by Noah Mann
“You should,” Neil said. “This is the finest joint in town right now.”
He brought both pans to the table and held them out, allowing Elaine and me to scoop out servings of chili and beans. Neil then filled his own bowl and set the pans aside, taking the two cans he’d emptied and setting them on the table before us.
“Just so you can see I use only the freshest ingredients,” he said.
Elaine and I chuckled. We might have laughed outright if we hadn’t begun shoveling food into our mouths. It was standard chili, and unremarkable beans, but I’d never, ever tasted anything so wonderful, so perfect. At that moment it was the best meal of my life, bar none.
“Good?” Neil asked, his question directed very specifically at Elaine.
She paused for a moment, spoon settled into her bowl. Looking to Neil she nodded. The moment between them was not about the food. It was about forgiveness. About letting go of things that had transpired.
“Perfect except for one thing,” Elaine said. “I noticed before you served us but...”
Neil and I both looked to her now as she lifted one of the cans the meal had come from and rotated it so the underside of the empty metal container was visible to us, lot number and date stamp prominent.
“It expired last month,” she said.
Now we did laugh. Fully. Our mouths bulging with food that threatened to explode as the absurd hilarity of the moment struck.
“Shut up and eat,” I managed to say past the chili.
Elaine smiled and put the can down. We ate. Then we ate more. And then we slept. It was a good day. A good night. The best we’d had since setting out on our quest.
We had no way of knowing it would be the last night of joy we’d know for a very long time.
Part Three
Hell
Seventeen
By the crow it was a hundred and fifty miles we’d travelled from Baggs. But we weren’t birds. We didn’t sail on the wind, skimming valleys and peaks with ease. We walked. Closer to two hundred miles was the distance we’d covered in the two weeks since our joyous feast in that dead Wyoming town. Two weeks with the meager supplies we’d found lasting half of that, through rations that barely kept us moving. But we’d made it.
Cheyenne was within sight.
From miles away we could just make out the city at night. Structures low and grey against the darkened landscape. That was with the naked eye.
Through binoculars we saw the pinpoint flicker of fires. Grouped near the center of the once thriving prairie metropolis. There was life in the city. What kind, and how much, was impossible to know from our vantage.
“You think this place might be in the city itself?” Neil asked.
I wasn’t sure. The idea of a greenhouse setup inside the city limits wasn’t beyond the realm of possibility, but some logic informed by what we all had experienced over the past year and a half pointed to a potential lone survivor wanting to position himself away from places where others might congregate.
“My guess is no,” I said.
Elaine brought the binoculars to her eyes and surveyed the dim landscape before us.
“This is a lot of territory to search,” she observed.
She was more than right. We sat on a rise, looking out over the terrain stepping gently down toward Cheyenne. Between us and the city lay an expanse of onetime farms and ranches. To the north, as well. And the south. And the east. Thousands of places where the mystery man Martin had shown me on video could have set up his spot to grow the tomato plant. Houses. Outbuildings. Barns.
Thousands, I thought. A number inversely related to the time we had to find what we’d come looking for.
“It’s not going to look any less daunting in daylight,” Neil said.
Elaine lowered the binoculars and handed them to me. I put them on my lap and took in the scope of the way ahead without the aid of optics.
“That’s a big haystack out there,” I said.
“And we hope it’s the right one,” Neil said.
Both Elaine and I looked to him, surprised at the sudden flourish of doubt.
“We’re here because a kid said this would be the place,” my friend reminded us. “A kid.”
Micah, while he was alive, had made many pronouncements. I hadn’t known one to be wrong. We all, though, had seen what a lack of specificity from information he’d generated could lead to.
“You thinking about what killed Burke?” I asked.
“I’m thinking about a lot of things,” Neil replied. “Mostly, though, I’m thinking that I don’t want to screw things up now that we’ve come this far. So if his information was even a little bit off, we need to be prepared.”
“Off how?” Elaine asked.
Neil thought for a moment, then shook his head.
“I don’t know. And that’s what worries me. Every unknown we’ve come up against so far has tried to kill us. And it’s one for four in the success column.”
He had a point. A big, ominous point. We were, in essence, treading a minefield, no different than a soldier in battle. Any step could be our last.
“If we go traipsing all over out there,” Neil said, “we could step in it. Big time.”
“I’m open to suggestions,” I said.
Anything that could focus our search beyond a scattershot wandering of every acre before our eyes was welcome. In fact, it was a necessity. We simply couldn’t walk every lane and search every structure. Time wouldn’t allow it. Our bodies would never survive such an effort, certain to take weeks, if not months.
“What do we know about the video you saw?” Neil asked.
It was a familiar beginning. A history teacher we’d both had in high school, Mrs. Hellenson, had, without fail, begun nearly every lecture with those words—what do we know about... Through questioning she’d prodded us to learn, to explore, to take chances and fail, so that we might ultimately find success. Here, my friend was setting us on track to, hopefully, do just that.
“He looked older,” Elaine said, recalling what she’d seen on the video that she and I had watched multiple times prior to leaving.
“You sure that wasn’t just thinning?” I pressed her.
She shook her head.
“Those skin spots, the wrinkles, they were from age.”
Neil took in the exchange. Neither he nor Burke had looked at the video of the mystery gardener tending the singular tomato plant. Neil’s excuse was his late decision to join us. Burke’s reason was more in line with his personality—he simply wanted to get on with it.
For a moment I found myself wondering what our journey to this point would have been like had Burke Stovich had not been killed. Would we have come farther, faster? Or would some conflict have arisen to slow us more than events had?
Another mystery, I told myself. Another ‘what if’ to never be known.
“So we’ve got an old guy who we’re assuming is outside the city somewhere,” Neil said, summing up our beliefs at the moment. “He had to have power, right? From what you described there had to be some heat and light in the place for cold weather.”
“And water,” I said.
“Solar panels, windmill,” Elaine said.
“Water tank,” Neil said. “Stream or pond.”
Stream or pond. A body of water. A skim of glassy liquid that did one thing everywhere you found it.
Reflected light.
“Let me see the binoculars,” I said, and Elaine handed them back.
“What is it?” she asked.
“Water,” I said, scanning the distance, looking for the telltale glint of moonlight dancing on water. “I’m betting it’s not a tank. Why count on manmade storage when nature provides what you need?”
Neil gave me a gentle, atta boy slap on the back and opened the map we’d brought of Cheyenne and the land surrounding it.
“Tell me what you see and I’ll mark it,” he said.
For the next hour that was precisely what I did, estimating locatio
ns and distances of every source of water I could see. Even ones I was uncertain of were noted. Shortly after midnight we had what was akin to a treasure map, with multiple X’s marking dozens and dozens of spots where we might find the incalculably valuable thing we’d come in search of.
Then we rested, making camp behind a hill, foregoing a fire. There was no need for one. Not for warmth, as the season was exceedingly temperate. And not for food, for there was none to cook. None to consume cold. The hope for either of the latter lay out there, in the dark, unfamiliar landscape.
At dawn, we would make our way into this unknown.
Eighteen
North of Cheyenne, as the blue morning spread higher and higher from the eastern horizon, we reached our first X on the map, a pond behind a farmhouse, the structure looking like a dustbowl relic. But for the small satellite dish dangling from its mount near the peak of the roof it might have been. The truth was more recent, storms and abandonment, forced by the blight, had left the small, classic building to slowly succumb.
“Do we even need to bother?” Elaine wondered aloud.
“I’ll check the house,” Neil said.
My friend shuffled forward in the cool morning air.
“You want to have a look in the barn?” I suggested to Elaine.
She acquiesced and gave me a nod and went straight for the more sturdy building, metal walls and intact roof. One of its wide doors was open. Beyond, the interior was as dark as the receding night. Elaine disappeared inside.
Alone, watching the prairie that surrounded the farm, I waited for my friends, little hope that this first stop on our search would yield results. There was water, but I saw no method to move it. No pipe or pumping mechanism. Also lacking was some source of power to keep alive the plant that had been shown on the broadcast. Power to operate pumps, ventilation, heating, even light for days when the sun was low in the southern sky.
Our time here was going to be a bust.
But we had to look. Everywhere. Because my estimations and beliefs about what was needed could be wrong. Just as Jack Miner had camouflaged an entire trailer truck of beef to supply himself and his family, the man who’d somehow brought life where only death existed could have been equally clever. Blending in, in the new world, keeping one’s head low as much as possible, was one path to longevity. To not being prey for a predator.
So I waited. I let my friends be thorough in the interior search. In the morning silence, devoid of crowing roosters or singing starlings, I stood, and I waited, the day just born wondrously calm. And still.
Except...it wasn’t. I heard something.
Or I thought I did.
Flat as the landscape was, sections of it still rolled, rising and falling, hills no more than head high serving to obscure any view, twist any breeze, and, presumably, mask any sound. Yet I was certain that I had heard something. And more than just an odd burst of noise. This was familiar. Known, but unlikely bordering on impossible considering the state of the world.
Crazy or not, I would swear that I’d heard a motor out there, sputtering and revving for a few seconds, whining fast just like a motorcycle engine.
I walked a few dozen yards from the farmhouse and stood atop a low rise that doubled my height. The brightening fields in front of me had once moved with amber waves of grain. Now they lay barren, dust atop dirt. Empty.
And silent.
There was no sound of any motorcycle. No growl of an engine at all. Just an unsettling stillness between where I stood and Cheyenne, the tops of its buildings just visible to the southwest. We’d noted the signs of life there. Fires at night. But would any mechanical vehicle still be operational now, be it family sedan or weekend toy to bound across dunes like some motocross hero?
There was nothing there now. Not a damn thing. But there might have been.
“Eric.”
I turned. Elaine and Neil stood just below me at the base of the low rise.
“You see something?” Neil asked.
I looked back out to the empty fields.
“No,” I said. “But I heard something.”
My friends joined me atop the rise, Neil struggling with each ascending step.
“What?” Elaine asked.
“A motorcycle,” I told them.
We stood together, quiet, not moving, and listened. They heard nothing, as did I.
“What do you want to do?” Neil asked me.
“Stick to the plan,” I said. “But stay sharp.”
It seemed sad that life as it was had come to this, avoiding human contact. But that was reality, one each of us had come to understand in our own way. We trusted each other out here. To extend that acceptance to any other was beyond risky. Dangerous more closely described any such interaction we might face. Deadly, if our worst fears were realized.
We couldn’t chance that. We had to keep on task, and keep our heads down at the same time.
Nineteen
We worked our way east, keeping north of Cheyenne as the sun rose and arced into the blue sky, painting all above with harsh yellow and blinding white. By nightfall we had checked two dozen bodies of water for any connection to what we were searching for. Exhausted, we settled into a ranch house with three graves just outside the back door and the remains of a man on the ground next to them.
He was mostly bones, skin peeled away by the extremes of weather, rain to soak, snow to freeze, wind to tear and shred. Names had been carved into wooden crosses that marked each resting place, the symbols leaning severely, and one lay snapped atop the low mound that concealed the body beneath. They were wife, and two sons, according to the epitaphs, and it was reasonable to assume that the man who’d planted them in the ground was husband and father. He’d watched each succumb to the ravages of the blight, or disease, or things more horrible to consider. Then, in his final moments, when he knew that death was there to take him, he’d simply laid down with his loved ones and slipped away.
Elaine had insisted upon fixing the toppled cross and securing the others before we slept. While she completed those tasks, I scraped a shallow grave and eased the father’s remains into the hole, covering him before fashioning a marker for his place of final rest.
While we worked, Neil mounted the steps and disappeared inside. When Elaine and I finished we entered and found our friend already collapsed on a dusty bed in a back room, pack on the floor, Benelli next to him. We retreated quietly and found a space in the front room to shed our gear and stow our weapons.
I let my body almost fall into the cushions of the couch and expected Elaine to sit next to me. She didn’t. Instead she walked to the front window, a half pane of glass still in its frame. Beyond her the nearly black fields stretched west toward a fading red line on the horizon.
“What do you think’s wrong with Neil?” she asked, not looking to me. “Besides what’s wrong with all of us.”
“Some virus, maybe. He’ll beat it down.”
“He rallies when he gets some food,” she said. “Then he fades.”
“He’ll be okay,” I assured her. “We all will.”
She nodded and said no more about my friend, just stared out at the night as it swallowed the world whole.
“What do you miss?” she asked. “About the way it was.”
I knew what she was curious about. We’d all become so dialed into this existence, scraping by, scavenging, living in fear of others and unknowns, that the ways of the old world seemed beyond alien. How I’d been then as a person was not as I was now. I was different, and I suspected that Elaine was taking the opportunity of this quiet moment to probe a bit. To peel back the coarse layers built upon my persona by necessity.
“I miss driving,” I said.
She looked back and flashed a smile.
“You’re a man all right.”
“Being behind the wheel of my truck, heading out for a run to the store, or up to my place near Whitefish,” I said, pausing, smiling myself now. “That was good.”
El
aine looked back out the window to the night.
“I miss wine,” she said.
“You’re a woman all right,” I half parroted. “But I could go for a nice cab right now.”
“Yeah,” she said, the agreement almost a whisper. “Together we make a drunk driver.”
I rose and walked to the window and stood close behind her, letting my hands ease around her waist. She leaned back into me and I kissed the side of her face.
“I just miss...normal,” she said.
Behind us, Neil began to cough in his sleep. Outside, the stillness of the dead, dark world loomed.
“We’ll make our own normal,” I told her.
It was a statement of hope, but, in all honesty, I couldn’t begin to imagine what we could create that would even begin to approach that state of contentment.
Twenty
We were a mile from the wide stream when I glassed the way ahead and saw the solar panels, midday sun glinting off their dusty black surface.
“Take a look at this,” I said, handing the binoculars to Elaine.
She surveyed the location, a onetime ranch of some sort, or farm, maybe, that sat ten miles east of Cheyenne on a flat plain laced with seasonal and permanent streams. It was the third spot we’d checked since waking and departing our billet for the night.
“You see the panels?” I asked.
“And a windmill,” she said.
I’d noted that, too, the long blades hanging slack in the calm air. It rose from the earth on a solid tower, solar panels mounted to risers just beyond it, both maybe seventy feet from a peculiar arrangement of structures.
“There’s a grain silo right next to some buildings,” she said. “One of them is pretty big. A barn, maybe.”
I took the binoculars back and looked again.
“That silo is right against the big building,” I said. “Maybe even attached.”
I lowered the binoculars.
“I’ve never seen a setup like that,” I said.
“Neither have I,” Elaine agreed.
We knelt next to each other, one knee each on the hard ground. From that low position I looked behind. My friend sat there, a dozen feet behind, collapsed upright.