Staying Alive

30

“You sure you’re going to come?”

The woman nodded again.

“What’s your name?”

“Cynthia.”

“I’m John.” There was no point with last names. At least not the way John figured it.

“We’d better get going,” said John. “Unless we want to stay the day here. I only travel by night. Less of a chance of getting seen or caught or killed.”

The woman just nodded. She was still crying, staring at her dead husband.

There were cars in the driveways of the neighboring houses. There must have been people still in their homes. And they must have heard the gunshots and the trucks. But they didn’t leave their houses. No one came to help. They were too scared. It made John mad, even though he didn’t blame them. They were protecting themselves, as best they could, looking out for themselves. He couldn’t fault them for that. But his blood was boiling, and his chest felt hot with anger.

“Do you have anything in the house we could use?” said John. “I know you said they took all the food.”

“I don’t know.”

“Come on, let’s go look. Time’s passing.”

“What are we going to do with him?”

“With John?”

She nodded, her eyes fixed on her husband.

John knew she’d want to bury him. But there wasn’t time.

“We’ve got to get going,” said John. “I’m sorry, but there isn’t time to bury him.”

John walked over to a large bush, broke off a couple branches, and laid them down over the woman’s husband. His face remained uncovered. John closed the eyelids one by one. The gaze of death was concealed.

The woman was muttering something to herself, probably saying a prayer.

John had to take her hand and tug her until she budged, heading back into her darkened house.

Being physically removed from her husband’s body had an awakening effect on her. It was slight, but it was there. She was able to take some action now. She took a candle from a table in the pitch-black house and lit it with a match.

Together, they searched the house quickly for anything they might take. The woman had a backpack that John carried for her, leaving his own pack by the door. He filled it with things he could see by the candlelight.

The militia soldiers had torn through the house, leaving hardly anything unturned. Tables had been toppled over and doors had been broken, and for no reason at all.

There wasn’t a scrap of food in the kitchen. All the kitchen knives were gone.

“Do you have a shed, a garage?”

“No.”

“Any tools, anything like that? Camping gear?”

“No, we’ve never been into anything like that.”

John sighed. There wasn’t much that would be of value for them.

The best he could do was to gather all the candles that remained, the ones that the soldiers had overlooked in their hasty raid. Along with the candles, John took blankets from the beds.

Cynthia took a picture of herself and her husband. She wasn’t foolish, and didn’t go for jewelry or anything like that. Interestingly, the soldiers hadn’t either.

John could understand taking the picture, but when she took a book from her bedside table, John had to say something in protest.

“Do you really need that?”

“I guess not.”

“What is it?”

“The Savage Detectives.”

“A crime novel?”

“Not really. It’s fiction, I guess. It means a lot to me… My husband gave it to me.”

“We’ve got to go,” said John. “Take it. Come on. We can’t spend any more time here. Daylight’s coming.”

They left through the backyard. John wore his backpack and she wore hers. He carried his hoe, and he handed her his kitchen knife, telling her to keep it in hand at all times.

John led the way at first, and she followed. But they soon realized that she knew the area far better than he did. She’d lived there for ten years, after all, and she knew which backyards they could cut easily through and when it’d make more sense to cross the street. Or if it was better to risk walking along the sidewalk for a short distance.

A couple times they lost precious time by having to hide, frozen, in a backyard when a truck had rumbled by. A couple times they’d heard shouting. No gunfire, though.

It was getting close to dawn when they arrived at the top of the huge hill. They were both sweating and exhausted. John was ravenous and his throat was parched.

“I don’t know whether to go through King of Prussia, or Valley Forge,” he said.

“I used to go running at Valley Forge Park all the time,” said Cynthia.

“You know it well then?”

“You could say that.”

“Park it is then,” said John, making the decision quickly. “But I’m worried we’re not going to get there by morning.”

“If we take Maple Street,” said Cynthia, “we can save a lot of time. We can cut right through to the park.”

“I’m starting to think it’s good I brought you along.”

Cynthia didn’t say anything. But then again, she was still grieving. Her husband was freshly dead. And he didn’t even qualify as “freshly buried.”

Maple Street was a long, narrow road. Beautiful trees formed a canopy overhead. The sun was rising, and light was spreading out across the world.

The view was incredible, but John was worried. There’d be nowhere to hide in the daylight.

Twenty minutes later, they’d made it to the southeast corner of Valley Forge Park.

They crossed over a road and made their way into the park, which was, in parts, thickly forested. They crossed a single dirt trail as they headed deeper into the wilder areas of the park. Cynthia knew the way well, which was good, because John wouldn’t have known which way to go. If he’d been by himself, he could have easily found himself exiting the park by mistake, or heading to the main trail and the parking lots.

For all John knew, there were people in the park. After all, it was the biggest public space in the entire area. Maybe people would have come here to camp, to get away from the power outage, thinking that they were far enough removed. John already knew better. There wasn’t any escaping this madness. At least not until one was much farther away.

John was exhausted when he finally set his pack down. He lay on the ground and stared up through the trees at the slowly brightening sky. Near him, Cynthia was softly crying.

“We’re going to have to hide out in the woods for the day,” said John. “We can eat, and then you can rest. I’ll take first shift, and then wake you up in the middle of the night.”

“OK,” said Cynthia, her voice soft and weak.

He knew that he had no words of comfort for her that would ring true.

“You’d better eat something,” said John, groaning as he finally sat up, getting into a cross-legged position. He started rummaging through his pack for the energy bars, and handed one to Cynthia.

“Thanks.”

“I’ve got to take a leak,” said John.

He hadn’t urinated since the shed, where he’d gone in the corner, leaving himself to deal with the smell for the rest of the day.

He walked a little ways away from Cynthia, heading further into the park. When he looked over his shoulder, he could still see her, sitting there, her energy bar untouched and unopened.

He undid his pants and let out a sigh of relief as the urine started to flow.

In the silence of the morning, without any nearby freeway traffic, there was nothing but the sound of the birds and squirrels.

Or so he would have thought.

From off in the distance came the unmistakable sound of human voices.

Human voices and human laughter, mixed together.

John cut himself off midstream, in order to listen better. The sounds were faint, but they were definitely there.

If he hadn’t known any better, he would have said it sounded like a party. A large one.

He turned around and motioned for Cynthia to come over. But she didn’t see him gesturing.

“Cynthia,” he hissed, trying to speak loudly and quietly at the same time.

She looked up.

“Come over!”

She came over, and her ears must have been a little better than John’s, because she perked her ears when she was still about ten feet from John.

“You hear that?” said John.

She nodded. “Sounds like a party.”

“Who would be throwing a party during a time like this?”

John already knew the answer. People that they didn’t want to run into, that’s who.