The Enduring: Stories of Surviving the Apocalypse (15 page)

“No,” he looked suddenly crestfallen, almost to the point of pain. “It was a beautiful city once. But it’s not that place any more. I saw enough on the streets that one night we went for supplies. It’s lawless, dark and dangerous now.”

I thought about that, and once again, I looked around, trying to recall what I had read on the maps as I had travelled here. The compound was maybe ten or twelve miles from the heart of the city. I looked at Larry, my expression betraying some of my concern.

“What happens if you’re ever discovered?” I tried to ask the question with as much innocence as I could muster. “You can’t stay unnoticed forever…”

He swatted the question away. “We’re small fish,” he laughed hollowly. “No one has any reason to want what we have, because we don’t have enough to take. But if they do try…” there was an edge of menace in the way he muttered the last few words.

“Yes…?”

His expression became secretive, as though he had already revealed too much. He shook his head. “We won’t give up without a fight.”

It was all he would say.

For a long while we just stood in awkward silence. I was taking in my surroundings, trying to recall all those elements that were impossible to note on paper. Larry kicked his boots in the dirt, waiting.

“Okay. Take me back,” I asked at last. “Tell me how you survived those first hours of the Apocalypse. Were you at work when you first heard about the ‘Affliction’?”

Larry seemed almost relieved at the change of subject. He nodded his head. “I was working as a security guard for a trucking firm. I was watching the news websites as well as listening to a police scanner radio. Suddenly the airwaves just lit up. It was bizarre. One minute the cops were attending to routine traffic dramas and the next they were mobilizing every black and white they could towards the regional hospital. That’s when I started to get a bad feeling. I could hear the far away sound of helicopters coming closer. Not one, or two… a shit-load of them.”

“What did you do?”

“I knew about the ‘Affliction’ of course. The spread of the infection had been on the news for days leading up to this. I just never expected it to reach us… and certainly not so fast. As soon as I heard the burst of activity on the police scanner and then the sounds of the helicopters, I put two and two together and left work immediately. I knew what was coming.

“On the way home I called my wife and told her to leave work too. I needed her to start moving our emergency supplies into the living room.”

“So you knew – even before you arrived home – that you were going to evacuate?”

“Yes,” Larry said emphatically. “Mr. Culver, I have a wife and son. Taking chances with their lives was not an option.”

I nodded, understanding and respecting his decision. “What was the scene like when you came through the front door of your home?”

“Stacy – my wife was already packing,” Larry explained. “She is a nurse, and I was worried that she might get called into work. To be sure that didn’t happen, I took her phone and threw it out the window.  My son, Richard Alec, was a high school student. Thankfully he was home that day. He was bringing the last of our supplies out from the bedrooms when I got home.”

“Did you know where you were going to go to?”

“Yes,” he said again. Larry Phelps was like that; not once during our interview did I hear or see any sign of hesitation. He was decisive and clear-minded. “We were heading to my in-laws. That was a decision Stacy and I had made several years before when we were playing through several ‘what if’ scenarios. I never thought it would actually happen…”

“You said earlier the drive there was about an hour, right?”

“Right,” he said. “We had to be on the road quickly. I knew traffic would get chaotic if we were delayed. I was sure the whole town would start to evacuate. I wanted to be ahead of them, not caught in the midst of a gridlock.”

“So what exactly was in the supplies that you packed and took with you? Was it just a matter of grabbing anything you could… or was it more organized than that?”

“Organized, of course,” Larry sounded almost offended at the suggestion that his plan had been anything but a model of efficiency. “My wife and I both have get-home bags in our cars, and we all have a bug out bag ready in the garage as well as food stored to last us two weeks. It was all there, ready to go.”

“And that was all you took with you?”

“We had weapons,” Larry added. “My wife and I both have concealed carry permits, so I had a pistol on me. There was another in a locked box beside the bed. Apart from the essentials, I snatched up some things that have significance to me – an old bank bag that was my father’s. In it was packed a small bible that had been passed down from my great grandfather, to my grandfather, to my father, on to me. I had also packed my father’s Mason ring, our marriage license, birth certificates and some photos.”

We watched one of the women walk past us, carrying a woven cane basket filled with washed clothes. She was a tall blonde woman with Scandinavian features. She had a calm purposeful poise about the way she walked that seemed to typify everything about this bustling little compound. I watched the woman until she disappeared through the door of one of the houses.

“Were you prepared for this, Larry?”

“This?”

“The Apocalypse?”

He shook his head solemnly. “No,” he admitted. “I don’t think anyone was prepared for what happened. We all thought about it from time to time, but it’s never
imminent
. It’s never in the context of ‘about to happen’. Before the ‘Affliction’ I made sure we were as ready as we could be. I had taken a number of bush craft classes that covered the identification of wild edibles, shelter making, fire building and trapping and water purification. I was also a former animal control officer and a volunteer police officer. But for all that… I still wasn’t prepared beyond the practical.”

“Can you explain that?” I stood with my pen poised while Larry looked away as though he were searching for words.

“Gathering skills is just one kind of preparedness,” he said, making a face that suggested he was struggling to explain himself. “But it’s the psychological aspects that catch you off guard. It’s the fear – fear for your family, fear for friends… the country,” his voice became quiet for a moment. “As individuals we can be ready, but that’s really only half the survival story. The rest is how you adapt, deal with the stress and horror.”

I sensed the interview coming to an end. It was early afternoon. Several of the men were gathered at the end of the street, preparing to pour the concrete that would hold the gate posts upright. Slowly we began to walk towards the work site.

“One last question,” I paused in mid stride. “From the moment you heard about the ‘Affliction’ right up until the moment I arrived here to interview you… did you ever actually encounter anyone infected with the contagion?”

“No,” Larry sounded relieved. “We got through to the in-laws place before the traffic snarled. For a few days after that the sky was thick with helicopters and aircraft… and far away on the horizon we could see the smoke along the skyline. It was as close as we ever came, and I’m glad about that.” He looked me in the eye like he was staring right through me and then went on, speaking slowly and calmly.

“A man can tell himself that in a crisis he will turn into some efficient killing machine, Mr. Culver… but the reality is often very different. I for one, am glad I was never put to the test. For me, the real test was to get my family to safety unharmed…
and I passed.”

* * *

Eagle, Wisconsin:

When I thought about the ‘Affliction’, I always thought in terms of the big cities; New York, Chicago, Los Angeles… I imagined those massive areas of population being overrun with the undead, and the nightmarish horror that would have crashed through America’s areas of dense population.

But the ‘Affliction’ was an indiscriminant plague that swept
right across
the country, infecting the young and old, the rich and poor… the massive cities and the smallest of towns.

Including Eagle, Wisconsin; a sleepy little village tucked away in the south east corner of the state – current population 2.

Eagle had once been home to a couple of thousand fiercely proud locals that had banded together in good times and bad, and had come through the tornado of 2010 relatively unscathed. But the ‘Affliction’ had been something else entirely; an inhumane force of unstoppable power that had infected everyone in the village.

Except for Laura Ellen, and her fifteen-year-old daughter, Emily.

Laura and I were standing in front of a run-down factory on the outskirts of town. Grass and weeds had grown up through the cracked concrete, and pieces of heavy machinery stood forlorn and abandoned in the yard, like the ancient carcasses of farm machinery that once littered America’s rural landscape. They were broken down hulks, spotted with rust, covered in cobwebs and dust. The factory building beyond the yard was abandoned. It had the feeling of a derelict barn. The doors were wide open, yawning like a cavernous mouth.

I turned to Laura, bewildered.

“I was expecting something… grander,” I said.

Laura looked a little surprised. “Why?”

“Well you told me you were a machinist before the Apocalypse, and that you worked in a factory that manufactured Hellfire missile parts for Lockheed. When we arrived here, I was expecting to see something more like a military base,” I shrugged my shoulders. “You know – high wire fences, checkpoints at the gates… that kind of thing.”

Laura shook her head. She was a slim woman in her late thirties with a kind of elegant economical grace, and a quirky sense of humor – despite all that she and her daughter had endured. Superficially, she seemed well adjusted, but I had seen small signs; a nerved tick at the corner of her eye and the way she clenched her hands into white-knuckled fists when we had first arrived here.

Laura was like the graceful swan that people admired as it glided across a calm lake… never quite understanding that below the surface she was silently thrashing to stay afloat…

“The company I worked for supplied the parts to Lockheed,” Laura explained. “Our factory was like a sub-contractor. There was no fence, no armed guards… although I wished there had been on the day the ‘Affliction’ broke out.”

I nodded. “How many people worked here?”

“A hundred?” she answered with an uplift of her voice to turn it into a kind of question, and then shrugged her shoulders. “Something like that.”

We walked slowly towards the open doors of the factory building. Overhead the sky was sullen with dark clouds the color of old bruises. They hung low against the ground, heavy with pending rain, pushing a skirt of cold air ahead of them so that I shivered.

The factory had the eerie menacing feel of a haunted house. Cobwebs hung like a veil from the open doorway and the rafter beams within. Overhead lights swung gently, pushed about by the gusting breeze. The sound of the wind through the empty shed was like a low lamenting moan.

I scuffed my feet on the oil-spotted concrete floor and kicked up a layer of grey dust. The ground was spattered with dried splashes of blood. I took a deep breath and the taste of something rotting filled the back of my throat.

“Okay,” I said. “Tell me what happened here.”

Laura turned in a slow circle, her eyes roaming around the remains of the abandoned factory. Either she was re-familiarizing herself with her surroundings or she was doing exactly what I was surreptitiously doing; checking the darkened corners for undead…

“I was on a break, hiding in my special spot so no one would bug me,” she confided.

“What were you doing?”

“Watching TV on my tablet.”

“You were watching the news?”

“No,” Laura said. “My favorite show… when suddenly I heard people around the factory starting to scream. They weren’t happy screams like when you’re cheering your team, they were screams of fear and panic and then of pain.”

“What did you do?”

“Nothing for the first minute,” Laura confessed, and wrung her hands. “I… I thought it was a joke at first, you see. I had been a fan of everything zombie for years. I thought my co-workers were messing with me because I was forever talking about a zombie movie I just saw, or a zombie book I was reading.”

“That minute you hesitated, Laura… it could have cost you your life too.”

“Yes,” she said heavily. “I still think about that, Mr. Culver. I wonder how things would have been different if I had taken those first screams seriously. Would I have been attacked and infected? Could I have gotten away sooner and maybe saved some people..?” Her face began to crumble, and her eyes welled with unshed tears. I saw her shoulders shake. Then she took a deep breath and trapped her bottom lip between her teeth as though she were physically restraining herself from crying.

I looked away and for a long moment I found the dust on my boots absolutely fascinating. When I sensed Laura had composed herself, I glanced up.

“Tell me what happened,” I said softly. “From the moment you went to investigate the sounds of screaming.”