First Mom had us block all the passageways but the main one between the theater and the office. This took the better part of a day and was harder than I thought it would be. Maybe it would have been easier back when we had enough to eat and weren’t so stiff with cold, but I think it still would have been difficult no matter what the circumstances; Mclean High school has a lot of hallways and a lot of furniture. We started with the heaviest pieces first and then worked our way down to the lighter items, like unused cots and chairs. First we pushed the bookshelves and teacher’s desks in front of the doors to the outside. Then we backed up the hallways with lab tables, then everything from the defunct computer lab, then all the cafeteria tables. We saved some of the cheaper bookshelves for the front doors. This allowed us to cover them but still look through the gaps in the boards to see outside if we needed to. Not that anyone wants to. KC was the last person to do so in the daylight, and she described what she saw as a “writhing mass of necrotic tissue.”
Ugh.
There’s still a lot of division among the survivors, but everyone seems to visibly relax at our cozy-sized living quarters. I don’t think anyone felt safe being scattered between dark hallways so they could guard some obscure exit. “There’s strength in numbers!” one of the drifters said happily when we finished off the passageway with a lattice of stacked chairs. I watch Andrew’s eyes to see what he thinks of all this, but he seemed just as happy as the others to stay in one area. Maybe it’s because he’ll be closer to the food and can grab it when he gets the chance. I’m surprised that no one protested at shrinking our personal space down to the lobby. In fact, I’m surprised I’m not upset at having to be this close to others. The truth is, we don’t have the energy to go far when we’re on such strict rations, not even Jesse.
Yeah, I think we’re mostly on the same page for now, though I’m sure Andrew will look for ways to leap off of it the moment he thinks of a way to be in charge. I don’t expect this uneasy peace to last long. How much hungrier and thirstier do we have to get before we start attacking each other? I’m starting to fear what’s inside this building more than I fear what’s outside. I’m glad my mom’s in control for now and that there’s people like Mr. Cromwell to help her out, ‘cause I’m sure that without them things would quickly go all Lord-Of-The-Flies on us.
We’ve started to conserve the power in the flashlights. This means we go to bed in the cots we’ve dragged into the office once the sun goes down and rise when shafts of light spike their way through the observation holes left in the bookshelf barricades. Those of us in the Dumb Luck Club take turns staying up because we can’t trust Andrew and his gang not to try something when we’re asleep. We listen for sound and movement from those inside, and we watch for any penetration from the outside.
Tonight it’s Doom and me on watch. Mom hasn’t been sleeping well these days so she’s up talking to this little old lady (what’s her name? Deborah? Donna? Denise? I can’t remember) who hangs around us like a silent groupie. She appears to be harmless with a touch of nuttiness. She’s not crazy in a scary way, but there must be something wrong with her because she’s downright cheerful in the face of certain death. I like to think of her as a good luck charm, or maybe as a mascot. She’s a slimmed-down version of Granny from Looney Tunes, seemingly frail and clueless, but always there to save the day when Tweety’s about to be swallowed by the bad ol’ puddy tat. I don’t know why I’m only noticing her now, but if I think back, she was always there in the background, avoiding attention. If I thought I’d ever be going back to high school I’d ask her for tips on how to do that.
Doom and I tune into their conversation as we try to block out the sounds of poking and prodding from the outside. “I’m not saying it’s not a good idea” Granny starts, “but I think you have another reason for blocking up all those hallways and living out of one small space.”
“Well, I like to keep tabs on everyone, and I want to be able to see my kids at all times…”
“And?”
“And I still get lost in these corridors! Honestly, I can’t find my way out of a paper bag without my GPS.”
“Oh, sweetheart,” Granny croons without the least hint of condescension, “I can’t believe you’re that bad.”
“Oh yeah?” my mother cracks. “Jesse’s first word was ‘recalculating…’!”
This sets Granny off in a fit of giggles. She pats my mother on the back and chuckles all the way over to Doom and me. She catches her breath once she reaches us at our front door post and asks, “Mind if I keep you company?”
“Uh, okay.” I’m not sure if this is a good thing or a bad thing, but before I know it, Doom has tactlessly blurted out “How can you help? I mean, how did you even manage to get this far? Did anyone else in your family make it? How did someone as old as you survive?”
I quickly follow Doom’s comments up with an apology. “I’m sorry about my friend, um…”
“Dorothy”
Whoops, I wasn’t even close. She does have an old lady name though.
“Dorothy, I’m sorry about my friend, Doom, I mean ‘John,’ here. When they home-schooled him they forgot to teach him social skills.”
“That’s okay, dear. I’m not sure social skills are going to get us very far right now.”
But Doom wants information and he doesn’t care if he’s being impolite. “Seriously, Debbie, how did someone as ancient and feeble as you make it this far?”
I sigh, get ready to issue another apology but am interrupted by the soft chime of Dorothy’s voice. “It’s Dorothy. Debbie’s a young person’s name. And I could say the same about you. You have the look of a scared underfed rabbit, young man, and if this were the Hunger Games, I wouldn’t be placing any bets on you.”
I laugh out loud in spite of myself. “Right back at you, Doom!” It feels good to laugh. I haven’t so much as smiled in days.
“Hmmmm,” continues Dorothy, “Doom’s a good fit for you. I like it better than John.”
“Call me John,” Doom sulks.
Dorothy smiles and decides to give him what he wanted in the first place. “I survived because, like you, John, I can be a bit paranoid. I came from a family that believed the world was going to end at any moment, and they were going to make sure we were ready for it. Of course, for my parents that day never came, so all their over-preparation and apocalyptic talk only served to alienate them from the community. And we lived in Idaho, which is saying something.”
“Hey, my family has a lot of friends in Idaho! They gave us lots of information on peak oil and government shutdowns and Tectonic Shift…”
“I bet they did, sweetie,” Dorothy says with a hint of sarcasm in her voice. “Anyway, by the time I was eighteen I had enough of all that. I didn’t like the isolation that went along with the suspicion and if the world was as bad as my parents said it was, I was going to see it for myself! I hitchhiked my way right out of that valley and started a life of adventure. I worked as a diplomatic courier for the State Department just to take advantage of international travel. I couldn’t get enough of it, that is, until the day I met Ralph. Ralph was an MSF doctor based on a ship just outside the Ivory Coast…”
A what? I have to ask, “What’s an MSF doctor?”
“Sorry about that, it stands for Medeins Sans Fontieres.”
Right, gotcha. I feel kind of stupid because one of my father’s friends worked for them, so I should have known that. Doom doesn’t though. “That doesn’t clear anything up! What language is that anyway? Is that Swahili or something?”
“It’s French,” I say, probably a little too condescendingly. I’m not used to being the one in the know. “It means Doctors Without Borders. It’s a humanitarian organization that gives emergency aid to people affected by war.”
“Oh, right.” The look on Doom’s face betrays the fact that he still doesn’t get it. He doesn’t want this bit of technical information to get in the way of a good story, so he’s happy to pretend he understand
s. “Sure, I remember now. Whatever. You were saying?”
Dorothy gives Doom another one of her warm smiles and carries on. “After a few months of dating Ralph I found what love meant to me—it meant that I could not bear a life apart from him. I no longer needed travel and adventure. I just needed Ralph. I left my job and settled down, well, so to speak. I had married too late in life to have children, so we spent our free time on travel as I showed Ralph all the places I’d been. It was a time we would call ‘The Salad Bowl Days.’”
Dorothy pauses and her eyes take on a misty and wistful look. “But I guess all good things must come to an end. Ralph had a massive stroke about two years ago, and I had to put him in a home. I hardly knew what to do with myself. I felt we were both trapped: he by his body and I by my love and loyalty. I was as tethered to his motionless form as he was. There was nothing I could do to help him, and I longed to be free, but I couldn’t leave him, so I stayed.
“I was so lonely. I would talk to Ralph, reading the latest articles and stories to him, but it was always a one-sided conversation. I guess I could have gone outside to talk to someone else, but most of our friends had passed on or were too ill to visit or talk to. My family died years before, not that it mattered. They felt I had betrayed them when I went to work for the government, so they had long since disowned me. All that was left were a few nutty nieces whose sole intention of getting in touch with me was for money.”
“I’m sorry,” was all I could think of to say. Dorothy nodded at me and carried on.
“I drifted from day to day like that, in and out of disbelief. There were days I was so depressed you would have had trouble picking out which one of us was alive and which one of us was in a coma. Then there were days when I’d dive straight into the river of denial. Those were the days I’d start telling him my plans for future travel. Sometimes I’d read or tell Ralph about everything that was going on in the world; that way we would both be up-to-date when he woke up and just take up life where we left off.”
“And then one day, my wish seemed to come true! It was one of my denial days, so I was telling Ralph about something I heard on the radio on the way over to the rest home, something about the customer service coming to a standstill after a freak storm battered New Delhi and Mumbai. A nurse came in all gloved up for Ralph’s sponge bath. She had just finished with his left arm when suddenly, for the first time in two years, his eyes popped open and he moved!
We both yelped and jumped back. We looked at each other incredulously and then, before I knew it, I was hugging Ralph to me and calling out to the part of him I believed still lived deep inside his head. ‘Ralph! Ralph! Come back to me Ralph!’ I had so much hope coursing through my veins I thought I could just scoop him off the bed and put him back on his feet.
“The nurse gently separated us, saying she’d like to take a few vital signs. I backed up a couple of feet to give her room, my heart fluttering with happiness. And just as she reached for his hand to take his pulse, he sat up! He actually sat up! I felt a flash of jealousy as he took her hand in his. I knew his brain had been damaged by the stroke, but didn’t he realize that wasn’t me? The nurse didn’t care what he did. She was just mesmerized that her patient had gone from vegetable to human in the course of one sponge bath. I felt a stab of envy again as Ralph brought her hand to his mouth as if to kiss her.
“And then he bit her.
“Despair replaced hope. Ralph would never hurt a soul—he was a doctor for heaven’s sake! The part of the brain that controlled his movements may be awake, but the part that was him appeared to be gone. I tried to see if there was anything left of his personality in his face, but his eyes said nothing to me. Then it got worse.
“The nurse collapsed to the floor. ‘What’s wrong with her?’ I thought. ‘It’s only a bite. He’s not poisonous!’ My first reaction was to help her up, but as I took my first step towards the bed my father’s voice exploded in my head with a single harsh command: ‘Don’t!’
“‘What? Why?’ I thought. I had driven my father’s voice out of my head decades ago, but it was back, giving me orders. When I think of it now I realize it was probably my intuition using my father’s voice to get me to stop. A new feeling came over me, far different from the despair-to-hope ride I was on earlier. Something was wrong.
“I took a few more steps back and tried to make sense out of what I was feeling. I watched as the nurse flailed about on the floor, trying to get up and then getting tangled up in her own floppy legs and arms. She looked like an infant trying to walk before it knows how to crawl. Then Ralph rolled off the other side of the bed and started doing the same thing.
“I don’t know how long I stood there watching, but it was long enough for both of them to figure out how to push themselves onto their feet by using the bed to steady them. Suddenly I found myself in a face-off with these two. They looked like they were in a trance, as if they had been possessed.
“They looked hungry.
“They swayed unsteadily on their feet as I stood there paralyzed with fear. In the distance I could hear people running and screaming and falling down and wondered if the same thing was happening through the rest of the facility.
“This was not a scenario my upbringing had primed me for. I wasn’t prepared to be afraid of my own husband. I wanted to hit the call button for help, but I’d have to get past those two first. I wanted to run out in the hallway, but it sounded like things were worse out there than in here.
“A movement from Ralph broke my psychosis-induced paralysis. He took one step towards me and that was it, the time for thinking was over. I dashed for the bathroom and locked myself in.
“Fifteen, twenty minutes before this I thought I was as miserable as an old girl could be. I was caught in limbo, not a widow, not a wife. What was I now? A victim? A refugee? I could hear my husband and his nurse as they tried to get into the bathroom: jiggling the doorknob, clumsily throwing their weight against the door, scratching around to find an opening. From far away I could hear the muffled cries of people behind closed doors calling out ‘Help me! Help me. I’m trapped! I think they’re trying to kill me!’
“‘You and me both.’ I thought. I backed away from the shuddering door and turned towards the bathroom window. I stood on top of the toilet to get a better view out and peered over the ledge. What I saw made my father’s voice smugly say, ‘See, I told you so.’ Outside there was nothing but chaos. There were cars filled with terrified passengers that were covered with even more people trying to get in than trying to get out. The ones outside slapped at the glass as if they could break it with their bare hands and were pushing their fingers into the cracks between the windows and doors, trying to pry them open with ragged and bloody fingernails. One of them was crawling under a big camouflage-brown SUV as if he could get inside the vehicle from below.
“There were people running because they were being chased, but it wasn’t a hot pursuit, more like folks staggering in their general direction. It looked funny because there didn’t seem to be a need to run from bodies that could barely walk. I was too far up to see the eyes of the stumbling horde but I was sure that if I could, they’d be as void of emotion as Ralph’s. I noticed there were EMTs mixed in with the staggering group as well as a few wearing running and biking gear. Were the EMTs bit by the very patients they tried to help, like Ralph’s nurse? I wanted to call out to them, to cry for help, but I could see they needed help more than I did.
“So I waited and observed. It was a small relief to come to the conclusion that although this disease worked at lightning speed, it wasn’t airborne. In fact, it appeared to be water and blood-borne. I was thinking like my father now. It was frightening to realize that the infected water only had to touch you like it did Ralph. You didn’t have to drink it for the poison to work, it just needed to be absorbed through your pores. I could only assume that some terrorist group dropped something into the water supply that turned people into mindless drones whose sole intent was to
spread the toxin and create more of their own kind. I imagined a light bulb suddenly switching on over my head and my father saying, ‘Good girl!’ as I came to this conclusion.
“It was almost nightfall when the soldiers came. They swooped in with their armored vehicles, first rescuing the occupants of the cars by shooting at the heads of the ones that covered them. The part of me that was my father understood why they had to do this, but the part of me that was like my husband screamed out ‘You don’t have to kill them! Can’t you just tranquilize them? Can’t you just handcuff them and find a cure before you start to shoot?’ I retreated away from the window and back into the bathroom, trying to make sense of everything, trying to take a break from what I had just seen; yet I could not resist looking outside the bathroom window again. The shooting had died down and I could hear the grateful sobbing of the rescued as they were finally able to get safely out of their cars.
“Or so I thought. I looked out just in time to see a soldier approach the brown SUV to let its occupants out. I shouted, ‘Look out! There’s one underneath!’ but I hadn’t shouted at anything in years and I don’t think my voice carried far enough for anyone to hear me. I wasn’t able to call out another warning before a hand shot out from under the car and grabbed on to his ankle. The soldier wasn’t expecting this, so this thing was able to pull him right off his feet and down to the ground. Before he knew what was happening, the possessed one bit him on the one place that was left uncovered by his armor: his cheek. I watched in horror at what happened next. Instead of mourning the loss of this hero, his colleagues shot him in the head.
“I had enough. There was nothing more I wanted to see. I sat back down on the toilet and put my head in my hands. I wondered how long I could stay like this, how long it would be before I could no longer find a reason why I shouldn’t open the door and let my husband bite me like some sparkly romantic vampire.
“But I didn’t open the door. I waited until I could hear the soldiers running through the corridor calling out for survivors while shooting their merry way down hallways and stairways. I waited until they reached my room, waited for the two shots that stopped the scratching and thumping on my door, and waited for my feelings to drain out before I cried out for their help. I unlocked the door, half-expecting them to shoot me too. Instead they led me gently past my husband’s body, past the hallway dotted with the dead, and outside to join the other survivors in their armored vehicle.”
Notes from a Necrophobe Page 25