by Sean Little
I tried to fight unconsciousness, but shock and blood loss took over. I felt sick and cold all at once, a wracking shudder ran through my entire body. I started seeing amoeba-like blobs of black swimming across my vision. The pain in my back and shoulder lessened, and then it left me entirely. Comforting darkness blanketed me. I closed my eyes and let it.
I only remember bits and pieces for a while after that, little flashes and fragments of memory and experience. Some of them felt so strange that I think they were dream-state hallucinations. Some were definitely real.
Bigfoot tending to my wounds was likely a hallucination. I remember clearly seeing an ape-like visage up close, a friendly, rubbery Sasquatch face smiling benevolently. The shaggy mop of ape-fur around his leathery face smelled of violets and summer grass. I felt thick, heavy fingers prodding at my back and sides. “You’ll be okay,” Sasquatch said to me. “I will make sure of it.” I tried to thank him, but he swirled into darkness in a whorl of black fog and disappeared.
The RV headlights roaring down the road toward the MagLite’s beacon. That felt real, at least more real than Bigfoot did. They looked like the eyes of an angry monster, brilliant and blinding. For a moment, I was scared, but then my body and brain told me I was too hurt to be scared. I relaxed and decided the monster could kill me if it wanted. I would not fight it anymore.
Renata going into full emergency room nurse-mode was definitely real. I have vague visions of her leaping out of the cab, rushing for the First Aid kit, and falling to her knees by my side. There are sound bites and flashes of vision lodged in my memory. Gauze. Iodine. Ren sniffling back tears. Ren yelling commands at me. Don’t go. You stay here with me! Swearing—mine and Ren’s. A fire. Boiled water. Volcanic, white-hot pain as Ren scrubbed the wounds trying to clear out whatever manner of toxic infestation the tiger’s dirty claws might have put into me. There was the warmth of my own sticky blood running down my sides. I remember being dragged into the RV. For a petite, diminutive woman, Ren somehow muscled me into the camper with incredible strength. Did I help her? Did I stand and walk with her support, or did she lift me? I can’t remember. After that, there are great gaps of darkness. I woke at one point and found myself lying facedown on my bed, my head propped to the side so I could breath. I tried to roll over, but lightning bolts of pain kept me facedown. I felt feverish and sweaty. Sick. Sicker than I had ever been in my life. I was immune to viruses, but not bacteria. Why was I so sick? Did I throw up? My stomach felt empty. My mouth tasted like death. I worried about what the bile from my stomach would do to my teeth. I let the darkness come back.
It was two days before I remember waking up and being fully conscious, fully aware. Even then, I was not well. I was sick, feverish. I was hot and cold all at once. The blankets I had on my legs were simultaneous too heavy, too hot, and not warm enough. Everything on my back hurt. My left ass-cheek felt like a hunk of rawhide leather, stiff and unwilling to bend. I was lying on my bed. I would have thought that I would have needed to pee, but I didn’t. I realized that I didn’t feel quite normal down there. My first instinct was that the tiger got my penis. Let me tell you—that was a blast of panic the likes of which I had never experienced. If you need a reason to suddenly be a hundred-percent conscious, just pretend a man-eating beast got your junk. You, my friend, will be wide a-friggin’-wake. After a few seconds of self-examination, I realized there was a tube coming out of my urethra. Renata had put a catheter in me. I didn’t know where she’d gotten a catheter, but there were plenty of hospitals out there. I am sure she knew what she was doing.
I was naked beneath a sheet on my bunk. I could feel thick, heavy bandages on my back. The RV was swaying, and I could hear the sounds of the engine and tires-on-road. We were traveling. I was suddenly aware that I was thirsty. My throat, my tongue, my lips were dryer than desert air. I was thirstier than I have ever been in my life. I felt weak from thirst. I tried to call out, but it came out a croak. I tried to summon wetness from my salivary glands by kneading my tongue into the roof of my mouth until I was able to approximate something close to speech. It was weak and feeble, but I was able to call her name. “Ren.”
She heard me. The brakes immediately locked up and the RV lurched to a hard stop. The sudden change in momentum hurt. I groaned involuntarily. I heard the transmission shift to park. I heard the seatbelt being unbuckled. I could not look back over my shoulder, but I could feel her coming. She was at my side in an instant. “Twist? You there? You awake? How do you feel?”
I licked my lips. I coughed. I felt the bed move slightly as she knelt on it. She rolled me to my side and placed a bottle in my mouth. I was able to suck down some water, lukewarm, but clean and wet. It made me cough. Coughing hurt. The muscles along my left side were torn and sore. “Feel okay.” I grimaced. Any hope of being cool and stoic went out the window. I was in a bad way. “No, that’s a lie. I feel bad, actually. Everything hurts.”
“I don’t doubt that,” she said. Ren laid me back on my stomach. She started looking in my eyes with a penlight. “You got ripped the hell open by some kind of big animal.”
“Tiger.”
“Really? A tiger did this?” Ren shook her head. Her tongue made a clicking noise. “Amazing. You lost a lot of blood and you had a fever.” Her hand cupped my forehead. “You still do. You’re very warm.” She left the bed and returned with pills. “I would have given you something intravenous, but it was all expired or stored incorrectly because of the lack of refrigeration. I couldn’t risk it. I made do with a little saline solution to help you get back some fluids. That stuff will keep for a long while.” She put the pills in my mouth and made me take more water with them. I swallowed them, but they felt like large chunks of gravel in my throat. I coughed and struggled to get them down.
“Where are we?” I choked the words out.
“The panhandle of Mississippi, almost to Louisiana. We stayed an extra day in Pensacola to get you travel-ready.”
I nodded. I tried to picture the location on the map in my head, but the whole Mississippi/Alabama/Louisiana area blurred into a single lump in my brain. Was it Alabama, then Mississippi, or the other way around?
“You scared me.” Ren started to laugh, but it came out as a half-sob. She spent several minutes composing herself. I could hear her sniffing. She used a corner of my sheets to wipe her eyes. I felt her fingertips touch my right shoulder. They were warm and soft, but toughened by a life of surviving. “I mean, I didn’t think you were going to die. You would have if I hadn’t found you, but once I found you I knew I could save you. I just…couldn’t stop thinking about what I would do if you died.”
“You’d adapt. You’d make do.”
Ren’s voice was just above a whisper. “No. You do not get to die on me. Not now. Maybe in sixty or seventy years, we can discuss it, but not now. I need you too much.” Her voice cracked with emotion. She sniffed again. “Please swear to me you won’t try fighting a tiger again.”
I felt a corner of my mouth curl into a smile. “No promises.”
She punched my shoulder gently. “Jerk.” Even the light jostling hurt, but I didn’t complain. Her hand stayed on my shoulder, gripping it lightly.
I shifted my body a bit and felt fire burning down my back and on my left side. “How bad is it?”
“Bad enough,” she said. “Mostly flesh wounds. A little bit of muscle tearing. The tiger got you good, sank its claws deep into your back muscles, but it didn’t hit anything vital. You’re going to be sore for a long time. Going to take a long time to heal. Want some painkillers?”
“Hell, yes.” I remembered Doug and his painkillers. Hit me again, dealer. I only have a five and a three showing.
Ren got up from the bunk and came back with another bottle of pills. “Just take one. It’ll knock you out for a while.”
I swallowed the pill. It could not start working fast enough. I tried to tighten the muscles in my back, but the flash of pain made me yelp. I gritted my teeth and turned to look
at Renata’s face. Her cheeks were tear-streaked. I reached up and ran my thumb over one of her cheeks. She grabbed my wrist and held my hand on her face.
“Twist, I’m sorry—”
I cut her off. “No, I am sorry. This is my fault. I was angry and stupid, and I should not have gone off alone.”
“No, I am sorry. I was stupid. I was confused. This is on me.”
I started to protest, but she pressed a finger to my lips. “No talking, now. Your job is to just rest. Get better. I can handle things for a little while. Okay?” She leaned down and pressed her lips to my cheek. I inhaled. She smelled like violets and summer grasses. Was she Bigfoot? It felt good to have her face that close to my face. I did not want it to end.
It was then I noticed Fester. He was curled up in what I called the “snail pose.” He was a lump with his head up and his back curled like a snail’s shell, but his paws completely tucked under him. He was staring at me with concerned eyes.
“He never left this bed, except to eat and use his box,” Ren said. She ran a finger over the cat’s head. He closed his eyes and purred loudly. “Wouldn’t even come sit by the fire with me at night.”
At that moment, I felt a swell of love for that stupid, semi-traitorous cat. I should have known he would not have forsaken me. I laid my head back on the bed. “Hot in here.”
Ren laughed. “Hot everywhere. It’s Mississippi.” She sat on the bed next to me. She reached out a hand. I felt her fingers lightly caressing the back of my neck. It was soothing. The endorphins her touch gave me helped bury a lot of the pain. Or was it the pills? Maybe both. I let my eyes close. That’s the last thing I remember that day.
If it was the last thing I ever remembered, I would have been okay with it. I felt loved. Cared for. I felt hopeful. I felt like the future was broad and expansive, an unwritten book. I felt whole again, even if it was a new shape for feeling whole, it was still a feeling of being whole for the first time in more than a year.
Best of all, I did not feel alone.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The End of the Road
It took almost a week to cross Louisiana. With only Ren able to do all the work, we spent a lot less time on the road. She had to clean my wounds, change my bandages, and give me drugs to fight off infection and pain. She had to pump all the gas by herself. She was not used to it. She fatigued a lot faster than I did. It took her longer. The gas was also going south (no pun intended) in quality. The world’s remaining supply of gasoline was quickly turning gelatinous. The time of the internal combustion engine was coming to an end. The future was looking painfully rustic and pioneer-like. Maybe that was a good thing?
We did swing through Madisonville because I insisted. Ren helped me struggle into the library where I had intended to live when I first set out from Wisconsin a lifetime ago. There on the wall in the entry, I wrote a message to anyone who might have seen my message back in Sun Prairie and traveled to Louisiana looking for me:
Moved to Lake Houston, Texas.
Come find us. We are surviving.
We are still alive.
—Twist and Renata
I was mostly bedridden for four more days. In that time, Ren spent a lot of time keeping the wounds on my back moist beneath the bandages so the scabs wouldn’t form too quickly. There were no stitches because the tears were too ragged. There were no clean edges to join. I would have scabs for a while, and eventually the wounds would turn into ragged scars. The muscle damage hurt more than the skin damage. The skin damage burned a bit, and it itched where it was healing, but the small tears in the muscle hurt. I don’t know of a better way to explain it other than that. A deep-set ache made every motion, every breath a chore.
Ren pulled the catheter, since I was awake and able to deal with that business on my own, with a bit of assistance. Ever had a catheter pulled out of your junk? It’s not a great feeling. It burns and it feels like your bladder is being yanked out through your urethra. All in all, given a choice between yanking a catheter or having chocolate cake, I’m just saying—always take the cake. Once the catheter was out, and I stopped screaming, I started laughing.
“What’s so funny?” Ren demanded.
“A couple of days ago, you and I were embarrassed because I saw your boobs.”
“Yeah?”
“And you just stabbed a tube into my junk and then ripped it out. You’ve cleaned bedpans for me. If you don’t find that hilarious, check your pulse, lady.”
Ren tried to be angry at me for a moment, but she couldn’t. A half-smile curled on her mouth, and she punched my shoulder. “Jerk.”
At the end of the fourth day, I was feeling better. I numbed up with a couple of hydrocodone pills, and I actually sat up on my own. Every move was painful, but I was able to grit my teeth and get through it. That was the first step. It was important. After that, it would be a long, slow expansion toward getting back to normal, but I would recover. Nothing would be easy in the next few months, but I would recover. I would eventually be fine. I would have some bad-ass scars, to be sure—but I would be fine.
That whole time I was bedridden, I didn’t think about surviving. I only thought about living. That was enough. I just worried about continuing to live, to breathe, to take in air and let it back out. Simple. Easy. Just exist, and keep existing.
I replayed the confrontation with the tiger over and over in my head. I remembered the base level, lizard-brain panic. I remembered scrambling for the gun and shooting. I remembered the agonizing crawl for the flashlight. There was no conscious thought in that time, only panic. Only an animalistic desire for self-preservation, a sheer, unfettered will to live. I had zero desire to die during that whole exchange. I had been prepared to accept it, but I did not want it. It would have been really simple to just let death win, too. All I would have had to do was just stop fighting. I had been hurt. I didn’t want to fight. I had wanted to just lie there, but I fought. I could have just let shock take over my body, and I could have just lay there and bled, but I didn’t. I fought. This made me think about the stormy early June night in Wisconsin where I’d thought about taking my own life. I hadn’t. My body had not wanted me to die. No matter what I felt about the existential dread that plagued me, no matter how meaningless life felt, no matter how many pieces of logic I could stack up to justify my own death in the coming wasteland, at heart, at a base level where thought and logic did not apply, I desired to live.
Over the days it took us to cross Louisiana, all I did was concentrate on that fact. I wanted to live. I wanted to be alive. I wanted to experience everything this life could offer, this strange post-societal existence in which I was trapped. It was a brave new world, but not in the Aldous Huxley sense. It was hopeful. There was unlimited potential hampered only by my will and sense of adventure.
I wanted to laugh. To love. To risk. To be safe and sheltered, but to face the wild unknown. I wanted to know what tomorrow might reveal. I wanted to know what next month, next year, and the next decade might present to me. It might be rough, but as long as I wasn’t tiger food, I could face it. I would face it. I could take the chunk of my brain that made me dwell on sad things and the meaninglessness of existence, and try to retrain it to be positive, to think of the future, and make myself a life. What was done was done, and nothing I could do could change it. There was only the present and the future. There was only now, and what came next—whatever that might be.
And I looked forward to it.
We crossed the Louisiana/Texas border in the late afternoon. We stopped at a Flying J Travel Center just outside of Orange, Texas. Ren was still driving, as I was still crunching painkillers to function. She made up camp while I stood next to the van and swung my left leg back and forth, trying to rebuild some of the damaged muscles in my buttock. Every kick hurt, but I just told myself that pain was only a symptom of being alive. Alive was good. Alive was positive. There was potential in Alive. I would handle the pain.
Ren built up the fire. We looted th
e Travel Center together, me limping heavily and leaning on a cane. We found a backroom that was still stacked with bottles of water. It was the post-viral apocalypse equivalent to finding a cache of money hidden in a well. Ren hauled the water to the RV one case at a time while I sat and felt worthless because I couldn’t even lift a case of water at that moment. Ren rooted through a couple of nearby homes and rooted out a massive aluminum pot, one of those twelve-gallon beasts that an Italian restaurant would use to make the day’s marinara. We filled that thing with water, let that water boil, and then used the hot water to take actual showers using a camp shower bag. It was a rare treat. The soap and water stung my wounds, but it was a good kind of sting.
Ren scrubbed my wounds with scalding water and opened them afresh (which hurt like blue blazes), but they bled bright red blood. Healthy blood. And they only bled—no pus, nothing gross. The infection was gone. That was a good sign. She repacked the wounds with clean, fresh bandages and pronounced my recovery on track.
We sat together by the fire that night and listened to the crickets and the cicadas. There were fewer of them now. Fall was coming. It had to be sometime in mid-September. Maybe even late September. In Wisconsin, I could tell the seasons by the trees and the fact that the mornings would get colder. In the South, all the mornings were warm, as warm like late summer days in Wisconsin. All the leaves were still green. I couldn’t tell anything about the time of year anymore. Being in the South was going to throw off my ability to keep track of the passing of time. Maybe that’s a good thing.
The wedge that had been driven between us that day at the beach was still there. It didn’t feel quite as big, but it was still there. At least, it still felt like it was there to me. I laughed. I tried to joke. Ren talked some. There were some prolonged pauses in the conversation. There was still a strange distance between us. We were circling each other like magnets of the same polarity, spinning in circles near each other, but never touching—we were just keeping a safe, respectful distance between us, but I felt like the distance was shrinking. I think we both had confusing emotions that we needed to learn to control.
