Part 4, Chapter 1 (First Half)

This is the beginning of the end, quite literally. Part 4 is the culmination of everything to happen so far in A Pittsburgh Storm. Coming up we have some shoot-outs, arson, a new major character, and then maybe somewhere along the way, Matthew will finally find what he's looking for. Maybe. And like I haven't said it enough times, if you're impatient to see what comes next, you can just get the ebook for $1.25, with the links on the right. You can even get the paperback if you're ritzy.

This chapter's pretty big so I've broken it in two. Expect the second half on Sunday.

Dave

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Part Four

Downtown

1

The sun is high and I know that the town of Bramble, with all of its abandoned vehicles and potential transport, is only another fifteen minutes walk. The burning house may draw the attention of any other survivors in the area and I'm excited to see if I meet anybody on their way to investigate. I attempt to calculate the probability of someone else from the town being alive.

Pittsburgh had a population of, I guess, three hundred thousand. The metropolitan area had about two million people, I think, but I don’t know where the metropolitan area ends. I compromise and place the population of the city and close surrounding area at six hundred thousand. There were about fifty people in Mecca, and I figure it’s possible to double or triple that figure to guess the total number of survivors in the city. The next part takes a while to figure out as I walk along the bends and curves in the road. Six hundred thousand total population divided by one-hundred and fifty survivors leaves a figure of about one survivor out of every four or five thousand. I need to allow for a huge margin of error. Bramble, Pennsylvania, had a population of six thousand. Maybe there’s one person there now? Maybe five, ten, or none? Does living in an area of lower population density have anything to do with the figure when you consider an infectious disease? Possibly.

Although the snow on the road has drifted deep in places, the walk into Bramble is pleasant enough. Winter birds chirp in the trees and the sun glistens though overhead branches creating a spider web of shadows on the road. The winter must end soon and this spring, unlike any previous spring, will be a season where regrowth of the environment will also be a reclamation; nature reclaiming the earth from man, slowly erasing his impact. It all starts now. Slowly reclaiming more and more, year by year, until only crumbled ruins will remain and then, after millennia, nothing at all. Lawns, crop fields, and houseplants will run amok. I can’t help but wonder at what any civilization in hundreds, thousands, or millions of years time will think of this human race. I imagine a civilization similar to the one I have already known. If they start from scratch, maybe their knowledge will head in a different direction than ours. Maybe, rather than initially focusing on theology or faith and then allowing the sciences to stem from that, their science will start elsewhere, perhaps astrology, biology, or physics, and any theological sense will arrive from there instead. Perhaps they’ll worship Pi and the perfection of trigonometry. Perhaps not. Maybe they’ll evolve as normal and then one day learn how to extract the data from our old computer hard-drives, or decipher the text in our dusty, decaying libraries, making a huge leap in knowledge in only one or two generations. The wild speculations are endless during this easy walk.

I remember one time, when travelling through Europe as an exchange student, visiting a roadside attraction in Wales called King Arthur’s Labyrinth. It involved taking a boat ride down underground rivers, deep into a cold, breezy mountain cave system, to see comical recreations of the King Arthur myths using old shop manikins. At the time, I laughed with my travelling companions to think what future civilization would think of this bizarre set-up. Surely, a collection of plastic men beneath a mountain would be on par with the inexplicable stone heads of Easter Island. Now, I can’t get that image out of my head.

I approach Bramble town center and, like Pittsburgh, the streets are a mess, though fewer inhabitants mean the carnage is tamer in scale. I walk down a long hill onto the town, with the community college on my left, then a medical clinic, library, and a collection of small bookshops. The clinic is ruined. In its last days, it must have been overcrowded and abused. Now it’s quiet and still, no doubt filled with bodies. Beneath the snow, the sidewalk, cracked and spoiled, pounds against my feet. To my right, the bare forest watches my stroll down the shallow incline, until I turn onto one of the town’s main streets and leave the empty hollows behind.

The sun is bright and for the first time since I can remember, I’m uncomfortably hot.

I emerge by the side of a Korean restaurant into the town square. Small businesses and two drugstore chains surround the area, which houses a small garden in the centre. The frontage of Rite-Aid has been smashed up and the building’s contents spilled into the street, covered up by fresh snow. I look back in the direction I came from and spot the smoke from my family’s old home, perhaps a mile away. I wonder how long it will take the fire to stop. Six hours, maybe? I walk across the square and stub my toe on a brick buried in the snow. I pick it up and turn it over in my hand, feeling its weight. I drop my bag to the ground and then, in a moment of whimsy, I throw the brick through a window of the Korean restaurant, so I can watch the destruction and enjoy the sense of power. The sound of the breaking glass carries easily through the otherwise silent air and surrounded by the new noise, I suck in a lungful of the invigorating and refreshing cold.

“Hyahh,” I yell in happy exultation. I both roar and yawn, stretching my arms above my head, satisfied and awake to the sensations around me.

I kick around the square for a while, unwilling to do anything else; there’s no reason to rush myself. I look into what was once the window of a bookstore, checking if there’s anything worth taking, but looters have devastated the interior and I can’t muster the energy to dig through the chaos.

I grab my bag again and slink along side streets, eyeing up any cars I come across, looking for any vehicle suitable for a journey back to Pittsburgh. It’s as I'm doing this that the young boy yells from behind me, “Hey, Sir. Hey, wait!” The voice is full of excitement and relief and, for the first time, the encounter with another human doesn’t scare me; so reassuring is the boy’s tone, and so relaxed is my own psychology. The boy runs towards me, waving his arms, bearing a huge grin of satisfaction. He must be no older than eleven or twelve.

“I can’t believe I found someone,” he yells, as I remain silent. “I thought everyone was, you know. Like, everyone – I thought—”

I maintain my silence. I must appear emotionless and imposing to the boy, but really, the sudden energy of the situation has caught me off guard. In response, the boy slows his erratic gestures and glances and instead looks straight at me. “Hey, are you alright?”

I’m scaring him, so I pull myself together and display my own genuine sense of relief. “Oh yeah, I’m fine,” I laugh. “Sorry, you surprised me there. I’m sorry.” There’s a grateful silence, where the boy smiles. “Have you been here alone all this time?” I ask. “Is there anybody else?”

“I’ve been, yeah— There’s nobody else in town at all, I think. You haven’t been here all this time, right?” I shake my head and he continues. “I’ve been staying at Judy Mullen’s place, just over the square.” He points, but I already know where he means. Judy Mullen was the hostess of the town’s best diner, Judy’s, and therefore she’s a local celebrity. Judy’s made great breakfast eggs and fried potato, and those breakfasts became symbolic of my time at high school.

“Yeah,” I smiled. “I know Judy’s.”

We’re quiet for a moment and the boy’s expression wavers. The next time he speaks, his voice wobbles and cracks. “My parents—,” is all he says. I know that this boy has been though more in these past weeks than any kid his age should ever have to go through.

“Listen,” I say, trying to reassure him. If he starts to talk about his parents, he’ll be lost in depression and he may drag me in with him. “I'm going to head back into Pittsburgh. I know you don’t know who I am, but maybe, if you want, you should come with me. I think it would be for the best if we stuck together.” I feel like we have to do this and I think I would enjoy the company. Furthermore, maybe the role of protector to this kid could at least give me a direction. Only moment’s ago I was wandering an old town square in the snow, throwing bricks. Maybe this kid could provide a reason for this otherwise aimless existence.

“Oh, man, Sir—”

“Sorry, I should have said earlier. I’m Matthew.” We shake hands and the kid smiles further.

“My name’s Martin,” he tells me with pride.

“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Martin.” I formulate a plan of action. “Maybe you can show me where you’ve been staying? We need food and a car. Specifically, we need a car that can deal with all this snow. Have you any ideas? Have you seen any around?”

He seems like a good kid. Very polite and grateful, and this makes him a pleasure to be around. We go to Judy’s and he shows me the bed he made on one of the longer booth seats. It occurs to me how strange it is that he would choose this diner for a home, amongst all the red and while porcelain and the plastic covered seating, rather than a house, which would be more comfortable by a magnitude. He’s eager to explain his reasoning. “There are too many things going on in those houses,” he says. “Like ghosts.” I know what he means. There are too many memories and traces of other people. Those homes should have been rarely if ever, empty. I feel the photo of Karen Spellman in my back pocket and remember how all of these ghosts can live on in the imagination. These people will never be seen or heard again, yet in a way they live on, if only in our minds. “The diner is like, it’s like it has everybody’s memories, so it’s like it has no ghosts at all, or maybe so many that none of them matter any more.”

He has comics and books strewn across the tables in the rear corner of the building. He also has a large stash of batteries, which he's been using in an old hand-held Nintendo Gameboy. Amongst multitudes of Little Betty Crocker Cookie wrappers and Oreos is the boys screwed up blankets. “I had to leave my home,” he says, “because somebody broke the window. It got too cold with the wind blowing through it. And then we were running out of food too.”

“We?”

“My family— before—”

He looks down at the ground. His body is thin with brown hair hanging limp over his forehead. By all appearances, he would have been classed as a nerdy kid when there were others around to judge him. Perhaps this is why he reminds me of myself.

“So, what have you been doing for all this time?” I ask.

“I was building defenses.” I can see these ‘defenses’ piled up by the front window of Judy's; a jumble of wood and garbage cans. He’s made no effort to give the materials much of an overall structure. They are no more defenses than a cocoa bean is a Hershey bar. I look back at the boy and raise my eyebrows in question and he reads the expression with ease. “Well, I was building defenses, but then there was nobody left to defend against.” I wonder at how he ever coped during a time when he had to barricade himself into a diner to protect himself from what had become of the people he had once known. Then I ask myself how I had ever coped with that, and I recall that the dead body on the Birmingham Bridge stands as testament to how I haven't coped at all.

After I take in the surroundings Martin has constructed, the pair of us go for a walk to see if we can find any suitable vehicles, perhaps to go back to the city in, perhaps to go and see Saul again, or perhaps to do something entirely different. Martin promises me that his old neighbors have a battered, but usable, four-wheel drive in their garage. It should still be there, he says, because he hasn't seen the family in weeks. And he's right. When we break in to the garage, there is indeed a huge, red, rusting hulk of a truck. What’s more, from all outward appearances, it’s in a usable condition. While Martin hunts around the rest of the house, looking for truck’s keys, I attach chains to the wheels, in order to maintain traction when driving in the snow.

As I finish, Martin returns with the vehicle’s keys and stands by my backpack, which I left by the door. A moment passes and Martin notices the machine-gun, wrapped in an old sweater, and strapped to the bags’ side. Considering the boy’s age, his excitement seems justifiable. He asks to see it, but he means he wants to attempt shooting something. In theory, I find it objectionable to be excited by a firearm, like to do so would be trivializing the items unique quality of violence. Then I recall how it felt to hold and fire the weapon for the first time myself. How I felt as I peppered holes into a car at the roadblock. Then again, he’s only a kid, and kids shouldn’t do those kinds of things. And then a third time, his parents are no longer around, which means he’s his own boss, because I'm not going to claim that position. I consider how much he’s had to deal with in the past weeks, and I consider how fast he’s had to grow in that time. I consider all of these things and deduce that he’s perfectly within his rights to ask to use the weapon. He’s been through a lot, so I should respect that and let him make his own choices. So I agree that he can shoot the gun sometime soon. Maybe he’ll need the practice. Neither of us know who or what waits around the next corner.

I’m a bad driver to begin with, and I’m rusty because I don’t drive in the city, but in an automatic vehicle, going slow, with no other traffic or rules to obey, driving is much simpler than I remember. After Martin and I open the garage doors, I reverse the truck out across the front lawn, across skeletons of rose bushes, and into a mailbox. I suspect that this is the first time Martin has laughed in weeks, and I feel the same way. The boy’s face turns red and he doubles over in hysterics, watching the mailbox buckle and snag, as I pull the truck out into the road. I raise my arms at him as if to say, “Not my problem! They shouldn’t have put it there!” and he laughs again, stood amongst our bags and supplies.

He climbs in the passenger seat and we wind through the town in the old red four by four at an excruciating pace, slowly heading back towards Pittsburgh, with a planned stopover at Saul’s home. Martin makes small talk while I concentrate on driving.

“So, did you see any other kids in the city?” he asks.

“Nobody younger than seventeen or eighteen.”

“Don’t you think that’s weird?”

“Yeah, I guess. I didn’t really think about it.” I don’t ask Martin if he’s noticed the absence of women yet. I imagine he hasn’t and there’s no reason to upset him.

There’s a brief silence and we watch a deer dart along the side of the road.

“So, do you think that I could be the youngest person there is now?” Martin asks.

“I don’t know. How old are you?”

“Eleven.”

“Is that so?” I ask rhetorically. He could well be the youngest survivor for hundreds of miles.

“But I bet any kids younger than me wouldn’t even be able to take care of themselves. I mean, even if they didn’t get sick, like us, I bet they’d have trouble finding food, and a place to sleep, and a place to hide. You know?”

“Yeah, I understand. You know, I think you’re right.”

There’s a brief silence as Martin considers the consequences of being the youngest person alive.

“Man,” the kid says with an odd, excited tone. “That’s going to suck!”

We both laugh. It feels great.