On the way to my parents’ neighborhood, I’d passed a number of people whose reaction to this… thing… was to go on a rampage. They were howling and running, busting out windows, throwing things at cars, and in general making a terrible disaster even worse. I supposed they hadn’t gotten the message to stay in their homes. I didn’t stop the car but I saw dead bodies – some of which appeared to be in the same condition as Zoni but others seemed to be whole.
There were vehicles sitting wrecked in the streets around which I had to weave. I saw smoke in several places in the distance and heard gunfire, and that made me wonder if there had been an attack. That, as I found out later, was not the case. The smoke was from fires set either accidentally or by someone whose reaction to the calamity was to destroy. So was the gunfire. Not everyone who died that day did so by the direct effects of whatever happened that morning.
I didn’t consider myself lucky to have made it to my parents’ house unscathed, but I suppose I was. Lucky but not fortunate.
I didn’t know what to do and had no idea of whom else to try to reach at the police department, so I called a couple of funeral homes and got no one who could come to the house to collect my parents and Zoni, or tell me what I should do. I sat in silence for a long moment, thinking, and unable to come up with a different solution, I went to my dad’s toolshed and found the garden spade and his old work gloves. It was late afternoon by then, and it was hot, but I went out back and began to dig.
The sun’s scorching rays slowly sank below the horizon, and the day gradually dwindled away to night. I turned on the outside lights and kept shoveling, pausing only to get water. I turned the soft earth, focusing on getting the three openings wide and deep enough. When I reached harder, red clay soil, I went back into the toolshed and locating the mattock, I continued to dig.
It was a grueling – and perhaps foolish – thing to do but with my body and soul infused with fury and grief, there was nothing else around on which to expend it. Something… some unseen atrocity… took the people I loved away from me, and I couldn’t touch whatever it was. So I dug.
Dawn saw me continuing my self-imposed task, and as the sun trekked its way into morning and on toward the noon hour in a bright, cloudless sky, I was finally satisfied with my work. The graves were only about four feet deep and three feet wide, but I managed to get them nearly perfectly squared.
With the day heating up, one by one I carried out the people who raised, loved and took care of me.
Then I retrieved the remains of the loving, beautiful woman with whom I was going have children and spend the rest of my life.
As gently as possible, I laid them into the graves I made for them in my mother’s vegetable garden in the back yard.
I stared down at them, my rage driven energy at last draining away. I tried to say a prayer but I had no words, only hot, silent tears that were at last working their way from somewhere within and washing down my face.
I picked up the shovel and covered them over, then I staggered into the house.
Chapter Five
I STOOD IN THE SHOWER FOR A LONG TIME washing blood, sweat, dirt, and my old life down the drain.
Then, I found my mom’s soothing antibacterial cream and slathered it on hands that blistered in spite of the gloves. I sat on the neatly made bed of my old room and glanced at the clock on my otherwise useless cellphone. One p.m. I was exhausted and needed rest but in spite of that, I was jittery. That wasn’t conducive to sleep no matter how tired I was, so I hunted in the pantry where my mom kept her vitamins and supplements and found her melatonin sleep aids. I stared blurrily at the bottle labeclass="underline" take two .5-milligram tablets at bedtime. I shook out six and downed them then I crawled into bed.
On top of my general exhaustion, six may have been a little much because I didn’t awaken until early the next morning. But, I didn’t care. I dragged into the bathroom and emptied my bladder. Then, feeling the rough two-day stubble on my chin, I reached to pull the cabinet open to search for a razor and caught sight of myself in the mirror. I stared. My eyes were bloodshot and baggy. The dark brown of my irises looked washed out and filmy. That was no more than expected, but what I hadn’t bargained for was my close-cropped, normally off-black hair being dotted with gray.
I’d never believed those old tales of folk going gray overnight but there it was.
I stared for a moment longer, noting that my non-descript medium-brown face sported newly acquired fine lines that spread from my eyes and mouth, walked across my forehead, and down the sides of my face. I looked a lot older than my twenty-five years, almost as old as my fifty-four years old father.
I shrugged and went on with my shave. Life as I’d known it was over. My bride, with whom I should’ve been taking vows in twenty-eight hours or so, lay buried in the back yard. The parents who would’ve been celebrating with us surrounded by family and friends, lay beside her. I didn’t much care how I looked.
After throwing my clothes, sneakers and all, into the washer, I pulled on an old pajama bottom of mine I’d found in a drawer, while I waited for my wash to finish. My dad and I wore about the same sizes though I’m two inches taller than his six-foot frame, but I couldn’t bear to put on anything of his.
I went about cleaning the kitchen, and scrubbing and hosing down the deck all of which I had to do manually since none of my mom’s cleaning ‘bots worked. It was hard to keep my mind away from exactly what I was cleaning up, but I managed to get through it.
Then I spent some time trying to reach my sister Missy and her husband Jon, who’d gone to Jamaica on vacation but should have gotten back… two days before… to attend my wedding. I never got an answer. I began to try phone numbers: members of my extended family and friends, and Zoni’s parents, but got nowhere with those either. Cellphone reception was sporadic so I tried calling landlines – the ones for which I had the numbers – and reached answering messages on a couple, but mainly I got busy signals or that fast-busy that kicks in when all the circuits are tied up. I attempted 911 again but didn’t get anyone.
I turned on the television. It flashed a couple of times but never came on so after my clothes dried, I got dressed and went outside. I knocked on some of the neighbors’ doors. It didn’t take long to discover there was no one left on the street – or no one alive, anyway. I went back to the house and in switching on the small, antique radio my dad kept in the kitchen, I found it worked. I listened intently but the few news reporters and DJs were as much in the dark as I was, and, they kept playing that music put on when a disaster strikes – funeral music I call it – so I turned it off.
I went out and cleaned my car then I spent the rest of the day and the morning of the next day sticking near the phone in hopes someone would call. No one did, so on what would’ve been Zoni’s and my wedding day, I shut the house up and went back to my apartment.
I was relieved that someone had removed all the bodies from the parking lot and taken away the remains of Dave but whoever performed that duty didn’t do any cleaning. The lobby reeked. So did my apartment when I stepped in. The first thing I did was to take the bed mattress down and toss it into the dumpster out back. I wasn’t ever going to sleep in that bed again or even in the bedroom. The couch would be good enough.
Then I rounded up a bucket, detergent, and bleach, and scoured the apartment clean before going down and tackling the lobby. The same as at my parents’ house, the cleaning ‘bots wouldn’t activate, so I found the ancient manual machines kept in the downstairs maintenance closet and vacuumed and scrubbed. I washed down the lobby couch and set it out on the porch to dry but there was still a smell in the air and all of the stains weren’t coming out of the old carpet. I pulled out the big carpet cleaner, loaded it up with sudsy bleach and took about all the color out trying to get rid of the stench, however, the odors lingered.