenty of food, plenty for places to scavenge. Plenty of things to burn for heat. Just stay away from the Patriots.”
“Yeah. That’s what I figured.” Ren dropped the blanket. The light from the fire became our sole source of light again, rich, yellow-and-orange tones. “That’s what I was planning to do, anyhow.”
“But then what?”
Ren squinted at me. “Then what? What do you mean?”
I shrugged. I gestured at the canned food. “You’re going to get tired of canned food, aren’t you? In the south, there will be fresh food. Fruit trees. Fresh game animals. Ocean fish. River fish.”
“I got river and ocean fish here,” Ren said defensively.
“You actually want to eat what you pull out of the rivers around here?”
Ren shrugged, then shook her head. “Nah. The East River is really gross. I found a couple of bodies floating in it last year. Figured that people probably were dying of the Flu and chose to bail off the Brooklyn Bridge.”
“The South will be warm,” I said. “That’s my main reason for going. It took a lot of wood to get through a single Wisconsin winter. Down south, I won’t have to fear freezing to death. There will be plenty of food in the South, too. All kinds of animals and farmland. Orchards. It just seemed to me that if I was going to live someplace for the rest of my life, I should live someplace where it was warm and food would be plentiful, and then I could figure the rest out as I went along.”
There was a silence, and then Ren walked toward me. She looked at me with serious eyes. “Can I go with you?”
CHAPTER NINE
The President of the United States of America
I wasn’t about to tell someone who did not shoot me or club me to death when she had the chance that I wouldn’t let her come with me. I needed friends. I needed friends badly. I did not know for certain if I could trust Renata; after all, she did hold a gun on me. An empty gun, sure, but a gun nonetheless. I would have done the same thing in her position, though.
I held back the knowledge of my RV. I didn’t want her to decide to clobber me in the middle of the night and steal it. I had no desire to face off with the so-called ‘Patriots.’ I wanted to get free and clear of New York as fast as possible. I told her she could come with me. When I said it aloud, I realized I wasn’t just being nice. I really wanted her to come with me.
Turns out, Renata was not sure she could trust me, either. After we talked about the South for a while, she said, “I’m going to bed. If we’re going to leave New York, we need to go early. The Patriots tend to sleep late. The first couple hours after dawn are pretty safe for moving around the city. Meet me under the overpass tomorrow morning where we found each other, okay? Be there early.”
I didn’t blame her for being cautious. I asked for my gun back. She hesitated. “If I give you this back, do you promise not to shoot me?”
I promised. It was a major moment of trust-building between us. She held it out, I took it back, and then I ejected the magazine and popped the single bullet out of the chamber, just to show her that I wasn’t going to use it against her. “Friends?” I said. I held out my hand.
“Friends.” She shook my hand. I’d like to say something like her touch sent electric shocks up my arm, and our eyes met. If there’s something that my journals lack, it’s love scenes. Unfortunately, if I’m completely honest with you, at that moment there was no love, only a tentative friendship, a sincere bond between two people who each desperately needed a friend and someone to trust.
She walked me to the door of the bar and locked it behind me. There were three large deadbolts in the door. No one was getting through that door without hitting it with a truck. Once outside, I reloaded my gun. I decided to play it safe and took a roundabout path back to the RV. I went north for six blocks, ducked down an alley, and climbed a fire escape just to make sure she wasn’t trailing me with a group of armed goons waiting to take whatever supplies I had. I even considered just sleeping on a roof. It was a nice, warm night. It was the sort of judgment call that I hated to make. If she was in cahoots with others, I could be foiling their plans. If she was alone, I was just making myself miserable for nothing. I waited on the roof for maybe an hour. I had no idea what time it was. Easily after midnight, probably closer to dawn than midnight. I listened for engines, voices, footsteps, for anything. I heard nothing but wind, crickets, and the occasional distant bark or howl of stray dogs. Eventually, I decided to trust that Ren was as alone as I was, and I went back to the RV.
I slipped in the side door of the Greyhawk. I retreated to the back bedroom with my shotgun and semi-auto pistol, and I lay down on the bed, shotgun barrel pointed toward the narrow door. I didn’t sleep, though. I laid awake and listened to the night, my heart in my throat, until dawn.
Was I doing the right thing? I couldn’t know. I wouldn’t know. Renata had given me no reason to doubt her, but I didn’t know her. I had no way of seeing down the road, as it were. Was she using me? Would she steal my RV later on? Could I trust her? In everything, there comes a time in every relationship where both parties have to make a leap of faith. Sometimes, it comes back to bite one of the parties in the ass, and sometimes it pays off for both parties. I had to hope this was one of those ti
mes where it was the latter.
Minutes after dawn broke, I was crouched low behind an old delivery truck. All four tires on the thing were flat as crepes. I positioned myself so that I could see clearly in the direction of Ren’s bar. I wanted to be able to see her approaching. I had a foil-wrapped breakfast bar in my hand, but no desire to eat it. I only brought it in case Renata was late, and I got bored. I also had my shotgun on my shoulder on a sling. I wasn’t going to draw it unless necessary, and I wanted to trust in Renata, but I couldn’t risk losing my RV now. If she tried to rob me of it, I’d be stuck in New York. I didn’t think I would be able to get another vehicle running, so that left trying to walk or bicycle all the way to the South.
I didn’t have to wait long. Ren showed up a few minutes later. She was carrying a large duffel, something like a hockey bag, and the police-issue shotgun. She had her head on a swivel, scanning the cars for trouble. When she ducked under the chain-fence at the edge of the overpass, she paused and squinted into the shadows. She looked cleaner than she did the night before, like she’d bathed herself since then. She was wearing different clothes, a pair of green cargo-style Capri pants and an Iron Maiden concert t-shirt. She was wearing the hiking boots she’d worn the previous night.
Leap of faith. Ignore the fear. Point of no return. I took a deep breath and made a conscious choice to trust Renata. I stood up and walked around the corner of the delivery truck. “Over here!” I called. The sound of my voice echoed off the concrete overhead. It was very loud against the stillness of a summer morning.
Ren jumped when she heard my voice, but when she spotted me, I saw her visibly relax. She hustled through the maze of cars. “I was worried you might have left without me.”
“Nope. I waited.” I tried to give a genuine smile. I don’t know if it worked. I was never good at smiling. Every photograph I’ve ever taken where I had to force a smile ends up with me looking slightly constipated. “Are you ready to go?”
Ren held up the bag and the shotgun. “This is all I need, I guess. Anything else, we can pick up on our way south. Do you want to stop and try to find some food? I know plenty of buildings that no one has gotten into, yet.”
“I’ve got food. C’mon.” I started to walk toward the RV.
“Wait.” Ren didn’t follow. “Can we talk for just a minute?”
“Sure,” I said. I turned to face her.
Ren bit her lip. She looked me up and down. “You’re not a psycho or anything, are you?”
“What do you mean?” I knew what she meant. I was thinking the same things about her.
“Like, you’re not a rapist or a murderer, are you?”
I shook my head. “No, not in the least. I’m just a guy from Wisconsin who didn’t get to die when the rest of the world did.”
“Wisconsin doesn’t have the best reputation when it comes to serial killers, you know.”
“That’s true, but I’m not one. Honest.” I held up my right hand in a Cub Scout salute.
Ren bit her lower lip. “We’re going to be together for a long time, aren’t we?”
I nodded. “If neither of us ends up being a psycho, I guess. I need a friend. We,” I corrected myself, “need friends.”
“I’m putting a lot of trust in you. You seem like an okay guy. Just…don’t disappoint me, right?”
“I’ll try not to,” I said.
“Just be honest with me, okay?” She smiled and rolled her eyes. “Christ, this sounds like we’re starting to date or something.”
“In a way, we are,” I said. “It’s a partnership, right? We don’t know what else is out there, or who else is out there. We have to look out for each other. I get your back, you get mine.”
“Trust is earned, though.” She adjusted the hockey bag and slung it over her shoulder.
She had a point. I said, “I will try to earn your trust. You try to earn mine.”
She looked me up and down again. “Deal. Now, let’s go, eh? We got a long way to walk. Maybe we can find some bikes?”
“I can do you one better than that.” We walked to the RV. I held out an arm toward it. “We travel in style.”
Ren’s mouth dropped open. “Oh, my god. That’s amazing. It runs? I thought you said it broke down?”
“I didn’t know you last night. I was protecting myself.”
Ren approached the RV and pulled the side door. “Oh, you have a kitty!”
In that moment, she sounded like a teenage girl, her voice lost any grit or edge. She clambered into the Greyhawk, dropped her bag and gun, and scooped Fester into her arms. Attention hog that he is, he let her hold him, instantly going into super-purr mode. She buried her face into the fur of his neck. “Oh, what a sweetie.”
“His name is Fester.” I pulled the curtains in the cab and climbed into the driver’s seat.
“Like, Fester Addams?”
“Exactly like.”
“I love him.” Ren cradled the cat in her arms belly-up like a baby. When I did that to him, he would flip himself around and climb up my chest to perch his front paws on my shoulder. When she did it, he purred louder, the furry traitor.
I started the RV, pulled back to the street, and slapped it in drive. I had no desire to stay in New York any longer. I took the Brooklyn Bridge back to New Jersey as fast as I could. The tunnels would have been better, less chance of being seen, but the bridge was faster. I was operating on what Ren had said about the Patriots sleeping late.
Ren slipped through the gap between the seats and plopped into the passenger seat. She was still holding her weapon. “Look! I’m riding shotgun! Literally!” She seemed different than she had the night before, more alive, more vibrant. I hoped it was because she was feeling good about finding someone alive, someone whom she might learn to trust. That’s what I was feeling, too. After a year of near isolation, it was surreal to turn my head and see an actual, living, breathing person in the RV next to me.
After a few moments of riding shotgun, she hopped up and went into the back of the RV. She started poking through the drawers and cupboards. “I hope you don’t mind. I just wanted to see what sort of supplies you have.”
“I don’t mind,” I said. “When I stop for gas, I usually hit up any stores or shops in the area and scavenge.”
“Smart thinking.” Ren found a box of Rice Krispies Treats. “Mind if I have one?”
“Ren, this is your home now, too. Just help yourself. Don’t even ask.” I glanced over my shoulder. She was smiling.
“You mean that?”
“Partners, right? We ride together. What’s mine is yours.”
Ren came back to the passenger seat with her snack. She put her bare feet on the dash. “What’s the plan, boss?” She unwrapped the treat and took a bite. Her eyes rolled upward with joy. “I love these things.”
I shrugged. “I guess I was just going to continue doing what I was going to do, even if I hadn’t found anyone else. I was going to head down to Washington D.C. If anyone is still alive, I have a feeling they would go there. New York and D.C. were my two likeliest scenarios for finding people. Oh, and Disney World. On the way, I find small towns and look for signs of life.”
“Wouldn’t major cities give better odds?”
“Yes, and no. Statistically speaking, I think they would. But I was in a small town, and I went through all the major cities in Wisconsin and didn’t find a single person. I’ve been through Chicago and Minneapolis, and I didn’t find anyone. I might have missed them. In a small town, it’s easier to find someone if they’re still alive, I guess. Fewer places to hide, more chances to cross paths.”
Ren considered that and bobbed her head. “Makes sense, I suppose.”
We lapsed into silence and I found the highway heading south through New Jersey. When Ren was able to get out of her microcosm of New York City, she was able to see the desolation and entropy of the rest of the country. She gave a low whistle as we hit an elevated section of the highway and she was able to look down and see s
ome of the suburbs with their overgrown lawns, fallen tree branches, and houses with siding coming off them in sheets. “Looks rough out there.”
“It is.” I wanted to hold back, but I figured she knew already. “Almost all of those houses have decaying bodies in them.”
“Just like the apartments in Brooklyn,” Ren said. “I was in the hospital, sort of being a CNA to help out my sister. I cleaned up a lot of puke, changed a lot of bed sheets. Then, there were just too many people. People lying on beds, slumped in chairs, sitting on the floors, lying on the floors. People everywhere. And they started dying, right? I couldn’t….we, my sister and me, we couldn’t do nothing, man. They just died. All the doctors, all the nurses, everyone. Toward the end, we just went home. We’d been working for days. There wasn’t nothing else could be done. We just went home because Carlos came in and said our parents were gone. We had to abandon people. We just left them to die. I still feel horrible about it, but there wasn’t any other choice.”
“I can’t imagine,” I told her. I’d been sequestered in my family’s house watching my parents die.
“In the first couple days, Elena, Carlos, and I, we had to break into our neighbors’ places to find food, water, and wood to burn. We found them lying in their beds, on the couches. It was tragic. Some of them, their pets were dead. Some, the pets were still alive and we released them to the wild. What else could we do, you know?”
“I did the same thing. Well, as much as I could.”
Ren looked out the window at garbage on the side of the road. She heaved a heavy sigh. “I’m tired of death, man.”
Washington D.C. looked like a war zone. I don’t know what happened after television went dark midway through the third week of the Flu, but it was apparently not good. Many buildings were destroyed around the outskirts of town. In the distance, I could see a chunk of the Washington Monument was missing, like someone had hacked at it with a gigantic ax. The obelisk was still standing, but it didn’t look structurally safe. Tanks, honest-to-god Army tanks littered the streets. The cold, charred wreckage of a fighter jet was scattered around the soot-black, crumbled remains of the apartment building it hit when it crashed. There were remnants of bodies in the streets, skulls with spines still attached, pelvic bones with femurs lying nearby. The capitol city looked cold and dark, even with a sky full of sunshine.