(this is part two of a series; if you haven’t read part one, you can go back and read it here)
Claire and her husband had spent many weekends at Uncle Rick’s cabin when they were young and too broke for a proper vacation. If he was looking for her now he might go to Rick’s. When she took the exit she thought was for the cabin, it took her an hour to find it without GPS, relying on 20-year-old memories and landmarks that were long gone.
But she found it somehow, in thick woods, far from the paved road. From the outside, it was a simple thing, wood planks and a pitched roof. Small windows uncovered. Moss had colonized the eaves, dusting them lime green.
She knew it was the one because of the mailbox. There was no mail delivery in the middle of the woods, but Uncle Rick had been a postman for forty years. The mailbox was his badge of honor.
She found the front door, a surprisingly solid piece of wood, was locked with a keypad. She frowned. Pretty sophisticated for Uncle Rick. She couldn’t imagine what was inside that could be important enough to lock up. She remembered thin flannel blankets, a camping stove, a few forlorn taxidermies. She hoped this was still his house.
She knocked. When no one answered she knocked harder. Civility clung to her, even though it had done her no favors.
“Uncle Rick? It’s Claire! Hello? Uncle Rick?” She peered in the windows but she couldn’t see much. She walked around the cabin, calling out and hoping for another way in. There were no other cars, no trace of any people.
The sun was getting low. In the thick trees the dark would come quickly. She had to get inside.
When she got back to the front she stared at the keypad. She tried 1234 and 0000 without success. Uncle Rick’s birthday? She didn’t even know when it was. She closed her eyes and pictured him. A round, balding man with a salt-and-pepper beard and big brown eyes. Freckles and sunspots on his head. Low-slung jeans riding under a round belly, smile lines when he talked about his hideaway in the woods. She tried to think of numbers that would matter to this man.
She tried her grandmother’s—his mother’s— birthday. She tried the address of the house Rick and her own mother had grown up in. Nothing worked. Dusk gathered around her, bringing a new feeling of dread. Darkness in the forest was a different creature than darkness in the suburbs. Leaves rustled, betraying movement nearby.
The windows were too small to try to climb through. She had to crack the code or she’d be sleeping in her car again.
“Come on Uncle Rick, give me something,” Claire whispered. She remembered the day he proudly told her he had become a deacon at his church. Surely he would have some numbers from the Bible memorized. But unfortunately Claire did not. She called up a number she thought she’d seen printed on a football player’s face: 3:16 maybe? She tried 0316. The keypad numbers lit up when she pressed them, their glow becoming more obvious in the dimming daylight, but the lock didn’t turn.
Claire banged on the door with her fists. She inspected the lock— maybe she could break it? But then what? She felt like she was slogging through mud, every step of her way was resisting her. Her stupid ideas were so flimsy in the face of hard-edged obstacles. She gritted her teeth, imagining Rick coming out here and installing this lock. His self-importance, his pretension, using technology to seal her out of his dirty rundown cabin.
Her rage reminded her of something and she tapped in 1-6-2-1. The whir of electricity turning the deadbolt told her she was right. She pressed on the door and it swung inward, but she hesitated. Uncle Rick, former federal employee, where were you on January 6th? Oscar dashed inside through her legs. He had no time for doubts.
She stepped in after him and closed and locked the door behind her. The comfort of a locked door depends what side you’re on.
Claire relaxed when she saw no indication anyone had been there. No shoes by the door, no mud on the mat. The familiar thin flannel blankets were piled up on the small bed in the corner. Incredibly, there was a landline.
Claire grabbed the phone and took a deep breath before lifting it from the cradle. She tried to manifest a dial tone, and didn’t breathe out until she heard one. Her husband’s phone number was one digit off from hers. She dialed.
It never rang, instead delivering an automated woman’s voice, “We’re sorry. You have reached a number that has been disconnected or is no longer in service.” She tried two more times, choking back sobs.
She steadied herself and dialed 911. The sound of ringing sent a lightness through her limbs. It kept ringing. She pictured an official-looking phone on a desk somewhere, with people in uniforms bustling around, too busy saving the world to pick up. She stayed with it for more than a minute, feeling the hope drain out of her like the charge on a battery.
As the line rang and rang she began to picture a phone on a desk in an empty, dark room, ringing for no one. She would try again later.
She retrieved her cell phone from the car and decided to dial every number she had saved. Many of them delivered the same message, some in a man’s voice, and some a beeping tone that sounded like an alarm. She tried the dry cleaner, the pharmacy. She tried her sister-in-law, who lived on the other side of the country. She didn’t know anyone who lived farther than that. But every one was a dead end.
She decided not to try her kids. Maybe tomorrow, when things were better.
The cabin had a television, but when she turned it on nothing happened. She looked at the back of it, at the different colored connectors going in and out. She pulled some out and put them back in. She unplugged it and plugged it back in. She didn’t know if the problem was with Uncle Rick’s TV or the whole world. Tears burned her eyes. She didn’t know anything.
Oscar wound himself around her ankles, yowling. He was hungry, and she realized she probably was too, though her sensation of hunger was dim. She got the meager gas station supplies from her car and searched the kitchen for a can opener.
Opening shabby cabinets, she found the little cabin was stuffed with supplies. Canned food to last months. A chest of first aid and medicine. And the water was running. She emptied the cat food onto a plate, smushed in Oscar’s pill, and set it on the floor.
For herself, she peeled back the pop-top on a can of Spaghetti-O’s and dug them out of the can with a spoon. Cooking felt vulnerable, a peaceful domestic task in the face of a nightmare, so she ate them cold. She couldn’t be a mother today, not even to herself.
The gelatinous noodles, with the aluminum nose still clinging to them, were satisfying. Gooey and salty, they tasted like childhood. For a moment, with sugar and carbs flooding her body, she felt capable. She was safe now. The bouncy O’s and sweet, electric-red sauce were too silly, too unnecessary to be part of a scary story.
Can in hand, Claire began to search the cabin. It was not the rustic hideaway she remembered, but something like a survival bunker. It had a gas stove now, and a real bathroom. The lights were running on solar power, she realized, locating a control panel near the front door. There was a freezer full of plastic wrapped hunks of meat.
So, Rick had thought about the day when he would have to turn away from society and make a life in the woods. Maybe he had even hoped for it. If he was still alive he was at least 80, surely too old to make a go as a survivalist, even if he had been out here tinkering, installing keypad locks. She hoped she was wrong, and he would pull into the drive any second.
Someone would turn up, Claire was certain. If not Rick, he had surely bragged to a friend about his preparations. It dawned on Claire that some people were joyful today, their obsessive planning and stockpiling finally vindicated. Others were out there searching for a life boat exactly like this one. For the first time, Claire felt afraid that someone might show up.
She pushed the fear aside, setting the can down on the counter with a loud clang. People were not movie characters. She believed that people were good.
But her belief flickered as she thought of everyone who had come and gone at the gas station. No one had organized their neighbors into a posse, no one had shepherded them to safety. No one had even checked on her, parked by the dumpster for days. She eyed the windows, the dark sky, her car parked out front like a beacon.
She wondered if this was it, the crisis Rick prepped for. Was this the end of the world? Claire tallied up what she knew: the cell phone network was dead, she guessed the internet too. The radio was gone, maybe television, though she couldn’t be sure.
Black smoke had filled the sky. She could still see it rising, growing like a living thing above her little suburb. It carried the smell of death. She saw the body bags.
There had been an invasion. They had appeared out of nowhere, in the time she was waiting at the vet, using simple road barricades to take over. An image of the seam on the soldiers’ faces came to her and she felt her chest seize. People had complied, they had fled, or they had been gunned down. She saw the little pile of clothes and blood that had been the pickup driver. Her breath came in gasps as the horror rolled over her. People were not in charge anymore. They had lost.
She gulped at the air until she started to see stars.
***
She woke up on the floor. The small windows showed pitch black outside. She frantically patted at her body, her head. No blood, no broken bones. She had been lucky. She couldn’t allow herself to panic, to faint again. A head injury could mean death.
Claire was uninjured, but she was not intact. Loneliness scraped her insides. She wasn’t missing a limb, she was missing four: her children, her husband. How would she keep a sputtering flame of hope alive? She dragged herself to standing, leaning on the kitchen counter. Get busy, Claire. Do something.
There was a pen and paper on the counter and Claire decided to make a list. Lists were a balm for anxiety. She tapped the pen on the pad, but she had no idea what to list. She started instead to doodle, a lifelong habit of keeping her hands busy so her mind could focus.
As a young woman, Claire had meant to be an artist, but like many artists, she became a teacher. A more realistic path, one she could tread from the suburbs while raising three kids. She had guided a generation of children through papier-mâché, pinch pots, and watercolors. Her talent channeled into the kids and it leaked out of her in doodles.
Absentmindedly, she sketched an insect with wings, fluttering across the page. Her little life had unraveled without explanation.
She thought about humans arriving in an untouched forest. Chopping down trees, crushing insect families under shoes and machines. She drew the mirrored helmet. People would not think to explain their intentions to insects, or even to something as obvious as a primate. If the animals fled and found refuge in a remote hunting cabin, so be it. If some slid under boots and tires, that was the price of doing business.
For the first time, Claire wondered if she would ever know what happened to the world. The idea made her feel like she was falling. End of the world stories were stories. There were motivations and reasons and narrative. But what if the world— every life, boring or fantastic, every success, every attempt, every creation— actually ended without a story?
She drew the face of the pickup driver in the greatest detail she could manage. His angry eyes, his belief that things would bend to his will, haunted her. She found herself sketching Oscar’s dash across the road, the gun barrels pointing at her. She had gathered no information, offered no resistance, only a pleading politeness and her driver’s license. Her damn driver’s license. The memory of reaching for her ID at the end of the world humiliated her, it was so ridiculous a gesture.
She replayed the scene at her neighborhood entrance until she made herself sick. The Spaghetti-O’s came up on waves of terror and regret, landing in the sink in a red pile that reminded her of the pickup truck driver.
She sank to the floor and cried. Claire had believed in the rules of the world right up until they evaporated. Had her kids done something similar, meeting their annihilation with manners? Claire pictured her sons— mute, inscrutable boys in too-big bodies, staring at their phones, eating pizza rolls, growing peach fuzz on their lips. They would hardly utter a syllable if there was an adult nearby. She wished they had been more rebellious.
She reached over her head for the paper and pen, pulling them into her lap. She started to draw her youngest son, his eyes, but her hand stopped. If her family was dead she could not go on. She would simply walk into the woods, lay down, and die.
Next to her on the floor, Oscar carefully finished his dinner, leaving the pill, licked clean, on the plate. The white tab mocked her, a symbol of yesterday’s problems.
Into her mental parade of horrors a practical thought made its way. Claire took medication for an auto-immune disease, two shots a month. She was on the second week of her current dose, and the next one was in her purse. Leaving the portrait, she wrote the name of her drug in extravagant letters on the page.
Without that shot, she needn’t worry about raiders or robots, because her body would devour itself before any of them got to her. The illness wouldn’t kill her, not quickly at least, but it would weaken her, stealing the iron out of her blood until she was dizzy and confused. Alone, she would not last. A tear plopped onto the paper.
Could she go to some shattered pharmacy and try to find the drug? She had watched that scene in so many movies. Dirty, bloodied heroes fighting to reach the world’s last stock of antibiotics.
Two shots a month and she had six days— seven?— on the current dose. Then fourteen more. The numbers tumbled in her head. Twenty-one days? She would make it to thirty before she was too lightheaded to stand. She wrote 30 in friendly, bubbly letters, then encircled it with choking vines.
Claire was uninjured, but she was not intact. Loneliness scraped her insides. so good.
paving the way for autoimmune horror, i am innnnnnn
I continue to be fascinated and horrified by this story. I'm on meds myself, and yeah, if something like that happens I probably wouldn't last long. Not fun to think about.