Wasteland

by Noah Mann

  I wasn’t thinking of that specifically as I walked up to the white Camry parked half on the shoulder and half off, its right rear fender caved in but the tires I could see still somewhat inflated. I wasn’t offering some silent prayer that this turn of the key would bring success.

  And it didn’t. It rotated silently forward with no effect.

  I moved on, walking away from the car. But I made it only a few feet when something stopped me. In no way could I describe why I turned around and went back to the car, but I did. It was as though something was pulling me to it. Urging me to return.

  At the driver’s door I crouched and looked within. The seats weren’t weathered. No windows were broken, the driver’s side actually lowered. Lowered with no crank. Which meant that someone had used the switch. Which meant there had been power.

  I leaned in a bit and sampled the air. There was no stale odor of old death. No mold. The interior, oddly, appeared preserved. As if it had not been sitting by the side of the road for a year. Or a month. Or even a week.

  With a pull on the handle I opened the driver’s door and sat, trying the key again. Nothing. Outside, my friends passed me, continuing up the road, Ben next to Elaine for support and Neil a few paces behind, making himself keep up.

  I watched them go and wondered why the car would be where it was, when it was. It had been preserved, somewhere. Maybe in a garage. On the trip from my refuge to Bandon we’d found a stored vehicle that worked. Had someone brought this car out in recent weeks or days to travel somewhere? Had it died on them, right here, making them leave it behind?

  And if it had, why?

  I stepped from inside and popped the hood, lifting it as I reached the front. The engine compartment looked relatively clean. There were no overt signs of rust or leaks. Ignition wires and battery cables appeared intact.

  “Wait,” I said softly to myself, then turned quickly to where my friends were down the road and shouted to them. “Wait!”

  They stopped and came back, joining me at the business end of the vehicle.

  “What is it?” Neil asked, tired.

  “Someone replaced the battery cable,” I said. “The negative. Look.”

  I pointed, and Neil nodded, neither Elaine nor Ben paying as close attention.

  “It’s too long,” I said, reaching to where the length of thick wire had come into contact with the exhaust manifold. “It melted and burned through.”

  I reached down and brought the two ends together.

  “Neil, give it a turn,” I said.

  My friend reached in and turned the key. The starter turned.

  “Oh please,” I said, then separated the wires as Neil looked to me. “This might work.”

  I used my multi-tool to strip the wire’s melted ends, then twisted them together, insulating the connection with a wrapping of tape from our medical kit, securing the union away from the hellish heat that would radiate from the manifold.

  “Try it again,” I said.

  Neil turned the key once more. The starter spun and the engine started. Just started. No different than it would have if parked in a driveway in the old world. It simply started!

  How long it would run was another question entirely.

  “Get in,” I said.

  Neil joined me in front, Elaine helping Ben into the back and sitting next to him, the three of them too exhausted to display much emotion. But within, I knew, they were rejoicing.

  “How much gas does it have?” Elaine asked from behind.

  I looked. The needle was just below F.

  “Almost full,” I answered. “Let’s see if it actually goes anywhere.”

  I shifted from park into drive and swung the wheel toward the roadway, giving it gas, and it began to move. A breath rushed out of me. One that felt as if it had been trapped for days.

  “Let’s see how this goes,” I said, and gave it more gas.

  “She’s not accelerating right,” Neil observed. “We’re going to have to take it in for service.”

  I looked to my friend, his expression stone. It wasn’t a joke he was attempting. He was serious, his psyche battered to the point that memories, mere glimpses of the old world, were disconnecting him from the terrible now. His thinking was warped. That scared the hell out of me.

  “It’ll be fine,” I said, steering around abandoned cars as we drove slowly west.

  Forty Six

  Idaho greeted us with desolation.

  We struggled toward Mountain Home on foot. The car we’d found and gotten to work had given out just west of Twin Falls, and every one we’d come across since then had been a bust. We’d thought of bicycles, but with Ben along, his balance and strength compromised, and with Neil weakening precipitously by resurgent hunger and a lingering illness, that mode of travel was far from practical. That was without considering the energy we’d expend pedaling on the maddening uphill climbs, however gentle they might be. Walking them was hard enough, with little relief on the downhill slopes. Trying to ascend on two wheels, with packs and weapons...

  But transportation, as much as we longed for it, was a distant second in the hierarchy of things we thought about. Things we searched for. Things we craved.

  Food...

  The irony that we carried with us the means to, potentially, restore a food source to those we knew and loved, while we ourselves were starving toward oblivion, might have brought a chuckle if we’d had the energy.

  We didn’t.

  It had been six days since our last food. Six days on the road. Five in a car that had to be stopped every hour to cool its overheating engine. A car whose speedometer never topped twenty. A car that was on its last legs when we’d come across it. And now, with its silent hulk a day behind us, we were in a similar state of decline.

  “Ben,” Elaine said, no alarm in her voice, though in other times there might have been.

  He’d fallen again.

  I looked behind. I’d set the pace, keeping our group moving along Interstate 84. Through the moonscape southeast of Boise. Land that would have been green in spring, and brown from parched grass about the time of our arrival. But those colors were gone from the world. For now.

  “Ben,” Elaine said, grabbing the frail man by one arm. “Come on.”

  Just ahead I stopped, watching as he struggled to one knee with Elaine’s help. He’d discarded the pack we’d fashioned for him before departing the devastation created around Cheyenne. And the M4 he’d insisted on carrying. A few yards behind, running on empty himself, Neil reached where Ben had fallen and gripped the man’s other arm and, with Elaine, got him back to his feet.

  But Ben didn’t immediately move. None of them did. For a moment, seconds that seemed longer, he turned to face my friend and simply stared at Neil. Gazed upon him as one might a horrific reflection of themself.

  “We’ve gotta move,” I said.

  They did, finally. Neil and Elaine helping Ben, his compromised leg dragging severely, almost useless now.

  A hundred yards down the highway, as I reached through the open window of an abandoned ambulance, Elaine called to me from behind.

  “Eric!”

  I looked. Ben was flat on the ground again. Neil sat next to him, spent. I jogged slowly back to where they’d stopped and checked my friend.

  “You okay?”

  Neil looked to me, and where once I might have expected a nod of reassurance, there was none. Just a blank, hollow stare.

  “We need to stop,” Elaine said as she checked Ben.

  I looked south of the highway we were traveling along. Houses sat beyond wooden fences toppled by weather and neglect. They would be little more than shelter, with nothing to offer within. No food. No medicine. Just a roof and a bed and a couch.

  “Eric...”

  “Yeah?”

  Elaine left where she’d positioned Ben, sitting now upon the hard, cracked roadway, and came to me. To where I stood.

  “I don’t think they can go on,” she said, and I knew s
he wasn’t speaking of some temporary setback. “This may be it for them.”

  “We can rest,” I told her. “And look for food.”

  It was what she’d expected me to say. But ‘looking’ and ‘finding’ were two vastly different things.

  * * *

  We set up in a house just off the Interstate, Ben in one room on a couch, and Neil curled up on the floor near a fireplace where he’d insisted we start a fire. I’d found a blanket in another room and left it for him as Elaine and I set out to search for food.

  Empty cupboards and scavenged store shelves were all we found.

  At least there was water. It was warm and dirty, but it cooled and refreshed once filtered and dribbling past our lips.

  “What do you want to do?” Elaine asked me as we stood at the edge of a pond beyond the neighborhood we’d stopped in.

  “How far do we have to go?” I asked her, the number escaping me at the moment.

  From her pack she removed the map she’d taken from Neil some days ago, his duties as navigator shifted to her. It had been his decision, the moments when lucid thought evaded him as frightening to my friend as they were to me as I witnessed them. He’d realized he wasn’t capable of carrying out even minor mental calculations as his condition deteriorated.

  “Six hundred miles,” she said, doing a quick estimation. “Maybe a little more.”

  Six hundred miles. That would be thirty days if we could maintain twenty miles a day. Which we couldn’t.

  But one of us might.

  “We could—”

  She sensed what I was going to put out there and cut me off.

  “Don’t. I’m not leaving you, Eric, and you’re not leaving me. And we both know we’re not abandoning them.”

  I nodded. She was right. It was just that I was groping for an answer to the situation. But there seemed to be nothing, no solution, no option, that would save them and allow us to bring back to Bandon what we’d set out to retrieve.

  “I’m responsible,” I said, adding no more to the statement.

  “Not for this,” she countered. “You’ve kept us moving so that we’re six hundred miles from home.”

  “It might as well be six thousand.”

  She put a hand to my cheek. I leaned into her touch and let my eyes close.

  “I’m tired,” I said.

  “I know,” she said, glancing over her shoulder at the sun, a few hours of daylight left. “Let’s look around a little more. Let’s keep trying.”

  I nodded against her palm and opened my eyes to see the most beautiful smile I’d ever known.

  “Okay,” I said.

  I wasn’t giving up. I didn’t want to, but, more importantly, she wouldn’t let me. So we tried. We searched. And, still, we found no food.

  Tomorrow, though, was another day. Another chance to try. To fight.

  We returned to the house to find Ben asleep and Neil wrapped in the blanket near the fire, staring at the flames. I gave him water, but he said nothing. He was lost in thought, some memory. I knew who lived in that vision. Two faces. Grace and Krista.

  “Get some sleep, buddy,” I told my friend.

  Elaine and I went to a room across the hall. There was no bed there, but I didn’t want to be far from Neil. We positioned cushions from an old chair against the wall and lay our heads upon them, drifting off as we held each other. Waiting for the new day.

  Forty Seven

  Before I could fully wake I felt the Springfield being slid from the holster that lay on the floor by my side.

  “What—”

  Feet shuffled, receding away as I rolled and woke, reaching for my AR, expecting to find as I opened my eyes that some dangerous stranger had invaded the room that Elaine and I had gone to sleep in. But I did not find that at all.

  “It’s all right,” Ben said.

  Next to me, Elaine jerked up from sleep, instinctively reaching for her own weapon. I reached with my free hand and put it on her shoulder, calming her immediately as she joined me in looking to Ben where he stood just inside the room. It was dark and I reached for my flashlight, turning it on and shifting the beam toward Ben’s voice.

  “Don’t worry,” he said, my Springfield .45 in one hand, and the other clamped to the edge of the door for support. “It’s all right.”

  “Ben,” I said, standing slowly, my AR in one hand, held with no threat implied. “What’s going on?”

  Elaine rose next to me, setting her MP5 against the wall.

  “You both have done so much for me,” he said. “Neil, too.”

  “What’s this about?” I asked, lowering the flashlight beam to the floor.

  His gaze shifted between us, the slack half of his face dragged down as if melting, eye and lids sagging severely, matching corner of his mouth angled like a cartoon frown.

  “You two are strong,” he said. “You’re hanging on. But Neil...”

  “Ben,” Elaine said, her tone soft, soothing, almost mothering. “We’re going to be okay.”

  He glanced behind, across the hall to the room where Neil slept, bundled near a crackling fire in the hearth.

  “He is?” Ben asked. “You sure about that?”

  I shifted my position and he half stumbled away from the door, planting his free hand against the wall, weak leg trembling.

  “You can lie to yourself if you want,” he said. “But reality doesn’t change because you want it to. It changes because you do something to change it.”

  He looked to the pistol in his hand and slowly raised it until the muzzle was a few inches from his temple.

  “Ben!” Elaine shouted softly, a hushed plea. “You cannot do this!”

  He smiled at her determination to save him. A calm surety seemed captured in his gaze. The kind one knows when a decision has been made. When a precipice that must be crossed has been reached.

  “You’re not vultures,” Ben said. “You don’t pick from carrion.”

  “Ben,” I said, imploring him with a looked that begged him to reconsider.

  I took a step toward him and he took a step back. Then another. Until he could retreat no further, his body backed into a corner, the convergence of walls supporting him as he leaned into it.

  “Fresh kill,” he said, bringing my Springfield toward his head and thumbing the safety off. “You have to have a fresh kill.”

  “Don’t,” Elaine said. “You don’t have to do this.”

  “I’m not going to make it to where you’re taking me,” Ben said, his words so true it hurt. “There’s no point in you dying, in you starving until you rot, if I can change that reality.”

  He moved the pistol closer to his head now. Just an inch separated the cold barrel from the smooth skin drawn taut over his wasting skull.

  “I won’t do what you want us to do,” I told him. “I won’t go that way. Never.”

  “Me either, Ben,” Elaine joined me.

  He looked to Elaine, and then to me.

  “You have to do it quick,” Ben said. “There’s already a fire. Just...cut what you need and live. Okay? Live.”

  “Ben...”

  He heard his name as it passed my lips. As it was, it was the last thing Ben Michaels ever heard. His hand gripped the Springfield tightly and pushed the muzzle solidly against his temple as his finger squeezed the trigger. The deep, sharp crack of the weapon firing the single shot filled the room, his head jerking to the left as the pistol flew to the right, falling from his grip. His body folded sideways, angling sharply at the waist like a snapped twig. A spray of misty red tissue stained the wall nearest the ragged, gaping exit wound. Beneath that, where his body came to rest, twisted and limp, a bloody pool began to form, the garish flow spilling from both sides of his head and through his nose and mouth.

  “No...” Elaine said, turning away.

  I stared at Ben’s body. It didn’t twitch. Didn’t spasm or hiss or roil in the throes of an agonizing death. It just lay there, an empty vessel, the person who’d inhabited it gon
e. By his own hand.

  “He’s not wrong,” Elaine said, catching the mistake in the tense she’d chosen. “Wasn’t wrong.”

  I looked past her into the room across the hall from where she and I had slept. Neil sat now, curled up against the wall next to the hearth, roaring fire within. He’d pulled a blanket tight around his body. It was summer now, days blazing and nights thick with leftover heat, and still he shivered, cold and sweating. My friend was sick. My friend was weak.

  My friend was dying.

  “I’m not saying I want in any way to do what Ben wanted us to, but...”

  “Let’s find another house and move Neil,” I said.

  Elaine nodded and looked to my friend. Our friend. She was worried. Maybe as worried as I was. But as she turned and I glimpsed her profile, the concern I felt began to encompass her. The cut of her jawline was more pronounced than I’d ever seen it, bone pressing against skin. Her neck, narrow and once chiseled with muscled beauty, had thinned to the point it looked as if it might belong to a store mannequin manufactured to impossible standards of femininity.

  She was right. About Ben. About what he’d said. Neil might be the first of us to go, but that same fate was awaiting us all if we didn’t change our situation.

  We left the room where Ben lay and entered where Neil rested, the air hot and thick. It felt as if the space itself was infected.

  “Neil,” I said, crouching next to my friend, Elaine standing behind. “Hey.”

  His eyelids were parted, hardly slits, and his gaze angled up to me, yellowed eyes over ashen cheeks.

  “How are you?” I asked.

  For a moment he didn’t answer. He just looked at me, as if waiting for more to come. As if expecting me to continue.

  “What?”

  “I heard,” Neil said. “Ben’s gone, isn’t he?”

  I hesitated just an instant before nodding.

  “Elaine and I are going to find another house for us,” I said. “We’ll get it situated and come back for you. Okay?”

  He considered what I’d just told him, then looked past me. To the hall. To the door beyond. In the room it let into, Ben’s body lay out of sight near the corner.

  “Okay,” he said.