Part 1, Chapter 2

If you missed it, part 1 is here. Also, if you came here from a forum, chances are you only saw the first part of chapter one, so it may be worth following that link to catch up.

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2


We arrive at James’ place twenty minutes later; a small house in a residential district on the east side of the city. The place is run down but provides shelter from the storm. Who am I to be fussy? If I’m honest, and maybe a bit judgmental, run down homes always surprise me. I’m from a small town, but my family was by no means poor. My father made his living through the sale and manufacture hypodermic needles, which sounds boring, and indeed it is, but it paid the bills, and it means that I’ve barely had to work a day of my life prior to my twenty-first birthday. My father’s job meant my family were able to live in a pleasant middle-class neighborhood where everybody kept their lawns mowed and cars clean. As an ignorant young kid, I couldn’t fathom the logic behind run down homes and it’s the sentiment still pervades.

Now none of that matters anyway.

Inside the house, James has a good set up, as far as any survivalist set ups go. The house isn’t as secure as my apartment in Oakland, but he’s collected plenty of food, candles, batteries, torches, bottles of water, and a camping stove with about fifteen gas canisters. A small pile of men’s magazines sit on the floor of the living room and James deftly stacks then into a corner as we enter the home.

I convince James that if we’re going to stay at his place, which seems like the best idea, then we need to secure the doors and windows against thieves and whoever else may be roaming the streets. He agrees with me and we spend the afternoon boarding up windows, after liberating wood from various garages in the area. I haven’t stolen anything in my life and find the crack of the neighbor’s wooden doors at the application of a crowbar to be an exhilarating and cathartic experience. By evening, most of the windows in the home have wood panels, boards, or a door nailed across them.

At around six-thirty, we draw the curtains, light candles, and have a small dinner. Outside, it’s snowing again.

We talk, though we have little to say, because otherwise the silence would be too heavy in our minds. James tells me that both of his parents died upon the onset of the G9 plague. He tells me this, with little sorrow, in a relate-the-facts manner. Things like this are simple truths now and we must deal with them pragmatically. To deal with them any other way could be disastrous. He told me that his parents were amongst the first to die and subsequently amongst the few people to receive any good quality medical care. This all happened so early that even James found himself receiving some medical care, considering he’d made direct contact with infected individuals. But the hospitals filled up in a matter of days and, because the plague was untreatable, the hospital buildings became little more than quarantine zones: filthy, crowded, and suffering from a disastrous lack of resources. So the medical staff discharged James only hours later, when too many verifiable G9 cases came through the doors. They took blood samples, to find out why he wasn’t ill, and sent him home.

The problem with James’ story is that it ruins my theory of hereditary immunity. For a week now, I’ve been fostering a fantasy that perhaps my family is still alive. I’m not surprised or shocked when James explains that the probability of this is very low, because I’ve known all along, deep down, at the back of my mind, that my family is probably dead. I’ve seen so much death in the past week, so what’s a few more? Another snowflake amid a storm. Does it make a difference that those people are so close to me? Of course it does, but I don’t see what I can do. I know that my theory of hereditary immunity was just a fantasy to help me cope with my loss and understand the chance occurrence that was my own survival. And because I so easily created that fantasy, I’ll relegate the probable death of my family to fantasy too. I simply won’t think about it. I’ll do whatever’s necessary to survive.

*

At eight that evening, we open the bottle of rum I’d found in the grocery store. Lacking any kind of mixer, aside from thirty or so large bottles of water in the basement, we drink the rum straight, laughing as we grimace. We’ll do anything to take the edge off our day and preceding week. If drinking straight rum in this cold house is our only option, then so be it. I know that I’m an emotional mess. I feel like a like a gnarled and twisted wire, held together by the conviction that if I break down now I’ll be stuck in a hopeless lull that I may never escape. So I pull myself together, hold onto those bootstraps, and drink until I’m numb.

As night comes the cold house becomes unbearably colder. The heating system has been out for days.

Soon enough I’m fully clothed in James’ parents’ old bed. My extremities numb from a cocktail of rum and frigid air.

Sleep swims towards me, shivering.

*

The sound of fireworks in the night carries across the dead city. I can hear the explosions in the distance to the south. Elsewhere in the house, Ben is barking at the noise. I want to go to the window to watch the lights, but my face is numb, my vision blurred, and my limbs don’t respond. Besides, maybe this is dream. I slip back into sleep. Or out of the dream and into a deeper state.

*

I shiver from the cold and wake the next morning to a silent house. I presume James is still asleep. The room he’s in is smaller than my own and retains more heat.

I’m hungry, but stave off eating for a while, considering the early hour. Instead, I decide to search some of the neighboring houses for supplies. I still want to find a gun for myself.

I walk around the exterior of a neighboring building and look for a way in. All of the doors are locked and the crowbar I’m carrying only chips splinters from the frames. I already know this is the case because James and I tried to gain access to this place yesterday. This was the first house we approached and we did this with a distinct respect. When we couldn’t open the doors, we moved along. Now, after a day of looting, I have no respect for old property.

I drop the crowbar on the ground and throw a plant pot through the living room window.

The smash is invigorating. The shards of glass glisten white and gold in the dawn sun as they slice through the air and settle on the living-room carpet. They crunch underfoot as I climb in through the window, pleased with my own act of wanton destruction. In Oakland, where my own apartment is, looters have thoroughly ransacked the majority of the houses, but in these residential areas, many homes are surprisingly untouched.

This house is bright and clean, as if the family is merely holidaying for the winter. I expect to see evidence of a struggle as this family left life, but there’s nothing out of the ordinary in the room. A TV. A couch. Some plants. On the streets, it was those who were healthy enough to move around and those who were lucky enough to contract the plague later on, who did all the damage. The streets were trashed in waves of riots and looting. But this house is quiet and pristine. Perhaps this house will remain preserved like this for decades to come, as plants crawled though the cracks, vines climbed the walls, and the roof gradually weathered away, one tile at a time. Perhaps that green throw on the couch will remain there, untouched, as destruction marches through the city, over the course of years, across homes and businesses and infrastructure, as nature reclaims what was once its own. Tree roots shattering asphalt, five, ten years from now. Leaves and dirt burying the streets. The country and the parks breaking their boundaries, pouring in to eliminate the city. And simultaneously, every city across the world facing this same slow death. In hundreds of years, if there’s anybody left to look down at the earth through the lens of a satellite, if any satellites remain in the sky, then maybe the roofs of skyscrapers that the foliage hasn't had a chance to envelope will be all to show that there was once something here. Instead of the current swathes of gray asphalt, there will only be dots of helipads and rooftop ventilation systems.

Or maybe I’m overreacting. Maybe, minutes from now, I’ll see government airplanes appear on the horizon and know that everything will be fine and that people survived.

Maybe I’ll stand here in this strange, perfectly ordinary city house and see those planes appear.

*

I watch for a moment, but no planes pass overhead. I walk into the kitchen and open the fridge. A bottle of milk sits in there, rotten. Picking through cabinets, I ask, “Where do people hide guns anyway?”

I ascend the stairs and open a door at random. A bathroom.

The next room is the master bedroom. A middle-aged woman lays in the bed, face up, eyes closed, with the comforter pulled up to her armpits. Her face is relaxed. All of her facial muscles have stopped working, so the deepest lines of expression are gone. She displays utter neutrality. Maybe everyone is neutral in death. Emily was neutral in death.

Here, the woman in front of me lays the right side of the bed, leaving the left side untouched. It’s an enormous, aching chasm of emptiness. I check in the bedside cabinets and avoid looking directly at her — not out of respect, but out of guilt. There’s a photo of her and a man, who I presume is her husband, on one of the cabinets. The photo’s from years back. An attractive couple.

The next room belongs to a teenage boy. There’s a computer on a desk and mess everywhere else. There are posters of old metal bands on the wall: Pantera, Metallica, Slayer, System of a Down, and concert ticket stubs with photos of his friends. There’s no body this time. Otherwise, the room is exactly what I expect a teenage boy’s room to look like. In fact, it’s a lot like my own room when I lived at my parent’s home.

The last room belongs to the teenage daughter. Again, there’s no body. Pinned to the wall, surrounded by photos of girls at school football games, TGI Fridays, and on the river Clipper, there’s a photo of the girl who I suspect lives here. She wears a blue bikini in the photo. She’s full breasted, and smiling.

The photo is the only thing I steal from that house; slipped into my back pocket.

*

When I return to James’ home, he’s in the kitchen making coffee on the camping stove. Ben is next to him eating dog food, flicking it out of the bowl with each lick from his enormous tongue. It’s strange that we still use the kitchen space as a kitchen, when we’ve abandoned so many other conventions. None of the appliances work, so the room is now just another space. When I think about how many other social constructs we have rendered meaningless in the past week, it’s hard to see any justification for this one to remain. I mean, money’s useless now. Governments are gone. Oil’s free. There’s no such thing as a cop. Corporate headquarters downtown are now useless buildings filled with clutter. Then I realize we still use a kitchen as a kitchen because it’s where we’ve left all of the pans and the packet of coffee.

“So you broke in next door, huh?” James says. “I heard you smash the window. That must’ve been fun.”

“Yeah, you bet,” I laugh. “Sorry if I woke you. I’m still trying to find a gun.”

“Who would have thought it would be so difficult, huh? But I could have told you there are no guns in there. I’ve known them, the Spellmans, my whole life.” He pauses for a moment. “Were any of them still in there?”

“An old lady.”

“Jeez. That must be Martha. She used to look after me when I was kid. She’d bake a lot, and when I was around she’d give me a lump of dough and tell me I could make bread for her. I’d knead it until it turned green from my hands and she’d smile and cook it for me anyway. Then I’d try to get my dad to eat it. ‘I’ll put it in my lunchbox for tomorrow,’ he’d say. Sneaky, huh?” He chuckled, but then abruptly stopped himself. “I can’t believe it, you know? I wonder where the rest of them went. Where they went to die, I mean. I can’t believe it. There was Martha’s husband, Jack, who I would call Mr. Spellman, 'cause he was a bit of a hard-ass. I guess he was always tired from work. He was nuts, too. One time I came home from school to see him hanging out of the window, and I haven’t a fucking clue why, but Martha was beneath him, laughing at him, and Ben was running about barking. I walked past, bemused, and Martha just waved at me and smiled.

“The son, Andrew, was always too young to hang out with, but Martha and Jack also had this daughter, Karen, who’s the same age as me. She was the secret object of my awkward teenage lust. Yeah, a genuine girl next door.” By now, James is smiling and looking off into the distance, visualizing those curves I was admiring only minutes earlier.

I interrupt by pulling the photo out from my pocket. “Is this her?”

“That’s right,” he sighs. “Jeez.”

“Yeah,” I say with a mournful tone slipping in from somewhere. “Yeah, I know.” I know she’s beautiful and I know she’s dead and I know neither of us will ever see her again outside of this lustful photograph. A blanket of loss falls over the house. Not only the loss of this one girl, but a loss of everything.

We don’t speak for a while.

I listen to Ben licking at his bowl.

I had a girlfriend only a week ago. She was the kind of girl I thought I was going to be with forever, maybe not the girl, but the type of girl. Amongst all the events that have occurred since last week, I’ve found sorrow difficult to find. I’m so overwhelmed that I’ve gone numb. Survival is the only thing that matters now, so the past is mute. Karen Spellman, in her bikini, beautiful, stood on (the back of the photo reads) “Clearwater Beach, Florida. August 7, ’08”. Karen Spellman brings that loss back to the present, gives it an image, and hammers it into my chest. It really fucking hurts.

“You want some breakfast?” James asks. “I’ve got eggs here and this bread looks like it could still be ok.”

I nod and force a smile.

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Move on to Chapter 3.

If you enjoy A Pittsburgh Storm, why not support independent publishing and get the whole book without the wait. Available in paperback and ebook (only $1.25) on Lulu and Smashwords. See the links to the right.

Dave