The Last Tribe (35 page)

Kelly was shy and reserved at their
camp, but a few minutes into the drive to Chelsea, she would not stop talking. 
All John, Craig, Solange, and Peter could do was nod and said “okay” and
“sure.”

“Obviously the racetracks were
closed right after Raleigh, and I wasn’t needed there, so I went to the SPCA to
see if I could help, but all those animals died. One after another, they just
got sick and died, faster than people did.  And I’m sitting there saying, ‘what
am I going to do with my life?  Horse racing is gone, domestic animals are
dead, great career you’ve picked.’ But then, everyone started to die.”

Kelly stopped to drink a swig of
water from a bottle given to her by John.  “Thank you for the water.  You have
no idea.  We started rationing water four months ago, unless you wanted to boil
water from the river, and I am not drinking water from the Hudson or East
River, no matter how long you boil it.”  She drank another swig.  “Anyway, I
was living on the upper West side with a girlfriend from college.  We had this
TINY one bedroom, but we were never there, except now we were always there,
because neither of us had jobs to go to, and it’s not like you wanted to go out
into crowds or anything, so there we were in this tiny room together.  My
family was in Kentucky, which is why I love horses, and her family was out in
Colorado, and neither one of us had a car, because we live in New York City, so
we had no way to get home, not that we wanted to go home, because everyone was
sick anyway.  Then Sarah, my roommate, gets sick, and I have to try and keep it
together, and I stay with her, and we cry and she dies, and I’m like ‘what do I
do now?.’  So I call the morgue, and they actually picked up her body, like,
the next day, it was amazing, nothing is running in New York, not the subways
or the cabs, but the morgue service comes in 24 hrs?  Insane, right?  I’d heard
the stories, about people who aren’t sick, you know, disappearing, so before
the morgue people come, I run up and down the stairs of our apartment building
a bunch of times, get a good sweat going, get all flushed, and then I cough a
few times.   There was a woman with them, she was in fatigues, and she had a
pocket thermometer, and I guess she’s supposes to take my temp.  She takes one
look at me and decides I’m sick already.”  Kelly took another swig of water. 
“And the woman says to me, ‘If you have the faculties, and can call us when you
get close to the end, we’ll come by to see what we can do.  God bless.’  See
what they can do?  She meant she’d pick up my body.  Then she puts a big red
sharpie marker ‘X’ on my door, and I look up and down the hall and see that all
the doors have a red X and a black X too.  I hadn’t left the apartment in over
a week, since Sarah got sick, so I had heard doors open and shut, but had not
paid attention.  Sarah was Korean, or half Korean and half American.  She was a
Ramen noodle and pasta nut, and she had cases of the stuff laying around,
literally, this high end Ramen Noodle she ate, that you couldn’t find in the
bodegas, and if you did it cost like $2 a pack, she would buy a case of it at
warehouse stores and live off the stuff.  Well, I lived off that during the
week she was sick.  So the lady is walking down the hall, and I cough and ask
her, ‘I get the red X, but what is the black X?’ and she looks back and says,
‘The black X means we’ve made a second visit.  Those apartments are empty.’ 
Then she steps in the elevator and is gone.  That’s when I realized I was the
only one left alive in my building.  I go up and down each floor, it’s a ten
floor building, 65 apartments, every single door has a black ‘X’ on it.  Well,
the good news was, there weren’t any bodies left in my building, the bad news
was, I was alone in a big scary building.”

“Oh my gosh, what did you do?” 
Craig sat behind Kelly, enthralled by her story.  At 10 years old, he was
following it like it was fiction.  He hoped there would be a ghost or vampire
responsible for the deaths. 

Kelly turned around to speak
directly to Craig. She seemed to speak a thousand words a second.  “Well, I
went to my apartment and thought for a while.  I was a little tired of eating
ramen noodles, but I didn’t have any other food, so I went to the basement
apartment, where my super lived.  Sure enough, there was a black ‘X’ on her
door.  She was this sweet, hardworking, wonder woman named Sylvana, who took
care of everyone in the building like we were her children.  Anyway, Sylvana
kept a hidden key to her apartment in a magnet box in the laundry room down the
hall.  Only a few tenants knew about it.  She kept UPS and FedEx deliveries in
the apartment for everyone, and she trusted a few of us to have the key to help
out if she was not around and people wanted their packages.  So I knock on the
door for a while, then I get the key and open the apartment.  Everything is
there, but no Sylvana.  I was looking for her master key, so I could scavenge
for food in the rest of the building.  I scour her place and find some great
dried sausages, tuna fish, and a big ring of keys.”

Craig couldn’t help himself.  “Did
you find any bodies?” 

“No.  The black ‘X’s’ were
accurate.  My building was empty.  Bizarre that I would luck out and get an
empty building.  Anyway, I found as much food as I could.  I moved into the top
floor penthouse, and I waited.”

It was John’s turn to ask.  “Waited
for what, Kelly?”

“For it to end.”  Kelly said
quietly. 

Peter, Solange, and John knew what
she was talking about.  Craig looked at her curiously and asked.  “For what to
end?”

Kelly looked out the window at the
passing buildings.  “The world.”

Craig looked at Solange.  The story
was not over, and he wanted answers.  He opened his mouth to ask another
question, but Solange held up her hand and shook her head.

Several seconds passed.  Kelly
snapped out of her trance.  “There used to be people in all of these
buildings.  Now there are just red and black ‘X’s’ on the apartment doors. 
It’s so sad.”  She paused again, looked at Craig, took a quick drink of water,
and started.  “Seriously, this water is so delicious.”  She screwed the cap
back on and turned to Solange.  “I’m sorry that I ramble on, but I don’t talk
much within our group.  It felt good to get it all out.  I’m okay now, I can’t
promise I won’t slip into more ranting, but I hope to keep it together.”

They drove slowly down the avenue. 
The ice and snow made it hard to control the SUV.  John pointed to Madison
Square Garden as they turned onto 21
^st
Street. 

“That’s was where the Knicks and
the Rangers played.  A lot of the big bands played.”  John said to his
uninterested son.  Craig wanted to hear more of Kelly’s story.

“How did you meet the other people
in New York?”  Craig asked Kelly.  The boy ignored Solange’s head shaking.

“We’ll have plenty of time to talk
about that.”  Kelly told him  “I don’t know for sure, but from what I could see
in the few minutes I was with ya’ll,”  Kelly’s Kentucky accent came through
strongly as she said ‘ya’ll.’  “You have a cohesive unit, working together and
making good decisions.  My group is not as unified.  We want to stay alive, but
we don’t work well together.  It’s one of the reasons we didn’t leave New York
when we should have.  I work best with Bernie and Jamie.  We take care of the
younger kids.  There are three of them.  I would include Meredith, an eleven
year old girl, but she usually stays close to Avery, a 17 year old girl, and
they are pretty much self sufficient.  The teens do some chores, but not too
much.  They’ll help if we ask.  Anyway, Ahmed was a hot shot banker, and while
he and Bernie are close, he keeps coming up with ‘plans.’  He works hard, but I
can tell he wants to be somewhere else and with other people.  He isn’t happy,
but he does his work.  I’m okay with him, we’re just not close.  We have two people
who are useless.  Sal is a big man who could be a great asset, but he’s
addicted to pills.  He sleeps and drinks most of the time.  He scares me more
than a little, and we try to keep the kids away from him, not get him angry. 
He shows up to eat, talks about doing a bunch of stuff, starts a project, then
gets high and leaves us alone for a few days.  The last person is Antonio.  He
was in a gang in the Bronx, and he can’t let it go.  He wears his colors, keeps
a gun and knife with him all the time, calls me ‘bitch’ a lot.”  Kelly stopped
and looked at Craig and then at John.  “I’m sorry.”

Craig replied quickly, “It’s okay,
I know what bitch means.  I don’t say it, but I know what it means.”  Everyone
had a quick chuckle.

“Anyway, he tries to hang out with
Avery, the older teen girl, but she won’t have anything to do with him.  
Antonio takes food, walks around muttering Spanish about all of us, and doesn’t
help.”

John looked over at Peter.  Peter
nodded back at him.  They paid close attention to Kelly’s descriptions.  John
looked in his rearview mirror at Solange.  She was looking back at him and
nodded.  Solange turned to Kelly and said, “I joined this group a week or so
ago.  They welcome everyone.”

“Craig told me you are headed to
New Hampshire to meet his uncles and brother?”  Kelly asked innocently.  “Did
your entire family survive?”

John nodded.  “That’s the plan.  We
met Solange and Peter in Washington.  We have to go to New Hampshire.  It’s not
an option for most of us.  We are inviting anyone who wants to come.  We can’t
stay in New York.  I have a 14 year old son who is alone in New Hampshire.”

“Greg is 15 now, Dad.  His birthday
was in January.”  Craig chimed in.

John shook his head.  “You’re
right, damn, I missed his birthday.  I have a 15 year old son in New
Hampshire.  Wow.  Anyway, after New Hampshire we are open to suggestions about places
to settle, but we have to go to New Hampshire first.”

“I’ll talk to my people, which
doesn’t include the entire 11, and see what they think.  The fact that you have
so many young kids is inviting.”  Kelly sat back in her seat, taking one last
sip of her water.  “That’s the seminary up there on your right.  The red brick
building.  See the smoke coming out of the chimney?”

“Is there a place to pull in, or
should I just park on the street?”  John asked.  “I don’t want to freak anyone
out by showing up unannounced.”

“Just park by the hydrant.  I doubt
anyone is looking.  The car noise will be strange, but we’re not as with it as
your group.  Sal is probably sleeping one off or has disappeared.  If the kids
are screaming, no one will hear us.”  She wore a smile as wide as a child at
Christmas.  “This is going to be exciting.  I went out to find food, and I find
food AND people.  Heck, if you show the bottled water, most of us will follow
you to Canada.” 

John pulled up next to a red brick
complex of buildings with a black iron fence running along the street.  A gate
led to a large grassy common area in the middle of the buildings.  John turned
around to face the rest of his group.  “Everyone ready to make some friends?”

They opened their car doors and
stepped out.  It was cold.  The sun was sinking off to the west, and the large
skyscrapers of Manhattan blocked the sunlight that remained.  John looked north
to see if his signal fire was visible, but the skyscrapers blocked the black
smoke.  If Kelly had not stumbled upon the group, John doubted the tribes would
have met.

Kelly walked to the gate.

“I’ll call everyone.  As I said,
half of us will be friendly, the teens will be indifferent, and I don’t know if
Sal and Antonio will come out or are even around.”

She walked into the center of four
buildings.  It was a beautiful arboretum with stone benches and walkways
connecting the buildings.  The paths were shoveled and the courtyard was maintained. 
As John stood in the common area of the buildings, he could almost imagine
nothing was wrong with the world. 

They entered one of the buildings
through a coat room.  Kelly held the door to the main area, which was warm but
not comfortable in temperature.  The veterinarian walked across the room to a
door.  She opened it and yelled.  “Jamie!  Bernie!  Kids!  Everyone!  I found
survivors!  Come out and meet them!”  Kelly yelled for her groups.  “Come on
out, they are great people.  They have food for us, food and water.”

John held Craig by the shoulders. 
The boy stood in front of him.  Solange and Peter flanked John on either side. 
They smiled warmly.  John pointed Craig towards the door where Kelly yelled.  Three
small faces appeared in a window next to the door.  A little girl waved to
Craig.  Craig waved back to her.  All of the kids smiled and began to talk to
each other.  A woman in her late 30’s or early 40’s appeared in the window
above the kids.  She was shocked to see other people, and she moved the kids
behind her.

Kelly saw the woman and waved. 
“Bernie, it’s okay.  I met these people up on 59
^th
.  They are from
North Carolina.  It’s a group of survivors.”  The woman waved to Kelly, and
made a gesture as if she was wiping sweat from her brow and mouthed ‘whew.’  

The door opened and the woman
entered.  She wore a hooded sweatshirt with the hood pulled up to cover her
head.  “It’s still cold in here.”  She said as she walked across the room to
greet the new people.  “The kids will be here in a second, I told them they
needed shoes and jackets.”  She finished zipping her jacket.

“You brought visitors.  That’s
great.  It’s wonderful to meet new people.”  She hugged Kelly, and walked
towards John.  “My name is Bernadette Evans, but everyone calls me Bernie.” 
She held out her hand to Craig.

Bernie was an attractive African
American woman.  She was 5 foot 8 inches with a kind face and trusting brown
eyes.  She did not have gray hair yet, and her curly locks grew out of control
and stuck out of the front of her hood.  She was noticeably thin.  Gaunt was
the best description.  She was thinner than Kelly.