Catastropolis

Chapter 5

 I leave Jo home with Jack and take the van into town. It isn’t a town, really, just the businesses that grew up around that exit off I-96. It is the first time I’ve been there since before Dad left, and it doesn’t match up at all to my memory of it. The buildings are the same, though being unlit they look corpse-like now. What strikes me hardest is the stillness. The intersection at Jolly and Okemos roads had been as busy as any I’d ever seen, and all the time. I stop the car right under the light and look west, then north, then east. The wide, straight roads are empty as far as my eyes can see. There is a car here and there in the parking lots. A white SUV is still parked next to a pump at the Sunoco station. The driver’s door is open and a booted leg hangs beneath. But the roads are desolate, and the sight makes me feel that way too.

I drive the two miles down Okemos road to the library. The doors are locked, so I walk around the building pushing at windows and the big garage doors in back. It is thoroughly locked.

I saw a show once on some cable channel about what would happen to our cities if humans are wiped out. I remember being amazed at how quick the wild would take things over. A broken window lets seeds and a few critters in, and before long you’ve got a jungle where once was a living room. We believe most of what we heard on TV, so we’re careful to keep houses buttoned up. We look for keys or push open windows, and when neither works we go on to the next house. There will come a time when we need to break in, but we haven’t arrived there yet.

There is no next library here, so I pick up a landscape stone and pitch it through one of the tall, narrow front windows. It is darker than dark, but that’s no matter. After months of exploring houses, we’ve all gotten into the habit of carrying lights or glow sticks. I carry a small mag light. At the front I grab a basket then go straight to the non-fiction section. I walk the aisles quickly, scanning over titles until I find something medical sounding. I’m not sure which books I left behind or most of what I took, but I can give the title of one of them because I can see it now on a shelf near me. Where There Is No Doctor. Next to it sits Weed Garden: A Field Guide to Edible Plants. Taken together the two books have been for us as Squanto to the pilgrims. I slip back out through the window, then place one of the bigger shards of glass in the opening. I’ll come back when I can board it over. Of all the places in town, the library seems the one to preserve as long as possible.

On the way back I’m sidetracked when I see a girl running down the sidewalk in front of 7-11. I have the same feeling of adrenalin that I’d get spotting a deer in our yard, or a raccoon on the back porch. She sees me too and is angling off the walk and into the road, her arms waving wild. I stop.

“Hi,” I say through the opened window. She is younger than me by a couple years, Jack’s age probably. And though she’s dressed in nice clothes, they’re dirty. Her hair hangs down in flat, greasy strips that frame a dark-skinned face, almond-shaped brown eyes. I think to myself she was once pretty.

“Are you nice?” she asks, breathless.

Just then I hear a bang from behind her. She doesn’t look back, and I don’t answer, just stare past her to the 7-11.

“I asked if you were nice,” she says.

Another bang.

“What is that?” I ask.

“Just boys shootin bottles,” she answers.

I catch the sight of something small rising up in the air behind the store. There is another bang and I watch it fall back to earth unharmed.

“What do you mean am I nice?”

“Some kids ain’t nice around here, and I want a ride home.”

“Like those kids?” I nod toward the store.

“Them?” she laughs. “They’re nothin but a bunch of kindergartners.”

“Shooting guns?”

She shrugs. “So are you nice, and will you drive me home?”

“Where do you live?”

“Just down Jolly.” She turns and faces east as she says it.

“Not far? My brother’s hurt and I need to get back.”

“Not far,” she says then runs to the passenger side.

We head east down Jolly. As we pass the 7­-11, I can see four or five kids looking up at another thrown bottle. But when they hear me, they all swing around, including the shooter. He takes aim at me then raises his gun and fires over the van. The rest erupt in laughter and shouts of some kind of triumph. I roll the window up.

“That can’t end good,” I say.

“They’re harmless enough,” she says.

“You’re the first person I’ve seen since…since everything. Other than Jack and Jo I mean.”

“You ain’t been far then,” she says “I can’t get far enough away from the people around here. See ‘em too much.”

I notice the office buildings along both sides of the road have most of the windows broken out. “The boys back there do that? Broke those windows?”

“Not them. They wouldn’t be caught dead there. You see the paint?” She points through my window. On the brick wall of a bank, a white circle with a crude bird at its center is spray painted between two broken windows.

“What is it?”

“The Westgates. It’s their sign. All the buildings along this stretch, both sides, belong to the Westgates.”

“What do you mean belongs? It’s nobody’s now.”

“It’s nobody’s, so it’s whoever takes it—first find, right?—and the Westgates have taken everything in this part of Okemos.”

“Why are they called that?”

“It’s where they live. Westgate subdivision.”

“And what happens if someone else goes in? If someone goes into that pharmacy looking for medicine, what will the… West-gates do to stop them?”

She doesn’t answer for a moment then turns to me and says, “They might shoot em.” She pulls the sleeve of her coat up then holds her arm out. She has a tattoo on her wrist, the same symbol as on the bank. “Or they might just take em, like they do the buildings.”

“Take them?” I ask.

“Here’s my house.” She goes for the door before I am stopped, so I have to slam on the brakes. She says thanks, jumps out, and runs to the side of the road, but there is no house here, only a stubbled corn field and woods beyond that. I roll down her window to yell, but she stops and looks back at me. I listen instead.

“I hope your brother’s ok,” she yells through cupped hands and then takes off running through the field. I look past her and search out the point she is aiming at. There is nothing there but a deer blind up on stilts at the field’s edge.

The thought of Jack and what I’ll have to do when I get home nags at me, so I don’t see where she ends up. Not right then anyway.