The Time Before

The sound was incomprehensible after these two years. Inhuman. A thrill of emotion raced through me, and my heart sprinted into overdrive as I crouched on the stairs.

How did someone find me?

The low keen of the whirring blades was louder by the time I edged down the steps to the boarded-over window and peeked out. I had just a glimpse of the drone before it dived upward through the air and became a dot against the gray sky. I blinked and lost it, although I marked the direction it had been headed - northeast.

The direction I'd originally been going. Although I wasn't so sure of my destination anymore. The ever-present dilemma - head towards or away?

There were signs to direct me, of course - real signs, not some ambiguous mumbo jumbo machine from Heaven. Spray-painted arrows showing the way on familiar street signs, billboards. But I knew from experience that these remnants of humanity were impossible to trust. People are scavengers by genetics, adaptable to changes big and small. We've survived hurricanes, earthquakes, fires, famine, floods, and war. All kinds of natural and manmade disasters.

Of course, we might not survive this. We're our own worst enemy, after all.

The boards on the window cut across my vision as I craned my neck to peek at the spot where the drone had hovered over the porch. I'd come in the back door - front doors could be problematic - and although I'd done a quick visual of the street to make sure it was danger-free, I couldn't recall if the box I now saw had been there before. Unlikely, but possible, since it was very small and blended into the weathered wood of the porch. Easy to overlook.

I moved my gaze up and down the street as far as I could see from the spaces in between the boards. No movement. No sound, either. But if someone knew I was here, they could easily lay a trap for me.

I took a deep breath. Now or never. I flicked the lock on the front door. Silence followed the hard click. I closed my hand on the doorknob and slowly turned. The spindle was stiff from disuse, but gave under my insistent palm. I cracked the door and glanced out.

Still nothing - no movement, no sound.

A quick rush outside, and I dropped to a crouch, grabbed the package, then scuttled backwards into the house. Slammed the door and locked it.

I waited one moment, but no scream of discovery followed my mad dash. No bullets shattered the walls around me.

I glanced down at the package in my hand. It was square, about the size of my palm, wrapped in wrinkled brown paper and tied closed with twine in a double knot. I hefted it up and down - not too heavy. The small drone would have struggled with something that was weighty - wouldn't have been able to go far before its battery gave out. I used one of the knives from a sheathe inside my boots, and sliced through the string.

Irrationally, I smiled as the twine popped open and the paper loosened. Transported back in time - a kid under the sparkling decorations of the fir tree, shiny paper and curled ribbons lying in heaps around me. I pulled back the paper and took out a cream-colored box, faux leather over cardboard. At one point, a box like this would have contained jewelry - a gold watch, a locket with pictures of loved ones. Without hesitation, I popped it open.

Inside was an old-fashioned compass with curly letters marking N, S, E, and W. Puzzled, I flipped the compass over. On the back, someone had scratched into the brass NE @Haven.

I examined the brown paper and the box, checked every surface for another clue. But there was nothing else.

The question was... with my food running low, what should I do now?

* * * * * * * * * *

I slept on it. After all, I hadn't stopped here for a cushy vacation but a much-needed rest. Barricaded in an upstairs bedroom, doors locked and propped closed with chairs under knobs, leaves piled under every window and door, inside and out. This wasn't my first rodeo, and houses could always be a target.

But the night passed without incident. As the sky brightened with a murky dawn, I packed up my sleeping bag and chewed on something that passed for food while scanning the street through the boarded window. All was quiet, so I reluctantly opened the door.

Having not been raised in a barn, I closed the door behind me. Once in a while, I had to retrace my steps when I ran into difficulty, and it was always good to have a secure location to retreat to. Even rarer, I came across a house that looked like someone had briefly stayed there, as I had.

And very, very seldom, I came across one of those someones. That was when things got interesting.

The first year had been the hardest. I'd been terribly lucky at the timing of my idiotic plan, and started out with an advantage over almost everyone else. I'd already been intending on flying solo for a long time in my rented cabin out in the woods, and stocked up for the long haul. Having broken up with my girlfriend Heather and taken a year off my job, I was going to write the great American novel.

I'd thought Heather was my soulmate, but she was on a career track and didn't want to live the Bohemian lifestyle in the middle of nowhere. And she didn't seem to give much weight to my dream of being the next Harper Lee or female Thomas Pynchon. Without the love of my life by my side, instead I'd be only making love to my creative impulses.

Well, I never finished writing my book. I barely eked out a few pages. One week in, and the world went to hell. I stayed at the cabin a few months, but when I ran out of supplies, it was time to get moving. And I'd been moving ever since.

After that first year on the run, weather and time had taken its toll on the most immediate threat. There's only so long that decaying flesh can be rained on and cooked in heat and frozen in cold before it just falls to pieces. Directors seldom thought of that in those apocalypse movies I used to watch - the movies would be set years in the future, but the dead buggers would still be roaming around and attacking people with ease. Utter nonsense.

However, aside from starvation, what was the biggest danger to me, following the year after the zombie hordes had rotted into the ground?

Why, my fellow survivors, of course.

As I walked down the street, heading northeast, I absently rubbed at the long, jagged scar on my face. I'd gotten it half a year ago, but the cautionary memory would linger a lot longer than the wound itself. The rippled skin felt like a bumpy line under my fingertips. I didn't have a mirror to look in - nor would I have spent much time on looking, even if I had one - but I was fairly certain that the angry red edges of the wound had faded somewhat as it healed. I probably only looked like half a Frankenstein, but there was a certain freedom in having no one left to impress.

I'd never trusted anyone before. And after the shitstorm of the past two years, I certainly wasn't going to start now.

The gray clouds that had threatened rain yesterday were slowly being blown to harmless blue and white streaks. The wind was coming from the east - according to my map, I was only a few miles from the ocean. Spring had sprung, and as the sun stretched towards its apex, the day warmed to shirtsleeves weather.

I made a brief stop to roll up my jacket and store it in my pack before continuing. The skies were raucous with the warbling of horny birds trying to catcall their mates, and daffodils exploded in vibrant yellows next to cement sidewalks that were crumbling from disrepair.

Towns always set my spidey sense tingling. You never knew who was still lingering there. While I liked to keep to the roads, I didn't actually walk on the streets - I'd walk under the shade of trees, just far enough out of the way that I had a bit of shelter. Not enough if someone was seriously gunning for me, but it had saved my life more than once.

As I walked, I puzzled over the clue on the back of the compass, even as I kept the artifact itself in my pocket for guidance. Although I was used to navigating without help, every once in a while, I'd pull the compass out and take a glance at it.

@Haven was the curious part. According to time I'd spent here before, when I was visiting my ex-girlfriend, there was a city nearby called New Haven. I'd never been there, but perhaps that was the reference? Whomever had sent the drone couldn't be far, or it never would have reached me.

The spring day echoed with allusions to long-ago Thoreau, and I took in several deep breaths and felt some of the tension in my neck and back come unwound. No pollution or smog to mar the fresh air.

The world had been on the precipice of climate change disaster a couple years back - I remembered the headlines. While two years was not enough time to heal the damage we had caused, ecosystems now seemed on track to recover someday. Like the animals of sea and land that people had brought to the edge of extinction, we had wiped ourselves out pretty well with this self-created biological weapon that killed 95%+ of the population, and kept the dead coming back to life to kill and attack the remaining survivors. Only a few immunes remained these days, people like me.

So few that I was able to enjoy this beautiful spring day all to myself. Along the way as I walked, I ducked into a few smashed stores, but most were picked clean of supplies.

When the sun slanted west, I was faced with a gnawing in the pit of my stomach that was hard to fill. I chewed on the last of my jerky - found in a gas station several days ago, hard as a rock, and slightly green and fuzzy around the edges. But it would suffice, being better than all the nothing I'd found today.

This stretch of the land, there were plenty of houses to stay in that had either boarded windows (the safest) or vinyl ones that were unbroken (less safe because of visibility, but still acceptable). I picked one at random, prepped it for safety, then pulled out my map before the sunlight faded. According to my calculations, I should arrive in the city of New Haven by tomorrow. Normally, I skirted cities, but curiosity nibbled away at the edges of my cautionary isolation - who had sent the compass?

Knowing that I was probably walking into a trap didn't blunt my curiosity one bit. But I lay awake for a lot longer than I usually did at night, staring out the window, and dreaming of escape plans.

* * * * * * * * * *

The next day, I saw tall buildings poking through the trees before I even got close - although New Haven was a smallish city, it was only slowly being taken over again by nature. The vegetation was held at bay by rippled seas of unrepaired asphalt and cement. Here and there, tufts of grass and saplings buckled the hard concrete surfaces even more than the passage of time and weather, but most of the manmade streets and sidewalks were more or less intact.

Cities were both more dangerous and less. When the hordes had fallen sick and died, then risen again, they'd been so concentrated in cities that there were fewer survivors there than out in the countryside.

However, remember that "humans are scavengers" comment I made before? Well, after the dead died again, the leftover people were attracted to cities like moths to a flame, banking on scavenging usable stuff left behind by the dead. If I was going to run into survivors - the not-so-nice kind, like those who had given me my scar - it would probably be here.

On a simply personal note, I disliked the bones you found in cities. The streets were littered with them - while animals had scavenged the corpses and time had taken care of the rest, the human bones were left behind to remind anyone who ventured near. I stepped around them as best as I could, sometimes kicking them out of the way - stepping on them could turn an ankle, and I couldn't afford an injury.

I carefully made my way around the edges of the city. In the distance, I could see the overpass that swooped into the heart of the buildings - once upon a time crowded with cars heading home in rush hour traffic. There were still a number of cars, abandoned and with doors gaping wide in some cases from those who had searched them for loot. Before the gas went bad and couldn't be replenished, I'd driven when possible - but by now, the car batteries would also be useless, the engines rotting like the rest of humanity's achievements.

But someone had kept things going. Or several someones. At least, they had electricity enough to power drones.

There were no sounds to guide me - I stopped and listened for a while, parking my butt on a guardrail at the edge of a main road, but there was no whirring machinery to overcome the sound of the lusty spring birds in full chorus.

I fingered the compass in my pocket. NE @Haven. Well, I was at New Haven. And there was nothing here.

But that's not what the clue had said, was it? Suddenly realizing something, I pulled out the compass and ran my thumb over the etching on the back. If I was looking at this as directions to the final destination, it didn't say "Stop at Haven." It said "NE @Haven." As in, turn northeast and head out of the city.

Perhaps this place... it wasn't where the message came from. It was just another arrow to where I was supposed to go.

Okay. I got to my feet. If this wasn't it, I'd keep going. I'd follow the road northeast into the backwoods, which was where I was headed in the first place. And I'd either find out who sent this compass... or I wouldn't.

I took one last look at the bone-littered city that was slowly being reclaimed by nature. The scream of a hawk drew my gaze upwards. I might not pass back this way, but I could see in my mind's eye the seasons turning and the buildings falling. In five years, ten, fifty... this place would be a forgotten relic puzzled upon only by deer and crows.

Shaking my head, I turned my back on it. And kept walking.

* * * * * * * * * *

A couple weeks passed, and the daffodils were withered and gone by the time I heard the whirring sound again. I don't know what instinct made me take one road over another when it came to my wandering. Mostly, I pulled out the compass at every fork and followed the path that most closely guided me northeast. It wasn't with the idea that I would eventually find what I wanted to find, but simple curiosity. The way grew hillier, the distance between settlements fewer and farther between, and scavenging harder to come by.

So when I crested a ridge and smelled smoke, I felt at first the animal fear of wildfire rather than trepidation at the idea of a human settlement. But there - just ahead - was something I'd never thought to see again.

A face turned towards me. A hesitant smile. A wave.

At the sound of whirring overhead, I instinctively ducked, fearing attack - but the drone was far overhead, sailing past me on another mission.

Perhaps to find - and bring back - another lost soul like me.

* * * * * * * * * *

Don't get me wrong - even after months at this settlement, I have a hard time trusting people. Even these ones who have welcomed me in. That might never change, no matter how long I'm here.

But that doesn't mean they don't trust me. They like to listen to my stories from all the traveling I've done. And it makes me wonder, sometimes, what I would've been like if I'd been living here from the beginning. Would I be more like who I used to be and less the person I am today?

At thoughts like these, I touch my scar... or Heather touches it for me.

Yes, she's here. It's why they sent the drone back for me. Before they'd dropped the package off to guide me here, the drone had spotted me on an earlier mission. Heather recognized me on the screen, wild-looking woman though I was. She'd lost half a leg in the zombie years (a story for another time), so she couldn't come to me. But she knew, given some help, I would be able to find her.

In some ways, I've always been journeying to her. After two crazy years apart, I've rediscovered a purpose, and a home - and a love - I never knew I was looking for still.