" ER/Stand part 14 "
Carter awoke from his dream with his heart racing and his
hands clenched around his sleeping bag. He sat up, noting with
relief that the others were in their own sleeping bags, not
getting up with looks of concern on their faces. I didn't scream,
he thought with relief. It was bad, it seemed like it got worse
every night, and he had been certain towards the end that he had
screamed in terror. But everyone was still asleep, and the night
seemed undisturbed.
He carefully got up, mindful to be quiet. Everyone needed
their rest and just because he was having nightmares, that was no
reason for everyone to be up at three a.m.. He glanced around the
small huddle, his eyes already adjusted to the dark, mentally
taking note of everything. They hadn't bothered with tents yet.
They had stayed in Chicago for another three days, not wanting to
leave unprepared, and feeling more than a little trepidation at
the thought of leaving. It meant that their truck seemed
overstuffed with gear but at least they were prepared. They had
all gotten new clothes and camping gear and everyone had picked
up a gun after Jeanie's incident. Everyone, but Kerry, who had
quietly stated that she didn't think it was a wise move. Carter
had gotten the impression she didn't much care one way or the
other, though his own words had come back to him later. They
couldn't stop her from finding a gun, just like they couldn't
stop Doug from drinking.
He noted that Doug, curled up in his own sleeping bag, had
only killed half the bottle of scotch he'd picked up earlier that
evening. Doug was drinking a lot. Carter understood grief and its
various problems but Doug was starting to concern him. The man
didn't start drinking until they stopped motoring for the day,
but he drank a lot. It didn't make him very pleasant to be around
in the morning, and in the evening he was either jolly or surly.
There was very little in between. Carter found himself conflicted
by it. He certainly understood why Doug was drinking. He had
drunk more than his own fair share of alcohol in the last few
days. It had originally helped take the edge off his emotions,
and on one occasion while still at the house, he had killed a
bottle of schnapps in hopes that it'd hold off the bad dreams he
had been having. He had stopped it when it didn't work. He still
had the bad dreams and he had just ended up with a hangover. He
wondered idly if Doug was using the alcohol to deaden his grief
or as a sleep aid. He was willing to admit that he didn't know,
and he didn't know how to talk to Doug about it. They simply
weren't that close. I had better think of something, he decided.
His eyes fell on Jeanie, who was lying next to Doug. She had
been sniffling over dinner. It had worried all of them, to the
point that they had repeatedly pestered her. She insisted it was
just a cold, that she had picked it up from the crazed car lot
attendant. He doubted it was some sort of late flu, but Jeanie
didn't need any sort of infections, especially while they were
traveling.
Not that they needed to make great time. He felt an almost
irrational urge to keep moving. There had been times during the
last few days where he had been so frustrated with their slow
pace, he had wanted to just speed off down the road. He had to
fight it and constantly remind himself that there was no rush. As
long as they made it to the lodge by September, they were fine.
He had to keep reminding himself of that, that there was no
crisis. Even at the snail pace they were moving, they would be
there before the snow fell. He held on to that thought. He
thought that his anxiety on that issue stemmed from his odd sense
that they weren't safe. He couldn't explain it, but he found
himself hoping that Jeanie felt well enough to travel just
because he wanted to move.
He glanced at Luka and Lucy. They weren't quite sleeping
together, but their sleeping bags were touching. He wasn't quite
sure how he felt about that. Luka seemed like a pretty good guy,
but Lucy was a little young for him. It wasn't his place to
judge, but it worried him just the same. It was too soon and he
worried that Lucy was latching onto the handsome older man as a
sort of safety net. We'll find other people, Carter thought as he
fiddled with his sleeping bag, she might be making a mistake
getting too close so soon. It wouldn't be long before they found
more people and he thought enough of her to hope that she didn't
regret her choice. Luka for his part was treating her like a
younger sister, but Carter could see budding interest in his
eyes. Am I jealous, he asked himself. No, I'm not. Lucy was
attractive but aside from that, she wasn't quite what he was
looking for.
And until they met some more people, he had precious few
women to pick from. Jeanie was nice but HIV positive. She also
had never seemed interested in him and still didn't seem
interested. Lucy was like his sister and Kerry was like his stern
much older sister. It was difficult to see either of them in any
light other than as friends, Then there was Randi who viewed him
as some sort of slow witted drag. Is it such a crime that I never
learned how to steal gas out of underground tanks? Randi had
rolled her eyes at that news and declared that he was mostly
useless in a crisis. There was that, and the fact that out of all
of his companions, he simply didn't know Randi that well. Oh
sure, he knew she'd been in prison but he hadn't know for what.
It bothered him to think that he had worked with Randi for three
years and had hardly known a thing about her. It clearly bothered
her though she hid it with sarcasm. He glanced at her sleeping
form wondering what exactly what she was thinking. It was a
mystery to him.
The next pile of bedding lying on the ground was empty and
Carter felt a sudden wave of concern. Kerry wasn't there. He had
been sitting up, looking around, for almost five minutes. Long
enough for someone, even someone as slow as Kerry, to return from
a bathroom trip. He stood up, and looked around the small
campground. They had picked it because there were no cars or
bodies around. The notion of having to clear motel rooms of
corpses every night had been the primary reason they had gone
with camping out.
He spotted a flashlight beam over by a small group of picnic
tables. Far enough away to not wake anyone, he realized, but not
so far that there was any concern about calling for help if
needed. Maybe one hundred feet. He walked over, his feet
crackling on twigs and fallen leaves. " Kerry?" he called softly,
mindful of the fact that it was the middle of the night, and some
people were able to sleep.
She shined the flashlight into his face. " Carter? Why are
you up?" She moved the light back to the table. He was blinded
for a moment, but as he stepped forward, he could see that she
was writing on a spiral notebook.
" What are you doing?" he asked. He hoped she didn't take
offense. She was touchy even under normal circumstances. Besides,
it wasn't an unreasonable question.
She gestured to the notebook. " I couldn't sleep, so I
decided to write in my journal. What about you?"
" Had a nightmare. Decided there wasn't much point in
tossing and turning." He didn't quite know what else to say. It
wasn't exactly a situation covered in Miss Manners. " I didn't
know you kept a journal."
Kerry shrugged. " I've kept a journal for years. If we
stopped by a computer store, I could get a laptop and show you
most of it. It's all on disk." She tapped the notebook with her
pen. " That's not a terribly practical for travel though, so I
thought I'd do it the old fashioned way." She smiled, a cynical
expression crossing her face. " It's in keeping with my thoughts
anyway."
" What do you mean?" Carter asked. He found himself
intrigued, if not also a little creeped out. It was a little too
dark and late in the night for a profound discussion, and his
nerves were still shook up from his dream. On the other hand,
they were both awake and he knew Kerry to be a fountain of good
sense and intelligent thought when she wasn't acting insane.
Again she shrugged. " Just pondering the future really. Did
you think last year on the Fourth of July that you'd be sitting
on a picnic table in some random campground... because the motels
were full of plague victims? Where do you think you'll be next
year? What'll you be doing? What kind of society are we going to
have? If human nature remains as constant, there's reason to
worry."
" Is it really the Fourth?" The rest of her questions, he
started to think about.
" It was as of midnight." She tapped the journal again. " I
was never that fond of science fiction but I guess I always had
the belief that it had, that things were always going to move
forward. You know, there would be cures for all the major
diseases, we'd all have our own personal air cars and we'd be
living on the moon. That's all... over and done with. At least
for a while." She chuckled suddenly. " You know, the Russians had
three men up in the Mir Space Station when this all started. I
would really hate to be in their shoes."
" Oh god..." That gave Carter a chill.
" In theory, they could return but then they're playing the
odds that they might be immune. Odds are they aren't but
eventually they'll run out of food." Kerry shrugged again. " Ugly
thought isn't it? "
" Very." This isn't helping me feel better, Carter thought
darkly. Trust Kerry to be disturbing.
" Think about where you will be this time next year. Or
twenty years from now." Kerry sounded tired and more concerned
than he had seen her in the last few days. Her medication must be
wearing off, he thought. For a while he had agreed with Kovac
that she was over medicated, but the last couple of days had made
him decide otherwise. It was possible that she had just needed to
get used to it. The fact that she seemed more normal helped ease
his mind on that point. She gestured around the small clearing. "
Think about it. In twenty years this place will be overgrown. A
new wilderness. Societies are going to form, and our little group
is on the ground floor. How do you think that's going to work?"
Carter was struck by the idea. " We'll find more people," he
said after a long moment. They had already talked on that point
as a group. If they ran across fellow survivors that didn't
attack them like the fellow in the car lot, or people that ran
off before they could even stop to call to them.
Kerry nodded along as if his statement was obvious. " We
have to find more people. We don't have enough genetic variety in
this group. Jeanie can't reproduce without spreading HIV so that
leaves three potential couples. Even if each of the women have a
child by each of the men, our descendants would be marrying first
cousins in two generations. That's not really a societal concern
though. Consider this. Any group that forms around us will
obviously have a strong medical base for science, but aside from
that, we're lacking in ability as far as reconstructing our
world. Do you know how to build a car? Raise cows? Make the
liquor that Doug is drowning himself in? " She held up her pen. "
We use these and if we lose one, we just get another but we don't
know how to make more and there's a lot of things that fall into
that category."
Carter was beginning to get an inkling of the direction she
was going. " Even though there's hardly anyone left, after a few
years a lot of the goods in the stores won't be useable. Like
pens. They won't last twenty or so years." I'm really not feeling
better now, he thought. The future, which before had been
indistinct seemed to rise up before his eyes as a sad decline
into primitive lifestyles.
" That's it exactly, John." Kerry said. She hesitated. " I
think... I feel this urge to look for people. I think we'll find
more people but right now, I guess I'm just worrying too much."
" It's not a bad thing." Carter allowed. " Thinking ahead
like that. It might be a lot better than you expect though.
People are going to want to gather around, and we're doctors." He
smiled. " Everyone wants good health care, even now I bet."
" There's probably some poor sap out there right now that
survived the flu but is gamely dying of appendicitis." Kerry said
by way of agreement. " Anyway, I've just been depressing myself
since I couldn't sleep. What about you? You said you had a
nightmare."
He shook his head. " I don't want to talk about it." It had
been violent and scary and while dreams didn't usually affect him
that badly, he didn't want to discuss it. It was dark and the
wind was rustling and his imagination was already running wild. "
What about you? Why couldn't you sleep?"
She looked back at her notebook. He sensed that she felt
awkward. " I fell asleep but then I had a bad dream. I woke up
about twenty minutes before you did."
" You know," he said slowly, " It was not sleeping that made
you act... irrational." It was really just one factor, but he
felt that it had to be said. He felt like a heel saying it, but
it had to be said. He could see by the look in her eyes that his
statement not only had angered her, it had also hurt her
feelings. Her expression immediately became guarded.
" I got five hours of rest. I have been sleeping every
night. " Her tone took on an icy edge. " If you're worrying about
my mental status, don't. I'll be all right. " She gestured back
to the group that was still sleeping. " We should take a break
tomorrow. Jeanie's sick and she could use a day off."
" It's just a cold." He didn't want to take a day off and
Jeanie hadn't been complaining.
" She's HIV positive and it won't be long before her drug
cocktail starts to lose effectiveness. It wouldn't hurt to let
her rest and fight off an infection." Kerry returned to writing
in her notebook. Carter took that as the quiet dismissal it
obviously was. He got up and decided to walk down to the closed
concession stand. I could get a coke, he thought, and wait for
the sun to rise. And, he resigned himself, we'll stay here for
the day. As much as he wanted to hurry, he also knew Jeanie
didn't have much time to begin with. It wouldn't hurt any of them
to take a day to celebrate the Fourth.
Carter awoke from his dream with his heart racing and his
hands clenched around his sleeping bag. He sat up, noting with
relief that the others were in their own sleeping bags, not
getting up with looks of concern on their faces. I didn't scream,
he thought with relief. It was bad, it seemed like it got worse
every night, and he had been certain towards the end that he had
screamed in terror. But everyone was still asleep, and the night
seemed undisturbed.
He carefully got up, mindful to be quiet. Everyone needed
their rest and just because he was having nightmares, that was no
reason for everyone to be up at three a.m.. He glanced around the
small huddle, his eyes already adjusted to the dark, mentally
taking note of everything. They hadn't bothered with tents yet.
They had stayed in Chicago for another three days, not wanting to
leave unprepared, and feeling more than a little trepidation at
the thought of leaving. It meant that their truck seemed
overstuffed with gear but at least they were prepared. They had
all gotten new clothes and camping gear and everyone had picked
up a gun after Jeanie's incident. Everyone, but Kerry, who had
quietly stated that she didn't think it was a wise move. Carter
had gotten the impression she didn't much care one way or the
other, though his own words had come back to him later. They
couldn't stop her from finding a gun, just like they couldn't
stop Doug from drinking.
He noted that Doug, curled up in his own sleeping bag, had
only killed half the bottle of scotch he'd picked up earlier that
evening. Doug was drinking a lot. Carter understood grief and its
various problems but Doug was starting to concern him. The man
didn't start drinking until they stopped motoring for the day,
but he drank a lot. It didn't make him very pleasant to be around
in the morning, and in the evening he was either jolly or surly.
There was very little in between. Carter found himself conflicted
by it. He certainly understood why Doug was drinking. He had
drunk more than his own fair share of alcohol in the last few
days. It had originally helped take the edge off his emotions,
and on one occasion while still at the house, he had killed a
bottle of schnapps in hopes that it'd hold off the bad dreams he
had been having. He had stopped it when it didn't work. He still
had the bad dreams and he had just ended up with a hangover. He
wondered idly if Doug was using the alcohol to deaden his grief
or as a sleep aid. He was willing to admit that he didn't know,
and he didn't know how to talk to Doug about it. They simply
weren't that close. I had better think of something, he decided.
His eyes fell on Jeanie, who was lying next to Doug. She had
been sniffling over dinner. It had worried all of them, to the
point that they had repeatedly pestered her. She insisted it was
just a cold, that she had picked it up from the crazed car lot
attendant. He doubted it was some sort of late flu, but Jeanie
didn't need any sort of infections, especially while they were
traveling.
Not that they needed to make great time. He felt an almost
irrational urge to keep moving. There had been times during the
last few days where he had been so frustrated with their slow
pace, he had wanted to just speed off down the road. He had to
fight it and constantly remind himself that there was no rush. As
long as they made it to the lodge by September, they were fine.
He had to keep reminding himself of that, that there was no
crisis. Even at the snail pace they were moving, they would be
there before the snow fell. He held on to that thought. He
thought that his anxiety on that issue stemmed from his odd sense
that they weren't safe. He couldn't explain it, but he found
himself hoping that Jeanie felt well enough to travel just
because he wanted to move.
He glanced at Luka and Lucy. They weren't quite sleeping
together, but their sleeping bags were touching. He wasn't quite
sure how he felt about that. Luka seemed like a pretty good guy,
but Lucy was a little young for him. It wasn't his place to
judge, but it worried him just the same. It was too soon and he
worried that Lucy was latching onto the handsome older man as a
sort of safety net. We'll find other people, Carter thought as he
fiddled with his sleeping bag, she might be making a mistake
getting too close so soon. It wouldn't be long before they found
more people and he thought enough of her to hope that she didn't
regret her choice. Luka for his part was treating her like a
younger sister, but Carter could see budding interest in his
eyes. Am I jealous, he asked himself. No, I'm not. Lucy was
attractive but aside from that, she wasn't quite what he was
looking for.
And until they met some more people, he had precious few
women to pick from. Jeanie was nice but HIV positive. She also
had never seemed interested in him and still didn't seem
interested. Lucy was like his sister and Kerry was like his stern
much older sister. It was difficult to see either of them in any
light other than as friends, Then there was Randi who viewed him
as some sort of slow witted drag. Is it such a crime that I never
learned how to steal gas out of underground tanks? Randi had
rolled her eyes at that news and declared that he was mostly
useless in a crisis. There was that, and the fact that out of all
of his companions, he simply didn't know Randi that well. Oh
sure, he knew she'd been in prison but he hadn't know for what.
It bothered him to think that he had worked with Randi for three
years and had hardly known a thing about her. It clearly bothered
her though she hid it with sarcasm. He glanced at her sleeping
form wondering what exactly what she was thinking. It was a
mystery to him.
The next pile of bedding lying on the ground was empty and
Carter felt a sudden wave of concern. Kerry wasn't there. He had
been sitting up, looking around, for almost five minutes. Long
enough for someone, even someone as slow as Kerry, to return from
a bathroom trip. He stood up, and looked around the small
campground. They had picked it because there were no cars or
bodies around. The notion of having to clear motel rooms of
corpses every night had been the primary reason they had gone
with camping out.
He spotted a flashlight beam over by a small group of picnic
tables. Far enough away to not wake anyone, he realized, but not
so far that there was any concern about calling for help if
needed. Maybe one hundred feet. He walked over, his feet
crackling on twigs and fallen leaves. " Kerry?" he called softly,
mindful of the fact that it was the middle of the night, and some
people were able to sleep.
She shined the flashlight into his face. " Carter? Why are
you up?" She moved the light back to the table. He was blinded
for a moment, but as he stepped forward, he could see that she
was writing on a spiral notebook.
" What are you doing?" he asked. He hoped she didn't take
offense. She was touchy even under normal circumstances. Besides,
it wasn't an unreasonable question.
She gestured to the notebook. " I couldn't sleep, so I
decided to write in my journal. What about you?"
" Had a nightmare. Decided there wasn't much point in
tossing and turning." He didn't quite know what else to say. It
wasn't exactly a situation covered in Miss Manners. " I didn't
know you kept a journal."
Kerry shrugged. " I've kept a journal for years. If we
stopped by a computer store, I could get a laptop and show you
most of it. It's all on disk." She tapped the notebook with her
pen. " That's not a terribly practical for travel though, so I
thought I'd do it the old fashioned way." She smiled, a cynical
expression crossing her face. " It's in keeping with my thoughts
anyway."
" What do you mean?" Carter asked. He found himself
intrigued, if not also a little creeped out. It was a little too
dark and late in the night for a profound discussion, and his
nerves were still shook up from his dream. On the other hand,
they were both awake and he knew Kerry to be a fountain of good
sense and intelligent thought when she wasn't acting insane.
Again she shrugged. " Just pondering the future really. Did
you think last year on the Fourth of July that you'd be sitting
on a picnic table in some random campground... because the motels
were full of plague victims? Where do you think you'll be next
year? What'll you be doing? What kind of society are we going to
have? If human nature remains as constant, there's reason to
worry."
" Is it really the Fourth?" The rest of her questions, he
started to think about.
" It was as of midnight." She tapped the journal again. " I
was never that fond of science fiction but I guess I always had
the belief that it had, that things were always going to move
forward. You know, there would be cures for all the major
diseases, we'd all have our own personal air cars and we'd be
living on the moon. That's all... over and done with. At least
for a while." She chuckled suddenly. " You know, the Russians had
three men up in the Mir Space Station when this all started. I
would really hate to be in their shoes."
" Oh god..." That gave Carter a chill.
" In theory, they could return but then they're playing the
odds that they might be immune. Odds are they aren't but
eventually they'll run out of food." Kerry shrugged again. " Ugly
thought isn't it? "
" Very." This isn't helping me feel better, Carter thought
darkly. Trust Kerry to be disturbing.
" Think about where you will be this time next year. Or
twenty years from now." Kerry sounded tired and more concerned
than he had seen her in the last few days. Her medication must be
wearing off, he thought. For a while he had agreed with Kovac
that she was over medicated, but the last couple of days had made
him decide otherwise. It was possible that she had just needed to
get used to it. The fact that she seemed more normal helped ease
his mind on that point. She gestured around the small clearing. "
Think about it. In twenty years this place will be overgrown. A
new wilderness. Societies are going to form, and our little group
is on the ground floor. How do you think that's going to work?"
Carter was struck by the idea. " We'll find more people," he
said after a long moment. They had already talked on that point
as a group. If they ran across fellow survivors that didn't
attack them like the fellow in the car lot, or people that ran
off before they could even stop to call to them.
Kerry nodded along as if his statement was obvious. " We
have to find more people. We don't have enough genetic variety in
this group. Jeanie can't reproduce without spreading HIV so that
leaves three potential couples. Even if each of the women have a
child by each of the men, our descendants would be marrying first
cousins in two generations. That's not really a societal concern
though. Consider this. Any group that forms around us will
obviously have a strong medical base for science, but aside from
that, we're lacking in ability as far as reconstructing our
world. Do you know how to build a car? Raise cows? Make the
liquor that Doug is drowning himself in? " She held up her pen. "
We use these and if we lose one, we just get another but we don't
know how to make more and there's a lot of things that fall into
that category."
Carter was beginning to get an inkling of the direction she
was going. " Even though there's hardly anyone left, after a few
years a lot of the goods in the stores won't be useable. Like
pens. They won't last twenty or so years." I'm really not feeling
better now, he thought. The future, which before had been
indistinct seemed to rise up before his eyes as a sad decline
into primitive lifestyles.
" That's it exactly, John." Kerry said. She hesitated. " I
think... I feel this urge to look for people. I think we'll find
more people but right now, I guess I'm just worrying too much."
" It's not a bad thing." Carter allowed. " Thinking ahead
like that. It might be a lot better than you expect though.
People are going to want to gather around, and we're doctors." He
smiled. " Everyone wants good health care, even now I bet."
" There's probably some poor sap out there right now that
survived the flu but is gamely dying of appendicitis." Kerry said
by way of agreement. " Anyway, I've just been depressing myself
since I couldn't sleep. What about you? You said you had a
nightmare."
He shook his head. " I don't want to talk about it." It had
been violent and scary and while dreams didn't usually affect him
that badly, he didn't want to discuss it. It was dark and the
wind was rustling and his imagination was already running wild. "
What about you? Why couldn't you sleep?"
She looked back at her notebook. He sensed that she felt
awkward. " I fell asleep but then I had a bad dream. I woke up
about twenty minutes before you did."
" You know," he said slowly, " It was not sleeping that made
you act... irrational." It was really just one factor, but he
felt that it had to be said. He felt like a heel saying it, but
it had to be said. He could see by the look in her eyes that his
statement not only had angered her, it had also hurt her
feelings. Her expression immediately became guarded.
" I got five hours of rest. I have been sleeping every
night. " Her tone took on an icy edge. " If you're worrying about
my mental status, don't. I'll be all right. " She gestured back
to the group that was still sleeping. " We should take a break
tomorrow. Jeanie's sick and she could use a day off."
" It's just a cold." He didn't want to take a day off and
Jeanie hadn't been complaining.
" She's HIV positive and it won't be long before her drug
cocktail starts to lose effectiveness. It wouldn't hurt to let
her rest and fight off an infection." Kerry returned to writing
in her notebook. Carter took that as the quiet dismissal it
obviously was. He got up and decided to walk down to the closed
concession stand. I could get a coke, he thought, and wait for
the sun to rise. And, he resigned himself, we'll stay here for
the day. As much as he wanted to hurry, he also knew Jeanie
didn't have much time to begin with. It wouldn't hurt any of them
to take a day to celebrate the Fourth.