Long Empty Roads

by Sean Little

  “I like the idea of a statue of me. Could I be doing some dramatic pose like a conquering Valkyrie, with wings and a spear?”

  “I don’t see why not.”

  The corner of Ren’s mouth turned up in a cat-who-ate-the-canary smile. “Hell, yeah.”

  The battlefield was overgrown like everything else. The monuments stood above a sea of long grass and new tree and shrub growth. Cicadas droned everywhere. I parked the RV and we got out to walk around and see what we could see. Turns out, there wasn’t a ton to see. I’d been to other historical sites before. I remember seeing Indian/Cavalry battle sites on trips west with my parents. Usually, I got a spooky feeling from them, like I was looking at a holy place or something like that. It felt overwhelming. I still felt that at Petersburg, but it had lessened considerably. I don’t know if that’s because I was older, more jaded, or if it had something to do with the fact that almost every building I passed was basically a mausoleum now. If the dead needed to be venerated, I spent all day, every day in near-constant veneration.

  The heat and humidity of the day was like a choking fog. Walking became a miserable activity. We poured water over our heads and tried to ignore it, but it was sometime in the middle of August at this point. The temperature was easily over a hundred, and the humidity felt like 100 percent. Heat waves rose from pavement and made the distance hazy.

  “This is miserable.” Ren said. She slugged some water and grimaced. “Scratch what I said about Subway. I really miss ice. I miss refrigeration.”

  “Ever think about how ‘fridge’ has a D in it and refrigeration doesn’t?” I said.

  Ren squinted at me. “No. Never once. What’s your point?”

  I shrugged. I felt a flash of embarrassment and stupidity. “No point. Just pointing something out.” It was an awkward cover, and thankfully Ren let it slide.

  We stopped on a concrete sidewalk to read a plaque about the battlefield we were overlooking. The plaque informed us about what the Civil War-era cannons were pointed at during the battle, and how the charge on the field went down. It also mentioned that almost eight hundred men died on the field on which we stood.

  “Ever think about ghosts?” Ren said. She brought it up out of nowhere.

  “Ghosts?”

  “Yeah. Like, eight hundred people died here. Right. Here.” Ren pointed to the field. “They died in tragic circumstances. Do you think their spirits still wander this field looking to right wrongs or something?”

  “If ghosts are real, then we’re surrounded by them right now. Everyone who died in the Flu would be watching us at all times.”

  “What if they are?” said Ren. “What if your parents are watching over you right now.”

  “I’d feel bad that the afterlife is so dull that they feel a need to do that. But, I like the sentiment. I sort of feel like my parents have been around me. The only problem is that I can’t decide if they are really there, or if I’m just hallucinating because I want them to be around me.”

  Ren leaned on a walkway railing. “If my sister was a ghost, I’d know if she was near me; I’d feel her. I haven’t felt her presence, though.” She looked at the clear sky. “I kind of wish she was, though. It would make me feel better.”

  Ren pushed off the railing and turned back toward the RV. “This sucks. It’s hot. There’s no one here, and I’m not going to camp on a Civil War battlefield…just in case there are ghosts.”

  I followed her. I didn’t want to sleep around ghosts, either. Bigfoots were bad enough.

  We drove south another couple of hours. It was still hot and humid when we stopped for gas and set up camp. We were just past the Virginia/North Carolina border in a little town called Gaston. As we left the battlefield, I explained to Ren that I picked towns to investigate based on names that were corny or fun to pronounce. She immediately dove on the map book and started scanning. Upon finding Gaston, North Carolina, she immediately burst into song, going through an exaggerated version of “Gaston” from Disney’s Beauty & the Beast. A destination had been duly selected.

  We filled up with gas at a Citgo station. We explored the town. Before the Flu, it had only had a population around 1,150, and it appeared that none of them had survived. Gaston was a northern suburb to the much larger Roanoke Rapids, a town formerly of about 15,000. It was nice. Homey. Simple. We parked on the road next to a city park that had bathrooms. There was a lot of open area around us. In a way, that was comforting. I was glad that there were not any trees where escaped lions could hide from us.

  It took a couple of hours to scavenge enough wood for the night’s fire and to gather bottles of water and other supplies from the stores and restaurants in town. When we reconvened at the campsite, we were both sweaty and cranky. We tried to bathe by pouring water over our heads, emptying a couple of gallons of the lukewarm bottled water. It helped a little. Instead of sitting near the fire that night, we did our cooking on a small fire, a simple meal of canned soup and crackers, and then let the flames die out. It was too hot for a bonfire. We sat in chairs and looked up at the night sky. We took turns pointing out the constellations we knew, and inventing fake stories for ones we didn’t. It was fun.

  “I can’t get over how many stars there are,” Ren said. “You never see this many stars in the city. The sky is so big out here.”

  “In Wisconsin, some nights we were lucky enough to see glimpses of the Northern Lights. Those are amazing.”

  “What are those like?”

  “Like…dancing ribbons of light in the sky, usually green. A vibrant green.”

  “That sounds cool. I heard people in New York talk about going upstate to see them, but I never did. Going upstate was for rich people.” Ren shifted in her seat. We were quiet for a long time. Ren squeaked. “What the hell is that?” She pointed into the sky. I tried to triangulate where she was pointing. High above us, she could see a small light that looked like it was moving. It was barely a pinpoint and it was hustling.

  “Satellite, probably,” I said. “You can see them sometimes.”

  “Satellites are still working?”

  “Most of them were solar-powered,” I said. Then another thought hit me, and I blanched. “Oh, god…the astronauts on the ISS. What happened to them?”

  Ren sat up in her chair. “Are they still up there? Could they live that long without supplies?”

  I didn’t know. I remembered reading something about escape pods, Soyuz rocket capsules the crew could use in an emergency situation, but what if the situation on Earth was dangerous? Would they just sit up there until they died? Would they just depressurize the ISS and let space do them in quick and easy? Did they wait until the Flu was over and then try to return to Earth? If so, did they land in Russia, like normal? How did they land without help from Mission Control? This was something that would keep me up at night for a few days. I couldn’t not think about it, and at the same time, I had no answers for it. The only way I eventually put it out of my head was the realization that there were going to be a lot of things to which I’d never have solid answers. I closed my eyes and wished those astronauts well, no matter where they were and whether or not they were alive.

  We eventually went to bed. The heat in the RV was stifling. I considered hanging a hammock between two trees and sleeping outside, but despite the open terrain around us, I just couldn’t bring myself to trust the night. It was silly, I know. My brain just kept telling me Bigfoot was coming. I felt better inside the Greyhawk. I slept in the back bunk; Ren slept in her bunk. She still slept next to her shotgun. She fashioned a spot to hang it from while she slept so that she wasn’t in danger of accidentally hitting it, but it was still within easy grasp. The next morning when I left my bunk at dawn, I didn’t step on empty bottles. The floor was clear. I smiled. That was progress on the Trust front.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Guidestones

  Renata and I spent weeks on the road repeating the same endless pattern. Up, breakfast, drive. Explore towns. A snack for l
unch. Drive. Explore more towns. Stop. Scavenge. Camp. Sleep. We explored as much as we could, crisscrossing through North Carolina and South Carolina, hitting a lot of towns. At first, Ren’s enthusiasm for finding others kept us going. Her optimism was renewed each morning. “Today we’re gonna find someone, I just know it!” By the end of the day, she was a little dejected, but at each night’s fire, she’d shake off the disappointment and tell me, “Tomorrow. Tomorrow’s the day. People are out there waiting for us.”

  In the meantime, as we rolled through the countryside, we learned to trust each other more and more. By the end of the first week, I felt comfortable around her. By the end of the second week, she was the best friend I’d ever had. We were different people. She was street smart and city-wise, almost a college graduate. I was four years younger than she, and something of a bumpkin from the sticks, comparatively. However, I’d somehow acquired skills in my suburban upbringing that she lacked, and she had thoughts and ideas that I lacked. We had similar senses of humor, though. We liked a lot of the same movies and books. We complemented each other well. In short order, we had become family tight because we had no other choice in the matter. We bonded.

  I taught the city girl to drive, something she’d never thought she’d have the need for in New York. I tried to explain that every town in Wisconsin was a ten-to-twenty minute drive from the next-nearest town, and our public transportation system was almost non-existent. That fact alone blew her mind. The first couple of days when she took a turn behind the wheel, it was a little rough. It is tough enough learning to drive in a small family car, but to learn at the wheel of a long, bulky RV—well, let’s just say it made me very glad there were no other cars on the road.

  Ren taught me some things about First Aid and medicines. She was invaluable in sorting out my medicine stash, and she took the point on our pharmacy raids. She taught me how to do stitches correctly. A year ago, I’d sliced my palm open on some sheet metal, and when she saw the lumpy scar tissue across my palm, it made her cringe. Although, she was impressed that I had been able to stitch it one-handed.

  We had fun along the way, too. Occasionally, we went swimming when we found a nice lake or river that was not overgrown with algae. Some nights, we played catch with an Aerobie we’d found, one of those orange, plastic, Frisbee-like rings. We played around in a climbing gym one night, scaling walls and swinging from ropes into a foam pit. We played ping-pong and basketball another night in a school gym. We played table tennis so long, the next day both of us had sore shoulders. We broke into a mall in Charlotte, North Carolina. The mall, surprisingly, was mostly intact. A few of the stores had been looted, but not many. I guess there aren’t a ton of survival necessities at Hot Topic and Spencer’s Gifts. We set up a bunch of battery-powered LED lanterns along the corridors to make the mall seem less scary. In the mall, we broke the lock on a gate to a skateboard shop and spent a night roller-blading and skateboarding the long, smooth floors. We had races. I wasn’t very good on a skateboard, but I was better than average on the roller-blades, thanks to growing up in a hockey town. Ren could roller-skate well. She could skateboard, too. She could ollie and do kickflips. To me, skateboards were the work of the devil. I didn’t understand how people could jump off the board and make the board come with them. It looked like it was defying physics. The mall had one of those little places where you could put on a harness attached to some bungie cords and bounce on a trampoline. We spent at least an hour on that thing, bouncing, laughing. My stomach hurt from laughing. My cheeks hurt from smiling. It was the most fun I’d had since before the Flu.

  Maybe the most fun ever.

  I thought a lot about Doug Fisk when we were in the mall. Being in the mall, laughing and goofing off with my only friend in the world, it was the first time I felt like I was living and not just surviving. It wasn’t part of the daily grind. It wasn’t slavish devotion to making sure the next day, the next week, and the next month would happen. It was a happy deviation in which I let myself be immature and stupid. It was fleeting moments where, for little windows of time, I could have just been my stupid teenage-self screwing around with friends, and my parents were still alive at home, probably watching NCIS reruns or complaining about how there was nothing on Netflix they wanted to watch. For those little windows, I had no pressures, no responsibilities. I wasn’t worried about a storm destroying my home. I wasn’t worried about running out of gasoline. I wasn’t worried about how I’d make clothes in the future, if I had to. I wasn’t worried about anything. And it was glorious. I just hoped Renata felt the same way.

  Ren was something of a mystery, despite how much we’d shared and done. She was cryptic, hard to read at times. I trusted her with my life on a daily basis. I like to believe that she trusted me, too. We got along well. We made a good team. If it hadn’t been for the Flu, neither of us would have ever met. I would have spent my life in Wisconsin. She would have spent hers in New York. There were some cultural differences between us, too. She grew up first generation American, while my parents’ families had been here for at least 150 years. One of my great-great-great-great grandfathers fought in the Civil War. She was city. I wasn’t exactly country, but Sun Prairie, Wisconsin is as good as country to someone from Brooklyn.

  I know that the more astute readers of these journals (if there ever will be any) would be wondering about romantic relations. As of the night I wrote this passage, there was none. Nothing. We were as asexual as amoebas. We were friendly—no, beyond friendly. We were bonded together through extreme trials. We’d both survived a year alone in a wasteland. We’d both faced loneliness and isolation. We’d both walked a fine line between sanity and raving madness during that year. We’d both faced the unanswerable questions about why we continued to live in a world that so clearly wanted human beings gone from its surface. We both faced questions about why we were such aberrations to the natural order of things. We’d done all that, and yet we kept kicking. We kept fighting. We were tight because we understood each other; we each knew how the other had lived. But, there was never any outward signs from Ren that she was interested in me beyond friendship and reliance. She wasn’t overly touchy. She didn’t laugh at my bad jokes. She didn’t lean toward me when we talked. I’m not any sort of player. I was on the cusp of nineteen—women were still very much a mystery, and maybe they always would be. I just felt that any sort of romantic instigation was not for me to do. I didn’t want to weird her out or make her reconsider coming with me. I needed her. I think she needed me. That was a bond more important than sex or romance. I did not want to try anything and then have to spend the next fifty years in an awkward place with her, always measuring every action, every gesture. Maybe she didn’t want to risk it, either. I couldn’t know.

  The heat and humidity continued to be a daily factor, and I started to reconsider my desire to live in Louisiana. I couldn’t imagine ever being used to heat and humidity like this. A friend of my dad’s was a librarian at the UW. He’d been a librarian for a school in southern Florida for a few years before taking the job in Wisconsin. He said the first six months of being Down South were miserable. Then, he got used to the heat. Then, after a year or so, he said he didn’t even notice the heat. When he moved to Wisconsin, seventy degrees—a temperature at which almost all Wisconsinites go tshirts and shorts—was sweatshirt weather for him until he adapted to the cold. In Wisconsin, I wore a sweatshirt until the temps fell below freezing, and then I’d break out my light winter coat. I didn’t break out my heavy winter coat until the temps were below 10 degrees or worse. Wisconsin: Where you need two different winter coats.

  We crossed the South Carolina/Georgia border, near Greenville, late in the summer. I was driving. We passed a sign for a town called Elberton. Ren’s face lit up, and she grabbed my arm. “Here! Turn here!” After some map consulting, she directed me to Highway 77 South, and then told me to turn left onto Guidestones Road. A hundred yards in, there was a small parking lot to the side of the road, and beyond that
lay a granite sculpture of a quartet of monoliths. “We need to see this.” Ren’s voice was solemn and insistent. I didn’t question her.

  “These are the Georgia Guidestones,” she said as we walked up to them. “I saw them on one of those weird unsolved mystery shows, the ones that talk about ghosts and aliens. There was a little feature on YouTube about them, too. These are important.” The stones were tall, almost twenty feet. There was a central slab flanked by three other slabs. They were topped with a smaller capstone, almost like Stonehenge.

  “I told myself that I would see these someday.” Ren ran up to the nearest one and placed her hands on it. “You know what these are?”

  “Sculptures?”

  Ren’s eyes were wide and full of reverence. “No. They’re a guide for rebuilding society after an apocalypse.”

  In 1979, a man calling himself “R.C. Christian” went to a local granite finishing company to commission the statue on behalf of a “loyal group of Americans.” The granite company thought he was cuckoo, and perhaps he was. They overbid the job in an attempt to discourage Christian, but he accepted their bid and paid what they asked. He told the company that the design of the stones had been planned for more than twenty years.

  R.C. Christian was a pseudonym. Some believe the name was an adaptation of the word “Rosicrucian,” tying the guidestones to the Rosicrucian movement, an old semi-secretive mystic order that sought a bridge between religion and metaphysics and looked to unlock the secrets of the universe. The Rosicrucians sought a reformation of mankind. No one knows who really commissioned the guidestones. They were put in place to function as “compass, calendar, and clock” in case of a cataclysm. The stones were astronomically aligned, and each stone bore a series of instructions for maintaining the world following a massive societal collapse. At the site, there was a square engraved on an explanatory tablet. It read, Let these be guidestones to an Age of Reason.