Charlie's Requiem: Democide

by Walt Browning

  “Do they even want you there?” he quietly asked.

  I turned away. And the gravity of our situation hit me between the eyes. A hidden truth that had been bugging me from the beginning. First, it was a lack of forethought. The same faltering, random decisions that had almost gotten us killed several times and led to Brie’s death. No planning, and more specifically, moving towards an uncertain place that may or may not welcome us.

  I could blame it on the situation. After all, no one planned on the lights going out or gangs forming or the government turning out to be on the wrong side. But it had been over a week since this all went down, and we had been stumbling about without a strategy, other than to get to Janice’s sister’s house in DeLand. It was like getting to DeLand was some trip back to Kansas and all we had to do was click our heels together to get there. But there was no Kansas. There were no “safe” places anymore, and the plan we had assumed would be our salvation was nothing more than a fairy tale. We had no way of knowing what we would find or whether we would even be accepted.

  “I don’t even know if they want us there,” I soberly replied.

  Jorge leaned back and sighed. “I think,” he said after a moment or two, “that you need a better plan.”

  Chapter 9

  “It is not the strongest or the most intelligent who will survive but those who can best manage change”

  — Charles Darwin

  I needed a plan. We needed a plan. I had no frame of reference to make a plan. Without the knowledge of what we were facing, any decision would be fraught with errors and potential disasters.

  Jorge and I gathered Janice and Garrett in our living room. We sat on the leather couch and chairs that faced the wall-mounted LCD television. Its 55-inch grey screen stood sentinel over the room, staring blankly at our little group.

  Janice sat transfixed at some unknown object off in the distance. The proverbial thousand-mile stare was all I needed to see to know that she wasn’t really with us. The trauma of Brie’s death hung in the air, mingling with the dust and debris that floated in the shadows created by the rising sun. Janice had internalized all this and nothing else was coming out.

  “She’s been silent and unresponsive for the last hour,” Garrett said. “At first, she cried and I rocked her in my arms. After a while, she got quiet and still. She won’t answer me. I’m scared.”

  “I don’t know what to say,” I replied. “Let’s just give her time.”

  “Sure,” Garrett replied. He sighed and pulled Janice close on the couch. Drawing her head to his shoulder, he gently stroked her hair and lightly kissed her forehead.

  “You’ll be OK,” he whispered. “I’m here.”

  Jorge, having settled back in his chair as we all first took our seats, leaned forward and addressed us all.

  “I’ve told Charlie about my situation,” he started. “My girlfriend lives in the apartment next door. She’s not here anymore and I need to find her. Best bet is that she’s in a relocation camp.”

  “The only one we know about,” I interjected, “is at the fairgrounds.”

  “But we have no way of knowing that is where she is,” he finished. “I need to find out and Charlie suggested we contact John. I don’t know if we can trust him. I want your opinions on him. What do you think, Garrett?”

  “Well,” Garrett said. “He didn’t turn us in yesterday. And he seemed to be friends with Beth and big Mike.”

  “OK,” Jorge interjected. “But how long have you known those two? A couple of hours?”

  “Not even,” I replied. “Maybe an hour.”

  “But they stopped the gang back at the roadblock!” Garrett stated.

  “Yeah, but we don’t know why,” Jorge stated. “They are any number of reasons they may have done that, which don’t indicate how they will handle us. What if Mike or Beth knew someone in the crowd? What if they turn on us and join the DHS after they check in? A full belly and safety in numbers is an awful big incentive to join the dark side.”

  “What can we do? We’re stuck here if we want their help; and if we leave, we lose that connection.”

  “Risk to benefit ratio,” Jorge said. “What are the risks and what are the benefits. Can we change the ratio to make our odds better? That’s the question we need to ask with any decision we make.”

  “How do we do that?” Garrett asked.

  “Well,” he began. “What are our needs? I need to find Maria, and John seems my best bet. But that doesn’t mean you three should take the same risks. We have different goals.”

  “Well,” I stated back. “We do and we don’t.”

  I turned to Janice and Garrett. Janice seemed to perk up as the conversation began. Her stare wasn’t off in the clouds anymore, and she seemed more aware.

  “Look you two, Jorge and I were speaking earlier and he brought up some good points. I am worried that going to DeLand isn’t our best option.”

  I got up from the chair where I faced Jorge and sat on the couch next to Garrett. I leaned past him and put my hand on Janice’s arm.

  “Janice,” I said. “Honey, please. We need to ask you some questions.”

  Janice looked at me; and although she still showed signs of the trauma over Brie’s death, she looked aware enough that I felt I could trust the answers I was seeking.

  “Janice, is your sister’s house going to be able to handle the three of us?”

  “Uh, I guess.” She quietly replied. “I mean it’s a three-bedroom house.”

  “I guess I am asking if she will let us stay there,” I replied. “Can she handle three more mouths to feed? Is it secure enough to be safe?”

  “I guess,” she responded. “I mean, what is safe anymore?”

  Our conversation seemed to draw her out of her stupor. The more we talked, the less likely it seemed that this was the best place to go. Her sister was married with two children. They had no garden, just a piece of land among many that had a large lot and a long driveway. Her property sat near a swamp (half of the towns north of Orlando were reclaimed swamp land) which was both good and bad. Good as an emergency escape route, but bad for security and for our health. Mosquito-borne diseases, criminals sneaking up from our rear, swamp critters and threat of flooding after a heavy rain were all on the “minus” column. In the “plus” column, we had distance from the government thugs. It was unknown whether food would be plentiful or scarce and whether the neighbors would be friend or foe.

  Travelling to DeLand meant getting around some of Florida’s largest bodies of water, Lake Jessup and Lake Monroe. Travelling would require using the roads due to the marshes that filled in the spaces between towns. Without a good trail map, we would be stumbling about in palmetto stands and muddy, snake and mosquito-infested swamp land. Further, getting to DeLand would put us on the road for many days; and Jorge’s experience with the rape gang showed that the longer you travelled, the higher the risk of a bad encounter.

  “Well,” I finished. “Going to DeLand doesn’t seem to be the only option we have at this point.” I returned to my chair and sat back heavily into its plush, leather cushion. “But it sounds like it is an option that we need to keep on the table.”

  “Now what?” Garrett asked.

  “Now we decide how to handle our next move. We need to contact John; but when and who is still up in the air.” I stated. “We need to take care of Brie, and Jorge needs some information on where his girlfriend might be.”

  When we had left John the day before, we agreed on marking a concrete column with chalk in the parking lot where we had hidden while waiting for Mike and Beth to return from checking into DHS headquarters.

  “The question is,” Jorge interjected. “How do we do that and minimize the risks.”

  “I’m comfortable with John,” I said. “I will make contact with him. But you
two might want to take some precautions.”

  “Like what?” Garrett asked.

  “Well, the first thing I was thinking of is that we need another place to hide. A secondary position that we can retreat to if things go bad. So I was thinking that we should try our key on one of the other apartment buildings next door. They all look like this one and they all look abandoned.”

  “A fallback position is good,” Jorge said. “We should also have a fallback plan if things turn for the worse. We always should have two plans in case we run into trouble, and we should all know what they are and what triggers them.”

  For the next hour, we debated what our next move should be. The only deadline we set for ourselves was that, security permitting, I would leave a mark on the bridge column for John before the agents returned from their duties. That meant we had until late afternoon to contact him.

  We agreed to find a fallback location based on Jorge’s journey into town and my knowledge of the downtown area. Having spent what weekends I could in the O-town night scene, I was familiar with the trendy areas of town. But the specifics of the neighborhoods right around us were a mystery to me. There were drive-through streets that I used to get to Thornton Park or the downtown clubs. I never really paid attention to the businesses or homes I journeyed past. Unless they were a block or two from my weekend entertainment spots, or they were adjacent to a medical office that I called on during my work week, they were background noise in the symphony of my daily life.

  Jorge and Garrett were picked to check the locks on the adjacent buildings while I was going to begin to document the traffic I could see from the top floor windows. The meeting we went through seemed to help Janice as well. By the time our session was complete, she had regained enough of her faculties to join me on the top floor to provide a second set of eyes. Janice took the east side and I took the west. Open doors would allow us to see each other with a little effort so it made the task a bit easier for both of us.

  We finished off a cold meal of canned fruit and some protein bars. There were still plenty of pouches of dehydrated camping food that would have allowed us a hot meal, but no one had the inclination to retrieve the camping stove from the bathroom. At least for the moment, the stove had become a symbol of our stupidity. The stupidity that comes from complacency and led to the death of little Brie. It was a terrible lesson to learn, but I vowed that it wouldn’t be forgotten. Hence, the stove may as well have been radioactive as far as we were concerned; so we made do with stuffing cold calories into our mouths and drinking room-temperature water.

  After finishing our meal, Janice and I made our way up to the top floor, taking a pad of paper and pen with each of us to mark buildings of interest and traffic patterns, both foot and vehicular movement. Garrett and Jorge were going to wait a couple of hours while we surveyed the area, so they made their way down to the basement. They were to search all the lockers and boxes piled in the middle of the room for anything of value we would be able to use, then we would meet and finalize our search.

  An hour or so into our watch, Garrett came clomping up the stairs holding an old fashioned alarm clock.

  “Here,” he said. “We have another one downstairs. They are set to the same time.”

  I looked at the large black enameled plastic clock and saw that it was 10 a.m.

  “Is it 10:00 already?” I asked.

  “We have no idea, so we just set them for the same time. Jorge wants to go check out some other buildings at 12:00, so come on down to his girlfriend’s apartment at noon.”

  Well, I thought. I guess that’ll work.

  I remember Dr. Kramer telling me once that you should always be able to adjust to the situations you face. Just as importantly, he always stressed the need to be prepared for anything. He quoted me something from an old movie once about improvising. For the life of me, I couldn’t remember what movie it was from. But I still remember the quote! “Only he who is well prepared has any opportunity to improvise.” Well, we weren’t going to be unprepared anymore.

  I can’t remember what brought us to that conversation, but he was always a fount of strength for me. If something was off at work, or I had problems dealing with my parents (usually my mom), it wasn’t unusual to stop by his office at the end of the workday and bring some leftover goodies I hadn’t distributed that day. As long as I brought him a cup of Earl Grey tea, two creamers and a good dose of honey, I was welcome. At least, that’s what he used to jokingly tell me.

  I miss him. I hope he is alright. It’s only been a day and it feels like a year. Too much happening in a short amount of time. I could use his advice right now. Moreso than my own father, he has been a mentor and source of wisdom these past few years. Now, more than ever, I would give anything to know he is alright, and get his input on what to do.

  You’re daydreaming! I said to myself. Focus on the outside!

  The next two hours went by, and before I knew it, my alarm went off. I had set it to ten before noon, and the ringer was obnoxiously loud, its shrill bell shattering the dense silence of the building. I slammed my hand down on the lever, sending the poor plastic timekeeper clattering across the faux wood floor.

  “Jesus,” Janice hissed. “Could you be any louder?”

  What could I say? The only thing I could.

  “Sorry,” I sheepishly answered. “I didn’t think it would be that loud.”

  “Oh, Crap!” Janice whispered forcefully. “Quick, come here!”

  I walked rapidly out of my west-facing living room, across the hall and into Janice’s space, the mirror image of the apartment I had just left. She was staring out the window, peeking past the sheer drapes that covered the picture window.

  “Down there!” She said as she pointed out the glass to the road below.

  Two DHS. agents had stopped and were staring up at the building. Their rifles were slung over their shoulders and they were holding clip boards, writing on whatever paper was attached to the metal and plastic sheet.

  “Did they hear me?” I gasped.

  “I don’t know,” Janice replied. “I just noticed them. They must have been walking close to the building.”

  We continued to stare through the cotton and polyester curtain, hoping they would go away. It seemed like hours as the two men gazed up at the building, seeming to bore their sight through our flimsy drape.

  Neither of us dared move, until they began to circle around the building.

  “We need to warn Garrett!” Janice said in a panic. “They might be coming into the building!”

  “GO!” I said. “I’ll clean up the rooms and meet you down there!”

  Janice sprinted out and I could hear the stairway door slam open and slowly creek shut. I began a quick cleanup, making sure that at least, each room appeared normal when casually looking into the opened front doors.

  Then, I thought of Brie. Her body was wrapped in linen and lying on a bed on the third floor behind a now-closed door. I ran out of the room, checked that both of the spaces Janice and I had been observing from were put back the way they were when we entered them a few hours ago. I sprinted down the 4th floor hallway, following in Janice’s footsteps from just a short minute ago. I quickly but gently opened the stairway access door and quietly closed it behind me. I clicked on the flashlight Garrett had found in the basement and scurried down the steps to the 3rd floor. I stopped and listened for sounds from below, but heard nothing suspicious.

  Maybe we are overreacting? I thought.

  I made my way to the 2nd floor, gently opened the doorway, then proceeding quickly down the hallway, I checked each room for signs of being disturbed. I came to the apartment where Brie’s body was stored. I hesitated. It felt like I was desecrating the dead. I froze as I thought of the child’s lifeless corpse wrapped in the white cotton linen bedsheet from the apartment we had slept in, th
e apartment we had almost died in, if it hadn’t been for Jorge.

  Suddenly, I heard the sound of the stairwell door open, and the sound of two men talking loudly reverberated from below.

  OH MY GOD! I thought. They’re coming. They heard me! What have I done?

  I swung the apartment door open and verified that everything in the living room, the room that you could see, was in order. I propped it back open with the brown rubber door jamb that had been used when the building had been cleaned out originally. A quick scan to the right down the hall revealed that both bedroom doors were closed. One of those rooms must have been where Jorge put her body.

  I forced myself into the hallway bathroom and quickly moved the camping stove under the king-sized bed in the master bedroom. Fortunately, there was no corpse, so I slid the Coleman 2 stove and its attached tiny propane tank as far as my arms could reach, pushing it almost to the wall at the head of the bed. The bathtub was still lined with the towels we had used to cushion little Brie’s body from the cold, beige acrylic. I quickly folded the towels and placed them in a neat stack in the hallway linen closet. Scanning about the master bedroom, something felt off. Something was missing. That’s when I realized that the sheet from the king-sized bed was missing. Brie’s body must have been wrapped in it. The pillow cases and the formed bottom sheet were properly folded and placed, but the sheet must be around Brie’s body in the other bedroom.

  As I quickly walked into the hallway to check the guest bedroom, the unthinkable occurred. The stairwell doors began to open. They were here! I quietly crept past the closed guest bedroom door and stood in the living room.

  I was trapped. They were coming from both directions, each man taking a different staircase to keep me from escaping. I frantically began searching for a place to hide. All the closet doors were open and the cabinets were too small to hide in. I could hear the men making their way down the hall. It sounded like they were entering each apartment as their footsteps disappeared for a few moments, then returned to the hallway. Each step froze my heart as I stood in the living room, my feet refusing to move. I flashed back to Dr. Kramer’s office when the thugs broke in, their murderous rampage cut short by Garrett and the doctor’s heroic acts. I had frozen there as well!