The Enduring: Stories of Surviving the Apocalypse (14 page)

“What happened?”

Jill let out a long shutter of breath and tried to smile. She blinked away unshed tears and sniffed. “The Army was very efficient,” she said. “There were hundreds of them, swarming up and down the corridors. I thought the helicopters were to airlift us out, but they weren’t; they were to support the perimeter the Army was defending. So we were evacuated downstairs – all the kids and teachers taken in long organized lines and put onto trucks. When the trucks were filled, we waited with our kids until other helicopters arrived. These were big transports. They landed on the school grounds and I led my students to the nearest one. There were soldiers on either side of us with their weapons drawn. The sound of the rotors was deafening, the wind of their downdraft adding to the chaos and confusion.”

“But everyone was evacuated, right?”

“Yes,” Jill said. “Every single student and teacher made it to safety before the Army pulled out of South Lyon, and the ‘Afflicted’ swept through destroying everything in their path.”

It had been a monumental military effort – a massive evacuation in the face of a swarming enemy, and all – apparently – executed with remarkable precision and efficiency. In some quarters, the military leadership had been criticized in the aftermath of the contagion. Well here in Detroit, the armed forces had done themselves proud.

Jill and I walked slowly back down the abandoned corridor, leaving the classroom and her hellish memories behind. On the way down the staircase it occurred to me suddenly that this young woman had lost everything in the Apocalypse. She had come to work and never had the time to retrieve even a keepsake from her home.

“That’s not true,” Jill said with a wisp of a smile. “I had family photos and my father’s program in my classroom. It includes pictures of my niece and four nephews, a family photo and some other pictures that mean a lot to me.

“My dad’s program was created by the funeral home. It’s very unique and has pictures of him from throughout his life…I have them still. They’re with me always.”

I smiled a rare happy smile.

Jill Blasy had proven herself calm and competent in the face of a crisis, and then endured the aftermath of those terrible days with steadfast resolve and a determination not to succumb to the fear that had infused us all.

Her dad had been a legendary hockey and softball coach – instilling discipline and fortitude into the young men and women who were mentored by him. I felt sure the great man would have been proud of her.

* * *

Siloam Springs, Arkansas:

The man standing by the chain wire fence looked at me suspiciously, and hefted the shovel he was holding in a thinly-veiled threat. He was a young guy, broad across the shoulders, his chest and forearms burned brown by the Arkansas sun. His face was dusted with grey concrete powder and his hands heavily calloused. He narrowed his eyes as I approached warily. When I was still twenty feet away, I waved a greeting and called out.

“I’m here to meet Larry Phelps. Is he around?”

“You mean Priest?”

“Phelps,” I said again.

“Who the fuck are you?” the young man was wary, bristling on the verge of open hostility. Behind the unfinished wire fence, I could see a cluster of other men and women talking with animated gestures in the middle of a quiet suburban street. None of the people were looking in our direction.

“My name is Culver,” I said. “I’m a writer.”

“Oh yeah?” the guy with the shovel seemed unimpressed. “Only writer I ever heard of was Tom Clancy. Do you write like him?”

“No. I’m a reporter.”

The man seemed unimpressed. He glanced over his shoulder. The discussion in the middle of the road was becoming louder, and voices were raised. He looked back at me. “Wait here,” he said, and buried the blade of the spade into the earth at his feet.

The guy turned and strode back to where the impromptu meeting was taking place. Heads turned in my direction. The guy pointed. From out of the group, a man in his forties or fifties came striding towards me with one hand extended and the hint of a welcoming smile showing through the grime and sweat that masked his face.

“You’re Culver?” the man asked. He had thinning black hair and the scruff of a white beard and moustache that had been trimmed around his mouth. He snatched off his glasses and studied my face carefully.

“Yes,” I said and shook hands.

“You’re Larry Phelps?”

“Yes.”

I indicated the guy that had greeted me. “He called you Priest.”

Larry smiled a little. “It’s a nickname,” he said. “Some people call me Priest because I performed wedding ceremonies at the Castle of Muskogee before the Apocalypse.”

I nodded. Larry wiped the sweat from his brow on the sleeve of the t-shirt he was wearing. It was stained with dirt and several sizes too large for his frame. It hung from his shoulders like a voluminous tent. His pants were tied around his waist with a length of rope. I was curious. The other people on the street were better dressed although they too were grimy with the dirt of hard toil. Larry must have caught my puzzled expression.

He held his arms wide, like he was offering himself up for inspection. “The clothes, right?”

I nodded, wanting to be polite, but not really knowing how. “You look like a hobo,” I said as kindly as I could.

Larry Phelps laughed.

“I wear these like a badge of honor,” he said, lowering his voice a little. “Before the ‘Affliction’ swept across the country, I was a big man, Mr. Culver. Overweight. Now…”

Now Larry Phelps was solid, the excess burned away by back-breaking work under the sun, and perhaps the mere deprivations of food supplies that were part of America’s struggle to survive. “These are my work clothes… and there is a lot of work to be done.”

He slapped me on the shoulder, and his face – for just a moment – broke out into a wide affable smile. He drew me towards the others who were waiting in the middle of the road, and the circle opened up reluctantly: the awkward way that a close-knit community begrudgingly accepts someone new to their group.

Larry introduced me to a blur of faces and names that I will never remember. The people were largely aged in their thirties and forties – couples who had forged a friendship through the arduous struggle to survive in a post-apocalyptic world filled with danger and hardships. I shook hands with everyone and then the group gradually began to break apart as each of them returned to the tasks they had been allocated. Finally it was just Larry Phelps, standing in the middle of a quiet suburban street, and me.

“What’s going on here?” I asked, turning myself in a slow circle and reaching into my pocket for my notebook at the same time. The site looked a little like a bush land estate of new homes, nestled beyond the outskirts of Siloam Springs.

“We’re building a compound,” Larry made a wide sweeping gesture with his arms that encompassed several homes on each side of the quiet, isolated street. “A fence that will encircle these three homes, and those three homes,” he turned to include houses on each side of the road. “With a gate at the end of the street.”

I frowned, trying to visualize the plan. Already I could see high wire fence running behind the three houses on the opposite side of the street, and there was more fence that had been erected to barricade off one end of the road. “So when it’s finished, these six houses will be isolated?”

“Fenced off,” Larry said precisely. “With a gate across the road. No one gets in and no one gets out… unless we want them to.”

I walked slowly between two of the homes. At the rear of each building the high chain link fence ran in a straight line, each post concreted deeply into the ground. The posts and wire looked brand new.

“Which house is yours?” I asked.

“None of them,” Larry said.

I did a double-take and stared into the man’s face. “What do you mean?”

He shrugged his shoulders. “These homes were all abandoned when the ‘Affliction’ came through Arkansas,” he explained. “No one came back for them… so we took them.”

“What about your own home?”

“It was on the other side of town,” Larry said. “The whole suburb was burned down when the Army fought back against the ‘Afflicted’. We went back there about six months ago. There’s nothing left – nothing at all that could be salvaged.”

“So you just chose these houses?”

“Yes,” Larry said simply. “We selected them because of their isolated location… and we took them.” He shrugged his shoulders again innocently. “They were abandoned, Mr. Culver. The owners aren’t coming back… if they’re even alive.”

I nodded, and then thought back to the moment when I met the group of people who were the basis of this new community. “I only counted five families.”

“Yes, that’s right. There is a home for each family, and one house spare.”

“Are you expecting someone else to join you?”

“No,” Larry’s face turned dark suddenly. “We don’t want anyone else. We have everyone we need to start again.”

“Then why an extra house?”

“When we have the fence finished and the gate across the road, we will convert one of the houses into a church, a meeting place… somewhere to store food supplies, water and weapons.”

I found this all quite fascinating and I spent several minutes writing in my notepad, and then committing the plan of the compound to a sketched map so I would recall the details later. When I had finished, I looked up and found Larry still watching me, his expression unfathomable. He looked like he was waiting patiently for me to ask him questions, the way traditional reporters interviewed people. I wasn’t really that kind of writer. Observation often told me a lot more than the people themselves could.

“Did you stay in Siloam Springs throughout the Apocalypse?” I asked dutifully.

“Hell no!” his voice almost sounded scandalized. “The whole place was on fire, and the Air Force was flying bombing missions right through this part of the world at the height of the ‘Affliction’.” He shook his head. “No. We got the hell out of town as soon as we could.”

“And went where?”

“My in-law’s house,” Larry said. “It’s in the backwoods of Northwest Arkansas. It’s a good hour drive from here.”

“The ‘Affliction’ never reached you?”

“Not way out there,” the man’s expression became a mixture of a smile and a grimace. “We spent a whole year in the backwoods, waiting for the dust to settle, listening to any of the news reports we could pick up on the radio. We only came back to Siloam Springs at the end of winter.”

“And then found this place?”

“Yes. After some searching…”

I jotted more notes and then threw a gesture at the other people working around the houses within the compound. “What about these other families? How did you select them?”

“They’re friends… former neighbors,” Larry’s expression became serious. “They’re good people – hard workers. They’re people that can be trusted. And right now, trust and hard work are all that’s stopping what’s left of America sliding into more chaos.”

I said nothing. Larry’s view of the world was reduced to the space around him. I had crisscrossed the ruins of America writing interviews. I had seen little of the trust Larry had spoken of. Beyond his isolated view, the nation was on its knees, divided, still smoldering.

Fractured.

But I didn’t tell Larry that. He was almost evangelical in his determination to rebuild this little corner of America – to lift it up out of the ashes and begin again with a small community of hardy supporters who wanted nothing more than to sustain and survive the aftermath of the Apocalypse in peace and simple prosperity. I admired his vision. I wished I had not been so cynical, so that I too could have been swept up in the man’s willful determination to endure.

We walked a slow circuit of the compound, and Larry pointed out the areas of ground behind each house that were already being carefully cultivated and nurtured into vegetable gardens. He was justifiably proud of the little community’s accomplishments.

“We had one shot at a raiding mission into Siloam Springs,” he recalled when we were back near the site for the gateposts. “That was soon after we found this place and decided to make it our new home. We took four trucks into town. The city is in ruins. The gangs that followed in the vacuum had looted whatever the Army hadn’t already destroyed as they fought against the ‘Afflicted’. The city has become a dark and dangerous place. We knew we had to risk one trip under the cover of night… but only one trip.”

“Like a covert smash and grab?”

Larry almost laughed. Perhaps the memories of that night forestalled him.

He nodded his head. “We took all the fencing wire, posts and concrete we could load up. We also took bags of seeds for the garden and any canned food we could find. There wasn’t much. The gangs had been there well before us. The building supplies were easy – no one was thinking about a future. Survival for everyone else was a minute-by-minute proposition.”

“So that’s how you got everything you needed to start here?”

“Yes.”

I narrowed my eyes. “Have you, or any of the others in the community ever been back into Siloam Springs?”