Thursday
April 20, 2003
5:23 PM

Two hours ago I killed my husband. Tom Everett Manning. He was 36 years old, a teacher at Mission High School. He had a masters in US history, and was under contract by a publisher to write a Civil War novel. Historical fiction was what it was. He was writing a romanticized account of the life of General Chamberlain.

He never finished it. I never got the chance to read it. Truth be told though I doubt I would have even if he did have it all done, published, book cover and all. I was never one for history. I guess you could say I’m one of those left-brain types of people.

Or was it right?

Damn. Everything’s been flying straight past me these days. Funny that. That right after getting out, after seeing all that’s left of the world, the only thing I can think of is my dead husband.

Funnier still, the thought that even after everything we went through, it still wells on me to see him gone.

Tom and I had a troubled marriage. Before that we had a troubled relationship. We never had much in common, but I suppose that for a loveless marriage we had enough.

It’s odd how people change the way they do. I remember a time long ago when I could look into his eyes, and see everything that I ever wanted out of life. Now I can’t explain to myself why I ever felt the way I did, or when or why it ever went away.

When the infection hit California, Tom had us sealed inside a bomb shelter underneath the house that belonged to his father. George Manning. George was a WWII veteran, the product of an era that saw nuclear war as a matter of time. He turned the basement into an air sealed bunker when he got back from his tour in Japan. In case the Commies attacked, he said, and meant it.

He and his wife died of age five years ago. Tom inherited the house. Two days after the attack on Oregon slipped down to Sacramento, that’s where Tom and I went. To hide inside his father’s bunker.

We were in there for four months. Sealed, disconnected from the rest of the world. The phones didn’t work. Radio had no signal. The television sent nothing but static.

Tom said it had to do with the power in the city being disconnected. There was no one around to manage infrastructure.

“It’s what happens when civilians are evacuated,” I remember him telling me. I asked him why we couldn’t have gone with everyone else to the military safe houses.

“They’ll just hole us up in some crowded facility,” he said, as if he’d done this kind of thing before. In fact, every moment from the Sacramento infection onwards, Tom had acted as though he knew exactly what we were supposed to do.

“We’re just as safe down here as everybody else is up there. Hell if anything, we’re safer. Plus, we get to keep our privacy.”

It wasn’t hard to see the situation from his perspective. Tom had a point and I couldn’t argue with it. We had our own laundry, our own shower, a stove, a computer, and a working television with some DVDs to pass the time.

The bunker had its own generator, which he said would be good for about a year. The motor was new, and we had more than enough barrels of gasoline to keep it running within that time.

“This disease will clear up long before we use a quarter of our power,” he said. “Once it’s done and dealt with, we’ll come back out, and I promise you everything’s going to be fine.”

I’m not sure if he meant that when he said it. He seemed sincere enough, and at the time I didn’t think to question it, so I believed him. But as I reflect back on everything now, all the time he’d spent preparing that bunker for a day like this, and those occasions during conversation when he would casually reminisce about living in the woods, isolated from the rest of the world. Was it all just coincidence? Or was it a sign to something I should have seen coming?

I didn’t love Tom. That made living with him difficult. There were people out there that I cared about and wanted to be with; friends that I hoped were doing fine. But we moved from San Fran to Tom’s bunker in Fremont, and there was no way to get a hold of any of them. If they were still alive, I had no way of knowing it. All I could do was sit in the comfort of an underground bunker, and hope that the world would still be there by the time I got out.

We marked the days on an Iceland calendar. January had a picture of the Black Waterfall. A column of hexagonal rocks over a waterfall that was said to be igneous, which meant it had been shaped by lava.

We didn’t have windows, so we used the clock to remind us of when each day passed. We marked it on the calendar, then waited for the next day. Or at least, I did.

It surprised me at first how well Tom had adjusted to our new, temporary life. He spent most of his time in the study, either reading a book or writing. As for me, I couldn’t stand it. Living inside the bunker, all I had to look forward to was getting out. I told myself that I would, eventually. I made myself hope.

Days went by. Weeks. And slowly, what had started out as bare contentment turned to dying impatience. 500 plus hours trapped in an underground home with nothing to do. Where the only books belonged to Tom, and watching the same damn movies day in and day out only made me restless.

I wanted to go back outside, to see what was going on. I wanted to know what had changed in the world up top. Where everyone went. Tom told me to stop staring at the calendar, and to find something else to do. It made me mad. And for the first time I went from tolerating my husband, to hating his guts.

To him the bunker was a goddamn haven. He didn’t care what happened beyond his walls. He had everything he wanted down there, and he was as happy as any could be. It didn’t matter to him one bit that the world was turning itself inside out. For all he was concerned, everyone he knew could burn in hell.

Tom never did have friends. At least, none that he spent any time outside of work with. He spent a lot of time on his own. Writing. Every day we spent locked inside that bunker together, I’d hear that fucking keyboard clack and clack and clack. He’d type for hours on end, stopping only to either disappear inside the bathroom, refuel the generator, or grab some food. Food that he enjoyed far too much for someone who was eating the same damn thing for months.

The storage room was stacked with canned food of little variety. Beans, soup, fish, and instant noodles. Stuff made me sick by the first week. I started to eat as less as I possibly could. Appetite became a foreign concept.

January passed, and in came February. The picture this time was a glacier. Jokulsarlon, if I remember right. I probably do. I have a habit of being able to memorize things pretty quickly.

It was at this point that depression reared its ugly head. Sometimes I would go to sleep crying. Sometimes I would think of simply killing myself. There were a few instances when I lashed out against Tom, took my frustrations out on the furniture. Vases, chairs, glasses, whatever I could get my hands on.

From then onwards I started sleeping on the couch in the entertainment room. He thought it was because I was mad at him. I was. But it never occurred to him that I was indifferent to his existence, and that I had no interest in ever sharing the same bed with him again.

Tom was always oblivious.

No. It was more than that. He never cared. That’s what it was. He never cared enough about anyone else to try to understand what they felt. All the missed hints and cues, because he never paid any goddamn attention.

March. Now a picture of the Thjorsa River, and by this point I had to leave the bunker.

I asked Tom how much longer it would be. He said at least three more months. As if somehow, without any radio communication or any means of reaching the outside world, he would know exactly how much longer we would have to stay.

Weeks more of bullshit like that, and eventually I had enough. I decided I was going to unseal the door, consequences be damned.

Early morning. I went up past the stairs to the entrance tunnel. I tried to turn the metal lever that kept the door closed. But either the thing was jammed, or it was just too damn heavy.

Tom must have known what I was doing. I knew he could hear me running along the tunnels. My footsteps left imprints in the air. But I didn’t care. Not at the time anyway. I was getting out, and I didn’t care enough to make a secret of it.

When I saw him standing behind me however, scowling at me like a vicious animal, I thought that maybe I should have reconsidered.

“What the hell are you doing?” he asked. And gone was the politeness in his eyes that I had once known him for. In its place, a grimace of unsaturated animosity that I had never seen in my entire life.

They say that people don’t change. They reveal. Maybe it’s true. If so, then I had to reconcile with the fact that the man I had once fallen in love with all those years ago never really existed. That he was just a mask to a demon I had never known existed.

The thought scared me. And it made me mad.

Six years of marriage for a man who was never really there.

“I am getting out of here!” I screamed to his face.

He threw me away from the door. My head hit the wall.

“It’s dangerous out there!”

A rising bruise on my forehead made me see the irony of his words.

“You’ll be putting both our lives in danger if you open this door!”

Anger weighed heavily in my gut, though it was subsided by the fear of what he would do if I argued, or hit him back.

“Honey,” he said, and changed his tone. “I’m sorry.”

Tom inched himself closer.

“Get away from me!” I cried, and ran back down the bunker.

I wanted a place to hide. A place where Tom wouldn’t find me. No such luck. Three months of living in the same house had a tendency to expose one’s occupants to every nook and cranny.

Hating myself for my failures, I ran straight to the bedroom like a little girl, where I cried until I couldn’t. When I left and entered the kitchen, I saw warming up a can of chicken soup was my husband.

“Have some breakfast,” he said, his voice both calm and normal, as if nothing had happened only moments ago.

My first thought then was how meaningless the word breakfast had become. Without the context of night and day, time was just an hour on a clock. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner, were just part of the same three square meals each day. One that in the end was no different in the other, considering the fact that we would always have the same damn food no matter the time. Gone were the days of eggs and bacon in the morning, sandwiches in the afternoon, and a glass of wine at night.

My second thought, one that lingered longer than it should have, was how indifferent I would have been if Tom had died. I could see him in the kitchen with his head over the stove, gleaming back at me with the same smile as the one he’d used when our marriage wasn’t a complete façade. All-the-while I imagined him lying lifeless on the floor, and feeling strangely comforted by the image.

The calendar on the wall was gone.

“Where is it?” I asked, looking to the direction where it had once been.

“It isn’t healthy for you to keep staring at that calendar. You need to preoccupy yourself, set your mind to different things.”

“Like what?”

“You can write, just like I do. Here, I’ll give you one of my empty notebooks.”

He did. But all I used it for was to jot down the remaining dates of March. One page for each day that passed. I wasn’t going to humor Tom. I wasn’t going to pacify myself while the rest of the world moved on. Unlike him, I wasn’t going to forget.

We’d been down there for three months. And by then, who could have known what was happening outside? For all either of us could be certain, the infection had already been dealt with. People could be returning back to their homes, rebuilding what had once been destroyed. What if my friends, Julia, Brett, Mike, or even Stephanie were back in San Fran, wondering where I’d gone?

Whatever was happening outside, I wanted more than anything to know. Instead I was trapped inside my own little hell, unable to escape no matter how much I wanted to. The dying marriage that I once had with Tom had now decayed into something else.

I was his prisoner.

April. I knew it was April, because I remembered from the calendar that March ended on the 31st. Problem now was that I didn’t know when April ended. Was it the 30th? Or 31st, like March? I wondered also what picture was on this month. What new sights of Iceland had I yet to see?

For the rest of April until the 20th, today, I set my sights on getting that bunker door unlocked. I was going to get out even if it killed me. Even if Tom killed me.

I went back to sharing the same bed with him. If I was going to try anything, I needed him disarmed. Having him think that I trusted him after all this time went a good way into doing precisely that. I even went ahead and had sex with him the first night, as much as the thought disgusted me.

To no surprise, he bought it. After he came, he told me how glad he was that I’d forgiven him. The warm feel of his body nearly made me think that I had.

It’d been three months since I last had sex. A moment of curiosity then, when I wondered if the man I’d done it with was still alive. If he went with the rest of the evacuees.

Tom kept a gun in the safe. I remember seeing him bring it in before we sealed the door. It was a pistol that belonged to his father George. Said he got it in the war, when he swiped it off a dead SS general.

He kept the pistol inside a safe along with our passports, wallets, and cash, just in case. I didn’t know the combination, so I asked him if I could see my passport. When he asked me why, I said I wanted to know if they weren’t expired. So that maybe, if the day came when we could finally leave, we could just grab our passports and go on a vacation together. Preferably someplace sunny.

Tom seemed to like the idea. Either that or his smile had only been meant to keep me entertained. To keep me dreaming.

“Sure thing honey,” he said, and unlocked the safe.

25; 4; 15. I repeated the combination in silence until I knew the numbers better than the date of my own birth.

“See? Passport’s good for two years.”

I feigned happiness.

“That’s good.”

The following night, I made certain that Tom was asleep. I whispered in his ear. He didn’t hear me. It was two in the morning, and Tom was out cold. I grabbed the pistol, and tip-toed my way up the ladder into the tunnel. If Tom tried to stop me this time, I swore to myself that I would be ready to shoot him dead.

Once again I struggled with the door. Only now there was something else there that I hadn’t noticed before. A lock tied around a chain. Tom must have done it the first time I tried to open the door.

I hesitated over what to do. But I guess I didn’t have much of a choice.

I shot the lock.

A shock of noise and vibrations reverberated around the bunker. I could feel it all, coupled with the warmth of the pistol in my hand, and the burning smell of gunpowder. Tom heard it. I could feel his bare feet shuffling around the bunker downstairs. Calling my name as he ran.

“Vanessa. Vanessa. Where are you Vanessa?”

I didn’t wait for him to show up. I set myself to unfurl the chains and open the latch.

Again, it was heavy. Sturdy as a goddamn rock.

With all the muscle I could put to it, I was able to weaken but not completely undo the latch.

And that was when he showed up.

“Vanessa, stop!”

The scream startled me. I aimed the pistol at Tom, my hands and fingers shaking as I did. Determined as I was to leave, a part of me was surprised at how much I was willing to do, and at how far I’d already gone.

I had a gun pointed at my husband’s chest. This was the point of no return. Live free or die, there was no going back to the four months of safe living underground. I couldn’t surrender. Not anymore. Tom would kill me.

“Come on Vanessa. Please, just put the gun down and let’s talk about this.”

He was afraid. I could see his skin turn pale just like mine. He didn’t know if I was going to shoot, and at the time neither did I.

I didn’t know what to do. I had to get that door open, but I couldn’t turn around and let him come any closer. Shooting him seemed a good idea even if it was on the leg to stop him from moving.

But I didn’t want to shoot Tom. Not for everything he’d done to me.

He stepped closer.

“Stop moving!” I yelled, and the pistol flailed so hysterically in my hand that a part of me was afraid it would go off on its own.

“Okay okay. Don’t do anything baby. Sweetheart. I’m staying right here.”

Tom was lying. I could see it in his face. I knew that the moment he had his chance, he would take the gun from my hand and beat me over the head with it. Or shoot me. No. I knew that if I took my eyes away from him, he wouldn’t hesitate to stop me.

And yet in spite of myself I wanted to believe him.

“Please. Don’t move.”

I turned around to open the door. And like the wiser part of me predicted, Tom attacked.

He threw me on the floor, and his hands clasped around my throat.

I couldn’t breathe.

“You stupid bitch!” he shouted in my ear, and his grip tightened.

The pressure mounted in my skull. I could feel myself turn red as I looked my husband in the eye.

“I loved you,” he said, and tears began to moisten his eyes. I could feel some of it drop on my cheeks. And I started crying too.

So close to freedom, and yet so hopelessly far.

32 years of life, and this was how I was going to die.

I heard knocking on the other side of the door. Tom was surprised, and so was I. Neither of us knew of what to make of it, but I could tell we were thinking the same thing.

There was someone out there.

The thought alone was enough to spring me back to life. With my foot right underneath the latch, I began kicking while Tom continued to squeeze my throat. The door loosened, and loosened, and loosened, until the sudden shot of hope gave me the strength I needed to finally undo the door.

It swung open on its own, and daylight flooded in. For an instant Tom let go and shielded his eyes. It was hard to take in the natural light after all that time, but I tried.

I couldn’t see straight, but I could see Tom start to shake. He blinked time and time again, and I could have sworn I saw his eyes turn bloodshot red.

Just like them. The infected.

That was when I saw two shapes run inside the bunker and tackle him off of me. At first I thought they were people. And in some Freudian sense they were. At one point in their lives anyhow.

They threw him on the floor and sunk their teeth in his skin. They bit him a few times, then stopped, then turned around to look at me.

Their eyes were deep red, their chins coated with blood both old and new.

I picked up Tom’s pistol and shot them. One I hit on the neck, the other in the mouth. They both fell.

I stood up, and with the pistol ready to fire, I went up to Tom.

He was still alive, except now he was just like them. He looked up at me, and all trace of familiarity was gone. What he saw in me was the exact same thing the others saw in the people they killed.

I shot him once in the chest. He was still alive. I shot him a second time, and here couldn’t tell where the bullet went. He raised his hands to pick himself up, but I kept on shooting until he fell, and then I shot again.

My finger was locked to the trigger, moving back and forth repeatedly. For every blare of gunfire, I wanted more. I shot him again and again, but it wasn’t enough.

Tom hadn’t suffered enough.

Eventually the gun stopped firing. It was out of bullets. No matter how many times I pulled the trigger, all that came out was a thin mechanical click.

The sound reminded me of Tom’s clacking keyboard, so I stopped. I dropped the gun on the floor, and finally, I stepped out the basement of my step parents’ home.

The air was different here. Warmer. It was sunny outside. I peeked through the blinds and what I saw what looked to be a normal day. Green lawn, adjacent houses, pavement, and a shining blue sky.

There was no one outside. The streets were empty. Sunny Lane was a ghost town.

I wanted to go outside and check, but a broken window in the kitchen stopped me.

It dawned on me then that with the windows closed and the doors locked, that must have been how the infected got in. Maybe they heard the gunfire. Maybe they heard it when I tried to open the door.

Either way, the realization hit me all the same.

It wasn’t, isn’t safe.

Four months since the evacuation, and things have only gotten worse.

As much as I want to go outside and see the neighborhood, I’ve been too afraid of what I might find. There might be more of them out there, waiting for me to come out.

Did I want to take that chance? Do I want to now?

I want to believe the blue sunny skies I see outside my window. I want to believe the rustling trees. I want to believe that everything’s fine. And yet I can’t bring myself to take the first step forward.

It’s been two hours since I killed my husband. In that time I’ve locked myself upstairs in my step parents’ bedroom, bringing nothing with me but an empty notebook and a pen. I’m writing because it’s all I can think to do. With no one here to talk to, all I can do is jot down my thoughts, and hope that someone reads this. I don’t know if anyone will.

But that’s what people do I suppose. They share their thoughts with the world when they realize they’re about to die.

We like to be remembered.

Daylight is fast disappearing. The light from the blinds is changing color, and the room is getting darker. Once night falls, I’ll have to stay inside where it’s safe. There’s no sense going anywhere else. Not now.

When it’s time to go outside I’ll pack my things, take the car, and drive as far away from this place as I can.

Eventually.