by Jeff Kirkham
“Can you teach me to ride?” They were the first words Caroline had said to Mat since they left the bodies of her parents in the back of the Raptor. With the bikes now found and the gangbangers far behind, Mat figured he might as well get it out in the open.
“I’m sorry I didn’t go to your parents when you said to go back in Lexington. I feel like shit. I should’ve listened to you.” Nobody would ever know how dangerous it might have been to infil Louisville during the afternoon, but Mat figured his only play was a full mea culpa. Given the death of her parents, she would probably never forgive him anyway.
“Mat…” she began, glancing at William, probably preferring privacy for the conversation. “You did what you thought was right. I would love to blame somebody for my mom and dad. Maybe if I could blame someone it’d hurt a little less. But you didn’t have to come at all, and your training saved our lives… Mom and Dad are gone and I hope you’ll understand if it takes me some time to grieve. Right now, it’s time to think about William. I’ll understand if you don’t want the additional responsibility, especially given how fucked up the world is. Whatever you decide to do, please understand that I don’t blame you for my parents’ death. They were killed by a gang.”
It took Mat a moment to grasp what he was hearing. “You don’t blame me for not getting to your parents earlier?”
“You were doing your best to keep us alive. On some level, I knew my mom and dad were in danger. I can’t explain it, but I knew it and I failed to make that clear to you. We will both have to live with our mistakes. I’m sure that won’t be the last of them.”
A crushing vice around Mat’s chest backed off by degrees. “Next time you tell me you have a strong feeling about something, we go.”
“I have no idea what’s going on in this world, Mat. One way or another, you’re the leader here.”
“Even so, we make decisions together from here on out, even if all we have are gut feelings to pull from.”
Maybe Mat spoke from pent-up relief. Maybe he spoke from the adrenaline come-down of two days of combat and exfil. Maybe this whole cluster-fuck world had jacked with his head. Either way, his next words sealed their fate together.
“Babe, as far as I’m concerned, William, you and me are family now. We live or we die together.”
10
“There's a storm heading our way
All that's been will be gone
All your cities will sink into the ocean
You run away like cattle
But you cannot flee the battle
Wipe your ass, it's time to put on your war paint.”
Hail The Apocalypse, Avatar, Hail The Apocalypse, 2014
Preston Highway, Outside Lebanon Junction, Kentucky
It was high time Mat figured out where they were going. Every mile of road was like a roll of the dice, and he constantly balanced risk factors: that they would get ambushed, that they would run out of gas, that Caroline would crash her bike.
So far, he had kept her bike in second gear, afraid that shifting gears would task load her too much and she would wobble into a tree. He didn’t know how far they’d come since breaking camp, but he knew two things for sure:
1. They were going really slow, and
2. They weren’t going to be able to travel at night.
Girl of his dreams or not, she couldn’t ride a motorcycle worth a good goddam. It was a miracle she hadn’t laid the bike down already.
Outside of Lebanon Junction, Mat stopped to check in with his team. William rode on the back of Mat’s bike, holding Mat around the waist and keeping the little dog wedged between them. In another miracle of canine cooperation, the terrier hadn’t tried to squirm free. With his nose and elephantine ears flapping in the wind, the dog seemed perfectly content to play the bologna to Mat and William’s sandwich.
Mat had given William the helmet, opting to wear his bump helmet with the NVGs removed and safely tucked in his backpack.
He shook his head as Caroline rolled to a stop and forgot to push in the clutch, stalling her bike.
She’ll get better, Mat promised himself. Everyone gets better with practice.
Beside just taking a break, a couple of things led Mat to stop. For one thing, he felt like they made their escape from Louisville proper, and he didn’t want to get too far from the Raptor. He fully intended on returning to it in a couple weeks. For another thing, dark clouds massed to the west and he worried they were headed into a storm.
Caroline popped the visor on her helmet, smiling. “I think I’m getting the hang of this.”
Mat wasn’t so sure. “Good work, babe. Remember to push in the clutch when you come to a stop or shift gears.”
“How do I shift gears?” she asked.
Mat grimaced. “Maybe I’ll show you later. Hey, we should start looking for a place to stop for the day. I’m worried about those clouds.” Mat pointed to the dark half of the sky. He hadn’t spent much time in the Midwest and didn’t know how hard or fast rain came in this part of the country.
“I’m good,” Caroline assured him. “I’m having fun. Let’s keep going.” She smiled through the helmet visor, her cheeks pressed up in a chipmunk grin.
“Onward, then.” Mat flipped down his visor and pumped the gearshift to confirm he was in first gear. The group pulled onto the road, with Caroline managing a half-decent clutch release, especially given she was in second gear. Bikes this light had no problem with a rolling start in second, which was good, considering that they could motor along up to twenty miles an hour in second gear. Mat figured he would find a place to pull over if it started to rain.
Even a town the size of the tiny Lebanon Junction felt too risky to Mat, so he kept to side roads, weaving through farmlands, driving by lone farmhouses. He mostly ignored the maps and navigated by dead reckoning, pointing them roughly south and west, hoping to avoid any urban overflow from Nashville.
The maps provided by the Ross family had been interesting—a window into the mind of a scared prepper. Old Daddy Ross had drawn three-hundred-mile circles around each metropolitan area from Baltimore to Salt Lake City, finding the least amount of overlap and then striking a route between the circles. Mat figured the three-hundred-mile circles had something to do with the distance an average car could travel on a tank of gas. If the cars carried gas cans, or if they filled up on the road, it would screw the range estimates. But it felt like a good guess—that a very small percentage of urban refugees could make it farther than three hundred miles. The spaces between the circles would be the closest thing to safety he would find this side of the Mississippi.
The west side of the Mississippi felt like reaching the Land of Oz—a mythical dividing line between chaos and less chaos. On this side of the big river, it was like running from the Wicked Witch of the West. Mat decided he would spend more time studying the maps when they stopped for the night, solidifying their travel plan to get beyond the Mississippi.
As they puttered along backcountry Kentucky, the rain began to fall. At first, it tinkled lightly against Mat’s visor. He immediately searched for a place to hole up for the night. A solid wall of pines hemmed in the road, interspersed with an occasional doublewide trailer. While Mat searched for a two-track trailing into the pines, the rain cranked up to a full downpour with only a few seconds warning.
It hadn’t rained in a week, and Mat suddenly worried the new rain might float the road oil and create slicker-than-usual conditions. He searched for a place to stop and hide, wary of every farmhouse and doublewide, since they were unlikely to welcome strangers with anything other than the barrel of a gun.
At the last second, through a curtain of water on his visor, Mat spied a lonesome dirt road heading into the forest. He hit his brakes and felt the give between his tires and the road. As he feathered his brakes and down-shifted to first, Mat heard a sickening screech as metal met asphalt behind him. He finessed his bike to a stop and cranked around in his seat only to find the sight he dreaded most: Caroli
ne and her bike splayed out on the road, horizontal and wrecked. She picked her head off the ground and struggled to get out from underneath the bike.
Mat helped William and the dog off the back, set his kickstand, and ran over to Caroline.
“Are you hurt?” he shouted over the pounding rain.
“I think I’m okay. Just a little scratched up.” She hobbled back toward the bike, reaching down to pick it up.
“Let me get it.” Mat lifted the bike with a grunt and rolled it over to his own bike. “Let me see your leg,” he asked, noticing her pronounced limp.
“I’m fine. Just some road rash,” she smiled with bravado, wrenching her helmet off. Mat inspected the wound, a solid fifteen inches of ground-up skin where the bike had pinned her calf against the road and scraped away denim and flesh.
“That needs treatment. We need to get you cleaned up. Let’s get out of the rain.”
Luckily for them, the road into the woods kept going, not ending at another doublewide trailer. After Mat and William walked the bikes about four hundred yards, they cut toward a small clearing in the pines.
“Let’s set the poncho and get out of the rain. I want to clean you up.”
Mat and William went to work setting up the Paratarp while Caroline worked on cleaning her leg. The boys battled the rain as they dug items out of their bags, trying to keep everything as dry as possible. They suspended the Paratarp taut across two trees and stashed their bags where the rain would hit from the sides and not dead-on. Somewhere during the rush to get under cover, Caroline gave up trying to roll up her jeans and took them off. She hobbled around the camp in a jacket and panties.
In the maddening complexity of working in the rain, it had taken them almost forty-five minutes to move the bikes to a campsite and set up their shelter. Mat hadn’t considered the effect it would have on her wound.
Mat steered Caroline under the tarp and inspected the wound carefully with the help of his headlamp. He sighed heavily as he got a good look. Rocks, pine needles, and dirt had found their way into the road rash and it had set up in a grey, watery scab.
Mat pinched her cheek. “I think you’re going to live, sweet cheeks. Let me get the first aid kit.” Mat popped out of the tarp and ran through the rain over to his pack.
He had checked “first aid kit” off his list when he pre-staged the backpacks two nights back before going into Louisville. He knew exactly where to find it in the outer compartment of his pack—where it would be easy to grab in an emergency.
Mat opened the basic backpacking first aid kit to find the regular items: gauze, wet wipes, band aids, ibuprofen, an ACE bandage, and moleskin. He found himself wishing he had looked through the kit before setting out for Louisville. It was a first aid kit in name only—worthy of a weekend backpacking trip and not much more. He hadn’t intended on losing the Raptor, staging the packs more as an insurance policy than a concrete plan. Now he was stuck with this underwhelming medical resource.
Somewhere in his career in the Army, he had been trained in trauma first aid by an Eighteen Delta medical sergeant. The old timer had drilled into their heads the fundamentals of a first aid kit: antiseptics, antidiarrheals, anti-inflammatories, and antibiotics.
The backpacker’s kit had a few ibuprofens and four alcohol wipes. Given the size of her wound, he could go through twenty alcohol wipes in just the first cleaning. They had no antidiarrheals nor any antibiotics.
If he had thought it through properly when he set up the packs, he would have raided his big first aid kit in the Raptor and doubled down on antiseptic. He knew he didn’t have antibiotics, since they were hard to come by without a prescription, but he thought he had a bottle of alcohol in the truck, and that would’ve been a godsend for cleaning her wound.
Mat dug out his half-full bottled water, worried that he might have just one chance to clean her wound properly. From here on out, they would be filtering water from the murky streams of southern Kentucky. Mat didn’t know enough about water filters to be sure he could pull medical quality water from dirty, rain-swollen streams. Needing their tarps for shelter, he would have a very hard time collecting any substantial amount of water from the rain.
Just cleansing the wound in the pouring rain, underneath the Paratarp, became a game of Twister. He wanted to rinse the wound with water to remove most of the big chunks. Then he would do the best wipe-down possible with two of the alcohol towelettes, saving two for another wipe-down tomorrow.
What Mat really needed was a fresh toothbrush to scrub away the shit that had impacted into the wound, now trapped in the huge scab like chocolate chips. He couldn’t use their toothbrushes because they had been in their mouths. Somehow, he needed to get the junk out of her wound or it would infect for sure.
“Babe, you’re not going to like this, but that scab has to come off. I can’t get the wound clean like this.”
“It’s just a road rash. It’ll be fine,” she smiled, looking down at the mess she had made of her leg, proud of herself for not making a big deal out of it.
“I’m not so sure… infections killed a lot of people before antibiotics came along and, if we don’t take care of it, it’s going to get infected.”
“Do your worst, Lieutenant Best,” she quipped.
“I work for a living. You can call me Sergeant Best.” Mat grabbed the clean shirt he had set aside and poured bottled water into it. “Hold this on the wound. When it’s good and soft, we’re taking that scab off.”
She grimaced. “I guess we should’ve cleaned it right away.”
“Yep.” Mat raised his eyebrows and pressed the shirt over the wound, saturating the scab with water. Even the clean shirt, Mat thought, probably carried its own host of bacteria just from being in his pack. He set up the JetBoil under the fly of the Paratarp and got it burning blue, running the back of his knife through the flame.
“You planning on doing surgery with that?” She stared at the heavy, fixed-blade knife with worry.
“I’m disinfecting the spine and I’ll use it to scrape off the scab.” He lifted the wet shirt and pulled her leg out into the rain, where the water, blood, and scab wouldn’t get on their sleeping bags.
“Ready?” he asked. When she nodded, he went to work, scraping the back of the knife across the scab until all that remained was a bleeding pool of skin and gore. Caroline had latched onto the sleeping bag with a death grip and sweat had popped out on her forehead but, other than labored breathing, she hadn’t made a sound.
“Let it bleed a little,” Mat suggested. He allowed the fresh blood to run for a moment in the rain, then poured the remainder of the bottled water over the wound, hopefully clearing any last foreign matter. With a dry corner of the shirt, he dried the wound and went to work with his alcohol towelettes, wringing every bit of alcohol he could out of the swabs. Then he laid several three-inch squares of gauze over the wound and wrapped it with the ACE bandage.
“That’s the best I can do given the conditions.” Mat sat back.
“It’s fine,” she said. “Just another bike crash. I had a zillion like it when I was a girl.”
Mat didn’t think it was the same thing at all.
Holland Farmhouse, Wallula, Washington
The Holland family invited Sage to stay for the winter. He would work for his food, but the farmer began to trust him and he looked forward to having an extra gun.
Either the food on the farm was incredibly delicious, or Sage was tasting his own gratitude. Either way, he ate well, with little concern for scarcity. The farm had run as a self-sufficient enterprise for several generations, and not much had changed with the collapse of modern civilization. Losing electricity was an inconvenience rather than a game-changer.
The farmer’s wife, Thelma, argued for taking food out to the highway. Her husband vetoed the idea with conviction. “If we start feeding some, the rest will lose their minds. We’re already too close to that damned highway. Giving them food will draw them to our farm, and that’ll be the e
nd of us.”
Sage spent most days working with the farm animals. Antonio taught him how to milk the cows, the job nobody else wanted because it necessitated waking up at the crack of dawn.
After chasing off the Starbucks Clan, Farmer Holland set up a watch schedule in case they came back. Since Sage was already waking up at dawn for milking, he drew the shift that Antonio called la madrugada: 4:00 a.m. until dawn. Luckily, the 30-30 had a scope that collected a little starlight. In ideal conditions, his Grandpa Bob’s Bushnell scope could see well in the dark.
After milking, Sage went back to sleep for a few hours. When he awoke, Thelma presented him with a heaping plate of held-over breakfast. He had never eaten biscuits and gravy, and the sheer decadence of the dish made his eyes roll.
After a late breakfast, Sage gravitated toward Angelina, who was tending to the horses in the barn. He stepped inside the door, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the dim light. Angelina combed the coat of a horse, her back turned toward Sage.
“What kind of horse is that?” Sage asked.
“It’s my mare, Patsy,” Angelina answered without turning around.
“What kind of horse is your mare?” Sage clarified.
“I’m guessing you don’t know the first thing about horses, so why are you asking?”
“I’m just making polite conversation.”
“Well, if you’re going to make conversation, you should work while you do it.”
“What am I supposed to work on?” Sage looked around the barn, but nothing jumped out at him.
“I shouldn’t have to tell you.”
“Imagine that you did have to tell me. What would you tell me to work on?”
