The Last Bastion

by K. W. Callahan

  “Yes, thank you, Wendell,” Julia Justak said from her canoe. “You really saved our butts back there.”

  “Yeah, thanks,” Josh nodded gratefully. “I might be a wife short right now if it weren’t for your brave actions.”

  “Great job, Wendell!” Michael said from the back of the boat.

  “Yeah, Wendell. Awesome work!” Christine Franko joined in.

  “No kidding,” added Patrick. “Sounds like you really kicked ass back there! I call Wendell for my boating partner next time we switch! I want a badass like that beside me when we’re fighting biters.”

  Wendell bowed his head bashfully, not used to having such praise lavished upon him. He glanced over at Charla, riding in the front of her canoe beside his own boat. She had remained silent while the others were praising him, but she was giving him a look he hadn’t seen in a long time. It was the sort of look that she used to give him when they were dating and for a time after they were married. It was a combination of admiration, longing, and awe that made him feel as though he were the only person in the world she saw. It made him feel ten feet tall and unstoppable no matter what the situation or the odds stacked against him. It was a look he hadn’t seen for far too long and had almost forgotten about. But now that he had seen it again, it did something too him. It swelled him with pride, confidence, and made him feel as though he could do anything and overcome any obstacle. It did more to bolster his long-deflated ego than any amount of praise from Ms. Mary or the others could ever do. Although, he had to admit, being praised by the group, really for the first time since he’d joined them, did feel good.

  Wendell gritted his teeth, mashed his lips together to suppress a prideful smile, and dug his paddle into the water with gusto.

  It was only minutes later when those inside the fishing boat saw the kayak paddling back toward them.

  “Ugh,” Michael let out an exhausted groan.

  “Need to bear hard left!” Caroline shouted from the kayak as they approached. “A large channel rejoins the main river, but it splits off again to the right at a sort of dammed diversion channel of sorts.”

  While the current from the main channel tried to push their fleet right, the boats were able to stay far enough left that they were unaffected by the flow of the diversion channel. Soon they were passing a large power station on their right. Giant silos loomed on their left that appeared to have once been associated with some sort of grain operation.

  “Maybe we should stop in and see if they have some corn or wheat or something left,” Wendell half joked. He was feeling better now that the group seemed finally to have accepted him as one of their own.

  “Not a bad idea, really,” Michael contemplated. “I’m just worried about what we might encounter there. If there was indeed grain left, either the rats have found it by now or someone else has. And if people have found it, that means one of several things, they’ve either consumed it, moved it, or are guarding it.”

  “You’re probably right,” Wendell agreed. “And with the way this river is moving, we’d have quite a walk to get back there by the time we got these boats over to the bank and docked.”

  Soon, the group was passing another casino set alongside the bank as the river continued to widen, spanning over 1000 feet in most spots now.

  After that, the signs of the city began rapidly to fade and the group was left feeling very small on a suddenly very large river.

  Then, it was on past a string of large barges next to what looked like a massive oil refinery. Some of the barges were still affixed to their moorings. Some were listing heavily and half submerged. Others had broken free and had drifted downriver, becoming lodged on the riverbank. At one point, the tiny regatta had to steer around the jutting bow of a bobbing barge that had partially sunk almost directly in the center of the river.

  But by the end of a very long day, the Des Plaines had met with the Kankakee and had become the Illinois River.

  CHAPTER 16

  Marta flung her right arm out wide beside her, hurling her net far out into the river. Her adeptness with the homemade fishing device had grown in leaps and bounds over the past week. And her efforts had been handsomely rewarded with a plethora of caught fish.

  The hardest part of fishing now for Marta was getting better at cleaning the fish she was catching. And as with her casting, she was honing her skill in this area with each passing day. But now the problem was what to do with the fish to make it appetizing as a regular, almost constant meal option.

  Louise was quickly tiring of eating Marta’s daily catches. And as with most five-year-olds, she made her displeasure vociferously known whenever she saw Marta come up the bank with a new haul. However, she was also intensely curious about the flopping fish that Marta would drop into a water-filled bucket on shore. Louise would often come over to inspect them, talk to them, and take little pokes at them, squealing in frightened delight when they flipped, flopped, and splashed inside the bucket.

  But with the entire supply of food they’d brought with them from town nearly exhausted, Marta was finding little that she could pair the fish with to make it more appetizing for Louise. And Marta readily admitted that she wasn’t the world’s best cook to begin with. Before the outbreak, most of her meals had been eaten at Dan’s bar. But she was proud of her recent advances in cooking and culinary creations no matter what Louise’s reactions of distaste.

  Her most recent menu option however had for once elicited a positive reaction from her little bunkmate. One day during a brief rain shower that had forced both of them inside for a somewhat tedious hour, the two had taken to scouring the roadhouse again. They took their time inspecting spots they hadn’t searched before, which, by this point, were few and far between. However, at a podium-style host station at the front of the roadhouse’s restaurant section, Marta found a red plastic basket, oval in shape, filled with an assortment of mints, salted crackers, and individually wrapped toothpicks.

  Louise was thrilled to see the red-and-white mints. Marta explained, however, that they were to be treats only and not to be consumed all at once, which quickly tempered the child’s excitement. Still, she was content with the single mint that Marta gave her to celebrate the find.

  Upon testing the crackers that came in sealed packages of two a piece, Marta found that they were stale. Undeterred by the revelation, she discovered a use for them in the next several days’ meals. Marta and Louise smashed up the cracker packets until they were ground into tiny crumbs. Then Marta took the pieces of the large catfish she’d caught and filleted earlier, rolled them in the cracker crumbs mixed with salt and pepper, and put them in a pan of oil that she had salvaged from the bottom of the kitchen’s deep fryer.

  The result was a batch of delicious fish sticks that satisfied not only Marta but Louise as well.

  Marta had also been working on perfecting a fish stew, that due to lack of ingredients was coming out more as a fish soup. She added bits of fish, a can of corn, the last of a can of carrots they’d brought along, salt, pepper, and some wild onions she’d discovered growing on the riverbank while fishing several days prior. For thickener, Marta added some of the cracker crumbs, but there weren’t enough cracker packets to make much of a difference and the stew remained rather soupy. Still, it was warm, and with the salt and pepper, it had plenty of taste. But even Marta had to admit there just wasn’t much substance to it.

  They needed more food, if nothing else but to help extend their steady supply of fish. They could live mainly off the fish, but neither of them wanted to. But Marta wasn’t sure where or how to find more supplies. If the invaders of their town were out scavenging, they’d likely discovered anything of use that the Riverport residents had missed in previous searches, which Marta guessed wasn’t much.

  The former residents of Riverport had picked the surrounding countryside clean in the weeks following the Carchar outbreak. And most of the survivors who lived outside of town had packed up their remaining supplies and come to reside i
n ‘fortress Riverport’ once they’d learned that’s where the majority of the town’s residents were holding out.

  Marta knew there were spots along the river known for their berries, but those berries usually didn’t arrive until summer. Grapes and fruit trees were abundant in the area, but again, not typically until much later in the season. She was running out of ideas and needed to come up with something quick.

  * * *

  For dinner that night, Marta served several freshly fried fish sticks paired with a small cup of fish soup for Louise. She took a full bowl of soup for herself.

  After a minute of eating, Marta asked, “So how is your dinner?”

  “Fish sticks are good. Soup is, meh,” Louise held her flattened hand out in front of her, palm down, and wobbled it back and forth to illustrate her “so-so” attitude regarding the food.

  It was cute. Even in just the short time the two had spent together, it seemed as though Louise was picking up some of Marta’s mannerisms. And Marta even thought she detected a hint of her Polish accent intermingling itself into the little one’s speech. She had to admit, she liked it. It made her feel closer to the child, almost as if Louise was her own.

  “Mint for dessert?” Marta asked.

  “Mmm hmm,” Louise nodded eagerly, making big eyes. “But just one,” she added knowingly.

  “And only if you eat all your soup,” Marta added, making big eyes of her own.

  “Aww,” Louise’s shoulders slumped in over-exaggerated frustration.

  “Come now, is good for you,” Marta reached a hand across the small table for two at which they sat in the roadhouse’s kitchen. She pushed the steaming cup of soup over closer to Louise.

  “It’s too hot,” Louise nodded at the cup. “I’ll wait for it to cool.”

  “Just don’t fill up on fish sticks,” Marta warned, her words reminding her of her own mother admonishing her to eat as a child back in Poland.

  It all felt so strange to Marta. Most people had time to ease into parenthood. They had a pregnancy, the birth of the child, and the years ahead to become accustomed to playing the part of parent. But Marta had been unexpectedly thrust into the role and in probably the worst situation possible. Yet she felt somehow at home as a mother, at least to Louise. Maybe with another child it wouldn’t have worked as well, but with Louise, it just felt right. She seemed to make parenting not just rewarding but fun, even at the worst of times.

  But the role added an immense weight of responsibility, something Marta had yet to learn how to handle. She wondered if she ever would. It seemed that every time she came up with a way to contend with one problem or security concern related to Louise, she was immediately faced with another. And no matter what solution or plan she came up with to handle such issues, it never seemed to be good enough. Marta wondered if it was normal to feel this way as a parent or if she was just being overly cautious. She didn’t want to coddle Louise. But in her situation, she was left to wonder since there were no other parents to whom she could raise her concerns or questions.

  One thing, however, was becoming increasingly evident. They couldn’t stay in the roadhouse much longer unless they wanted to subsist solely off fish for the next few months. And even the most novice parent had to realize that this would not be a good move nutritionally. There was a reason why children were taught about the five basic food groups early in life. And consuming but one of them was not going to cut it for very long.

  CHAPTER 17

  After over a week of being on the river, and having passed through Peoria several days prior, the Blender regatta arrived at a sizeable island.

  Their progress had been slowed substantially before reaching Peoria as they came to a series of lakes into which the river flowed. Throughout this roughly 30-mile stretch, the current decreased noticeably, and the group was forced to paddle much more than they had been while traversing the narrower river channel. It took them over two days to complete this portion of their journey, and it left them exhausted and famished, having burned far more calories than their restrictive diets provided.

  After Peoria, which they passed without incident, the river narrowed again. Although the river continued to range between 600 and 1,000-feet-wide at most points, the current picked back up, and the Blenders were presented with a welcome break during which they could focus more on floating and steering than on paddling. The current carried them along swiftly, yet soothingly once through the city, and the landscape returned mostly to woods and farmland.

  Michael estimated that they still had a good 150 miles before they reached St. Louis, although he had no idea for sure since the winding nature of the river could affect his estimate substantially. He put their arrival at the outskirts of St. Louis at anywhere from six to ten days. But that estimate depended on any number of factors including the pace of the river’s current, the exact distance, and river obstacles such as the dam they were forced to circumvent back in Joliet.

  And as the group continued their travels, they eased into a sort of daily routine. They’d wake at dawn, climbing from inside the tent or beneath the canoes. Both sleeping arrangements were wearing more than a little thin for pretty much everyone but the kids. People would break off for their morning bathroom activities. Then, several of the group would cook breakfast – usually a pot of grits or creamed wheat – while the rest of the group broke down camp and began to reload supplies into the boats.

  After breakfast the Blenders would load themselves into their respective boats. The one bullet-damaged canoe had been patched with some cloth and the remnants of a tube of caulk that Patrick had found washed up on one of the islands they’d stopped at. They’d typically spend about eight hours on the river, stopping at an island for lunch and making occasional stops on other islands for bathroom breaks or to scavenge potentially useful items that might have washed ashore. They would continue in this manner until about two hours before sunset, at which point they’d begin looking for an island on which to make camp. While this sometimes made for an earlier than planned stopping point in their trek, it also gave them the opportunity to find an island that worked well for their purposes. Then they would have time to explore the island to ensure that no one else was there, unload the boats, set up camp, and prepare dinner.

  It had only taken one misstep early in their river adventure to realize that selecting the proper island stopping point for their camp was crucial to their safety and wellbeing. The group had stopped at a sandy shoal, the only island they’d come across as late afternoon began to slip into evening. It was not an ideal location.

  The island, if one could even call it such, was small, maybe 70 feet long by 40 feet across, sat only about 50 feet from the river’s eastern bank, and had very little foliage. The spot was mostly sand and only rose to a height of about three feet above the river’s waters at its highest point. But with daylight fading, the group decided not to chance continuing downriver only to find themselves forced to set up camp on shore, in the dark, and with the prospect of having to contend with biters.

  They had just gotten their tent erected and dinner prepared when they’d heard a gunshot from the distant bank. A few seconds later, another shot sounded, striking the island with a puff of sand not more than ten feet from where Ms. Mary was cooking.

  The Blenders could tell little about where the gunfire was coming from other than that it was somewhere on the far bank. Michael and Josh had quickly led the others in a crouched run to the opposite side of the island. There, they lay behind the slight rise in the center of the island until darkness fell. And even though no more shots were fired after that, the group felt so exposed that they ended up sleeping on the cold sandy ground until early morning with little more than a few blankets that Michael fetched from inside the tent once it was dark. About an hour before sunrise the next morning, they hurriedly disassembled the tent and collected their supplies, tossing everything haphazardly inside the boats. Then they made a stealthy escape from the island, only stopping at a large
r, tree-covered island once the sun was up to eat, take naps, and reorganize the boats.

  Since that day, whenever they chose an island to stop at, even if it was just for lunch, they made sure that it offered enough tree cover that they weren’t exposed to potential gunfire from the shore.

  Eventually, the group stopped at a large island one evening. A torrential rain that started late that night and lasted well into the next morning had forced them to remain on the island longer than planned. During the tedium that ensued, as the group sat sheltering inside the tent, it came to light that most of them had grown sick of being on the river. They wanted a break from the monotony of river travel. Therefore, a vote was taken and the group decided to remain on the island with the intention of not only resting sore muscles but exploring the possibility of utilizing the island as a potential longer-term living location.

  Ms. Mary was of the opinion that the island offered plenty of room for living, enough trees not only for concealment but for building habitable structures, and a steady food supply in the way of ample fishing. She felt it might even be worth considering the spot as a permanent living location even over continuing their trek to St. Louis.

  “We don’t know what’s waiting for us in St. Louis, but we know what we’re getting with a spot like this,” she had offered in the form of advice.

  They had set up their camp toward the north end of the island, the size of which they estimated at about a quarter mile long by several hundred feet wide. The entire island was skirted by a sandy beach. Around most of its outer perimeter, this sandy portion was at most several feet wide. But at both the island’s northern and southern ends, the beach was wider. It stretched nearly 15 feet at the northern tip of the island and was closer to 10 feet before the sand met with the tree line at the southern shore.