The First Year Read online

  With the last of the day’s light, I mark the atlas pages of the individual states through which I’ll be crossing. Of all of them, Ohio and South Carolina are the biggest. I’ll be traveling Ohio top to bottom, from Toledo to Cincinnati. I’ll be cutting straight across South Carolina, from one edge to the opposite edge. But how big can they really be? They each fit on a map, right?

  The disaster manual gives me a place to start. My list of what I’ll need is on a big notepad on the coffee table. The first aid supplies alone are extensive.

  Spend a few days gathering everything on my list from stores in the neighborhood. The black smoke is getting thicker. The storm that started the fire was the last one to appear. The fire is spreading.

  The living room is full of things like backpacks, sleeping bags, camping stoves and bottles of propane. I sit in the middle of it all and shake my head.

  “This ain’t gonna’ work. ’ll need to find a semi to haul all of this.”

  I make two piles. One contains things that were easy to find; the other, things that eluded me. Piles are what Mom did. Lists. Mom was the organized one. Breakfast in the morning, lunches ready to go, clean laundry (when the water was working), checking homework. Grace used to say Mom was like one of those atomic clocks, accurate down to the microsecond. Grace had meant it as an insult, but I never heard it that way. I pick up the small compass I found in a garage three streets away. That was the same place I found most of the camping supplies. The compass fits snugly in my small hand. I turn it left and right, watch the red arrow maintain its truth. True north. Like Mom.

  “Is this the right thing to do?” For a moment I’m expecting an answer, hope desperately to hear one. I want my mom. Ineed my mom. I can pretend, maybe play the what-if game. And in that way some of Mom’s annoying attention to detail might rub off on me. But Mom was a lot more than lists and plans. At best, all I can be is a poorly-cast sequel. The chaos in the living room, the dog-eared pages of the atlas, Mom would’ve been able to put it all together. Mom is dead. I know that because I buried her in the backyard.

  “It should’ve been me.” The words are a surprise. As they pass over my lips I realize it’s the first time I’ve allowed the thought to enter my brain. It’s dangerous thinking. It’s the kind of thought that will make me curl up in a ball on the floor and never get back up.

  At some point I fall asleep on the sofa, surrounded by my scavenged supplies and with the compass clenched tightly in my hand. I know I’m asleep because I’m dreaming about emptiness — empty houses, empty streets, cities and towns and sports stadiums and subway tunnels and vast, open, empty highways. And somewhere, far away, barely audible to me, there’s the sound of someone singing.

  I wake up crying. I wipe my tears on my sleeve. Stop. Wait. What the hell? I stand still with my sleeve against my cheek. Someone reallyis singing. Whistling.

  I jump off the sofa and run to the living room window. The sun is high. I look up and down the bright street. The whistling is loud. My heart’s racing. Maybe, possibly, there is someone else. Someone alive. Someone not sick. Maybe it’s you.

  It’s a bird. A plump male blue jay is perched on a tree branch outside the window.

  There were no birds. No dogs or cats, no deer wandering into the empty city. The yapping I might or might not have heard aside, the silence has been absolute. It’s only now, with the horrendously beautiful screech of the jay echoing up and down the street, that I grasp how empty it is.

  In time, another jay joins the first. It’s a female, more gray than blue, with the same distinctive beak and sharp tuft of feathers on her head as the male. The female whistles to the male. I wipe my eyes again.

  “Where have you guys been?”

  By my calculations, it’s April. April twenty-seventh. Maybe the twenty-fourth. I’ve been guessing. Regardless, it’s spring. Wherever these birds have been, they’re here now. Which means that life, healthy life, is still going on. Somewhere out there, other birds are singing, too. Maybe another girl is staring out of another window, watching her birds and beginning to believe that, maybe, there might actually be a reason to keep going. It’s you, isn’t it? You’re that girl. You have to be.

  I drink a warm can of soda and continue my process of organizing. Whether it’s the right thing to do or whether I’m supposed to be lying in the ground next to my family, the fact is that I have a plan. And it’s time to go.

  MAY

  Ohio

  What the hell just happened? Stunned. Disoriented. Look up at my reflection in the rearview mirror. Bright red blood spills out of my left nostril. For a second I think I’m watching TV, one of those fire department shows that take place in Chicago or New York. I look down at the inflated airbag on the steering wheel in front of me. It’s splattered with my blood. The world is moving in slow motion. Signals from my brain are taking detours to get to the rest of my body. I guess it can’t be that bad if I recognize that, huh? I smell smoke. I crane my neck to peer across the top of the airbag and through the cracked windshield.

  The car has collided with a thick wooden pole, the kind used to support power lines. The hood of the car is crumpled around the pole, almost as if giving it a hug. Smoke pours out of the exposed engine.

  Slowly it’s starting to come back to me. I did pretty well, considering I’ve never driven a car. I chose one of the smallest cars from the few that were parked along the neighborhood street. The massive black SUV three houses down would’ve allowed me to carry more supplies, but the little blue Kia looked easier to handle. And for awhile it had been. With no other traffic on the road, driving was kind of easy. Once I got used to the flexibility of the gas pedal and the sensitivity of the steering wheel, I began to put some miles between me and Detroit.

  I stood over my family’s graves for a long time this morning. Some sort of wild critter, a raccoon or something bigger, had started digging at the loose dirt. I packed it back down with the shovel.

  “I don’t want to leave you.” I stared at the four mounds of disturbed earth. Tried to remember their faces. Not the horrible, bloated monsters I covered in sheets and dragged one by one down the stairs. Theirrealfaces, the ones that laughed until tears ran down their cheeks. We used to do that, once upon a time. There was Grace’s perpetual sneer, Gabe’s not-quite-there vacancy, Mom’s barely-veiled amusement hidden behind her stern mom look. And Dad, like an oversized little boy, with stars so bright in his eyes I could almost read by their light. Where are those people now? Where did they go? I didn’t burythem. I dragged strangers down the stairs. Those bodies had unrecognizable faces. It was almost like they’d abandoned me. Hmm. Sounding like Grace when I say that. Always the victim.

  Fight back tears and shake my head. That’s just useless selfish thinking. Oh poor me, poor lonely Hannah. My family had the gall to up and die on me without the slightest consideration for how it affected me. Boo-frickin-hoo.

  So I focus on remembering their faces. I’ve been trying to do it without looking at the photograph in my pocket. It’s important to remember them. Not through a picture, but in my own head. Their memory is the only thing that’ll be traveling with me. Their memory is my souvenir of that life to which I can never ever return.

  Leaving them behind was harder than I thought it would be. Long, empty months have passed since they died. What’s the difference between having their empty bodies lying in the backyard or a thousand miles away? Trouble is, thereis a difference. If I focus on it too long, I’ll end up joining them. But I already made my choice, didn’t I?

  The smell of smoke is getting stronger. Shake my head again, try to clear it. The last thing I need now is a concussion. I’ve barely made it into Ohio.

  Try to push the car door open. Won’t budge. A second, stronger tap with my shoulder loosens it up. The door pops open and I tumble out.

  Standing up makes me dizzy. Lean against the blue metal car door, throw up on the highway. There isn’t much in my stomach. What lands on the asphalt looks like frothy wa
ter. Wipe my mouth on the sleeve of my sweatshirt. Throwing up is not a good sign, no way at all. After a few moments, though, I feel steadier and stand up again.

  The car is a lost cause. I know nothing about engines, but figure smoke pouring out of one doesn’t bode well.

  “Shit!” I half-expect to hear Mom’s half-hearted “Hannah!” in response.

  “Mom, I’ve heard worse,” I’d tell her.

  “So have I,” Mom would say. “But I’m not going to hear it from you.”

  I take a look around. I passed through Toledo a while ago, no more than an hour, and almost immediately the landscape became devastatingly rural. Wrack my brain, try to remember the last road sign I saw. Findlay? Lima? Isn’t that in Peru? The highway is surrounded on both sides by empty fields. The only sign I see along the highway tells me I’m on I-75. Yeah, know that already.

  Throwing up has cleared my head enough to realize what a stupid idiot I am. I was doing so well, too. The car was surprisingly easy to drive.Deceptively easy, as it turns out. Driving is kind of boring so I started looking for a CD to put into the car’s player. I got cocky. Took my eyes off the road, hunting through the glove compartment, and by the time I looked up again I was steering into the opposite lane. Instinct made me turn the wheel hard. I was the only car on the road. Driving in the opposite lane wouldn’t matter. I turned the wheel and slammed the brake pedal down hard. The car spun around at least three times that I can remember. And then I don’t remember anything else until I woke up smothered by the airbag.

  The smoke from the engine is getting thicker. Where there’s smoke there’s fire, that’s what Dad always said. I look out again across the field, toward the distant barn or house or whatever it was, and then back to the car. The structure in the distance is the only one that’s visible. I got a later start out of Detroit than I planned. Already the sun has passed its apex and is racing toward sunset. Maybe I can use some of my water to cool down the engine, put out the fire that’s cooking inside. Sleep in the car. Figure things out in the morning. But would anything have changed in the morning? And what if the car catches fire during the night?

  “You sure spend a lot of time worrying,” Dad said. He and I were standing in the backyard, home this time, back in Flint. Dad loved to watch the stars. He could name all the constellations, and often the stars contained in them. Weird names, too, like Beitelgeuse.

  “But it’s possible, isn’t it?” I asked him. My expression must have been particularly earnest, because Dad looked concerned.

  “Anything’s possible, Muskrat,” he said. “But the better way to look at it is to ask what’sprobable. Space is so huge and empty that an asteroid would have to miss all the other zillions and zillions of nothing and somehow find our tiny little blue marble. The chances of an asteroidnot hitting us are almost infinitely greater than one hitting us.”

  I wasn’t much more than nine when we stood that night under the stars, but Dad always spoke to me as if my opinions mattered. He didn’t dismiss my concerns, like most of the other adults in my life. He explained things to me.

  Deep breath. Leaving Detroit seems like a pretty stupid idea. But I’m not going to allow myself that luxury. I already left Detroit. Right or wrong, I’m too far away to head back before nightfall. Not that there’s any real reason to worry about nightfall. I’m not going to wander into a questionable neighborhood. The worst thing that’ll happen is that I’ll get turned around in the dark. Or fall down a hill and break my legs. Or get eaten by rabid wolves. Or zombies.

  Okay, enough of that. If I want to freak herself out, I’m entirely capable of doing so. But stupid fear is just a waste of time. And time isn’t on my side.

  I empty out the trunk and back seat of the small car and set my supplies on the grass beside the highway. If the car is going to catch fire, it’ll be just plain dumb to let all my stuff burn up with it. That’s the kind of thinking that needs to dominate, not wondering where the zombies are. Maybe I passed a motel or a gas station awhile back, within walking distance. I don’t remember. The only structure as far as I can see is the distant farm across the field. Thick groves of distant trees obstruct anything else that might be nearby.

  The shadows have lengthened significantly by the time I pull my heavy backpack over my shoulders. Its weight makes me feel lightheaded, and I fear that I might throw up again. That’s a reasonable fear. Justified. The feeling passes and I start walking across the dry farm field.

  The sun has set behind a thick groves of trees. The twilight is deep enough for require me to switch on my flashlight. The building I saw from the highway is a barn, but not far from it is a large farmhouse. There are no lights on inside. Of course there aren’t. I wonder if there’ll ever come a time when that won’t surprise me.

  The familiar stink of dead bodies gets stronger the closer I get to the farmhouse. I stop walking. Yeah, that’s something I hadn’t thought about.

  People died in their beds. Sometimes on their sofas. I’ve even stumbled across one that died in the bathtub. That body had been particularly gruesome, swollen like a water balloon. Seeing the bodies used to terrify me. Going house-by-house in Detroit, looking first for food and then supplies, there were always dead bodies. When the hospitals closed, there’d been nowhere for people to go. I got used to finding them. A part of my mind convinced me that they were just mannequins. But all of my reconnaissance missions had been just that; I’d had a reasonably stench-free house to come home to.

  The sunset is beginning to paint the sky with a fiery fury. Soon I’ll lose all the light. And mannequins or not, I don’t want to be pulling dead bodies out of a house by moonlight. Call it stupid fear or whatever, but dealing with the dead at night is the thing nightmares are made of. And I’ve got more than enough nightmares already.

  Dealing with the dead. Yeah, that’s about right. Bodies have become a serious inconvenience to me. I’m a far cry from the squeamish little girl who couldn’t even touch earthworms. And how quickly the change happened. Four, five months? Has it only really been that long? Already the world before General Tsao is getting fuzzy. Engines, voices, machinery, music. That’s what I miss the most. Music. The old stuff my parents listened to, the thumping garbage Grace blasted from behind her closed bedroom door. Sometimes the snatches of sound from a passing car. Life used to have a soundtrack. It’s a silent world now. Not even the crickets keep me company. It’s too early for crickets. Will they come back? The blue jays did.

  I turn away from the farmhouse and head to the barn. Between the last blaze of brilliant sunset and my own powerful LED flashlight, I see that the building is fairly new. It’s painted a deep crimson red that looks eerily bright in the flashlight’s beam. I find a door and pull it open. The barn smells like the petting zoo Dad and I visited when I was kid. A raw, sort of greasy meaty stench fills my nose. I’m not sure if it’s animal poop or just the smell of dead animals. No, I don’t smell death. Shine my flashlight through the empty barn. A large set of doors on the opposite side of the barn are wide open. Whatever animals had been inside look like they’ve skipped town. Probably just as well.

  The barn is tall and wide, with empty animal paddocks along the left wall and a partially devoured pile of hay on the right. Above my head, large wooden beams crisscross over a partial second floor. A wooden ladder leads up to the loft space.

  I stand in the doorway listening for any sound. Opening the door and shining my light should have disturbed anything living inside. I still don’t know exactly what I’m expecting to disturb, but the zombies I planted earlier are having a hard time leaving me alone.

  Satisfied that I’m not about to be ambushed by a shuffling hoard of the undead, I walk into the barn. Climb the wooden ladder, which creaks under the combined weight of me and my heavy backpack.

  The loft space is mostly empty. A few old bales of hay are stacked along the far wall. Shovels and rakes and a pick-axe lay discarded on the floor.

  I’m exhausted. It’s been a powerful d
ay. My exhaustion even trumps my hunger, which gnaws at my belly like it’s trying to escape. I pull off my backpack, unroll my sleeping bag and I’m asleep before I know it.

  Cincinnati

  It would’ve been kind of beautiful, if not for the smell. Three days since I left the farm. I’d crashed near Findlay, Ohio. I made that discovery after passing a sign several miles farther down the highway. Ohio is more or less as flat as a pancake. I know that intimately. The landscape doesn’t allow for much else besides thinking.

  I’ve always spent a lot of time in my own head. Reading. Daydreaming. My own mind has comfortable seating and is never crowded. I like being alone, crave it even. I wasn’t antisocial but I always let the world seek me out instead of the other way around. I’m the polar opposite of my siblings. Both Gabe and Grace devoured human contact.

  I woke in the barn freakishly refreshed. Starving, but with a fresh energy I wasn’t expecting. I ate the granola bars and canned fruit in my backpack as I sat airing out my bare feet by hanging over the edge of the loft. A bird was chirping. That seemed like a good sign.

  A quick survey of the farm by daylight gave me a better lay of the land. Two old rocking chairs sat on the front porch of the farmhouse. The whole place looked like something out of a movie, the ideal location for some folksy drama about a big city gal coming home to visit the family she’d left behind. An old brown Ford pickup truck was parked in the long driveway. For a moment I considered looking for the keys. But I had little desire to drive again. My crash scared the shit out of me.

  I made the conscious choice to walk. I could have driven. Still can. Cars are everywhere, parked outside houses and roadside motels, even a few outside empty restaurants. But after I started walking down the highway on foot, I felt a renewed sense of control. It was an unexpected feeling. Walking is hard and it takes me a long time to get anywhere. But I’m in no hurry. That’s a pretty empowering thought.