One Man's Island

by Thomas J. Wolfenden

  “You’re turning into a great hunter, Robyn.”

  “Thanks! I learned it all from you,” she said, wrapping them up with butcher paper, and putting them in the freezer. “So, how much farther is it to Indiana?” “Oh, I reckon it’s about another fifty miles or so. We should be there before nightfall.”

  “I was just wondering,” she said, putting away the .22 rifle, washing her hands, and then opening a can of Coke. “I like the music, it makes the travelling go by easier.”

  “Yeah, I always loved to listen to music while I drive. One time when I was still in school, I hopped in my car one night, popped in a Ted Nugent tape, and headed out. Before I knew it, I was in Altoona, Pennsylvania, well over a hundred miles from home,” he laughed. “My dad was so pissed at me!”

  Robyn laughed, trying to imagine Tim at that age and couldn’t. “What happened?”

  “Well, I had no money, and because I was only sixteen, I couldn’t check into a motel. So I had to sleep in my car that night, and call my parents in the morning to Western Union me some money so I could get home.”

  “And?” she asked, loving the story.

  “Well, I got home late the next day, and my parents grounded me. A lot of good that did, though. I just stayed in my room and read my books!”

  “So you were a rebel?” Robyn asked.

  “Let’s just put it this way. I wasn’t the most well behaved kid on the block, and if I hadn’t gone into the Army when I did, I’d probably have wound up dead or in jail,” he said with sincerity.

  “Really?” she gasped.

  “The Army was the best thing that ever happened to me. Before that, I was sort of a disappointment to my dad.”

  “That’s kind of sad. I hope I’m never a disappointment to you,” Robyn said, taking his hand across the table.

  “Don’t worry about that, baby,” he smiled. “I don’t think you’ll ever be a disappointment to me.”

  They both got up and headed out to the truck. They had gone several miles when they started seeing the signs for Evansville, so they knew they were getting close to the Ohio River. They had seen several more wrecks along the way, passing them without even a second glance, until they came upon a single car sitting on the shoulder of the road in the southbound lane. It looked like an older car, and the trunk was open. Finding it curious, Tim pulled over to investigate. He grabbed his carbine out of habit, and Robyn did the same with hers, and they walked across the overgrown grass median to where the car sat. Tim saw right away that it was an older, rusted out Plymouth Valiant, probably around a 1971 or ‘72 model. As he got closer he began to get nervous, and he heard the unmistakable sound of blowflies buzzing around. He stopped and unslung the M4, pulling on the charging handle to load a round into the chamber and held the weapon at the ready position.

  “What is it?” Robyn asked quietly.

  “Shush.” He walked slowly and cautiously towards the parked vehicle. He noticed the passenger side door was hanging open, and there was a form in the driver’s seat. He got within a few feet and cringed, seeing what looked like a shotgun blast pattern of holes, in the windshield on the driver’s side. He peered in the window, and there sat the driver’s headless body, still sitting upright in the seat. Blood and brains were sprayed out behind him, covering the back seat and windows with a dried brown film. The flies covered this, along with the stump where the head used to be. He stifled a gag at the smell, and he reckoned it had only been a few days. He looked over at the passenger’s side, and saw a pair of women’s flat shoes on the floorboards. He stepped back and looked around.

  “Dad, what is it?” Robyn hissed, sounding very scared. She unslung her rifle too, and racked a round into the chamber.

  “Just stay back, okay?”

  Tim looked at the ground where the car sat, and saw the skid marks of this vehicle and another one, very fresh in the asphalt. He didn’t know exactly what had happened, but he had a pretty good idea what went down. They had to get out of here, and fast.

  “Robyn? When I turn around, I want you to run as fast as you can back to the truck, okay?”

  “Eh… okay.”

  “Just do it!” he hissed. He turned, and then they both bolted back to the truck, throwing their rifles in and slamming the doors. Tim put the truck into gear and peeled out, hauling the big trailer behind them. Faster and faster Tim drove until the speedometer was pegged at 85 MPH. They crossed over the Ohio River thirty-five miles later and never even slowed to look. They sped their way through Evansville and headed northward, only slowing when they were miles north, and well into farmland. It was not until then that a still ashen Robyn spoke.

  “Dad, what happened back there?”

  “I’m not a hundred percent sure, but it looked like two people— a man and a woman— were heading south, and were run off the road by someone. They shot and killed the man, and took the woman, along with all their shit.”

  “Was it, like, recently?”

  “Yeah, I figure only a day or two ago, the way the blood was dried,” Tim said, lighting a cigarette.

  “Oh shit!” Robyn gasped.

  “Yeah, oh shit. It’s why I want to be very careful if we’re going to meet up with people in the future. You have no idea who the fuck is out there. We could run into Mother fucking Teresa, or Charles fucking Manson.”

  “Okay, Dad. I trust you,” Robyn said, reaching out and grabbing hold of his arm. She could feel the tension there, and it worried her. They drove on for a few more hours, pulling into a truck stop in Patoka, Indiana, way after dark. Tim pulled their rig out behind the building, where it couldn’t be seen from the highway, before he could let himself relax some. They got out of the truck, locking it up, and took their rifles with them to the camper. They went inside and closed all the blinds before switching on any lights. Tim double locked the door, and very unlike him, he left the M4 carbine on ‘safe’ with a round in the chamber, and set it by the easy chair where he sat down. He lit another cigarette, and rubbed his forehead.

  “Do you want a beer?” Robyn asked.

  “Nah, sweetie. Not tonight,” he sighed.

  “Want some supper?”

  “Maybe after a while, I need to think right now.”

  “Okay,” she said, opening the fridge and pulling out a soda. She sat on the sofa and looked at her feet. After a while, her stomach started rumbling, so she got up and started to heat up some beef stew. While she was stirring the stew in a saucepan on the range, she looked over at Tim. She’d never seen him so troubled.

  “Daddy, are you sure you’re okay?”

  “Yeah, I’m fine. Just didn’t expect to see that here. I knew it could happen, but I just didn’t think it would again,” he said. Then he told her about meeting Paul, and the three men who’d hurt him. He left out the gory details, but told her enough to let her know they weren’t very nice people at all, and he’d ‘taken care of them’.

  “So you killed them.” It wasn’t a question.

  “Yeah, I did.”

  “Good. People like that shouldn’t be allowed to live.”

  “Well, we’ll just do our part and try to avoid those kinds of people, baby,” he said, as he stubbed out his smoke in an empty beer can.

  “Have you done it many times before?”

  “What? Killed people?” he asked with a raised eyebrow.

  “Yeah.”

  “Too many times to count,” he said. “It’s not like the movies or some video game, sweetheart. Once you squeeze the trigger, you can’t bring the bullet back or hit ‘reset’. It’s final.”

  “But you had to do it right? To protect yourself and the other soldiers around you? So it’s okay then. And those guys who attacked your friend, well, I think they got what they deserved, and not only that, they won’t be hurting any more nice people.”

  “Yeah, honey. But I don’t have to like it. Sometimes you have to do things you’d rather not, bad things, in order to get by and survive. A soldier trains his whole life in the
fine art of bringing death and destruction to his fellow man, but hopes he never, ever, has to use those skills. Sometimes, you have no choice.”

  “But you do have those skills, and you use them for good, like protecting me and yourself,” she said, turning off the flame under the pot, and ladling the stew out into two bowls, bringing it over to the dinette table. “C’mon, let’s eat.”

  Tim walked over to the table and sat down. The stew smelled wonderful, and as soon as he got a whiff, his stomach let him know to feed it. He began to relax, and by the time he was done eating, he was finally back to his old self. He realized that whoever had attacked those people were probably far south of them now. Probably just local punks that didn’t stray far from their home turf, and he and Robyn were miles and miles north of there now.

  “Do you want a beer now?” she asked.

  “Sure, why not?” He looked at the wall of the pullout section across from the easy chair and sofa at the nice sized flat-screen TV and DVD player, and was saddened by the thought of it not working. He plugged in the IVIS laptop and put on some after dinner music.

  Robyn handed him the beer. “Can I have one?”

  “You never give up, do you?”

  “Nope, I’m a Ranger in training, and won’t ever give up!”

  “Is that so?”

  “Absolutely. Does that mean I can have a beer?”

  “Absolutely not!” he said. It felt good to laugh after the scene on the highway today.

  “Can’t blame a girl for trying,” she said, winking at him. “Dad, do you think we could stay here just one day so we can bake some more bread?”

  “Sure, I don’t see why not. We’ve made damn good time getting this far, all things considering. I could use a day to rest up from driving, anyway.”

  “Good. I’ll make the dough and let it rise overnight. How many loaves do you think?

  “Only two. I hate to see them go bad before we get a chance to eat them. How much flour do we have left?” he asked. She went to the cupboard and checked. “Looks to me like about ten pounds or so.”

  “Alright then, go ahead and make the dough tonight. I’m not sure of the altitude here, so keep that in mind. We’re probably a lot closer to sea level here than back in West Virginia.”

  “Okeydokey!”

  Tim sat and watched her, busy in the galley. She was turning out to be a very beautiful young lady, and she was a pure pleasure to be around.

  “Where’d you learn all of this stuff in the kitchen?” he asked.

  “From my mama, she was a great cook.”

  “I’m sure she was, Pumpkin.”

  “She’d have really liked you, even though you’re a Yankee,” Robyn said, turning to smile at him, and he could see a smudge of flour on her nose.

  “Oh, is that so?”

  “Yeah, it’s a shame that you guys couldn’t have met before all this happened. She’d have probably taken a shine to you. Then you guys could have gotten married, and we all could have lived together.”

  “That’s a really nice thought, Robyn. But I already had a wife.”

  “True, but you could have left her and come and lived with us.”

  She was maturing in so many ways, but this thought was a throwback to wishful thinking. Yeah, he probably could have left Connie. He knew now for certain he didn’t love her anymore. Hell, he didn’t even like her anymore. He kind of knew that before his last deployment to Afghanistan, but he was in denial, just going through the motions. Whatever Connie had done before he came back was inevitable, just like the rising of the sun.

  “I’m sure your mom was a beautiful woman, and I would have loved to have met her,” he said.

  “Oh, she was beautiful. Here, look,” she said, pulling out the silver chain that she always wore around her neck. There was a heart shaped locket attached to it, and Tim had always wanted to ask her about it, but thought it was maybe something private and never had. With flour-covered fingers, she opened the locket to reveal a small photo of a mirror image of what she herself would someday look like, a stunning blonde with deep blue smiling eyes.

  “I agree. Your mom was beautiful, and I can imagine you’ll be that beautiful one day too,” he said, looking into her eyes to see if there was any sadness there.

  “Nah, I’ll never be that pretty,” she said, and closed the locket, dropping it back into her t-shirt. She went back to kneading the dough.

  Tim sat back and closed his eyes, thinking about Connie and whatever had possessed him to marry her in the first place. In retrospect, even on their wedding night, he’d not even liked her. He thought of all the other women in his past that he should have married and shook his head. He got up and walked to the fridge, and got himself another beer.

  “That’s too many bridges burned,” he said to no one.

  “What was that?”

  “Nothing, I was just talking to myself.”

  “You know what they say about people who talk to themselves, don’t you?”

  “Yeah, they’re having the only intelligent conversation they could have,” he said.

  Robyn poked her tongue out at him and went back to her dough. Tim went back to his easy chair and looked around. From the outside, it looked like a very normal existence for both of them. But how normal was the end of the world, and their crossing of the country, paranoid and armed to the teeth? About as normal as could be, he guessed.

  When Robyn was done, she cleaned up the galley, got a can of Coke out of the refrigerator, and sat down at the dinette table.

  “What did you mean earlier about burning bridges?”

  “It’s just an old saying; it’s like once you cross this bridge, you burn it, and you can never go back. Like when you leave a job on bad terms. You know you’ll never be able to go back there. It’s the same with friends or family. You have an argument, and it lasts forever, and you can never change it.”

  “So have you done that?”

  “There are plenty of bridges in my past that are burnt to a crisp.”

  “Like why you left Philadelphia?”

  “Sort of, but that was a real fire I was escaping from.”

  “Yeah, we have seen a lot of places burned down, haven’t we?”

  “Yes, that’s true. Probably lightning strikes or something like that. Sometimes barns filled with hay will spontaneously combust.”

  Robyn just nodded her head and drank the rest of her Coke. Tim finished his beer and tossed the can into the waste bin.

  ***

  Tim smoked a final cigarette of the night and shooed Robyn off to bed.

  “Good night, Daddy,” she said, reaching up and kissing him on the cheek.

  “Good night, Robyn,” he said, helping her up into her bunk, and turning off the lights, making sure Bad Bear was snug in her grasp. She was sound asleep in a flash, and Tim headed off to bed himself. He made sure there was still a round in the chamber of his M4 and the safety was still on, before propping the rifle up by his bed. He still had the old .45 auto under his pillow because it never hurt to be sure. He lay in bed for a while, listening for any sound, but all was quiet except for the screech of a barn owl somewhere off in the distance. He was soon fast asleep, and dreamt of a girl he knew in high school. He couldn’t remember her name but he could remember her kisses, and in his dream, he thought that maybe she was the one he should have married.

  The next morning, when he was woken by Robyn’s screams, it felt as though he had only just fallen asleep.

  “Daddy, Daddy! Come quick and look at this!”

  He quickly sat upright to the early morning light was streaming in between the cracks in the blinds. He looked at his watch and saw that it was 6 AM.

  “Alright, alright, hold your horses!” he shouted.

  “Daddy, please come quick!” she shouted again, and it sounded like it was coming from outside. He quickly donned some flip flops and a t-shirt, and grabbed the carbine, because he had no idea what the girl was shouting about, but she was sure excited o
ver something. Walking out to the common area of the camper, he saw no sign of Robyn but the door was hanging wide open. He rushed outside to find her standing about ten feet from the camper.

  When he saw what she was so excited about, he lowered the rifle.

  “Daddy, would you look at that!” she almost screamed.

  “I see it. That’s just incredible!” he said, just as amazed as she was.

  He walked over to her, and looked up. Only about a hundred feet from where they’d parked behind the truck stop was what looked like an overgrown soybean field. Right up to the edge of the barbed wire fence that separated the field from the truck stop parking lot was the nose of a huge Boeing 747. Driving in at night like they had, they completely missed it. There it was though. Split into what looked like four sections was the fuselage of the big plane. Looking back towards the rear, you could see the wings and engines off in the distance where they’d sheared off during the crash. The bright white and blue paint was still as shiny as it had been the last time it took off from Indonesia, almost two years ago. Tim knew exactly what plane this was, because he could still see the Presidential Seal of the United States on the nose.

  “What is it, Dad?”

  “Air Force One,” Tim said, shouldering the carbine.

  “But what’s it doing here?”

  “Looks like it crashed, honey. C’mon. Let’s get back inside and get dressed, and we can have a look around,” he said, turning to go back inside. After he got dressed, he grabbed his carbine again and went outside where found Robyn already halfway across the parking lot. She tuned when he called to her, and she waited until he was by her side.