Jack was sitting on the ground beside his wife, leaned back against the car and looking a little more disheveled than when I’d seen him earlier. At first I thought they may be dead, but he rose awkwardly and stretched his back. He tried to smile, but appeared worried. I was glad he wasn’t dead. I would have felt pretty shitty about him dying while I was enjoying my cheeseburger and baked beans.
“Howdy, friend,” he said, his voice raspy. “You remembered us.”
I nodded to him and handed him another water bottle. “Hey, Jack. You look like you need this. How’s Ruth?”
“I’m not really sure if she’s asleep or unconscious,” he said. “She went to sleep and I haven’t been able to wake her. She’s still breathing, though, best I can tell.”
I crouched by Ruth and placed the back of my hand against her cheek. Her skin was warm and clammy.
Emmet came up behind me and assessed the situation. “She alright? She doesn’t look so good.”
I shook my head. “I don’t know. Let’s just get her back and see what we can do for her.”
The three of us loaded her onto the utility trailer. The trailer had a tarp on it, held down by a few odd tent poles and a framing hammer. We shifted a few items to make her as comfortable as possible on the tarp. After getting her settled, we all returned to the front of the ATV while Jack retrieved a few items from his car.
Digging in the back seat, Jack removed his wife’s purse and a suitcase. When he locked up the car, he paused for a moment, staring at it from end to end.
“Not sure what the hell will happen to all these cars,” he said to no one in particular. “Hell of a thing leaving them all out here sitting by the road. A lot of money to leave abandoned.”
Jack turned to walk back to us, then stopped and stared past us to a point somewhere behind the ATV and trailer. Gary, Emmet, and I turned to see what he was staring at. From nowhere, a couple had appeared and were standing at the end of the trailer, staring down at Ruth. The girl appeared to be in her twenties, mousy, with long stringy hair that needed washing. She had a lot of sores on her face and was chewing on a fingernail with rotted teeth, staring at Ruth’s inert body. The man with her appeared to be a little older. His wore a dirty white t-shirt and his bare arms were covered with crude jailhouse tattoos – names, words, crosses. He needed a shave, and probably a bath, too. He looked us over, squinting against the sun. The girl continued staring at Ruth, not making eye contact with us. She seemed a little out of it.
When we didn’t offer a greeting the man broke the ice. “We were on our way to the clinic and run out of gas,” he said.
I stared back at him, trying to get a read on him. I saw no weapon but it was hard to gauge a person’s level of desperation. He could have been hiding a gun, a knife, or even a length of rebar. With no traffic, and no access to law enforcement, any encounters people had on the highway were subject to completely random and Darwinian forces. Those who survived had to be quicker, sneakier, more paranoid, or better armed than those they ran into.
“We’re in the same boat,” I finally said. “We can’t get gas, either.”
Emmet spoke up from the seat of the Polaris. “One of you folks sick?” he asked.
“Sick?” the man replied, confused.
“The clinic,” Emmet reminded him. “You said you were headed to the clinic.”
“Oh, yeah,” the man said. “Not that kind of clinic, the methadone clinic. We have to go twice a day. Reba here is trying to kick the OC.”
“The OC?” Emmet asked warily. “What the hell is the OC?”
“Oxycontin,” I said. Working at a mental health agency, I saw these kinds of people every day. Some were harmless, but some were not. Some were people wanting help, some were soulless leeches who used and abused their fellow man.
The man cast his eyes to the Polaris. “You got that,” he said, raising a finger toward it. “Would you sell us some gas from it?”
I shook my head. “Not enough gas in there to be of any help to you. It’s a small tank and it’s nearly empty anyway.”
“I got to get to the clinic,” the girl said, raising her eyes and speaking for the first time.
I saw the desperation that I’d seen many times before in the eyes of addicts. I wondered if she was preparing to appeal to our sympathy. Substance abusers were masters of manipulation. It was a tool of their trade.
I spoke to her softly, trying to be calming. “The clinic may be closed for while. Have you guys seen the news? We’re under attack and things are falling apart. It may take a while to get everything going again.”
“We’ve heard about it,” the man said. “But life goes on. People need what they need.”
I had nothing to say to that.
“Can you give us a ride?” the girl asked. “It’s probably just twenty-five miles or so to the clinic. We got to go soon. If we’re late, they quit dosing and I can’t get any until tomorrow.”
“Sorry, we’re not giving any rides,” I said firmly. “If we take you home, we’re burning gas we can’t replace. We came out to pick up this sick lady and we’re heading back home. She needs medical care now. We wish you good luck but we can’t help you. The clinic probably isn’t even open. I doubt they can even get their methadone shipments.”
The girl appeared not to hear me. “What’s wrong with the old lady?” the girl asked, pointing toward Ruth.
Jack, who’d worked his way from his car back to the trailer to stand at his wife’s side, addressed the girl. “She had surgery. We’re on our way home. She’s very sick.”
Jack leaned over the side of the trailer and placed the suitcase and his wife’s purse in there.
The girl’s eyes lit up and fixed on Ruth’s purse. “Surgery? Did they give her anything?”
“Excuse me?” Jack asked, unsure of what she meant.
“What did they give her?” the girl yelled, her voice shrill. “What medication? For the pain?”
I stepped toward the trailer. “We’re not giving you any medication.” I lowered a hand to my shirttail, reaching for the grip of my Beretta. I would not pull it out unless things escalated but I wanted it close at hand.
In a blur of motion, the girl drew a flimsy steak knife from her pocket and jumped over the side of the trailer. She stuck the knife to Ruth’s neck and screamed in my direction. “I will kill this bitch if you don’t give me her fucking pain pills!”
At the other side of the trailer, Jack lunged. “No!” he shouted, reaching for the knife with both hands.
Without hesitation, the girl slashed at his grasping hands, cutting him across his forearm. A trail of blood splashed across Ruth’s unconscious body and Jack drew away from the knife, falling as he backpedaled and tumbling down the shoulder of the highway into the weeds. The girl’s troubled eyes turned back to me, and I caught a brief flicker of panic before a concussive blast erupted behind me and to the left. I ducked and backed away from the noise, drawing my weapon. The girl’s body jerked and she slumped backward over the tailgate of the trailer and onto the ground.
“Reba!” the man screamed. He lunged for her, but another loud gunshot froze him in his tracks.
It was Emmet who had fired. He was holding what looked like a nickel .357 Magnum in a single-hand grip and it was now pointed toward the man at the end of the trailer.
“We’re pulling out of here,” he told the man. “You don’t move until we’re gone. If you move a damn muscle, I’ll kill you, too.”
“You killed my girlfriend, you fucking asshole!” the man hissed.
“Any girl who’d put a knife to a sick old lady’s throat ain’t worth missing,” Emmet replied. “Good riddance to bad rubbish.”
Damned if Emmett wasn’t a badass, after all. Gary and I ducked over the shoulder of the road and checked on Jack. The wound would require stitches but was mostly superficial. There were no gushing arteries. I pulled a bandana from the cargo pocket on my pants and wrapped his arm tightly.
“Let’s get you
into the trailer,” Gary said. “We’ve got to get out of here.”
We got Jack in the trailer while Emmet kept his gun trained on the man. Once Jack was situated, Gary pulled his Glock and kept it trained on the now weeping man while Emmet lowered himself into the seat and started the Polaris. When we pulled forward, the man dropped to his dead girlfriend and began talking softly to her, shaking her as if she’d awaken and continue their desperate walk. Gary continued watching him until we were out of sight, then he sat down in his seat. He kept the Glock in his lap, close at hand for the remainder of the ride.
“Lowlifes,” Emmet muttered. “Is this what people are acting like in times of national crisis? What happened to people pulling together in a crisis? This ain’t my fucking America.”
“From what we’ve seen, this could be the new normal,” I remarked.
On the drive back, I remembered the circumstances under which my grandfather first told me about the violence he’d experienced in his life. I was visiting him in West Virginia with my parents and brother. I’d been hanging out with some of the kids from the hollow he lived in and we were playing basketball in the road. In those days, it was nothing for people in rural areas to place a goal beside the road so that the packed surface of the roadway could act as the basketball court. There was not enough traffic to be concerned about and people couldn’t drive very fast on those rough roads anyway. A scuffle broke out when one of the West Virginia boys tried to take the ball from me. He was being more aggressive than I was used to and it led to a scuffle. He wanted to fight. I walked off with him calling me names as I left.
My grandfather, who heard about it later from a neighbor, was not happy about the way I acted. “Never show fear,” he said. “Never walk off and never let anyone know that you’re afraid. They smell weakness and they’ll never let up. The world will eat you alive.”
I didn’t know what to say to that. The world eating me alive was a vivid and somewhat disturbing image.
“When I was thirteen,” my grandfather told me, “my sister Lou was twelve. I was working in the mines already but Lou was in school. She came home one day and was all upset, crying, and wouldn’t talk to no one. Mom found out later from one of the other girls that there was a boy at school saying mean things about her. I found out from one of my friends that there was this boy at school telling everyone that Lou let him touch her. You know what I’m saying right? Well, I knew my sister and I knew there was no way it was true, but the boy who said this was seventeen and big as any man around these parts. I knew that if I went after him directly I’d get my ass whipped, maybe even killed.”
My grandfather, who smoked Pall Malls, lit one up at that point and his eyes shifted from me to the wooded hillside and I knew he was going back there in his head. The memory was fresh enough that he could walk back inside it like a familiar room.
“So this boy, his name was Jake, walked home each day from school down a trail by the Tug Fork River. He got off school about the same time I got off work at the mines. I had this little pump-action Stevens .22 rifle that I used for squirrels and rabbits, and I hid it in the woods in a hollow tree where I could get to it quick after I got off my shift. I would get the rifle and run to this little rocky bluff that looked out over the path that Jake walked. The first day, I just fired off a shot in the air. Not even close to him, just a shot to make him wonder who was shooting and what they were shooting at. The next day, I caught him in a different spot and I barked a tree just off the path he was walking. That got his attention.”
My grandfather put his feet up on the porch rail. His voice was hypnotic in the West Virginia evening, the air a soup of musty river smell and humidity. No traffic moved on the road in front of his house. The world was still, only the two of us in its entirety.
“Each day, I’d catch him at a different spot and shoot closer than the day before. I could tell he was getting nervous from the way he walked, the way he hesitated before each step. One day I shot a hole in his lunch bucket swinging in his hand while he walked. The next, I shot the top right off of a pop bottle he was carrying in his hand. He pissed his pants that time and I knew I’d made my point.
“The next day, that boy comes to the house and he apologizes to my sister. I was on the porch and never spoke a word to the boy, but he made eye contact with me and I knew his eyes were saying that we were square now and that I shouldn’t have reason to keep shooting at him. I never told anyone what I was doing but I guess he must have figured out that it weren’t no coincidence that the shooting started about the same time as my sister came home crying.”
“Why didn’t he just tell someone?” I asked him.
“He knew what we all knew then, that a man’s problems are his own to solve. You don’t put them off on other people to fix for you. If a man wrongs you, it’s between you and that man, not between you and the law and him. In the mountains, we take care of things ourselves. That boy knew that he had wronged me and he had to make it right or one of those bullets would eventually find its way into his head.”
My mom only heard the last part of this conversation and she did not approve. She loved her dad, but did not want us growing up in the middle of that way of life. She did not care for feuds and fights and blood vendettas, which was why she moved away to go to college and never went back.
Thinking of my mom made me wonder how they were doing. I was hoping that my wife and kids would check on them, maybe even bring them out to our house if they’d be willing to come.
When we got to our exit, Emmet drove the ATV toward the church tents. Since we were the only thing moving under gas power at this time, we attracted a lot of attention passing by the crowds of stalled travelers. The convenience store drunks were still drinking, and there was a little more staggering and obvious drunkenness than when we’d walked in earlier.
“You’re going to have trouble out of these folks here,” I told Emmet.
“No shit,” he replied. “I’m expecting a fight to break out any minute. I hope they keep it among themselves and leave us out of it. Let them kill each other off.”
Before we reached the church tents, Emmet stopped in the road and addressed Gary and I in a low voice. “I would like to keep that little incident on the road just between us,” he said. “You all know I didn’t have a choice about shooting that girl, but I don’t want folks second-guessing me. It’s a small community here.”
We all nodded.
“Fine with me, Emmett,” I said. “I’ll speak with Jack when we reach the tents. I know he’s grateful so I’m sure he’ll keep his mouth shut, too.”
We continued up the road a little further and when we approached the tents I could hear the sound of loud voices. Emmet pulled the ATV into the shade of a large maple tree off to the side. Randi, who was apparently already at the food tent, came walking quickly toward us with an older lady in tow who was carrying a first aid kit.
“This is Bonnie,” she said. “She’s a nurse practitioner.”
The two women approached the trailer and Bonnie immediately began providing aid to Ruth. She fired questions at Jack and he answered them, although he was obviously glazed over from exhaustion and perhaps a little in shock. He stood cradling his injured arm, and looking very tired.
I pulled Randi to the side. “What’s going on over there?”
Gary and Emmet walked up to us about that time and stood by, as anxious as I was to find out what all the noise at the food tent was about.
“There are a bunch of damn drunks who want fed. The minister said he wasn’t feeding them. They started getting all mouthy and Rebecca intervened, trying to keep the peace. Now they’re all pissed at her and the minister, and things are getting a little heated.”
“It was only a matter of time,” Emmet said. “You know those damn dopers can’t sit down there all day smoking their marijuana and having to smell cooking hamburgers. Eventually something would have to give. Potheads.”
“I think there’s going to be a fight,” R
andi commented. “I’ve been in brawls before. This is how they start.”
I raised an eyebrow at her. Obviously this girl had a more entertaining life than she let on at work.
Bonnie, the nurse practitioner, interrupted. She took Emmet by the arm and said in a low voice, “We’re going to have to take her in to the hospital. She needs fluids.”
“I thought they weren’t letting anyone through to town?” Gary asked.
“They’ll make an exception for a medical emergency, I think,” Bonnie replied. “Let’s move it though. She’s in a fragile state.”
“I’m going to tell the deputies at the roadblock to keep an eye on this situation,” Emmet said. “We don’t need a bunch of people getting killed for trying to help people.”
I wasn’t sure that calling the cops would help anything, but these were Emmet’s people here and if that’s what he thought he should do, I wasn’t going to tell him otherwise. We all shook hands, wished each other luck, and Emmet drove off.
Gary and I approached the tents. Inside we could see a large cluster of people with an opening in the center, where Rebecca and the minister were faced off against a half-dozen loud and angry-looking Hispanics. There was a lot of gesturing on both sides and it was hard to tell what was being said in the cacophony.
“Shit,” I said to Gary. “I hate getting in the middle of something like this, but what are we supposed to do?”
He shrugged. “I’ll go with you,” he said. “Reluctantly.”
The Borrowed World: A Novel of Post-Apocalyptic Collapse Page 9
