Chapter 13: For Whom the Siren Wails

“OK, an important notice to anyone listening. We’re striking out; searching for supplies or anyone we can meet. If anyone is in the region, we’ll be in Harrisonburg, Virginia tomorrow morning, and we’ll try to be in Charlottesville the next day. If you can pick up this broadcast and are close by, we’d be glad to meet you. Just be careful how you approach us, as we’re likely to be a bit gun-shy. We’ve survived a lot of craziness before the big die-off, so don’t startle us.

We’ll try to be at the main library of James Madison University in Harrisonburg around noon. We aren’t really sure where it is, so we can’t supply specific directions, but we’re hoping it’s clearly marked. If you miss us there, you can try to meet us the next day in Charlottesville at the main library on the University of Virginia campus. I think it’s called Clemons Library, but without an online guide, we’re just guessing. We’ll be there for a while, but we’re not going to wait around for too long.

If you’re in need of anything, come prepared to trade. We have a variety of resources including food, gas, working vehicles, working smart phones and music players loaded with music and instructions on how to survive in the coming months. We also have produce, seeds, medical care and a few animals for trade, though we won’t be bringing those with us. If you need those, we’ll make arrangements to meet later for those items.

Needless to say, these plans are very tentative, since we don’t know what shape these cities are in, or how the roads into and out of them are. If we don’t arrive on schedule, give us some time. As you can imagine, this may be the only time to find other survivors. But bear in mind, anyone listening to this with larceny or malicious intent may be looking for us as well, so if you come we suggest you come armed and prepared for anything. If you are nervous at all, run for it. We can’t assure your safety, and it’s better to live to try again another day than it is to die trying to attend a meeting that may not even happen.

Otherwise, we’ll let you know what we discover once we get back. Obviously, we’ll be off the air for the next few days, though someone will be repeating this message while we’re gone. Good luck, and may God be with you, because otherwise, we really are all alone in this mess.”

“Do we really have to stop and pick up every dead animal we come across?” Debbie asked, making a face as she tossed another couple birds into the back of the dead truck while Greg and David struggled with the body of a deer carcass. “I mean, this is so depressing. I’ve seen enough people die, I really don’t need to be reminded how much death there is all the time.”

“Hey, we’re not picking up every carcass,” David reminded her gently. “If we were, we’d be here for the next ten years. However, it makes sense to pick up those that are big enough to impede traffic. And as long as we’re stopped, it also makes sense to pick up the rest of the critters surrounding it. After all, you pick up a little at a time and soon you’ve got a passable road again.”

“A passable road?” Melissa asked, arching her eyebrow as she tossed a possum into the growing pile in the back of the truck. “Yeah, right, tell that to the cars and trucks we had to edge out of the road.” She had to stop to catch her breath again; despite how much weight she’d lost recently, she still got winded much faster than the others due to her weight.

“I’m guessing a lot of people died when they decided to escape the massive die off in the city,” Greg surmised, as he and David heaved the deer carcass into the back of the truck. “That would explain why there are so many cars with relatively fresh bodies in them.”

“Don’t worry, girls,” David said, “we’ll be back on the road soon enough, but we’ve got to straighten up when we can. Abandoned cars, dead animals or pot holes, all of them will impede people reaching us, and us reaching anyone else. The important thing to consider is establishing trade between survivors. If the winter is as bad as I’m guessing, people are going to be desperate by the time spring comes. We can either trade for what we need and what they want, or we can fight them over it. Take your pick.”

“Don’t take her too seriously,” Monique quietly told David. “She’s just grousing because that’s what teenagers do. You just learn to ignore it and hope they’ll be more talkative once they get it out of their system.”

Debbie stuck her tongue out at Monique for her comment, but Monique responded by tossing a dead owl at her, which caused her to shriek and quickly back away. When Monique laughed, Debbie followed suit, proving that Debbie’s feelings weren’t so much sour as simply being born out of frustration.

“Do you think the kids will be OK while we’re gone?” Monique asked, sounding worried. “I mean, five kids, mostly preteens, with only one recently recovered plague victim to watch over them. You may be expecting a bit much.”

“They’ll be fine,” Alice assured her, speaking for her father as she deftly tied off a bag of small animals and tossed it into the back of the dead truck. “They know this isn’t the world they left behind, and they’ve done without for long enough. I think you’ll find they’ve matured a tremendous amount in the past several weeks. I’d be surprised if you can find a single kid actually acting like a child anymore.”

“OK, we’ve got the area clean enough,” David said as he surveyed their handiwork with a grim smile. “Let’s get back in the cars and we can continue the conversation over the radios,” With more than one sigh of relief, the travelers climbed back into their vehicles and the make-shift caravan started moving once again.

As Melissa had noted, the going was fairly slow. Between bad roads left over from the meteor storm, the crashed cars filled with dead bodies and packed with possessions, and carcasses scattered around, it took a long time to clear passages or drive around the obstructions. Still, they had established a good rhythm and made more progress than they had in the beginning.

“Keep your eyes open along here,” David suggested over the radio during a lull in the ‘Will the kids back home be OK’ debate. “I remember someone who kept buffalo within sight of the highway. Chances are they’re few enough in number to have escaped unscathed, unless their owner decided to kill the whole herd, that is.”

“How do you expect us to take care of buffalo?” Melissa asked doubtfully. “Do we even have the room? After all, they take a hell of a lot of grazing space.”

“The same way we take care of goats and llamas,” he answered as he deftly maneuvered the truck around several more abandoned vehicles, the frame jolting as the wheels rumbled over a particularly deep pothole. “But actually, they’re kind of ideal. They eat grass, so they’ll graze on their own, and if they seem stable enough, we could actually turn them loose, letting them develop herds like they used to have before the white man slaughtered them.”

“Uh, I hate to break it to you, but they only thrived in the western states,” Greg pointed out. “They never thrived in Virginia or West Virginia before.”

“Actually, I’m not so sure they won’t thrive here,” David replied. “They seem to handle cold weather well, and there are plenty of small buffalo farms along the east coast. If they couldn’t survive here, I don’t think they’d have become so popular to raise. Speaking of which,” he added as a sudden thought occurred to him. “we either need to come up with a rancher, or we’ll have to build a barn before winter sets in.”

“We don’t have to muck out the barn, do we?” Debbie’s voice whined over the radio that Melissa had left on.

“Hey, that kind of stuff is going to fall to us kids,” Alice responded with a light, teasing tone. “Luckily I’ve got more essential duties, but I suspect you younger kids who can’t do as much will get most of the grunge duties.”

“Younger kids?” Debbie’s voice went up a full octave as she expressed her outrage, but her tone indicated that she was just as willing to tease back. “But you’re right, you’ve got too many duties as it is, I think you should allow me to remain inside working the radio while you run around shooting any and all bad guys.”

They’d broken everyone up into three vehicles. Mattie rode in David’s truck, affectionately named the ‘infected car’, silently listening to the ongoing radio discussions, content to remain quietly beside David in the passenger seat. Alice was driving the dead truck with Lassie, while Greg, Melissa, Monique took the final vehicle, a military truck hauling the empty horse trailer. Due to space constraints, Debbie and Tom were riding in the back, Tom fretting over his precious equipment while Debbie tried to ignore his insistent prattling. They’d debated taking the Humvee that David had salvaged from the National Guard Armory, but David had felt it may intimidate anyone they approached. He hadn’t wanted to frighten away the very people he was hoping to reach out to. Greg and the others were driving the military deuce-and-a-half because it was the best equipped to carry all of Tom’s equipment and the generators he’d need. Greg had fitted it with a civilian trailer hitch to pull the horse trailer and it was better designed to handle the rough roads.

They’d decided not to take many vehicles figuring they’d pick up some along the way, although they’d briefly considered taking the diesel tanker sitting in David’s front lawn. The fuel in the short, squat tanker alone would have kept the entire UVA science building humming for several weeks—but despite its being built for military transport they hadn’t felt safe driving something that vulnerable over inhospitable roads. Thus they felt it was safer transporting the two portable generators instead.

“Hey, there’s a big truck stop up on the right,” David announced as the group slowly made their way around a bend in the road, and he could decipher the badly battered highway exit sign. “We should check it out. We need to look for any empty trucks we can use to carry supplies back with us, as well as seeing if there’s anything worth salvaging.”

“A rest room wouldn’t hurt either,” Melissa added.

“You should have gone back when we were picking up the bodies,” Alice responded with a laugh. “I’m good for another couple hours.”

“Says the girl whose bladder is two-decades younger than mine,” Melissa shot back with a laugh of her own.

“Actually, if you’re trying to hold it in waiting for a rest stop, you’re going to be sorely disappointed,” David warned. “Without power, basic plumbing doesn’t work. Chances are there won’t be any water in the bathrooms, and even if there is, if you use it, it’ll sit there indefinitely. You’d best do what Alice and the bears used to; do it in the woods. At least there it’s out of the way.

“Well thanks for suggesting that option earlier,” Melissa replied sarcastically, “but I’m also interested in stocking up on any available toilet paper. You guys might be able to get away with just shaking it off, but we ladies appreciate being clean. It’s not just pleasant, but it helps avoid health issues,” she reminded them.

The truck stop was crowded with abandoned trucks. Even from the road they could tell that many contained the bodies of their owners who’d died in their seats. A closer examination of the truck cabs revealed that more had died in their sleeper compartments. The rest of the people had died inside the diner where they’d tried to wait out the sickness, but there was a mother lode of trucks to search through.

The first thing that David and Greg noticed were three fuel trucks; one large gas truck, one smaller propane truck, and another smaller diesel truck that had apparently been sent out when the bigger fuel trucks proved unable to weather the roads.

“We could certainly use those three,” Greg commented. “What should we do with them? Should one of us take the gas tanker back while the rest keep going? After all, we’re certainly going to need the fuel when the gas stations you’ve been syphoning finally run dry.”

“No, we don’t want to split up right now,” David answered. “There are too few of us as it is. If we start splitting off, we won’t have enough people if we run into trouble. We’ll have to leave them, picking them up on the way back. It’s unlikely anyone will take them before then, besides, while the fuel tanker looks impressive, it’s really just a small addition to what we already have stored underground at the various abandoned gas stations.”

“Hey,” Melissa called out from across the parking lot, “I found a refrigeration truck. It’s filled with rotting meat right now, but if we empty it we could potentially use it.”

“Good find. I doubt we’ll need it, but it would make a good item for trade,” David suggested. “We could fill it with gas and offer it as an alternative to in-house refrigeration. Starting the truck for short periods should be enough to keep most things cool enough to last.”

“So do we take it or not? If we are, we’ll need to empty it,” Melissa argued.

David thought about that for a moment. “Go ahead and dump the contents so it has time to air out, but we’ll leave it for now. It’s not a big priority at the moment. I’m thinking of it as a future trade item, meaning we can leave it until we need it.”

“Gotcha boss, I’ll keep looking then,” Melissa said, already heading off to examine more trucks.

“Boss?” David asked Greg in an amused tone.

“Hey, you’re the one with all the ideas,” the former cable repairman replied as he examined another big rig. “Clearly you’ve already thought all of this kind of stuff out in advance. We’re just the skilled labor.”

He jumped down from the cab, placed his hands on his hips and surveyed the truck stop. “I’m surprised there aren’t any survivors here, given how many trucks there are,” Greg wondered aloud.

“Actually, there are a lot of trucks, but there really aren’t that many people,” David reasoned. “Most trucks only had a single driver, and I suspect that anyone who was healthy grabbed an available car and took off. I think the only ones left were already too sick to get out. I doubt these people stuck around to watch over their truck’s contents, seeing as the people who paid them were likely already dead at the time.”

“You realize, most of these things have full loads of fuel and keys either in their ignitions or in the drivers’ pockets,” Alice observed as she approached the pair from having checked out some other trucks. “Why do you think no one drained them or simply drove them off?”

“I suspect it’s because no one drove along this way after the initial trouble, and anyone that did wasn’t really anxious to search dead bodies for keys.” David peered back towards their three vehicles parked on the shoulder, and then back at the truck stop. “I’d guess the vehicles nearest the road have been drained, while the ones further back are still full. You should check back there to see if there are any empty semis. But remember, these bigger rigs are all diesel, so they wouldn’t help anyone looking to top off their tanks.”

“And who’s going to drive it?” Alice yelled back, already weaving her way through the crowded parking lot. “I can make do with a car if I have enough leeway, but I have no clue how to drive a truck.”

“It can’t be that hard to figure out. We’ll have to let the others scout out the road ahead, so we won’t be forced to back up, but given enough time and driving slowly enough, we should do okay. Greg and I can drive them.”

“Hey, I got a truck full of new mattresses,” Debbie yelled, her voice hardly audible due to how far away she was.

“Leave it, that’s another trade item,” David yelled back.

“I’ve got a truck full of packaged dry goods bound for a grocery chain,” Melissa said over the military radios they wore. Even though David had initially insisted they only use them for actual emergencies, the light banter helped raise everyone spirits. The fact that everyone was now scattered over such a large distance proved the wisdom of that decision.

“When we find a decent vehicle to take with us, we’ll fill it partially full with the contents,” he radioed back. “That way we can trade it to anyone who might need it. The rest we’ll pick up later.”

They finally found a suitable vehicle, an empty tractor trailer making a return haul. It was bigger than David had wanted, but he acknowledged he couldn’t expect perfection. Hopefully they could exchange it for something smaller and easier to manage if they stumbled across a U-Haul storefront. They stocked it with a variety of goods. They’d left Tom’s supplies in the military transport, which freed up a lot of room for what David considered ‘trade goods’ including packaged foods, a few mattresses, and anything that anyone wanted to keep for themselves. David also refilled a couple of his fuel cans he carried in the back of his truck with Diesel. It wouldn’t get them far if they ran out, but it was easier locating an abandoned gas station than it was finding available diesel fuel. But he still kept a few filled with gas as yet another ‘trade item’.

Greg and Melissa took the big rig, leaving Monique driving the military transport with the horse trailer with Debbie riding shotgun. Tom, ever the impractical nerd, managed to find a fancy convertible sports car he claimed for himself. He couldn’t carry anything in it, but he was enjoying himself so much that David could hardly complain. Soon they were on their way again.

“Hold on, there it is,” David announced over the radio. “There’s a buffalo standing on the hill to the right. I’m pulling over.”

“We aren’t going to try to take them with us to Harrisonburg, are we?” Greg asked skeptically.

“No, no,” David assured him. “I just want to see how many there are and try to remember the location so we can find it on the way back.”

Once more the caravan pulled over. David slipped out, quickly climbing over the short restraining fence to study them. Greg hesitated confronting the large animals, but Alice didn’t pause before joining her father. Monique, shrugging, followed them in her new role as animal doctor.

“It’s amazing they’re OK,” Monique commented, as they stood examining the huge, hairy beast standing serenely staring at them with a curious gaze as it continued munching on a few strands of grass.

“I don’t think buffalo are raised like cattle,” David explained. “They aren’t shuffled through milking sheds or herded like cattle, they’re more independent and self-sustained. They’re also more resistant to herding than cattle are—thus they’d have been loose when the owners died, and they just went about their business. And since there are so few of them, they weren’t likely to have been infected.”

“Does it really make sense to take them home?” Greg asked finally joining them, the former city boy eyeing the large horned heavily muscled creature dubiously. “I mean, these are large animals that eat and drink a lot and require a large area to roam to support themselves. While you’ve got a fair amount of land, it’s mostly woodland and isn’t really suited for ranching.”

“You’ve got a point,” David admitted. “What do you suggest?”

Greg shrugged. “Simply that we leave them here. If there’re as independent as you say, then they don’t really need our day-to-day attention, right? We can check them, make sure they’re healthy, and then just leave them on their own. We’ll have to visit occasionally and we’ll probably lose a few, but it will stress them less and it won’t cause us that much extra work. Figure on stopping by every now and then to slaughter a single animal every couple of months if we end up needing the meat.”

“What about others stopping and taking them over?” Melissa asked, calling from behind the protective fence where she remained. “We could come back and find that someone’s taken them.”

“And do what?” Greg asked. “Eat them all, take them home with them? They’ve got the same limitations that we do. They’re better off here. If they kill a few, then more power to them. It’s better to keep people going than it is trying to control everything. If someone likes buffalo meat that much, they’re more likely to take care of them.”

“Except they’d be likely to shoot at us if we tried to return,” Alice pointed out.

“Then we trade for what we voluntarily gave up,” Greg argued. “Right now we have no lack of things to trade. By giving people incentives to maintain the animals, they’re more likely to treat them well.” He gazed around at their pasture, noting how neatly they kept the wild grasses and shrugged. “I don’t really see a downside to leaving them here.”

“You’ve got a point,” David replied, realizing he couldn’t have summarized the situation any better himself. “Let’s check and see approximately how many there are and what condition they’re in. Hopefully there’ll be some information on what they need to thrive, though we should probably move them to a different field so they can get some fresh grass.”

“I’m telling you this, I ain’t birthin’ me no breeched buffalo,” Monique warned him. “I don’t trust anything that big not to gore me!”

The buffalo indeed seemed to be doing fairly well, considering the deaths of their former owners. The ranch did in fact have extra feed, so David and Greg shoveled some out, assuming it was intended to augment what they naturally ate, but beyond that they simply left them alone. They also stopped by the rancher’s house, removing the dead bodies. David found some literature on raising buffalo, although he left most of it in the house, assuming that anyone interested in raising them would be better served by having the information than he would.

After the buffalo ranch, they continued on, driving for some time. They were stopped a few times by felled trees, something not uncommon since all the tall pine trees had sickened and died from their own version of the plague. David was prepared, as usual, although the others weren’t. With a grin he pulled out a good sized chain saw and set to work cutting them up. Unfortunately, whenever you work with a chainsaw, you end up spending more time taking care of it than you do actually cutting anything up. So it took a little while to finish the task.

“Look, up there, there’s a bird,” Alice excitedly exclaimed, pointing into the sky at a small dark figure circling some trees overhead.

“Damn,” David marveled, stopping what he was doing to glance skyward as well. “That’s the first one we’ve seen since the great die off. Well, the first live one at least.”