“Right.”
The inside was empty, with dim emergency lighting from the solar-powered batteries that helped subsidize the place. Everything was in place and deathly quiet. Neither of us said anything, but something about the creepy feel of it kept making me want to keep a hand near my pistol.
We went back into the restricted area and found a dead woman in a park services uniform lying on the break room couch. It really came as no surprise, although Jackie did sniffle a bit while we found a blanket and covered her up.
“I wish there was more we could do,” she said as we headed back out to the truck.
“There’s really too many,” I told her. “I hate it, too, but if we buried everyone we came across, we wouldn’t do anything else.”
The sheer impact of that simple statement suddenly hit me. In just the immediate area, there must have been thousands of dead in their homes. What sort of impact would that have on us, I wondered. The stores and warehouses would be mostly empty and safe, but the homes would draw insects and other small scavengers. Anything that could slip into a house would partake, rats and other vermin would multiply like mad until their predator populations increased.
It would be an interesting few months and probably longer. Once we got back to the farm, provided Jackie was willing to stay, we’d have to make a serious run to gather supplies. I already suspected I’d need to crank up my rusty CDL skills and go on a search for a gasoline tanker, plus all the stabilizer I could find in the auto shops and truck stops.
“Well, hello,” Jackie said suddenly, and I froze. She’d stepped out the door before me and looked down. There, looking up at us, was a small black dog. Bright brown eyes glistened in the dim light, and a pink tongue lolled from its mouth.
Slowly, the young woman knelt down and held out a hand, which the little creature daintily sniffed. Then it began to wag its tail. I just held still, not wanting to disrupt the moment. I knew dogs, and skittish little ones like this one would dart off if anything surprised them.
Jackie and the black dog made their introduction, and it let her pick it up, little tail wagging.
“Well,” she observed. “It’s a girl.”
“One more for the growing pack, I reckon,” I said. “Think she’ll fit in?”
“She was smart enough to come back,” Jackie said as I reached out a hand to let the little dog sniff me. “I guess we’ll see. She might have to stay inside a while.”
Who was I to argue? I liked dogs, anyway, and any creature we could save was good.
“What do we call her?” I asked.
Jackie checked the little dog’s collar and read, “My name is Sasha. If found, return to…” her voice trailed off. “I guess we don’t really need to know that.”
“Yeah,” I grunted. “Ready to get back on the road?”
“I think so,” she replied. “I’ll give her a little water and food in the truck.”
A few minutes later, we pulled out of the welcome center and got back onto I-85, heading towards LaGrange. There was still a little light in the sky from the setting sun, but night was definitely close at hand.
“Take the next exit,” Jackie said suddenly.
I nodded, tapped the brakes, and eased into the rightmost lane as the exit sign came up. A few seconds past that, and I braked harder as we left the interstate and pulled to a stop at the foot of a dead stoplight.
“Right,” she told me. Sasha whined and propped up on the window to look out, panting excitedly.
I took the turn, then followed a surprisingly complex set of directions that led us, eventually, to a small farm tucked away between two larger bits of land. To me, it looked more like a nice house on some farmland than an actual farm, though there were a chicken hutch and a pen with two goats.
Jackie was out of the car, the little dog on her heels, almost the exact moment that I stopped in front of the house. I shoved the gear into park, turned off the truck and followed after grabbing a Maglite from behind my seat. The place was far enough out to be dark as the inside of a pig, especially as overcast as the sky had gotten.
“Mom! Dad!” I heard Jackie shout from the porch, then a door banged open, and Sasha started barking.
I followed slowly, flashlight up and on, held so as to follow my gaze. My right hand rested unconsciously near the butt of my Les Baer .45. While Jackie clattered around inside, I gave the rest of the area to the front of the house a quick once-over. There was a small, dark blue pickup parked near the closed garage doors, not too far from where I’d pulled off into the yard to stop my own truck.
Animals rustled and complained in the pens, and the chickens started twittering a bit. We’d disturbed them, of course. I went ahead and made my way to the porch. The stairs creaked lightly under my weight.
Jackie had left the front door wide open on the dark interior, and I stepped in and had a look around. It was a nice foyer with a little crystal chandelier, a side table, and a coat rack. Doors led to the left and right, and straight ahead. Before I could take two more steps, Jackie practically flew from the left door and slammed into me, wrapped her arms around me, and buried her face in my chest, sobbing softly.
I hugged her back and lowered my head, burying my face in her hair. She smelled nice and didn’t pull away.
“They’re gone, too,” she gasped out between sobs. “I knew, but I didn’t want to admit it.”
“Shh, Jackie,” I murmured. “You’re safe. It’s bad now, but it’ll get better.” Platitudes were really all I had, right now, along with action. While I’d distracted myself with gathering supplies and burying my grandmother, the young woman had just buried herself in her own thoughts.
Sasha tap-danced her way out from the side door after a moment and propped up on my leg as if to ask for me to do something, anything, to help. What could I do, I wondered. I could offer to bury them, but that would be hard at night unless they had some kind of backhoe or trench-digger.
Jackie’s shoulders shook as she pressed against me, and I could feel her tears through my shirt.
“Let’s go sit down,” I murmured.
She nodded, and we awkwardly walked to the end of the hall together, then into a small den beyond. There were a small couch and a loveseat, along with a coffee table, end tables, and a fireplace. A small flat-screen television sat on a stand off to my right.
The loveseat was closer, so I went with her to it, and we both sat down. It would have been a lot easier, I thought, if Jackie had actually let me go during the process, but she clung to me like a needy cat. Not that I really minded, though, I just wished the circumstances were better.
So we just held each other while she cried into my chest, and I made comforting noises. Sasha hopped up into a bit of empty space and got herself scooped into the mix. It was quite dark in the empty house with the power out, and like all older, rural houses, this one wasn’t exactly silent at night. For me, staying calm with the unknown sounds was an exercise in willpower. Too many nights in the desert and nearly deserted settlements on vehicle recovery ops flooded back into my brain, and I fought to keep my composure.
Jackie must have sensed me tensing up as she lifted her head and asked, “Are you okay?” her voice was soft and thick with sorrow, but the sheer fact that she was concerned about me struck me to the core.
“Yeah,” I replied. “Long story. How are you?”
“I’ll live,” she sniffled and shifted. “Let me get a lamp lit. Then we can figure out what we’re doing.”
“I’d offer if I knew where anything was,” I said, trying to lighten the mood a bit.
She let out a chuckle and pulled away with a soft, “Thank you.”
A few minutes of rummaging and a stubbed toe later, a flame flared up, and the light grew. Jackie stood there with an emergency oil lamp that she set on the coffee table.
“We should see to your animals,” I said after she sat back down with me.
“I know,” she sighed. “Would you help me?”
“Of
course,” I said. “And tomorrow, we can…”
“Bury mom and dad,” she finished. “That would be good. I also… I want to take up the offer to come live with you. Is that okay?”
“Why wouldn’t it be?” I asked. “I ain’t one to take back an offer once made.”
“Good,” she said. “Good.”
6
The next morning, we dug graves and buried Jackie’s parents behind the house. It wasn’t fast as we didn’t have access to a backhoe, just shovels and a pickaxe. A few hours later, once the deed was done, I gave her a little privacy and walked around to check on the animals in their pens and look over the area. The Purcell home (she did finally tell me her last name) was on a small plot. Less than eight acres, I figured, and had four goats, a horse, and about a dozen chickens.
Oddly, they didn’t have any dogs, but I saw signs of at least a handful of feral or very skittish cats. The little dog, Sasha, stayed close to the young woman while I wandered, and I eventually ended up digging an MRE pack from my stash in the truck and settling on the tailgate to eat a cold, filling, relatively tasteless lunch.
The day was cool, with the temperatures probably in the fifties, which wasn’t too bad. I stared up at the cloudy sky and pondered how to proceed. We’d seen no one alive, though I thought I’d caught a glimpse of a car or truck driving past in the early morning. There was no contact on CB, cellular, or radio. The world seemed to have gone deathly silent in the span of a few days.
Once Jackie was ready, and I had no plan to rush her, I wanted to see if we could find a livestock trailer, load up her animals, and head back to my farm. This one was a bit small, far from the interstate and any major town, and probably the biggest issue, didn’t have easy access to water. The well pumps were dependent on electricity, and the house was on civil water, which would lose its trustworthiness fairly quickly, with everything unattended.
Back at the farm, Grandma had insisted on manual and electric pumps, since she didn’t trust the power to stay on all the time. She also had taken exception to connecting to the public water system but had accepted a bare minimum hook-up. With that and the septic tank, the farm was pretty independent of the local infrastructure, which I considered a significant advantage.
I briefly considered taking up smoking again while I waited. Damn near everyone in the service had smoked while I was stationed in the Middle East, and the story went that the U.S. Military ran on coffee and cigarettes. In my experience, I couldn’t refute that claim. I’d stopped pretty quick once I moved in at the farm with Grandma. She’d been really adamant about that, and I found out in a couple of months that I really didn’t need the fix that I thought I did. I stuck the rest of my last pack in the glove box of my truck and forgot about it.
Until today.
Of course, those old Camels would be stale as hell by now. It wasn’t like they were really good, to begin with, I just wasn’t the kind of guy that bothered to hand roll when I could get average rubbish for about five dollars in a convenience store.
“Penny for your thoughts,” Jackie asked.
I practically jumped out of my skin. She’d snuck up with me along with Sasha. Clamping down on my first snappish reaction, I turned it into a laugh and shook my head. “Thinking about picking up a bad habit again.”
“Oh,” she studied me thoughtfully. “Pot or something harder?”
“Just cigarettes,” I replied. “Though…” Trust a college girl to suggest marijuana. I guess it never stopped being a thing. “I remember when you could just go out in the cow pastures and pick mushrooms. Plus, I’ll bet that somebody has a field set aside for-” I made the motion for air quotes, “-hemp.”
“Hemp,” she said with a faint chuckle. “Yeah.” Jackie shoved her hands into her jacket pockets and looked at me with a quirky, unreadable expression.
I mostly just returned it. My thoughts were all over the place, unfocused and going in way too many directions all at once.
“We’ve got crates for the chickens and a horse trailer,” she said at last. “It should have room for Franklin and the goats.”
“Franklin?” I snapped out of my distraction and focused sharply on her. “You named your horse, ‘Franklin’?”
Jackie shrugged and blushed a little. “It’s a cute name,” she protested. “He’s a gelding, and very sweet. I thought he looked like a Franklin.”
“Is he smart?” I asked. Most horses were dumb as a sack of hammers, but there was always one brainiac in every herd.
“Fairly. Dad taught him a few tricks, and he hangs out with the goats. They’re trouble.”
“Yep,” I said as I hopped down off the tailgate. “Goats usually are.”
We chatted more or less about nothing as she led me to the shed where the trailer and chicken crates were, then we spent the next hour rounding up the various critters and loading them after attaching the trailer to my truck. The chickens were the hardest to catch and the easiest to load, and they went in the truck bed. Since it was cold, I threw some blankets from the house over the crates and tucked them in.
Next, we tied up the goats, and I stood watch over them while Jackie coaxed Franklin into the trailer. She was right about one thing. The gelding was an even-tempered creature. He was pretty big, too. I honestly wasn’t sure that you’d call a castrated horse a ‘he,’ but since he was, characteristically, hung like a horse despite not having a full sac, I couldn’t bring myself to call him anything else.
I swear that horse winked at me as Jackie walked him past me and up the ramp into the trailer. Next were the goats. Since it was a two-horse trailer, and there was only one horse, they weren’t terribly crowded.
Once all the animals were situated, I gave Jackie a questioning look before asking, “Is there anything else you want to bring with you?”
“I guess I should, huh,” she mused and looked back at the house. “I kinda don’t want to, but I’m going to need clothes and stuff.”
“Maybe we should have thought about it before we got the critters all packed up,” I said. “Too late now, though. I’d say just grab what you need, and we can make another trip back in a few days. I don’t think fuel will be a problem before it starts going bad.”
Jackie stuck her tongue out and sighed. “Give me about fifteen minutes.”
“Yell if you need a hand,” I called after her as she scampered back to the house. Sasha trotted after, tail wagging.
I leaned against the fender of my Dodge and shook my head in vague amusement. She’d done a good job getting herself in check after we interred her folks, which was a good thing. I figured she’d have a little breakdown in a week or so, and hopefully, I wouldn’t be going through issues of my own and would be able to help.
Of course, the girl might just surprise me. She really seemed a sturdy and stable sort. It really had been a good run of luck to meet her. I expected there’d be enough daylight left when we got back to the farm to situate all the animals at my farm. We had plenty of pasturage, a large chicken coop, and an extra few stalls for the horses. The goats could live in the barn. I expected the goats and chickens to free-range as the whim took them, but we’d see how that turned out.
We might have a good bit more work to do to make things right. I wanted to get a supply of fuel that would hopefully last as long as I could keep it stabilized. The gas would break down over time, no matter what, but if I could keep everything running for six months to a year, I could do the work to convert things to steam, or maybe solar.
While my abilities were significant, I didn’t know a damn thing about refining gasoline, nor was that really much of an export for my area. I’d have to dig around for some books on the subject, then see if I could find a refinery that still had crude storage, power, and all sorts of other necessities that I doubted would be easy to come by in the future.
Still, I could definitely keep my brain and my hands busy, and probably Jackie’s as well. She’d definitely be the one in charge of the livestock.
Lo and behold, at about fourteen minutes from when she disappeared into the house, the young woman came trundling out with a large canvas rucksack. I blinked and pushed off from the truck to go meet her.
“I figured I’d stick with the minimum, right now,” Jackie flashed me a grin as she passed, then heaved it into the truck bed. “It’s mostly clothes and a few books. I will take you up on the offer to come back, though. There are a few things that I’d like to hang on to, especially since I’m shacking up with you.”
“What?” I asked.
“I’m teasing,” she said with a genuine laugh. “Maybe. But we are moving in together, so…”
I just stood there looking dumbfounded as she brushed by me to check on the animals, then clambered into the cab of the truck.
“Ready, Henry?” she asked.
I shook my head and nodded. “Yeah, yeah,” I replied, got in the driver’s seat, and started the engine. My truck was still sitting at about three-quarters of a tank of fuel, but it did have a forty-gallon tank.
Soon, we were back on the road while I tried to remember the path back to the interstate. When I hesitated, Jackie filled me in, and we merged onto I-85, heading westward, now.
“Knowing helps,” she said out of nowhere as we closed in on the state line. “I wasn’t sure it would, and I’m very sad, but I’m also a bit more at ease.”
I nodded, keeping my eyes on the road. Our chance meeting had been because we caught sight of each other on the interstate, and I didn’t want to miss another living soul by being too distracted. The young woman’s realization was a very mature one. It was something you learned in grief counseling. You also learned that the sadness never truly went away, and you just coped as best you could.
“Thank you for taking me home,” Jackie continued. “And for doing most of the work.” Sasha sat quietly in her lap, looking up at her, then at me. Her little brown eyes were inscrutable with the wisdom of Dog.
We were silent for a bit longer. Opelika wasn’t that far, but I wasn’t speeding despite the emptiness of the road. There was a surging level of paranoia in the back of my brain that pushed me to want to avoid risk-taking right now. I’d have to get over that, though. There was so much to be done to get the pair of us a decent lifestyle without all the modern comforts.
After The Virus (Book 1): After The Virus Page 4