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Radio Silence - part 3

A post apocalyptic story

By Caitlin McCollPublished 3 years ago Updated 2 years ago 17 min read
5
Radio Silence - part 3
Photo by Victoria Poveda on Unsplash

MELANIE

Melanie stared at herself in the small bathroom mirror. The bags under her eyes seemed even darker than the day before.

“Another day for the crime fighting superhero,” she said to her reflection. Whatever good answering phones and opening mail did for reducing crime at Hallard & Sons Law Office. Minus the actual sons. There was just Brian Hallard, who didn’t have any sons but thought that calling his law practice Hallard and Sons had a better ring to it. “More caché. People instinctively trust a family business more,” he’d explained to her on her first day when she’d asked where his sons are after he introduced her to all the staff and there were no younger Hallards in sight. “I guess it must do some good,” she said to herself. “If it helps the lawyers. And lawyers fight crime. So,” she reasoned, in a roundabout way that makes her a crimefighter. Except she didn’t have a cape. She shuffled to her room and grabbed the throw that was across the bottom of her bed. It was covered in owls and moons and stars. She threw it over her shoulders. A makeshift cape, she thought with a small smile. She felt better even though she hadn’t even changed out of her clothes from work.

“Have a good day at work sweetie?” her mom shouted from the living room. “I have dinner in the fridge all ready to go when you want-“ Her mother’s voice was stopped by a volley of coughs. Melanie appeared at the edge of the living room. Her mother was sitting on the couch facing the TV so that all Melanie could see was her mother’s dark hair, streaked with grey, pulled up in a ponytail.

“You okay Mom?” she asked from the doorway.

Her mom turned around and Mel was shocked at how pale she was. “Yes, I’m f-“ another round of coughing stopped her mid-sentence.

Melanie moved closer. “You don’t look fine,” she said, worry creeping into her voice. “You look sick.” Her mother waved her away. “It’s just a little cold or something.Your father’s got the bug too. He’s just lying down. We just had dinner and you know how he gets after eating, especially Mexican food. I made tacos tonight. The ground beef is in the fridge and there’s-“ This time her mother started coughing and didn’t stop. She stood up shakily and then suddenly collapsed right in the middle of the living room, on the hideous beige paisley patterned carpet that Melanie always hated but her mother was loath to get rid of because ‘it’s so soft!’ And for once Melanie was thankful for its softness when Alana Bennett collapsed on it in a heap.

“Mom!” Melanie screamed. She could still remember that, reverberating in her head as if she’d just spoken it.

She rushed to her mother and knelt beside her. She shook her shoulder. Her mother felt more like a ragdoll than a person. “Mom!” she said, whispering the word fervently as if saying it so others wouldn’t hear would help wake her up.

“Dad!” she screamed, jumping to her feet. ‘”Something is wrong with Mom!”

Melanie waited a moment, but she didn’t hear any sound from the direction of her parent’s room. Surely her dad couldn’t be that sound asleep, she thought. “Dad!” she shouted even louder, not caring that it might piss off the neighbours. There was nothing from the bedroom. With an exasperated, angry grunt she ran down the hall and pushed open her parent’s bedroom door. Her dad was lying in bed. But something wasn’t right. He wasn’t moving. Not one single bit. Melanie stared at his chest and couldn’t see the telltale rise and fall.

“Dad?” Melanie said, moving slowly, softly, toward the bed as if she’d scare him. “Dad?” she repeated. Dread gripped her tight and squeezed. She moved to the bed in two quick strides, and still her dad didn’t move.

Tentatively she stuck a hand out and pressed two fingers against the side of his neck. She waited a heartbeat, and then two, but there was no pulse.

She ran back to her mother’s prone form in the living room and crouched down, placing two fingers, careful not the thumb, she remembered from first aid classes because it had its own pulse, and pressed them firmly against the side of her mother’s neck. She counted to ten. Nothing. Nothing at all. But she couldn’t just give up like that. Maybe there was something the hospital could do?

She ran to the kitchen and grabbed the cordless phone that sat on the edge of the large island in the middle of the room and punched in 911.

“We’re sorry, but all lines are currently busy,” an automated recording of a woman’s voice came on the line. “We are dealing with higher than normal call volume.” Melanie thought the robotic voice sounded apologetic. “Please stay on the line and one of our dispatchers will be with you as soon as they can.” And then smooth jazz filtered through the ear piece. After a few minutes the robotic woman interrupted again. “We are currently experiencing high call volume. Please be patient and our call takers will be with you as soon as possible. Thank you.” Melanie looked at her watch and watched as the second hand moved around the face. 30 seconds. 1 minute. Still there was only jazz music. And then there was a sound that got Melanie’s hopes up. It sounded like someone was going to come on the line. There was a crackle and some static, but then the line went dead and there was the long solid dial tone of the phone being hung up on the other end. “Dammit!” Melanie screamed and did something she had only ever done one other time in her life. She threw the phone across the room. It hit the far wall and shattered with a loud crack, pieces of plastic flying in all directions. A small square circuit board went rocketing past her head and hit the bookcase against the far wall, knocking over one of her mother’s many owl figurines, this one a small pewter one, which sat right next to a large ceramic one painted bright blue and pink. That was a close call, Melanie thought. Which was a strange thought. The kind of strange, random thoughts that occur to people who are in shock.

~*~

Melanie felt strange. Perhaps because just a few hours ago she had buried her parents in the small park at the bottom of her townhouse complex.

She had felt strange when she had gone to bed. Fluey, with a dry cough. But that wasn’t the symptoms that everyone else was getting. Those that were dying. She had gone to bed the night before feeling a bit feverish, a bit too sweaty. But here she was, looking at herself in the small bathroom mirror, the one with the crack in the corner that always annoyed her.

She looked…okay. Not alright, not 100 percent. But she was here, wasn’t she? Wasn’t that the important thing? She looked outside the living room window at the deathly silent townhouse complex. There was none of the usual hustle and bustle of people getting in their cars, or kids playing or people taking out their trash to the communal bins, or heading to the laundry room with baskets overflowing.

~*~

JOE

Three days ago. It all started only three days ago, yet it already felt like a lifetime. Strange how time changed, and morphed, and felt different, Joe thought.

He woke up, threw the duvet aside, and shivered in his boxers. It most definitely was Fall, now. He stood, did his swaying side to side full body stretch and did what he always did first thing in the morning. He peeked through the blinds at the world outside. It was cold and grey and gloomy. He looked at the digital clock beside his bed. It read 7:12. Normally, Joe would’ve panicked that he’d slept in, but today, he wasn’t worried. He’d head over to work in his own time. He knew, deep down, that no one would be in the station again, and he didn’t really want to rush over there to have that confirmed. It was strange, and creepy.

He peered through the venetian blinds at the world that seemed different. He opened the blinds. The outside seemed different. And not just because he was still home on a Thursday at 7am. It was the little things that caught his eye. The row of cars parked down the side of the street. Something was off about them, and it took him a moment to realize what. Leaves from the trees that grew next to the street had piled up around the tires of the cars. Evidence that they hadn’t been moved in a couple of days. Maybe since all of this started. Maybe they were all sick, or in hospital, or… he tugged the blind shut again threw on a shirt and went to the living room.

He turned on the TV. It was still on a news station. He pressed the remote to change the channel to something else. Anything else. But there didn’t seem to be anything else. Even channels that usually showed irritatingly bad daytime dramas, and morning talk shows with a bunch of women gossiping about this fashion icon, or that celebrity affair. Every channel had turned into people talking about the Sickness. And it was called the Sickness with a capital S, because no one knew exactly what it was. Was it some sort of malaria? Or a form of plague?

I guess it’d be have to be some sort of plague, Joe thought, given the nature of it. How everyone seemed to be coming down with it. That’s what plague meant, right? Joe turned back to one of the actual news channels. It showed the interior of the hospital. The reporter was wearing one of those white hazmat suits, the ones with the plastic face plate that made the man look more like a beekeeper than someone trying to stay safe from…whatever was going on.

He was standing in the middle of a wide corridor. On both sides there were people sitting in chairs and standing, leaning against the wall as if the wall itself was the only thing keeping them up. There were a few people in wheelchairs and a few occupied hospital beds taking up a lot of the wall space.

Joe turned up the volume. The reporter, sounding muffled in his medical space suit, was saying that the hospital was almost full now and they had begun turning people away, encouraging them to go to their doctors if it wasn’t anything that was life or death, or telling them to go to another hospital.

Joe turned the TV off and went to his living room window, pulling back the sheet he had tacked up that he used as a makeshift curtain and looked outside, expecting somehow, that the world would look different than it did from his bedroom window. The trees stood nearly bare, like skeletons, with the last few tenacious leaves clinging on for dear life, as if afraid to follow the fate of their brothers and sisters to become a sodden, trampled mess on the ground.

Am I the leaf on the tree or the ones on the ground? he wondered with a loud sigh, letting the sheet fall back.

A knock on the door startled him. He went to answer it, hiding partially behind the door as he opened it, aware he was still in his underwear even though he was at least wearing a shirt.

A young girl, late teens, maybe early twenties, with short dark hair and a single piercing through the left side of her nose stood there, a large satchel bag slung across her body to rest at her right hip. Her arms were wrapped tightly around her thin frame as if trying to hold in her own heat. She wore a thin down jacket in army green but still looked cold.

“Yes?” asked Joe, wondering if maybe she was some strange sort of Girl Guide, but she didn’t seem to be holding any boxes of cookies or chocolates for fundraising. She looked slightly familiar.

“Oh thank god!” she said, her face brightening with obvious relief. Then she composed herself. “Sorry to bother you,” she said, sounding slightly embarrassed at her outburst, but her face still showed the obvious relief she was feeling. “But, I’m alone.”

“Yeah?” Joe asked, confused. The yeah had the same tone as ‘so what’, but Joe thought that it sounded less rude. Maybe. “So am I,” he said, still not understanding.

“No, I mean, I’ve been knocking on every door in this townhouse complex and no one is answering it. You’re the first person.”

Oh, that’s who she was! Joe thought. “Wait, are you the girl that lives down at the other end of the complex? I’ve seen you sometimes.” Well, she was hard to miss, being rail thin, and wearing skin tight clothes that made Joe think she looked more skeleton than human. And she was always changing her hair colour. Last time he saw her it was purple. This time, it was actually normal, and he said so. “Your hair, it’s…no-” he began, and then tried to slide effortlessly into the word nice, which came out like some strange hackneyed New York accent, noice.

A bit self-consciously she raised a hand and patted her hair, as if forgetting she had any. “Uh, thanks.”

A silence began and started to stretch out, becoming more awkward, with the two of them just standing and staring at each other.

“So,” the girl continued, bursting the awkward bubble of silence between them. “I’m Melanie. And yeah, I live at the opposite end of the complex.”

Joe nodded. “Okay…” he trailed off, still unsure where she was headed.

“With my parents,” she continued. “Except. They’re dead.” She said it so matter-of-factly that Joe didn’t really comprehend it right away.

“Okay,” he began, nodding like it was something he expected to hear. “Wait, what?” he shook his head, as if to shake the confusion away.

“They’re dead. They died a couple days ago. Both of them, on the same day. They got a cough, and the next thing I knew, they were just sitting on the couch next to each other, with the TV on, but they were…dead.” She raised her hands in a sort of shrug.

“Well, you seem to be taking it awfully well,” he said. Joe noticed her swallow and she shrugged again. “Well, it was so sudden. And there wasn’t anything I could do…” she looked at her feet as the words fell away. “One minute they were there, alive and talking and the next minute. It’s just so surreal.” She shook her head, cleared her throat and raised her head again, looking at him.

“I called the funeral home, but they said there was a two week waitlist. And same with all the others in town. Some were even longer. I didn’t know what else to do, so…I buried them.” she said, the words followed again by a small shrug that said ‘what other option did I have?’.

After a minute Joe realized he had been staring at her in silence. “You buried them? Where?”

Melanie tossed her head in the direction of the small park at the bottom of the street that the last of the townhouses backed onto. “I’m glad winter hasn’t hit,” she said. “And for once I’m glad for all the rain that Seattle gets,” she gave a small smile. “It wasn’t too hard to dig up the ground. Though it did get a bit muddy,” she admitted.

“Okay…” he said, encouraging her to continue.

“So anyway, now I’m alone, like I said. And since you’re the only other person that has answered the door in this entire complex-”

Joe started to protest but Melanie held up a hand, which, like magic, shut him up. “Trust me,” she said. “I’ve been knocking on doors for the last few days. This is the third time I’ve done it. I thought that maybe if I go early enough, maybe someone will still be home, someone that’s still okay, and will answer the door. And,” she stuck her hand outwards in a sort of ‘ta da!’ gesture, “here you are!”

“But, don’t you have any friends or something? Or family somewhere?”

Melanie shook her head, her dark shaggy hair falling across her forehead. “Nope. I’ve tried everyone. Tried calling all my friends, tried going to their houses. No one was answering. And the rest of my family live out in Missouri.” She made a face and stuck her tongue out at the word as if she’d eaten something disgusting.

“So, what do you want from me?” Joe asked, finally being blunt.

“Well,” Melanie said, dragging out the word in a persuasive manner. “Seeing how you’re still here, and I’m still here, and we’re both here alone, together-”

“I have a girlfriend!” Joe said suddenly before Melanie could say any more.

She gave him a weird look, her brow wrinkling. “Ew, no, that’s not what I meant!” She waved a hand in front of her as if trying to swat away the idea like a swarm of buzzing bees. “Jeez,” she said, giving him a squinty look of revulsion. She craned her neck to look over his shoulder and into his house. “Where is she?”

“It’s none of your business,” Joe said, bristling. He began to close the door.

“Hey!” Melanie’s hand shot out and slapped against the door. “I was just kidding. Sort of. I’ve seen you before sometimes with some blonde woman in the laundry room. The one that dresses like Cinderella before she’s become some princess? With those rags in her hair?”

“It’s a headband,” Joe said, becoming defensive.

Melanie’s hand swatted in his direction again. “Yeah, okay, whatever. Headband, rag, same thing. I don’t care if she’s here or if she’s on the moon. Point is, you’re the only person that I know of…kind of.” She began to fiddle with the buckles on her satchel bag.

“Anyways, I was wondering…I’m getting tired of being by myself. I don’t really know what else to do. There’s no one for me to talk to, and the radio station is just playing on some kind of loop and I’m getting sick-”

“Shit!” Joe yelled. “The station!”

He started to close the door on Melanie. “I’m really sorry to interrupt our little pow-wow here but I have to go.”

“Now? Where?” she asked, her eyes suddenly wide.

“The radio station,” he said, slowly but surely closing the door on her until it went click. “Maybe I’ll talk to you later!” he shouted through the closed door as he ran to the bedroom for some pants.

He pulled on a pair of jeans that was lying crumpled on the floor, and spent the next five minutes searching for the house and car keys before finding them right under the TV on the TV stand.

He yanked open the front door and nearly ran right into Melanie who was still standing there.

“What?” Joe yelped, trying not to knock her over. “What are you still doing here?”

She shrugged. “Well I don’t have anything else to do. I’ve just been sitting in my house watching TV for the past three days and eating all the food in my house.”

Joe moved past her towards his car, and she followed him like a lost puppy. He resisted the urge to fling his hands at her and yell ‘shoo!’

“Well, why don’t you go back there?” he said, a bit more harshly than he meant. He hadn’t even had his coffee yet.

“Can’t I just come with you?” she said, heading to the passenger side of the car, once she realized which one he was heading to.

Joe opened his mouth to say no, and then he realized he had no real reason for her not to come. He sighed and then did what was obviously one of Melanie’s favourite moves, shrugged. “Fine, I guess. What harm could it do?: He said as he buckled himself in. She slid into the passenger seat next to him and gave him a wide smile. “Thanks. I appreciate it.”

He grunted and turned on the engine.

~~~

Check out parts 1 and 2 if you haven't read it yet and part 4 below to continue reading!

Series
5

About the Creator

Caitlin McColl

I hope you enjoy my writing! Your support means a lot to me!

Find me various places here.

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