Any Day Now

by Darrell Maloney

  This crap put everything in a new light.

  This crap wasn’t part of the equation.

  He was supposed to drop dead of a heart attack in his eighties. Quick and easy and hopefully relatively pain free.

  He wasn’t supposed to die of thirst because his primary source of fresh drinking water was now poisoned.

  Or starve to death because his food supply of choice was dead and floating on the top of the poisoned stream.

  Or attacked by former “friends” who he’d nurtured and cared for and brought back from certain death.

  None of that was in the mix.

  None of that was what he planned for.

  That was when Sam started rethinking his whole plan for living out his years in the woods.

  He went to his friend Jake.

  He consulted with the only other person on earth whose opinion he valued.

  “Suit yourself, Sam. I wouldn’t blame you for leaving. You’re twenty years younger than me. You’ve got a lot of good years left. Me, I’ve got one foot in the grave and the other on the edge.

  “Another heart attack will be my fourth. It’ll be my last too. I can feel it.

  “This is where I want to die, Sam. I’ve led a good life, but I’m ready to go. You go find a safer place to live out your years.

  “Mine are already spent.”

  Jake reached out to his longtime friend and shook his hand.

  For the last time.

  Chapter 53

  Sam waited an extra day to start packing out.

  Not because he was undecided, for once old Sam made up his mind it was unchangeable.

  No, he spent that last day looking through the forest, whistling and calling out Felix’s name.

  He held no animosity toward the little fox.

  They’d been friends for a very long time, after all, and even the closest of friends sometimes snap at one another.

  Not always so literally, but still…

  He knew Felix was frightened by things he sensed but didn’t understand.

  Sam suspected Felix could feel the ground rumbling beneath his feet but didn’t know why.

  He also suspected Felix felt a need to run out of self-preservation.

  And that he was likely miles away by now.

  But animals do one of two things when they’re scared.

  One is to run, as fast and as far away as they need to until they feel the danger has passed.

  The other is to hunker down beneath a fallen tree or in a cave or anywhere else they feel they might have some shelter.

  Hunker down and tremble and wait for the danger to pass.

  Sam supposed Felix had run.

  But just in case he didn’t… just in case Felix was hiding somewhere in the nearby woods… Sam would put in the effort to find him.

  To tell him there were no hard feelings.

  To let bygones be bygones.

  To invite him back.

  Sam spent that last day in the forest to no avail.

  For Felix was, as he’d suspected, long gone.

  When he finally packed up and left his cabin home of twelve years he left all alone.

  Sam wasn’t a man who burned his bridges.

  He wasn’t even sure he wanted to do this.

  He left the hasp on his cabin door open, didn’t lock the padlock.

  Just in case he changed his mind.

  All the same, though, he didn’t look back as he walked away.

  As he walked down the overgrown trail toward the highway he continued to whistle, continued to call Felix’s name.

  Just in case he was still out there and wanted to come along.

  By the time he’d made it to Highway 22, though, he’d given up on that too.

  He was sullen and lonely, heartbroken and depressed.

  Within a span of three days one of his only friends in the world bit and then deserted him.

  The other chose certain death over his company.

  And he himself chose the easy way out.

  On his back was a camper’s pack which contained mostly bottled water, hard tack and several kinds of jerky.

  When a man must pick and choose what to take with him, bearing in mind it all must be carried upon his back, certain things go by the wayside.

  Extra clothing was the first thing he tossed away.

  He could wear the clothes he had on for many months if he had to.

  Doing so certainly wouldn’t win him any friends.

  But clean underwear and fresh shirts wouldn’t keep him alive either.

  He’d made an exception for his second pair of boots, tied together by the laces and thrown over his shoulder.

  Inside each boot were three pairs of socks.

  His logic was simple.

  When a mountain man’s feet go bad he’s as good as dead.

  He can’t track, he can’t trap, he can’t hunt.

  When a mountain man’s feet go bad he can only lay down and die.

  Switching off boots each day can help. Switching off socks every few days can help even more.

  Over his other shoulder was his rifle, and his thigh pockets held every extra magazine he had.

  He didn’t expect to do any hunting on his long hike out of the Yellowstone area.

  He wouldn’t need to. The jerky he carried was lightweight and would feed his belly for weeks.

  But one doesn’t go anywhere in bear country without a good rifle.

  By his estimation at ten to twelve miles a day it would take him more than a month to get into the safe zone.

  And if fate decided to blow the mountain before then, if he was blown to bits by the blast or suffocated under two feet of hot gray ash, that was okay too.

  Sam got about seven miles that day when he heard a vehicle pull up behind him and stop.

  And then he heard a familiar voice.

  A voice he’d only heard once, and never really expected to hear again.

  He half-smiled and turned.

  “Well, I’ll be damned. Hello, sweet thang.”

  Julianna smiled back.

  “Hello, Sam. It was Sam, wasn’t it?”

  “A girl as pretty as you can call me anything at all and I’ll answer to it. But yes. It is Sam.

  “You have a good memory.”

  “And you have good sense, wanting to get out of here while you still can.

  “I wish I had more room in the cab.”

  “That’s okay, pretty lady. I don’t mind riding in the back.”

  Sam tossed his backpack in the back of the pickup, then placed his rifle almost tenderly on top of it.

  He stepped onto the bumper and one of the other three mountain men in the bed of the truck offered him a hand up.

  He didn’t really need it, but took it anyway.

  He’d have to learn to be civil again.

  Might as well start now.

  Chapter 54

  Julianna never told Sam she’d seen him the night before, as she lay in bed trying to sleep.

  She came from a family of seers that went back many generations, back to the pre-war days in Europe when her people were chased out of Germany by a newly born movement called Nazism.

  She wasn’t given the opportunity to pursue the family business. Her mother saw to that, forbidding Julianna’s grandmother and uncles from seeing her.

  She, the mother, saw the visions not as a means of making a living, but rather as a curse.

  For she herself sometimes saw ugly things. Things no one should ever see.

  Things which always came true.

  She didn’t want Julianna to suffer so, as she had.

  She tried to shield her from the lifestyle.

  Yet Julianna occasionally had what she called “glimpses.”

  Glimpses of what might come to be.

  She knew, just knew, that she was going to happen across Sam today.

  But she wouldn’t tell him.

  There was nothing to gain by telling him.

  He’d prob
ably scoff at her.

  And even if he didn’t, telling him was rather pointless.

  She looked in the mirror on the passenger side of the pickup truck as they rumbled toward the Red Cross Relocation Center in Wilson.

  She saw Sam carrying on a long-winded conversation with a man they’d picked up twenty miles to the west.

  A man Sam likely never laid eyes upon before.

  Yet they were conversing like they were old friends.

  She was glad Sam hadn’t been out there so long he’d forgotten how to communicate with other human beings.

  They’d picked up a man the day before who was just that way. Who sat stone faced in the corner of the truck bed and never uttered a word to anyone else.

  And who got motion sickness from riding in a vehicle for the first time in many years.

  The man wouldn’t even look at anyone else.

  When they’d dropped him off at the Red Cross a doctor told Julianna it wasn’t uncommon.

  It was a phenomenon similar to shell-shock, he told her. It had the same symptoms as PTSD.

  When everything a man has known for most of his life was taken away from him, he sometimes crawled inside himself and refused to come out.

  It was a survival technique some men would cling to for the rest of their lives.

  She was glad Sam wasn’t like that.

  She had the feeling Sam was going to make it.

  He had a long road ahead of him, for sure.

  But he’d be okay.

  They dropped the men off at the Relocation Center, as they’d done with forty seven others in recent days.

  Well, forty six men and one woman.

  Julianna wondered aloud at one point why most off-the-gridders were men.

  Deputy Dave responded, “Because most women have more sense.”

  She didn’t argue the point.

  The Red Cross gave Sam a bus ticket to get to Kansas City on a long yellow school bus, of all things.

  Commercial buses would no longer go into the danger zones, and the school buses were driven by National Guardsmen.

  The bus was old, with an air conditioner that only worked when it wanted to.

  But it beat walking.

  In Kansas City the bus would go to a second processing station, where Sam and the others would be given a free bus ticket to anywhere they wanted to go in the safe zone, forty dollars in cash, and one hundred dollars in federal food stamp vouchers.

  They were told that at their final destination they could report to their local Red Cross office for additional assistance.

  In exchange for the cash and the food, recipients had to agree never to return to the danger zones.

  “You can settle wherever you want in the safe zone,” they were told.

  “But you can never go home again.”

  Chapter 55

  Three days later Sam arrived at his final destination in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.

  He’d been born there, fifty seven years before.

  All his relatives were gone now, dead or scattered to the wind.

  The house where he grew up was gone too, replaced by a sprawling shopping mall.

  He was a bit of an odd duck in high school. A loner of sorts.

  He didn’t particularly want to hang around with the jocks, the geeks, the elites.

  And that was fine with them, because he didn’t really fit in with any of them.

  He had precious few friends back then.

  He reckoned they were all gone too.

  And he wasn’t close enough to any of them to waste his time looking for them.

  They’d likely have nothing to do with him now anyway, for to them he’d look like just another panhandler.

  Just another refugee with his hand out, looking for a place to stay and a free ride.

  He was homeless and destitute, with no recent work experience or skills that could be translated into income.

  He didn’t qualify for any of the free housing programs the government was offering because supply couldn’t keep up with demand.

  They were building as fast as they could, but there just wasn’t enough housing to accommodate all the displaced Yellowstone refugees.

  Those with children were given first priority.

  Married couples with no children were given second priority.

  Then single women.

  Single men were sent to the end of the line.

  Sam had no problem with that.

  He’d have set it up the same way, had he been in charge.

  But that didn’t put a roof over his head.

  At other times in America’s history, in other events of great tragedy, like world wars and natural disasters, Americans banded together to help one another.

  This time, with twenty percent of the country looking for a safe place to ride out the storm, it was different.

  It wasn’t that the people in the safe zones weren’t empathetic. They had great sympathy for the plight of the refugees.

  But charity, it’s said, begins at home.

  They were saying on the TV there would be vast shortages of food and water for a long time to come.

  And in a world where everyone couldn’t eat, family would win out every time.

  Relatives, therefore, got priority in people’s homes.

  Refugees without any living relatives were out of luck.

  He sat beneath a highway overpass, trying without success to hide from a driving rain.

  He shivered beneath a wet blanket and cursed his life.

  He wished he’d just stayed where he was.

  It was also raining in Little Rock.

  The phone was ringing in the Carson house, and Hannah went to answer it.

  Tony couldn’t, for he was in the nursery changing little Samson’s diaper.

  They’d expected to have problems with the baby, getting him used to them and to his new home.

  That wasn’t the case, though. He seemed to sense right away these were the people he was supposed to be with, and he settled in quickly.

  Now it was his nap time.

  As Hannah chatted away in the living room Tony picked up his son and the two sat in the rocking chair Hannah’s family had passed down from her grandmother.

  He was asleep in no time at all and Tony gently placed him in his crib.

  Then he went to the living room and collapsed on the couch.

  Changing messy diapers was, after all, exhausting work.

  Hannah hung up the phone and gazed out into nothingness.

  She was stunned. Her face was frozen. Her eyes were glazed.

  Tony came to her from across the room, thoroughly confused and trying to make some sense of the half-a-conversation he’d just heard.

  “Hannah… baby… what was that all about?”

  “The animals.”

  “What about the animals?”

  “They're all migrating away from Yellowstone.”

  It wasn’t registering.

  “What do you mean?”

  “The animals… the bears, the gray wolves. Even the raccoons and squirrels and skunks…. All of them.

  “They’re leaving the area in droves.

  “The highway patrols and sheriff’s deputies all over the area… they’re reporting thousands of animals walking alongside the highways away from the park.

  “They reported a bison walking into downtown Los Angeles. They thought it escaped from their zoo. But it didn’t. It walked there from the Yellowstone area, apparently at night.

  Tony, they spotted two black bears in the northern suburbs of Albuquerque last night. Do you know how long it’s been since anybody’s seen bears in Albuquerque?

  “And birds too. Hundreds of thousands are taking to the air and flying away from the Yellowstone area. Not just south, as many of them do in the winter, But in all directions.

  “Apparently the birds are so thick flying over Salt Lake City they’re almost blacking out the sun.”

  “So what does it all mean?”r />
  “Tony, animals have senses we can’t even begin to comprehend. They sense earthquakes long before humans can feel them, or modern seismographs can detect them.

  “It means they sense something big is coming. They can feel the earth start to rumble, deep underground.

  “And they’re running away from it.”

  “So is this what’s finally gonna make Julianna get out of there?”

  “No.”

  “No? What does that mean, no? This is the most convincing evidence yet, wouldn’t you say?”

  “She said it’s her job as a ranger to warn the people who are still out there and might not know about the volcano.”

  “No. That’s not her job to endanger herself to help people who made a decision to isolate themselves. They don’t even live in the park. And if they are trying so hard to be hidden and isolated, how in heck is she going to find them?”

  “She says the rangers know where many of them are. They’re all accessible by some type of road or trail, and there are hundreds of them in the area. Hundreds who have no televisions, no radios. People who wanted to live as their ancestors did. Off the land, with only their hunting and fishing and trapping skills to sustain them.

  “Honey, those people don’t live on the park. She’s under no obligation to risk her own life to save them.”

  “I told her that.”

  “And what did she say?”

  “She said they shouldn’t be written off, shouldn’t be allowed to die because they made a decision to live off the grid.

  “She said just because the government wants to write them off, to pretend they never existed, she and her ranger friends aren’t willing to do likewise. She said they deserve a chance to live also.”

  “Geez. They’re going on a suicide mission. She can’t see that?”

  “Apparently not. Or maybe they think they have time.”

  “Do you think they do?”

  “I don’t know, Tony.

  “But the animals sure don’t think so.”

  *************************

  Thank you for reading

  THE YELLOWSTONE EVENT

  Book 4: Any Day Now

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