I Made This Up

My tooth ached. I was going to have to venture out.

I had no idea what I would find. I hadn't been off the farm since 2020, when the virus hit and people in the United States began to drop like flies.

Mama and me, we were in the hills on our farm. I had Internet, though, because we weren't that rural.

I was in my last year of school, and would turn 18 in June.

But I'd never finish that last year.

Mama made me stay home even before the officials began telling everyone to practice something called "social distancing." We stayed home as long as we could, but the sugar and salt and other items began to run out.

The day Mama decided to go to the store, I cried.

"You stop that now," she chided. "But if I don't come back, don't you leave this place. Don't you leave until someone you trust says you can."

She never came back.

Mama could have been killed in a car wreck for all I knew. I feared she'd been taken, though. I'd read stories in the far corners of the Internet that the government was using this virus thing to take people, to simply steal them away, and then declare them dead.

I don't know what they were doing with those folks, and I didn't want to think about it.

The world began shutting itself down. For a while I tended the farm and things seemed like they might be normal. School maybe would be in my future in a few months, according to the TV. I was still online, things were still working. Mama had lots of money in her accounts from when Daddy'd died in an accident at work. I kept paying the bills when they came.

Then after some folks went back to their normal, the virus hit again.

I think most everyone died.

The TV stopped. My friends quit posting on Facebook, with no explanation. The guy who delivered the gas, who was the only person I'd seen on the farm since just before Mama left, never showed back up so I began rationing that so I would have it. Fortunately, Mama had filled the big tanks down at the barn.

Bills no longer came. Some things kept working though, like electricity and my Internet connection. The lights flickered sometimes during a storm, and once the Internet disappeared for days but it came back. The stuff still worked and I still used it.

I hadn't seen any updated news or information from anyone since late in 2021. That was four years ago.

There were no new videos of folks doing silly things to cheer one another up. No new videos of cats and dogs.

I'd been alone for 8 months when I felt like the world had stopped and left me alone. I didn't need the things Mama had gone after and I was afraid to leave the farm. I didn't have anyone to trust, really. We lived off the road a good ways, and the driveway was hard to spot. The last time I'd walked up there, it was so overgrown no one would have known a house was behind the trees.

I lived off of what I grew and canned. I had peach trees and I kept the seeds from the vegetables so I'd have enough for the next year. The cattle ran wild except for the six or seven I could manage. Once a year I shot a wild one and cut up the beef, canning most of it in case the electricity went out.

Never saw a soul, though.

Didn't see airplanes in the sky, or hear a car. It had been so long since I'd heard that lonesome whistle of the train way down over the hill that I'd about forgotten one once ran through there to the cement plant.

I checked the Internet every day after I did my chores. There were so many youtube videos I figured I could sit there and learn new things for years even if no one was putting up new stuff.

Then my tooth started hurting.

I googled how to fix your tooth and found that pulling it was about the only remedy without a dentist.

So I decided it was time to go see a dentist.

The ol' Toyota truck hadn't been moved much. I'd used it to drive to the mailbox for a while, but after the mail no longer came, I only turned the engine over once or twice every few months, to keep her running. Now I had to hope she'd hold up for the 15-mile trip to Daleville.

Getting out of the driveway was harder than I'd expected it to be. The dirt driveway was overgrown and I had to stop and cut down a few small palmetto trees every now and then. Bending over made my face throb with that tooth. Boy, did it ache.

The chain had rusted across the drive, but a spritz of WD-40 let me get that open. I was on the road, and now anyone could see that someone had driven back into that nearly invisible spot in the trees.

I did not pass a vehicle on my way to town. Nor did I see children playing, or clothes drying on clotheslines, or see another farmer making hay or a woman working in her garden. Every house I passed looked vacant.

Pulling onto the main road, I saw that the businesses along US 220 looked about the same as they did along Gravel Hill Road. Empty.

Empty like in the morning someone might come in and do a little cleaning. Not empty like vagrants had moved in and broken all the windows. Empty like someone had simply closed the door and then, "poof," no one went back.

I moved on through the community. No movement. No dogs, even.

My scream was audible when a cat darted across my path. First living thing I'd seen the whole trip.

I pulled into the dentist office and looked at the shuttered building. The windows weren't broken. The doors weren't open. No lights on. I hopped from the truck and tried a door.

I was going to have to break in.