Tamberlin's Account

by Jaime Munt

  I took a left at the next intersection. I was suddenly very conscious of two things—neither my rifle or shotgun were with me and I didn’t lock the doors. Even so, I pushed those thoughts aside. The need to see was stronger. I needed to see.

  I'd done things I shouldn't have done, as far as safety goes, but I didn't feel like it was as risky as it probably should have.

  Am I adapting or is my give-a-damn going the way of the dodo?

  Only so many possessions were allowed—what they could fit in their tent.

  There were areas that appeared to exist for dumping and sorting excess items.

  The next turn brought me face to face with a graveyard—a graveyard of cars. Campers, trailers, trucks. A supermarket—now an Items Consolidation and Trade Station, lost its parking lot to the vehicles of the people; at least from this camp. They were gathered so tightly you would have to take a vehicle from an end to get access to the next. A child would struggle to get through a window, if they could at all.

  There was a busy body sitting on the lip of a city planter. Their eyes sometimes move and I don't always know what's going on in their heads, but even for a zombie he looked despondent, like the one before.

  His presence didn't excite Mr. Ages. We were feet from him before it was clear he wasn't just another body.

  He was little more than a solid ghost. He was eaten on the neck, shoulder and had completely lost an ear, but everything that was left was young and handsome and gone—as gone as gone can be—

  You'll never catch me

  —he was helpless.

  He managed to look up at me and almost straightened a little. Almost.

  I reached out—Mr. Ages made a sound, almost a whimper, uneasy sound—I brushed snow off his hand and found a warm yellow gold band devoutly gripping the gray blue blackening flesh.

  "You came here with your family?" I asked him.

  I almost left my hand on his hand, but I stepped back—why take the chance?

  The dead, busy bodies sometimes have pattern behavior. Sometimes they learn. Sometimes their elbow bumps a doorknob and suddenly two dozen think that one must have tried to get in because there must have been something in there and suddenly that two dozen is shoving past the one to get at whatever was in that house.

  This one didn't know what to do with himself. He was cold and had no memories—or whatever stirred those habitual rituals.

  He was lost.

  "If they are alive, they won't know, but they are probably hoping you aren't suffering. If they are gone, really gone, you should be with them."

  I crouched enough to meet his eyes. He was trying to open his mouth. I felt tears rising, I asked him and wanted to know so badly, "Is your soul in there?"

  I reached out again and put my palm under his jaw and held it with my fingertips to his throat. I really felt, behind the weirdness in his eyes, that something was there. And when I drove the screwdriver up into his brain, through the soft spot my two longest fingers found, I watched the energy leave. Whether the energy of who he was or the energy that brought him back.

  I should have killed that other one.

  My fingers supported the jaw until it dropped as low as it was ever going to.

  Then I was going to leave.

  I stood up and turned and faced a street that caught my attention. I felt my eyes widen and my heart respond in surprise, wonder and fear.

  This side of town rolled down and what got my attention was little compared to what I had to digest when I could see down it.

  It was hard to tell if it was a flood or a tornado responsible for the devastation I was seeing below me—with the snow and filth—I just couldn't tell. Tall buildings slumped like they'd collapsed on their knees and put their heads to the ground.

  What buildings stood were dirty up to their waists. A flood could do that—a bad storm could do that.

  I was apprehensive about descending into this part of the city—like entering another level of Hell. No inferno—just cold and bleak and wasted. A sneak preview of the world without man—and of what our ruins will look like. They will find the bodies mummified, huddled on the floor in closets. They will see the blown out heads. They will see evidence of many families’ last stands. They will find a pile of bodies in front of a church. Somewhere in the distance they will find houses with a piles of bodies heaped around back—all of them killed by the same hammer or screwdriver.

  I wonder who will see them. Who will explore them? Will they have any idea how we lived? If I knew the answer to that would I realize how much of history is us just guessing?

  I walked carefully down the icy slope of cracking pavement. Ahead of me was an improvised and crudely compromised fence to Camp D. The buildings level off with me as I descend and I slowly submit to their shadows as I enter the ruined part of the city.

  Past a barely distinguishable out of state school bus, I see little bodies frozen in the shallow rerouted river that cuts through the city. The brown ice is rough with tall frost forests. Little fingers and small hands rise out of the dirty ice like fins and spray of water creatures in a miniature world. I can make no sense of what happened here. The children are mixed among frozen things and larger frozen people. But it is mostly children.

  The bus is battered. It’d left paint along the buildings east of it.

  “Cross something you shouldn’t have?” I said aloud.

  I scanned the ice. I guessed it was probably only a couple feet deep now and frozen solid. I was right when I thought there would be more bodies down the street, down stream, sorted out of the water by a couple military hummers and a sturdy road block. They looked like a beaver dam of frozen, depleted flesh, and wasted life.

  Mannequins boasted their infallibility from one of few intact windows.

  Perfect lips formed perfect smiles at the wasteland in front of them. They stood with their hands on their hips or extended casually over crumpled bodies. They would have remained still and fearless even as the dead overcame and overlooked them.

  I’m here, I thought to the plastic gods. The world isn’t yours yet.

  I was in a business district. I saw bakeries and bookshops. A coffee shop on a corner, there was a busy body slumped and stiff with cold in the doorway. A screen printing shop. Tattoos. A craft store. Antiques. Chocolate shop. Souvenirs. A lot of notices from the Powers That Be.

  I felt the pull of my old life drawing me to books—not that the pull of coffee and antiques wasn’t there, but availability and use sorta numbed that interest. But books… books could give me new life. They were always good, at least, for escaping mine.

  From the devastation, I wondered how much there was to salvage anyway. Very few windows left. The integrity of the buildings structures was iffy. Not worth the risk.

  Beyond this row of buildings, a wall of blowing snow concealed the city beyond. Through the now strong gusts of wind I dissolved into the curtain of white. As the breath of winter died and drew in for the next blow, I saw buildings eaten and broken like us. I saw a land ravaged by cruel weather.

  What's left?

  Not just here. Anywhere.

  Can I really hope there is somewhere to go?

  Looking at this raised new and old concerns—new problems. What happens to towns when there's no one to care for them?

  What happens when there's no one to fight the fires?

  Who sends out the tornado warnings?

  Who's going to get you breathing?

  Who's going to start your heart?

  Deliver your babies?

  Make babies.

  Take care of us when we're old?

  What happens to our warheads?

  What about all the people who should have been?

  The people who were already in hospitals?

  The pets in the pet shop? Animals in the zoo?

  No cops. No laws.

  No one to keep an eye on things. No one to keep track.

  No one to teach us.

  No one to clean up.


  No one to bury all these dead.

  No way to put to rest all the ghosts.

  This town is a ghost—as dead as the graffiti renamed it.

  There was nothing more for me to see. I wanted to leave, but it was hard to, too. Avoiding towns kept me from seeing. I was seeing. I'd seen enough.

  I turned on my heel to leave. One wall stood stubbornly among the rubble. Brushed with white paint on the red brick, it said, “But he that endures to the end, the same shall be saved.”

  I stared dumbly at it as the wind rose up and the white ate up the words and the sounds of cries this stupid girl couldn’t keep down. This stupid girl crying and screaming and feeling like somehow the words were making demands of me.

  I ran until I fell and then I walked the rest of the way back to my vehicle.

  I put my iPod on again when we got back in the truck. I did a U-turn in reverse—I couldn't bring myself to drive on the remains of the living and their lives.

  Fear, by Sarah McLachlan was ending. Pretty Donna, by Collective Soul played next on the shuffle. I always wished that song was longer. I pressed most of my concentration into driving and listening to the songs that played. I needed an out. I needed to get away from myself.

  I was fighting tears—making gross sounds in my throat. My vision warped as my eyes filled. I blinked hard and squeezed them out to clear them. My consciousness was so congested with thoughts and feelings that, at first, I didn’t realize what one thing made me feel so helpless and moved to submit to them.

  With all I couldn’t yet digest—my ears were eating Nothing Left to Say the Imagine Dragons song—I felt something in me breaking.

  It's dark. My headlights grab at unseen dangers and 40mph seems like the speed of light. In a way, it is.

  I see eyes flash in the night—most of them are likely deer and small critters. The rest? I don't know about them.

  I end the day to A.D.I.D.A.S.

  Feb 7 1:48pm

  I never slept by my boyfriend—the one I lived with.

  Sometimes we fell asleep on the couch or in bed watching movies on his laptop, but once sleep set in, it didn't last long enough to count.

  He was restless—it wasn't just the drugs—he was unsettled. If he tossed and turned and I had to leave so I could sleep; it bothered him. If I told him why I had to leave, it bothered him. If he got up and paced and paced and paced and I asked him what was wrong—everything was wrong.

  I couldn't hold him in those moments anymore than that poor creature in town.

  And I learned, again, to shrink.

  And I learned to yearn. All the good wants were there and I was in a home with someone that wanted me there, but it started to get cold—even when I felt things were good.

  It wasn't because we weren't sleeping together—neither of us was in a state of mind for that. I was learning about being close to people because of him, but him learning that being close could be safe and good was a greater challenge than mine.

  Love wanted to be there. We cared for each other more than I'd ever cared for anyone. And I yearned. I missed him—I felt him slipping away every time an embrace ended. I felt like he was beads of oil on a pan of water and I was trying to hold him all together. So I held him all the time. When he cried I felt the pieces trying to scatter through the gaps where we touched.

  When he was high, it was like holding in an explosion.

  I couldn’t hold it. He started breaking things—he scared the hell out of me. One time I called Carrie to see if I could spend the week with her. I locked him out of my room and cried until I fell asleep. Somewhere in there were his words, but I could barely understand them.

  He listened quietly the next morning while I told him I was going to go home for a week—he raised his eyebrows a little at this and searched my eyes—I explained that this meant seeing my friends, not my family. Obviously.

  He looked down.

  I told him that I would see him Sunday night and I held his face and made him look at me.

  "I'm coming back," I promised. "This isn't the end of anything, but I don't know what to do when it’s like that."

  I didn't want to say, when "you're" like that.

  "I'll stop." He meant the drugs. He couldn't live in his mind without them—not all the time.

  "I'm not worried," I said. I put my forehead to his. I didn't know I was crying until then—when I bent forward I felt hot wetness track down my face. I felt his tears run into the "L's" my hands made along his beautiful jaw. "We don't have to compromise."

  The only thing I'd change about him were old wounds that I could only wait to heal. And I could.

  I felt "I love you" fill every fiber of my being and light up every part of my soul—before then my friends were the only ones lighting candles in there—I love them, but it was different, something so big that I couldn't speak.

  I looked into his eyes, my mouth clamped on sobs coming up my throat—even as more tears came I forced a smile, albeit a weak one, as evidence we'd be okay.

  I left into a hot and humid August morning and returned on a hotter Sunday afternoon.

  When I opened the door, I knew he'd quit. He'd quit everything.

  My things just seemed to fall off me. I bashed my hip against the kitchen table as I went through the room. I looked at the chair where I left him as if he should have still been there. Like, "Where'd you go?"

  My knees were watery. I felt tears that must have only lain dormant since our "fight" come alive; just like the dead would do in a few years.

  I could smell it before I could see it. It's a smell you never forget. But I couldn't see him, only the blood. Everlasting blood. I'm sure I looked right at him and I couldn't see him. It was like being blind, only instead of seeing blackness I saw blood. A starburst of blood on the wall. I am now only vaguely aware that I had been screaming since the very moment the smell struck me.

  Somewhere in there I called the police, let them in and told them about the "fight." All the while I felt like I hadn't said anything—that I hadn't moved from the spot, like a plant in a time lapse or something. I was in a time lapse.

  Is there anyone we can call, someone asked.

  I could barely shake my head. I wanted to say, "They killed him! Everything is because of what they did—

  But I was the one who was with him. What should I have said differently? What should I not have said? What should I have?

  I feel like I was the straw that destroyed that beautiful, forsaken, broken creature—

  And I felt like I dunno. I felt everything. Everything. When someone dies, they aren’t the only ones that see their lives pass before their eyes… That I think sums up their importance in it and, I think, tells us how much it’s going to hurt.

  At some point I was screaming - or wailing - or howling - it was a sound, a terrible sound that scared me and felt like it was ripping out of my throat. I screamed "God" for what felt like minutes and cried his name what must have been a million times until I could only creak it out. I felt angry. I felt

  everything.

  My head felt like it was hemorrhaging, swelling, exploding—my lips felt puffy and I couldn’t breathe out of my nose.

  I was dully aware of the constant presence of a paramedic who didn’t leave me until my nearest friends arrived for me. I changed hands. I heard Patrick say, "I've got her." I felt the paramedic’s hand relax and leave my shoulder. I smelled Marie holding me. I felt the car ride. I lay in a bed. I lost time. In a couple days, I guess, it seemed like one night, I wanted to go back.

  His family was picking through everything, even my things. They were moving stuff out. They were gonna take my car. They didn't know about me because he had nothing to do with them.

  Marie immediately got involved—I watched them throw away things he loved. Patrick called the police. I heard someone say his uncle's name—I found him with my eyes and hated. I wanted to kill him. I could have killed him.

  I recovered some of my things, my car.

/>   I was not entitled to him. I was not family—I wasn't known to the family and I wasn't on the lease. I had no right to him.

  They took his things.

  They took his body.

  While I know it’s what he wanted, they cremated him and took away even knowing where he rested—or with who. I didn't even know when or where the funeral was. If the funeral was.

  But I knew what they did to him before he left us.

  I felt like the whole world should have stopped when he did—and it made me hurt and mad and so confused when it didn't.

  Didn't they know what was gone?

  Or how?

  Or why?

  He quit.

  You quit things you hate—if you can quit them.

  He quit.

  I thought we could do anything, eventually. What else did we have, but time?

  Feb 8 7:22am

  I am staring down a massive bridge. It crosses the Mississippi into Missouri.

  I hate bridges. I don’t like heights or water. Yippee.

  What happens if I’m out there and they mass around me? The coast looks clear, for now. The coast, as a matter of fact, looks really clear. Far back along its banks are signs of flooding that’s sometime receded. Perhaps the mother of the destruction I saw before.

  Well, rather than putting it off any longer—gonna just get it over with.

  I can’t stop wondering, how far up the Mississippi did that bull shark get?

  9:49am

  Most the right hand turns are telling me I’m really close to where that doctor was studying this. The one from the newspaper. Just a couple hours away, in St. Louis, this guy plunged headfirst into trying to tackle this problem, according to the article. Is it because he just knew how bad it was going to be?

  I wonder how much he knew. Or knows, I suppose. He could be alive… Shall we check the survival chance statistics?

  Within a week he already knew enough to tell us that it wasn’t just humans passing around doses of reality cancer. Maybe he was responsible?