When the chipmunk was full of crackers, it squeaked and ran off. I wondered if it was looking for compatriots. “Good luck,” I said softly and winced at the sound of my own voice. I hesitated before I put the backpack on. I couldn’t catch the little guy or girl and I knew it wouldn’t want me to catch it. But I left the rest of the crackers on the table.
I was nearly out of the campground before another chipmunk ran across the road. It paused to chatter at me. I paused and watched as it ran toward the table with the crackers on it. The first chipmunk rushed back. They chattered and chirped at each and I could almost put words to the conversation. “Where have you been?” “I’m not sure.” “Where are all the humans?” “Well’s she’s here, isn’t she?” “Yes, well, where are all the rest?” “Beats me.” “Let’s eat.”
I watched silently and took a deep breath. It wasn’t exactly relief that coursed through me. I don’t know what to call it. Chipmunks were normal. Then I swatted away a mosquito before I realized what I was doing. My list was getting bigger. Me, unicorns, two chipmunks, and a mosquito. Whoo-hoo.
It was nearly nightfall when I walked into the first small town. It wasn’t much bigger than the name on its sign. There was a general store, a gas station, a tiny post office, and three houses. The general store and the gas station were locked. The post office was too, I assumed.
It felt as though I was standing in a ghost town. There were cars parked at the houses but no one was moving, and all I could hear was the whistle of a breeze. I stood there for a long time before I knocked on one of the doors of the houses. Then I knocked on the door of the next house. I tried the doorbell, too, but I couldn’t hear it ring inside, so I resorted to my fist on the wood of the front entrances. Finally I knocked on the door of the third house.
I suppose I should have peeked inside the windows. I should have looked in the bedrooms to see if I could see flattened blankets and empty bed clothing, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. These houses had belonged to someone who wasn’t there anymore. They were empty yet they were full of the memories of those who had once walked there.
It felt like a cemetery.
I slept in a yard shed behind the third house. It was pleasantly cozy with the smell of freshly cut grass inundating it. I made a pallet between a lawn mower and a kayak and slept poorly through the night. Deep in my subconscious I was expecting someone to fling the door open and scream at me for trespassing.
In the morning I broke into the store to get food and water. I ate Vienna sausages with my fingers and drank a lukewarm coke from the fridge. It almost felt like a feast when I chased the coke with a package of Oreo cookies. Then I took about a half hour to find what I wanted. The garage of the second house had it. It was an old fashioned Schwinn bicycle. It had a rear carrier and was simple enough that I thought electronics couldn’t come into it. I fixed my pack onto the back with a bungee cord and took off to the west once again.
Being on the bike was almost heavenly to my blistered heels. What hiking would have taken all day, took me two hours on the bike. I made the next town well before noon and found more of what I had already seen. Just as I rode into the next spot on the map I passed a police cruiser planted cock-eyed in the road. It had hit an electrical pole. I slowed enough to see the hat on the seat and then disregarded it.
This town was a little bigger. It even had a drug store. What it didn’t have were any people.
I stopped for lunch, eating my pilfered goodies, trying to keep my mind blank. Not that that was hard to do.
The only stop I made was when I saw an empty Ford pickup truck that had run into a billboard’s supports. The billboard had canted forward but had remained upright. The truck had a set of clothing in it, too. Flannel shirt with jeans, boots, and a cheap watch that was no longer ticking. No underwear but maybe that had been a personal preference. What the truck did have was a rifle in the back window rack. I took that and hung it over my shoulder. I couldn’t find any bullets but could have slapped myself for not taking the police car’s weapons. I didn’t want to ride back so I continued west.
I couldn’t have told myself out loud where I was going, but I knew all the same. My family had lived in Springfield, Oregon. It was about sixty miles from where we had parked our VW Jetta in the Santiam Pass. I couldn’t find anyone here, but there was a niggling of hope that prodded at me. My mother stayed at home before she didn’t like to hike. I hoped, no I prayed, that I would ride up to our house and find her there, waiting for us.
The next car that I found on the side of the road was a Lexus. I stopped because I wanted a map. The topographical maps that I had stopped at the edge of the Three Sisters Wilderness Area and I needed something to give me a frame of reference. Instead I found a dash mounted GPS that was as dead as everything else. I also found an empty suit with an Armani tie. There was an Omega watch too. Pretty for a man’s watch and just as useless as a rock. There weren’t any paper maps inside the car.
I rode thirteen more miles on the bike, until my bottom became numb, and stopped at another wide spot in the road. On the way I saw several birds, squirrels, and heard a dog barking off in the woods. At least I thought it was a dog. Because of my experience with the unicorns I was apprehensive enough to decide to not go looking for the animal. Number one reason for that was that there could be all kinds of newly interesting things in the woods, any number of which might see me as an entrée. Number two reason was that the barking might not be coming from a…dog.
My list was growing. Because of that I was somewhat relieved. There was life here. There wasn’t just me. So far I hadn’t found another human being, but there were other things alive. The chipmunks, for example, hadn’t come from another place. They had been in that campground when the world had changed. They were little mooches who were used to getting goodies from campers. They knew a human being and knew a soft touch when they saw one. I wasn’t the only living thing who was still around after something very strange had happened. And if that was true, then there might be others, like me.
I limped around the little town for a little while and then helped myself inside the diner. There was a faint smell of something going bad. I hadn’t considered it but without electricity, all the food was going spoil. In the houses, in the grocery stores, and restaurants. I found an apple pie that didn’t smell bad and cut a thick piece. I sat at a counter on a bar stool and calmly ate the pie bite by bite with a fork I had snagged from a bin nearby. When I was done, I started to take the plate to the kitchen to clean up after myself, and then grimaced.
I was standing there at the end of the counter when I looked up and saw someone looking at me. I was frozen in place. So was the other person. When I dropped the dirty plate to the floor we both jumped. Then I realized I was looking in a mirror. I had been looking at my own reflection and I hadn’t recognized myself. My hair was still black and shoulder length. My eyes were still gray. I was still five foot five inches tall. I guessed I was still a size six although I hadn’t been eating well and my jeans were sagging at my waist.
The girl in the mirror looked…hollow. She was as empty as the world outside the little diner. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe I had changed that night, but it took a mirror to reveal it to me.
I bit my lip until it bled. (Of course, that added color to my face.) Then I fled the diner.
I slept that night in a barn outside a modest ranch house. I didn’t bother knocking at the door. But I did pull the wooden ladder up into the loft with me so that no would climb up after while I was asleep.
The next morning I let a horse out of its pen. It was a regular horse with painted spots. It didn’t look sick or bothered, other than being a little skittish. However, the horse, a girl horse I think, didn’t want to have anything to do with me. She stayed on the far side of the corral, even while I secured the gate to the fence to keep it from closing back on itself. I left the barn door open so the horse could help herself to the hay on the bottom floor. The water trough was full, due to the r
ain of the previous week.
If I’d had a measuring gauge to estimate how I was feeling, the freeing of the horse would have brought the gauge up one notch. There. Freed horse. Sophie, one extra notch. Life wasn’t great. In fact, life pretty well sucked, but it didn’t mean I couldn’t do something good for some other living creature. Maybe it didn’t make me feel quite so…hollow inside.
The horse nickered at me as I rode away. Maybe she could hang out with the unicorns.
By the end of that day I saw more animals. A lot of birds. There were some dogs. I saw one cat slinking into its yard. I felt sorry for the animals. They were going to have to learn how to exist without humans. Apparently, just like I was going to do. I stopped to unlock gates and propped doors open for animals as I got closer to the Eugene area. Two larger dogs snarled at me as if I was the enemy, a pair of pit bulls of some kind, and I was forced to flee before they could attack me.
There were a lot more vehicles that had simply come to stops wherever they happened to be. It looked as though engines had basically stopped and the wheels of the cars rolled to stops or collided with something or other. One minivan had apparently crashed into a Jeep. There had been a fire and the vehicles were blackened with soot. One car had gone into a window front of a dry cleaner’s store.
As I got closer to home I didn’t try to stop and look anymore. I worked a little harder on the pedals and moved through familiar city streets. A block away from my house I let the bike roll to a shaky stop and shuddered as I put my feet to the ground.
For two days my thoughts had been on my mother. Certainly there were others to think of as well that I hadn’t previously considered. I had two good friends, Charity (who hadn’t been named after the mountain, btw) and Kady, who lived a mile away with their mother, a postal worker. The twins went to my high school and were in several of my classes. My uncle, Avery, lived in Corvallis and was as close to us. His son, Jeffrey, was two years younger than I was, and I loved him like he was my brother. I didn’t have a boyfriend, but there was a boy named Nate who I liked. We’d gone on two dates. We were supposed to go the movies when I got back from the mountains. We hadn’t even kissed yet.
But it was my mother who drew me to Springfield. We had a nice three bedroom bungalow in a middle class neighborhood. The yard was landscaped and there wasn’t even a yard gnome to be found. She liked her rose bushes. She had ten different varieties in the front yard alone. She tried and tried again to teach me something about roses but I hadn’t wanted to listen about stupid, old plants.
I shuddered again and asked myself the anticipated question. What if she’s there? And the worse questions, the one I didn’t want to think about, slithered through my mind like an evil creature of night. What if she’s not? What if her gold band and diamond solitaire are in the bed next to her silk night gown? What if I’ve lost them both?
In the end my aching, overstrained muscles didn’t let me get back on the bike. I left the Schwinn in the middle of the street and walked around the corner. The third house on the left was ours. Brown with white trim. Brownish brick façade on the lower half. A white picket fence that was made from vinyl so neither Mom nor Dad would ever have to paint it again and again. My home.
The sun was starting below the horizon but I had enough light to discover the door was locked. I dug the keys out of my back pack and opened the door.
The house smelled slightly musty. I knew before I went a single step that no one was there. I looked for a note or a sign or anything. The last thing I looked for was Mom’s wedding set.
It wasn’t in the bed as I had expected. Instead it was in the kitchen, on the tile floor next to her favorite peach colored night gown. There was a broken glass of milk on the floor nearby. She had been having trouble sleeping without her husband and child in the house.
As I looked at it, I reached inside my jeans and retrieved Dad’s wedding band. The three rings were clasped together urgently in my hand. When I finally broke free of the trance I was in, I found it was complete darkness and that I was crying desperately.
Chapter Three – Not Alone…Exactly…
The fog lasted until the next day or so I thought. When I woke up the next day in my very own bed, I still had my parents’ wedding rings clasped in my hand. I was hungry and my body ached from the miles of bike riding. At the same time I realized that I smelled bad. I even discovered something interesting. The water faucets still worked. I knew the electric water heater was as dead as everything else, but cold water did just fine. Did I take advantage of it? Oh, yes I did. I was ripe.
I had a bath in a dark interior bathroom with only a candle for a companion. I even used a little bubble bath. It wasn’t the same in cold water but I smelled like freesia instead of body odor. Then I dressed in my own clothing and dried my hair with my own towel. It was strange. I was at home, by myself, not for the first time, but I thought perhaps for the last time.
I had hard thinking to do. I could live or I could die. I was alone and there wasn’t much I could do about it. There were animals and there might be other humans like me, but I had yet to see them. I had to…hope. But hope was a fleeting emotion and I didn’t know how slender the strand was that I was hanging on by.
I stayed at my home for three days. I thought about the new world I was living in now. I had no electricity and no ability to make any for myself. The only food I had was canned and the fruits that were yet unspoiled in the local supermarket. It turned out that apples and oranges were really long lasting. The winter was coming and I wasn’t sure if I was prepared to rough it.
I thought there was only one thing to do. I needed to head south. Just like the birds. South where winter wasn’t so strenuous and I could survive without excess stress. Maybe Los Angeles or San Diego. But the thing was I was going to have to hoof it the entire way. That, or I could go retrieve that Schwinn. Of course, there was a bicycle shop not a mile away, and the prices seemed to be right lately. (Big, fire sale? Low demand! Over inventory!)
I checked my friends’ house and found what I dismally expected. There was a neat row of stud earrings in Charity’s bed along with an oversized Grateful Dead T-shirt and Hello Kitty underwear. Kady left her charm bracelet and flannel jammies that seemed too warm for late summer. I decided against riding the bicycle to see about my uncle and my cousin. In my heart of hearts I knew that it was too likely that they were gone just everyone else. The utter disappointment that would have blasted over me when I saw what few items were left that represented their lives would have killed what was left of me.
I was numb. I thought the fog had lifted but I didn’t have a clue how wrong I was. I packed for a trip. I checked the map and decided that San Diego sounded like a nice place to spend the winter. It was about 900 miles on a bike that I would have pedal every inch of the way. I left Springfield one sunny morning in August and I didn’t even know what day it was. I had lost count and had no way of figuring out what date it was.
I took some of my clothes and my parents’ wedding rings which I hung on a necklace around my neck. I stopped by a gun shop and bought bullets for the rifle. Then I set up coke cans in the lot beside the gun store to practice. It was a good thing that I did that because not only was I a lousy shot but I couldn’t get the gun to shoot. I went back into the store and got more bullets. Same result. I went back into the shop and got a pistol, a Glock by its name, and the correct ammunition for it. After awkwardly loading the unfamiliar weapon I fired it and found that it didn’t work either. I tried a shotgun next but I was really surprised at the outcome. Nada.
So I went back into the gun shop again and went low tech. I got a crossbow and a box of bolts. It took me a solid hour to get a good handle on how to use the weapon. Pulling the draw of the crossbow took more effort than I was prepared to give. In the end my shoulders hurt and my fingers burned with repeated snaps of the string. I even managed to hit within a few feet of my targets. Despite the fact that it was only worth one shot before I would have to struggle
to reload it was better than nothing. Then I decided I should have something else.
With that I went back into the gun shop and got several knives. One hunting knife was attached to my waist. One was fixed to my boot. A third went into my backpack. I was starting to feel like a female Rambo but I didn’t have a war to fight. (And no, I didn’t have any baby oil to smear over my nonexistent bulging muscles.)
I stopped to look around the shop for something else and didn’t even realize that I was specifically looking for it until I thought of my dream. The dream I’d had where I was fighting with a sword and searching for my father. But this shop didn’t have swords and I pushed the thought away.
Even with aching limbs I wanted to leave Springfield, so I did. I pedaled past empty cars and emptier parking lots. I passed a mall that looked like a haunted castle; a single security car had plowed into a light pole in the middle of the front parking lot. By the time I got on Highway 126 I was sweating and not just from the exercise.
It was that the world was so empty. It was so the same as it was before but it was so different. The normal noises were gone. I could hear birds and sometimes insects, but little else. Even the wind had vanished on this hot, desolate day. By the time I got to Fern Ridge Reservoir I was panting with exertion. I wanted so desperately to be rid of the city. I wanted to be away from what should have been normal but was no longer.
Then, of course, something else happened. The reservoir was on the north side of the highway. In a few months the Army Corps of Engineers would have been draining in for winter. Not that that was going to happen any longer. At the moment its greenish blue fingers still reached almost to the highway. The marshes that surrounded its edges were still bountiful with flora. I even saw a loon.
Then I saw the Loch Ness Monster. The loon saw it too and took off for friendlier climates. Pretty smart bird.
Sea of Dreams Page 2