Black Autumn Travelers

by Jeff Kirkham

  “The water still needs to be boiled, okay?” Sage held up the water bottle, stating the obvious and relishing the success of his filter. The ladies looked duly impressed.

  “Yeah, we get it. Filter the water, then boil the hell out of it. None of us wants the Hershey Squirts like Penny.” Justin took the water bottle from Sage and held it up to the sky. “Looks pretty good, little man.”

  Sage had heard his dad call an open campfire the “white man’s cooking fire.” By that, he supposed his dad meant that an open campfire was big and wasteful, not that a campfire could carry racist implications.

  There had to be a more efficient way to boil water than over an open campfire. The water they boiled that morning for coffee required a huge pile of sagebrush to achieve a full boil. At that rate, they would spend most their day gathering firewood.

  The same afternoon, a group of new people wandered into camp―thirty-five people of all ages and genders. Most of them had no food and were well on their way to starvation. Their arrival set alarm bells ringing in Sage’s head.

  “The farmer is definitely going to come and kick us out if we let these people stay,” Sage reminded everyone.

  “We can’t send them away. They’re people,” Nora argued. “We’re all children of Gaia. We have no right to run them off as though we own this place.”

  “I have no idea what Gaia thinks,” Sage replied. “I don’t even know who Gaia is.”

  “Gaia is the spiritual talisman of Mother Earth,” Nora explained patiently. “She was the Greek goddess of the Earth. Saying we’re all children of Gaia is another way of saying that we all belong at the pond, or anywhere on the planet.”

  “I think I understand,” Sage continued. “But, if we think the farmer’s going to go along with us starting a refugee camp inside his farm… I’m just saying; it’s going to end badly.”

  Justin made the decision for the group. “We’ll let some of them stay, the ones like us. Then we’ll send the rest away. Agreed?” Nobody wanted to take responsibility for the decision, whether they agreed or not. Sending people away felt too much like sending them to die. Everyone either nodded or said nothing.

  “Then it’s settled.”

  Justin went around to the people he liked, mostly young women, and invited them to stay. Then he shouted to the milling crowd, “The farmer gave permission for just a few of us to camp here,” he said, “so only the folks I talked to can stay. The rest of you need to find another place away from the farm. I’m sorry, but only a few of us can camp here. It’s out of my control.”

  “Who the hell are you to decide who stays and who goes?” one guy yelled. He hadn’t been picked by Justin, probably because Justin hadn’t chosen anyone physically larger than himself.

  “It’s not my decision.” Justin held his hands out in feigned helplessness. “The farmer made it clear that only a few could stay here. Plus, we’re out of food.”

  The crowd grumbled but began to shuffle out of camp. A stroke of perverse genius, lying about the food had worked. It reminded Sage of when he certified as a Rescue SCUBA diver. He was taught that if someone panicked and grabbed him in the water, he should take a breath, deflate his buoyancy device and sink underwater. No drowning person would hold onto someone as they sank. By lying about the food, Justin gave the crowd no reason to stay.

  The crowd slowly massed and headed to the road, trundling off into the hills. Six of them stayed—the ones Justin had deemed “like us.” Five of the six were young women, and one of them was another slim hipster man named Felix.

  Sage left the group to their socializing, the Starbucks Camp going in an even more dangerous direction. They were truthfully running out of food. Regardless of Justin’s bullshit, the farmer had specifically asked them to leave. Inviting more people into camp increased the odds of expulsion.

  Sage gathered his figure-four traps and the rusty snare wire he had found. The old survival book showed how to set rabbit snares and Sage wanted to give it a try.

  A deadfall dropped a rock on an animal, smashing it. The design presumed a lot of things. Was the rock big enough to kill the animal? Would it fall fast enough to keep the animal from running out from underneath it? Would an edible creature even go for the bait in the first place?

  In any case, Sage was learning that he would have to experiment for a while before figuring out the rhythms of any given ecosphere. The more stuff he tried, the smarter he would become. It was an advantage of staying put; he could learn the natural patterns of the area. Even a valley or two over, the patterns would probably change. Moving around meant having to relearn at each place.

  Snares worked by entangling, then strangling an animal. While baited deadfalls wouldn’t normally work against plant eaters, like rabbits, snares could catch herbivores.

  Sage went with simple trail snares, where he would position a wire noose in the middle of a rabbit trail, then anchor it to a bush. Looking carefully, he could locate the rabbit thoroughfares, but finding good choke points with brushy walls required some work. Given the chance, a rabbit would simply hop around a snare unless Sage set it somewhere that forced it to squeeze through a gap in thick brush. He feared this would take many days of trial and error to master. The rabbits were clearly present, given the heavily-used trails. But tricking them into giving up their lives would be another matter altogether.

  Sage’s dad was an avid hunter. Because hunting competed for his attention with girlfriends and video games, Sage had only joined him once or twice.

  “An animal is a thousand times more adept in the wild than you are,” his dad preached. “For you to take an animal’s life on its home turf, the animal has to make a huge mistake. In a sense, the animal has to decide to allow you to kill it.”

  At the time, it had sounded like Native American folklore but, as Sage looked for places to set rabbit snares in the waning fall in eastern Washington, he sensed the truth of what his dad had said. Success would require a huge stroke of luck—the rabbits would need to cooperate. Sage said a silent prayer, begging the rabbits for their consent.

  He spent four hours setting deadfalls and snares. Some of the frozen Starbucks sandwiches had gone bad in the cooler, and Sage used the sausage and eggs for bait.

  He placed the snares along rabbit trails going in and out of fields of alfalfa. When he finished, he didn’t go back to the Starbucks Camp. Instead, he headed up to his secret stash and grabbed a Mountain House freeze-dried lasagna and his Coleman stove. He slid around to the back of the rock wall and boiled water from one of his clean water bottles to reconstitute the freeze-dried meal. He had plenty of stashed water, and there was no way he would drink the pond water, no matter how filtered and boiled it might be. Whenever he visited his cache, Sage refilled the same, blue Nalgene bottle with clean water so the others wouldn’t notice he had been drinking something different than they had.

  Grandpa Bob had given Sage a pump-action water purifier. It would purify the pond water in a single step. Problem was, Sage couldn’t produce a water purifier from thin air without causing suspicion. The water purifier hadn’t been in the backpack when he originally walked into camp. He should have kept it in his backpack from day one. Since he didn’t know how quickly the purifier might clog up from pumping pond water, part of him was glad he held it in reserve. Perhaps it was better to keep the purifier hidden with the rest of his gear, at least for the time being.

  As he enjoyed his meal, a wave of guilt washed over him. Was he cheating his friends? Sage provided way more than his fair share of food at the Starbucks Camp; he had been the one to discover the onions in the fields, after all. The thought of Penny eating only blackened onions made the lasagna stick in his throat. What kind of man had he become?

  The fact remained: he couldn’t trust the group not to take his food and kick him out. As much as he liked the idea of sharing, earlier that day the group had pushed a bunch of people off into uncertain wild lands with lies and deceit. Wilderness socialism wasn’t the utopian d
ream he had hoped, and someone was always going to get the shaft. Sage had promised his father it wouldn’t be him.

  In any case, the supplies weren’t really his to give. His grandfather and grandmother had sacrificed big for him to have so much food. Maybe it was a hollow justification, but Sage felt wrong about handing over his grandparents’ supplies to the group. His grandma and grandpa wouldn't approve.

  For the first time in his life, Sage weighed the value of his word. He had promised his father that he would do everything in his power to survive. Maybe he just wanted to believe that keeping food to himself penciled out as something other than selfishness. Maybe so, but he had promised his father, and the promise crept up on him like a chill in the night. Somehow, it mattered.

  Like the rabbits that might find their way into his snares and the snow that might fall any night, giving and keeping his word tied him to the earth. Perhaps a man who kept his word might also be the kind of man who honored the rhythms of nature, a man who deserved to live in this new, harsh world.

  Honesty pervaded everything outside the Starbucks Camp. Inside the camp, life depended on lies and deceit, maneuvering for sex and dominance. Outside the camp, in the rolling hills and alfalfa patchwork, honesty ruled. Nature, in a fit of virtue, had begun eroding the false human world, pounding like relentless waves against the fabrications of mankind, threatening to wash them away into something primeval and true.

  It might make him less of a gentleman to allow Penny to suffer, but Sage would not tell the Starbucks people about his supplies. Above all, Sage would keep his word to his father, no matter the cost.

  Highway 89, Outside Fredonia, Arizona

  Cameron and Sal leaned over the warm hood of Sal’s truck, studying Cameron’s road map.

  “Decision time, Sal,” Cameron announced. “Are we going down the freeway or taking the back roads?”

  “I’ve never been this way. I have no idea what these back roads look like. Have you been up Highway 89?”

  “Once,” Cameron remembered. “My brother and I rode motorcycles up there with my Pops. We went to visit my sister in Salt Lake. The road’s good, but what worries me are the little towns. See? Every few miles there’s one town after another all the way up 89. I’ll bet most of them have set up roadblocks by now, trying to keep the city slickers from Vegas and Phoenix out of their yards. You drive through enough towns like that and you’re going to hit one that won’t let you through. Or maybe they’ll steal your supplies and leave you in the cold.”

  Sal thought about it for a minute. “Can’t we just drive around the roadblocks? Take side streets?”

  Cameron ran his finger along the highway on the map as he spoke. “That’s the thing, hermano. Most of the towns tuck into these mountains like lint in a butt crack. There’s just one way in and one way out of each town. It’s not possible to drive around roadblocks on side streets. I’m guessing the townsfolk are good people, but who knows? One rotten sheriff like in Rambo First Blood and we’re screwed.” Cameron laughed and shrugged.

  “What other way is there?” Sal stared at the map. “I’ve only ever gone straight up the interstate.”

  “Yeah, that might not be a bad way to go. Check it out.” Cameron rotated the map to get a better look. “I’m guessing the city of Saint George blocked off the Virgin River Pass, here.” Cameron pointed to a spot in the road where it passed through a tight gorge. “My brother and I assumed they’d do that when we planned how we might get to Salt Lake if the world took a shit. The traffic jam I saw in Vegas probably confirms that roadblock’s up. It’s probably a sixty-mile traffic jam that butts right up against a roadblock near the state line. That’s bad news for folks coming out of Vegas, but it could be good news for us.”

  “How so?”

  “Since there’s no traffic making it past the Utah state line here in the Virgin River Gorge, then the towns after Saint George, north to Salt Lake, might not have roadblocks. If I remember correctly, most of the towns on the I-15 are set back a long way from the freeway. They won’t barricade the interstate, especially since Saint George already shut off the flow of refugees. I-15 runs through a series of wide valleys almost all the way to Salt Lake City. And there are tons of dirt roads to get around those roadblocks.”

  Sal looked at the map, not really understanding it like Cameron did. “Okay, sounds like you’ve thought this through. Let’s do it. How do we get back to the interstate?”

  “We need to cut west, going through these two small towns and then through Hurricane. We’ll completely bypass the Virgin River Gorge.”

  “Why’s that town sound familiar?” Sal pointed at the town of Colorado City on the map.

  Cameron guffawed. “That’s the polygamist town on the reality TV show. Remember: Warren Jeffs, hair bumps, long dresses, multiple wives?”

  “Oh, yeah,” Sal agreed. “Think they’d want me? I’ll convert. I can handle a bunch of wives.”

  “I think they might want you if you were a fifteen-year-old girl. I hate to break it to you, but you’re a forty-something, tatted-up, weather-beaten old man. Nobody’s going to want to add you to their fundamentalist community, bro. You’re all hat, no cattle.”

  “You got a point there, Anaheim,” Sal conceded. “What if they just want your wife, and leave us both out in the cold?”

  “Naw. These are inbreds,” Cameron laughed. “You gotta watch more TV, Sal. They’re too busy building altars and trying to get with their cousins. We’ll be fine. It’s better than taking our chances with the towns on the 89.”

  An hour later, they drove through the town of Fredonia and turned left on Highway AZ 389. Cameron led out in the 4Runner and Sal followed behind in his truck. Passing through Fredonia, they didn’t see a living soul. It should’ve given Cameron pause, but the freedom of the road prevailed and he slipped into a breezy nonchalance.

  The heat of the Arizona highway cooked through the floorboards of the 4Runner. The shiny strip of jet-black asphalt gleamed in the sun, contrasting with the umber sand and bright pops of green hackberry and juniper sprouting up in the bar pit.

  Cameron marveled at how liberating it felt to finally drive sixty-five again. He cruised over the crest of a hill, descending into another long depression in the road.

  As Cameron mounted the next rise, he saw three cars jumbled at the bottom, two hundred yards away, one leaking steam from under its hood. Cameron stood on the brakes, sending the 4Runner into a tire-smoking fishtail. Behind him, Sal did the same.

  “What is it?” Julie had been dozing and she sprang awake.

  “Not good! Not good!” Cameron shouted as he tried to jam the SUV into reverse before it had even come to a full stop. The moment after he got the transmission to cooperate, glass and plastic exploded into the passenger compartment, the windshield, hood and dash blasting inward with the angry buzz of incoming rifle rounds. Cameron flailed, trying to jam his mental transmission into reverse as well.

  —The wheel of fate spins again. Tits up, hombre. You lose.—

  Cameron stomped on the gas and the car lurched backward, clawing at the road to escape the fusillade. Before the 4Runner could retreat ten yards, a bullet found its mark, zipping through Cameron’s throat and just to the left of one of the boys in the back seat. Another round punched into his chest, passing between two ribs and slamming into the plastic of the car seat behind him. Cameron’s foot came off the pedal as he gasped.

  A grown man working at a welding store. His two boys. His wife. His brother. His sister.

  His life. Was that all it would ever be?

  His body relaxed. Finally, he rested. His spine curved sideways, his always-tense body listed to port.

  The 4Runner slowed, rolling in a gentle arc off the road and into the sandy shoulder with a dull thunk.

  The shooting abated. Julie and the children howled, but their cries melted into background noise as Cameron’s senses, one by one, abandoned him. The last thing he saw, like some kind of lurid hallucination, was a man
crucified high on a telephone pole, a hundred yards up the road.

  Interstate 64, Outside Lexington, Kentucky

  Mat saw it as a good news/bad news scenario. The good news was that traffic had thinned. The bad news was that it meant he was going a direction nobody else wanted to go—west toward Lexington, Kentucky. The eastbound lanes of Interstate 64 stood virtually gridlocked, packed with stalled cars, their occupants camping beside the road. The campfires caused eerie, white flashes in his NVGs as Mat drove slowly through the night.

  He had poured the last of the gasoline into the truck fifty miles back, the gas cans from the EZ Storage extending his truck’s range well beyond that of most refugees heading out of Baltimore and D.C.. Mat hadn’t seen an open gas station in two days.

  “What’s that glow on the horizon?” Caroline asked.

  Mat stopped the truck and pulled off the NVGs. He had been running dark, his headlights off. The white phosphor NVGs had truly been all that and the kitchen sink, worth every penny of Mac Daddy Ross’ money. He didn’t have to manually focus to see his truck gauges and he wasn’t getting the headache he usually got from driving under night vision. Running dark meant pissed-off campers alongside the road wouldn’t get much of a chance to shoot at them if they felt so inclined. By the time anyone knew of their approach, they were already heading away, making a shot less and less likely and offering a black hole as a target. Driving blacked out was the only way to fly in the Apocalypse.

  Mat’s eyes adjusted to the night without his NVGs and he could see the orange glow to the west.