The Rabid Mind

by Bruce Buckshot Hemming

  “Don’t try to soften me up with flattery, it won't work,” she smiled, “but it doesn’t hurt either.”

  He laughed and set the rifle down, leaning it against a tree. “I’ll finish gutting the deer and then skin out a back leg. You can carry both rifles and I’ll haul one hindquarter back up to the cabin.”

  As they walked back up the mountain, Matt was truly happy for the first time in his life. They were in great shape. The Indian summer would not last long, they both knew that, but it was a magical time of year with the cold mornings and sunny warm days. The smell of fall was crisp and the leaves were changing colors. It was great to be alive.

  Sandra asked, “What’cha thinking about?”

  “Just how great it is to be alive. We have meat in the freezer, plenty of supplies and enough wood to get through the winter. We’re going to make it. We are going to survive and we found each other.”

  She laughed, “Well, we still have to be careful. But I think we need to take an afternoon walk more often.”

  He laughed. “Whatever do you have in mind, my dear?”

  She smiled at him. “I am sure we can find something to do.”

  Jim was sitting on the porch smoking a Camel as they came into the yard. “Looks like you are earning your keep Matt.”

  “I’m trying. It’s not an elk, but a good tasting mulie.”

  “I'll grab the pack boards and we can haul the rest out. Sandra, you want to stay here and start dinner, or come with us?”

  “I think I’ll start cooking while you two get the rest of the venison.” She had to face her fear of being alone and this was as good a time to do it as any. They shouldn’t be gone more than an hour. She watched them leave, then locked the door. She pulled her pistol and made sure it was ready to go, telling herself to stop being so paranoid. The others were just down the hill and everything was going to be fine. She got busy cooking.

  As Jim and Matt cut up and hauled the rest of the venison, Jim said, “It’s sure strange a lone infected was way up here.”

  Matt replied, “I know. He acted different than the rest too. He just kept walking, like he couldn't hear us until he was real close.”

  “Those rifles have to be loaded and ready to fire if you want them to save your life.”

  “I know. I was just excited about getting a deer.”

  The next five days, Sandra and Matt went for a walk every afternoon. Jim figured out what was going on and that night at dinner said, “This is silly. I know what you two have been doing on your afternoon walks.” They both looked like kids who had been caught with their hands in the cookie jar. Jim continued, “You don't have to sneak off, Matt. You can just move into Sandra’s bedroom. Just remember our little talk.”

  Sandra said, “Little talk?”

  Jim looked at her. “I told Matt that I believed if you really wanted him, you two would get together and he should use protection, you know, to make sure you don't get pregnant. I might be old, but I’m not stupid. It’s only natural and Matt is a good guy. I think your mother would have liked him too.”

  Sandra looked at him. “I really miss mom.” She had died two years earlier from cancer.

  Jim was looking at Matt. “Just no wild stuff, like swinging from the rafters and keeping me up all night.”

  Matt blushed and not knowing what to say, just answered, “Okay.”

  Chapter 21

  Before they knew it, Thanksgiving was upon them and there was almost two feet of snow on the ground. The infected would be dying off in droves from exposure. Come spring, they could think about heading into town, and maybe even the surrounding little towns, to find survivors and then they could begin to rebuild a little community together.

  They celebrated Thanksgiving and Jim surprised them with two bottles of red wine he had been saving. There was no turkey, but it was good to be alive and have plenty to eat. They had a lot to be thankful for.

  December rolled in with a fury, dumping heavy snow, cold temperatures and howling winds. They would load up the porch with firewood, but still had to clean the snow off. When the snow was heavy on the roof, they would shovel it off, making sure it didn’t get too heavy. After one really bad storm, Sandra and Matt were bickering with each other over some stupid little things. Jim thought cabin fever was setting in already.

  The sun was shining and Jim said, “You two need to go for a walk. Strap on the snowshoes and go up the mountain. Spend a couple hours outside and get some exercise. It will do you both a world of good.”

  They hiked up the mountain with Matt leading the way. Making a trail in the deep snow was hard work and they were breaking out in a sweat. He stopped and turned around, looking back down the mountain. It was breathtaking. Matt mentioned it to Sandra, who looked around. “I’ve always wondered what it looked like from up here in the winter.”

  They saw squirrel tracks near the pine trees and the little red squirrels that the locals called pine squirrels, because they lived off the little nuts inside the pinecones. A lone bobcat track crossed the trail. Hunting for a living, Matt thought. He too had to find something to eat to fight off the cold weather.

  About an hour up the mountain they stopped again and Sandra said, “I’m sorry.”

  Matt looked at her quizzically, “For what?”

  “Bickering with you. It’s just that I guess we’re at that stage where we have to learn to work together and change little things that bug the other person.”

  “Fair enough. What am I doing that bugs you?”

  “You leave the cap off the toothpaste and then it’s all hard and I hate wasting anything.”

  Matt laughed. “Okay, I promise to put the cap back on from now on. Now I have one request for you.”

  “What's that?”

  “Start wearing socks to bed. Your feet are like ice cubes and you move them over and tuck them under my legs to warm them up in the middle of the night.”

  Sandra laughed. “But you are so warm and it leads to other things.”

  Matt thought for a minute. “Oh, okay, but there are other ways to wake me up for other things, without the ice cube waking me up part.”

  “Okay, we have to learn to work together. Everything is going to be great. It’s just difficult being cooped up in the winter.”

  They heard the boom of a rifle way off down the mountain, followed by another shot. They froze, straining their ears to listen. It sounded like it was a mile or two off, someone down in the valley they thought.

  “Maybe a survivor.” Matt said. “Hopefully they’ll make it until spring and maybe we can too, if we learn to work together.”

  “You’re right. Let’s go back. I feel better. How about you?”

  “Yeah, I think we need to go back and take a nap. I need warming up.”

  They came back in laughing and Jim was pleased, thinking it was just cabin fever. They told Jim about hearing the two shots and about how far away they thought the sound had come from. Jim thought it might be the Brannon brothers. They lived back up the draw quite a ways and ran an elk guiding service.

  “Damn, why didn't I think of them before? They’ll have lots of guns and ammo. Come spring we need to go look them up. One thing we need is ammo. I never really thought about it before, but now I understand why those guys stockpiled ammo. I sure wish I had bought 1000 rounds for each of my rifles.”

  Matt said, “Well who would have guessed this was going to happen? You never know, most of us thought we would just go on forever.”

  “That’s the point. There were plenty of warning signs. Heck, just the money I could have saved if I would have only bought a bunch of ammo in early 2000.”

  “What did you tell me before, Jim? Should’a, would’a, could’a - it’s too late now. You did the best you could.”

  Jim smiled. “You have a good memory.”

  December rolled into January and they could hear the coyote pack descending down on them. The pack was huge, numbering over 50. If the coyotes had not been sick and gone craz
y from rabies, they would have followed the elk and deer off the mountain and into the valley below. Never before had there been a pack of 50 coyotes enraged at the world, driven to the point of insanity with one single purpose on their mind. They operated as a collective, as if a foreign master somehow controlled them. They surrounded the cabin to attack and they needed to quench their thirst for blood — human blood.

  The battle began in the early morning hours. The smell of fresh live humans inside the cabin stopped the pack in their tracks. The howling and vicious attack on the door began the nightmare. The rest of the pack quickly surrounded the cabin, howling in delight. Fresh live victims were inside.

  Matt knew they were vulnerable, because they had a weak spot that forced them to go outside every day for firewood. Without it they would freeze to death in the bone chilling subzero weather. Like ghosts after the storm, the coyotes would rise out of the snow drifts, unseen and undetected until they heard the squeak of the door opening. Then the attack would begin. Racing in fierce bloodied insanity, they threw themselves against the door, snarling, clawing and howling in frustration and desperation, but unable to breach the solid cabin door. You could feel the tension brewing, as though the rest of the world had ceased to exist. This boiled down to a point of pure, primitive survival. It was, after all, stuck deep inside the human psyche for tens of thousands of years, from a time when man gathered around large fires and prayed to the different Gods to keep the beasts that hunted humans away from the camp. It was brought forward in these desperate hours of the oldest game in the book - survival of the fittest.

  Jim had his trusty 12 gauge Mossberg 500, but he was desperately low on ammunition for it. He had just a few rounds of buckshot left and only light birdshot to fall back on. Matt used Sandra’s pistol, a .40 SW semi auto, but, again, they didn’t have the ammo needed to deal with this situation. They had less than 50 rounds left for the fight for survival, which was each and every single day.

  Jim and Matt would jump out on the porch with their guns. Their job was to stop any coyote from reaching them or Sandra when she made a dash for the firewood stacked on the porch. She would load up her arms, race back to the door, throwing the armful inside, and then return for another load. Two armfuls of wood would just barely last until the next day’s battle. And it truly was a battle. They wondered if their ammo would hold out and if they’d be able to kill them all, or would an unrelenting and fiercely brutal winter storm claim all that lived on this mountainside during the winter of hell?

  Morning after morning the adrenaline of battle rushed in with the screaming and howling of the coyotes, followed by the yelping in pain of the wounded coyote soldiers, but they continued to survive. That was how Matt thought of them now - an invading Army trying to destroy them.

  Matt asked, “How many days of ammo do we have left?”

  “Two, maybe three at most.” Jim replied, his voice trailing off, leaving the unspoken words like an anvil above each of their heads.

  Matt asked what they all had been thinking, but were afraid to say out loud. “What then?”

  Jim said, “Use your little .22, open the door, pop a few and slam the door until we kill them all.”

  After the morning of fighting the pack, they were down to around 30 coyotes, but they all knew it only took a single bite and that person would be as good as dead.

  The brutal storm had been brewing for days, the howling wind and swirling snow making the fight that much harder. It was like God Himself had forgotten them and Satan had control over the earth. It is in these grim, hopeless times that man finds his true inner strength, knowing he must face the impossible and conquer this unknown force to survive, for that is how man has risen to the top. Maybe God had forgotten them. Maybe He was too busy saving others, but He would not want them to just give up.

  Sandra asked, “What if we could build a suit they couldn’t bite through, giving us a way to walk out to the wood pile, load up the wood and walk back with no fear? Or we could open a window and build a barricade, so the coyotes can’t get in but the person could toss the wood in.”

  Matt said, “That’s good, but I have a better idea. What about a shooting box that one of us could sit in? With small shooting slots, like you saw in old western movies, in the shape of a cross. We have plenty of ammo for the .22. The box would be just big enough to sit down comfortably and take our time killing them all.”

  Jim spoke. “Great idea, but where do we get the wood, tools and nails, or the saw to build it? Wait, we do have the brush saw in here and a claw hammer!”

  Matt was looking at the knotty pine boards that lined the hallway to the bedroom. “We could use that wood, carefully take the nails out and reuse them.”

  “How would it work?” Sandra asked.

  “If we have enough wood, I’m thinking we make it 4ft. high, 4ft. long and just under 3ft. wide, so it can fit through the door. No need for it to have a floor, just walls and a roof. We could place some kind of bracket on the bottom to step on when we are inside. Maybe that would hold it solid to the front porch. Next we cut three shooting ports, one in front and one on each side, leaving the back against the door. We have the ledge on the front door. We would have to push it past that, so it butts up to the door, you know, a lip to sit on the door ledge, so the rest of the box sits tight against the door. There should be no worries about the back side being attacked.”

  Jim said, “I take it you’re volunteering, ‘cause there’s no way in hell I’m going to allow Sandra to be the guinea pig to test your theory. Nor am I going to be the guinea pig.”

  Sandra said, “Wouldn't it be better if we just burned the wood to stay warm, hoping the coyotes die off in the cold?”

  Matt shook his head, “We can't take the chance. If they don't die off and we burn the wood up, there goes our only chance of ending this.”

  Sandra yelled, “I won't allow you to do this! This is insane! If they eat through the box, you would be dead and there’s no way we could save you!”

  Matt looked straight into her eyes. “If they bite me, I will kill them all so you two can make it. I promise you that.”

  “No. We are going to knock out a window and shoot them from here.” Sandra said defiantly.

  “You know that won't work because we can't see them all. They don't all attack until we’re on the porch. I'll be the bait to end the battle.”

  Sandra pleaded, “No! Dad, you can't let him do this.”

  Matt said, “We don't have a choice. It’s a good plan. I promise you we’ll build this box really tough.”

  They spent the rest of the day working on the box and by the next morning it was almost complete, just as they needed firewood for the stove. It was decided to grab wood to get the cabin warmed up and then put the box on the porch. With nothing to lubricate the door hinges to reduce the amount of noise they made when opened, they used cooking oil in an attempt to make them as silent as possible.

  The storm was almost over and the wind was dying down.

  Matt said, “I will creep out and you two cover me, if you have to.” The door silently opened. There was no sign of the coyotes. Matt carefully stepped out, the snow crunching under his feet, but there was still no sign of the coyotes. He managed to make it to the firewood and still no attack.

  Sandra wondered, “Maybe they left, or froze to death.”

  He loaded his arms up and walked back as silently as he could, placing the wood down inside. He crept back out, thinking maybe they did die off. Matt paused for a moment, trying to listen, but there were no sounds. It was almost silent. Nothing whispered, besides the sound of the wind.

  Suddenly, a loud thump echoed across the valley. Silence broke when a piece of wood slid from the top of the pile. It happened faster than a blink of an eye and ghosts unexpectedly exploded out of the snowdrifts, charging straight for Matt.

  Jim yelled, “Run for it!” He stepped clear of the door and out onto the porch. His 12 gauge roared, just as Matt made it in.

&nbs
p; Sandra shouted, “Dad, right side!”

  There was a large coyote, angry and deranged, charging towards him, its teeth fierce with hunger.

  Jim moved like an expert marksman, pumping the shotgun as he swung to face the threat. The rumble and flames could be seen coming out of the barrel. The coyote catapulted backwards, landing on the edge of the porch. Jim turned around and dove inside as Sandra slammed the door shut behind him.

  The lead coyote crashed into the door. Then the hell started all over again, with the piercing sounds of the pack howling, barking and growling as they attempted to savagely claw their way in.

  “I almost thought you were right, Sandra. I thought they had all died in the storm,” Matt said.

  “We couldn't be that lucky,” Jim said. “Are you ready to try your box of death now?”

  “Doesn't sound like you have much confidence in my chances of making it out alive, do you?”

  “I just don't know how long the wood is going to last and what I’m worried about is having time to reload. You have two magazines of 8 rounds each. If you take Sandra’s pistol, that’ll give you another two magazines of 14 rounds each, and that’s the last 28 rounds for the gun. If you fail and die, we lose two guns and you. That would not be a good day.”

  Matt thought about what he said, “But we don't have a choice. We have to finish this once and for all.”

  “It could very well mean your funeral.” Jim’s tone was grim.

  Sandra’s eyes suddenly welled up. “You come back to me alive and unharmed, understand?”

  “No problem,” said Matt, as he felt the warmth of Sandra’s kiss on his cheek.

  They peered out of the window, but there was no sign of the coyotes. Still, they knew they were out there. Slowly, Matt opened the front door and slid the box out. He crawled in as Jim lowered the lid over him.

  “Here they come.” Jim yelled, pushing the box so the lip sat on the door’s ledge. “Good luck kid.” Then the front door slammed shut.

  Matt saw several coyotes coming straight at him. He leveled off the rifle as quickly as possible, his hands shaking ever so slightly. The realization of what he was doing suddenly set in and fear slowly tried to consume him.