Alone: Book 1: Facing Armageddon (11 page)

     It took Dave four more days to finish the safe room. Once completed, it was a structure eight feet high, twelve feet long, and eight feet wide. One of the walls was built around the fireplace and had the added protection of four layers of brick, in addition to the plywood.

     The fireplace didn’t mean much now, as temperatures inside the safe room grew to a stuffy
eighty degrees in the afternoons.

     But in the wintertime, Dave had in essence constructed himself a windowless cabin, inside the house, with walls that were at least two and a half inches thick. The east wall, which faced the interior of the house, included a door about thirty inches wide and five feet high. He made it short on purpose, to help keep the winter heat in. Across the doorway he’d hung a wooden rod, fashioned by cutting a broomstick in half. And across the broomstick was a shower curtain from the downstairs bathroom he’d emptied out on the first day after the blackout. Back when he was trying to make the house appear to be vacant.

     He stood back and admired his work.

     Something appeared to be missing, but he couldn’t figure out what it was.

     And finally, in a moment of fancy, Dave decided to provide a name for his creation.

     He took a can of black spray paint from his garage and sprayed the words “THE HOLE” over the small doorway.

     “I christen thee ‘the hole’ after the scummiest and loneliest place in every prison movie ever made. I am now officially in solitary confinement.”

     He had no bottle of champagne to break across the bow of his new home. So instead he doused the painted words with water from a small bottle of
Ozarka.

     Then he guzzled the rest of the bottle, stood back and laughed.

     For the rest of the day, he lay in the middle of the hole curled up in the fetal position, wondering if he was going mad.

-23-

     Happy birthday, honey. You’re thirty six today. In a different time, in a different world, I’d have cooked you breakfast in bed this morning. Then, since it’s Saturday, or at least I think it is, I’d have crawled into bed with you and made sweet love to you.

     This stinks. All of it. Instead of helping you ring in another year of your life I’m s
itting here cursing the stench of death all around me.

     One of the neighbors killed a looter a couple of weeks ago and left his body on the street to rot. Every couple of days I’ve stood at the window and watched the buzzards slowly pick the meat off the bones. Lately I’ve worn
one of the paper masks from our first aid kit whenever I’m outside. The stench is that bad.

     Yesterday I saw a stray dog tear off one of
the looter’s forearms and carry it away like a trophy. I wish he’d have taken the whole damn thing.

     I’ve been waiting for the birds
and the dogs to finish picking the meat off of it. I figured when it was just bones, it wouldn’t smell so bad. And then it occurred to me that the smell of death is all around me no matter which way the wind is blowing.

     I’m surrounded by death. I suppose there are suicides in a lot of the houses in the neighborhood now, slowly rotting away. Seeing that desperate dog reminded me that I haven’t heard any barking at night lately. Remember when we used to lay in bed and bitch about all the neighbors’ dogs having barking contests at three in the morning? I haven’t heard a dog bark in two weeks or more, and in fact the one I saw picking at the looter’s carcass was the only one I’ve seen
since the blackout began.

     I suppose they were probably shot by owners who could no longer feed or water them.

     Either that, or they starved to death.

     I’ve been trying to remember everything I could about Tommy and Susan’s house. I know it wasn’t in a crowded neighborhood like our place is. I seemed to remember it was a bit outside the city. I hope you and the girls are being spared the awful smells.

     Now for some good news. I’ve finished the safe room and christened it “the hole.” In prison movies that’s what they call solitary confinement. I figured it was appropriate. When I bring you guys back here later on we can rename it. And yes, I do plan on bringing you guys back here some day. I don’t know how or when, but it’ll happen. You can bank on it.

     A little more good news. It dawned on me that since the chest freezer in the garage survived, some other things might have also. So I went around and started plugging all of the
appliances into the generator cord one at a time. It turns out that everything that was plugged into the wall is shot. But there were a few items in the attic that survived. I guess because they weren’t plugged in. Anyway, we have two electric box fans, two floor lamps and a space heater up

there that we can use, in addition to the stuff in the Faraday cage.

     My first project tomorrow is to furnish the hole. I’m going to bring down the single bed from Beth’s room and put it in there, as well as the coffee table and one of the occasional chairs from the den. The small folding table from the garage will hold the microwave and the Mr. Coffee. I’ll put the DVD player and the TV on the coffee table.

     I’ll use the floor lamp when the generator is working and open the shower curtain when it’s not. If I need to, I can burn candles to see at night, but I plan to do my sleeping during the hours of darkness.

     I think when I’m done it’ll resemble a college dorm room more than anything else. It’ll be cramped and cozy. But at least it’ll offer me some nice creature comforts for an hour and a half a day.

     I screwed up big time. Yesterday I woke up in the morning and it was raining, and I kicked
myself in the ass because I haven’t set up my rain collection system yet.

     It’s not a major
crisis. I counted the number of bottles I was able to fill from the tap. There were a hundred and twenty six of them. They’re taking up most of the spare floorspace in the garage and in the upstairs bathroom. And I’m still drinking from the cases of bottled water we stashed, so I’m not in danger of running out. But there are still at least three hundred more empty bottles in the attic I can fill with rainwater and use to irrigate the wheat and corn crops. The rain seems to have cleared off now, but my second project is to hang the gutters and the tarps so I can be ready the next time it rains.

     I’ve also decided to hang an extra set of gutters on the Hansen house. I think I’ll have enough pieces left over. If I don’t, I can fasten some two by fours to the roof to channel the water to the corners of the house and then into the trash cans below. Might as well make use of that house. They’ll never be back to use it again.

     I wish you were here to tell me when to start planting. I looked at the seeds in our seed stock. Most of the little packages have instructions on when and how to plant, so I should be covered on those. It’s the bulk wheat and corn seed we bought on-line that I’m worried about. Neither one came with instructions, and those are our subsistence crops.

     I’ll keep you posted on that.

     Kiss the girls for me. I love you all.

-24
-

     Dave awoke early the next morning, a few minutes before sunrise. It occurred to him that his body clock was starting to adjust to his sleep schedule now. That somehow his subconscious brain knew he needed to be up to take advantage of the daylight hours.

    
He stumbled out of bed and stretched. It was moving day today. He’d decided that after he finished furnishing the hole he’d reward himself by cranking the generator and watching a movie. Not home movies, of the girls as they were growing up. As much as he loved watching those movies, they made his heart hurt.

     No, today he’d pop in a
n old cowboy movie. Dave was a big fan of John Wayne. As a boy, he sat on the couch in the evenings eating popcorn with his father, watching John Wayne shoot it out with the bad guys. His father was a big fan of the Duke himself, and although he preferred Wayne’s war movies, he knew that Dave was more fond of the cowboy movies. So that’s what the two of them watched most of the time.

     When Dave’s dad died, he inherited the extensive collection of western movies. He seldom watched them, but today, with all the death and misery going on in the world, he needed something to distract him
from his pain.

     He went to the garage and selected the tools he’d need to dismantle Beth’s bed. Then he walked into her room and took the single mattress, threw it over his shoulder, and carried it down the stairs.

     He was startled to discover he could smell the scent of her shampoo on the sheets.

     Momentarily, he
wept just a bit. Then he shook his head to bring himself back to reality.

     There would be time to cry later if he wanted to. Right now he had a job to do.

     Two hours later he was finished. The bed was reassembled on one wall in the hole, and all of the other gadgets were placed around the room.

     He was surprised that he still had a bit of space to move around. But they had designed the small room to accommodate four, after all, so it made sense he’d still have a bit of breathing room.

     Just as he’d suspected, the hole looked a lot like a college dorm room, a mish mash of “stuff” and an unmade single bed. But it was what it was. And what it was for the foreseeable future was his home. Or at least the part of his home he’d spend most of his time in.

     Because of the way the hole was situated, with its single narrow door facing the interior of the house, he knew he could power the floor lamp, even at night if he wanted to, without the light being visible from outside the house. And he knew that plywood made excellent insulation, both from temperatures and from sound. He knew that the five layers of plywood would absorb the sounds from his television.

     Lastly, he knew that he’d look forward to the hour and a half respite he’d be able to take from the ugliness of the world outside each day. For those precious ninety minutes, he’d be able to escape reality, watch a movie, relax a bit and feel normal again.

     It was time for his break. He went to the garage and opened up his chest freezer. Most of the frozen food was gone now, and he was running out of choices.

     He picked up a box of corn dogs and looked at the back. One hundred and eighty calories apiece. He closed the freezer door and took them to the kitchen, where he put eleven corn dogs on a dinner plate. They pretty much covered every inch of it.

     He did the math in his head. Eleven corn dogs equaled 1980 calories. It was damn close to the
1900 calories he’d set as his goal each day. Close enough.

     He wasn’t crazy about corn dogs.
And he knew he couldn’t eat eleven at one sitting. But he only had a ninety minute window to cook them, so he’d cook them all at once, eat what he could, and save the rest for later.

     Back in the garage, he placed the box back into the chest freezer and did a quick survey of what was left in it.

     Another week’s worth, he decided. Then he’d transition from frozen food to the canned goods that were in the cupboard. He wasn’t looking forward to them. He knew that the vitamins they provided were important to his health, sure. The problem was that canned vegetables were relatively low in calories. So he might have to eat six cans of corn and peas and lima beans in a single day just to get the calories he needed to keep going.

     And for a man who wasn’t particularly fond of canned vegetables, that just didn’t appeal to him.

     The other alternative, of course, was just not eating the vegetables. But then they would eventually go bad and would expire.

     T
o waste food under the present circumstances would be a sin. And Dave was many things, but he wasn’t a sinner.

     He poured a cup of
gas into the generator and fired it up, then made sure the door leading into the house was completely closed.

     Then he went back to the hole, put the plate of corn dogs into the microwave for two minutes, and pressed the start button.

     While he was waiting for the microwave to shut off, he looked through the stack of John Wayne DVDs he’d put in the corner of the small room.

     He put
Red River
aside. He remembered the Wayne character as being too mean, and he wanted something a little lighter.