House of Gold (21 page)

Where were the police? Without gasoline for their cruisers or electricity for their own communication
systems, many had gone home to fend for their own families.

It was a quiet chaos. Many survivalist types had feared violence and riots, and yes, these had been an element of the breakdown. But as it turned out, people were too hungry, sick, and cold to do much more than burn furniture in their fireplaces (those fortunate enough to have fireplaces) and ration what food they had into smaller portions
until...the pantries were bare.

A particularly frigid February made forays outside, especially after dark, dangerous or deadly. Many of those who had prepared by storing extra food supplies faced a gruesome choice: hide the food from starving neighbors, or be discovered and face the wrath of those same neighbors. Touchingly, at least from Sister Regina's point of view, most chose to share, according
to the stories being told by the hundreds of pilgrims coming to Mass.

No one dared bring violence to the nuns, who were universally recognized, along with members of thousands of other churches around the world, Catholic and Protestant, for taking in the lonely, the dying, the sick, the hungry, the orphaned, the widowed, and the downtrodden.

People everywhere were also starving for news. What
Clevelander did not have several relatives who lived somewhere else in the nation? Or across town, which now seemed a universe away.

Since the regular radio broadcasts had stopped–and even those still on the air were difficult to trust–it simply was not known what was going on in Europe, in New York, in Colorado–and in Buzz's case, in New Hampshire.

Sam, Ellie, and Mel, watching the darkness slowly
make its deadly way across the world, had sent a stream of emails to the Man in the final hours before the electricity and telephone lines went dead.

They all contained the same theme:

"We're okay. We're trusting in God. We love you. When you wake up, come to us when it's safe."

Without explanation, on the fifth day of January, Mark Johnson and his family disappeared. Buzz and the Man suspected
that he had gone to his place in Oberlin to ride things out.

Anywhere there was a stream, or brook, or outdoor running water, people could be seen with buckets and pitchers, trekking back and forth to get drinking water. Most homes had bleach, and it was quickly learned by all that a few drops could be used to purify water. Those lucky enough to have fireplaces gathered snow and ice from their
backyards and melted it.

Men, women, and children who had showered and bathed every day for their entire lives had now gone without a bath for weeks.

Refugees, fewer as the Ides of March approached, were everywhere, on foot, most heading south.

People had already started to drop in the streets.

Corpses, many still nursing diseases, were stored in backyards–covered with tarps or stones if possible–to
await the spring thaw for burial.

What had been a large city surrounded by a dozen large suburbs had degenerated in a matter of weeks into hundreds of disparate neighborhoods. Some neighborhoods had even set up crude roadblocks using abandoned vehicles, with sentries taking turns to block passage. Refugees were told to walk around.

The denial about the crash that existed before the Troubles, as
they became known in the Cleveland area, did not abate. Yes, it was no longer possible to deny that the lights had gone out, and only the insane would debate that the computer bug had been the cause. But now, the denial took the form of March Madness, as the Man aptly named it.

"Things will get better in the spring," people told themselves. "The authorities will come with food. It will get warmer.
If we can just hold out."

None of these people dared to admit the awful truth: the infrastructure for growing, fertilizing, harvesting, processing, storing, delivering, and selling food was gone. An intelligent man could deduce that the world's summer harvest of 2000 would be a tiny fraction of the harvest of 1999.

Others, more realistic, realizing they would be dead by spring, and cold and lethargic,
simply gave up struggling, took to their beds, and waited for death.

Others, a minority of grim realists, began to do what the most desperate have done throughout history. When faced with starvation, they reenacted the deeds of some of the citizens of Leningrad during Hitler's siege in World War II:

They became cannibals.

The worst disease of all, dubbed Captain Breakers by a person whose name
would be lost to history, was manifested by millions of souls. Captain Breakers took many forms, but all its forms shared this in common: the modern mind, raised from birth with no care or concern for procuring daily bread, accustomed to artificial light at the flick of a switch, now forced to go cold turkey from what had been dozens of hours a week of television, bereft of the false identities supplied
by one's occupation (I'm a lawyer; I'm a truck driver; I'm a nurse; I'm a house painter), unable to accept the death of friends and relatives and–God, oh-God-no–not the children, the babies, the little ones–this modern mind simply turned off.

Off, like the lights. Captain Breakers.

And thus, suicide. Irrational bursts. Fits of sobbing. Running. Running in the streets toward destinations unknown
or destinations dreamed–to the South, to Florida, to Columbus, to California, where the lights really, really truly
must
be on and the food grows right off the trees. Anywhere but here, where reality bore down like a giant unseen anvil on mental shoulders too weak to hold up to the agonizing strain. Breakers were everywhere.

This is the world Buzz found when he woke up: a world coming more and
more to be dominated by insanity.

But none of this mattered to him.

Buzz had been insane once himself, and thus inoculated, was not disturbed when Hal and Donna (she allowed him to call her by her old name when she was alone with him) described all these things.

+  +  +

Three days after he woke up, they sat together in his little room, the svelte black man and Sister Regina on wooden chairs, and
Buzz on his bed.

"I've already lost thirty pounds, so I must begin the journey soon, or I'll become too weak," he told them. "I'm now two-fifty. I can probably go down to one-eighty."

"I'll go with you. There is nothing for me here," the Man offered, his tone hard.

"Okay," Buzz accepted, holding back a tear. This was true friendship.

"What if you die out there? At least wait until the weather
gets warmer," Sister Regina protested, anxiety apparent in her voice. "Hal can forage for food here and you can build your strength."

"There is no food here. Or at least I don't think Hal and I are willing to kill for what food there is. I will probably die on the long walk. But I will die if I stay here. My life is not the issue. You pray for me, as long as you live, and I know that I will see
Mel and my boys again." Buzz finished his speech.

Buzz succinctly defined the moral parameters and the overarching goal of his journey–his long walk, as he called it, to his personal house of gold.

The stocky nun opened her mouth and closed it. There was no use arguing. In her heart, she didn't want him to stay, and she knew him. She knew he had to go after his family.

They shared a silence.

"Then we leave tonight," the Man said. "According to plan."

+  +  +

The plan the Man had referred to had been hatched before the millennium. The day Sam and Mel drove back to New Hampshire, the Man had decided that he would help Buzz return to Bagpipe if and when his friend came out of the coma.

He had moved his extra food from his home to the convent–mostly canned goods bought from the local grocery
stores, and survived by strictly rationing it for the past two and a half months. He had also purchased two large, nylon backpacks and simple hiking supplies: hunting knives, wire traps, camp cookware, a small Bible, lightweight sleeping bags, a small tent, a bag of one hundred Miraculous Medals, two large bottles of vitamins, four extra-heavy wool scapulars, a retractable fishing pole and
reel, an ancient rugged Forest Service compass, a wind-up Baygen flashlight, twelve gold coins which Sam had given him, and one thousand rounds of ammunition for his .22 Ruger rifle–his "rabbit gun." The rounds came in two bricks, and weighed but a few pounds.

Buzz did not own a gun, and even if he had, it would have been in Bagpipe. Both men already owned high-quality hiking boots–Caterpillar
brand. For clothing, they had two extra pairs of wool socks, Land's End thermal underwear (which Buzz had been wearing the day of his fall), Thinsulate gloves, black Polartec fleece hats (which Buzz insisted on calling
goupaleens
), one T-shirt (Buzz's had
Tabasco
screened on his, and Hal had his decade-old Scaps shirt from the championship year), and one heavy cotton long-sleeve shirt they planned
to wear under two layers: a sweatshirt covered by a wool sweater.

The Man had been given the foresight to buy two expensive, but thin, lightweight winter "climbing" jackets rated for subzero temperatures. Buzz's fit loosely because of his weight loss, making it easier for him to wear his layers beneath.

A week after the blackout, Tim Penny had walked two miles to the convent with his oldest son
to pray at the chapel and to visit Buzz. He had given the Man Buzz's careworn brass Zippo, and two tin bottles of lighter fluid for the journey.

"Marie told me to tell you she knows he'll wake up, and that we've got the children praying," Tim promised.

He knelt next to the bed and spoke to Buzz in an emotional whisper, "You wake up now..." his voice cracked.

"You hear me? You wake up! And no 'I
told you so.' You and Sam were right, and there have been times I wish we were up in Bagpipe. Our neighborhood is getting crazy. My job is gone. But we've got a few weeks of rations left. We're heading out in the morning with all our gear, on foot, with Jimmy Lawrence and Brian Thredda, for Findley State Park, where we used to go camping. You remember that first time you went with us? When we kept
that fire going all night long? If you can hear me, Buzz, you keep that fire going. Do you hear me? You keep that fire going."

Tim had prayed in silence for several more minutes before rising to leave.

The Man had not heard from the Pennys since the visit. There was now nothing left for him in Cleveland.

At two in the morning, Buzz limped out to the front steps of the monastery, all loaded down,
waiting for Sister Regina. The Man stood silently by as Buzz shook the hand of the stout little nun. Her hand was warm, his cold, like the air around them.

"I love you, my little one," he whispered hoarsely.

His head was aching. His ankle was sore, but able to hold his weight. He was thankful that it hadn't been broken in the fall.

"I love you, too," she replied, leaping up to hug him impulsively,
carefully avoiding throwing her arms around his neck; the stitches had been out for weeks now, but the area was still tender. She got his shoulders instead. He was still strong–like a big piece of furniture.

They pulled away quickly.

She turned to the Man, who was holding his Ruger on his hip, barrel facing toward the sky. His brown eyes, narrowed to slits with a slightly yellow outline, were
unreadable, impenetrable.

She had seen that expression many, many times before, in her previous life–when she had watched him on the court, when he was playing for the win. His game face.

You take care of my Buzz,
she ordered him with her eyes.

He nodded back, then looked up to the concrete cross on the top of the gable over the steps.

Sometimes there was nothing more to say.

She watched them
walk into the darkness.

+  +  +

Both men knew the area well. It only took them an hour to walk north through Lakewood to the lake. They stayed on the back roads. The partial moon supplied enough light to guide them. Finally, they climbed down to the boathouse of the Westside Sailing Club, nestled below the cliffs on the rippling shore of Lake Erie, out of sight.

It was a tall, almost gothic, three-story
wooden structure with wrought-iron outdoor staircases and balconies overlooking the water. The front door had been busted in, but there were no squatters–weather on the lakefront during Cleveland winters could be brutal. There were plenty of signs of looting in the abandoned building–furniture was overturned, the kitchen shelves had been emptied. Outside several of the pleasure boats had
been sunk at their docks–why, it was anybody's guess. Perhaps by a storm.

The frozen lake had only melted a week earlier–though there were still jagged, flat floating rafts of ice glimmering in the moonlight. The water was calm.

The Man led Buzz down to the basement, and past all sorts of junk and flotsam to a back room. They took off their coats, and together, knocked over a large bookcase filled
with old paint cans. There was a door on the wall revealed, a padlock secure.

"Good," the Man grunted. "Now if I can just remember the combination."

"You're kidding, right?" Buzz asked.

The Man didn't answer. After three or four tries, the lock clicked open, and Buzz shined the flashlight over the Man's shoulder and saw the jerry cans–fuel for the Man's boat.

Half an hour later, they were zipping
away in the Man's Waverunner–a little boat with the same kind of engine used for jet skis. They headed directly north for a long interlude before the Man turned right, and east.

"Hal, can I ask you a question?"

"Keep it down," the Man whispered dryly. "Our voices will carry over the water. You'd be surprised."

Buzz wasn't sure if he was kidding or not–they were at least a mile from the shoreline,
and there wasn't another boat or ship in sight.

"Okay," Buzz whispered. "How did you know we would be making this trip? I mean–storing the gasoline for the Waverunner, the supplies, the backpacks."

"The Lord told me."

"How did He tell you?"

"I was in front of the Blessed Sacrament at Holy Angels, three months ago, and I was told in my heart to store the fuel and buy the supplies."