The plaza was nothing unique. Your typical tiny, cramped variety store and a beauty salon were side-by-side. A bar with dark windows anchored the end of the plaza. There were suburban pockets like this everywhere within the city – nothing but house upon house for dozens of blocks and then you’d come across a more industrialized area with manufacturing plants and decrepit strip malls and the like. There may have only been 50 buildings in this part of town. The rest of it was comprised of generic brown brick buildings with fences going right around the property. Thoughts of stockpiled food and H-gas in an abandoned store plagued his thoughts, but he was pretty sure that they were already likely pillaged of any usefulness.
They had brought along a few light items. Boxes of crackers. Bottles of water. They wouldn’t last.
Still he investigated the plaza and found some candy packages and a package of Band-Aids that they pocketed for later.
Daniel walked incredibly slowly. He held his arm to his body like it was a fragile piece of glass.
Not surprisingly, the next recognizable building they came across was a gas station. Its walls were formed with crude cement – the uneven finish was painted white and two-foot high letters were hung over the only open garage bay, spelling American Gas. It looked like it had been sitting here since the 1950s or earlier. A sign was hung from a frail-looking door. The sign only communicated a few choice words:
Have Gun, Know How to Use It.
There was one pump, and it was empty.
Jess turned his attention to the open garage. It might have been a mistake to go inside. There was no light source inside. The lone light bulb seemed to be smashed on the floor and he didn’t have any other way to illuminate the area since both of them had long since dropped their flashlights. Without a way to see, he would be at a distinct disadvantage if there were anything inside waiting. But at the same time, he wasn’t going to get far by foot and he needed H-gas. He knew he had to check every square inch of the gas station before leaving it behind. He didn’t want to, but he knew he must.
Daniel seemed to know what he was thinking. “I’ll stay back here, where I’m not being threatened by guns.”
“You do what you need to kid, I’ll see you on the other side.”
“Wait,” Daniel said. He held out the smartcard Jess didn’t understand. When Daniel held it up to his face and turned on the screen Jess got it. It served as a poor but usable light in the dark.
The crowbar was heavy in his hands. At first, that weight was what made it feel like a good choice for a weapon. Now he had to wonder if it was just going to slow him down if he was surprised.
He moved forward slowly. A few steps, stop, look around. Nothing was inside the garage apart from a wall of basic tools like wrenches and an air hose. A half dozen tires were stacked up in the corner. There was a single door at the back that had a union jack hanging over it. He grabbed the cold metal handle and opened it as slowly as he could, but still it made a horrible creak. He waited in position, in the dark, for two full minutes, listening for a sound, before moving again.
Pulling open the drapes from the lone window of the room let in just enough of the dim night in to make a difference. It was enough to see that he was in a small office. A large table with a matching chair and a bench for guests were pulled in tight. The room seemed a little too pristine. He expected garages to have nothing but oil and grease and soot.
A good dozen pages of loose leaf paper were lined up squarely on the desk. A metal coffee machine sat on a small table in the corner. Jess pressed the button on the front. It made neither noise nor any other indication that it was working.
“I’d kill for a cup of coffee right now,” he said to no one.
Even from grind that’s two weeks old.
Jess noticed that the table beneath the coffee machine was solid. There was a silver streak along its front that turned out to be an indented handle. Inside was a fridge, still slightly cooler than the rest of the room. He opened it and saw the outlines of some shapes that looked familiar. A container of orange juice that he knew he dare not drink. A small container of milk – which would be in even worse condition. There was also a glass bottle of lime cordial. Jess unscrewed the cap and put his nose to it. It didn’t smell bad. He raised it to his lips slowly. It tasted both bitter and sweet somehow, but not bad. It was like fizzy lime juice mixed with liquid sugar.
There was also a small box of fruit crème cookies. Jess decided to take a chance and popped a whole one in his mouth. It seemed okay, even though it was strangely soft and chewable. The thought that they had slightly gone bad didn’t much faze him. He figured it would take a long time for mass-produced cookies like this to go bad enough to make you sick. They sat on store shelves for weeks and weeks, presumably.
God bless preservatives.
There was little else of interest in the office. A smartcard that appeared to have melted. A miniature vial of champagne in the desk drawer. He opened the latter and downed it in one big gulp. With the taste of pure liquor warming his throat, he took the crowbar in one hand and the box of cookies in the other and walked back outside.
The usual twilight-like colour of the sky had darkened since he went in the gas station. By the time he reached the car large raindrops were falling from the dark clouds. Daniel was asleep in the passenger seat and Jess felt calmed by the drink, happy knowing that he at least had something to fill his belly with for the moment. He decided he too would sleep and explore the rest of the town when the sun came up.
When he awoke, his driver’s seat was as reclined as it would go. Daniel slept in the seat beside him. Something was tapping on the roof above. Tiny crumbs of half-eaten cookies littered the front of his shirt. He grabbed the crowbar and stepped outside, quickly turning around in case anything was on the roof. As if they were frozen or coated with something heavy, leaves were falling like bombs from nearby trees. When they hit the van it sounded more like hail than a leaf.
The sky had again turned grey and along with the downpour of leaves were more flakes of dirty ash that had covered the car’s windshield. From the inside, it looked like frost had covered the entire exterior of the car.
It appeared to be early morning, although it was difficult to tell. The skies were still sullied with hovering ashes. Nearly everything was varying shades of grey. The ground, the trees, even the distant buildings were speckled with black and grey and other hues in-between.
Daniel’s face had begun to sprout round white zits.
“Hey kid, wake up,” Jess said.
Daniel didn’t move, not even when Jess repeated himself, louder.
Jess sat up in the driver’s seat and tried giving the boy’s shoulder a gentle shake. His head lulled to the side. Jess grabbed his hand and felt that it was ice-cold. It had been chilly in the car but not cold enough to freeze them solid.
Jess grabbed him by the jacket and sat him up straight again then proceeded to smack him in the face several times.
“Wake up! Daniel, snap out of it!”
Finally, there was a barely perceptible shudder in the boy’s body. His arm twitched. His eyelids fluttered. After about a minute of these diminutive shudders, Daniel’s eyes opened. Jess couldn’t recall if the boy’s eyes were blue or brown or green yesterday but they certainly were not glazed over in white like they were now.
The boy’s arms came up slowly and grabbed Jess’s jacket. Daniel tried to pull himself up but was acting like he was drunk. Jess knocked his arms away and backed out of the car, slipping in the ash. Daniel crawled out of the car head and hands first. He fell out, his chin colliding with the ground below him with an audible thud, yet his eyes betrayed everything: pain didn’t register.
And then his mouth opened and Daniel moaned in such a familiar way that Jess could have cried if he weren’t so scared.
Jess’s brain told him to run. Just turn and leave and don’t look back, but he had made the boy a promise.
He walked to the back of the van and retrieved the crowbar.
Although there were several dozen businesses in this area of town, none of them looked particularly inviting.
Jess had no alternative but to search them all, at least until he found what he needed so that he could continue.
The next structure he came to was a dilapidated store operating out of the first floor of a traditional 1950s-style house, but no more rundown-looking than the gas station. He was clearly making his way through an old part of town whose inhabitants didn’t have a lot of money to waste on aesthetic things like paint and decoration. The place was nestled between an area so entrenched in buildings of a certain style that each had about a foot or two at most between it and its neighbour.
The roof of the one he eyed was dark brown – seen only in small spots since it was also covered in fallen ash – and the once white wooden planks that covered the outer walls were both peeling and filthy. The closer he got to it, the worse it looked. A nearby tree had branches that hung down like protective arms. Every opening into the dwelling – windows, doors and what may as well have been unnatural holes – were black with mysterious interiors.
The front of the house was simply designed. The porch was non-existent, at least when compared to houses of the day. It had an open walkway that was abnormally wide, without anywhere to sit or rest. The porch had an overhanging rooftop that was divided in half by a single wooden pole that presumably kept it from falling down on visitor’s heads. Like so many other shops in the area, there was no bright neon sign like you might expect to find elsewhere. These were business signs that had been inviting customers in for decades and decades.
A lone sign was strung underneath the overhang. The letters were bright yellow. The wave-like oval rings of the wood underneath seemed to be bleeding through the coat of paint. Sam’s Supplies had apparently spent a good number of years meeting the needs of the neighbourhood.
The first floor was like an ancient pharmacy or convenience store; a discarded museum of general-use drugs and household supplies. He was able to grab a still sealed bottle of Tylenol and a small working LED flashlight. The shelves were in disarray and there was little else of any use. Sofas in the back appeared to be ancient and were apparently there to allow customers to wait in comfort for their orders to be readied. They were covered with a fine layer of dust. Bizarre props aligned on the service counter all seemed to have eyes that stared out at you through an unnerving alien sentience. One such ornament was a metal butler in a tuxedo with a few medicine bottles on a carrying tray who swung precariously from side-to-side, if you gave him a little nudge. Jess did so with the gentle push of a finger and watched as the cut-out see-sawed back and forth on an invisible pendulum.
The upper landing of the building was in even worse shape. The ceiling was peeling, perhaps from the moisture of the ash on the outer ledges of the rooftop or from the greenhouse-like moisture vacuumed inside the husk of the house. There was a large, lone room up here, perhaps at one time used as a storage area. All that remained now were two large wall portraits. One was a torn poster from an old science fiction movie release and the other was an old painting of a man in a suit. Jess knew it was old because there wasn’t a speck of colour in the photo – just black and white and faded beiges. Every wall had the decaying wallpaper of times gone by hanging by frayed edges. It was clear that there was an old fire that had burned in the center of the room at one time. Bits of ash and paper cascaded outwards from the center as though it had exploded in one last blast.
There was a door in a tiny kitchen at the back of the building that led down one more flight of stairs. Jess aimed his flashlight down the entrance way but the beam of light seemed swallowed up in the darkness below. Each step down receded into increasing levels of darkness. There was nothing to be seen but wooden planks leading down into a pit of unknown.
Jess tried to talk himself out of going down. He could move on to the next building, where perhaps the chance of finding something that would help him rendezvous with his family was greater. There was also the chance that he would be going down into the dark cave of something vicious or defensive. There was something about the fact that the light got swallowed up into nothing that made him feel like he should close the door and turn around.
The only thing that made him doubt his natural inclination to turn and run was that his children were out there somewhere, perhaps not too far ahead, in a spot that was perhaps attainable from his current location. If they weren’t at the apartment, he would need fuel and supplies to venture any further. Though Jess angered at the thought of a God having a place in this desolate world, he still quietly prayed for the safekeeping of his children.
When both his sons were born, he would buy a bubble bath concoction for babies that perfumed their skin like lavender and chamomile and he continued to use it long after they stopped being babies.
Jess was surprised to find that one of the things he missed most as a result of the separation from his family was their smell. He was sure it must have been a Wednesday or Thursday when the apocalypse happened. A mere two days from his weekend rendezvous with his sons. He had always looked forward to midday grilled cheese sandwiches on sour dough bread and a couple old Twilight Zone episodes courtesy the legendary Rod Serling. Up until a few years ago, one of them would lean up against him as they watched a movie. Michael distanced himself from leaning in too close to family first, being that he was the eldest child. Dustin had only recently shown signs of needing his own independence but the boy slept like the dead, even in the middle of movies and Jess would pull him in close and sniff his hair as he slept. It allowed him to remember when he was just a babe and could be cradled in the crook of his arm.
“Orson, has the date for that stock car race passed yet?”
“It was scheduled to happen yesterday.”
“That’s too bad. Would have been nice.”
“I know the boys would have enjoyed it. May I ask what you’re doing here? Do you really think there’s a chance you’ll find anything useful here? It seems like this house has been deserted for quite some time.”
“I have to check Orson. By the way, how are your batteries doing?”
“Getting a little low.”
“Why don’t take a nap. I’ll wake you when I need you.”
“Very well.”
Time was of the essence. Jess didn’t know where the boys were. They could have made it halfway around the world or worse, but sitting around and avoiding frightening basements wasn’t helping him get back in contact with them any sooner.
Cool air wafted up from the dark depths below. It gave him the momentary hope that food could be found down there, sufficiently chilled to still be edible. The thought of a fresh find, like chocolate or canned pasta or even potatoes was enough to get him to test the stability of the first step. It held up well, as did the crude handrail attached to the wall.
The flashlight did a poor job of illuminating his descent. It emitted a single ray of light that showed a very small area at any given time. But, it was better than nothing at all. Jess swore to himself that if he ever got out of this and back to some semblance of a civilized world, he would go into business designing a powerful LED flashlight that would have different settings, such as a wide or narrow beam.
As it was now, the light projected out in a very specific and contained area; illuminating very little at any given time. It gave everything an undersea-like blue hue and his eyes had difficulty separating the monochromatic scene before him.
The wind whistled through the building as though there were several open drafts coming from places unknown. Air bristled past his ear and Jess pointed the light to follow the movement.
It was like looking at shadows upon shadows. Your eyes could so easily play games as you tried to scan the darkness. You think you’ve caught something as you’re swinging your light around and by the time you move it back to the spot you thought you were looking at, the shadow you were looking for was gone.
There was no food to be seen down here, and no fuel either. But there were several bottles of wine that hopefully had avoided all radiation that could have infiltrated the walls. Jess realized he was beginning to lose hope as the prospect of getting drunk became increasingly attractive.
Jess tucked several bottles in his jacket. There seemed to be a small door in the far end of the room that might have led to a closet or a storage area. Designed to be out-of-the-way and barely noticeable, it had almost achieved the effect. Jess gripped the handle, feeling it for some kind of sign, thinking back to when, as a kid, he was told that if he was ever caught in the middle of a house fire, that he should test door handles before opening them.
The handle was cold.
Jess was suddenly tackled from the side and thrown to the ground. The flashlight was thrown from his hand and it rolled away to the edge of the ground, continuing to burn its small pure-like radiance in a single, focused beam against a portion of the wall.
Some creature, small but ferocious and berserk, had wound up on top of him, clawing and roaring like a tornado of limbs and teeth. Jess kicked and punched in retaliation and managed to push the thing backwards to the point where it smacked against the far wall.
It didn’t stay down for long. It was back up on its feet like a thing demented. The flashlight bounced and rolled again to the edge of the floor and pointed at an empty corner of the room. The creature positioned itself for another attack and Jess saw just how small it really was. It had to be a child or a really small person. It stood on two legs and had long hair but seemed barely able to stand higher than his waist. He reached for the wall behind him for some kind of a weapon. A glass bottle half-full of screws and nails. He hurled it at her.
Missed.
It smashed against the wall, snatching away its attention for a brief moment.
He reached back again and grabbed something else - a hammer - just as she jumped atop him again. A howl coming from her throat somehow sounded like a little girl’s demented play-like scream. They both went down and Jess started swinging with the tool in his hand while the girl’s jaws clamped down on the shoulder of his jacket.
It was a heavy hammer he had grabbed and he brought it down upon the side of her head. It made hard whacks against the bone. He swung rapidly and not very strongly, but she was reacting to the blows. Her hands ignored the hammer and continued to reach out to try and get him.
When she didn’t retreat like a normal person would have after having been struck so viciously, he swung down hard with blow after blow and the strength of her attacks noticeably slowed. The girl rolled off him, moaning and clutching her head with both hands.
She wasn’t dead and after a brief moment, she rolled and squealed and thrashed against the wall. Her arms were alternating between tearing at the open wound in her forehead and scratching at the open air before her. Jess got to his feet and held the hammer aloft, moving forward with slow steps. The girl seemed a blind animal now. Her face seemed as grey as the ash in the sky and her skin was cracked and withered. Her eyes were lifeless white things and part of her nose seemed to be missing. Off to the side of the room he saw several shapes. Half-eaten bodies, by the look of it.
He brought the flat end of the hammer down upon her face and she fell to the ground and he swung it down again and again against the round shape of her head until it fell in upon itself.
She twitched a little, one arm shaking out the last signals from her brain and then she came to be completely still. Jess kicked at the body to make sure before the flashlight’s batteries seemed to die. It was pointed against a curtain and the beam of light was so bright that it almost seemed like it might catch afire before it went out completely.
He picked up the flashlight and smacked it against the palm of his hand. It lit again and showed that the girl wore clothes that were tattered and blood-stained. One of the bodies off to the far end of the room appeared to be in two pieces, its lower half about a foot away from the rest of it, ragged red meat staining the space in-between.
She had ripped a hole in the shoulder of his jacket but had not broken the skin. He was about to leave and head for the stairs when he noticed light reflecting from within the hidden door, which somehow got knocked open during their struggle. He leaned in closer, training the light upon the spot and saw several red plastic bottles sitting within a small closet. He pulled one out, unscrewed the lid and lifted it to his nose, inhaling.
It was H-gas.
Jess carried the two bottles he found to the car. It wasn’t a lot of gas, but it should be sufficient to get him to the apartment, he thought.