The Last Tribe (5 page)

The rapture began in the U.S. on
the east coast, ravaging the large cities up and down the sea board before leapfrogging
the center of the country to devastate the west coast.  Dayton, Ohio did not
have a confirmed rapture death until over a month after Raleigh went dark. 

Hank Dixon survived the rapture. 
His wife and children did not.  He married late in life, and his children were
adopted from his wife’s previous marriage.  None of them carried the cure, or
resistance, or what saved Hank and his brothers.  Losing his wife was
devastating.  The death of his four children was soul crushing.  Physically
Hank was alive.  Emotionally he was dead.

Hank’s neighborhood was
relentlessly combed and monitored for rapture resistant survivors.  Many of his
neighbors were picked up.  Visibly sick or not, they were bused to who knows
where for who knows what.  Hank’s family died early.  They were five of the
first confirmed cases.  As soon as he had a plan with his brothers, Hank burned
his house to give it the appearance that it was destroyed during looting. 

He set the southern side of his
house on fire, charred the east and west, and scorched the north side.  He
control burned the inside, taking out the top floor, and marring the walls,
floors, and staircase.  He kept the basement free from harm, the first floor
structurally sound, and the roof weather proof. 

Hank moved into his basement,
hiding under his apparently destroyed house.  He collected water from a hose he
ran from his downspout into two rain barrels, and scavenged enough food for the
two months he planned to live underground. 

He knew everyone would die.  He
just needed to wait them out, or not.

Hank held a revolver in his hand the
first month.  He had it to his head or in his mouth most evenings.  He
alternated between the revolver and a shotgun as he debated joining his family
in heaven or his brothers in New Hampshire. 

He stopped eating.  The pounds he
accumulated through decades of bad food melted off his body.

Hank was not a drinker.  He did not
seek solace in a bottle or through drugs.  He was not a man of faith, and could
not pray his pain away.  He lived with his anguish.  He stared at the grave
markers twenty feet from the basement dormer window, and he held a gun to his
head while he tried to think of reasons not to kill himself.

Hank could think of only one. 

Hank believed his lost teenage
nephew, Greg Dixon, was alive and in peril.  Without knowing and through no
action of his own, Greg Dixon saved his uncle’s life. 

Hank emerged from his basement when
his crank radio remained silent for weeks.  He was pale, filthy, smelled like a
dirty sock, and wanted desperately to talk to someone.  Despite the time of
year and the insanity of his plan, Hank prepared for his rescue trip to New
Hampshire.

Hank exited the basement with his first
stroke of luck since the rapture began. 

“Hank?”  A voice called out to the disgusting
man.  “Holy crap are you thin.  You must be down 100 pounds.”

Paul stood over a bike having
pedaled the 80 miles from Cincinnati.  He was soaked with sweat, and panted as
he spoke.

The men walked towards each other
and embraced in a strong hug, weeping with joy.

“Okay,” Paul said through tears as
he stepped away from Hank.  “I’m prepared to stay here, but only if we find you
a shower.  You really, really smell.”

“We’re not staying here.”  Hank
told his brother.  “I have to get to New Hampshire to help Greg.”

Paul replied with a laugh.  “Are
you crazy?  It’s the middle of December.  We won’t make it through
Pennsylvania.  No, we find a house here.  We stay safe here, and move in the
spring.  We’re no good to anyone dead.  For all we know, John and his boys are
already in Hanover with Greg.”

Hank spoke in a firm and even tone,
leaving no room for argument.  “You can do what you want.  I’m taking a shower,
and I’m going to find Greg.”

Todd spoke to his brother John by
phone one last time in September.  They connected an hour after the brothers’ agreement
to meet in Hanover.  Todd no longer travelled away from his home to use a dead stranger’s
cell phone.  He called from his living room.  Todd assumed and hoped the
government and military were too busy to care about a single survivor in
Raleigh.

“What’s your plan?”  Todd asked his
brother bluntly.  “You have to find Greg, right?  Do you want to leave Matt and
Craig, or maybe just Craig with me? “

“If I leave one or two of my sons
with you, I’m in the same situation I’m in now.  Greg is heading to Hanover as
soon as he can.  I can’t risk all of our lives to get up there.  If I leave
now, we’d get caught and experimented on.  If I wait the 2-3 months I assume it
will take for everyone to die, it will be winter and I risk dying on the trip. 
I have to wait.”  John was resolute in his decision, even though it meant
leaving Greg on his own for a harsh New England winter.

“Then what is your plan for coming
here from Charleston?  Do you want to make the trip to Hanover together?  I
have young kids.  I could use your help and the help of your boys.”  Todd could
make it on his own, he and Emily were strong.  He had two good kids, but the
trip north would be easier with three additional people.

“I’ll be there in April, maybe March
if it’s warm, but let’s count on April.  Things have started to calm down
around here.  I’m going to keep the boys in the house and lay low for the next
few months.”  John’s voice was tense, worried, scared.

Todd tried to assure him.  “I don’t
hear planes unless they are very high in the sky.  I’ll hold on until April.  I
won’t think about leaving until May.  We’ll go up together.  I’m only 30
minutes out of your way.”  Todd added a laugh to the last comment.  He heard
John chuckle in response, but it was hollow.  There was no humor in the
situation for John and his boys.

“If the phones go dead before we
can talk again, I’ll see you in April.  Leave a note at your house if you leave
earlier.”  John cleared his throat.  “Love you, brother.”

“Love you too, John.“

Todd hung up the phone and turned
to Emily.  “We have six or seven months.“

“Let’s wait another two weeks and start
exploring.  I know we’ve talked about staying in the attic and living bunker
style, but I don’t think that will be necessary.  Do you?  It will start to get
cold at night.  We’ll need the fireplace in the living room for warmth.”  Emily
was bored.  She kept the kids home since the outbreak started in July.  There
had not been another sound in Raleigh since the beginning of August.

Her children were tired of their
yard and watching DVD’s.  The neighbor’s pool was too cold to use, dropping to
the low 70’s as the nights grew longer.  Emily and her kids needed to get out.

“I think it will be over everywhere
soon, it just happened here first, so it ended here first.”  Todd patted her
knee.  They embraced, holding each other for several minutes. 

“Let’s get some sleep, and we’ll
see what tomorrow brings.”  He whispered into her ear.  They went up to their
bedroom hand in hand, checked on their children, and went to sleep.

Brazil was the first country to
have the disease, experiencing a mini-outbreak with 100 people dying within one
week of each other.  It was thought to be the flu, a deadly strain of the flu,
but nothing beyond extra hand washing and “don’t touch your eyes and nose”
advice was issued by governments.

When similar cases occurred in
three Asian countries, Nigeria, and Ireland, the alarm bells went off
globally.  The first person died in Raleigh two weeks after the first person
died in Sao Paulo.  The rapture was worldwide, and more importantly, it was
stateside.    

For the next two weeks, while the
world panicked and struggled to contain a rapidly spreading pandemic, Raleigh,
North Carolina was the only U.S. city with confirmed cases.

Scientists retrofitted ideas to
explain the symptoms and outcomes, trying to calm the public.   The Raleigh
outbreak occurred one week after the State Fair.  All of the confirmed cases
attended or could be connected to a person who attended the fair.  Some ‘concluded’
the rapture was an animal transmitted flu, similar to swine or mad cow. 
Another theory believed it was a mutated canine or feline illness, possibly an
airborne version of rabies, explaining why domestic dogs and cats perished
during the epidemic. 

Others believed companies operating
out the Raleigh’s Research Triangle Park made trips to Brazil, were exposed to
“the rapture” as it was being called, and brought it back to Raleigh.  This
theory in particular allowed the U.S. government to believe the disease could
be contained. 

Few people knew the truth.  The
Research Triangle companies brought the rapture back from Brazil 12-18 months
prior to the actual outbreak.  Containment was not possible, every person in
the U.S. had already been exposed, and the incubation period was over. 

Panic did not begin with the first
confirmed case in Raleigh, but after one week and more 1, 500 dead North Carolinians,
panic was too mild a word.  Throughout the country, daycares, schools, restaurants,
and stores closed.  Public events were cancelled.  Downtown streets, typically
filled with people, were empty.  It was not the 1,500 people dead in Raleigh,
it was the 100,000 dead around the world and the millions suffering from
symptoms, that caused hysteria. 

The entire population of Raleigh was
mandated to leave.  Similar to a hurricane evacuation, people were ordered to
go somewhere else, anywhere safe.  All of the roads heading out of town were
jammed with cars for three days.  If a person’s temperature was 1 degree above
98.6, Center for Disease Control officials, as well as U.S. military officials
stationed on every road, directed the car to a containment area.

Todd stayed in Raleigh because he
was afraid of the containment areas.  He grew up watching pandemic and outbreak
movies in which the government was typically a villain.  Todd feared Jay would
be taken from them, sequestered, hidden, and lost.  If his son was going to
die, he would die with his parents and brother, not in some cold quarantine
room.   

No healthy citizens remained within
100 miles of Raleigh.  The residents fled without shopping or looting the
stores, packing only clothes in expectation they would soon return home.  Food
and bottled water sat in pantries and kitchens across the area.  Supermarket,
big box stores, and warehouse clubs were abandoned, still fully stocked. 

Todd and Emily made smart choices
during the weeks of panic.  They stayed home, stopped using lights, and powered
down their cell phones.  They stocked food, used rain barrels to collect water,
and prepared for at least two months of solitude.  Jay’s benign summer flu,
which made them stay in Raleigh when everyone else fled, was a stroke of luck.

When the rapture struck outside of
Raleigh, the government did not have the means to handle an epidemic in every
state, city, and town.  Just a few months into the pandemic, world governments
and militaries collapsed.

While the globe exploded into
hysteria, violence, and looting, the Dixons lived comfortably in their house,
safely hidden in the empty city of Raleigh, North Carolina. 

Greg walked for what felt like
hours after he left Ms. Berry’s house.  He quickly made it to US 495 and then
to US 93 North.  He was cold and scared in the half-moon light.  Despite what
he thought was a quick pace, he was moving slowly and looking around too
often.  The adrenaline rush of starting his journey wore off, and he was
exhausted by midnight. 

He was on an overpass when he came
upon a large sports utility vehicle abandoned on the side of the road.  A white
towel dangled from the driver’s side window.  Moonlight showed the car was
empty.  Greg tried all the doors, and as luck would have it, one was unlocked. 
Exhausted from just two hours of travelling, he decided to take a quick nap
inside.  He folded the back seats down, crawled inside, unfurled his sleeping
bag, and fell asleep instantly.

Greg woke to sunlight streaming
through the windows of the SUV.  It took him a few moments to get his bearings,
and he soon realized he was trapped and exposed on the highway, half a mile
from the nearest woods.  Unless he broke his own protocol and walked in the
daylight, he was stuck.    

He felt a tinge of panic, like a
dog when the owner shuts the door and leaves the pet in the car.  He looked at
his watch, 7:30am.  He had two choices, stay in the car for the next 10 hours
using all of his water, or take a risk and walk in the daylight for the next 10
hours.  Maybe it was that part of him that was 14 and considered himself
immortal, or maybe it was the part of him that had grown up in the last two
months and realized he was the only person alive within 700 miles, but Greg left
the car.

“Play time is over.  I have to get
up to Hanover, and daytime is the best time to travel.”  He spoke aloud, like
he did back in the dorms.  “I can do this.  I can see people coming in the day. 
I can see animals in the day.  I can avoid rocks and things that will twist my
ankles in the day.  Let’s go, Greg, time to move.” 

Greg pulled out his map, saw an
exit about 20-25 miles up the highway, and started walking.  He stopped and ate
a can of cold soup at noon.  At 4:30 he stumbled off the highway and onto a
rural road along 93N.  He covered just ten miles of his route. 

He found a combination general
store and gas station, pulled out his sleeping bag, and slept on the floor. 
The next morning he filled his water, grabbed what little food was available,
and hoped to make it at least fifteen miles by sunset.

The highways of Northern
Massachusetts and New Hampshire are cut through mountains and valleys.  The
roads move up and down, winding around rivers and streams.  What a crow flies
in ten miles can take a New England highway twenty miles to connect the same
two points.  When Greg planned his trip, he did not realize how hard it was to
walk long distances in New England.  He assumed he could log 35-45 miles a day
and would be in Hanover by the end of his third day.  The late fall season
meant exposure to wind and cold, and Greg was not prepared for the up and down
aspect of the journey.  After two days of hard walking, he reset his daily goal
to 15 miles, but he never reached the goal.  He spent each morning mapping how
far he needed or wanted to go.  If he saw a house that was close to the mark,
he would stop for the night. At the end of his third day he was just 28 miles
away from Ms. Berry’s house, and still over 70 miles from Hanover.

Greg found the trip to be slow and
hard going, and his number one challenge was staying hydrated.  He kept two
water bottles in the slots on his backpack.  When he finished the first bottle,
he stopped at the next exit to find a way to refill.  Sometimes he could get
water right away at a gas station or general store, but exits were further
apart as he went north, and stores were not immediately off the exit ramps. 
Keeping hydrated added time and effort and extra miles to his trek, but if he
stopped drinking water he felt weak and his head ached.  Greg might walk twenty
miles during the day, but only eight of those miles were towards his
destination. 

Greg also needed food, and was
faced with the decision of carrying weight or relying on scavenging.  He opted
for scavenging. 

The rapture was a devastating
disease, but it was custom built for survivors.  The earliest symptom was loss
of appetite.  Supermarkets were looted and emptied, but all the looting did was
transfer the food to houses where it sat uneaten.  Greg had early success
scavenging, but as he entered more rural areas, food was scarce to non-existent. 

Despite the viscous, cold,
unappealing soup he found in cans at the homes where he squatted, Greg was so
ravenous he did not care what he ate.  One night he considered eating cat food
when it was the first and only thing he found in that evening’s home.  He
stayed in the ‘cat house’ and slept on a couch, but ventured next door and
found stale granola cereal.  The next morning he held the small can of cat
food, weighing it in his palm.  It was light, and would provide a quick meal
when he needed it.  Greg put the can on the table.  “I’m not there yet.”  He
told himself. 

The weather turned on Greg’s third
day.  Gray clouds rolled in and the temperature dropped to the mid 40’s as he
walked.  Rain fell on him in a steady mist.  If the rain down poured, he would
stop, but it teased him by keeping him soaked to the bone while never coming
down hard enough to halt his progress.  It was colder at night. Greg cut his
walking time short each afternoon to find an empty home with a working
fireplace.  His sleeping bag was soaked and heavy.  He abandoned it after the
first day of rain.  Greg relied on sheets and blankets he found in homes along
the highway.

Seven days after leaving the broken
SUV on the overpass, Greg walked through the toll booths at the end of US 93.  He
was sixty miles into his journey.  He rummaged through the State liquor store
at the N.H. state line for water and food. Greg was half way to Hanover.   A
trip he anticipated taking three, maybe four days, was going to stretch for at
least two weeks.  Greg was down five pounds in the last week, and over twenty
pounds from when his mother dropped him off at Hightower.  He was dirty, cold, slowly
losing his sanity, and more importantly losing his will to continue. 

The pocket of his backpack held two
cans of cat food.  Unlike the first time he found the light weight meal, Greg
did not leave the cans behind when he discovered them at a house the previous
night.  He had one power bar left before he was out of human food, one step
away from eating Super Cat Feast.

It was close to 5pm.  He had an
hour of light left.  Dark clouds remained as rain continued in a steady drizzle. 
There would be no moon to help him after sunset. 

Greg left the liquor store with two
bottles of water and ate a snack size bag of nuts he found near a register.  He
quickened his pace towards the junction of US 89/93.  He considered staying at
the liquor store, but it had no fireplace, no food other than the measly bag of
nuts, and no blankets.  Greg was wet and needed a fire to dry his clothes. 

He approached the intersection of
the two highways at 5:30pm.  He noticed a town off to his right, and went to
find a place to spend the night.  He walked down the South Street exit of 93
North, passing the highway motels, and continuing towards town. 

There were several homes close to
the exit, but Greg learned to venture further into towns to find nicer homes
away from the highway.  He was losing daylight, and his legs were tired, but
the reward of a higher end residence was worth the extra few minutes of
walking.  A nicer home meant a better chance of food.  Low income families did
not keep large pantries.  Their homes were bare after the food shortages caused
by the rapture.  Rural communities, like the ones he found on his trip from
Hightower, were also devastated from the food delivery issues.  Tonight he was in
an upper middle class suburb of Concord, N.H, and had high hopes of locating
food other than the feline variety in his pack.

Greg strode into the first
subdivision and stopped dead in his tracks.  He smelled smoke.  He smelled
smoke and food.  He definitely smelled food.  It had been months since he smelled
food being cooked.  It was a welcome aroma.  He lost himself in the moment as
he breathed it in, standing in the same spot for several minutes, dreaming of a
warm dinner.  He snapped out of his daze with the realization there was someone
else alive, a survivor, another person. 

It was past dusk, and the sun was
almost gone.  Greg determined the direction of the smell, and noticed light
coming from a window in one of the houses just off of the street.  Before he
realized what he was doing, Greg ran towards the smell.  He was cold, wet, and
hungry, and did not want to stay outside much longer.  He needed to get out of
the elements and into shelter.

His heart raced in anticipation of
finding a fellow survivor.  His mouth drooled as the smell of food grew
stronger.

“What should I do?” he whispered to
himself.  He went over his choices.  He could avoid the survivor, like his
father advised, and keep going to Hanover, or he go to the house and meet the person. 
The risks and rewards of another survivor were equally great.  Two people could
survive the winter more easily than he could alone, but meeting an evil person
could be fatal.

Greg wanted to catch a glimpse of
the person before deciding.  He made his way to an adjacent house, found the
front door unlocked, and went to the second floor for the best vantage point. 
The light coming from the other house was from a fire.  Greg was hungry before
but famished after smelling the cooking food.  He pulled his last power bar
from his backpack, and ate his now unappealing dinner.  He was still hungry, but
out of food.  Greg held a can of cat food in his palm.  “I’m still not there
yet, but I’m a lot closer than ever I thought I’d be.”  He zipped the can back
in his pack.

Drawn curtains blocked the windows of
the other house, but Greg made out a silhouette of at least one person.  
Unfortunately, because it was a distorted shadow, he could not tell the gender,
age, or size of the person.

He went downstairs to the kitchen to
scavenge for food.  There was furniture in the house, but the cupboards were
bare.  He pulled a drawer open and felt for utensils.  It was empty.  “Just my
luck.”  He muttered.  Greg was in a house that was for sale before the
rapture. 

It was cat food or no food for now.

Greg went back upstairs and sat in
the window for an hour watching the shadow move around the room.  If it was an
older person or a woman, someone he could escape, Greg would knock on the
door.  If the survivor was a man, Greg would leave and return with his father
and brothers next spring. 

The house with the fire looked new,
built to mimic old New England.  It was brick on the sides with a large wooden front
porch.  The roof and shutters were black.  The fire was burning in what Greg
assumed was the living room.  There was little space between homes, standard
for modern subdivisions.  Greg could easily sit in his cold house and look down
upon the warm fire and food house. 

He was in an upstairs study on the
corner of the second floor.  A wall faced the fire house, and another faced the
street.  Occasionally Greg walked to the front window to look out.  He wondered
if any other survivors were coming home.  He could only make out one shadow in
the fire house.  Greg decided, because it was dark and cold, no logical person
would be out on a night with no moon to guide them back home. 

Greg noticed a dozen trash cans
lined up on the street in front of the fire house.  Large bins that trash
trucks grabbed with their mechanical claw.  While Greg was staring at the trash
cans, wondering why they were there, light appeared on the front lawn.  The
warm fire and food house’s front door was open.  Greg ducked down in the
window, peering over the sill.  A figure walked from the porch to one of the
trash cans with a small plastic bag.  The figure opened the can, threw out the
bag, and skipped back into the house.

Skipped?  It was a girl, a young
girl.  Greg was not a good judge of girl ages, but since she was alive and
working with fire, he bet she was at least 12 or 13. 

Greg knew instantly he was going to
approach the survivor.  His next decision was how and when to approach her. 
Did he want to wait a day, come up in the daylight so she was not scared?  Did
he want to go over tonight so he could be warm next to the fire and eat the
food he smelled cooking?  He was so excited to find another person, and to find
another person close to his age, he decided not to wait.

He grabbed his pack, walked down
the stairs, walked out the door, and slowly approached the front of the other house.
 He did not want to scare the girl, and being direct was his best approach. 
She was probably just as alone and desperate for company as he was. 

“Should I knock?” he asked
himself.  “Should I just open the door and say “hello?”  The front door was
wood framed with a large glass upper half.  There was a storm door with a sign
reading
Model House – Rutledge
. 

“This isn’t even the girl’s house,
she’s squatting.” Greg noticed.  He wondered where she lived before moving into
this house.

 “Here we go.”  Greg muttered to
himself.  He raised his hand and knocked politely but firmly.

The girl was on a couch reading a
book next to the fire.  Her head popped over the back of the couch and looked at
the door.  Greg wore a big grin, waving slowly.  He spoke in a loud voice,
making sure she could hear him through the glass doors “My name is Greg.  Can I
come in?  I’m 14 and alone.  I just want to say hello and warm up by your
fire.”

The girl jumped up and ran to the
door with a huge smile on her face.  “Oh my god!  A cute boy’s here to rescue
me!”  She screamed through the other side of the door.