In practice, he got blisters. He got tired. Sometimes he had to spend hours combing hills for a stream and then precious minutes more gathering kindling to boil his water. Four miles per hour was doable on a flat road, but when the asphalt sloped up or he had to hike through woods and fields to avoid the towns, hampered by his swollen heels and toes, he found himself reduced to half that pace. Counting by highway mileposts, he managed ten to twenty miles a day.
Along the road, flies clouded bodies lying gape-mouthed in cars. He drank when he could find it, which was often. Dogs barked behind dark windows. Their owners made no appearance. Except, perhaps, when the dogs licked their blood-dirty muzzles.
His mind was often numb. When it wasn't, he experienced his hurt from a remove, as if he were isolated outside the fence of a park while inside a man struck a goat with a cane until it bleated and bled. And sometimes it all hit him with a shock as icy and total as when he'd jumped into the Upper Bay. Then he lost track of his own steps, mumbling to himself, ears ringing in the silence, a black stricture tightening around his neck, fingers tingling with the cold of it all. And if his thoughts were trite—indifference was universal; everyone would die some day; no one would get what they want—that was just a reflection of the world's own triteness, an existence where dogs ate their dead owners only to starve in the locked house that once kept them safe.
He walked on.
A cough laid him up in a white house in an Ohio suburb. He waited for flecks of blood to show up in his phlegm or to seep from the corners of his eyes, but after three days he felt well enough to keep moving. In a quiet parking lot, hundreds of VW Bugs had been arranged in a snaking conga line. The black, quartzlike Sears Tower thrust from the skyline miles beyond. On the plains, he saw men in chains dragging plows and hacking hoes into the soil while two men with guns watched from chairs at the end of the field. Walt ducked into a ditch on the far side of the road and crawled forward until his jeans clung to the rubbed-raw skin of his knees. An hour later, he almost went back for them, but it was getting late and he was tired.
When he passed in and out of the cities, he looted houses for canned food and dry goods; many had already been broken into, windows shattered over living rooms, kitchens littered with spilled coffee beans and moldering bread, but enough had gone untouched to keep him alive, if bored, on a diet of all the unwanted things families donated to canned food drives: beans, carrot soup, cream of mushroom. Outside the cities, he walked across dusty farms, plucking carrots from the dirt and tomatoes and soybeans from the vine. He'd picked up some ammo back in the green hills of eastern Pennsylvania—most houses he'd broken into there had a gun collection somewhere—and sometimes when he was off in the woods and fields he shot at squirrels and rabbits. Once in a while he even hit them. He ate these roasted on sticks over fires lit with lighters, inured to the greasiness of the meat and the occasional tendon or small bone missed by his clumsy butchery.
His feet grew calluses so thick he couldn't feel it when he poked them with a knife. He slept in the grass and listened to the wind. It couldn't tell him where it had been, but it seemed to carry other secrets, a wistful sadness of the constant traveler that sometimes exploded into the righteous gales of the wronged. Birds twittered, too, and screamed at each other or themselves to hear anything besides the rustling wind. He heard cars no more than once a day; once, a single-engine plane buzzed like a fly beyond a window; another time, the chug of a lawnmower blatted from somewhere in a wooded village.
During a muggy and miserably rainy summer day in Missouri, he left the road, shoes squelching, and climbed a low rise to change his socks; they wore harder when they were wet and he was down to three pairs. Rain lashed the forest canopy, thumping his hat with thick drops. He stripped off his soaked socks, rubbed his feet, drank some water.
Down the way, the road bent around the hill. Some two hundred yards along, four cars had been parked lengthwise across the lanes.
He put on clean socks and his shoes and picked up his pistol and the rifle. He left his bags beside a broad-leafed maple and crept downhill, keeping a screen of trees between himself and the road. He knelt beside a trunk and fitted his eye to the scope of the rifle. The cars were silent, empty. Beyond them, a man climbed up the road's shoulder, rifle in hand, and stared down the way Walt had come from.
Walt backed away and crept a couple hundred yards through the woods along the road, now grateful for the rain that pattered the leaves and obscured their crackles. The road wound around the hill, hiding him from the man with the gun; he cut across and circled back, peering between the dripping branches. On the slope above the cars, smoke stagnated in the soupy air. Two men sat with their backs to a tree, cigarettes in hand, rifles propped beside them.
Walt didn't need a pile of skulls to know what they were. He lined his crosshairs on a forehead, waited for his breathing to slow, and squeezed the trigger. The scope jolted as the stock shoved into his shoulder. The man's head snapped into the tree and rebounded forward. He slumped, drooping between his sprawled legs. His partner grabbed his rifle and bounced to his feet, sweeping the trees. Walt's shot took him through the right lung. As he lay gasping in the damp brown leaves, Walt aimed, waited, and shot him through the head.
Discarded wallets littered the ground beneath the tree. The men wore gold rings on most of their fingers, heavy watches on their wrists. The rain washed the blood down their bodies.
The old masters said if you met another Buddha on the road, you should kill him. All reality is an illusion: if you think you've found the incarnation of enlightenment, destroy that illusion on the spot. But the real world is real. Therefore, if you meet a bandit on the road, you should kill him. Anyone who seeks to make a bad world worse is a monster and an alien. You don't hope they'll come around for the same reason you don't hope the weeds in your garden will realize the error of their ways and convert to a life of cornhood. To lock these men up or threaten them would be no more effective than imprisoning the milkweed or shouting at the kudzu.
So the universal tendency is to entropy and chaos. Most of the universe is cold, airless, bereft. The first step to reversal is to eliminate anything aligned with prevailing universal philosophy.
Walt flung the bandits' rifles into the woods, stole their food, went back for his bags, and moved on. He slept when he was tired. He ate when he was hungry. He walked when he could. There were few days now he didn't cover twenty miles. Once he went two days without water, lips cracked and skin burning, until he left the road for the wooded hills and scouted the draws until he found a creek. For the most part, water wasn't a worry—he gorged himself when it was plentiful, rationed when it wasn't, checked any gas stations and houses and canals he found.
At times the walk grew hypnotic, the slow unspooling of a land he'd never seen. Cornfields, the morning gold of the Mississippi, and town after town after town. Other times, the outer world was lost to him. Instead he swam in a dim memory-sea of Vanessa's face, of the taste of falafel and vindaloo and pierogies with sour cream, and of his dream, now pointless, of writing literature so powerful it could lift hearts and inspire readers to right wrongs. Frequently, he walked miles with no memory of what he'd just seen.
13
"No," Mia said when she tried the shower, a clean reach of dark slate and cool tan travertine. The faucet stood silent. "Noooooooo!"
"I don't think we should count on that coming back any time soon."
Mia sunk to her knees, laughing ruefully. "Well, it was fun while it lasted."
"There's fog here like every day. Look how green it is compared to Redondo."
"Do we have tarps? Buckets?"
They found several of both in a shed bracketed by lemon trees in the back of the yard. They tied the tarps to the bottom of the deck, funneling the lower ends to waiting buckets. That night, stirred by the silence, Raymond wandered the house, candle in hand, and found a radio. They sat in the couch in near darkness and twiddled the dial. Static ruled the FM side from start
to finish. On the AM, a garbled voice quoted scripture. A few ticks on, a sleepy-sounding kid DJed sets of electronic music. Mia got up and swung her arms in the Monkey. After sitting through a set, Raymond dialed on. A springy man's voice rose from the static.
"...steer clear, it's Bakersfield, where armed gangs are reported to be enslaving other survivors and putting them to work on the farms. As if you needed one more reason to stay out of Bakersfield! The tourism board is going to have problems this year. In the meantime, for the first time in its history, Los Angeles has stopped burning. As the I-5 remains permanently clogged, visitors are advised to arrive via foot, boat, or flying machine. This has been your daily travel report with WTFN news."
"He's going to get in trouble," Mia said. "Callsigns that start with W are reserved for stations east of the Rockies."
"Where's he getting his info? This could be crucial if we ever go anywhere."
"Where are we going to go? Our summer home?"
"What if I decide to steal a yacht for our anniversary?" He shrugged. "It would sure be useful to know the South Pacific's swarming with pirates before I sail you to Tahiti."
The tarps worked just well enough to keep them alive. They drove back to Home Depot, loaded the car with dozens of orange mixing buckets which they left in the yard to gather rain. At the old house in Redondo, they found a burnt-out shell with black stakes rising from the foundation. Somehow, the basement had survived; amongst ashes and old books, Raymond rooted out a camp shower to hang from the deck alongside the tarps. They gathered up loose sticks and branches and leaves and hauled them in a stolen truck to their new house, where they stashed the kindling in the shed in the back yard and used it to barbecue hot dogs and boil water for rice and potatoes and drinking.
Cilantro sprouted beside the green onions and mint. They sowed artichokes, potatoes, tomatoes. Mia suggested restricting candles to the back of the house where they couldn't be seen through the front windows. Cars crept by a couple times a week. From a sporting goods store with smashed-in display cases, they took two more pistols, a .308 with a scope, heavy boxes of ammunition, a bow and scores of arrows. They wrote lists of goods and made weekly trips to the grocers and pharmacies. After a month, most of the shops had been emptied out. Meat rotted in black piles. They listened to Josh Jones' hourly show on WTFN every night, heard about the growing colony in Portland, where hundreds of survivors policed a few square blocks from looters and gangs, and the fires that reduced Phoenix to a charred wasteland. Jones relayed theories on where the Panhandler had come from: accidentally released from the CDC labs, stolen from Russian facilities by Middle Eastern terrorists, a naturally lethal mutation of the flu.
"Remember, folks, in our brave new world, dogs are no longer man's best friend," Jones declared over the sough of the surf. "It's potatoes. An acre or two of potatoes can keep a man alive for a year. Plant 'em early and often and you won't be eating each other come winter. Have you ever tasted human meat? Much too fatty in this country. You'll die of cardiac arrest before you get the chance to die of good ol' fashioned cholera. God may not be watching, but with all those eyes, you can be sure the potatoes are."
Weeks went by in a soft blur of gardening, gathering, and jury-rigging the house for the long haul: filling the garage with extra jugs of water collected during heavy rains, testing the fireplaces for the couple weeks in winter when they'd need them, digging a proper firepit and lining it with stones taken from the walk of the home next door. After another dinner of rice and beans, Raymond crumpled his paper plate and dropped it into the firepit.
"I miss meat," he said.
"I miss ice cream."
"Let's get some meat."
Mia nodded. "Let's get some ice cream first."
"I'm serious. We should get chickens or something. We can have eggs. Grow more chickens and eat those chickens."
"Look, we can't just go 'get' chickens. We'd need things. Cages. Chicken food. It'll be work."
"And with these high-stress jobs of ours I'm sure we can't find the time." He plopped down on the couch they'd dragged out to the back porch. "There used to be this place on the PCH that was like a bulk pet store but for farm animals. I doubt anyone's looted that."
"We could use dog crates for coops." Mia frowned in thought. "So where are we going to find the chickens?"
"The Chicken Depository should have a few."
"Of course." They picked up crates and heavy bags of seed from the supply store. In their free time, they parked in the valley in the middle of the peninsula's hills and roamed the silent yards. It had been a horse-heavy community, with crossing signs posted on many of the main roads, and Raymond had hoped that some of the people who'd been willing to husband animals as big as horses would have raised some chickens as well because why not, but over two weeks of searching they only found two coops. Both were closed. Inside, mounds of feathers ruffled in a breeze of faint decay.
Once they saw a curtain swirl in a window. Another time, while they tramped up a grassy ridge, a car pulled up alongside theirs. Mia watched through the scope of her rifle as two men tried the doors, exchanged a few sentences, and drove off.
Summer arrived. They left the windows open at all hours, retiring to the shade beneath the deck during the afternoons of a week-long heat wave. As the garden wilted, they tapped the jugs in the garage to keep their food alive; when the jugs dwindled, they drove to the ocean, filled them with seawater, and boiled huge pots under tarps slanted to catch the steam. Raymond wiped ash from his hands, sweat tickling his ribs. How did plants turn water and sunshine into bananas and peppers and blueberries? It was magic. True-life alchemy. Every day, Raymond played apprentice to this sorcery, watering the spreading leaves, plucking thorny weeds. He learned the difference between a thistle sprout and a budding cilantro or basil plant.
Mia talked him into driving to a surf shop on the PCH, where they grabbed a few boards and a couple wetsuits. On days when the work was light, they walked down to the beach and taught themselves to surf. They grew tanned, lean, taut-muscled, bobbing on the breaks. Dolphins paralleled the shore, dark fins cutting the water. Pelicans tucked their wings and splooshed into the waves. They fished from the shore. Often they caught nothing. When they brought home a catch, they fried it over a fire lit with eyeglass lenses, eating the fish skin and tails along with the meat.
"Rumors have flowed from New York for weeks about a secret government vaccine," Josh Jones reported. "And isn't it just like the feds to slam the barn doors after the horses have run off? First, they made us take off our shoes in airports after a single failed shoebombing that would never be repeated. Now, they funnel their resources into a cure for something that's already killed everyone who could die from it. Do they even know how viruses work? Do they think infections just chill out when their hosts die? Wrong. Wronger than a Noah's Ark carrying two of each wrong. When the host dies, the virus dies. Oh, the Panhandler was a great virus, all right: it got everyone. Not one in a hundred was immune. But it was a very stupid virus, too. It burned down every house it could possibly live in. Now it's gone. If, God forbid, you pop a kid out into this wasteland, you can sleep easy knowing that whatever else the little tyke has to face, he won't have to worry about the Panhandler.
"Well, that's all moot now. The government hideout on Staten Island got blowed up. Witnesses report soldiers fleeing in lifeboats and helicopters. They were not headed in the same direction. Are there other government holdouts out there somewhere? Oh, no doubt. But if you're waiting on them for salvation, well, you better be wearing comfy shoes."
"Because you've got a long walk ahead of you?" Mia said. "That doesn't really make sense."
Raymond stretched his sore legs. "I am not sure this man is a professional."
Mia kept track of days on a kitchen calendar. On August 13, on a trip to the rambling homes near the south of the hills, Raymond heard clucks and cackles from a fenced yard. Five scruffy chickens pecked beetles from the grass.
"How do we get
them in the car?" he said.
Mia laughed. "We probably should have brought a sack. That's what chicken-thieves use, right? A big sack?"
"Um." Wind tousled the grass. "We'll just sort of drop them in through the sun roof, how about."
"Wow. We're going to die, aren't we?"
He hopped the fence. Chickens milled, pecking and cooing. He lined up behind a white one and leaned in for the grab. It squirted away, kicking dirt.
"I just want you to know you're being foiled by a chicken," Mia said.
"Let's see you do better."
"No, I think watching is more fun."
Another scooted away. Raymond adjusted his tactics, squatting down and leaning in as slowly as a stalking cat. Rather than striking, he just reached in and grabbed the body of a brown-feathered bird. It flapped its thick wings, yellow feet kicking, then settled down in his arms.
"Who's the king?" he said. "Now take this chicken and throw it through the roof of my car."
Mia grinned, grabbing the bird without incident, and deposited it through the sun roof. Raymond had a second waiting for her by the time she got back. They loaded up the others and turned home, birds clucking, whuffing their wings, scrabbling around the seats, stirring up a smell that was half sour and half pleasingly alive. At the house, Mia hopped out and opened the gate. He pulled into the garage.
"You definitely need a new car," Mia said.
He craned around. White liquid streaked his seats. "I look forward to killing them some day."
They transferred the birds into dog crates and carried the crates beneath the deck and scattered seeds in the crates.
The Breakers Series: Books 1-3 Page 13