by LeRoy Clary
I asked if she’d seen a can of peaches in with the others. After the pears, peaches sounded like caviar and rare white wine. Suddenly, that was a goal of mine. Find and eat peaches. The pears had been good, but peaches would be better.
“Cravings,” Sue said in a knowing way. “Mine is chocolate. Remember those big boxes on Valentine's day? I want one. A red one. The whole thing. Eat until I’m sick.”
That started a verbal contest of what we missed most. The list was ever-changing, odd, lilting, and at the same time, humorous. I wanted to watch western movies again. She wanted to date a tall basketball player. I wanted to surf in Hawaii. She wanted to learn to drive a truck—a big one, all the way across the country.
We laughed. We cried. Time passed and we fell asleep. When morning arrived, we were still sharing the same sleeping bag. I tried to slip out without waking her and get in another. She woke, realized what I was doing, and cried because, obviously, I didn’t like her.
I climbed back in and held her.
We warmed baked beans in our only pot for breakfast. They were the kind with the little sausages. Sue had never eaten them. After a few snide comments from her while they cooked, when the beans were warm enough, she tentatively tried a spoonful. The disdain abruptly ended. It was her new favorite meal.
The snow had stopped, and we climbed into two sleeping bags after finding the zippers didn’t match on any of the three to make one large one. The air was too cold to spread it one on top of another. The girl would have stolen all the cover and I’d have frozen. At least, that’s the way I’d tell the story in the future.
She wouldn’t hear of sleeping alone. After the whimpers, cries, sudden starts, and once a scream in the middle of the night, I understood in my own way. She was as messed up as me. Fear didn’t describe her feelings. Terror did. I finally realized she had lost far more than me.
Two weeks ago, she had a mother, father, sisters, brothers, aunts, uncles, friends, neighbors, and classmates, and a nice safe home. Now she had me, no matter how haphazard our relationship, or how poor my interpersonal skills. I was it. Her instincts were to cling to me.
Mine were more basic. I wanted to live. Survive.
After eating, we huddled under two sleeping bags facing each other. She said, “Did you hear me when I said I need a gun?”
“Did you hear that rifle yesterday morning? People miles away did.”
“I want one like yours so I can make a silencer and carry lots of spare little bullets in my pocket.”
“We’ll see what we can find, but your ideas are good. You’re learning. Not many people are going to continue fighting with you if they have one of your tiny bullets in them.”
She looked up at the roof of the tunnel. “The boom of that rifle was stupid-loud. I never heard one before but understand why you don’t want a rifle like that around here. What sort of sound does yours make with that goofy-looking homemade silencer?”
I had to chuckle. Then, got serious. “I don’t know.”
“Why not?”
“I didn’t want anyone to hear it, so I didn’t test it.”
“You’ve never tried it?” She sounded incredulous.
“Nope.” I paused. “And if all goes well, I won’t.”
“That is really stupid. You know more, so tell me.”
I cracked a smile. “You heard the boom of that rifle. My gun makes a crack compared to that rifle, maybe half the noise, probably less. If I had fired my gun while standing beside the rifle, you may not have even heard it from the same distance. If the silencer does anything at all, I expect to hear a pop, about like a balloon popping. You’ll hear it a hundred yards away, not a mile or two.”
She gave the tilt of her head that I was beginning to realize that meant she was thinking and disagreeing with me. “So, that is not really a silencer, but a shrinker. It reduces the sound, but it is still loud?”
I couldn’t argue. Without testing the homemade item, shrinking the sound was okay with me if that’s all it did.
Sue said, “If someone is close, they will hear it?”
“If they would hear a balloon popping at the same distance, yes.”
She gave a slight nod. “It won’t bring people hunting for you from miles away, and that’s good. Will it kill? Yes, I suppose so, especially if you shoot them four or five times, huh?”
Again, I couldn’t argue.
She had a far-away look in her eyes. She shivered and looked back at me. “I didn’t really bury them in our yard, you know. None of them. I lied about that. My father said to get as far away as fast as I could and leave everyone there where they were. Him included. He insisted and I agreed to do it.”
“He told you the right thing.” It was all I could think to say.
She continued as if she hadn’t heard, “Do you think we could go back and do that someday? Bury my family?”
It only took a microsecond to realize what a good-intentioned idea that was, and another microsecond to realize in practical terms, that it was a terrible idea. Rotting bodies of her family couldn’t be good for her to see. Worse were ones strewn about while animals ate the flesh. There would be maggots for sure. My eyes met hers. She was waiting for an answer. “Not right away. Too dangerous.”
“Maybe later?”
My voice choked up. I nodded slowly, knowing my nods were lies.
CHAPTER THREE
Our basic plan, meaning my plan which I hadn’t yet fully discussed with Sue, was to wait safely in the tunnels until the spring thaw. It was a good plan until the middle of the night when a shotgun blast erupted and echoed down the mountain and through the quiet valleys. We woke and leaped from the sleeping bag. With my little twenty-two in hand, I rushed down the tunnel in the dark wearing my underwear, too afraid to use the LED flashlight.
A wolf, or better said, the bloody, shattered remains of a wolf greeted me. The animal was nearly decapitated from the buckshot. My ears were still ringing from the blast when Sue came up behind me, a kitchen knife taken from the cabin held at the ready.
Her first words pulled me back to reality. “Do you think anyone heard?”
I thought everyone within five miles had heard the blast.
A glance outside the mouth of the tunnel revealed it was no longer snowing. The entrance was hidden by the small cedars and firs, but a thorough search of the area by anyone hearing the shotgun would find it. My only weapon to protect us was the small handgun, and of course, the shotguns. I’d decided that carrying a larger caliber would tempt me to use it and that would put me in more danger, so I had ignored the temptation.
The pair of shotguns was the result of a search of a single-wide mobile home hidden in the trees, down an overgrown driveway near where I’d parked my car. It was an accidental find. The scattered remains of a man and a woman were in the yard and I chanced slipping inside to the bedroom. That’s where most valuables are usually kept, and the shotguns hung on pegs attached to the imitation wood wall. A nearly full box of shells was on a dresser.
I grabbed the guns and shells and raced outside where I let the air escape from my lungs. Breathing inside didn’t seem a good idea. The bodies were outside, and nobody had definitively proved how the flu was transmitted, so I’d made the entire venture inside on one breath. Right now, the shotgun traps I’d set didn’t seem like as good an idea as when I’d set them. Neither did being attacked by a wolf, but it was too late to second-guess my earlier actions.
“We can stay here,” Sue said with a ring of desperation. “Rig a few more alarms, reload the shotgun, and if they get past that, you have your little gun. We’ll get some more guns, too.”
She had me almost convinced until she said the last two words along with mentioning my little gun. If an enemy made it past the shotguns, he or they would carry heavier firepower. Enough time had elapsed since the flu struck that many people would have secured weapons such as Sue had carried. Maybe leaving hers in the snow had been a poor idea. Maybe choosing to live in a mining tunn
el with only one entrance was a mistake. There was no back door.
The few people who had survived the flu, and who were living nearby were most likely local residents, people who lived in and around Darrington. Almost all of them hunted deer, elk, and bear. They fished the rivers and were happy living in the dense wet forests at the edge of civilization. Most were uncomfortable on their rare trips to Everett, let alone Seattle, and all the people they would encounter there were exactly what they’d tried to escape. They would have scurried back to their mountains, trees, and privacy as quickly as possible, where they knew how to survive using techniques held over from the last century.
At the time I had first moved into the tunnel, locating where the smoke exited should have been more important to me. It may have provided another way out, a bolt-hole. The downside was that if I found it, I’d know of another entrance to worry over and try to protect. I’d rejected doing anything—a stupid decision, it seemed. I’d just wanted another basement to hide in—and if somehow there was Internet access, I’d have willingly stayed for months.
“No, we have to leave here,” I reluctantly told her, as my mind raced with details that I should have thought about two weeks ago. Prepared for. Only an idiot would not have had a “go-bag” considering the circumstances. I should have been prepared to run off in minutes, taking only what was critical to my survival. That’s the problem with being lazy by nature. I put things off until they became critical.
“How long do we have to stay away?”
She asked the damned hard questions. Her thinking was that we’d return after a few days and things quieted down. I wasn’t so sure. I didn’t know anything as a fact, so I ventured, “Two days? Three? Maybe more.”
Before asking for an explanation of my estimate, she gathered two sleeping bags, a little food we could eat cold, her boots, a warm coat, and I stood and watched like an invalid. She hissed at me, telling me to get my ass busy in a way that got me moving.
I got my boots on, a coat, and other warm clothing. On the way out, I grabbed two more shotgun shells, replaced the spent ones, and reset the tripwire. Then, because we wouldn’t be there and I didn’t want to be responsible for killing an innocent person a month or even a year from now, I disabled them both. We reached the entrance, but instead of rushing out and leaving fresh tracks across the clearing, we edged along the face of the cliff with our backs to it. The melt running down the rocks would soon dissolve our footprints. The warmer weather was already melting the snow, so it was only six inches deep.
Where a heavy stand of trees began, we hunched over and entered the forest, so it wasn’t quite leaving an obvious trail of footprints. A game path wound around the side of the hill and then upward. When we reached twenty feet of elevation and a small ledge, I unrolled an eight by ten sheet of tan plastic and placed it on the ground.
Since nobody was in sight in the predawn, I told Sue, “Move around and gather green branches from the backside of the nearby trees. Slice the limbs off, don’t hack. It will make less noise.”
I helped. We scattered a layer of green on the tarp and placed a pile a foot high at the front edge. While lying down, we could observe the clearing with the entrance to the tunnel and the trees beyond where I would expect people investigating the gunshot to arrive. From down there, they couldn’t see us.
If people came, we could move backward, remain hidden by the top of the hill, and quietly leave by a back way. Behind us were more miles of the Cascade Mountains and beyond them, even more. I hadn’t scouted the area extensively but suspected we’d soon run out of people and find deeper snow to move through.
Maybe a good idea, or a better one, would come to me while we waited and watched. The problem was not the initial escape. I felt confident about that. It was what came after. No shelter. No food. Constant cold. And of course, the daily fear of being discovered.
Shortly after dawn, a movement below drew my attention. Sue stiffened beside me, telling me wordlessly that she had seen it also. Shortly after, three figures appeared, moving ahead eight or ten yards apart, side by side, like the military would do. Each held a rifle as comfortably as if it was an extension of their arms. All the rifles had scopes, and their clothing were all variations of army camouflage, like a mix-and-match from a grab bag of leftovers. They were heavyset, all three wore beards, and they moved carefully, searching. They knew someone nearby had fired that shot.
Despite the weapons and military dress, they didn’t seem military. Each dressed differently, the camo patterns varied even on the individual, and their long hair and beards didn’t fit my image of troops. At the edge of the clearing, they paused and used their scopes to examine everything ahead before advancing into the open. I reached out and pushed Sue’s face into the tarp as I did the same to mine. Spotting hair and our hats behind the little brush we’d placed in front of us would be almost impossible if we remained still. They would spot our faces in their scopes instantly if we watched.
I used my ears. The men didn’t speak. I heard the snap of a branch and when I looked again, they were moving parallel to the hillside, away from us. They had missed the tunnel entrance. Their footprints were clear as two of them walked across the clearing, while the third remained under the cover of the trees protecting their backs. He used his scope to scan the entire area again as if suspecting they were in the right place, but he found no evidence of us.
If they had spotted anything out of place, they would have, at least, whispered to each other. In the crisp, cold morning air, we’d have heard that exchange, if not the words. From our vantage, I realized that if more people arrived to search for us, they would see the tracks of the three below and realize they had seen nothing in the clearing and quickly move on. They might even follow the three men and think them responsible for the shotgun blast.
That was my recent way of thinking. Everybody hunts everybody else. Kill them all. Avoid people if possible and if not, shoot to kill. My train of thought went back to the pair at the skier’s cabin. I’d let them go when I was so near them, I couldn’t have missed a shot and Sue had seemed to approve of that action. She had no idea of how close I had come to shooting both. I’d keep that to myself.
I whispered, “Good job.”
“Being too scared to move is cause for thanks?”
My smile was unintentional. We remained still and waited. I had to pee but held it. To give in and stand to find a place to relieve myself might get us killed if there were more searchers we hadn’t spotted. An hour later, emptying my bladder became critical.
Sue slowly slid away from me, to the edge of the tarp and slipped her pants down. She relieved herself in that position and pulled her pants back up. She saw me look and said with a wry grin, “I can wash later.”
She was right, and I had to pee. I moved to the other side and rolled to my side. Afterward, we grinned at each other like school kids who had enjoyed a smoke behind the fieldhouse. We were good for another few hours of watching.
Near midmorning, a shot rang out, breaking the crisp air like a sheet of glass breaking on the pavement. Then another. Then rapidly, two more shots. The last two were higher pitched—a different gun. The last shot we heard was the same tone as the first two. Five in all. Then nothing.
In my imagination, it sounded like someone had fired two times, a different person fired twice, followed by a final shot. If it had been only a single shot, I’d have thought the shooter hit was he aimed at, like a hunter taking down a deer. The series indicated either the second shots were returning fire, or more than one person firing at a single target. There was no way to tell without investigating. But it the circumstances said there were at least two shooters out there.
“What do we do?” she asked.
“We have to go find out what happened, but not right away.”
We waited a while longer, thinking the three who had passed this way might return and we didn’t want to run into them in the heavy underbrush. Nobody returned. I pointed to our right.
“The shots came from over there in the direction they went.”
She was thinking about the same thing. “If we run into them, or others who were investigating them? What then?”
Sue’s perceptions and insights were beginning to annoy me, primarily because she was usually right. I’d already warned her about rushing to investigate gunshots and now I was about to do the same. After seeing three men we believed were hunting us, I needed to know. “We’ll be careful.”
“Why do it at all?”
This time I drew in a breath before answering. It provided enough time to hide my fears and true feelings, and it gave me time to determine the words I’d use. “The other time, the single shot we heard, didn’t really concern us. One shot, too far away to be a danger. This time, there are three men who nearly found our hideout. They were searching for us. They all carried similar rifles that should make the same sounds, more or less. That’s not what we heard, so there are more people out there who are shooting.”
“Searching for us?”
“I don’t know. What seems likely is that our three visitors met up with another person or group and had themselves a gunfight. We don’t know who won. Or what they are up to. I think we need to risk a little spying without getting involved.”
“Me too,” she agreed. “We don’t need those people sneaking up on us at night.”
I had made her wear a tan shirt of mine over the pink jacket she wore. I wore a red flannel shirt and a dark green coat over it. Movement is the first thing to give you away. Color is the second. We made sure our bright colors were hidden. “Leave our things here. We’re going to move fast and sneaky. We’ll circle around a bit and try to find out what happened. But no unnecessary talking. Not even whispering.”
