The Hole (2 page)

“Henry?” she said behind him, her voice confused.

“No, Evajean. It’s me, Elliot.” He waited a moment while she stared without comprehension at him. Then he said, “Henry’s dead.”

She put her head back down, started to cry, and then began coughing. He got her some water and she drank it.

“I’m sorry,” she said, when she had herself back under some control.

“No-”

“No, I’m sorry. For being like this.”

Elliot shook his head and put his hand on her arm. “We’re both like this,” he said. “We’re both left with everyone… With them all dead.”

She nodded and looked around the kitchen like she was searching for something.

“What’s the Hole?” she asked.

Elliot was startled by the question. “It’s where they take the bodies,” he said. “Where they burn them, I guess.”

“How do you know?”

Elliot shrugged. “It’s what I’ve heard. People say-”

“But you don’t know,” she said quickly, even angrily.

He sat down in the chair across from her, puzzled. No, he didn’t know that. He’d heard it, catching it again and again in rumors from neighbors before they’d died, from a teacher at Callie’s school on the day they’d called the assembly to announce the indefinite end of classes. He guessed he’d even assumed it himself because that was what made the most sense. But he didn’t know.

“I want to see it,” Evajean said.

“You-”

“I want to
know
. If things were still running, that’s where they’d take Henry. They’d take him to the Hole.”

“And you want to take him there now?”

“No,” she said. “No, I can’t… He’s dead but I can’t carry him around like he’s-I don’t know-like he’s something I got to return to the goddamn store.”

“Then why-”

“Because I want to
know
. What is it? Why do they take the bodies there?”

“Quarantine,” Elliot said. “So it doesn’t spread.”

“All to the same place? Why don’t they just burn them?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe so scientists, doctors can study them? Far as I know, nobody knows what this is and so maybe they get all the bodies in one place and can try to figure it out from there.”

Evajean looked at him and lifted the corner of her mouth with biting condescension. “I’m sure that’s what they do, Mr. Bishop. Get all the victims together in one big, fucking pile, and
study
them to come up with a cure.”

“Eva-”

“But if that’s what they’re doing, why haven’t they found anything? Why hasn’t there been any news? All we got for months is the same ’stay in your homes, don’t panic, and put your goddamn loved ones at the curb.’ I want to
know
, Mr. Bishop.”

“It’s Ell-”

“I
want to know
,” she said again. Then she stood up and walked into the living room to pour herself another glass of whiskey.

He didn’t move, thinking over what she’d said. Was she going to leave? There could be anything out there beyond the few blocks of quiet and calm they’d known these prior weeks. if she did leave, if she did intend to find the Hole, Elliot would go with her. Sitting alone in his house as she, the only living person he knew, walked away would be the worst kind of contrition to this victorious plague. His home was a shell, his neighborhood an lifeless wreck. He’d follow Evajean because she still walked and breathed, was still warm-and was without the madness of the infected.

Decision energizing his movement, he followed her now into the living room. She was seated on the couch, head back on the cushions, a nearly full glass of whiskey resting on one leg.

She looked up as he came in. “I can’t drink it,” she said.

Elliot closed his eyes and nodded. “I understand,” he said.

“I need to get out.”

“Now?”

She smiled at him. “No, not now. If I’m going to do this-find the Hole-I really should pack. Get some stuff together. Fill up the car with food and clothes.”

“Supplies,” he said.

“Uh huh.”

He took the glass from her and swallowed a mouthful of the drink. It was terrible stuff, harsh and bitter. Elliot never drank it, save during college when they’d poured it over ice and pretended they were characters from the pulp novels. “I want to go with you,” he said.

Evajean looked at him long, far longer than she done since he’d helped her carry Henry across the lawn. He thought she’d say no, tell him this was a journey she needed to do for herself and by herself, a spiritual quest of sorts about a lone woman making her way across the apocalypse to find the answers to the mysteries that assaulted her. But-and this surprised the hell out of him in its suddenness-he was prepared to beg.

“I want you to,” she said, however. “I don’t want to do this alone.”

Talk spiraled between them for the next hour, with discussions of how they’d get wherever they were going and what to bring and what to leave. Elliot realized how rushed it all felt and how consumed the two were with it, like children who’d made plans to run away and seek their fortune in a wide world free of parental control. If they stopped to think it all over, the spell would break, the absurdity of driving into a dead wilderness without direction would pound them back into sensibility and they’d retire to their homes to await the return of the authorities. They’d become sensible adults again.

Elliot pushed through those doubts. There was nothing left so why not go for it? He didn’t know Evajean beyond friendly hellos as neighbors, but she was enthusiastic (manically so, he recognized, and probably coping barely at all with the terrifying grief they both felt) and attractive and the idea of seeking out the Hole with her, whatever it turned out to be, had immediately, and with a sense of salvation, trumped the depression and defeatism inflicting him like the as yet unexperienced plague.

So they prepared. It was decided early on they’d take Elliot’s truck, the Ford F-250 that had been the chariot of the landscaping business he’d run with his brother before Clarine had talked him into moving out to the east coast. The back could hold all the food the two of them had on hand as well as a good deal more. Mileage wasn’t great but Evajean said there were bound to be plenty of cars out there they could siphon gas from as needed.

During breaks for lunch and dinner they finished the perishable food in Elliot’s freezer. Now it was entirely cans and dry goods-and whatever else they picked up along the way. And what “along the way” meant exactly became their first significant argument as a hastily assembled couple.

“It’s west, is what I heard,” Evajean said, pushing around the last of her meat.

“West?” A night a month ago, when he was on his fifth beer at the road house bar outside of Charlottesville he went to when he needed to get away from things, Elliot had been told by a trucker heading through to Richmond that the Hole was in Montana. The guy said he had a buddy who’d been hired by the state to haul corpses there but that things had gone irreparably to shit before he’d had a chance to get started.

Evajean said, “In Colorado, in the Rockies, I think. The same place they have that military base.”

“NORAD?”

She nodded. “That sounds right. Henry, my husband, he showed me a website. He’d gotten kind of obsessed with it before he got sick and this one site had a lot of eyewitness things about people who’d followed the trucks, the ones that came and got the bodies, and how the trucks were dumped into bigger trucks that went west to-what was it?”

“To NORAD?”

“At least that’s what this website said.”

“I heard Montana,” he said and told her about the trucker and his buddy.

“I don’t think so,” Evajean told him, shaking her head. “What’s in Montana? If this is like you said, if the Hole is a place to see if someone can figure out the plague, it makes a lot more sense for it to be a hidden military base where they can have scientists and doctors and keep it all secret. Because what if this plague was terrorism.” She said this last like the thought had just now occurred to her-like it hadn’t been all over the news channels for months-and her startled eyes went wide. “What if it was terrorism, Elliot? What if we’re all dying because those guys in the Middle East-”

“If it was terrorism,” he said, “it’s over now. Whoever did it’s dead, too.”

She breathed heavily, calming herself. “I want to go to Colorado,” she said.

“Because of a website? The Hole in Montana makes a lot more sense than some underground bunker. How many bodies were there? Millions? How would they fit all those people in a tunnel under the mountains? And Montana is coming from a guy who was hired to take them there. Your website- Most of that stuff online’s bullshit, anyway.”

“Henry wouldn’t have showed it to me if it was bullshit,” Evajean said, anger sharpening her tone. “He makes his living on the Internet, anyway, so he knows when sites are good.”

He didn’t bother to correct her tense. And, after several more back and forth protests of quickly waning heat, they settled on driving west to Colorado and then, if the NORAD hypothesis failed to pan out, going north into Montana.

Evajean rolled down the truck’s window and leaned out. “Jesus,” she said.

“This the furthest out you’ve been?” Elliot asked. They’d decided to drive through town towards the freeway, a route that would take them past a Wal-Mart where they hoped to pick up rifles and ammunition. This was Evajean’s idea and Elliot had been brought around to seeing it as a good one. They had a lot of desirable items in the truck and no way of knowing how bad things were out beyond the borders of town. Neither knew how to use firearms but they figured if they stuck to shotguns and only then as items to point threateningly, not so much to actually shoot, the could avoid most trouble. After that brief stop, it’d be two days of driving on I-70 before they hit Colorado.

Evajean shook her head. “I went out-to the Wal-Mart, actually-back just before Henry got sick, since we were out of things, but once he started- Once things got bad, I stayed home.” She rolled the window up again and leaded back in her seat, closing her eyes. “I didn’t know they were this bad.”

Abandoned cars made the driving difficult. Elliot had to keep his speed down and carefully weave, since the roads were clogged with vehicles, some with their doors open like the passengers had been too much in a hurry to even both closing up, and some with their windshields or side windows smashed out. But neither Elliot nor Evajean had seen a single other person since they’d set out thirty minutes ago.

Outside of their neighborhood, there’d been out buildings, street lights and power lines knocked and torn down, and a pet store with the back end of a large van sticking out the huge front windows. At this last they’d stopped, Elliot saying that maybe they should see if there were any animals still trapped inside. Evajean laughed, but agreed.

The result was a tiny black puppy curled asleep on the bench seat behind them, probably exhausted from lack of food. They’d given it water, which it lapped mightily, and searched the store for dog food, but found none. Wal-Mart would have some, Evajean said, and they’d added that to their shopping list right under buckshot.

The devastation they passed now, as they finally cleared the main downtown of Charlottesville and drove into the thinning residential areas between them and the big box store, was more subtle-but equally frightening. Most of the houses had open doors and windows and at several they saw clothes tossed across the lawn. Nothing moved and the emptiness and odd clutter heightened the sense of a world gone.

“I always thought it’d be gorier,” Evajean said after several minutes. The stopped cars were less dense now and Elliot had increased their pace.

“What?”

“The end of the world. I mean those-you’ve seen them-those zombie movies. Day of the Dead, Dawn of the Dead-”

“Night of the Living Dead,” he said.

“Those. Everyone’s killed and torn up, there are bodies and fires.”

“We saw those burned buildings.”

She shrugged. “But I guess I thought there’d be more. Where is everyone?”

“I don’t know,” he said.

“I don’t know,” he said. “It’s not like there were many left by the time the collections stopped.”

When this had all began, when the first people here and there got sick and the news was treating it like nothing more than another summer cycle of West Nile Virus or the latest strain of flu, the town on Charlottesville maintained its simple status quo. That first month, three elderly residents had contracted the disease and they’d all heard about a dozen more over in Richmond, but old people are always getting sick. It’s not worth getting worked into a town wide panic because a handful old people come down with something-even if that something makes them speak in tongues and slowly go mad.

But as it spread, as more stories came in from across the country and the television news channels put together animated intros, complete with heavy music, for stories about the plague, neighbors started talking about how maybe this was cause for genuine concern. Grandparents were pulled from nursing homes to live with their families. People stopped going out as much and the restaurants, bars, and nightclubs saw business plunge. Authorities told people to be calm and adopt the usual precautions: report any new cases, wash hands, avoid the sick, and only assemble when necessary.

Then the plague hit the children. A little boy in Alabama came down with it but his parents, conservative Pentecostals, thought his babbling was the voice of the Lord and so it was only when the autopsy found the spongy masses where his liver and stomach had been that the world realized the full panic of not just those already close to death being picked off but the youngest generation, too. As more sick children were found, the schools closed and Carlottesville organized food drops so citizens could remain in their homes, minimizing contact even with close friends and extended family.

The hospitals closed when the plague had infected forty percent of the adult population. Television stations went into automated reruns and the news played only recorded messages about new disposal procedures. Anyone dead was to be brought to the curb, where garbage collection had once occurred, and men in trucks came by every other day to pick them up. These men would leave immediately in anyone from in the houses tried to approach, cutting off perhaps the only remaining venue for updates beyond the city. And even that minimal contact ceased.