by Joshua Gayou
I looked at Lizzy and knew he was right. Even so, I thought of what lie ahead in the coming years and felt exhausted just to contemplate it all. “There’s so much to do,” I said.
“Don’t think about it all at once,” Billy said. “If you do that, you’ll never get anything done; you’ll just freeze in place. Just think about the next thing you have to do. There’s always one more thing that needs to be fixed. One more problem to be solved. I can think of a few right now.”
“Such as?” I asked.
“Well, we gotta solve getting that damned truck loaded up,” he said, waving in the general direction of the Dodge. The poor guy was looking pretty well spent. I walked up next to him and grabbed a duffel bag that we had stuffed full of dried goods, canned food, and the few remaining MREs. I grabbed it, hauled it over to the truck bed, and stashed it among the plastic bins and other items.
I turned and looked back at him. “What next?”
He was smiling at me. “Load up the rest of this here, I guess, and I’ll go through the site and see if we forgot anything.”
“Stay out of the rear camper,” I advised. I had left things badly in there.
He had frozen halfway to standing up. “Hadn’t planned on looking there. Nothing in there anyone needs.” He straightened up with a groan and walked off.
I turned back and saw Jake, who was also watching Billy make his way toward the leading RV. He stood there thinking his own hidden thoughts.
“What about you?” I asked. “You’re going to Wyoming to start over, too?”
“Billy helped me to get somewhere. Stayed with me when he didn’t have to. When he maybe shouldn’t have. I’m going to help him get to Wyoming.”
“You’re not staying once we get there?”
“We?” he asked. He gave me what passed for a Jake smile: slightly raised eyebrows. “You’ve decided you’ll join us, then?”
“Don’t deflect. You won’t stay?”
He became very quiet and still. Just when I thought he wouldn’t say anything at all, he finally answered. “Hadn’t thought about it. I’m only thinking as far ahead as the next problem, see?”
We finished loading up the truck and made ready to depart right around sunset. We weren’t planning on going very far but we all agreed that spending the night by the motorhomes was out of the question; we didn’t even have to discuss it.
“Why don’t you guys ride in the truck with Jake, huh?” Billy said. “There’re only the two seats in the van and I can’t imagine you want to be apart from your daughter. Truck has a quad cab. Nice and roomy.”
“Umm, okay…” I said, not excited about riding with Jake. Rather than saying anything, Jake just nodded and walked to the driver side of the truck. He got in, shut the door, and then sat there facing forward. Waiting.
“You sure you don’t feel like driving the truck?” I asked, looking over at the back of Jake’s head.
“Well...uh, you see, the truck has a manual tranny,” Billy grinned sheepishly. “Never learned.” He shrugged and made his way to the van.
“Of course,” I sighed. “C’mon, Mija. Let’s hit it.” Lizzy jumped into the back of the truck and I climbed into the front passenger’s side. As I was situating myself and arranging the seat belt, Jake reached up and turned on the dome light.
“Elizabeth, if you look around back there you should see a backpack. Look around in it; you may find some books that you like.”
There came the sound of rummaging in the back. I looked back at her and saw her pulling several small books out of a bag. Craning my neck further, I saw titles like Junie B. Jones, Olivia, Charlotte’s Web, and the like. “Some of those are pretty good,” he said. “You may enjoy them.”
Lizzy reached forward into the front seat and actually patted him on the shoulder, which floored me. “Thank you, Jake,” she said in a tiny voice.
“Welcome,” he replied. He turned off the front dome light and then reached back and turned hers on for her. “You go ahead and leave the light on. Doesn’t bother me.”
“Where…” I struggled to find words. “Where did you get a bunch of kid’s books?”
“Picked them up a few towns back.” He glanced in my direction; looked back out the front windshield. He started up the engine, put it into first, and gave a short rap on the horn to let Billy know he was ready to go.
“Jake.”
“Yeah?”
“Thank you, Jake.”
He shifted into second as we got onto the road.
“Welcome.”
-
When we finally stopped for the night it was only a little further up the 15. Billy found a spot that he liked the look of and pulled off the road. He led us away for a good distance; less than a mile but far enough that anyone passing by would miss us in the dark. The men both had their own tents that they set up outside. When Jake was finished with his, he came back to the truck and offered to let us take it. Sleeping out in a tent felt a little too exposed for me so I thanked him but said we’d stay in the truck. I would get over this inhibition later on, certainly, but at this point I wasn’t very long out of civilization.
The next morning when I woke up, it took me several moments to remember that we weren’t with James or his gang anymore. I’m struggling to find the words to describe what this was like; when you’re in a situation like that, you don’t awake every morning in a terrified state. No matter what kind of situation you’re in, you only have so much energy. Being terrified takes a lot of energy, so you don’t stay in that state indefinitely. Eventually, you wear out. You simply get too exhausted to be scared. The state that you go to after you wear yourself out being scared is the state that I woke up in every morning. Exhausted, numb, impending sense of doom, hopelessness. You walk around on eggshells all day feeling this way. If someone close by moves too quickly, the deadened feelings flare up inside you instantly into a kind of electric panic but then subside back to the low thrum quickly if nothing actually happens.
Waking up in that truck was like a shock of cold water. The absence of danger was as shocking and electrifying to me that morning as any present danger I’d encountered previously.
I lifted the back of my seat out of a reclined position, stretched my neck a bit, and looked in the back seat.
I came up off the seat and must have rotated in midair because I came back down on my knees facing the rear of the cab. Elizabeth was gone. I grabbed my rifle and slammed into the passenger side door trying to open it. I had to fumble with the handle before I could operate it properly. I finally got the door opened and jumped out of the truck. I was barefoot. I remember the rocks on the ground hurt and that I didn’t care.
I ran around the front of the truck and stopped immediately when I saw Elizabeth, Billy, and Jake sitting around a smoking campfire. All three of them turned to look at me, all wearing the same wide eyed, confused expression.
“Mom?” Lizzy asked.
I felt a sharp throbbing pain in my right hand along the ring finger. I lifted it up to look at it and saw an angry, white crease along the back of the nail. I must have folded it back when I was fighting with the door handle.
Billy came over with a wool-lined denim jacket and offered it to me. “Put some shoes on,” he suggested. “It’s chilly out this morning.”
I was distracted then by an incredibly savory smell coming from the fire. “Oh...oh my God,” I said. “What do I smell? What is that?” The smell was making me salivate; it was so good that I had forgotten to be pissed at Lizzy for scaring me half to death.
“Sausage!” Billy said in his best homemaker voice.
“Sausage? Where did you find sausage??”
“Freeze dried sausage!!”
I only stood there, alternating my gaze between him and the fire. I think he actually shocked me stupid.
His shoulders slumped a little and he finally said, “Look, go put some shoes on. You’re going to hurt yourself.” He returned to his spot at the fire. “I have some coffee
brewed up. We’ll save some for you when you get back.”
“You have...coffee?”
“Well, we have it for now,” he said. “We’ll run out at some point, of course. That doesn’t mean we have to live like a bunch of savages right now, though, does it?”
I didn’t even bother to tie my shoes. I just pulled them on and rushed back to the fire. Lizzy was opening up a chair for me to sit in, humming to herself and chewing at the same time. I had just finished pulling on the jacket when a metal plate was thrust in front of me with a little pile of crumbled sausage and some crackers. “I’ve got a fork or something here in the Kitchen bin,” Billy muttered, digging in a plastic container. He turned back to me to hold out a fork and saw that my plate was empty. He stared at the empty plate and then looked up at me. “More?”
“Yes, please,” I said through a mouthful. I wiped my eyes, which were watering because my tongue was stinging from where I had bit it when James attacked me.
He took the plate and offered me a cup filled with black coffee. “Sorry,” he said, “I don’t have any creamer or sugar.”
“I don’t care, this is amazing,” I said, and meant it. I never would have done black coffee once upon a time but the smell of this stuff alone perked me up. I felt a panicked urge to gulp it down and had to restrain myself from burning my mouth. Thinking of this, I felt an unhappy twinge in my bladder. I handed the cup back to Billy. “I have to go take care of some business,” I said.
“Yes, ma’am,” Billy said, taking the cup back. “Bushes and such over there,” he gestured to a thick patch on the other side of the trucks.
When I came back to my spot by the fire there was another plate of food and my coffee, now cooled down a bit. I dug in, going slower now and taking the time to savor it.
“Be a nice day today,” said Billy happily. “Clear sky. Beautiful weather.”
“What’s the plan?” I asked.
“We were discussing that before you woke up,” Jake said.
“We’re going shopping for a new car, Mom,” Lizzy interrupted.
“New car?”
“Yeah, it’s probably a good idea to find you a vehicle,” Billy said. “We need to get you started on gear and supplies and the truck and van are just about filled to capacity carrying all of Jake’s and my crap to begin with. If we find something really good, we might could hook up some kind of trailer to whatever we get you. There was no ball hitch on either of ours.”
“What about gas?” I asked.
“No worries. We have ways.”
I thought about all that for a minute. Something about taking the extra time to locate a suitable vehicle, fuel it (however that was done), and load it full of supplies that had yet to be acquired seemed off to me.
“How far is your place from here, Billy? How long will it take to get there?”
“Well, the town I’m closest to is Jackson. From here I’m guessing that’s about a ten hour drive? Maybe less - but that was how long it took before. Who knows what road conditions are on the way? I suppose we’ll either get there tomorrow or the next day.”
“And how are we set for food and water?”
Billy nodded. He was probably beginning to understand my train of thought. “Before when it was just Jake and I, we could have probably stretched out what we had for a week, assuming we minimized physical activity. Now that you’ve joined us, we’re down to maybe half of that, depending. I’m not sure how much Elizabeth eats - maybe not too much at all - but you just murdered enough canned pork to put your face on The Little Pig’s community watch list, so…”
I burst out laughing, surprising myself and everyone else around the fire. It was a peaceful morning, interrupted suddenly by my cackling. I couldn’t help myself. I had gone so, so long without laughing and it just felt so good to do it. All of the tension and the fear, the anger, resentment, the despair and hate; every bit of poison that had been building inside of me ever since that first day when the lights went out broke loose and poured out from me like a flood. It was a vomiting forth of raw, pent up emotion. I tried to tamp it all back down and control myself but the mental image of my face on a “Have you seen this woman?” poster got me going again in fresh peels of chortling.
It was worse when I tried to look up at the rest of them. Lizzy was laughing along with me, not understanding what was funny but infected by my behavior even so. Billy had a ridiculously goofy grin on his face (which is about as close as I ever saw him come to laughing; he would joke with us constantly but his delivery was always straight and deadpan). I then looked over to Jake and lost any remaining reserve of control that was left to me. His look of mild confusion sent me right over the edge.
Before I understood what was happening, I felt a hand on my back rubbing gently along the length of my spine and there was another, much larger hand resting on my shoulder. I realized Lizzy was standing next to me saying, “Mom? Mom, what is it?” and Billy was soothing her, telling her, “It’s okay, Girly. This was gonna happen at some point. It just had to shake loose and work its way out. This is normal. She’ll be okay.”
I realized I was sobbing uncontrollably and rocking in my chair. Billy was down on one knee next to me with his arm around my shoulder. He stayed like that with me until the worst of it was past, reaching out every so often to squeeze Elizabeth’s hand.
“What the hell?” I said, after things had calmed down a bit. “I wasn’t even feeling sad. I don’t know where that came from.”
“It’s fine,” said Billy. “It turns out the part of you that makes you laugh lives right next to the part of you that makes you cry. All that stuff is controlled by the same buttons. You just went through a hell of a thing. You gotta give yourself some time; this will happen every so often. You’ll have to let it work its way out of your system.”
I looked up; saw an empty chair in front of me across the fire. “What happened to Jake?” I asked. Billy was heaving himself up off the ground to settle back into his seat.
Some paper towels materialized just to the right of my face from behind me and I jumped. “Jesus-FUCK, hijole!” I yelped.
“Mom!”
“Sorry, Mija. Sorry.”
“Pardon…” Jake said as he walked back to his chair.
“So getting back to the point,” I continued as I wiped my eyes and blew my nose, “call it three days’ worth of food from this point and three days’ worth of driving. Would it not make sense to just push through with what we have right now and get where we’re going?”
“You have a valid point,” Billy said. “I’ve been thinking about this myself. I guess it’s not a bad idea if we all just discuss it right now and agree on it. What I was thinking was this…” He held up his hand and started extending fingers as he talked, beginning with the thumb and working his way down, as he listed off points. “This is the Spring/Summer period right now. It’s been, what, three months? Four months? Since everything really went south? So that means Northern Utah and the great state of Wyoming has just been through a winter period. We don’t know what the state of the roads is or even if any road crews had begun repair work before it all went to hell. California and Nevada were more or less okay because they don’t get a lot of rain to begin with but, the further North we go from here, the nastier it’s going to get, I think.”
“That’s a good point,” Jake agreed. “Roads fall apart a lot faster than anyone realizes. You have to constantly be repairing them.”
“Yap. Give it a year. You won’t be able to get anywhere far without four wheel drive. This brings me to the point. The Dodge can handle some mild off-roading if it comes to it.” He pointed over at the van. “I don’t know about that Transit. It’s long, looks kind of top heavy, and is close to the ground. I don’t think the path can get very rough before we have to abandon it.”
I saw Jake give Billy a pointed look in response to his statement. Billy nodded and sent a calming “it’s cool” gesture back his way.
“If that happens, we wo
n’t be able to haul everything we have plus ourselves. The truck bed is already overloaded as it is.”
He eased back into his chair and took a sip of coffee. “We prepper types have a saying that we ripped off from the military: Two is one and one is none. So, applying that math to our situation, we really only have one vehicle. I’d like to have two - what you would call three. I don’t want to leave anything behind and I sure as hell don’t want to find myself hoofing it again.”
“On top of that, we have time, guys. My place isn’t going anywhere. It’ll be waiting for us whether we get there three days from now or one week from now. It won’t hurt to take it a little slow and collect things as we go.” He took another sip. He had given up on tracking points with extended fingers by now; I think he preferred to keep them wrapped around the warm coffee cup in the cold morning air instead of extended out in space.
“The more supplies we have when we get there, the better we’ll be as well. We’ll be able to take a few days to settle in before we have to head out again.”
“Head out why?” Jake asked. I was curious as well.
“We’re going to have to go out and get everything we can get our hands on,” Billy said. “Everything. None of the things we rely on to live are being manufactured anymore. At some period, all of this stuff that we need is going to run out. Maybe not for a year or two but it is coming. We need to get as much of it as we can to our home base like apocalyptic squirrels. This will buy us the time we need to develop a more permanent situation. The main thing will be food; living on a subsistence basis. There’s definitely enough land to support us, even if we start cultivating livestock. The main thing is that we have to get it planted and producing enough so that we can wean ourselves off all the manufactured shit. Oh...excuse me, Girly.”
“That’s alright,” Lizzy said. “Mostly, I just don’t like the F-word.”
“What? Flapjacks?”