Page 48 of The End of the World As We Know It

“The dogs all died,” she said. “The people died. Damn cats lived on. Ones that didn’t get eaten, that is.”

“But you survived?”

“I did.”

Turned out nearly the whole town died, and when it was obvious someone had caught the bug, the National Guard, what was left of it, put down the Sickies, as they called them. Gene, the police chief, helped them.

Pretty soon members of the Guard were dying. Most everyone was dying.

“I hid in the clock,” she said.

The town center had a tall tower with a clock in it. It had been built in the thirties and still ticked with little metal animal figures that rode in a circle around the tower. Her father had been the man to take care of it and did so for many years. She knew the tower well and knew there was a hiding place there. Her father kept a room full of stored food, water, and tools. The room was hidden behind a sliding door that looked like part of the wall.

“Dad read a lot of Hardy Boys as a kid,” she said. “He had that room built into the tower in the fifties. He showed it to me as a kid. When he died, I never thought about it much. I just took over his job.”

She hid in there, came out at night and slipped from behind the clock tower, crept down to the creek, where she washed her face and drank water, not worried about germs because she had no choice but to drink. She would then creep into the woods to take care of bathroom matters. She spent time among the trees looking at the moon. Then, well before morning, she would sneak back to the tower.

“I should have shit in a can, but can you imagine the smell in that little room? And I should have stayed in there all the time, but I didn’t. Foolishly, I felt I needed to know what was going on. At night, I would sometimes climb up in the tower and grease the clock and look out the little windows or the clock face at the town.

“It was coming apart out there. People killing one another. People like you and I, immune, gathering together and deciding anyone not immune had to go.”

She explained how they had cookouts in the middle of the street. It got so even those immune to the disease fell to hunger after thestores had been looted of food. The survivors began to form gangs. Gene was head of one of them. When they ran out of dogs and cats, rats and mice, they killed one another for a food source. They had barbecues down there.

“The smell of meat cooking. It made me hungry. I’m ashamed, but it made me hungry.”

The population fought and dwindled. In time, there were only a few visible out there in the street.

Jett did all right until the voluminous food supply in the secret room became less so. Rats had been in the crackers. The canned goods went faster than she expected.

“I thought someone would come, you know? A government agency. But they never did. I got very hungry pretty quick. I slipped out at night and started looking around the town for food, but the place was well plundered. I found a little something now and then. Hunger is what got me in trouble.”

She explained how she had been spotted one night by a roving band led by Gene, who had finally found his spot in the world; ruling over a group of people dumber than he was, but equally cruel.

They wanted her, and not just to rape, but to eat. They caught her and told her how it would work, the way she would first service them, and then would serve as a delectable meal after they fattened her up with whatever they had.

They took her to a room in the courthouse. The place was filled with trash, and the group lived there and ruled over themselves, because the inhabitants of the town, due primarily to the disease, murder, and the cannibalism, were down to just them and her.

The room they put her in was warm and without circulating air. It had one chair and nothing else. They brought a mattress in, and she knew that wasn’t for her comfort. It would have a onetime long-extended use, and then dinner, with her as the main course. They joked about it. They discussed who got what piece when shewas well cooked and the meat ready to drop off the bone. Greg wanted a thigh.

But they messed up. They left her alone for a few minutes. She looked out the window. The room was three stories high, as any building went in Mud Creek, except for the clock tower, which would have measured about four stories.

She could see the street and what one of them had called the barbecue station. It was a big smoker barrel and the fire inside of it had already been started, working its way down to coals. The black smoke chugged out of the smoker pipe. She thought maybe she could break out of the window and jump. They might not have their mattress fun, just dinner if she did that.

Jett had a penny. She discovered it while idly sticking her hand in her pocket. A nervous gesture.

“I remembered that old rhyme about find a penny, pick it up, and all the day you’ll have good luck.”

Jett used the chair to stand on and used the penny as a kind of screwdriver to unscrew an air vent. She pulled herself into it.

It was dead dark in there, but she kept crawling, and after a while, the air vent warped beneath her, then gave way. She crashed through the ceiling and landed on the floor of a large empty room that had once been the DMV.

Chairs, tables, for some reason, they were all gone. She got up as soon as her stunned body let her.

“I limped out of there, and I hadn’t gone far when one of Gene’s men saw me. They came after me. I got down to the creek and ran along that, my leg having lost its limp by then. I managed across the little creek, up a hill, and through some trees. A trail led down to the Sabine, and I found the boat there. The outboard had gas. I got it cranked, and away I went. I had driven a boat a few times, but I was hardly an expert.

“I saw the men, Gene included, onshore. He fired his pistol at me.Fortunately, I was moving fast. I went down the river, found a little cover of sorts, lots of willows hanging off the riverbank. I motored up there among the trees, tied off the boat to a cypress root, and slept on the boat bottom. I had to. I was about to fall over.

“I began to think I had it made. I decided I would try and find a place along the river where I might find food. An abandoned cabin. Anything.