Remnants: A Record of Our Survival

Chapter Two: Gathering and Searching and Finding Others

Well, hello there again, X-NET! We’ve gone almost a week without the juice. I could have logged on with the battery but, as you’ll learn a little bit later in this post, I used most of my battery power in making an audio recording.

I’ve always enjoyed plugging in and logging on, by the way. It’s like pulling up a digital crab pot—you never know what you might find (hey, maybe Dad’s on to something about that technical birthright stuff)...

But darn it, still no connection to others! I have faith, though, that there are others out there, and that some are maybe even reading what I write here.

Where does that faith come from, you might ask?

Well, we just met another group of survivors. It’s been more than a month since I’ve even seen another soul, and a few weeks since Dad has, but we finally had a real, in-the-flesh encounter!

This happened back in Sandy, four days ago. We’d cleared most of the western end of town, with Dad marking each building off on a checklist he’d been keeping, and we were making our way through what we thought was pretty much an abandoned Elks Lodge. We’d found some stale instant coffee and half a bag of hard cinnamon candy that Billy and I were pretty much salivating over, but that Dad was holding onto for safe keeping.

It was a big place—big enough to have an auditorium that had basketball hoops and racks of metal folding chairs. There was even a stage, and that’s where we found them. They had drawn the curtains, hoping to remain hidden, but it’s pretty much impossible to hide a baby’s cry.

What we found was a young couple (John and Carrie) and their newborn baby and Carrie’s brother, Ben. The baby’s name is Marianne.

Pretty neat, huh?

When the baby started bawling, John immediately stepped out from behind the curtain. He had two pistols, and Dad knelt down slowly and put his shotgun on the ground and his hands in the air. Billy put his revolver down, too, and we did like Dad and raised our hands.

“Are you infected?” John called down at us. “Do you have the blight? Be honest now, or I will cut you down where you stand!”

It wasn’t the usual test, but this wasn’t the usual encounter. John had to keep his distance, and asking us to eat isn’t exactly the first thing on anyone’s mind when the hammers are cocked, if you know what I mean.

“No,” Dad replied. He shook his head slowly from side to side. “We’re clean—I promise. We’ve been drinking from a well and wearing gloves.”

I wiggled my fingers in support of his point; they were sheathed in plastic. We’d been lucky in that regard. Mom had had six boxes of disposables at home—an occupational necessity with some of the labs that she taught—and we wore them whenever we went into Sandy.

John lowered the pistols, and that’s when Ben drew the curtain and we saw poor Carrie and her tiny daughter. Marianne couldn’t have been much more than a few weeks old. Carrie had tears on her cheeks. I can’t imagine how scared she must have been, holding her child like that and never knowing if we were blighted—or if we had come to take her baby girl away.

And that’s how we stumbled across another group of survivors. I don’t mind mentioning it here that we discovered each other at the Elks Lodge, because they’re long gone now. We all walked out of that place together. They were heading east (or were they? ha, ha!), where Carrie thought she might still have some family.

But before they departed, we shared a meal together. Ben’s a bow-hunter, you see, and he had managed to kill a pair of seagulls just a few hours before we showed up. We built a little fire out behind the lodge, too overcome with hunger to care much about whether the blighted might notice the smoke.