The Borrowed World: A Novel of Post-Apocalyptic Collapse (17 page)

With a plan in place, we all went to work with the same weary efficiency that Walt and Katie had demonstrated earlier.  In about twenty minutes, we had a functional shelter.  I had planned to eat a little more and drink another bottle of water, but that went out the window when we completed the shelter and all sat under it for a test drive.  Within seconds, we were all fumbling with the purloined hotel blankets and covering ourselves.  I put my pack at my head and used one soft corner of it for a pillow.  I could feel my pistol poking me in the side and I started to remove the holster and slide it under the pack, but I was asleep before I could complete the action.

At some point in the night, I thought I heard the sound of an ATV nearby but I couldn’t be sure if it was real or if I dreamed it.  I rolled over and went back to sleep.

Working until darkness closed around them, Ellen, Pops, and Pete strung a series of tripwires around the house.  There would be three rings of tripwires that any trespasser would have to get through to make it to the house.  Those farthest from the house used the fishing line because they had more of it than anything else.  Attached to the fishing line were clip-on bells from the fishing aisle at Wal-Mart, strings of cans that would rattle together, and even a set of wind chimes from the back porch.  Anything that would make a noise that the person on watch would hear. 

The next two rings utilized mason’s twine and party poppers.  Someone activating one of these trip wires would set off a small firework that would give us a very loud notification of an intruder.  Hopefully it would startle the visitor also, and perhaps send them running the other way.

Ellen would do the first watch tonight, Pete the second, and Pops would take over in the early morning.  They planned to try that arrangement for the night and see how it worked.  They could always switch the arrangement if it didn’t.

Ellen’s shift went without any hitches.  She moved from the front porch to the back and walked around the house several times.  The night was warm and quiet.  At one point, coyotes began yipping and howling in the distance.  Rather than being scared by the sound, she was always thrilled by it.  It was part of why she loved living in the country so much.  When her shift ended, she gave the yard one last scan with the night vision and went to wake Pete up.

When she was sure Pete was fully awake and not going to pass out in the porch swing, she went over the basics with him.  She hung the night vision monocular over his head and made sure he knew how to use it.

“I’ve used it before, Mom,” he said.  “Several times.”

“Just checking,” she said.  “This is important work.  We’re all depending on you.  You’re such a big boy now.” 

She leaned over and kissed him on the head, then gave him the shotgun, showing him that there was now a round in the chamber and that it was ready to fire when the safety was turned off.  She went over this in great detail, even though she knew Pete had a lot of gun experience for someone his age, knowing that repetition was how things became committed to memory, even if it was irritating.

“Remember how loud this will be if you shoot it,” she reminded him.  “Don’t be startled.  Just make sure you have a firm grip on it so that it doesn’t kick the fire out of you.”

Pete nodded.

“If you have things under control, I’m going to bed,” Ellen said.

“I do, Mom,” he told her.  “I’ll be fine.”

And he was fine.  For most of his shift, that was.

It was around 2:30 a.m. when the tinkle of a bell, followed by a hissed curse, told him that someone had found the first ring of tripwires.  From his dark perch on the front porch, Pete quietly raised the night vision monocular to his eye and looked out in the direction of the bell.  He could clearly make out two men walking toward the house through a field to his left.  They were not men he recognized.   He could see well enough to know that neither man was his father.  One man was carrying something in his hand that may have been a pistol but it was hard to tell.   Neither man had any sort of long gun.

Pete started to go wake Ellen and Pops.  He stood and the porch creaked beneath his feet.  He took another step and there was another creak.  His heart rate accelerated.  He could feel the fringes of panic.  He knew that his own sound was broadcasting through the silence of the night as clearly as the bell had.  He turned back toward the field without moving his feet and took another glance through the monocular.  The men were closer now, crouched low and moving quickly across the damp grass.  They would be on him soon.

Pete dropped the monocular back to his chest and took another step toward the door to the house.  There was another creak of boards beneath his feet.  How had he never noticed before that the porch was so loud?  Another step and he could hear the men talking, whispering back and forth.  He took another step and reached in the darkness for the door handle.  He knew he was close, knew the handle was just outside his reach.  He felt tears burning down his cheeks and his breathing increased.  He wanted to run but had a job to do. 

A bang behind him scared him nearly to death.  In his panic, he could not tell if it was one of the party poppers or if one of the men had opened fire on him.  He spun and clicked the safety to the fire position, pointed the muzzle of the shotgun toward the last sound he’d heard in the darkness, and fired.  The fire erupting from the short shotgun barrel temporarily blinded him just as the noise from the blast set his ears ringing.  When he recovered, he could hear a man screaming.

“Shit, Mike, you okay!” the voice said.  “Mike, get up!”

Pete snapped to attention and racked the slide on the shotgun, ejecting the spent round and chambering a fresh one.

“Mike!” the voice in the darkness said one more time.

The shotgun erupted again, Pete still in a state of blind panic, his adrenaline pouring through his body.  He racked the slide again. 

BOOM!

He pumped the slide again.

BOOM!

Pump.

BOOM!

He continued until there were no more rounds.  Behind him the porch door opened and he spun his head toward it, nearly blinded by fear, tears, and adrenaline but catching himself before he turned the gun in that direction.  Ellen came rushing out the door, a pistol in her hand, Pops behind her with his at the ready. 

“What’s going on?” Ellen asked, shining a flashlight onto Pete’s chest, illuminating his face.  In her panic, she did not realize that this could have made Pete an easy target for any shooter still out there in the darkness.

From his panicked expression, she could see that this was no false alarm.  She heard the groan of a wounded man in the dark.  She started to shine the light toward the sound but Pete grabbed the light and turned it off.  He handed her the night vision monocular from around his neck, all the while pointing his empty shotgun in the direction where he thought the intruders were.

In the green flow of the night vision, Ellen could see two men lying in the yard about thirty feet away.  One was still.  One was moaning and moving around.  She dropped the monocular to her chest.

“Oh, Pete,” she said, her voice full of regret and sorrow at what he’d had to do.

Pops took the shotgun from Pete.  Pete collapsed into his mother’s arms, sobbing loudly and holding her tight.  She held him for a moment, still worried about the potentially dangerous wounded man. 

“Go to Pops, baby,” she whispered in Pete’s ear.  “Mommy has to make sure we’re safe.”

She turned on her flashlight and trained it on the two men.  Her weapon was raised in the other hand.  Occasionally, she would sweep both the light and weapon across the yard, making sure there were no other people with them.  In a dozen or so steps she reached the men.  She kicked the still one and could tell that if he was not dead now, he would be by morning.  There was no response.  The other man was conscious, blood pouring from a wound in his stomach.  He pressed his hand to it, trying to stem the flow of blood but there was a hell of a lot of it.

It was the rabbit hunter who had been at the gate earlier. 

“You shouldn’t have come here,” Ellen said.

“You’ll go to jail for this, bitch,” the man hissed.  “If my family don’t get you first.”

Ellen could hear crying behind her and knew it was Pete.  The emerging man inside Pete had known what he had to do tonight, but the little boy inside of him was having a hard time seeing it before his eyes.

Seeing the shotgun in Pete’s hand, the man looked at Pete.  “Look what you done to me, boy!” he screeched.  “They’ll put your momma and you both in jail for this.  And if the cops don’t take care of her, my brother will.  He’ll shoot her bitch ass right in front of you!”

Ellen dropped her pistol and fired a single shot into the man’s head ending his rant.  She’d heard all she was listening to.  Pete was having a hard enough time dealing with this.  The last thing he needed was to be having to deal with the threat of potential consequences.  She knew there would probably be no consequences to a shooting like this, under these circumstances, but Pete didn’t know that.  She mourned for her poor, soft-hearted child.

“Stay with them,” Ellen told Pops.  “I’ve got to get the tractor.”

Ellen used the rubber tracks of the excavator to compact the soil over the hole they’d just dug and refilled.  Jim had taught her how to use the machine but she wasn’t very efficient at it.  Once she had it in place, the digging went quickly.  Pete and Pops stood watching.  They were in a hollow behind the house, out of sight from everyone but the waning moon.  An owl broke the night with his mournful sound.  The hole was beneath a feedlot where the neighbor’s cattle came to eat.  The ground was in a constant state of trampled, muddy carnage.  No one would ever know.

It was 5:24 a.m. when my internal clock woke me up.  Either that or my bladder, which was ready to explode.  I rolled out of the crinkly bed and took shelter behind a nearby tree to take a leak.  I wasn’t particularly shy but tried to use my manners occasionally.  What I could see of the sky looked clear, giving me hope of a dry day for walking, even if it might be hot and humid.  With pressing business attended to, I walked back to our shelter.  My legs were stiff from the previous day’s walking and I could tell that I was slightly dehydrated. 

I lifted my pack from beneath the tarp and sat down against a tree.  We’d been munching candy bars and sucking down water bottles all day yesterday and I needed to take inventory of my supplies.  I was glad that we were drinking up some of the water bottles because I was tired of carrying all that water weight, but the bottled water was too precious to toss out because we needed it to keep going.  This was a constant dilemma for the trekker and backpacker – how much water to carry.  Too much weighs you down; too little and you find yourself fighting dehydration.

I still had eight bottles remaining and a few empty bottles that I’d saved for refilling when we found a good water source.  I knew Randi had a few more also, and Gary had an unopened 8-pack in addition to what loose bottles he might have accumulated.  We could get by on what we had in the bottles today, but may need to start filtering some stream or spring water tomorrow to refill our empties.  The Katadyn filter in my pack was more than adequate for keeping us supplied until we got home.  It was a veteran of many backcountry trips and had never let me down.  Nothing could ruin a backpacking trip faster than spewing from both ends.

As far as food went, I had not yet tapped into the emergency food that I kept in my Get Home Bag, relying instead on what we’d pilfered from the vending machines.  In the bottom of my pack was a Chinese knock-off of the MSR Pocket Rocket that I backpacked with.  The knock-off had been less than $10, including shipping from China, and functioned much the same as my MSR stove except it had a piezo ignitor that the MSR didn’t have.  I had one unused canister of isobutane gas for the stove.  It wouldn’t be enough for the whole trip, it only served as a backup for times when I couldn’t build a fire due to rain or security reasons.

I was also carrying a one quart pot from an old Coleman backpacking set.  I had since replaced it in my primary backpacking gear with a titanium pot that had been a Father’s Day present from my wife and kids.  This pot was the right size for boiling water for drinking or cooking.  It was also the right size that the can of isobutane stove fuel and the stove itself would fit down inside it and allow me room to get the lid on.  That protected the whole setup and kept it together in one place.  I had some used Gatorade bottles that held the food rations I kept in the pack for shit-hits-the-fan situations, kind of like the one I found myself in now.  One held a two pound bag of white rice, the other a two pound bag of red beans.  The bottles were marked in one cup increments to make measuring portions easier. 

There was a large baggie that held a couple of expired Mountain House freeze-dried backpacker meals, two  MREs that I’d bought at a gun show, and a mixture of various energy and protein bars, in addition to a few drink mixes that could boost electrolytes, provide carbs, or just help cover the taste of bad water.

I’d once backpacked a section of the Appalachian Trail around Roan Mountain in Tennessee during a particularly dry summer.  Many of the normal watering holes and springs where backpackers traditionally refilled their water had dried up.  At one point I’d become thirsty enough to filter water directly from a leaf-filled mud puddle.  I knew the Katadyn would filter out anything unhealthy from the water but it did nothing to erase the taste of old leaves.  I had since started carrying a few drink mixes for that very reason.  Even nasty-tasting water can save your life.

The stack of candy bars, granola bars, and jerky from the vending machine at the hotel had dwindled.  I had divvied up the haul in a tentative fashion soon after the Great Vending Machine Heist, giving Gary some to stash in his pack, and during a rest break yesterday I’d given Randi some to stash in her improvised pack so that she would have access to fuel when she needed it without having to ask for it.  You can burn several thousand calories a day hiking trails with a pack and if you don’t constantly refuel you will “bonk” and reach such a deficit state that you crash and can’t continue.  We couldn’t risk a bonk. 

I had nine snacks of different types left from the vending machine.  Those would be gone today.  I figured Randi had fewer, and I wasn’t sure what Gary had.  Since no one else was moving yet, I decided to boil up some water and dig into one of the freeze-dried backpacking meals.  I needed something besides junk food.  After sorting through the stack, I arrived at Spinach Fettuccini for Two.  Not usual breakfast fare but my only concern at the point was packing calories into by body for the day’s trek.  Carbs would be great.  I set up the stove, poured some water in the cooking pot, and balanced it atop the stove.  I took another bottle of water and began attempting to rehydrate myself.

Rather than the soft whisper produced by a gas range, the canister stove sounds like a small jet engine, producing a roar that eventually had Randi and Gary stirring.  Murmurs inside Walt and Katie’s tent indicated that were waking up too.

“Is that garlic I smell?” Randi asked.

“It is,” I said.  “Guess your sense of smell has not been damaged by all that smoking.”

“What in the hell are you eating for breakfast that has garlic in it?”

“Spinach fettucine,” I replied.  “It’s about done.  Want some?”

“I don’t know,” she said hesitantly.

“You’d prefer more candy bars?”

“Fettucine it is,” she replied, sitting up and throwing back her blanket.

Gary got up and raided his own pack for an MRE, although I offered him a third portion of the pasta.  Fortunately, I had two plastic sporks in my pack so Randi and I didn’t have to share a utensil.  The meals were cooked by pouring boiling water into the bag that the meal comes in, then closing the bag up while the meal rehydrates and cooks.  When the correct amount of time has passed, you simply stir the meal and eat it from the bag.  Since I didn’t have any plates in my pack and didn’t want to dirty up the pot, Randi and I passed the bag back and forth alternately until we decimated our spinach fettuccini breakfast.

“Best breakfast pasta I’ve ever had,” Randi said, digging immediately for a cigarette.

“I think I’d agree,” I said.  “What did you end up with, Gary?”

“Huevos rancheros,” he replied.  “Real breakfast food.”

“I’m eating with him tomorrow,” Randi said, winking at me.

Walt and Katie had been packing up their gear while we ate.  When they finished they joined us, each of them nibbling on a Clif bar.

“How are you guys set for food?” I asked.

“Getting low,” Walt said.  “We’d just come through a five day section with no resupply, which is a long stretch for us.  We usually don’t carry more than three days’ food.  We were planning to resupply today before we changed plans.”

“How many meals do you have?”

Walt looked at Katie.  She held up a lone finger.

“Lunch,” she replied.

I wasn’t to the point of singing kumbaya with these folks yet and telling them that what was mine was theirs.  I had a lot of reservations about sharing supplies with everyone I met, potentially depleting them.  As her co-workers, Gary and I had already assumed responsibility for helping Randi get home, which would put a dent in our supplies.  We had accepted that, though.  If we assumed responsibility for everyone we met along the way, we may eventually run out of resources and fail in our mission of getting our own selves home to our families.

Feeling a need to address this now that it was hanging out there, I thought of the plan I’d been turning over in my head during our walk yesterday.

“I don’t have a lot,” I said.  “I can get you through dinner tonight.  We are also facing a resupply issue, though.  We don’t have enough to get us home.”

“Getting on this trail is the first time I’ve felt safe since leaving Richmond,” Randi said.  “Don’t tell me we’re going to have to get off it and go back into the world again?  Where all the crazy people are?”

“Yes, we are,” I said.  “There’s no alternative.  You can’t travel fast and live off the land.  If you are going to travel fast, you need to carry your food with you.”

“Are we still shooting for Crawfish?” Gary asked.

“Crawfish?” Katie asked. “Your plan is to eat crawfish?”

“No,” I said.  “Crawfish is a town.  My best friend from high school, Lloyd, runs a barbershop in a town on the outskirts of Buena Vista.  He’s also the mayor.  I think he can help us if we can get to his place.”

“How far is that?” Katie asked.

“Maybe thirty-five miles,” I responded.  “If we can make good time, we could be there tomorrow night.”

“You think he’d take us in?” Gary asked.  “All of us?”

“I think he will,” I said.  “There’s probably a party at his place right now.  He’s an old time musician and he kind of lives in the past.  I doubt any of this has fazed him at all.”

*

The day’s walk began fairly well considering the circumstances.  I had always found long walks to be meditative and it was easy to lose track of time plodding along a mountain trail.   I was a little sore that morning, which was a combination of age and pushing it yesterday.  Though I was in fairly good shape and did a variety of exercises and activities, hiking is more extreme than people think.  My shoulders were sore from the weight of the pack pulling on them; my knees were a sore from stabilizing the combined weight of my body and my pack on uneven and hilly terrain; my calves were sore from climbing, as were my quads; my back was stiff from everything combined.  The bottom of my forefoot was also hot from a day’s walking.  I had taped it with duct tape this morning and hoped that it would wear better today.  I knew that if I was experiencing all this, the rest had to be in as much pain or worse.

I had tried to text my family again and found my iPhone dead.  I pulled it from my shirt pocket and checked it again, hoping it had miraculously charged in my sleep but it had not.  While I was staring at it, Gary pulled his from his pocket and checked it also.

“Dead,” he muttered.

“Mine, too,” I said.

He stuck his back in his pocket.  “Even unreliable communication was better than nothing.”

“Let’s take a short break,” I announced to the group. 

Everyone gladly stopped and dropped their loads for a moment.  Usually on backpacking trips, people string out a little based on their individual pace and then they catch up at with each other at the rest breaks.  It’s no big deal for people to be thirty minutes apart when the path is clearly delineated and there are no hazards or navigational challenges.  Due to the unusual circumstances of this particular disaster, and the way strangers were not always behaving nicely under the present conditions, I had warned people this morning that I felt it was best to stay within sight of each other as much as possible.  I had also told them that if they were pulling off trail to take a bathroom break they needed to let someone know so we didn’t leave them behind.  Everyone agreed with the plan.  I didn’t necessarily consider myself the leader of this bunch but there were things that needed to be discussed.  If no one else brought them up, I would. 

I dug in my pack and removed a padded nylon case about the size of a hardcover book, around an inch thick.  I unfolded the case to the solar cells lining the inside.  It was an Anker portable solar charger with a USB port that could charge a phone or tablet.  I carried a spare iPhone cable inside the case and plugged it into my phone and then into the charger.  Using two carabiners, I hung the charger from the back of my pack so that my phone would charge as I walked.  The charger worked best in direct sunlight, but a day of walking should leave it usable by the time we stopped for the day, as long as I could get signal.

“That’s a trick,” Gary said.  “I’ve been wanting one of those.”

“Start backpacking,” I said.  “It gives you the excuse to buy a lot of prepper gadgets.  My wife would have rolled her eyes at me purchasing this for ‘the apocalypse’ but she was fine with me buying it so I could call her and tell her how much I love her from the trail.”

“I might enjoy backpacking under different circumstances,” he said. 

“Not this girl,” Randi said from where she rested against a tree.  “I think this will be my one and only backpacking trip.  Hell, once I’m home, I may never leave town again.”

“Can’t say I blame you,” I remarked.

After another candy bar, we hit the trail again.  I stared at the empty wrapper before I stuffed it into my pocket, recalling a day when I had looked at a Snickers bar as a treat.  I expected it would be a long time before I ever craved another one.  I really wanted a club sandwich.

We stopped for an early lunch at the empty Blackwood shelter, another of the sparse overnight huts scattered along the trail.  Every shelter had a trail register where hikers could sign in with their trail name and indicate they’d been here and even include a short message if they wanted.  There were no entries dated for the previous night.  Perhaps word was reaching the trail that things had gone to shit and people were peeling off to try to get home.  Come to think of it, we hadn’t passed any hikers all day, and that was unusual on the AT.  This time of year, it was practically a freeway for the great unwashed and overburdened.