Tamberlin's Account (15 page)

I was entering Camp F. Crystal Lake and Arawak were in Camp E

So from the key it looked like this area was for out-of-towners. There was an area for internationals too. An orphans tent. Senior Citizens and Disabled. The Jail was called a Detention Center.

His
song was playing,
Gone Away
, by Cold, when I turned the truck off and got out to see better.

The “No Clearance Area”, a small sign said, was where one should go to report suspicious behavior, fever, bites, crimes, and disorderly people, among other things.

Camp meetings were strictly prohibited unless organized by camp administrators. Apparently any organized group wasn't allowed. The list of rules was almost as tall as the "gatehouse"—I guess more so than a fish house now.

"Out-of-towners" would explain a lot about the look of this place. It looked like a tornado hit an all state flea market.

All the things they couldn't bear to leave behind—

I heard Mr. Ages scratch at the window so I let him out. He doesn't wear a leash anymore.

We went into the camp. Down each side street were identical tents. Large signs, like name tags, showed what buildings were to function as in their last days serving people.

I kicked a book accidently, that was buried in the snow—it turned out not to be a book at all when loose photographs scattered freely across—getting caught on the remains of other people's lives or blowing to an unknown end on the suddenly rising wind.

I used a long sleeved t-shirt for a scarf and I raised it up to my eyes.

I needed to see more.

People were supposed to go to these places.

There was nothing on the radio when I tried it, but I knew that sometime the airwaves were live again, telling people to come here for help. People like Mickey and Janice. Where were the people?

I think all those bodies outside town were survivors that didn't make it inside the Camp. There were a lot of ways for the people who came here to be fucked over. The lists on the gatehouse probably explained why there were so many at the church:

-If you came you had to be registered, you couldn’t leave.

-You couldn’t get rations without a registration card.

-You couldn’t get rations without a “housing” assignment.

-You can’t get a housing assignment without being allowed inside.

-You wouldn’t be allowed inside until there was room.

The punishments were grotesque and probably lethal—eventually—for most of the “crimes” listed. If money meant anything, I’d put a lot on the bet that there were good Samaritans at the church back there trying to supplement what people weren’t getting from the camp and couldn’t keep up with the demands, or perhaps the violence of people doing anything to live.

But that didn’t explain where all the bodies of the people inside the
compound
camp were.

So I looked harder. I paid more attention as I walked—they were under the snow.

The street signs showed evidence of violence—bends and bullet holes. There was very old blood on everything. Windows smashed out. Burned houses. One section of the chain link fence was collapsed outward. The front doors of the school were broken—one hanging like a small child on its parent's hand, the other lay mostly covered in a drift that freely entered the school hall. The lockers—they looked so short—didn't have any locks on them. It was summer, then. The best time in a child's life.

I took a left at the next intersection. I was suddenly very conscious of two things—neither my rifle or shotgun were with me and I didn’t lock the doors. Even so, I pushed those thoughts aside. The need to see was stronger. I needed to see.

I'd done things I shouldn't have done, as far as safety goes, but I didn't feel like it was as risky as it probably should have.

Am I adapting or is my give-a-damn going the way of the dodo?

Only so many possessions were allowed—what they could fit in their tent.

There were areas that appeared to exist for dumping and sorting excess items.

The next turn brought me face to face with a graveyard—a graveyard of cars. Campers, trailers, trucks. A supermarket—now an Items Consolidation and Trade Station, lost its parking lot to the vehicles of the people; at least from this camp. They were gathered so tightly you would have to take a vehicle from an end to get access to the next. A child would struggle to get through a window, if they could at all.

There was a busy body sitting on the lip of a city planter. Their eyes sometimes move and I don't
always
know what's going on in their heads, but even for a zombie he looked despondent, like the one before.

His presence didn't excite Mr. Ages. We were feet from him before it was clear he wasn't just another body.

He was little more than a solid ghost. He was eaten on the neck, shoulder and had completely lost an ear, but everything that was left was young and handsome and gone—as gone as gone can be—

You'll never catch me

—he was helpless.

He managed to look up at me and almost straightened a little. Almost.

I reached out—Mr. Ages made a sound, almost a whimper, uneasy sound—I brushed snow off his hand and found a warm yellow gold band devoutly gripping the gray blue blackening flesh.

"You came here with your family?" I asked him.

I almost left my hand on his hand, but I stepped back—why take the chance?

The dead, busy bodies sometimes have pattern behavior. Sometimes they learn. Sometimes their elbow bumps a doorknob and suddenly two dozen think that one must have tried to get in because there must have been something in there and suddenly that two dozen is shoving past the one to get at whatever was in that house.

This one didn't know what to do with himself. He was cold and had no memories—or whatever stirred those habitual rituals.

He was lost.

"If they are alive, they won't know, but they are probably hoping you aren't suffering. If they are gone, really gone, you should be with them."

I crouched enough to meet his eyes. He was trying to open his mouth. I felt tears rising, I asked him and wanted to know so badly, "Is your soul in there?"

I reached out again and put my palm under his jaw and held it with my fingertips to his throat. I really felt, behind the weirdness in his eyes, that something was there. And when I drove the screwdriver up into his brain, through the soft spot my two longest fingers found, I watched the energy leave. Whether the energy of who he was or the energy that brought him back.

I should have killed that other one.

My fingers supported the jaw until it dropped as low as it was ever going to.

Then I was going to leave.

I stood up and turned and faced a street that caught my attention. I felt my eyes widen and my heart respond in surprise, wonder and fear.

This side of town rolled down and what got my attention was little compared to what I had to digest when I could see down it.

It was hard to tell if it was a flood or a tornado responsible for the devastation I was seeing below me—with the snow and filth—I just couldn't tell. Tall buildings slumped like they'd collapsed on their knees and put their heads to the ground.

What buildings stood were dirty up to their waists. A flood could do that—a bad storm could do that.

I was apprehensive about descending into this part of the city—like entering another level of Hell. No inferno—just cold and bleak and wasted. A sneak preview of the world without man—and of what our ruins will look like. They will find the bodies mummified, huddled on the floor in closets. They will see the blown out heads. They will see evidence of many families’ last stands. They will find a pile of bodies in front of a church. Somewhere in the distance they will find houses with a piles of bodies heaped around back—all of them killed by the same hammer or screwdriver.

I wonder who will see them. Who will explore them? Will they have any idea how we lived? If I knew the answer to that would I realize how much of history is us just guessing?

I walked carefully down the icy slope of cracking pavement. Ahead of me was an improvised and crudely compromised fence to Camp D. The buildings level off with me as I descend and I slowly submit to their shadows as I enter the ruined part of the city.

Past a barely distinguishable out of state school bus, I see little bodies frozen in the shallow rerouted river that cuts through the city. The brown ice is rough with tall frost forests. Little fingers and small hands rise out of the dirty ice like fins and spray of water creatures in a miniature world. I can make no sense of what happened here. The children are mixed among frozen things and larger frozen people. But it is mostly children.

The bus is battered. It’d left paint along the buildings east of it.

“Cross something you shouldn’t have?” I said aloud.

I scanned the ice. I guessed it was probably only a couple feet deep now and frozen solid. I was right when I thought there would be more bodies down the street, down stream, sorted out of the water by a couple military hummers and a sturdy road block. They looked like a beaver dam of frozen, depleted flesh, and wasted life.

Mannequins boasted their infallibility from one of few intact windows.

Perfect lips formed perfect smiles at the wasteland in front of them. They stood with their hands on their hips or extended casually over crumpled bodies. They would have remained still and fearless even as the dead overcame and overlooked them.

I’m here, I thought to the plastic gods. The world isn’t yours yet.

I was in a business district. I saw bakeries and bookshops. A coffee shop on a corner, there was a busy body slumped and stiff with cold in the doorway. A screen printing shop. Tattoos. A craft store. Antiques. Chocolate shop. Souvenirs. A lot of notices from the Powers That Be.

I felt the pull of my old life drawing me to books—not that the pull of coffee and antiques wasn’t there, but availability and use sorta numbed that interest. But books… books could give me new life. They were always good, at least, for escaping mine.

From the devastation, I wondered how much there was to salvage anyway. Very few windows left. The integrity of the buildings structures was iffy. Not worth the risk.

Beyond this row of buildings, a wall of blowing snow concealed the city beyond. Through the now strong gusts of wind I dissolved into the curtain of white. As the breath of winter died and drew in for the next blow, I saw buildings eaten and broken like us. I saw a land ravaged by cruel weather.

What's left?

Not just here. Anywhere.

Can I really hope there is somewhere to go?

Looking at this raised new and old concerns—new problems. What happens to towns when there's no one to care for them?

What happens when there's no one to fight the fires?

Who sends out the tornado warnings?

Who's going to get you breathing?

Who's going to start your heart?

Deliver your babies?

Make babies.

Take care of us when we're old?

What happens to our warheads?

What about all the people who should have been?

The people who were already in hospitals?

The pets in the pet shop? Animals in the zoo?

No cops. No laws.

No one to keep an eye on things. No one to keep track.

No one to teach us.

No one to clean up.

No one to bury all these dead.

No way to put to rest all the ghosts.

This town is a ghost—as dead as the graffiti renamed it.

There was nothing more for me to see. I wanted to leave, but it was hard to, too. Avoiding towns kept me from seeing. I was
seeing
. I'd seen enough.

I turned on my heel to leave. One wall stood stubbornly among the rubble. Brushed with white paint on the red brick, it said, “But he that endures to the end, the same shall be saved.”

I stared dumbly at it as the wind rose up and the white ate up the words and the sounds of cries this stupid girl couldn’t keep down. This stupid girl crying and screaming and feeling like somehow the words were making demands of me.

I ran until I fell and then I walked the rest of the way back to my vehicle.

I put my iPod on again when we got back in the truck. I did a U-turn in reverse—I couldn't bring myself to drive on the remains of the living and their lives.

Fear
, by Sarah McLachlan was ending.
Pretty Donna
, by Collective Soul played next on the shuffle. I always wished that song was longer. I pressed most of my concentration into driving and listening to the songs that played. I needed an out. I needed to get away from myself.

I was fighting tears—making gross sounds in my throat. My vision warped as my eyes filled. I blinked hard and squeezed them out to clear them. My consciousness was so congested with thoughts and feelings that, at first, I didn’t realize what one thing made me feel so helpless and moved to submit to them.

With all I couldn’t yet digest—my ears were eating
Nothing Left to Say
the Imagine Dragons song—I felt something in me breaking.