Rare Air
Part Three
Still and after that, the power outages came and the sirens blared. My roommates packed up their belongings and headed for a relative’s house. I was a boulder, unmoving. The worthless misinformation flowed when the electricity was on, neighbors in the complex were welcoming and held cook outs. Everyone loves you when you’re the one willing to do the dishes, I already knew that rule.
Some of those neighbors stopped coming to our nightly greet and eats, people in full body PPE started showing up and carrying away black bags. A few days later they stopped coming and we started covering ourselves up as best we could and we starting hauling people out to the curb until there was no room. We carried them out until the smell was so bad that we couldn’t go near the pile anymore.
I don’t know how many people were in our little complex before it came. There were twenty-four units altogether so what is that, forty or fifty people. I left with the last three people who called that complex home, we all loaded our shit into a van that belonged to someone who had already started to decay out in that pile of bodies by the road side.
We had maybe two meals worth of food between us and absolutely no idea where to go besides the idea “where other people aren’t.” We drove until that van was running on fumes and yeah, we stole gas out of the cars we found nearby. We also stole from the local convenience store we saw. The windows were all boarded up and someone took the time to spray paint in blocky black letters “no cash inside.” As if cash was even remotely on any of our minds.
Soda lasts a pretty long time, bottled water of course even longer, salted nuts though, and salted and dried meat. Bags of jerky and trail mix were pure gold in those early days. We pulled the boards off one of the windows and filled the damn van with things we would soon come to regret.
Life without a working toilet is one thing, life without toilet paper another. Life without both…well, after so many weeks of calmly rationing and doing without we all came to regret our sudden indulgences without any means but to let someone out as we stopped and listen to them struggle.
I think back on those early days and I want to laugh. Hardy animals we are. Always willing to sacrifice and do without. We thought we did without in those early days and then we really learned what doing without was. Books and T.V. shows talk about hunger, how eventually you stop worrying about it, how your stomach becomes a stone. What a bunch of bullshit. Starvation is not a condition you endure; it is the all-consuming focus of your being. You will do anything to stop that howl and it is a scream the never stops until you solve the cause.
After the camp ground and raiding the local warehouse store days, after the generators ran dry and we started trying to learn how to fish and hunt. After that when so many of us failed, after that when all you could manage to do was lay in your sleeping bag and moan, no water to spare for tears.
There were maybe a hundred of us, probably less, all living up here by the peak. I killed a woman over a can of peas. I hate peas. They taste like fucking dirt. She smelled like dirt, and sweat. I hit her with a rock and then I climbed on top of her and hit her again. She grunted and kept on breathing and struggling. The whole thing was disgusting. I just wanted it to be over with but she kept on breathing, ragged and wet. I hit her a third and fourth time and her body started to drum against the floor. I got off of her and grabbed the can of peas out of her hand and started trying to figure out a way to open them as she started to slow down and finally stop.
Those peas tasted like dirt and metal, they were wet and mushy. It was like eating an entire can of the color grab olive. I ate a squirrel soon after that. I just barely managed to pinch the damn things head off with a crude spear. No wood to cook it with. I pulled at the thing and swallowed two finger pulls full of squirming filth. I thought I would never stop shitting. I laid in a sleeping bag under a stand of pines and figured that would finally be my fitting end. None doing.