by Noah Mann
I’d realized that seeking the same medication in a pharmacy would be pointless. They would have been cleaned out weeks ago, looted to the rafters. Just as the larger and more well-stocked stores in Whitefish certainly were. For the moment, though, traveling there was out of the question. This I’d decided after witnessing the firefight and its aftermath between my refuge and Whitefish. North to Eureka was the only choice I had, the only choice I’d given myself, and it was where, finally, I struck pay dirt.
Bright yellow bottles of the aquatic antibiotic lay in a heap beneath a collection of aquarium decorations. I pushed the packages of faux treasure chests and miniature deep sea divers clear and scooped every bottle I could find into the cargo pockets of my pants, seven in all, more than enough, I hoped, for any potential injury requiring a course of antibiotics to treat. Finished, I came around the toppled shelves at the back of the store and turned toward the front door.
That’s when I saw the boy.
He stood just outside the shattered front door, on the sidewalk, staring in at me, remarkably bright eyes over thin cheeks. A quick appraisal of his stature set his age at about nine, likely no older. In his hand a candy bar of some sort was held in a death grip, upper portion of its wrapper peeled back, exposing the sweet, dark candy within. A smear of the treat darkened the skin around his lips. For a few seconds we just looked at each other. There was no fear in his eyes, just surprise.
“Hello,” I said.
“Hello yourself,” a woman behind me said, at the same instant I felt the round chill of a rifle barrel touch the base of my skull.
I didn’t dare turn. Without prompting I eased my hands from the AR slung across my chest.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” I said, and the rifle barrel jabbed hard against my skull, pushing my head forward.
“I will damn sure hurt you before you get the chance to do anything to us.”
She sounded something beyond desperate. Determined. Maybe committed. To what, I wasn’t certain. The boy, maybe.
“Your son?” I asked.
“Don’t concern yourself with us,” the woman said. “Do you have any food?”
“A little. In my right cargo pocket. Just some energy bars.”
I sensed the woman crouching behind, rifle still in contact with the back of my head, from a lower angle now. She reached to the pocket just above my right knee and probed it. Her hand came out with just what I’d described and she stood again in my blind spot. My gaze angled toward the boy once more. He had the chocolate bar to his mouth and was chewing slowly on a piece he’d just bitten off. The energy bars sailed past me and landed near the boy’s feet.
“Take those,” the woman instructed. “Put them in your pockets.”
“Do you have any more?” the woman pressed. “Anywhere?”
“I can get you some,” I told her, and again the rifle barrel jabbed against the bony flesh at the back of my head.
“Where is it?!”
This was beyond committed, I realized.
“WHERE IS THE FOOD?!!!”
I felt the weapon shudder in her grip. My deepest hope right then was that her finger was off the trigger.
“You’re not the only one afraid,” I said. She quieted. Fast breaths filled the space between us. “I’m afraid, too.”
“I’m not...”
She wasn’t professing any lack of fear. No, what she’d said was preface to more. To some statement relevant to the situation, be it the standoff between us, or the larger apocalypse that had befallen the world. Whatever it was, I decided to chance a move. To interject some understanding into the softening of her demeanor. Slowly, I began to turn, just my head at first, then the whole of my body. The rifle barrel came away from my skull and I felt the woman backing away before my gaze finally settled on her.
“You’re not what?”
It was a simple question I proposed. Just something to elicit some response as I appraised who I faced. She was in her early thirties and pretty, even with the folds of skin that had appeared on her face where muscle and fat had once given contour to her appearance. There was a clear resemblance between her and the boy, in the eyes, more their shape than any similar coloring. He had thinned, but nowhere as much as the woman had. Clearly she’d been diverting sustenance to him, to her own detriment.
This was a mother’s love I was witnessing.
“You’re not what?” I repeated calmly.
For a moment she did as I had, took in the sight of me, then nodded toward the front of the store where her son stood, lever action 30-30 in her hands shifting in concert with the gesture.
“I’m not letting us turn into what’s out there.”
Out there. It took little imagination to understand what she was referring to. Or who.
Cannibals.
“I need food,” she said, then quickly added, “For him.”
She spoke as though seeking food for herself was selfish.
A mother’s love...
“Are you from Eureka?” I asked.
She shook her head quickly.
“Canada?”
Another head shake, less forceful this time.
“Do you want to tell me where you’re fr—”
“Where is the food?” she asked again, some low menace in her voice now. Her finger flexed on the old lever action’s trigger.
“Where are you from?” I pressed calmly.
Still she didn’t answer.
“Whitefish,” the answer came, from behind, the boy speaking. I glanced back to him. He took another bite of chocolate and slowly chewed it as he eyed me.
“There’s no food there,” the woman said. “We can’t go back there.”
I nodded, thinking. The reality was that I still had to, somehow, get this woman to a point of calm that we could converse without firearms being involved. Reiterating an offer I’d made a moment before might open the door to that possibility.
“I do have food,” I said. “I can bring you some.”
She half smiled, but didn’t lower the rifle an inch.
“Yeah, you head off and leave us and we never see you again.”
“Yeah,” I said, concurring with what she was surmising. “I could do that. But what good does keeping me here do if you’re not going to end up like the cannibals?”
What I’d just told her sank in, slowly, and finally her weapon did come down, its muzzle pointed at the ravaged floor.
“What’s your name?” I asked.
“I’m Sarah Elway.”
“I’m Jeff,” the boy said, slipping past to join his mother, who pulled him into a tired, one-handed hug against her hip.
I slid the AR slung across my chest under my left arm so that it hung behind me now. Sarah placed her lever action atop a dirty counter and groped at the edge for support. She was weak. Far weaker than I’d suspected. Her knees buckled and both her son and I grabbed her, setting gently down, back against an empty display stand.
“Give me one of those bars,” I told Jeff, and he reached into his pocket.
“No!” Sarah said sharply. “Those are for him.”
I took the energy bar from the boy and peeled the wrapper back, then twisted a bit from one end and held it out to Sarah.
“Eat this.”
She shook her head at my direction.
“Look, if you want him to eat, you’re going to need to eat.” I eased the piece of food closer to her. “He needs you.”
That seemed to register. Not that she’d never thought or accepted that, but to hear another lay it out, with the circumstances plain as day, was enough that she reached up and took what I was offering and slipped it into her mouth. She chewed, her eyes closing, as if some silent prayer had gripped her. Tears trickled from her eyes as they opened again and looked to me.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“For what? Putting a gun to my head? I’ve had worse happen on dates.”
She smiled at my attempt at humor, then took the rest of the bar f
rom me and bit off another piece. As she held it I saw the simple diamond ring on the third finger of her left hand.
“Where is your husband?”
I knew it was a risk to ask. Especially in front of her son. Had some horror befallen him? Was that the reason for his absence from their immediate lives?
“He’s in the Navy,” Sarah answered, a distant hope to the way she said it. Some true likelihood that, whatever they were faced with, he was alive.
“We’re going to meet him,” Jeff said. “In Washington.”
Sarah smiled at her son and nodded, the gesture filled with pained hope. But hope nonetheless.
“Bremerton,” she said. “He’s on a submarine. We haven’t heard from him since before...”
“Because they can’t always send messages,” Jeff added quickly, wanting to counter any negativity implied by his mother. “They have to stay hidden underwater.”
“That’s true,” I told the boy. “I’ve heard that.” I looked back to Sarah. “Seems to me a pretty safe place to be is on a sub under the ocean right now.”
She accepted that assurance with a nod and a smile and kept eating, her son slipping even closer to his mother, curling up against her on the dirty floor. They were a pair. A team. Alone in what had become a built-up wilderness.
Alone...
The idea came to me naturally. I’d made the same offer to Marco. Sarah Elway and her boy, Jeff, needed help. Needed a chance to get through this nightmare. I was well stocked. If nothing else I could give them a chance to get healthy and ready for any trek to the Pacific Northwest.
“Listen, I have food, and plenty of room. It’s safe. You can both come rest up at my place. It’s not that far south of here.”
Sarah had seemed to listen with openness, until I mentioned the direction of my refuge. She shook her emphatically after that.
“No. We’re not going south. We have to head north, and then west.”
“You can still do that,” I assured her. “Just after you—”
“No,” she said, with quiet force. “There’s not a chance in hell we’re moving one inch to the south.”
Jeff nodded agreement with his mother. Total agreement.
“That’s where the Major is.”
I looked between mother and son, puzzled.
“Who?”
“The Major,” Jeff repeated, then he clammed up, seeming to want to visit the subject no more. He tucked his head in against his mother’s shoulder.
“You’re from south of here and you haven’t had any run-in with him?”
I shook my head at Sarah’s question.
“I’m north of Whitefish.”
“Well, my advice is, don’t go south.”
Her words were more warning than suggestion. I wondered if the firefight I’d watched between my refuge and Whitefish had any relation to what might be motivating her fear of the area.
“Who is this Major?”
“That’s what he calls himself,” Sarah explained. “And what his people call him. Major James Layton.”
“Is he in uniform?”
She shook her head at my question.
“He came into town three weeks after everything went to hell.”
“After the Red Signal?” I asked, the timing worrisome. That would have been about the time Marco was heading south from my refuge with his family.
“Yeah,” she confirmed, finishing the last of the energy bar, a bitter exasperation rising. “That damn thing blocked everything. I couldn’t get in touch with Charlie’s—that’s my husband—with his base in Bremerton. I just wanted to see if they knew anything. No one could get through to anyone, anywhere, I think.”
“The police were able to get some radio traffic through,” I told her. “So some allowance for official communication was made.”
“Official,” she said, nearly spitting a laugh after the word. “The ‘official’ people in Whitefish didn’t seem to stick around to do much communicating. After the third day, I didn’t see a cop or firefighter anywhere in town. But I tried not to go out too much after that.”
“Dangerous?”
“A lot of shooting. Fires. By the end of the first week it was chaos. People were killing each other for whatever food they had in their cupboards. All the stores had been cleaned out in the first few days. I was lucky that my husband made a big deal about being prepared. He grew up in the Midwest with a lot of ice storms. No power, no open stores.”
“So you had food,” I said.
“For a while. Until I traded it away.”
“For what?” I asked, unsure what would be worth more than the thing keeping them alive.
“Freedom,” she answered. That, too, was a precious commodity, often taken for granted. “When the Major arrived with his people, he started gathering all the supplies to keep under guard. He was some kind of authority figure.”
“With sufficient weaponry, I imagine.”
She nodded.
“No one was in control,” she went on. “People weren’t even able to control themselves. The few who’d survived, who’d hung on, they gave in. By that time they wanted someone to take charge.”
“You didn’t,” I said.
“My parents escaped from East Germany when there still was an East Germany,” she explained. “I was born here, in America, but they made sure I knew what kind of system they’d lived under. One thing they drilled into me was that you never, ever, allow yourself to live under someone else’s control. No matter what sort of order or utopia they promise.”
“Freedom isn’t free,” I said, and she nodded.
“So I bribed my way out with what was left of our food.” She gave a small, light chuckle. “You don’t have to be a big country like East Germany to have graft and bribery be the way things get done.”
“You made your way up here after that?”
“Yeah. We couldn’t head down toward Kalispell. The Major was telling people that he was securing that as well.”
“He didn’t give any indication where he was from? Anything?”
“No. Just rolled into town with thirty, maybe forty people, all armed to the teeth, and took over.” Sarah quieted, thinking back. “Not everyone gave in. Not everyone had the ability to bribe their way out.”
Some memory was rising. A terrible memory, I could tell.
“That bad?”
She didn’t nod this time. Didn’t respond at all for a moment.
“He told people if they tried to leave, they’d die. My friend, Ellen, she told the Major’s men that she had a cabin she wanted to go to, but they wouldn’t let her leave town. They said if she tried, she’d be killed.”
She was spinning a harsh tale. So harsh I hoped it was at least partly embellished.
“I won’t go south again,” she said. “You shouldn’t either. Not that far. Stay away from Whitefish.”
Some trauma had clearly worked its way deep into her psyche. And that was standing in the way of getting her, and her son, the help they needed.
“You can’t scrounge your way north and then west,” I told her. “Then south again. Washington is a long way.”
“We’ll make it.”
I laid a hard stare on her and, making sure her son wasn’t looking, I shook my head—no you won’t.
“I just need to find enough food,” she said. “Then we can get one of the abandoned cars running and...”
There was a fairytale quality to how she was expressing her plans, and it quickly caught up with her. Reality set in and she stared at me, a skim of tears glinting over her gaze. She was afraid.
Damn...
“Okay, you won’t come with me,” I agreed. “But will you wait here?”
“Why?”
“Because I can be back here with food for you tonight.”
She puzzled visibly at my plan. At my offer. For an instant as I conceived it, I did as well. To get home and back in the time I was promising I’d have to hustle my ass on foot, then risk putting my truck o
n the road to get supplies back here. Then I’d return home, in a truck growling along the silent highway. Anyone within earshot would hear it, and, as I’d just learned, even apparently decent people tended now to respond with, at the minimum, the threat of force.
We were long past the time of handshakes as initial greetings.
“You’d do that?” Sarah asked, truly asked, as if expecting I would up and reveal that it was just some sick joke I was proposing.
“I will.”
She glanced down to her son, nuzzled against her, his eyes closed. He was sleeping, the state of rest stealing him fast from the waking world, exhaustion trumping their interaction with a stranger.
“Thank you,” Sarah said, managing a smile as a single tear spilled from each eye.
I rose from my crouch and looked behind, to the door that was not that anymore. Wind pushed dust down the street outside. The day was more than half done, sun already taking aim at the western horizon. In a few hours it would be setting. My trip back here would be in the dark.
Nineteen
I sensed something was wrong a hundred yards from my refuge as I was about to cross Weiland Road. Night was rolling over the hills, the glow ahead of me to the west dimming by the minute. But not enough that I couldn’t see the collection of empty boxes scattered along the road, cardboard brown, flaps ripped, as if opened with haste. Familiar boxes. Ones that had, until recently, been packed with MREs.
Checking both directions for any sign of life, I jogged to the center of the road and crouched near one of the boxes. On one flap I could plainly see markings that were more than familiar. These marking were mine, done with my own hand while organizing my cache of food soon after settling in. I’d dated and labeled each case. And here one, minus its precious contents, lay in the middle of the road.
I looked across to the vague notch in the forest that was all that remained of the driveway I’d obliterated. Limbs snapped from the dying pines lay haphazardly across the onetime path, several splintered further. As if stepped on.