She’d seen that happen quite a bit around Santa Fe to the south of the city, where the elevation was “only” about 6,000 feet, it was dry and the plants were adapted to the desert. They were mainly shrubby and stumpy. No tall trees grew there and the land was so wide open you could see for miles and miles. Only half an hour north of the city it was much higher and there were many tall evergreens.
Meg suddenly realized she’d been lost in her own thoughts again.
The cold was getting to her.
She made herself focus on her surroundings, which was difficult. Fatigue was setting in.
She had to keep going, keep putting one leg in front of the other.
It was dark now.
The moon, by her best guess, was up but it was covered by clouds.
The snow on the ground helped illuminate things a bit, reflecting the little light that did come through the clouds.
It had started snowing lightly. Not enough to seriously change anything for Meg. Not enough to affect visibility. Not enough to add substantially more snow to the ground.
Her legs were the coldest part of her now. They had gone from sweating to wet, to freezing, to numb, and now to painful as the temperature continued to drop.
Her pants weren’t waterproof and her leg muscles had made the snow hot enough to melt, in turn soaking her legs which then got colder as a result.
As the hours passed and as she walked through the snow and the night, Meg’s fatigue only grew. And she found that she no longer had to worry about getting lost in her thoughts. She was simply too exhausted to think. Her thoughts consisted of absolutely nothing, except maybe forcing her legs forward once more.
It was, by her best guess, well after midnight when she finally reached her truck. She’d only taken two wrong turns, costing her the better part of an hour each time.
The truck was there, just as she and James had left it.
It was barely recognizable with all the sticks and things she’d left covering it. And plenty more snow had fallen, making it look more like some strange primitive dwelling than a modern gas-consuming vehicle.
“Shit,” she muttered to herself. “I’ve got to make my decision.”
It was true. She needed to know now what she was going to do. She needed to know in which direction she was going to drive.
But she still didn’t know.
She hadn’t made up her mind. If anything, the long, exhausting, freezing walk had only made her more confused.
“What do I do?” she said to herself.
The words sounded weird. They were horribly slurred. Her lips weren’t working right. Neither was her tongue. They were all too cold.
“I can’t even understand myself,” she said.
But if someone else had been there, they wouldn’t have been able to understand what she’d said either. It would have sounded as though her tongue were stuck to a frozen bit of metal, because of how limited her use of it was.
“I’m getting too cold,” she said as she realized that now she could once again no longer feel her legs or feet.
Digging in her pocket for the keys, she realized that her hands were also numb. And not only numb, but almost completely useless.
No matter how hard she tried, she simply couldn’t dig the keys out of her pocket. It wasn’t as if it was a task that required unusual dexterity, but she just couldn’t do it.
She ended up having to basically turn her pocket inside out. That much she could at least manage with her hand, but it was still difficult.
The keys fell into the snow, sinking several inches down.
She went to grab them.
She got them, but her dexterity was so bad because of her freezing fingers that she essentially had to claw at them.
Her hand had regressed to something more like a lobster’s claw.
And with that realization, Meg’s heart suddenly started pounding. Worry and anxiety flooded her.
At first, it had seemed as if the loss of dexterity would be nothing but a minor annoyance, something that would soon disappear when she got into the truck and cranked the heat.
But now, she was beginning to think that she might not be able to get into her truck.
After all, how was she going to manage to turn the key with her hands like this?
It was one of those situations that she never could have imagined ahead of time. In fact, it would have sounded fantastical and unrealistic if someone had related to her a similar story.
But here she was, her hands not working right, on the verge of collapsing from exhaustion and exposure. And she wasn’t able to manipulate the key finely enough to get it into the truck’s door, let alone turn it.
What should she do?
Should she try to break a window? Maybe she still had enough gross motor skills to pick up a rock and bash it against a window.
But what good would that do her? If she couldn’t start the truck then the cab with a broken window wasn’t any more shelter than just staying outside would be.
She was panicking.
Whatever she did, she knew she’d have to do it soon. She couldn’t last much longer out in the cold, especially not standing still. The more time she stood in one place rather than continuing her march, the more she felt the cold, the numbness, and the pain.
And the night was only getting colder.
14
James
Night had fallen. The sun had gone down and it had gotten colder. But James and Barb weren’t that badly off. It was certainly better to be inside than outside. Some of the heat from the fire earlier still remained. Not a lot, but some of it.
James had taken a short nap after Meg left, with Barb keeping watch. He felt better now, surprisingly carrying substantially less pain and fatigue than earlier.
The two of them were in the small, cramped kitchen, going through what supplies Barb had.
A lot of it was canned stuff, things that had sat there in the crowded cupboard year after year, without anyone touching them.
Fortunately they had both heard that the expiration dates weren’t so much hard and fast rules as dates to be aware of.
Luckily, Barb had plenty of candles. Enough to cast a good amount of light and they actually did provide a very small amount of warmth.
A lot of the food was expired. But without big bulges in the cans it seemed likely that most of it would still be edible. Maybe not as tasty as before, but who cared about taste if you were starving?
“You have a decent amount of food here,” said James.
“I wish I had more. But I was never expecting this.”
“None of us were.”
“Well, I bet there are some people out there who are…”
“Like who?”
“Well, lots of people keep a decent supply of food at home for emergencies.”
“Yeah, but that doesn’t mean they’re expecting an EMP, or for society to collapse.”
“Some are. I’ve interviewed them before.”
“Yeah? Where?”
“Oh, there was one guy out in northern Utah. He was a survivalist. He wanted to be able to live off the land.”
“Do you think he could?”
“Hard to say. When I interviewed him, he was still buying a lot of food from Walmart. It’s surprisingly difficult to produce enough food for yourself.”
“Wasn’t he farming?
“Yeah. But it’s hard.”
“Hunting?”
“Again, yeah. But it’s pretty hard to hunt.”
“I’ve done a little of it,” said James. “Not a ton, though.”
“I’d imagine the options are a little limited down in Florida.”
“Not really…. hey, how’d you know I’m from Florida?”
“Your accent.”
“I thought I was doing a good job in hiding it. I sort of adapted it when I came up north.”
“A lot of people do,” said Barb. “But when you travel as much as I do, you get used to different accents.”
<
br /> “I’ll bet,” said James. “Wait, so you’re saying that even this guy who was committed to it full-time couldn’t go without taking a couple trips to Walmart for groceries?”
Bob nodded. “That’s right,” she said. “And he’d been at it for years.”
“Years?”
“Yeah. I forget how many. And he was no novice or idiot. He was a smart guy.”
“That doesn’t give me a lot of hope,” said James. “If someone like him couldn’t make it, what hope do we have?”
“Well,” said Barb, talking as if she were thinking it over carefully. “There are a lot of differences between our current situation and the situation a survivalist might have found themselves in in years past.”
“Yeah, like what?”
“Well, for one thing, we’re in geographically distinct areas. The flora and fauna are going to be completely different. The land is different.”
“Yeah. But do you think this survival guy you interviewed could have made it here in Massachusetts? With all this snow?”
“I don’t know. Probably not.”
“Then what do you mean when you say that there are big differences? It sounds like you’re saying we might have some kind of advantages.”
“I do think so,” said Barb. “For one thing, that particular survivalist I interviewed was just one man. And while certainly one person can survive indefinitely on their own given the right circumstances, humans are by nature social and tribal. That’s one of the reasons that I’m excited about Meg’s proposal.”
“You mean for all of us to team up together?”
“Yeah, and with more people I think that’s one huge advantage we’d have over a lone survivalist.”
“But in all those movies… it’s always one guy alone in the mountains.”
“Like you said,” said Barb. “Those are movies.”
“Right,” said James, nodding.
He was already learning to respect Barb for her realism and practicality. She also knew quite a bit about the world. As a journalist, she’d been everywhere and talked to nearly everyone, or so it seemed.
“Now,” said Barb. “I also interviewed some families and small communities as well…. this was about ten years ago, when there was a sort of spurt of interest in the outdoor magazines and things. They all wanted interviews with survivalists. The thing is, the survivalists and people who are like them but don’t call themselves survivalists… they’re always there. There’s always a small subset of the population that are going to want to branch off and do their own thing…. it’s just every so often that the magazines and various other publications get interested in them.”
“So you’re saying you talked to some groups of people, too? Not just this one guy?”
“Yeah. Some families. And also small groups that lived apart from society.”
“So what advantages do we have over them?”
“I think the biggest thing is that society seems to be collapsing.”
“I’m not following. Isn’t that a huge disadvantage for us?”
“Well, yes, and no. It depends how you think about it.”
“How so? They could go to Walmart and buy supplies. We can’t. Seems like a big disadvantage to me.”
“Yeah. And if things don’t work out for us, we’ll die.”
“And they won’t.”
“Right.”
“That seems… like a disadvantage,” said James.
He wasn’t understanding what she was saying. He was missing something.
“What I mean,” said Barb. “Is that they had to compete with a society and culture running full steam ahead. For instance, if they wanted to hunt, they had to know that the local population was going to scare off the animals…. we don’t always realize it when we live in cities, but towns and suburbs all have massive impacts on the environment around them. Now I’m not one of these environmentalists… I’ve simply seen too much and I know that no story is as simple as it’s sometimes made out to be.”
James nodded.
“But look at it this way. Those survivalists have all along been going to Walmart. And also competing with everyone else who shopped at Walmart. They’ve had to deal with the rules and regulations of the society that they don’t want to be a part of. And that holds them back. More than you might imagine. More than I think even they imagine.”
“But now that society’s fallen… I mean, I’m assuming it’s the same out in Utah. So this guy, this one survivalist you were telling me about, he no longer has to compete with society… he no longer has to deal with their rules or anything like that.”
“Right,” said Barb, nodding, as she started handing cans of boiled potato slices back to James. She was halfway in the cupboard, digging deep into the back where the cans were. “But all along, he’s grown accustomed to doing things a certain way. He’s been living in a symbiotic or parasitic relationship, depending on how you look at it, with the society near him. No matter how far away he thinks he is, no matter how isolated he thinks he is, there’s always society to contend with.”
“And us?”
“Well, with people like us, society is falling. Collapsing. Crumbling. If we get things set up the right way, we’ll become the society. I’ve studied quite a bit of history and my suspicion is that what will happen is that America will fall back into isolated tribalism.”
“You mean city states?”
“Sort of. Something more basic at first. It’s probably going to be groups of people in houses and buildings…. or out in the woods.”
“You think it will be a constant fight for survival?”
“I don’t know. There’s certainly going to be a lot of fighting. But alliances could also be formed… when there’s mutual respect, of course.”
“Is this what you’ve seen?”
“Sure,” she said. “I’ve seen governments fall. And a lot of times, another government comes right in to take its place. But sometimes, it doesn’t. It’s happened throughout history. Look at what happened when Rome fell.”
“Yeah?” said James, feeling sort of ignorant. He didn’t know what happened when Rome fell. He had the vague idea that it was the Mongols or some sort of invading tribe coming in from somewhere else who had destroyed an empire that had been stretched too thin by warring politicians and various factions within the empire itself.
But Barb had a different take. “Rome was huge when it fell,” she said. “Sure, there were the Mongol hordes. But what happened was that Rome was made up of many nations, many different types of people… it all fell apart and splintered… there was nothing holding it together…. they fought among themselves and they had to fight against others…. look at it this way, before the Europeans came through, what was North America like?”
“What do you mean? With the Native Americans?”
“Yeah. What was it like?”
“Uh, I guess some of them kept to themselves…. a lot of them were at war with one another.”
“Exactly,” said Barb. “We like to reimagine things in our culture, but there has always been constant war. Look at Mexico.”
“Mexico?”
“Yeah, Mexico. I spent a lot of time reporting down there. And one thing that’s been drilled into my head over and over again is that down there they have a longer version of history than we do…. people still talk about the Spanish coming over.”
“Wow.”
“Yeah, but listen to this. The Spaniards, who were cruel to the natives, weren’t the first to subjugate them and install a top-down oppressive rule.”
“They weren’t?”
“No. Now don’t get me wrong. They were by far the worst. Do you know how many different empires there were in Mexico before the Spaniards?”
“No.”
“Well, me neither. But I used to. The Aztecs… you’ve heard of them?”
“Sure.”
“They were really an empire, rather than a people, you know…”
James was feeling c
ompletely engrossed in what Barb was saying. It was obvious she’d been a reporter, or a writer, since she had a way of spinning the facts into an interesting story, arranging them in such a way, using the words just so to convey a certain feeling and meaning.
But a knock at the door brought him suddenly back to reality.
He and Barb both froze, their arms loaded up with canned foods. They’d moved on to a stash of beans, many of which unfortunately didn’t look okay to eat, with labels of a type last seen in the early 1990s and sides bulging out in strange ways.
“Did you hear that?” whispered Barb.
Not wanting to make any more noise than necessary, James simply nodded.
There was silence.
For about thirty seconds.
Then the person knocked again. Louder, this time. Much louder. The words were clear. Huge pauses between them, the speaker making sure that the words were completely intelligible.
“I know you’re in there! The squad car’s out front! And there’s no body. So what am I supposed to think? And I don’t take too kindly to those who harbor cops. If you have him, give him up. And if you can’t, then you’re getting a bullet to the forehead too.”
It was a man’s voice. Loud and deep. Gruff sounding.
“Shit,” hissed Barb.
James’s eyes were casting about the semi-dark, candle-lit, cramped little kitchen, looking for where he’d placed his gun.
Why hadn’t he put it in his waistband?
Well, he’d tried. But it had seemed too loose there, as if it would fall out. He’d wanted a proper holster, but it had stayed with the dead officer. It had seemed wrong to take it from him, although now James was seriously regretting that decision and his way of looking at things.
Where was it? Where was that gun?
His eyes had adjusted to the darkness, but it was still difficult to see. There were shadows everywhere and the black gun was somehow blending right in.
Constant Danger (Book 2): Defeat The Anarchy Page 11
