Long Empty Roads

by Sean Little

  Ren ran back to the RV and grabbed the MagLite from its spot by the door. She slapped the handle into my palm. I clicked the power button and the shop was flooded with light. Ren slipped under the push bar of the door and stood next to me, shotgun in hand. “Smells in here,” she said. The darkened coolers on either side of the room were black with mold.

  I stepped to the counter gap and shone a light to where the shadow had been. I shined it straight on a fat, angry raccoon. The fuzzy bandit hissed at me and scattered, clambering to a table with a single jump off a short file cabinet, and then jumped from the table to the counter.

  Ren shrieked and pulled the trigger on the shotgun out of panic. She hip-fired, off-balance and unready. The blast roared, the recoil sent her spinning. The raccoon, unharmed and scared, immediately crapped itself and pissed all over the counter and floor while sprinting out the broken door and into the night. If you’ve never smelled raccoon urine, it is a far cry from Chanel No. 5. I started to gag. Ren and I retreated back to the clean air outside the shop.

  “How did a raccoon get in there?” Ren said. She jammed her pinky into her ear and tried to clear the ringing.

  “Probably a hole somewhere. It was too fat to have been trapped in there for a year. I started walking around the building.

  Ren inspected a welt on her arm where the shotgun had smacked her. “This hurts. I never fired a shotgun before.”

  “Never?”

  “I never really had a reason. The movies make it look easy. It’s not. It’s scary. You know how to shoot?”

  “Not really,” I admitted. I’d fired my shotgun before, but I was not skilled with the thing. I had read manuals, though. I had read books on guns. Shooting a gun is one of those things where book-learning is a far cry from practice, though.

  Ren waved her arm in the night air to cool the burning. “One of us had better learn to shoot, then. If we plan on hunting fresh food ever, we might need to.”

  “It’s been on my list of things to do.” I found the rear door to the flower shop. The door’s deadbolt had been extended so the door couldn’t really close. The winds probably battered it open and closed at their leisure. A creature with clever paws like a raccoon could easily swing open the door. “Mystery solved.”

  “Disappointing,” said Ren. She was looking at her shotgun. She looked like she didn’t want to hold it anymore. She looked around at the quiet, desolate city. “It would have been cool to find another person.”

  “What would another person have been doing in an abandoned flower shop in the middle of the night?”

  Ren rolled her eyes. “I know. I just…” She tilted her head toward the vacant road. “There’s nothing out there, you know?”

  “There are lots of things out there. Just not people.”

  “That’s not what I meant…”

  “I know what you meant.” It was the same question I battled daily.

  Ren sighed. “I’m ready to go to bed.”

  “Me, too.”

  We climbed back into the RV. Renata said, “You want to go back to the gas station?”

  “Not really. We don’t need to. We can just sleep here.”

  “That feels weird. We’re parked on a street in a strange town.”

  “You’ll get used to it. This is life now.” I started pulling down cases of water from the bunk over the cab and stacking them on the little table. “Do you want the bunk up here or the bunk in the back?”

  “What?” She looked confused.

  “I figured you didn’t want to sleep together,” I said.

  Realization crossed her face. She flicked her eyes to the two bunks. “Oh. Yeah. Of course. I just…I guess I hadn’t thought about sleeping arrangements until now. I don’t want to kick you out of your bed.”

  “Then you can have the bunk up here. I’ve got a sleeping bag for tonight. We can get your sheets and real blankets tomorrow, if you’d like.” I cleared the last case of water, stacking them up on the benches next to the table and the table itself.

  Ren looked around the cab and scratched at her arm. “It feels kind of…open out here, doesn’t it?”

  “You can have the back bed. I don’t mind.” And I really didn’t. Both bunks were comfortable. “You might have to sleep with Fester, though. He usually sleeps in the rear bunk at night.”

  She looked to the door of the back bedroom, and then the cab bunk. “No. It will be fine. I’ll take the bed out here. I don’t want to take your bed.”

  “It honestly doesn’t matter to me,” I said. It didn’t really.

  “No,” she said firmly. “I’ll take this bed up here. It looks cool.”

  I dug the sleeping bag out of the storage compartment where I’d stashed it and handed it to her. I pulled one of the spare pillows from my own bed. “We’ll get you your own bedding and pillows tomorrow.”

  “Sounds good.”

  I unrolled the sleeping bag and tossed it to the top bunk, smoothing it out flat for her. I looked to Ren, and she looked back at me. She looked to her hockey bag of supplies and then down at her clothes. I took the hint. “Right, sorry. I just—I’ll go to bed.”

  “Thanks, Twist.” Ren smiled warmly at me. “Really.”

  I went into my bedroom and shut the door. I stripped out of my cargo shorts and t-shirt. It was hot and humid, of course. Virginia in the summer. I had taken to sleeping naked just for comfort’s sake, but with a new traveling companion, I decided that probably was not a wise thing to do anymore. I left my boxer-briefs on. I started arranging my unmade bed. There was a knock at the door. It was such an unfamiliar sound that my heart jumped. I cracked the door.

  Ren was standing there in an over-sized green New York Jets jersey. “Hey, I just wanted to say thank you, you know? I don’t know why we met, but I’m glad you took me with you. There was nothing left for me in New York. I am really glad we are making a new start.”

  I wanted to say five or six witty lines. I wanted to be charming or dismissive. Instead, I just took the sincerity she gave me and returned it. “You’re welcome. I’m glad you’re here, too. I needed a friend.”

  Ren smiled. I smiled back. She shrugged a shoulder. “I guess I’ll see you in the morning.”

  “Sure. Good night.”

  “Good night.” Ren turned and went back to her bunk. I closed my door. Fester was impatiently waiting for me to lie down so he could get his nightly dose of attention.

  Sleeping in the RV with another human was a new experience. I could feel Ren’s movements. If she rolled over, the whole vehicle swayed slightly, waking me. It was reassuring, though. It was a reminder that I was no longer alone. It actually helped me sleep better.

  My alarm went off at its usual time, and I shut it off. I dressed in my shorts and a Wisconsin Badgers t-shirt. I opened the door to the rear bunk and saw Ren’s sleeping form huddled under the sleeping bag in the front. I wanted to let her sleep, but when I stepped forward, I crunched down on a dozen empty plastic water bottles. They made a cacophonous sound. Ren was instantly sitting up in bed, shotgun in hand. Her head whipped toward me, and then to the window in the front bunk. She saw it was morning. She fell back to her pillow.

  “What’s this?” I asked. I picked up one of the bottles.

  “Ghetto door alarm,” she said. “Sorry. It’s just…”

  “You were taking extra precautions in case I tried to attack you in the night?”

  “I put them in front of the side door, too, man. I was just trying to be cautious. I mean, I really like you and all, but we still don’t really know each other.”

  I couldn’t fault her for being cautious, I guess. She was five-three and maybe a hundred-ten pounds. I was six-feet and change, a buck-seventy, maybe buck-eighty. I was a big guy compared to her. I shrugged off the bottles. “No problem. Honest. It’s all good.” I smiled sheepishly. “I locked the door to the back bunk last night for the first time since I started sleeping in the RV.”

  Ren smiled. She shoved the heels of her hands
into her eyes and rubbed. “Yeah, I guess it’s like getting a new roommate. You hope they’re nice, but you still need to know if they’re going to be psycho, you know?”

  “I get you.”

  Ren rolled out of the sleeping bag. “What’s the plan for the day, boss?”

  “Get some breakfast. Get on the road. First department store we see, we’ll stop and get you some sheets and stuff.”

  “Sounds good.”

  I stepped out to take a leak behind the flower shop. When I returned, Ren was dressed in shorts and halter-top. “Is there a bathroom in the flower shop?”

  “Probably.” I had spaced-off the fact that basic urination was pretty simple for a man, unzip and go. For a woman, there were a few more logistics involved.

  “If it’s gross, we’re going to have to find another one.” She started out the door to the RV.

  “You can just go outside, too.”

  Ren stopped and held up a finger. “I accept the fact that I will probably have to do that one day…but that day has not yet come. I will use a toilet for as long as I absolutely can.”

  When she returned, we drove to Richmond and, as promised, looted some high-thread count sheets, a comforter, and several pillows from a Target. We made up Ren’s bunk together, and then she climbed up to give it a test run. “This is doable,” she said. “I like it.” Fester leapt up next to her and curled into a ball at her side. He approved, as well.

  “It’s only until we get to Madisonville, Louisiana,” I said. “Then we can live in a house.”

  Ren climbed down and dropped into the passenger seat. Fester ran over and climbed into her lap. “Not much between here and there, though. Is there?”

  I didn’t know for sure. I answered her honestly. “I don’t think so. Just long, empty roads.”

  Ren inhaled sharply through her nose and blew out a long, slow exhale. “I guess so. Onward, Jeeves. The world awaits.”

  I climbed into the driver’s seat and fired the engine. There was a whole lot of no one to see and nothing to do that day.

  Ennui is one of the biggest problems with the apocalypse. I say ennui because I’m not “bored.” I’m rarely bored. There is always something to do; survival is a full-time occupation. However, there exists a general blah feeling that settles over you on a daily basis. It’s hard to ignore. I didn’t fully appreciate how distracted I was before the Flu until I lost everything that distracted me. TV, laptop, tablet, phones, friends, family, job, school—so many things kept me from stopping and appreciating silence. At first, I didn’t mind it. Over the winter in Wisconsin, the silence almost drove me insane. Now, the static noise of wind in the windows of the RV drowned out the desire to converse for both of us, and the malaise of the road set in heavily. I had been dealing with it for weeks before Ren came along. It was a new experience for her. The first day, everything was still new and interesting. Early in the second day of being stuck in a twenty-five foot vehicle, the shine was quickly wearing.

  We continued south from Richmond. The sun rose and baked the day. The humidity felt like a velvet cloak. Speaking as a Wisconsin boy, I thought I knew humidity; Wisconsin got quite humid in the summers. However, Midwest humidity was nothing compared to the southern coastal states. Even Ren, with her Venezuelan heritage, cursed the humidity every time we stopped and got out of the RV. Even though it probably cost us some gas, we cranked that A/C hard on the main roads. When we slowed to creep through towns, though—the A/C had to be shut down. It was just too hard on the engine when we weren’t cruising at highway speeds. The humidity was so uncomfortable I ended up stripping off my t-shirt and going shirtless. Ren held out a little longer than I did, but eventually she took her hockey bag into the back bunk and emerged in a black sports bra.

  Highway 95 out of Richmond was the route we were following, but I continued to veer from the highway to smaller towns and side roads hoping to find signs of life. We only found continued evidence of the Earth reclaiming homes and roads. I saw herds of cattle wandering freely through towns. Herds of free-roaming Holsteins were a new sight. Cattle are not wild animals. They never were. When you look at the history of the domestic cows, they were created to be work animals, bred to be smaller and more docile. They were bred down selectively from the large and powerful Auroch. Now, this domestic species was starting to have to learn to be wild, again. One time, where we were passing a large group of them outside of a small town, I saw a large bull standing apart from the larger congregation of females. A couple of small, gangly calves milling about, playing amongst the cows. The herd was perpetuating. They were adapting. I pointed this out to Ren. “We can adapt, too.”

  “We’re going to have to,” she said. There was a silence. She added, “I worry about stuff, though.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like when we run out of stuff. Like, what happens if we run out of toilet paper?”

  “I think we’ll be able to scavenge enough paper to cover us for the rest of our lives.” I pointed at the homes we could see to the left. “All those homes there have paper in them right now, I guarantee it. If we ever can’t find any in stores, every house in this country has a supply, and a lot of them are in plastic.”

  “Think long term, though.” Ren wiped sweat from her forehead. “A lot of these houses are going to go to hell in the next five years. A lot of these homes will be compromised over time. Who knows for certain what we’ll be able to scavenge in ten years, in twenty years? What about things like tampons and pads, even? I know you don’t need them, but back in the day women had to pin folded up cotton towels into their underthings and then wash that shit every day. I don’t want to have to do that.” She shuddered. “Gross.”

  I had a lot of those same worries, albeit not about tampons. I wondered how long canned food would hold out and not spoil, especially in warm, humid conditions. That stuff would start to rust and rot. I wondered how much longer I would be able to keep the RV running. I wondered if the ammunition for the guns would go bad. Could I make more? Could I make gun powder? Would I have to get really good at archery? Could I make my own arrows? The future held a lot more questions than answers, none of which could be answered at that moment. “I guess that’s part of adapting. We’ll have to figure it out as we go.”

  “I hope I don’t run out of feminine products until well after I hit menopause.”

  “I think there will be a lot of bridges we won’t have to cross until we get to them. It’s natural to worry, but I think for a lot of things Necessity will have to be the Mother of Invention. At least we have blueprints. Could you imagine being the pioneers or explorers? They had to figure stuff out on their own. We have a head start on all of them.”

  “When I was a kid, I loved the Laura Ingalls Wilder books,” said Ren. “As a city girl, they made the empty prairies sound almost romantic. I wanted to live there.”

  I whipped my head around to look at her. “Those are my favorite books!” I told her about how my mom read them all to me when I was little, and how I spent an inordinate amount of time reading The Long Winter during my snowbound days in the library in Sun Prairie.

  “Get out!” Ren said. Her eyes looked alive for the first time that day. “I used to sit in the library down the street from our apartment and read those things over and over again. I adore Laura so much, I even ignore all the racist bullshit about Indians.” She leaned toward me. “Did we just become best friends?”

  “If you just referenced Stepbrothers, we sure as hell did!”

  “We can make bunk beds so we’ll have more room for activities!” Ren held out her hand, and I slapped it. After that flurry of excitement, neither of us said anything more. It was like a firecracker had just gone off, and then we realized we didn’t have any more fireworks. Ren leaned her head against the passenger window. “Be nicer if we didn’t have to do any of that, though. I hate not knowing. I just want the future to be planned and laid out for me. Go here. Do that. Everything will work out.”

  We passed
a sign pointing to the Petersburg National Civil War Battlefield, site of the longest battle of the Civil War. For nine months, Union troops under Ulysses S. Grant conducted a long and brutal trench warfare campaign against Confederate soldiers. Taking Petersburg would have been a deathblow to General Lee’s troops because it would have severed supply lines, but eventually Grant gave up the battle and retreated north to intercept Lee’s troops at Appomattox, leading to the end of the Civil War. I veered to the exit.

  Ren looked at me with narrowed eyes. “What is it with boys and war?”

  I shrugged. “Couldn’t tell you. I do not care for war. I do enjoy history, though.”

  Ren protested. “Why? What’s the point? History is over. We’re writing our own history now. Isn’t that why you spent so much time writing in your little journals every night?”

  “What’s that line about people doomed to repeat history?” I retorted.

  “The Civil War doesn’t have to exist anymore. We are at the dawn of a new era of history. We decide what’s worth including. We can wipe out that era of history, start a new world where there is no inequality, no Confederacy, no more stupidity!”

  “Doesn’t sound logical to me,” I said. “We are human. There will always be stupidity. The Civil War was a volatile time in the history of this land. Even if America no longer exists, it seems folly to ignore the fact that it existed, it happened. Hundreds of thousands of Americans gave their lives to it, right or wrong. We would dishonor their existences if we just tried to forget what happened.”

  “Maybe,” she acquiesced. “What will people remember about the Flu? Hypothetically, say we somehow recover from this as a species. Will people remember you and me? Will they remember how good we had it before everything went to hell?”

  I couldn’t answer her. I doubted it. “Maybe they will remember us. I started my journals for that purpose. There will be a written record of what we did, and how we survived, just in case someone cares someday. Maybe that’s good enough for now. Maybe someday we’ll build a monument to ourselves.”