Alone: Book 1: Facing Armageddon (19 page)

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     He wasn’t sure why he was doing it, exactly. It was a very risky move on his part, and he was exposing himself to great violence. It went against all of the plans that he and Sarah had made for three long years.

     And it wasn’t that he didn’t have enough
other things to do, either.

     The wheat crop was ready to harvest, and the corn wasn’t
far behind it. He certainly had enough to keep him busy from dawn to dusk for at least the next month.

     Something inside of him, though, made him go.

     It made him open the gate on the side of his house, in broad daylight, and walk next door to his nameless neighbor’s house to the west.

     It was the same something that made him knock several times on the front door. Hoping someone would answer. And knowing deep within his soul that it wasn’t going to happen.

     He’d had a tough time sleeping the night before.

     Every time he closed his eyes he could see the children, and imagine what they must have gone through. And he felt like the worst person in the world.

     It was easy for him to say that the red headed man and his wife had the same opportunities to prepare that he and Sarah did.

     And that was true.

     But it was also true that Dave had way more than he needed, since he’d planned for provisions to support four people and three of them weren’t there. Yes, the smart thing to do was to conserve as much as he could as long as he could, so that when his family reconciled they’d be in good shape.

     But that didn’t help him feel better. The bottom line was, he was almost positive that the family next door took their own lives to keep from dying of thirst or starving to death. And he, Dave Speer, could have saved them.

     But he didn’t.

     He felt he had to do something.

     It had nothing to do with paying penance. He was quite sure that if God was angry with him for his behavior, he’d burn in hell no matter what he did.

     No, it had more to do with a strong desire to do something… anything, to give these people
back a semblance of dignity.

     When he received no answer at the door, he was convinced his neighbors were dead. He didn’t want to raise the ire of his neighbors by breaking into the front of the house.

     So he returned to his own yard and secured the gate.

     Then he went into his garage and retri
eved the saw he’d used to cut secret passages between his yard and the other two yards sharing his fence line.

     He might as well make passages in all three sides of the fence.

     Within an hour he was at the rear of the neighbor’s house, peeking in the windows.

     He could plainly see them, lined up on the living room floor. The furniture had been moved aside, so they could lay in repose together.

     Now there was no doubt.

     He kicked in a window at the back of the house and climbed inside, then went to the living room to examine the carnage.

     It seemed rather odd. The mother was on one side and the three children lay in the center. The father lay on the other side. It was as though even in their last moments, the parents were trying to protect their children.

     The woman and children each had a gunshot in the center of their foreheads.

     The father had placed the gun in his mouth and had blown the top of his head off. The gun was still gripped tightly in his hand.

     Dave wondered how the father had gotten his children to lie so straight and still when they knew the end was coming. Then he saw two empty bottles of sleeping pills on the coffee table. He supposed that the children were dead or near death
from an overdose when they were shot. The bullets were probably an insurance policy to make sure they didn’t wake up and have to fend for themselves after the parents were gone.

     Dave had to step back outside and retch.

     After his stomach emptied, he returned to the house and went to the master bedroom. He pulled a comforter off the bed and dragged it back to the living room. He used it to cover up the bodies, both to give them a little bit of dignity, and to chase away the flies that had already started to gather on the bodies.

     He looked at the children’s faces and cried for a moment.

     Then he returned to the back yard, picked up his shovel, and started to dig.

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The sun was low in the sky when Dave finally finished digging the mass grave. His back was aching and his arms were on fire. This surpassed even the planting, and was the most physical labor he remembered ever doing in a single day.

     He was too exhausted to prepare and move the bodies. That would have to wait until morning.

     He climbed out of the hole, which was about six feet long and four feet wide. It was about four feet deep or so. He wasn’t sure exactly, but it was over his waist and deep enough to make him struggle to get his weary body out of it.

     He stumbled to the fence that separated this yard from his own, and it occurred to him that he walked unlike a zombie. Slowly, deliberately, dragging his feet. He hadn’t slept well the night before and hoped he could get some sleep tonight.

     Usually, when he and his body were exhausted from a hard day’s work, Dave slept very well.

     But he knew that every time he’d close his eyes he’d see the faces of those three emaciated children, each with a clean round bullet hole in their little foreheads.

     He wasn’t sure, but he suspected that the images would haunt him for the rest of his life.

     As he crawled through the
hole in the fence, one of the rabbits darted through it and into the neighbor’s yard.

     He was too tired to chase it.

     But it did give him an idea.

     Dave had no trouble falling asleep that night. His body, in desperate need of recovering after being abused all day, simply pulled rank on his troubled mind.

     But that didn’t mean he slept well.

     He tossed and turned and even woke up once, a little after three a.m.

     He’d had a bad dream.

     That on the southern outskirts of Kansas City, Sarah’s brother Tommy, and his wife Sarah, hadn’t planned as well as they though they had.

     And they’d run out of provisions.

     And that Sarah had made a difficult decision.

     In his dream, he saw Sarah, dressed in white, lying on her back. His daughters, Lindsey and Beth, lay on either side of her, her arms wrapped around them. Their heads lay on her breasts in a peaceful pose.

     And all three of them had bullet holes in their foreheads.

     Dave seldom dreamed. And he almost never had nightmares.

     So this one affected him greatly.

     Unable to get the ugly vision out of his head, he stumbled out of bed and went into the back yard to urinate.

     With every movement, his body screamed in pain, stiff and sore from the previous day’s work.

     He knew his dream wasn’t based in reality. He’d seen Tommy’s food stores. He had enough to feed his own family of four for at least three or four years. Yes, the stores would be depleted sooner with three extra mouths to feed, sure.

     But Tommy and Susan had an advantage over Dave and Sarah because they lived outside the city. It would be much easier to grow crops, and they had the equipment they needed to grow crops on a large basis.

     And they had livestock, too. Six head of cattle and a couple of pigs. And chickens.

     Dave didn’t want to admit it, although a tiny voice in the back of his mind kept reminding him. But his wife and daughters were probably better off with Tommy and Susan than they would be at home.

     He wondered if they worried about his safety and well being as much as he worried about them.

     He downed a bottle of water, and the ease at which it went down reminded him he was dehydrated from the day before.

     Then he returned to
the hole. It was still too dark outside to do anything. So he went back to bed, fully expecting to still be there, wide awake, when the sun came up an hour and a half later.

     Instead,
he was asleep almost as soon as his head hit the pillow.

     He woke up again just before noon. Still sore, his head foggy from lack of water. And he was famished.

     The frozen food in the freezer was long gone now, and he was surviving on canned goods. In a way, he preferred them over the frozen food that had to be cooked, or at least heated. Most of the canned goods were just as tasty eaten from the can as they were when heated.

     The day before Dave had killed six cans of vegetables to get his daily calorie count. He had to eat them a little at a time throughout the day, and he wondered if the strictly vegetarian diet helped weaken him during the four long hours he was digging the grave.

     Today, he needed something more substantial.

     He pulled two large cans of Dinty Moore beef stew from a temporary hiding place underneath Beth’s old bed. He noted that there were just a few cans left. Soon, he’d have to pull one of the posters from her wall and pull out some more of his long term stock to replenish this day to day pile.

     He took the cans of stew to the dining room table and pondered his situation.

     It was only a few months before when Sarah had teased him.

     “Look at that! You’re getting a middle aged spread!”

     He’d been standing naked in the bathroom, after stepping out of the shower. Sarah was taking off her makeup and getting ready for bed when she’d noticed his expanding stomach in the mirror.

     He looked down, and sure enough, it was getting a bit harder to see his own toes.

     She hadn’t meant it harshly, of course. She was way too sweet for that. But it did make him think.

     Dave had always been proud of his physique. He jogged more than most men, and even went to the gym three days a week to do time on the weight machines or to play basketball. But he had indeed been slowing down in recent months, and had developed a great love for Sarah’s good cooking.

     He remembered making a mental note to himself to cut back on the
second helpings and to increase his jogging distance.

     But now, it was a different story.

     He’d taken off his shirt while he was upstairs and stepped into the bathroom.

     Even in the semi-darkness, it was easy to see his paunch was gone. He hadn’t been this slim since he was in the Marine Corps and had
no choice.

     His stomach had shrunk considerably in the months since the blackout. He knew he wasn’t starving. He always counted his calories to make sure he was getting enough.

     No, the problem was that his lifestyle had changed. He was no longer leading a mostly sedentary lifestyle, sprawled across the couch all weekend watching three ball games back to back.

     He was no longer hitting the all you can eat buffet up the street every weekend, or enjoying Sarah’s cooking so much that seconds just wasn’t enough.

     His stomach had shrunk considerably.

     So much so that he was unsure he could eat both cans of beef stew at one sitting.

     But he had to try. He needed the fuel to wrap the bodies, and to get them out of the house and into the grave.

     He also strongly suspected that he’d have no
appetite later, when the deed was done.

     Even now, he felt guilty for eating. In his mind he could still see the emaciated corpses of the family who’d gotten so desperate they saw no other way out.

     He didn’t know if they ran out of food or water first. He hadn’t taken the time to look around their house to see what provisions they’d left behind.

     He wondered what he’d have done if they’d come knocking on his door, asking for food and water. Would he have ignored them, even though he had plenty? Would he have wanted so much to keep his presence in the neighborhood hidden that he’d let fellow human beings starve to death or die of thirst?
Had he sunk that low?