Long Empty Roads

by Sean Little

  “What the hell went down here?” Ren was leaning forward in the cab, her face almost pressed to the front windshield. “Last I saw, everything in the capitol was copacetic, you know?”

  The last time I’d seen Washington on TV, the president had been telling us that everything in the country was being taken offline. He was admitting that the Flu was unstoppable. He’d called it the “end of Mankind.” His face was stern and stoic. Presidential. He’d wished any who might survive good luck, and God bless. He asked any who might survive to rebuild the country and remember the principles for which America has always stood. Then, he got into Marine 1 and helicoptered away from the White House, probably to the secret base in Virginia to see if he could survive the Flu with the most advanced medical treatment that could be found.

  “What do you think happened?” Ren pointed toward a toppled apartment building. “Looks like a war happened.”

  “Might have. Probably once the president abandoned the White House, anyone still alive got mad that he was abandoning us. Maybe a mob mobilized against the White House. Maybe some foreign enemy attacked us?” That seemed unlikely. All the tanks were US Army. I didn’t know, though. Riots or attacks were the only likely possibilities.

  Ren had my book of maps spread out on her lap. She directed me through the streets of the capitol to the White House. There, we saw more evidence that there had been some sort of disturbance. A tank had been driven through the tall iron fence in front of the White House and was now a permanent monument on the lawn. There were more skeletal bodies on the roads and the sidewalks. Neither Ren nor I could speak. Everywhere we looked were the remnants of chaos.

  Ren sniffed. “Some of the neighborhoods where I lived in Brooklyn, some of the survivors went crazy with the looting during the second and third week. There were a lot of fights, gunshots. Pure panic. Think this is something like that?”

  I couldn’t tell her, so I just shrugged. I knew some looting had gone down around Madison. I think it was just a natural response to impending death. Mostly, it’d been pharmacies and gun stores that had taken the brunt of the looting. People had been desperate for any sort of cure, and should they survive, they were desperate for weapons to protect themselves from any possible roving bands of marauders.

  “Pull over here.” Ren pointed to a clear spot on the sidewalk in front of the south face of the White House. I did as she asked. We got ready to explore. I showed her my ruck with tools. I told her how I equipped to scavenge. She raised her eyebrows. “You were way more prepared for this crap than I was.”

  “I had more time to prepare. I also didn’t have to contend with the Patriots.”

  “True enough.” She held up her shotgun. “You got anything that will go in here?”

  “Probably,” I said. I had no idea if I did or not. I’m not a gun guy. I figured out most of what worked and what didn’t by reading guides. I figured most shotgun ammo was similar, though. I handed her a box of the same stuff I was putting in my shotgun, and she loaded it. The shells look like they fit. I looked like I knew what I was doing. I did not know for certain if they would work, but we would only have to worry about that if we needed to shoot the thing.

  We walked through the fallen gate toward the White House. We started out a few feet apart, but Ren drifted to her right, away from me. “Stay far away,” she said. “If there’s someone with a gun, give him two targets, not one.” I figured that was sound advice. We parted, each of us taking one side of the expansive, overgrown lawn.

  The White House was impressive, even in entropy. According to history, it had been built to intimidate visiting dignitaries and instill confidence in the American people. Even with the lack of upkeep, it still held true to those ideas. It loomed like a beacon of brilliant white. It was, perhaps, a little more worn than any pictures I’d seen of it, but time hadn’t started to beat it down yet. The windows, all bullet-proof glass, were lasting a little better than the standard plate-glass in most homes.

  I kept scanning the roof. I know that before the Flu, Secret Service snipers would sit on the roof, ready to take down any encroaching threat. If we were going to be in danger, I assumed it would be from that. After a year, I doubted that anyone was still in the White House, though. There wasn’t anywhere to get supplies nearby. There were better homes with more practical access to wood and food. The White House was too big to maintain, too. Smaller homes were more practical, more viable. I thought about the log cabins of the pioneers; most were the size of a master bedroom in a really nice house. Easier to heat and weatherproof. The White House, the great American icon, was impractical and it was going to rot just like everything else.

  We approached the front door. It was open. Ren had her shotgun in her hands. She held a finger to her lips and motioned for me to halt. She slipped in the door like we were sneaking into a building to arrest a serial killer. After a second, I heard her hiss. I peeked in the gap in the door. She was motioning for me to enter. I shoved the door and walked in, shotgun still hanging on my shoulder.

  “Really, dude?” Ren shouldered her own weapon. She gave me a look of disgust. “We could have gone all Serpico on this place, secret agent-style.”

  “Just listen for a second.” I craned my neck to listen to the stillness in the house. “You hear anything that would suggest anyone is here?”

  Ren listened and shook her head. “Quiet.”

  “Do you smell death?” I inhaled. There was a slight funk. Someone had died in the Whitehouse, maybe a couple of people. Not many, though.

  “I think so.”

  I was pretty confident the White House was empty. “Anyone here?” I shouted just enough for my voice to carry to adjacent rooms. I didn’t want to scream out my presence, but a small announcement felt safe. No one responded. I shrugged at Ren. “Empty.”

  We walked through the initial foyer to the reception room, a large, round room where visitors would have been greeted. That led to the Center Hall, a wide corridor that ran the length of the house. I tilted my head toward the left hallway. “Let’s see what we can see.”

  In moments, it was clear that what we could see wasn’t great. The White House had been ransacked. Plates were smashed, portraits were torn from the walls, holes had been kicked in the walls. It looked like someone had a major rager and the old building couldn’t keep up with the party. It was more damage than one person could have done. It had to have been a mob of some sort. We meandered to the East Wing where the President and his family would have lived. It was trashed out, as well. There were three stories above ground, a basement, and a subbasement. As we walked through the house, it became more and more evident that no one was there. People had lived there for a time, though. We found evidence of food wrappers, clothes, and dried human waste, as gross as that sounds. People had been content to turn the corners of rooms into private latrines.

  “I don’t think anyone has been here for at least a year,” Ren said. “I would have thought people would have come here to live. Resettle the country.”

  “I guess they did at first.” I opened a drawer and poked through a desk in one of the bedrooms.

  “Maybe thirty or forty people still alive in New York. About half of them, maybe more came to New York after the Flu was over, though. The first weeks after everyone died, there were only a handful of us roaming New York from what I saw. You said you found at least three others, though they’re dead now. Judging from the damage around here, maybe five or six more people. That sound about right?” Ren closed her eyes to do the math. “That’s what, let’s say fifty people we can be sure are still alive.”

  “Okay. Let’s go with that. If that figure holds true, and we project it throughout the rest of the US, maybe we hit what—two hundred? Two-fifty?”

  “Safe estimate,” said Ren. She poked through a different drawer, found a solar calculator, and hacked in some numbers. “If that’s true, that’s like a tiny fraction of the population. If it held true throughout the world, we’re looking at some
thing like maybe only six-thousand people still alive in the world, give or take. Six thousand out of what was almost eight billion. That’s like what, one ten-millionth of the population or something?”

  I knew towns back in Wisconsin that were six thousand people. It was hard to picture one of those little places being the entire world.

  Ren fell back into a desk chair. She looked defeated. Her face was slack. The melancholy etched into her expression was unmistakable. “There’s no coming back from that, is there? The world is really done, isn’t it?”

  I didn’t know how to answer her. I had the same sentiment. Humanity was over.

  We walked through the second story to the West Wing of the White House. The West Wing had survived the anger of an unknown crowd no better than the East Wing. We went to the Oval Office. The door was hanging wide open. At some point, someone had battered it from the frame, probably with a sledgehammer. The door was heavy reinforced steel. The person or people who’d breached the room had to knock the door from its hinges. The wall around the doorframe was wrecked.

  The Oval Office looked like pictures I’d seen, except the office had been entirely trashed. The couches in the center of the room had been slashed with knives. Stuffing was everywhere. The pictures on the walls had been ripped down and spray-painted or slashed. The sculptures were shattered on the floor. The chair where the President normally would have sat behind his desk was slashed to ribbons. The desk drawers were all dumped. And, as a crowning glory, someone had left a healthy defecation on the desk, dead center.

  “Lovely,” Ren said eying the dried pile. “Looks like he had a lot of fiber in his diet.”

  “I can’t believe this place got destroyed like this. I would have wanted to live here or something. Maybe declare myself President of the United States of America. I don’t understand the mindset of someone who sees this place and thinks that it needs to be wrecked.” I moved to the desk. On the side of the wood, someone had carved Good-bye America. Good-bye World.

  “Anarchy. True anarchy.” Ren flopped on one of the couches. “The country fell. The world fell. Everyone died. No more governments. No more world rulers. It was all done. Why not destroy the symbols of it?”

  I crossed to the couch opposite Ren. I sat carefully on the shredded cushions. “I guess I hadn’t expected anyone to still be alive here in D.C. If anyone is still alive, they’re in that bunker in Virginia.”

  “Probably. I know the Vice-President was showing signs of the Flu before TV went off. He’s dead now; I guarantee it.”

  “The President looked okay,” I said. “That speech before television signed off was pretty good.”

  “The First Lady didn’t. Did you see her nose? It was all red. She had the start of it. If she had it, the Prez was infected, too. That bunker in Virginia is probably a mausoleum now. The only way you and me got through this was dumb luck.”

  I leaned back on the couch. The cushions did not feel right. It was uncomfortable. “You ever think about why you’re still alive? It doesn’t seem right, you know? Out of eight billion people, the Flu didn’t affect you. You ever remember being sick in your life?”

  Renata’s eyes looked up and off to the left. “No. I remember being angry at my brother because of his CF. He got to stay home from school a lot, and I never did. Neither did Elena.”

  “Me too. I used to have to fake sick just to stay home. I’d hold a heating pad to my forehead to fake a fever just so I could stay home and play a new video game or something. I was never sick.”

  Renata glanced around the Oval Office. “Ever just stop and think, Why me?”

  “Every second of every day.”

  “Would have been easier to pull a trigger on myself after my sister died, you know? Less heartache. Less struggle. Less worry.”

  “Less fear.” I said. My voice came out as a whisper.

  “Yeah!” Renata said. She leaned forward. “Less fear! I spent too many nights scared to death, scared I might get taken by the Patriots, scared I might starve or freeze. Why are we here, man?”

  I couldn’t answer her. I was searching for that meaning, myself. I told her about the Indiana preppers, Jim and Nancy. I told her about their supply store and how they left the world with a gun in their garage.

  Renata shook her head and gave a weak laugh. “I never watched those prepper TV shows, you know? I figured anything that came down, it was gonna kill me, too. I was expecting nuclear war or maybe zombies. I figured being prepared for an apocalypse was a waste of time, because no one sane would want to keep living after the power grids and sanitation stopped working.”

  “So why did you keep living?” This is a question I came to terms with in the first days after the end of the Flu. The only answer I could come up with was that I was still living just to spite Nature.

  “At first, it was for Carlos. He needed help. After he died, I still had Elena. We had each other. It was almost fun sometimes. We broke into people’s places and took what we needed. We stole batteries and played CDs and danced. We broke into stores and took haute couture, you know? We dressed up like fashion models and swam in rich people’s pools. It was fun, for a while. But, after she died…I guess I don’t know why I’m still alive. Maybe it’s because I’m too much of a coward to end it.”

  “Did you ever…try?”

  Renata licked her lips. She looked at her hands. “Once. Had the gun in my mouth, finger on the trigger, but I couldn’t find the strength to pull it. I just started crying.”

  That sounded familiar. “Me too.”

  “Do you believe we’re here for a greater purpose? Like, maybe there is a God and this is His test for us?”

  I shrugged. I had no real answers. And even if I did, it felt sort of moot at this point. “I don’t know. Maybe. Seems like a pretty extreme test, though. Like, I would have been fine if God would have just let me find a wallet with a thousand dollars in it to see if I would have kept it, or if I would have turned it in. That’s probably all the testing I really needed.”

  Renata laughed. “Yeah. This is like when you went to school expecting a pop quiz and instead the teacher throws a research paper at you.”

  “I don’t miss those,” I said.

  “Me neither. I’m kind of mad that the Flu didn’t hold off for another month, though.” Renata held out her thumb and forefinger almost touching. “I was this close to getting my B.A. I almost had a degree.”

  “In what?”

  “Nursing. Like my sister.” Renata stood up from the couch. “It would have been nice to take that walk and get the paper. I was really looking forward to seeing my dad cry. He cried when Elena got hers. Bawled his eyes out during the ceremony. He came to this country from Venezuela when he was sixteen. He never went to school or anything. He just got a job and worked his ass off as a garbage man to provide for us.” Ren moved toward the door. She swiped a tear from her eye with her fingers. “I just wanted him to be proud of me, too.”

  “I’m sure he was proud of you,” I said. It was a hollow condolence, but I had to say something.

  “Oh, I know he was.” Renata’s voice steadied. “He told me so before he died. I just really wanted to give him that gift of seeing me in that cap and gown. I wanted him to see me be successful.”

  There was a Bible on the floor of the Oval Office, a thick, leather-bound version near the desk. I leapt off the couch and grabbed it. “We can give him another gift, how about that?” I held out the Bible. “Renata, how would you like to be sworn in as the President of the United States of America?”

  She rolled her eyes. “Stupid. I’m not thirty-five.”

  “Speaking as the only other human being in Washington D.C., which makes me the senior lawmaker in America, I’m waiving that stipulation. Desperate times call for desperate measures. I just held an emergency election and you won unanimously.”

  Her eyes narrowed for a second. “What if I become a tyrant dictator?”

  “There will be a general election to remove you f
rom office.”

  “And how will you accomplish that?”

  I raised an eyebrow. “Are you ticklish?”

  She raised her own eyebrow. “If you try to find out, I’m gonna kick you in the balls.”

  “That’s a yes, then. If you become a tyrant dictator, the people shall tickle you until you relinquish your office.”

  Ren hesitated. She jutted out her hand. “Deal. Swear me in, man.”

  I held out the Bible. She put her hand on it. “Repeat after me: I, Renata…”

  “I, Renata…”

  “Uh…I don’t know your last name,” I whispered.

  She whispered back, “Lameda.”

  I cleared my throat. “I, Renata Lameda, do solemnly swear to uphold the Constitution of the United States of America.”

  She repeated my words. “Wasn’t there supposed to be something about ‘executing the Office of the President of the United States?’”

  I looked around at the debris around us. “I think the office has already been executed.”

  “Good point. I accept your appointment of me as President, so help me God. I look forward to leading this nation into a bleak, unknown future free from corruption and big corporations. I shall hereby be known as the ‘Back to Pioneer Times’ President.”

  I tossed the Bible aside and clapped. “I guess we’re starting to rebuild America, aren’t we?”

  She bowed. “Thank you. I agree. I bet one of those Patriot assholes has already thought to declare himself President, though.”

  “Did he get sworn-in in the Oval Office? I think not. We shall refuse to accept his declaration.”