Dead Reckoning (34 page)

After the snow had melted, I sent the boys out fishing again since they seemed good at it. Fish would be helpful, but we couldn't live on protein alone. We needed energy—carbohydrates. I realized why they were all so skinny—not because of a lack of food but because they'd been living almost exclusively on fish. In essence, they had been doing the low carbohydrate diet. It obviously worked as a weight-loss diet, but it was just slow starvation.

I started my search at the far end of the beach. I kept my pistol at the ready at all times. The boys told me that, except for us and an imaginary friend they called little bear, the beach was deserted. But I suspected different and took no chances. The first house I checked was an old cabin. Since the family did not inhabit it year-round, it did not have a lot of the amenities normally found in the houses at Shadow Beach. It had been ransacked, nevertheless. I found a can of green beans on a high shelf, but no other food. I left the house and placed the green beans in the wheel barrow I had so optimistically brought with me, and pushed it to the next house.

I found nothing in the second or third houses except a lot of damage and a general lack of valuable items. In fact, I hadn't seen one television set or computer in any house I'd been in since my friend Paul's.

I entered the fourth house with some trepidation since its residents were—had been—friends of ours. Every house on the beach was known by the last name of the family who originally owned it—not its current occupant, but its original owner. A family named Spencer could move into the Brown's house, but it would remain the Brown's house. The fourth house was known as the Hellenberg house. Our friends, the Hellenbergs, were a beautiful family of four. Eric, the man of the house, was an airline pilot for Alaska Airlines and Jenny, his wife, was a flight attendant. Their two young daughters, Amy and Kathryn, were beautiful children. So beautiful, in fact, that they modeled clothes for department store catalogues. My trepidation was well founded as I was greeted just inside the door by a grizzly scene, and an even worse smell.

Two adult bodies laid on the living room floor in an advanced stage of decomposition. They were so far gone that I could not tell the sex of the victims—not that I wanted to get close anyway. I instinctively held my gun out in front of me as I moved through the house—which seems ridiculous in hindsight, but you can't fight instinct. I quickly searched the kitchen and found nothing of use.

I should have left it at that, but I did not. I moved down the hall and found two small bodies in one of the children's room. I suddenly felt light headed and nauseas and began to leave when I noticed a foot in the doorway of the master bedroom. I took a quick look and saw the rest of an adult body, bound and gagged, decomposing at the foot of the bed. It wore navy blue pants with a stripe up the side of the leg. Eric. My eyes moved up to the bed. A nude, unmistakably female corpse was melting into the bed, its bones still tied to it. I vomited on the floor then ran toward the door. I only hoped that it hadn't gone on long.

Suddenly, I heard the panic bell in the distance.

I tore out of the Hellenbergs and burst onto the road. I ran with every ounce of energy I had toward the house. My heart thumped in my chest as the bell continued to ring. I scrambled around the corner into the yard and nearly fell in the gravel. I gained speed as I approached the house and flung my weight into the door. The locks gave way and I tumbled into the house, gun drawn.

I waved my gun around the house. Kelly sat in the middle of the room crying and pulling on the rope.

I rushed over to her. “What’s the matter?”

“I’m scared.”

Suddenly very rattled, I picked her up and headed for the boys' fishing spot. When I arrived, the boys dropped their poles and raced over to me. They had caught one small fish but also had a chunk of some sort of dark flesh. It looked like a large chicken thigh, but its size and dark skin were not fowl-like. I thought maybe it was a chunk of seal leftover from a shark or whale attack that washed up on the beach. They said they had eaten some of it before. I told them that they shouldn’t eat dead things they find on the beach, but they boisterously informed me that it had been given to them by little bear. I didn’t argue with them about their imaginary friend, since I questioned even my own sanity at that point.

“Boys, look,” I said. “Have you searched any of the houses for food?”

“No, we're scared to go in any of them.”

“Are there any that haven't been broken in to?”

“Yes, the Mercer house,” said Tommy.

“Which one is that?”

“Three houses from the end,” he pointed to the end opposite that of which I had just been.

“Come with me. I don't think we should split up any more.”

We proceeded to the Mercer house. It was locked up tight, just as the boys had indicated. The Mercer house and the two further down were walk-ins. Nothing but a narrow sidewalk along the bulkhead connected them to civilization, which served as a reasonable explanation as to why they had not been touched.

“Are you boys sure there is no one here?”

“The Mercer's were on vacation when The Red Plague started,” Tommy said. “I never saw them again.”

We knocked on the door anyway. No answer. We walked around and looked in the windows. There was no sign of anyone or anything unusual. I knocked on the large beach side window. Nothing moved.

I went around to a side door. I put Kelly down and kicked the door firmly near the knob. It popped right open. Once again, a storm front of death stench blew out of the door. By that point, I had gotten somewhat used to it, but I was also tired of what it meant: that nothing but dead people would be found. This time, however, there were other familiar odors mixed in, but I couldn’t unravel the smells to identify them.

I resigned myself to the facts, steeled myself against what I would find, and entered, restricting the children to the outside. The door accessed the kitchen, and I noticed that, while the house had not been gone through, there were numerous piles of feces on the floor. The unusual odors materialized in my mind as urine and feces—probably cat. I stepped carefully around the piles and
opened one of the cupboard doors. Boxes of food neatly lined the shelves and my heart jumped. I opened the next cupboard, and it was filled with canned goods.

I moved excitedly into the darkened pantry where I stepped on something squishy and nearly fell. I heard a dull pop, and what followed can only be described as the most horrific smell that exists. A decaying body puts out a fair amount of odor, but what most people don't know is that the vast majority remains trapped within. If you leave it alone, it stinks, but if you meddle with it, the smell could gag a maggot, as my grandfather used to say. The only good news was that the smell came from Smiley, the Mercer's cat, and not one of the Mercers. The bad news is that my shoes were never the same.

After I disposed of the cat and opened the doors for a while, we took four wheel barrows full of boxed and canned food out of the Mercer house. I also went through their closets and found a pair of hiking boots for me—a little tight but doable—and a pair of boys sneakers that were too big for Charlie. I gave them to Tommy. I checked the two houses further down, and they were also undisturbed. I found several more cupboards full of food but decided to get it all later.

The four of us enjoyed a dinner of Au Gratin potatoes, green beans, and salmon—not a bad meal after the end of the world. I forced them to throw away the seal though. The children ate all they were served which struck me odd, since those were three items that my children wouldn't have touched just a few months prior. Even children eventually discover that when you are hungry—really hungry—any food always tastes better than no food.

We were startled awake in the middle of the night by a banging at the door. I couldn't make out the muffled yelling through the solid front door and thick-glassed storm door. I retrieved my gun and flashlight and scrambled to the door. Standing aside of the door, I shined the light through. Tommy peered back with tears streaming down his face.

I opened the door, and he raced into my arms.

“What is it?”

“It's Grandma! She won't move!”

Charlie and Kelly were also awakened by the commotion, so the four of us made the dreadful walk to Tommy's house. Indeed, his grandmother had died in her sleep. We broke the frosty ground in the darkness and fog and buried her. Then we went back to bed—this time, Tommy stayed with us.

Now I had three children.

The next day, the boys helped me rig up an alarm at the top of the hill while Kelly watched, or at least looked at us. Shortly into our project, I got the feeling again. I had the urge to go looking, but didn’t want to spook the children. I casually kept an eye out but never saw a thing. The feeling wasn’t as frightening as before. The stream made me aware but wasn’t telling me to be wary.

We found a long rubber bladder, filled it with water, laid it across the road, and covered it with leaves. We loosely stoppered the valve in the end of the bladder so that the water wouldn't run out. We fished the neighborhood rope swing to the top of the hill
, tied a large boulder to it, and secured it to a tree with a double metal ring and upside down pin. We tethered the boulder to another line which ran from the top to a pole at the bottom. We fastened the bell from Tommy's neighbor's sailboat onto the pole. Finally, we attached a bucket to the bottom of the pin and set the bladder valve inside the bucket.

The boys jumped on the bladder to test the system. The stopper popped out which filled the bucket with water. The bucket pulled the pin, setting the boulder free. It careened along the guide wire and smashed into the bell. The force of the heavy boulder drove the edge of the bell about two inches into the pole and it stuck there, hardly making a sound. We pried the bell free and placed it on the side of the pole, refilled the bladders, and tested it again. This time, the sound was so loud that I was afraid we would attract attention clear down in Langley.

We reset the alarm and went back down to the beach. The alarm would definitely alert us of any approaching vehicles, but it would do nothing about an intruder on foot unless he walked down the road and happened to step on the bladder with enough force to dislodge the stopper. A single intruder, I could deal with. A car full of thugs, we'd need to hide.

We spent the next week alone at the beach, fishing, eating, and building our strength. Twice the boys came back with food from the little bear—a ling cod and a Dungeness crab, both of which are deep water creatures—which smelled fresh, so we ate them. I honestly had no idea what to say about this imaginary little bear friend, but it grew more worrisome. I was sure that these were just things washing up on the beach, although, somehow, I never found any of it myself.

The weather grew ever colder, and the days continued to shorten. On the fourth day of that week, it snowed over a foot. On the fifth day, the snow hadn't melted a bit, and the wind came up from the north. The salt spray began to freeze on the deck and the windows. That meant the temperature was well down in the twenties. I also realized that the freezing temperatures meant an end to our alarm's effectiveness. Despite the fact that a car could probably no longer get down the road, we spent the fifth day re-tooling the alarm. We tied a rope to the pin and stretched it across the road, just below the surface of the snow.

When the wind hadn't abated on the sixth day and it began to snow again, I grew very worried. We couldn’t fish, and the salmon run was waning. I had hoped to lay in a lot of salmon while they were around, but so much for that. We hadn’t had any meat for days, and we were getting too far into our supplies already.

Worse yet, there was no way we could make the walk I had planned through a foot of snow and near blizzard conditions. It would have been bad enough in good weather, but in winter weather, it would have been the end of all of us. But to stay there also meant likely death—an agonizing, slow, painful death from starvation. We had plenty of wood to burn for heat—we had tons of wood, in fact, considering all the houses around us—but we had all the food there was and I calculated it would last us less than two months. We'd run out in the dead of winter.

It snowed through the entire seventh day. The children sat inside and read and played games. I almost got the feeling they were happy. I continued to worry.

On the eighth day, the wind switched to the south, and it warmed up and rained. The heavy rain on top of almost two feet of snow made a terrible mess of things, but the combination of salty air, wind, and warm rain ate into the snow quickly. It blew and rained all day and melted the snow down to only a few inches by day’s end.

I was never so glad to see the rain in my life. As a meteorologist, I should have known that, despite the lack of sun, the Pacifi
c was still quite warm and the wind would eventually switch. But my tendency was to worry—about things as they were, but more so about things as I feared them to be.

On the ninth day, the snow melted off entirely, and it became warmer than I had experienced in over a month. Not since I was out in the middle of the Pacific had it been that warm—the cheap thermometer on the fence read 74F at the day’s zenith. The sky was still dark and gunmetal gray, but the south wind brought in much deserved comfort. I spent some time fishing with the boys and noticed that they used a homemade lure. It turned out that little bear had shown them how to make it. I let it go.