Final Chaos

14

Jessica was feeling better. Her head wasn’t in the clouds like it had been. Maybe it was the adrenaline from shooting, but her head actually felt clear.

She still couldn’t remember what had happened. She had no memory of the accident whatsoever.

But it was getting clearer by the minute that Jim, the man who drove the Subaru, was someone she wanted to stick with.

And it was clear that the situation was dire and extremely serious.

Jessica was practical minded. It wasn’t hard for her to see that society could descend into chaos in short order. Without basic public services, without food or water, people would react. And violently. When it came to that point.

“Are you OK?” said Jessica, putting her arm around Aly, Jim’s wife, who had curled herself up into a little shaking ball.

Now it was Jessica’s turn to do the comforting.

“She’s having a panic attack,” said Jim, from the front seat. “She’ll be OK. Remind her of her techniques.”

“Her techniques?”

“Just do it.”

“I think she already heard you.”

“Maybe not.”

Jessica leaned right up against Aly’s ear and spoke clearly into it. “Your husband says to remember your techniques.”

“She’s supposed to watch her breathing.”

“He says you’re supposed to watch your breathing.”

Sure enough, after a few minutes, Aly started breathing differently. Her breaths turned from shallow and frantic to slow and calm. She looked up at Jessica and smiled. “Thanks,” she said.

“You back with us, Aly?” said Jim.

“More or less.”

Jim was driving fast. The road was clear, for the most part. All the traffic lights were still out, as were all the lights in the stores and houses on the side of the road. They passed one cop standing on the side of the road in uniform. They simply drove right past him as he tried to wave him down.

“He looked like he wanted you to stop,” said Rob.

Jim said nothing.

Jessica’s thoughts turned for a moment to her parents. She’d barely had contact with them since she’d moved out, and she supposed that was going to be the way it stayed.

Now, her mind went to the practical. To survival.

“So what’s the plan?” said Jessica, directing her voice to Jim, who seemed like the only other one who had it together.

“Like I said, get to Aly’s mother’s house. Get her mother and get whatever supplies are there. We’ll split up and comb through the house. We’ve got to go for food, candles, knives, cookware, and any medicine you can find.”

“I got that part,” said Jessica. “But what about after that? Once we get out of the whole Rochester area?”

“That’s the part we don’t have figured out yet. Any ideas?”

“No,” said Jessica. “I’ve barely ever been out of Rochester.”

“We could go to my uncle’s house,” said Aly, speaking up for the first time since her panic attack.

“Your uncle Jordan? The drunk?”

“Yeah. He’s got that lake house on Chautauqua, remember?”

“Of course I remember. We spent that disastrous weekend there a couple years ago. The place was a dump and your uncle spent the entire time either passed out on the floor or actively trying to destroy all his possessions.”

“So what?” said Aly. “There aren’t many houses near it.”

“What about your uncle? He’s not exactly a reliable person we can count on in a situation like this.”

“No one knows where he is.”

“What? You didn’t tell me that.”

“It’s just been a couple weeks. My mom’s been calling him over and over. The last she heard from him he was in Buffalo.”

“Buffalo?”

“Yeah, doing who knows what.”

“Another bender, probably,” said Jim, dismissively.

Jessica noticed that Rob didn’t speak up at all during this exchange between husband and wife, as if he didn’t dare get in the middle of it should it turn into an argument.

Finally, Jessica spoke up herself. “Am I missing something?” she said. “It sounds like we’ve got the place to go. If it’s on the lake, we’ll be able to fish.”

As soon as she spoke, she realized that she hadn’t exactly been invited to go live with them.

But she’d helped them already. She felt like she’d proven herself.

And it wasn’t like she had anywhere else to go.

The way she understood it, remaining in Rochester would be a death sentence.

“Anyone have any better ideas?” said Jim.

No one spoke.

“All right,” said Jim. “We’re heading to drunk Uncle Jordan’s lake house. Let’s just hope he hasn’t burned the house down or sold it or something since we were last there.”

“Jordan’s caused the family a lot of problems,” said Aly, almost as an aside to Jessica.

“It’s about a two hour drive if I remember correctly,” said Jim.

They’d entered a nice neighborhood, where the houses had large manicured lawns.

Jim swerved easily around the stopped cars in the street. It seemed as if some of the cars had been pushed to the side of the road.

There was no one in the street.

“Looks like everyone’s finally gone indoors,” said Jim as they pulled into a driveway in front of what must have been Aly’s mother’s house.

“We don’t have a lot of time,” said Jim, throwing open his door.

Jessica followed behind the three of them. The front door was locked.

“Shit,” said Aly. “My key’s at the police station still, along with the rest of my stuff.”

“Wasn’t there one under the door mat?” said Jim.

“No, she got worried about it and had me move it. It’s around back.”

Aly disappeared around the back of the house.

“I had to shoot a looter,” said Jim. “Don’t be alarmed when you see the body.”

“Already saw it,” said Rob.

“I know you did, Rob. I was speaking to Jessica.”

Jessica just nodded stiffly.

To her own surprise, shooting dead a man not long ago hadn’t had as much of an effect on her as she would have thought. In fact, she felt nothing except relief that they’d gotten out of the situation alive.

And, if she was being honest, she felt proud of herself. Proud of what she’d done. Proud of being useful. Proud of keeping a cool head in a tough situation.

Aly reappeared a moment later with the key. It worked, and Aly swung the door open and rushed inside.

A second later, there was a scream.

“Mom!” screamed Aly.

Jim pushed Rob back roughly and rushed into the house.

Rob followed, and Jessica followed him.

A woman who must have been Aly’s mother lay on the floor. Her eyes were open, and it didn’t appear that she was breathing.

Aly was already on her knees, shaking her mother’s body. Tears poured from her eyes, and her voice was frantic. “Mom, Mom, Mom! Come on!” Now she turned to Jim, and screamed, “Do something!”

Jim was there by Aly’s side, on his knees, his fingers against the woman’s neck. He shook his head.

But he wasn’t giving up.

He motioned for Aly to move out of the way, and he put his hands flat against the woman’s heart and began pumping.

Rob and Jessica exchanged a look.

“Mom! Can’t you do something, Jim? Mouth to mouth. Out of the way.”

Aly tried to push Jim aside to get to her mother’s head. Instead, her feet got tangled together and she lost her balance and collapsed to the floor.

Jim grabbed her and pulled her up again.

“Mouth to mouth isn’t going to do any good,” he said. “I’m sorry, Aly. She’s dead.”

“What? You just saw her.”

Jessica was still standing by the front door, observing, along with Rob.

Aly’s mother body was in the room to the left, and to the right, in another room, there was the blood-stained body of a young man. Must have been the one Jim had shot earlier.

“Come on,” muttered Rob, almost under his breath. “Let’s get to work.”

Jessica didn’t move immediately, and Rob elbowed her slightly and indicated with his head that they should head to the kitchen.

Jessica followed him, registering her surprise. He’d seemed like a big lump of nothing, just some kind of useless dud. But it turned out he had some practical impulses of his own.

Neither one of them said anything about Aly’s mother. There was obviously nothing they could do.

Except prepare. Gather supplies.

“You work on the food,” said Rob, gesturing to the cabinets. “I’ll head to the basement.”

“All right,” said Jessica. “You’ll check for tools, right?”

He nodded.

Jessica threw open the cabinets underneath the sink, expecting to find bleach. But there was nothing there except for some large black trash bags.

“If there’s any bleach down there, grab it.”

“Bleach?”

“For purifying water.”

Rob gave her a stiff nod and disappeared down the basement stairs.

Jessica assumed that Rob would have enough sense to grab anything else he thought was useful.

She didn’t know exactly what they’d need, but she figured she’d do a check of the basement after he was done.

She figured that anything in a bottle, anything from a store whatsoever, might be useful.

Who knew how long it’d be until they could get their hands on more products. If ever.

Without any lights, it was fairly dark in the kitchen. The sky outside was still grey, and not much light came in through the windows.

But it was enough. Enough to see by, and her eyes slowly adjusted to the interior.

From the other room, Aly’s sobs could clearly be heard.

Jim was talking to his wife in a low voice, presumably comforting her. But Jessica couldn’t make out what he was saying.

Jessica concentrated hard at the task at hand.

She took the trash bags from under the sink, shook them out, and began stuffing everything on the shelves into them that she could.

There were boxes of crackers, cookies, and a lot of snack foods in general. She filled one whole bag with those, tied it up, and let it drop to the ground.

Next, she started emptying the freezer and the fridge.

There wasn’t much of anything in the fridge except for a gallon of milk.

The freezer wasn’t what she’d been hoping for. Ideally, it would have been packed full of meat. Lots of protein, plenty of fat, and generally calorie dense.

Instead, the freezer was packed full of frozen dinners from the grocery store. Jessica knew the type. They were marketed towards women who wanted to lose weight, even though they had no real reason to lose any weight whatsoever.

It was a good business practice, in a sense. Sell people less calories for more money. They could charge more because it was a specialty product.

The frozen dinners wouldn’t do them much good. Jessica grabbed one of the boxes almost savagely and flipped it around to check the nutrition label. Five hundred calories in one box. That wasn’t a lot.

But it would be something.

She threw three boxes into the bag, tied it up. She grabbed both bags now, and started making her way back out to the car.

Her body still hurt from the accident. It rebelled against the heavy load of the trash bags.

Her knee didn’t seem to be working quite right, and her shoulder was making a clicking sound.

But she ignored it all.

She ignored the strange hole in her memory, the odd feeling that there was part of her brain she just couldn’t access.

She remembered enough, she figured, to be able to survive. What difference did it make if she couldn’t remember the accident, or exactly what she’d been doing or thinking in that moment?

It simply wasn’t as important as the task at hand.

This wasn’t the time to worry about minor inconveniences like that. There were two people dead in the house, and two more had died not long ago on the road.

This was life or death now.

Jim appeared by the door just as she was opening it up. He nodded approvingly at the trash bags.

“Get everything,” he said. “I’ll help you in a minute.”

“What happened to her?”

“Not sure. Heart attack or stroke most likely. Probably the stress of the situation.”

“I’m sorry, Jim.”

“It was my fault,” said Jim. “I did everything the wrong way. I should have never left her here by herself. I should have taken her with us…”

Jessica stared at his face, which was normally so impassive, so calm. It didn’t show much now either, but she saw something underneath the surface. It looked almost as if he might break.

He needed some words that cut right to the point.

And telling him that he’d done the best he could wasn’t going to be enough.

“She would have died anyway,” said Jessica. “If it was the stress that killed her, she would have died when those guys in the truck attacked us.”

Jim said nothing, just stared at her.

But something in his face was changing.

Aly was still sobbing in the other room, only just slightly out of view.

“I’m taking these out to the car. Rob’s in the basement. Head upstairs and grab what you can.”

“OK,” said Jim, apparently surprised to receive orders from her.

Jessica didn’t bother looking to see if he was heading upstairs or not. She knew what she’d said had worked, and that Jim was practical enough to not fall apart.

They’d do what they had to do. Aly could grieve later, once they were in safety. For now, she obviously wasn’t going to be of any help, and there wasn’t any point in trying to get her to do something physical like gathering supplies.

Using her elbow, Jessica got the door open, and began walking to the car, weighed down heavily by the bags.

“Hey!” yelled out someone.

Someone was coming out of the house next door, waving his hand at Jessica.

Her eyes went right to his hand. She half expected to see some sort of weapon. A gun. A knife. Something.

But he held nothing.

He stepped out onto the small stone stoop, and another person followed him. And another.

And another.

Jessica quickened her pace.