Part 1, Chapter 3 (Continued)

Here's the second part to Chapter 3. Chapter 4 will be posted on Monday, May 11th. If this is your first visit, A Pittsburgh Storm starts here.

Enjoy your weekend!

Dave

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3 (Continued)

The next week would see every family and individual fighting for themselves, as numbers dwindled, those we loved were lost, and it seemed that everyone else began to crack at the edges. Some people absolutely shattered; the harsh reality destroyed them at their very core and left any vestige of sanity long behind. Bodies were piling up and no individual knew why they were still alive and how long it would stay that way. Were we immune or just lucky? As amenities cut out and the technology we relied upon fell into redundancy, as our reliance on these things came back to haunt us, we found that we had no form of mass communication, information, or even chilled food. Everyone was desperate. I watched (and participated in) looting on the Craig Street businesses, so I smashed up the lobby in my apartment building to imply to others that there’d be nothing left to take. After finishing my own bit of looting, I boarded up the windows, fastened locks to my door, and holed myself up.

I haven’t forgotten what happened to Emily, I could never forget that, but I’ll come back to that later. I promise.

The corpse outside my apartment’s window is the product of the fear the plague instilled in all of us. When a healthy individual believes that they are merely lucky, rather than immune, close contact with anybody else is risking the end of your luck. In our irrationality, most of us believed we were only lucky (though, most of the time, that’s all it was), despite the knowledge that the plague was both air and waterborne and highly infectious. I watched from my window as one man wearing a facemask pushed a shopping cart, half-filled with food, along Forbes Avenue. Another individual approached him and an argument broke out. The second individual wanted the food in the cart. The first was afraid of human contact and possible contamination. The second made a lunge for the cart, and the first produced a gun and fired. For the gunman, there was no fear of retaliation or condemnation.

I think that my fear of man is well founded. In one week, I have seen this cold-blooded murder, that violent form of crowd control, and I’ve been held at gunpoint on the floor of a grocery store.

*

James and I are silent on our walk back into Oakland. The events of the past weeks leaves us sullen and depressed, but there’s little else to discuss. So we remain silent. I occupy myself by swinging a crowbar through the slow falling snow. The silence is even more peculiar because we left the dog, Ben, at James home. He was distracted with the bushes in the back yard and didn’t respond to our calls, so we left him to his own devices.

We walk for a while more. Eventually James talks about his short-lived college days, his old fraternity, and we laugh at his college pranks. I recount some of my own college stories in return. I graduated the previous semester, while James dropped out the previous year. Then I tell James about my recent, brief, travels in Europe as an exchange student.

We’re still strolling down Liberty Ave., talking, when we hear an engine in the west. It sounds to be a fair distance away. A mile, maybe? It’s hard to guess. I look at James and he raises his eyebrows. A frown trembles in the corner of his mouth.

“What do you want to do?” he asks.

“Let’s keep going and see if it comes closer.”

So we do. We stroll slowly, silently, down Liberty, towards the Bloomfield Bridge, heading in the direction of North Oakland. The engine noise moves to the north a few blocks, but then turns and begins to approach. To my side, James withdraws his pistol from his waistband.

“We should hide before whoever this is gets too close,” I tell James. “At least then we can scope them out and decide want we want to do.” The last thing I want is for James to use the gun.

Fortunately, James nods in agreement, so we duck behind a car, which has crashed into a postbox and juts out across the road at a right angle. Moments later, we spot a snowmobile turn round the corner ahead. Time slows as the sound of the engine approaches. Leaving Ben at home had been a stroke of luck — the dog would sell us out in a heartbeat. The engine lessens in intensity, evidently slowing to a stop, meters from our pathetic hiding place. The rider of the vehicle knows were here, but we remain crouched in the hope that the rider will feign ignorance and pass by. Our hopes are unfounded.

“Hey! Hey, you behind the car.” A man’s voice.

James stands up first and I follow reluctance. A middle-aged man sits on the snowmobile, pointing a hunting rifle at us. James squints as if staring into the sun. Maybe he’s forgotten that he has a pistol in his hand. “Hey,” he stutters to the stranger. He flaps his hand out, and awkwardly pats his thigh with the weapon. This is suicide, I think. But the thick built stranger smiles at us, nods at James, and lowers his rifle. In my relief, the sweat that has accumulated all over my body turns ice-cold. I’m so happy. So fucking happy.

“I figured you guys were safe, or else you wouldn’t have tried to hide just then,” the gray-haired stranger says in a cheerful, youthful voice. “I’m Hank.”

I laugh at my fleeting terror and in the sudden joy at finding another friendly face.

I smile and speak up. “Hi, I’m Matthew. This,” I indicate, “is James.”

“Matthew and James, huh? Hey, I, uh—”

Again, we’re lost for words. Conversation is difficult because we build so many walls. Everyone’s own agenda is survival and we’re scared of having that threatened, so we build walls and block ourselves off. We know were safe now and the walls are unnecessary, but the adrenaline’s still there and we have to stumble over the bricks in conversation.

So, through the rubble, Hank makes small talk. “It’s good to meet you, Matthew, James,” he says, and nods at us in turn. Then, relaxed, he takes off the woolen scarf he wears, exposing a mound of gray stubble on his chin. “Say, uh, so how are you both getting by?” He pulls an awkward expression and we all laugh together.

*

Hank had been hiding out for a few days, but eventually decided that remaining isolated in his apartment was just as likely to kill him. He needed to get out and be proactive about his life. He recalled that his neighbor had made a yearly tradition to load a snowmobile into a trailer and hunt deer north of Toronto. So Hank decided to break into his neighbor’s garage, steal the snowmobile and a hunting rifle, and attempt to better his situation.

I take an immediate shine to Hank.

That morning, he had driven his snowmobile across half of central Pittsburgh — through the Strip District, Downtown, the Hill District, Polish Hill, Oakland, Squirrel Hill, Shadyside, Bloomfield, Garfield, and Lawrenceville — to find other survivors. So few people remained alive in the city that James and I were the first he had spoken to all day. At least three people, he claims, disappeared down alleyways and into buildings the moment they noticed him. From a loft apartment downtown, a man had yelled things towards Hank that were both indecipherable and aggressive. Hank had kept driving.

Then he then says he spotted small fires from the Northside, near PNC Park — the baseball stadium — and the Warhol museum. Again, these were not the kind of people he was looking for.

And that was all he saw — until he found us.

In accordance with his plan, Hank decided to stick with James and me. So, with a third member in our team, we reassess our framework of ideas with Hank’s input. Hank has a house near to the Strip District, by the Allegheny River, but it’s too run down to stand up to the cold Pittsburgh nights without a working heating system. This means that James’ home wins by default, as it is still the safest and most convenient place of our three choices — well, theoretically, we could live anywhere, but we don’t even consider the idea. It’s still worth picking up the food I’ve gathered in my own apartment and Hank offers to do the same at his place once we show him where James lives.

So as a trio, we ride the snowmobile through the abandoned city, sitting one behind the other, on the way to my apartment. The journey is both exhilarating and saddening. The noise of the engine lets you forget that there are no other sounds for miles around — only blackened windows, and dead, stuffy rooms — but once the engine cuts out the silence crowds back in again, as deafening as before. Once we arrive at my apartment and as we ascend the dead stairwell, we force ourselves to make pointless and casual conversation, just to keep the shroud of silence away.

“This is a cool building Matt. You’re lucky.”

“Oh, thanks.”

But our voices sound small and forced and in the end, in the growing darkness of abandoned buildings, we all know our speech is only there to keep the ghosts of loneliness away.

*

Looking through the window from inside my apartment, snow is falling again, first in light wisps and then, in time, heavy labored clumps. James and Hank loiter with awkward turns and glances while I pack my rucksack with canned food, portable gas canisters, and a few books. Even with so many of the social barriers broken down, James and Hank still stand in the center of my apartment respecting what they regard as my space and my property. Only this morning I broke into a stranger’s home and stole a photo of their daughter wearing a bikini. All sense of personal space has dissolved, but it would seem this apartment is exempt.

A hungry dog howls outside and others respond in the distance. Despite the ramifications of the past week’s terrible losses, that singular dog only cares about it stomach. There must be hundreds of thousands of animals locked up in houses across the country, waiting to starve.

After I finish packing my bag, I take one last glance over the studio apartment that has been my home for the past two years — its junk and clutter and memories. The fridge is still pushed up against the smallest window. Photos are tacked on its door with colorful magnets I collected as a kid. Just like each photo, each magnet recalls cheerful memories. One magnet reads, “I’ve been to Yellowstone!” in yellow, or course, over an illustration of a geyser. I was ten years old when I visited the national park with my family. A tour guide, pleased with my questions and eager to amaze me, told me about all of the tiny microbes that live in the hot vents there. She told me that creatures like these were so important, doing whatever it is they do with enzymes and gasses and so on, that without their existence the whole of the human race would be wiped out. On the contrary, should the human race die, the microbes would only adapt very slightly and carry on as if nothing had happened — they are so powerful. Like those dogs that only worried about their stomachs, these microbes wouldn’t concern themselves with what happened to the human race. And so, right now, all around me are the reminders that nature is carrying on as if nothing has happened. In fact, the eradication of the human race may be one of the best things that has ever happened to nature.

I remove the Yellowstone magnet and retrieve the photo beneath it: Emily and I, drunk at a friend’s birthday party. Then I take a photo of my family, standing on Mount Washington and looking over Pittsburgh’s skyline. I fold the two photographs in half and put them in my back pocket, next to Karen Spellman on that beach in Florida.

I’d made a mess in the kitchen while gathering food. Knives, forks, and empty cartons are scatted over the work surfaces. On the far side of the room, the useless television and computer work as makeshift candle stands. Wax has trickled down into electronics and across the screens. The television was once a shrine that took proud place in my apartment and to which I sacrificed hours of my time every day. Now it’s smeared with wax and defunct. It holds no power over anybody’s time and mind anymore. I look to the desktop computer. With electricity gone from most of (if not all of) the world, perhaps the internet has been erased. Well, no, computers don’t work like that. I know the collected information of the world wide web is sitting dormant on hard drives across the globe, ready for reaccess when civilization returns, one day somewhere in the future. I’m confident civilization will return because without this hope, I have little else.

“Gentlemen,” I say in my brightest tone. “Shall we depart?”

“Lets,” Hank replies with a curtsy.

James nods and we make for the door, leaving it open as we leave, and abandoning my apartment to the ages.

*

I leave my apartment for the final time, and the moment feels weighed with symbolism, as if I’m leaving the entirety of my old life behind. That’s what the ex-literature student in me screams. I’m leaving the comfort of routine and from here on out, nothing will have the slightest resemblance to pre-plague normality — not even the place where I choose to live.

As we sit three deep on the snowmobile and Hank steers us North through the Oakland district, a new chill runs through me. This chill doesn’t come from the intensified snow and falling temperatures. Instead, the chill runs straight up the inside of my spine and through the back of my skull, through my brain, behind my eyes. It’s a foreboding and anxiety for the coming days. I know that things aren’t going to get better — not like they were before. Civilization and society will not be reestablishing themselves any time soon. This is clear to me. This will be a long haul.

*

We return to James’ home and eat a lunch of canned chili and overripe fruit. Afterwards, Hank visits his old apartment to collect his things — he promises to be back within a few hours.

James and I haven’t seen another soul all afternoon, or any evidence that another soul may exist anywhere nearby. No footprints in the fresh snow, no unusual sounds, no lights, and as of today, no more gunshots in the distance.

James and I try to keep busy for the afternoon, but with no commitments or schedules, we’re boggled by our new-found freedom. At one point, I show James the photos I took from my apartment and he shows me the photos he has framed above the fireplace. We regret mentioning our families. Loss tinges the conversation, so I decide to take a walk. James figures he’ll workout. “Gotta’ work for the ‘V’” he jokes.

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Chapter 4 is here.