What he did feel like doing was running through the darkness, hunting, with his handgun.
Unlike Rod, Bill knew about guns. Really knew about them. Not in the way that some of the real enthusiasts did, but he knew enough to shoot properly, and he could differentiate between junk firearms and quality ones. He’d put his time in on the range, and if it came to a gunfight, as it had in the past, he was sure he’d come out on top.
Suddenly, off to his right, he spotted a flash of movement.
Was it a figure? Someone running?
“Rod?” he called out, swinging his flashlight around before thinking it through, realizing that maybe that wasn’t the best idea.
The light caught a figure. A woman. It was that other woman. A gun was in her hands.
It wasn’t Rod.
And she shot at him.
A gunshot rang out.
The bullet missed.
Bill threw himself to the ground. He had enough sense despite his drug-addled state to know that he needed to get down. He still had some strategy to him, some wits about him.
He switched off the flashlight. He had enough sense to do that too.
Seconds passed.
It was hard to lie there. The energy was practically bursting out of him. He wanted to get up. He wanted to fight. He wanted to make love. He wanted to dance. He wanted to do a thousand things. None of them made sense for the situation.
He was starting to lose the grip on the edge of his mind. Sometimes that happened to him when he did too much of the stuff, when he made the lines too big or overindulged in one of the thousand ways that a man could overindulge.
He couldn’t wait there. He couldn’t do it. He was already fidgeting, his fingers moving rapidly, making it difficult to keep the gun steady.
His feet were tapping behind him. His whole body felt like it was shaking.
Shit. He was really losing it. What had he taken again? He couldn’t even remember.
Maybe he’d taken the wrong stuff. Shit. That’d happened to him before, and he hadn’t been able to sleep for a whole week.
Well, if he didn’t get it together soon enough, he’d be asleep forever.
Yup, he’d be dead. He had enough rationality left in his wigging-out brain to recognize that.
He had to make a move. Yup. That was the only way. There was no way that he could make it patiently waiting, playing the long game, like a miniature version of the cold war.
OK. “Get a hold of yourself,” he muttered to himself, as softly as he could. It was hard to get the words out. His teeth were chattering from the drugs. He had to fight the effects. Fight the buzz. Fight it all.
And he was good at it, in a sense. He knew how to play to his strengths, recognize his weaknesses. He’d had plenty of experiences getting blasted to know the signs, to know how to handle his high. Hell, back in the day, he’d done enough acid to know how to handle all that shit too. And there was some crossover. Not much, but just enough.
“OK,” he muttered. “You’re losing it again. Stay with me here, buddy. Stay with reality. Or you die.”
It was a sobering thought. Cold, like the ground. Like the night.
He had his hand on the gun.
He knew where she was. More or less. Off to the right still. She’d thrown herself down.
It’d be hard to hit her like that. But not too hard.
He’d done something similar back at the range plenty of times. It wasn’t like he didn’t know what he was doing.
His teeth were chattering from the drug energy. He was hopped up. His mind was frazzled.
But not too bad.
Not bad enough to make him miss.
The next step was easy. Easy in theory. Probably easy in practice too. At least that’s what he had to tell himself to get through it. Or did he?
He was so messed up he was actually looking forward to it. In some sick way, it seemed like it actually might be kind of fun.
Kind of fun? He really was losing it.
Or maybe he wasn’t. Maybe he was just feeling good.
Whatever.
Time to do it.
No time to waste.
Once he turned the flashlight on her, he wouldn’t have long. If she’d killed Rod, she was a decent shot. And that made it all the more fun, in that twisted way his mind was working.
Once he turned that flashlight on, he wouldn’t have long to find her there on the ground. Wouldn’t have long to shine the beam on her. Once he switched that light on, he’d be a target himself.
And that was all part of the game.
“OK,” he muttered under his breath. “Almost time. This is the big one, buddy. The one you’ve been waiting for. The one just like in the old movies. Just the shootout you’ve been waiting for. Just the time. Just like those old-timers. Just the way you’ve always wanted it.”
As he was talking to himself, his finger started inching its way towards the on switch of the flashlight.
As he talked, a vague thought bubbled up from the back of his mind, a thought that said, “Hey, you wanted to make this woman your wife. Now you’re going to shoot her. This doesn’t make sense. And what kind of movie-worthy stand-up has you paired off against a woman?”
But he was too far gone from the drugs to listen to a pesky little thought like that. He was all keyed up and he was ready for action. And he was going to have it.
His finger pressed the button.
The flashlight burst to life. Its bright beam cut through the night.
He swung the flashlight around, across the ground. His arm moved rapidly. But it didn’t shake. He was enough of a good old-fashioned doper to know how to keep his arms steady despite the stuff pumping through his veins. Hell, he’d been to the range how many times when all drugged up?
The flashlight beam found her.
She was there. Lying in the ground. Gun in hands.
He got an impression rapidly, his brain taking it all in. A flash of a beautiful young woman. Pretty bad off. Beat-up or something. Blood in her hair. She looked ghostly in the pale white light of the flashlight beam, surrounded by the shadows and the darkness.
Shame to shoot her.
She was going to shoot him if he didn’t.
His finger pulled the trigger.
20
Jim
The night had been long.
Too long.
Physically, it’d been more or less comfortable.
Mentally, it had been torture.
Well, maybe saying it had been physically comfortable was a stretch. Even for Jim, who hadn’t been “enjoying” the most comfortable of circumstances since he’d left Rochester.
But it’d been comfortable in the sense that he wasn’t getting his face beaten in by a giant biker, and that there wasn’t a gun or a knife jammed into his face. And that he wasn’t starving.
He’d spent the night resting, eating, keeping watch, and worrying.
After all, he knew that he was still alive. But just because his wife and his friends had left when the bikers had arrived didn’t mean anything about their safety. It didn’t mean that they were still alive, and it didn’t mean that they hadn’t run into the bikers later. Or someone else. Some group of even worse people.
Why hadn’t they come back yet? Surely they wouldn’t simply leave him there for dead. Yes, he’d told them to leave. He’d given them explicit instructions, and he was glad that they’d followed them. But they must have understood that he hadn’t meant that they should simply leave for good. Right?
In moments of weakness, he’d imagined terrible things. Too many terrible things to count. Terrible things that had happened to Aly, Rob, and Jessica. And there was, of course, the possibility that was the most painful, the most private, the one that he’d never admit to anyone. And that was that his wife and his friends had decided to leave him behind.
He’d managed to push these thoughts away at times. Enough to fall asleep for ten-minute stretches several times throughout the night. His
body and mind had been too on edge to sleep for any longer than that.
He’d needed the rest. And he was beyond the idea of trying to keep awake all night to keep watch. When it was his wife and his friends that he was protecting, that was one thing. But when it was just himself? It was a different story, especially considering how long he’d been awake, and what he’d been through.
The darkness of the cloudy night had made the mental anguish much worse. It really was strange to be sitting there alone in the darkness, staring off into nothing. When he was in the pharmacy, he couldn’t tell the difference between keeping his eyes closed and keeping them open.
Before the EMP, he could only remember a few times when the world had been this dark. Really there were just the handful of times he’d gone camping in the last dozen years or so. It’d been hard to get away from the business in Rochester, and the light “pollution” from streetlights, buildings, and cars had meant that no matter where he’d gone that wasn’t really far out there, there was going to be much more light than there was now.
Not that it mattered much. Really, in the pre-EMP world there weren’t many opportunities for a man to sit there and stare into nothing and just think. There was always something to do. Always some task or chore that needed to be done.
And since the EMP, there had barely been a second of downtime. It had seemed like he’d been on the go since the EMP. Not to mention existing in a state of constant anxiety about the very real dangers that waited for them.
Sure, he still had that very palatable worry. But now he was alone and in this intense darkness, with nothing but the thoughts.
Since his mind and body wouldn’t let Jim sleep, the best he could do for rest was to make sure that he was eating and drinking. Fortunately, there was still plenty of food to be found at the pharmacy. Now that he had time to look, he discovered all types of packages that had been overlooked by previous looters. There were packets of beef jerky that had gotten stuck under the shelving units, and smashed up crackers, which were still perfectly fine to eat, scattered near the bathroom and all sorts of other strange places. Of course, he had to feel around for what was what in the darkness.
His body was bloodied and pretty badly beaten up from the encounter with the bikers. But he was still alive. That was the main thing.
He’d gingerly tested all of his limbs and all ten of his fingers, making sure that he could still move them. He was surprised to find that everything more or less still worked. Maybe not exactly the way it had worked before. But worked well enough.
Jim knew he shouldn’t even have been alive. So how could he complain if a finger didn’t feel quite right, or his leg now made a strange noise when he moved it a certain way?
His body would continue to hurt for a long while. Their blood would remain on his clothes, since it wasn’t like he could wash it off.
But what would remain for longer than anything physical were the mental images he had of the fight. The images were so strong that he couldn’t see them ever fading away. Images of blood. Images of faces of anger. Images of that stairwell. Images of just the concrete from that landing that he’d been stuck on, where he’d felt like he was making his last stand.
He was glad, in a way, that it was dark enough so that he couldn’t even see the door that he’d fled into. But, in a way, it didn’t matter, because the image of that door was etched into his mind’s eye. It was almost as if he really could see it already.
The hours were slow to pass as he ate and drank in the darkness and tried to avoid the thoughts and images that were unavoidable. There weren’t many noises in the night. At least not the normal noises one was used to hearing in a suburban or urban area. Jim didn’t hear a single car the whole night, except once, when maybe, off in the distance, there was just the faintest hint of a motor. But he couldn’t be totally sure.
The noises of animals off in the distance, and of insects, seemed to be louder than he’d remembered before the EMP. It was probably just due to the fact that in the pre-EMP society, there’d been so much background noise from unseen machinery that chugged along in the background, keeping the society running. That machinery was all still there, of course, like the HVAC system of the pharmacy, but it just sat there, unused, unpowered, and completely silent.
Finally, after what felt like an eternity, the night was over. Streaks of sun were starting to appear on the horizon. Jim had stepped outdoors for a breath of fresh air and was leaning against the pharmacy’s exterior wall.
The nearby road looked just as it had the previous day. There were still a few cars in the parking lot of the pharmacy, and if Jim hadn’t known any better, this might have been any normal day, with a couple of the night-shift employees getting about ready to get into their cars and head home.
The nearby buildings looked exactly the same, and Jim knew that they hadn’t looked any differently before the EMP. It was strange looking at them now, in the new light of day, knowing that, in a way, not that much had changed. Those buildings were still there. The sun still rose. The Earth still turned, and still tilted on its axis. The birds still chirped, those that had returned from their migration.
Those buildings across the street looked exactly the same. There was no outward sign of anything catastrophic. There was no evidence of a fire. No tree had fallen on them.
Those buildings no longer received power. And none of the mundane, yet important, electronic things would work.
It was really such a small change. Just a tiny difference from before and after the EMP.
Well, a small change in the broadest sense. But a huge change to human civilization.
The animals, of course, didn’t know the difference. There was a lone squirrel, running across the street. The sight seemed both common and yet strange to Jim at the same time, and he suddenly realized why. If this had been a regular pre-EMP day, that squirrel wouldn’t have lasted a full minute on that road. It either would have had to successfully dodge the rush-hour traffic, or it would have quickly become roadkill.
As the months and years passed from the EMP, and the power didn’t come back on, what would happen to the animal and plant worlds? Certainly there’d be some effect. Jim vaguely remembered seeing pictures of an artist’s interpretation of New York City if the power were shut off. There’d been vines and trees and all sorts of vegetation slowly devouring the buildings, and eventually, if he remembered correctly, the artist had imagined that the entire island would become submerged in water, due to the lack of drainage.
Maybe that interpretation of New York City wasn’t correct. Or maybe it was. Jim didn’t know, and it didn’t matter to him, since he wasn’t in New York City and would never choose to head into a city.
But maybe there was something to the idea in a general way. For instance, just thinking of the amount of roadkill he’d seen over the years on the highways, would the animal populations increase in number now that vehicle traffic would be reduced so greatly?
Jim didn’t know the numbers or the statistics, but if he were to hazard a guess, he’d go with the animal populations increasing dramatically. Maybe not just because of the lack of traffic and roadkill. Surely there were other factors as well. It didn’t mean that humans were bad that they’d been killing the animals. No, nothing like that. It was just the facts of life. One species had to sometimes move aside for another. And now that the human population was apparently about to dwindle dramatically, the animal population would swell.
Jim saw it as a good thing, in a way. More animals meant more food. He was already thinking ahead to hunting, and to making traps. Squirrels, he imagined, were already plentiful enough, and they’d be hopefully easy enough to trap. Maybe they weren’t the most delicious animal to eat, but what did he care? A squirrel to him now meant food. It meant protein. It meant life.
Of course, he was getting way ahead of himself. He didn’t know, after all, that the whole country was affected. It could be that it was just New York State and Pennsylvania. Maybe not even the
whole state. Of course, in that case, as he’d thought many times before, why hadn’t anyone come to help? Why hadn’t the National Guard or the military been dispatched?
In the pit of his stomach, he knew the truth. It was because the whole country was affected. Probably the whole world, or else aid would certainly have been sent in some form or another. There would have been some sign that civilization still chugged along. Some message. Something. Anything.
The sun was rising slowly but steadily in the sky.
Jim’s mind began to drift towards possibilities again. Even though day was finally upon him, his thoughts were becoming once again very dark.
What if the others never came back? What if he never found them again?
Would he have the strength to continue on his own?
Of course, he’d have the physical strength. He’d have the stamina. He probably even had the ability and the mental wherewithal to continue to survive on his own. For some strange reason, he seemed to have what it took to continue in a world that had turned towards chaos. It wasn’t necessarily any one thing, one belief, or one ability, but a combination of many factors, and perhaps an overall attitude that made him this way.
Not that this apparent advantage guaranteed his survival. Not in the least bit. But it did improve his chances. If he were on his own, maybe he could make it a few more years if he was lucky. Or maybe even longer than that. Who knew? Maybe the world would get less dangerous as more and more people died off. Or maybe it wouldn’t. Anyone could say anything with certainty and conviction, but it didn’t mean that they’re right, and in many situations, there was simply no way to know the outcome of events unless you were actually there watching them unfold before you.
So maybe he’d survive if he was on his own. Maybe.
Surviving: The Complete Series [Books 1-3] Page 45
