by Mic Roland
“There. You’re done,” she announced. “Stop that. Don’t touch. Just leave it alone.”
Martin turned to look and listen for the carjackers. The woods were silent.
“I think they’re gone.”
“How can you be sure?” she whispered.
“They weren’t the quietest at moving through the woods.”
“True.”
“So, I think we can get going again,” he said. He stood to put on his backpack. “The more distance we put between us and them, the better. I’ll take wheels again. We can go slower this time.”
“Okay, but which way?”
Good question, Martin thought. They ran into the woods, going no particular direction, often changing directions. The sky was evenly gray overcast. No sun for bearings. The trees had moss all the way around them, so the old Boy Scout adage was useless.
Martin’s map was a street map. It did not show creeks, ponds or rock walls. He located the dead-end street they had run up and traced a line into the large, featureless void. He knew they were near the New Hampshire border, but not much else.
“I think we’re somewhere around here.” He pointed to an empty area on his map. “We sure don’t want to go back the way we came. If we go up this way, we’ll eventually meet this road here. It leads up to this other road. I know this road up here. Not the most direct route, but it will work.”
“Okay, but which way is ‘that way’?” She looked around at the evenly distributed trees.
Martin dug out his little button compass — a freebie from a trade show. He turned the map so that map north aligned with the red needle, then off a bit for the deviation. “Looks like north-northeast will be the shortest path. Which would be that way.” He pointed.
Avoiding thickets and denser stands of trees meant their course was anything but a straight line. Martin tried to ‘dead-reckon’ how much to compensate their heading for each deviation, but he knew it was just guesswork. He took some comfort in knowing that they would have to come to a road eventually. He was hoping for the shortest walk possible.
“You shoot the squirrels?” Susan asked.
He was surprised she was still thinking about the squirrels. “Yes.”
They trudged without words, ducking under low branches. Martin imagined she was conjuring unpleasant mental images of bristling black guns, innocent-looking squirrels and pink mist. Maybe not the pink mist part. He did not use an assault rifle on them, nor were they innocent in Martin’s mind. Sometimes, they were more akin to a biblical plague.Nobody in the Bible ever said, ‘Locusts have to eat too.’ Ever.
“What do you do with them?” she asked.
Martin was about to answer, I certainly don’t hold little funerals for them. He knew that was far too sarcastic. Squirrels tended to bring out his dark side. He did not want her to think he was a vicious killer type. He was already on the margins of civilized society by being a gun owner. He decided that he should try a kinder and gentler style.
“Well, let’s just say they don’t go to waste.”
“Oh.”
After they negotiated a thicket of saplings, she asked, “What does ‘don’t go to waste’ mean?”
Martin sighed. He did not want to go there. “We eat them.”
After the words left his mouth, he realized it was a poor time for brevity. His words sounded barbaric, like he bit into their dead furry bodies and ripped off a strip of red flesh with his teeth.
“What?” Her shocked tone signaled that he did sound barbaric.
“I mean, I clean them…” (Clean, being a nicer word than butcher.) “Then we cook them. Not a lot of meat on a squirrel, but they taste okay.”
He glanced back. Susan had a swallowed-a-bug expression.
“It’s not that bad,” he said. “People have done that for thousands of years. Hunt their prey, cook it over a fire…” Martin stopped himself. He was painting a barbaric picture again.
“I know, I know. But I don’t even like looking at the packages of meats in the cooler at the supermarket.”
“Oh. You’re a vegetarian?” That spelled some future trouble. What food they had stored away had not been blessed by some Vegan priest-guru-expert. It was just plain food.
“No. I like meat well enough. I’m just used to it being already diced up and in my meal.”
He was relieved to hear she did not have complicated diet restrictions, whether medical or ‘ethical’, but her phrase ‘already diced up’ stuck in his mind. He wondered what that meant.
“So you prefer to buy things like ground turkey, or hamburger?”
“Not so much that. I just don’t cook much.”
This was a does-not-compute comment to Martin. People eat every day. How could they not cook? Margaret was always cooking something. Pumpkin bread, pies, soups, casseroles, even her canned tomatoes, or salsa were cooked by her before going into the canning jars. Martin liked to cook too. His father always told him, ‘If a guy’s gonna eat, then a guy’s gotta cook.’ It did prove a useful skill in his bachelor days.
“You mean you eat out a lot?”
“Not a lot. Only like three times a week. It gets expensive.”
Three times a week? Martin felt like a hermit. He tried to think of the last time he and Margaret had gone out to eat. He could not come up with one. He wondered if the drive-thru at Dunkin’ Donuts counted? He thought not.
“Mostly,” Susan continued. “I just buy frozen meals. You know, Stoeffer’s, or Lean Cuisine. I usually get the store brand, though. Less expensive.”
“Oh. Are those any good?” He had not eaten a frozen meal since college. Margaret would not abide them in her house.
“They’re okay. A little salty sometimes, or bland, especially the low-fat ones. Still, couldn’t be easier. Just pop it in the microwave and there ya go. That’s how almost everybody does it in town.”
“Hmmm.” Martin still had a hard time imagining that lifestyle. “You mentioned, the other day, about waiting through that last power outage. What did you eat while you couldn’t use your microwave?”
“Graham crackers,” she said flatly.
“For two days?” Martin paused to point at a mossy log. “Oh, be careful with that log there. That’s really rotten.”
“Thanks.” She stepped over the log. “Technically, it was only a day and a half, but yes. They did get a little boring. I haven’t been able to eat graham crackers ever since. I was so glad when the power came back on, but I had to throw out all my meals and buy new ones.”
“You just threw them away?”
“Yeah. They were probably bad. They thawed out.”
Martin felt barbaric again. He would sniff some meat past-its-date, from the back of the fridge, know it was iffy, but cook it anyway. Was he just one rung up from eating road kill? How charming was that? And why did it matter if he was charming or not?
“Sometimes the store would carry exotic meats like buffalo or mutton, but I never tried those. I’m good with plain ol’ beef or chicken. Sometimes fish. I don’t think I could ever eat anything like squirrel.”
“I wonder what all those people back in the city are doing now,” Martin mused. “If most of them shopped and ate like you, they would be running out of things like graham crackers n’ stuff pretty soon.”
“Yeah. Kinda scary, but let’s talk about something else, okay? This is making me realize how hungry I am. I’m regretting that we did not buy that jar of olives from Andrew’s. I don’t really like olives, but even they sound pretty good about now.”
The trees thinned somewhat. The ground ahead of them was muddy and had more tussock sedge than leafy bushes. Martin stopped and set down the roller bag.
“Looks like we’ve come to a strip of swamp. The ground gets higher again on the other side, see? But I don’t feel like mucking straight through there.”
“So what do we do? Go around?”
“Yes, but no sense both of us walking back and forth looking for a way around. How about you stay
here with the bags and rest. Maybe on that log over there. Looks dry. I’ll go up this way and see if there’s a way around.”
Martin pushed his way through the spindly brush for what he guessed was thirty yards. He had lost sight of Susan. The marsh was getting wider, not narrower. Another fifty yards ahead, there was open water: a pond. This was not the easy way around.
Susan was watching, nervously, and eagerly, when Martin emerged from the brush.
“Can’t go that way,” he said. “The swamp starts turning into a pond. I’ll try the other way next, after a bit of a rest. Didn’t get that much sleep last night.” He sat on the log with the roller bag between himself and Susan.
“Um…Martin?”
There was something in her ‘um’ that sounded like trouble. “Yeah?”
“I didn’t get a chance to finish what I wanted to say this morning.”
“This is about when I scared you, isn’t it? Look, I’m really sorry that I…”
“Hold on.” She interrupted. “You didn’t do anything. That’s why I’m trying to apologize to you.”
“What? Why?”
Susan looked away, sheepishly. “For thinking that you…”
“Well, I wouldn’t!” Martin did not want her to finish her sentence. He could feel a blush of embarrassment coming on.
“I know. That’s why I feel terrible.…It was just something about the fall, I guess. I got scared.”
“These are scary times,” Martin conceded. “We’ve seen that.”
“True, but it wasn’t right. I know you’re not like that.”
“Not your fault. You couldn’t really know. Five minutes a week through a teller window? A couple of days of chaos on the road? Still plenty of room for reasonable doubt.” Martin was trying to excuse her fears as reasonable, but wondered why he was trying to leave the door open that he might be a terrible person. He needed to fire his lawyer.
She glanced at him. “People skills, remember? There’s a whole lot of guys out there that…well, a girl can just tell that they would…you know, given half a chance, no matter how nice they talk. Something in their eyes.”
She looked down and fidgeted with the buttons on her coat. “But you…”
Martin could see an inner struggle playing out on her face as she searched for words. Something inside of him suddenly realized that he did not want her to find those words. Things said in the flush of emotion usually went horribly wrong. Many times in his past he had said things too spontaneously, too candidly, and regretted it. All those times, he had wished that someone would have doused him with ice water, or set a trashcan on fire — anything to distract him and derail his tongue.
He had no ice water or trashcans, but he could change the subject for her. “We’ll just both have to be more careful, right?”
Her small smile told him she appreciated the derailment. “Yeah. That’s it. More careful.”
“With that in mind…” Martin handed her the folding knife. “You should carry this.”
Susan tried to decline, but Martin insisted. “I’ve got the blade in my multi-tool. You should have something too. We might run into more trouble.”
She reluctantly took the knife: a physical symbol of the brutality that had so quickly risen around them. “It’s hard to believe that people are acting this way. Out there, I mean. They didn’t act like this during the last big outage. Why is this time different?”
Martin had to think. What was the difference? Were people losing hope so quickly because they connected the dots like Leo had? Did they sense that help would not be coming quickly, that ‘normal’ would not return soon? Was it a sudden lack of law enforcement? After Katrina hit, people looted and committed crimes pretty quickly. It could be that law enforcement gets overwhelmed at times like these and people are on their own. Being on your own is scary.
“Maybe it’s that bad people, who are always there, feel like they can get away with things now,” he offered.
She frowned. “With all the policeman piddling around with roadblocks, of course they can.”
Martin matched her frown. “There wasn’t much stopping those two carjackers. Who knows what they’ve already done and what they would have done if they caught us. Thank God we got away.”
This thought sent Martin down a dark rat hole. If he had not stuffed newspapers in his jacket, the thug might have killed him, then and there. Then Martin realized that would have left Susan alone with them. He felt a flash of fear, quickly followed both rage and terror swelling inside him. His rage surprised him. The Good Samaritan in the Bible felt compassion and concern for the wounded stranger, but not rage at the robbers. Was Martin even entitled to the emotion of rage?
It was Susan’s turn to derail deep thoughts. “I got away okay, but you’re not looking so good.” She pointed at his muddy, duct-taped jacket
He appreciated her interruption of his dark mood. It was kinder than ice water. He looked down at his jacket. “Yeah, I seem to be kind of accident prone lately.”
“You said you were going to go look for a way across this swamp, right?” she added brightly.
“Yes I did.”
“I’ll wait here.” She patted the log. “Don’t be gone too long…and try not to fall down so much, okay?”
He gave her a give-me-a-break eye roll, then pulled out his invisible note pad and pretended to write. “Don’t - fall - down. Got it. Like my new notepad?”
“I like it. It’s pink.” She winked.
The swamp tapered down to a muddy stream, roughly a dozen yards southeast. It took a bit of careful balancing on wobbly tussocks to get across. They traveled back up the other edge of the swamp until they spotted the log they sat on.
“Okay. Now we’re back on course. North-northeast. Ready?”
“Sure. I’m really getting hungry, though.”
Pushing through the woods had the same perpetual quality that walking the railroad tracks had. There always seemed to be more trees ahead.
“Hey, look up there.” Martin pointed through the tree trunks.
“That looks like a shed or a garage or something.”
“Cool. That means we’re almost to the road.”
They walked with more enthusiasm. Their ordeal in the woods was almost over.
“Hmm. This is more of a little barn,” said Martin. “I wonder what they keep in this little pen.”
Susan cupped her hands around her eyes as she peered in a dusty window. “Rabbits. There’s a bunch of cages of rabbits in there.”
“Interesting. I wonder if they…” Martin trailed off. He realized the owners were raising them for meat. He had already bungled that topic with squirrels, so felt it was best to avoid round two. “That must be the house up through there. The road is probably just on the other side.”
Martin welcomed Susan to New Hampshire officially with a theatrical bow. Somewhere back in the woods, they had crossed the line. Susan chatted about traveling, but never making it up to New Hampshire, as the two of them walked up the path from the rabbit barn to the house’s back yard.
“Stop right there!” shouted a man’s voice from the house.
Martin and Susan looked up, startled. Stepping off the back porch was stout little man with salt and pepper hair. He had a shotgun to his shoulder, one eye squinted, the open eye behind the bead. The gun was aimed at Martin’s head.
* * *
Chapter 12: Captured as looters
“You two just stop right there, or I’ll blast ya. So help me, I will.”
Martin and Susan put their hands up. The roller bag clattered onto the path.
“Um, hey, Mister, we don’t mean any…” began Martin.
“Shaddup you,” hollered the angry man.
As he took a few careful steps toward Martin and Susan, he was muttering to himself. “I knew them low life scums would be coming. She said I was nuts, but I knew. Dang mass-holes. I knew they’d come sneaking up here eventually. Well, I was ready for ‘em.”
To Martin, h
e yelled. “What did you do to my rabbits?”
“Nothing, sir. We just came through the woods and…”
“So, you DID come from Mass. I knew it. I knew you low-lifes would come sneakin’ up here as soon as yer precious system collapsed. It was only a matter of time. Get out here in the yard, both of ya. And don’t try anything or I’ll blow a hole in ya.” He waved the shotgun barrel to point to a spot in the back yard.
Martin tried to walk slowly but keep himself between Susan and the angry man. As he walked closer to the man, Martin got a far better view of the muzzle than he liked.
12 gauge Mossberg, he thought. Rifled barrel. Slugs. Oh great.
“Now both of ya. Lie down on the ground with your hands out where I can see ‘em. Go on. Lay down. Now!”
Martin knelt down, then Susan. It was not easy to lie down without using one’s hands.
“Keep yer hands out! None of yer stinkin’ tricks. I’ll just shoot ya where ya lay.” The man’s voice had a nervous tremble to it.
Martin lay facing Susan. She had a worried look, and rightly so.
“Sorry,” he whispered. “Don’t do anything to…”
“Shaddup!”
They laid on the cold ground for what seemed forever. The man with the shotgun continued muttering to himself as he paced back and forth.
“Now what am I gonna do with these two? Can’t just shoot ‘em in cold blood, even if they are thieving looters. Be easier if they made a move on me. Then it’d be self-defense.”
Martin saw Susan’s eyes get a little wider.
“Can’t just let ‘em go, neither. They’d go back and tell their gang about that old softie on the back road thats got rabbits. No, no. They’d be back here in big numbers. These two would tell ‘em how I had guns and defended my place. They’d put two n’ two together and figure I had lots of good stuff worth defending. That’s how they think. Dang looters.”
