Rubble and Ruin (Book 1): Welcome to the End Read online

  “Haven’t you already read that one?” Walter asks as he walks back to our circle. He’s dressed the rabbits and put them on the spit he’s cobbled together from things he found on the fairgrounds.

  “It’s good,” Caroline says, never pulling herself from the pages.

  Walter gets the rabbits positioned above the fire. We take turns spinning the spit, and the meat is soon roasting. It’s smelling delicious, and we make meaningless conversation while we wait to eat better than we have in a couple of weeks.

  The fire’s hot, and we are impatient so it takes less than an hour for us to get the rabbits cooked and cut up. Other than some repeated thanks to J.R. for bringing the meat, we eat in silence. Everything’s gone in just a few minutes. It’s amazing how quickly manners and decorum get tossed aside when the world falls apart around you. I look around the fire. Everyone’s cheeks and chins shine with the fatty leave-behinds of a meal hastily eaten.

  We are all sitting fat and happy when a wailer cries out. Then another. And another. We wait for the choir to really start singing. Get a couple of different voices talking all at once and they can all get riled up and start screaming. But it doesn’t happen. It’s quiet for another few minutes, then Maggie announces that she’s going to bed.

  It feels late, but no one really knows what time it is. Maggie says: “I’ve got an early morning. She smiles like she does every night when she makes that joke. We all tell her to sleep well. Caroline dismisses herself a few minutes later. J.R. just walks away without saying anything. And since we don’t know where in camp Britt and Bethany are, it’s just me and Walter around the fire.

  “The natives seem restless tonight,” I say.

  He looks out into the dark. “They surely do. Wonder what has them so worked up.”

  “Think they are worked up, or are things changing?”

  “I hope it’s the former, but I fear it’s the latter.”

  “Me too.” I nod. “Me too.”

  “Go to bed,” Walter says. “I’ve got this tonight.”

  “You sure? I don’t mind taking the first go.”

  Walter shakes me off and pulls the shotgun that’s been sitting on the ground next to him into his lap. “Just come relieve me before morning.”

  “Deal.” I stand and step behind my chair. I push. The casters squeak and a chorus of wailers call out. I leave the chair next to Walter.

  “Yours for the night,” I tell him and pat the chair’s seat back with an open palm. “If you want it.”

  FOUR

  Caroline approaches me as I’m putting stuff into my pack. I was up before dawn to relieve Walter only to find him sleeping hard in the chair.

  The sun is up now, but the clouds are only letting a bit of its light break through. These clouds aren’t really clouds at all. They’re dust kicked into the atmosphere when the rocks made their impact. We all keep waiting for them to dissipate, for it all to fall back to Earth in a storm of rock and gravel and dirt. It hasn’t yet, but it will. First good rain, I’ve predicted, will kick start it.

  “Where you headed?” Caroline asks. I’m finishing packing my pack, dropping a flashlight onto the top in case my trip takes longer than expected.

  “To my apartment,” I say as I cinch the top of the bag closed.

  “Need company?”

  “You want to walk all that way?”

  “It’s something to do.”

  “That bored?”

  “Well,” she says, “I’ve ridden all the rides here. I’ve won all the games.”

  “Shut up,” I tell her. “If your mom is OK with it and you can get your pack together in time, you’re welcome to come. But it’s not going to be much more exciting than staying here.”

  I’ve grown tired of the clothes I’ve got on. I’ve been back to my apartment one other time since the collapse. I grabbed a handful of things — a few shirts, some pants, a couple personal things. But I need more. Everything is starting to stink. Plus I have other gear that I want to grab that could be useful. Travel writers, at least the kind I was, have lots of camping equipment. Why I didn’t think to get it sooner is a little puzzling to me. I don’t think I ever thought I’d need to set up house with it, but here we are.

  Caroline’s eyes light up. “Don’t. Leave.”

  I make no promises and give her five minutes before I slowly start walking to the entrance to Fair Park that we all are using, one that makes the Texas Star the focal point of the whole grounds. Now, with all of the trees torn apart and knocked over and the museum buildings nearer the entrance all destroyed, the Ferris wheel is spotlighted even more.

  My walk to the exit is slow and methodical. The truth is, I wouldn’t mind the company, and Caroline is pretty good company. Quick footsteps approach from behind me.

  “Mac Attack! Wait up!” she calls out. I turn, and she’s trying to shrug her pack more securely onto her shoulders. Her machete is in her right hand.

  “Really?” I gesture to the machete.

  “What? I’m being careful.” She drops into a squat position and puts the machete out in front of her. Her eyes squint as she struggles to find a look of intimidation.

  “Let’s go, ninja warrior.” I pick up my pace. “Put that in your pack. Let’s pray we don’t need to get it out again.”

  We head down Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard. It’s a six lane street with a grass median dividing the middle. We are staying on the grass. One thing you learn quickly is keep to the middle. Keep a nice cushion of open space on either side of you when you can. Easier to see things coming. Sure, it’s daytime now. Wailers aren’t going to be out. In theory. But better safe than sorry.

  “What are you going back for?” Caroline asks.

  “Stuff.”

  “No kidding? Because I thought maybe it was for things.”

  “I’ve got some more clothes that I want to grab. And there’s some camping gear I want. You’re carrying the stove.”

  “I am, am I?”

  “You can go back.”

  “I guess I’m carrying a stove.”

  Caroline picks a rock up off the street and flings it far out in front of us. She has a good arm. The rock skips across the road and bounces into a mailbox. The ping of metal rings, and we wait for something else to squeal in response, but nothing comes.

  “You have camping gear? Stuff worth going back for? Like a tent? A sleeping bag?”

  “Well,” I tell her, “there’s a stove.”

  “Yeah, yeah. But besides that.”

  “The usual. A tent. Some compact gear that can be stowed in a pack.”

  Caroline drops off the curb and walks down the middle of Martin Luther King. “Why do you have it all? You some kind of outdoorsman?”

  “Something like that.” Most of the buildings lining the side of the street have been taken out. “I was a travel writer for a bit.”

  She’s treating the divider lines as a balance beam, placing heel to toe with her arms shot out straight from her sides. “For magazines and stuff?”

  “Mostly, yeah.”

  Caroline jogs back to the median and takes a spot walking next to me, although her attention is elsewhere. She keeps looking off into the neighborhood. She senses something, and I’m trying to tune into her channel.

  “Where’d you go?” she asks. “They ever send you any place fun?”

  “Europe. South America. Wherever someone paid me to go I went. I’d backpack around and write about my trip. The people I’d find. The things I’d see.”

  “The people?”

  “People are fascinating.”

  “I guess,” she says then pauses. “What would you write about me?”

  “Oh, I don’t want to play that game.”

  “Come on. I won’t get my feelings hurt. I’m big enough to handle it.”

  Fair Park is a mile behind us. The Texas Star just a small spot in the distance. We get to what should be highway and overpasses, but it’s all rubble and ruin now -- piles high that are diffi
cult to negotiate.

  I give Caroline a hand up onto the broken concrete. Rebar pokes up like weeds that have forced their way through the sidewalk. She takes cautious steps up and over the fallen overpasses. Her movements are deliberate. Purposeful. I follow just behind.

  I’m reminded for a moment of Europe. Not if I look up and across this beaten landscape, of course. Then I’m back in the middle of a tattered Dallas trying to make sense of a world that’s suddenly confusing. But if I keep my head down and concentrate on where I’ll put my next step, I’m back in Romania hiking through the mountains and making mental notes about the storm clouds overhead that threaten to pull us from our adventure.

  Caroline is getting more confident. These piles are sturdy. They fell hard. The boulders of poured concrete planted themselves on top of each other with such force that they aren’t moving anywhere. She’s bouncing up the piles now. Jumping down the opposite sides, and her confidence has her in the mood to talk. She repeats the question that I was hoping she’d forgotten.

  “So, Mister Writer, how would you describe me?”

  I hesitate before answering. I slow my steps, faking a lack of certainty about where to move next. Step right. Pause. Step left. She calls me on it.

  “Come on, chicken. Just answer. You aren’t going to hurt my feelings.”

  I jump from the top of a pile and land hard, flat footed next to her. The smack of my boots hitting the ground echoes through our little canyon.

  “She’s a plain girl, but plain in all the best ways. Quietly confident. Smart. Funny. Capable. She moves around unaware of the spell she casts. She pulls people to her like a magnet, but they stay in her orbit by choice.”

  I keep going, but she stops me.

  “Jeezo, Mac. You don’t have to lie.”

  “It’s not a lie. You asked.”

  We traverse two more piles in silence. Watching Caroline in this apocalyptic playground reminds me just how young she really is. She’s like a little kid here. She’s relaxed. She’s having fun.

  Meanwhile, my age is showing. I’m cautious, and, with all this climbing, I’m sore. This isn’t fun, but it’s necessary. There are things at my apartment that I wish I hadn’t left behind. I’d always planned on going to get them sometime. But with our little adventure the other night and with the activity that J.R. described, sometime needed to be sooner rather than later.

  Most of what I want is camping gear. It could all make life back at camp easier. Some of it, though, is personal. I’d love a fresh shirt or underwear, obviously. There are a few pictures that I want for purely sentimental reasons. And nick nacks from my travels that I need to see again. I want to bring them back with me and place them around my bedroll. Personalize the space. Make it home, as much as I can.

  Caroline is a few dozen feet ahead of me. She turns and shouts: “Your writing life sounds pretty great. Why would you leave that to come to a place like Dallas?”

  She stops walking, and I quickly catch up. We pass the final couple stacks of rubble and step out into an open area that used to be the Farmers Market. A beaten and broken skyline stretches in front of us. I swing my arms out in front of me like some game show hostess presenting a car and say: “You mean why’d I give up a life on the road for all of this?”

  “Yes, Vanna.”

  The eerie silence of a dead downtown has returned. It’s the afternoon now. The sun should be directly above us. Instead it’s just a bright spot in the inky-smudge sky. The buildings here on the edges of downtown are low, the foothills before you get to the skyscraper mountains.

  “I was tired,” I say. “Tired of not having a life. I don’t have a lot of friends because how can you when you’re never home. The travel was fun, but the pay wasn’t great. I was tired of eating noodles and sandwiches. I was tired of living life out of a backpack. Which, now …”

  I don’t finish my thought. Caroline doesn’t let me.

  “What kind of life were you hoping for?”

  I turn the question back to her. “What kind of life are you hoping for?”

  “Now or before?”

  “Before, I guess.”

  “I don’t know that I’d thought about it. I was going to be a senior next school year. I was kind of keeping the big life decisions until then.”

  Something rattles in a parking garage to our left—metal hitting concrete. There’s a moan that follows. Caroline and I practically snap our necks turning to look for the sudden commotion, and a child appears at the edge of the garage three floors up. He waves down to us. Caroline waves back. Something gruff is shouted from somewhere inside the parking garage and the kid disappears.

  People. I hadn’t expected that.

  “He’s the one I feel sorry for,” Caroline says. “I’m not old, but at least I had a childhood.”

  She thinks for a moment more. “The kind of life I’d expected? Normal. I’d go to college. Get a job. Married. Kids. I don’t know that I’d put many details around any of it, but that’s sort of what I expected.”

  “It’s what I wanted too,” I tell her and start fishing around in my pocket for keys. “I wasn’t going to get it unless I quit living the freelancer life. Settle down. Hopefully meet someone else who was settled, and our journey would begin.”

  I point to a building a few blocks up: “That one’s mine.”

  I pull the keys from my pocket and hang the ring off a finger. The metal rattles and Caroline smiles.

  “Oh, please tell me that, as the world was collapsing around you, you took a moment to lock up.”

  “Shut up,” I say. “It’s habit.”

  “You’re such a Boy Scout.”

  My complex is in rough shape. Some buildings are gone completely. Others are half of what they were. Mine was lucky. It was hit by whatever it was that fell that night, but it survived mostly intact. There are a couple of small holes in the roof of my place. And one large chunk of roof is missing over what was the bathroom, but the stuff I care about—the stuff I came for—is mostly protected still.

  We take the steps up to the fourth floor. These are the steps I used to unload the truck with all of my stuff when it finally arrived, cursing my choice of the top floor in the complex after just 30 minutes of going up and down and up and down the stairs.

  Caroline stood behind me while I unlocked the apartment door.

  “Boy Scout,” she said again quietly.

  The air inside was stale and everything looked a little different. It’d been weeks since I’d seen the place, and when I had gone back it was only for a few minutes. Wailer activity was still hot through this part of downtown, and I didn’t want to dawdle. Now, it all seems like a monument of some kind. Everything is still where I left it the night the world fell apart. The apartment is a living snapshot of a moment in time.

  There’s a stink from the food rotting in the fridge, and Caroline brings her shirt to her nose.

  “We’ll just be a couple of minutes,” I tell her and head to the closet in the hall.

  I start pulling items from the top shelf and tossing them toward the couch.

  Caroline is looking through my collection of DVDs.

  “Interesting choices,” she says, her voice muffled by her shirt.

  “It’s eclectic,” I say.

  “It’s something.”

  She flops hard into the chair that’s behind her. I see her relax. She sinks into the cushions. “Let’s not go back,” she says. “They’re all grown-ups back at camp. They can take care of themselves. Or maybe you carry this one back too.”

  I smile at her suggestion. “You’re welcome to carry back whatever you want to take.”

  “You’ve already got me carrying a stove.” Her head is tipped back onto the cushion behind her. Her eyes are closed.

  “Well, we can always come back. But stay there for a few minutes. I’ve got a few more things I want to go through. If you’re comfortable there I can go do that.”

  She waves me away with a lazy hand. “Take your tim
e. Take your time.”

  I move to the bedroom and want to fall onto the bed. Instead, I sit at the foot and start going through the bookshelf that sits against the wall. This place was nice—new when I moved in—but they didn’t waste any of their money building extra space. The apartment is tiny. Most of my stuff ended up in a storage unit across the highway. I’m sure it’s all beaten to hell by now considering what happened to the overpasses nearer Fair Park.

  I start pulling titles off the shelves and flip through the pages. I don’t know what I’m looking for. Money? Bookmarks? Reminders of what life was?

  I toss a couple of so-called classics behind me, wondering again, as I did when I read them, who made that distinction. Was it just one of those lies that, if repeated enough, become true. These books were a lot of things—heavy, verbose, confusing—but they were far from good. But that’s me and my weird tastes. I like something smaller.

  I move to the second shelf and grab a couple real classics. My favorites. Both books found on a discount shelf that won’t be taught in any college classroom, but found me at just the right moment. I’d been absorbed into those pages, becoming the main character. Living those stories. I sit the books on the bed next to me and grab one last volume: the Bible that my grandmother had given me. It was tattered and dog-eared from summers spent at camps and weekends in services, but it hadn’t been used near enough recently. But it too often takes moments like we’d been living for the last month to make you realize that. I add it to the top of my pile and move to the closet. Besides, If J.R. is right, I don’t want to be the only member of the congregation without my own copy of the Good Book.

  There are a couple of pictures of my folks on the bookshelf too. I grab those.

  At the closet, I start throwing clothes into a pile on the bed.

  “Wow. Fashion plate.” Caroline is in the doorway.