Containment (18 page)

“That morning, it started out like any other. We got ourselves up and out the door. Nothing seemed amiss. We just went about our business like usual. The neighborhood was quiet, but it always was early in the day. Again, that’s why we walked then. It was still dark when we got home, and that’s when things started to happen I guess.

“At first, we heard a few sirens and then a few more and then a few more. It was like the whole city was burning down or something. I didn’t smell smoke, so I thought that maybe one of the big banks had been robbed or something. Well, Moe doesn’t much like the sound of sirens, so he and I went downstairs to watch some TV and read the paper. Hell, I figured that if something was happening, being downstairs was probably better anyway. Boy was I right.

“We were watching a little CNN when the program was interrupted by an emergency news update. Some yahoo from one of the local news stations started going on about a disturbance of some sort in Anchorage. He started talking about looting, arson, and killing and how the authorities were trying to get the situation under control. They showed some video taken from a news helicopter that was circling over the university. Looked like a riot to me. Not that much different than what you might see from a protest from Iranians angry at their government again.

“They couldn’t tell us for certain what was happening, only that civilian and military authorities were doing what they could to restore order. From the video shots they were showing, it didn’t look like the civilian authorities, at least, were having much luck at stopping anything. There were police cars all over the screen but nothing seemed to be working. Those folks just kept coming.

“Pretty soon, the helicopter wasn’t just over the university. They were showing shots from all over Midtown and then, all of a sudden, the screen went to a test pattern and that was all the TV was going to tell us. I went upstairs to make sure that the front door was locked. I started moving as much food downstairs to this fridge as I could. I grabbed blankets and some books. I didn’t know how long this was going to last or how long we would be stuck down here, but I’d never been through a real disaster before so I was just guessing. Lucy and I didn’t move here until 1965, so we missed the big quake of ’64, which I guess would have been a bit of a warm-up.”

“At that point, no one really knew what was happening. While I was upstairs during one of my trips to move supplies, I saw Mrs. Gardner across the street. She was loading up her car with...well, with stuff. She loaded in some photo albums–she was so proud of those, a suitcase full of clothes, and some other odds and ends. I just kept watching her and wondering if maybe I should be getting out of town too. When I looked around at this old house though, I just couldn’t bring myself to leave it. Me, Lucy, and Moe were just too comfortable here. So Moe and I stayed. We watched Mrs. Gardner and most of the neighbors leave. For a short while, the neighborhood was more hectic than it had ever been. Even on the nicest of summer days, I don’t know that I’ve ever seen that many people in the street. And then they were all just gone.

“The folks on the radio tried to stay calm and cool, but you could hear in their voices that everyone was just plain scared. They didn’t sound like they knew any better what was going on than the folks on TV. They started telling people to go to some of the safe collection sites...schools mostly. Moe and I, we just got ourselves comfortable downstairs and decided to wait it out.

“Early on that first day, I decided that it might be safer if I was to put a lock on the door at the top of the stairs. I took one of the deadbolts from a door down here and put it on the door. With that on, we started to settle in a little. I guess I must have dozed off because the next thing I remember was waking up to total quiet. I looked out those small windows over there to see out into the street. They sit right at ground level and, as you can see, are really too small to let anything in or out except a little sunlight. You know how I said that I had never seen the streets so filled with people before? Well...I didn’t see anyone. I looked up the street and down, there wasn’t so much as a hint of anyone still around. I had one of those Vincent Price
Last Man on Earth
moments.

“You folks know what was happening probably better than I did at the time. All of a sudden, there just wasn’t anybody around anymore. We stayed downstairs for the next few days. I was already a bit of a hermit, but at least before I could watch people doing their daily activities. The only thing to watch during those days was the grass grow.”

Charles could tell that his audience was reliving those same first few hours and days themselves in their minds. He could tell that the memories for all of them were less confusing and more traumatic than his. They had seen up close and personal and lived through what he had only seen glimpses of from cameras in hovering helicopters and heard about from radio reports. He decided that his experiences from early on paled in comparison to theirs and that they probably didn’t need to hear all of the mundane details of how he spent his time.

The room was quiet though. The gentle hum of the freezer was the only sound in the room. It was the hum that encouraged the questions.

Neil asked, “Do you have electricity?”

“Well, yes and no. I have a generator upstairs in the garage that’s keeping the freezer running and lets me turn on the stove every now and again. After I went through all the gasoline in my car, I just went around and found all the other cars in the area and have been running it off of that since. I haven’t needed to take that much gas so far, but I know where the cars are and know where I can get gas when I need it. I usually turn it off at night and then turn it back on during the day. I figure the freezer should be able to keep itself cold when I’m not going in and out of it.”

“So what all do you have in the freezer?” asked Jerry. “If you can share a pizza, I think I would be willing to be your slave for all of eternity.”

“No. No pizzas. It’s mainly halibut, salmon, and moose with a little caribou and some vegetables from the garden.”

Emma asked, “Garden?”

“Oh yeah. It was Lucy’s garden but Moe and I have kept it up over the years. We’ve got tomatoes, potatoes, carrots, cabbage, and some other odds and ends out there. Lucy showed me how to can vegetables a few years back, so I’ve got shelves of jarred vegetables in the storage pantry and even some cranberry, blackberry, and raspberry jelly in there. If we’re quick about it, I can show you out back if you’d like. There are quite a few raspberries still out there.”

Emma, still distracted with his inventory, asked, “Cranberry jelly?”

“Sure. You want to try some? I’ve got a jar over here in the fridge.”

Neil asked, “I thought you only ran the freezer?”

“Oh, I do. But I keep re-freezing water bottles and cooling packs to keep in the fridge so that I can keep some of that chilled too. I figured it would be a long time before Fred Meyer was going to open again, so I’m trying to make everything last as long as possible.”

Neil had thought he had been clever and resourceful, but now he was seeing true resourcefulness. Charles was amazing. He did not strike any of them as someone who was trying to scratch out a basic existence with only survival in mind. He was living well...as well as could be expected. Looking around the room again, Neil found himself wondering at the level of comfort in which Charles had surrounded himself. Neil looked at the cleaned and drying dishes sitting next to the sink in the kitchenette, at the garbage can next to the stove, and at the dog food dish next to that. He looked at the neatly arranged books and magazines on the shelves along the wall and at the blankets folded and sitting along the top of the couch. There were some candles and flashlights on the couple of end tables in the room. Nothing was out of place and nothing seemed out of the ordinary. Really, the only things in the room that looked slightly out of place and dirty were the group of survivors that were Charles’ guests.

That one fact was more than a little embarrassing to Neil. Here was a guy who was older than any of them by decades and he was doing a much better job of taking care of himself and his surroundings than all of them combined. Sure, it could be argued that a single person requires less food and less maintenance, but a single person only has himself to rely upon as well.

What would Neil have done if he were alone? Could he have made it this far all by himself? He doubted it. And then he remembered the day when he and Tony started the fire down the block from their safe house. He got himself up and over a fence only to be confronted, grabbed, and threatened by one of the ghouls. The creature had Neil in his clutches and had it not been for Jerry, Neil would be one of them now. That memory still chilled Neil’s thoughts and made him in even more awe of Charles.

Dr. Caldwell asked what Neil and Jerry were thinking, “What about...you know...the zekes... zombies...those things? You’ve obviously seen them. When did you first start seeing them?”

Charles sat back in his chair and thought. A hint of emotion crept onto his face and landed squarely in his eyes; eyes that were as grey as time. He took a deep breath before he began, “Sorry. It’s just this is really the first time that I’ve had to talk about those first few days. Moe doesn’t ask me a lot of questions and when he does it’s usually about either eating or going to the bathroom.

“The street lights still worked through that first night but they only light things up so far. I think I started seeing them then. There were just a few, and in the dark they kind of looked like normal folks who were just in a bit of a daze. I guess I wasn’t the only one who decided not to leave, because ole’ Jaspar from down the street, he went out to see if he could help them. Maybe he thought they were just in shock or something, I don’t know. I could tell that they didn’t seem right and it wasn’t shock. They just weren’t right.

“As soon as Jaspar came into the light, there was this horrible noise and they took off after him. Jaspar was old, so he wasn’t running anywhere. He held up his hands but they didn’t stop. They just came at him. In the glow from the street light they didn’t look human anymore as they went to work. It looked like something you might see on Discovery or....” He looked at Jules and Danny and stopped himself short, “Well, you know what happened.

“I heard his wife scream from further down, out of the light, and those things were after her just like that. She must have been up at the house still, because I heard some banging and then some shattering glass. There was a scream and then nothing. I hoped she had a heart attack or something before they got to her. Betty...Beatrice, had a bad heart. The next morning though, there was Beatrice, in her pink nightgown, wandering in the street. She was a walking nightmare. She wasn’t a thing of grace and beauty when she was alive, I gotta be honest, but she really was a monster. The thing that I think bothered me the most, though, was that her little yappy pain in the ass white dog was still following her around like she was still in there. I’d hope Moe would have better sense.

“The next day I woke up and looked out the window there and didn’t see anything. Beatrice was gone and so were all the others. Of course, I couldn’t see much from those windows, but what I did see was a lot of nothing out there. A little later in the day, I saw my first group of survivors. They were running. There were about six of them, maybe more. They looked like they were just ordinary folks, but they looked so scared. They stopped right out there by the street lamp. It looked like they were just resting; trying to catch their breaths. I wanted to go upstairs and tell them to come inside, but I just couldn’t. I was too afraid.

“It looked like two of them started to argue about which way they should go. One pointed north, into downtown, and the other pointed west, toward the airport. Maybe they were being tracked already or maybe it was their raised voices. Regardless, they all stood up at once and the fear already in their eyes became panic. Two of the women, girls really, started to cry.

“I might have still had time to help them. I could have told them to run over here and they could have hid in the basement with Moe and me, but I didn’t. Instead, I watched them start to run that way up the street and then all of a sudden they came running back the other way. They disappeared from my sight and so I didn’t see what happened, but then I heard the screaming. I honestly don’t know what happened to them. They might have gotten away. I haven’t seen any of them around since, if you catch my meaning.

“I saw a handful of others over the days, but it’s been quite some time since the last group. In fact, the last one I saw was a single woman. She looked like she was in a bit of a daze, but she was still alive. I saw her at least a couple more times after the first too. She would just wander in the street and then disappear again. My guess is that she’s moving from house to house, if she’s still alive.”

Jerry asked him, “What about lately? Have you seen any people or any of those things?”

Charles nodded and continued, “I’ve seen those things a bit but we’ve been able to avoid them mostly.”

Neil tilted his chin and said, “Mostly?”

“Well, Moe still needs to go out. I didn’t really want to turn Lucy’s house into a latrine. I didn’t want to catch hell from her for an eternity when it was my time to join her. So, after the first few days, Moe started to go out back but I could tell that he wasn’t satisfied with this arrangement. I got myself a tire iron and decided to take him out.”

Meghan asked, “A tire iron?”

Charles answered, “It was the best I could do.”