“Where are we?” It was hard to choke the words out.
“The panhandle of Mississippi, almost to Louisiana. We stayed an extra day in Pensacola to get you travel-ready.”
I nodded. I tried to picture the location on the map in my head, but the whole Mississippi/Alabama/Louisiana area blurred into a single lump in my brain. Was it Alabama, then Mississippi, or the other way around?
“You scared me.” Ren started to laugh, but it came out as a half-sob. She spent several minutes composing herself. I could hear her sniffing. She used a corner of my sheets to wipe her eyes. I felt her fingertips touch my right shoulder. They were warm and soft, but toughened by a life of surviving. “I mean, I didn’t think you were going to die. You would have if I hadn’t found you, but once I found you I knew I could save you. I just…couldn’t stop thinking about what I would do if you died.”
“You’d adapt. You’d make do.”
Ren’s voice was just above a whisper. “No. You do not get to die on me. Not now. Maybe in sixty or seventy years, we can discuss it, but not now. I need you too much.” Her voice cracked with emotion. She sniffed again. “Please swear to me you won’t try fighting a tiger again.”
I felt a corner of my mouth curl into a smile. “No promises.”
She punched my shoulder gently. “Jerk.” Even the light jostling hurt, but I didn’t complain. Her hand stayed on my shoulder, gripping it lightly.
I shifted my body a bit and felt fire burning down my back and on my left side. “How bad is it?”
“Bad enough,” she said. “Mostly flesh wounds. A little bit of muscle tearing. The tiger got you good, sank its claws deep into your back muscles, but it didn’t hit anything vital. You’re going to be sore for a long time. Going to take a long time to heal. Want some painkillers?”
“Hell, yes.” I remembered Doug and his painkillers. Hit me again, dealer. I only have a five and a three showing.
Ren got up from the bunk and came back with another bottle of pills. “Just take one. It’ll knock you out for a while.”
I swallowed the pill. It could not start working fast enough. I tried to tighten the muscles in my back, but the flash of pain made me yelp. I gritted my teeth and turned to look at Renata’s face. Her cheeks were tear-streaked. I reached up and ran my thumb over one of her cheeks. She grabbed my wrist and held my hand on her face.
“Twist, I’m sorry--”
I cut her off. “No, I am sorry. This is my fault. I was angry and stupid, and I should not have gone off alone.”
“No, I am sorry. I was stupid. I was confused. This is on me.”
I started to protest, but she pressed a finger to my lips. “No talking, now. Your job is to just rest. Get better. I can handle things for a little while. Okay?” She leaned down and pressed her lips to my cheek. I inhaled. She smelled like violets and summer grasses. Was she Bigfoot? It felt good to have her face that close to my face. I did not want it to end.
It was then I noticed Fester. He was curled up in what I called the snail pose. He was a lump with his head up and his back curled like a snail’s shell, but his paws completely tucked under him. He was staring at me with concerned eyes.
“He never left this bed, except to eat and use his box.” Ren ran a finger over the cat’s head. He closed his eyes and purred loudly. “Wouldn’t even come sit by the fire with me at night.”
At that moment, I felt a swell of love for that stupid, semi-traitorous cat. I should have known he would not have forsaken me. I laid my head back on the bed. “Hot in here.”
Ren laughed. “Hot everywhere. It’s Mississippi.” She sat on the bed next to me. She reached out a hand. I felt her fingers lightly caressing the back of my neck. It was soothing. The endorphins her touch gave me helped bury a lot of the pain. Or was it the pills? Maybe both. I let my eyes close. That’s the last thing I remember that day.
If it was the last thing I ever remembered, I would have been okay with it. I felt loved. Cared for. I felt hopeful. I felt like the future was broad and expansive, an unwritten book. I felt whole again, even if it was a new shape for feeling whole, it was still a feeling of being whole for the first time in more than a year.
Best of all, I did not feel alone.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The End of the Road
It took almost a week to cross Louisiana. With only Ren able to do all the work, we spent a lot less time on the road. She had to clean my wounds, change my bandages, and give me drugs to fight off infection and pain. She had to pump all the gas by herself. She was not used to it. She fatigued a lot faster than I did. It took her longer. The gas was also going south (no pun intended) in quality. The world’s remaining supply of gasoline was quickly turning gelatinous. The time of the internal combustion engine was coming to an end. The future was looking painfully rustic and pioneer-like. Maybe that was a good thing?
We did swing through Madisonville because I insisted. Ren helped me struggle into the library where I had intended to live when I first set out from Wisconsin a lifetime ago. There on the wall in the entry, I wrote a message to anyone who might have seen my message back in Sun Prairie and traveled to Louisiana looking for me:
Moved to Lake Houston, Texas.
Come find us. We are surviving.
We are still alive.
—Twist and Renata
I was mostly bedridden for four more days. In that time, Ren spent a lot of time keeping the wounds on my back moist beneath the bandages so the scabs wouldn’t form too quickly. There were no stitches because the tears were too ragged. There were no clean edges to join. I would have scabs for a while, and eventually the wounds would turn into ragged scars. The muscle damage hurt more than the skin damage. The skin damage burned a bit, and it itched where it was healing, but the small tears in the muscle hurt. I don’t know of a better way to explain it other than that. A deep-set ache made every motion, every breath a chore.
Ren pulled the catheter, since I was awake and able to deal with that business on my own, with a bit of assistance. Ever had a catheter pulled out of your junk? It’s not a great feeling. It burns and it feels like your bladder is being yanked out through your urethra. All in all, given a choice between yanking a catheter or having chocolate cake, I’m just saying--always take the cake. Once the catheter was out, and I stopped screaming, I started laughing.
“What’s so funny?” Ren demanded.
“A couple of days ago, you and I were embarrassed because I saw your boobs.”
“Yeah?”
“And you just stabbed a tube into my junk and then ripped it out. You’ve cleaned bedpans for me. If you don’t find that hilarious, check your pulse, lady.”
Ren tried to be angry at me for a moment, but she couldn’t. A half-smile curled on her mouth, and she punched my shoulder. “Jerk.”
At the end of the fourth day, I was feeling better. I numbed up with a couple of hydrocodone pills, and I actually sat up on my own. Every move was painful, but I was able to grit my teeth and get through it. That was the first step. It was important. After that, it would be a long, slow expansion toward getting back to normal, but I would recover. Nothing would be easy in the next few months, but I would recover. I would eventually be fine. I would have some bad-ass scars, to be sure—but I would be fine.
That whole time I was bedridden, I didn’t think about surviving. I only thought about living. That was enough. I just worried about continuing to live, to breathe, to take in air and let it back out. Simple. Easy. Just exist, and keep existing.
I replayed the confrontation with the tiger over and over in my head. I remembered the base level, lizard-brain panic. I remembered scrambling for the gun and shooting. I remembered the agonizing crawl for the flashlight. There was no conscious thought in that time, only panic. Only an animalistic desire for self-preservation, a sheer, unfettered will to live. I had zero desire to die during that whole exchange. I had been prepared to accept it, but I did not want it. It would have been really simple to
just let death win, too. All I would have had to do was just stop fighting. I had been hurt. I didn’t want to fight. I had wanted to just lie there, but I fought. I could have just let shock take over my body, and I could have just lay there and bled, but I didn’t. I fought. This made me think about the stormy early June night in Wisconsin where I’d thought about taking my own life. I hadn’t. My body had not wanted me to die. No matter what I felt about the existential dread that plagued me, no matter how meaningless life felt, no matter how many pieces of logic I could stack up to justify my own death in the coming wasteland, at heart, at a base level where thought and logic did not apply, I desired to live.
Over the days it took us to cross Louisiana, all I did was concentrate on that fact. I wanted to live. I wanted to be alive. I wanted to experience everything this life could offer, this strange post-societal existence in which I was trapped. It was a brave new world, but not in the Aldous Huxley sense. It was hopeful. There was unlimited potential hampered only by my will and sense of adventure.
I wanted to laugh. To love. To risk. To be safe and sheltered, but to face the wild unknown. I wanted to know what tomorrow might reveal. I wanted to know what next month, next year, and the next decade might present to me. It might be rough, but as long as I wasn’t tiger food, I could face it. I would face it. I could take the chunk of my brain that made me dwell on sad things and the meaninglessness of existence, and try to retrain it to be positive, to think of the future, and make myself a life. What was done was done, and nothing I could do could change it. There was only the present and the future. There was only now, and what came next—whatever that might be.
And I looked forward to it.
We crossed the Louisiana/Texas border in the late afternoon. We stopped at a Flying J Travel Center just outside of Orange, Texas. Ren was still driving, as I was still crunching painkillers to function. She made up camp while I stood next to the van and swung my left leg back and forth, trying to rebuild some of the damaged muscles in my buttock. Every kick hurt, but I just told myself that pain was only a symptom of being alive. Alive was good. Alive was positive. There was potential in Alive. I would handle the pain.
Ren built up the fire. We looted the Travel Center together, me limping heavily and leaning on a cane. We found a backroom that was still stacked with bottles of water. It was the post-viral apocalypse equivalent to finding a cache of money hidden in a well. Ren hauled the water to the RV one case at a time while I sat and felt worthless because I couldn’t even lift a case of water at that moment. Ren rooted through a couple of nearby homes and rooted out a massive aluminum pot, one of those twelve-gallon beasts that an Italian restaurant would use to make the day’s marinara. We filled that thing with water, let that water boil, and then used the hot water to take actual showers using a camp shower bag. It was a rare treat. The soap and water stung my wounds, but it was a good kind of sting.
Ren scrubbed my wounds with scalding water and opened them afresh (which hurt like blue blazes), but they bled bright red blood. Healthy blood. And they only bled--no pus, nothing gross. The infection was gone. That was a good sign. She repacked the wounds with clean, fresh bandages and pronounced my recovery on track.
We sat together by the fire that night and listened to the crickets and the cicadas. There were fewer of them now. Fall was coming. It had to be sometime in mid-September. Maybe even late September. In Wisconsin, I could tell the seasons by the trees and the fact that the mornings would get colder. In the South, all the mornings were warm, as warm like late summer days in Wisconsin. All the leaves were still green. I couldn’t tell anything about the time of year anymore. Being in the South was going to throw off my ability to keep track of the passing of time. Maybe that’s a good thing.
The wedge that had been driven between us that day at the beach was still there. It didn’t feel quite as big, but it was still there. At least, it still felt like it was there to me. I laughed. I tried to joke. Ren talked some. There were some prolonged pauses in the conversation. There was still a strange distance between us. We were circling each other like magnets of the same polarity, spinning in circles near each other, but never touching—we were just keeping a safe, respectful distance between us, but I felt like the distance was shrinking. I think we both had confusing emotions that we needed to learn to control.
Ren sat in a chair by the fire and flexed her toes in the heat. She chewed on her lower lip for a while. “We’ll get to Houston tomorrow. There is going to be someone alive there, you know. At least one person, maybe more.” Ren shrugged. “I don’t know if we’ll find them. Houston is big. Not New York-big, but still pretty big.”
“In some ways, it’s bigger. Houston is more like Madison or Milwaukee than New York. New York is condensed. It builds upwards. Madison and Houston build outward. They sprawl. Houston is like that. It covers a lot of ground.”
Ren stopped chewing her lip. She looked over to me. “I hope they’ll be friendly. And not insane.”
“Me, too. I wonder if other people are traveling around the country like we did. I wonder if they’re looking for us.”
“There are.” Ren’s tone wasn’t hopeful; it was definitive. She was dead certain on that fact. “They might never find us, but there are people out there. They are looking.”
You don’t really appreciate how big this country is until you’re trying to find needles in the haystack. America is massive. Sure, if you have a good car and a supply of No-Doz, you could drive across it in four or five days. I think someone once did a speed drive from Los Angeles to New York in something like thirty-two hours. When you think about America like that, it doesn’t seem all that big. It is big, though. It is grand and broad and majestic. There are hundreds of million miles of roads, hundreds of millions of homes. We were but specks of unimportant dust in the massive landscape, a pair of sand grains blowing across a vast, expansive prairie. I told Ren, “We’ll build a big fire after we find a place to live. We’ll burn it black so that clouds rise up. If people are within thirty miles, they’ll see the smoke. They can come to us.”
Ren’s voice dropped to a low, serious tone. A grim, nervous expression settled on her face. “Can we really do this? Can we really be like Ma and Pa Ingalls in the Kansas Territory and just be self-sufficient? Can we make a life out of this place?”
I didn’t know the answer to that. “We can try. I don’t think we have much of a choice, otherwise. We can try, though. If we try hard enough, we will find a way to make it work. We will not only make a life, we’ll make a good life. It won’t be an easy life, but it will be a good life, I promise you that.”
Ren stretched out a hand and rested it on mine. Her hand was warm and soft. At that moment, when she touched me, I felt sparks run up my arm and across my back. The sparks danced in my head. Ren leaned closer to me. “Thank you.”
I turned to look at her. “For what?”
“For bringing me with you.” She smiled. Her face was warm and sincere. At that moment, something unspoken passed between us. The wedge between us melted away, never to return.
I smiled back to her. For the first time in my life, the smile felt natural and unforced. I hope it looked like a real person’s smile. “Thank you.”
We lapsed into silence again. I felt like saying something more, but I didn’t want to break the mood. Maybe we’d said enough. I could not ignore the fact that Ren’s hand was resting on the back of mine, though. I turned my hand over so that she was no longer resting her hand on mine. We held hands. Our fingers interlaced. Ren squeezed my hand tightly. She made no attempt to pull it away. I didn’t look over at her, but I knew what that squeeze meant. It said more than words ever could.
Lake Houston spread out before us, a long, shimmering expanse of water in the middle of the Texas prairie. We stood on the shore and watched a badling of ducks circling overhead and descending for a watery landing, their wings splashing water before transitioning into an easy, graceful float. We saw a herd of deer in a field nearb
y. They looked strong and healthy. They were thriving in the post-human world. I thought about the hunting rifle I had stored in the RV. Fresh meat would require killing. I was not a fan of the thought of having to take an animal’s life, but I would cross that bridge when I came to it. In the drive through the Texas countryside, we had seen herds of cattle, mobs of horses, and loads of formerly domestic pigs gone feral in roving packs. The countryside was practically crawling with life. There was food on the hoof aplenty. And, since we were in Texas, I knew there wouldn’t be any shortage of ammunition any time soon.
There were dozens of nice homes around the edge of the lake. Any one of them might be our new house. We had an outdoor brick oven kit lying on the mattress in the back bunk. We would build an outdoor fire pit and wood-fired oven. If we found a house with a hearth and fireplace, even better. Some of the homes had barns. We would need one of those, eventually. I wanted to capture a few horses and cows. We would require them in the coming years. I knew nothing about horse training, but that was why there were libraries. I would find books and teach myself. I would learn by doing, by trial-and-error. There were large, open parcels of land in the area, and many of the homes had expansive lawns. Lawns were a needless luxury now. Ren and I would turn them into large, sprawling gardens and vast orchards. We would capture chickens and raise them for eggs. If we could catch rabbits and pigs, we could farm them, too. We would reclaim the overgrown land. We would wrestle weeds from the ground, till the soil, and plant gardens. We would return our little patch of the world to an agrarian paradise. We would build our life.
“It’s beautiful here,” said Ren. She turned her face to the sun and inhaled the warm prairie air. “I mean, it’s not Brooklyn, but I think I can be happy here.”
“Happy is a state of mind,” I told her. “You can be happy anywhere as long as you set your mind to it and decide to be happy.”
Ren smiled at me. Her smile thrilled me. She said, “We can be happy here.” She leaned up on her tiptoes and kissed my cheek. I turned my face, and we found each other’s lips. I put my hand on the back of her head and the kiss extended from a peck to something much longer and sweeter. Her hands ran gently over my shoulders. I cradled the small of her back. Time stopped for several seconds, a blissful and welcome break from reality.
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