The Enduring: Stories of Surviving the Apocalypse (19 page)

I stood up slowly from the table and stuffed the notebook back into my pocket. “And what if I do write the story, Mr. Valles? And what if people do respond, and they risk the journey to this forest to search for your group? What happens to those people?”

“We’ll take them,” Roman Valles said firmly. “If they’re worthy and if they’re willing to contribute and work to the same goal we have set ourselves.”

“And if they won’t?”

“Then they’ll die in the forest, Mr. Culver,” he said bluntly and then turned away. The interview with Roman Valles was over.

Armed men escorted me to the bottom of the exit shaft and I climbed the ladder in stoic silence.  Two more of Valles’ men were waiting for me when I clambered from the dark breach into subdued afternoon light. The soldiers came out of the forest like wraiths, and marched in silence behind me until I had reached my truck.

I started the engine and then, on impulse, wound down the truck’s window. The two soldiers hadn’t moved. They were waiting for me to drive away.

“Tell me something,” I insisted. The air in the truck was like a furnace. Sweat stuck my shirt to my back and ran in trickles down my cheeks.

“What?” one of the men grunted.

“Valles?” I wanted to know. “Is he a good man?”

The two militiamen exchanged glances. One of them spat into the dirt. “He’s a good soldier,” the guy said. “And he’s respected as a leader.”

I put the car in gear and drove slowly away, into an afternoon that was melting slowly into the radiant colors of a sunset. I hadn’t received the answer I wanted, but maybe I had been given the answer I needed. Valles was a good leader… and in a post-apocalyptic world, perhaps strong leadership would one day allow the good men to emerge once more.

* * *

Sandwich, Illinois:

“I can’t find a nice way to say this,” I turned to the woman sitting beside me and looked apologetic. My truck was parked in front of a two-story house in Sandwich, an hour outside of Chicago. I turned off the ignition and glanced out through the windshield before going on. “But from all the survivors I have met who endured the Apocalypse, you – of all people – should have died.”

Debbie Kagan blanched as though the words had stung her. Tears welled in her eyes and she sniffed and bit her lip.

I replayed what I had said in my head and went on quickly. “I don’t mean that you
deserved
to die,” I reached across the seat of the truck’s cab and put a comforting hand on hers. The woman’s fingers were trembling. “I just mean that everyone else I have spoken to about their harrowing tales of the ‘Affliction’ did something to ensure their survival. They had protection, or they had a home that was fortified. Many of them had an escape plan, or a safe-place they were able to escape to. You didn’t. You did nothing. You had nothing in your favor and somehow… incredibly… you survived!”

I shook my head with a slow wonder. Debbie rolled down her window. She was looking at the place that had been her home. The smell of smoke was in the air. Chicago – even after all this time – was still burning. Smoke scarred the far horizon, and on the air was the sweet sickly taint of burning flesh.

The silence on the suburban street was eerie. There was no sound but the cooling tick of the truck’s engine. I got out of the vehicle slowly and turned in a circle. This part of Sandwich was up-market suburbia; neat cookie-cutter homes that looked so similar to each other I wondered how the former residents had remembered which one they owned. Double garages, high-pitched roofs – everything brown brick and grey shingle. Once the lawns here would have been manicured like green carpet. Now the ground was overgrown with weeds and the slush of recent snow and ash. The air was frigid, the gutters running with muddy ice. Perched on the peaked point of a nearby roof, a dozen big black crows watched me with curious fascination.

Several of the neighboring houses had been burned to the ground. They looked like the black stumps of rotting teeth in a once-perfect smile.

“Are you getting out?” I asked gently.

Debbie turned huge horrified eyes on me.

“No.”

“But we had an agreement…”

Debbie was shaking her head. I could see the terror in her face even through the dust and grime of the windshield. “I… I’ve changed my mind,” her voice wavered. “Just take me back. Take me away from here.”

I arched an eyebrow in surprise. “You want me to take you back to the camp?”

That gave her pause. Her mouth hung open for an instant and then it closed like a trap.

I had met this woman at ‘Cage Camp’ – a refugee camp south of Chicago. The camp was a squalor of teeming masses, misery and hardship that had grown like a filthy infestation along the banks of the Kankakee River. It was the home to over twenty-thousand of the pitiless and destitute who had survived the terror of the ‘Affliction’ only to discover that the despair of life in the aftermath was the slow death of starvation and brutal deprivation.

I asked the question again, giving the words an edge of menace. “Do you want to go back to the camp?”

Debbie shook her head. She was a woman in her late forties, or maybe her early fifties with a friendly smile and kindly eyes. She was the kind of lady that drew people to her with her friendliness and empathy. At the camp I had seen her give away the few scraps of food she had to a starving mother and a young child. Debbie was that kind of person – she put others before herself, and thought nothing of it.

Now she was thinking furiously.

I went around to the passenger-side of the truck and leaned through the open window.

“Debbie, come inside with me,” I gentled her. “The ‘Affliction’ is over. There are no more undead. You know that… and you know you won’t survive if you stay at that camp.”

Debbie turned her wide, fearful eyes to me. She was trembling.

I took a breath. “Okay,” I said. “Then think of the others,” I carefully baited the hook with that which I knew she could not resist. “Think of that young mother and her starving child. The ones you gave your food away to. Will they survive another month at the camp? No, they won’t. But you could move back here, Debbie. At least you would be out of the mud and filth and vermin infesting the camp. And maybe you could make it a home for others too. You could save people, Debbie. You could take them into your home. That mother… her starving daughter… If you come inside and tell me your story, I will bring them here. You can save them from death and disease…”

Debbie’s expression changed slowly. Pain came into her eyes. Perhaps it was the sting of injured pride. Maybe it was empathy for the woman and her child. It might have been the dark shadow of her memories.

She pushed open the passenger door of the truck and the hinges groaned in stiff protest. Two of the crows on the nearby rooftop took to lazy flight, circling the air above us like vultures.

Debbie was vertically challenged – a petite woman short in stature, but with the heart of a giant. She wrapped an arm around my waist as if to support trembling legs and together we stood in the driveway to her old home and stared at the building like it was a haunted house from a horror film.

The front door was cracked around the lock and hung ajar on its hinges. The downstairs windows were spotted with dark brown spatters that I knew was dried blood. The upstairs windows were smudged and streaked with fingerprints. The shutters of the blinds were broken. One of the upstairs windows had been smashed.

We went along the pathway to the front door and as we drew closer I felt myself infected with the same superstitious foreboding that radiated like a heat from Debbie’s trembling body. Her grip around my waist became tighter. Our steps became shorter, less certain. I screwed up my resolve.

“The ‘Affliction’ is over,” I said firmly, repeating the words like some kind of mantra. “The undead plague has passed.”

I reached the front door of Debbie’s house and pushed it wide open with an impulsive kick. The door smashed back against the wall behind it and I heard the distinct scamper of feet across a floor. Then the stench hit me like a wave and I recoiled like a man in the face of a fire.

“Jesus!” I gasped.

The stench of death and decay was thick as an unseen mist; a veil of putrification dripping from the walls. I went into the house with one hand clamped over my mouth. Debbie stood on the threshold, torn and uncertain. Finally her fear of remaining alone outside compelled her into the house. We stood together in a small foyer area and slowly I scanned the ground floor interior of the home.

Ahead of where we stood was a living area with a high cabinet against one wall and a sofa below a large window on the opposite exterior wall of the home. Next to the sofa was a fireplace and above it a mantelpiece. The floor was littered with broken shards of glass and fragments of colored porcelain that might once have been decorative plates or maybe cups.

To my right was a long waist-high bench that divided the living area from the kitchen, and beyond the cooking area was a small dining table that faced out to a set of sliding glass doors. The ground floor was open-plan living… and I was grateful for that. I could tell at a glance that the area was uninhabited of anyone, living or otherwise.

That didn’t mean the home was uninhabited. The floor was sprinkled with the dark droppings of animals and birds and there were muddy critter paw prints on the dining table. The sofa had been clawed and slashed in a dozen places, and white whirling clouds of stuffing had been dragged across the floor and used for nests.

The walls in the dining area alcove and the two full-length glass doors looked like a Jackson Pollock painting; spattered and streaked with dried blood that ran in rivulets and splashes into puddles across the floor.

Debbie gasped, and then gaped in white-face horror.

A squirrel scampered across the kitchen counter-top. It froze when it saw us, then scurried back out of sight.

There were papers strewn across the floor, dirt and droppings everywhere. We walked slowly to the foot of the steps that led upstairs. The steps had once been carpeted. Now only threads of it remained. The rest had been gnawed and chewed until unrecognizable. I put my boot on the bottom step and the timber creaked. I heard Debbie hiss a sharp breath of panic.

I went up the stairs.

There were three bedrooms, a laundry closet, and a bathroom on the top floor. The biggest bedroom was at the front of the house and overlooked the suburban street. I stood at the bay window that hung over the driveway and could see my truck directly below where I stood. The skyline beyond the window seeped random spires of grey smoke from dozens of burning homes around the surrounding suburbs.

The sky was steel grey and lowering. Rain was on its way.

I checked the bathroom, and then the remaining bedrooms. There were paperback novels scattered across the floor. For a brief moment I felt a lift of delight. I had not seen a paperback for months. I scoured the debris avidly, but found only romance novels. I left them where they had been thrown.

The house was empty, but the horror of the ‘Affliction’ remained. It was on the walls and in the air. It was the stench of decay and fear. It was the lingering menace of death.

I went back down the stairs. Debbie had not moved. She saw me coming and relaxed visibly. Then she turned her head slowly back to the devastated remains of her home like a survivor of a tornado who had been left to pick through the debris of her memories.

“The house is empty,” I assured her. “And I have some basic tools in the back of my truck – enough to fix the door lock and board over the broken upstairs window. If you want to, I can’t see why you couldn’t live here again.”

Debbie looked aghast. “It’s a mess.”

I shrugged my shoulders. “Think of it as a ‘fixer-upper’,” I tried a little levity. Debbie didn’t laugh, and I decided it was time to start the interview.

I took the notebook from my pocket and went round the countertop into the kitchen. A pantry door was open and in a dark corner I could see some kind of vermin nest. I cleared away some space from the kitchen bench and when I looked up, ready, Debbie was standing in the living room, trying to piece together shards of porcelain as though she could make the thing whole again.

“What kind of work did you do before the Apocalypse?” I asked.

Debbie looked up, startled. It was as if she had forgotten I was there. She frowned. “Accounting,” she said.

“Is that where you were when you heard about the spread of the ‘Affliction’? At work?”

“No,” Debbie set the two shards of broken plate down carefully and wiped the dust from her fingertips on her slacks. She looked close to sad tears. “I was asleep. The alarm went off at 6 a.m. I heard a news report on the radio.”

“What did you do?”

Debbie looked wistful and tired. “At first I thought it was a prank, but there was something very fearful in the announcer’s voice. If it was acting, it was superb… and the Chicago disc-jockeys aren’t that good. I got dressed and ran downstairs to the television. On the news, the world seemed to be on fire.”

“So, tell me what you did –
for the record?”

Debbie and I had already talked about the events surrounding her survival at Cage Camp. It was why I had brought her to her home to conduct the interview. I wanted to see for myself the environment she had been in.