by Sean Little
The whole time I talked, Doug never looked bored. His eyes sparkled. He smiled. He laughed in the right places. He was the best audience. When I finished my summary, at least a half-hour had passed, maybe more. I paused to finish the glass of water he’d given me. Doug leaned back in his chair like a man who’d just finished a Thanksgiving feast. He smiled broadly. “Man, it’s good to hear someone else’s voice.”
“It’s good to have someone to listen to me,” I told him. I meant it, too. I hadn’t realized how badly I’d needed to just talk to another human, just be heard by someone. Fester was a fine listener, but he wasn’t really what you would call an “active listener.” During the long days driving, I tended to make up Fester’s part in the dialog by filling in his commentary in a silly posh British accent, which is how I think Fester would sound if he did have a voice.
I tried to be a gracious guest and afford Doug the same opportunity to unload his past year’s activities. “What about you? What have you been doing?”
The smile was chased from his face. He shrugged and waved a hand at me. “Ahh, what I’ve been doing isn’t important. I’ve just been waiting to die. Literally. That’s it.”
“No exploration? No nothing?”
Doug’s mouth curled into a half-smile. His eyes took on a wistful sheen. “Went into South Bend once in the first month after everyone was gone, probably early June. I stole a Viper from the Dodge dealership—you know, one of those showroom models. I pushed it out, reconnected the battery, and then put the hammer down on it on the Interstate. That was fun for an hour, but after that, I realized I was kind of immune to the rush, you know? There were no cops, no traffic to dodge. It was just sort of empty, you know?”
I did know. I’d considered doing the same sort of thing at one point, but my own cowardice chased me away from it. I didn’t want to get in a wreck and die a slow, painful death bleeding out on the side of a road. “How fast?”
“Got it up to a hundred and forty before I chickened out and eased it back to a hundred.” Doug chuckled. “Hey, I’d like to show you something, if you don’t mind.”
“Lead the way,” I said.
Doug stood up from the table and grabbed his crutches. He limped toward the screen door in the kitchen. “C’mon.”
We walked out onto a flagstone patio in his backyard. Weeds were creeping through the gaps in the gray-and-brown flagstones. The backyard was not overgrown, though. It was definitely shaggy, but Doug had mowed the yard a few times this summer. It must have been a real chore for a man in his state. I know why he’d done it, though. It was much nicer to look at a well-manicured lawn than the shaggy wild growth everywhere else in the neighborhood.
There was a row of tall lilac bushes along one edge of the yard, a sort of natural fence line. In the rear left corner was a large chicken coop with at least a dozen hens running around an enclosed wire-mesh yard. He paused at the edge of the flagstones and pointed to the rear of the yard. “I did this last year.”
There were two graves. One was filled in and covered with large stones to prevent predators from digging into it. There was a crudely constructed cross hammered into the ground at its head. The other grave was empty. It had been dug deeply and a large, weathered pile of earth sat next to it. Grass was sprouting in spots on the hillock of dirt.
Doug pointed to the covered grave. “That’s my wife Miranda. Lost her in the third week of the Flu, after they were telling everyone there was nothing to be done. Buried her myself. Only dug the grave a few feet down, though. It was rough going.” Doug started to limp out to the other grave. “I figured I was going to go too, so I dug my own grave. I didn’t think I’d actually get to use it, though. It was more of a metaphor, really. It was representative of my intent to lay by my wife’s side forever. Sounds corny when I say it out loud, but that’s how it is.”
I didn’t know how to reply to that. I’d buried my parents and girlfriend in similar shallow graves. I buried my dog Rowdy, and my friend Meri, too. I never dug my own, though. Was I secretly optimistic, or was that just effort after foolishness. Doug wasn’t talking, so I sought for something to break the silence. “It doesn’t sound corny,” I said. “It looks like a nice grave.”
Doug nodded. “Took my time on it. The first two or three feet was pretty easy going. After that, it was all a war of attrition against the ground. Rocks, roots—you name it. Had to use a pick, a shovel, and a chainsaw to get it to where I wanted it. I got it to six feet, though.”
“Impressive.”
There was a pause. Doug reached out and put his hand on my shoulder. “I need you to bury me in it, Twist.”
“Now?”
Doug laughed, his voice ringing out through the neighborhood. “No, not now. Although, I wouldn’t put up much of a fight. I’m not long for this world. The way I feel, I figure I could check out at any time.”
Doug limped back to the patio and sat in a weather-beaten plastic chair. A grim look chased the smile from his face. “One of my biggest fears, and this goes back to my childhood, was dying alone. I’m scared to go, Twist.”
“I don’t blame you,” I said.
“It seems silly, doesn’t it, after being surrounded by death for so long? Dying alone was something I have had to work really hard to accept, and in some ways I’ve even been able to coach myself up to the point where I’m almost looking forward to it.” Doug gestured to his legs. “Feels like I got lightning hitting me in the ass half the time. Feels like there’s fire in my balls. I got no appetite anymore. I spend half my days in a drug-induced sleep. It’s no way to keep living. Death has its benefits, I guess. The pain will end, at least. That’s the only part of it I’m looking forward to, though.” Doug swallowed hard. Tears were brimming in the corners of his eyes. “I’d retired the year before I was diagnosed with the cancer. Almost forty-five years of selling houses, coaching youth baseball and basketball, doing a little residential painting on the side here and there for extra money—I’d worked hard. My wife, she was a school secretary. Worked the same job since she was twenty-three. Good job. A State job. We both retired and were finally going to travel to all the places we wanted to go. England, France, Hawaii, Japan…you name it, we were going. You know where we went?”
I shook my head.
Doug leaned toward me. “Canada. That’s it. We went to Banff. It was glorious. Beautiful, beautiful city. I wanted to move there. But, that’s all we got to do. The summer after I retired went by too quickly. One of my daughters had another baby, so we didn’t go anywhere that winter. Next spring rolls around, and my doctor says I got cancer. No more travel plans anywhere. Just treatment. Even with the treatment, the doc said it didn’t look good. It had spread pretty quickly. Told me three years, at best.” A single tear slipped down Doug’s cheek. “You know what was bad about that? I was selfish enough to be glad I was going to die before my wife. I knew she was strong enough to go on without me, but I knew I wasn’t strong enough to go on without her.” Doug buried his face in his hands. His back shuddered as he sobbed for a few moments. I said nothing, but I felt very uncomfortable. I had no mechanisms for dealing with something like this. My only defense was to stand there silently and let him cry.
Doug’s head snapped up, and he laughed. He wiped tears from his eyes with his fingers. “Life has a really bad sense of humor, you know? I had to bury her, and here I still sit, wasting away a centimeter at a time.” He used the edge of his t-shirt sleeve to wipe his cheeks. His stomach was wasted, pale, and sickly thin, and his ribs were showing through his skin. “It just doesn’t seem fair.”
There was a long silence. I was still standing on the edge of the flagstones. I hate to say it, but I had thoughts about running to my RV and leaving. All this time, I wanted to meet other survivors, I wanted human contact, but I’d come upon a man with days, maybe weeks left to live. He was right; it wasn’t fair. I cleared my throat. “Why didn’t you…”
He looked up at me. “Suicide?”
I nodded. “
If you dug—” I nodded toward the grave. “Weren’t you going to?”
Doug blew out a long, slow breath. “Thought about it, sure. I had all the painkillers I could want. It would have been easy. I even went so far as to uncap the bottle of morphine tablets. It would have been really easy.”
“So why…”
Doug shrugged. He fell back in the chair, shoulders slumping. “I don’t know. Maybe because seventy years of Catholic upbringing told me suicide is a Mortal Sin. Maybe I was just too scared.” Then he flipped the question. “What about you? You must have thought about it, too.” I hesitated. He already knew the answer. At that moment, I realized that anyone who survived the Flu must have thought about it. I know of one man who had done it back in Wisconsin. It was only natural. Why keep living if no one needed you to keep living? “How were you going to do it?” he asked.
“Gun,” I said.
“Simple. Quick. Smart. Why didn’t you?”
“Because a tornado almost killed me. I was getting ready to do it, and a tornado swept through my neighborhood. It destroyed several houses, but left mine standing. I figured it must have missed me for a reason, and who was I to argue why. I guess I wanted to know why I was still standing after surviving a tornado and the Flu.”
Doug chuckled. “Yeah, that’s as good a reason as any, I guess.”
I crossed the patio and sat in a second weather-beaten chair facing Doug. “After the tornado missed me, I figured I owed it to all my friends and family who died to keep on living, for their sakes. Maybe part of me considered it a big middle finger to Fate or something.”
“I like that.” Doug smiled. “A big middle finger to the universe. Did you go stand in the storm and yell at the sky? Really let God have a piece of your mind?”
“Not really, no.” I thought for a second. “I should have.”
“Me too.” Doug gestured at his yard. “Instead, I just sat back here waiting for my clock to run out.” He sniffed. “I’m ready to go now, Twist. I didn’t want to die alone, and I prayed to every god I could think of to send an angel to watch over me. God, Allah, Zeus, Yahweh, Odin—I begged them all for someone. And then you came. I don’t know which one of those crazy bastards sent you, but Twist, I’m begging you: Please, please stay. Please bury me after I’m gone. Can you please grant a dying man a last request?”
How do you say no to that?
CHAPTER FOUR
Waiting for the Inevitable
We had a fine dinner that night. Doug killed one of his hens and roasted it spatchcocked in a cast-iron pan over the fire pit at the edge of his patio. Fresh meat was a treat. It was the first time I’d had fresh chicken since before the Flu. Doug had a can of small potatoes, and we made that our side dish along with some baked beans from my own stores. After dinner, we sat in the cooling summer night slapping mosquitoes and talking about life before and after the Flu. In the few hours I’d known him, and despite our age differences, Doug had quickly become one of the best friends I’d ever had. Maybe it was because of the situation. Maybe if there were still people on the planet, there would have been no reason for us to bond that quickly. I couldn’t tell you. I was just glad to be there.
Doug was a great talker, one of those guys who could just talk, not ramble—talk. Conversation, true conversation, was a dying art form before the Flu, and now it was almost deceased permanently. It was nice to be in his presence and absorb some of his gift. I suppose a career in sales had helped him, or perhaps that’s why he sought out a career in sales. He spoke easily of his wife and three children, of life in Shipshewana, of selling houses. He didn’t dominate the conversation, and knew the intricacies of give and take when two people are speaking. I could never be as slick as he was when talking to people. When I told him about Sun Prairie, and what I’d done before the Flu, he listened intently, asking questions and nodding along. I felt important when I talked to him. I felt like he was valuing me as a person, maybe even as a fellow adult. In high school, I was never one who really joined into conversations. I preferred to sit around the edges and listen. It was easier. Maybe it was because I was worried about what other people might think. With Doug, there was none of that fear. We sat by the fire, joked, and told stories for hours, well into the dark of night. I even let Fester out of the RV and he hung out with us in the backyard, picking meat out of the leftover chicken bones while doing that oddly charming threat-growling narm, narm, narm noise that cats do when they think you’re about to steal their food.
When we finally decided to call it a night, Doug tried to offer me a bed in his house, but I declined. I had a bed. Even though I’d only been in the RV for a couple of nights, it was my home. He understood and told me that his doors would be unlocked if I needed anything.
In the morning, I walked into his house and found it quiet. My stomach plunged. I hoped he hadn’t died that night. I walked down the hall toward the bedrooms and found his room empty. I felt relieved in that moment.
Doug was on the patio with a pot of coffee. He was still wearing the Pink Floyd t-shirt, but the green shorts had been replaced with khaki cargo shorts that were too big on his decaying body, so he’d belted them tightly at his waist with a thick, black belt. The sun was rising, flooding his yard with morning light. There were houses in the neighborhood blocking the view of the sun at daybreak, but after an hour or two it climbed above the offending homes. He offered me coffee. I declined, never acquired the taste for it.
“I like to come out here in the mornings when the weather lets me. The sun feels good on these old bones,” Doug said refreshing his mug from an insulated plastic thermos.
We talked more. I told him about driving through most of Wisconsin looking for other survivors. I told him about trying to free as much livestock as I could by cutting down fences and opening barns. I told him about the dog packs that started roaming Sun Prairie by the time I’d left. He listened and nodded along.
When I finished my stories, he got to his feet. He stretched and coughed. “I don’t have long now,” he said. He rolled his shoulders forward. “I can feel it, Twist. Getting old is hell. You know the bitch of it? I never felt old until the last couple of weeks. That way you feel in your head right now? That never went away for me. In my head, I’m still seventeen, eighteen years old. I look in the mirror and think, who the hell is this old man looking back at me?”
“At least you made it to old age,” I said. “A lot of people didn’t get to. Hell, I might not get to. Think positive!”
Doug chuckled. He scratched at his wiry beard. “I suppose that’s true. I always figured if you made it to fifty, that was a good life. Anything past that was a gift. Then, I turned fifty and thought, I want another fifty years. We never get enough time, do we?” He picked up his canes. “Hey, I want to show you something. It’s just down the road. I could use the walk.” We strolled to the end of his block. There was a cross-street at the end of it, and then there was a large cul-de-sac with only three houses on it beyond the cross-street. Doug walked toward the middle house, crutching along on wobbling legs. “That house there was my neighbor’s. Fella named Jim. Good guy, but he was one of those conspiracy guys, you know? Always thinking the government was coming for him. Always thinking that the sky was falling. He was always talking about aliens and the Illuminati and the Bilderberg Group.”
“I’ll bet he had a field day when the Flu started,” I said.
“Oh god, yes. Said it was a government conspiracy, a manufactured virus to purge the poor and save the resources for the wealthy. The first week of it, he was on his porch shouting to the heavens that we were all doomed. For the first time in his life, he was right, I guess.” Doug walked to the front door and opened it.
The house had a lingering smell of decay. It wasn’t unpleasant, though. No one had died in this house. It was just the start of the house’s eventual collapse, water stagnating in the basement, walls taking on mold, and support timbers rotting behind the drywall. The house was messy, as though it had been
abandoned mid-task. I could see a lot of survival gear scattered around the living room and kitchen. Doug pushed through the main floor of the one-story rambler and out a sliding patio door at the rear of the house. The backyard was overgrown. A garden shed stood in one corner of the fenced-off yard.
“Jim was one of them—what you call ‘em? The guys who think the world’s ending tomorrow?”
“Preppers?”
“That’s it.” Doug limped toward the garden shed. “He’s been talking for years about economic collapse, Russian nukes, and the super-volcano under Yellowstone. About eight years ago, he and his wife went whole hog and had a military-style bomb shelter installed beneath their backyard. Oh, it was a whole thing with the city. Took him two years just to get the permits. No one wanted him to do it, but he did it anyway.” Doug opened the garden shed, and instead of a lawn mower and some tools, there was nothing. The shed was empty, save for a metal cover on the floor of the shed. Doug cast the cover aside and revealed a heavy steel hatch with a push-button combination door.
“I don’t know why, but Jim decided he liked me,” Doug said. “Gave me the combo to that door just in case. That’s how he said it: ‘Here, Doug—just in case.’ Then, he winked like he was letting me in on some grand secret.”
I knew why Jim liked him. It was probably because Doug listened to Jim’s stories of the apocalypse like he’d listened to me. You gravitate toward people that make you feel important.
“Combo’s six, three, six, eight, nine, zero, zero. Punch that in for me, would you?”