Remnants: A Record of Our Survival Page 4

  Still…our bellies are mostly full and our spirits have been good since the holiday. These turkeys living on the mountain are actually kind of scrawny (we’re not talking hormone-filled Buttberballs here), but we ate like pigs and then put some aside as well. We keep a cold box in the creek on the far side of the property for when the juice is off. So far, nothing has spoiled and, even though it’s lumpy and it could really use some butter, that giblet gravy has been sooo good!

  Hello, tummy! Do you remember what it was like to just walk right into the grocery store? To look around and see clean, fresh food? To walk down the aisles, a little bit of light music in the background, just studying the tantalizing pictures on the front of all those colorful boxes?

  Do you remember hamburgers? You do? How about bacon double cheeseburgers?

  Oh man. I need to stop this before the nostalgia becomes too much. It was such a short time ago…

  Anyway, we learned about this guy Dr. Camille when we were in Sandy (we’re just about done with our searching, by the way—that little town has been picked clean). This was just yesterday morning, and we’d had a really lucky day. We’d found some pretty useful stuff. There was a nice little bag of cornmeal and some yeast packets and baking soda. We found a little first-aid kit with iodine. There was a small bottle of chewable kids’ vitamins. Billy found a really nice tackle box, which will come in handy when the water levels drop in a few months. Dad found three cans of canned clams and a portable transistor radio with a hand-powered crank that actually worked.

  The radio was a revelation. I’ve found a few sites on the X-NET that claimed to host radio content, but none of them actually worked. They were probably skeletons (I guess they’re kind of like Billy and Dad and me in that way)—remnants of what once was a viable community. I haven’t been able to make much out of the organization of the X-NET, by the way. There’s no rhyme or reason as to why some sites seem to be filled with updated content (like this little journal, thank you very much!), while others are nothing more than hollow reflections of what they were when the worldwide web was the thing. It’s not like I have a lot of time to research it, with the power coming and going the way it does, but it’s still pretty fascinating to poke around and see how people are living. There is actually a little colony living on an island off the coast of Australia; supposedly, there are no traces of the blight! There are almost 30,000 healthy souls living there.

  Then there is the other end of the spectrum. Remember that crazy insignia we saw on the side of the military vehicles all those weeks ago in Sandy? It is the sigul (Dad’s word; who knows where he got that one) of the Rising Red. That’s the name they’ve chosen for themselves.

  Pretty stupid if you ask me.

  If you read through the stuff on the X-NET (and believe me, I think Dad has spent more time up here than I have lately—at least, that’s what the battery is telling me), they get all bent out of shape if you use the word “blight” when talking about what happened. They fancy themselves a new, hardier version of humanity. That’s some serious delusion for you, but at least you now know what we do, and that’s what they call themselves.

  There are sites hosting out of Seattle, Denver, Jacksonville, Vancouver—it looks to me like they’re the ones behind the X-NET. Heaven only knows when they’ll figure out a way to hack my little ol’ site here…

  But I digress, and I can’t afford to do that. We’re getting ready to leave, you see. It’s almost time to go into the city.

  So anyway, we sat down at the kitchen table of an old farmhouse and switched the radio on. There was a little lake of dried blood on the floor and one set of bare footprints—small, heartbreaking footprints—heading out of the kitchen and off down the hallway.

  We ignored it. After everything we’ve seen in the last few months, it’s just another pattern in the linoleum. Your mileage will probably vary, of course, but I imagine you’ve adjusted at least a little to the new normal wherever you’re reading this…

  Dad thumbed through the dial and we listened. I haven’t heard anything on the radio since the summer, and that’s a real shame. Music goes a long way in lifting the spirit. KINK was one of the last stations on the radio, bless their hearts, and they really tried to make a go of it, right up until the end.

  The FM side was pure static, top to bottom. Not even a Ke$ha jam to pass the time (I joke, I joke).

  But the AM side was a much different story. The first hit was on the low end. We heard the crackle and pop of an old recording (Dad said something about vinyl). Some choir sang “Bringing in the Sheaves” with a warbling brass accompaniment. It was bad enough to elicit a group cringe, and then the song ended and a man with this weird, high-pitched voice came on and cried for a little bit while he read from the book of Revelation. There was no telling if he was crying because of what the blight had done to our part of the world, or if it was because he was showing early symptoms.

  The cynic in each of us, I’m sure, assumed the latter. Anyway, he launched into a bunch of “amens” and “selahs” before putting on another hymn.

  Sheesh. Time to move on.

  The next broadcast chilled me to the bone. Just typing this out here sends a little shiver up my spine.

  In a clinical, perfectly matter-of-fact tone, this woman read from a list. “In Olympia, there are thought to be in excess of sixteen hundred remnants, though there appears to be very little in the way of formal organization. There are reports, unconfirmed, of a sizable collective taking refuge in Capitol High School. General Ambrose, we trust, will soon investigate these reports. The following families have been reported as splintered, their remnants unknown: Abrams, Aikens, Allens—the families of both Ryan and Michael, Amundsons…”

  Dad held us in place with his eyes. He was searching for an indication that we understood what we were hearing, and he certainly got it.

  Suddenly, that farmhouse felt like a crypt. My heart hammered in my chest like it used to before a track-and-field event, and I looked over at Billy. He swallowed thickly, and I knew he was feeling the same thing.

  The blighted (can’t call them the Red Rising…sorry, jerks) were organizing. Not only that, but they were actually informing on their own kin.

  They were keeping a list—documenting their resources. Remember Dad’s theory of halves? Well, there must be some seriously empty bellies among the blighted as well. What they were talking about here amounted to genocide, although I don’t think that word really works when we’re talking about systems of food production.

  Twenty minutes later and little miss cannibal robot moved on to a town call Omak. Omak’s list was much, much shorter.

  We listened for a time, but other than those terrible lists, the woman offered no real insights into what life was like where the radio stations were up and running. Basically, we had the name of some guy named General Ambrose and the terrible feeling in our guts that our family’s name might one day appear on the lips of that horrible woman.

  Dad thumbed the dial and we found still a third station. It was a stronger, clearer signal—probably coming out of downtown Portland. I watched in wonder as a little smile formed on Dad’s face. He recognized the voice.

  “That doesn’t change,” the woman purred. Her voice was pure and smooth. It was vaguely familiar, and I could tell from his reaction that Billy had also heard her speak before. “These are still your family members, regardless of everything that has transpired. Regardless of all the terrible things they’ve done. They are still our brothers and sisters in humanity, and Dr. Camille’s treatments can, possibly, restore them to you. I want to stress that these treatments represent possibilities—they represent hope. Will there be trying times along the way? Of course there will be. Of course. Nothing like the blight has ever happened in our lifetimes, but similar pandemics have happened before. Even when all of this is all over, it’ll likely happen all over again.

  “Fifty million people died in the flu pandemic of 1918. In 1968, a virus came out of Hong Kong t
hat might have actually been an ancestor of the blight. And in…”

  On and on she went, documenting the millions of people whose lives had become forfeit to organisms invisible to the naked eye. Dad put the macabre inventory aside, still smiling. “Do you kids know who that is?”

  We shook our heads, and he laughed. “Well, of course you wouldn’t. You’re not exactly in her target demographic. That woman’s name is Delilah. She used to have this late-night call-in show on the radio. Real lovey-dovey stuff. Folks would give her a sob story about a break-up or the loss of a family member, and she’d hit them with some Toto or a Whitney Houston song. Your mom and I would listen to it on the way back from Volcanoes games down in Salem. I can’t believe she’s on the radio. Heck, I’m surprised anybody’s on the radio, but this is really strange. And it’s got to be close—that’s a really clear broadcast. I wonder what she’s doing up here in the Northwest.”

  We turned our attention back to the radio. “…Dr. Camille’s treatment has worked wonders. Early human trials have been successful beyond measure, with many, many blighted reporting the full reversal of all symptoms. The mortality rates have been, unfortunately, very high. A little more than 20% of trial participants do not survive the treatment. But still, that number is diminishing with every new cohort, and Dr. Camille believes he understands why these deaths are happening. The truth is, if you’re afflicted with the blight and you have a strong constitution, it’s time to come back into the city. It’s time to allow yourself to be pre-screened at the Pearl Point Security Facility…”

  “I have to go,” Dad said, turning the radio down. “Look kids, this sounds too good to be true, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t at least look into it.”

  “What if it’s a trap?” Billy said. “She might be some famous disc jockey from back in the day, Dad, but what if she’s working with them? I don’t think it’s a good idea. I think we should just stay here and wait for Mom to come home.”

  Dad sighed. He looked on Billy right then with genuine pride. “That’s a great point, Son. I just got so excited by the possibility of it. News like this would bring survivors into the city in droves. But still…what if it’s true, huh? What if they’ve found a legitimate treatment?”

  The idea of it just kind of hovered there for a long moment. I don’t know what the boys were thinking, but in that moment I was with Mom again in my mind. She was laughing at a cookout we’d had to celebrate the end of the school year, long before she’d felt the need to steal away from the family she loved with all her heart on some gray, miserable day on the side of Larch Mountain.

  “We won’t let you go without us,” I said. I tried to muster as much conviction as I could, but I doubt I was all that convincing. I looked at Billy and he nodded his agreement, so I pushed forward. “We’re staying together, Dad, whatever we decide. You can ask us to stay behind—heck, you can order us to if you feel like it—but there’s no way you’ll ever know for sure if we will. And you don’t want us on our own out there, do you? Just following you, out there in the what’s left of the city?”

  To this, he could only respond with another heavy sigh.

  “How much fuel is left, Bill?” he said after a long minute.

  “A little less than forty gallons. Way more than we’d need to get down into the city and stash the truck and get home safely.”

  Dad’s eyes darted back and forth, searching the faces of his children for the resolve needed to risk the very worst. I couldn’t imagine what he must have been feeling as a parent right then.

  “Okay,” he said, swallowing thickly. “Okay, we’ll sleep on it tonight and then push into the city tomorrow. We’ll hide the truck and approach this checkpoint on foot. What’s the address?”

  “11th and Davis,” Billy replied without hesitation. The address was a tattoo on my mind as well, and I knew that Dad was just testing us. There was no way we were ever going to forget what that Delilah woman had just said on the radio.

  Mom.

  Mom, Mom, Mom, Mom, Mom….we’re coming, Mom.

  “Let’s get the truck packed up then, kids. See if we can’t figure out what’s what down there in the city.”

  As I type this, they’re just finishing up the last of the preparations. It’s an hour until darkness—an hour until we head down the mountain. We don’t know where we’ll be staying, of course, but if I find an X-NET hotspot you can be sure that I’ll be back online here soon…

  Chapter Six: A Glimpse of the City

  So this is what happened.

  If you’re still following along here then you probably saw this coming. While I’ve tried to be as faithful as possible throughout this process (by making recordings and trying to add links and all that good stuff that any real historian should be doing), you’ll just have to trust me from here on out that I’m reporting things faithfully. As Dad recently told me, history isn’t exactly objective anyway.

  So I’m posting this by the thin beam of a dying flashlight in the back room of a deserted bowling alley. We’re locked in—barricaded with a heavy metal desk in front of the only entrance. Billy and Dad are here, and Billy has taken a nasty bullet wound to the shoulder. Dad says that it went clear through the skin and muscle without hitting any bone, so at least that’s a blessing. Billy says it stings like crazy, but he seems to be handling it okay and the bleeding is under control.

  There is the unmistakable musk of a hundred moldering bowling shoes wafting on the air.

  Lovely.

  Outside, all heck is breaking loose. It would appear that the blighted don’t share our shortage of ammunition, which is just a huge bummer.

  But here’s the good news: we found him, and the treatments are real.

  So, okay…let me backtrack again. We left the cabin four days ago, right at dusk. The truck is pretty noisy but Dad took it slow, trying to keep it stealth. We left the lights off and slunk down those logging trails like a pack of jewel thieves, never really pushing it over 15 or 20 MPH. Outside of a sizable herd of deer grazing in a high-mountain meadow, we didn’t encounter another soul. The city loomed dark in the distance, with just a smattering of solar LEDs glowing from the exteriors of a few of the busted-up skyscrapers on the far side of the Willamette.

  A dying town in a dying world, Portland is. So sad…

  “I don’t expect that they’ll be rolling out the welcome mat,” Billy said. Dad chuckled, but there was no humor in it. We were all on edge. Portland is danged scary, and I immediately missed the safety of the cabin. It occurred to me then that if we could just find Mom, we’d be able to make it fine there on the side of that mountain. It was an epiphany, and it felt really good to just let go of any misguided hope I had been holding onto that things would go back again to the way they were. So much for school. So much for soccer practice and grocery stores and piano lessons.

  None of that mattered if we could all just be together again. That’s what leaving the safety of the mountain taught me. It also taught me that people can be terrible, terrible monsters, but more on that later…

  So we jounced our way down those rutted logging trails in the darkness. My brother sat shotgun, our actual shotgun in his lap. The closer you get to Gresham, the more you need to stick to the paved roads, but Dad got sneaky and cut through some alfalfa fields over by the college. It turns out that Mom used to work as an adjunct over at Mt. Hood Community College. They have an arboretum on the outskirts of campus that Dad used to take jogs in during the summer, and we found it and stuck to its dirt paths and avoided the entry onto Glisan altogether that way.

  It took a few hours but we finally made it down off the mountain and, I have to be honest—it was really disorienting. After a couple of months spent looking down on everything, losing that vantage point gives a person a strange, vulnerable feeling. We rolled slowly through abandoned neighborhoods, most of them little more than ash-blackened husks.

  We didn’t speak. I think we were too scared to even risk it, as if breaking the silence would
somehow coax the blighted out into the streets. If there were people there, they were content to simply let us pass. I kept expecting roadblocks and checkpoints (the blighted posting news out of Denver and Jacksonville seemed to have their cities almost completely locked down, if they were telling the truth), but I guess we were still too far out from the heart of the city.

  “We have to get back to higher ground,” Dad finally said. “We need a vantage point on the waterfront. Any thoughts?”

  “How about Mt. Tabor?” I said. “We could maybe stow the truck in the park.” Man, I loved the park there. We used to run cross country races—just the little short ones—up there in the fall.

  Dad gave me a 1,000-watt grin and reached back to squeeze my hand, just as the first RPG glanced off the driver-side quarter-panel of the truck. Gunfire fractured the eerie quiet and I saw muzzle flashes in the distance. Dad and Billy ducked as webs of fractured glass laced the windshield. Head beneath the dash, Dad instinctively spun the wheel and the truck lurched into the nearest yard, where maybe half a dozen figures on foot sprinted straight toward us. I saw it all from my perch in the crew cab, and boy was it horrible. Dad punched it, shooting the truck right into them and I felt it rise and fall as we plowed those jerks down into the concrete. We clobbered through a back fence and into the neighbor’s yard, catching a little air on a bit of garden bordering. “Guns, Billy! Guns!” he shouted, the truck fishtailing through flowerbeds.

  My brother rolled his window down as we crossed the lawn. Staying low, he leaned a bit out the window and let the shotgun do its job. I watched a figure’s head disappear in a crimson vapor. I couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman because they wore scarves over their mouths and noses, and they were dressed all in black.

  “Whoooo!” Billy hollered. He fired the gun again, screaming at the top of his lungs. I joined in, and then Dad was doing it too. We hooted and hollered to beat the band, and those folks must have wondered if a trio of demons straight from the fiery depths had somehow found a service elevator and the keys to a Chevy Silverado. If they were going to try to take us down, we’d put the ever-loving fear of God in them first (that’s a Mommism, by the way; I kind of like it), that was for sure.