Prepper Fiction Collection: Four Books in One

by Susan Gregersen

  The people’s clothes were woven, some from what appeared to be cloth fiber and some from plant fiber. A young girl brought them a gourd full of water and handed it to Wilma, then scurried away. The water tasted slightly chalky but was refreshing. Wilma handed it to Fred after she took a long drink.

  Soon it appeared as though everyone had gotten bored with them and gone back to what they were doing. Boys ran along the river bank, flushing out rabbits and trying to catch them. Girls carried water from the river in what looked like woven jugs.

  Older people worked on a variety of projects. An older man appeared to be making a spear, winding threads around a pointed rock and a stick. Some women sat near a small stream that flowed into the river, pulling out flat grasses they had soaking in the water and coiling and wrapping them. Wilma figured they were making baskets or jugs.

  Women were grinding corn on large flat rocks, holding a long round rock and rubbing it forward and backward over the corn. Men were turning strips of fish hanging on horizontal poles over a smoky fire. There was activity, steady and calm, all around them. No one seemed hurried. No one seemed alarmed. There was quiet pleasant chatter and occasional laughter.

  Wilma woke with a start. She felt sunburned and grainy. Fred sat with his arms around her and she had her head leaned back on his chest. The sun was edging toward the mountains in the west. People were gathering, and fires had been built up. Soon everyone was eating, and Fred and Wilma watched quietly.

  When everyone was finished, some of the young women went around and cleaned up crumbs and leftover food. It was scraped together on a board which was placed on the ground in front of them. The woman who brought it walked away without looking at their faces.

  “We get their garbage?” Fred asked in disbelief.

  “It’s food!” Wilma shrugged. She started picking through it. She popped a piece of what looked like a yellow sponge into her mouth. “Kinda’ like cornbread, only not sweet at all!”

  Fred watched her, then reached for a piece of dried meat. “Smoky-tasting, but good!”

  There were green and yellow bits of vegetables they didn’t recognize, either by appearance or taste, but they ate them anyway. In fact, they ate every crumb and bit of food on the board. No one came to take the board away. Instead, groups of people gathered near the various fires and talked or played games. Some worked on things with their hands. One woman seemed to be braiding a pair of sandals. Another was painting designs on a basket with a stick and a small woven bowl of dye.

  After a while the same young girl went around with the gourd of water offering it to people. She’d return to the woven jug from time-to-time to refill it, then continue her rounds. After she’d offered water to everyone, big and little, she came over to Fred and Wilma and handed it to them. With a sigh, they took it and drank.

  “Germs. Are we kind of like blood-brothers with them now? Or should I say “spit-brothers’?” Fred said half-humouredly. Wilma just smiled. The girl thought she was smiling at her. She looked back at Wilma with a serious look, then her lips twitched and she curled them upward into a smile. Wilma caught her breath in her throat.

  The girl reached out and touched the necklace around Wilma’s neck. From it hung a small metal palm tree, the trunk painted brown, the leaves painted green. It was about an inch tall. The kids had given it to her for Christmas in honor of her affection for palm trees. It wasn’t palm trees she liked so much as the warm climate they represented, but palm trees were pretty.

  “You like this?” Wilma said gently. She reached up behind her head and unclasped it, then slowly reached her hands up to clasp it around the girl’s neck.

  Suddenly she was bowled to the ground and there was shouting around her. The young girl’s eyes had widened in fear, but just as Wilma was knocked down she slipped the necklace into the girl’s hand. The men shook her and pointed at the girl and shouted words she didn’t understand. The girl got up and ran toward one of the huts. Apparently they thought she was reaching for the girl’s neck to hurt her!

  When things calmed down Wilma could see the girl watching her from the shadows. Wilma darted her eyes around at the others, then raised her hand in the friendship greeting. The girl returned the gesture, then held up the necklace for a minute, hugged it quickly to her, and then it disappeared out of sight.

  After dark the camp began to get quiet. Most of the people disappeared into the huts, but a few of the men stayed around one of the fires late into the night. Fred and Wilma drifted in and out of sleep. Once when they were both awake Fred grumbled “Aren’t they going to let us go to the bathroom or anything?”

  Fred felt disoriented when someone shook him. He started to speak and a hand slid over his mouth. He opened his eyes and saw the two young men who’d been playing with the motorcycle helmets. He motioned to Fred to be quiet, and Fred saw Wilma had been wakened, too, and was sitting up.

  One of the boys pulled a sharpened rock from his waistband and started sawing through the ropes. Wilma wondered why they didn’t just untie it. Fred reached into his pocket and pulled out his pocket knife. The boys drew back in fear, then leaned forward to see what strange, wonderful thing their pale friend had this time.

  They made soft sounds of amazement when Fred opened the knife and the metal blade glinted in the dim light of the stars. With a quick motion he sliced through the rope around his ankles. The boys eagerly pulled Wilma’s ankles toward Fred and motioned to the rope. Fred took one of the boys’ hands and put the shaft of the knife in it and nodded his head.

  After a quick, questioning look the boy sliced through Wilma’s rope. He started to make ‘happy’ noises and his friend silenced him. The first boy handed the knife back to Fred, who folded it and put it in his pocket.

  The boys motioned them to follow and ran in a half-crouch back the way Fred and Wilma had been brought in. When they were around the curve, out of sight of the village, the boys stopped them. They pulled out braided sandals and motioned toward their feet.

  “They want us to change into those!” Fred said. “I get it. They don’t want us leaving tracks with our shoes!” Both of them sat down and quickly removed their shoes and socks. The boys helped them get the sandals on and tied. They stuffed their socks into the shoes, tied the laces together, and hung them around their necks, then stood, ready to walk.

  The fibers of the sandals were soft but slightly prickly. At first they felt like the sandals would slide right off their feet, but soon they realized the sandals not only fit snuggly against their feet, but they were tied on firmly and easy to walk in. Wilma enjoyed feeling of the contours of the ground through them.

  They by-passed the wash they’d hiked down earlier and continued along the of the river. After a couple hours of walking they turned up a gully. One of the boys walked ahead and motioned for Fred and Wilma to step where he did. The boy was stepping from rock to rock, leaving no tracks. The second boy came last, checking each step behind them to see that they left no trace. Fred guessed they were half a mile from the river before the boys relaxed and they all began walking normally. He figured the boys knew how far from the river those tracking them would look up each ravine, gully, or wash.

  In a narrow canyon they stopped and drank from small jugs the boys carried on string over their shoulders. They were offered seeds and bits of dried meat from pouches tied to their waists. Fred and Wilma nibbled on the food and felt surprisingly replenished. They sat there looking around. The shadows of the rock and dirt walls rose up to meet the stars. A light breeze blew down the canyon, which meant morning wasn’t far away. In the evening the hot air rose upward through the canyons, shifting to sink back down as morning neared and the air cooled.

  One of the boys began to act restless. He kept looking at Fred, or more precisely, toward Fred’s mid-section. Fred wondered what was making the boy anxious, and he looked down at his shirt, his belt, and his pants. He didn’t see anything odd. When he looked up, the boy was holding a length of the rope they had cut off Wil
ma’s ankles. He held the rope across the sand in front of him and made cutting motions with his other hand, then pointed at Fred’s pocket.

  Fred grinned and pulled out the pocket knife. He showed the boy how to open it and pantomimed that one side of the blade was sharp and could hurt him, and that the other side wasn’t sharp and wouldn’t cut. The boy opened and closed the knife about a dozen times and looked into the hollow slit in the handle where the blade folded in to. Then he cut the rope into many small pieces, watching the action as though he was absorbing it with all of his senses.

  When there wasn’t anything left long enough to cut he looked around for other things to cut, but the other boy laid a hand on his arm and said something to him. They rose to their feet, motioning Fred and Wilma to do the same. The boy folded the knife, looked at it longingly, and handed it back to Fred.

  Soon the gray edge of dawn was spreading across the sky to the east. When they reached the place where Wilma had frightened the boys away with her camera, they stopped. The boys looked at them questioningly, and with motions and strange words, they gestured all directions and looked expectantly at Fred and Wilma.

  “I think they want to know where we were going. Or something like that.” Fred said. He turned and pointed southeast, toward where the uhaul-camper was. One of the boys climbed up the tall rock and looked all around. When he climbed down he took the lead and they started walking.

  The boys kept them near the base of the mountains as they skirted the desert floor. Each time they reached a wash the boys would point down it and look questioningly at Fred and Wilma. Fred shook his head ‘no’ and they kept walking.

  Finally they reached one of the hot springs at the base of the mountain and Fred pointed downstream from it, toward where Lake Mead used to be, or rather where it would be someday, and they started downhill along the tall oasis grasses that grew along the wet channel.

  One of the boys uttered a cry and suddenly Fred and Wilma were pulled to the ground. The four of them crept on their bellies into a break in the weeds. The damp sand soaked through their clothes as they sat breathing hard and trying to be quiet. One of the boys raised up slowly among the grass and peered back the way they came. He spoke to the other boy, who also rose up and looked. The next words they said had the same tone as cuss words exploding from the mouth of modern teens.

  With resignation and a few more of those colorful-sounding words, one of the boys crawled out of the grass and along the bank, then stood and began to walk back up the slope. A minute later they heard him talking to someone. A quiet voice answered him, and they wondered who he was talking to. They heard him give a big sigh, then come walking back toward them. It was light enough for them to recognize the young girl who had brought them water. She walked over and sat next to Wilma on the wet sand and leaned against her.

  Wilma was startled, then put her arms protectively around the girl as the other boy started shouting at her. The first boy shushed him and pointed with a sweeping motion back toward the village. They had a short, urgent argument, then rose and started walking. Fred, Wilma, and the girl followed. The boys muttered from time to time, but other than that they walked in silence.

  They came out onto a point where the land split into a multitude of ravines and dropped to the river valley. Fred and Wilma could make out the shape of their camper in the distance, high and dry on a knob of land, where it used to sit a couple hundred feet from the shore of the lake. Instead, now the land sloped down to the bottom of the valley where the Virgin River flowed, having been met by the Muddy River a few miles upstream.

  Fred pointed toward the square shape of the camper and said “That’s it, that’s our camper. That’s where we’re heading.” He knew they wouldn’t understand his words but he hoped they understood his meaning.

  The sound they made sounded like “Wow” in modern English as their sharp eyes saw the camper, barely visible over the mounds of sand and plants between them and the camper.

  The going was rougher here. Rocks and gravel lay over the sand, and they had to climb in and out of ravine after ravine. Sometimes they’d follow a spine or a ridge for a while, or walk along the bottom of a ravine, then climb out and over another.

  Cactus was mixed in among the greasewood and other brush, and rodents had dug entry holes to their tunnels around the base of the plants. If they walked too close to the plants, the ground would give way and they’d drop a few inches into the collapsed tunnels.

  Suddenly Fred yelped and hopped on one foot. Immediately the three young native people looked at the ground where Fred had stepped. In a flash one of the boys darted over and grabbed something off the ground and held it up.

  Carefully holding a scorpion near it’s tail so it couldn’t sting him, he held it out for the rest to see. The other boy murmured something and the first one agreed. The girl looked at it, then turned and walked across the rocky ground toward a spiny ball of a plant. She pulled one of the stalky leaves of a yucca plant down and used a rock to saw at it and cut it loose.

  She spoke to one of the boys and they started gathering sticks as though they were going to build a fire. When they had it all laid out, Fred reached for his lighter, but realized the “abra-ca-dabra“ Indian had it. Wilma reached into her pocket and pulled out hers, then squatted down and lit the fire.

  One of the boys had been holding a flat board and a stick, which appeared to be their fire-starting equipment. He grinned and shoved the fireboard and spindle back into the pouch on this waistband. The girl stirred the fire, then waited for it to burn down to coals.

  Meanwhile, Fred was in misery with the stinging pain in the side of his foot. Wilma made motions like pouring water over it, thinking it would soothe the pain, but the three natives shook their heads. Wilma searched her pockets for anything that would help, maybe even some aspirin, if she was lucky. She came up with several plastic-wrapped mints from a restaurant they’d been to recently…well, “recently” in their real life!

  Thinking this would be a nice treat she showed them to the natives, unwrapped one, and popped it in her mouth and sucked on it. They watched her, then picked up the clear plastic wrapper and turned it over and over, speaking in amazement. They held it up and looked through it. Wilma handed them each one, and they admired the red and white ball inside it. She tore another one open, and they did the same with the ones they had. They dumped the ball into their hand and marveled over it and the wrapper.

  Wilma handed the mint she’d just opened to Fred, and he put it in his mouth. Wilma opened her mouth and showed them the candy was still in her mouth. The inside of her mouth was stained red.

  The natives hesitantly put the candy into their mouths, then immediately spit them back into their hands and looked at them suspiciously. The girl tentatively licked hers with her tongue, then as she got used to the flavor she carefully placed it on her tongue. After a minute she took it out again, then put it back in her mouth. The boys held theirs for a while, then carefully poked them back into the wrappers.

  The fire had burned to coals and the girl set her water pouch on the coals. She started to cut the stiff green stalk-like leaf with a rock, and the boy who had cut up the rope with the pocket knife stopped her. He came to Fred and pointed toward his pocket. Fred took out the knife and handed it to him, saying “Knife” and pointing to it.

  The boy held up the knife and repeated the word. “Knife” He looked questioningly at Fred.

  “Knife,” Fred agreed. Then he pointed to himself and said “Fred.” He pointed at Wilma and said “Wilma.”

  The boy looked back and forth between them and then said “Wed? Frilma?”

  Fred laughed, then corrected him. The boy pointed to himself and said what sounded like “Aye-hoo-yit”. He pointed to the other boy and said “Jum-koo-yah”. The girl pointed to herself and said “Mah-yah-li”.

  The boy cut up the stalk for the girl, then folded the knife and handed it to Fred. Fred put his hand over the boy’s hand and gently pushed the hand t
oward the boy. The boy understood the gesture and slid the knife into one of his pouches. He muttered a word that might have meant “Thanks”, but the look on his face made words unnecessary.

  The girl, Mahyahli, put the plant pieces in the water and watched it while it heated to a boil. She motioned Fred to sit and she took her water pouch off the fire. She fished out pieces of the plant with quick fingers, blew on them for a minute, then placed them on the sting on Fred’s foot. She pulled off a strip of cloth that had been tied around her head and tied it around Fred’s foot. Then she handed him his sandal. He put it back on and got to his feet.

  “Wow, it’s feeling better already!” he said. “These people know their medicines, don’t they? How come we don’t?”

  “We should, shouldn’t we?” Wilma said. “We’re always trying to lug along First Aid kits, which are a good idea, but we might not always have them with us. We should know what we can use for food and medicine in any place we spend time.”

  They were a few ridges away from the uhaul-camper when they heard shouts behind them. Turning, they saw many of the men from the village spread along the base of the mountains. They were pointing toward the small group below them and grouping themselves together, now that they had spotted what they were after.