by Misty Vixen
And she had. And it had been just fantastic.
That was where I’d found my car, actually, at that gas station. It was during this little excursion, while I was scouring the land, looking for parts to repair the car, that something that had bugged me didn’t quite bug me anymore. Suddenly, for no obvious reason, and I’d ultimately just set it aside, I had kind of solved the question of: does my life have meaning? Or, I guess, sometimes I asked myself if life was ultimately meaningless, and up until that point, I always came with some variation of: I don’t know, I don’t want to think about this.
But I knew I set and achieved goals for myself and, more importantly, sometimes I helped people.
And the last time I asked myself if that was enough, the question was no longer uncertain.
It was just: yes, this is enough.
In some way that I spent hours teasing out, these two incidents were connected. I think I finally finished putting the pieces together when I locked myself in the cabin’s small bathroom for an hour and a half and first read my entire journal from start to finish, (surprisingly, sixteen months’ worth of writing from me didn’t take all that long to get through), and then I wrote and updated since last time. I scribbled in my blocky handwriting for half an hour straight and then just sat there for awhile, letting it all sink in.
Finally, I emerged from the bathroom after tucking my journal deep back into my coat pocket. I was glad that this time I’d had an excuse to hide away. Megan and Delilah seemed to understand that I needed some space.
They both looked at me inquiringly as I came out. There were two single-wide beds that we’d pulled the mattresses from, pushed together, and made into one large bed. They were sitting on it. Delilah was nude save for a pair of panties, laying on the side closest to the fireplace, reading the thin paperback novel we’d found. Megan was still in her clothes, sitting at the table, sorting through our supplies again.
“You okay?” Megan asked as I emerged.
“Yeah...I think so. I need to step outside for a minute,” I replied.
They both seemed to take the implied alone attached to that and just nodded, going back to what they were doing. I crossed the cabin and slipped out the door. Good, I’d made it out before the sun had gone down. In fact, it was sunset, and it was beautiful. It was perfect. I walked a little ways out from the cabin, not far, my boots crunching in the snow. There was no wind, there were no clouds in the skies, and nothing was moving for as far as I could see. Which was quite a ways. The cabin was built onto a little flat patch of land maybe fifty feet up, and so I had a clear view for miles and miles. I could see the highway, the fields, the little patch of civilization, the trees.
The world might have been an oil painting in that moment.
I stood there with my hands in my pockets, breathing slowly in and out, watching the sun gradually disappear beyond the horizon.
It just about disappeared before the cold really started to get to me, so I turned my back on the twilight and walked back inside.
“Okay,” I said as I came in, locking the door behind me, then hanging up my jacket and getting out of my boots, “I’m ready to talk. I think I’ve got it figured out.”
Delilah set her book aside and got up. She pulled on a sweater and a pair of thermal underwear and joined me as I sat at the table with Megan.
They both watched me attentively.
“So...I’ll put this as best I can. For awhile now, even before the apocalypse, I was asking the same question almost everyone asks: what’s the point of living? I’ve been wrestling with it for awhile. After the snow fell, I think I was in a mild state of shock for awhile, and honestly just surviving allowed me to put it off. Eventually though, it started coming back. I was living in this little town in Florida, doing okay for myself honestly, but I asked ‘is this it? Is this the rest of my life?’ And it just freaked me out. I think I developed my wanderlust as a direct response, or at least it was sent into overdrive. I’d been getting the urge to leave for a bit.
“Hitting the road helped alleviate it. The question didn’t bug me for months. I walked a lot. Survived a lot. Explored a lot. Met a lot of new people.” I paused, chuckled. “And fucked a lot of new people. But it didn’t last. It started bugging me again. Mostly I avoided it, but sometimes I ruminated on it, when I was completely alone. But about a month, month and a half ago, the question cropped up again and this time, it didn’t bug me. I kind of asked myself ‘is this it? Is this my life?’ And it was like, ‘Yeah, it is’. So naturally I thought, ‘is it enough?’ For some reason, I thought ‘yeah’. I just wasn’t afraid anymore. At least not of that particular line of reasoning. But I didn’t pursue it any further. Which I guess was a mistake.”
I waited, gauging their reaction. I didn’t think I was talking about any high-reaching stuff here, intellectually, but it was tough to tell what some people got or didn’t get. But Megan and Delilah were just watching me, listening, waiting.
I went on. “When I confronted Tanner, I saw…” I stopped, feeling that same shock of fear that I’d been feeling every day a nightmare had woken me. I swallowed and pushed on. “I saw something that just scared the fucking shit out of me. I saw myself in a decade if I didn’t, you know, stick to my morals, or find a greater purpose in life. I...he…” I hesitated, getting to the harder part, looking down at the table for a moment.
“He told me about himself. Used to have a wife, a baby. He worked at a grocery store after having a long, fucked up life. Things were still mostly okay, even after the snowfall. But then his baby was killed during a riot, and he went crazy and shot some people. They locked him up for months. His wife got sick and died while he was in lockup. Friend of his finally just let him go. He’d been wandering ever since. He couldn’t...kill himself.” I looked back up at them finally. “I don’t think I can. I mean, I’ll never know for sure until I’m actually standing there, gun in hand, with intent to do it, but I don’t think I can. I just think my survival instinct is too strong or fuck, maybe I’m just too afraid of dying to do it.”
I stopped again, then shook my head, plunged on. “He did fucked up shit, because he couldn’t kill himself. And he couldn’t assign any real meaning to his life. Couldn’t find any. Things have been going okay for me since the end of the world, but that existential question has been creeping up on me again and again, and I think facing Tanner, when he forced me to kill him even though I didn’t really want to...I don’t know. I guess it’s kind of forced me to confront that particular problem. Helping people is enough, but I guess what bugs me is I’m not sure if it will remain enough.” I waited, wondering if I’d gotten it all out.
“So…” Megan replied after a moment, “I think I get the gist of what you’re saying, but I’m not sure I entirely get it. What, specifically, is the problem?”
I thought about it, closing my eyes for a second. I was kind of all over the place there. After a moment, I had it. I opened my eyes back up. “I’m scared that I’ll turn into Tanner if I don’t find a larger meaning for my life. Not today, or tomorrow, or even three years from now, but eventually, if I don’t take steps now, and work to maintain some semblance of order and meaning to my life, I’ll end up there. And I don’t want to turn into a monster.”
“You don’t think this is enough?” Delilah asked. “I mean, you saved our lives. Twice. You’re helping me find my best friend. It sounds like you’ve helped lots of people.”
“It’s enough right now,” I replied. “Don’t get me wrong, I think this is important. Honestly, the two of you mean a lot to me. I’m just wondering if I might need to do more in order to continue feeling satisfied about my…” I sighed, searching for the words. “My place in the universe.”
“Lots of people don’t feel satisfied about their place in the universe,” Megan said.
“And I don’t want to be one of them.”
“You don’t think it’s possible that instead of turning into a monster you’ll just settle down somewhere wit
h a girl or three? Or is that the same amount of awful to you?”
I laughed unexpectedly. “No. Honestly, if I somehow found a way past this feeling, this drive to do more...I’d be grateful. I don’t think it’s impossible that I’ll find a place I want to settle, but right now it feels unlikely.”
Megan frowned and seemed to gather her own thoughts. “You want my advice?” she asked after a moment. I nodded. “Just go with the flow. I know it sounds so trite, but I think part of growing up is realizing that...you keep growing. You change. And not necessarily because you want to. Maybe in five or ten or fifteen years you’ll decide ‘you know what? Fuck it. I’m putting down roots’. And you’ll be fine with that because you changed. I understand your existential crisis. Almost everyone has them. But I think you’ll find that if you stay the course, maybe start going out of your way to help people more than you already do, you’ll get along just fine.”
I was silent for a long moment, considering that.
Her words felt like they stripped away a lot, or quieted a lot of noise.
They rang of truth. I liked that. “Stay the course. Help people,” I muttered. Then I nodded. “I can do that...thank you. For that and for listening.”
They both smiled.
“I’ll always listen,” Delilah said. “I will also always open my legs for you.”
“Always?” I asked.
“Well...hmm. I guess not if I hurt down there. But otherwise, yeah.”
“And if you have a boyfriend or girlfriend that wants exclusivity?” Megan asked.
“Personally, I don’t think it could work between me and someone else if they aren’t into polyamory.”
“Well...cool,” I replied.
“I will stop opening my legs for you if you turn into an asshole, but I just don’t see that happening.”
“Well, you know how I feel about you,” Megan said.
I looked at her. “How do you feel about me?”
She sighed and crossed her arms. “I like you. I trust you. Sex with you is awesome. I respect you. Let’s leave it at that, okay?”
“Fair enough,” I replied. I stretched and popped my neck, then my back. It felt as if an enormous weight had been lifted from my shoulders. “What’s say I bring out that last blunt, and you girls polish off the rest of the wine, and we have a nice big threesome or three, and then have a nice, long, luxurious sleep before hitting the road again tomorrow?”
“That sounds excellent,” Delilah replied immediately.
“I’m down for it. Though I’d appreciate it if you’d find me more booze,” Megan replied.
“I’ll see what I can do.”
We got up and got to it.
TEN
The next three days were actually really pleasant.
Part of that was due to the fact that they were uneventful, but I thought a lot of it had to do with the fact that I’d not only gotten a lot off my chest, but also actually figured some shit out. I didn’t think I had it all figured out, there was still some stuff rattling around in my head, and I didn’t know if I’d ever get it all nailed down into place.
Shit, I didn’t even know if it was all supposed to be nailed down into place. As Megan had pointed out, people were supposed to change as they grew older and experienced more life, especially if they were on the younger side, like me.
But I felt good, and I didn’t know if they had their own things going on or a good mood was just infectious, because the girls were in pretty high spirits too.
We made good progress those three days, hitting ten miles each day. Eleven on the second, actually.
By the time we ran into our next genuine problem, I thought we had covered about half the distance to our intended destination. Not bad, but I knew it couldn’t keep up. We were tired, even with the nights of sleep and the clear weather we’d been enjoying, and we were going to need at least one day of rest soon.
“Well...fuck,” I said as we stood at the edge of our problem.
The highway terminated very abruptly a few feet ahead of us. A section of it that was meant to span a river some thirty feet straight down had collapsed. I peered carefully over the edge. Judging by the amount of cars down there, embedded in the band of ice that had once been a small river, I’m guessing that weight plus time equaled collapse. And I doubted it was too well-maintained even before the end of the world.
“Now what?” Delilah muttered, for the first time in days sounding unhappy.
“Don’t worry,” I replied. “Just a detour.”
I walked first to the right, peering over the guardrail, and saw a lone house maybe a hundred yards back the way we’d come. Should be easy enough to get to, and it looked fairly intact. Plus, there were woods behind it.
Perfect hunting ground, if it came to that.
I walked over to the other side. Much more to work with here, as I’d noted earlier when we were first approaching the bridge. There were five buildings down along a simple road that came off the highway, most of them looked like places of commerce, and another quartet of narrow structures strung out along the river.
Probably rental fishing cabins.
Then I turned around and looked back the way we’d come. The first thing I wanted to do, before anything else, was check the semi-truck that was sitting there. The huge boxy cargo container it was hauling might hold some goodies, as it was the kind of thing someone might have turned into a little basecamp at one point or another.
“Let’s check that out first,” I said. “Then we’ll head down to the house. We’ll turn in for the night.”
It was going to be dark soon, maybe even heading towards twilight by the time we actually got down to the house, depending on how long the truck took to search. The two back doors were slightly ajar. I pulled out my pistol, just in case, and motioned for the women to get to the side, out of view. Once they were safely out of sight, I grabbed the bottom of one of the doors and pulled it open while walking backwards with it.
Sometimes, if someone was trigger-happy enough, they’d just open fire the second the door opened up, even if no one was standing there, thus giving themselves away and me the advantage. No bullets came out, but that was no promise of safety. Carefully, I peered around the open door and looked in through the opening.
Someone had definitely converted it into a little outpost, but I thought that whoever it was had long since moved on. The stuff I could see had that ‘long dark and dead’ look that a lot of abandoned places did. Everything was oriented along the left side of the trailer, leaving an alcove of space to walk down along the right. Closest to me was a shelf that had been cleaned out, beyond that was a little table with a single chair, some boxes were stacked up beyond that, and at the back someone had rigged up a curtain that crossed the width of the trailer. I figured that this was probably where the sleeping area had been set up.
The curtain was closed.
I hauled myself up into the trailer and then froze as I spied something: snow with a bootprint in it. Several actually, walking back towards the curtain.
“Okay, I know someone’s in here,” I said, keeping my voice calm. “I’m not looking for trouble, I’m not looking for a fight. If you want me to leave, I’ll leave. If you’re looking to trade, I can trade. If you’re in trouble, I’ll help you.”
I waited. I thought I could hear heavy breathing over the winds outside, but it was hard to tell. Someone was almost certainly in here.
I took another step in. “Come on, seriously. Just say the word, I’m not looking to cause problems for anyone.”
Okay, definitely breathing. I took another two steps deeper in. Whoever it was, they were back there behind the curtain.
While considering what to do, the curtain suddenly pulled aside. I raised my pistol, faced with that sudden crucial moment of whether to act or not.
I didn’t pull the trigger, and thank fucking God.
“Pl-please don’t hurt me.”
A woman stood back there, her hands up now. She wa
s pale, about average height and weight, shivering violently.
“It’s okay,” I said, putting my gun away, “I won’t hurt you.”
Slowly, she lowered her hands, looking at me in obvious fear. Fuck, I hadn’t checked the fucking cab of the truck. Could be someone laying in wait, she could be the bait. But Megan would definitely catch it if someone came out of the cabin, and something about this woman seemed really genuine. Then, as she put her arms down, she rested her hands protectively over her stomach, and in the thin light coming in behind me, I suddenly noticed it.
“Oh, fuck,” I whispered.
She was pregnant. Noticeably pregnant.
“Please don’t hurt me,” she repeated.
“I won’t, I promise,” I replied. “Delilah, get up here,” I said over my shoulder. “Are you hurt?” I asked as Delilah moved to join me.
“No,” she said.
“Are you alone?”
She hesitated. “Not-not exactly.”
“What’s going on?” Delilah asked.
“What does that mean?” I replied.
“Oh my God, she’s pregnant,” Delilah whispered.
“I-people are chasing me,” she said, trembling now.
Fuck. Fuck. Shit. Well, this was quite the situation I’d stepped into.
“We have to get you warm,” I said. “There’s a house nearby, off the highway. Will you come with us? We can get you warm.”
She hesitated for a long moment, looking between me and Delilah, then nodded. She looked terrified and tired and freezing.
“Why don’t you go help her get ready?” I asked. In my experience, most times, not all but most, women who were terrified, especially if another human had done the terrifying, responded better to other women than men. Especially big men who looked like me. And I was willing to bet a lot that it was a group of mostly if not exclusively guys after her. I believed that women were just as capable of evil as men, but…
Let’s just say that I’d encountered a lot more evil dudes than chicks so far.