Earth's Survivors, page 138
The north end of the park was her destination and she walked the abandoned pathways and roads, finally finding East Drive and making her way along the darkened blacktop.
In the distance there was a glow over the tops of the trees, and the tops of the buildings. She could pick out individual streetlights farther away. Harlem. And Harlem would be a harder nut to crack.
The breathers in Harlem had closed it off entirely. Abandoned cars blocked the streets. There were shooters everywhere. The dead or dying were dealt with immediately. There was no mercy, no second guessing, dead was dead and dead bought more dead with it. They understood it on their own terms. They could not see it as it truly was. A gift. She had hoped she could get them to see it, but she was sure they would not see it until death introduced it to them. She could smell that fact. It came to her on the wind that blew across the tree tops and dropped down to the cracked pavement where she walked.
She reached the shadows at the edge of the trees and peered out at the split where Lenox Avenue veered away. Quiet, deserted, but not far away she could hear the noise that accompanied the breathers. The smell of fire and smoke hung on the air, igniting a fear within her that she could not suppress. She took the sweeping right hand road and walked quietly along in the shadows to the park entrance. She left the road and entered the tree line, following it towards West 110th Street. She stopped within the trees and looked out at Lenox Avenue where it crossed 110th and headed into Harlem.
On the park side there were buses that closed off the entrance and marched away into the darkness. The buses were empty.
On the other side of West 110th a nearly identical line of buses marched away. The space in between was littered with corpses, burned out cars, skeletal remains still resting in the rusted hulks. Beyond the second row of buses the street lights marched away into Harlem. She could smell the river, whether the Hudson or The East she did not know. The lights and the noise of the breathers drew her attention back to the buses. She scaled a nearby tree and looked over the tops of the buses into the projects and the city beyond.
The streets inside the closed off area were clear for as far as she could see. Some places had been devastated, buildings down, but gangs of people worked there still, clearing the damaged buildings, or what was left. Small trucks patrolled the streets. Machine gun toting men in the back, riding in the open air. Everything she had hoped to see was not there. There was no disorganization of any kind at all. Whoever was in charge in Harlem had the electricity on and the peace kept. No rioting. No bodies littered the streets. If there had been abandoned vehicles they had been cleared. People strolled the streets under the lights, looking as though the world had never changed at all, or had maybe even changed for the better.
Donita watched from her perch in the tree for a few minutes longer and then dropped to the ground. She found the shadows at the edges of the road once more and began her walk back down into the park.
FOUR
The Nation: October 15 Th
To Mike it seemed as though the pounding went on and on.
”Baby... Baby.” Candace from beside him.
“Yeah... Yeah. I'm,” he cocked his head to the sound. The door rattled again as someone pounded on it once more. He swung his feet to the floor and started for the door. “Yeah... Yeah! I'm coming... I'm coming,”
“Baby,” Candace called. “Pants.” His jeans hit his lower legs as he began to turn back toward her. One hand shot downward and caught them before they hit the floor. As he pulled them on his eyes met Candace's own. She shrugged, but her eyes held worry. Good news didn't come pounding on your door in the middle of the night.
Mike opened the door to Bear and Ronnie.
“Hey... Sorry, Mike,” Bear said. Ronnie looked grim.
“It's all good... What... What is it? I mean what's wrong?”
Billy Jingo stepped out of the shadows of the front porch, Pearl with him.
“Something I remembered,” Pearl said quietly. “Something important.”
“Better get Candace too,” Patty said from the thicker shadows.
“Jesus, is everybody here?” Mike asked.
“Yeah... We're all here,” Bob answered. “Better get Candace up too.” Bob stepped into the light. His face was drawn and haggard. “We might just have something for them bastards,” He said quietly. He looked behind him into the darkness.
“What bastards,” Candace asked as she suddenly appeared beside Mike. Her hand slipped into his. “What bastards, Bob.”
'The dead... The dead, Candace.... Pearl thinks... Pearl saw something,” Bob finished. He looked around once more at the completeness of the darkness. “The barn... We'll be at the barn.”
“Right behind you,” Mike said to his back.
“It's not bad news,” Ronnie told him. “Jesus... Jesus, I think it might be good news, Mike.” He began to follow as Mike closed the door and then he and Patty walked with them down to the barn.
~
The lights in the barn seemed excessively bright after the darkness of the valley. People probably were getting used to real darkness all over the world, Mike though. There had always been a glow from cities, some sort of electric light somewhere, but now there was none at all. What had seemed like darkness had only been an illusion.
Everyone appeared half dressed, still hoping for a state of sleep. Mike himself had pulled on the jeans, zipped them up and shoved his feet into his boots. He wore only a cotton T-shirt and the night was cold. Candace handed him a lightweight jacket and he slipped it on. Patty wore a thick robe, bob was dressed, but his feet were clad in slippers. He turned his eyes to the thin young woman at Billy's side. “You have the floor,” Mike told her, unsure what he was about to hear.
Pearl lifted her head from the floor. “I know a few things, but I just didn't know if I could trust it. And I don't know if it's any good to you.” She looked at Billy.
“Just tell them,” Billy said softly.
“So Billy is telling me that he came from Watertown a long while back. I hadn't known that, but then he begins to tell me about the place, and I realize he really has been there, same as I have been.” Her eyes rose to their own. “I was there when it all happened. I was living there before it all happened. I never knew none of you then, but I lived there. I worked downtown... The market there?”
'Hey! We were there after,” Candace said.
“Right after,” Mike agreed.
“Some bad shit happened there,” Candace said. “Some really bad shit... We saw the aftermath of it.”
Pearl nodded and her eyes became shiny as she did. She caught her breath, as it seemed to run out on her words. “I... I was there for that... They took me with them or I might have died with the rest of them.” Her eyes overflowed as she finished.
“Well... Take it slow, girl,” Candace told her. She remembered the bodies handcuffed and thrown into the back of the store area. “Take it slow.”
Pearl drew a deep breath and began. “I was working. It was after the big quake. The power was already out...”
Pearl: Plague Day Two
March 2nd
Grocery King Supermarket:
Watertown, NY: Early Morning
“I don't give a fuck what you think, girl. Get that fuckin' money in the bag and get it in the bag now.” He shifted away, leaning back from Pearl, but with the mirrored sun glasses it was hard for her to tell whether he was still looking at her or away from her. Young, scared, trying to sound tough. She picked up her cash drawer and dumped it into the green plastic garbage bag he held. The ground trembled a little under her feet causing her to sway, and they both paused... Waiting...
There had been earthquakes. A few aftershocks in between the major jolts, and then the power had gone out. This was, Pearl hoped, only a tremor.
It had been the new assistant manager's bright idea to stay open. To be a gathering place for people in the area until someone in charge showed up. It was three A.M. and no one in charge had shown up. Twenty minutes ago three people had walked through the front door: All dressed in military fatigues; all wearing the mirrored sunglasses and some sort of scarves or bandannas tied around their heads and below their noses. Hair, eyes, all the features you could look for and remember were gone. They would probably never get caught, there was nothing to remember. Never mind the fact that the alarms were out, the cops hadn't been seen for hours, and they were robbing the supermarket in the middle of some kind of disaster. Pearl only hoped they made it fast and didn't hurt anyone. The oldsters, her nickname for the older folks that lived in the downtown area, couldn't handle a lot of shock. Already some of them were overly frightened and shaking.
Her eyes swept around to the other two. The one guy seemed slightly heavier through the upper body. But the fatigues were out sized so it was hard to tell. The other had a deep booming voice that he had only used once when they had come into the market, kicked the chocks that held the doors open out of the way, and announced the robbery. None of the three had spoken since then.
There were twenty eight people in the market, mostly the oldsters from the downtown neighborhood who had come to the market area because the lights were still on and there were other people there. The downtown area contained many older buildings that had been converted into housing. Some young couples lived here, but getting into and out of downtown was sometimes too much and before you knew it a face you had gotten used to seeing was gone. The oldsters with their pensions and fixed incomes stayed. Driving, as rarely as they had to do it, meant nothing to them. Crime was usually low: There was a small satellite police station down on the square itself, it wasn't a bad place to live.
A tremble passed through the floor once more; weaker than the last. It felt like a heavy truck passing over a bridge, no more than that, she thought.
Three earthquakes had hit so far, each one stronger than the last. Pearl herself had watched the lights outside of the market dim and then wink out. All of those streetlights that had lit up the sky over Watertown every night for as long as she had been here gone in the wink of an eye. The flat screens that hung above the checkouts had winked out, and the two televisions at the front of the store that were on every hour of every day, blacked out and then came back with snow and static.
Pearl had grown up on a council estate in London. When her mother had died she had come to the United States only to find herself in the Maywood projects on the north side of Watertown. From one pit to another. Just different names, she liked to tell herself. Up until a few weeks ago she had still made the trip back and forth every day, but she had found a place, a small walk-up, not far from the market. It seemed extravagant to have her own space, but living in the downtown area suited her, or had. She didn't know how this was going to change the equation.
The lights ran by generator. The generator was necessary for the meat department at the back of the store. It wouldn't run forever but it was on now, keeping the meat freezers and the cold cases working, and running the low powered emergency lighting system inside the market.
The man that had been in front of her moved down the line to the next register when the shaking stopped. Bag in hand, the other two stood silently at the front of the store, some sort of rifles with clips held in their hands, watching, Pearl supposed, through their mirrored lenses.
The man with the bag had reached the end of the line when a much heavier earthquake hit and things began to tumble from the shelves into the aisles. Above her she watched the ceiling lift from the painted cinder block walls and then slam back down once more. One second she had been looking outside at the massive bare limbs of the oaks that lined the other side of the street, and the next she had been looking at the backside of the corrugated panels that made up the roof of the market. It had happened so fast that she wondered to herself if it had really happened at all.
Her eyes swept quickly around the inside of the market. Most of the oldsters were screaming, cowering where they stood, trying to melt into the floor, but a few were standing stoically; watching parts of the ceiling begin to fall. Pearl held the side of the dead conveyor belt of her checkout lane as the floor rose, and shook. The robbers scrambled to stay on their feet, the stock tipped and tumbled, spilling across the floor.
The looks on some of the oldsters faces said, “I knew this is how it would end,” and Pearl believed in that split second that they really did know all along that the world would come to an end in the Grocery King supermarket in downtown Watertown just like it was right now. They had been children playing in the school yard, young lovers chasing after one another through the tall grass, parents watching their first born go to school on that first day: Pensioners walking to the box to get their check as the little girls that lived next door played hopscotch on the sidewalk; old folks coaxing the cat into the house through the back door, and they had known. They had known all along. Her eyes swiveled back to the front of the market, and that was when the roof at the front of the store collapsed. The robber, the one with the bigger upper body, screamed and jumped back, and Pearl understood then that he was a she. It seemed like a signal to everyone, and a fraction of a second later they were all, oldsters, employees and robbers, running for the back of the store as the ceiling of the market collapsed onto the tops of the aisle shelving.
The doors to the back stock area slammed open and the crowd poured into the rear storage area, coming up against the stacks of boxes and crates and stopping. Just that suddenly the situation had changed. They were no longer running for their lives, they were being herded like cattle by the three and their waving, motioning rifles, holding the doors open, motioning the last stragglers, cut and bleeding, into the area as the shaking stopped. Large clips depended in a curve from those rifles, Pearl noticed. They were in their hands, but they also had other weapons depended upon their backs by straps that looked every bit as capable as the ones they held in their hands. The one with the thicker chest, the one who at least screamed like a woman, kicked the doors shut and they stood, choking and sneezing as the thick clouds of dust swirled and billowed in the emergency lights.
The Parking Lot
The old Chevy began to rock on its springs, lunging first right and then left. It took a harder lunge to the right and then jumped forward and slammed head on into the side of the building.
“Fuck, Calvin. Fuck,” the woman driver screamed. She held a rifle with a long banana clip that slammed into the ceiling. Her finger squeezed the trigger tightly for just a brief second and spat a burst of bright white light and noise, a jagged hole appeared in the roof of the car.
“Bitch! What the fuck?” Calvin screamed as he tried to roll with the shaking car, hanging onto the dashboard. The three in the back added their own comments and in a second the entire car erupted in to cursing and yelling. The ground movement tossed the car once more, picking it up and slamming it sideways into a truck that had slid over three spaces. The screech of grinding metal and breaking glass silenced the screams and yells from the car. The car bounced away from the truck, jiggled from side to side and then settled onto the ground, one tire flat, the nose bent upward.
“Get out... Get out of this motherfucker,” the one called Calvin screamed. Bricks and pieces of concrete block began to tumble from the roof line as the main wall of the market bulged out and the false roof structure that fronted the store titled backwards and tumbled into the store space. A few of the huge glass windows that fronted the market cracked with loud audible clicks: Spider webs running like a bolts of lightning top to bottom, and shooting off to the sides. Huge walls of glass that were now held together only by the aluminum frames they rested in.
”Jesus... Jesus, those bitches will go... I know it,” one of the men that had been in the back seat muttered as he tumbled from the car and staggered away. One tall window groaned, splinters of glass shooting out onto the sidewalk and the front passenger side of the car, and then collapsed in a small pile onto the concrete as if to prove him right. Screams surged out from inside the store, mixing with their own. A thick cloud of dust billowed out through the opening. The glass glittered like gemstones in the sparse light from the interior of the market.
“Out... Out!” Calvin yelled. A small section of brick bonded to concrete block fell over and crushed the nose of the car, pinning it to the ground. Steam erupted from the buried nose of the car and rose into the cold air, mixing with the dust as it did. Calvin skipped backwards, the hard heels of the combat boots he wore getting a good purchase on the asphalt. He fell backwards with the momentum, his hands splaying behind him, immediately cut on the glass and other debris that covered the asphalt. He wrenched himself forward and began to pluck at the pieces embedded in his palms. His eyes rose and swept across the others as his fingers worked. “Who? “ he asked. His quick head count had come up short.
“Rosie,” a thin girl with a shock of kinky pink hair said. The name was picked up by the other two.
Rosie had been in the front with him. She had been the one that had shot the car. She was nowhere to be seen. Calvin stood, dusted his bleeding palms against his fatigues and walked around the edge of the car. Rosie's feet protruded from under the car. Not moving. A pool of spreading blood, seeping past the wheel that rested partway onto her body and out into the lot. He stopped. “Rosie's finished,” he said aloud. He raised his eyes from the pavement. “Better see what's happened inside.” He trotted toward the front entrance with the others, his rifle in his hands, safety off.
The Stock Room
Things moved fast after the doors swung shut. The one that had robbed her pulled off his face mask, young, she had been right. He scrubbed at his pale gray complexion with brown fingers that seemed out of place: Choking on the dust, tears streaming from his reddened eyes. He was too scared, he couldn't be the one running things here.
The one with the thick chest tore off her bandanna and shook her head as if to get some of the dust out of her hair. White-blond hair flew about her face. She bent over a second later and vomited. Pearl smelled it on the air instantly and fought the gag reflex that started in her own throat. A few of the oldsters didn't make it, and the small floor area was covered with sprawled and bent double bodies a second later as more became sick. Pearl kept her eyes on the three. A second later the other two tore off their bandannas and Pearl's heart sank.
