This topic contains 4 replies, has 2 voices, and was last updated by Cheryl McKinney 7 months, 2 weeks ago.
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When we set out for Dodd and Emma’s compound, my dad said I’d see things a girl my age should never see.
I was fourteen years old and had spent the winter in a little country cabin where Dad and I took refuge during the outbreak. In a week at the hospital before leaving the city, we’d seen how fast the virus was spreading and how quickly it killed. We’d learned things about it before it even had a name - before it broke out in other places and before they shut the airports down. In that sense, I guess we were lucky that Mom was one of the first to get sick. Dad said that if we hadn’t left the city any sooner, we might not have made it out alive.
All I knew about what happened thereafter was what we heard on a small hand-crank radio in the month before the broadcasting stopped. We sat by the fire under the mantle where we’d put Mom’s ashes and listened to the outside world fade into static and then silence. It was a somber kind of silence that lingered between us throughout all the frigid months that followed. We were in mourning.
In late February, I got sick and Dad was afraid I might die. He never said it, but I could see it on his face. I woke up feeling better one morning and found him weeping. “You need to shave,” I told him. The way he looked at me, you would have thought I was my own ghost just passing through to say goodbye. He lifted a tired face from his hands, drug them firmly down his cheeks to wipe a spell away and just said, “Hm?”
“I said, you need to shave. You look like a caveman.”
He smiled and I saw once again, for the first time since Mom left us, the return of some of the light I thought she’d taken with her. That night while I watched him shave in the candlelight, he promised we’d hold out until the spring and then head south to find the compound.
“If something happens to me, I don’t want you to be alone,” he said.
So, we counted the days and as each passed, a feeling of hope grew within me. When I tried to imagine and prepare for what we might see out there, I couldn’t help but think of the good things we could find like a pair of jeans that actually fit me or maybe even a new generator. Secretly, I wished for the luxury of a good book. I’d survived the winter on nothing but a few issues of Better Homes and Gardens and, as suspected, never found use for bathroom makeover tips or even one of the sixty-three ways to get the look I wanted. And music. I missed it so bad.
Dad started beating the sunrise each morning to run with the call of coyotes and check traps. I made coffee and watched from the window as he did pull-ups on the dock. He showed me exercises that he’d learned during basic training - leg lifts, squat thrusts, dive bombers, and mountain climbers. Before long, he could do thirty push-ups with me on his shoulders and his body reclaimed the shape of the Marine that he was.
He put a map of Texas on the wall and plotted courses for the journey to Floresville, a place about thirty miles out from San Antonio. From where we were, it was a little over three-hundred miles by highway, but Dad thought we should stay off the main roads. He guessed we could make it in about three days. On the map, it didn’t look so far to me, but Dad said that Texas was as big as Australia.
“It’s like a whole damn country,” he said. “Aint no telling’ what’s in between.”
He sat against the edge of the dining table, folded his arms, sighed, and then made a clicking sound with his mouth, which I couldn’t quite decipher. Was he was doubting the whole thing? For a moment, I worried he might change his mind, but then he looked at me and raised his eyebrows as if to signal for my thoughts on the matter - whatever matter it was that I was supposed to have guessed.
“It is what it is,” I said.
I was ready.
- This topic was modified 7 months, 2 weeks ago by Cody Burleson.
- This topic was modified 7 months, 2 weeks ago by Cody Burleson.
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Wow! What a start! That’s chapter 1? I can already see a series with a prequel! Love it so far! I’m mainly a nonfiction writer who has never been able to grasp the skill of fiction writing. (I’ve tried and need to seriously work on my skills). But I sure love to read fiction!
I soaked this right in. It went smooth and left me anticipating all that could happen. I especially loved these lines: “It’s like a whole damn country,” he said. “Aint no telling’ what’s in between.”
Amazing that you are writing from the point of view of a teenage girl.I so respect fiction writers for being able to capture the perspective of characters and lay it out in such a realistic way. Love it! Can’t wait to see more Cody.
Feel free to email me if you want feedback about future chapters, just in case I loose track here among so many other posts.
P.S. I’m not pro editor, but I did notice 1 typo in the last paragraph and figured it would be helpful to let you know: “Was he was doubting the whole thing?” - was is written twice.
Keep it coming, Cody!
- Cheryl - Email Me: [email protected]
Blog: https://yourreformation.wordpress.com -
Thanks so much for your kind words of encouragement! It’s a lonely game, this writing. Just getting any sort of feedback to the positive is immensely encouraging. Indeed a challenge to write as a fourteen year old girl - given that I’m a forty-three year old man :-). Thanks for sharing your email and the typo. I will try to keep you posted.
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CHAPTER ONE - SCENE 2
When spring came, we left under the cover of darkness. Dad drove with his chest against the steering wheel and peered beyond the wiper blades through a drizzle of rain.
“We can walk faster than this,” I said. “Why can’t we turn on the headlights?”
“I told you,” he said. “We could get spotted.”
“So, what? Why not get spotted? I want to get spotted. You’re the one who said that if something happened to me, you wouldn’t want me to be alone, so… I don’t get it. Don’t you want to find people?”
“Maybe,” he said. “But if they see us before we see them, they got the high ground.”
“Huh?”
“I’m not keen on meeting no one new.”
“But, why?”
“Cause first off, they could be infected,” he said. “Or, desperate. Desperate people are dangerous.”
“But what if they’re just like us?” I asked. “I mean, what if they’re good?”
Dad slowed the car to a stop. There was a pickup truck ditched on the side of the road ahead. He locked the gear in park.
“Stay in the car,” he said, and then stepped out to inspect the vehicle. He approached it cautiously - turning in all directions to survey the environment. I saw him only briefly in the beats between the wiper blades. He cupped his hands to peer through the window. Startled, he jerked his head away from something he saw through the window. He looked at me to see if I’d seen him, then cupped his hands again to take a second look.
He flipped the gas cover open above the wheel well and stuck his hand inside. The cap was missing, so he learned over to smell for gas. After taking an apprehensive look down both directions of the road, he returned to the car, opened the driver side door, and leaned in to pop the trunk.
“What’d you see?” I asked.
“Stay in the car,” he said.
After digging through the trunk, he returned to the truck with a water hose and threw it on the asphalt beside the truck’s flat tire. After cutting the head off one end of the hose, he fed it down into the gas port and then singled me to roll down my window by spinning his finger in a little circle.
I opened the door and stepped out. The cool rain tickled my skin.
“Get two of the water jugs,” he said, sizing the length of hose required to siphon gas.
I went around to the back of the car, and checked under a brown tarp that he’d laid over the milk jugs. I checked them each quickly, but none were empty; we’d filled them all with water.
The jugs were so heavy, they pulled on my shoulders and straightened my arms like strings. I lugged them back towards Dad. “They’re full of water,” I said. “You want me to pour it out?”
“No, wait,” Dad said, pausing only briefly between quick inhalations on the end of the hose. “Just put ‘em down.”
I set the jugs down, stood behind him, and folded my arms. The drizzle had now covered me and a cool breeze gave me the shivers.
“Stay back,” he said.
I stood on my toes to peer inside and could see the dark mass of a man’s body slumped over towards the passenger seat. Dad turned his head up to look at me and knew that I’d seen it.
He pulled the hose from the truck, grabbed the two jugs of water and headed back to the car. “Claire, C’mon.” he said. “Don’t look at it.”
By the time he’d repacked and closed the trunk, I still hadn’t moved. I was transfixed on the silhouette of this poor man who had died alone on the road with no one to burn or burry him. His grave, as far as I knew, forevermore, was this old pickup truck on the side of a country road in the middle of nowhere.
A quiet stretch of lighting crawled across the sky just above the low hanging clouds and for a moment, I could see the shape of the man’s face. Through the rain-covered windows, I couldn’t see him clearly, but I saw enough to know that his clock stopped in a gasp for life. His teeth protruded from an emaciated face and his fingers curled in the air like the legs of a dying spider. His eyes were sunken into dark shadows.
It was not the man’s emaciated corpse that struck me, but rather, it was the thought of him dying alone there in the cab of that truck. A little native american dream catcher hung from the rearview mirror. A gift, perhaps, from some girlfriend who rode with him in that old truck on a warm summer Sunday with the windows down. Maybe he’d thought of her when he died. Maybe she wore cowboy boots below her Daisy Duke shorts. Absurd that I thought of that, I know.
I don’t know why, but the name that came to me was James. His name was James.
“Get in the car, Claire,” Dad said.
When I got in the car, dad handed me a towel. He waited with his hands on the steering wheel while I dried my arms and face. I could tell that he was searching for words - some kind of fatherly wisdom to add to the moment. But honestly, it wasn’t much to me. I’d already imagined worse and knew there’d be more to come. In a weird sort of way, I was kind of relieved for such a gentle test.
We’d only been on the road for an hour and these were back-country roads - desolate under any circumstance. On our route just ahead was Cisco, a small town with a population of a little more than four-thousand people, under normal circumstances. But these weren’t normal circumstances and James, that poor man in the pickup truck was kind enough to remind us.
“Dad,” I said, urging him to pull the shift and drive on, “I’m not afraid.”
He nodded his head and then pulled the shift into drive. “On to Cisco,” he said. It sounded more like a question than a statement.
“On we go,” I said, pretending to be over and done with the moment. Truth is - that moment has been with me ever since. After Dad released the break and edged forward past the truck, I kept thinking about the man inside.
See, the thing about James that nobody knows is that in spite of his hard faćade, his dip-spitting cowboy bravado - he’s got a really soft heart. He’s just a nice guy who, in spite of his desperate love for one woman, would treat a little girl like me as if I was one. He’d call me ma’am just like he would any other, young or old because that’s the way he was raised. A farm boy.
Maybe his girl was like Curly’s wife in Of Mice and Men, on her way out of town to be a movie star. He couldn’t go with her because he had the farm and the family to tend to. Maybe when they died, he set off to find her. And maybe, she’s still alive out there somewhere in a world where movie are just memories, wishing she never left him.
I felt sorry for James. James in his pickup truck - country boy who loved a girl.
I imagined that before he died and the winter burned his skin, he was handsome. I imagined all kinds of things about James. The way he smiled with just one side of his mouth. They way he took his hat off in the presence of a lady - just like old times. The way he did simple, special little things like pick flowers for his mom on the way back from the feed store. The way he could remember almost every silly joke he read from taffy taffy wrapper. Especially the horse jokes.
What did the guy say to the horse when he walked in the bar?
Why the long face?
James, with his one-sided smile and a twinkle in his wink. He rode with me through all the quiet miles ahead to Cisco and then disappeared in the darkness of my dreams, which as it would turn out, were considerably brighter than reality.
- This reply was modified 7 months, 2 weeks ago by Cody Burleson.
- This reply was modified 7 months, 2 weeks ago by Cody Burleson.
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Good stuff Cody!
I love how you captured the way she is processing the death that she is exposed to. And the way that her dad acts about it is spot-on for a parent who isn’t sure about how to help her to cope with such things but, wants to protect her.
Your use of imagery is great too.That’s the fiction writing skill that I greatly lack. It’s amazing to be able to paint a picture with words.
- Cheryl - Email Me: [email protected]
Blog: https://yourreformation.wordpress.com
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