Long Empty Roads

by Sean Little

  I trusted my gut, and stayed very low. The Jeep passed. There were four men of various ages. They each carried a large gun. They looked rough, tough, hardened. The three men who weren’t driving were looking up, scanning the windows of buildings, probably looking for the telltale signs of flashlights or lanterns. They didn’t see me. I didn’t know what they were doing or why they were doing it, but everything in my body told me to hide, to get away from them. Everything about them told me nothing good would happen if they found me. The Jeep rolled down the street. I tasted exhaust. It rolled around a corner and out of view. I stayed crouched and hidden until the noise of the engine faded to silence.

  Now I was given an interesting quandary: I knew for certain people still lived in the city, but did I really want to go to those people? How could I be certain they were good people? Could I be sure they wouldn’t kill me and take my supplies? Worse, what if they beat me and enslaved me? What if they just locked me in a cell and left me to starve to death? I had no idea what rules would apply to existing communities in this post-Flu world. I had so desperately wanted to find people, but now that I had, it was time to question whether or not that was what I really wanted. The four men in the Jeep were all alpha-male looking dudes. They held their guns easily, like they’d known weapons well before the Flu wiped out society. I was the opposite of that. I was an awkward boy, barely eighteen, and a pacifist at heart. Even when I wrestled, my favorite part was the end of the match. Hug the guy you just fought and congratulate him if he beat you. No hard feelings, my friend. Well done, you. These guys were different. They were not my type of people.

  All this only served to enhance the fear I battled constantly. Why was I so scared of everything? In all the books I’d ever read, the heroes were always the type who were able to rise above their fears. They would stare a dragon in the eye or make the suicide charge into the swords of the oncoming army. They would stand on the deck of a wind-sheared, madly tilting ship and scream curses at Poseidon himself. I wasn’t one of those guys. It made me mad. All the hours I spent reading those books, I always wanted to be the hero of the story. I wanted to be the one who pulled the enchanted sword from the stone and ruled a nation. Now, cowering beneath the quarter-panel of an Impala, I realized that I wasn’t even in the hero’s entourage. I wasn’t the plucky comic relief or the strong, silent best friend who had the hero’s back. I was a minor character, at best. A two-chapter character, long forgotten by story’s end. I was an armorer’s apprentice who stayed back in town, married a horrible woman, and hated myself forever. I wanted to rage at my own weakness. I hated myself for it. I was a coward, and I couldn’t even bullshit myself into believing otherwise.

  I resolved to go back to the RV, get as much of a night’s sleep as I could, and then get on the road heading south again before the men in the Jeep discovered that I was in their territory. Being alone forever wouldn’t be too bad, I told myself. I could learn to enjoy it.

  Because I didn’t hear any noise in the vicinity, I didn’t crouch and move from cover-to-cover like I had when I’d heard the Jeep. I just strolled relying on the darkness and the abandoned cars under the overpass to hide me, sidearm held lazily in my right hand. This was a mistake, I quickly learned. Never assume you’re alone in the city, even after the viral apocalypse.

  “Get on your face!”

  I had not been prepared to hear another person’s voice, and certainly not one shouting commands at me from somewhere nearby. I froze, raising my arms. The voice reverberated off the cars and the concrete of the overpass. I couldn’t tell from what direction it was coming.

  “Get down! Put your face to the pavement. Now!”

  The voice was female. Had to be. She was trying to sound gruff and male, but I could tell it was a woman. I knelt on the ground, and then lay flat.

  “Get rid of the gun.”

  I had no choice, at that point. I could not start wildly shooting. I didn’t know where the voice was coming from, for starters, and I certainly did not want to alert the guys in the Jeep by firing a gun. I slid the handgun away from me. I heard footsteps off to my left. I craned my neck around to see who was approaching. I could make out the shape of someone in the darkness. Definitely female. Short, curvy hips, and long hair in a ponytail.

  She walked over and picked up my gun, slipping it into the back of her cut-off jeans shorts. She had a shotgun cradled in her right arm. “You got anything else on you? And I swear, if you make a stupid joke about your penis, I will end you right here and right now.”

  I shook my head. “Not a thing. Honest.”

  “You sure?”

  I was wearing a sleeveless, heather gray t-shirt and a pair of black basketball shorts. What else would I be carrying? “Positive.”

  She leaned back against a car. “You’re real lucky those guys didn’t see you.”

  “Why?”

  “You’re not from New York, are you? Outsider? You sound like you’re from Chicago.” She leaned back against a nearby SUV, shotgun held in front of her. She wasn’t pointing it at me, but she could have spun it and gunned me down before I could have gotten to my knees. I stayed on the ground.

  “I’m from near Madison, Wisconsin.”

  “Close enough,” she said. “To me, that’s Chicago.”

  I was not about to argue with her over a matter of two hundred miles. “How many people are still alive here?”

  “Too many for my tastes.” She spat on the ground. “The Big Apple has survivors. I’ve been able to count at least twenty since television went dark. There are more, though. I don’t know how many more. Those guys in the Jeep call themselves ‘Patriots.’ They say they’re trying to rebuild America, but they’re really just ransacking peoples’ private supply stashes and trying to find people they can enslave to do scut work for them. Bad dudes. I’ve had a couple of run-ins with them. Barely escaped both times. I just try to stay out of their way, stay hidden. You should do likewise.”

  I risked pushing myself up a little so I could better see her. Her face was obscured in shadow, but I could see she was wearing hiking boots that showed the creases and shiny leather that came with a lot of use. She held the shotgun in the crook of her arm. It wasn’t pointed at me. Her fingers were nowhere near the trigger guard. That let me relax a little. It meant she did not intend to shoot me. I feel that not shooting each other is always a good basis on which to begin a friendship.

  “What’s your name?” she said.

  “Twist.”

  “That’s a stupid name.”

  “Nickname. My real name is Barnabas.”

  “That’s even worse.”

  “Yeah. My mom really loved that old Dark Shadows soap when she was younger. It’s not the most practical of names.”

  “Got a last name?”

  “I do, but does it matter anymore? Just Twist is fine, isn’t it? Are you going to confuse me with all the other Twists you know?” There was a silence after that. I feared she took my response as being too sarcastic. I had to change my tone. “What’s your name?” I asked. When she hesitated, I said, “It’s just a name. Make it hard to be friends if we don’t exchange names.”

  “You think we’re gonna be friends?”

  “I’m hopeful. I could use some friends.”

  There was another long hesitation. Finally she said, “Ren. Renata, actually, but people call me Ren.” She moved back a few feet and gestured with the barrel of her shotgun. “Stand up. Don’t try anything, though. If you even think about moving toward me, I’ll cut you down.”

  “Fair enough.” I stood. I was not scared at that moment, though. I was staring down the night-black barrel of a police-style Remington 870, but I didn’t think for a second she’d use it on me. I think it was the tone of her voice. She sounded rational. She wasn’t scared of me. She wasn’t showing any fear, herself.

  She started to circle me. “How old are you?”

  “Eighteen.” I didn’t like her being behind me, but I didn’t have much control
of the situation at that moment.

  “You came here from Wisconsin? How’d you get here?”

  “Drove.”

  “You got a working car?”

  “I did.” I lied. I didn’t need her stealing the RV out from under me. “Broke down in Newark. I walked here.”

  Ren whistled through her teeth. “That’s a helluva walk.”

  “Didn’t have much choice, did I?”

  “I would have found a bike somewhere.”

  “Wise.”

  “Anyone else with you?”

  On this, I told the truth: “Until today, I’d found three living people. All of them are now dead. One was killed by someone else. That someone else died from injuries he’d given her. One died from cancer shortly after I found him.”

  Renata stopped circling. “Is it that bad out there? I mean, how many people are still alive, you think?”

  “Not many, sadly.” I told her about exploring most of Wisconsin, Minneapolis, Chicago, and northeast Iowa. I told her about driving across Indiana, Ohio, and Pennsylvania and coming up snake-eyes. I heard her lean on a car behind me.

  “Damn.” That was all she said.

  We were both quiet for a long time. I broke the silence. “How about you? Have you been in New York the whole time?”

  She cleared her throat. “Yeah. Brooklyn born and raised. When the Flu really got bad, I was sort of conscripted into the hospital where my sister was a nurse. I watched a lot of people die. I just kept hoping it was better in other states, though. I thought New York was just bad because everyone is so close together, you know?”

  “Yeah. I thought the countryside would have been better because people were so spread out. Flu took them out just as fast as it killed people in the city. It was hyper-contagious.” I heard her sniff behind me, the sort of sniff of someone trying not to cry.

  “So that’s it, then. The Flu was global. If it was the same overseas as here, then the world is dead.”

  “Looks that way.” I lowered my hands. My shoulders had started to ache.

  A low droning rose in the distance. The Jeep was returning. I spun around to face Renata. She was looking toward the sound of the engine. “We need to hide,” she said. “C’mon.”

  Ren started to run. I followed. She led me to a hole in a wire fence beneath the overpass. We slipped through it and ran across a street to the remnants of an old bar, the kind of neighborhood place that would have been ignored by tourists. The door was unlocked and Renata slipped inside. The bar still clung to that stale beer smell for which old bars were famous. The bottle racks inside the bar were picked clean, not even a dusty jar of pickled pearl onions remained. “The Patriots hit this place months ago. I moved in after they left it. I knew it was safe because they probably wouldn’t be back.”

  Ren led me to a back room. The back room had a door that led to a narrow stairway. The stairway led to a tiny apartment above the bar. The flat was stark, but it had an actual fireplace. There were two windows facing the street. They were both blocked off with thick blankets to prevent anyone on the street from seeing any sort of light from behind them. There was a queen-sized mattress on the floor in one corner, a plush leather chair in another. Near the hearth was a rather eclectic pile of things to burn, mostly broken furniture and old pallet slats, none of it cordwood. There was a supply of canned food, bottled water, toilet paper, and other necessities. Clothes were scattered around the apartment. There was a small, square balcony outside of a narrow door next to the bathroom. On that balcony, Ren had a bunch of five-gallon plastic paint buckets grouped in a square. “My water collection system,” she said. “It was easier in the winter when it snowed a lot. This summer has been pretty dry. Water is starting to get sparse. I could drink water out of the East River, but I’m not that desperate, yet.”

  I looked around at her place. It was small and spartan. My digs at the library had been pretty cushy in comparison. “It’s nice.” It was a lie, but a tactical lie. She knew it wasn’t great. She didn’t need me reminding her.

  “Can I trust you?” she said. “You seem like a nice guy and all, but I need to know you’re not going to try anything stupid.” She still had the shotgun in her hands and my handgun in her pants.

  “Can I trust you?” I countered. “You’re the one with the guns, right now. I honestly mean you no harm. I’m just making my way south to start to build a new life.”

  We stood in the dark looking at each other. Eventually she sighed and put the shotgun in a corner of the little apartment. “Damned thing wasn’t even loaded, anyhow.” She pulled the revolver out of her pants and set it on the mantel over the fireplace. “Mind if we just keep it there for a while?”

  “If it makes you feel better.”

  The sound of the Jeep was coming closer. Renata crept to the window and pulled back a corner of blanket. I crept to the other window and pulled the other blanket, peering out through just a crack of space. The Jeep was rolling down the street where I’d first seen it. I couldn’t see the Jeep itself, but I could see the illumination of the headlights and hear the engine. When the Jeep rolled out of sight and out of range of hearing the engine, Ren relaxed visibly. Her shoulders slumped with relief.

  She knelt next to the fire and lit a few scraps of newsprint for tinder. In a moment, she’d coaxed the flames to light into some old chunks of wood that looked like they’d once been part of a hardwood bureau. It was warm and stuffy in the apartment, but the fire was needed to cook a can of soup. “It’s not much,” she said.

  “It’s how we live now.” I sat in the leather chair. The fire lit her face, and I could see what she looked like for the first time. She was pretty. Her hair was brown, naturally wavy; it was thick, too. She looked Latina. She had dark eyes and high cheekbones. Her face was smeared with grime, but it only served to make her look rugged and alive.

  When the soup was ready, she split the contents of the pot, ladling them into Styrofoam bowls. She jabbed a plastic spoon into one and held it out for me. “Chili,” she said. “Before the Flu, I was one of those annoying-ass college student vegan types for a couple of years, the kind that lectured everyone about how good it was to be vegan. Took me exactly four days to abandon that lifestyle after the final week of the Flu.”

  “What caused you to do it?”

  “You know we have coyotes in New York?”

  I shook my head; I hadn’t known that, but I did not doubt it. I knew they were hardy little critters. I’d seen them on rare occasions out in the countryside in Wisconsin, and I knew they had started to move into the outer edges of Madison, even well before the Flu. They were like canine cockroaches. They would survive, no matter what it took to do so.

  “Well, we did. We do,” she corrected. “I was out picking apart a head of wilting lettuce to eat, and I saw one of the little buggers at the end of the street. He was munching on a discarded crust of pizza, happy as a lark. I realized that stupid coyote was the perfect symbol of my future. I decided that my future was going to be as a scavenger. Scavengers don’t get to be choosy. They certainly don’t need to stand on a moral high ground.”

  “That’s true,” I said. “I’ve done more than my own fair share of scavenging.”

  Ren arched an eyebrow. “A fellow master of the canned goods, I see. What’s your favorite thing to eat?”

  “Chef Boyardee lasagna. Love it.”

  Ren smiled. “Those are good. I like pumpkin pie Pop Tarts. Hard to find them, especially since the Flu hit in May, but when I do—watch out. I will eat the entire box in a single sitting.”

  We lapsed into silence again. I was finding Renata a lot harder to talk to than Doug had been. There was a lot of quiet in the room. Doug’s house had been silent, but out on his patio, we’d talked easily. I ate the can of chili she’d cooked for me. “You know what I miss most?” She looked at me expectantly. I said, “Pizza and garlic cheese bread.”

  Her eyes lit up, and she laughed. “Oh, man. You are not kidding. Even when I was in my
most hardcore vegan phase, I would still sneak garlic cheese bread. I used to take a bus halfway across town to go to this little Italian place just to have garlic cheese bread where none of my vegan friends might see me. I used to get so embarrassed about having it, too. Stupid, I know. It was my own private Ortolan.”

  I didn’t know what an Ortolan was, but I didn’t want her to think I was dumb, so I just nodded. I made a mental note to look it up next time I found a library. (Turns out, it is a little bird that French chefs force-feed and roast whole, and then the diner would eat it whole—feet, beak, and all. It was said that it was such a despicable and extravagant act, one should shield their face from God with a napkin while one does it. So…Renata has brains. I was a little intimidated. Scratch that—a lot intimidated.)

  Renata kicked off her boots and sat cross-legged on her bed, her back against the wall. “Did you think it’d be like this?”

  “No.” I had never even thought about how life would be after the Flu. I’d fully expected to die during the Flu, and then when I realized I wasn’t going to die, I’d spent every waking moment just surviving. I had no expectations of life after the Flu in the least. I lived day-to-day, while trying to plan for an uncertain future as best I could.

  Ren said, “Ever watch any of those apocalypse shows on TV?”

  “Not really, no. I liked comedies and video games.”

  Renata yawned and stretched. “I used to watch a couple. I liked how the survivors all banded together and helped each other survive. When I knew I wasn’t going to die, that’s what I tried to do. My sister, Elena, and I both survived. So did my little brother, Carlos. He had pretty bad cystic fibrosis, though. Without the ability to get him on his treatments, he didn’t last.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  She shrugged. “Ain’t that a bitch? He survives the Flu just fine, but a stupid lung disease kills him two months later. Elena and I dug a grave for him and our parents in the cemetery near our house. Took us almost a week to dig out three graves. Blisters for days.” Ren laughed at the memory. “My hands hurt so bad, man. I didn’t think they’d ever be normal again.”