Behind Our Walls (26 page)

Clive didn't waste time or take any risks as he rushed over to the body and kicked the gun over to Sophie. She grabbed it in order to safe it, ejecting the magazine and checking for the round that would have been chambered.

The chamber was empty.

She looked down at the gun, stunned that it hadn't even been ready to fire. Had he just forgotten in the heat of the moment? She lifted up the magazine to examine it and upon looking, felt the gun slipping from her numb fingers. Clive turned to look at her in inquiry. She met his gaze, feeling her lip starting to quiver.

"The gun wasn't loaded."

His face was blank at first, then stupefied, and angry. "What? Why the hell would he come up on us like that if he didn't even have any bullets in his gun?"

One of the others came up and bent down to pick up a small notebook that had been stuffed under the kid's shirt. He began flipping through it and Sophie could see the neat handwriting inside. She walked over to take it, looking over the entries.

"It looks like a journal."

Clive shrugged. "Okay."

Sophie looked around, spotting a bench in the nearby park. There had to be something more to this.

"Look, I need a few minutes. Why don't you guys start looking through the houses and I'll stay here."

"Sophie, the kid didn't give us a choice."

"I know. I just want to read through this."

He looked like he wanted to argue, but knew her well enough to leave it alone. "You two stick around in case there's someone else wandering around." Sophie wanted to object at the gesture, but appreciated the protection. She looked at the body on the ground and back at the notebook, trying to imagine what could have led someone so young to do something as awful and stupid as this.

She opened the journal to the first page and began to read.

Monday, September 10

I found this notebook along the side of the road yesterday. You wouldn't think anything of it and I'm sure I've seen plenty of notebooks lying around but for some reason this one grabbed me. It's probably good that I found it first because Stella would have used it for lighting fires or stuffing into clothes to keep warm or, you know, wiping. But I put my foot down. I think that it's important to put at least some words down on paper - so that people later on can look back and understand better. It would be nice to know that if life ever becomes "normal" again, people could know about what life was like for people like us.

So I'm going to start keeping a journal. I don't know why it came to me now - Stella and I have been on our own for years. The idea just came to me and I couldn't ignore it. So what follows are my thoughts and words. Words written for God only knows who or even where or when.

If you are reading this right now, then you probably know more about what happened than I do. For all I know, you're like 500 years into the future or something. It would be like if I found a diary kept by some Roman centurion or something. Do you even know who the Romans were? So I'll go through it all best I can. I don't know how much of this is true so don't take it as gospel or anything. If you already know all of this, just skip ahead.

Mom and Dad always were on my case for not keeping up with current events but as many times as I have thought back, things started going to shit right around the time that they took the President down into the bunker. Do you even have a President anymore? I wonder. Anyway, the bunker is where they take him during national emergencies and terrorist attacks and stuff. It's supposed to be buried like a mile underneath the White House and would stand up to pretty much anything blowing up above it. They pick out really important people and can stay down there forever if they need to.

The story that was put out to the press was that some imminent threat had forced them to get the President to safety but wouldn't explain what the threat was. Everyone was pretty scared. People were saying it was the first time anything like that had ever happened. We sat around the TV and the radio and computer trying to figure out what was going on.

Nothing Happened.

No bomb, no hijacking, no gunfire. Nothing ever happened but the "threat" never seemed to go away. Some military guys would come on and talk about how it wasn't quite the right time to bring him back up but the country should rest assured ... such bullshit. A few guys in congress started making noise calling the President a coward but that was shut down pretty quick. The cable news shows got really weird. It was like they were reading off a script because they were all reporting the same stories and were going out of their way to not criticize the President or especially the military.

Then all the television stations went to just a test signal. Nothing was being aired - not just news. No sports, no sitcoms, no infomercials, nothing. I've heard that some of the smaller market indie stations were up and running for longer but before long their signal went dark too. There was a ton of gossip and a lot of bullshit getting passed around.

Whatever was going on, two weeks had gone by and no word from the President. No explanation from anyone. Even the newspapers weren't being distributed anymore. Neighborhood watch groups formed for people to share any info they had picked up. The internet was still up even though the mainstream news outlets were shut down. Cell towers still seemed to be working so people still felt somewhat connected and assured.

Then the first bomb went off.

It was in Berlin so some people could pretend that since it was so far away it didn't matter. It scared the shit out of rest of us. The news spread around pretty fast. A guy who was passing through with his daughters showed me the footage of the mushroom cloud on his smartphone. Millions dead or dying. And of course silence from the White House.

Within the next week, six more nukes went off. First Moscow, Buenos Aires, then I think Johannesburg, then London and Tokyo. And all the people who were convinced about how all the problems were only happening "over there" got a big dose in reality when the sixth bomb went off in Montreal.

Stella just told me that she thinks she heard some rovers wandering around nearby. I need to douse this light. I'll write again when I can.

Saturday, September 15

Last year for my birthday my dad gave me one of those hand cranked flashlights that don't need batteries. That's been pretty sweet to have but the really nice thing is that we can use it to charge our mp3 players. I'm not going to pretend that being able to listen to music is the answer to all this shit we live through but it does make things easier. Stella says that we have to be really careful about how we use it though. We have to make sure it stays out of sight because it's exactly the kind of thing that the wrong people would kill us for.

Stella has been riding me nonstop about keeping this journal. She thinks that it's pointless to be so hung up on the past.

She might have a point.

I really do miss the way things used to be. I miss my house and my bed. I miss my parents and having a hot dinner at a table and always having clean clothes to wear. I miss taking showers so long that the water goes from scalding to freezing cold and back to hot before you're done. I miss flicking the lights on and off.

Anyway, I was writing about the nukes going off. In the month after the Montreal bomb, at least twenty more had gone off around the world. No one ever stepped forward to claim responsibility. The internet was getting even spottier so it was harder to get information there. Servers would pop up here and there and sometimes a random wireless signal would be available but they wouldn't stay active for very long.

One website in particular managed to stay up and running for a pretty long time. It was originally a site on making Italian style coffee but if you clicked on the "n" in Italian and pressed tab-alt-f10 in that order, you got redirected to an underground news site. I say "news" loosely since it was mainly conspiracy nuts going off about how the whole situation had been hatched by uber-rich living it up in secret bases all over the world while the rest of us just killed each other off. People were all worked up over the fact that most of the other major powers around the world had also seen their leaders vanish without explanation.

I don't know if I buy into that crap. I mean, how could a conspiracy that massive have been kept secret from everyone? With all the technology and social networking sites, I can't see how they could have pulled it off. And even if it is true, what the hell are these people doing down in their little bunkers? Playing table tennis? Watching movies?

I remember getting into an argument with a teacher after class one day. I argued that if everything was leveled and made fair that people generally could be counted on for their inherent goodness to come out. My teacher called me naïve. I guess he ended up being on the right side of that argument. Because there's hasn't been much of anything I would call examples of people's inherent goodness.

For a while, things held together all right. Groups formed in neighborhoods and people tried to band together for support. We actually had some fun nights hanging out with the block, eating cold soup out of cans and trying to stay positive. Groups would form to go out and look for food, or to go around the neighborhood seeing if anyone needed medical help or needed something fixed. At night we would sit around and listen to CB broadcasts. It was easy to pretend that it was all temporary, like a blackout or a draught or something. Things would go back to normal.

And it's not like the whole planet turned into a grind-house movie overnight. There are steps. Things escalate. But inevitably, people start hatching reasons to take advantage of people who are weaker than them. Your next door neighbor might just break down your back door because he remembered seeing a lot of batteries in your kitchen cabinet that night you had them over for dinner. Or maybe he'll decide that the family dog would make for a better meal then the canned beans and uncooked pasta he's been eating for the past month.

Things got really bad when rovers started to show up in the neighborhood, although no one was calling them by that name yet. Most of them were people who were trying to get away from the clouds of radiation that hung around after the bombs went off in L.A. and Miami. The major cities had become war zones with local grown militias squaring off against regular army to see who could get control. People flocked away from that but it was impossible to tell the genuine refugees from the people just taking whatever they could get their hands on. We wanted to help but when there is only so much food for us, we couldn't really spare anything.

Stella was the next door neighbor. She had moved in my sophomore year in high school. I've never told her this but I used to love watching her mow the lawn in her jean shorts and bikini. My dad had asked me to go next door and check up on her one day because we had seen some rovers wandering around the houses across the street. He wanted to make sure she was all right.

She had given me a glass of water when I saw the rovers kicking in our front door. They dragged my dad out into the front yard and started talking to him, jabbing a baseball bat in the air at him to make their point. I couldn't hear what my dad was saying but I'm pretty sure it was his standard "Sorry we can't help you" with maybe a little bit of extra pleading thrown in. The last thing I remember seeing before Stella pulled me down out of my chair was the bat coming down towards my dad's head.

I had to put the notebook away for a little while. It's been years since it happened but it never gets any easier to think about. After the rovers had their way with our house - I don't know what they did to Mom, I could just hear her screaming. I wanted to help but Stella wouldn't let me go. She said that more would be coming and that my parents would want me to be safe.

Within ten minutes, a medium sized group rovers came down our street. They were going from house to house, looting and killing as they went. Stella made me go down into her basement. I guess her house was so old it had been a part of the Underground Railroad - there was an old work bench that pulled aside to reveal a staircase down to a hidden room under the floor. We hid down there for the rest of the day and all of the next day just to be safe. I had always been nervous around Stella but having to go to the bathroom right there in front of someone pretty much melts the ice.

When we came back up top, the neighborhood was quieter than I have ever heard. We checked all the houses but there wasn't anyone left. People either ran off when they realized what was happening or were just killed in their houses. Some people, I think just let it happen. They didn't want to have to try and forage it out on their own.