Pete Conrad - Survival of the Sparrows

“This is what I took. Give your father my best.”

“Okay, Mr. Sparrow. Good luck. Oh, and Happy Labor Day!”

Winston wanted to say something to her — anything — that would make everything better. He wanted to tell her about his plan and that she would be welcomed to tuck herself away in their little bunker, but he just couldn’t. She and her family were on their own just as he and May were on their own. Besides, it was far too late to start offering contingency plans. Instead, Winston sighed, “I plum forgot. The same to you, Julie,” rapped on the counter twice, scooped up the box of food, and ambled out the front door. He set the box in the truck’s passenger seat, drove around the rear of the store, and backed the truck through the open chain-link fence to the bags of crushed stone. He filled the bed with twenty fifty-pound bags — a thousand pounds — all the truck could handle, and hoped the half ton of crushed stones would be enough. He closed the chain-link gate behind him and drove back to the main road. Med’s militia faded in Winston’s rearview mirror as he drove the short distance back home. Besides his truck, the streets of Johnsonville were desolate and apocalyptic, yet there was something oddly comforting to Winston about the barrenness of it all.

Winston pulled into the driveway and stopped the truck. Its blurred halogen headlights lit the barn up as he put the truck in park and worried there alone, staring beyond the barn’s thin walls and picturing the tiny room that they prepared to hide in. Damned fools, he thought — ideologues, too egocentric and stubborn not to stop this war from starting in the first place. He detested them all — and wondered why humans had evolved into such abhorrent creatures to think that war and hate actually solved problems. He shook his head and stroked the Cheyenne’s bench seat. The vinyl seat was cold and calming, an old friend who had been there for him for many years. He would have liked to weep, if only momentarily and silently, for the great loss his country and indeed the entire world currently experienced, but he didn’t want to appear feeble in May’s eyes. He shifted the truck back into gear and parked it on the lake side of the barn in an attempt to obscure it from the view of the road. He pulled the box of food from the passenger seat, already forgetting about the powerful .357 magnum hidden behind it.

May was still awake when he marched triumphantly through the back door with the box of food. She was sitting at the kitchen table rummaging through family photos and had gathered a collection of her favorites to take with them into the barn. She didn’t look up when he came in.

“You get what you need?” she asked.

“Yes, Mother. Ol’ George set aside this here box a rations for us.”

He shook the box of Count Chocula in the air and smiled. She looked up just long enough to see what he was holding, and went back to shuffling photos.

“That what we’re gonna call ‘em now, Winston? Rations?”

Winston looked sheepishly at his wife. “We’ll get through this.”

May nodded, but didn’t look up at her husband for fear of breaking down entirely. She only quietly murmured, “I know.”

And right at that moment, Winston was grateful that he could never give her children — that his insides weren’t right, that they didn’t have to worry about any damned children the way George Calef was forced to worry about Julie, or that he was a failure as a father who other women might have left long ago. But May didn’t go, she stayed with Winston despite his inability to procreate — even though she had expressed from nearly the day they first met how much she wanted to be a mother and he be a father to their children. Winston recognized this as the purest, most unadulterated and selfless pure act of love — staying with a man despite his absence of virility. Winston had vowed to keep her safe, and all of this — the apartment, as he called it — was solely for May. Had he been alone in the world, like ol’ Ben Rollins, he might be sitting on Ben’s front porch with him, awaiting the enemy’s arrival, locked and loaded.

But love does what love needs in order to survive.

Winston was eager to complete the barn project and was surprised that May hadn’t woken him when his eyes opened and saw the time on the battery-powered travel clock. Its loud ticking belied its petite frame. It was 7:45 a.m. He sprang out of bed, dressed, found his favorite Rusty Wallace #2 cap, and reveled in the wafting aroma of fresh-brewed coffee as he floated downstairs toward the fragrance.

“Good morning, my love,” May said the same way she had said it a million times before as Winston rounded the corner into the kitchen.

“Good mornin’, dear,” Winston replied, “I’ll have our apartment finished today. We can move the supplies out there by this afternoon.”

Winston kissed May on the crown of her head. She reached back and touched his right shoulder, holding him there for a moment. “Apartment. I like that. It doesn’t sound so… ominous.”

A stale English muffin with warm red raspberry preserves was breakfast. Normally, Winston would have dashed out the back door, coffee and English muffin in hand, to begin his day. Today, however, he felt compelled to linger at the kitchen table, still littered with photos and family memorabilia, to make certain that May remained calm to all that was happening around them.

He sat down in his chair as she spoke. “There’s no telling what they’ll do if they come into this house. I know I can’t save them all, but dammit, Winston…”

Her defensiveness trailed off.

“Make sure you got all a tha Mayor’s photos and my favorite picture of us,” Winston said, defusing May’s reaction.

She nodded. She knew the photo he was referring to.

“That was the first one I found,” she said as she looked at him. May noticed the worried look on his face. “What’s wrong?” she asked.

Winston lied when he said, “nothin’ really. Jes’ wanna get this all done with.”

Truth be told, Winston was deeply concerned over the waste that he and May would generate with even the shortest of stays in the apartment. Even if the PLA marched straight on through Johnsonville, leaving the town undamaged, it would still mean a three- or four-day stay in the apartment. That’s three or four days of food waste, and more importantly, their human waste. Emptied cans could be “washed” with a bit of water and stored inside a Ziploc bag, urine could simply be poured down the rudimentary septic system Winston planned on building this morning, but what would they do with the rest?

After a moment of reflecting on their dilemma, Winston said, “we’re gon’ need more water. Fill anything that closes with a lid with water — coolers, jugs, Tupperware, whatnot. I’ll be outside.”

Winston had tossed the plumbing supplies inside the barn the prior evening after he got home from Calef’s. He left the crushed stones in the truck and was anxious to get the crux of the hard labor out of the way while it was still relatively cool. He immediately started digging a hole — a two-foot square by three-foot deep pit that Winston hoped would be large enough to contain the human waste they were forced to dump into it. Ideally, the entire hole should have been dug directly underneath the barn — there was certainly room, with a twelve-inch crawl space that Amadeus enjoyed to sleep in — but that wasn’t possible, so he dug the hole as far under the barn as he could — on the corner that faced the woods and was nearest to the driveway — with about half of it under the barn, the other half outside of the barn. It took him nearly two hours to dig and fill the hole halfway with the crushed stones. A verily cautious man, Winston carted the excess dirt to the edge of Robin Lake in a wheelbarrow and dumped it into the flowing water, afraid that the fresh digging might arouse suspicion. He cursed his back for causing him so much grief, and yearned for the strong one of his youth when he could have dug and filled that hole in a fraction of the time it took him today.