I thought of the soldier sacrificed to this strange G.o.d, the one Wesley reported seeing, and wondered how many others like him had been similarly staked and dressed out on some makeshift altar, butchered to a G.o.d unknown to modern anthropology.
These were the things I was thinking as we made our way up the winding mountain pa.s.s toward my family"s cabin.
I had no idea that there would be a clan of primitives at the cabin when we arrived.
I had traveled only halfway up the private dirt road that led to the secluded cabin when I saw movement in the trees ahead. I stopped the vehicle and that"s when we heard the running feet and howls. I could see the cabin through the trees and made out more than two-dozen primitives. They must have made my cabin their home-after all, it would have been empty-and they were now running toward us, shouting war cries, bearing sticks and stones and other makeshift weapons.
I stopped the vehicle, told Tracy to protect Emily, and brought the M4 out. Martin leaped into action, as did Wesley. We met the primitives" onslaught with twenty-first century technology and weaponry, and when it was over and the primitives were all dead, and others who"d been hanging near the cabin having fled, we piled back in the vehicles and resumed our drive to the cabin.
Where we saw that they"d painted a crude caricature of that strange G.o.d-like thing on the south wall of the cabin.
And that they"d built some sort of altar on my front porch.
An altar consisting of another drawing on the front door, and what looked like more of those weird geometrical drawings on the porch floor...and two severed human heads that sat facing each other on opposite ends of the porch stoop.
"Jesus," Lori said as I pulled the SUV up to the porch.
The presence was stronger here. With it was a feeling of dread. I thought we"d be safe here. Thought we would have refuge from the primitives, away from the major urban areas where population had been more plentiful.
I was wrong.
"s.h.i.t!" I muttered. I was so frustrated, so angry, so scared, I wanted to cry.
"I don"t want to stay here," Tracy said. Her eyes were wide with fright. Emily cowered against her mother.
I know how she felt. Our retreat, our family hideaway, felt tainted now. The primitives and their strange G.o.d had marked it. I knew if we stayed here even overnight that the primitives would zero in on us. We could continue to fight them off with our superior weaponry but they would continue to come until they won.
We stayed long enough to get more food-canned and dry goods from the pantry, and then we set off again. We left just in time. A large pack of primitives was coming down the mountain. We could hear their collective war cries as we drove away.
Somehow we made it back onto the main road. We stocked up on more ammo at a sporting good"s store in town. Martin and Lori stood guard outside while Wesley and I went in and nabbed a dozen rifles and handguns and several thousand rounds of ammunition. Wesley also snagged a couple of crossbows and arrows and some basic camping equipment-a Bunsen grill, various knives, some canteens, sleeping bags, tents. We piled this material in the back of the SUV and the Jeep, and by the time we peeled away the roar of the primitives was resounding through the valley. I was surprised there weren"t any remaining in town when we drove in. Perhaps they"d instinctively left the area, zeroing in on some internal compa.s.s, heading on their own ma.s.s exodus somewhere only they were being called to.
We made it down the other end of the mountains and made camp that night in an empty Mexican restaurant on the outskirts of a small town called Gra.s.s Valley. It was there, with my laptop sitting on one of the tables in the dining area late on that first evening, that I began this narrative. It was done not only to chronicle the beginning stages of what I"ve come to call the end of human society, but to eventually doc.u.ment for future ages our struggles as we lurch toward the unknown darkness into the early years of the twenty-first century and the third millennium.
We"d killed over two hundred primitives in those first few days, and we realized that we would be in constant danger if we were in what were once heavily populated areas. Prior to the collapse of civilization, the least populated areas in North America were the upper west-the areas of Wyoming, Montana, and the Dakotas, along with Alberta, Canada. Wesley had been to that part of the country once and suggested we make that area our goal. "It"s still early enough in the summer that we could find a large house or a cabin somewhere and lay claim to it," he told us that night. "We could get firewood and make preparations to hold us over for the winter. I don"t know if the primitives will have to relearn how to make fire, but if they have to then I can guarantee that the few that are up there will freeze to death when the first winter chill hits."
"And what about us?" Tracy asked. She was cradling a sleeping Emily in her arms. "What if we can"t make it through the winter? What if we run out of food and heat, what if one of us has a heart attack or gets appendicitis and..." She let the implications trail off, but I think we knew what she was getting at.
Wesley didn"t have an answer for that and neither did I. What I did know was that everything was uncertain now. There were no guarantees that we would make it to our destination alive. There was no guarantee we would even be alive tomorrow.
So we stayed at that Mexican restaurant that night, each of us taking an evening guard shift, and then the next morning we siphoned some gas from a handful of vehicles in the parking lot and hit the road again.
And as we headed northeast out of California, crossing into Nevada and eventually through Utah, Wyoming, and into Montana over several days, I began seeing fewer of those strange drawings on the ground, on walls, on rocks and trees. And as we put distance between ourselves and California, I felt the presence grow fainter as we headed into some truly remote areas. Even as we hit secondary roads in Montana, relying on a map we"d picked up at an abandoned gas station somewhere on US 84 north of Casper, Wyoming, I was feeling more confident that we were going to be okay. We would find a place-an abandoned house somewhere, an apartment building, any kind of structure would do-and we would prepare it for the coming winter. We would find a way to harvest the land for our own use. I"d never hunted game before in my life, nor had I ever grown fruits or vegetables for consumption, but I could learn. We all would. Surely we could find an abandoned bookstore somewhere, pilfer a few volumes on gardening and hunting and how to live off the land. And to address the medical concerns that came up, we could pick up medicine, medical tools and books at an abandoned hospital or medical clinic somewhere. None of us were doctors, but we could try.
And sure enough, we did. On all counts. We learned about a very large custom-built cabin in an abandoned real estate office we camped out at one night while scouting the southern fringes of Montana. It was built for a retired hospital executive and was situated on one hundred and twenty acres of fertile land, complete with a lake. We found the place easily with the help of a map and we were in luck-the place was deserted and had sustained no damage. It was almost as if it was waiting for us to occupy it.
And it was only accessible through five miles of dirt road, far away from the secondary road, and more than one hundred miles from the nearest interstate.
That"s a good thing.
When we arrived at the cabin we checked out the structure and the surrounding grounds and quickly p.r.o.nounced it safe. The cabin was huge-constructed of thick logs, it was a large two-story, with a great room on the first floor with a stone fireplace, a large country kitchen and adjoining dining room, and a den with floor to ceiling bookshelves. Apparently the guy who owned the place was a reader in addition to being a technophile, for just off the den there was a room crammed to the hilt with computers and ham radio equipment. There were so many computer monitors and equipment in there that you could probably launch the s.p.a.ce shuttle with the stuff.
Upstairs there was what amounted to two separate wings-both left and right wings consisted of large bedrooms with their own baths. The middle section that joined them had two bedrooms with an adjoining bath. Tracy and I claimed the right wing for Emily and ourselves while Wesley took the left. Martin and Lori took the middle section, sharing the bathroom.
For the first few days, we made camp. I had not felt the presence for days. It grew fainter the farther northeast we drove, and by the time we crossed the Montana state line I didn"t feel it at all. I voiced this to Wesley, who nodded. "I don"t feel it either."
The others chimed in that they didn"t feel it, either. Likewise, during our drive through Nevada, Utah, and into Wyoming, we came across fewer primitives. If there were any normal people in that barren stretch of land, we saw no signs of them.
The area around the cabin was rich and fertile with deep woods, a stream a hundred yards behind the property, and a meadow located a mile away. Right off the front porch and beyond the large dirt circular drive lay a field that eventually blended into woods. One day, Martin, Wesley, and I took a ten-mile hike around the property, noting the terrain. Wildlife was plentiful. Wesley saw evidence that the area was lush with deer; he pointed out some spoor to Martin and me on what seemed to be a hiking trail. "We"ll have plenty of good eatin"," he said with a grin.
About a week into our stay at the cabin we were sitting outside, on the large porch that stretched along the front of the house. I had found a bunch of toys in an abandoned (and looted) general store in town the other day when Martin and I drove in to pilfer supplies, and Emily was playing with one of them-a large Barbie house. The summer night was pleasant, warm with a cool breeze.
"I haven"t felt the presence in a good while," Martin said. He was sitting in a rocking chair. "What about any of you?"
"I haven"t either," Lori said.
The rest of us chimed in. Tracy and I traded a glance, and I looked down at Emily, who"d stopped playing with her Barbies and was regarding the grownups with such a look of seriousness that was far advanced for a girl her age. I felt an instinctual urge to steer the conversation in a different direction in an attempt to shield her from the nightmares that were to come, but Emily beat me to it. "You mean that thing?" she asked. "The thing that flies?"
"What thing are you talking about honey?" Tracy asked. She leaned forward, and while she was obviously trying to be the caring mom, I could see from her body language that she was spooked by what Emily had just said.
"The thing that flies," Emily said, looking up at Tracy. "I see it sometimes."
"When do you see it, Emily?" I asked. My hand reached for the gla.s.s of scotch I was nursing.
Emily looked at me. Her expression was hard to describe. The only way I can describe it now is she looked far older than her four and a half years. "I see it in my mind. Sometimes I see it when I sleep."
We were silent for a moment. I glanced around at the others, trying not to let my fear shine through.
"Do you see it a lot, honey?" Lori asked.
Emily shook her head. "Not all the time. When I sleep mostly. But sometimes if I think about it, I"ll see it. Is it the devil?"
"Why do you ask that, honey?" Tracy asked.
"Because it flies...and it...has horns. It looks bad!"
I thought back to that drawing Wesley sketched out in California. With what looked like wings, what appeared to be horns sprouting from its head, and that evil visage...it did look like what we, as a culture comprised of Judeo-Christian Americans, would consider the devil. I was not a Christian-before the world ended, I was a strict agnostic, my spiritual beliefs leaning more toward those of my Native American ancestors. Those beliefs had dwindled since the days of my late teens and early twenties when I"d embraced my heritage and partic.i.p.ated in powwows and tribal gatherings, and they made more sense to me than the strict regimen of Christianity. Tracy, on the other hand, had been raised in a Christian household, and while she had not been a practicing Christian in the traditional sense of going to church every Sunday, she was a believer. We were raising Emily with an open mind toward religion. We wanted Emily to develop a spiritual faith on own terms, to find a path that was right for her. We"d talked to her about some basic concepts of Christianity and Judaism, told her about G.o.d, Jesus Christ, and the Devil. She also knew about Santa Claus, The Easter Bunny, and The Tooth Fairy. She believed in all of them. She was four.
What a smart-a.s.s thing to think. If I only knew then...
"Emily," Wesley began. He was taking keen interest in what Emily was saying. He leaned forward in his chair, his demeanor totally disarming. In the days we"d been on the road Wesley had allowed Emily to get to know him on her terms and our own, and that made me feel good. He was a father too, and I know he was grieving for his wife and son. He didn"t talk about it much, but late at night when he wasn"t on guard shift he would retreat to his quarters with a bottle of scotch and we wouldn"t see him until the following morning when he would emerge tired, eyes red from crying and worry, and soldier on. The few times I asked if he was okay, if there was anything I could do, he would politely turn down my offer of help and say he was doing as well as he could under the circ.u.mstances. I no longer held reservations against him from a few weeks before, when he"d been forced to kill Heather.
Emily looked at Wesley as he seemed to think of the right words to say. "You not only see this thing in your dreams, but do you still feel its presence...like the way we felt it in California?"
Emily didn"t say anything for a moment. She appeared to truly think about it, then she shook her head. "No. I don"t feel it anymore. It used to feel like somebody was looking for us...or seeing us."
We were all riveted to what that little girl was saying. Several of us nodded in understanding.
"I don"t feel that, but..." She looked from her mother to me, perhaps in an effort to seek our help. "...I still see it in my head sometimes and...it"s far away...real far away... but...it has eyes...and they"re...searching..."
I felt myself shiver.
"Do you know what it"s searching for, honey?" Tracy asked.
"No." For the first time, Emily looked afraid. "It"s not looking for us, is it?"
Martin quickly changed the subject. "If I"m not mistaken, July 4th is coming up real soon. Do you like the Fourth of July, Emily?"
Emily brightened up quickly. "I love the Fourth of July! I like fireworks!" She clapped her hands in glee.
Later that night after Tracy laid Emily down to bed, we met outside on the porch again. It was Martin"s watch but the warm summer nights were so nice it was hard to not bask in their natural beauty. "Do you think she"s really seeing that thing or do you think she"s just dreaming about it?" Martin asked Tracy and me.
"It"s hard to say," Tracy said. She was nursing a gla.s.s of wine. Our nameless benefactor had a well-stocked bar that was going to be depleted by the end of the year if we didn"t restock it soon. "Emily"s always been an imaginative child. I"d like to think the dreams are a projection of the stress she"s no doubt going through. I don"t think she saw that drawing but-"
"She"s seen plenty of them on the drive out here," I said.
Tracy sighed. "Yeah, she has."
"The key is, she hasn"t felt the presence," Martin said. "Neither have we. I agree that her dreams might be a projection of what she"s been going through. She"s witnessed far too much for a child her age, and you and David have done remarkably well in shielding her from much of the ugliness we"ve been through. I think it might be a good idea to encourage her to share with you anything she dreams about, especially when it concerns that thing."
"You don"t think her dreams are psychic visions or something, do you?" I asked.
Martin shrugged. "No. I really don"t know. Just that..." he regarded us all calmly. His Glock rested on an end table near a tall gla.s.s of ice tea. He picked up the gla.s.s, took a sip. "...I want to keep an open mind. I don"t know what that thing is and...we all felt a presence of something. And now we don"t feel it. Right?"
I nodded, as did the rest of us. It was true. I hadn"t felt the presence since entering Montana.
"All I"m saying is we should allow Emily to naturally share her dreams with us as much as possible and without scaring her," Martin continued. "I"m far from being a child psychologist, and I"d like to think that what she"s shared with us is simply her subconscious helping her deal with the trauma of the last few weeks."
"That"s what I"d like to think too," Tracy said.
"But we don"t know for sure," I said.
"Right," Martin intoned.
I didn"t like the idea of using Emily as a conduit to that thing, because that"s what Martin was suggesting. I expressed this to Tracy later that night in the sitting room of our wing.
"I think we might be over-reacting just a little bit," Tracy said. "Emily"s an imaginative child and she"s gone through a lot the past few weeks. I think it"s possible she"s connected the presence we felt to that drawing, and even though she no longer feels the presence itself, she"s retained the image of whatever that thing is and has dreamed about it. I think her subconscious has pegged it as a symbol for what"s happened."
Tracy"s explanation made a lot of sense. And in the days that followed, Tracy researched the subject of childhood trauma and dreams further in a series of books on childhood care and development I"d brought home from our first big expedition into town. Emily"s behavior didn"t change either, a further stamp of approval on Tracy"s hypothesis.
Within a few days we decided to make the cabin our permanent home in this new world. It just felt safe. The remote location, the absence of primitives, much less other people who, to tell you the truth, I did not want to run across, was the deciding factor.
Our days were spent securing our new home, making sure we had enough provisions. Making sure there were no signs of primitives, or other normal humans. We agreed that if we came across any normal people, either on our trips into town for provisions, or if any came across our territory, that we would have to a.s.sume they were hostile until they proved otherwise.
"It might be a good idea to make only periodic trips to town," Lori said one day during breakfast. "Say one every few months. Both to save on gas, and less exposure for us in case trouble does happen to head this way."
I thought back to how we found out about this cabin. We had taken a copy of the real estate listing with us when we left the building, but how many other copies were left? I mentioned this casually to the group, then made a mental note that next time we were in town to find all references to the cabin in that real estate office and destroy them. I didn"t want to give anybody else the same idea we had.
Wesley marked down the days with a large calendar the former owner had tacked up on a cork bulletin board in a kitchen alcove. He also made himself responsible for the weapons, securing boxes of various caliber rounds in a utility room off the garage. The guns and more ammunition were stored in two large gun cabinets in the living room that we kept unlocked. Wesley explained this was a necessity in the event we needed to get to them immediately. Because the weapons were already loaded and ready for use, the living room was the only place in the house Emily was not allowed in by herself.
In addition, Wesley took it upon himself to learn how the generator worked, and in no time had the electricity running. He also started fiddling with the ham radio equipment in what he was now calling "the radio room." He got the main console powered up and searched across all the bands, trying to get a signal. He was sure that eventually people like us would stumble upon similar equipment, which they would use to attempt to communicate with others in a feeble attempt to regroup. Civilization might be gone, but the satellites we"d launched into s.p.a.ce were still up there orbiting the planet. "We have to be aware of our own kind," he told us one night over dinner. "We have to know what"s out there, what"s going on in the rest of the world." I agreed. It was better to know how the rest of the world was faring than to not know.
On July 2nd Wesley and I drove into town in the Jeep. We saw no primitives, no signs of human life. In addition to getting supplies such as food-mostly canned and dry goods-first aid supplies, household goods, and more weapons and ammunition, we also found a couple sets of two-way radios. "So we can communicate better on trips like this, and around the grounds," Wesley explained. He also scooped up a CB radio kit and several books on short-wave and ham radio. I found a couple of medical books, some kids books for Emily, some DVDs to try out on the entertainment center in the great room (might as well take advantage of the way our benefactor powered his property), among other things. Our last stop was the real estate office where we searched for other references to the cabin and destroyed those we found.
On July 4th we had our own Independence Day celebration. Martin grilled hotdogs and hamburgers from the supply that was still in our benefactor"s freezer. Emily wanted to play with sparklers, which Tracy and I forbade. "We don"t want to start a fire," I told her. Emily didn"t like it, and we were probably going a little overboard, but it was a different world now.
That night as the darkness crept in, we watched Emily chase fireflies. Lori, Tracy, and I stepped out to join her, running through the fields, laughing and chasing each other around while Wesley stood watch on the deck. Later we all congregated on the back deck, and as Emily reclined with Tracy on a La-Z-Boy, Martin summed up what I think all of us were feeling. "Over two hundred years ago, people in this country sacrificed their lives for their independence. How could their descendents f.u.c.k it up so quickly?"
None of us had an answer for that.
Two days later we came up with a basic plan of survival for the coming months and years. All of us had some kind of watch patrol, and that went on twenty-four seven. Our individual strengths and talents were utilized for other things. Martin admitted to being an amateur chef and was deemed the house cook while Tracy, who once had multiple first aid certifications in her youth and spent some corporate time at an HMO, was deemed the house MD. Of course the guys we had were pretty able bodied and strong, so we all joined in for any kind of manual labor that needed to be done. Lori had been into gardening in her past life and she took it upon herself to take stock of the surrounding vegetation and draw up a list of what she wanted to cultivate next spring. "Maybe next trip into town you can pick this stuff up in the greenhouse section of Wal-Mart," she said, handing me a list of herbs and vegetables. No problem.
There was no real official leader. With only six of us in our group, one of us being a child under the age of five, we all pretty much fell in to our duties and took charge of other things. I think the only defacto "government" type of meeting we had was one night a few days after July 4th when we agreed to a.s.sume all non-primitive humans were hostile. Wesley clarified things by saying, "Anybody comes across here, we try to take them peacefully. If they"re not peaceful, we kill them."
"What do we do with them if they are peaceful?" I asked. "Tie them up and chain them to the posts in the bas.e.m.e.nt?"
"Yes," Wesley said. He wasn"t kidding. "I"ve partic.i.p.ated in interrogations. I"ll be able to tell if they"re telling me the truth. We find out what they know and we"ll use whatever information we learn to base our next decision on."
It made sense, especially in our neck of the woods where the human population seemed to be nonexistent. I had a feeling that if James Goodman were still with us, he would have been the lone dissenting voice in that decision. That last gasp of good old-fashioned liberalism straining to hold on.
Meanwhile, every day, Wesley spent time in the radio room poring over books, twiddling k.n.o.bs and switches, teaching himself the ins and outs of ham radio. We"d already tried the computers and failed at connecting with the Internet. I always wondered how this guy would have connected to the Internet way out in the middle of b.u.mf.u.c.k anyway without a landline. I asked Wesley how this was possible one night and he pointed out the small satellite dish on the roof as possibly being military.
Tracy was beginning a home schooling program for Emily. Lori a.s.sisted when possible. Still grieving over Eric"s loss, Tracy would often retreat to our suite and not emerge for hours. One day I went up there to see if she was okay and she was crying hysterically. She was clutching his baby pictures in her lap. "Go away! Please, leave me alone!" I retreated, afraid for her sanity, realizing that she"d never get over the loss of her firstborn child. The few times I tried to bring it up to her she"d say, "I can"t talk about it right now," and turn away.
Lori Smith became my sounding board, my personal therapist, for all things concerning Tracy and Eric. "She just needs time to heal," she told me one afternoon. We were sitting on the back deck, watching Emily play with her Barbie dollhouse on the lawn below. "Right now Emily is her world. She"s keeping herself together because she has Emily. If she didn"t...even though she loves you, I think she"d be in worse shape than she is now."
Lori was right. All I could do was try to be supportive and learn to read Tracy"s emotions. I cared for Emily as much as I could during those weeks, and we allowed Emily to run free and live her childhood as much as we could that summer. I played with her frequently. There were afternoons when Emily and I would run in the fields and I"d pick her up and swing her by her hands, listening as she laughed. Then I"d tickle the soft skin of her belly and she"d giggle hysterically. It was times like that when I forgot everything that had happened, when I wished I could envelop Tracy and Emily into a world of endless fields where we"d play and be childlike, without a care in the world. I felt so good about giving that to Emily, giving her this opportunity to be a child, that if I could die with happiness that would be my crowning achievement: making my little girl feel happy. Alive. Cared for. Loved.
Those feelings solidified for me late at night when I"d creep into our bedroom on bare feet, Emily nestled against Tracy, both of them fast asleep. I"d pause for a moment, watching them sleep so peacefully, so calmly, and then I"d cry for a world our child would never have...a life she"d never have or experience. I"d cry for her future, for the future of others, the world.
But despite that, we soldiered on.
And we saw no primitives.
Or normal people for that matter.
I began to settle into the notion that perhaps it would be okay if we were the last sane people on earth. We would do okay on our own. We would survive.
Besides, if there were other people somewhere, say in larger metropolitan areas, who hadn"t been killed, surely many of them had banded together in their own civilizations. The old system of government would be gone and, as we"d discussed before, tyrants would emerge and rule by force and fear. Surely we were better off by ourselves, far away from the possibility of living under such harsh conditions.
There was no way to find out if this was happening. And we had no desire to send somebody out to scout outlying areas and report back if this was happening.
Besides, the primitives would eventually die out, right?
And then one night in late July, as I was preparing to head upstairs to my suite, Wesley called me over to the radio room.
It seems he"d made contact with somebody.
Our world changed again that night.