Dahmer Flu (23 page)

She snapped her head towards me, “Thank God,” I heard her mutter as she pulled herself out of the bed, first making sure Madi was still tucked in. She came over to join me on the floor where I sat. “I… had a dream… it wasn’t good.”

“Isn’t that what Martin Luther King said?” I joked, drawing a slight smile from her. “I did, too.” I confessed.

“It’s not going to stop anytime soon, is it?” She asked.

“I don’t expect it to.”

We sat in silence for a moment, considering the fact. “Looks like it’s getting light out,” she said, motioning towards the sunlight that was starting to peek through the spaces between the boards.

“Yeah. I was thinking about getting an early start; maybe find us something for breakfast. Get the door for me?”

“Sure,” she answered.

I grabbed the crowbar on the way out and Lisa locked the door behind me. The early start was a good idea- it gave me more time to search some of the homes and stores before it got too late. By the time I made it back to the home, I was carrying what I could; boards and nails from the hardware store to reinforce the barricades, enough food and water to last a day or two from some of the homes, a propane lantern from the thrift store and, maybe most valuable, some board games and playing cards. The latter would help get us through another long night.

Later in the evening, after we had eaten, I was glad for the board games. Madi won reliably, based on the unwritten rules that Lisa and I followed, and we settled in for our second night in our new home. As we lay in the bed, we agreed that tomorrow would be the day that we all went out together, at least to make it to the river and bathe. The girls agreed that it would be good to get out, and we ended the night with hope, and a renewed sense of normalcy in our lives. One by one, we fell asleep, first Madi, then Lisa and, finally, me. That night, I didn’t dream at all, and was thankful for it.

I woke up with the sense that something was somehow
wrong
, but I couldn’t immediately name it. Then I realized. Madi was gone.

I bolted upright and shook Lisa. “Lisa! Madi’s gone!” She was immediately awake.

“Gone? What do you mean?”

“Gone, I don’t know!” I was already out of bed with my crowbar in hand, looking on the floor, under the bed, then in the closet and finally the bathroom. Each was empty. Lisa was right behind me as I raced from the room, and we noticed at the same time- there was light escaping from the open door to the boy’s room. We raced down the hallway, quietly as possible in our sock feet but more concerned with speed than stealth. When we reached the doorway, we saw Madi sitting in front of the lantern, seemingly safe. A small figure was seated across from her, deathly still.

“Madi?” I called.

She turned and looked up, smiling warmly. “Hi, Daddy! This is Robert; he lives here, too.”

Robert stared, frozen, with the rest of us around the lantern. I couldn’t tell how old he was, but he appeared to be slightly younger than Madi physically and much more so emotionally. He was slender and wild and his matted, filthy hair had grown ragged and long. He had a noticeable ‘unwashed’ smell, and the undersides of his eyes were dark and deep. His clothes, however, were clean and fresh.

“He was just talking a moment ago,” Madi explained. She moved to sit next to him and offered her his hand; he grabbed it greedily and visibly relaxed slightly.

He spoke haltingly and unsure, as if he hadn’t talked to another person in some time. “Are you going to hurt me?” he asked.

“No,” Lisa and I answered in unison. Lisa slid closer to Robert, who in turn pressed closer to Madi.

“It’s okay, she’s a doctor,” I heard Madi whisper; it appeared to comfort him, if only from her endorsement.

“No one’s going to hurt you,” Lisa cooed as if to an infant, without approaching where he sat. “Madi told you I’m a doctor right? Can I look at you and make sure you’re okay?”

Robert looked at Madi for the answer, and she nodded encouragingly. He trusted her; I wondered what adults had done, that he was so fearful of us, but opened to Madi so readily. Maybe he was right, to trust a child over an adult. He nodded as he croaked a nervous “okay;” but he didn’t let go of Madi’s hand, and neither she nor Lisa tried to force him to. Instead, Lisa conducted a very brief examination; checking his breathing with her unamplified hearing, feeling for broken bones and abdominal pain and checking his ears and teeth. He clearly wasn’t comfortable with the process, but reluctantly allowed it.

“Thank you,” Lisa said to Robert, and then turned to me. “Can we talk?”

“Sure. Madi, can you keep Robert company?”

“Of course!” She smiled. Lisa and I left the room for the hallway, hearing Robert and Madi whispering quietly to each other once we left.

“He’s not too bad, considering,” Lisa began. “I think he’s been feeding himself for a while, so he’s going to have some problems. If we get him on a good diet now, he’ll be fine. But I think he has scurvy, of all things. His gums aren’t looking so great, and he’s got a few nasty bruises on his arms and chest- probably from crawling around in these houses looking for food, ‘though I’m not sure how he’s getting in and out. You’ll need to find him some vitamin C, maybe something canned. Asparagus, pineapple, grapefruit, whatever you can find.”

“How is he… mentally? Is it safe to have him around?”

“I’m not sure yet, we’re going to have to watch him to-” She stopped when Madi screamed. We ran to the room; Madi had stood upright, frantically backing from a rat that closed on her aggressively and pulling Robert with her in her panic-
rabies
, I thought to myself,
some sort of disease
; for all I knew, rodents could transfer the same virus that had caused the Dahmer Flu. The rodent was closing manically, barely able to keep a straight line and I was too far away to catch it in time. I lunged, but Robert was faster. He let go of Madi’s hand, for the first time that I had seen and caught the creature just behind the neck. He lifted it high above his head, and threw it to the ground with a sickening crunch. The creature lay still and broken on the floor, and Robert returned to Madi’s side and again held her hand.

“Oh, God,” Lisa said, as she ran to Madi’s side, catching her in a warm embrace. I was right behind her.

Robert didn’t know what to read in our reaction, as he hadn’t been around living people for some time and assumed he had done something wrong. “I’m sorry,” he said, “It... it was going to hurt her, I didn’t mean to-” His words turned into an anguished, tortured sob. “I’m sorry,” he said again through the tears.

Madi pulled him close into a grateful embrace. “No, no, you did good; thank you!”

“I did good?” he asked me and Lisa, sniffling through his tears.

I rested a hand reassuringly on his shoulder. He let me. “Yeah, Robert. You did good.” He smiled a genuine smile, and Lisa and Madi both planted an affectionate kiss on either cheek. As if with effort, his smile grew even wider. There was no longer a choice- he was with us, for better or worse- but I knew that behind that smile was a dangerous thing; another mouth to feed.

Back in the master bedroom, Robert showed us some of the treasures- mostly small toys- that he had collected, and then we watched as he hungrily consumed the rest of the food and water. He still sat close to Madi, but no longer had to hold her hand as long as she was close to him. He scraped the nearly-empty peanut jar with his finger, taking the last of its taste before leaning back with a satisfied belch. “Excuse me,” he said politely.

“Robert,” I said. “Is this your home?” Lisa shot me a look at the directness of the question, but I couldn’t think of any other way to ask what we were all wondering;
how did he get in? Had he been in the home since the time it was boarded? Why is he alone? Was he in the home with us last night?
My mind raced with the questions, but I didn’t want to overwhelm the child by asking them all at once.

He reached for Madi’s hand, who allowed him to take it. In it, he found his courage. “No. My house burned down.” I knew the home he was talking about. His eyes were sad, but his voice was strong as he continued, “my sister was real sick and Mom and Dad took her to the doctor. Tiffany came over to watch me while they were gone; she was a teenager and she always bringed her video games when she sat me so we always had fun.” He spoke with an unsettling mix of childlike naiveté and unawareness and very adult maturity.

“I don’t remember some of what happened then, but it happened fast. Mom and Dad came running in the house and they slammed the door. They looked scared, which made me scared, too, and Dad was carrying Sis but he was being careful ‘cause she was real mad and she was bleeding in her mouth, too, and she had blood all over her shirt. I tried to talk to her but Dad yelled at me so I stopped.”

He was silent for a minute before Madi broke in. “Then what happened, Robert?”

“Someone started knocking on the door, real heavy like they were mad. Dad told Mom to take Sis upstairs, which she did, but real slow because she was trying to fight her, but Mom wasn’t yelling at her or spankin’ her or nothing’. When Mom was upstairs then Dad opened the door and there were a lot of people there and they all started yelling and I didn’t know why everyone was so mad, even Dad was mad and they were all yelling at each other, but I didn’t know what about. Then I heard Mom yell really loud and she said a swear. I didn’t know what to do, but Tiffany pulled me into the kitchen and she covered my ears, but she didn’t know that I could still see in the mirror, though, and I could still hear that they were yelling.”

“The man that was yelling at my Dad, he tried to come inside, but Dad pushed him and they hit each other but Dad shutted the door. I don’t know why he hit my Dad, but everyone was still real mad.” He was crying now, as he relived the memory.

“Robert,” Lisa said softly, sitting next to him and draping an arm over his shoulder. “You don’t need to talk about this, if you don’t want to.” She looked at me; “Does he, Brad?” It wasn’t a question. She was mad at me for bringing it up, and I didn’t blame her.

“No, of course- it’s okay,” I said.

He wiped his tears with his free sleeve. “I think about it a lot,” He continued idly, as if in explanation. “They started hitting the door real loud, like they were trying to break it, and Dad was pushing it and then someone threw a big rock through the window and it broked and Tiffany screamed. More people started throwing rocks, too, and Mom came downstairs but without my sister. She was bleeding too, but it was on her hand. My Dad yelled at Tiffany to take me out the back door and she pulled on me and told me to come on. I think she was really scared, too, because her hands were real sweaty and she was crying and my Mom was too, but she was just sitting on the stairs. I tried to talk to her, but Tiffany pulled me and Dad yelled again, so I went with her. I didn’t get to talk to her.”

“Tiffany opened the back door, just a little, and she said a swear, too, but she said the ‘F’-word, but no one yelled at her. There were more people on the other side of the fence; I could see them through the cracks and trying to look over. We went outside and we were real low, but they were all around and I didn’t know what we were going to do. Tiffany was getting real scared and then she looked at me and said ‘sorry’. I didn’t know what she meant, but she ran really fast and went on top of the table and climbed up over the fence. I couldn’t see her, but I could hear her running away and I was alone.

“The other people, they started yelling after her and running to catch her. When they were all gone, I opened the gate and I ran as fast as I could because I didn’t know what else to do and didn’t want them to hurt me. I should have gone back in the house, because I could have helped my dad, but I didn’t. When I was hiding I looked back because I wanted to make sure she was okay, but they had caught up to her and someone tackled her like in football. She fell on the ground and someone kicked her and she tried to get up, but they kicked her again and she fell down. Then a lot of them started hitting her and kicking her, and then she didn’t get up no more.”

“I saw the police showed up, and thought things were going to be okay, but then they just left and the people were still there. After that, I saw smoke because my house was on fire, and I knew my Mom and Dad and Sister was dead. I didn’t know where to go and I didn’t know who was going to be nice or mean to me, so I stayed outside and hid from people.”

Lisa asked, “How did you survive? What did you eat?”

He looked embarrassed with his answer. “I found food in trash cans when no one was around, like when it was night-time.”

“It’s okay, you did what you had to do,” Madi comforted as best she could.

“I was very scared at night, and I had bad dreams every time. One time, I don’t remember after how long, I snuck to look at my house and it was all burned down and people were taking stuff from it. That made me sad. Some of the neighbors started leaving and some people even started putting boards on their windows. One day I was sleeping in a dumpster because it was soft and nobody looked in there because no one was picking up the trash any more, and I heard people start screaming and yelling. And so I peeked out real careful and I could see up the road towards where they have the big ice cream store and there were a whole bunch of people walking towards town. Everyone was real scared, and they were yelling at each other and some people just left and drove away without packing or nothin’. Some people went home to pack and I stayed where I was hiding. Some of the cars started coming back which confused people and then they started yelling that there were more coming from the other direction, too, so everybody really panicked then because there was just nowhere to go, except some people were running into the woods and I don’t know where they were going.”

I realized that I had no idea what, out of what he was saying, had actually happened and what was the result of a child’s traumatized imagination that had a year to worsen.

Robert continued. “Then there was this huge crash that scared me a lot and knocked me over. I climbed over the trash and onto the other side and looked out; there was a car that crashed into the dumpster and I could see inside even though the windshield was broken and had blood on it. There was a man and a woman in the car, but their heads were down and they weren’t moving. I just ran, I climbed out and I came here because I didn’t know where else to go. Everybody was running around crazy, but this was my friend Jamal’s house and I knew that I could get in and it would be safer than being outside.”

“How did you get in?” I asked.

“You wanna see?” He asked with a slight twinkle in his eye through the tears.

He led us down the stairs to the bathroom. Climbing up a set of shelves like a mountain goat, he peeled back the wooden plank that covered the narrow window. “One day when me and Jamal were playing, we broke the wood with a toy we had. His Dad was real mean and he was scared, so we didn’t tell him and you couldn’t really tell if you didn’t look real close at it.” He peeled the wood again, wider this time, and I could see that the frame itself was lifting from the wall and the nails were coming up with the frame. “This house was real strong and I knew that no one would be looking in here, so I stayed here.”

“Smart,” I said, genuinely impressed. He beamed. I wondered why the town had been left largely intact, but knew that Robert wouldn’t be able to answer that question.

“How about we get you kids down to the river and get cleaned up? I think we could all use some freshening up,” Lisa offered. She didn’t mention that Robert needed it more than the rest of us; clearly when a young child is left on their own, hygiene isn’t high on his list of priorities.

“Sure!” said Madi.

Robert was very quiet when he said, “I don’t like the river.”

“Why?” I asked with concern.

“There’s dead people down there, and I haven’t gone back there since I saw them.”

I hadn’t seen anything when I had walked through the town, but I could see that Madi and Lisa were frightened by the idea. Fear, especially when there was something to be afraid of, was a cancer that was most often fatal.

“I was there not long ago- it’s fine,” I said. No one argued, but no one moved, either. I sighed. “I’ll go take a look, then if it’s clear we all go together. Deal?” Each of them nodded solemnly.