But the recording always said the same. If you’re still sick, stay in your home. If you need medical attention, call your primary care doctor. “If you’re dying, we can’t help,” was the essence of those words.
Suicide had been on Fabian’s mind lately, though he would never do it. He was no coward. He was also stubborn in a way that would not allow suicide into his life. But in that moment, he wanted it all to end. He wanted the daily drudgery of inventory after inventory to stop. But what had once been the comfort of routine now felt like a curse. Day in, day out, over and over, the same food, week after week, and no joy in it.
Fabian fell to the ground, his knees hitting the concrete floor with a jolt, sending waves of searing pain up his legs.
He ignored it. He didn’t care anymore.
“Please, God, I’m sorry for everything that I’ve done. I’m sorry. Just tell me what to do. I’m so sorry...”
But there came no answer.
His first prayer in decades drifted up through the rafters and mingled with the sun shining through dusty particles.
“I said, ‘help me!’” he screamed. “Help me!”
There was a rustling sound in the corner and a raccoon darted away, knocking a bag of rice over and scattering the contents from the hole. The vermin had probably chewed through it.
“I asked for help and you send me a raccoon?” Fabian said. Ticking one more tock closer to insanity. But his supply chief mind wouldn’t leave the rice bag alone. He went over to it and looked down at the mess. Tears came to his eyes—tears of pity for himself, tears of grief for his brother, tears for the world that never understood who he was.
Through the blur he saw the rice, just a white blob skating from bag to concrete floor. It looked like a white, sandy beach that smelled of salt air and sunscreen in the eighties. He remembered the first time he’d been to the beach. Iggy had barely been out of diapers. They’d run into the Pacific Ocean together, screaming as the frigid water hit their legs. That had been one of the few good days of his childhood. They played in the surf, eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. And they’d gotten burnt to a crisp and loved every second of it.
He was far from the Pacific Ocean. His mind drifted to the Atlantic. He could get to it. If he was remembering correctly, the Atlantic Ocean wasn’t as cold as the Pacific. Maybe there was something to that. It was an idea that dropped seed in Fabian’s mind, one that would take a week to fully germinate.
Two weeks passed before he made a new inventory—a travel inventory—and scoured the city until he found the vehicles he needed. Ones that would take every item for his journey. And so two and a half weeks after Fabian Moon hit his knees in that precious warehouse, he left his old life in search of a new one, in search of a vision somewhere along the Atlantic coast. Maybe somewhere on the beach.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Sandy Kaplan
This was the life, truly. Walking, kicking along the abandoned American roads. Sandy had rekindled his love for the world. Sure, humankind might be gone, but there was still a wide world to explore. Fields to traipse, streams to swim, lakes to fish. And it was all here for the taking. Just hop over a corpse or two along the way. No biggie.
He didn’t need much. Not anymore. And still he marveled that he could hike for hours and hours. His longest trek had been eighteen straight hours of walking, with sips of water and nibbles of snacks along the way. Then he slept a few hours, feeling completely refreshed. Not a sore bone in his body. Yep, this was a life, alright.
There was the odd day that he missed his children. Sometimes he thought about his wife, but mostly he marveled at the world, at all the things he could now see. Rainbows seemed to greet him at every new town. Clouds, billowing or streaming overhead, as fresh and as full as the day the Maker had made them. Every green seemed to be greener. Every white, whiter. Even the streams he dipped his feet into seemed to be cleaner, fresher, stronger. And he fed off every bit of it, his soul cleansed like a new birth.
And Sandy walked mostly eastward. Sometimes he’d vary his route because he saw an interesting hill up ahead, or a group of trees that looked like they might be interesting to climb. So much like a child, he wandered, vaguely eastward, enjoying some wild blackberries one day, or maybe some fresh strawberries he found in a fallow field the next. They were like little morsels left for him by some unseen sower.
He filed these memories away and thought maybe if one day, if he came across an old Barnes & Noble, he’d pick up a few journals and maybe start writing. But for whom? And why?
Sure, he’d seen people along the way, but he’d been quick about hiding, as if them seeing him would somehow steal the joy of the dream he was now living. He preferred to be alone. He’d planned on it. Every day, he walked farther. Every day, he distanced himself from mankind. He figured that this was the way it was supposed to be. Like a nomad wandering over vacant fields. And already the Earth was taking itself back—climbing over fences, creeping up through cracks in the highway concrete. Even the rivers seemed to be helping with the work, occasionally flooding and sweeping homes entirely away. Maybe X-99 had been the plan all along. Clean humanity off the planet and start afresh. A new species. Another chance to get things right.
Then one day he cut the tip of his finger on a bramble. It was nothing. A bead of blood that he sucked down and then went on with his existence.
The next day, he noticed something.
I’m healing, he thought. Even now, as the human world dies around me, I heal.
What was this mystery? What was it inside him that wanted him to go on, that worked to preserve him even though everything seemed to be telling him that it was over for him and his kind?
He could almost smell it now. The ocean, up ahead. He was excited.
There was a time when going to the beach meant fussing about sunscreen and drinking enough water. Sandy didn’t care a damn for any of that now. His rejuvenated body didn’t seem to need as much water, and if he did get the odd nick or scratch, or even a deep cut, it seemed to heal much faster. Sometimes in a day. And he wondered if he’d even gotten that scratch from sliding down the broad oak.
There were times when he thought that maybe this was Heaven itself. Maybe this is what God had intended, but then someone would drive by in a sputtering truck, or there would be a blood-curdling scream from off in the distance, and he knew that this was not anything remotely resembling Heaven. It was his new Earth. So, on he walked, careful to hide from any interlopers on his dream.
He would hit the Atlantic and find a small home. Nothing ostentatious. Nothing too big. He’d strip it bare of all but the essentials. Maybe he’d plant a garden. Maybe he’d just fish. He was quite sure he could live off fish for the rest of his life. Once again, food seemed to be an afterthought rather than a need for survival.
So it wasn’t with much worry that Sandy left the ruins of Chapel Hill, North Carolina. He wanted to visit UNC. He’d always been a Tar Heels fan, mostly because that’s where Michael Jordan had gone. But when he got to the campus, he found some of the gymnasiums and quads stacked with bodies. Most of the buildings had been spray-painted. Some looked like they had been firebombed by B-52s overhead. He thought about making the trek up the road to Duke University, but the thought of finding another unholy wreck of a campus depressed him. And these days, Sandy didn’t want to be depressed.
He left Chapel Hill humming a tune that he’d made up along the way.
He wasn’t five miles out of the city when he heard the wailing. It was a woman. He’d heard it before. He stopped and listened, thinking that maybe he should hide and wait for the sound to pass. But the wailing persisted. It wasn’t pain. If not, what was it? Anguish? Yes, there was anguish in that sound. Curiosity got the better of him and he crept closer, careful to stick to hiding places.
The sound brought him to a park. When it had been maintained, the place was probably beautiful. But now, Sandy thought, it was even more so. Wildflowers had sprung up where man
icured grass had once sat, and there in the middle of the tiny park, sitting on a stone bench, was a woman, wailing so hard that the sound cut deep into his heart.
He tried to turn away. It would have been easy. Her eyes were closed. There was no way she could have seen him. But that sound, that pain. It reminded him of his own pain when his wife had died. He moved closer and he could see more of her now. She was wearing a white dress, like she’d been on her way to a summer picnic. He moved closer. This time he could see over the long grass, and it looked like it was some sort of ombré pattern on her dress, white transitioning to red.
But then, as he moved, he saw the truth. That wasn’t a man-made pattern. That was blood. And it came from her wrists. They’d been cut by the knife in her hand.
Sandy told himself to run. To run far, far away. To run east. To find that little hut on the ocean and hide forever. He didn’t need this. His dream was being shattered by standing there. And yet he couldn’t ignore the pain, the absolute grief melting out of this woman.
He called to her, but she didn’t hear him.
“Hello?” he said loudly.
Nothing. He was maybe twenty feet from her now. Fifteen... ten....
“Excuse me, miss? Are you okay?”
She turned now, but her eyes were unseeing. Then they focused. And the knife came up.
“It’s okay,” said Sandy, “I’m not going to hurt you.”
He put his hands in the air. Then the woman screamed like she’d seen a ghost. Her eyes fluttered and Sandy rushed forward, just managing to catch her before she hit the ground. The knife fell and Sandy kicked it away.
Then he looked down at the woman, at the wrists that were seeping blood, and it was impossible to miss the swollen belly. This poor woman was pregnant and quite far along, and if Sandy didn’t do something, two lives would soon perish.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Sandy Kaplan
Her name was Molly. It took him two days to figure that out. In the meantime, her wounds were well on the mend, though every time he seemed to look away, she’d try to find something sharp to cut herself. Sandy barely slept for 72 hours.
On the third day, she told him that she was 27-years-old and that she’d been married twice. Once for real, before X-99, and once in a private ceremony with the true love of her life, the two of them under the stars. But he was dead now and she did not want to tell him the details. It was obvious by the way she wept afterward that it was this that had caused her breakdown. That had caused her to want to take her own life, and Sandy would never in his life forget that scene.
They did not move during the three days they spent together. Though she seemed to be regaining her strength even though she rarely ate.
Sandy had no idea how he’d keep this woman safe. She had already been at the precipice of her sanity but had then gone over the edge. Every time he dozed off, he’d be thinking that she’d gotten away, that she’d found some sharp stone and plunged it into her still-healing wounds.
For three days, she stayed alive. And on the fourth, she told him her water broke and that the baby was coming.
There was no emotion in her words, and Sandy wondered how this broken woman could take care of a child. He had no experience delivering a baby. There had been the first-aid checkups required by the high school, but that was only in case a student had an epileptic seizure or passed out in the middle of a hallway. Newborn babies, they weren’t on the list of things to do. And yet, here he was about to deliver a baby with a few pieces of torn T-shirt and some cool water from the nearby creek. There was no medication to give her, so she gave birth the way women had for thousands of years. It was obvious that she was in pain, but through it all, she instructed him as she pushed. She told him when to pull the baby out. She told him what to do with the umbilical cord. He cut it with the same knife he used to eat his dinner.
And when it was done, he had a healthy baby boy cuddled in his arms. He tried to give the baby to Molly and, at first, she took it and looked down at him.
“He looks like my first husband,” she said. And then gave the baby back.
She told Sandy that she’d have to find a private place for the rest of the birthing business to be done. She didn’t give him details and he didn’t ask. There was a house not far away, and he waited outside with the baby.
“You might be the first new boy in this new world,” he said to the little one.
The baby’s eyes looked curious, nothing like the scrunched prunes he’d seen when his own children had been born.
“Everything okay in there?” he called to Molly.
She called back, the same detached voice.
It would take a long time for her heart to heal, but Sandy knew it would. He strode around the house, cooing to the little baby, marveling at the fact that he, Sandy Kaplan, had delivered a healthy child, another thing to add to his memoirs. When he made two complete loops around the home, he checked his watch. One hour had passed. He called up to Molly.
“You okay, Molly?”
She was pushing or getting cleaned up. He checked and the bathroom was clean, and surprisingly enough had running water. She was probably taking a shower or maybe a bath. But in a few more minutes he called out again: “Hey, Molly. Your little one sure seems to like me.”
No answer. Maybe she needed help. Maybe she’d passed out. Maybe she’d fallen asleep because she was so tired, how his own wife had slept for hours after giving birth to both of their children. Sandy couldn’t imagine the energy it took to do such a thing.
He stepped inside, still bouncing the baby. “Molly,” he called out, not wanting to walk in on her naked, though he’d basically seen everything she had to see. “Molly, you hungry? Can I get you something from the kitchen?”
There’d been a few cast-off cans of green beans and okra. He wasn’t picky and he hoped Molly wasn’t either.
He went to the bathroom door and knocked. “Molly, is everything okay?”
No answer.
Now he beat on the door. “Molly, open up.”
Nothing from inside. He started crying. Again, it was locked. He banged on the door until his hand was sore. The door was thick and sturdy. He lined up for a kick and he saw a hairline crack in the frame. Another kick and the crack widened. Finally the door burst open. And there she was lying on the floor, once more covered in blood, eyes open, a single tear running down her cheek. She’d found a knife and plunged it straight into her heart. It was obvious that she was dead.
Sandy walked over and laid a bathroom towel over her face. And then he saw the note sitting next to the sink.
Dear Sandy,
I bet you’re wondering why I was crying and carrying on so when I... you know... when you found me. Why would I be crying like I wanted to be saved just after I had cut myself?
Strange things happen all the time. We’re just not always looking for them.
I did the deed, and I lay there bleeding out all over the place. I was finally happy.
Then I saw it. I saw my belly.
A tiny little foot was poking against it from the inside.
All I know is that I wanted to live again. Not for me, for the baby. And after the baby came, well, I had you. It was like Divine providence that you came along. But don’t quote me on that.
At any rate, it’s done and I’m back to where I was the moment before I took that blade in my hands.
Please take care of my child. He deserves better than me.
Molly
Sandy didn’t have the strength to pull the body from the house, even if he’d wanted to. Emotionally he was spent but had to find food for the baby. Instead of burying her, he did what he’d often done on the road. He found some gasoline, spread it all throughout the bottom level of the house, lit it on fire for a time, and said an insignificant prayer.
The baby was quiet through it all, as if he knew what a solemn moment this had been. If only he knew he was witnessing the final rest of his mother.
Sandy tho
ught, “I know pain, but that was a different kind of pain.” Something so deep and insidious that there was probably nothing he could have said or done that could have helped. He wished Molly had told her the name of either of her husbands, then he could name the child. He didn’t feel right coming up with a name himself, so he decided to wait. Maybe the world would tell him.
And so the widowed former Driver’s Ed teacher and the newborn continued east, leaving behind the sadness of young Molly. Sandy whistled a tune that he wondered if the baby would remember when he was older. And then he grabbed onto the hope that maybe this was the other gift he’d been given, another payment for the years of toil, a companion he could care for, maybe even someday a friend.
“Come on, little one. Let’s go see what kind of adventure we can find.”
Part III
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Chapter Forty
Chuck Yarling
By the time they reached the ocean, their numbers had swelled to more than 120. Chuck surveyed the throng of people, unbelieving that their number had grown to that size. Cliques had been formed, but nothing to worry their growing team of leaders. Much to his surprise, Chuck had been voted onto their board unanimously. He knew each person’s name and prided himself for knowing much of their background.
The Next Dawn Page 12