Long Empty Roads

by Sean Little

Ren started to dress, pulling her clothes onto her wet body. “It has nothing to do with you, or who you are, or anything like that.”

  “It’s fine.” I kept saying. “You don’t owe me any explanation. We’re both free and independent people. You can hold your views. I can hold mine. We can still be friends and rely on each other. We don’t have to do anything else—”

  “Twist—” She grabbed my arm. “Look around us. I got you, and you got me. That’s it. There’s no one else. If I got pregnant or something, I’d have to deliver that baby in a crumbling world with little to no medicine. You know what the mortality rate was for women giving birth in the olden days? It was like thirty-three percent. That means I’d have a one-outta-three chance to die during or after delivery. Plus, there’s the whole emotional thing that sex brings. What if it changes who we are and what we have between us? We cannot afford to alienate each other.” Ren cut off her rant and sighed. She lunged forward and latched her arms around my waist. She pressed her head into my chest, clutching me to her as hard as she could. I felt the world melt around me. I looped my arms around her. We stood in the sand, dripping wet, and just held each other. Few things in my life have ever felt so good. Ren’s voice muffled against my chest. “I just can’t take any chances on losing you, Twist. You’re all I have.”

  The rest of the afternoon was very awkward. On the one hand, I felt like we had broken through an important door between us; we had opened up and shared. Cards were on the table, now. We had addressed the elephant in the room. On the other hand, I realized that our relationship had been previously based on the stance that she thought I had been gay. Gay Me was apparently a very different person to her than Not Gay Me. The revelation of my heterosexuality forced a very distinct wedge into our tiny, confined world, and that only served to magnify the unspoken fallout from abandoning King Francis back in Atlanta. Everything between us felt weird and wrong now. It was uncomfortable. It needled at me.

  In silence, I drove the RV out of Panama City Beach and headed west. Ren sat in the passenger seat cuddling Fester in her arms like he was an infant. She idly stroked his chest and belly. His big, stupid head lolled over the crook her arm and he squeezed his eyes in pleasure. Neither of us said anything. It felt like the first day we started riding together, both of us trying to feel each other out, trying to gauge how we would behave, how we would react. The only difference was that Ren was not looking at me, was not trying to find things along the road to point out to force us into conversation.

  The empty wasteland was painful when I was alone. I thought it would be better with someone else, but now I wasn’t sure anymore. It was going to make for an awkward fifty or sixty years if we both lived a long time and never got over this. I pictured us in rocking chairs on the porch of an old farmhouse, still walking on proverbial eggshells and talking around the fact that I only saw her almost naked once because she thought I was gay.

  We camped in the parking lot of a gas station in Pensacola. I let Ren set up camp while I worked on filling the tank. I noticed the gas didn’t look right. I couldn’t tell what was wrong with it, though. It just wasn’t right. I hoped my filters would continue to work. We were so close to finding a home. We were so close to being done. I just needed the van to hold out another couple of days. Then, it could lock up and become a lawn sculpture. I’d convert it to my writing shed or a man cave on rusting rims. We would figure out a new life after that.

  Ren was reading a travel guide about Louisiana that she’d plucked from the convenience store. “Madisonville is right next to Lake Pontchartrain, right?”

  “Yeah. I figured it would be a good place to be. Big supply of fresh water.”

  Ren held up a finger. “Wrong, dude. Lake Pontchartrain is brackish. It has an inlet to the ocean.”

  “I thought ‘brackish’ meant unpleasant. I was going to make a purification system.”

  “It also means a mixture of fresh and salt water.”

  My face flamed in embarrassment. “Ooh. That means—”

  “We ain’t drinking that water.” Ren consulted a map. “How about Houston?”

  “What about it?”

  “Lake Houston is just northeast of Houston. It will have land for hunting and farming around it. There is plenty of fresh water, plus we’d still be able to scavenge the city of Houston if we needed stuff. It’s not too far beyond Louisiana. Maybe an extra day or two of travel.”

  It was a good plan, as far as I could tell. “I guess that’s what we’ll do, then.” I had never considered living in Texas, but I guess there could be worse places.

  “Tomorrow, we’ll head to Texas.” Ren closed her map and went back into the RV to throw it onto the passenger chair.

  “Deal.”

  Ren put her bare feet on the dash. “You think we’ll be able to find a nice house there?”

  “Sure. Plenty of them, probably.” That was true enough. I refrained from telling her that most of them might take a little elbow grease to get them up to par, but that was nothing we couldn’t handle.

  “What about a house with a fireplace? It’s Texas. Might not be too many of them.”

  I thought for a second. “We can build an outdoor wood-fire oven. I’ve seen kits for them at Home Depot. They’re made of concrete. They’ll last a long time. We’ll adapt. We’ll improvise. We’ll overcome. We can figure it out as we go.” I settled into my chair next to Ren. She handed me a plate with steaming canned corned beef hash and a plastic fork. I ate without tasting the food.

  We didn’t speak. An hour passed. The awkwardness between us was sickeningly uncomfortable, like a hair shirt or thumbscrews. It was like we were on a bad blind date that we couldn’t leave. Fester stalked his way out of the RV to nestle himself in Ren’s lap. He might have been my cat to start with, but it was clear that while he enjoyed my company, he preferred Ren. At that moment, that bothered me more than anything else. I got antsy. I wanted to say something, but I had nothing to say. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know how to repair the gap between us. The jittery feeling in my gut worked its way to my legs. My feet started to itch. I had to move. I stood. It was an abrupt motion. It startled Ren and Fester. I scratched at what felt like bugs crawling on my scalp. I had to get away from there for a while. “I’m going for a walk. See what I can see. You be okay here alone?”

  “Yeah, sure.” Ren looked concerned, but she said nothing. “Do you want—” She stopped. I knew she had been about to ask if I wanted her to come with me, but she had reconsidered. She chewed her lower lip for a second. “Twist?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Be…be careful,” Ren said. I nodded and started to walk away from the camp, but Ren called back. “Take a gun, at least. If something happens, shoot. I’ll come running.”

  I didn’t feel like I needed a gun. Part of me wanted to willfully ignore her like a petulant child. You’re not the boss of me! I knew that would only lead to more discussion between us, her pleading and me protesting, and I didn’t want that at the moment. I reached into the Greyhawk and plucked my gun belt from its spot. I didn’t fasten it around my waist, like normal. I just threw the belt over my shoulder. I was wearing nylon basketball shorts and a pair of Adidas flip-flops. It wasn’t the sort of look that said “bad ass gunslinger.” If you’re going to carry a weapon, you should at least look the part. Long pants. Boots. Look like you’re ready for a fight. I looked like I was ready for a quick pick-up game of three-on-three. As an afterthought, I grabbed a flashlight, too.

  I meandered through the beachfront properties, shining my flashlight into the windows. Most of the homes had suffered damage over the previous year. Windows were broken. Palmetto trees were toppled. The formerly manicured hedges and lawns had grown out of control. Chunks of siding or stucco were ripped from homes and lay on the ground to be slowly reclaimed by the Earth.

  I walked north for maybe a mile, maybe a little less than a mile. I found a gated community with houses that easily would have been in the half-million do
llar-and-up range before the Flu. Nice places, all vaguely similar in design and coloring, but different enough to not quite be cookie-cutter. The large, wrought-iron gate at the community’s access road was no longer secured. Both halves had been opened, probably to allow ambulance access while the Flu was becoming epidemic. A few of the homes were looted. Most of them weren’t. On a whim, I walked into one of the looted homes because the front door was wide open, propped open with a heavy iron doorstop. The house had been looted and destroyed. The looters had survived late into the Flu, apparently. They had put holes in most of the walls, smashing through the drywall with hammers, feet, or fists. They had smashed mirrors and picture frames. Carpet had been lit on fire and swaths of it burned. On one wall, someone had spray-painted The Flu is a Government Lie Created to Get Away with Killing the Poor! On a large entertainment center, a massive flat-screen TV had been shattered, the orange-handled claw hammer used to do it still hanging from the center of the broken screen. The house, without the damage, would have been amazing. The kitchen was large and open, the living areas equally so. It was a house that my parents would have willingly sold me to a pit-fighting ring to have, and we hadn’t been even been anywhere close to poor. My parents worked to have a very distinct middle-class life. This was a high-end upper-middle class home, maybe even on the lower end of upper class.

  I moved to the stairway and walked upstairs slowly. I didn’t smell a lot of human death in the house, possibly because it had been well-aired out over the past year, but it didn’t smell right, either. There was something unusual about the air. It smelled like feces and rot, but not the standard rot smells. It was different. It was something I had not smelled in my travels to that point.

  The stairs exited at the second floor hall. A half-dozen doors were visible along the corridor. All but one was open. I moved to the first one, the only closed door, and tried the handle. Locked. That made it much more curious. I backed up and kicked the door police-style, planting my foot flat on the door just above the handle. The door cracked loudly, but didn’t give. Two more kicks broke the doorframe. Beyond was a bathroom, a large, marble-tiled room with a standing shower, a toilet and bidet, a large pedestal sink, and a wooden armoire for storing towels and supplies. The bathroom’s only window had cracked, a corner of it broken out. In the corner of the large shower was a dried corpse.

  At this point, I was becoming so jaded to skeletons and mummies that I didn’t even blink. They still weren’t my favorite things to happen upon, but they didn’t faze me like they used to. I crept over to the skeleton and knelt next to it. The skin had rotted from most of the skull, but there was still moldering flesh and tissue beneath the clothes. Judging from the clothes, this was likely the person, or one of the persons who trashed the house. The body was lying on its left side, head tilted to the ground. The sleeve of his jacket was rolled up on the left arm, a needle still stuck into the dried flesh at the crook of the arm. A lighter was on the floor of the shower, as well as a dirty, brown-stained spoon. Heroin. I guess it seemed a better way to go out than letting the Flu win. I wondered if that person had even been experiencing symptoms of the Flu. It might have been accidental overdose, too. But why here? There were a billion questions I would never get answers to, and this was one of them. I left the corpse to its resting place.

  I went to the next room down the hall. There was a study filled with books. The smell of mold was heavy there. There were two small bedrooms. They lacked personality. Guest rooms, probably. At the end of the hallway, I peeked into the final bedroom. This would go down as one of the great regrets of my short, young life.

  My flashlight caught eye-shine first, and then I heard a low, throaty rumble. I saw bones, the remnants of a small deer in a corner. Its head was bent back at a horrible angle and most of its body was missing. Dried tendrils of tissue extended from the carcass. I caught a glimpse of a massive animal curled on the king-sized bed in the room. It took up a great amount of space on that bed. I saw a lot of rusty orange fur intermixed with thick, black stripes. A tiger, a broad-headed, glossy-eyed Bengal tiger, had turned the bedroom into its lair.

  My heart stopped for a moment. I clicked the flashlight off and backed out of the room. I took two steps backward, spun on the ball of my foot, and sprinted for the stairs. I was out of the house in a flash, my legs carrying me with speed that I hadn’t known I possessed. Terror does a lot to help you run. Even in flip-flops.

  The tiger followed, though. I’d disturbed its slumber. I had invaded its lair. And I had run from it. Of course it was going to follow. The tiger might have been a zoo escapee or one of the animals released by a keeper in the waning weeks of the Flu. It might have been one of those exotic animals trafficked to America by drug dealers or idiots with too much wealth and not enough IQ points. It didn’t matter. It must have known humans, because it had been living comfortably in a home, and it had followed me. Maybe it thought I had food. Maybe it was just curious. I don’t know. I saw animals in the wild on my travels. Most predators will run from humans. If you make noise, black bears will run. Wolves avoid people altogether. Coyotes fear humans. This tiger followed. It knew humans. That made it particularly dangerous. Was I food to it? A plaything? Or a provider?

  The tiger was out the front door by the time I made it to the end of the driveway of the house. I made it to the street before the animal caught me. It was three hundred pounds of sprinting apex-predator. I couldn’t outrun it. I felt claws slash my lower back and left butt cheek. It ripped through my flesh like tearing paper. White hot pain flashed through my body. There was so much pain that I couldn’t even scream out. It was paralyzing. The tiger’s broad head and shoulder smashed into my back and sent me sprawling face down on the asphalt. The skin on my knees and palms was shredded on the rough pavement. I couldn’t get breath. I could feel blood seeping into my clothes. A steady stream of blood was seeping from my back to my sides. The tiger had veered to the left slightly after taking me down. I saw it out of the corner of my eye. It was rounding back on me. I fought to make my arms work. Every move hurt. The flesh on my back was shredded. The muscles had probably suffered some damage, too. My breathing got labored. A wave of cold fear rushed over me, the kind of fear that shakes you to the core of your being. I started to get light-headed and I felt a wave of nausea. Shock? I bit hard on the end of my tongue. This was not the time to pass out.

  The gun belt was still looped over my left shoulder. I rolled to my right side, my right hand flailing, trying to catch the handle of the gun through some sort of miracle. The tiger snuffled lowly. Its head was down. It was moving slowly. It saw me writhing. It knew the game was almost over. Its massive head snuffled at my shoulder. I felt teeth start to sink into my shoulder. The power in the animal’s jaw was immense. I felt my skin pop beneath its pronounced canines. I screamed out in pain. I think this scared the cat. It released my shoulder and backed up a half step.

  I caught the pistol handle and somehow yanked it free of the holster. The tiger stepped forward, a massive paw reaching for me, steel-black talons bared. It slashed at my forearm, toying with me like a house cat would with a mouse. I felt my forearm tear open beneath its claws. I fired. Once. Twice. The first bullet clipped the animal in the rear leg. It leapt to the side. The second bullet hit it higher in the flank, near its rear hip. The tiger snarled and backed away. I fired a third time with a wobbly arm. The bullet flew wide, but the noise and sudden pain of the first two shots was enough to make the tiger retreat. It turned and ran, disappearing in the night in a flash of orange and black.

  My body was shuddering involuntarily. I was hurt. Badly. Every move—even breathing—sent waves of crippling pain through me. Those stories about people gaining superhuman strength or determination when they were injured—that wasn’t happening for me. I think I might have even pissed myself. There was so much blood seeping to my groin that I couldn’t be sure. I was getting cold and weak. A mile, in the grand scheme of the universe, is nothing. It is an inconvenience. At
that moment, it was about a mile back to the RV, back to Renata, back to my only chance to get help before I bled out or went into shock. It might as well have been interstellar travel. It was an insurmountable distance in my condition. I came to terms with a cold reality: I was going to die.

  Death was not scaring me at that moment, though. I think I was ready for it. I had been ready for it since the Flu first started knocking off wide swaths of the world’s populace. I had made my peace with death. I was willing to go. But, then I thought of Renata. I thought of her trying to make it in this world without me. I did not doubt that she could—she was tough. She was a Brooklyn girl. She would be fine. But, I realized that I selfishly did not want her to live without me. I wanted to be there with her in this world, even if it meant only being near her, and never with her. Near her would be enough. I did not want to abandon her. I needed to keep living.

  I had twelve more shots in the semi-auto. I squeezed off three more into the night sky. I would have done more, but the strength in my hand failed. Three was all I could muster. Renata hearing those shots was my only hope. I dropped the gun. I remember laughing, thinking of the absurdity that she would hear the pistol shots so far away. She was near the ocean with its constant static noise of waves. There was wind. There were other sounds in the night, dogs and insects. There was no way she would hear those gunshots. It had been a slim chance, at best. I did not want to resign myself to death, though. The will to keep fighting reared up inside me. I absolutely did not want to die.

  The MagLite lay six feet to my right. Using my right leg to propel myself, I was able to rock my body across the pavement to the flashlight. It took more effort and energy than I thought it would. I could feel myself getting weaker by the second. I bounced and scraped along the pavement. I extended my hand, grabbed the heavy handle, and thumbed the button. The bright, white light lit the darkness. I pointed the light down the street toward the campsite, toward Renata. Then, I let my head drop to the pavement. The ground was still warm from absorbing the sun during the day. It felt good, not too hot. Pleasant. I started to get sleepy.