by Sean Little
In the fields below the little hill, I was watching a worn game trail. At one point, it might have been a place where cattle herds walked to pasture, but over the last two years, it had started to be reclaimed by the land. It was still visible, but a fine green fuzz of grass and weeds was finally starting to poke up through the hard-packed clay of the path.
After what felt like hours, but had probably only been forty or fifty minutes, I started to see movement in the tall grass around the trail. Something was coming. It was obviously not large game, but it might be edible. A turkey would be welcome, so would grouse or pheasant. I felt my pulse begin to elevate. I rocked into a better position, bringing up my right leg slightly to provide the feeling of a more stable base. I raised the rifle, elevating the barrel with my left hand and keeping the stock tight into my shoulder with the right. My mouth went dry. My heart began to race. I began to understand why people seemed to enjoy hunting. There was an anticipation to it, an excitement. What was coming? What will happen next?
The grass began to part, a dozen brown-and-white striped blobs emptied onto the game trail in a hodge-podge of grunts and awkward stumbles. Peccaries. In Texas, they were commonly called javelinas, and they looked like dwarf versions of wild boars, but hairier. In the right light, they were almost cute. I knew from reading issues of Field & Stream in the library back in Wisconsin that they were edible. In Portugal, rural families often raised them for food. I didn’t have a recipe for cooking peccary handy, but I figured they were close enough to pigs that it would be similar. I wagered they’d be downright tasty with barbeque sauce, although to be fair—not much in this world isn’t improved with barbeque sauce. I could put that stuff on cereal.
I tensed up. I did not want to miss. One loud crack of the rifle would be all I would be able to get. Once that thing roared, every animal within a two miles would promptly do an about-face from my position and start running. I sighted down the scope and found the fat male in the lead of the squadron. (I’m not being hyperbolic: the collective noun for javelinas is “squadron.”) The male was lazing, not in any sort of a hurry. The rest of them followed his lead. They rooted. They sniffed. A couple of them rolled in the short grass, writhing to scratch their backs.
I reminded myself that I was not committing any sort of crime. I was an omnivore. They were food. Ren and I had no fresh meat at home. This was the way of the world, I told myself. Apex predators preyed upon prey. Taking a single javelina out of the world was not going to deplete the species. Even prior to the Flu, javelinas were something of a nuisance in Texas.
I lined up the male’s head in the crosshairs of the scope. I took a deep breath and blew it out slowly, calming my heart rate. I took another breath and held it. The male paused, almost as if he sensed impending doom. It was now or never. I squeezed the trigger and the gun bucked and roared. My ears were ringing. At the base of the hill, the squadron scattered, the fuzzy blobs darting every which way for cover, legs churning like windmills.
Except for one.
A single blob lay still on the trail, a red stain on the side of its head.
Direct hit.
My heart stopped. I didn’t know if I should scream, run away, or wet myself. I was stunned. I was in shock. I did it. I actually did it! I hunted!
It was only then that I realized my shoulder was killing me. The recoil of the rifle had been far more than I had anticipated. I really should practice with these things. The muscles in my arm hurt. My ears hurt. The world was muffled and faint-sounding. I should have used earplugs.
I slung the rifle onto my left shoulder—the one that didn’t hurt—and walked down the hill toward my kill. I was prepared for field-dressing the thing, at least. I used a sharp hunting knife I’d been carrying since Wisconsin to open the cavity, remove the testicles, and cut out the organs. I left the gut pile in the field. Coyotes and buzzards will love me for it, I’m sure. The little peccary weighed somewhere between sixty and seventy pounds before the field dressing. After, he was still a weighty little thing, a compact forty or fifty pounds. I used a length of cord I carried in my pocket to loop him up by his legs so I could carry him a little easier. I threw him over a shoulder and set off for home. I could feel him bleeding onto my back and my jeans. Ren would probably throw a fit about that, and I couldn’t blame her. We both did the laundry, and washing clothes by hand was no picnic. Maybe the sight of fresh meat would make her forget it. It was a brave new world, and we were bound to get a little dirty in it.
My mountain bike came with me from Wisconsin. I love that bike. While it was tethered to the back of the RV, I did not use it much, but once gasoline went to bunk, I was so glad to have that bike. The roads in Texas were still in surprisingly good condition. The lack of weather fluctuation in the North absolutely destroyed the highways and byways. Frost heaves and heat buckles were everywhere. With no road crews to fix potholes or repair major damage, the entropy that would eventually claim all the roads was only hastened. In Texas, the biggest thing I could see happening was the grass and occasional weed sprouting from the cracks in the asphalt. It was the start of the breakdown of the roads, I knew, but it would take longer down here.
One of the first things I did when we set up shop on the farm was to get a big cart that hooked onto the back of my bike. When I couldn’t find one big enough in the bike stores around Houston, I used the frame of one to build a bigger one by putting down a plywood bed and making a cage of two-by-fours around it. On one side, there were hinges so it could open like a door for easier loading and unloading. Once the RV died, the bike became a vital piece of machinery for me on the farm, every bit as important as a rake, a hoe, and a hammer.
There were plenty of houses around the farm to scavenge for supplies. Once the homes were ransacked of usable goods, there were couches to tear apart for firewood or walls to tear down for studs. The houses would continue to give us usable goods for years, and I was grateful for that. However, there were tens of thousands of homes within bike-riding distance of the farm, and then the city of Houston beyond that. Houston, by road, was probably thirty or thirty-five miles from the farm. It was close enough that I could be there by bike in two or three hours. I could get up early, cycle to the city, loot a few stores, and be back at the farm by dinner, an exhausting day in the Texas heat, but not too difficult that it wasn’t out of the question.
No matter how useful the bike was, and no matter how many tires, inner tubes, and cans of lithium grease I stockpiled in the garage for repairs, the bike was subject to entropy and would eventually break down. I had already grabbed a couple of new bikes and had them on a rack on the wall of the garage for when the inevitable happened. It might take a decade or two for the bike to go down, but it would eventually. I guess that’s why I started looking at horses.
In the world before the Flu, horses were an expensive, impractical hobby for most of the people I knew in Wisconsin who owned them. I was always impressed by horses when I got to see them up close, but I never gave them a second thought. They were not part of my world. Now I had a farm with cows and chickens. A horse would be a very good addition to my world. A horse could be ridden, could pull a cart, or pull a plow. That would be very practical and necessary. I had no idea how to get a horse, though.
I saw herds of horses ranging around the grassy fields between Houston and the farm. The horses, probably freed from domestication during the Flu, had done very well for themselves. They had quickly banded together in groups for protection and procreation. I saw many foals trailing behind placid mothers. Alpha-male stallions led the herds, and anytime they were close to the road where I was riding, the stallions would swagger toward me, eying me suspiciously until they felt I was far enough along the road to no longer be a threat to their ladies.
I tried approaching a herd once. A pair of foals, curious and wide-eyed, were near the asphalt, and when I stopped to watch them play, they started moving closer to me. I got off my bike and moved slowly toward them. I stopped a safe distance
from them and held out my hands. I spoke in a low voice and tried to coax them to coming toward me. Those foals had never seen a human in their lives. They walked closer, tentative and curious, but cautious. When the stallion saw his progeny moving toward the unwelcome biped, he charged me. I saw a flash of dappled gray out of the corner of my eye, and a mountain of horseflesh was steaming toward me, head low and teeth bared. I started to back up in a hurry. The stallion was faster than I was. He was on me in a second, so I dove to the side, hit the ground, and rolled. The stallion flashed past me and wheeled about for a second pass. I ran in the opposite direction of the herd until the stallion was satisfied with my retreat. Then, and only then, did he merge back with the herd, but he kept an eye on me until I rode away on my bike. When I was a hundred yards down the road, I heard the big stallion whinny a challenge at me. If I spoke horse, I would bet it he was saying something in a tough-guy voice, something like, Yeah, keep walking, chump! He bested me, and he knew it. That moment put the pipe dream of capturing one of those animals out of my head for a couple of weeks.
In my travels around the Texas plains, I saw a lot of horses and a lot of cows. They were everywhere, it seemed. After a few weeks of scavenging, I started to recognize different groups, each denoted by the stallion that led them. I also saw a lot of things you would not think you would see on the Texas plains: a quartet of elephants, a flock of ostrich, a couple mobs of emus, the occasional mating pair of giraffes, a caravan of dromedary camels—at least thirty of them—and a mob of kangaroos. In the waning days of the Flu, as people realized they were doomed, many zookeepers or wild animal park workers knew that the animals for which they cared were doomed if they were not freed from their enclosures. It might not have been ecologically sound in every case, but the rules of ecology went out the window when the dominant species that wrote the rules checked out of the planet. Most of the animals did very well. They kept to themselves. They foraged. They procreated. They prospered. Even cattle, which were never wild animals, figured out a way to keep living. Michael Crichton was right: Life does find a way.
Every so often, usually at night, Ren and I would hear a lion’s roar. That was unsettling. Lion roars were very loud, and on a still night the sound could carry five or six miles, easily. It was a reminder that any still-living humans were no longer the apex predators. Even with a gun handy, a surprise lion attack would be difficult to survive. I even outfitted the cage on the bike cart to carry a shotgun in a sleeve so it would be in close enough proximity to me that I would have time to retrieve it if I saw one of the big cats. I was not worried about them coming into the farm, though. The fire we usually had burning in the fire pit was an excellent deterrent, and there was more than enough easy prey in the larger world for them. Still, I made plans to build a stockade wall around the farm at some point. That would be a monumental chore, but I would sleep better at night if I knew that Leo the Light-pawed Lion was not skulking around the barn upsetting Thing 1 and Thing 2. I would add it to the ever-expanding list of things that needed to be done.
I made future plans for domesticating some of the animals I saw roaming around the farm. Ostriches and emus could be used for meat and eggs. I’ve even heard that their skin makes good leather. I don’t know what I’d do with emu leather, but I’m sure it might be useful someday. Kangaroos are probably good eating; I’m sure the Aboriginals probably ate ‘roo. It might not be the tastiest thing on the planet, but beggars can’t be choosers, and since the local Kroger’s was no longer functioning, I would take my protein where I could get it.
I used my bike to haul scads of fencing material back to the farm. I pounded posts, put up crossbars and chicken wire, and made several large paddocks, just in case I would have the good fortune to capture a new animal that might benefit us in the long run.
I bring all this up because, as I hiked back to the farm with the peccary bleeding down my back, I saw a horse that I thought I might have a chance of capturing. It was a beautiful mare, small for an adult. I know horses get measured for height in a unit called “hands”—like, that horse is sixteen hands tall—but, but I have no idea how to measure a horse in “hands.” This horse was smaller than most horses I’ve seen, but it was still clearly an adult horse. She was a bay horse, dark brownish-red body and black mane and tail. I have no notion of breeding and what makes a Quarter Horse different from an Arabian horse or anything else, so I could not tell you what breed she was. I know some colors. I know some breed names. I know that draught horses are the big monster horses, and that Thoroughbreds are fast. Other than that, I am a horse newbie. I know they’re pretty, and they can be useful when domesticated and broken to ride and drive carts. The bay I saw seemed to be running solo. She was standing in the middle of a field placidly eating grass when I first saw her. I crested a small rise in the field and there she was, barely twenty yards from me. There was no herd around her, which I found strange. Horses are herd animals by nature. Solitary horses in the wild were fodder for predators. There was safety in numbers. I could not even see a herd anywhere in the vicinity. It seemed odd.
I froze in my spot and watched her. She watched me, too. There was no fear or concern in her eyes. She seemed to accept my presence. Slowly, I slipped the peccary off my shoulder and laid it in the grass. I laid the rifle next to the carcass. Cautiously, I took a couple of slow, easy steps toward the mare, my hands raised. She continued to watch me, head raised, ears twitching. After I closed the gap between us by half, she started to move. I froze again. She took two steps backward, then moved forward a step. The lack of fear told me she had once been owned, once been loved. She had been someone’s horse. I took two more steps, then froze. She watched me carefully. I took another step. I was nearing touching distance. I watched her face for signs of annoyance or anger. Her large, black eyes just continued to watch me curiously. I held my hand out toward her. Cautiously, she leaned her long neck forward and snuffled at my hand. I could feel her hot, wet breath on my skin. It sent shivers up my spine. After a moment, she pulled back and cropped another mouthful of grass from the sea of green around us. I moved another step closer. I leaned my hand out and touched her neck, feeling heat and solid muscle beneath her fine coat.
I had no rope or halter to put on her, and no way of getting her back to the farm at the moment, unless she chose to follow me, which she did not. When I stepped back toward the javelina and my rifle, she decided that was the moment to turn and mosey off to other pastures. I watched her walk away from me and felt sad that I wasn’t prepared to bring her home that day, but I knew she was around now. I could spend time looking for her, and maybe even catch her. If I could break her to ride or pull a cart or even plow, a horse would be worth her weight in canned food. I made the vow to bring that horse to the farm.
CHAPTER TWO
Ren
It’s Thursday, I think…
I have no idea why Twist starts all his journals like that. I think it’s stupid. Who cares what day it is? It’s just another day, and the Gregorian calendar stopped existing the day no one in Greenwich was alive to take care of time. That’s the reality of the world: a day is a day a day. Today will blend into tomorrow, and tomorrow will blend into the day after tomorrow. Sunrise, sunset. Seasons pass. It all becomes a blur, and tracking them no longer serves a purpose.
My name is Renata Lameda. Don’t call me Renata. Ren is fine. I won’t punch you if you call me Renata, but it’s such a weird name. Years ago, my mother confided in me that Renata was a family name from my father’s side of the family (he was Venezuelan), and she never really liked it. She wanted to name me “Trixie” after the Trixie Belden books she loved as a child. I don’t know if that would have been any better. Unless I’d become a stripper. Trixie was a good stripper name. Or a magician. Trixie would be a good name for a female magician, too.
I’m twenty-three now. I was almost twenty-two when the flu hit. I’m soon going to be twenty-four. I feel old. As far as I know, I can legitimately claim to be the world�
��s oldest woman. That just helps make me feel older.
I don’t know why Twist writes these journals. He says it helps him clear his head, and he says it will be good to have a history of the world after the Flu. I think he’s probably full of it, but it does give me something to do at night, and maybe that’s worth it. Twist says I don’t have to write every detail like he does, but for some reason it feels like it’s competitive, like I need to write as much as he does, if not more.
This is the first entry in my journal. Until I met Twist, keeping a journal had never even occurred to me. Who would be around to read it? What was the point? If nothing else, Twist said that writing was therapeutic. We both have endured a lot. I guess having an outlet for all that trauma and frustration is a good thing.
Most of the past two years has been a blur. My parents died in the Flu. My brother was sickly, had cerebral palsy, and died shortly after my parents died because of his diseases and lack of medical care. He, like me and my sister, was immune to the Flu. My sister died at the hands of a group of psychos in New York when she and I were out scavenging for food. I was hiding in the shadows when they did. I had to watch her die. That was a dark time for me, but I came out of it, I guess. And I’m still here. That what doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger, right?
I’m glad I’m in Texas with Twist, though. If it hadn’t been for him, I’d probably still be in Brooklyn trying to carve out some sort of existence. Maybe I’d be dead. Maybe the friggin’ Patriots would have captured me and turned me into some sort of slave for them. Maybe I would have gotten sick of the city and set out on foot or by bike to New Jersey or Virginia or something. Who knows? My dad always said that you have to play the hand you’re dealt, and this is how I’m playing that hand.
