Remnants: A Record of Our Survival

by Daniel Powell

  Cannibalism? Yeah, right…

  But like I said before, things moved quickly after what happened in Canada. The networks—you have to give ‘em credit—tried to cover it right up until the end. I couldn’t find it, but there was this terrible video of an on-air attack on the replacement hosts on the Today Show. The blighted just streamed into the studio and ripped the place apart, right while they were doing the weather in between the latest updates on the blight.

  After that, most newscasters worked from home.

  The markets tumbled. The banks failed. The infrastructure crumbled—I mean, I haven’t heard an airplane in at least two months.

  Dad calls it provincialism. People banded together, leaving the cities. The blighted took advantage of the empty cities and fire, that age-old tool of conquest, was used to ferret out the stragglers. Our old neighborhood is gone (Dad and Billy have gone back twice; Mom and me went back the first time with them, but it had been burned to the ground when the guys made their second trip), and so are most of the others. Multnomah Village, Sellwood, Mt. Tabor, most of the West Hills—heck, even little ol’ Corbett is nothing more than a pile of ash and steel and sooty, busted-up rebar.

  The naturalists took down the zoo. Someone made a film of a pack of elephants crunching through the remains of the old Zupan’s down on Macadam. I can’t imagine what happened to the big cats.

  The four of us had taken to the basement of our house. Dad boarded up the windows and doors—from the inside. I have to give him credit. He hates guns, but he went to Wal-Mart and purchased the shotgun really early on in this whole mess. Billy’s revolver we found in a house in Sandy, but the shotgun was Dad thinking this through from the very start.

  Anyway, there used to be this show on television about getting ready for disasters. We never watched it, but there was this thing they used to talk about that we came to value when everything hit the fan here in America.

  The people on the show liked to talk about bug-out bags—basically, they were these backpacks filled with survival stuff. When the first cannibalism clusters showed up in Minneapolis, Grand Forks, Kalispell, and Spokane, we got our things together pretty quickly.

  Six weeks later, the schools were shuttered. Six weeks after that, the fires started. We were asleep in the basement when the smoke detectors upstairs went off. We went out the back, through a corner window that was kind of tucked away, but the blighted were already out there waiting for us.

  Dad had to use the gun. He actually used it a few times and we made it out of there, all four of us, even though we could tell that some of our neighbors hadn’t been so lucky. Billy once told me that he saw Janie Kittredge just lying there in the street that night. Someone had hurt her really bad, and Mr. and Mrs. Kittredge were on their knees, just crying over their little girl, holding her there in the street for an instant before the blighted were upon them.

  Billy said he saw it, and I believe him. When the blighted get their dander up, they can become positively savage.

  Janie was in my class at OES, by the way. We used to sleep at each other’s house all the time.

  So we spent that first terrible night in an abandoned houseboat down on the south waterfront. Dad pulled the tether and we eventually beached on a little island a few miles downstream. We stayed inside for three full days, just watching the news—watching Portland fall apart.

  Then, when night fell on the fourth day, we started for the mountain. We traveled by night, covering as much ground as we could. There were others like us—their flashlights telling the story—but we avoided them. Too dangerous. It was better just to circle the wagons, Dad said.

  He had done a lot of work out in East County throughout the years, and had always talked about buying a cabin on the mountain. We walked for days before melting into the Mt. Hood National Forest.

  We walked another ten days, pushing further into the wilderness, crammed into that little survival tent at night, before we found the cabin.

  The road is just barely there. We’re talking two microscopic dirt tracks. There are saplings growing right in the middle. It’s not really navigable for anyone except for maybe those hummers.

  The owners had left the place alone for all of those years. There are two rooms and one old stone well filled with cold, sweet water. There’s an outhouse and a little shed filled with hand tools.

  It’s home.

  So there you have it. There’s the how. You probably want to know the why, but that way lies madness, I think.

  Why did this happen? How could that same God that I pray to every night when I pray for Mom to come back to us let these terrible things happen?

  Gosh, it beats me. It really, seriously does.

  But what I do know for sure is that it did happen. Heck, it’s still happening. And that’s all. I don’t think I need to know much else, to be honest.

  There’s this old movie I used to love. It’s called Cloverfield. It’s about this crazy dinosaur that attacks New York. I remember this one time, Janie Kittredge slept over and we watched it. When the movie was finished, Janie said it was stupid and I asked her why she thought that.

  She told me that it just didn’t make any sense. “Why would that even happen?” she said. “Why on Earth would that creature even exist?”

  I remember telling her then that the why didn’t matter—that the why wasn’t the point. What did matter was that it very certainly was happening, and the point was first acknowledging that, and then doing whatever it took to survive. Janie wasn’t buying it, but I remember thinking, even way back then, that the why didn’t matter.

  The how did. How does one react to such trying circumstances? And how did we get here in the first place?

  And so there you have it. That’s the how.

  For whatever it’s worth…

  Chapter Four: A Welcome Surprise

  Dad just completely blew our minds this afternoon.

  One of the hardest adjustments we’ve had to make through of all this is our shifting concept of time. Billy and I used to have structure in our lives. Each day was basically a series of carefully plotted points on a timeline—our lives neatly mapped out from soccer practice to soccer practice, from band rehearsal to band rehearsal.

  Now? Well, now we have what feels like an eternity of time in every day.

  But that doesn’t mean we’ve lost our structure. We harvest edibles every single day. Mushrooms, ferns, berries. Dad keeps us busy with lessons that he plans for us each week. We study history and science, and he gets a real kick out of coming up with new ways to teach us geometry. I write about what’s happening here in this journal, and I know that he looks over it when he finds the time (love you, Dad—stop lurking!).

  And we’re always on the lookout for food, fuel, and ammunition. That never changes. It’s always there, in the back of our minds…

  And so the time just kind of spins out there—our days governed by the sun and the moon and the stars, and not the watches on our wrists.

  Only, it turns out that Dad’s still been keeping track.

  Today, he sent me and Billy out on the prowl. That’s what he calls it—“the prowl.” It’s basically our little scavenger trips into the woods for food. We brought back the usual amount, taking only what we needed for the next few days, always mindful that we would need more soon.

  And we found something really special, but more on that later.

  We’ve grown really lean, Billy and me. We’re kind of bordering on skin and bones, but not in a bad way. We’re stronger now than we’ve ever been—our muscles stretching long, our skin tight on our frames. Our bodies are waaay more efficient, you see, and we can go pretty deep into the woods when we’re out on the prowl. Today, we hiked from about two hours past dawn until well into the afternoon. I think we probably covered at least twenty miles, all told. That’s just a guess, but we went all the way to the ninth waterfall. A few more miles and I think we might have caught a glimpse of the old lodge at Multnomah Falls.

&nbs
p; So I guess what I’m getting at is that Dad had a lot of time to get things ready.

  I should also mention here that ammunition is a really big deal for us. When we high-tailed it out of Portland, Dad had a single box of ammo. Since then, we’ve found the equivalent of four more boxes of working shells for the shotgun. Billy has fourteen bullets for the revolver, all of them dry, but it’s the shotgun that means the most to us.

  The shotgun means food. It means protein, if Dad doesn’t miss.

  Remember when I mentioned those chickens that we traded for snakebite treatment? Well, Dad had built a little coop early on. We had seven birds—a rooster and six hens. We used the truck to take them from an abandoned hobby farm outside of Eagle Point. They were just about dead, and we nursed them back to health. Dad scavenged the chicken wire from an Ace Hardware in Sandy. He’d built what we thought was a sturdy little home for them, but it didn’t hold. We awoke one morning in early summer to four hens clucking around the yard, clearly agitated. There was a hole in the wire, an explosion of feathers, and that was it.

  Whatever had been at them had been efficient. We rebuilt the coop, but there were no more eggs. We ate two, traded the others off, and that was the end of our little farming experiment.

  So I don’t have to tell you that protein is at a premium around here.

  There are other ways, of course. We eat the fish that Dad and Billy catch in the Sandy River, but with all the rain, the river’s been out of shape for weeks. We haven’t had a fresh steelhead in a month, and any dried fish we put by in the summer is long gone.

  We come across the occasional can of protein—a can of chili here, some tuna there. It happens so rarely that we never bank on it. We can’t afford to. No, we have to make our own way, and the ammunition is our best bet in that regard.

  Dad has a few slugs, but mostly he has birdshot. He prefers the shot, I think, because he’s not the best shooter, and it’s not like he has the luxury of practice.

  So Billy and I went deep, and we did a really good job. We picked red clover and a big batch of fiddleheads. We grabbed some chanterelles and some oyster mushrooms. And then, miracle of miracles, we were near the end of our prowl when Billy found them!

  That they were still okay to eat should have tipped me off to the date, because I hadn’t seen huckleberries in about a month. These were a little on the far side of ripe, but gosh they were good all the same! They speckled a big clump of shrubs along the banks of this little cold, clear stream that we hadn’t ever followed before.

  We took as much as we could carry. There was no guarantee that we would find the spot again, and it’s been getting colder every night. I think we’ve been getting down into the thirties lately, and when we have our first major freeze, these little treasures will be lost to us until spring.

  Huckleberries are wonderful, by the way—sweet and juicy, with a pleasant tartness to them. Mom used to bake them in muffins, and what I wouldn’t give for one of those right now, with a hot cup of tea and a warm pat of soft butter!

  What I wouldn’t give to see Mom again…

  But anyway, Billy and me did a good job on our end, and we made the long hike back to the cabin filled with absolute pride. We’d take care of Dad tonight—make him a big mix of greens and some nice boiled mushrooms, with a side of huckleberries. That’s a feast, friends.

  And then we smelled it. Oh man, did we ever!

  I caught the first whiff about a half mile from the cabin. My stomach buckled. I started drooling (no joke!), and my heart kicked into overdrive. Billy just stopped dead in his tracks. He sniffed the air and a grin lit his face like I hadn’t seen in months.

  “Protein,” he said. There was a light in his eyes, and I caught a glimpse of the Billy I’d known when were kids—a glimpse of the boy that was so quick to hug his parents and who would spend hours patiently playing with his kid sister.

  Not the young man with a gun and fourteen bullets who believed his mother had become a cannibal.

  “Protein!” he shouted, and we were off. Running is usually a no-no, except in obvious survival situations. We try to conserve calories—try to balance the needs of our bodies with the energy it takes to keep them running.

  But there was no stopping us this afternoon. We tore through those woods, covering that last half mile in record time.

  Dad must have sensed us coming, because he was sitting out front when we came down the road and into the little clearing in which our cabin sat.

  He was smiling warmly, and it was Dad. I’m talking old Dad—happy Dad. Gosh, I won’t ever forget it for as long as I live. In that moment, it was Dad—all the way, just like he used to be.

  He opened his arms and we piled into him for the ultimate family hug.

  “What is that?” Billy said. “It smells like…criminy, it’s not chicken is it? Dad, is it…turkey? Is it!?”

  Dad laughed. “Bingo, Son,” he said. “I have a surprise for you two. Come on in. I’ve been planning this all out. C’mon, Allie.”

  I thought he was going to scoop me up into his arms, and I have to be honest—it was all I really wanted in that moment. The sky was gray and the air was cold, and Billy and me were dog tired, but I was so happy right then that I wanted him to pick me up just like he did before I got too big. Instead, he knelt and kissed my cheek and hugged me close, and his whiskers felt soft and warm against my face, and not at all scratchy.

  It had been a very good day, and then it just kept getting better.

  If we thought the smell was tantalizing outside the cabin, we were in no way prepared for what it was like on the inside. It was a sensory slap to the face, and my salivary glands went nuts.

  The rich, unmistakable aroma of roasting turkey hung on the warm air. Dad had set the table, and he walked over and lit a pair of candles.

  “So what’d you bring back?” he said, washing up in the water bucket at the sink. We didn’t get the juice back on until about forty minutes ago. I doubt there’s even any warm water yet at the cabin. “Let’s work on some side dishes, eh?”

  Billy and I scrubbed our hands and helped him clean the haul. We worked together, shoulder to shoulder, building our feast. We had spices—the cabin had been stocked with a few groceries in its meager pantry—and dad sautéed the mushrooms in a little bit of chicken fat we’d been holding back. We salted the greens and simmered them down in a little bit of stream water before adding the mushrooms and making a kind of dressing.

  Dad grinned as he opened the door of the woodstove. A bed of coals had been pushed to one side; on the other, a turkey wrapped in aluminum foil hissed and popped atop a roasting pan. There must have been a half inch of sizzling fat in there. My stomach howled, and Dad and Billy laughed at me.

  “Should be ready in a few minutes,” Dad said. “C’mere. Take a look at this.”

  With a dish towel, he lifted the top off an old cast-iron stewpot. Inside, cooking down in more chicken fat, were the turkey’s innards. Dad had made gravy. Honest-to-goodness gravy!

  “I used a few tablespoons of the flour,” he said. It had been the best find in the cabin’s pantry, and we were running really low. “I thought the situation called for it.”

  He wasn’t getting any arguments from us. I dunked a finger and tasted it, and I was suddenly right back home for an instant. It was Thanksgiving, that gravy!

  When the turkey was finished roasting, he let it rest for about thirty minutes before carving it into generous portions and ladling gravy over the whole mess. He placed a platter of meat in the center of the table, grabbed the dressing we’d made, and told us to sit down and close our eyes.

  I heard him making noise, heard the clinking of glass on glass, and when he told us to open our eyes, we each had a bottle of Yoo-hoo in front of our plates.

  “Dad!” I said. “How on earth did you keep all of this a secret?”

  As an answer, he pulled a pocket calendar from his sweater. There, circled in bright red magic marker, was the fourth Thursday in November
. “It was a secret worth keeping, don’t you think?” he said. We joined hands and bowed our heads.

  “Lord, we are so very thankful for our unity and our health,” Dad said. “We are thankful for a warm home, and for the pleasure of each other’s company, and for this roof over our head. Please see it clear to bring…” his voice caught, just for a moment, “…to bring our Marjorie home to us. We are thankful for our daily hope that she is alive and okay, and that she knows how much we love and miss her. In Your name we pray, amen.”

  We concluded our prayer, content merely to hold hands a moment longer in the candlelight. “Happy Thanksgiving, kids,” Dad said. He served us up and we toasted with the Yoo-hoos and dug in.

  And man…did we ever eat.

  Chapter Five: A Glimmer of Hope

  So I guess the biggest news is that we’re going to attempt to visit a man in the city—a doctor. Some claims have been made that we can’t help but investigate for ourselves. I wish I could post here more often, but the power has been so sporadic lately, and the nights are getting a lot colder. I don’t like making the hike up here as much when it’s this cold. There’s ice crusting on the edges of the creeks, and Billy and Dad and me have to really layer up when we head out on the prowl.

  It’s been four days since the euphoria of Thanksgiving, and Dad’s been out hunting every morning since. We had no idea, but it turns out he’s been scouting all sorts of waterfowl for a few weeks now. Our Dad, the mighty hunter! That would have been pretty hard to call a few years ago, I have to say. If we had more shells, I don’t think we’d want for protein much at all anymore. A lot of the larger birds have left with the weather change, but there are still gulls coming off of the Columbia and there are loads and loads of ducks, of course. It’s just a matter of picking out the birdshot, to hear him tell it.

  And he thinks he knows where there are more turkeys, which is a really comforting thought. But they’re wily creatures, those turkeys. He came up empty on a shot two days ago and I think he mourned for that spent shell—I really do.