The No Where Apocalypse (Book 1): Stranded No Where

by Lake, E. A.

  “You don’t watch much TV, do you Dizzy?” What a dumb question. Nowhere did I see a satellite dish on his property. Cable wires? No, just a few power lines. And the nearest television station was over 100 miles away. Except for a fat-tubed color set, the oldest VCR known to mankind, and a stack of skin flicks (as he lovingly called them) that would have made Ron Jeremy proud, Dizzy had no need for such a frivolity.

  “You either need to get two cords cut, or figure out how to haul that much from my place,” he continued. “And I’m out of gas, so the putt putt ain’t gonna work no more.”

  Leaning against the trunk of a large oak, I thought about his advice. I needed venison and wood. Dizzy would happily supply both, but I felt I needed to be able to produce something myself as well.

  “I’m gonna head back to my place,” I told Dizzy, seeing his trailer in the distance. “I still got a few hours of daylight. First thing I’m going to do is drag all those chunks out of the woods on the west side. All that stuff my dad cut last spring.”

  “Last summer,” Dizzy interjected. “And that’s good because it will be dry enough to burn this winter.” He slapped my back, damn near knocking me over. This guy wasn’t losing any strength in the dark days of the world. No sir, Dizzy was in his element.

  Almost back to the highway I paused to watch bright yellow leaves drop from the birch tree lining the road. Dizzy was right; fall had come quick and brief. That could only mean winter’s early arrival. Marvelous.

  My brother and father drug their hunting stuff back and forth each fall. Neither wanted to leave much at the cabin over the winter, afraid someone would break in and take their belongings. As such, I didn’t have a winter coat or a decent pair of boots. Certainly not what Dizzy called winter boots.

  Fred’s feet were too small, as were Dizzy’s. Anything they had would be three sizes tighter than preferred. And, according to both experienced woodsmen, tight boots got cold fast.

  Lettie offered me a pair she had lying around. They were only a single size too small. Thus, they might fit the need. Except of course they were pink. Not hers, she claimed. Just something some relative had left behind years back.

  So I had a pair of boots that would work in a pinch, but what I really needed to do was scavenge around the area. Who knew, I just might find something my size, and a bit more manly.

  Dizzy promised to dig through his back shed and find me a parka that would last the winter. Claiming to have clothes dating back to the 40s, he couldn’t guarantee any coat he found would be fashionable — just warm.

  A few more strides and I was on the highway leading home. That’s when I saw it. Standing there on the shoulder, chewing on the last of the green weeds of the season.

  The doe was small but vulnerable. Perhaps she’d never seen a human before. It was, after all, possible in these parts. My dad had said once that if a hunter went deep enough into the woods and swamps of this area, you’d set foot on land where man had never trod.

  Slowly, trying not to spook the brown animal, I raised the gun. When the explosion sounded, the doe took off for the far side of the road.

  Damn it!

  Day 50 - continued - WOP

  My heart fell when the tiny doe began her dash for the east side of the road. Fifteen shots and ten deer and I was zero-for-10. There had to be a worse hunter than me somewhere in the world. At least I hoped there was.

  When I heard the crash just into the woods to my left, I craned my neck to see if the confused animal was coming back. Maybe she’d be closer, and dumber. A second chance at a (hopefully) non-moving target.

  A thrashing sound came next. One that made me wonder if I was about to meet my first wolf. Then it died away, slowly, suddenly halting. I stepped into the ditch to investigate.

  The first thing I noticed was blood at my feet, on a path the deer had taken in her hasty retreat. There were some on the road, I noticed. Not a lot, but enough to give me hope. And in the ditch just before the tree-line I found more, much more.

  Bright red foamy droplets covered the ground near my feet. According to what Dizzy had said, that was a good sign. A double-lunger, as he called it.

  Excitement took over once I was inside the forest. There, maybe ten feet in front of me laid the doe on her side, not moving. I noticed the gun tremble as I extended it at the animal, making sure it didn’t jump up suddenly and sprint further into the woods.

  By the time I reached it, I knew it was dead. Well, I was pretty sure it was dead. With each step, dead leaves and small twigs cracked under my dirty boots. And with each sound, the deer remaining motionless. So either it was a good faker, or she was dead.

  I nudged her hindquarter with the toe of my boot — no response. Slowly, I circled towards her head, my gun still pointed at the deer. Gently I gave her one last nudge, just under her jaw.

  She was dead. I was a hunter.

  Kneeling beside the kill, I slapped its back quarter several times. Perhaps not as much meat as I might need for a month, but still something. And I had taken it. No one helped me.

  “I can do this,” I whispered aloud, smoothing the fur on the side of my deer. “I can survive this. I can make it to next spring. Then maybe, I can get home.”

  Rising up, I threw my arms in the air above my head. Pumping several times like Rocky Balboa celebrating his stair climb, I let out a small whoop. Remembering there was no one to hear me, I doubted Dizzy would have even heard the gunshots two miles back in, I shouted as loud as I could.

  “Yes! Yes! Yes!” echoed through the otherwise silent woods. Only the pines, and maples, and birches took in my celebration.

  When the adrenaline quit pumping through my veins, and my heart rate slowed to below 500, I studied my kill. It was double-lunged, just where I was aiming…I think. Dizzy claimed I only pointed the gun; you need to aim was his typical battle cry after a miss. Well, aim this, sucker.

  A problem came to mind, studying the deer. What was I supposed to do next?

  My plan had always been to have Dizzy guide me through the next steps. He was the experienced hunter. Certainly more experienced than I was. But he was two plus miles away. Most likely memorizing his magazines.

  “Gut it,” I said aloud as if I knew what that meant. I remembered that much from my limited hunting experience.

  And that was a problem. I had never actually watched a deer’s entrails being removed. Typically, I showed up an hour after Dad or Bud had taken and properly cleaned their kill. Even then, the nearby gut piles made me want to puke.

  To gut this thing, my first kill, I was going to need a knife. That meant running back to the cabin, finding a sharp knife, and making my way through the rest of the mysterious process.

  I rose, glancing one more time at my deer. My deer. That sounded awesome for some reason to me.

  Day 50 - continued - WOP

  I ran most of the few hundred yards back to the cabin. Trotted was probably a better description. Though I was “fit,” I wasn’t that physically active in my former life. My exercise program included a weekly walk with Shelly, usually taken on Sunday mornings.

  My wife had always warned me I needed more physical activity. “Some day you’ll thank me for riding your butt,” she often said. Usually, I laughed her off. But at that moment, I remembered just how right she was. Eerily correct.

  Sucking for air, I scanned my small home. Somewhere someone must have left a decent knife here. A quick check of the kitchen offered one possibility. An old wood-handle meat knife with an edge duller than the lip of a wood table. If needed, I could make it work.

  I lit a candle to dig in the deep recesses of the dark closet — nothing. Did Dad really cart his hunting knives back and forth to Milwaukee every deer season? Didn’t he know that I might be in need of one someday? Like when the world ended and I found myself stranded here, in thew middle of nowhere?

  I took a spot on the couch; my heart rate settled. There had to be a real-life hunting knife, somewhere, in a real-life hunting cabin. Bu
t where?

  A thought finally came to me. Standing, I made my way back into the bedroom. Pulling open a dresser drawer, then a second, I spotted what I knew I’d find, Grandpa’s old hunting knife.

  My first recollection of the tool was my first deer season, some 10 years in the past. Grandpa, dressed from head to toe in woolen blaze orange, strapping a thick leather belt around his rotund mid-section. The only reason for the belt was to hold his knife, sheathed in a dark tan leather holder.

  Back then, it and he was the coolest thing I’d ever seen.

  “Don’t you dare touch that,” he warned me at the time. “It’s sharper than a surgeon’s scalpel.”

  Grandpa died the winter after that deer season. Since then the knife had sat in the same spot in the white painted dresser. It was my dad’s homage to his dad. We all knew it was there; and that meant Grandpa was still with us, no matter what.

  Picking the antique up, another voice sounded in my head.

  “Don’t touch that.” It was Dad. I looked around the room, expecting him to be standing there. “That’s Grandpa’s knife. It belongs right where he left it. You’ll just lose it somewhere. Grandpa deserves more respect than that from you.”

  I pulled the blade from its sheath. What I expected to find was a shiny steel knife with an edge that could slice on sight. However, I discovered something else.

  A layer of rust covered the tool. And I mean the whole thing. Only the cracked leather handle wasn’t covered by the orange coating.

  “You two are such morons,” I replied to the ghosts of my father and brother.

  I needed to clean this thing up so I could gut that deer, hopefully sometime today.

  I used a generous coating of cooking oil and a dirty rag to work on the rust. Happy with the results I searched for something to tackle the last problem.

  This knife was duller than my first find. While I was excited to get back to my kill and clean it, I knew I needed an edge that would cut something other than water.

  Fortunately, someone had left a sharpening steel here at the cabin. At home, I did a lot of cooking, well actually more like the prep work. Steely did most of the actual cooking. But I knew how to slice and dice. And that began with a sharp knife.

  Drawing the metal against metal, I felt the dull edge give up some of its coating. This wasn’t going to be a quick job, but with each pass I knew the knife was getting closer to being useful. And how sharp did it need to be?

  My dad always claimed that a hunter’s knife needed to be so sharp that he was scared of it. Well, this wasn’t going to be that sharp. This would eventually end up somewhere between scared and concerned. Probably more on the concerned end of the spectrum.

  The entire time I ran the blade down the steel I tried to recall the process of cleaning a deer. I knew the guts needed to come out, that much was common knowledge. Even if I messed it up, which I would undoubtedly do, I couldn’t make that much of a mess, could I?

  After poking a hole just below the sternum, the next slice went up the rib cage. And I had to be careful to stick to the cartilage. Slicing through ribs would take the edge off the blade.

  I as a little fuzzy on how to cut around the hindquarters. That was going to be an issue. But I shrugged it away, testing the blade on a piece of scratch paper I’d found. Perfect; I was ready.

  The pelvic bone ran across my mind. I did a quick scan of the room. An ax would come in handy. Seeing none I decided to play it by feel. I’d figure out a way once I was inside the bloody mess.

  Day 50 - continued - WOP

  I stood over the gut pile winded. Sprinting back to my kill, I’d almost tripped twice. I guess I was anxious to get at this…the process.

  But staring down at where my deer had been, the only thing left was a mess of blood and entrails. The deer itself, the one I knew I had killed a half hour ago, was gone.

  My eyes squeezed tightly shut before I let out a low guttural moan. Someone had swiped my deer.

  Hustling back to the road, I first looked left then right. Left — south — was nothing but a gloomy empty road. To my right, I spied a single soul, trotting down the middle of the blacktop. And if I was seeing things correctly, he had something slung over his shoulders and around his neck. Something large. Something that looked similar to a small deer.

  It took a few minutes of running, something I wasn’t really good at, to catch up to the man. Well, I assumed it was a man. Twice he had looked back and picked up his pace. Each time I saw his face and swore he had a beard.

  “Where you going with my deer?” I shouted ahead when I was within 50 yards of him.

  He slowed and then stopped. Turning, I noticed his grin.

  “This is my deer,” he answered in a friendly way.

  Yeah, that wasn’t gonna happen. I stepped within 20 feet of him, winded but ready for action.

  “My deer that I killed back there, just off the road,” I continued, studying my thief. He was a little shorter than me, but otherwise we could have been kin I thought. We both had longish sweaty hair, each had a scruffy beard, and neither of our clothing could be called anything but filthy.

  “I have to warn you,” he stated, laying the deer on the road. It was then I noticed the fresh blood running down the front of his tan leather jacket. “I have a knife. So before you think about anything goofy, just be warned.”

  I shook him off. Pulling the Glock from my pocket, I held it at my side.

  His confident expression changed to one of guilt. “Huh,” he said, his eyes moving from the gun to my face. “Guess you got me beat.”

  “I just shot that thing,” I said, pointing at the deer. “What gives you the right to come take it?”

  He shrugged first and then scratched at his face with a bloody hand. “Heard you shoot, came to see what was happening, and saw you run away from the woods, back towards that cabin on the other side of the road. When I came and checked, there was the deer.”

  “And it didn’t dawn on you I was coming back?”

  He laughed, wiping blood on his pants. “Me and my family ain’t had much to eat in a week now.” He pointed north, behind him. “We’re camped up on the edge of the lake, about a half-mile in from the road. Safer that way. I was out foraging, heard you shoot, saw the deer. Well, you know how desperate things have become.”

  To be honest, he looked more ragged than I did. And I did understand his desperation.

  “How many in your family?” I asked.

  He held up four fingers. “Me, the wife, young daughter, and son. We had to leave Covington last week. Things have gotten a little unruly up there. Not safe for a family right now.”

  I wished it had just been him. That would have made it easier to chase him off. But a wife and two kids? Chased from their home?

  “Make you a deal,” I said, stepping between him and the deer. “You can have a front quarter.”

  The disappointment in his eyes was obvious. “How about a half?” he begged. “I did clean it after all.”

  How about nothing, ran through my mind. But that wasn’t very neighborly of me and I knew it. If not for the generosity of my three new friends, I might already be dead myself.

  I let him cut one of the back quarters away. Ten minutes later he headed north, a deer lag and ham hoisted over his shoulder and I carried the remainder back towards my place.

  A thought kept running through my mind: What if he didn’t have a family? What if he was just some road bum looking for a free lunch?

  I made up my mind to investigate the lake and his cozy sounding setup. Not today, but sometime in the near future.

  Day 65 WOP

  Frank praised me for my generosity when I saw him next. People needed to help one another at a time like this, he claimed. Turning on your fellow man wasn’t the way to act.

  A few days after that Lettie affirmed what Frank had said. She even gave me a hug, and a hearty one at that. I’d never taken the old gal to be much of a feeling person. Goes to show everyone can surpr
ise you.

  Lettie canned a good amount of the meat for me in glass jars. I dropped it off one morning and picked it up three nights later. Packed in each glass jar was a good amount of venison, half an onion (cut into smaller pieces) and one smashed bulb of garlic.

  I dragged sixteen one-pound jars back to my place in a pull-behind carrier that was usually used to haul deer from the woods. Something my father and Bud did manage to leave behind that was of use to me. I figured that if I could make each container last three days, I had enough meat for a month.

  Added on that were the dozen or so containers Lettie had given me earlier. Two months down; at least two more months of winter to cover, she warned.

  Dizzy had agreed that the deer, taken a little more than a week back, was mine and I needed to tell that bum to pound sand. Winter was going to be tough enough without sharing with strangers. But it still made me think, weren’t we all strangers a mere few months back?

  I helped Lettie harvest the last of her garden just as the first snows arrived. As best as I could tell it was late October, third week maybe. Snow in Chicago sometimes came in late November, but typically later than that. But watching the small white flakes dot the back of Lettie’s dark blue barn coat reminded me where I was. And that was most certainly not Chicago.

  Dragging the final bag of potatoes down to her small smelly root cellar, I searched in the near darkness for the jar she said I would find down there. Turns out, they were easy to find. Hundreds and hundreds of mason jars lined the far wall, in a way that made grabbing them easy.

  “Were gonna need more lids come spring,” Lettie said as I hauled 20 or so into her kitchen. There, over a wood stove, she prepared the last of the early spuds for canning.

  “And where do we find those?” I asked, slightly winded from all the steps.