Wasteland

by Noah Mann

  “You just rest,” Elaine said.

  I put my hand to Neil’s cheek and gave it a light, reassuring slap.

  “Something with a view,” he joked.

  I smiled and stood. Elaine led us out of the room, and out of the house.

  * * *

  Three houses down from where we’d left Neil, and Ben’s body, we found a suitable space for the three of us, the interior relatively untrashed.

  “You want some help moving him over?” Elaine asked.

  I shook my head at the offer.

  “Get some rest,” I told her.

  “I can’t sleep,” Elaine said, her gaze sweeping over the space. “I’m going to scrounge for a while. Maybe we’ll get lucky.”

  Lucky...

  I wondered what that might entail. A stash of food? Miracle medicine to heal my friend? A working car with a full tank of gas? Maybe all three. I wasn’t sure. Even the concept of good fortune seemed alien right then.

  “Don’t go far,” I said.

  “I won’t,” she said, kissing me before heading out.

  After getting a bed set for my friend, with extra blankets pulled from another room, I left the house and crossed the dead rectangles where lawns had once grown. It was all dirt now. Dust. As all things once would be.

  Even us.

  Forty Eight

  I smelled it as soon as I came through the front door of the house we’d occupied. That same scent. Identical to what my friend and I had sampled on the breeze near my refuge shortly before we’d been forced to flee.

  Dear God...

  I walked slowly down the dim corridor, flickering firelight spilling from a room to the left, illuminating the floorboards ahead enough that I could see a line of blood trickling from the room across the hall. Each step I took forward felt as though I was wading into deep water. To a place I did not want to be. A tide of dread slowed me, but it could not stop me. I reached the room and looked in.

  Neil sat facing the fire in the hearth, a pointed poker in his hand, chunk of red flesh sizzling at its end over the leaping flames. He didn’t see me. Hadn’t heard me. That was what I thought. Or he had and he’d chosen not to face me right then.

  I looked away from my friend, to the spotted red trail leading from him to the door, then across the hall, and into the bedroom where Ben lay, one leg of his pants cut open and a slice of his flesh missing from the back of his calf.

  “Don’t ever tell her,” Neil said, and I looked back to see him picking bits of cooked meat from the end of the metal poker, slipping them past his lips and chewing. “Please.”

  “Elaine will understand,” I said.

  Now he looked to me, over his shoulder, his jaw working, up and down, up and down, finally swallowing.

  “Not her,” he said. “Grace. Never tell her. Ever. Please. I couldn’t live with myself if she...”

  “I won’t say a thing,” I promised him.

  He nodded weakly and turned back toward the fire and the impossible choice he’d made.

  “Let me have some time,” he said. “I’ll come when I’m ready.”

  “Three houses down on the left,” I told him.

  I wanted to do more. I wanted to say something to comfort him. Do something to ease the shame I knew he was feeling. The guilt.

  But I couldn’t. Neil had crossed a bridge I had not. That I would not. Ever.

  That’s what I told myself as I left him.

  * * *

  I wandered away from the house, out of the neighborhood, to a street where diners and liquor stores and flower shops once bustled with life. Now they stood empty and dead beneath the night sky.

  I hated this place. I hated every place that was dead. Every place, every barren meadow, every wreck-choked road where life had been stripped away. Death was everywhere. It was common.

  And it had just saved my friend. With the sickening, acrid aroma of an unholy act, it would let him live.

  In the empty street I stood and I wanted to scream.

  “Eric.”

  It was Elaine, emerging from a mini-mart behind me. She smiled, and it seemed such an odd expression right then. Welcome, and warm, but indescribably odd. Considering what we’d recently witnessed, the man who’d saved our lives taking his own, the hint of joy, however thin, was jarring.

  “Look,” she said, something pinched between her fingers. “Gum.”

  A single stick in a shiny wrapper. No sustenance at all, but it was something. It was real. It was good.

  “I say we give it to Neil,” she said.

  I reached out and took the stick from her, staring at it for a moment before slipping it into her shirt pocket. Then I took her hand, lacing my fingers with hers, and led her off the street and up the walkway of the closest house to the gathering of businesses.

  “Eric, what is it?”

  I offered no answer. I just led her inside, past a front room strewn with broken furniture, to what had been a dining room, the table once at its center upended and shoved against the wall, leaving a clear space on the floor.

  “What’s going—”

  I didn’t let her finish, pulling her close and letting my pack and weapon slide to the floor as I kissed her, my hand sliding up over her breasts to unbutton her shirt. She didn’t resist. Didn’t say anything as she let her own gear fall away and pulled at my shirt, then my belt.

  I wanted no death near. Not for a while. I wanted there to be life. I wanted to feel alive. To feel love with another.

  And I did as we settled to the floor and made love. The world beyond our two bodies ceased to exist. If only for a while.

  Forty Nine

  We left the house in Mountain Home on a cloudy morning two days after Ben took his life. Neil walked ahead of Elaine and me, some bit of energy restored to him. But something taken away, as well.

  On the outskirts of Boise we found an overturned truck, its trailer split open. Remnants of canned stews and soups were strewn about the roadway, lids opened, containers empty. Either someone, or someones, had forced the accident to take control of the cargo, or opportunists had converged after the mishap. Either way, at some point in the distant past, a feast had been had here.

  “What if it spilled?”

  I looked to Neil first, then Elaine. He’d stopped next to the jagged openings on the back and top of the flipped trailer.

  “Things could have just flown out,” he said.

  He’d had episodes of disjointed thoughts and expressions just a few days before. Now, though, I saw that clarity of reason in my friend’s eyes. He wasn’t healed yet, but he was better than he’d been. He was closer to his old self.

  “There could be cans anywhere around here,” he said.

  Elaine and I looked, behind us, around the trailer, to the sidewalk along the roadway. Nothing other than trash was apparent.

  “What about there?” Neil asked, pointing to a dark recess along the curb.

  It was the entrance to a storm drain, metal bars stretched across it to prevent children or pets from slipping in. But anything smaller...

  I went to the drain entrance and looked in, shadows deep within the concrete vault below where water would collect and start its way along miles of pipes.

  “Here,” Elaine said, handing me her flashlight.

  Its beam cut through the darkness, sweeping over the recessed catch basin that was roughly the size of a walk-in closet.

  “Anything?” Neil asked.

  The light stopped moving. I held it still in my hand, focused on the most wonderful sight gathered in the far corner of the drain.

  “Five cans,” I said, looking back to my friend. “No labels.”

  “I don’t care if it’s dog food,” Elaine said.

  It took us ten minutes to pry open a manhole cover above the drain and lower Elaine into the space. She passed up the cans and we sat there, by the edge of the road, and pried them open with our knives.

  “They don’t smell bad,” I said.

  Neil che
cked as well, testing the contents for any hint of spoilage.

  “We’ve gotta be safe,” Elaine said.

  Five minutes later we had a fire going, all five cans atop a makeshift cooking surface fashioned out of a hubcap. When the contents were nearly boiling over we removed them from the fire and, with a quick wipe to clean the spoons we carried in our packs, we ate.

  The meal was small, but it was good. Whatever energy we gained from it would be expended by the end of the next day. But it would carry us that far. That much closer to home.

  Home...

  “We have to take a shot,” I said. “We’ve still got over five hundred miles to cross. There aren’t going to be happy accidents like this every twenty miles.”

  “Then we’d better find a vehicle, or a lot more food.”

  Elaine’s read of the situation, and of what I was aiming toward, was spot on.

  “I’d vote for the vehicle,” I said. “We could be home in ten hours with something that ran right and a tank of gas. But what are the odds of that?”

  “Numbers don’t go that low,” Neil said.

  I reached into my pack and pulled out the list Martin had given us.

  “Not too far across the Oregon border is a cache,” I said. “It’s off the beaten path. I don’t have any idea why they’d put one there, but maybe that’s good for us.”

  “There’d be enough food in one of those to get us the rest of the way,” Elaine said. “Except we can’t carry it.”

  “We can carry some,” I said. “We can make a cart to pull the rest.”

  “Where is this thing?” Neil asked.

  “A hundred ten miles,” I told him. “That includes a forty mile trip off our route.”

  “Five or six days walking,” Elaine said. “Including two days for nothing, maybe.”

  “We have to supply ourselves,” I said. “We have to. This close to home, we can’t starve. This is worth the risk.”

  There really was little choice to be made. That would have to be our destination, altered only if we came upon a better supply, or a working car. But after dragging ourselves across prairies and mountains and cities after leaving the relative safety of the LCC, we had to ensure success. And this was the best, if not the only, chance at achieving that.

  Fifty

  The ground was undisturbed.

  “This is the spot?” Elaine asked.

  Neil nodded and folded the map, fumbling as he slipped it back into the pocket of his coat. He’d taken on the role of navigator once again, seeking some normalcy in his own existence, I suspected, after what he’d allowed himself to do. Over the last five days he’d pushed through building hunger and guided us to where we needed to be. To where Micah’s magic said something we desperately needed should be.

  “Eric?”

  She sought confirmation from me. An almost desperate desire to accept, to actually believe, that we’d found a food cache. An unopened food cache.

  I looked again to the small notebook given to me by Martin before we’d left Bandon. On the fifth page, penned neatly by his son, was the notation ‘Twenty feet north of pump house’.

  And that’s where we were. On the outskirts of some town in eastern Oregon whose name I couldn’t remember. It was nestled near a natural reservoir, the supply for the farming community relying on water drawn from that source to provide for homes, and businesses, and fields. Hydration distributed by a pump situated in a square stone building just off an access road leading to the shore. And twenty feet from that small structure lay a patch of earth flat and bare and cracked by years of blight and months of heat.

  “This has to be it,” I said. “It’s unopened.”

  Unless, of course, someone had opened what lay beneath, cleaned it out, and, for some reason, closed it up and buried it again.

  Neil dropped his pack and weapon and stumbled forward, falling to his knees beneath the starry sky and stabbing his fingers into the hard dirt. Clawing at it. Driven by hunger. Almost mad by the want of food and the promise that it was within reach. He’d rallied briefly after taking in what Ben had offered up for our consumption, and the few cans of food we’d found two days later had buoyed him further still, but as we crossed the border into Oregon he began to crash. His body was rebelling against every signal his brain transmitted to keep moving. To make it home. He was the living example that, sometimes, sheer will could not overcome an inevitability.

  “We have to get it,” Neil said, wasting fingers ripped open as he dug.

  “Neil!”

  I shed my pack and weapon and ran to my friend, grabbing him, Elaine joining to help me pull him back, the combination of our weakened selves enough to overcome the desperation driving my friend.

  “We have to get it!” Neil protested.

  “We will,” I assured him, the three of us falling backward.

  “I’ll get the shovel,” Elaine said, extricating herself from the sadly comical dogpile we’d made.

  “It’s down there,” Neil said, breathing heavily.

  “We’ll find it,” I said, pulling my friend to a sitting position as Elaine moved past us, folded shovel retrieved from her pack in hand.

  She stood on the spot a few feet away and stepped hard on it with one foot, testing the density of the ground. Then she took a few steps to one side and repeated the action. Her face came up, a hint of the possible about her.

  “Definitely something different down there,” she said.

  Neil tried to join her, but I held him back.

  “She’s got this,” I said.

  Elaine returned to her original position and opened the shovel, securing handle and blade before jabbing it into the crisp soil. She knelt and dug. And dug. Scooping piles of dirt to the side. Clearing a narrow hole six inches down. Then eight. Then twelve.

  Clunk.

  The shovel blade found metal. Elaine withdrew it and drove it again into the soil a foot down. It reverberated with the same metallic impact.

  “It’s here,” she said.

  Neil turned toward me, burying his head against my shoulder, weeping softly as I held him.

  “We’re going to make it,” I said, patting his back as I watched Elaine dig. “We’re going to see them again.”

  He nodded thankfully against me. Elaine beamed now as she dug furiously, clearing more soil, widening the hole, clearing off a patch of the lid.

  That was when she stopped. The subtle joy that had bloomed about her dead now, like a blighted flower. Like all the blighted flowers.

  She looked to me and shook her head.

  “What?” I asked.

  Neil peeled himself from the hold I had on him and looked to Elaine. Her gaze shifted between us, then fell again toward the hole she’d made. It was only a foot or so deep, but, to me, it seemed as though she was staring into some damning abyss.

  “It’s green,” she said.

  No...

  The light, I told myself. The light from the stars and the low moon played tricks with colors. Robbed them of their hue. She could be wrong. She had to be wrong. That’s what I told myself as I pulled away from my friend and took the flashlight from my pocket. I scrambled on all fours to where Elaine stood and shined it into the hole.

  What I saw was green. Green metal. Green metal like what Burke must have seen when he exposed the lid. How long ago was that now? One week? Two? Five? Ten? I didn’t know. All I did know was what I remembered of that moment. That terrible moment as the wind howled and an explosion erased Burke Stovich from this life.

  The batteries in my flashlight died and I let the device fall to the ground.

  “This isn’t right,” Elaine said, her will breaking, the shovel slipping from her grip. “This isn’t fair.”

  She walked away, stopping near the pump house and aiming her raging face at the sky.

  “Why are you doing this?! Why?!”

  I didn’t know if she was screaming at God. Or at anyone. I didn’t know who she could blame for this specific setback. But
I understood her anger. Her frustration.

  Neil didn’t approach the hole. He sat where I’d left him, staring bleakly at me. We had four hundred miles ahead of us, roughly. Most likely to be traversed on foot. Traveling twenty miles a day, which we’d been averaging with our fading strength, that was almost three weeks more on the road.

  We wouldn’t make it one week. I knew that. Looking at my friend, I had no doubt that he would be the first to go. Probably Elaine next. I would be left to stumble forward until I, too, dropped dead by the side of some meaningless strip of blacktop, the hope of all those in Bandon gone with me. With us.

  I looked to Elaine. She stood with her face buried in her hands, sobbing dryly, embarrassed. The flourish of weakness and anger that had erupted was not who she was, the emotions alien to her. I stood and walked to her.

  “Hey,” I said.

  She lowered her hands and looked to me, eyes glistening with a bare skim of tears, all her parched and starved system could manage.

  “I’m out of ideas,” she said.

  I eased my arms around her and drew her close, rubbing the back of her head, trying to sooth her, to assure her with my touch.

  “I’m not,” I said.

  “Not what?”

  “Out of ideas.”

  Her gaze rose, meeting mine. Then it shifted, past me to the hole she’d dug. She gently stepped away from me and shook her head.

  “You saw what happened to Burke,” she said. “We all saw what happened to him.”

  I nodded.

  “You can’t be thinking...”

  “He got his hands on what was in there before the explosion,” I reminded her. “He had an MRE in his hand.”

  “And then it blew up in his face!”

  She wasn’t wrong. But neither was I.

  “It’s a risk I have to take.”

  “No it’s not,” she challenged me.

  Neil began to crawl past me. I stopped him, pushing him back until he was sitting again.

  “I’m not going to make it,” he said. “You have the seeds, the book. You have a better chance of getting through if I can get even a few MREs out of there before...”

  Before...

  “No,” I said. “I’m responsible for this. It’s my call.”