Wasteland

by Noah Mann

  In the end, I settled it. I acted to end the loggerheads, reaching to my friend’s pack and removing the MREs from within and handing them to Elaine. She didn’t take them immediately. For a few seconds she continued to stare at Neil, the hardness about her easing by a degree. The fire in her gaze ebbed. It was not any overt expression of apology, but it might have been a recognition of how far she’d pushed the issue. How delicate the moment had become.

  “Go on,” I said to Elaine, the MREs bunched in my hands. “Take them and do what you have to do so we can get going.”

  Finally, she took the packaged meals from me and turned away. I stood with Neil, the both of us watching her cross through front and back yards, making her way to the next street over where the little girl’s house was.

  “Did something happen between you two last night?” Neil asked without looking at me.

  “I didn’t do this because of that,” I said. “Whatever happened, whatever is happening between Elaine and me...”

  I knew where his question was leading. I also knew that the answer I was trying to give was, at best, an obfuscation. I’d taken her side. Whether that was because the closeness we felt to one another had finally begun to manifest, or because it was the right thing to do, raiding Neil’s pack for the last of his food, to him, must have seemed like an undeniable shift in the dynamics of the friendship we’d shared since high school.

  “Look, I get it,” Neil said. “Sometimes you have to give in. But what the hell are we going to eat, Fletch?”

  “There are still more food lockers east of here on the list,” I told him.

  “And the chances are the ones that aren’t empty could blow up in our faces,” he reminded me.

  My friend grimaced suddenly and rolled his shoulder, readjusting the strap of his pack off of the bandaged wound.

  “Let me redo that dressing,” I said, but Neil shook off my concern.

  “Just go get her moving,” he said, taking a look around the eerily silent town. “I want to get out of here, too.”

  I nodded. In full agreement. The dead space around us was beginning to feel claustrophobic. Almost suffocating with negative presence. No one was out there, yet my skin crawled with the sensation of being watched. It was crazy, but so was the world we now lived in.

  * * *

  I found Elaine in the little girl’s house, standing at the dining room table and cutting open every MRE pouch we’d surrendered. She was removing and stacking the boxed contents of each, arranging them by meal—breakfast, lunch, and dinner—until my presence and the absurdity of the process she was engaged in became apparent.

  “How will she know what to do?” Elaine asked.

  She turned to me, distraught, the reality of the situation, the reality of reality dawning upon her with terrible vengeance.

  “She’ll know what to do,” I said. “She saw you open one of them.”

  Elaine nodded, both doubt and hope in the gesture. Her gaze tracked past me, past the open front door, to the lawn beyond the street and the body that still lay upon it.

  “Should we bury him?”

  “We have to get moving, Elaine.”

  She looked to me now. Her eyes glistened. In an instant, with enough emotional provocation, tears could fall. But they didn’t. I suspected she wouldn’t let them.

  “All right,” she said, looking to the meals spread upon the table once more. “How long do you think she’ll live?”

  It was a question I was not about to answer. I didn’t know, to be truthful. There was a chance, I supposed, that the little girl might outlive us, considering that she had shelter, water, and now food. We did not.

  “Let’s go,” I said.

  Elaine turned toward the door and took a step that way before shifting direction and coming to me, pressing her face against my shoulder. I felt no sobbing. I heard no whimper. But I felt sadness. Terrible, terrible sadness.

  “You did the right thing,” I said softly, planting a soft kiss just above her ear as I reached up and stroked the back of her head. “Believe that.”

  She eased her face away from my shoulder and looked up at me.

  “Thank you,” she said, reaching her hand behind my head as she rose up to kiss me.

  It was a short embrace. Just a few seconds. But in that brief moment, my world felt alive and right.

  The kiss ended and we left the house. Elaine called out to Emma several times from the street, not trying to draw her from her hiding place, but to tell her that food would be waiting when she got home.

  Home...

  That was what this place was to her. It was the only place she’d ever known. The only place she’d ever know.

  We moved between the houses and rejoined Neil. Nothing more was said. We started walking, the town of ghosts receding behind.

  Two hours down the road we reached the Green River, wide and calm where it spread across the border of Wyoming and Utah. Through filtration straws we drank until our bellies seemed ready to burst. We doused ourselves in the heavenly liquid, bathing and washing the grit from our faces, arms, legs, bodies.

  For an hour we did nothing but lounge silently in a shallow pool near the shore. I cleaned Neil’s wound as best I could and dressed it with a proper bandage and gave him a course of antibiotics to begin. We dried off and dressed and readied ourselves, starting off again with a few hours of daylight left, crossing a creek that spilled into the larger flow and locating a boat thudding rhythmically against a large rock near the shore.

  We scrounged two narrow planks from the remnants of a nearby campground and used them as oars, Elaine and I paddling as Neil scanned the far shore of the river for any movement. Any life. Any threats.

  There were none. We landed and filled our canteens and water bottles one more time, then moved with the sun at our backs. Across open country and along remote roads where there were any. Hugging the border between Utah and Wyoming. Wanting our path to be a near arrow straight shot to Cheyenne. A rugged, trying trek to our ultimate destination.

  That was the plan. That was the hope.

  Twelve

  Two days later we saw the man on his cell phone.

  “Christ...”

  Neil’s commentary encapsulated all that any of us might offer about the sight. All that we might think, judge, or imagine as we stopped at the edge of the narrow road in the north of Colorado and watched the emaciated man shamble toward us, hugging the opposite edge of the blacktop. As he drew near, the utter absurdity of the scene was amplified. A tattered suit draped the man’s thin frame, coat and slacks once something approximating blue, white shirt beneath that, and a striped tie loose around his soiled collar. Worn leather shoes flopped loose as he walked. Atop his head, wisps of hair hung like frayed strings from his sunburned scalp. One hand was buried in the pocket of his pants and the other held the useless phone to his ear.

  “Hello,” Elaine said as the man approached.

  He seemed not to hear the greeting. Or chose to ignore it. His shuffling pace never changed.

  “Watch his other hand,” Neil said softly.

  Both he and I remembered the crazed woman who’d cut off her own eyelids on our journey to Eagle One. She’d seemed harmless—until she produced a knife from her purse. That encounter had ended with gunfire, and screaming, and a body by the side of the road.

  “Sir,” Elaine said, making a move toward him until I put a hand to her shoulder.

  “Let him go,” I said.

  She stood next to me and watched as the man walked unsteadily past, silent, as if listening intently to a call of immeasurable importance. He continued west, toward nothing.

  “Shouldn’t we give him some water?” Elaine asked.

  Neil turned half away, suppressing the urge to respond. To challenge Elaine on giving away another part of our meager supplies. To offer some respite, some brief relief to one condemned.

  This time, I could not abide by allowing that.

  “He’s gone, Elaine,” I said.
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  She understood. Physically, the man would be gone from our proximity soon as he walked on. But he was already beyond help. Beyond hope.

  “I know,” she said, accepting the truth that, despite its ubiquity, was still hard to believe.

  The man stumble-walked on. Elaine and I watched him grow smaller and smaller in the distance. Neil did not. He focused his attention up the road. In the direction we had to go.

  We began walking again. Every so often I noticed Elaine glancing behind. After a few hundred yards she came to a full stop and stared in the direction we’d come. I halted, but Neil did not, keeping his modest pace.

  “He’s down,” Elaine said.

  I looked back down the road and saw the dark lump on the dusty asphalt. Just a tiny bump of fabric and flesh.

  “One minute you’re there, and the next you’re not,” Elaine said. “Like him. Like Burke. Like Micah.”

  She turned and faced me now.

  “Emma’s father.”

  “Stop beating yourself—”

  She shook her head, cutting me off.

  “No. I’m not. It’s just, I’m realizing right now, right here, that we’re not on borrowed time. No one left is. We’re out of time.”

  My confusion at what she was trying to get across was obvious.

  “Don’t you understand?” she asked. “We’re all miracles. Every last one of us still drawing breath, still fighting the fight, is a miracle.”

  “A miracle...”

  She nodded, then glance down the road again to the man who’d been alive just moments before, but now was not, his own miraculous self snuffed out.

  “I love you, Eric,” she said, still staring down the road. “I’ve never in my life said that to another person that I wasn’t related to. And now, standing in the middle of nowhere, with death everywhere, I know that I love one person and that’s you.”

  A soft, sweet smile warmed her face. Her dirty, weathered, thinning face.

  “That I have the chance to even say that is a miracle,” she added, turning to me. “And I can’t imagine goin—”

  “Hey!”

  Neil’s shout cut her wondrous words off. We looked up the road and saw him stopped, staring upward, into the cloudless sky.

  Only it wasn’t that.

  “Son of a...”

  The three words slipped out, without thought, a simple, instinctive exclamation to what I was seeing.

  “That’s...”

  “I know,” I said to Elaine, then began jogging up the road toward Neil, glancing above every few seconds.

  I reached my friend a moment later, Elaine just behind, the three of us together on a no name road along the Colorado/Wyoming border, looking into the sky at an arrow straight line of white drawn across pure blue, two in parallel it seemed, contrails stretching from northeast to southwest.

  “A plane,” Elaine said, voicing the obvious as if describing something so unique that it verged on the impossible.

  The lines of vapor were lengthening, being dragged westward by the nearly invisible jet at altitude. I slipped my pack off and retrieved a large pair of binoculars from within, bringing them to my eyes as I tipped my head back and focused in on the aircraft.

  “He’s at thirty thousand feet plus, Fletch,” Neil said. “You can’t see anything. Not with those.”

  I heard my friend, but I wasn’t looking to read a tail number off the aircraft.

  “It’s grey,” I said. “Dark grey. Wide body. And there are four trails.”

  A four engine dark grey plane with a bit of girth. I knew what that most likely meant. So did Neil.

  “Military,” he said. “C-17 maybe.”

  A transport. But transporting what? And to where?

  “That takes personnel to keep in the air,” Elaine said. “Crew. Maintenance.”

  “Someone’s still processing jet fuel,” Neil said.

  So there were people. A large group. Far east of here. Or west. Maybe a military installation that was still somewhat functioning.

  “There’s your miracle,” I said to Elaine, lowering the binoculars as the jet sped along in the icy troposphere.

  She smiled at me and leaned her head against my shoulder. For an instant, out of the corner of my eye, I saw Neil take in the sight of our connection. He seemed to consider it with a sense of loss and envy. I understood. I was here, on our journey, with someone. More than someone. The woman I’d come to know and love. My friend had left that behind, and more, on a mission of salvation. If we failed, he would die without Grace. Without Krista.

  I would leave this world with Elaine.

  But those were melancholy musings. Too defeatist. We were still moving forward. Still—

  The flash caught my eye beyond Neil. In the distance where a low, bare hill crested. Bright and instantaneous. A reflection. Off something.

  “Neil,” I said. “Southeast hill. I saw something.”

  He turned, bringing his Benelli up. Elaine stepped away from me, spreading out, making our little group a less uniform target.

  “What was it?”

  “A flash,” I told Neil. “A reflection. Something like that.”

  I brought the binoculars up and scanned the spot. It was easily a mile distant, just a squat bump of scoured earth where wild grasses had once bloomed green in spring and turned tawny brown in high summer.

  “Do you see anything?” Elaine asked.

  I looked. I dialed in the focus. But all I saw was nothing. Nothing where something had to have been.

  “No,” I said.

  It could have been many things. Sunlight glinting off a fencepost. Off the shattered remnants of a discarded bottle.

  Or it could have been reflected off binoculars like the ones I was holding. Or the scope of a rifle.

  I lowered the binoculars and surveyed the empty distance, feeling, knowing that it was not that at all.

  “Someone’s out there,” I said.

  “Let’s keep moving,” Neil said, taking the map from his pocket and aligning it with our direction of travel.

  There was no need to discuss it further. We were in the open, a place none of us now wanted to be.

  “There’s some sort of forested area ahead,” Neil told us, tracing a finger along the map’s contour lines. “In a shallow valley with a stream running through it. It’s maybe five miles away over land.”

  It was likely green on the folded square of paper my friend held, representing how forests used to appear. Lush growth hugging a source of flowing water. It would not be that now. But it would be better than the terrain that now surrounded us.

  “Let’s head there,” I said.

  Neil nodded and folded the map, tucking it away as he began walking, leading us off the narrow strip of asphalt and across the vast openness. I scanned the horizon to the south continually as we moved. I saw no more flashes. No movement. Nothing at all.

  But I felt, I knew, that we were not alone.

  Thirteen

  We were already into the woods when we saw the footprints.

  Boot prints, actually. Larger than mine. They wove between the trunks of dead trees to my right, moving the same direction as we were. Fresh. As if pressed into the dusty earth just ahead of our arrival.

  “They’re trailing us,” Neil suggested.

  I thought on that. It was possible. Even likely. So was the possibility that spun from that.

  “And getting ahead of us,” I said, looking up from the prints and scanning the grey woods ahead.

  “Trying to cut us off,” Elaine added.

  The glint of light I’d seen had been real. Someone had been watching us cross the open country. Someone who might have approached us. Who might have announced their presence in greeting.

  But that hadn’t happened. This had. The tracks of a lone stalker.

  “So we have company,” Neil said.

  “They had cover here,” Elaine pointed out. “Why not just shoot us when we were out there? In the open?”

&
nbsp; “Maybe that’s not their plan,” I said. “They could just be wary. Watching us to see if we’re a threat.”

  I thought back to Del. Before we’d met and become friends, close friends, I’d sensed his presence in the woods around my refuge. Not until he’d decided that I wasn’t a threat did he reach out to me. That had come after a lengthy period of watching my movements. Observing my actions. Judging my character.

  “That’s one helluva benefit of the doubt you’re giving a complete stranger,” Elaine said.

  She was right. With the few who were left on the dying earth, the survivors were either very lucky, prepared, or ruthless. Only one of those was a true predator. One who hunted. Who took their prey.

  I wasn’t going to let us be taken.

  I glanced behind, toward the fading daylight. Darkness would be upon us soon. Night that could either shelter us, or shield the one who’d taken an interest in us.

  “Any thoughts on spending the night here,” I said, “or out in the open somewhere?”

  “In the open all we’d have for cover is the dark,” Neil said. “At least in here there’s something to get behind.”

  I looked to Elaine, waiting for her to weigh in. She reached out to one of the trees next to her and thumped it with the side of her gloved fist, a still solid thunk sounding.

  “Yeah,” she said. “Here. In the woods.”

  That was two voting for the expanse of dead pines. I was leaning that way. The only thing that made me hesitate was Del. His mantra.

  Distance is your friend...

  It could be. To any who would use it. Our pursuer might just as easily have taken us while we were exposed. What worried me about the fact that they didn’t was simple—maybe they wanted us here. In the woods.

  Still, some protection, some obstacles between us and whoever was out there was preferable to none.

  “We’ll split watches,” I said.

  It was decided. We drank our ration of water and set up a small camp as the light around us dimmed. Quiet was the order. Both so no one might hear us, and so we might hear anyone drawing near.