The Enduring: Stories of Surviving the Apocalypse (7 page)

“So you let him inside?”

“No,” Kate shook her head like I was crazy. “I pulled the door open and he was screaming that the ‘Afflicted’ were coming. He was bleeding and there was a terrible gash on one of his forearms.”

“What did you do?”

“I called Mike downstairs. He checked the news on the internet.”

“That wasn’t the first you heard of the Apocalypse – was it?”

“No,” Kate’s tone turned scornful. “We get the news, Mr. Culver – even all the way up here in Maine. We knew what was happening. We had been following the updates for days. We just never thought it would spread this far, or into Canada. We thought we were safe.”

“What happened when you realized that Maine was being overrun? Where did you flee to?”

Again Kate’s face went through a myriad of expressions; puzzlement, confusion and then finally settled into bemusement.

“We didn’t flee anywhere, Mr. Culver,” her voice lifted into a lilt of mocking derision. “We stayed right here. We defended our home.”

“Just you, your husband and your two teenage children?”

Kate nodded her head. “My husband is a retired police officer for the city of Waterville. He is also retired Navy; a sonar man and a diver on a nuclear submarine for six years. He knows how to fight and make it hurt against the living. The undead were easier.”

I stood back from Kate a little to give myself some time and space to process this. The Sellar home was the only one standing on the entire block – in the entire suburb, for that matter. They had lost their young daughter, Danni, but had fought off the ‘Afflicted’. All this without any apparent preparation, stockpile of weapons or food supplies.

It was almost unbelievable.

“Is your husband home?” I asked Kate. “I’d like to meet him.”

She shook her head. “I don’t expect him back until sometime tomorrow,” she explained. “He left with John, my son, at sunrise. They’ve gone hunting.”

I was disappointed. Mike Sellar sounded like a formidable character.

I turned on my heel and went back through the house, out the front door, and stood on the sidewalk, trying to see the Sellar home from an objective viewpoint. The home was unremarkable. The doors were not reinforced. The windows at the front and side of the home were unusually high off the ground but as I walked around to the back of the property I saw two full size windows of glass panes that were unbroken. There was only a front and back exit to the home. I stood with my hands on my hips, utterly disbelieving. Kate came out through the rear door of the house and stood beside me.

“Did you have guns in the home?” I scratched my head.

Kate almost laughed. “All Mainers are gun owners, Mr. Culver,” she said elusively. “We’re no exception.”

I nodded. “So you had guns and what? Knives?”

“Yes.”

“Did you need to use the knives?”

“No.”

Kate was being deliberately vague suddenly, keeping the details of her family’s remarkable tale of survival shrouded in mystery. I went back to the side of the house and saw black scorch marks on the walls where fire had licked at the siding but never caught hold. “Okay,” I shrugged in defeat. I could see no apparent reasoning why this Maine family had survived the ravages of the ‘Affliction’ when so many others had not. “Then please tell me how you did it. How did you and your husband protect your kids and keep your home safe?”

Kate took my notepad out of my hand and flipped through the sheath of pages until she found a blank space. She wrote in the book, then tore a separate page out and wrote something else. I looked down at the notebook.

There were just three letters, capitalized.

‘DFL’.

I looked up at Kate, perplexed. “DFL? What does that mean? Is it a code – something military?”

Kate said nothing. She finished writing the note on the page she had torn from my book and then stuffed the piece of paper deep into the pocket of the pants she wore.

“Are you hungry, Mr. Culver?” she changed the subject. “We have a couple of tins of tomatoes in the cupboard.”

I followed Kate back inside the house, frustrated. She opened the tins of tomato and poured them into a saucepan. On the sink was a tarnished gas burner. She lit the gas and heated up the meager meal.

We sat at the table together and ate in silence. Two of the cats came from the shadows, winding themselves around my legs, purring. Kate applied herself to her food with studious dedication. She didn’t once look up at me until her fork was clattering on the bottom of her plate. “Better?”

I nodded. “Yes. Thanks.” I appreciated the hospitality. It was just two cans of tomatoes, but in a world of food shortages it was a veritable banquet. I forgave Kate some of her frustrating obstruction for just a few minutes. I sensed she was a kind and decent person. I sensed she loved her family and her town. Maybe she was being vague because I was an outsider. Perhaps that’s how Mainers did things; kept their secrets close to their chests.

My instincts told me I would learn little else from continuing the interview.

I glanced out through the window. It was still morning. I sat back in the chair, weary from the long drive north to Maine and reluctant to start back south with only half an interview.

Kate was watching me from across the table with a veiled expression on her face. She would have made a fine poker player.

“What else would you like to know?” she clasped her hands in front of her and set them on the tabletop like an attentive student in a classroom.

“Apart from how you survived?”

Kate inclined her head.

I thought for a moment and then threw out a question without any expectation of an answer. “Did the ‘Afflicted’ actually reach your home? Did you come in contact with any of the undead?”

“Yes,” Kate nodded. She snatched off her glasses and polished the lenses on the tail of her shirt. She was frowning. She set the spectacles back on the end of her nose and sighed.

“It was on that first day – the day that Danni was run over and killed,” her voice suddenly became dread filled. “They came in the afternoon – a horde of them – a mass of wild bodies moving without co-ordination, rampaging down the street.”

“How many?”

Kate shrugged and shook her head. “I don’t know. Twenty? Maybe thirty? They were shrieking, covered in filth and gore and blood. They were disfigured, bleeding from wounds or dragging broken limbs.”

“And they came to the house?” suddenly the world seemed very hushed. Kate stared at me from across the table.

“No,” she said. “Further along the road, a car pulled out of the driveway from one of the houses. It reversed in a screech of rubber and smoke, and then hurtled towards the intersection. It crashed into the ‘Afflicted’. I saw several of them thrown over the hood of the car, one went under the wheels.”

“It was a neighbor driving?”

“With his family,” Kate nodded and clarified. “I don’t know who they were. They had only moved to Waterville a few weeks before the ‘Affliction’ began to spread. The car went up onto the sidewalk and then crashed into the front yard of a house on the corner. The undead went after it. They were baying like wild animals, thrashing to get to the people inside the vehicle.”

“What did you do?”

“Mike had his hunting rifle,” Kate made a pained face. She was uncomfortable talking about this. I could see the tension creep into her body, starting with her hands and tightening in her shoulders. I sat back in the chair and lowered my voice.

“Did he go outside?”

“No, he stayed upstairs. From one of the bedroom windows he had a view of the whole road. We watched the ‘Afflicted’ drag the people in that car out through the smashed windows and the broken windshield. They were screaming, but I only know that because I saw their terrified faces. The sound of the undead was louder. And over the top of all the noise was the crash of houses burning, explosions… the chaos and clamor of Armageddon.”

“What happened after the family was attacked?” I nudged Kate carefully. She was on the verge of falling silent again. I knew if she did, the interview would be over. She stared at me for a long moment, then began to murmur.

“They killed the people in the car – dismembered them. They tore the arms and legs from the bodies and feasted on their guts,” Kate’s voice was like the whisper of someone sitting around a campfire, reciting a horror story: it was hushed, yet filled with the agony of the telling. “Mike had them in his sights. Each time one of the ‘Afflicted’ turned and looked towards our house, he shot them.”

“And they never reacted?”

“There was too much noise,” Kate breathed in relief. “It was like a war zone. He killed three of them with head shots. They never knew where the firing came from.”

“And then…?”

Kate pushed her chair back and stood up slowly from the table. She carried the plates across to the sink and wiped her hands carefully on a dishcloth. “And then they just went away, Mr. Culver,” she said in a steady voice, like suddenly she could breathe again. “Something drew their attention – it might have been another car, or maybe one of the explosions. They went back to the intersection and disappeared behind the smoke and wreckage of all these burning houses.”

“Was that the last you saw of the ‘Afflicted’, Kate?”

“Yes. In a few days the fires stopped burning and the smoke became just a black smudge on the skyline. The Apocalypse swept over us like a wildfire. We never saw any more infected. We started to rebuild.”

When the interview was over I went out through the front door and stood on the sidewalk again, imagining the scene on that day the ‘Affliction’ came to this sleepy Maine suburb. I could see it all in my mind’s-eye: the car screeching out from a garage, the collision… the ‘Afflicted’ swarming all over the vehicle, tearing at the terrified people inside.

I climbed wearily behind the wheel and started the engine. Kate came out through the front door, waving her hand for me to wait. She reached the driver’s side door and smiled down at me. “Here,” she handed me the piece of paper she had torn from my notebook and had folded into the pocket of her pants. “Here’s your answer, Mr. Culver. This is how we survived the Apocalypse. I hope it helps you with your interview.”

I tucked the piece of paper into my shirt pocket, waved goodbye and drove to the end of the street, past the burned out shell of a vehicle crashed against a power pole. I didn’t look back.

When I got around the corner I stopped the car in the middle of the road, left the engine idling, and reached into my pocket for the piece of paper Kate Sellar had handed me, my curiosity burning like a fire.

She had written just three words.

Dumb.

Fucking.

Luck.

At the bottom of the page she had drawn a smiley face.

I stared at the piece of paper for a long time, shaking my head with slow wonder. I had travelled the length and breadth of America searching for answers – trying to understand those indomitable characteristics that separated those who had survived the ‘Affliction’ from the many, many millions who had perished. Each person’s story I had heard had been a tale of painstaking preparation or determination – quiet stoic heroism in the face of impossible odds. Now, I had another intangible factor to ponder.

Some people had just been dumb fucking lucky.

* * *

Laurel Fork, Virginia:

Hard eyes: a hard man.

Mike Jackson greeted me with a grunt, a shake of the hand – and then turned his head away, staring out across the tree-studded land that surrounded us.

He had his balled fists thrust deep into the pockets of his jacket, his heavy jaw set in a determined thrust, his chin and cheeks stubbled with a couple of days growth. He said nothing more, and I spent a couple of moments taking in the view of the Virginia countryside, sneaking glances at him from out of the corner of my eye. He was a man in his late forties, his hair brown turning grey, cropped close to his skull. His eyes were set in a web of fine wrinkles, his face tanned to the color of mahogany.

We stayed that way – standing in utter silence – until it became almost awkward. I felt unwelcome; like a stranger who had encroached on some private place that was somehow sacred.

I drew a deep breath, kicked my feet around in the dead grass.

“How much land do you have here?” I made a wide sweeping gesture with the flat of my hand.

Mike Jackson turned his head and stared at me for a full five seconds, his eyes narrowed warily before he finally answered.

“Twenty-one acres,” he said.

I nodded. If he wasn’t outright hostile towards me, he was at the very least guarded.

Mike Jackson was a man of few words.

I tried to engage him. “That’s a lot of space. Do you have neighbors?”

“We did have,” Mike muttered. He let out a sigh. “Before we fled Virginia at the outbreak of the ‘Affliction’, we had neighbors on either side. I don’t know if they’re still living or not.”

“You haven’t checked?”

The man glared at me. “No,” he said bluntly. “Not my business and not my problem.”