In crisis situations, survival often depends on making difficult decisions and accepting help from unexpected sources, as demonstrated by a father who, during a fictional zombie outbreak on January 6, 2021, was saved by three strangers—a roadblock guard who could have shot him, a basement survivor who provided information, and a retired doctor who found and returned his daughter—showing that during catastrophic events, the people who help are often not the ones we expect.
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On January 6, 2021, I Left the City Before Sunrise as the Zombie Outbreak Reached the StreetsAdded:
The cold came in through the windshield seal like it had been waiting for me.
3:47 in the morning, January 6th, and the dashboard thermometer said 19° and the radio said nothing at all.
Not static, nothing.
I had driven from my apartment in the West Loop to the on-ramp at Roosevelt with the FM scanner cycling and every preset had gone dark in the last 20 minutes.
The AM band had one voice left on it, a man in Hammond reading the same sentence over and over, and the sentence was, "Do not open your door for anyone you know." I had a half tank of gas, a duffel I had packed 11 days ago and kept by the door since, and a daughter in Rockford who had stopped answering her phone at 12 2. I am 46 years old. I worked 21 years as a building engineer for a hospital system on the near west side, which means I know how heat moves through a structure, how water finds the lowest point, how a generator lies to you in the first 90 seconds after a transfer.
None of that was going to help me on the Eisenhower.
What was going to help me was that I had left before the lights went and that the man in Hammond, whoever he was, was still talking.
Before I go any further, I want to be honest with you for a second.
The channel hasn't been doing well lately. And at this stage of things, your support actually matters to me. If these survival stories are something you find yourself coming back to, take a moment to like the video, leave a comment, or send it to someone who'd sit through a story like this one.
It helps more than you'd think. I pulled onto the Eisenhower westbound at 351 and the city behind me was wrong in a way I'm still trying to describe. Not dark. Dark would have made sense.
Halflit. Whole blocks of street lights were burning. And whole blocks were not in a pattern that did not look like a grid failure. Grid failures fall in zones, in substations, in shapes you can recognize.
This was speckled. It was as if someone was choosing.
The expressway was emptier than it should have been at that hour. Not empty. A salt truck ahead of me was driving in the center lane at maybe 30 m an hour. And I watched its hazard lights for almost a mile before I realized the driver's door was hanging open and the truck was simply rolling.
I went around it on the left and did not look inside.
I have thought about that since. I have thought about whether a man was lying across the bench seat with his foot on the pedal or whether the cruise had taken over a corpse.
Both options were available. I picked neither and kept driving.
The first body I actually saw was on the shoulder near the Austin exit. A woman in a long brown coat sitting upright against the concrete divider, her legs stretched out in front of her like she was waiting for a bus. My headlights caught her for maybe two seconds.
Her chin was on her chest. Her left hand was missing, not bandaged, missing. And the stump was not bleeding, which is the detail I keep returning to because at 19° a fresh wound should still be bleeding and hers was not. And that meant either she had been there a long time or something about her had stopped working in a way that bodies do not stop working. I did not slow down. The radio in Hammond cut out at 4:06 mid-sentence.
He had been saying the word window and the word never arrived.
I let the silence sit for a mile, then turned the radio off completely because a silent speaker that used to have a voice in it is worse than a speaker you chose to mute. That is a small thing and it is true. I had three rules in my head when I left the apartment. The first rule was do not stop in the city. The second rule was do not use the tollway because tollways have plazas and plazas have crowds.
The third rule was if you see a roadblock you cannot identify, you go backward, not through.
The first two rules held until Desplain's Oasis. The third rule broke me at 422.
I came around the long curve where the tri-state meets the northwest and the road in front of me was lit up like a film set. Emergency vehicles, maybe nine of them, parked in a wedge across all four lanes. Light bars on, no sirens.
Two semis turned sideways behind the wedge to seal the gap.
Men in winter gear with long guns walking between the vehicles. Not police uniforms. Not National Guard either, or not the kind I have ever seen. The jackets were dark and unmarked, and the men moved like they had been doing this for longer than the night had been going on, which was not possible, and which is why I tapped the brake.
I'm going to ask you something now, and I want you to actually think about it before you keep listening.
If you came around that curve at 4 in the morning and saw what I saw and you had a daughter 80 mi past it, would you have turned around? Would you have tried to talk your way through? Leave your honest answer in the comments. I want to know what you would have done because I'm still not sure what I did was right.
What I did was kill my headlights, drop to the right shoulder, and coast. There is an access road that parallels the Eisenhower for about a/4 mile near that interchange used by maintenance crews. I have driven trucks down it during a sewer job in 2014.
The chainlink gate at the entrance was already open. That bothered me. It bothered me enough that I almost did not take it. But the alternative was the wedge. And the wedge had no civilian cars going through it that I could see.
only stopped on the near side with their headlights pointing at the men and that meant the wedge was not letting anyone through, only collecting them.
The access road dropped me out behind a shell station on Mannheim. I sat in the dark with the engine off for two full minutes, listening.
There was a sound I could not place. A low mechanical thumping far away like a basement compressor cycling.
Except it was outside and it was not regular. Every 14 or 15 seconds.
I counted three of them before I started the car again and rolled out onto Mannheim with the lights off.
The Shell station's windows were broken.
All of them. The inside was dark and I did not look closely, but the door was propped open with what I thought at first was a tire iron.
And what I realized as I passed was an arm, just the arm holding the door open the way you would prop it with a brick.
I did not stop to understand it.
There are things I'm not going to understand, and I made peace with that around mile 12.
I picked up Route 20 west of Elgian at about 5:15.
The sky was still completely black.
Sunrise on January 6th in northern Illinois is around 7:16.
And I had 2 hours to put as much distance between me and the city as I could before the world could see itself.
I wanted to be in Rockford before sunrise. I wanted my daughter in the passenger seat before the sun came up. I had this idea and I knew it was an idea and not a plan. That whatever was happening was easier in the dark. That daylight would force decisions on people who were currently just acting. And that once decisions started, the roads would close in ways that could not be reopened.
Route 20 was a different country than the expressway. No bodies, no lights.
farms on either side, dark houses set back from the road, occasional mailboxes catching my headlights.
I let myself drive normally for about 11 miles. I let myself believe for those 11 miles that whatever was in Chicago had stayed in Chicago and that the rest of the state was just sleeping.
Then I came over a small rise outside Morango and saw the church.
It was a white clabboard country church, the kind with a single steeple set maybe 60 ft off the road. Every window was lit. Every single one. Not candles, electric light, fluorescent, the bluish kind they use in basement and fellowship halls.
and the parking lot was full, maybe 40 cars.
I slowed without meaning to. A church full of light at 5:30 in the morning in the middle of a county where nothing else had power. I could see figures moving inside through the windows, standing close together, not sitting in pews, standing in the open part where they would have folding chairs out for a potluck.
I have thought about that church a lot.
I did not stop. I almost stopped. The reason I did not stop was that the front door was open and no one was using it and no one was coming or going. And people who have built a refuge do not leave the front door open in January at 19° with the lights on. The light coming through that doorway was not warm. It was the same fluorescent color as the inside, and it was pouring out onto the steps, and the steps were empty.
That was the moment I understood that the people in there were not gathered.
They were coralled.
By whom or by what, I do not know. I passed the church at about 40 m an hour with the heater on full and did not look in my mirror. I am telling you about the church because of what happened 20 minutes later and because the church is when I knew this was not a city problem and not even a state problem. The church was 30 mi outside Chicago in a town of 7,000 people. And the church had power when nothing around it did. And the church had 40 cars in its lot. And I could not make any of that fit together in a way that did not involve someone organizing it. The dead do not organize.
The infected, if that is what we are calling them, do not gather under fluorescent light in fellowship halls.
Somebody had done that. Somebody was doing it. And that meant the thing happening across the region was not one thing. It was two things at minimum. And they were not necessarily on the same side.
And I was driving alone through both of them with a duffel bag and a Honda that was 8 years old and a daughter 80 miles ahead who had stopped answering her phone. I tried her again at 5:51.
It rang four times and went to voicemail.
The voicemail was still her voice recorded sometime last spring telling me cheerfully that she could not come to the phone. I left a message. I said, "I'm about an hour out." I said, "Please stay inside." I said, "If you are with someone, tell them I'm coming." I said, "I love you." I have a habit of saying that last part on every voicemail to her since her mother died in 2018 because I do not believe in saving it.
And that morning, I was glad of the habit because it meant the last thing she would have on her phone if anything happened was that the first infected I saw. And I'm calling them infected because I do not have a better word. And because by then the AM radio had come back on for 90 seconds before dying again. And a man in Deuke had used that word. was at 6:04 in the morning on Route 20 near Cherry Valley.
He was running in the middle of the road, coming at me headon in just a t-shirt and pants.
No coat at 19°. No coat. He was sprinting, not staggering. Sprinting flat out the way a man sprints toward a finish line with his arms pumping. I had maybe 4 seconds to decide what to do.
And I did not decide anything.
I just held the wheel straight and accelerated.
And at the last instant, he veered toward me on purpose. And the impact threw him over the hood and into the windshield and over the roof. And I did not stop. And when I checked the mirror, he was getting up.
He was getting up. I want you to sit with that for a second because I sat with it for the next 10 miles. a man hit by a sedan at 60 mph at a closing speed of probably 90 getting up. There was no calculus for that. There was no medical explanation that I, as a man who has worked in a hospital for two decades, could put on it.
So, I stopped trying to explain it and I drove and I kept driving. and the windshield had a crack in it now that started at the top right corner and worked its way diagonally across my field of view.
And every time my headlights hit a road sign, the crack lit up like a vein.
The sun came up at 7:19, 3 minutes late by my watch, but on time by the official almanac, and I crossed into the Rockford city limits at 7:26.
The light was gray and thin and lay flat over everything.
There were columns of smoke rising from at least four locations in the city.
None of them were small.
One was downtown, two were on the south side, one was further west near where my daughter lived.
And I did not let myself look at that one for very long because I needed to drive.
My daughter is 24. Her name is Anna. She is a nurse at Swedish American, which is one of the two big hospitals in Rockford.
And she lives in a duplex on Auburn Street with a roommate named Devon who works in IT and who I have never trusted, not for anything he did, but because he is the kind of person who answers questions, with another question, and that wears on a father.
Anna had texted me at 12:04 in the morning that the hospital was diverting and that she was being told to come in and that she would call me when she knew what was happening. The call had not come. At 12:12, she had stopped answering. I had loaded the car at 12:40 and left the apartment at 3:45 because I wanted the roads as empty as I could get them and because I wanted to arrive when the sun came up and not before. And now the sun was up and I was here and the column of smoke was on her side of the town. The first roadblock inside Rockford was at the intersection of Riverside and North Second. This one was civilian.
Two pickup trucks parked nose tonose across the street and a man in a car heart jacket standing in front of them with a rifle held across his chest.
He was older than me, maybe 60, and he looked tired in a way that I recognized because I had felt it in my own face since about 4:00 in the morning. I rolled my window down. The cold came in.
He did not raise the rifle. He just looked at me. I told him I am going to my daughter's place on Auburn Street. I told him she is a nurse. She has not answered since midnight. I drove from Chicago. I'm not stopping in Rockford for anything else, just her. I said all of it in one breath because I had practiced it on the last 10 miles of Route 20.
He listened. Then he said, "Son, you do not want to go to Auburn Street." I asked him why. He said, "Because Auburn Street is where it started here." He said the hospital sent some of its nurses home last night around 11:00 when they realized what they had.
He said the nurses went home and the nurses had it and Auburn Street had three of them within four blocks of each other. He said by 3:00 in the morning that whole street was lit up. He said it had been quiet for the last hour and that quiet was not the same thing as safe.
I asked him if he had seen anyone leave Auburn Street since midnight.
He said a few. I asked him to describe them. He did. None of them sounded like Anna. He moved one of the pickups and let me through. He told me there was nothing he could do to stop me and that he wished he could. He told me if I came back out the way I came in, he would still be there until 10:00 in the morning when his shift ended. He said his name was Larry. I said mine was Mike. He said, "Good luck, Mike." I said, "Thank you, Larry." I drove the last mile and a half to Auburn Street with my hands at 10 and two and my breath shallow. The neighborhood looked at first like any neighborhood on a January morning. Snow on the lawns, cars in the driveways, a few trash cans still at the curb from a pickup that had clearly not happened the day before.
The duplex was the third house on the right on the 400 block.
A brick two-story split down the middle with a small porch on either side.
Anna's side was the left side. The porch light was on. The porch light was on.
And that meant power. And that mattered to me because if power was on, then her heat was on. And if her heat was on, then anyone inside was alive enough to need it. I am not sure that logic held.
I'm not sure of any of the logic I was using by then.
But the porch light was on and I parked across the street and I sat in the car for 90 seconds and I watched her front window for movement and I saw none. And then I got out.
I left the engine running. I had decided that before I parked.
If I had to come out fast, I did not want to fumble for keys.
I left the driver's door unlocked. I took the tire iron from the trunk because it was the heaviest thing I had that I could swing in a hallway. I left the duffel in the car. I crossed the street. The snow on her walk had footprints in it. Several sets, some going in, some going out.
The going out prints were not normal. I am not a tracker, but I have walked in snow my whole life. And the going out prints were dragged, not stepped. Long furrows with toes pointing down, as if whoever made them was being pulled by the arms and not lifting their feet.
The footprints next to the furrows were normal.
Bootprints, two sets, on either side of each furrow. Whoever was being dragged was being dragged by two people walking upright.
I stood on the porch for a long moment and listened.
Nothing inside. Nothing.
The door was unlocked. I knew it would be before I tried it because the deadbolt plate was bent outward gently in the way a deadbolt plate bends when someone pushes on the door from inside.
Hard enough to flex it but not break it.
Anna had a habit of throwing the deadbolt at night. Every night since college, she had thrown it. Someone had pushed against it from inside hard until it had given a little. Then they had opened the door normally from the outside to leave.
I went in. The living room was a wreck, but not a violent one. A wreck of someone leaving in a hurry. A throw blanket on the floor. a coffee cup on its side on the rug. The spill long since soaked in.
Her work bag, which I had given her at her graduation, was on the dining table, open with her stethoscope inside, which meant she had not gone to work, which contradicted what Larry had said about the hospital sending nurses home.
She had never gone in at all, or she had gone in and come back, or someone else had brought the bag back.
I did not know her bedroom door was closed. I called her name. I called it three times increasing in volume. The way you call into a building when you are not sure what is on the other side of the door.
There was no answer.
I want to ask you something here. I want you to tell me in the comments where you are listening from right now.
What city? What state? What country? I am asking because I want to know how far this kind of story travels and because I want to know who is out there in the kind of dark I was standing in. Drop it in the comments. It matters more than you'd think. I opened her bedroom door.
The bed was unmade and empty. The window was open. The window was open at 19° in January.
And the curtain was moving in the cold draft, and there was a smear on the window sill, dark, the color and consistency of jam left out too long.
The window opened onto the small backyard, which had a wooden fence with a gate, and the gate was open.
I crossed to the window and looked out.
The snow in the yard was a mess of prints, but the same dragging pattern I'd seen on the walk was here, too, leading from the window to the gate.
She had not been dragged. The going out prints from the front had two sets of boots. The yard had only one set of boots beside the drag mark, plus the dragged figure. Two different drags, two different events. Someone had been dragged out the front by two people.
Someone else had been dragged out the back by one.
That was at least two bodies that had left this house since midnight, and they had not been the same body. The bathroom door was also closed. I made myself open it. Devon was in the bathtub. He was fully dressed. He had a kitchen knife in his right hand and a deep, deliberate cut across his left forearm.
And the tub was full of blood that had stopped flowing some hours ago. And his eyes were open. And they were the wrong color.
They were not the gray blue I remembered. They were milky, the color of skin milk. And they tracked to me when I opened the door.
He did not move. He looked at me and I looked at him. And his chest did not rise. And I understood that I was looking at a thing that was watching me without breathing.
The knife was in his hand because he had used it on himself. And he had used it on himself because he had known what was happening to him.
And he had not finished the job. Or the job did not finish the way he had thought it would.
And now he was in the tub and his eyes were tracking me. I closed the bathroom door.
I'm going to be honest with you. I almost broke right there. I almost sat down on Anna's bed and stopped. The only thing that kept me moving was that Devon was in the tub and Anna was not. And that meant Anna might be alive somewhere and the dragging tracks led out of the yard. I went back through the house and out the front. Larry's words were in my head. She had been one of the nurses sent home or not sent home. something.
The bootprints on the walk and the two going out furrows said that two people had been removed from this house through the front door and a third had gone out the back and Devon was still inside.
And that meant Anna was one of the two who had gone out the front or the one who had gone out the back and I needed to choose which direction to follow because I could not follow both. The front prince led down the walk to the street. From the street they turned right and went two houses down, and then I lost them on a cleared driveway.
The back prints went through the gate into the alley, and the alley's snow was less disturbed, easier to follow.
I chose the back. I will tell you why I chose the back.
The front had two captors and one captive. The back had one captor and one captive. If I had to take someone, I would rather take one than two. That is the math I did standing in her front yard at 7:46 in the morning on January 6th. I am not proud of it. I am telling you because I want you to know what kind of thinking happens in those minutes. It is not heroic thinking. It is just math.
I went back through the house, out the back door, through the open gate, into the alley.
The alley ran east west between Auburn and the next street north, which I did not know the name of. The prince went east. I followed them on foot, tire iron in my right hand, my keys in my left pocket, my car running on the street behind me with the door unlocked. I was at most 3 minutes from the car at any point. That was my rule. 3 minutes from the car. If anything happened, I could be in the driver's seat in 3 minutes.
The prince went east for half a block, then turned north into the yard of a house I did not know. The back gate of that house was also open. The prince went up to the back porch. The back door of that house was also open, standing open at 19°.
I stopped at the gate. I stood there for what felt like a long time and was probably 20 seconds. Every part of me that had survived this far was telling me not to go through that gate. Every part of me that was a father was telling me to go through it. The father part was louder. I went through. The yard was small, a swing set dusted with snow, a grill on the patio with a cover on it, a child's plastic sled leaning against the back of the house. I crossed it in four strides and stopped at the bottom of the back porch steps. The drag furrow went up onto the porch and through the open door. There was a smell coming out of the house. Not a strong smell, a wrong smell. warm air and something underneath the warm air, sweet and old.
I went up the steps. The back door opened into a mud room, then a kitchen.
The kitchen was clean. Dishes drying in the rack. A coffee maker with a half pot of coffee still in it, cold. A child's drawing on the refrigerator held up by an alphabet magnet.
I stood in that kitchen and listened.
And what I heard was a sound from the basement. A scraping sound. Steady, methodical. The sound of something being moved across a concrete floor.
Then a pause.
Then the sound again.
The basement door was in the corner of the kitchen off the mudroom. It was closed.
There was a dead bolt on it. Brass, the kind you install yourself.
and the deadbolt was unlocked and pointing outward, which meant the lock had been installed to keep someone in the basement, not out of it. I stood with my hand on the door knob and listened. The scraping continued. Then it stopped. Then a voice, a woman's voice, said something I could not make out.
It was not Anna's voice. I knew that immediately.
Anna's voice has a particular weight in the lower register, a small rasp she got after a bout of pneumonia in 2019.
The voice in the basement did not have that. The voice in the basement was younger and softer, and it said a word that sounded like, "Please."
I opened the door. The basement stairs were lit by a single bare bulb. The steps were wooden and old. At the bottom, I could see the edge of a concrete floor. In the corner of what looked like a workbench, I could not see the speaker.
I started down. Three steps in, the woman spoke again, more clearly, and what she said was, "Do not come down here."
Her voice was tight, controlled, the voice of someone giving an instruction that costs her something to give. I stopped. I asked her who she was. There was a long pause.
Then she said, "My name is Karen, and there is someone in the corner with me who is not safe, and if you come down here, both of you are going to die." I asked her if there was a girl with her.
I asked her if there was a young woman named Anna. She said, "No."
She said, "The only people in the basement are me and the thing in the corner, and the thing in the corner is my husband.
and he turned about an hour ago. And the only reason I'm still alive is that I'm sitting very still on the other side of the support post and he cannot see me clearly because his eyes are not working right yet.
She said, "Do not come down." She said, "Please do not come down." She said, "If you come down, he is going to come at you and I'm going to have to move and then we are both going to die." I stood on the third step from the top and I tried to think. I asked her if she had seen anyone come through her yard. She said yes. She said about an hour and a half ago she had been at the kitchen window and she had seen a man drag a woman through the alley and into the yard two doors down.
She said the woman had been moving, walking almost, not fighting like she was drunk or drugged.
She said the man had been wearing a brown coat with a fur collar and he had taken the woman into the yard two doors down the gray house with the white shutters and they had not come back out.
I asked her what the woman looked like.
She said dark hair, slim scrubs under a winter coat like she had come from a hospital.
That was Anna.
The man with the fur collar coat had taken her into the gray house two doors down at around 6:15 in the morning.
It was now 7:53.
She had been in that house for an hour and 38 minutes. I told Karen I was sorry. I told her I was leaving.
I told her I would close the basement door behind me. She said thank you. She said good luck. She said one more thing as I started back up the stairs.
She said, "If you find her, do not bring her back to my house. Do not bring her near my house. I do not care what you do. I have a child upstairs in the front bedroom who is asleep and who has not seen any of this. And if anything comes near this house, my child is going to wake up to a thing I cannot describe to you. So, please, whatever you do, do not come back."
I told her I would not. I closed the basement door. I threw the deadbolt. I left through the back the way I came.
The gray house with white shutters was two doors east on the same alley. I had walked past it on the way in without noticing it. I was paying attention now.
The back gate was closed. The backyard, when I looked over the fence, was undisturbed snow. No prints. The drag prints had gone in the front. I went around the block. The front of the gray house had a wide porch with two rocking chairs covered in a thin layer of snow.
The walk had been cleared, possibly the day before, and the prints on it were faint but readable.
Two sets coming up the walk. One set the man's boots large, deep, the other set lighter, scuffed, almost a dragging walk.
They had stopped at the porch. Then one set, the heavy boots, had gone back down the walk and out into the street. The lighter prince had not come back out. He had taken her in. He had left her there.
He had gone somewhere else. I stood across the street for 30 seconds and watched the front of that house. No movement in the windows, curtains drawn on the front. The porch light was off.
There was a small American flag mounted on a bracket beside the door, the kind that hangs vertically and the flag was still.
I went up the walk. The front door was locked. I went around to the side and tried a side window. Locked. I went to the back. The back door was locked, but the door beside it, a door into what I assumed was a sun room or a porch, was not.
I let myself in.
The sun room was full of plants, living plants. Someone had watered them recently. I crossed it into the kitchen.
The house was warm, hot, almost. The thermostat was running at maybe 78°.
I could feel it through my coat. There were two coffee cups on the counter, both used, both cold. A pan on the stove with the remains of scrambled eggs, also cold.
A second person had been here for a while. The man in the fur collar coat lived here or had been staying here or had taken it over. Either way, this was not a quick stash. This was a place he was using. I moved through the first floor as quietly as I could. Living room empty. Dining room empty. Tables set for two with placemats like he had been planning to eat with someone.
front hall empty.
There was a stairway up. There was also a door under the stairway, the kind that usually leads to a basement.
I tried the basement door first because basements are where people put things they do not want seen.
The door was unlocked. I opened it. The basement was finished. carpet, a pool table, a bar in one corner with bottles on it, a flat screen television mounted on the wall. Off everything tidy, and on a couch against the far wall, lying on her back with her eyes closed, was Anna.
She was breathing.
I crossed the room in maybe four steps and dropped to one knee beside her. She was warm. Her pulse was fast but steady.
Her left wrist was bound to the leg of the couch with a length of nylon rope, the kind you use for pulling things on a boat.
The knot was a clove hitch.
Whoever had tied it knew what they were doing. There was no blood on her, no marks on her face. Her scrubs were intact, and her winter coat was folded on a chair beside the couch.
He had not heard her, or he had not heard her yet.
I said her name. She did not wake. I said it again. Her eyelids moved but did not open. I checked her pupils with the screenlight of my phone and they responded. Slow, but they responded.
She had been drugged. Something heavy but not dangerous.
She had a pulse and pupils and breath and that meant I had time.
I started on the knot. The clove hitch took me longer than it should have because my hands were shaking.
And because I kept stopping every 15 seconds to listen for footsteps overhead.
The house was quiet. Whoever the man in the fur collar coat was, he was not in this building right now. He had taken her, brought her here, tied her to a couch in a finished basement that he had set up like a den, and then gone out again.
I want to stop here and ask you something because I've been turning it over in my head for 10 months and I do not have an answer.
Was the man in the fur collar coat trying to save her?
Was he collecting her the way the church on Route 20 had collected its 40?
Was he a predator using the cover of the outbreak to do what predators do?
Was he something else I do not have a name for yet? You tell me. Tell me what you think he was. Tell me what you think he was planning. When he set the table for two upstairs, I got the knot loose at 8:06. I got her arm around my shoulders. I got her sitting up. She was 120 lb and I am 200.
And I have lifted heavier in a worse condition.
But I had not slept since the previous morning, and my hands were shaking.
And getting her up the basement stairs took me almost 3 minutes.
At the top of the stairs in the kitchen with her leaning against me and her feet trying to remember how to walk, I heard the front door open.
I do not have a good way to describe what I felt in that moment. I will try.
I felt all at once that I had been stupid, that I had been lucky for too long, that I had thought of myself as the man rescuing his daughter, and I had not thought of myself as a man who had walked into another man's house.
I had walked into another man's house, and the other man had just come home.
I pulled Anna with me into the pantry off the kitchen, which had a louvered door I could see through. I lowered her to the floor as quietly as I could. I closed the pantry door. I put my hand over her mouth gently because she was making small sounds in her sleep that were going to carry.
He came through the front hall and into the kitchen. I could see him through the slats. He was maybe 55, heavy build, gray hair, a brown wool coat with a fur collar, just like Karen had said.
He took the coat off and hung it on a hook by the back door. Under the coat, he was wearing a sweater and corduroy pants. He looked like a man going to a brunch. He looked entirely ordinary.
He set a paper grocery bag on the counter. He started taking things out of it. a loaf of bread, a jar of preserves, a package of bacon.
He was unloading groceries at 8:00 in the morning on January 6th in a city that was burning.
I watched him take the groceries out of the bag and put them away with the absolute calm of a man who had done it a thousand times.
He hummed while he did it. I could not make out the tune. It sounded like a hymn, maybe. Then he stopped. He stood very still with his hand on the refrigerator door and he tilted his head. And I knew I knew before he turned around that he had heard Anna in the pantry.
She was making a small humming sound in her sleep the way she has done since she was a child when she was deep under. And I had not been able to stop it without waking her. And she had made it just once. But it had been enough.
He turned and looked directly at the pantry door. He did not move for a long moment. Neither did I. He was standing maybe 12 ft away. I had the tire iron in my right hand. Anna was slumped against my left side, half conscious with her head on my shoulder. The pantry was small and there was nowhere to go.
He smiled. He smiled like a man who has just remembered something pleasant. And he walked toward the pantry. He walked the way you walked toward a child you were about to surprise. His hands were empty. He had no weapon I could see. He was just walking and smiling, and that was somehow worse than if he had been running with a knife. He got to within 4 ft of the door and said in a voice that was perfectly calm and perfectly conversational.
You can come out now. I have made enough breakfast for three.
I did not say anything. He said it again. He said please. I made enough for three. I have been hoping you would wake up. He thought I was Anna. He thought she had untied herself and was hiding.
He had not seen me. The pantry door was louvered, and I'd been holding still, and from his side, it was probably dark.
I shifted Anna's weight off me as gently as I could. I put her against the wall of the pantry. I stood up. I gripped the tire iron with both hands.
I waited until his shadow fell across the slats and his hand touched the doororknob.
And then I drove the door open as hard as I could with my shoulder. The door hit him across the bridge of the nose and the side of his head. He went down.
He went down hard on his back and he did not get up immediately. And I came out of the pantry over him with a tire iron raised. And I did not bring it down. I do not know why I did not bring it down.
I should have. I know that. I have thought about it for 10 months and I know I should have. But he was a man on his back on a kitchen floor with blood running out of his nose and his eyes were open and looking up at me and I could not do it.
I said, "Who are you?" He said, "My name is Paul." He said it through the blood.
He said, "Please do not hurt me." I asked him why he had taken my daughter.
He looked confused for a second. Then he said, "I did not take her. I found her.
She was on the corner of Auburn and Mulford at 6:03 this morning walking in circles.
She had blood on her hands. She had been bitten on the forearm and she had it patched with gauze and tape, but she could not tell me her name. I brought her here. I gave her something to make her sleep.
I tied her wrist so she would not hurt herself if she woke up confused.
I asked him what he had given her. He told me it was a brand of antihistamine I recognized.
It was in fact a sensible choice for sedating a confused adult.
I asked him about her arm. He said, "Look at her arm."
I crouched. I pushed up the sleeve of her scrub top on her left forearm.
There was a bandage there, neat, professionally applied.
The kind of bandage a nurse would put on herself or that someone trained would put on a nurse.
Under the bandage, when I lifted the edge, there were four small puncture wounds in a curved pattern.
She had been bitten.
I sat back on my heels. Paul was still on the floor. He was watching me. he said very quietly. I have been trying to figure out what to do. I am a retired ER doctor. I worked in Chicago for 28 years.
I have seen a lot of bites in my life. I have never seen one like this one.
She is not running a fever. She is not seizing. Her pulse is normal. Her pupils are equal and reactive. The bite is from a human mouth and it is 6 hours old and she is fine.
I do not know what that means. I asked him why he had set the table for two. He said, "Because I thought when she woke up, she might be hungry."
I want to ask you something. I want you to actually answer this in the comments.
Did I read him right in that moment? Did I make the right call? Because I made one in the next 30 seconds.
And I cannot tell you for sure that it was correct. and I've been turning it over since.
I lowered the tire iron. I held out my hand. Paul took it. I pulled him up. He pressed a kitchen towel to his nose. He said, "You must be her father." I nodded. He said, "I am sorry. I would have answered the door if you had knocked." I told him I was not going to knock on a stranger's door in a city like this.
He said, "Fair enough."
He helped me carry Anna out to my car.
He gave me a brown paper bag with a sandwich and two bottles of water in it.
He gave me a written note with a dosage of the antihistamine he had given her and the time he had given it. He gave me the address of a clinic on Mulford that he said was still standing as of an hour ago, and the name of a doctor there he trusted. He stood on his front porch in his sweater at 19° and watched me load my daughter into the back seat.
And when I started the engine, he raised one hand in a kind of halfwave.
And then he went back inside and closed the door.
I sat in the driver's seat for a moment with the engine running.
I looked at my daughter in the rear view mirror. She was breathing slowly. Her color was good. The bandage on her forearm was clean.
I thought about the bite and what it might mean and what it might not mean.
And I made a decision I have not changed since.
I drove west, not to the clinic on Mulford. I drove west out of Rockford on back roads toward a small house my brother had owned outside Galina before he died, which I had inherited and never sold. It was 40 mi further on a hill with a well and a wood stove and a propane tank that I had topped off in November because I had a feeling about the winter. It was the place I'd been planning to go all along with her. I just had not told her yet. I want to tell you what I have learned in the 10 months since that morning. Because the story does not end on January 6th and because the question that started in Paul's kitchen has not gone away. Anna woke up at 11:00 in the morning that day in the backseat of my car on a county road outside Pecatonica.
She was groggy.
She remembered nothing from after 11 at night the previous evening.
She did not remember the bite. She did not remember Paul. She did not remember the man who had bitten her, who I'm now almost certain was Devon in their kitchen sometime between midnight and 1:00 in the morning.
before he went into the bathtub and used the knife. Anna has not turned. She has not run a fever. She has not shown any sign that the thing in her arm is the same as the thing in the rest of them.
The puncture marks have healed into four faint scars. She works the well pump every morning. She splits wood. She has gained back the seven lbs she lost in the first month. When she looks at me, her eyes are the right color. And they are tracking me the way they have tracked me her whole life.
But she sleeps with her bedroom door locked from the inside.
She has asked me to promise that if anything changes, I will not hesitate.
She has shown me how she wants it done.
She has been very precise about it. She has made me say it back to her. And she has made me say her mother's name while I said it because she does not want me to be able to lie to her about whether I will keep the promise. I have said it. I have said her mother's name. I have not lied. We listen to the radio every night. Most nights there is nothing.
Some nights there is a voice from a place we have never been reading the same kind of sentences that man in Hammond was reading on January 6th. and we listen to the whole thing and then we turn it off and we eat dinner and we go to bed in separate rooms with our doors locked from the inside.
And in the morning we get up and we do the work.
She is asleep down the hall right now. I can hear her breathing through the wall if I hold still.
She is 25 next month.
I am going to bake her a cake. We have flour and we have eggs from the two hens that survived the spring. And I have a tin of cocoa I've been saving since before Christmas.
I'm going to bake her a cake and I'm going to put 25 candles on it because we have a lot of candles and not very many reasons to use them. And I am going to sing to her. And she is going to roll her eyes at me the way she has since she was eight. And we are going to eat the cake. And we're going to listen to whatever the radio gives us that night.
And then we are going to lock our doors.
The man in the brown coat with the fur collar.
Paul, I think about him often. I do not know if he is still alive. I do not know what would have happened to Anna if he had not found her on that corner. I do not know if I should have hit him harder or not at all or just talked to him through the door. I have made my peace with the fact that I will not get an answer to any of those questions. He gave my daughter back to me. He could have done a hundred other things and he did that one. That is what I have. That is what I'm keeping.
The thing I want you to take from this, if you take anything, is that on the worst morning of my life, the people who helped me were not the ones I expected.
Larry at the roadblock, who could have shot me and did not. Karen in the basement, who told me where my daughter had gone when she had every reason to stay silent.
Paul, who set a table for three because he had been hoping she would wake up.
None of them owed me anything. All of them gave me what they had. I do not know what is coming. I do not know what the thing in Anna's arm is or why it did not finish what it started or whether it will wake up one day and finish. I do not know if there are still cities. I do not know if there is still a country. I do not know if anyone is going to listen to this who has any of those answers.
But she is asleep down the hall. Her door is locked from the inside. The wood stove is throwing heat and the well pump worked this morning and the radio is off and the snow is falling on the fields outside the window. And I'm sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee that is still hot and tomorrow she will be 25.
That is enough for tonight. That is enough. Title: On January 6th, 2021, I left the city before sunrise as the zombie outbreak reached the streets. The cold came in through the windshield seal like it had been waiting for me. 3:47 in the morning, January 6th, and the dashboard thermometer said 19°, and the radio said nothing at all.
Not static, nothing.
I had driven from my apartment in the West Loop to the on-ramp at Roosevelt with the FM scanner cycling, and every preset had gone dark in the last 20 minutes. The AM band had one voice left on it. A man in Hammond reading the same sentence over and over, and the sentence was, "Do not open your door for anyone you know." I had a half tank of gas, a duffel I had packed 11 days ago and kept by the door since, and a daughter in Rockford who had stopped answering her phone at 12 2. I am 46 years old. I worked 21 years as a building engineer for a hospital system on the near west side, which means I know how heat moves through a structure, how water finds the lowest point, how a generator lies to you in the first 90 seconds after a transfer. None of that was going to help me on the Eisenhower.
What was going to help me was that I had left before the lights went and that the man in Hammond, whoever he was, was still talking.
Before I go any further, I want to be honest with you for a second. The channel hasn't been doing well lately, and at this stage of things, your support actually matters to me. If these survival stories are something you find yourself coming back to, take a moment to like the video, leave a comment, or send it to someone who'd sit through a story like this one. It helps more than you'd think. I pulled onto the Eisenhower westbound at 351 and the city behind me was wrong in a way I'm still trying to describe.
Not dark. Dark would have made sense.
Half lit. Whole blocks of street lights were burning and whole blocks were not in a pattern that did not look like a grid failure.
Grid failures fall in zones, in substations, in shapes you can recognize.
This was speckled. It was as if someone was choosing.
The expressway was emptier than it should have been at that hour.
Not empty.
A salt truck ahead of me was driving in the center lane at maybe 30 m an hour.
And I watched its hazard lights for almost a mile before I realized the driver's door was hanging open and the truck was simply rolling. I went around it on the left and did not look inside.
I have thought about that since. I have thought about whether a man was lying across the bench seat with his foot on the pedal or whether the cruise had taken over a corpse.
Both options were available.
I picked neither and kept driving.
The first body I actually saw was on the shoulder near the Austin exit. a woman in a long brown coat sitting upright against the concrete divider. Her legs stretched out in front of her like she was waiting for a bus. My headlights caught her for maybe two seconds. Her chin was on her chest. Her left hand was missing, not bandaged, missing. And the stump was not bleeding, which is the detail I keep returning to because at 19° a fresh wound should still be bleeding and hers was not. Lauren. And that meant either she had been there a long time or something about her had stopped working in a way that bodies do not stop working. I did not slow down.
The radio and Hammond cut out at 406 mid-sentence.
He had been saying the word window and the word never arrived.
I let the silence sit for a mile, then turned the radio off completely because a silent speaker that used to have a voice in it is worse than a speaker you chose to mute.
That is a small thing and it is true.
I had three rules in my head when I left the apartment. The first rule was do not stop in the city. The second rule was do not use the tollway because tollways have plazas and plazas have crowds. The third rule was if you see a roadblock you cannot identify, you go backward, not through. The first two rules held until Displains Oasis. The third rule broke me at 422.
I came around the long curve where the tri-state meets the northwest and the road in front of me was lit up like a film set.
Emergency vehicles, maybe nine of them, parked in a wedge across all four lanes, light bars on, no sirens.
Two semiis turned sideways behind the wedge to seal the gap. Men in winter gear with long guns walking between the vehicles. Uh, not police uniforms, not National Guard either, or not the kind I have ever seen.
The jackets were dark and unmarked, and the men moved like they had been doing this for longer than the night had been going on, which was not possible. And which is why I tap the break.
I am going to ask you something now. And I want you to actually think about it before you keep listening.
If you came around that curve at 4 in the morning and saw what I saw and you had a daughter 80 miles past it, would you have turned around? Would you have tried to talk your way through? Leave your honest answer in the comments. I want to know what you would have done because I'm still not sure what I did was right. What I did was kill my headlights, drop to the right shoulder, and coast.
There is an access road that parallels the Eisenhower for about a/4 mile near that interchange used by maintenance crews.
I have driven trucks down it during a sewer job in 2014.
The chain link gate at the entrance was already open.
That bothered me. It bothered me enough that I almost did not take it. But the alternative was the wedge. And the wedge had no civilian cars going through it that I could see. Only stopped on the near side with their headlights pointing at the men. And that meant the wedge was not letting anyone through, only collecting them. The access road dropped me out behind a shell station on Mannheim.
I sat in the dark with the engine off for two full minutes, listening.
There was a sound I could not place. A low mechanical thumping far away like a basement compressor cycling.
Except it was outside and it was not regular every 14 or 15 seconds.
I counted three of them before I started the car again and rolled out onto Mannheim with the lights off.
The Shell station's windows were broken.
all of them. The inside was dark and I did not look closely, but the door was propped open with what I thought at first was a tire iron.
And what I realized as I passed was an arm. Just the arm holding the door open the way you would prop it with a brick. I did not stop to understand it.
There are things I am not going to understand and I made peace with that around mile 12. I picked up Route 20 west of Elgen at about 5:15.
The sky was still completely black.
Sunrise on January 6th in northern Illinois is around 7:16 and I had 2 hours to put as much distance between me and the city as I could before the world could see itself.
I wanted to be in Rockford before sunrise. I wanted my daughter in the passenger seat before the sun came up. I had this idea and I knew it was an idea and not a plan. That whatever was happening was easier in the dark. That daylight would force decisions on people who were currently just acting.
And that once decisions started, the roads would close in ways that could not be reopened.
Route 20 was a different country than the expressway. No bodies, no lights, farms on either side, dark houses set back from the road, occasional mailboxes catching my headlights.
I let myself drive normally for about 11 miles.
I let myself believe for those 11 miles that whatever was in Chicago had stayed in Chicago and that the rest of the state was just sleeping. Then I came over a small rise outside Morango and saw the church.
It was a white clappered country church, the kind with a single steeple set maybe 60 ft off the road. Every window was lit. Every single one.
Not candles, electric light, fluorescent, the bluish kind they use in basements and fellowship halls.
and the parking lot was full, maybe 40 cars.
I slowed without meaning to. A church full of light at 5:30 in the morning in the middle of a county where nothing else had power. I could see figures moving inside through the windows, standing close together, not sitting in pews, standing in the open part where they would have folding chairs out for a potluck.
I have thought about that church a lot.
I did not stop. I almost stopped. The reason I did not stop was that the front door was open and no one was using it and no one was coming or going. And people who have built a refuge do not leave the front door open in January at 19° with the lights on. The light coming through that doorway was not warm. It was the same fluorescent color as the inside and it was pouring out onto the steps and the steps were empty.
And that was the moment I understood that the people in there were not gathered.
They were coralled.
By whom or by what I do not know.
I passed the church at about 40 m an hour with the heater on full and did not look in my mirror.
I am telling you about the church because of what happened 20 minutes later and because the church is when I knew this was not a city problem and not even a state problem.
The church was 30 mi outside Chicago in a town of 7,000 people and the church had power when nothing around it did.
And the church had 40 cars in its lot.
And I could not make any of that fit together in a way that did not involve someone organizing it. The dead do not organize. The infected, if that is what we are calling them, do not gather under fluorescent light in fellowship halls.
Somebody had done that. Somebody was doing it. And that meant the thing happening across the region was not one thing. It was two things at minimum. and they were not necessarily on the same side. And I was driving alone through both of them with a duffel bag and a Honda that was 8 years old and a daughter 80 mi ahead who had stopped answering her phone. I tried her again at 551.
It rang four times and went to voicemail.
The voicemail was still her voice recorded sometime last spring telling me cheerfully that she could not come to the phone.
I left a message. I said, "I'm about an hour out." I said, "Please stay inside."
I said, "If you are with someone, tell them I'm coming." I said, "I love you."
I have a habit of saying that last part on every voicemail to her since her mother died in 2018.
Because I do not believe in saving it.
And that morning, I was glad of the habit because it meant the last thing she would have on her phone if anything happened was that the first infected I saw. And I'm calling them infected because I do not have a better word and because by then the AM radio had come back on for 90 seconds before dying again.
And a man in Debuke had used that word.
was at 6:04 in the morning on Route 20 near Cherry Valley.
He was running in the middle of the road, coming at me headon in just a t-shirt and pants, no coat at 19°, no coat. He was sprinting, not staggering, sprinting flat out the way a man sprints toward a finish line with his arms pumping. I had maybe 4 seconds to decide what to do. And I did not decide anything. I just held the wheel straight and accelerated.
And at the last instant, he veered toward me on purpose. And the impact threw him over the hood and into the windshield and over the roof. And I did not stop. And when I checked the mirror, he was getting up.
He was getting up. I want you to sit with that for a second because I sat with it for the next 10 miles.
a man hit by a sedan at 60 mph at a closing speed of probably 90 getting up.
There was no calculus for that. There was no medical explanation that I, as a man who has worked in a hospital for two decades, could put on it. So, I stopped trying to explain it and I drove and I kept driving. And the windshield had a crack in it now that started at the top right corner and worked its way diagonally across my field of view. And every time my headlights hit a road sign, the crack lit up like a vein.
The sun came up at 7:19, 3 minutes late by my watch, but on time by the official almanac, and I crossed into the Rockford city limits at 7:26.
The light was gray and thin and lay flat over everything.
There were columns of smoke rising from at least four locations in the city.
None of them were small. One was downtown. Two were on the south side.
One was further west near where my daughter lived. And I did not let myself look at that one for very long because I needed to drive. My daughter is 24. Her name is Anna. She is a nurse at Swedish American, which is one of the two big hospitals in Rockford and she lives in a duplex on Auburn Street with a roommate named Devon who works in IT and who I have never trusted not for anything he did but because he is the kind of person who answers questions with another question and that wears on a father.
Anna had texted me at 12:04 in the morning that the hospital was diverting and that she was being told to come in and that she would call me when she knew what was happening. The call had not come. At 12:12, she had stopped answering.
I had loaded the car at 12:40 and left the apartment at 3:45 because I wanted the roads as empty as I could get them and because I wanted to arrive when the sun came up and not before. And now the sun was up and I was here and the column of smoke was on her side of the wall.
The first roadblock inside Rockford was at the intersection of Riverside and North Second. This one was civilian. Two pickup trucks parked nose tonose across the street and a man in a car heart jacket standing in front of them with a rifle held across his chest. He was older than me, maybe 60, and he looked tired in a way that I recognized because I had felt it in my own face since about 4:00 in the morning. I rolled my window down. The cold came in. He did not raise the rifle. He just looked at me. I told him I am going to my daughter's place on Auburn Street. I told him she is a nurse. She has not answered since midnight. I drove from Chicago. I'm not stopping in Rockford for anything else, just her. I said all of it in one breath because I had practiced it on the last 10 miles of Route 20. He listened. Then he said, "Son, you do not want to go to Auburn Street." I asked him why. He said, "Because Auburn Street is where it started here." He said the hospital sent some of its nurses home last night around 11:00 when they realized what they had.
He said the nurses went home and the nurses had it and Auburn Street had three of them within four blocks of each other.
He said by 3:00 in the morning that whole street was lit up.
He said it had been quiet for the last hour and that quiet was not the same thing as safe. I asked him if he had seen anyone leave Auburn Street since midnight. He said a few. I asked him to describe them. He did. None of them sounded like Anna.
He moved one of the pickups and let me through. He told me there was nothing he could do to stop me and that he wished he could. He told me if I came back out the way I came in, he would still be there until 10:00 in the morning when his shift ended. He said his name was Larry. I said mine was Mike. He said, "Good luck, Mike." I said, "Thank you, Larry."
I drove the last mile and a half to Auburn Street with my hands at 10 and two and my breath shallow. The neighborhood looked at first like any neighborhood on a January morning. Snow on the lawns, cars in the driveways, a few trash cans still at the curb from a pickup that had clearly not happened the day before.
The duplex was the third house on the right on the 400 block. A brick two-story split down the middle with a small porch on either side. Anna's side was the left side. The porch light was on. The porch light was on and that meant power. And that mattered to me because if power was on, then her heat was on. And if her heat was on, then anyone inside was alive enough to need it.
I am not sure that logic held. I'm not sure of any of the logic I was using by then. But the porch light was on and I parked across the street and I sat in the car for 90 seconds and I watched her front window for movement and I saw none and then I got out.
I left the engine running. I had decided that before I parked. If I had to come out fast, I did not want to fumble for keys. I left the driver's door unlocked.
I took the tire iron from the trunk because it was the heaviest thing I had that I could swing in a hallway. I left the duffel in the car. I crossed the street. The snow on her walk had footprints in it. Several sets, some going in, some going out. The going out prints were not normal. I am not a tracker, but I've walked in snow my whole life. And the going out prints were dragged, not stepped.
Long furrows with toes pointing down, as if whoever made them was being pulled by the arms and not lifting their feet. The footprints next to the furrows were normal. Bootprints, two sets on either side of each furrow.
Whoever was being dragged was being dragged by two people walking upright.
I stood on the porch for a long moment and listened.
Nothing. Inside, nothing.
The door was unlocked. I knew it would be before I tried it because the deadbolt plate was bent outward gently in the way a deadbolt plate bends when someone pushes on the door from inside hard enough to flex it but not break it.
Anna had a habit of throwing the deadbolt at night. Every night since college, she had thrown it. Someone had pushed against it from inside hard until it had given a little. Then they had opened the door normally from the outside to leave.
I went in.
The living room was a wreck, but not a violent one. A wreck of someone leaving in a hurry. A throw blanket on the floor. a coffee cup on its side on the rug, the spill long since soaked in. Her work bag, which I had given her at her graduation, was on the dining table, open with her stethoscope inside, which meant she had not gone to work, which contradicted what Larry had said about the hospital sending nurses home. She had never gone in at all, or she had gone in and come back, or someone else had brought the bag back. I did not know her bedroom door was closed. I called her name. I called it three times increasing in volume. The way you call into a building when you are not sure what is on the other side of the door.
There was no answer. I want to ask you something here. I want you to tell me in the comments where you are listening from right now. What city? What state?
What country? I am asking because I want to know how far this kind of story travels and because I want to know who is out there in the kind of dark I was standing in. Drop it in the comments. It matters more than you'd think. I opened her bedroom door. The bed was unmade and empty. The window was open. The window was open at 19° in January.
And the curtain was moving in the cold draft. and there was a smear on the window sill, dark, the color and consistency of jam left out too long.
The window opened onto the small backyard, which had a wooden fence with a gate, and the gate was open.
I crossed to the window and looked out.
The snow in the yard was a mess of prints, but the same dragging pattern I'd seen on the walk was here, too, leading from the window to the gate.
She had not been dragged. The going out prints from the front had two sets of boots. The yard had only one set of boots beside the drag mark, plus the dragged figure. Two different drags, two different events. Someone had been dragged out the front by two people.
Someone else had been dragged out the back by one. That was at least two bodies that had left this house since midnight.
and they had not been the same body.
The bathroom door was also closed. I made myself open it. Devon was in the bathtub. He was fully dressed. He had a kitchen knife in his right hand and a deep, deliberate cut across his left forearm.
And the tub was full of blood that had stopped flowing some hours ago. And his eyes were open. And they were the wrong color. They were not the gray blue I remembered. They were milky, the color of skim milk. And they tracked to me when I opened the door.
He did not move.
He looked at me and I looked at him and his chest did not rise. And I understood that I was looking at a thing that was watching me without breathing. The knife was in his hand because he had used it on himself. and he had used it on himself because he had known what was happening to him and he had not finished the job or the job did not finish the way he had thought it would. And now he was in the tub and his eyes were tracking me. I closed the bathroom door.
I'm going to be honest with you. I almost broke right there. I almost sat down on Anna's bed and stopped.
The only thing that kept me moving was that Devon was in the tub and Anna was not. and that meant Anna might be alive somewhere and the dragging tracks led out of the yard. I went back through the house and out the front. Larry's words were in my head. She had been one of the nurses sent home or not sent home.
something. The bootprints on the walk and the two going out furrows said that two people had been removed from this house through the front door and a third had gone out the back and Devon was still inside. And that meant Anna was one of the two who had gone out the front or the one who had gone out the back. And I needed to choose which direction to follow because I could not follow both. The front prince led down the walk to the street. From the street they turned right and went two houses down. And then I lost them on a cleared driveway.
The back prince went through the gate into the alley and the alley snow was less disturbed, easier to follow.
I chose the back. I will tell you why I chose the back.
The front had two captors and one captive. The back had one captor and one captive. If I had to take someone, I would rather take one than two.
That is the math I did standing in her front yard at 7:46 in the morning on January 6th.
I am not proud of it. I am telling you because I want you to know what kind of thinking happens in those minutes.
It is not heroic thinking. It is just math.
I went back through the house, out the back door, through the open gate into the alley. The alley ran east west between Auburn and the next street north, which I did not know the name of.
The prince went east. I followed them on foot, tire iron in my right hand, my keys in my left pocket, my car running on the street behind me with the door unlocked. I was at most 3 minutes from the car at any point.
That was my rule. 3 minutes from the car. If anything happened, I could be in the driver's seat in 3 minutes. The prince went east for half a block, then turned north into the yard of a house I did not know. The back gate of that house was also open. The prince went up to the back porch. The back door of that house was also open, standing open at 19°.
I stopped at the gate. I stood there for what felt like a long time and was probably 20 seconds.
Every part of me that had survived this far was telling me not to go through that gate.
Every part of me that was a father was telling me to go through it. The father part was louder. I went through. The yard was small. A swing set dusted with snow. a grill on the patio with a cover on it, a child's plastic sled leaning against the back of the house.
I crossed it in four strides and stopped at the bottom of the back porch steps.
The drag furrow went up onto the porch and through the open door.
There was a smell coming out of the house. Not a strong smell, a wrong smell. Warm air and something underneath the warm air. Sweet and old.
I went up the steps. The back door opened into a mud room, then a kitchen.
The kitchen was clean. Dishes drying in the rack. A coffee maker with a half pot of coffee still in it, cold. A child's drawing on the refrigerator held up by an alphabet magnet.
I stood in that kitchen and listened.
And what I heard was a sound from the basement. A scraping sound. steady, methodical. The sound of something being moved across a concrete floor.
Then a pause, then the sound again. The basement door was in the corner of the kitchen off the mudroom. It was closed.
There was a dead bolt on it, brass, the kind you install yourself. And the dead bolt was unlocked and pointing outward, which meant the lock had been installed to keep someone in the basement, not out of it.
I stood with my hand on the doororknob and listened. The scraping continued.
Then it stopped. Then a voice, a woman's voice, said something I could not make out. It was not Anna's voice. I knew that immediately. Anna's voice has a particular weight in the lower register.
A small rasp she got after a bout of pneumonia in 2019.
The voice in the basement did not have that. The voice in the basement was younger and softer, and it said a word that sounded like please.
I opened the door. The basement stairs were lit by a single bare bulb. The steps were wooden and old. At the bottom, I could see the edge of a concrete floor and the corner of what looked like a workbench. I could not see the speaker.
I started down.
Three steps in, the woman spoke again, more clearly, and what she said was, "Do not come down here."
Her voice was tight, controlled, the voice of someone giving an instruction that costs her something to give. I stopped. I asked her who she was.
There was a long pause. Then she said, "My name is Karen, and there is someone in the corner with me who is not safe, and if you come down here, both of you are going to die." I asked her if there was a girl with her.
I asked her if there was a young woman named Anna. She said, "No."
She said, "The only people in the basement are me and the thing in the corner, and the thing in the corner is my husband."
and he turned about an hour ago and the only reason I'm still alive is that I'm sitting very still on the other side of the support post and he cannot see me clearly because his eyes are not working right yet.
She said do not come down. She said please do not come down. She said if you come down he is going to come at you and I am going to have to move and then we are both going to die. I stood on the third step from the top and I tried to think. I asked her if she had seen anyone come through her yard. She said yes. She said about an hour and a half ago she had been at the kitchen window and she had seen a man drag a woman through the alley and into the yard two doors down. She said the woman had been moving, walking almost, not fighting like she was drunk or drugged.
She said the man had been wearing a brown coat with a fur collar, and he had taken the woman into the yard two doors down, the gray house with the white shutters, and they had not come back out. I asked her what the woman looked like. She said dark hair, slim scrubs under a winter coat, like she had come from a hospital. That was Anna.
The man with the fur collar coat had taken her into the gray house two doors down at around 6:15 in the morning. It was now 7:53.
She had been in that house for an hour and 38 minutes. I told Karen I was sorry. I told her I was leaving. I told her I would close the basement door behind me. She said thank you. She said good luck. She said one more thing as I started back up the stairs. She said, "If you find her, do not bring her back to my house. Do not bring her near my house. I do not care what you do. I have a child upstairs in the front bedroom who is asleep and who has not seen any of this. And if anything comes near this house, my child is going to wake up to a thing I cannot describe to you. So please, whatever you do, do not come back. I told her I would not. I closed the basement door. I threw the deadbolt.
I left through the back the way I came.
The gray house with white shutters was two doors east on the same alley. I had walked past it on the way in without noticing it. I was paying attention now.
The back gate was closed. The backyard when I looked over the fence was undisturbed snow. No prints. The drag prints had gone in the front. I went around the block. The front of the gray house had a wide porch with two rocking chairs covered in a thin layer of snow.
The walk had been cleared, possibly the day before, and the prints on it were faint but readable.
Two sets coming up the walk. One set, the man's boots, large, deep. The other set, lighter, scuffed, almost a dragging walk.
They had stopped at the porch. Then one set, their heavy boots, had gone back down the walk and out into the street.
The lighter prince had not come back out. He had taken her in. He had left her there. He had gone somewhere else.
I stood across the street for 30 seconds and watched the front of that house. No movement in the windows. Curtains drawn on the front. The porch light was off.
There was a small American flag mounted on a bracket beside the door, the kind that hangs vertically, and the flag was still.
I went up the walk. The front door was locked. I went around to the side and tried a side window. Locked. I went to the back.
The back door was locked, but the door beside it, a door into what I assumed was a sun room or a porch, was not.
I let myself in.
The sun room was full of plants, living plants. Someone had watered them recently. I crossed it into the kitchen.
The house was warm, hot, almost. The thermostat was running at maybe 78°.
I could feel it through my coat.
There were two coffee cups on the counter, both used, both cold. A pan on the stove with the remains of scrambled eggs, also cold.
A second person had been here for a while. The man in the fur collar coat lived here or had been staying here or had taken it over. Either way, this was not a quick stash. This was a place he was using. I moved through the first floor as quietly as I could. Living room empty, dining room empty, table set for two with placemats like he had been planning to eat with someone.
Front hall empty.
There was a stairway up. There was also a door under the stairway, the kind that usually leads to a basement.
I tried the basement door first because basements are where people put things they do not want seen.
The door was unlocked. I opened it. The basement was finished. Carpet, a pool table, a bar in one corner with bottles on it. A flat screen television mounted on the wall off. Everything tidy. And on a couch against the far wall, lying on her back with her eyes closed, was Anna.
She was breathing.
I crossed the room in maybe four steps and dropped to one knee beside her.
She was warm. Her pulse was fast but steady. Her left wrist was bound to the leg of the couch with a length of nylon rope, the kind you use for pulling things on a boat.
The knot was a clove hitch. Whoever had tied it knew what they were doing. There was no blood on her, no marks on her face. Her scrubs were intact and her winter coat was folded on a chair beside the couch.
He had not heard her or he had not heard her yet.
I said her name. She did not wake. I said it again. Her eyelids moved but did not open. I checked her pupils with the screenlight of my phone and they responded. Slow, but they responded.
She had been drugged. Something heavy but not dangerous.
She had a pulse and pupils and breath.
And that meant I had time.
I started on the knot. The clove hitch took me longer than it should have because my hands were shaking.
And because I kept stopping every 15 seconds to listen for footsteps overhead.
The house was quiet. Whoever the man in the fur collar coat was, he was not in this building right now.
He had taken her, brought her here, tied her to a couch in a finished basement that he had set up like a den, and then gone out again. I want to stop here and ask you something because I've been turning it over in my head for 10 months, and I do not have an answer. Was the man in the fur collar coat trying to save her? Was he collecting her the way the church on Route 20 had collected its 40?
Was he a predator using the cover of the outbreak to do what predators do?
Was he something else I do not have a name for yet? You tell me. Tell me what you think he was. Tell me what you think he was planning when he set the table for two upstairs.
I got the knot loose at 8:06. I got her arm around my shoulders. I got her sitting up. She was 120 lb and I am 200.
and I have lifted heavier in a worse condition, but I had not slept since the previous morning. And my hands were shaking and getting her up the basement stairs took me almost 3 minutes.
At the top of the stairs in the kitchen with her leaning against me and her feet trying to remember how to walk, I heard the front door open.
I do not have a good way to describe what I felt in that moment.
I will try.
I felt all at once that I had been stupid, that I had been lucky for too long, that I had thought of myself as the man rescuing his daughter.
And I had not thought of myself as a man who had walked into another man's house.
I had walked into another man's house, and the other man had just come home.
I pulled Anna with me into the pantry off the kitchen, which had a louvered door I could see through.
I lowered her to the floor as quietly as I could. I closed the pantry door. I put my hand over her mouth gently because she was making small sounds in her sleep that were going to carry.
He came through the front hall and into the kitchen. I could see him through the slats. He was maybe 55, heavy build, gray hair, a brown wool coat with a fur collar, just like Karen had said. He took the coat off and hung it on a hook by the back door. Under the coat, he was wearing a sweater and corduroy pants.
He looked like a man going to a brunch.
He looked entirely ordinary.
He set a paper grocery bag on the counter. He started taking things out of it. a loaf of bread, a jar of preserves, a package of bacon.
He was unloading groceries at 8:00 in the morning on January 6th in a city that was burning.
I watched him take the groceries out of the bag and put them away with the absolute calm of a man who had done it a thousand times.
He hummed while he did it. I could not make out the tune. It sounded like a hymn, maybe.
Then he stopped. He stood very still with his hand on the refrigerator door and he tilted his head. And I knew I knew before he turned around that he had heard Anna in the pantry. She was making a small humming sound in her sleep the way she has done since she was a child when she was deep under. And I had not been able to stop it without waking her.
and she had made it just once, but it had been enough.
He turned and looked directly at the pantry door. He did not move for a long moment. Neither did I. He was standing maybe 12 ft away. I had the tire iron in my right hand. Anna was slumped against my left side, half conscious with her head on my shoulder. The pantry was small and there was nowhere to go.
He smiled. He smiled like a man who has just remembered something pleasant. And he walked toward the pantry. He walked the way you walk toward a child you are about to surprise. His hands were empty.
He had no weapon I could see. He was just walking and smiling. And that was somehow worse than if he had been running with a knife. He got to within 4 ft of the door and said in a voice that was perfectly calm and perfectly conversational, "You can come out now. I have made enough breakfast for three."
I did not say anything. He said it again. He said, "Please, I made enough for three. I have been hoping you would wake up." He thought I was Anna. He thought she had untied herself and was hiding. He had not seen me. The pantry door was louvered and I had been holding still and from his side it was probably dark.
I shifted Anna's weight off me as gently as I could. I put her against the wall of the pantry. I stood up. I gripped the tire iron with both hands. I waited until his shadow fell across the slats and his hand touched the doororknob.
And then I drove the door open as hard as I could with my shoulder.
The door hit him across the bridge of the nose and the side of his head.
He went down. He went down hard on his back and he did not get up immediately.
And I came out of the pantry over him with the tire iron raised. And I did not bring it down. I do not know why I did not bring it down. I should have. I know that. I have thought about it for 10 months and I know I should have.
But he was a man on his back on a kitchen floor with blood running out of his nose and his eyes were open and looking up at me and I could not do it.
I said, "Who are you?"
He said, "My name is Paul."
He said it through the blood. He said, "Please do not hurt me." I asked him why he had taken my daughter. He looked confused for a second.
Then he said, "I did not take her. I found her. She was on the corner of Auburn and Mulford at 6:03 this morning, walking in circles. She had blood on her hands. She had been bitten on the forearm, and she had it patched with gauze and tape, but she could not tell me her name. I brought her here. I gave her something to make her sleep. I tied her wrist so she would not hurt herself if she woke up confused.
I asked him what he had given her. He told me it was a brand of antihistamine I recognized. It was in fact a sensible choice for sedating a confused adult.
I asked him about her arm. He said, "Look at her arm." I crouched. I pushed up the sleeve of her scrub top on her left forearm. There was a bandage there.
Neat. Professionally applied.
the kind of bandage a nurse would put on herself or that someone trained would put on a nurse. Under the bandage when I lifted the edge, there were four small puncture wounds in a curved pattern.
She had been bitten.
I sat back on my heels. Paul was still on the floor. He was watching me. He said very quietly, "I have been trying to figure out what to do. I am a retired ER doctor. I worked in Chicago for 28 years. I've seen a lot of bites in my life. I've never seen one like this one.
She is not running a fever. She is not seizing. Her pulse is normal. Her pupils are equal and reactive. The bite is from a human mouth and it is 6 hours old and she is fine. I do not know what that means.
I asked him why he had set the table for two. He said, "Because I thought when she woke up she might be hungry."
I want to ask you something. I want you to actually answer this in the comments.
Did I read him right in that moment?
Did I make the right call? Because I made one in the next 30 seconds and I cannot tell you for sure that it was correct and I have been turning it over since.
I lowered the tire iron. I held out my hand. Paul took it. I pulled him up. He pressed a kitchen towel to his nose.
He said, "You must be her father." I nodded. He said, "I am sorry. I would have answered the door if you had knocked." I told him I was not going to knock on a stranger's door in a city like this.
He said, "Fair enough."
He helped me carry Anna out to my car.
He gave me a brown paper bag with a sandwich and two bottles of water in it.
He gave me a written note with the dosage of the antihistamine he had given her and the time he had given it. He gave me the address of a clinic on Mulford that he said was still standing as of an hour ago. And the name of a doctor there he trusted.
He stood on his front porch in his sweater at 19° and watched me load my daughter into the back seat. And when I started the engine, he raised one hand in a kind of halfwave.
And then he went back inside and closed the door. I sat in the driver's seat for a moment with the engine running. I looked at my daughter in the rear view mirror. She was breathing slowly. Her color was good. The bandage on her forearm was clean. I thought about the bite and what it might mean and what it might not mean. And I made a decision.
and I have not changed since. I drove west, not to the clinic on Mulford. I drove west out of Rockford on back roads toward a small house my brother had owned outside Galina before he died, which I had inherited and never sold. It was 40 mi further on a hill with a well and a wood stove and a propane tank that I had topped off in November because I had a feeling about the winter.
It was the place I'd been planning to go all along with her. I just had not told her yet.
I want to tell you what I have learned in the 10 months since that morning because the story does not end on January 6th and because the question that started in Paul's kitchen has not gone away. Anna woke up at 11 in the morning that day in the backseat of my car on a county road outside Pecatonica.
She was groggy. She remembered nothing from after 11 at night the previous evening.
She did not remember the bite. She did not remember Paul. She did not remember the man who had bitten her, who I'm now almost certain was Devon in their kitchen sometime between midnight and 1:00 in the morning before he went into the bathtub and used the knife.
Anna has not turned. She has not run a fever.
She has not shown any sign that the thing in her arm is the same as the thing in the rest of them.
The puncture marks have healed into four faint scars. She works the well pump every morning. She splits wood. She has gained back the 7 lbs she lost in the first month. When she looks at me, her eyes are the right color. And they are tracking me the way they have tracked me her whole life.
But she sleeps with her bedroom door locked from the inside.
She has asked me to promise that if anything changes, I will not hesitate.
She has shown me how she wants it done.
She has been very precise about it. She has made me say it back to her and she has made me say her mother's name while I said it because she does not want me to be able to lie to her about whether I will keep the promise. I have said it. I have said her mother's name. I have not lied. We listen to the radio every night. Most nights there is nothing.
Some nights there is a voice from a place we have never been reading the same kind of sentences that man in Hammond was reading on January 6th. And we listen to the whole thing. And then we turn it off and we eat dinner. and we go to bed in separate rooms with our doors locked from the inside.
And in the morning, we get up and we do the work. She is asleep down the hall right now. I can hear her breathing through the wall if I hold still. She is 25 next month. I'm going to bake her a cake. We have flour and we have eggs from the two hens that survived the spring. And I have a tin of cocoa I have been saving since before Christmas. I am going to bake her a cake and I'm going to put 25 candles on it because we have a lot of candles and not very many reasons to use them.
And I am going to sing to her and she is going to roll her eyes at me the way she has since she was eight. And we are going to eat the cake and we are going to listen to whatever the radio gives us that night. And then we are going to lock our doors. The man in the brown coat with the fur collar, Paul.
I think about him often.
I do not know if he is still alive.
I do not know what would have happened to Anna if he had not found her on that corner. I do not know if I should have hit him harder or not at all or just talked to him through the door. I have made my peace with the fact that I will not get an answer to any of those questions. He gave my daughter back to me. He could have done a hundred other things and he did that one. That is what I have. That is what I am keeping.
The thing I want you to take from this, if you take anything, is that on the worst morning of my life, the people who helped me were not the ones I expected.
Larry at the roadblock, who could have shot me and did not. Karen in the basement who told me where my daughter had gone when she had every reason to stay silent.
Paul who set a table for three because he had been hoping she would wake up.
None of them owed me anything.
All of them gave me what they had. I do not know what is coming. I do not know what the thing in Anna's arm is or why it did not finish what it started or whether it will wake up one day and finish. I do not know if there are still cities. I do not know if there is still a country. I do not know if anyone is going to listen to this who has any of those answers. But she is asleep down the hall. Her door is locked from the inside. The wood stove is throwing heat and the well pump worked this morning and the radio was off and the snow is falling on the fields outside the window. And I am sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee that is still hot. And tomorrow she will be 25.
That is enough for tonight. That is enough.
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