Authors: Brad Manuel
Tags: #Literature & Fiction, #Action & Adventure, #Science Fiction & Fantasy, #Science Fiction, #Post-Apocalyptic, #Teen & Young Adult
The Last Tribe
The
Last Tribe
Brad
Manuel
Text
copyright © 2014 Brad W. Manuel
All
Rights Reserved
All
thanks to my wife for her love, unwavering confidence, editing, and support.
“I don’t feel good.” Jay stood in
the doorway of the bedroom. His face was red, flushed with a fever, and his
hair was stuck to his forehead with sweat. He wore a white short-sleeved
pajama shirt with teal sleeves. A brown baseball mitt was in the center of his
shirt catching an oversized baseball. His orange pajama shorts were from a
different set. Jay seldom matched his clothes. The white shirt and orange
pants were soaked with sweat, clinging to his thin five year old frame.
Todd and Emily were packing to leave
Raleigh. It was early in the morning, 6am. The sun was already up. Emily put
her arm around Jay, and gave him some soothing words. She talked to him about
going to the couch downstairs, and watching a movie. Jay nodded. Todd looked
at the television in their room. It showed an exodus, a traffic jam of cars
fleeing their city. Dozens of news helicopters cast black shadows on the
ground while filming the government checkpoints on every road. Workers in
yellow hazmat suits examined people before letting cars pass.
Todd walked downstairs. He told Jay
to feel better, and went into the kitchen to pour his son a dose of cherry flavored
medicine to curb his fever and make him comfortable. Emily tucked Jay into a
snuggly bed of blankets and pillows on the couch in front of their living room
television. She checked the kids’ networks for cartoons, but even those
channels showed images of cars stuck in traffic with the scroll “Residents Flee
Raleigh, North Carolina.” Emily switched to their DVR recordings and started
a movie.
Todd wanted to be one of the cars
being filmed on the road. His plan was ruined. Jay was sick. They would not
make it through the checkpoints out of Raleigh. The helicopters showed
infected people being ushered to government vehicles, separated from their
families.
Todd would not risk Jay being taken
from them.
He handed Emily the red syrupy
medicine before stepping outside onto their deck. Todd was in a daze. He sat
down on the extra wide steps their contractor built two summers before. The
steps were stadium sized, and took up an entire corner. They flowed into the
yard, allowing anyone to sit on the steps comfortably. The contractor sold
them on the idea of a “party deck,” with the stairs doubling as extra seating
for guests.
Todd and Emily watched the kids
play in the yard from the steps. The kids ate their lunch on them too. It was
a great deck.
He heard the door open and close.
Emily sat next to him, and put her arm around him, the same way she soothed
their son a few minutes ago. “What now?” She whispered.
“I guess we wait.” He told her as she
rested her head on his shoulder. “And hope.”
Matthew Boone, Todd’s neighbor, was
a road warrior salesman for a technology company. Boone travelled everywhere
and all the time. The Boone children were similar in age to Todd’s, and played
together almost every day. Two weeks ago the Boones came down with a summer
flu. They had fevers, were lethargic, and had no appetite. It was not
unusual to have a flu in the summer, but after what happened in Sao Paulo,
Brazil, people were on edge.
Matthew Boone died three days ago.
The people in the yellow Hazmat
suits removed the rest of the Boone bodies yesterday, one mother and four
children.
The Boones were part of a growing
number of dead in Raleigh, more than 1,500 bodies in three days. Panic was
everywhere. People fled the city. Todd and Emily planned to take their two
children to New Hampshire, riding out the epidemic at their family cottage.
Now that Jay was sick, they needed a new plan.
“You don’t think we can get through?”
Emily asked her husband. They began to sweat under the strong Carolina sun.
It was already 80 degrees at 6:15 in the morning.
“You saw the T.V. They have
checkpoints on every road. If you’re sick, they want you to stay in Raleigh.
It’s not a recommendation. They are going to keep us here, or worse, they’ll
take Jay and send us away.” Todd shut his eyes. “Dammit.” They sat on the
steps together trying to make sense out of their situation.
He turned and looked at his wife.
“How much food do we have?”
“Why?”
“How much food do we have? The
stores are closed, there won’t be any more food coming into Raleigh. We need
to make sure we have enough to last a few weeks, maybe a few months. Let’s
take an inventory.” Todd got up. “I’m not going to die, and neither are you
or the kids. Let’s plan on making it through this plague, whatever it is. The
first thing we need to do is make sure we have food.”
Two hours later Emily and Todd
stood in the kitchen with all of their food categorized on the counters and
table. They had short term perishables and long term non-perishables. Todd
assumed the power would go off if enough people left Raleigh. He suggested
they eat everything in the fridge immediately.
“Meals are going to get smaller and
more interesting. We waste nothing. If the kids don’t finish something, it
gets bagged and they have it at the next meal, or for a snack. Same goes for
us.” Todd paused. “I’m going to sneak over to the Boone’s later and see what
they have in the fridge. I’ll go behind the houses, not on the street.”
“Are you crazy? Why are you going
to steal their food?”
“They’re dead, Emily, they aren’t
going to eat it. If this gets any worse, I’m going to steal everyone’s food,
but I’ll start with the Boone’s before someone else gets the same idea.” Todd
surveyed the counter and looked at Emily. “This is bad. Look at the news
reports out of Brazil, and China, and Germany, and Australia. This isn’t a
passing flu that happened to kill our friends. We’re in it, and the best way
to survive is to plan to survive.”
Todd took Emily’s trembling hands.
She was scared, and he could see despair in her eyes.
“We have to plan to survive, and our
first step is to get as much food as we can. The Boones are gone. I’m taking
their food, today. We have two rain barrels. I’ll clean them out, sanitize
them with bleach, and we can collect rain water.”
“You really think we’re okay?”
Emily asked hopefully.
“I have to, and so do you.”
The last neighbors in their cul de
sac, the Williams, pulled out at noon. Todd waited an hour before he walked
behind the two houses between his home and the Boone’s. There were woods in
each backyard running for fifty to one hundred yards, keeping Todd well hidden
from the main road. He heard cars honking and frustrated drivers screaming, panicked
and impatient people stuck in traffic.
It was oppressively hot, as North
Carolina is every July. Todd was dripping by the time he arrived at the
Boone’s sliding glass backdoor. He cupped his hands and peaked through the
glass, spying a dark kitchen and apparently empty house. His sweaty hands and
nose left an odd print on the clean glass, like a comma inside of parenthesis.
He wondered if the symbol represented something, if teens used it on their
phones to signify a sweaty burglar or peeping tom.
Todd tried to slide the door. It
was locked.
“So much for easy.” He mumbled.
Todd walked off the deck and around the house to a side door leading into the
garage. It was also locked. He paused, took a deep breath and walked as
casually as he could to the front door. He turned the handle and went inside.
The hazmat people had left the door unlocked after removing the bodies.
Todd shut the door quickly. Instinctively
he called out, “hello?” He waited a second, but there was no response.
“Hello?” He yelled again loudly.
The house was empty. Todd moved
down a hallway to the kitchen and went to work. He had been in the Boone’s
house for a few parties over the years, but he was not completely familiar with
their layout. He was going to have to search for the food stores.
Like most houses built in the
neighborhood, the Boone’s kitchen included a walk-in pantry. Todd stacked the
food next to the sliding glass back door. He would use one of his kid’s wagons
to retrieve the supplies after the sun went down, moving them under the cover
of darkness.
Todd paused again. “Hello?” He
called out. He could not shake the feeling that someone else was in the house.
It was just a feeling. He was alone. The Boones were dead. No one was on
their street. Everyone was gone. He ignored the eerie feelings and began to
search through the kitchen for food not kept in the pantry. He opened the
fridge. “Let’s see what we have here…”
A white van pulled into the
cul-de-sac and parked. Four people in yellow Hazmat suits got out of the vehicle.
They split up and worked in pairs, two people approaching each house. One of
the people carried a clipboard, the other an automatic weapon.
The rifleman stood guard as the
clipboard person knocked on the front door. If no one answered, the case in
all four of the other houses on the street, the clipboard person walked to the
top of the house’s driveway touching the street and spray painted a black
symbol before moving to the next residence.
Todd watched the van from his
upstairs bedroom window. He saw the four people split into pairs and begin
their door to door search on the other side of the street. He nodded to Emily,
and she took Brian, their oldest son, to the attic. Jay was asleep in his bedroom.
Todd followed his wife and son.
The attic was unfinished and
sweltering hot, the temperature increased as Todd trudged up the stairs. He
walked to the lone window overlooking the driveway where he could watch the
front doors of the two houses next to him. After a few minutes he saw the
yellow puffy suits approaching the front of each home.
“They look like teletubbies. You
remember teletubbies?” Todd asked Emily.
“Not the time.” She said, trying
to entertain Brian and keep his mind off the uncomfortable room. “And why are
we up here again?”
The four yellow suited people met
at Todd’s house, the fifth on the street. One of them walked up the steps and
rang the doorbell. Todd opened the front door. He was red faced and sweating
from his time in the attic. The yellow suit stepped back quickly, shocked to
find a person at home and answering the door. The two armed people gripped
their rifles in a ready position.
“Sir, are you aware there is a
mandatory evacuation of Raleigh? You need to leave.” Todd was unable to
determine the sex of the people until now. An elderly woman spoke to him
through a clear plastic face shield. She looked hot and uncomfortable, her face
was flushed and her forehead glistened.
“My son is sick.” Todd told them
solemnly. “He has…”
The woman cut him off, raising her
arm into the air and showing her palm. “We need to see him.”
“Please, come in, help us if you
can.” Todd pleaded.
The woman took another step away,
backing down the stairs. “Just bring your son to the door, and put this in his
mouth.” She tossed him a white box with a thermometer. “Is there anyone else
home?” The woman looked at her clipboard. Todd guessed it was a census
description. “Your wife and other child?”
“Do you need to see them too?”
Todd tried to act lethargic and groggy.
“We need to see everyone.” The
woman was not polite.
Todd shut the glass storm door and
went inside to get his family. He walked slowly and deliberately to the top of
the stairs, knowing the woman and the three other people were watching him. He
turned left and opened the attic door. “Emily, you need to come down and stand
in the doorway.”
“I’m dripping from head to toe. It’s
a sauna up here.” She came down the attic stairs with their seven year old. Mother
and child were sweating and red faced.
“I’ll get Jay.” Todd went into
Jay’s room and lifted his son. Jay was suffering through an actual bought of
the flu, one Todd hoped was a benign version rather than the one that killed
the Boones. Jay continued to sleep. He was flushed, and soaking from night
sweats. Todd put the thermometer in his mouth, and carried him down the
stairs. Sweaty Brian and Emily followed.
The Hazmat woman stood in the
doorway, observing everything through the glass storm door. When she saw Todd
and the three seemingly ill people, she backed down the front steps and into
the yard.
Todd turned the handle and pushed
the front door open with Jay’s feet. “Please, what should I do? Our neighbors
died a few days ago. Does he have it?” Todd was a horrible actor, but the
situation was so real the four yellow suits did not realize the ruse.
The clipboard people spoke to each as
they wrote. “This area is supposed to be cleared. I’m not a doctor, I don’t
get paid to deal with this stuff.” The other hazmat person was upset to find
the Dixons home.
“Have you had any contact with the
Boone family in the last month?” The woman asked Todd.
“Yes, a lot, Jay played with them
almost every day. Why? Is that bad? Does he have it?” Todd took a step
forward. The men with rifles pointed the guns toward him.
“Why didn’t you call the mandatory
medical hotline?” The other person asked. Part of the television scroll below
the videos of Raleigh was a phone number to self report fevers and other flu
like symptoms.
“I don’t know what you’re…” Todd
continued his lie.
“Sir, stay on your porch. You are
officially quarantined. I am going to mark your house as such. Do not leave
your residence or attempt to leave Raleigh. Do you understand?”
“I, I do. Can’t you help us?
Can’t you help my son?” Todd took a step back towards his house.
“A medical team will be through
soon.” The woman pointed to the van, motioning the guards and her associate to
go back to it.
“Don’t you want the thermometer?”
Todd asked, begging her for help.
“Please stay in your house. Your
actions may save the rest of us.” She started towards the van before stopping
and walking back to Todd. “Mr. Dixon? God bless you and your family. Good
luck.” Her voice was kind and full of sympathy.
Behind her, the other clipboard
person was arguing with the riflemen. “I don’t have orange paint, I’m not a
doctor. They only gave me black paint. What the hell am I supposed to do?
They aren’t dead or gone.”
The woman approached the end of the
driveway, and Todd saw her head shake back and forth.
The four people got in their van
and drove to the next cul-de-sac. Todd stood on the front porch holding Jay
until the van left his street. He looked at the four other driveways in his
cul-de-sac. Three of the driveways had black “V’s”, probably indicating
“vacant.” The new paint ran down the slopes. The Boone’s driveway had two
symbols, the first was an orange circle with a line, given to them after a
visit from government health officials. Painted over that symbol two days ago,
when their bodies were removed, was a black circle with a line.
Todd went inside. He carried Jay to
his bedroom, and kissed him on the forehead, “feel better buddy.” Car horns continued
in the distance as the last residents of Raleigh sat on nearby roads, waiting
to join the slow moving river of fleeing cars on the highway.
Todd came downstairs and into the
kitchen to speak with Emily and Brian. “Well,” he told them. “It looks like
they bought it.”
The Boone’s, warehouse shoppers and
a family of six, tripled Todd and Emily’s food inventory. Cases sat on the
floor as Emily decided how and where to store the excess.
Todd’s phone rang. His brother
Hank’s picture flashed on the screen.
“What the hell is happening down
there?” Todd heard screaming from the cell before he could bring the phone to
his ear.
“Hey.” Todd said. “I don’t know.
Jay is sick.”
Hank was silent.
“I know,” Todd acknowledged the
gravity of the situation, “but I think it’s just the flu, not the bad flu, the
real flu. Maybe I’m delusional. I gotta believe, right?”
“Jesus.” Was all Hank could
muster.
“Seriously, I think he’s going to
be fine.” Todd replayed the government interaction from the morning. “I don’t
know why, I just don’t trust the disease people right now. This thing killed
my neighbors in a week, and there is still a message to be calm. Calm is not
an option.”
“What are you going to do?” Hank
was a world away in Dayton, Ohio. There were no confirmed cases in the U.S.
outside of Raleigh. The government was praising itself for containing the
disease.
“I’m going to spray paint our driveway
with a symbol that says we’re dead. We are loading up on food, and laying
low. This is going to go one of two ways for me. Either Jay is fine, or the
four of us will be dead very soon.”
“Jesus.” Hank muttered again. “What
do you mean spray paint your driveway? The girls want to stay home from
school, and I’m telling them it’s okay.”
“Hank, do me a favor. Emily and I
are turning off our phones. We are going to play possum for a few weeks.
Please relay our status to the family. I am leaning towards paranoia right
now.”
“Sure, Jesus, anything.”
“And Hank?” Todd said before
turning off his phone.
“Yeah?”
“Keep your girls home from school.”