The Survivor Journals (Book 2): Long Empty Roads Read online

  Long Empty Roads

  The Survivor Journals, Book Two

  Sean Patrick Little

  Spilled Inc. Press

  Sun Prairie, Wisconsin

  © 2018

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, character, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. All characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the author and have no relationship to anyone, living or dead, bearing the same name or names. All incidents are pure invention from the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved.

  Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including xerography, photocopying or recording, or in any information or retrieval system, is forbidden without the prior written permission of both the publisher and copyright owner of this book.

  (What that fancy paragraph above said was: Please don’t pirate this book. The author barely makes any money off it as it is, and he has a child going to college soon. Support the creative art you enjoy. Thank you for being considerate.)

  Copyright 2017 Sean Patrick Little

  Published by Spilled Inc. Press

  Sun Prairie, Wisconsin

  Email: [email protected]

  On Twitter: @SpilledIncPress

  All rights reserved.

  Cover Design: Paige Krogwold, © 2018

  November 2017

  Printed in the U.S.A.

  Table of Contents

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Publisher’s Note

  Long Empty Roads

  The Survivor Journals, Book 2

  By Twist

  For anyone who understands loneliness,

  And anyone who has cured someone of it.

  .

  It’s Thursday, I think. I’m not sure.

  Honestly, it doesn’t even matter. The apocalypse wasn’t a cruel dream. The Flu was real. Everyone I have ever known is still dead.

  The world is still a vacant and barren place. I am still alone, heading south-by-way-of-the-East-Coast looking for any possible survivors of a catastrophic viral apocalypse who might want to help me rebuild civilization.

  This is the continued journal of my daily life.

  My name is Twist (it’s a nickname, actually). I’m eighteen. I miss Big Macs, television, human contact, and going to the movies.

  And I am still alive.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Still Alive

  I dreamed last night. I don’t often remember my dreams, but this particular dream I did. In the dream, I was surrounded by friends. Not particular friends, mind you, just faceless, voiceless shapes that my subconscious brain recognized as friends. That was something that I haven’t known in over a year. All my friends were dead.

  In the dream, my friends and I were bowling. What bowling has to do with anything, I’m not sure. I was never into bowling when everyone was still alive. I have no desire to go bowling now. Bowling was something Wisconsin kids did on Friday or Saturday nights when there wasn’t anything better to do. A small group of us would go get some cheese curds, a few Mountain Dews, and roll balls at the Prairie Lanes until midnight. It wasn’t exciting. It wasn’t even fun, really. It was just something to do while we hung out, something to break the monotony of sitting around and talking. It was easier to talk to girls if every so often you had someone to laugh at or some silly new way to roll the ball.

  Anyhow, I dreamed I was doing well. This is highly unusual. I’m lucky if I break a hundred. I’m a lousy bowler; it’s just not something I was raised to do. In Wisco, there are families who take bowling very seriously. Their kids start in leagues when they’re four or five. The parents bowl every weekend. My parents were from outside the Bowling Belt, originally. My dad was not into playing sports in the least; he was an occasional hack golfer, but that was it. My mom would never have worn shoes that other people also wore, so we never went.

  In the dream, I’m a strike king. The ball is hooking like I’m some PBA tour pro. The pins are scattering like playing card houses in a tornado before the might of my throws. All the girls in those faceless, voiceless shapes are watching me in awe. I have no idea how I knew they were in awe—my brain was taking great liberties. Anyhow, after I throw my final ball and seal the 300 game, one of the girls approaches me. There’s sexual tension between us. She moves in to kiss me. I can feel her form, the softness of her curves. I don’t know what kind of girl gets turned on by someone who is really good at bowling, but it’s a dream so I roll with it. She parts her mouth slightly, and I lean in. We’re almost touching. I feel electric. My lips almost touch hers, and I catch a whiff of her breath. It is foul, like tuna and old socks. I start to gag.

  And like that, I’m awake. The dream world dissipates in an instant. I’m in bed, curled into a near-fetal position. There is a large black-and-white cat an inch from my nose. He is curled up like a furry burrito with his feet tucked under him, and his rank stank-breff is assaulting my nasal passages.

  “Seven hells, Fester.” I rolled away from him. “I’m brushing your teeth as soon as it’s morning.” I tried to bury my head under my pillow and return to sleep, but it was too late. I was awake. Outside the thin plastic windows in the back of my trusty Jayco Greyhawk RV, I saw the pale pink sky of the morning sunrise. Somewhere, birds were beginning to stir. I could hear their first tentative chirps. It was morning.

  I lay in bed a moment longer, staring at the white plastic on the ceiling of the RV. It was bumpy, like the surface of an orange. It reminded me that I hadn’t had an orange in well over a year. I wondered if I’d find orange trees in Louisiana. I thought about making a detour to Florida, first. If I harvested some oranges, maybe I could plant some orange trees in Louisiana if I didn’t find any. I shook off the covers and sat up. It was the middle of summer. Already the air was thick with humidity, and I could tell that it was going to be an aggressively hot day.

  I was parked on the desolate Interstate Highway 90 just outside of South Bend, Indiana. When I’d stopped for the night, I’d just thrown the RV in park in the middle of the eastbound lanes. It wasn’t like I was going to cause an accident or any delays. That’s one of the few bright spots of the apocalypse: No more traffic jams. I could also say that it was nice that no police officer was going to roll up on me and write me a ticket, but after a year with barely any human contact, I would have welcomed any amount of ticket-writing or general questioning from someone in a blue uniform.

  I threw open the RV door and stepped into the thigh-high weeds along the side of the road to relieve myself. Fester watched from the doorway. When I finished, he meowed impatiently, one of those long, drawn out whiny meows. I don’t speak Cat, but I’m certain it translated to something like, “Feed me, stupid human.”

  Fester has only been with me two days. He climbed into my RV while I was parked on the highway outside of Rockford, Illinois, and has been largely disinclined to lea
ve it. He’s an adult shorthair, as far as I can tell, one of those common, everyday types of furballs that tended to populate animal shelters and Facebook photos. He was super friendly, and he was fixed at some point in his life, so I assume he was owned and loved by someone before the Flu. He claimed the shotgun spot in the RV as his own. As far as travel companions go, I could have done worse.

  I left the door of the RV open while we ate. The morning air was thick and humid, perfumed heavily with wildflowers along the side of the road. It was nice. I drank in deep breaths of it even though I knew it would probably set off my allergies. It was moments like that: me sitting at the table and having a bowl of instant oatmeal, Fester chowing down on some canned cat food, with the birdsong and summer air almost overwhelming me that I felt normal, like this was what life was meant to be, that I might actually enjoy being in this new world.

  It was the rest of the time that I confronted the oppressive, depressive, and stark reality of being constantly alone.

  It has been a year and a few months since the Flu struck and killed everyone. Already the Earth was beginning a vast reclamation project by slowly erasing human existence. The highways, without constant traffic, were given over to frost heaves in winter and heat buckles in the summer. What was once a smooth blacktop highway became a mostly semi-smooth highway with the occasional bump that would jar my suspension and knock the teeth out of my head. (I only had to hit one of those before I started really concentrating on the road.) Weeds were beginning to grow rampant from the new weather-made cracks in the asphalt. The more they grew, the faster the asphalt began to break down. The occasional highway signpost, uprooted by weather and time, lay across the highway like roadblocks. Wind-blown debris from homes and dumpsters was scattered in the ditches slowly being swallowed by a choking growth of unchecked weeds.

  The highways were devoid of human existence, though. The Flu hadn’t hit suddenly. It was fast, but it had waylaid people for a few days before claiming them. There were no cars along the sides of the road. No one outran the Flu. People died at home alone or with their families, or they died crammed into standing-room-only hospitals that couldn’t help them, that couldn’t even make them feel comfortable as they died. It had culled the primate genus from the face of the Earth with wicked efficiency, save for a few lucky schlubs like myself who somehow had a genetic immunity to the virus.

  In the year I was alone, I was struck by how much I’d taken for granted. When I drove my parents’ car before the Flu and I hit a stretch of bumpy road, I used to curse the government and the lazy road crews that couldn’t keep that tiny section of highway in decent working order. Now, I understood the scope and gravity of their job and marveled that they were able to do as much as they did.

  Entropy was an ugly, daily reality in my world. I was confronted with it constantly. I was fighting a losing battle against time. Just because I dodged a bullet by being somehow immune to the Flu doesn’t mean that I was immortal. Eventually, something would get me, I would die, and then I would break down just like the roads. I was alone and fending off Death until the Grim Reaper decided it was my time. I refused to lie down and die, but I also had to wonder what the point of being so stubborn was. I was alive, and I told myself that I had to go on living for the sake of those that died, but why?

  When I tried to find a reason for why I continued to live, I could never come up with a decent answer. I felt like I was having a mid-life crisis, and I was only eighteen. I was in constant battle with feelings of futility. I knew what lay at the end of my road because it was the same as everyone else’s road. I just wondered why I had to keep driving it. Like Jim Morrison said: “No one gets out alive.”

  Depression and breakfast: a winning combination!

  Fester and I set off for South Bend after we finished eating. I made sure to dress myself in a presentable fashion. This was important. Getting dressed everyday forced upon me a meager sense of normalcy. It also would help if I happened to stumble upon another survivor. I knew for certain that three other people besides me had survived the Flu, even though all three were dead now. The Laws of Probability would say that there had to be others. It wasn’t a matter of if I would find other survivors; it was a matter of when. I was always actively looking for any signs of life. If I happened to find another person, I certainly didn’t want to look like a deranged lunatic or something, unshorn, wearing three-day-old boxer shorts and a single sock because my right foot tended to get cold while I was driving the RV. It’s not a good look. I kept my hair scalp-short and practical with battery-powered clippers, giving myself a boot camp buzz every two weeks or so. I shaved every four days to stay neat. I made sure I dressed every day as though I were going out amongst living people in a regular society. I forced myself into these routines. Routines were how I kept from losing my mind and giving up.

  During my first day on the road, I made up a rigid schedule in my head and vowed to stick to it. I had a wind-up alarm clock in the RV. It went off at what I assumed was around seven every morning, just in case my tuna-breathed traveling companion chose not to wake me at dawn. (At this point, Greenwich Mean Time was non-existent. I set the clock by guessing dawn was somewhere around 5:30 AM.) By eight, I was fed, dressed, and on the road. I only stopped for the day at dark. No point in trying to go on hucking through the night and getting sleepy. That was just dangerous and stupid. I had a queen-sized bed literally twelve feet behind the driver’s seat. Moreover, in the dark I might miss some tiny sign that someone was still alive in the area.

  I’d gone through the northeast corner of Illinois and crossed into Indiana. I’d found no signs of life in the areas of Rockford, Des Plaines, Chicago, or Gary, Indiana. It didn’t mean there weren’t people alive in those cities; it only meant I hadn’t found them. I worried about that. How many people was I missing? There was no way I could ever know. I’d ventured into smaller towns along the way, using the highway as a guide, but exiting frequently to roll through the smaller burghs and villages five or ten miles off the main path. It was difficult to assume where some living person might be hiding. Would they stay in the city because the looting for supplies was easy? Would they retreat to the country because it would be easier to grow food and harvest wood for burning? Are they traveling around, like me, looking for other people? Would I never find them because they’re busy looking for me? I shoved those thoughts out of my head and exited the highway at the signs pointing the way to the University of Notre Dame.

  I wasn’t a huge sports fan. I’m awkward and relatively nonathletic. I was a decent wrestler, but I lost as often as I won. That was about the extent of my physical abilities. I couldn’t hit or throw well. I wasn’t particularly fast. Wrestling was a good sport for me. My dad wasn’t athletic, either. He had been an accountant. He played golf maybe once a month when clients insisted. He wasn’t good at it. He didn’t have a team loyalty outside our general proximity to the Wisconsin Badgers, Milwaukee Brewers, and Green Bay Packers. However, my dad was a Notre Dame fan. He wasn’t Irish or Catholic, and his own alma mater was Colorado State, so I have no idea why. He said it was a throwback to his dad. I didn’t know my grandfather too well; he died when I was young. Apparently, when my dad was a kid, they’d always watched Notre Dame on Saturdays, so the tradition just continued. Saturday afternoons in the fall at my house were reserved for Golden Domer football. When I was a kid, I had a Fightin’ Irish jacket. I had been steeped in the lore and glory of ND football since I was a fetus. I just wanted to see the stadium in person once before I settled in the south. Just once. Just once before travel possibilities reverted to pre-internal combustion engine times.

  That was the most haunting part of this journey: I knew that gasoline wouldn’t stay viable forever. Already I was starting to see breakdowns in the fuel reserves I was finding. I was operating wholly on the knowledge that I would never venture back to the north again. I would never see my old hometown of Sun Prairie again. I would never see any of the towns I was driving through agai
n. Once I made it Louisiana, that was it; I would be done traveling. Forever. I would build my life there. I would die there, eventually. The rest of the country, the rest of the great open space of America would be dead to me. My whole world would be the little bubble of land where I carved out a daily existence. Everything I passed, I tried to make sure I locked it deep into my memory banks. It would be all I would have in terms of knowledge of the world for the remainder of my life.

  I rolled the RV slowly through the streets toward the campus of Notre Dame. Cars were parked haphazardly on the sides of the roads. I occasionally glimpsed some dogs. Most of the dogs that were surviving had gone feral and become dangerous, returning to that necessary pack-hunter mentality that they had locked away in the back of the wolf-part of their brains. Maybe some of them would welcome a human master again, but it was hard to trust a pack of them when they growled and barked at your arrival. A single blast of the shotgun into the air would send them scattering. Silly dogs. Still scared of the boom of fireworks.

  I parked the RV on the edge of campus, the stadium in sight. I geared up: a mostly-empty Army-issue rucksack for hauling back anything worth taking (I also carried a couple of tools in the bottom of the bag for breaking locks when necessary), a Remington shotgun on a shoulder sling that I threw across my back apocalypse warrior-style, a slim, black semi-automatic handgun in a leather holster on my right hip secured with a tactical gun belt that I’d taken from Cabela’s back in Wisconsin. Please do not think for an instant that I’m some sort of badass post-apocalyptic warrior god. I am not. I’m rather the opposite. I don’t like guns; I barely touch them. I just know their value in this world-gone-wild. The shotgun is there to scare away the dogs should they start to think about attacking me. The SIG Sauer is there for my own mental health. I don’t want to use it, but I don’t want to not have it there if I have to use it. Prior to the apocalypse, I wasn’t anti-gun, but I wasn’t pro-gun, either. I was gun indifferent. Now, I am all for guns. Totally pro-weapon. I know they have their place. They are tools. They are insurance. I both fear and respect them. I just do not like them or enjoy them, and I wish I did not have to carry them.