The Enduring: Stories of Surviving the Apocalypse (6 page)

“Not yet,” Tara admitted. “We’re supplementing what we grow with the food we stockpiled and brought with us. Each month we use a little more of what we grow, and a little left of our supplies.”

“And water?”

“Look around,” Tara propped her hands on her hips, satisfied. There were buckets to catch rain water, plastic bottles, and a contraption that ran from the storm water pipes along the roofline of the brick building down into a kind of canvas bladder. It looked like a kind of primitive water tank that farmers on the land might use to water crops.

“It’s enough?”

She shrugged. “There’s never too much,” she countered my question. “But we get by.” She glanced up at the wide blue sky. “Days like today don’t help. But when the storms come we make up for it.”

We walked a slow circuit of the compound, pausing in the shade of the giant dying trees that fringed the far fence line.

And suddenly I couldn’t resist the temptation a moment longer. I dropped down into the green soft ground and kicked off my boots. I sat there, looking up at the sunlight filtering through the dense canopy of leaves, grateful for the cool shade. I wiggled my toes. It was the first time I had felt green grass under my feet since the Apocalypse.

Tara smiled, bemused. “Makes you feel like a kid again, doesn’t it.”

I smiled sheepishly. She stood over me and sighed. “It’s therapeutic. It reminds us, Mr. Culver. It reminds us of when the world wasn’t such an awful, godless place; when life was simpler and we clung to the last of our nation’s innocence. It’s only grass, but it means a lot more than that.”

I wished I had written her words down. Inadvertently Tara Copsy had summed up all we had lost – everything we would forever regret and lament. When I got back to the car, I tried to recall her expression and what she had said down on the grassy field. I fear it’s not word-for-word… but the sentiment is hers.

–
and that of all Americans who endured.

We hadn’t just lost over two hundred million lives during the terror of the ‘Affliction’. We had lost the last shreds of our nation’s innocence.

I sat in my car for a long time with the engine running, the gates of the compound open for me. Tara and the other survivors were gathered around the vehicle – and suddenly I didn’t want to leave. Here was the genesis of the new America; a band of hardy self-sufficient survivors who were scratching out a living, laying the foundations of a new world for future generations. Some part of me wanted to remain – to be a part of this.

I realized it was because I was just like everyone else who had endured. We were drawn towards hope.

I drove slowly out through the gates and turned west. I watched the compound in my rearview mirror until it eventually disappeared from sight.

* * *

Waterville, Maine:

I sat in my car for five full minutes, shaking my head, flicking through the pages of my notebook. I was checking the address for the tenth time in disbelief.
“It wasn’t possible, was it?”

I was parked on what was left of a suburban street in Waterville, Maine, staring at a single two story house that stood at the apex of a dead end. There was nothing else left of the entire street apart from the broken burned bones of other homes. It was as if a tornado had swept through the area, indiscriminately cleaving a swathe of destruction – tearing everything in its path to pieces, but miraculously leaving one home untouched.

This was like that house – the single building in the entire neighborhood that remained standing.

I got out of the car, pushed the driver’s door closed and approached the front door. The home was old and wooden; ordinary in every way. A woman came striding out onto the porch like maybe she had been standing at the window with the curtains twitched aside, watching me.

“Mr. Culver?”

“Yes.” I dusted off my friendly grin and hung it from the corner of my mouth. I hadn’t had much use for the expression in recent months.

“Kate? Kate Sellar?”

“That’s right.” I went up the porch steps and we shook hands. She was a woman in her forties or fifties with short cut no-nonsense hair and bright intelligent eyes behind a pair of spectacles. She had the robust healthy complexion that came from living so far north, color on her cheeks and a smile on her lips. “Glad you could make it,” she stood back and took a moment to study the morning sky. “Looks like we might get rain later.”

I turned and looked at the same scene Kate was viewing. All I saw was a street of broken, ruined houses. There was rubble and upended cars on the front lawns of the neighboring houses. Everything was blackened with fire or grey with dust. A crisscross of downed power lines and charred power poles were strung across the rubble. Kate didn’t even seem to notice.

I followed Kate inside and we stood in a wide living room filled with an eclectic assortment of furniture. There were framed photographs of family members on one wall. I went towards the images curiously. The floorboards squeaked.

Of the dozen or so photographs hung on the wall, more than half of them were of the same girl. She was a teenager with identical features to Kate; the family resemblance was unmistakable. In many of the photos, the girl’s hair color was different. I stared at an image of the girl showing her with a blue scarf around her neck and an older, stern-faced man, sitting beside her. The man had steely eyes and a stubble of white beard. I turned back to Kate and looked a question.

“That’s my daughter, Danni,” she said. There was pride in her voice, underlying a sad smile. Kate’s lips trembled and the expression on her face became a mix of happiness and tears.

“And the man?”

“My husband, Mike.”

“How old was Danni?” It was only immediately after I had asked the question that I realized what I had said. For some unknown reason I had referred to her daughter in past tense.

Kate looked at me like maybe I was psychic.

“How did you know…?” her voice dropped to a whisper of shock.

I said nothing. I felt my face flushing with color and suddenly the room became very small and very quiet. I could hear a clock ticking somewhere in the background, the sound almost ominous.

For long moments Kate said nothing. She turned away from me and ran her eyes distractedly over a bookcase filled with horror novels and old movies. When she turned back, she had composed herself. The tears were gone, but so was the laughter. Her face was ashen, and her eyes had lost their sheen.

“Danni died in the Apocalypse,” Kate said like she was reciting the words in a monologue.

“I’m truly sorry,” I said.

Kate nodded. “That’s why we have her photos on the wall.”

“And the other children?”

“My other kids – Dena and John.”

“They survived?”

“Yes. John is sixteen. He was attending junior high school and had just finished a college course in Criminal Justice at Mid Maine Tech. It was just a few blocks from our house. The building is still standing… John made it home before the world went to hell.”

“And your daughter, Dena?”

“She is a freshman at the University of Orono in Maine… or at least she was before the Apocalypse. She was getting her degree in Biochemistry.”

I furrowed my brow. “Where is the University?”

“About forty-five minutes away from Waterville. Dena hid out at a friend’s house for two days when the outbreak first spread across Maine, and then my husband went to fetch her.”

“Where is she now?”

“She’s back with her friends from the University,” Kate said, disapproving. “A couple of her girlfriends. They’re making their own way through this new world,” she shrugged with a perplexed expression on her face. “Kids, right?”

I smiled in sympathy. I had no children, but I could imagine a parent’s frustration.

“You must worry about her.”

“Every damned day,” Kate said bluntly. “But what can you do except give them the space they need to be independent and at the same time offer a safety net of support to catch them…
when they fall
.”

“But Danni…? Can you tell me what happened?”

Kate lowered herself into a chair by the bookcase and took a long time to collect herself. Through the window behind her I could see the devastated ruin of the neighboring house. It looked as though it had been demolished. The roof had collapsed in upon the structure and only part of one wall remained.

“Danni got caught up in the chaos when the ‘Afflicted’ suddenly appeared at the end of our street,” Kate said. She wasn’t looking at me. Her eyes were on the wall of photographs as if seeing them made the memory of her daughter more vivid. “She was at a neighbors house. There was an explosion – one of the homes somewhere past the intersection,” Kate pointed vaguely. “Danni went out onto the street to investigate.”

“You saw this, Kate?”

“Yes. I was standing on the porch. The sound of the explosion shook the old house down to its foundations. Mike and I went out to investigate and that was when we saw Danni. She was standing in the middle of the road. Her back was turned to us. She was looking off into the distance where smoke was rising. She had one hand up to her face – I remember it so clearly.”

I wrote down Kate’s recollection in the notebook, keeping my head bowed over the pages as if it might somehow make it easier for Kate if she felt like I was not in the room. Her voice became remote as though she were narrating some event that was disconnected from her emotionally.

I said nothing. I just waited. The ticking clock filled in the long silence until Kate spoke again.

“I called out to her as loudly as I could, but she didn’t seem to hear. By then there were more explosions and we heard gunfire. It might have been the military. It might have been local folks defending their homes. Mike shouted out to her.”

“Did she hear?”

“Yes,” Kate whispered. “She turned and started to run towards home. She was running as fast as she could. Her face. I remember her face. It was filled with panic and fear. Her mouth was open. Maybe she was screaming,” Kate shook her head and wrung her hands in her lap. “I’ll never know,” she muttered. “Because suddenly a car came around the corner, skidding out of control. It slid across the road, smashed into someone’s front fence and then ran Danni down.”

I gaped in silent shock. I stopped writing and slowly lifted my face. Kate’s eyes were waiting for me. We stared at each other.

“She was killed instantly?” I asked in a small compassionate voice of sympathy.

“Yes.” Kate nodded. “The driver never stopped. His car ran out of control and he swerved into the house right beside us. The car exploded and the house caught fire.”

“Were there people inside the home?”

Kate shook her head and blew out her cheeks with a long exhalation of breath. “No. The Kings had left the day before. Stephen took his wife and kids and fled to Canada.”

“What about your other neighbors?” I remembered the ruined houses on both sides.

Kate looked suddenly scornful. “Never spoke to the other couple that lived on that side of us,” her voice filled with acrimony. “They weren’t the socializing kind. Kept to themselves.”

“And Danni?” I tried to bring the conversation back to the sensitive issue of her daughter. Kate sniffed and gnawed on her bottom lip like she was chewing up words. “Mike went out and brought her home.”

It was all she would say. Her eyes glazed over and though I waited for more, Kate would utter not a single other word about what happened to her youngest child. After a long tense silence I folded my notebook and tucked it into my pocket. Kate saw me, and some of the strain went out of her. She got up out of the chair and led me through the downstairs of the house. A breath of crisp morning air came through the back door, stirring the curtains across the windows.

A cat scurried under my feet, and then another one. Kate scooped up one of the cats into her arms and scratched the animal under its chin. “This is actually what I was doing when we first heard about the Apocalypse,” Kate smiled wistfully. “I was feeding my cats.”

“How many do you have?”

“Five.”

“That’s a lot of extra mouths to feed, isn’t it, especially given the food shortages?”

Kate shrugged her shoulders like it was a question she never considered before. “We grow a few vegetables, and Mike is a hunter,” Kate said. “And the cats…? Well they feed themselves. Rats, Mr. Culver,” she gave me a mirthless little smile that almost looked menacing. “There are lots of them since the Apocalypse.”

I said nothing. Kate put the cat back on the floor and it disappeared into a dark corner beneath a piece of furniture.

“I was in the kitchen when I heard a terrible pounding on the front door,” Kate picked up the retelling of her story without missing a beat.

“And you went to investigate?”

“Yes. Mike was upstairs, and so were the kids. I went to the front door suspiciously because I thought it might have been someone trying to break in. It was, in a way.”

“What do you mean?” I became curious.

“It was our mailman. He was hammering on the front door with his fist. He was screaming. Not in pain, and not in anger. He was screaming in fear. I could see him through the side window.”