Awake-
I was awake, out of bed, and halfway to the crib before the kid had begun to cry out. I must have heard it in the change in his breathing. Maybe it was just paternal instincts taking over. Then again, maybe it was the sudden movement that elicited the child’s cry. Needless to say, I didn’t make it in time.
With the baby’s first loud wailing, I glanced back at Beth. She was moving toward the window, the Beretta she keeps under her pillow now in her hands. Maternal instincts are a dangerous thing.
The child was screaming as I picked it up and checked the diaper. Sure enough it was wet. Beth was quickly making the rounds, checking behind the blinds to the world outside.
She caught me looking at her and shook her head.
I reached around the crib to find the pacifier but it was lost in the dark. The child’s cry was insistent, and I quickly lost patience. I tried to rock the kid in my hands as I moved toward the bathroom, hoping my body and the familiar motion would calm the kid. But he wasn’t having any of it. In the bathroom the kid’s screams seemed to bounce off the wall, making them even louder.
Quickly, I put the kid on a changing mat, and tore open the Velcro that kept the diaper together. The kid was moving about, wiping s*** on the mat, his tears and cries demanding and impatient. I looked for the diapers, but instead my foot kicked it away. Need light. I found the matches in the bathroom drawer and brought it to a kerosene lamp, which quickly filled the small room with light and the smell of burnt fuels.
In the light I found a box of diapers, the last box, and broke them open, ripping open the plastic package, and wishing the kid would just shut the f*** up. I turned on the faucet to wet a rag to wash him down.
Beth stuck her head in the door, “What the f*** are you doing?” She whispered angrily.
“I am changing the kid. He wet himself.”
“Will you hurry the f*** up!” She said and then was gone. Probably to check the rest of the house.
I quickly wiped down the kid, tossed the soiled diaper away, and put on another. Just as I was about to put the Velcro back on, the kid let out another crap, soiling this diaper. I looked at the kid, astonished. For a moment, the kid stopped screaming, one little fat pudgy hand reaching for his face while the other made little jerking motions in the air. For a moment the kid just looked at me, his eyes curious, perhaps wondering what the concern was. Then he closed his eyes and let out a loud, painful wail.
I reached down another diaper and took the old one away and tried to repeat the process, wiping the kid down and getting another diaper.
“Christ, Robert, what the f*** are you doing?” Beth, back in the room. Her eyes still dark with bags of sleeplessness.
“He crapped the second diaper.” I said, trying to apologize.
“Where the f*** is the pacifier?” She demanded. She still had the pistol in her hands. Usually she doesn't repeat the word "f***" Only when she's nervous.
“I don’t know, back in the crib I think.” I said. “Maybe he’s hungry too.”
But she had vanished again.
I got the diaper on and this time the kid didn’t poop into it. I tried to rock him but he didn’t take to it and was still screaming out, deafening my right ear.
“Give me the kid.” Said Beth, reaching for the child. In her other hand she had the pacifier.
“I got him.” I said, demanding she respect my paternal role.
“No you don’t. Don’t be stubborn.” She tried to put the pacifier in his mouth, but the kid spat it out.
And we were perhaps arguing about this for 10 minutes when we heard the first thumping coming from below.
We both froze, looking at each other. More thumps.
“We got neighbors.”
The thumps were coming from below, banging the floor loudly, powerfully. Powerful enough to come through the floor.
This time when she reached for the kid I didn’t refuse. I blew out the kerosene lamp and we both went back into the bedroom. Beth was rocking the kid now, but she was having about as much luck as I was. And the more the kid cried out, the more the thumping got louder.
We waited, hoping the kid would get quiet, trying to force the pacifier on him, which he kept spitting out.
Amazingly he stopped crying and looked at both of us with his little eyes. Moments like this I think that this kid is just the cutest pain in the ass I have ever had to deal with.
We had hoped that the thumping would stop when the kid stopped crying and our neighbors would leave us alone.
But they didn't. The thumping continued. The kid suddenly looked scared and let out an awfully loud wail.
"Maybe you should nurse him." I suggested. I went to the drawers and found my gun, attached the silencer.
Beth watched me, holding our child. “Better take two.”
It's a wonderful thing when someone cares for you. Love is a mighty powerful thing.
___________________________________________________
Dealing with Noisy Neighbors-
Runners, Stumblers and Twitchers-
I took a peek out the window to the front gate. But I could see nothing outside. The gate swung on the wind that I noticed was blowing down the plains. I felt near the windows and could feel a cold draft sneaking through the cracks.
There’s a lesson there. No defense is impregnable. There is always a way in.
You keep track of these kinds of lessons after awhile. Record them in some mental notebook you keep stored and filed away. This way you can kick yourself in the ass later when you realize that you missed something right before bad things start to happen. That is if you have time to think about it. Bad things tend to happen really fast.
Beth had managed to quiet the kid. I think she had stuck her thumb in the kids mouth and he was busy suckling it thinking it was a nipple to a breast or a bottle. Eat-s***-sleep is the daily routine of a toddler. Perhaps she had found the pacifier. I would imagine she might be finding the portable stove to heat up the bottle, and perhaps prepare some breakfast. I doubted we would get to sleep again.
I continued to move around the bedroom to each window, peering out. Hoping the thumping downstairs would still.
It wouldn’t until I had to go away and deal with it personally. That’s another lesson. The problems in your life usually don’t go away on their own. Normally you have to go and deal with them.
The lazy and passive die. That might sound callous, but the thing is, you learn or you die. It’s that simple. That’s just the way it is.
Lessons. It's all about the lessons you need to learn. For example, I had learned a few things.
LESSON – They can’t climb. The harder the ascent, the harder it is for them to climb up. They just lack the coordination.
The faster ones might have more coordination, but I have yet to find one who climb a ladder. Sure, some might be able to jump on a fence, and dig their fingers and toes around the wire, but that’s not exactly climbing. But most Runners can’t manage to climb. It’s too much mental function. One or two steps perhaps, but they inevitably fall. Most of them, the Stumblers just can’t do it. You can forget about the Twitchers.
Thus the important practical lesson - first go up the stairs and then destroy them behind you.
When Beth and I had chosen our current accommodations, one of the first things we had done was destroy the stairs. It had taken the better part of a day, but having done it, we could sleep better. Now instead of a stairwell we used a rope and a few planks to climb down.
Never have I seen one that could climb up a rope, or even climb up a steep ladder for that matter. Hell, I had seen them slide down steep slopes.
That said,
LESSON - Don’t think you can’t be surprised. Paranoia can be your friend.
So I had rigged up a signal of cans and string along the corridor leading to the demolished stairs. Should one manage the remarkable feat of actually getting to the second floor, it would trip across those wires, making an audible signal of impending danger. We kept our pistols under our pillows.
As I moved toward the demolished stairwell I took special care not to trip my own trap. For there was another valuable lesson.
LESSON - Silence is golden. The more noise you make, the more you attract attention. The best policy was not to make noise.
And the damn thing was, that they had good hearing. No one I talked to can explain it. They can hear you from a distance. Maybe they sense you. Maybe they smell you. I have no idea why. You’d think they would have lost that.
Someone from the truck stop had once thought that it was really the smell - they could smell your fear the way predator animals smell fear in prey. He never got the chance to test that theory.
I don’t think that the ghouls, that first day, knew we were coming until we crossed paths with the one coming up the trail. That was just bad luck, which was another thing you had to take precautions for.
LESSON - The trick to survival was to minimize the possibilities that unlikely probabilities can cause you pain.
The more risk you allow, the less likely your chances. Simple math really. Cautious living gets you through the day. So perhaps this is more of an ancillary rule to Paranoia is your friend.
Thus the lesson, don’t attract them or give them notice, lest you lose what little surprise you might have.
So I walked around the second floor landing of the stairs and looked down. We had decided to take residence in a large two story farmhouse, one flight of stairs up, distant from any neighborhoods. I moved tip-toe, trying not to allow the floor to creak, hoping their banging would mask any sounds I made.
I screwed on the silencer I had acquired along the way to my own gun. Beth had quickly prepared her own. This was another valuable lesson. Don’t draw attention to the kill.
In my experience a silenced pistol is best, with the other pistol as back-up especially when going through dangerous territory. Both Beth and I also keep longer range weapons but they wouldn’t be as effective for this kind of work. For one thing, if they come too close you have to be real quick on the shot and in cramped spaces you need a weapon that won’t bump into walls or be difficult to bring to bear.
I waited for a few minutes to see if the landing below was clear. I knew they were in the room beneath the bedroom, but that didn’t mean there weren't others wandering the house. With all the banging they were making, they might have begun to attract more.
Thus-
LESSON - Be careful and always watch your back.
I could smell them but I couldn’t tell how many there were. Might have been a dozen or more.
(LESSON - guns with big clips are better than guns without)
(LESSON - use your instincts)
They may not be fast, but they still stink of decay. I don’t know why they don’t decompose as fast as they should. It seems that what made them also repelled any of the usual things that consumed the flesh of the dead. A person who dies is often a feast for bugs and other critters that aren’t discriminating about carrion. I have yet to see a buzzard peck at the still corpse of one of them.
So, usually you could smell them before they got up close. Sometimes you could hear them when they moaned or did that growling thing.
But sometimes they just surprised you. Next thing you know, they are snapping at your skin.
They bite you once, and it's game over. That simple. Once bitten and you’re finished. Sometimes it's fast, sometimes it's slow. Either way, best to eat a bullet before you turn.
A hard rule but that’s just how it is.
Beth would be watching to see what I did when I came back. She’d see if I could come up the stairs, or if I acknowledged her. If I didn’t...well. Best not dwell on that.
I moved around the stairwell, crouching to see what I could. I had the silenced pistol in my hand and had a flashlight in my jacket pocket, the other gun tucked under the waistline of my jeans. I could feel the metal against the small of my back, the silenced muzzle against my spine.
If it was just stumblers, and even if there were a lot of them, I could probably finish them off with the guns I had. Hopefully one weapon would be enough.
But if one was a fast mover, a runner, it would be on me before I could get the second piece out.
They were just that fast.
If that was the case, I would have to rely on the metal of the flashlight to bludgeon the damn thing before it bit me.
Maybe they were all in the same place.
Maybe new ones were entering the house.
The longer you wait, Robert, the more will come in.
The ones below might have wandered in during the night, the gate blown open, the wind might have done it. Or the wind carrying the sound of them. How did they get in the house?
It might have been the smell that woke the baby, if its instincts were better than mine. But my guess was that the baby’s cry had attracted them.
And I didn’t know how many were down there or even where they were.
If I survived this I would have to make changes so this uncertainty was minimized.
The baby had stopped crying. But the thumping would continue all night.
That was because-
LESSON – They are instinctive eating machines.
Like great white sharks with two feet, they just existed to eat. Maybe that was all the purpose they had.
I have seen them keep coming after they have been shot at, after we have climbed up and out of their reach, as we have put them afire.
So these bastards below us would be with us all night long if we let them. And sooner or later they would wake up the kid, or scare the kid into screaming again, which would only attract more. if there were more around. And even if the kid didn’t scream those below would keep banging at the floor until they were either killed or they got us.
And they were not going to get us.
So why delay?
I looked back toward the bedroom, thinking about Beth, thinking that I might get bit or brought down and I might not see my son again.
I saw her stepping around the wire alarm, cradling our son with one hand, its face in her breast. She held a gun in the other hand.
Strange circumstance that I should have begun to raise a family after the apocalypse had fallen.
She was watching me, her eyes dark, knowing that I should act and waiting for me to get my courage up to go maybe, or maybe also wondering if I was going to come back this time.
And if I didn’t come back?
I have always known Beth is a fatalist. What I have never known is why, despite her rather suicidal disposition, she hasn’t finally done it yet.
LESSON - When confronted with immediate danger or death, best to be decisive and act.
Delay can kill you, uncertainty can steal your courage, fear can make your aim waiver, and that is all it takes to lose it.
In the days since the apocalypse one thing is always clear. We are always a moment away from death.
Maybe that’s why, despite it all, I seem to enjoy life more these days.
I lifted off the landing, the rope in my hands and my feet on the boards we had nailed into the side of the wall, and then tried to climb down quietly, One hand on the rope, the other with the pistol. Beth’s presence above gave me a bit more comfort that someone was watching my back and I made it to the floor quietly and without interruption.
Then, slowly, tiptoeing across the hallway, I moved toward where the thumping was coming. I felt the pistol sweaty in my hands, nerves. There was no door into the room where they were. I looked down the hallway. The front door was closed. How did they get in?
It’s a big farmhouse. Originally only a small house, generations had added to it, expanding the house past its original dimensions. Inside the house had odd dimensions. Hallways were tilted at odd angles, door ways were crooked, but overall the house had been well built. Unknown generations had made this house their home, and it had probably sheltered multiple families. For privacy most of the attachments had been divided by doors that separated the different dwellings. Outside was a big barn and a grain silo, a coop for chickens. But all the livestock, chickens or cattle, were gone. We had lost the horses months ago.
I started to feel that thrill, the buzz, the sense of expectation, the excitement.
The door to the cellar was open. Perhaps they had broken through and gained access into the basement somehow, and then come up to the first floor?
Had that awoken the baby? What had we missed.
I tried to still my heart. A rapid heartbeat can throw off your aim. I tried to cool my nerves, to relax.
LESSON - Don’t delay - act.
I turned around and shone the flashlight into the room.
There were four of them, but only one was making the noise. Somehow it had managed to climb up on an old couch and was now within arms reach of banging on the ceiling. It had made quite a bit of damage, smashing the ceiling with large holes to expose the ceiling beams, and covering the floor with flakes of plaster and sheet-rock. It had sawdust and plaster on its face and hair.
As soon as it saw me it stepped in my direction, lost its balance…
(At that moment I fired my first round in the one that was closest to me, which stood no more than four feet from the end of my silenced barrel. A farmer by the look of it.)
………and fell off the couch, tripping forward…
(I fired quickly into the head of the second one, an ugly and gangly child with a missing eye and without a jaw, that had made a lurch toward me and fell like a rag doll while I turned to face...)
…hitting the floor with a loud thump, moaning out.
(...the third one was nearly on top of me. I could smell the rotten flesh in its mouth and its damaged teeth from chewing at raw bone, the eyes, felt the extended hot breath of its growl against my face. This one was grotesquely fat and I would later wonder why his body hadn’t been torn apart prior to the conversion. I had brought the pistol in and put it up against the bottom of its chin. I fired twice, quickly and in panic, blowing the top of its head off).
I didn’t dare step closer to the one that had fallen, lest the sweep of its arms pull me down. Instead I shone the light on its bald, plaster-covered head, and fired, missing clearly twice and then hitting it in the head the third time.
I flashed my light at the four bodies on the floor, making sure none moved, that none were twitchers (for every once and awhile a stumbler became a twitcher if you didn’t manage enough damage to its brain) and then flashed the light around the rest of the room. Nothing.
I backed out of the room still pointing the gun at the four bodies.
That was a mistake.
Perhaps it was the light, or a reflection of the light.
Or maybe it was the low sound of the pistol’s muffler,
or maybe it had begun to come at the sound of the other zombies had made.
But I didn’t see it.
“Robert.” Beth’s voice was hardly more than a whisper but it was enough.
I turned, and the thing was on me.
I fired my gun twice, and I think the rounds hit it, but not the head, the essential head.
LESSON - Only head shots can kill them instantly.
Its arms went for my throat, but it had lost balance with the gunshots, and it fell to my left. Perhaps I had broken a bone, or knocked it back somehow. That was enough for me to hit it with the flashlight, knocking it down to the floor.
It was still grabbing at my throat as I brought the edge of the metal flashlight down on its head. Once was probably enough.
But I only stopped smashing the flashlight against its head when I heard Beth say, again, “Robert.”
I looked up at her, holding the bloodied flashlight in one hand, the gun in the other, five bodies underneath me.
(LESSON - Count Bullets - 9 fired, 6 left)
I smiled.
She smiled back.
“I still need to check the rest of the house.” I said, though I knew that there were no more in the building. “I think they came up through the cellar.”
“Best do that. I’ll keep an eye on the front door.” She said. The baby’s eyes were open but black in the darkness.
I heard the kid gurgle and sigh. “He’s awake.”
“Yeah. But at least he’s not crying.”
“Not yet.”
She smiled again. “No not yet.”
“I’ll wait down here until sun-up to see if more are coming.”
She was still at the top landing after I checked the other rooms. “You going to be ok?” She asked.
“I’ll be fine. You better get some sleep. Tomorrow is another day.”
"Hey, we're out of diapers. We'll need to go to the store for more tomorrow." She said. “That and other supplies.”
"Tomorrow." I said.
She slipped back into the darkness, our baby in her arms.
I watched her disappear, and then continued to search the house, trying to move quickly and quietly, although if there had been more wandering around, they certainly would have been drawn to us by now. The windows on the ground floor had been boarded up so there was really one way in through the first floor. But I was unsure how many others might have heard the noise.
The cellar was dark and cold, musty and smelled of mildew. The owners had never finished it but had used the cellar as a storage and work space during the winter months, perhaps. There was a generator down there but we never turned it on because it made too much noise. But from the cellar there was a short flight of stairs leading into the yard through a pair of storm doors slanted against the floor. One of the doors had broken in. I imagined that the fat one had been too heavy and had forced the door open, allowing the others to gain entry. The door from the first floor to the cellar had been left open carelessly. Perhaps we had been moving food from the cold cellar to the kitchen, and simply left it open.
I had considered this a possible escape out should the front door or windows be overwhelmed- we could barricade ourselves in the cellar if cut off from the second floor, and then escape the house through the cellar. But the ways of escape are sometimes the ways of entry.
I would have to fix that in the morning. I felt fatigue creep over me.
LESSON - Beware of fatigue. It is usually fatigue that allows the zombies to catch you.
Near sunrise I began to nod off, sleep finally catching me. The wise thing would have been to close up the door or block it up and then go back upstairs were it was safe, but sleep sometimes just creeps up on you.
But the baby woke up with a loud cry, and that sound quickly refreshed me.
The kid was still crying when daylight came.
_________________________________________
Meeting Beth-
I was still outside near the front gate when Beth checked on me from the window and then descended to the ground floor. She came out through the front door and gave me a kiss.
“Good morning,” she said to me.
“You too,” I said.
“Nice work,” she said. The baby was in one of those backpack baby carriers that you can get at Target.
“Close one. Glad you were watching my back.” I was thinking about the fifth one that had almost caught me.
“Always. Breakfast?” she asked.
“Sounds good. I’ll get to fixing the gate.” The gate latch had been forced out last night, perhaps because they had been able to put sufficient pressure against the gate to force the nails holding the latch up out of the wood. “Probably better if we chained the gate down in the future.”
She nodded, smiled, and went back to house to prepare something to eat. The baby was sleeping in the baby-pack, a dribble of spittle from its mouth, and I felt my heart grow warm. Love? Commitment? Belonging? I am not sure. Peace, perhaps.
We’d been together for well over a year and a lot had changed in that time. When I met her I was on my way to California, going to the West Coast to start grad school in the fall.
So much had changed in, what, 16 months? I had gone from being single to being a husband and father. Life had taken a curious turn.
Yet, I couldn’t really complain. Not really.
I had no plans for commitment, to settle down, to raise a family. It wasn’t something I even considered, it just wasn’t my style. Sure, I had girlfriends, but nothing serious since high school. I didn’t want to be tied down, to be responsible. I didn’t think it was the right time for it.
Now, I could not imagine a life without Beth and the kid. And despite everything that had happened, I don’t think I could have been happier. Sure there were problems, but what life doesn’t have problems?
Life is less about what you do, but who you spend it with and what you make of what are your limited opportunities.
Sure, the world as I knew it had come virtually to an end as a plague of flesh-eating ghouls had taken over and become the dominant species. True, we lived a precarious existence.
But truth be told, I can’t complain too much. I have a partner I love, and a child I adore.
And to think, it all began about the same time the world, as I knew it, was coming to an end.
Most of the past 28 years I had spent going from place to place and trying to figure out what to do with my life. After college, I had gotten a job working with AmeriCorps as a teacher in the projects of New York. Then I had gone and joined an MFA program in Vermont, where I spent two years writing introspective crap about meaning and character and feeling with a lot of would-be writers who were only really interested about writing about the despair and tragedy of life. Boring. After that I had taken a job as a bartender in Chicago, working nights at the bar and during the day time trying to write as much as I could. Novels, short stories, whatever. I had a couple small things published, but nothing major and no agent really took interest in me.
Unsure what to do, I turned to law school, applied and got into Boalt Hall, in California. I called up Duke, my best friend from Boston U who was currently at University of Michigan working on a degree in Biology.
“Cool. Let’s do it. Maybe we road trip out. We’ll travel through Minnesota and the Dakotas, do Yellow Stone, Wyoming and Montana and the Northwest before getting to California. It’ll be epic.” He said, enthusiastic. Duke loved to camp and do the outdoors thing. A hunter, backpacker, hiker, climber, Duke was all about the outdoors.
“You’re not going all Brokeback on me, are ya, Duke,” I replied jokingly.
“You know I love ya man, but I don’t love ya that much. I finish in early May and can join you for a couple of months. I got grant money to burn and my chair is on sabbatical, so what the f***?”
And so we had sat down to plan our trip, and in May we started from Michigan and followed the Great Lakes coast around Wisconsin before heading over to the Black Hills. It had been cheap. We camped out on the side of the road, fished a lot for our food, or lived on cheap fast food. The hiking and outdoors did me good, making me lean, tougher and thinner. I brought books along the trail, Graham Greene and other modern classics, and just enjoyed the time outside. Along the way we met people, including a few girls, shared adventures. Duke smoked most of the grass he brought along within the first two weeks, and then we settled for cheap beer and booze. It was a good way to see the country.
Leaving the Black Hills, Duke had talked me into going to Lincoln, NE to see a girl he knew. She was an undergraduate from a class he had TA’d, and he had ended up sleeping with her. We were using his van, so I couldn’t complain, even if I spent most of the time talking to her idiot roommate while Duke boned his former student in the next room. We spent the night and were supposed to leave early the next morning, but Duke had a hard time leaving the pretty 20 year old. We got a late start on I-80 hoping to make Rawlings, our next destination, on the way to Yellowstone.
Nebraska is an endless state of flat country and rolling plains, and I couldn’t help but wonder if this is where the Dust Bowls had ended. Farmlands to the east gave way endless grasslands swept free of life no doubt by tornadoes. But the sky was incredible, the way the night sky seems so endless out west. Without civilization or mountains or trees, the sky becomes huge.
We were nearly out of the state, already past where I-80 splits with I-76 into Colorado, when the night became full of fireworks. Shooting stars, more than I had ever seen before, speared across the sky. We peered up through the grimy front window of the van as the number of shooting stars increased in number until we decided to pull off outside of Sidney, and set camp, made a small fire, ate some food we had picked up at North Platte, settled into to sleeping bags around the fire, and watched.
I was starting to doze off when Duke woke me around midnight. “Rob, check this s*** out.”
“What?” I said, tired and wanting sleep.
But I opened my eyes to see a falling meteor come soaring past us, a plume of fire and smoke trailing it, clear against the cloudless sky.
“Wow,” I muttered.
“That’s not the first,” said Duke.
For the next hour or so, we must have seen nearly a dozen meteors fall nearby. The one I saw fell to the east, and was followed by another. One blazing meteorite came down in Sidney itself and was followed by an explosion. Soon there was a glow coming from Sidney. Others fell to the north and south of us and then they began to fall to the west.
Duke was really into it. “Man, this is some meteor shower. Usually they burn up in the atmosphere.”
“Yeah. But why wasn’t there any news?”
“All we got is that asshole Rush Limbaugh on the radio,” said Duke. Truth is that we had been listening to Duke’s grunge CDs since South Dakota and had no idea what was going on.
The shooting stars continued to fall, but now they were falling in the western sky, and slowly they became infrequent. My eyes closed before it was all over and did not open again until the morning. Stretching my back out, I woke up Duke. We broke camp, repacked our s*** and continued.
“F***in' starving,” said Duke, behind the wheel.
“Me too,” I said. Spotting a truck stop along side the road, I said, “Let’s stop there.”
“Place looks like s***,” said Duke, but he pulled into the exit ramp.
He was right. The off ramp was only available for traffic going west and ended on a dirt road that went off into the northern horizon. Only two businesses were on the ramp, an old and worn out looking Motel 8 and the T-Bone Truck Stop and Café. Behind the truck stop was a huge junkyard of broken down vehicles, many turned red with rust and corrosion. Surprisingly, on one side of the parking lot was a Bell helicopter, parked as if the pilot had suddently gotten a hanker for some hash browns and eggs.
The truck stop was a single complex that included a garage, a central area, and a restaurant. There were a half dozen garage doors, but only one was open for maintenance on a diesel truck. In the parking lot were a handful of cars, SUVs, and an RV, as well as three trucks. A number of motorcycles were parked near the front door. We could see in the window a number of people were in the restaurant, but most seemed to be watching TV. In front was a big black dog that seemed to be asleep in the morning sun. Another dog was prowling around the junkyard, a Shepherd by the look of it.
We parked close to the restaurant and went inside. It was a typical run-down and otherwise forgotten truck stop. A bath area, convenience area, telephones, a garage, and a restaurant. A woman was working a cashier’s station near the front and watched us come in, but didn’t seem to have anything else to do.
We went into the restaurant. Most of the people, including the staff were watching the TV. Without a hostess to seat us we took seats on the counter and turned our attention to what the others were watching. The place had only a handful of customers. A family of four, a few people eating alone, what looked like two skinheads, some truckers. Off to one side was a state trooper talking too a couple of guys in uniform, one looking like a Park ranger, and two women in business attire. There were three waitresses, but none of them seemed very interested in waiting tables. The kitchen staff had also come forward, two older men (one an Indian) and two teenage boys.
The anchor was at the desk with a picture of New York City burning, huge fires lighting up the buildings and the sky dark with smoke.
The picture turned to the anchor, an older gentleman who was sitting next to an attractive younger woman. The anchor turned to the camera. “Now to the nation's capital where Alice Montgomery with our affiliate WRCK is standing by.”
Behind the pretty reporter was a line of riot police. It looked like they were on Pennsylvania Avenue, near the White House.
Alice Montgomery looked earnestly at the camera. “Roger, we have just had a report that the President has declared a national emergency and is imposing martial law. Behind me Marine One has landed to take the President out of Washington where it is no longer safe. Since last night Washington has been swept by a wave of riots and the city is under siege. We have confirmed reports that most of the city's police stations have been overrun. Reports are sketchy at the moment, but it seems that the mobs have been…no, this can’t be right…cannibals? Wait a minute. Something is happening behind me.”
Behind the reporter a mob of people were running down the street toward the riot police. The camera tried to focus on the people, but the image was distorted. Montgomery continued to talk over it. “The police captain reports that this mob has already overrun one police line at the far end of Pennsylvania Avenue and suggesting we evacuate immediately…”
But it was too late. On the screen the image became clear. It was people, hundreds of them, many of them carrying terrible wounds, bloody. But more, their faces and skin had turned an odd pale color. As they got closer the wounds became clearer and more horrible.
In the restaurant, so many miles away, one of the customers, a trucker, muttered. “Just look at them. It’s like they are dead.”
“Hush now,” said a woman. I thought it was the older waitress.
“I bet this is all because of the n****s and the Jews. Don’t forget all the faggots,” said the older skinhead, a fat slob whose gut rolled over his belt.
“Gotta be,” said his young colleague.
A young woman who looked polished and poised, pretty but not pretty enough to be a model or an actress, was especially pissed off. “Jesus, what a f***ing story. And we’re missing it.”
“Probably better that way,” said an old grizzled fellow who shared the booth with the woman and a video camera.
On the TV the journalist said, “Can you hear that? Should we get out. Let’s get going…Now…” Over the audio we heard the sound of crowd, a mix of a low moan and a snarl.
The mob crashed into the police line, and we could see the police clubs come down, gun fire as riot guns blasted into the crowd, and still they came, tearing through the police line, climbing atop them, policemen being pulled down. God love the cameraman because he was either a brave man to hold his spot or too afraid to run. The police line broke down under the attack, and then the police were running. One riot cop fell to the ground and was being pulled apart by members of the mob before he was hidden by the mass of the mob. The cameraman continued to videotape the scene as the mob ran toward him, and as they closed we could see them now, their eyes a bloody, ruby red and insane, their mouths open and arms desperate. We heard Montgomery cry out, “No, no…Get away…” and then start screaming.
Then the picture went blank. Then the anchors came back on, speechless.
Inside the Café no one spoke for a moment.
Then Duke said, “Hey, I think I saw this film.”
The girl sitting next to me was nonchalantly drinking her coffee. She took a sip and then opened a pack of cigarettes. “It’s not a movie. It’s the end of the world,” she said, and lit one up.
It was the first time I noticed her, and it seemed to me she was completely unfazed by what had been depicted on the TV. “Hi. My name is Robert,” I said.
“Beth,” she said.