by Angela Scott
But wild berries could kill a person. Stomach pains, diarrhea, and then death.
Yes, death.
Did deer have two stomachs or stomach acid that made it okay to eat stuff that humans shouldn’t?
“They could be poisonous.” I shuffled from one foot to the other. “Or they could be regular old raspberries. What do I do? What do I do?” Starvation. Death. Starvation. Death.
Eat the berries? I could die. Not eat the berries? I could die.
We needed food. I had stretched our rations as best as I could, trying to keep what foods Callie could eat for her. A cat could only stomach so much without getting sick. I needed to find better food for my cat. I could feel her ribs through her fur coat. She needed tuna and chicken and stuff like that, not mushy granola and berries with a bit of jerky.
I needed to get us off the mountain.
If the raspberries were not dangerous, then eating them would be short of a miracle and would buy us more time.
“Okay, deer, I’m trusting you.”
The deer turned and eyed me, her mouth chewing the fruit. She stared at me and then resumed eating. My decision didn’t seem to affect her one way or the other.
Callie had fallen asleep on my shoulder, her stomach rising and falling with each little breath. Her whiskers tickled my neck. If this were a steak bush, I’d be waking her up. I let her nap.
I picked a berry from a branch and held it, examining it from every angle. It looked perfect.
“Ahhh … okay, great wizard in the sky, I really don’t want to die. Please don’t let this be a deadly berry. Amen” And I plopped it into my mouth.
The sweet tartness of the fruit exploded in my mouth, coating my tongue. Little, almost microscopic seeds found their way into the spaces between my teeth. I plucked handful after handful, eating them like a kid in a candy store. More, more, more. The thorns on the bushes scratched my bare hands, but it was totally worth it.
I’d almost forgotten what raspberries tasted like. Had they always been this heavenly?
The deer turned from the bush and started down the trail. Usually, she walked a few paces and then turned to see if I followed, but she didn’t.
Shoot.
Berries on the bush still called out to me, but with the deer ready to move on, I reluctantly left the bush of goodness behind.
Deer or berries?
It wasn’t even a hard pick.
Something about that deer kept me following it.
What the hell? This can’t be right.
I wanted it to be a mirage, a mistake.
I’d climbed down a freaking mountain for this? For this!
Miles and miles of nothingness. Flat barren land, dried and cracking, stretched in every direction. Well, every direction except the lush mountain behind me. The mountain I had spent many days climbing down. The mountain where people died, where I lost my family.
I collapsed to my knees. This isn’t possible.
The deer stood still at my side, unmoving.
Callie leaped from my shoulder, circled a patch of crusty earth, and proceeded to take a very long pee. The ground swallowed up the liquid. Seconds later, the wet spot was completely dried.
“What is going on?” I screamed at the cloudless sky above me. “What is going on?”
I knew my state geography. I had studied the counties, county seats, the natural landscapes. I had drawn in the rivers and labeled the mountains. Arid salt flats? How? Salt flats were found in Utah, not here.
Whatever it was, it stretched on for miles. No rivers. No trees. Not one bush or plant. No towns. No cities. No signs of life. Nothing.
Gone. All of it. Whatever was there before no longer existed.
A wasteland.
I bent forward, my head against the hard ground. “I can’t do this. I can’t. I … I can’t.”
The idea of turning around and climbing back up the mountain? No, I couldn’t. Going forward, into the unknown nothingness? I couldn’t do that either.
I lay there, bent into a ball with my head against the dirt.
It was over. This was the end.
I’d survived so much for this? I couldn’t even cry.
Meow.
Callie shoved herself into the small dark space I had created with my body and molded into the perfect puzzle piece that fit just right, her face inches from my own.
The deer nudged me with her head, pushing against my shoulder.
“I don’t know what you guys want from me.”
This wasn’t something that I could fix. It was bigger than all of us.
I didn’t know what I expected to find when I came off the mountain, but this was not it.
We needed food. We needed water. We needed shelter.
None of that was here.
Meow.
The deer nudged me again.
I sat up but stayed on the ground. “What? What do you guys think I can do? Look around us! There’s nothing here! Nothing!” Even though I raised my voice, raised it loudly, neither animal moved. The one time they both united on something.
“We’re going to die! We’re going to shrivel up and die! If we go back into the mountains, we die.” I pointed at the deer. “Maybe not you, but we will.” I waved my hand between my cat and me. “We won’t make it on that mountain and if we head out there…“ I waved my hand toward the crackled earth and froze.
The mid-afternoon sun glinted off something in the distance. My words trailed off. My arm hung in the air. The glare was so far away that it appeared no bigger than a speck, something easily missed. I moved my head slowly from side to side, unsure if what I saw was real. The tiny dot of light remained.
I clamored to my feet, brushed off the dirt, and shielded my eyes with both hands. Something reflected the light and bounced it back in my direction.
“It might not be anything.” I lowered my hands, but then quickly raised them once more to scour the area for anything else. Nothing. I turned my attention back to the flickering light. “It’s probably a piece of junk, maybe an abandoned car.” Out here, where nothing existed, I refused to let my hopes rise. I made that mistake too many times. I knew better. “There’s nowhere to hide, no shelter, nothing. If the sun decides to fry us, we fry. If a tornado comes roaring in or some big gusts of wind decide to show up, there’s nothing to hang onto, nothing to grab. We’ll be killed. Simple as that. Dead. So very dead.”
The deer took a few steps in the direction of the dot of light. She stopped and glanced back at me.
“No.” I shook my head. “If I go, you can’t come.”
The deer continued to stare at me, her nose twitching, her tail swishing side to side.
“You have to stay here, go back into the mountains.” I made a shooing motion, trying to get her to run back into the hills, where she could graze on grass and berries and whatever else deer ate. “There’s nothing out here for you.” Heck, there’s nothing out here for me either.
She walked away, but not into the mountains as I wanted her too. She moved farther out into the dry nothingness. The hard ground cracked and broke with each placement of her hooves. The sun beat down on the surface of the flat land, causing a rippling effect in the air that surrounded her.
Callie glanced up at me and let out a tiny, almost questioning meow. Before I could grab her, she bounded after the deer, the leash dragging behind her. The traitor.
“Wait!” I started after them but stopped. I turned and ran back to the edge of the mountainside. The deer would die if I didn’t do something, so I shoved as much grass and leaves into my backpack while keeping a close eye on the two animals that seemed oblivious to my actions.
We were going to die. I had no doubt. We didn’t have enough food. We had barely enough water. Depending on how tricky the weather decided to be, we had no shelter. Not even a small tree to protect us.
I put my faith in the deer and followed her.
She damn well better be right.
Chapter 20
Shoes.
Dozens of them.
Men’s shoes. Women’s shoes. Children’s shoes.
Pairs placed side by side on the crusty ground, as if someone carefully arranged them just right and then vanished. All of them pointed the same way, pointing in the same direction we walked.
I saw no other clothing items, just the shoes, faded by the sun and covered in a fine layer of dirt. No bodies, thank goodness.
Only the pairs of shoes.
They spread out in every direction, sometimes yards apart and sometimes I could walk a half mile or more before seeing another set. No two sets of shoes were the same, and no two sets ever appeared right next to another pair. There didn’t appear to be any order to them at all. The randomness of the abandoned shoes caused an eeriness to hang in the air. I walked a bit slower.
Even the animals sensed the combined spookiness and sacredness of it all and purposefully went out of their way to maneuver around the shoes. At one point, Callie leapt into my arms, begging to be carried, and buried herself in the crook of my arm with her eyes barely peeking over the edge of my elbow. I didn’t mind at all.
In any other circumstance, non-apocalyptic, something might seem almost artistic to the layout and design of it all — the vast nothingness and all the different shoes, representing different people, different lives.
Instead of feeling profound and inspired by the display, a heavy sadness settled in my chest. Fear, anxiety — which I kept in check by managing my breathing and petting my cat — and an abnormal level of strangeness couldn’t be denied.
With every pair of shoes, I couldn’t help but slow my walking and glance around me in all directions. There was nowhere to hide, no trees, no hills, not even a bush. The weirdness of it all kept me on guard. Something had happened here, and it wasn’t good.
“If I start taking off my shoes, you guys stop me, okay?” I put my fate in the hands of a deer and a selfish cat. My odds of survival perpetually worsened.
The surface of the ground cracked with each step we took. Only Callie’s steps had left the ground unmarred. We left trails behind us. We couldn’t help it. Even the slightest weight cracked the ground. We couldn’t hide our crackled steps from anyone who might follow us.
No other trails appeared in the parched landscape, no other indication that someone had been there. I looked to the sky, which though ridiculous, seemed like the only explanation. Poof. Evaporated.
I shivered despite the wicked heat.
How long had the shoes been sitting there? How much time had passed? I had no idea. Maybe the weather and passing of days erased the trails, but I could hardly wrap my mind around that idea. The shoes hadn’t moved. Not even one shoe was missing. None lay on its side. Perfect pairs of shoes placed in various locations stretched over the course of miles—super strange.
I wanted to get out of there. I was even willing to go back into the thicket of the mountains to get away from the shoes. The deer kept leading us farther away from the mighty hills. The mountain ridge lay behind us, lining the horizon like a zigzag drawn on the bottom edge of a paper, miles and miles away.
Going back meant no hope. I already knew what was back there. Going forward gave us at least a sliver of a chance.
Basically, walking toward the glittering light sucked a little less than walking back to the mountain. Not much less suckage, but less.
I didn’t know what exactly I expected the glistening to be. I kept my expectations low to avoid disappointment. If the shoes hadn’t already confused me, the never-ending chain-link fencing would have.
Out in the middle of nowhere, a fence divided the nothingness in half. The weathered signs attached to the fence with their backs facing us, making them unreadable to me, made me realize that I was on the wrong side of this deal.
I ran my hand over the metal links, touching one of the backs of the many many signs spaced every couple of feet along the fence to assure myself that it was real.
It was.
The fence must have been time consuming and tedious to put up. It existed for a reason. Without being able to read the posted signs, I couldn’t possibly know exactly what that point was, but to me it seemed clear — either it was built to trap people like me inside, or to keep people out.
Not great options either way.
I could’ve climbed it, shoved Callie in the backpack and heave-hoed myself over the top. It was about ten feet high, high enough to be a deterrent, but not so high it wasn’t climbable. The top wasn’t lined with barbed wire or anything menacing. I didn’t hear sounds of electricity to zap a person. I’d touched it and didn’t fry. It was just a plain old chain link fence smack in the middle of dried up salt flats.
Yeah, I could’ve climbed it and was tempted to, but I had a deer to think about. Deer could jump fences, but a ten-foot tall fence? That seemed highly unlikely. Impossible even.
“Now what?” I gave the fence a little shake. It stayed intact and solidly placed in the ground. No wiggle room. I shook it one more time. “I guess we keep walking, right? Hope for a break in the fence somewhere?”
I turned to the deer as if talking and asking advice from an animal was a perfectly normal thing to do.
Only she wasn’t there.
I hadn’t heard a thing. No preamble running. No soaring noise in the sky. Nothing.
She stared at me through the opposite side of the fence, blinking those big brown eyes of hers.
I stumbled back, taking several steps. “No, no. That’s not even … how? How did you? What in the … Noooooo!”
I could accept the weird shoes and the strange fence, but this?
Sure enough, she stood there, tipping her head side to side, watching me, her hooves scratching the ground impatiently.
Maybe she’d jumped the fence when I explored it. She was young, not much more than a baby, really. Maybe she leaped over the fence. It wasn’t as if I were an expert on deer. Heck, all I knew about deer I learned from watching Bambi.
Maybe it was possible.
I couldn’t quite wrap my brain around how.
“Okay, Callie.” I gave my cat a few good pets before doing my best to shove her in my backpack. “I guess we climb.”
The thin metal of the chain links bit into my hands, making it difficult to grasp. The toes of my boots barely fit into each groove. I fought to hang on, using my upper body strength to keep from plummeting to the ground while my feet struggled to get a toehold.
Having not eaten much of anything in days and drinking very little water didn’t help. I swung my legs over the top of the fence and climbed most of the way down, until I couldn’t hang on any longer and let go. I collapsed on the ground, rolling to my side to keep from squishing my cat.
A sharp pain zipped through my chest, but quickly lessened in intensity as each second passed. It sucked being broken and bruised, but as the pain went away, I realized maybe I was starting to heal. Being a normal able-bodied person again would be super helpful, especially now. As I lay there, taking a little longer than normal to sit up, I knew I still had a long way to go.
The deer pawed at the ground again. I lifted my arm and waved off her impatience. “I don’t have magical powers, so cut me some slack, will you? That was harder than it looked.”
Callie screeched from inside the backpack. I unzipped it and let her out. She wiggled and fought at the leash, trying to get away from me. Who could blame her? We fell from the fence and I almost turned her into a pancake. She was free from me like she wanted. If the stupid cat bolted, so be it. I didn’t have the strength to chase her, but she found a place in the shade of the deer, sat down, and licked her paws.
Always grooming, that cat. I couldn’t even remember the last time I’d brushed my teeth or combed my hair. And a shower? Yeah, I was smelling quite ripe.
Slowly, I made my way to my feet. I dusted off my pants but stopped. Though faded, the words on the signs still had the same impact: DO NOT ENTER. NO TRESPASSING BEYOND THIS POINT. STRICTLY ENFORCED. RESTRICTED AREA. HAZARDOUS COND
ITIONS. CONTROLLED AREA.
Some signs were in Spanish, with others in languages I didn’t recognize. Whoever constructed the fence wanted everyone, and I mean everyone, to know that going beyond the fence was a no-no.
I had just come from the no-no area. To see the fence stretching in both directions and the different colored signs telling people to stay out brought about several different feelings. None of them good.
Well, except one — that maybe now things would be better.
Chapter 21
It would be foolish to think people would wait for me at the next town, their arms open wide, welcoming me and congratulating me on not dying and for finding them in an oasis of happy survivors. It would be dumb. It would be unrealistic. Only an idiot would believe any of that.
Apparently, I was an idiot, a fool, a total dumb-dumb.
But this was the right side of the fence. I stood on the right side of the fence, and I wanted it all to be true so badly that it hurt when it wasn’t.
I took a deep breath and blew it out along with my frustration and disappointment.
The lone town situated less than twenty miles from the fence was abandoned. Of course, it was. Why in the world would anyone want to live there? It would be much too close to the craziness and destruction for anyone’s liking. I’d bolt, too, if given the choice.
Still, it sucked.
The deer found a few leaves clinging to a bush in front of a used car dealership, barren of cars. Callie sat at my feet, content on her leash, as I processed the fact that salvation and normalcy would not happen today.
Food, shelter, water. Those had been my goal.
I stood unmoving in the middle of the four-lane street.
I wanted more.
The streetlights at the intersection above my head didn’t change colors—red, yellow, green. No cars waited to turn left or right. The dark interior of stores looked creepy. As hungry and thirsty as I was, I wasn’t quite ready to explore them.
Maybe this was as good as it would ever get. This thought crept in and kept me from doing anything but stare down the vacant streets.
