She was right. We should have gotten an abortion.
Now it was too late.
And so I slept.
Days 56-62 Third Week of February.
THE SMELL WOKE me up-an incredible, delicious smell.
The smell almost levitated me up out of my bed. It was chilly, so I went to the dresser to see if I could find something to wear. Opening the drawers, I found rows of neatly folded clothes, and I pulled out a sweater and put it on. It hung like a tent on my thin frame. Looking around, I saw that our room was perfectly swept and tidy. The crumple of sheets on the bed was the only mess-that, and me.
What"s that smell? Bacon?
Outside I heard the thwack of someone chopping wood, and I walked over to the window and pulled back the curtains. Through the window I could see my pregnant wife, her shirtsleeves rolled up and hair tied back with a kerchief, picking up a log and balancing it upright on a larger log beneath.
The sun was shining warmly in a blue sky. With the back of one hand, she wiped sweat from her forehead. In her other hand she was holding an ax. Planting her feet widely, she swung the ax around, and then- Thwack!
-the ax landed squarely in the log, splitting it apart.
My head felt clear for the first time in longer than I could remember, and I was so hungry. Through the slightly open door to our bedroom I could hear something sizzle and pop.
Am I still dreaming?
Whatever was making the smell, it even sounded like bacon.
Slipping on my sneakers, I opened the bedroom door and walked down the hallway to descend the stairs. The hallway was dim. Unconsciously, I flipped the switch on the wall and then laughed at myself. Like a phantom limb, I still felt the itch to turn on lights and check my phone.
At the bottom of the stairs I entered the main living area. It was an open s.p.a.ce, panelled in stained wood, with area rugs strewn on the floors and faded oil paintings of landscapes and old snowshoes on the walls. There was a large stone fireplace against one wall, and Chuck was sitting cross-legged in front of it, coals glowing warmly in the hearth.
Hearing me, he turned around, holding a large iron skillet that had been sitting on the coals. He held it with his good hand, with the skillet"s handle wrapped in a tea towel. His bad hand was still bundled in a sling around his neck.
"I thought that might wake you up," he said, smiling. "Come help me turn these over. I think I"m burning them."
"What is that?"
"Bacon."
Spellbound, I felt like I floated across the room. Chuck set the skillet down on the bare wood floor and held a fork up to me.
"Well, not really bacon-it"s not smoked and cured-but it"s pig fat and skin. Try a piece?"
I took the fork and squatted next to him, feeling the heat of the coals on my face. I hesitated.
I should keep this for Lauren, for the baby.
"Go ahead," encouraged Chuck. "You need to eat, buddy."
Tentatively, I put the fork into the skillet and stabbed a strip of sizzling meat. I was terribly dehydrated and winced in pain as I began salivating. I put the meat in my mouth and chewed, and the taste exploded across my tongue.
"No need to cry," laughed Chuck.
Tears rolled down my face with the intensity of the experience.
"You can have some more. Have the whole pan. I was just frying this up to get some grease to fry the meat. And have some bread with it."
Reaching on top of the counter next to him, he produced a crust of burnt flat bread and gave it to me. I picked up another piece of bacon and stuffed it hungrily into my mouth with the bread.
"Where did you get bacon? The bread?"
"The bread is from cattail flour-I can show you how-and one of our traps by the river caught a small pig. I heard there were feral hogs in these woods-the newspapers in Gainesville were complaining about them the last few years-but I sure ain"t complaining today."
"A whole pig?"
He nodded. "A baby pig, anyway. Susie"s in the cellar butchering it right now. I fried up these hunks of skin to get things going."
"Susie"s butchering it?"
She"d always struck me as slightly squeamish.
Chuck laughed.
"Who do you think has been taking care of things around here? I"m a cripple, and you," he said, pausing, "well, you"ve been taking a time-out. Our women have been out hunting and fishing, cutting up wood, keeping the place shipshape and warm. Keeping us fed."
I hadn"t thought about it.
"Grab some fiddleheads from over there," said Chuck, nodding toward a pile of greens on the couch. "We"ll fry them in the bacon grease, soak it up, get some good stuff into you."
Reaching over, I took two handfuls and dropped them into the pan. They began to sizzle, and he swung the skillet back onto the coals in the fireplace. Releasing the handle, he dropped the tea towel and looked down at the floor, scratching his head.
"We know you go out at night sometimes," he said quietly.
I"d almost forgotten.
"To be honest, I"m getting tired of sending my wife out to follow you. You have to stop, Mike."
"I"m sorry, I don"t know-"
Chuck smiled. "No need to apologize. I"m glad to see you"re back, though. You"ve been nearly dead to the world for two weeks."
I wasn"t sure what to say.
"Why didn"t you come and get me up out of bed, tell me off?"
He reached over and stirred the fiddleheads.
"We"re all going through our own thing. We just figured you were going through yours. We couldn"t fix you. You had to fix yourself. You think too much for us to fix you."
"Did you see anything happen? Did you talk to anyone?" I asked.
Maybe things had changed since I"d been out of it.
"We"ve been watching Washington at night. No signs of fighting, no ma.s.s evacuations. I don"t think anything has changed. And we haven"t spoken to anyone."
"What"s the plan then?"
He stirred the greens, picking one out for me to eat.
"We wait. There"s got to be a Resistance or Underground or something. Maybe they just occupied the East Coast."
"So we wait?"
Chuck looked directly at me.
"We can do this, Mike. We"re surviving. And Lauren is amazing."
He smiled and nodded toward the door.
"Why don"t you go and say h.e.l.lo?"
Taking a deep breath, I stretched, feeling the air fill my lungs.
"This isn"t your fault, Mike. You can"t fix it. Go and see your family. Go on out."
I looked toward the door, motes of dust settling and spinning in the light streaming in from it. Go to the light. This was life, and it was time to get on with it.
"Yeah," I replied quietly, getting up from the floor.
Through the window, Lauren saw me and smiled. The bulge of the baby was clearly visible. I smiled back and waved, and she dropped the ax, running toward the door.
She was so beautiful.
Day 63 February 23.
"CAN WE EAT this?" I asked Chuck.
I was looking at a mushroom growing out from underneath a rotted log at the side of the river. I sniffed it and then poked its base, uncovering a ma.s.s of wriggling grubs in the earth.
"Not sure," he replied.
For some reason I remembered reading that the body had two brains. One in your head, the one we called the brain, and the other circling your gut, what they called the ENS, the enteric nervous system.
They used to think that the ENS was just for controlling digestion, but they"d discovered it was much more than that. The ENS was actually the ancient brain, a ma.s.s of nerves that had originally appeared in the first worm-like creatures on Earth.
All complex life on Earth had evolved from these ancestors, including us, and we were all still worms if you looked at the human form from the inside out. Starting at the mouth, then the esophagus, stomach, intestines, and finishing at the a.n.u.s, we were one long tube, with food coming in at one end and waste out the other.
We were worms with legs and arms.
The modern brain had grown out of the ancient brain. It was an appendage that had sprouted out to control the arms and legs, to understand what the first eyes were seeing, and eventually, allowing humans to think and be self-aware. But this was still just an appendage to the ancient brain, that part of us that gave us the "gut feeling" when something wasn"t right.
The same way that I"d become aware of the sky and the weather and the cycles of the moon, somehow I felt like I"d started listening to my ancient brain, and right now it was echoing a message up into my consciousness-don"t eat those mushrooms-but the grubs on the other hand...
With a spoon from my pocket, I began digging them out, spooning them into a plastic bag.
Worms could eat worms.
We were down at the Shenandoah, checking on the fishing lines and traps we had set along the banks. Like us, other animals had to come down out of the hills to the water from time to time, so this was the best place to hunt and trap them. I had the rifle slung over my shoulder, just in case we saw a deer or pig, and, of course, for protection in case we saw any people.
All of the other cabins were empty now, even the one that I"d visited during my night prowls.
We were alone, apart from the glow on the horizon that we watched carefully each night, waiting for any signs of activity or change as we began to eke out a marginal existence.
"What were the garbage bags on the deck for?" I asked.
I"d noticed them this morning when we"d left. At first I thought they were for stuff the others were throwing out, but the girls were composting anything remotely organic, and we didn"t have any waste to speak of.
"That"s one of your wife"s projects. Take all the clothes and sheets and tie them up inside garbage bags for two weeks and you kill all the lice, even the eggs. They all hatch and die."
I nodded without saying anything as I surveyed the forest for anything that looked edible.
The double-edged sword of being an omnivore was that while I could eat nearly anything, it also meant that I had to decide what was edible.
Almost everything in the forest held some possibility of being eaten-berries, nuts, leaves, shoots. I"d always thought that it was the human brain that had enabled us to cover the planet, but really it was our stomachs and our ability to eat almost anything that crossed our paths.
The problem was that eating some things could kill us. Or make us sick, but that was the same thing in our condition.
"I think I could be Chinese," I said to Chuck.
I"d been thinking about it more and more. What difference would it really make anyway? They"d become more like us lately, with all the money and wealth, and we"d become more like them, spying on our citizens. Maybe we"d reached a middle point; maybe it wouldn"t make any difference anymore who was in charge.
"Chinese-American, or American-Chinese, huh?" laughed Chuck. "That"s what you"re thinking?"
"We can"t survive out here much longer," I replied.
The creek near the cabin had mostly dried up as the last of the snow had melted, reducing it to a muddy path through the forest. To get fresh water we had to now walk to the river, over a thousand vertical feet down and several miles.
To begin with, Chuck had found some iodine to sanitize the water, but we"d run out, and now we had to try and boil it first. It was difficult to constantly boil enough, so we"d drank untreated water and contracted bouts of diarrhea. We were weakening and slowly starving to death.