by McBain, Tim
Erin was sure she smelled, too. Showering and being powder fresh wasn’t high on the priority list at this point. But she at least made it a point to clean up a little every evening. The water from the rain barrel was usually still a little warm from sitting all day in the sun. All Erin had to do was fill the little bucket she kept nearby. A few quick splashes and a scrub at the armpits and she was not-quite-Zestfully clean, but better than nothing. Anything was better than walking around feeling like the death-stink of the world was clinging to you.
But a real bath? The closest she’d had to that was the shower back when they first got to the FEMA camp. And she’d rather not think about that.
Over their breakfast of mushy white blobs, formerly known as fruit, Erin pondered the beans on toast enigma.
“One of them is called S.O.S.”
“Huh?” Izzy crammed a pear into her mouth.
“Shit on a Shingle.”
“Language!”
“But I think that’s some kind of chipped beef or something. Whatever chipped beef is.”
Pear juice dribbled down Izzy’s chin. Erin watched as she wiped it way with her hand, then smeared her hand on her pants. Yeah, the kid definitely needed a bath.
“You’re already up to ten dollars, and you just woke up.”
“Turds on Toast.”
“That’s what they call it?”
“No, that’s what I’m going to call it from now on.”
After breakfast, Erin pumped water from the well to wash the dishes in. When she dipped her hands in to scrub the bowls, she gave a little shiver. The water was frigid. Way too cold for a bath. Even the rain barrel water wouldn’t be warm enough.
She needed a way to heat a lot of water, and a fire seemed like the only way. She had yet to build one. They hadn’t really needed it so far. Most of the canned food they ate cold, and the rest she heated on the propane grill next to the deck.
OK, so she had to build a fire. That was the easy part. Cavemen did it, and they didn’t even have matches.
At first she imagined herself heating a big pot of water and then hauling it to the bathtub in the house. She’d only probably need to repeat that fifty times to fill the damn thing. No, that wouldn’t do. Too much work, plus by the time she boiled the second pot of water, the first one would probably have gotten cold.
There had to be a way to heat it all at once. An image came to her then. An old Bugs Bunny cartoon, where Bugs is in a giant cooking pot over a fire. Elmer Fudd or some other antagonist is fixing to make rabbit stew, but Bugs is chillaxing in the pot like it’s a hot tub, using the ladle to spoon hot water over himself.
She smiled to herself. Now she just needed to find a human sized soup pot. And she knew exactly where to find it.
The barn sat on the crest of a small hill, standing watch over the rolling terrain of the property. They’d taken a quick look-see when they’d first arrived. Just enough to get the sense that there was a borderline hoarding situation going on inside.
A few flakes of red paint peeled away as she unlatched the door. The iron was warm under her hand, and she just stood for a moment, admiring the tremendous piles of crap laid out before her. There had to be a vessel suitable for bathing somewhere in there.
“What are you looking for?” Izzy asked.
“You’ll see.”
She couldn’t stop picturing the giant Bugs Bunny cauldron, even though she knew that was out of the question. But with all the junk heaped around her -- furniture, bikes, farm tools and machinery, moldering boxes, lumber scraps, tires and other automotive odds and ends -- she was confident she’d find something that would work.
Her dad always liked Bugs Bunny. One of the cable channels used to play old cartoons during the day, and Erin always wound up watching them when she was home sick from school. Her dad would pass by the living room, pausing in the doorway, transfixed by the images on the TV screen. Caught by some feeling of nostalgia from his own childhood, probably. Eventually, he’d be sitting on the floor or couch with her, laughing when Yosemite Sam’s ass caught on fire, and he started screaming about how his biscuits were burning.
He had a funny laugh, the kind that was more inhale than exhale. Almost a reverse-laugh.
He didn’t laugh the last time they watched Bugs Bunny together. He was too sick by then. In too much pain. She bought the Looney Tunes DVD, thinking it would cheer him up. Maybe remembering how they’d laughed together watching it when she was the one that was sick. He smiled then, but he didn’t laugh.
He didn’t look sick. Not even once he was in hospice, and just getting up to go to the bathroom winded him, so most of the time he just sat in bed in his robe.
She spotted a 55 gallon barrel wedged behind an antique sewing machine on one side of the barn. That could make an OK tub. Sure, she’d have to fold herself into a pretzel shape to fit in it, but that was a small price to pay for hot water. For Izzy, it would be the perfect size.
She hopped onto the sewing machine table and gazed down into the barrel.
“Fuck,” she said, quiet enough that Izzy couldn’t hear and scold her for it. Probably would have charged her double for using the mother-of-all swear words.
Someone had cut a big rectangle out of the side, to convert it into a burn barrel, she supposed. The hole made it useless as a tub.
Erin climbed off the sewing machine and resumed her search, brushing the dust from her hands and knees.
Izzy’s voice came from the other side of a pile of bicycles.
“I’m bored.”
“Go outside and play then.”
“That’s what grown ups always say,” Izzy said, and Erin had to chuckle.
It was true. Her mom used to say it to her all the time. She bumped into the wheel of one of the bikes, and she stopped to watch the spokes go round and round. They were both gone now. Mom and dad. For the first time, it occurred to her that she was an orphan.
But then anybody that was left now probably was.
Everyone who’s anyone is an orphan, she thought, then laughed because her first instinct was to get out her phone and post it on Instagram.
#foundling #AllTheCoolKidsAreDoingIt
But there was no more Instagram. No more Twitter. No more internet. And yet she still carried her phone around in her pocket. Not quite willing to let it go yet.
Sometimes she pulled it out and pressed the button, trying to get it to power up. But the battery was long dead. And ever since that night with the weird bright flash in the sky, it wouldn’t even flash the low battery warning anymore. The rumor at camp was that it was something called an Electro-Magnetic Pulse, but Erin didn’t know if that was true or just someone talking out of their ass.
A stack of terracotta planters caught her attention. They ranged from tiny pots, only three inches in diameter, to larger ones that must have been three feet across. Some of them were even vaguely cauldron shaped. But they all had drainage holes in the bottom, and even the largest pot wasn’t big enough for her to sit in.
Moving toward the back of the barn, her foot caught on an uneven floorboard. She stumbled forward, almost toppling headfirst into a horse trough. There was a beat where she contemplated her own clumsiness before she realized that she was staring into her new bathtub.
Someone had stacked a pair of old dining room chairs in the basin, so she pulled them out and set them aside.
“Hey Erin.” Izzy’s voice came from outside the barn.
Erin lifted the handle that was welded to one side of the steel trough, testing the weight. Not too bad.
“Erin?”
Erin heaved the tub over her head and side-stepped her way out of the maze of junk into more open space.
“Erin!”
She let the tub fall to the ground with a clang.
“What?!”
“Come here,” Izzy said.
Erin inhaled deeply, trying not to lose her temper. Was this what it was like having a kid?
Mom. Mom? MOM! I’m bored.
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Mom. Mom? MOM! Come here!
Mom. Mom? MOM! I’m hungry.
She let the breath out slowly, puffing her cheeks with air.
“I’m busy.”
“But you have to come see this!”
She sounded different this time. Not quite scared, but something. Something that told Erin she better go look.
The tank dragged behind her as she made her way to the white rectangle of light that was the open door.
At first all she could see was white. She squinted and blinked, waiting for her eyes to adjust after the murky gloom of the barn.
Izzy’s finger pointed at the sky, off toward the horizon. A plume rose there, like a black feather sticking out of the ground, the end listing to the right because of the wind. At first she thought it was a tornado, but that didn’t make sense. The skies were clear and blue. That and it didn’t actually look quite like one. In all the pictures she’d seen of tornadoes, the sides were sort of smooth. You could almost tell from looking at a photograph that it was a sucking, swirling vortex.
But this… this had the almost fluffy looking sides of a cloud. Finally it dawned on her that she was looking at a column of smoke. The base looked almost solid. From this distance she couldn’t see the roiling movement of the plume. But toward the top where the smoke thinned into lighter wisps, the haze swirled slowly, caught by the air currents.
“What do you think it is?” Izzy asked.
“I don’t know. A house maybe, or a building. Something big.”
Neither of them spoke for a moment. Izzy broke the silence.
“Maybe we should try to get closer. To see.”
Erin almost considered it for half a second, her curiosity piqued. But then she shook her head. Bad idea.
No, terrible idea.
First, because she had no idea how far away it was. She had no sense of judging a distance like that. Was it two miles? Or ten?
But second, and more importantly, that smoke was visible for miles around. There was no telling how many people it might draw. Like moths to a porch light. It could even be a trap, couldn’t it? She imagined the sound of the bug zapper her grandparents had in their backyard when she was a kid. The blue glow luring bugs in and frying them in a buzzing flash of light.
“What’s that?” Izzy said, gesturing behind Erin.
She craned her head to look over her shoulder, following Izzy’s gaze. She was still holding the galvanized water trough in one hand. The metal clanked as she dropped it to the ground, all thoughts of building her own fire evaporating at another glimpse at the sky.
“Nothing,” she said.
Mitch
North of Bethel Park, Pennsylvania
42 days before
The car crested a hill as they approached town, the road winding around a bend with a sheared wall of rock to their left. Turning to their right, they looked down upon the city in the valley below, upon the big buildings downtown and the rows of houses and businesses. Black smoke billowed everywhere, an ever roiling cloud hung up above the streets, concealing the tops of the high-rises. Mitch smelled the char after a few seconds of staring at the smoke, like burnt popcorn mixed with a chemical odor. Jesus. What was he driving them into?
“It’s on fire?” Matt said.
“It’s from the riot,” Mitch said.
A glance in the mirror showed no fear on his son’s face. He looked engaged, perhaps even a little excited.
Mitch angled to get a look at his eldest son. Kevin’s eyebrows scrunched together, that wrinkle forming between them. He looked hateful, Mitch thought.
“Dad, what is going on?” he said. “Where’s mom?”
“I told you-”
“Bullshit. You didn’t tell us anything, like always. You never said where she was. You told us the softened version, all mushed up like baby food. Where is she? For real.”
Mitch adjusted his grip on the wheel, a film of sweat greasing the surfaces of his palms like two oil slicks. He wiped them on his jeans, one then the other. His heart battered away in his chest, not fast so much as particularly violent beats.
“Well,” he said, drawing out the moment as though he could find a way out of it if he stalled. “If you want to know the truth, I think she’s dead.”
Matt’s mouth dropped open and he clapped a hand over his eyes.
“You think she’s dead or you know?” Kevin said.
Mitch craned his head around to face them again, that clammy feeling from his palms crawling over all of him now, leaving its greasy trail everywhere it touched. When his eyes looked into theirs, he blinked a few times, a rapid fluttering of his eyelids, something just shy of flinching. His head felt swollen, and his face felt too hot and too cold at the same time. In no way did this seem like a thing he was actually doing. He felt outside of it, like he was watching it happen rather than participating.
“Guys, I’m sorry. I didn’t know how to tell you,” he said. “She’s gone.”
He turned back around, and silence fell upon the car. That thoughtful quiet one encounters in waiting rooms at doctor’s offices, emergency rooms, and abortion clinics, places where people mull lists full of bad options, and pain, and unhappy endings.
The sun shimmered in the sky to their right, an orange ball of fire. Mitch opened his mouth, stretched his jaw, felt some amount of soreness in the muscles in the sideburn region on both sides. What the hell? He rubbed his fingers at one of the knotted up spots. Could this be a result of the black gunk spreading through him? A gland there or something? He didn’t know. So many things he didn’t know just now. Important things. He would never know most of them, he figured.
He wondered... If Janice was right about how it all worked, did that mean he would go to Hell? Would he pay forever for the choices he made? Right now it seemed like a kind of justice to him. Just cover him with gas and set him on fire and be done with it. But it couldn’t be so simple. He had two other people depending on him.
“Where the fuck is she?” Kevin said. “Stop bullshitting us. What’s going on? Just tell us.”
Mitch’s hand dropped from his jaw.
“Just look around, kid. The world is going to shit in a hurry,” he said. “A bunch of people are going to die. Maybe most of the people if things go as wrong as they possibly can. Hell, maybe even all of the people.”
“Answer the question, Dad. Where is mom? Why can’t you just tell us the truth?”
Mitch spoke into the mirror, making eye contact with the furious pair of eyes there. It felt safer that way.
“The truth is that I’m going to die, too. I’m sick the same way your mother was. I don’t have long. I’m trying to find a place where you guys can be safe once I’m gone, and I don’t think I’m doing a very good job. The truth? The truth is that I don’t really know what I’m doing. I’m not sure I ever did.”
The quiet returned after he spoke. Mitch looked away from the mirror, avoiding its gaze to watch the other cars instead. A semi passed on their left, mud flaps wobbling behind the sets of tires. The branches of the trees all drooped along the side of the road here. Even the plant life was withering away.
The tires thumped over cracks in the road. He followed a line of cars onto the exit ramp, felt the centrifugal pull as they curled away from the highway, slowing down all the while. They came to a stop at the light, and Mitch braved a glance into the mirror. He wasn’t sure what to expect, but he found them staring out their windows as always. Maybe they looked scared, just a little bit, he couldn’t tell. Mostly their features looked smooth and calm, he thought. Blank as ever.
After waiting at the light, they turned right onto West Main, moving back into town. They were almost home now.
Teddy
69 days after
Moundsville, West Virginia
The empty road ran out ahead of him and disappeared over a hill. From his vantage point, it looked like the woods swallowed the highway up, but he knew that wasn’t true. The woods couldn’t actually do that.
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He stalked down the side of the road, walking in that strip of dirt and rocks that separated the green of the woods from the blacktop. Little clouds of dust kicked up with each footstep. The air was still, and the smell of death was everywhere. Flies circled around him, around the duffel bag hanging at his side. The rise and fall of their collective buzzing reminded him of radio static, that endless swirl of noises piled on top of each other that somehow added up to a big nothing.
He watched his shadow walk along beside him, the black copy of his torso and arms stretched comically long over the asphalt, angled so the head of the shadow cheated out ahead of him to lead the way. He was tall, a touch over six feet and three inches. His shadow was more like nine feet tall just now, he thought, most of it torso.
A fly landed on his cheek, and he shooed it away with a flutter of his hand. Touching his face, he realized his mouth was open, jaw hanging wide, so he closed it. He didn’t like that. His mama always yelled at him for it, said the kids at school would make fun of him, and she was right. They called him a mouth-breather and a retard. But that was over now. He’d been out of school for a long time, and all of those people were dead and gone, his mama included.
The sun beat down on the back of his neck, the peeling pink flesh there perpetually sunburned. He touched it, felt the sting of the burn and the wet of the layer of sweat lingering there. His elbow touched the hatchet holstered at his side. Always there if he needed it.
There wasn’t much traffic. Not anymore. In town, he hadn’t seen any passing cars in weeks. But out here on the highway they went by every so often. Enough for him to get what he wanted, apparently.
He got a whiff, a strong one. Freshly dead meat.
And then he saw the black shapes on the road up ahead. They looked like crooked hooded things from here, three of them, their backs all hunched over to feast on the dead. He ran at them, waving his arms and yelling as he got close.
The vultures turned their backs to him at first, two of them splaying their wings to try to intimidate him. Their beaks opened up, and they stared at him with their dead eyes. He kept running, and they took off one by one, doing some reverse swoop that lifted them into their circular patrol of this spot. They had no intention of leaving this meal. Neither did he.