Summer of the Apocalypse

by James Van Pelt

  Lightning flashed, flickering brightly for an instant. Eyes below reflected the light back, and then Eric was left to contemplate the afterimage floating before him. Long legs, solid bodies, huge feet. For a second Eric thought they were dogs, but the next burst of lightning confirmed what he feared. They were too big, too similar to each other. Feral dog pack’s members showed all the remnants of their mixed ancestry. In the same group might be a few that looked like collies, a few like German shepherds, some like Dobermans. Their snouts and heads varied in shape and size. And they barked a lot. Dog packs were almost always noisy, but Eric had heard nothing from these animals. They were wolves. He placed the ball bearing in the sling shot’s leather patch.

  Here is something worth telling them in town, he thought. He’d read that wolves were hunted to extinction in Colorado by 1930. No wild wolves lived in the contiguous 48 states, except for a small population in Minnesota and an experimental pack in Yellowstone. It’s taken 50 years for them to get here from Canada, but they’re back. He remembered stories he’d read about wolves, all of them frightening; how wolves would attack lone men hunting in the woods; how they were the animal kingdom’s equivalent of mass murderers, killing way more than they could eat; how one wolf might fatally cripple a dozen cows in one night, eating none of them but leaving them to suffer until the poor rancher the next day would be forced to destroy them. He’d read a book once about famous outlaw wolves, the kind that terrorized communities and defied hunters to kill them: Queen Wolf in Unaweep Canyon, Colorado; Split Rock Wolf in Wyoming; Old Whitey in Bear Springs Mesa, Colorado, and perhaps the most notorious, Three Toes of Harding County, South Dakota, who took thirteen years to hunt down, and whom ranchers credited with destroying fifty thousand dollars worth of stock.

  Wild dogs the town can handle. A couple of guards on horseback, with their own dogs to help, managed to keep stock loss to a minimum; a sick cow now and then, or sometimes a calf that wandered off. But if wolves are back, he thought, then precautions will have to be doubled.

  In the next flash of lightning he counted a dozen of them. Some lay down; four or five were standing, sniffing the wind perhaps. He wondered if they knew he was there. Surely they do, he thought. How could they not? He’d read that a wolf’s sense of smell was a hundred times keener than a man’s, and that its eyesight was phenomenal at night. He scooted himself to the edge of the rock, taking his sling shot with him, although now all he thought was that if the wolves tried to climb the rock, he might be able to scare them off. The chances of striking a fatal blow in the dark seemed remote. He felt the edge of the stone beneath his hand. Something moved below him, and then the lightning flashed again. A wolf standing with its forefeet on the rock, stretching almost five feet vertically, its head only three feet away, met him eye to eye. Eric froze.

  The wolf whined. It seemed such a small sound for an animal this size to make and so ridiculous that Eric almost laughed, but instead he screamed, “Back off!” Claws scrabbled against the rock, and the next flash revealed all the wolves looking up at him, heads cocked to one side or the other, tongues lolling lazily out of their mouths, their eyes like bright lights shining out of their dark faces. Eric held the slingshot ready, but the next flicker showed none of them had moved, and when it flashed again, the wolves seemed disinterested. For a long time, maybe an hour, Eric sat up watching the wolves by lightning. One was much larger than the rest, the one who’d partially climbed the rock. Eric guessed he might be one-hundred and fifty pounds or so and at least three feet tall at the shoulder. The rest ranged from sixty pounds to maybe a hundred. They seemed well fed. No lean and hungry look in them at all. Of course there were range cattle to eat, he thought, and the deer population had soared once man wasn’t around to harvest the surplus each year. He should have guessed that wolves, the natural predator, would eventually return.

  Dogs’ days were numbered. They’d either interbreed or be driven out of the ecological niche. He thought about the others, mountain lion and bear. They’d probably made a comeback too. Maybe out on the plains of Kansas, buffalo herds were slowly building. If the fences were down, and they undoubtedly were, and if the pathetic little populations that lived on the tiny preserves hadn’t died the first few winters, then even now the plains might be the home of the buffalo again. He imagined them nosing through the abandoned streets of Kansas City. The thought tickled him, and then frightened him. If the animals come back, where will the men go? Man had to reassert his place in the new world. The thought reminded him of why he started this trip. Tomorrow he would reach C-470 and start north to Boulder. The best library in Colorado was at the university. Boulder might have escaped the general destruction that Denver suffered. If the building stands, the books might be safe.

  A sound rose from below, but Eric couldn’t pin its source. It seemed to swell out of the air around him, a cool, piercing animal siren, and then another joined it. They all started, a huge, primeval harmony of sound. In the lightning, the wolves strained their snouts up, howling at the sky. Eric shivered. They continued, two barks and a howl; two barks and a howl.

  He realized they weren’t afraid of him. They weren’t threatening him; they weren’t hungry. He probably could climb off the rock and walk away and they wouldn’t do anything, because a five-foot wolf would have no trouble jumping to the top of an eight-foot rock. Eric tilted his head back to see what the wolves saw. The clouds covered the sky now, hiding the stars, and the lightning flashes within the clouds lit up their fantastic shapes: bottomless valleys and prodigious mountains of mist, fantastic rollings of shapes birthing and swallowing each other, like a slow motion ocean gone mad. Profound rumbles shook the air regularly.

  The wolves howled, and after a moment of this, Eric cleared his throat and joined them. The sound rose up from deep in his chest. He joined their harmony. Despite his fears, despite his imagining of a world without men, it felt good to yowl at the sky.

  The clouds hid the sunrise the next morning, and when Eric awoke late, it took him a minute to place where he was. He sat in his sleeping bag. To the east, almost on the horizon, a dark line of trees marked the course of the South Platte. To the south, the gentle hills rose and fell until they blurred in the distance. North, ruins of houses and dark foundations marked the same hills. On the north side of Bowles Avenue, several large houses behind a long line of crumbling brick wall still stood. Unlike so many others, they looked as if they had escaped the burning during the great panic, but their roofs had long since collapsed, and they sagged like tired old men.

  He shuddered, thinking about the great fire that had almost killed him when he was young. The remnants of the western edge of Denver and its suburbs stretched for twenty-five miles in that direction. Eric planned on walking beyond Denver’s western edge before heading north to Boulder. The dogs were worse in the city, where they roamed in large packs, and a man traveling alone would be too tempting. To the west, the hills sloped until they leapt into mountains only a half a dozen miles away. Snow still covered the front range, but the low clouds kept him from seeing them.

  Except for tracks as big as his hand, he found no sign of the wolves after he stowed the sleeping bag and climbed off the rock. Before he started, he finished twenty push-ups, fifty sit-ups and a series of stretching exercises—his morning routine for years. His back felt much better when he’d worked the kinks out, and by the time he hefted his pack to his shoulders, he was whistling. Twenty minutes farther down the road, he realized the tune was “Aquarius.” By the time the sun popped from behind the clouds an hour later, when he guessed he was still two or three miles from the C-470 interchange where he would turn north, he realized he was being followed. Nerves, he thought at first. A man spends an evening perched above wolves, and he gets jumpy. He twirled at a clatter, like gravel being kicked, but the road stretched as empty behind him as it stretched in front. Plenty of brush for something to hide in, he observed. An army could sneak along ten feet from the road, and he’d never know a th
ing. He walked on, ears finely tuned.

  He calmed himself by contemplating the changes in the road since the last time he went west fifteen years ago. First, weeds commanded more of the path than asphalt now. Fifteen years ago, at least in most spots, the road was still a road. Double yellow lines, faded to near invisibility, still marked the middle. But this hadn’t surprised him. The first spring of the Now Time he’d been amazed at how bad the roads were. Cracks had formed. Weeds had pushed through in some spots already. Winter swelling had buckled the asphalt in some places and pulled it apart in others. Without constant traffic and road crews, the elements and nature went to work. Each year after that, erosion undercut some parts. Wind-blown dirt or mud overflows from rain covered other sections, and plants rooted in every crack and every deposit of soil, so that even if he had a car now, he wouldn’t be able to drive a quarter of a mile without falling into a gully or stopping at an obstruction. In Europe, he’d read, the Romans built a road called the Appian Way, and some sections of it were still passable 2,000 years later, but they built with stones. Asphalt was too biodegradable.

  He pushed through a line of weeds a yard wide that cut all the way across the road. Weeds and grasses skirted the next thirty feet of relatively clean asphalt, then a grass peninsula covered the path, and if he didn’t know better, he could have sworn that there had never been a road. Glass crunched behind him. He twirled again. Grasses, weeds, scrub oak, but nothing else. He sniffed: a hint of Pinyon and ozone in the air, a remnant of last night’s storm. He wet his finger and held it up. The sound was downwind. If it were animal, it’d be smelling him, not the other way around.

  He’d left the outskirts of Littleton and although ruins no longer dotted the landscape, he’d reached the line of gutted and rusted cars that ended at the C-470 intersection. All were rust red or brown and resting on their rims. Not a speck of paint left on them. Eric knew of at least four big grass fires in the last fifty years that must have burned any paint that weathering alone wouldn’t have removed. Through open doors and broken windows he saw black seat springs and bare metal. All the vinyl, rubber, leather and plastic were long gone. Tumbleweed filled some cars and poked out so that they looked like weird planters in need of watering. Eric guessed that in the panic to flee Denver, a monstrous traffic jam gridlocked this road west. People must have abandoned their cars and walked. Later, the civil authorities, or the army, had cleared the road with bull dozers or tanks. Pieces of safety glass glittered wherever he looked. He kept to the middle, as far from the wrecks as he could. The empty headlight sockets, broken grills and dangling wires kept a somber witness. A breeze whistled hollowly.

  Eric picked up his pace and glanced quickly side to side. It couldn’t be the wolves, he thought. Too noisy. And not dogs. Not noisy enough. Then ahead he saw what he’d been hoping for: a bus. When he reached it, he glanced over his shoulder, then bent low and ran behind the crumpled metal mass. He gasped; his heart throbbed solidly in his ears. Ruefully, he admitted to himself that although he was in fine shape for seventy-five, he was seventy-five. Dots circled through his vision. He braced himself against the bus’s cool bulk, and rust powdered his hands. Then he crept to the back of the bus so that he could see the road without being seen. Why do I want to know? he thought. It’d be best to keep going and let them play their hand. He wasn’t worried about death by violence, he realized. It was more like idle curiosity, or the challenge of turning the tables on whoever was following him. Not feeling fear was wonderful, liberating. He realized that staying at home he had become afraid. Fighting with Troy over how to direct the town, he’d become a shut-in. The only reason to leave the house was to go to town meetings, and all he’d thought about for the last few years was how afraid he was for the future of humanity, or at least that segment of humanity he knew. Cut off from other groups, salvaging manufactured goods, making nothing for themselves, he feared their death by ignorance. As he lay in the shade of the bus, half buried by a tumbleweed, miles from home, followed by who knew what for who knew why, he felt glad. He smiled.

  A half hour passed. Eric pinched the back of his hand to stay awake. A mouse ran across the road. A bird sang the same six notes over and over. A meadow lark, he thought. He smiled. He’d never forgotten his dad’s bird calls. The breeze stopped and heat waves shimmered off the asphalt and broken glass. Eric thought about a hunting trip he taken when Troy was twelve. Carrying compound bows, they’d left before dawn for a blind set near a salt lick by McLellan Reservoir. Rains had come down hard for several weeks before, softening the ground, and a visit to the lick the day before showed deer used it. With luck, there’d be fresh venison on their table. But nothing went well. At the blind, Troy refused to stay still, jumping up at every sound, notching and un-notching an arrow, rummaging through his day pack, and when a deer did come, he scared it off with a hasty, ill-aimed shot. Eric thought, I was too rough with him. I shouldn’t have yelled. But the missed meal was too real in his head, and Troy was crushed. He didn’t speak to Eric for the rest of the day, and the next day, when Eric called him in for his reading lesson, Troy said, “I don’t need to read, I need to hunt.” A week later Troy brought in a deer he’d shot on his own. Exhausted, he dropped it at Eric’s feet. Dirt covered his face. A long scratch ran down the side of his cheek, but he didn’t look proud; he looked angry, and Eric didn’t know what to say. Confronted with this new version of his son, this defiant hunter, he felt at a loss. Finally, Eric put out his hand. He wanted to hug him, to pull him close to his chest and say, “Ah, son.” But he didn’t. He knew now, at the time when he most needed to show he loved him he’d made a mistake: he only offered to shake his son’s hand. Troy kept his own hands at his side for a long time before he reached out and shook with Eric. He never read with his father again.

  Eric’s chin rested on his forearm, and he knew he’d been sleeping. Whatever had been following him had either been a figment of his imagination, or it had spotted him leaving the road and was now holed up on its own waiting for him to move. He rolled onto his side and dug into his backpack for a jar of preserves and some bread. He decided he had no need to rush. Traveling in the heat drained him. If he reached the intersection by evening, he could find a good campsite on the hill beyond. There used to be a stone hut above a gully a few hundred yards up the hill, and if it still stood, he would sleep there. When he spotted a coyote trotting up the road, he paused in mid-bite. He thought, this is my day for the dog family. No wind now to carry my scent, he’s probably tracking me. As if to confirm this thought, the coyote paused to smell the asphalt before continuing towards Eric. Then it stopped a hundred and fifty yards away, perked its ears, and stepped toward a car on its side. A rock sailed from behind the car; the coyote ducked and sprinted away.

  Got you, thought Eric. He moved his backpack to the corner of the bus where it’d be visible, put his hat on top of it, as if he’d decided to lay down, then crawled into the underbrush, carefully keeping out of sight of whoever hid behind the car down the road. Out of the shade, the sun beat hard on his back. He partially stood, and, using bushes for cover, maneuvered himself closer to the car. I’m on a stalk, and we’ll see just who you are. He felt strong, springy, like a twenty-year-old. He slipped a rock the size of an egg into his pocket, and when he found another about the same size, he kept it in his hand. Slowly now, he crept closer. Twenty yards away, he squatted behind a Volkswagon Bug with Colorado plates. The embossed mountains still showed in the metal. The rock he tossed over the other car clattered loudly in the silence of the afternoon. Somebody said something and somebody else hissed a loud “Shhhh!” Eric weighed the second rock in his hand. After considering what to do with it for a moment, he threw it directly at the other car. The “clang” still echoed when a head popped up, looked around, then dropped out of sight.

  Eric yelled, “Dodge! You can come out now.” He heard frantic whispering. “You too, Rabbit.” Sheepishly, the two boys stood. “How’d you find us, Grandfather?” asked Dodge. Rab
bit said, “I told you he was too smart for us.”

  Eric smiled at them. “You boys eat yet?”

  When they finished lunch, Dodge showed Eric their inventory. Dodge had packed five one-pound packages of beef jerky, a roll of dried crab apple leather and a package of rock candy. Rabbit’s pack, which Eric decided must weigh sixty pounds, had twice as much food, two knives, a first-aid kit box filled with various herbs, a tool kit complete with hammer and saw, a hundred-foot length of rope, a tent, a shovel, and a complete change of clothes for both of them. “I like to be prepared,” he said.

  “You can’t come with me, boys,” said Eric.

  “I knew he’d say that,” said Rabbit. He scowled and turned his scarred face away. Dodge wasn’t bothered. “Where you going to anyway?” He sucked on a piece of candy. “Dad don’t even know your gone. He’s going to bust a bow string for sure.”

  Dodge told him that they’d discovered him missing the day before, probably only minutes after he’d left, and they decided to go after him. They’d run home, packed, and been on the road for an hour when nightfall came. They’d slept in a Chevy van that was partially protected by a collapsed garage. “Old man will kill himself if we don’t catch him,” is what Dodge said that Rabbit had said. “Said no such thing,” said Rabbit.