Mary plopped down in her seat, cupping her head in her hands. “Two days and you promise you’ll go?”
“I’ll leave this house and your general vicinity, yes,” I told her.
“That’ll have to do,” she answered solemnly.
“Yes,” Josh said, pumping his fist.
“Can I eat now?”
“Not at the table,” she said without removing her head from her hands.
That was fine with me. If I wasn’t with my immediate family, I preferred to eat alone. I didn’t generally like people enough to break bread with them and make idle chit chat about things I didn’t give a crap about; and don’t get me started if I came across signs of uncleanliness on their utensils or dishes. It was best to not go down a road lined with potholes, when holding such a fragile, glass-wrapped psyche like my own.
I grabbed BT’s MRE off the table before she could object and headed into the living room. Josh was immediately on my heels. Mary had not stopped him, probably hadn’t pulled her head up yet to take note. BT slumbered on as I tore open the near nuclear-proof plastic wrapping.
I don’t know how many of you have ever had dealings with MREs, but if you’ve survived this long, then you, my friend, are a survivalist and EVERY survivalist has at one time or another had an MRE, whether from the military or an Army/Navy surplus store. (You know those places that were located in the worst parts of every town and the guy behind the counter looks suspiciously at every customer like they could be the feds come to get his secret cache of hand grenades and rocket launchers in the back room.)
If, on the off chance that you have somehow made it this far without one, I will relate a short story. When I was in Marine Corps boot camp, eating was one of the only events that any recruit could sort of look forward to. I say “sort of” because we generally were not allowed to finish any meal. I can, without even thinking about it, honestly tell you that I threw more food away during my three and a half months of boot camp than I actually ate.
When we went to the dining halls, there was a chance I would get to shovel as much food into my mouth before the DIs would start barking at us to get back outside and in military formation. The times we spent out in the field without access to a dining hall, however, were times of depravation and starvation. The DIs would put a box of MREs out in a field, usually somewhere in the neighborhood of one hundred or so yards away, and then tell us that we had five minutes to eat. So, we would race out to the box and tear into it, which in itself takes a little to get through. Removing the metal banding straps without tools was always a good time to see who would bleed first, then as the piñata of meals fell to the ground, it was a scramble to grab a meal. There was not the luxury of choosing one particular meal over another. Did I tell you this one little tidbit? There are twelve meals in an MRE case and we had two boxes. There were thirty Marine recruits in my platoon, easy enough math. You think people fighting for a stupid, sold-out, hot toy during Christmas is fierce? Tell a starving Marine you just took the last meal.
Looking back on it, the ones that didn’t get the meal were probably better off. I can’t tell you how many fingernails I tore, trying to tear through the five mm gauge, sealed-by-a-glue-fanatic bags. Ripping with teeth was perhaps marginally better, chipped tooth, bleeding fingers, to-MAY-toe, to-MAH-toe, just give me my fucking food! Alright, so let’s see where we are. Sprint to box, five guys trying desperately to crack boxes open, ensuing fight for insufficient meals as they spill to the dirt, check so far. So now you have battled and won a meal and are hiding your kill from your fellow predators. You have successfully torn through the hard exterior carcass to get at the “meat and potatoes” so to speak. It doesn’t matter much whether it is wombat or porcupine meat, you’re going to eat it.
By this point, three of the five allotted minutes have been used up, and now for the topper. Apparently, Marine DIs do not make much money because they cannot afford watches that keep particularly good time. I would finally be at a point where I could rip open the food’s foil container and squeeze food down my gullet (forget the plastic utensils, forget chewing, this was all about sustenance) when the DIs would start screaming at us to assemble. Now some of you may not have ever joined the services. That is fine; we all walk our own path in life, some of you may have chosen the Army, or were maybe a little smarter and went to the Navy or quite possibly, you were a genius and joined the Air Force. But I was in the Marines. When your DI screamed at you to be somewhere you did it, no questions asked.
The gut-crippling clutches of hunger were far outweighed by the prospect of suffering the wrath of a DI who felt you had wronged him. Some of you sneakier souls are thinking, don’t those camis have dozens of pockets? Yes, they do. Then why not shove your uneaten food in those and eat them later? Any former Marines want to answer this one? Because, my dear reader, DIs know about pockets and they know about what lengths a desperate starving recruit will go to. You would be treated less harshly in the real world if you had just killed a cop and his partner caught you first and was alone with you for a half hour before his back-up got there.
Some of you may scoff at that analogy, I had to stand at the position of attention while the recruit next to me suffered the wrath of two DIs for trying to heist a jelly packet that he had shoved down his trousers. By the time they were done with him, well let’s just say that the jelly packet would have been the only thing he would have been able to eat.
***
I ended up with a beef stew MRE packet. Think Dinty Moore, but gross. The fat congealed at the top of the packet was the thickest part of the whole meal, including the mystery meat. I ate everything, I was famished. I looked over to BT, who was still sleeping. It left me wondering if getting Tomas into the mix was a good call or not. I had no viable alternative, but still it nagged at me; knowledge is power and now Tomas had some. Life was already precarious. Why I felt the need to keep digging holes around the lip of the precipice was beyond me.
I could hear Deneaux in the next room trying to comfort Mary. It was like listening to a snake tell its prey that everything would be alright. Sure, for the snake it would be. I was staring so hard at BT, I wasn’t even looking at him anymore, if that makes any sense. I never noticed when his eyes opened.
“You scare me sometimes,” BT said, his vocal chords sounding coarse and dry.
I quickly pulled my thousand-yard stare back in. “Yeah, well you do that to me all the time.”
“So we’re here a few more days?” he asked as he pulled himself up to a sitting position.
“What’d you hear?” I asked him.
“Enough to know that you must have stomped all over Deneaux’s prized azaleas. She does not like you.”
“It’s more than that, I agree she’s not a fan, but there’s something more. Do you have enough strength to head upstairs?” BT nodded. “I figure the old bat has ears like one.”
Josh laughed.
“Josh is everything all right in there?” Mary called.
“You really shouldn’t let him get too much influence from Michael. He sets bad examples,” Deneaux chirped into Mary’s ear.
“Tell me again why you decided to come with us?” I asked, before she could respond, I continued on. “Or better yet, why did I allow you to come with us?”
I could hear her over-exaggerated heavy sigh from where I was.
“Mom, I’m fine, we’re going to play with my Lego’s again,” Josh said, winking to me.
“Be careful,” Mary said.
“From the Lego’s?” Josh asked, completely confused.
“You know what I mean,” she answered.
Josh shrugged his shoulders and mouthed, “No, I don’t” to me.
“I do,” I soundlessly worded to him and then waved him to go upstairs.
BT followed, the big man was moving slowly and had to take a break halfway up the stairs.
“You alright?” I asked him from the top of the stairs.
“I didn’t know you cared,” he said
a little more heatedly than perhaps he meant to, as he apologized when he got up to me. “I’m sorry, man, I feel like I’ve got the flu, without all the phlegm.”
“Gross,” Josh said. “Come on,” he said, pushing the door to his room open.
BT almost crashed into a rendition of a B-1 bomber as he headed straight for the bed to plop down on it. Josh’s bed creaked and groaned from a pressure it had not been designed to bear. Josh and I stared for a few seconds waiting for the resultant collapse.
BT, getting wind of what we were doing, spoke. “It’ll hold,” he growled, and as if intimidated by his words, the bed did as it was told.
“Can I stay?” Josh asked. “I know you guys came up here to talk and get away from the women, but I’m a man too, so I should be here.”
“It’s your house, my man,” BT said. “I don’t see why not.”
I was more inclined to send him packing for a few minutes, but I don’t think he was going to do any heart to heart talking with Deneaux anytime soon.
“What’s going on, Mike?” BT asked. “I caught some of her conversation with Mary, but I kept drifting in and out. All I could really tell is that she wants to get out of here as quick as possible.”
“It’s nothing concrete, BT, but she’s trying to cover her tracks.” I related the story of finding Brian and how he was facing away AFTER she had called him, and how she now was in possession of Paul’s rifle. I also mentioned how she had said she was alone, but the house she was staying in provided clues to the contrary. “It’s nothing but a suspicion, but she did something she’s trying to cover up and she wants us to leave the scene of the crime before we turn up any evidence.”
“Brian’s dead,” BT said wiping his hand down his face. “Man, I almost don’t want to go back to your brother’s and see what this does to Cindy.”
“I cannot leave here until I know about Paul. There’s no way I could look Erin in the face and tell her that I have absolutely no clue what happened to her husband and my best friend.”
“So Brian was a zombie? Why lie about anything to do with that then?” BT asked confused. “Could the bullet have spun him around or anything?”
I looked over to Josh before I replied. “Exit wound was on his face.”
“Gross,” Josh said, I agreed implicitly.
“She’s acting so shifty, even more so than usual. I don’t have a good feeling about Paul.” I hitched a little, I’m still mostly human I thought, I’m still entitled to have feelings. “I’ve known him for thirty years. I owe it to him at the very least to find out what happened.”
“You’ve got to prepare yourself for the real possibility that he is no longer with us,” BT said tenderly.
“I know that man, I do. With a rifle, Paul wasn’t a huge threat; well without…” I didn’t, I couldn’t finish the damn sentence.
“I’d like to head out with you in the morning,” BT said. “Help look for him.”
“Me too,” Josh threw in before I could even tell BT no.
“No, on both counts.”
“You gonna stop me?” BT said, trying to rise up off the bed and use his height advantage as a mitigating factor.
“BT, Josh could stop you right now.”
Josh looked over at me like maybe I shouldn’t be throwing him under the bus quite like that.
“Dammit, Mike! I’m as weak as you right now,” BT said, cursing. “I can barely move.”
I didn’t rise to his bait, I did think about putting him in a headlock though, just because I thought I could probably take him. But merely to gaze upon the man is to feel intimidation. “You sure you never played in the NFL?”
“Why? Because I’m big and I’m black?” BT said with some force.
I thought about it. “Well, yeah.”
He laughed. “Played some college ball, had some pro scouts interested. It never went any further.”
And he dropped it, I don’t know if there was no more to add or he didn’t want to talk about it.
“What time are we leaving tomorrow?” Josh asked.
“No way, kiddo,” I told him. “Your mom, if given the chance, would throw me out into the street in front of a convoy.”
“A what?” Josh asked.
“A bunch of trucks,” BT clarified. “And he’s right. It’s too dangerous out there for you.”
“I’m almost twelve,” Josh said, making it sound as authoritative as possible.
“Yeah, and I’m sure you’re going to want to make thirteen,” I told him. And then reality with its ugly iron fist hit me with an uppercut. What really is the rest of his life going to encompass? Eventually, they are going to run out of food and they will have to leave their relatively safe haven and neither seemed to have the skills to scavenge in a hostile world. Basically, they were living on borrowed time.
That didn’t mean I was taking him with me on a learning expedition, but I still felt for the kid and his mother. Her ex-husband, his father, was gone (much like Paul, crept in. I squashed it heavily, but the thought kept peeking from around the edges) and he wasn’t coming back. How many “families” were there still out there like this? Isolated, each its own island of remoteness. There could still be a salvageable community in this city, but they would never be able to become cohesive. There was no communication, no ability to seek others out. The populace would be too fearful to create bonds anyway. There might be a few brave souls like Mary that would open a door to a stranger, but she was in the minority. We were just as lucky she hadn’t shot us instead.
Between zombies and criminally opportunistic humans, the world was merely a shell. The day of humans as the dominant species on the planet was coming to close and it was just as violently dangerous and deadly as the great comet strike that took out the dinosaurs two hundred million years ago. There would be a few viable communities still intact, places like Little Turtle or Easter Evans School, but as the zombies’ resources became fewer and fewer, they would seek these last food zones out relentlessly. Nothing would be able to withstand that type of onslaught.
Ultimately, the zombies and Eliza would have won, but what was the prize? She would rule a planet of mindless eating machines. I can’t imagine she had thought this out completely. She gets off on the power she holds over people and the fear she instills in their hearts. Zombies didn’t care, at all, they eat. And make no mistake, we would be just like every other extinct species on the planet, gone and for good. Seen any Tasmanian wolves lately? Maybe a dodo bird or two? There is no species regeneration. And Eliza and Tomas would hardly qualify as Adam and Eve.
Would she live long enough to see another sentient being rise from the ashes of our deaths? Would dolphins come ashore and finally take their rightful place as care-takers of the land? Would zombies give anything a chance to get a foothold? They ate everything. They were worse than locusts. They stripped the land clean of every type of animal. Looks like it was going to be the age of plants. I hope Eliza likes roses.
I had spent the last few seconds mulling over my dark thoughts when Josh interrupted me. Maybe the kid had an idea what he was in for. “I will be thirteen. I miss my dad, but I know he’s not coming back. I don’t tell my mom that because she needs to believe that I think he is. I need to see what it is like out there. We won’t be able to stay here forever, no matter what my mom says. Sometimes I think that she just doesn’t want to think about it. I think about it every day. We’ve got maybe six months of food and three months of bottled water, so what time are we leaving?”
“You’re a realist, Josh, and I can appreciate that,” I told him, and that was the honest truth. “But you’re not my kid and the danger out there, it’s real. This isn’t a training exercise. I would no sooner put you in any needless danger than I would any of my own.”
Mary had at some point come up the stairs and had been at Josh’s doorway while I spoke to him. She grudgingly nodded at me for what I said to him, but she still didn’t want him to be with me. The kid might have been thinking about g
oing out at some point while he was with his mother, but he had never before voiced it. So again, something else was my fault by default.
“Come on, Josh. It’s time for bed,” Mary said, grabbing her son by the shoulders, steering him towards his bed.
It didn’t seem that late to me, but that wasn’t what this was about anyway. I took one longing look at the Lego’s I wanted to play with and headed downstairs, making sure that BT led the way. If he fell down the stairs behind me, I’d be crushed.
Mary came down a few minutes later. “I’d appreciate if you didn’t put any wild thoughts in my son’s head,” she said hotly.
“Those ‘wild thoughts’,” I told her with air quotes and everything, “came from the mouth of your son without any prompting from me.”
“He doesn’t understand what is going on!” she yelled and then brought her voice down to that inside yelling tone, cognizant of the fact that she had just put her offspring to bed.
“I think you underestimate him. He understands, probably even more so than you. He knows that his father isn’t coming back, he understands that you have a finite supply of food and water and more importantly, he understands that as the man of the family, he is wholly unprepared to defend the both of you. I’m not arguing in the least to take him with me, Mary. I’m just telling you what is going through the boy’s head. He’s growing up fast because he has to. Just because last year he might have been playing with Pokemon cards and plastic dinosaurs doesn’t mean he can’t comprehend the danger around him now.”
Mary sat down hard, I thought for sure she was going to miss the couch completely, again. As it was, she had to put her hand on the armrest to keep her ass from going to the ground. After she had situated herself properly, she brought her wet hand to her face. “What the hell is this?” she said, showing her hand to me.
What the fuck? I thought. It’s not like I took a piss on her couch while she wasn’t looking.