Fear of the Dead

Two hours ago I killed my husband. Tom Everett Manning. He was 36 years old, a teacher at Mission High School. He had a masters in US history, and was under contract by a publisher to write a Civil War novel. Historical fiction was what it was. He was writing an account on the early life of General Chamberlain.

He never finished it. I never got the chance to read it. Truth be told though I doubt I would have even if he did have it done, published, book cover and all. I was never one for history. I guess you could say I’m one of those left-brain types of people.

Or was it right?

Everything’s been flying straight past me these days. Funny that. That right after getting out, right after seeing all that’s been left of the world, the only thing I can think of is my dead husband.

Funnier still, the thought that even after everything we went through, it still hurts to know that he’s gone.

Tom and I had a troubled marriage. Before that we had a troubled relationship. We never had much in common, but I suppose that for a loveless marriage we had enough.

It’s odd how people change the way they do. I remember a time, long ago by now, when I could look into his eyes and see everything that I ever wanted out of life. Now I can’t even explain to myself why I ever felt the way I did, or when or why it ever went away.

When the infection hit California, Tom had us sealed inside a bomb shelter underneath the house that belonged to his father. George Manning. George was a WWII veteran, the product of an era that pictured nuclear war as some unavoidable future. He turned the basement into an air sealed bunker when he got back from his tour in Japan. In case the commies attacked, he said, and meant it too.

He and his wife died of age six months ago. Tom inherited the house. Two days after the attack on Oregon slipped down to Sacramento, that’s where Tom and I went. To hide inside his father’s bunker.

We were in there for four months. Sealed, disconnected from the rest of the world. The phones didn’t work. Radio had no signal. The television sent nothing but static.

Tom said it had to do with the power in the city being disconnected. There was no one around to manage infrastructure.

“
It’s what happens when civilians are evacuated.”

I remember him telling me that. Word for word. And I asked him why we couldn’t have gone with everyone else to the military safe houses.

He grumbled on about how the military would just hole us up in some crowded facility, as if he’d done this kind of thing before. In fact, every moment from the Sacramento infection onwards, Tom acted as though he knew exactly what we were supposed to do.

According to Tom, we were just as safe as everybody up there in those evac zones. Safer, in fact. Plus we had our own space.

It wasn’t hard to see the situation from his perspective. Not at the time anyhow. Tom had a point and I couldn’t argue with it. We had our own laundry, our own shower, a stove, a computer, and a working television with some DVDs to pass the time.

The bunker had its own generator, which he said would be good for about a year. The motor was new, and we had more than enough barrels of gasoline to keep it running within that time.

He told me that the disease would clear up long before we used a quarter of our power.

I’m not sure if he meant that when he said it. I didn’t know how he came up with the number, but at the time I didn’t want to ask. He seemed sincere enough, so I believed him. But as I reflect back on everything now, all the time he’d spent preparing that bunker for a day like this, and those occasions on conversation when he would casually reminisce about living in the woods, isolated from the rest of the world. Was it all just coincidence? Or was it a sign to something I should have seen coming?

I didn’t love Tom. That made living with him difficult. There were people out there that I actually cared about and wanted to be with; friends that I hoped were doing fine. But we moved from San Fran to Tom’s bunker up in Fremont, and there was no way to get a hold of anyone I knew. If they were still alive, I had no way of knowing it. All I could do was sit in the comfort of an underground bunker, and hope that the world would still be there by the time I got out.

We marked the days on an Iceland calendar. January had a picture of the Black Waterfall. A column of hexagonal rocks over a waterfall that was said to be igneous, which meant it had been shaped by lava.

We didn’t have windows, so we used the clock to remind us of when each day passed. We marked it on the calendar, then waited for the next day. Or at least, I did.

It surprised me at first how well Tom had adjusted to our new, temporary life. He spent most of his time in the study, either reading a book or writing. As for me, I couldn’t stand it. Living inside that bunker, all I had to look forward to was getting out. I told myself that I would, eventually. I made myself hope.

Days went by. Weeks. And slowly, what had started out as bare contentment turned into dying impatience. 500 plus hours trapped in an underground home with nothing to do. Where the only books belonged to Tom, and watching the same goddamn movies day in and day out only made me restless.

I wanted to go back outside, to see what was going on. I wanted to know what had changed in the world up top. Where everyone went. Tom told me to stop staring at the calendar, and to find something else to do. It made me mad. And for the first time I went from merely tolerating my husband, to fucking hating his guts.

To him the bunker was a goddamn haven. He didn’t care what happened beyond his walls. He had everything he wanted down there, and he was as happy as could be. It didn’t matter to him one bit that the world was turning itself inside out. For all he was concerned, everyone he knew could have burned in hell.

Tom never did have friends. At least, none that he spent any time outside of work with. He spent a lot of time on his own. Writing. Every day we spent locked inside that bunker together, I’d hear that fucking keyboard clack and clack and clack. He’d type for hours on end, stopping only to either disappear inside our bathroom, refuel the generator, or grab some food. Food that he enjoyed far too much for someone who was eating the same fucking thing for four months.

The storage room was stacked with canned food of little variety. Beans, soup, fish, and instant noodles. Stuff made me sick by the first week. I started to eat as less as I possibly could. Appetite became a foreign concept.

January passed, and in came February. The picture this time was a glacier. Jokulsarlon, if I remember right. I probably do. I have a habit of being able to memorize things pretty quickly.

It was at this point that depression reared its ugly head. Sometimes I would go to sleep crying. Sometimes I would think of simply killing myself. There were a few instances when I lashed out against Tom, took my frustrations out on the furniture. Vases, chairs, glasses, whatever I could get my hands on.

From then onwards I started sleeping on the couch in the entertainment room. He thought it was because I was mad at him. I was. But it never occurred to him that I was anything more than that. That I was tired of being with him, and that I had no interest in ever sharing the same bed with him ever again.

Tom was always so oblivious.

No. It was more than that. He never cared. That’s what it was. He never cared enough about anyone else to try to understand what they felt. All the missed hints and cues, because he never paid any goddamn attention.

March. Now a picture of the Thjorsa River, and by this point I had to leave the bunker.

I asked Tom how much longer it would be. He said at least three more months. As if somehow, without any radio communication or any means of reaching the outside world, he would know exactly how much longer we would have to stay.

Weeks more of bullshit like that, and eventually I had enough. I decided I was going to unseal the door, consequences be damned.

Early morning. I went up past the stairs to the entrance tunnel. I tried to turn the metal lever that kept the door closed. But either the thing was jammed, or it was just too damn heavy.

Tom must have known what I was doing. I knew he could hear me running along the tunnels. My footsteps left imprints in the air. But I didn’t care. Not at the time anyway. I was getting out, and I didn’t care enough to make a secret of it.

When I saw him standing behind me however, scowling at me like a vicious animal, I thought that maybe I should have reconsidered.

He asked me what the hell I thought I was doing. And gone was the politeness in his eyes that I had once known him for. In its place, a grimace of unsaturated animosity that I had never seen in my entire life.

They say that people don’t change. They reveal. Maybe it’s true. If so, then I had to reconcile with the fact that the man I had once fallen in love with all those years ago never really existed. That he was just a mask to a demon I had never known was there.

The thought scared me. And it made me mad.

Six years of marriage for a man who never really existed.

I screamed to his face and told him that I was getting out.

He threw me away from the door. My head hit the wall.

He screamed that it was dangerous out there. A rising bruise on my forehead made me see the irony of his words.

He said I’d be putting both our lives in danger if I opened that door.

The anger weighed heavily on my gut, though it was subsided by the fear of what he would do if I argued, or hit him back.

He apologized right away. Tom inched himself closer.

I cried, and ran back down to the bunker.