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Thursday, April 30, 2009
Chapter 2 Update
Another fairly long chapter today, still setting the scene and pointing the way. So far this blog has had hundreds of hits, which is really encouraging. I've also received some excellent constructive criticism off various internet forums. I particularly suggest that writers check out legendfire.com, which gave me some really interesting things to think about.
Forum user, Raveneye, also asked me here if I thought posting my work for free online was possibly burning my bridges with conventional publishers. I'll post my thoughts about this later in the weekend, when I have a bit more time to put some words down.
Anyway, enjoy Chapter 2. Expect Chapter 3 to be posted on Monday -- April 4th.
Dave
Forum user, Raveneye, also asked me here if I thought posting my work for free online was possibly burning my bridges with conventional publishers. I'll post my thoughts about this later in the weekend, when I have a bit more time to put some words down.
Anyway, enjoy Chapter 2. Expect Chapter 3 to be posted on Monday -- April 4th.
Dave
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.
-----
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.
------
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
-----
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.
------
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
Sunday, April 26, 2009
Part 1, Chapter 1
Part One
Pittsburgh, PA
1
I woke this morning to my beeping watch alarm. It’s Thursday. Or maybe it’s Friday. I lost count of the days after the heating and power cut out.
Outside my apartment, the snow falls in thick sheets, pulsing with each gust of wind. Beyond the snow, through my grill-covered window, I can see the Carnegie Museum looming against the gray sky. The museum has stood empty for over a week.
I hear gunshots in the distance. There’s a body lying face down on the plaza across the deserted street. It’s been there for several days; its white flesh obscured by the even whiter snow. As for the gunshots, which pop again, there’s no way to tell where they come from because the sound soars over the otherwise silent rooftops and alleyways and travels for miles around. It could as easily be from the next block.
My watch reads 8:31 because I like to set the alarm to irregular numbers.
But I don’t know why I still set the alarm.
Canned peaches for breakfast and coffee boiled on a camping stove. The electricity stopped working two days ago. Gas: three days ago. The phones: almost a week. I’m certain of each of these figures, but this information doesn’t help me guess the day because I can’t pinpoint when this chaos first broke out. The days and nights have been so busy, surprising, and often violent. In the madness, it’s hard to keep track of anything. Surely, the authorities wouldn’t cut the gas off on a Sunday, so it must be midweek. Right?
I had a nightmare last night, which isn’t surprising considering the things I’ve seen and heard during the last eight or nine days. What is surprising is that the sleeping nightmare bared no resemblance to this waking nightmare. What’s more surprising is that, somehow, I’m one of the few still alive and able to have nightmares at all.
The nightmare featured a girl from my old high school trying to seduce me. She was a particularly vicious individual — a pretty girl made ugly by her words. The dream ended with the beginnings of a sexual act and then me running to puke in the bathroom. I think this dream stems from sleeping alone for the past week, which I haven’t done for almost a year now. My girlfriend, Emily Jacobs, succumbed to the plague last Saturday. Or was it Sunday?
*
Today, I need to gather more food. I have enough to last another week or two, but I have no idea when rescue will arrive — or, indeed, if rescue will ever arrive. I also need gas canisters for my camping stove, and maybe even a gun. People around here are getting crazy. I’m serious. I’ve already mentioned the dead body across the street.
*
There are four bolts on my apartment’s door. I added two more bolts three days ago, when the TV news broadcasts reached a new level of dire and the building’s heating finally cut out amid an hour of creaking, groaning pipes.
For further security, I’ve nailed a sheet of plywood over one of the apartment’s windows. I then pushed the defunct fridge up against the wood to keep it in place. Fortunately, the small side window, which faces a busy road, already has a grill over it. I pull thick curtains across this window each evening so that when I turn on my recently acquired wind-up lantern the light doesn’t draw any outside attention. I know I’m paranoid, but I’m still alive, so I’m doing something right.
*
I grab my empty backpack, a large one made for hiking but perfect for looting, throw it over my shoulder, and step into the hallway. I push my bike ahead of me, but as I turn to lock the door, the front wheel slips to the side and the whole thing topples down the stairs with a clatter. Typical.
From outside my apartment, I can close only two of the door’s locks, so I do that and head downstairs, grabbing the tangled bicycle on the way.
In the building’s foyer, the glass doors facing the street are smashed. I did this myself to make it look like looters have already pillaged the building, so others will pass by and leave my apartment untouched. It means the building’s colder, but it feels worth it. Even when the wind blows snow all the way up to the base of the stairwell, which is now more of an ice-tomb, it still feels worth it.
The snow outside falls in dense waves, but is still shallow enough on the ground to cycle through. Seeing untouched snow in such a busy part of the city is a rare event. I can’t recall ever seeing city roads blanketed as thoroughly as they are now, without the snow already tarnished by footsteps and tire tracks. Normally, by the time I would wake up on a snowy day, postal workers, people on night or dawn shifts, and newspaper delivery kids would have already broken the snows purity. Now the snow buries the city in slow growing, untouched layers, as if nature, renewed of its sentience, is seeking its final revenge. I’m lucky, in a way, because all of this can be quite beautiful sometimes.
The corpse I saw on the museum plaza ten minutes ago is now only a white mound on a whiter expanse. I can only hope that the roads are still traversable an hour from now when I’ll need to head home again.
I pull my scarf tight around my neck and mouth and pedal down the street, blinking away the blinding ice.
I choose to cycle because it’s convenient and allows me to navigate the damaged and cluttered streets with relative ease. It’s also quiet, so that I don’t attract any unwanted attention. These days, any attention could be dangerous attention.
But cycling in this weather is tough and slippery work. I have to remain focused on the road immediately ahead of me in order to shield my eyes from the blinding snow, but need to remain aware of my surroundings as to avoid collisions with the masses of junk all over the city. When people die, they don’t take the time to park their car correctly, so thousands of vehicles sit abandoned at chaotic angles all over the streets, cluttered and cumbersome. What’s more, in the past week, looting has been pandemic, so I’m as liable to crash into an old TV set as I am to crash into a car. All around, looters have emptied stores into the street. On Craig Street, even the comic-book store has been ransacked.
My luck holds out because the snowfall eases for a while once I leave my street and stays like this for five or six blocks. A little further on, in what was once a pleasant shopping area, I see a figure walking ahead. I stop the bike, hard. I don’t know what else to do in such a situation because I don’t know how safe this individual is. In the past few days, all of my encounters with other people have turned sour. As you’d expect, seeing almost everyone you know die within a week can seriously fuck a guy up. Most of the people who are still alive freak out if you get too close to them, fearful of any disease you may carry. But I figure that if you’re susceptible to the plague then you’ll already be contaminated and dead by now. I mean, the plague, or virus, or whatever they defined it as, was certainly contagious enough.
The past few nights of loneliness have given plenty me of time to mull my ideas over. My theory, up until now, first states that I’m evidently immune to the G9 contamination. If I’m vulnerable to the plague, then as I’ve said, I’m sure I’d be quite dead by now. The guy I can see standing ahead of me must be immune too, otherwise he wouldn’t be doing what he’s doing right now. That is, standing there. So, is this something to do with our genetics? That's what I believe, because I can't see where else this immunity could have come from. It’s not like I had Nile Virus as a kid or anything. So is this a hereditary thing? That would follow the train of logic I’ve established. Does that mean that my parents, brothers, and sister are still alive? That’s another question entirely, because the G9 plague is not the only killer around here.
My family lives in the small town of Bramble in northern Pennsylvania. When I last called them, when all of this chaos first broke out a week or so ago, they were all doing well. Most of my immediate family still lives in the same house I grew up in. That’s two parents, one sister, and one brother. Another brother lives in Philadelphia, after he moved there to study Philosophy and dropped out after eight months. Now he works as a supervisor in a bookstore and smokes a lot of pot. So aside from my older brother, who I haven’t heard from in months, my family was doing fine a week ago. Then the phone lines became swamped and cut out, along with, in time, all the other amenities. I rest my hopes on the belief that my family are indeed well and trying to get in touch with me, but with the phones out and the mail stopped, well, nobody’s contacting anybody in any great hurry. As I see it, one of my first priorities, after I find a decent roadworthy car, is to travel to my family’s home and see what’s happened there. I can only presume that my brother, Alex, in Philadelphia, has had the same idea and that he’ll head home too.
But this reunion has to wait because outside the world of my speculation, right here, in the immediate of the tactile and empirical, a stranger at the end of the street is poking at something in the snow. He (I assume they’re a “He”) twitches a bit. Almost everyone’s dead or dying and in my limited observations, those that remain healthy react in one of three ways. The first possibility is that they may have cracked, gone nuts, and plan on blowing me away with whatever weapons they have. Second, they may become hell-bent on their own survival and, to increase the odds of this, have isolated themselves from everybody else. Should I attempt to break this isolation and possibly infect them, they too may well plan on blowing me away. Anybody else, like me, is in the third category, trying to stay as low as possible, biding their time, and thus avoiding being blown the fuck away.
I remain standing with my bike and the figure at the opposite end of the street sees me. He runs down a side street without a moment’s hesitation. Like me, he’s a category three.
I pedal away and take a detour to avoid bumping into the individual again. Fifteen minutes later, I arrive at the ravaged grocery store.
*
I wheel into the parking lot and scope the place out. From the exterior, at least, the building looks empty. The main doors are wide open and snow has blown inside the building. Observing such desolation, I now doubt the logic behind coming here; I’m sure that looters have already taken everything of value. Still, I’ve come all this way, so I leave my bike down by the side of the store, where I hope nobody will notice it, and stroll over to the entrance.
Glass crunches underfoot as I step into the dim building. Silence, and then a dog barks from somewhere in the dark aisles. The noise echoes through the cavernous expanse. The plague affected few animals and now thousands of homeless dogs roam the streets. Of course, most of the dogs are harmless and this one it sounds like its eating, so it should be safe enough.
Strolling through the empty, endless aisles is a bizarre experience. Every footfall echoes through the vast building and the dog’s distant chews dominate the remainder of the soundscape. Pushing an empty shopping cart in front of me, I chew a wormy apple I find by the base of a refrigeration unit. My shopping trip amounts to a few cans of chick peas, a can of lentil soup, two cans of fruit, several sour apples, a bag of dried butter beans and, I can’t believe my luck, one entire bottle of premium-brand rum!
I find the dog at the far corner of the building, chewing bones on the ground behind the meat counter. I pet the animal for a while and think of taking some of the bones to make a soup, boiling them for a day or so to get the marrow out. But I decide otherwise. Boiling them would require too much gas from the camping stove, so the rewards won’t be worth the cost. Besides, the dog is enjoying the bones now more than I ever will.
The dog loves to receive attention and while it doesn’t lift its head from the bone on the ground, it contorts its body to keep close to my hand, as I rub its head and neck. The warmth of another body surprises me, and as I pet the dog, I feel the anxiety from the past week slip away. It drops its bone on the ground, lolls its tongue out, and pants as I rub under its chin and stroke its ears. It stares at me with wide eyes. This goes on for some minutes — the reciprocal comfort of affectionate company.
Then the dog looks up and I hear a footfall behind me. That is, directly behind me and only feet away. Panicked, I try to twist my body and a man screams, “STAY DOWN THERE, DON’T YOU FUCKING MOVE!”
But no, sorry, it’s not a shout — it’s a loud plea. “Stay down! I have a gun.”
I fall back to my knees, raise my shaking arms into the air, and crane my neck a few inches to the side, to plead and reason with the man. “Please, I’m not doing anything. I’m just getting some food. That’s all. I can just go and leave you alone.” I can already feel the sweat pooling on my burning face.
The dog has recognized the stranger — who is no doubt his owner — and leaps to the side of the confrontation, disturbed by the raised and threatening voice.
The stranger doesn’t respond to my statement. Instead, he hums a quivering note as if he doesn’t know what to do. I crane my neck enough to see him: a man no older than me, red faced in panic. He holds a small handgun.
“I said don’t move,” he screams. “Stay where you are. Tell me your name.”
“Uh—” I remain watching him.
“I said, tell me your fucking name!” He gestures to the gun in his hands by rocking them up and down. “I can use this, you know,” he says, “I’m not fucking around here.”
“I know. I believe you,” I blurt.
“Well?”
“Matthew. My name’s Matthew Cahill.”
It’s obvious that neither of us know what to say in this situation. “Are you crazy?” and “Do you want to kill me?” are things we want to say, but we could never do that.
“Are you crazy?”
“Me?” Of course he means me. “No!”
“‘No’? Everyone’s gone crazy. What are you doing here? Speak up. Don’t forget I still have the gun.”
I feel a wave of relief because, yes, he has the gun, but no, he won’t use it. We’re both scared shitless and don’t know what to do. He has a gun, but we’re in a stalemate, because he doesn’t want to shoot. I need to diffuse the situation. I have to speak in a calm voice and say things like, “Please, relax,” “We’re cool,” and so on, and then we’re friends forever, allies, and come through this whole mess together and emerge, in a few weeks, on the other side of disaster, victorious over nature’s worst. But all I say is a cracked and panicked, “I— I know you’ve got the gun.” It’s not a scream or a piercing yell. It’s as calm a statement as I can manage through the adrenaline rush. I say it to affirm my understanding of the situation and to let him know that things don’t need to escalate any further. But in the immediate, I don’t think in such rational terms. This is pure intuition.
“That’s right. So who the fuck are you?” The dog growls because of the tension in the air.
“You already asked. My name’s Matthew Cahill.”
“Oh yeah, yeah.” He lowers the gun and my relief is palpable. I can feel the perspiration on my face, dripping down my upper lip, and the sweat on his face falls into clear focus. Now that we’re on the same level, I drop my arms to my side and ask a question of my own.
“So who are you?”
“Sorry I acted like that. I’m scared, man. You know? I’m just scared.” He pauses. “My name’s James Klein.” There’s a long silence as we assess each other and then he smiles a little, turning his gun from me. “I don’t really know how to use this.”
I laugh with relief.
“I’m sorry,” he says again, “but people are cracking up around here and I don’t know who I can trust.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“There’s someone up on Ellsworth Avenue, well I didn’t see where they were, but I was up there with Ben, the dog, you know. We were walking down there minding our own business, kicking the trash around and there’s a rifle crack in the distance and the snow on the ground next to us puffs up into the air with a clap. Snipers, man! Snipers! How are you supposed to stay sane or sober with shit like that going on? Of course, I ran, and the rifle cracked again while I got the hell out of there. That’s why I got this.” He holds out the gun as if he’s allergic to it. “I knew that the guy who lived a few houses over from me had one, so I went and broke in.” He pauses. I remain sat on the ground waiting for him to continue, which, by the expression on his face, he clearly wishes to do, if only he can find the correct words. “He was laying in a recliner with the gun in his lap, dead of course. With that pale face that they got. That face everyone got. Except me, and you, I guess. It felt wrong to steal from a dead man, but—” he thinks for a beat, “—well.” In light of recent events, “well” is excuse enough.
He carries on talking about himself and his dog for a few minutes because he’s happy, relieved, and excited to see another friendly face. I blank out most of what he says. I’m still too shocked from having a gun pointed at me. For a moment there, I thought I was going to die. A wave of adrenaline had thrust me to the edge of reality, and now that the situation has finally calmed and the adrenaline has become unnecessary, all I can do is emit weak laughs and watch my arms shake. The dog, Ben, continues to gnaw at a bone on the ground.
James reminds me of myself. My age — early to mid-twenties — with an awkward gait. Brown hair and sunken eyes, like the kind you get when you spend your days in front of a computer monitor. He tells me that he’s lived in Pittsburgh his entire life — at his parent’s home in Lawrenceville — and that he works in a nearby bagel shop.
After some time, he helps me get up from my crouched position and I lean against the deli counter, recovering from the adrenaline surge that doesn’t appear to have affected him at all. When he comes to a natural pause, I ask what we’re going to do next. He gives a perplexed look.
“I mean, we can’t stay here,” I clarify. “The snow’s coming down too heavily. We’ll be trapped.”
“Yeah, of course. I need to get some food, and then we can head back to one of our places, huh?” He waits for a reply, but I’m still shaky and fail to respond in time. “We are sticking together, right?”
“If you’re cool with it,” I smile at him. “There’s no more food here though, other than what I’ve already collected.”
We grab my shopping cart and head to the exit. Ben follows behind us, sniffing the various refrigerators. During my time in the store, the snow has thickened, and drifts of it are gathering against the exterior wall.
“Do you live nearby?” I ask. “It’ll take an age to walk back to my place in this weather. I biked up here when it was calmer.”
“You cycled in this? You’re mad. You’ll freeze your balls off cycling in this. Forget that, my place is only ten minutes walking.”
So we start walking.
I pull my jacket tight, more as a gesture of defiance than for any practical purpose, and we begin our trek through the worst storm of the winter. James pushes the near empty shopping cart, I walk with my bike, and Ben walks alongside, hunched down in the deepening snow.
-------
Read Chapter 2 here.
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Dave
Pittsburgh, PA
1
I woke this morning to my beeping watch alarm. It’s Thursday. Or maybe it’s Friday. I lost count of the days after the heating and power cut out.
Outside my apartment, the snow falls in thick sheets, pulsing with each gust of wind. Beyond the snow, through my grill-covered window, I can see the Carnegie Museum looming against the gray sky. The museum has stood empty for over a week.
I hear gunshots in the distance. There’s a body lying face down on the plaza across the deserted street. It’s been there for several days; its white flesh obscured by the even whiter snow. As for the gunshots, which pop again, there’s no way to tell where they come from because the sound soars over the otherwise silent rooftops and alleyways and travels for miles around. It could as easily be from the next block.
My watch reads 8:31 because I like to set the alarm to irregular numbers.
But I don’t know why I still set the alarm.
Canned peaches for breakfast and coffee boiled on a camping stove. The electricity stopped working two days ago. Gas: three days ago. The phones: almost a week. I’m certain of each of these figures, but this information doesn’t help me guess the day because I can’t pinpoint when this chaos first broke out. The days and nights have been so busy, surprising, and often violent. In the madness, it’s hard to keep track of anything. Surely, the authorities wouldn’t cut the gas off on a Sunday, so it must be midweek. Right?
I had a nightmare last night, which isn’t surprising considering the things I’ve seen and heard during the last eight or nine days. What is surprising is that the sleeping nightmare bared no resemblance to this waking nightmare. What’s more surprising is that, somehow, I’m one of the few still alive and able to have nightmares at all.
The nightmare featured a girl from my old high school trying to seduce me. She was a particularly vicious individual — a pretty girl made ugly by her words. The dream ended with the beginnings of a sexual act and then me running to puke in the bathroom. I think this dream stems from sleeping alone for the past week, which I haven’t done for almost a year now. My girlfriend, Emily Jacobs, succumbed to the plague last Saturday. Or was it Sunday?
*
Today, I need to gather more food. I have enough to last another week or two, but I have no idea when rescue will arrive — or, indeed, if rescue will ever arrive. I also need gas canisters for my camping stove, and maybe even a gun. People around here are getting crazy. I’m serious. I’ve already mentioned the dead body across the street.
*
There are four bolts on my apartment’s door. I added two more bolts three days ago, when the TV news broadcasts reached a new level of dire and the building’s heating finally cut out amid an hour of creaking, groaning pipes.
For further security, I’ve nailed a sheet of plywood over one of the apartment’s windows. I then pushed the defunct fridge up against the wood to keep it in place. Fortunately, the small side window, which faces a busy road, already has a grill over it. I pull thick curtains across this window each evening so that when I turn on my recently acquired wind-up lantern the light doesn’t draw any outside attention. I know I’m paranoid, but I’m still alive, so I’m doing something right.
*
I grab my empty backpack, a large one made for hiking but perfect for looting, throw it over my shoulder, and step into the hallway. I push my bike ahead of me, but as I turn to lock the door, the front wheel slips to the side and the whole thing topples down the stairs with a clatter. Typical.
From outside my apartment, I can close only two of the door’s locks, so I do that and head downstairs, grabbing the tangled bicycle on the way.
In the building’s foyer, the glass doors facing the street are smashed. I did this myself to make it look like looters have already pillaged the building, so others will pass by and leave my apartment untouched. It means the building’s colder, but it feels worth it. Even when the wind blows snow all the way up to the base of the stairwell, which is now more of an ice-tomb, it still feels worth it.
The snow outside falls in dense waves, but is still shallow enough on the ground to cycle through. Seeing untouched snow in such a busy part of the city is a rare event. I can’t recall ever seeing city roads blanketed as thoroughly as they are now, without the snow already tarnished by footsteps and tire tracks. Normally, by the time I would wake up on a snowy day, postal workers, people on night or dawn shifts, and newspaper delivery kids would have already broken the snows purity. Now the snow buries the city in slow growing, untouched layers, as if nature, renewed of its sentience, is seeking its final revenge. I’m lucky, in a way, because all of this can be quite beautiful sometimes.
The corpse I saw on the museum plaza ten minutes ago is now only a white mound on a whiter expanse. I can only hope that the roads are still traversable an hour from now when I’ll need to head home again.
I pull my scarf tight around my neck and mouth and pedal down the street, blinking away the blinding ice.
I choose to cycle because it’s convenient and allows me to navigate the damaged and cluttered streets with relative ease. It’s also quiet, so that I don’t attract any unwanted attention. These days, any attention could be dangerous attention.
But cycling in this weather is tough and slippery work. I have to remain focused on the road immediately ahead of me in order to shield my eyes from the blinding snow, but need to remain aware of my surroundings as to avoid collisions with the masses of junk all over the city. When people die, they don’t take the time to park their car correctly, so thousands of vehicles sit abandoned at chaotic angles all over the streets, cluttered and cumbersome. What’s more, in the past week, looting has been pandemic, so I’m as liable to crash into an old TV set as I am to crash into a car. All around, looters have emptied stores into the street. On Craig Street, even the comic-book store has been ransacked.
My luck holds out because the snowfall eases for a while once I leave my street and stays like this for five or six blocks. A little further on, in what was once a pleasant shopping area, I see a figure walking ahead. I stop the bike, hard. I don’t know what else to do in such a situation because I don’t know how safe this individual is. In the past few days, all of my encounters with other people have turned sour. As you’d expect, seeing almost everyone you know die within a week can seriously fuck a guy up. Most of the people who are still alive freak out if you get too close to them, fearful of any disease you may carry. But I figure that if you’re susceptible to the plague then you’ll already be contaminated and dead by now. I mean, the plague, or virus, or whatever they defined it as, was certainly contagious enough.
The past few nights of loneliness have given plenty me of time to mull my ideas over. My theory, up until now, first states that I’m evidently immune to the G9 contamination. If I’m vulnerable to the plague, then as I’ve said, I’m sure I’d be quite dead by now. The guy I can see standing ahead of me must be immune too, otherwise he wouldn’t be doing what he’s doing right now. That is, standing there. So, is this something to do with our genetics? That's what I believe, because I can't see where else this immunity could have come from. It’s not like I had Nile Virus as a kid or anything. So is this a hereditary thing? That would follow the train of logic I’ve established. Does that mean that my parents, brothers, and sister are still alive? That’s another question entirely, because the G9 plague is not the only killer around here.
My family lives in the small town of Bramble in northern Pennsylvania. When I last called them, when all of this chaos first broke out a week or so ago, they were all doing well. Most of my immediate family still lives in the same house I grew up in. That’s two parents, one sister, and one brother. Another brother lives in Philadelphia, after he moved there to study Philosophy and dropped out after eight months. Now he works as a supervisor in a bookstore and smokes a lot of pot. So aside from my older brother, who I haven’t heard from in months, my family was doing fine a week ago. Then the phone lines became swamped and cut out, along with, in time, all the other amenities. I rest my hopes on the belief that my family are indeed well and trying to get in touch with me, but with the phones out and the mail stopped, well, nobody’s contacting anybody in any great hurry. As I see it, one of my first priorities, after I find a decent roadworthy car, is to travel to my family’s home and see what’s happened there. I can only presume that my brother, Alex, in Philadelphia, has had the same idea and that he’ll head home too.
But this reunion has to wait because outside the world of my speculation, right here, in the immediate of the tactile and empirical, a stranger at the end of the street is poking at something in the snow. He (I assume they’re a “He”) twitches a bit. Almost everyone’s dead or dying and in my limited observations, those that remain healthy react in one of three ways. The first possibility is that they may have cracked, gone nuts, and plan on blowing me away with whatever weapons they have. Second, they may become hell-bent on their own survival and, to increase the odds of this, have isolated themselves from everybody else. Should I attempt to break this isolation and possibly infect them, they too may well plan on blowing me away. Anybody else, like me, is in the third category, trying to stay as low as possible, biding their time, and thus avoiding being blown the fuck away.
I remain standing with my bike and the figure at the opposite end of the street sees me. He runs down a side street without a moment’s hesitation. Like me, he’s a category three.
I pedal away and take a detour to avoid bumping into the individual again. Fifteen minutes later, I arrive at the ravaged grocery store.
*
I wheel into the parking lot and scope the place out. From the exterior, at least, the building looks empty. The main doors are wide open and snow has blown inside the building. Observing such desolation, I now doubt the logic behind coming here; I’m sure that looters have already taken everything of value. Still, I’ve come all this way, so I leave my bike down by the side of the store, where I hope nobody will notice it, and stroll over to the entrance.
Glass crunches underfoot as I step into the dim building. Silence, and then a dog barks from somewhere in the dark aisles. The noise echoes through the cavernous expanse. The plague affected few animals and now thousands of homeless dogs roam the streets. Of course, most of the dogs are harmless and this one it sounds like its eating, so it should be safe enough.
Strolling through the empty, endless aisles is a bizarre experience. Every footfall echoes through the vast building and the dog’s distant chews dominate the remainder of the soundscape. Pushing an empty shopping cart in front of me, I chew a wormy apple I find by the base of a refrigeration unit. My shopping trip amounts to a few cans of chick peas, a can of lentil soup, two cans of fruit, several sour apples, a bag of dried butter beans and, I can’t believe my luck, one entire bottle of premium-brand rum!
I find the dog at the far corner of the building, chewing bones on the ground behind the meat counter. I pet the animal for a while and think of taking some of the bones to make a soup, boiling them for a day or so to get the marrow out. But I decide otherwise. Boiling them would require too much gas from the camping stove, so the rewards won’t be worth the cost. Besides, the dog is enjoying the bones now more than I ever will.
The dog loves to receive attention and while it doesn’t lift its head from the bone on the ground, it contorts its body to keep close to my hand, as I rub its head and neck. The warmth of another body surprises me, and as I pet the dog, I feel the anxiety from the past week slip away. It drops its bone on the ground, lolls its tongue out, and pants as I rub under its chin and stroke its ears. It stares at me with wide eyes. This goes on for some minutes — the reciprocal comfort of affectionate company.
Then the dog looks up and I hear a footfall behind me. That is, directly behind me and only feet away. Panicked, I try to twist my body and a man screams, “STAY DOWN THERE, DON’T YOU FUCKING MOVE!”
But no, sorry, it’s not a shout — it’s a loud plea. “Stay down! I have a gun.”
I fall back to my knees, raise my shaking arms into the air, and crane my neck a few inches to the side, to plead and reason with the man. “Please, I’m not doing anything. I’m just getting some food. That’s all. I can just go and leave you alone.” I can already feel the sweat pooling on my burning face.
The dog has recognized the stranger — who is no doubt his owner — and leaps to the side of the confrontation, disturbed by the raised and threatening voice.
The stranger doesn’t respond to my statement. Instead, he hums a quivering note as if he doesn’t know what to do. I crane my neck enough to see him: a man no older than me, red faced in panic. He holds a small handgun.
“I said don’t move,” he screams. “Stay where you are. Tell me your name.”
“Uh—” I remain watching him.
“I said, tell me your fucking name!” He gestures to the gun in his hands by rocking them up and down. “I can use this, you know,” he says, “I’m not fucking around here.”
“I know. I believe you,” I blurt.
“Well?”
“Matthew. My name’s Matthew Cahill.”
It’s obvious that neither of us know what to say in this situation. “Are you crazy?” and “Do you want to kill me?” are things we want to say, but we could never do that.
“Are you crazy?”
“Me?” Of course he means me. “No!”
“‘No’? Everyone’s gone crazy. What are you doing here? Speak up. Don’t forget I still have the gun.”
I feel a wave of relief because, yes, he has the gun, but no, he won’t use it. We’re both scared shitless and don’t know what to do. He has a gun, but we’re in a stalemate, because he doesn’t want to shoot. I need to diffuse the situation. I have to speak in a calm voice and say things like, “Please, relax,” “We’re cool,” and so on, and then we’re friends forever, allies, and come through this whole mess together and emerge, in a few weeks, on the other side of disaster, victorious over nature’s worst. But all I say is a cracked and panicked, “I— I know you’ve got the gun.” It’s not a scream or a piercing yell. It’s as calm a statement as I can manage through the adrenaline rush. I say it to affirm my understanding of the situation and to let him know that things don’t need to escalate any further. But in the immediate, I don’t think in such rational terms. This is pure intuition.
“That’s right. So who the fuck are you?” The dog growls because of the tension in the air.
“You already asked. My name’s Matthew Cahill.”
“Oh yeah, yeah.” He lowers the gun and my relief is palpable. I can feel the perspiration on my face, dripping down my upper lip, and the sweat on his face falls into clear focus. Now that we’re on the same level, I drop my arms to my side and ask a question of my own.
“So who are you?”
“Sorry I acted like that. I’m scared, man. You know? I’m just scared.” He pauses. “My name’s James Klein.” There’s a long silence as we assess each other and then he smiles a little, turning his gun from me. “I don’t really know how to use this.”
I laugh with relief.
“I’m sorry,” he says again, “but people are cracking up around here and I don’t know who I can trust.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“There’s someone up on Ellsworth Avenue, well I didn’t see where they were, but I was up there with Ben, the dog, you know. We were walking down there minding our own business, kicking the trash around and there’s a rifle crack in the distance and the snow on the ground next to us puffs up into the air with a clap. Snipers, man! Snipers! How are you supposed to stay sane or sober with shit like that going on? Of course, I ran, and the rifle cracked again while I got the hell out of there. That’s why I got this.” He holds out the gun as if he’s allergic to it. “I knew that the guy who lived a few houses over from me had one, so I went and broke in.” He pauses. I remain sat on the ground waiting for him to continue, which, by the expression on his face, he clearly wishes to do, if only he can find the correct words. “He was laying in a recliner with the gun in his lap, dead of course. With that pale face that they got. That face everyone got. Except me, and you, I guess. It felt wrong to steal from a dead man, but—” he thinks for a beat, “—well.” In light of recent events, “well” is excuse enough.
He carries on talking about himself and his dog for a few minutes because he’s happy, relieved, and excited to see another friendly face. I blank out most of what he says. I’m still too shocked from having a gun pointed at me. For a moment there, I thought I was going to die. A wave of adrenaline had thrust me to the edge of reality, and now that the situation has finally calmed and the adrenaline has become unnecessary, all I can do is emit weak laughs and watch my arms shake. The dog, Ben, continues to gnaw at a bone on the ground.
James reminds me of myself. My age — early to mid-twenties — with an awkward gait. Brown hair and sunken eyes, like the kind you get when you spend your days in front of a computer monitor. He tells me that he’s lived in Pittsburgh his entire life — at his parent’s home in Lawrenceville — and that he works in a nearby bagel shop.
After some time, he helps me get up from my crouched position and I lean against the deli counter, recovering from the adrenaline surge that doesn’t appear to have affected him at all. When he comes to a natural pause, I ask what we’re going to do next. He gives a perplexed look.
“I mean, we can’t stay here,” I clarify. “The snow’s coming down too heavily. We’ll be trapped.”
“Yeah, of course. I need to get some food, and then we can head back to one of our places, huh?” He waits for a reply, but I’m still shaky and fail to respond in time. “We are sticking together, right?”
“If you’re cool with it,” I smile at him. “There’s no more food here though, other than what I’ve already collected.”
We grab my shopping cart and head to the exit. Ben follows behind us, sniffing the various refrigerators. During my time in the store, the snow has thickened, and drifts of it are gathering against the exterior wall.
“Do you live nearby?” I ask. “It’ll take an age to walk back to my place in this weather. I biked up here when it was calmer.”
“You cycled in this? You’re mad. You’ll freeze your balls off cycling in this. Forget that, my place is only ten minutes walking.”
So we start walking.
I pull my jacket tight, more as a gesture of defiance than for any practical purpose, and we begin our trek through the worst storm of the winter. James pushes the near empty shopping cart, I walk with my bike, and Ben walks alongside, hunched down in the deepening snow.
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Read Chapter 2 here.
If you enjoyed what you read, why not support independent publishing and get the whole book without the wait. Available in paperback and ebook ($1.25!) on Lulu and Smashwords. See the links to the right.
Dave
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