Rubber City Ruins Read online

  He never paid attention and was incapable of following directions. When she would ask him a question he would respond by just staring at her blankly. The first half of the year, his apathy made her furious and she would send him to the office. No matter how mean and harsh she was with that boy nothing seemed to faze him. She would go home and ask Rick if he had any ideas of what to do with a student like David. Rick suggested that David might be having troubles at home and that he is bottling up all of his feelings. One rainy day after Thanksgiving break, Anna did something that she had never done before: she looked up David’s address and drove over to his house to see if that was the cause of his apathy and poor grades. As she pulled into the driveway, she muttered, ‘Rick doesn’t know what he’s talking about’ as she stared up at the newer 2 story colonial in a nicer neighborhood than hers. There was a boat covered in a tarp next to the attached garage and behind it was a gate to the backyard. Three small dogs noticed Anna on the other side of the boat and ran up to the fence to yip at her.

  “Hey guys, what’re you doing out in the rain?” Anna reached her fingers through the fence to let them feverishly sniffer her fingers. She laughed at their intensity to identify her until she noticed a cage against the back of the privacy fence next to a red barn. “David?” She yelled out, and the mass inside the cage looked up. He gave her that same broken and apathetic look he gave her in class. With her heart pounding, she ran to the front door and began to beat on it. “Mrs. Williamson, are you home?” When no one answered, she pulled down on the door handle and it opened.

  On a beige couch in a room off of the foyer was a woman in a bright pink top and white Capri pants who was sleeping on her back. There was a glass of spilled red wine on the floor.

  “Mrs. Williamson!” Anna yelled clapping her hands together.

  The woman shot up and peered around the room with droopy eyes. “Are you with the service?”

  “Why is your son outside in a cage?”

  “He ate the rice crispy treats that I had made for his brother. He’s waiting for his dad to get home,” she said, and laid back on the couch.

  Anna let David out of the cage and ran a bath to warm him up as she called Child Services. David missed school for a few days, and then came back as if nothing happened. She asked him if he was still at home and he nodded. Then, he said something that would haunt her for a very long time. He motioned for her to come down to his level so he could whisper. He cupped his sticky hands over her ear and whispered, “Don’t feel sad for me, Mrs. Kemp. My brother says one day soon dad will burn in hell.” And for the first time, Anna saw David smile.

  Anna took the picture of David’s dad, folded it up and put it in her pocket as she began to walk down the hallway. The railings were all decorated in silver tinsel and there were cardboard Santa Claus cut outs pinned on the bulletin board outside of each classroom. She ignored all the classrooms leading to hers with the exception of Jackie’s classroom. Jackie Lee was the kindergarten teacher to which Anna had sparked an unlikely friendship. Jackie was upbeat and colorful and brimming with sunshine and rainbows- a character trait someone as cynical as Anna would typically avoid. But Jackie was magnanimous and strange. She loved teaching her students about sharing and singing, but her favorite movie was Eraserhead (because she loved the nightmarish alien baby fetus) and she swore like a drunken sailor the minute she exited school grounds. She wore neon pink and black suspenders every day because the kids found them to be hilarious and became her trademark, but after school she took them off and wore baggy, faded jeans and 90’s band t-shirts.

  The minute she opened Jackie’s door the smell of garbage overwhelmed her. She stepped back and covered her nose with the collar of her shirt. Once the smell had dissipated a bit, she walked inside to find that the source of the smell was, in fact, garbage. There was a buffet table in the back of the room where she normally kept her art supplies that was full of rotten food that was covered in flies. Food and glitter and construction paper scraps littered the floor, and the chalkboard was full of 5-year-old scribbles that only reached a quarter of the way. A banner, that was clearly in Jackie’s unique handwriting, said Thanks for A Great Year! On the chalkboard on the other side of the classroom was a message- also written in Jackie’s handwriting- that read If there ever comes a day where we can’t be together, keep me in your heart and I’ll stay there forever. -Pooh.

  “Oh Jackie… what happened?” Anna frowned, looking at the words on the chalkboard.

  As she made her way down the hallway, she didn’t bother to even peek into anyone else’s classroom. She just wanted to see hers. As she turned the corner, she immediately noticed that the name above her door wasn’t hers.

  “Mrs. Morrison? Who the hell in Mrs. Morrison?” Anna groaned as she opened the door to her old classroom.

  Everything was the same as she had left it. The desks were still in their 4 rows with a space down the middle for her to walk during long lessons. She distinctly remembered hanging the framed picture of John F. Kennedy when she taught her history lesson on the 1960’s and loved it so much that she decided to keep it there. The Christmas decorations were all the same ones that she had used in the past, but they were hung in different places.

  She walked over to the desk and sat down in a chair that wasn’t hers. The chair that she used to sit in was expensive- Rick bought it specially for her on her birthday after a year of complaining about her terrible desk chair at school. The chair that was there was something that someone had dragged in from the faculty lounge.

  “This isn’t right…” Anna huffed as she opened every desk drawer to find all of her pens and pencils and grading supplies were all the same. It was as if someone had taken over her life without even skipping a beat.

  Anna left her old classroom and walked down the hallway, dejected and confused. The only question that was running over and over through her mind was, ‘What happened?’ The notion of everything being the product of a tumor-induced nightmare seemed less plausible as time went on. Everything felt so real and her senses heightened. She could pick out each individual scent note in the air. She could almost taste the pencil shavings and the chalkboard dust and the pages from overused textbooks. There was no doubt that Anna was actually living within that moment, and that scared her more than anything.

  Before she headed back to her truck to head home, Anna decided to take one last look into the teacher's lounge. When she got there, she saw the note on the door that read Ms. Lee’s private club meets in the basement, and it was written in a student’s handwriting. Anna turned the handle of the teacher’s lounge but it was locked. Turning on a heel, she made her way to the basement and opened the door.

  Much like when she opened the door to Jackie’s classroom, she was hit with an overwhelmingly foul smell that made her step back and cover her nose with the collar of her shirt. Once the smell had lessened she began to walk down the concrete basement stairs, stepping on wrappers and knocking over aluminum cans as she went. Beams of sunlight illuminated the disturbing scene on the floor: almost a dozen small and badly decayed bodies. Anna sucked in a startled gasp as the pieces of the scene began to fall into place. There were books and board games lining the floor, as well as empty soda cans and wrappers to candy bars and potato chips. A blinking red light from a malfunctioning light-up sneaker caught her attention for the corner of the room. The children were so badly decayed but their clothes were still perfectly intact- the boys were wearing their superhero sweatshirts and faded blue jeans with washed-in, grass-stained knees, and the girls wore pretty cardigans with floral designs and shirts with cute, fuzzy animals. Leaning against the wall, Anna spotted the trademark neon pink and black suspenders.

  “No...” Anna exhaled as she ran back up each concrete step and slammed the basement door behind her. She crumpled onto the floor and rubbed her eyes in a vain effort to remove the grotesque scene from her brain. She was overwhelmed with sadness and she wanted to cry. Crying was what people did when they saw d
ead children and their former dead best friend. But it was as if her feelings were so intense and razor sharp that the tears never came. Her chest burned and ached and there was a loud buzzing in her ears. She tried to focus on her breathing, paying close attention to the sounds that the air made as it passed through her nose and into her chest. It was a trick that Rick at taught her years ago, when she first started teaching and would become overwhelmed. As she counted each second of each breath she noticed a squeaking noise coming from outside. At first, she just assumed it was the wind blowing against the chain link fence. But she soon realized that the squeak was too evenly measured to be the wind. Slowly standing up, she saw a figure in the long narrow window of the recess doors swinging on a swing.

  As she walked towards the door, the figure became clearer. It was a grown man wearing a baseball cap, sunglasses, light blue jeans and a white t-shirt. Anna watched him closely before opening the door, and considered leaving him alone. It was the first time she had encountered a living person in the ruins of her old town. Maybe people weren’t friendly? Looking around she couldn’t imagine encountering any friendly people, given all the death and destruction around her.

  But the man was smiling. Every once in awhile, he would blurt out a laugh when he swung high enough for the chain to lose tension momentarily.

  The recess door scraped along the blacktop as she opened it, and the man’s head jerked in her direction. His feet kicked up dust as he dragged them in the gravel to stop himself.

  Anna held her breath firmly in her chest as she watched him stand up from the swing. Surely a grown man swinging and laughing on a swing set in the parking lot of an elementary school couldn’t be dangerous. Surely, he wasn’t dangerous.

  Chapter 4

  The man took off his sunglasses and hung them from the collar of his shirt. He raised his hand and waved cautiously. “Hey?” He cleared his throat. “Are… are you real?”

  Anna did not anticipate the question and paused before answering. “I think so.” She laughed under her breath at her own response. “Are you friendly?”

  The man smiled. “Yeah, I’m friendly. Are you friendly?”

  The answer to that question was typically no. Many people thought that Anna was standoffish and cold. She didn’t open up to people easily and she spent most of the time keeping to herself. The students at her school referred to her as the ‘mean teacher’. That was because Anna was serious about her job and she wanted to make an impression on her students. Rick used to tease her about her reputation at the school and she would respond ‘every adult remembers their mean elementary school teacher’. The grades of her students were the highest in the school. And every year on field day she would have her students prepare for a giant ‘3rd grade exit test’. She would pass it out and then tell them to rip it up and hand them candy bars as they lined up to go outside.

  Anna assumed that the man had meant a different kind of friendly. More of an ‘are you going to kill me?’ type of friendly. She nodded, and then said “Yeah, I’m friendly.”

  The man stood up from his swing and began to walk toward her. The closer he neared, the wider the smile on his face became. His face was tan and dirt had settled in the creases on his face. Anna guessed him to be in his mid 30’s, but he was dressed as if he was 20.

  “I’m Cole,” he said sticking out his hand.

  “Anna.” She grabbed his hand and winced as he squeezed it a little too hard.

  He let out a long, excited sigh, and then said “I’m sorry, I can’t help it…” As he wrapped his arms around her and held her tightly. When he pulled away there were tears welling in his eyes and he wiped them away with the back of his hand. “I didn’t think I’d ever see another person ever again. It’s been… so long.”

  “It’s been a long time since you saw another person?”

  “Like... a really, really long time. I mean, I dream about people… and women… but after all this time I have yet to find one outside of my imagination. Do you ever dream about people? A boyfriend? A husband?”

  “I just saw my husband a few days ago.”

  “There’s more of you?” Cole’s eyes grew large.

  “I think… maybe… I don’t know. The last thing that I remember is everything being fine. And now… well, everything looks like this.”

  “Wait… so you don’t know what happened?”

  “The only thing I can recall is seeing the first half of a news story about some new virus. And Rick said it was just another false alarm.”

  “False alarm...” Cole rested his hands-on top of his head in astonishment. “You are blowing my mind right now, Anna.”

  “Can you tell me what happened?”

  Cole scoffed. “Kind of. I don’t know a whole lot of the specifics. I was 7 years old when everything started to go wrong. Mom cried a lot because a lot of people were dying… including my dad. I helped her bury him in the back yard. Almost immediately after we buried him our neighborhood was seized by heavily armed American soldiers. They took all of us out of our houses and put us in camps. At the time, we thought they were saving us… but it turned out not to be the case. They would take us, one by one, into the big building. And they would…” Cole rubbed his eyes and shook his head as if he was trying to shake his thoughts away.

  “American troops?” Anna asked, furrowing her brow in suspicion.

  “Yup.”

  “How long were you in the camp?”

  “About a year. I remember we saw the weather change four times. The winter was the worst.”

  “How did you get out?”

  “There was a hole that the community took turns digging under the fence. Before the ground froze for the winter they were only able to get it dug deep enough for me to fit through. They told me to run and find help. And if I couldn’t find any help, that I needed to come back with weapons. They wanted me to find guns or knives and slip them to them under the fence.”

  “Did you?”

  Tears began to well in his eyes again. “No.” He wiped them away with the back of his hand. “I’m sorry, you must think that I’m a big baby.”

  “I don’t think that.”

  He smiled through his tears. “You’re nice.”

  “I don’t know about that…”

  “I was just a kid… a dumb, stupid kid… and I was scared. You don’t know the things that they did to us there. Sometimes people would go into the big building and walk out perfectly fine. Sometimes they would come back like someone sucked their soul right out of their body. And sometimes… they just didn’t come back. So, when I was on the other side of that fence and looked out at the road that led away from it… I knew I couldn’t go back. I was scared. And little. The older I got… I began to plan a rescue mission. I would barge in like Superman and save everyone. But… as I planned my rescue mission… I began to wonder what I would come back to. It had been over 10 years since I had escaped… would there even be anyone left?” Cole shook his head as he stared into the asphalt. “I could have saved them all if I were braver. I mean… Jesus… what kind of son leaves his mother there to die? I just kept running further and further away until I couldn’t find my way back even if I tried.”

  Anna wanted to console him, but her mind was spinning from the unbelievable story that he had told. “Why are you here now… at the school?”

  “I just like it here. I have a lot of good and happy memories at my old school.” Cole looked up at Anna and smiled. “My parents always fought and life at home was never great, but going to school always made things better. We had a party on the last day before they let out school for the year. Because of the virus, they shut down all the schools. There was a big party with cake and candy and a big assembly where we watched movies. It’s a very dark place out there now… so to keep from going crazy I spend a lot of time here.” He paused. “Have you been inside?”