The Survivors (Book 1): Summer (6 page)

Across the road, another small storefront attracted my eye, one that was simply labelled 'Ohaupo Store'.
 The front window was smashed, the faded Lotto logo barely visible through the spider-webbed glass, and the old magazine racks that framed the doorway were tattered beyond all recognition.  Old spray paint proclaimed a mixture of biblical end-of-days prophecy and faded swear words.

Still, despite the damage, I drew my taser and approached the doorway with silent-footed caution.

The door swung in the wind, squeaking rhythmically with each gust.  I paused and drew a deep breath of the clean, cool air, made pleasant by last night's rain, then ducked through the doorway into the waiting stench.  Crouching just inside the entrance, I waited until my eyes adjusted to the dark, breathing shallowly through my mouth to keep the inevitable stink at bay.

The place appeared to have been ransacked.

Not surprising.  In the riots during the final days of civilization, many places had been devastated by the panicked populace as they tried to flee the cities, or by the undead who simply didn't know any better.  Most of those people were dead now, or they were like me – picking a living from the ruins of the old world.

Regardless of the destruction, I snuck deeper inside with my taser at the ready.
 Most of the time there was still something left in these old, trashed general stores.  You just had to know where to look.

Glass crunched underfoot as I crept along the end of the aisles to check for unwelcome guests of any stripe.
 The only sign of life was a nest of mice behind the counter, full of angry babies that hissed at me when I passed, but to them I was big and scary, so they fled when I got too close.

Behind the counter, I spotted a closed door.
 I moved closer to examine it, and found that it was made of solid steel with a modern lock.  It was still intact despite dents that spoke of repeated attempts to burst it open.  I tried the handle and found it firmly locked.  A quick hunt turned up no keys nearby, so I would have to return later to try and figure out a way inside.  It would take some creativity for me to get through that.

I was always up for a challenge
– particularly since there was probably a storeroom back there with stock that didn't fit on the shelves, which could well be a gold mine for someone like me.  As it was still sealed, the chances were extremely good that no one else had gotten in there yet.  I added the location to my mental map and moved on.

Picking over what was left on the store’s shelves did not yield quite the bounty that I hoped for.
 Most of the tinned goods were long gone, and the dried goods were well past the point of being remotely edible.  Piles of decay sat in what had once been displays of fresh vegetables, and rancid-smelling slivers of glass was all that was left of the preserves.

Even the cash register was cracked open, and hung sad and empty inside.
 A tiny mouse stuck its head out of one and squeaked in horror, then fled back into its sanctuary.

That's not to say the store was useless, though.
 In the back of the store, I found a small stash of hardware that no one had thought to steal during the riots.  I came away with half a dozen knives, two metal can openers, and a few small hand tools.  To a scavenger like me, those kinds of things were a treasure trove almost as exciting as an entire crate of tinned spaghetti.

I stuffed my treasures into a plastic bag liberated from behind the counter, and left the store behind.

***

By midday, I had picked over most of the other stores in the district as well, and come away with enough food and bottled water to last me for a few weeks, with some careful rationing.

Even more exciting, I found a small automotive workshop fully equipped with machinery, and a few cars that I thought I could salvage with enough time and determination.  Not that I planned to go anywhere, but if I needed to get out of town in a hurry, then having a functioning vehicle made it so much easier.  Plus, with a vehicle I would be able to visit the outlying farms more easily, and see what treasures waited for me there.

I was feeling rather buoyant and pleased with my morning's work.
 The pantry was filling up nicely and I even found a few treats along the way.  I was practically salivating at the thought of the large tin of peaches I found in the back room of the cafe.  They were long past their ‘best before’ date, but a girl could still hope.

As a reward, I decided to stop for lunch and crack open the peaches.
 To my delight, I found that they were still good.  They tasted a little metallic, but I couldn’t complain; it was rare to find fruit that was still edible in the towns these days.  I did hope to find a local orchard that might have some fruit growing wild, but it would be a few days before I was prepared to go that far out of town.

In the meantime... ah, I could practically taste the vitamin C.
 De-lish!

Peaches in one hand and fork in the other, I wandered back down the stairs.
 In front of the store was a battered bench, left for people passing by to sit and rest their feet; now it was my turn.  Like everything else, the bench had seen better days, but in my imagination I could picture this as Benny’s favourite place to sit and watch the evenings go by.  It was mine now, and I gave silent thanks to the poor old fellow for his foresight.   

All in all, I was feeling pretty relaxed by that stage.
 I had almost finished securing the town and seen none of the tell-tale signs of danger, so I felt more or less at ease.  I let my guard down for a moment, to enjoy the warmth of the sun and the simple human pleasure of eating.

Needless to say, the ambush took me completely by surprise.

I was so startled that I almost dropped my food when the tiny kitten suddenly leapt from the bushes onto the seat beside me.

"
Mew?"  The kitten queried, its little face canted at a curious angle as it watched me eat.

Some ambush.
 Beware the fuzzy terror.

Still, the kitten's arrival was completely unexpected, and its fearlessness struck me as peculiar.
 I immediately worried that it might be diseased, but it showed no signs of any illness that I was familiar with.  Rabies had been eliminated from my country decades before Ebola-X decimated us, and this tiny cat showed none of the telltale symptoms of carrying either of those diseases.  Its eyes were alert, and... well, it was quite vocal.  The walking dead are not.

"
Mew?"  It cried again, inching closer to me on cautious paws, not quite confident enough to touch me but too inquisitive to back away.  Likewise, I was too curious to shoo it off, but too wary to try to touch it.

I put another slice of delicious peach in my mouth and chewed thoughtfully, which drew yet another demanding cry from the kitten.
 I blinked and held the tin down low enough for it to smell the contents, and it immediately lost interest.

"
Yeah.  You don't eat peaches, kitty," I told it dryly, and resumed eating them myself.  Mmm, tasty.  

Rebuked, the kitten sat down and started grooming its little paws with intense concentration, pretending that it didn't see me at all.
 My heart softened.  It seemed hungry, with the way it was crying at me, and it was so young – no more than six weeks old.  Maybe its mother was dead, like mine?

Damn it.
 What am I, made of stone?

"
Stay here, kitty."  I sighed and rose carefully so as not to disturb the fluffball, then headed upstairs to find that dreaded cat food.  Well, at least if I fed it to the kitten then I wouldn’t have to stomach it myself.  My morning’s exploration had turned up plenty of supplies, so I could spare one can for a hungry kitten.

Even after all these years alone, I still had my human compassion.
 The day I lost that, is the day I wouldn’t be a human being any more.

I returned upstairs to find the can right where I had left it
– hidden right at the back of the pantry behind my new-found bounty, where I wouldn't have to think about it unless things got desperate.  I cracked open the pop-top lid, scooped a couple of spoonfuls of the foul-smelling pseudo-meat into a bowl liberated from Benny's cupboards, then carried it back downstairs.

In the doorway, I stopped and looked around.

The kitten was gone.

I found myself surprisingly disappointed by the kitten's disappearance.  As much as I tried to ignore it, I longed for some kind of companionship, anything to help keep the loneliness at bay.  I was tempted to call for the little cat, but I didn't want to risk giving away my position in case there were larger creatures around.  With few other options, I set the bowl down on the ground beneath the bench and left it there.  There was still much of the town left to explore, and perhaps while I was gone the kitten would return.

There were only two stores left on the main drag for me to investigate
– a little antique store, and the simply named 'Function' building.  I wasn't expecting much from either, but instinct said to check anyway.  At least then I'd sleep easier at night, because I would know the buildings were safe.  Lacking any particular inspiration, I flipped a mental coin and headed for the antique store.

As it turned out, 'antique' was a fancy name for 'second hand'.
 The store had survived the riots surprisingly well, mostly due to the fact it stocked very little of conventional value.  The lock on the door had been forced, and the contents of a few shelves strewn across the floor, but mostly it was just dusty and quiet.  I took in the entire room at a glance, soon realising that there was nothing of great value to me either, but I still felt drawn inside.

The shelves that were still standing contained things that fascinated my inner child.
 Along one high shelf was a row of tiny porcelain tea sets in miniature, with little teapots, sugar bowls, teacups and saucers all to perfect scale, and resplendent with beautiful, hand-painted patterns.  Unlike just about everything else, porcelain survived the years without fading; the painted flowers were still just as bright and vibrant as the day they felt the artist’s brush.   

I found that fascinating.
 Even after all this time, there were still some things made by human hands that stood the test of time.  But it wasn’t the cheap, mass produced things from my generation; it was the old, beautifully hand-crafted items that survived the best.

Some morbid part of me hoped that if the human race survived long enough to
 flourish again, in a thousand years archaeologists would come to dig through these ruins and find these beautiful little things.  Maybe that way, our distant descendants could look back on our civilization with some sense of pride, instead of with shame.

I picked up one tiny teapot and turned it over between my fingers, half-expecting it to crumble to powder at my touch.
 It didn't.  It just sparkled prettily, its glossy paint as flawless as the day it was made.  I wanted desperately to put it in my pocket and take it with me, but I knew it would not survive the rigors of my journey and it felt like a sin to destroy something so beautiful.  With reverence, I set it back down with its little teacups and moved on.

There were a great many things in this store that served no real purpose, or whose function I could simply not name.
 They were things that had once been so important to society, but their purpose was forgotten long before I was born.  Now that the generation who remembered them was gone, there was no one left to understand them.

But there were some things I understood
, like the beautiful doll house beside the counter.  Oh, I remembered longing for something just like it when I was a little girl, a doll house so perfect in every detail.  I bent down to peer inside, and in the living room I found a family of little figurines, humanised bunny rabbits – a mother, a father, and two little girls.  They were dressed in human clothes, old fashioned but perfect in their own way.

In my memory, I heard Skylar’s sweet little voice cry out with delight. Suddenly, I remembered that once, long ago, we
had stood in this very store together admiring that doll house.

A pang of grief socked me in the gut, and I stood sharply to leave.
 I was halfway to the door before a sense of longing overwhelmed me, and forced me to turn back and look at that little family again.  They were so perfect, happy and sweet.

I felt such a sense of abandonment at the thought of leaving them behind that I just couldn’t bear it.
 Those little dolls reminded me of my own lost family.  I could justify it if I thought about it.  There was no harm in one tangible keepsake to remember them by.  They weighed next to nothing.

So I took them, my little family, and I put them in my pocket.

Tears blurred my eyes as I left the antique store behind, putting as much distance between it and myself as I could.  There was one last port of call for today, that vaguely-named 'Function' building.  I assumed it was used by the community for events, possibly even as a multi-purpose church or chapel, but beyond that I really didn’t know what to expect.

Following my usual protocol, I kept my weapon in hand while I slipped open the door and moved into the building.
 I hovered in a half-crouch while my eyes adjusted; when they did, I found myself in a short hallway with a double-door in the centre and a single door on each wall flanking it.  

I tried the left and right doors first and found them both unlocked, revealing small, basic offices beyond.
 The religious paraphernalia told me that they were probably used by the preachers who gathered their flocks here, and that there was little of use to me.

I was just about to close the door to the second office, when something out of the ordinary caught my eye.
 In a clear plastic bag on the desk was a quantity of tiny prescription bottles.   A very large quantity.

Overcome by morbid curiosity, I crossed the room to the bag and pulled out a couple of the little bottles, and then turned them over to read the
faded labels.  Trilam, Riopnol, Hypnovel and Laroxyl?  I was no pharmacist, but I have had a lot of time to read.  I knew what those tablets were: Sleeping pills and antidepressants.  Strong ones.  Every single one of those little prescription bottles was empty.

I had a bad feeling about this.

The claws of dread tangled in my gut as I returned the bottles to their bag and retraced my steps to the hallway.  There, I hesitated in front of that last set of double-doors.  I wasn't entirely sure I wanted to open that door, but I needed to know for sure.

I’d seen a lot of death in the last ten years.
 What were a couple more bodies?  On the other hand, curiosity killed the cat.

My hand shook on the door handle as I turned it, but I swallowed hard and pushed it open anyway.
 

A moment later, I slammed it closed again and burst into tears.

***

January, 2014

This was not how I pictured spending my first New Years as a legal adult.  I wasn’t the kind of girl who would go out drinking and dancing on tables and flinging my knickers at anything with a penis, but anything would have been better than spending the night crammed in a car with a panicked mother and stressed-out grandmother.  Not my idea of fun.

Mum was in a panic because Skylar, ever the adoring Daddy's Girl, insisted on travelling in Dad's car.
 When Mum had tried to force the issue, my sister threw such a tantrum that I was afraid she would wake the dead.

Now the problem had grown.
 We’d lost sight of Dad's car an hour ago, and none of us were able to get a cell phone signal to try and call him.

We pulled into the driveway of Grandma's holiday home on the coast, but the sedan was nowhere to be seen.
 The holiday house was miles from anywhere, totally isolated from the rest of civilization.  It had taken most of the night to get there; by the time we arrived, the sun was rising over the ocean to the east.

As soon as we stopped, I leaped out and climbed up onto the roof of the car to look for Dad.
 I stretched up on tiptoes and shaded my eyes with one hand, staring long and hard into the gloom behind us, but there was no sign of him.

"
Do you see anything?"  Mum asked, her voice shaking.  The fact that she let me stand on her car without kicking up a fuss told me just how upset she really was.  I shook my head, and looked away so that I wouldn't have to see the tears well up in her eyes.  Instead, I hopped down as fast as I could without breaking an ankle and I wrapped my arms around her, holding her tight as she cried helplessly.

"
Oh God, Roger," she sobbed, shaking convulsively in my arms.  "I have to go back for him.  I-I have to—"

"
No, you can't."  I tried to keep my voice even, but I could hear it shaking despite my best efforts.  "They're going to come here looking for us soon, and if you’re not here then Dad will panic.  They'll make it, I promise they will."

Grandma's cool hand landed upon my shoulder, and I looked at her over my mother's head, staring deep into her concerned eyes.
 I gently released my distressed mother into her care, and she led her off towards the house.

"
Come along, sweetheart.  You're very tired, let's get you to bed.  I'm sure they'll be here by the time you wake up," she cooed, leaving me to tend to Mushkin and the supplies we carried in Mum's tiny hatchback.  Silently, I prayed that Dad and little Skylar would arrive soon, so that my beloved family could be whole again.

But they never did.

***

Present Day

I sat in the sun on my little bench with my head between my knees, gasping for breath as I struggled to get my racing heart back under control.  Tears rolled freely down my cheeks, but I didn’t have the willpower to wipe them away.  You would think that after this long, my heart would be hardened to this kind of thing, but it wasn't.  I was still a person, still a human being.

Just like they had been.
 There were at least a hundred of them, all crammed into that hall together.  A decade later, their skeletons lay in the positions in which they'd died.  Clinging to one another, curled up in as though in sleep.

So many bodies… so very many bodies
– and the smell... oh God, the smell.  I couldn’t get it out of my head.

I muffled a sob and wiped my nose on my sleeve.
 Not the most elegant thing to do, but as I was having a bit of a breakdown and there was no one else around to see me so it didn’t really matter.  There was only so much one can person could handle before it became
too
much.  

There were so many of them: Men, women and children alike all crammed into that dusty hall.
 They weren’t even infected.  Maybe a couple were, but not many.  The skeletons were still there, bleached by the humid air over the years, their clothing preserved from the elements by the shelter of the hall.  If they had carried the infection, then there would be no bones left, or at least not nearly as many.

They might have lived!
 

My mind rebelled at the idea.
 Some of them could have been immune, but they didn’t dare to take the risk.  So they chose to die together, huddled in a dark building for all of eternity.  Husbands and wives, friends and neighbours, and even parents and children alike.

The parents
– how could they do that?  How could they murder their own babies?

But it was to spare them the horror of becoming like poor, poor Benny.
 I could understand that.  I couldn't bear knowing my children might end up like that.

But they might have lived!

If I don’t find some way to calm myself down, I am going to lose my peaches
.  That thought made me laugh, but it was a hysterical kind of laugh that did nothing to stop the sobs from wracking my body.  It had been awhile since I'd had a full blown break down, so I suppose I was entitled to one.

I’d seen suicides before, but never so many all at once.
 A lot of people had chosen to take their own lives rather than let the disease run its course.  My own mother did, as did my grandmother.  But I’d never seen so many in one place before.  I was completely overwhelmed.

"
Mew?"  A soft head bonked against my hand; I looked up and found myself staring down into a pair of huge golden eyes, set into a fluffy little tabby face.  The kitten had returned.

How did the animals always know?

***

January
2014

Mushkin purred contentedly in my lap, oblivious to the shaking of my hands as tears rolled silently down my cheeks.
 No, oblivious wasn't the right word.  He wasn't oblivious.  As soon as I started crying, he climbed up into my lap and started purring, rubbing his soft head against my hands until I patted him.  He knew something was wrong.  He always did.

Mum was the first of us to get sick.
 It had started a week ago, with a fever.  When Dad and Skylar failed to arrive, it was like all the strength had drained right out of her and with it had gone her will to live.  She hadn’t let me out of her sight, she was so terrified that she might lose me as well.

It had ended up being just the three of us huddled around the television while the latest updates were read out by an exhausted and frightened news anchorman.

"That man needs a shave," Grandma had commented dryly as we sat together, with her usual irreverent sense of humour.  My parents had always joked that I inherited my sense of humour from her, and they were probably right.  At that moment though, even I hadn’t felt like jokes.  I was watching my mother more than the television.  Once I became aware of how pale she’d become, I became more and more anxious.