The Enduring: Stories of Surviving the Apocalypse (20 page)

“I. Did. Nothing.”

I shook my head once more at the incredulity of this woman’s survival. “You had no weapon, did you?”

“No,” Debbie said. “I’ve never owned a gun. I had knives in the house, but I didn’t use one to defend myself.”

“And you didn’t look to flee to a safer location?”

“No,” Debbie confirmed, and then shrugged her shoulders expressively. “Where would I go? There is nowhere safe in the surrounding area. There was nowhere I could think of to flee.”

“And you didn’t do anything to barricade your house?”

“No,” Debbie looked almost apologetic and then her expression turned to exasperation. “I’m a single middle-aged woman living alone,” she tried to explain. “There were some boards in the garage but not enough to block off the glass doors or the windows.” She made an expressive gesture with her hands. “I was unprepared.”

It sounded lame, but I supposed there were many millions of Americans who had been similarly unprepared. Not everyone in the U.S.A. was a prepper. Not everyone owned a weapon or took survival skills training. But what made Debbie Kagan’s story of survival so remarkable was that despite taking no preparations, nor lifting a hand to defend herself, she had lived through the Apocalypse. The ‘Afflicted’ had been inside this house. They had rampaged through the entire street. The killing frenzy had torn through this entire Chicago suburb in a single afternoon… but she had survived.

“You did have a survival bag, though, didn’t you,” I encouraged Debbie to keep telling her story.

“Yes,” she said.

Right now that bag was in the cab of my truck. It was all Debbie had taken from the house when she had been evacuated to Cage Camp. It was her only worldly possession. “It was a survival kit I had prepared in the event of a natural disaster,” she shrugged her shoulders again. “It had some canned goods, water, batteries, over-the-counter medications, bandages and a can opener. I had also packed two pairs of sweats with t-shirts, hoodies and socks.”

I nodded. I had written this information down when we had first met at the camp. “You had a radio too, right?”

“Yes,” Debbie said. “And rope, and tape, and scissors. On reflection, it wasn’t a lot.”

“No, not compared to some other survivors I have interviewed,” I admitted. “But,” I put a smile at the end of the sentence, “it was enough for you to survive.”

Debbie said nothing.

For a long time we both stood in reflective silence. I looked towards the top of the stairs. “Debbie… do you want to talk me through it. You haven’t told me exactly
how
you survived. You said the undead came into this house – and I can see that from the blood, the destruction. I assume you had a cunning hiding place?”

Debbie swallowed and gnawed at her lip.

“Show me,” I urged her.

We went up the stairs together, taking each step deliberately. Debbie’s eyes were everywhere at once, as though expecting one of the ‘Afflicted’ to lunge at her from out of a bedroom door. When we had reached the landing I stood expectantly. I could see a small square ceiling trap door above our heads. It was access to the home’s attic. I could see the faint smudge of fingerprints around the trap door. I looked at Debbie.

“Up there,” I said. “That was where you hid.”

Debbie looked horrified. She shook her head. “God, no,” her voice became tremulous. “I’ve never been in the attic.”

“Then where?” I frowned and looked closely at the upstairs walls. They looked normal. I ran my hands along the surfaces, feeling for something that might be a concealed panel. There was nothing I could see. I felt a rising sense of frustration. There was nowhere in the bedrooms to hide.

Debbie reached for the double doors of the laundry closet. She pulled them open. Inside stood a family-sized washing machine and a dryer. Beside the washing machine was a large laundry basket, filled with unwashed clothes.

“This is where I hid,” Debbie said softly.

I blinked in surprise. “In the laundry closet?”

“Under… under a pile of unwashed clothes.”

I looked again, then looked hard at Debbie. “You hid from the undead
in the laundry basket?
”

“Yes,” Debbie said with a rush of breath that sounded like relief. “That was where I hid. Right there.”

“How?” I asked incredulously.

Debbie took a step back, but her eyes were still fixed on the pile of unwashed clothes. “When the ‘Afflicted’ appeared on the street, people began to run, screaming. There were gunshots – lots of gunshots. A car came around the corner and drove straight through the front of a house across the road. Everything went up in flames.”

“And you saw all this?”

“Everything,” Debbie said in a whisper. “From the window over the driveway.”

“So what did you do?”

“I had no escape, and nowhere to hide,” she admitted. “I didn’t have a weapon I could defend myself with, so I went to the bedroom and covered myself with perfume. I emptied every bottle over me and then spread what was left on the floor. I did the same with every cleaning product in the house. Detergent, soap powder, window cleaner. Then I stripped the beds and emptied my dresser drawers of clothes. I hid myself in the corner beside the washing machine and then put the laundry basket in front of me. I covered myself with the washing.”

“And it worked?”

Debbie shrugged. “Concealment and camouflage,” she said suddenly. “My father once told me that was how a lot of animals protected themselves against predators. So that’s what I did. I hid, and then concealed any trace of human scent with perfume and cleaning products. I didn’t know if the ‘Afflicted’ had a sense of smell, or how good their eyesight was. I just hoped and prayed that the strong scents throughout the house would be enough to confuse them and conceal me.”

“And it worked.”

“Yes.”

“How long did you hide in the laundry closet for?”

“Almost two days,” Debbie said. “The first twenty-four hours were horrible. I heard the ‘Afflicted’. They were in this house. They were everywhere. They tore the downstairs rooms apart. I heard a gunshot, but I don’t know who fired. They came rampaging up the stairs and pulled the bedrooms apart. They were howling, screaming. The sound was terrifying.”

“But they didn’t look in here?”

“Yes, they did,” Debbie said. “They flung the doors open. I heard them panting. Then someone in one of the neighboring houses must have screamed. It was a shrill, terrified scream. The ‘Afflicted’ seemed to be drawn away by the sound. I heard their footsteps pounding back down the stairs.”

“But still you stayed hidden?”

“Yes. For two days.”

I shook my head with slow incredulity. It was a remarkable tale of survival. Heroics hadn’t saved Debbie Kagan’s life. Common sense had.

I repaired Debbie’s front door and boarded up her broken window. I left her at sunset and drove back to Cage Camp, replaying in my mind the events of her remarkable survival as the slow miles stretched behind me. At sunrise the following day I was back in Sandwich with the young mother and her daughter sitting wide eyed but silent in the truck.

Debbie looked distraught and tired. I didn’t ask, but I sensed she had not slept at all through the night. She wrapped an arm around the shoulder of the young child.

I waved farewell to Debbie an hour later and drove north.

The ‘Affliction’ had ended a year before, and yet the fallout from that apocalyptic event still rumbled like seismic aftershocks through the lives of everyone who had endured. For mankind, the world would never be the same. But for some that endured – like Debbie Kagan – survival came with a glimmer of renewed hope, and an opportunity…

… to start again.

* * *

Lake St. Clair, Michigan:

Through the tall grass that fringed the waterline I could see a small aluminum tender, gliding across the still water of the lake, crinkling the surface with every splash of the oars. In the boat, with his back to me, was a man. I saw him glance over his shoulder towards where I stood.

I waved, and stepped down to the edge of the water. The small boat was twenty yards away, coming on quickly. The sky overhead was achingly, perfect blue and the morning so still that it felt like the world was holding its breath. Beyond the tender I could see a larger boat. It was a yacht of some kind, with a single mast. I guessed it was forty foot long, the hull gleaming white and reflecting on the deep blue mirror of the lake. The sails were furled, the bow of the boat tugging gently at an anchor cable against the gentle draw of the tide.

The tender swept down on the beach. At the last moment the man brought the oars up and let the bow drive onto the gravel shore. The man splashed from the boat, heaved the bow a little higher from the lap of the waterline and then – at last – turned and drew himself upright so that we were standing face-to-face.

He was a tall, lithe man, maybe in his fifties. He had an interesting face, tanned and weather-beaten around the edges. His dark hair and beard were streaked with grey, and there was a fine web of wrinkles around the deep set eyes, like the cracking of an ancient painting.

“You’re Culver?” the man asked. He was wearing jeans and an unbuttoned shirt, the skin of his chest tanned dark by the sun. Around his neck was a thin gold chain, and there was another on his wrist above the leather band of his watch.

“Yes,” I said and hung my friendliest smile off the corner of my mouth. I held out my hand. “And you’re Bill…?” my voice trailed off into a question. ‘Bill’ was the only name I had been given during the exchange of terse and cryptic radio messages that had led to this meeting.

“I’m Bill,” he agreed.

My hand was still hanging in the air. The man seemed not to have noticed. He was studying my face, his eyes slitted and wary. He had one hand on his hip and for the first time I realized that he was actually poised to reach for a weapon concealed behind his back. I felt the sudden instinctive urge to take a step back, and had to fight it down.

“Do you have a surname?” I let my hand drop to my side.

“Yes.”

“Want to tell me – for the article?”

“No. It’s redacted.”

“Redacted?”

“Yep. Not for publication. Deleted. Removed from all official records,” his voice became a growl. “Understand?”

I blinked, made a face of bemused confusion, and then shrugged my shoulders. “Fine,” I said.

The man seemed to relax a little and I wondered if the bristling hostility was some kind of a test. Most people I had met during the writing of this book had been wary, secretive, and defensive. I understood the primitive instinct for survival as well as anyone, and I guessed that Bill’s snarling aggression was a protective and defensive mechanism. It was the way of the new world, I realized. We were all survivors, and all scarred by the experience… perhaps permanently.

“Nice to finally meet you, Bill.” I kept my voice neutral, and deliberately thrust out my hand again. The man’s eyes flashed for just a second of hesitation… and then he took his hand from his hip and we shook.

“I’m no threat,” I assured Bill. “I have no weapons.”

The man smiled without humor. “Mind if I check for myself?”

I raised my hands and Bill padded me down for a concealed weapon. He found my notepad and threw it onto a nearby rock, then stepped back, satisfied. The tension went out of him. He drew a short knife from the back of his jeans and held it almost apologetically in his palm. “You can’t be too sure,” he said. He set the knife down on the rock where he had left my notebook and exhaled a long breath.

At last.

For a long moment we stood awkwardly, neither of us quite sure what to do next. It was as if all we knew as men was hostility and wariness. Now there was no longer the need for either, we were at a loss.

I picked up my notebook and glanced past Bill, out to where the yacht nuzzled against its anchor cable on Lake St. Clair.

“Nice boat,” I said and gestured. Bill glanced over his shoulder as though he had forgotten what the vessel looked like. He nodded and smiled ruefully. “Yeah,” he said. “It’s a Gulfstar – a 36 foot sloop.”

I made a face like I was impressed. In truth, I knew nothing at all about boats, or sailing. “Expensive?”

“It would have been,” Bill admitted. “If I had bought it.”

I shot him a glance and he stared levelly back. “I took it when the ‘Affliction’ came sweeping through Detroit,” Bill explained. “I figured the safest place to be was on the water or hiding out in the woods. The water is what I know best, so I made my way to a marina.”

“You’ve been living on Lake St. Clair since the outbreak?”

“Not exactly,” Bill said. “I’ve actually spent most of my time on Lake Huron – there’s a lot more water to get lost on. Lake St. Clair is too small, and I’m not the only one on the water, you know. There are other boats – other survivors of the ‘Affliction’. So I keep moving every few days, working up and down Lake Huron and following the fishing. The boat was well-provisioned and it has a 4 cylinder Perkins diesel. The tanks were full when I took it – eighty gallons of fresh water and fifty gallons of diesel. I’ve still got diesel left.”