Route 70 was the most direct path, but I’m starting to think I should have walked north, out of Colorado, and taken the relatively flat saddle of the South Pass in Wyoming. Regrets are not a good thing at this stage of the game, but I’m facing the mouth of the Eisenhower Tunnel above Denver, and it seems, abruptly, like a long way to go in the dark. And I remember the high passes between here and Grand Junction, the toil of simply climbing. Maybe I should have gone around.
I’m not used to making decisions like this and having them routinely be a matter of life and death. Very few of us are.
I guess those of us who survive will get better at it.
It’s spring—Memorial Day, more or less—which doesn’t mean as much in the Rockies as it otherwise might. It’s morning, but gray, and lazy flakes of snow drift down from the haze to speckle my sleeves and pack straps. I’m lucky; I was in the Rockies for field research, and my work involves a lot of hiking. I have good socks, good boots, a good frame pack full of technical base layers and Clif bars.
What I don’t have is anything resembling a weapon, unless you count my pocket knife. And there are three people standing between me and the tunnel entrance, blocking my path. All are more or less dressed for the weather. They’re waiting for me. One has empty hands. One is holding an aluminum softball bat.
One is wearing a gun.
I raise my hands so they can see that they are empty. “I’m Alyce Hemingway of San Diego,” I tell them. I think of you, to keep my voice from shaking. “All I ask is passage through the tunnel. I’m trying to get home.”
They share a look. Gun wrinkles his nose; Softball Bat shrugs her shoulders. The one with empty hands steps forward. “There’s a toll.”
• • • •
Not cash. Nobody cares about cash right now. But I’ve bargained them down to two packages of trail mix and some water purification tabs when, in the course of their questioning, it comes out that I’m a biologist—a botanist, to be more precise—at UCSD.
“You got any medical skills?” asks Softball Bat.
“Some first aid,” I say. “And my specialty is plants. Some have medicinal value.”
“Can you do anything for the Fever?” she asks.
I wince. “I can show you willow bark. It’s got salicylic acid in it. That’s a component of aspirin. Horehound, though that grows at lower elevations. Soothes coughs. There’s a lichen called old man’s beard that’s supposed to be an antiviral, but I don’t know about any studies off the top of my head, or what the dosage or preparation would be.” I shrug. “I’m sorry. Anything I can show you is palliative or speculative. If there was a cure—”
If there was a cure, we wouldn’t be standing here. There’s a vaccine now but there wasn’t last winter. And now there’s lousy distribution and limited supplies. The exceptional virulence of the strain has combined with anti-vaccine panic to create the sort of short-term death toll not seen since the Spanish Influenza or the Black Death.
The Fever. It makes me nervous that people have given the new pandemic a nickname in which you can hear that same capital letter. It means they’re mythologizing it.
It turns out otters and orcas and elephant seals can all get the flu. And in a warming ocean, that H1N1 sea mammal strain thrives and spreads and mutates quickly. That it jumped to humans in a contagious form in the same season the H10N8 bird flu managed to also complete the hat trick is just damned poor luck.
That they reassorted and turned into the monster that flattened North America and, I guess, the world—though information is scarce . . . that’s something worse than damned poor luck. If I were a religious person, I might call it the wrath of God. I wouldn’t be the first.
Last winter was a bad flu season. This winter was murderous.
At least if we’re lucky, once we recover, I expect the anti-vaxxer fad will have run its course for good. But the question of whether even the people who want to vaccinate will be able to get their hands on the materials is an open one.
The otter flu will be done with us in a couple of years; it’ll burn itself out, even if it takes half of humanity with it. The longer-term problem is that it’s distracted the hell out of us when we should have been dealing with climate change and trying to figure out how to keep everybody fed. How to deal with the new fungal illnesses decimating wildlife and people at the urban-rural interface.
The end of the world was supposed to be gradual. There was supposed to be warning. A long, slow slide. What we got was punctuated equilibrium: a stately wobbling, then a sudden tipping point.
There was plenty of warning, I suppose. We just weren’t paying attention.
• • • •
They give me a mask and bring me in to see the patients, who look even worse than you’d expect. Whether their natural skin tone is light or dark, they all have that grayish cast. The conscious ones move and stretch restlessly, trying to ease aching limbs. The semiconscious ones toss—if they have the energy. Some moan or whimper. Some lie still, breathing raggedly, their skin slick with sweat. Some shake in ragged agues.
I have no idea what to do to help any of them. But I pay my tunnel passage the only way I can—boiling willow bark in water and dripping the bitter decoction down swollen throats.
Denver’s been turning people out when they get sick. I knew that. I didn’t know where they were going.
Here, apparently. The Eisenhower Tunnel. Softball Bat, Empty Hands, and Gun were among the first to find their way here.
They’ve survived the Fever. The otter flu, as I prefer to call it. Now they’re trying to help others.
So this isn’t what my racing heart told me to fear at all.
It’s something much more frightening than that.
• • • •
Wonder of wonders, the aspirin helps. Two days later, as I’m packing to leave, Empty Hands—turns out his name is Ryan—comes up to me and says, “If you want to stay, you’d be welcome.”
I glance back into the depths of the underground kingdom. “I have a partner and kid in San Diego.”
Ryan licks his lips. “You’re going to cross the Great Basin and the Mojave on foot?”
I shrug. I shoulder my pack. I sigh and look back at the tunnel. I could hole up here, wait for cell service or landlines to come back up. It’s bound to happen eventually. The infrastructure’s still there: it’s just a matter of running it.
Hell, eventually there might even be buses or something.
“I said I’d come home.”
He doesn’t say anything else, but I feel Ryan watching me as I settle into my boots with each stride west along 70.
At least it’s stopped snowing. And the snowing stays stopped for two whole days, which is what I budgeted to get to Vail. It’s only about thirty-nine miles over roads, and I’m fit.
But I’m not moving as fast as I’d like, and the road—well, it isn’t flat, exactly. And it sure isn’t easy going, though I’m grateful again and again and again that you can’t get gasoline for love or money, and the highways are devoid of anything but pedestrians and military vehicles these days.
Well, it’s what they were built for. Civilian uses are—were—well, not just a bonus. Because the economic impact of the interstate system was huge. But they were secondary to military needs. Just like Rome.
Why am I thinking about this? Some combination of the Eisenhower tunnel (get it?), military convoys, and hypoxia. Low blood sugar, too, as I’m trying to go easy on my food supplies.
End of the world as we know it or not, it’s beautiful up here. The mountains hump like spruce-scaled snakes on either side of me, generally rising on the right and dropping into a valley on the left, though that varies. I can see the train tracks on the abandoned right-of-way, and the sky above bright and fragile as a sheet of cobalt glass. I’m getting used to walking. I’m even getting used to the inclines, though my quads and hamstrings and glutes and calves have words with me when I lie down at night.
Vail Pass is only 10,000
feet and change. Piece of cake, right?
Passing Copper Mountain on the second day, I pick up the bike trail. At least it’s a nicer walk than the interstate. As night is falling, I hike up the hillside over the highway to find an out-of-the-way place to lay my sleeping bag.
• • • •
On the third day, I wake up in my sleeping bag shuddering with cold and body aches, and I know I’m not going to make it to Vail today, either. I’m close enough that there are scattered houses, and a road or two off the south side of 70 leading down into some settled country. Beyond, the ski slopes still gleam with manufactured snow, though it’s patchy and unrepaired. I wonder how long ago they stopped making it.
I wonder how many of these houses are inhabited, and how many belonged to movie stars and Silicon Valley types who used them for a month or two out of the year.
I wonder if anybody will take in a footsore wanderer who just woke up with the Fever.
• • • •
Somehow, I bundle up my sleeping bag, although it’s not what you’d call a tidy roll. I can’t manage to get my pack up on my shoulders, so I half-drag it across the deserted highway, hop the K-rails, and stumble down a brushy hillside to a secondary road. There’s a sort of retaining slope made of round boulders shoved into the earth. I stagger-slide-tumble down it and roll onto the shoulder of the street.
There’s a house across the road. If I walk up to it and it’s inhabited, whoever lives there might just shoot me as a public health hazard. If it’s not inhabited, I don’t know how I might get in.
I could just lie here and die on the side of the road. The neighbors, if there are neighbors, might come put me out of my misery if I get lucky.
The house is probably empty. I can’t imagine a lot of people stayed in Vail when the food trucks stopped running. The ones who did probably have generators and hunting rifles, though. But when I haul myself to my hands and knees, collect my pack, and push myself upright on it, nobody shoots at me. That I notice. And still nobody shoots at me—that I notice—as I drag the pack and the now-torn sleeping bag across the road and up onto the wraparound porch of the wood-timbered house. I have to pause halfway up the four steps to rest, so they’d have plenty of time, too.
I stagger to the back, thinking maybe I can pry a window open with my pocket knife. But when I get there I discover the sliding door has been wrenched out of its tracks, then leaned back up against the house next to a top-of-the-line propane grill. I push it aside—this takes minutes of fumbling—squeeze through the gap, and collapse, along with my sleeping bag, onto the musty-smelling couch of a big room with an empty fireplace and a leather-upholstered conversation pit. I curl up, shuddering, aching, chest heaving, so cold my body won’t stop shaking. So cold my nipples ache and my teeth chatter.
I only stay like that for maybe half an hour, maybe only twenty minutes, but it feels like a year. When the ague eases—it’s like something out of Little House on the Prairie—I manage to stagger to the kitchen. I locate the bathroom—no water, but there’s a half-full bottle of NyQuil and some Excedrin in the medicine cabinet. A gun safe in the hallway has been pried open with something like a wrecking bar.
The weapons are gone. But whoever did it spilled a box of ammunition in their haste. I squat to pick up the bullets. Heavy—and I don’t have a gun—but each one is worth significantly more than its weight in calories. With those swaying in the pockets of my cargo pants, I follow the smell of rotting fruit to the kitchen and steel myself to open the fridge. It reeks, but there are two gallon jugs of water in there, and one is completely full. The cabinet beside it yields a half dozen more gallons, and a sealed bottle of cranberry juice, and two bottles of Mountain Dew. I score some protein powder, some weevily crackers, an unopened package of Oreos, an unopened box of granola bars, two tins of sardines, and a mason jar full of lentils that lurks behind an infested bag of flour. A small treasure trove of ramen packets lies scattered across the pantry floor. I almost weep with gratitude.
The cabinets have been rifled and all the canned goods taken except those sardines, some split pea soup, a tin of bean sprouts, and some low-fat coconut milk. There’s a locked, smashed liquor cabinet, but whoever looted the place took lightweight things: food and weapons easy to carry or valuable for trade.
Bananas have turned into a grayish sludge on the counter. The onions in the copper hanging basket are sprouting, but not spoiled.
I load a selection of my treasure, heavy on the beverages, into a bucket from under the sink and trudge back to the couch.
I don’t remember the next few days very well.
• • • •
I dream of our last phone call. You offered to come find me. I told you to sit tight and take care of Casey. I told you I was coming home.
That’s not going to be a lie. I swear it. Lying on the clammy leather in a pool of my own sweat, struggling to gulp water from the jug, I swear it over and over and over again.
I learn why they call it the Fever.
The otter flu disproportionately kills the young—medically speaking—and the strong.
At first, I can stagger to the bathroom to pee. Later, the bucket comes in handy. More rigors. More hallucinations. I know I ought to do something to break the fever, but what, exactly, eludes me. If there were water, I could fill the tub.
That obsesses me, during my conscious half-hours. Through the daze of illness, of muscle aches, of sweat, I think about long, cool baths. I think about swimming, cool water parting before my body. I think about peace.
I think about you and Casey. Whether you’re safe. Whether there’s food and water in San Diego. Whether Casey got sick, or you got sicker, and—this scares me most—what happened to her if you did. I trust you to do everything right for her. But—as I’m proving right now—you can’t plan for everything.
You’ve been sick. You know how it is.
One afternoon I wake up with the green mountain light filtering through the windows overlooking the valley and the sky slopes beyond. My forehead is cool; my skin is dry. My joints ache only with disuse.
I lie on the sweat-stained leather, surrounded by a wasteland of empty pop bottles and water jugs. At some point, I must have made it to the kitchen for more water, because there are two empty and three half-full.
My bucket stinks.
I sit up, and nearly fall over. My waistband and shirt cuffs are loose. The skin on my face and hands feels as if it has shrunken over the bone.
I rest my elbows on my knees, put my head down between them, and try not to laugh because laughing makes the room spin. I had the otter flu and I lived.
Now I just have to walk a thousand miles across two major deserts, two major mountain ranges, and any number of smaller ones . . . and I can go home.
• • • •
I rest for two weeks, foraging nearby houses for more scraps of food and water. I find corpses in two. You’ve never seen everything, but you can get used to anything.
One house has a generator and a working well, and after I siphon gas from several lawn mowers and chainsaws I do manage to fill up the bath tub. One has a hand-cranked radio, which tells me that the only thing on the air is emergency broadcasts.
At least we still seem to have a government.
Coloradans are an outdoorsy cohort. When I leave, I have appropriated a lightweight tent, some space blankets, a little freeze-dried food, two pairs of twenty-five-dollar socks and a merino wool base layer. A pair of good work gloves. A coat. Some trade goods—more ammo, jerky, candy, bags of freeze-dried fruit from Trader Joe’s.
I also have a large-scale topo atlas of the Western states and a dull-gray burro with a stripe down her spine, because this is Colorado and apparently a lot of people had livestock and left it behind when the world ended.
I don’t know how to ride. But she can carry a lot of supplies. I wonder if Casey will settle for a donkey instead of a pony. I bet she will.
I name her Asset.
She is. She
can live on prickly pear and barrel cactus and eats cholla like churros, as long as I scorch the thorns off for her. She’s got a good eye for rattlesnakes.
We get to be old friends on the road, especially after we reach Grand Junction and the desert takes over. There aren’t a hell of a lot of people between Grand Junction and Las Vegas. There were pit stops, ranches, homesteads, last gas for three hundred miles. Now there’s wasteland.
The next nine months are about as dreary as you’re probably imagining. Asset and I don’t honestly have much trouble with other people, though we spend one night under a half-moon sneaking down canyons to avoid some men on horseback with guns—vigilantes or outlaws, I couldn’t tell you. We’re more invested in staying hidden than they are in finding us, but it’s cold and terrifying and I think of you and Casey while we huddle in the mesquite to keep my courage up.
We travel mostly by night in the summer, and we don’t make ten miles every day. We have to find water before we can move on, for me more than Asset, who can chew it out of plants. I’m grateful for my complexion: if I were pale, I’d burn to crisp out here. As it is, even with the hat, I spend some time thinking about skin cancer. Melanin is only good for so much.
The days are hot and the nights are cold and the landscape is breathtaking, and I’m too old for sleeping on rocks.
When we come through the Virgin River Gorge, we meet up with a caravan, and I pay them in bullets to let us travel with them as far as Las Vegas. The Virgin River itself is a blessing; all the water you want, all the time. It’s probably full of perchlorate.
From Vegas, the caravan master tells me, there’s regular convoys to Los Angeles. And in L.A., I can catch a train home.
The trains are still running on the coasts, in the population centers. There’s other news, too, but trains hearten me more than the woman who tells me that CDC teams are working across the country, or the guy who came all the way from Galveston who says that the ports are re-opening.
If there are trains, then there’s infrastructure. And if there’s infrastructure, then you and Casey probably have food and water.
The End Is Now Page 20