THE TRASHMAN (8 page)

“Just up and leave our home, live like savages in the woods, eating bugs and weeds? You’d have to drag me screaming and clawing.”

Becky disagreed. “Jessica may be right about one thing. We are exposed here and if someone meant harm and was sneaky, I’m sure they could get close enough to do us damage. We could consider finding a place farther from main roads, maybe a cabin in the Smoky Mountains National forest. Some of the vacation rentals near the lakes are very nice.”

Lucy said, “I guess I could go for a place like that. I’m not a wigwam type girl. I need my running water and indoor plumbing.”

Mentally, I agreed with Lucy, and also thought Becky had a good idea. “Tell you what; when we go into Adel, let’s try to find information about the Smokys and about rentals in the park. Becky’s idea has legs.”

“I’ll talk to the Two J’s and see if they’ll go for a move like that. I don’t like the thought of them being on their own.”

“Neither do I,” Becky said, “but they are right about learning to use bows and traps and what wild plants are good to eat. That girl’s smart as a whip.”

*****

Sam’s report on the Nash place wasn’t good. From the front porch of the doublewide, he could smell the odor of death. He peeked through some windows. Inside one bedroom, he saw the rotting corpse of a woman. Peering into another he saw the body of a young man lying on the floor.

He made a decision to leave the property without searching any of the outbuildings for fear surfaces might be contaminated. I think that was his wisest choice.

The next morning I made a decision to defer weapons training. If the trailers and homes to the north were contaminated, I was determined to go farther in search of supplies.

I gave the trailer park a wide berth. The wind was blowing from the northeast and I smelled the stench of death from a hundred yards away. It made me wonder just how bad it must be in Atlanta, in all the big cities. Millions of bodies rotting! It made me thankful for Maggie and Neal’s warning to get out of town.

I passed by the drive to the trailers and continued on to the residential community. As Sam had said, the homes were on large lots. The first home I approached was at the end of a long paved driveway. A two level, stucco dwelling with a large front porch with beautiful stained-glass entrance doors.

As I neared the porch, a short, dark complexioned man opened the door and stood with a rifle pointed at me.

“Come no closer, por favor,” he shouted.

I stopped and shouted back, “I’m not here to cause you harm. I’m looking for supplies and people. Do you mind if I come closer? I’d like to talk.”

“You come with a gun but say you mean no harm. I tell you now to go away.”

I did want to talk to him and figured if he was going to shoot me, he would have done so.

“If I leave my rifle and pistol here, would you agree to speak for a moment?”

“Why?”

I decided honesty was my best bet. “Because I’m scared and don’t know what’s going on in the world and I’d like to ask you some questions.”

He took a moment to consider my request. “Okay. Leave guns there and come no closer than the end of the stones.”

I took the end of the stones to mean the end of the low wall bordering the driveway before it widened at the house. I laid the rifle and pistol on the pavement and walked toward the house, stopping beside the last of the stones.

With only twenty feet separating us, it wasn’t necessary for him to shout. “What do you ask me? I know very little.”

“I came from the city, from Atlanta. I’m staying with the Olmsted family in the house past the trailers. We are about out of food and other things.”

“When the sickness comes to the trailers, I think maybe it be good to not be there. I bring my family here to this casa... house. I know it is empty because I cut the grass for the owner. He and family go to stay with wife with the cancer. Stay at place near the hospital.”

“That was smart thinking. I could smell death at the trailers.”

“Everyone is dead. I do not go there.”

“I thought that was the case. What about the rest of the homes here? Are there any survivors?”

“I check the houses. Twenty houses. Inside all but four is death. Three are empty of the bodies. Maybe no one was home. In one is old lady. She does not catch the sickness because she does not leave her home for nothing.”

“Is she still there?”

“I tell you she leave home for nothing. Now I tell you, go from here and do not come back. What is here is mine. I take care of old lady and
mi familia
. You must take care of yourself. Maybe I don’t want to, but I shoot you next time.”

“What is your name?” I asked.

“I am Salvo.”

“I’m Ralph. Salvo, thank you for talking and I won’t be back. Like you say, what’s here is yours. If you had to guess, how many people from the trailers and from here are dead?”

“All but
mi familia
and the lady are dead.”

“I meant a number.”

“A total. I say more than a hundred, Señor Ralph.”

“Do you have electricity?”

Salvo gave me a puzzled look. “No, Señor, the power is gone.”

“What about water?”

“We drink from the bottles. I find mucho in houses but not so much now.”

“You know the house I said I’m staying at. If you run out of water, you’re welcome to come with a truck and get some.”

“I do not have a truck, only the old car, the Chevy.”

I didn’t see the car he was referring to. “None of the empty homes had a truck?”

“Yes, but it is not mine.”

“Salvo, take the truck. The owner is probably dead, wherever he might be. I’m going to draw you a map in the dirt. The map will show you where to go for a generator. There you will find much you can use.”

“Thank you, Señor Ralph. I think before about the truck, but I worry about the police. I think maybe no problem anymore about police or ICE or nothing.”

“I believe you are right. Have you checked any of the homes further up the road?”

“No. Only here.”

I checked another three homes along the road. From all of them, I detected the sickening scent of corrupted flesh. I would have went farther, but city boy that I am, the few miles I’d walked were telling, and I knew by the time I returned to Sam’s place my legs would be at their limit.

I arrived late for lunch but Becky made a plate for me. I asked her to organize a meeting of all the adults and the J’s. She left to let them know. The plate was tuna fish mixed with barbeque sauce. The mix tasted a lot like barbecued pork. A side dish of rice with steamed vegetables rounded the meal. I rinsed my plate in the sink and went to Sam’s house. The younger ones were in the living room watching a movie on the big flat-screen TV.

In the den, I settled into a comfortable armchair at the game table.

“What’s up? Sam asked.

“I want to fill all of you in on what I discovered walking north. Within a few miles, I found at least a hundred people have died, and only one family and one old lady are alive.”

“Christ!” Lucy shook her head. “If that holds up… I mean if the ratio is the same everywhere, the kill rate from the plague is over ninety percent. That can’t be the norm.”

“At yesterday’s weapons session with Jerold and Jessica, Jessica told me some things that might explain the high kill rate. Her mother worked at the trauma center in Atlanta, Grady Memorial. According to… Excuse me, what was your mother’s name?”

“Agnes. Agnes Jackson. Dad’s name was Derrick,” Jerold supplied.

“Their mother, Agnes, was a nurse there. She had a conversation with a virologist who made a radical claim. He said that the cause of plague, the virus, was not a natural organism. He believed it was a hybrid made in a lab. I don’t know if his claim was verified, but if true, the death rate I found may be the same or worse everywhere. I mean ninety percent out here in a rural area. It has to be worse in the cities where the chances for exposure were even greater.”

“What does this mean to us in our situation?”

I turned to face Sam to answer. “I’m not sure. One thing that concerns me is the question of how long the virus can live inside a dead person and how long it can live on surfaces.”

I shifted my attention to Jessica. “You’re the most knowledgeable.”

“I don’t know an exact answer. Some viruses only live for a few minutes outside of the host. HIV is like that. The flu or cold virus can survive a couple weeks in the right conditions. Mers, the full name is Mers Coronavirus. I don’t know the answer, but I’d aim for the safe side and say a month. Even then I’d wipe surfaces with bleach or alcohol, something to dry it out and make it inactive.”

“Thank you. I have another question. If the virus runs out of hosts will it be gone?”

Jessica nodded. Yes. Transmission needs vectors. Vectors are where a person is in an area to get the plague, either from touching a person or from the air where a person sneezed or coughed or from a surface. Given sufficient time, the virus will run out of hosts and disappear. There is a chance a survivor will harbor the virus and be able to transmit it even though the person is not sick.”

“Typhoid Mary’s,” Becky said.

Jessica nodded. “Yes, but given how virulent this viral strain is I don’t know if it could live dormant in a host. Also, if the death rate Mister Ralph saw holds up for the rest of the world, the virus could be running out of vectors soon. It may be on its way to extinction.”

“How soon?” Sam asked.

“Please, Mister Sam. I’m just guessing based on what my mother said, and she was repeating what someone else told her. Maybe the plague will run its course in a few more weeks, but no matter what, I think we should be careful about exposure for a long time.”

I wasn’t done with putting Jessica on the spot.

“Jessica informed me she and Jerold may split soon. She thinks it will be safer living in the forest.”

Lucy said, “You’ll do no such thing. Staying with us is your safest place. What would you eat in the woods? How would you survive?”

Becky nodded agreement to Lucy’s statement, but I’d given thought to my conversation with Jessica.

“Becky, Lucy, I agree with you that they would be safer with us, but I’ll flip that around and say we might be safer with them. Jessica brought up the point that we are too exposed here. She mentioned hiding out in a national forest. She mentioned the Smoky Mountains. Becky, do you remember two years ago when you were stressing about where to vacation?”

“I wasn’t stressing, I was planning. I think I know where you’re going with this. There were several cabins I considered. Some of them were fabulous, but rented for more than we could afford. Even though they were isolated, they had indoor plumbing, with state of the art kitchens. They were all located on or near a lake or river. I could live in one of those.”

I glanced at Jessica. “What do you think? Would you two want to stay with us if we moved to a place like that?”

Jessica delayed her answer to think.

“Yes. But there are some problems that would have to be solved. If you’re going to be running a noisy generator or burning wood to cook, I wouldn’t. Things like those will draw attention to us. Even shooting guns will.”

I agreed with her. “You’re right. I believe we can work out solutions. We can use solar for lighting. Preserve foods instead of refrigeration. Fish and trap or use bows to get fresh meat. We can continue to look for canned food, especially vegetables until we can plant a garden and learn what wild plants are edible. We can make it work.”

Sam spoke. “It may be a lot of work to set a place up and we’d have to learn how to use bows and traps, but I’m ready to leave right now.” He paused and turned to Lucy. “Almost every house around here is full of dead people. You can smell them from outside. It would be better for us to go away from civilization at least long enough for the rotting to be over.”

“We should be able to find a camp with several cabins in the same area,” Becky said and then spoke to me. “When should we leave? What do we need to do to get ready?”

“We should follow Jessica’s suggestion and visit a library for the survival books. I think we should go to a bigger city for the things we need. Adel doesn’t have a Walmart or anything like that.”

“We’re about midway between Tifton and Valdosta, Georgia,” Sam said.

“Yeah, they both have Walmarts. Valdosta’s a lot bigger and has other large stores, Sam’s and Academy Sports.”

“Not Valdosta,” Lucy said, disagreeing with Becky. “It’s too big. We should be able to get what we need in Tifton.”

Sam chimed in. “If all we need is a Walmart, there’s one in Moultrie. Moultrie’s smaller than Tifton and just as close. I think a smaller town will be the safest bet.”

“Who all is going,” Jerold asked.

All eyes turned my way.

“If you you’re asking me, I say kids and all. Jerold, do you know how to drive?”

“Yes sir, as long as it’s an automatic.”

“Here’s what I say we do. I’ll raise the third row of seats in my Durango so the two J’s can ride with my family. Sam, you drive one of your cars with your family. When we get to Moultrie, we’ll trade your car for a large, four-wheel drive SUV, and then pick another for Jerold to drive.

“We’ll raid the Walmart and library and any other places we need to gather supplies. After that we’ll find a county facility where they keep those big towable solar panels you see at roadwork sites. One of those will give us enough power for all our needs. We can get battery-powered tools, too. The panel can recharge them.”

Sam was getting into the idea. “We could find another propane trailer. Add that to the one we have and we’ll be good, especially if we all stay in the same cabin on the coldest days.”

Becky chimed in. “And more suitable clothing. We left Atlanta in a rush and packed so little. The clothing we have is for urban life, not camping. We need boots and jeans, the whole kit and caboodle.”

“Enough food to last the rest of this winter,” Jessica said. “Until we learn to live off the land, we’re still dependent on what’s available in the stores. I think the first thing we need to do when we get there is find sterile gloves, masks, and disinfectants. After we finish shopping—.”