I stood in the church foyer with Celia, Dawson, and Saint John. Hannah’s phone rang. Dawson’s hand went behind his back. Celia yelled, “Gun!” I couldn’t move. I grunted and groaned, straining to raise my own gun that now suddenly weighed a ton and wouldn’t budge and oh God he’s going to shoot us and I’ll never see Hannah again and Dawson pulled the trigger and pulled the trigger and pulled the trigger. Every bullet traced a path of fire and pain and blood through my belly, but I didn’t fall down. I was frozen in place, watching his grin as he turned to shoot at Ciera. She screamed each time he shot her, each time a bullet ripped through her, finally collapsing after the fifth shot. Then he stood next to me, whispering in my ear. “How’s that feel, asshole?” Somehow I knew that if I moved, she’d die. But if I didn’t move, she’d keep bleeding forever. I struggled and fought against whatever had me immobilized. I had to break free. I—
“Adam!”
Who is that? I sat upright. Looked around. Darkened room. Bed. Woman next to me. Karen? “Wha—where’s Hannah? Where’s Ciera? Dawson? He was right here.” Scanned the room again.
“Adam, it’s Karen. We’re in Hannah’s apartment. You’re safe. We’re all safe.” She put a hand on my arm.
Scanned the room one more time, searching the shadows for the demon that had been whispering in my ear moments ago. Heart pounding. No one else in the room. I checked my belly. No bullet holes. No blood.
“I couldn’t wake you up. Knew you were having a nightmare, but no matter how hard I shoved you or pushed you, you wouldn’t wake up.” She laid her hand on my shoulder. “Is this okay?”
I didn’t know. I couldn’t answer her for several minutes. “Church. I was back at the church. Couldn’t move. If I moved, Ciera would die.” I swallowed hard several times. Rubbed my face. “He shot me, then he shot her, then told me if I moved, she’d die. I couldn’t move.” My heart finally started to slow. My knee throbbed from my fall.
Karen slipped her other arm around me, hugged me. “We’re all here. They’re in the other room. Do you want to check on them?”
I scanned the room again, searching the shadows for Dawson. Swung my legs over the side of the bed and sat fully upright finally. Turned on the light to push the darkness away. My gun sat on the nightstand. I’d started keeping it close to my bed once I hit the road. Is that such a good idea now?
I sat there for the longest time, only barely aware of Karen getting up, then coming back a few minutes later, glass of water in hand. Minion followed her in and nuzzled my legs.
“I looked in on the girls. They’re fine. Here. I’ve got some acetaminophen here too if you want it.
My hand started shaking when I took the glass. I thought about the pills for a minute, then shook my head. Then I changed my mind and took them anyway so I’d be mobile in the morning. Drank the water and sat there for another few minutes, then lay back down. Karen rested her head on my chest and was asleep long before I was.
I never turned the light off.
I was not at all well-rested when I woke up a few hours later. I even briefly considered waiting one more day to head back to Gettysburg, but Karen reminded me we had plenty of drivers for a pretty short trip. I ended up letting her drive, as much so I could think about the last few days as because she was a little nervous about having Anthem in the trailer. Gave me a chance to rest my leg, too.
We made it to the farm by five, taking basically the same route back that I’d taken on the way over. It took me six hours on the way over, and about five today. Our conversations avoided my nightmares and our divorce, staying on safe topics like a meandering discussion about what caused the dying-off, and how to refer to it. We settled on aliens as a cause, and didn’t come up with a name.
The farm was as Karen and I had left it, empty and deserted. Twenty minutes after we arrived, Doug and Jason Sands showed up. They spent the next hour helping us unload, then invited us over for dinner. I started to decline, saying that they couldn’t be prepared for an extra ten people for dinner, but Karen shut that idea down pretty quickly. “If I know Laura, it’ll take her all of an extra ten minutes to be ready for us. You’re not going to win this one, Adam.”
She was right. And I had to admit that it was pretty nice to not have to worry about cooking after a long drive. Laura and Doug’s wife, Vicki, fell in love with the girls, who didn’t seem to mind a bit. Paige even quit following me around for most of the evening to enjoy the attention. Dinner was simple—spaghetti and meat sauce with plenty of garlic bread and salad—but very filling. The kids ate in the kitchen while we adults filled the dining room, making it easier to catch up on what we knew about conditions.
It took me the better part of dinner to fill everyone in on what I had learned on my trip. Doug said they hadn’t seen any violence yet, but that there had been a whole lot of confused travelers at the Battlefield. He and Vicki had taken a couple of days to check friends and neighbors with disappointing but not unexpected results. As we talked through the math, our best estimate for survival was just under ten percent of the population.
Jason and Laura had heard from Connie that her husband Ethan had died. She was helping her church help people around Hagerstown, though they’d told her she was welcome to come home.
“How far is it to Hagerstown from here? My friend Joe said there are some amateur radio people around there who might have some gear for me.” I’d passed by the place on the way up but couldn’t recall much about it.
“Mmm. ‘Bout thirty miles or so, depending on your route,” said Jason. “Gotta cross the mountains no matter how you go, so there’s no telling what it’s like.”
Doug and I talked for a bit, deciding to head over tomorrow, but Laura cut us off. “Tomorrow is Easter Sunday, boys. No traveling. We’re going to have a proper family dinner and Easter egg hunt. Got to keep things as normal as we can for the littles.”
Easter Sunday. The memories washed over in a crushing wave, threatening to drown me. Taylor had loved hunting for eggs, and it’d always been a real challenge to hide them. Sometimes I wondered if she watched me while I hid them. I hadn’t done anything big for Easter since Sarah and I divorced. My heart wasn’t in it the first year, and Kevin was already twelve by then. I’d still cooked a ham each year, but hadn’t messed with coloring eggs in a long time. This might be fun.
It was. Karen and Ciera and Hannah all jumped into helping Laura in the kitchen. Doug and Jason and Vicki handled the eggs for the kids. They only had a couple of dozen regular eggs, but Vicki had been a Sunday School teacher, so she had a bunch of plastic eggs, and they’d picked up some candy last night after dinner.
I think the adults needed the giggles and grins as much as the kids did. We had a pretty good idea of what life was going to be like in the future. The kids probably didn’t have a clue. They might have seen the power go out for a few hours, or had to walk to school one day because the car wouldn’t start. Most of them, except maybe for Paige, didn’t have the life experience to be able to wrap their minds around the changes that were coming. When would the power go out for good? When would the last car stop running? What was going to change?
We adults weren’t that much better off, because we knew what was coming. We just didn’t know when. I had enough insulin to last me another three or so weeks, depending on how I rationed it. Then what? I was on a blood pressure med too. The advantage I had was that my meds weren’t high on the list of stuff to steal when someone broke into the pharmacy, so I’d probably be able to get by for a while. Laura took digoxin and a blood pressure med, so she was in the same boat. Going to need a list of meds to stock up on.
My mind continued down the “We need to get organized” rabbit trail for a few minutes while the kids raced around hunting for eggs. Jason wandered over after a bit, a coffee cup in each hand. He handed me one and raised the other in salute.
“Kinda nice to see normal for a bit, ain’t it?”
The coffee was sweet and rich and just the right temperature. I nodded. “I’m trying not to think about how much longer normal’s going to look like this.”
“Maybe it was time for normal to change. Who knows?” He sipped at his coffee. We’d speculated late into last night about the possible causes of the die-off. Our explanations clustered in three major group: Aliens, God, or Mother Nature. In the end, we decided it didn’t matter at our level. We were just going to keep going, whatever that looked like.
Dawson didn’t visit me either night.
Monday, Doug and I left for Hagerstown. As we passed through the small towns, I saw more movement than I expected. It was still obvious that many people had died, but even in Blue Ridge Summit, they seemed to be picking up the pieces. We passed two wreckers pulling cars apart at the main downtown intersection, and we didn’t see any bodies out in the open. I mentioned to Doug that Joe Caughey had speculated that the altitude may have affected the death rate in some way. “He said they were close to a fifty percent survival rate up there.”
“Hmm. You know what his altitude is?”
“No, but it’d be easy enough to find. Why?”
“If he survived, I’ve got a distant cousin who works with World Health. He’s not a doctor. Heck, I’m not even sure what it is he does. But if anyone’s trying to figure this thing out, it’d be them, I’d think.”
“Interesting thought. You think anyone’s really looking into that aspect of it?”
“I’d give it about fifty-fifty. It’s probably a lower priority than making sure things keep running, but I’d expect them to want to know what happened so they can figure out if it’s going to happen again.”
The man had a point.
We met the radio guy at his place. The fifty-foot-tall antennas made it easy enough to find even if Joe hadn’t given us great directions. Louie Vogler was a super-nice old guy. He and his wife Carla had survived just fine, even if they were both in their late seventies. He’d picked up a bunch of extra gear over the last few years at estate sales and clean-outs of buddies who’d died or just given up the hobby. Along with half a dozen handheld radios, he gave me three vehicle-mounted radios and three big binders of information on getting things set up. The largest one, a three-inch binder, talked about nothing but antennas—what each kind did, how to set them up, and how to make some if you had to. He gave me his landline number along with his email address and said if we had any problems to get in touch. I asked him what we needed to do about getting licenses, and he laughed. “Son, I really doubt the FCC is going to bother with anyone about paying license fees and using the right call signs. I think the feds finally are going to have more important things to worry about. Worst comes to worst, I’ve got license info for a couple of old friends of mine that I can give you, but it ain’t gonna be a problem.”
From there, we made our way over to the church where Doug expected his sister to be. A modern-looking building just south of the 70 and 81 interchange, Crossroads Restoration Church reminded me far too much of the place in North Hills where we’d rescued the girls. Dawson’s face flashed in my mind and I shivered before I could stop it.
“You okay?” Doug watched me from the passenger seat as we pulled into the lot.
“Thought I caught that in time.”
He smiled. “Almost. And if I hadn’t known about what happened earlier, I probably wouldn’t have thought about it.”
I shrugged. “I’ll be okay, I guess. Be nice when the nightmares go away.”
“Well, let’s see what my sister’s gotten herself into.”
As we walked to the building, I asked him about Connie.
“She’s six years older than I am, and never fails to remind me that she’s the big sister, like it means she’s automatically smarter than me or something. She met this guy I guess five years ago, and they got married quick enough that my folks and I thought she’d gotten herself pregnant. She said she wasn’t, and it was a year or so before they had a baby, so who knows? Ethan was raised Mennonite, but left the faith, or something. They ended up here because that’s where he attended.” He looked around. There were over a dozen cars and trucks in the lot, and the LED message board out front said “Survivor Services Here,” whatever that meant. “Seemed like a really conservative church when they got married, but maybe they’ve lightened up a little since then.”
“You got a real plan here?”
He shook his head. “Mom’s kinda upset that we didn’t hear from her yesterday. Dad’s worried that we didn’t hear from her. I think Mom’s a little worried too, but she doesn’t want to admit it around Dad. Trying to keep him calm or something. The funny thing is, she’s the one with the heart problem. Anyway, I just want to talk to her for a few minutes and make sure she’s okay. Ethan didn’t make it, I know. Kinda figured she’d come home over that. It was just the two of them, because the baby died when she was about six months old.”
“Ouch. What happened?”
Doug sighed. “All Connie ever told us was that she went to check on her in the middle of the night, and she was dead. She was pretty torn up about it. I guess Ethan was, too.”
“You guess?”
“He wasn’t real talkative around us even before that, and after, he just quit coming around. Connie still came up for birthdays and most of the holidays, but they kept Christmas themselves.”
“Grief does weird things to you.” I wasn’t sure how much I’d processed my grief over Kevin, and I’d been on an emotional roller coaster for several days over Hannah and then Karen. Part of me was afraid to stop moving because I thought everything would come crashing down on me all at once.
We headed into the building, dodging a man and a teen girl carrying two large shopping bags. After asking three different people about Connie, we finally found her in an office down one hallway. She didn’t move when we stopped at the doorway, just stared at us for the longest time. She and Doug hugged a long time, and both wiped some tears away. I almost felt uncomfortable watching, and wondered if I’d have the same kind of reunion with anyone else.
“What you guys got going on, Sis? You holding up okay?”
She nodded after a moment. “It’s pretty weird. All I could think of to do after I woke up and found Ethan was to come here. Didn’t even know what I was going to find, but I knew I’d be okay once I got here.” She shrugged as they broke their hug. “And I have been. Can’t explain it. I can’t point to any one thing that’s made it all better.” She sniffled. “Nothing can make it all better. I mean, Ethan’s gone. I’m all alone. But I’m not, you know? Everyone on staff lost someone, but we’ve got each other, like a second family.” She looked over at me and stuck out her hand. “Connie Reimer. I’m Doug’s sister.”
I shook her hand. “Adam Ktokolwiek. Karen’s brother. Nice to meet you.”
“You don’t live up here, do you? I’ve heard your name, but I don’t think I’ve ever met you.”
“Texas. Came up to find Hannah and figure out what we’re doing from there.”
She leaned back on the desk and studied me for a minute. “Who’d you lose?”
I glanced at Doug and smiled. “She always this direct?”
He laughed and nodded.
“So far, my son, Kevin. Got a brother and sister I haven’t heard from yet. She works for a cruise line, and he’s got a bunch of land out in Montana, so who knows? Don’t know about my second ex-wife or our daughter either. Southern Ohio. I’m less hopeful for them than for my siblings, and why am I spilling my guts to you so easily?”
“Ha! I get that a lot, sweetie. Everyone says it’s easy to talk to the short fat chick.” She was shorter than me, but I wouldn’t have called her fat. Not petite, but not fat. “So what brings you guys over this way?”
“Officially, we came down to pick up some radios from a ham operator. Unofficially?”
“Mom and Dad?”
He nodded. “Mom’s pissed and Dad’s worried. You didn’t even call yesterday.”
“Crap. We were so busy with trying to pull an Easter thing together that I just plain ran out of time. I was up and running from seven till after one this morning.” She hung her head. “Did they actually send you down here?”
“Well, not officially. But they both thought it’d be a good idea for me to come with Adam. Shotgun rider, tour guide, and by the way, can you check on your sister?” He watched her for a minute. “We miss you, kiddo.”
“’Kiddo?’ I’m the big sister, remember?” She wiped her eyes. “And I miss you guys. I just . . . don’t know what to do. I mean, I’ve always been active here. Never had an official title, but I’m that lady that everyone goes to. And since this happened, there’s lots of people coming to us for help. Pastor Brian lost his whole family, so he’s having a hard enough time. We lost three other people on staff. But we’ve got dozens and dozens of people coming here for help. Kids who lost everyone. Elderly who lost their kids or their spouses. It’s heartbreaking. The county is overwhelmed too, so they can’t exactly help. We’re trying to put the kids with families who have room, and making sure we keep track of them. We’ve got a team of guys who are checking on all of our members and helping them . . . clean up . . . if that’s what they need. We’re gathering non-perishable stuff like diapers and pads and tampons. Clothes. Different stuff.” She wiped her eyes again. “I can’t just walk away from this.”
I was impressed, and wondered if Karen’s take on Connie was really accurate.
“Wow, Sis,” Doug said after a minute. “That’s pretty awesome. Proud of you. Mom and Dad will be, too.”
“Thanks,” she said after a minute. “I mean, I want to come see everyone. I just don’t know when I can.”
Doug nodded. “I get it. And they will, too. Just stay in touch as much as you can, ‘kay?”
We said out goodbyes and headed for the farm. Doug was quiet on the drive home, which gave me plenty of time to think, which wasn’t necessarily a good thing. Probably because we’d just left a church, I found myself considering things back at North Hills Baptist Church. Was Dowson still lying right where I’d killed him? We didn’t see a need to do anything with Saint John or Dawson. The girls told us the two men were the only people they’d seen. I wondered, though, if the two men had family, and if anyone was missing them. My cynical side said no one would miss people like that, but everyone has somebody, right? But did I want someone to be missing them? Because that person would likely never have any kind of closure. Either they’d never find out what happened to them, or they’d track down their bodies and wonder who killed them and why.
From there my thoughts meandered to the girls we’d rescued. Did they have extended family who was looking for them? None of them had mentioned anyone. Paige had Monica, but they hadn’t talked about any other cousins or uncles or anything like that. Is there any kind of registry set up? Was anyone tracking survivors yet? It would be a simple thing to set up a database on some website, but how long would that be available to anyone? I knew major parts of the electrical grid would start failing soon enough. No one was delivering coal in any meaningful amounts now, even if there weren’t many coal plants still running. I figured the lack of operating crews would cause most of the other plants to shut down.
And then what?
My best guess was that we’d see close to fifty percent of the initial survivors die in the next year. People with chronic conditions like me were going to run out of meds soon enough. I could maybe stave off the worst of the diabetes complications for a couple of years, maybe, but it would kill me one way or another. It wouldn’t take much for some disease to go epidemic and wipe out a chunk of the remaining population. Injuries that we could have shaken off a month ago with a trip to the urgent care were going to be at best difficult to treat.
I’d survived the apocalypse. Would I live to see the end of the world?
Copyright © 2019 Bob Mueller
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