Earthbound

by Adam Lewinson

  “Let’s try to find something that’s actually useful,” I said.

  We searched around and did find an area with clothing, but most of that had gotten soaked, then frozen, then thawed, and it was covered in mold. Then we found something amazing. A whole section with tools. Some of them had rusted over, or snapped when we picked them up, but others were in decent shape. I found an axe. That was all I needed to cut down some trees in Riverside Park and get a real fire going. Pace found a handsaw, a sturdy hammer and a lot of not too rusty nails. With all of that we could board up all the windows and keep the cold out much better. Nearby we found some fishing poles too. That’d come in handy for all the fish swimming around in the Missouri.

  Our arms and pockets were overfull so we figured it was time to climb on out of there. But then we turned a corner and saw a sight we never thought we’d see. We dropped everything in our hands.

  “Mother-effer.”

  Before us was a display case filled with firearms. Revolvers. Pistols. Shotguns. Rifles. Even some big scary-looking thirty-round semi-automatic rifles with detachable magazines. Sweet.

  The glass they were behind was extra-thick, which was probably the reason why it hadn’t shattered. So we found a few chunks of concrete and smashed that case right open. We damaged a few of the firearms in the process but that still left plenty for us to examine. Most were rusted through or the firing mechanism was forever stuck from years of neglect. But a few seemed to be in decent working order. A Winchester double-barreled shotgun seemed to have held up. Some pistols from a company I never heard of before called SigSauer. Never saw anything like ‘em except in the movies. They were mostly six-shooters, so not as handy as what we already had, but a few of ‘em had laser sites. Definitely not something I needed, but it would help Pace out some with his aim. So I tossed a few over to him. He could figure out if they still worked or not. I went through the revolvers – the type of gun I’m most happy with. Most were only six shooters, but I found a few with ten chambers the way I liked it. None were as pretty as the one I carried, but that didn’t matter much. I only needed one more so I’d have one in each hand. Gimme twenty bullets at a time and I’m pretty hard to handle. I found a couple from Smith & Wesson that seemed like they’d be in decent shape with a good cleaning. I tried a few of the big semi-automatic rifles on for size but they were too bulky, even if they still worked. No place to stash them on a horse, even if they were kinda sexy.

  Pace whacked me on the shoulder. “Ash, check this out.”

  I turned and saw a steel cage, and what was inside was way more exciting than the weapons. Ammo. Boxes and boxes of ammo.

  Pace gave the cage a good look. “They might be in good shape, if they didn’t oxidize,” he told me. Then he gave me a look. “That means if they were sealed away from oxygen.”

  “I know what the eff ‘oxidize’ means,” I replied. I had no effing idea what ‘oxidize’ meant.

  The case did seem to be airtight, encased in some sort of plastic mesh. It was locked with a rusted padlock, which came off with a swift kick. Then the case made some sort of hissing noise as Pace opened it. Yup, that was airtight. We had maybe two thousands rounds of ammo in there. It was a very happy day.

  The problem was bringing everything back to the hideout. We did find some shoulder bags to help us haul everything up and out. Left a few things behind just so we wouldn’t overburden the horses, but we came back for them the next day. On that second trip, we also found another boarded up warehouse. Seemed kinda interesting. It was some kind of military facility. Inside I found boxes of bullets that had turned to dust. Some thick blankets. We could use those. Some bad-ass looking weapons, although none of them worked. Some field glasses that still worked – that’d be useful. And some bricks of some kind of clay. The cover on the crate just said the letter C and the number 4. I picked up a brick and stared at it curiously.

  Then I realized I knew what this stuff was. C4. Some kind of explosive. Slowly I put the C4 back in its crate. Didn’t want to blow us up. But it could come in handy someday.

  Heading back to our hideout with a whole lot of supplies, I looked up and I saw a vulture circling overhead. Yeah, you’re gonna have to wait, buddy. It’s not our time yet. Boy, those vultures get impatient. When we lost one of our cattle to a bear or whatever, those vultures showed up in no time to pick over whatever’s left behind. Funny, I guess that’s what we were doing too. Picking over the remains of people who don’t exist anymore.

  We headed back to the hideout and decided to take a couple a days to get the place fixed up as best we could. I started with the firewood, happily cutting down trees in Riverside Park and whittling them down to kindling. We worked on boarding up the broken windows. We used the hammer and nails from that Walmart place, and we got some big scraps of wood we pulled off of other buildings. With the boards up, the hideout felt a good twenty degrees warmer. Next we spent a little time getting to know our new weapons. Most of them turned out to be shit. They’d been sitting around probably a hundred years too long. But the Winchester was in good shape, and one ten-shooter revolver worked great for me. Pace was partial to two of the SigSauer pistols. He couldn’t get the laser site working though. That would’ve been sweet.

  Later we played catch in the street outside of our hideout. We were starting to call that area our yard, which was kinda funny, but it was like our front yard. We were slowly reclaiming it from the wild. The opposite of when nature reclaimed it from the city man had built.

  When it got too dark we got drunk as usual and went to bed. Funny though. Before I fell asleep I could see Pace playing with something inside his sleeping bag. No, not that. Pervert. No, he was playing with one of those little computers we saw in Walmart. He must’ve pocketed it when I wasn’t looking. It didn’t work and there was no way to get it to work, but I guess it fascinated him all the same. He probably thought I’d think it was stupid which is why he hid it from me. But I thought no such thing. I rolled over and went to sleep.

  The next couple of weeks was a good time. Yeah, we went out to Fort Benton and Havre and Lewistown and hit their banks, killed more robots, hid away our loot in our hiding place. Nothing special. My initial enthusiasm of going somewhere I’d never gone before quickly started to fade. Everything in the Great Plains all seemed to look the same. Bunch of prairies. Some forests. Couple a mountains. Ho-hum.

  We also kept improving on the comfortability of our hideout. Set up some animal traps we found to protect the perimeter of our yard, giving us more room where we felt safer. Cleared out more of the rubble from the lobby. Had Pace help me build out a vent for the fire pit. That lobby really started to warm up. Built a makeshift outhouse in the yard so we could manage our shit a little better. We practiced our shooting too, since we had plenty of bullets to spare. By this point, we were both accustomed to shooting with our right hand, but we were both determined to learn how to shoot ambidextrously. Okay, I don’t know what the eff that word means, but Pace said it enough times. Over time we started to improve but it was not as natural as our dominant hand. At some point we found a box of girly magazines in one of the nearby buildings. Never had anything like that back in Great Falls, and even though the pages were yellowed and stuck together they came in handy. We started to eat better too. We took our fishing poles and found a fairly calm spot along the Missouri. Lots of trout, catfish, sturgeon, walleye, paddlefish, yellow perch, plus a whole lot more species to be caught. Plenty of grubs and worms all around to use as bait. We started catching fresh fish every day. And one day when I was starting to get bored of all that fish all the time, we awoke to good fortune – the sounds of pigs snorting. At first I thought it was a dream, but no, when I looked outside there was a wild boar herd moseying right through our yard. I nudged Pace and we sat up as quiet as we could and grabbed our guns. Actually I took hold of that Winchester shotgun. It was high time to see what that baby could do. Then it was pig shooting time. I knocked down six of ‘em before they ran off. Pace
got two. Not bad considering his skills. We ate well all day. If we had salt I could cure some so it would last longer. Maybe even make bacon out of the pork belly. Damned Pace.

  That night after giving our horses a thorough grooming and mucking out their stall (okay, can’t really call it a stall, I’ll call it the place they shit), I got pretty drunk on whiskey. What we had done was starting to settle in. Not the bank robbing thing. The outlaw thing. I like Pace and all, but was that gonna be it? Just him and me, our horses and some vultures? Would I never have sex again? At least those girly magazines helped. Helped me fall asleep anyway.

  Anyway, my drunken sleep never lasted too long. One night I woke up hearing something stirring. I opened my eyes. And in the dim light of the fire, I saw eyes staring back at me. Nearly shit myself. It was a wolf, fully grown, maybe six feet away from my sleeping bag. It’d probably been attracted by the pig carcass I left to rot a block away. Apparently not far enough. The wolf obviously had no problem avoiding our animal traps.

  One wolf was probably not much of a concern, but they were never alone. They traveled in packs. If it had its friends nearby, they’d have a fight on their hands – that they might win. And if Pace and I survived, there was no guarantee for our horses.

  I slowly slipped my hand around my revolver. I could take this one out. Shoot him cleanly in the forehead. The only question was what would happen next. Would it scare the rest off, if they were even there? Would it spook our horses, and cause them to run right outside, where there was either a pack of wolves or our traps? I wasn’t seeing many good options before me.

  So this wolf and I just sized each other up for a minute. Hell, maybe I surprised it myself. Maybe it was just curious, not having seen a human in, well, ever.

  It licked its lips. That wasn’t comforting. But finally I saw the wolf blink. It started backing up, and then it turned around and skipped out of the lobby.

  “Pace!” I shouted. “Wake the eff up!” I leapt up and threw on my boots. I had to give Pace a kick to wake him up fully.

  “What?” he moaned.

  I leaned in and whispered in his ear. “Wolves.”

  That got his attention. In moments, he was on his feet too, boots on, guns loaded.

  We slowly made our way through the lobby, looking closely in every direction in case we hadn’t spotted one of ‘em. Then when we made it through the entrance, there they were. About twenty of ‘em. Mostly juveniles, but a couple of adults and lots of yearlings. They all stood on the outskirts of our traps, as if to taunt us.

  Pace raised his arm to shoot, but I stopped him. He looked at me, surprised. I didn’t want to speak to explain that there was too many of ‘em. I could try to shoot a perfect ten for ten using both revolvers and fell the whole pack. But my aim with my left hand wasn’t perfected yet and I couldn’t count on Pace to shoot perfectly. One of ‘em could get to us, or past us to our horses, before we could reload. No, we couldn’t shoot our way out of this one. I hoped they were just curious, and not hungry. Please, I said to myself, let them be well fed! But they sure looked hungry.

  The standoff was taking too long. Every second that ticked off, I felt I was getting a little less in control of the situation. I needed to try something. I thought back to how I handled wolf packs back on the ranch. Course I was riding on my horse which made me a moving target, so I could blast away with a shotgun more freely, but I was also yelling at those animals. Made the situation chaotic so they’d scatter. I thought maybe I should try that.

  “Get the eff out of here!” I yelled, waving my arms around wildly. “Go on! Get out of here. Scatter!”

  That didn’t have the desired effect. Instead that seemed to rile them up. Okay, I got it. They weren’t curious. They were hungry. And me acting like an idiot only made me look more appetizing, I suppose.

  The leader of the pack – the alpha – made himself apparent. He jumped forward at us, stopping only a yard away, baring his teeth and snarling. The others followed suit. We had maybe a second before they would pounce.

  Suddenly I remembered what I’d learned about wolf packs from the ranch. They follow the alpha wolf.

  I raised my arm and fired, cleanly piercing the alpha wolf’s skull. He didn’t whimper. He just fell down dead.

  This was the moment. Would the other wolves attack, letting their hunger overcome their social order? Or would they follow nature? Their leader was dead. They should run.

  I wasn’t sure which way things were going to go for a second… I started to pull back both triggers…and then they ran. All of ‘em, as if at once. They left behind their alpha, probably so they could go off and fight amongst themselves to find out who would be the next alpha.

  Pace and I collapsed against the wall, lowering our guns with relief. “What the eff,” Pace exhaled. “I thought you said no shooting.”

  “Yeah, got lucky with that one.”

  After the adrenaline coursing through me subsided, I took hold of the alpha wolf by his paws and dragged him into our lobby.

  “Why are you doing that?” Pace asked with surprise.

  “Breakfast,” I replied.

  I dumped the wolf on the cold stone floor in the bank, far away from the fire. Didn’t need to worry about his meat spoiling. Nature would be our refrigerator. I’d tasted wolf before, and if it’s cooked properly it isn’t too tough. Better than eating some of the hundreds of rodents we were sharing the building with.

  In the morning I harvested the wolf and cooked what little edible parts there were over the fire. The meat was pretty tough. Not a lot of fat on there, and I didn’t have any cooking supplies to make it taste better. Like salt. But we ate it anyway. Then we hauled away the carcass as far away from our hideout as we could manage. Didn’t want to make the same mistake twice.

  And since a predator found it easy to wander right into our hideout, it was clear we needed to protect ourselves better. Since I had some pliers from that Walmart I went around and cut off some useable chunks of barbed wires from other buildings. We managed to raise around six feet of barbed wire around the perimeter of our building so we’d have something akin to a proper yard that’d be impenetrable to wolves and bears. Horses could safely stay out there too. We built a temporary shelter for them, akin to a proper stable but we needed a lot more wood to make it as good as we’d like. It was enough though to keep them protected from the wind. And it’d keep their shit outside. With everyone’s shit outside it started to smell better. Or at least not awful.

  Finally after all these weeks I felt like we had our hideout in good working order. Food was plentiful, but we still had an ongoing worry about other supplies. Pace kept complaining about the diminishing water supply and I kept complaining that we were almost outta whiskey. Clearly it was time to resupply. The question was where’d we go next.

  “So what’s next?” I asked. “You think things through better ‘n me. So what’re you thinking through?”

  “I have been thinking,” Pace replied. He pulled a map of the Great Plains out of his saddle bag. He had drawn big X’s through Great Falls, Augusta, Fort Benton, Havre and Lewistown. All the banks we’d already robbed. “I think we go up to Conrad next.” He circled it on the map, about sixty miles north. It was sort of a risky choice, since that’s where we sent Augusta’s lawman to go looking for us. No doubt he spoke with the local authorities about us. But, as Pace reasoned, it was a bank we wanted to hit eventually so why not do it now. “After Conrad,” Pace suggested, “we should think about Choteau. After that, we should think about taking a one-way trip north, to Shelby and Cut Bank and Browning, and then on up to Canada.” Pace pointed out the route on the map. “Or we should start heading to points south. Helena, then Butte, Three Forks, Bozeman, Livingston, Billings. A one-way trip southeast, maybe head to Wyoming.”

  “One-way. That means saying goodbye to our hideout.”

  Pace shrugged. “You going to be okay with that?”

  “No.”

  “Come on, you know we
can’t live here forever…”

  “It’s not the hideout. It’s her.” I put my finger on Great Falls on the map. “Becca. Can’t leave her forever, no matter what.”

  Pace thought about that for a moment, then slowly nodded. We’d have to figure that out, one way or another.

  Once we passed the fork in the road that led to Augusta, which we didn’t tread on in keeping with our agreement, we continued north on route 15. We reached the outskirts of Conrad without incident at around two in the afternoon. Nobody seemed to be on the lookout for us so far. The Conrad settlement spanned out to our right, so we rode unnoticed to the left, into their original town. It wasn’t much, mind you. No skyscrapers, nothing impressive, just a bunch of decaying buildings. But it gave us a place to hide out for an hour to rest the horses and eat.

  After that we hid in an overgrowth of shrubs near the entrance to the settlement. We laid down on the ground, our eyes darting back and forth searching with our field glasses for something in particular. We found it relatively quickly. Much easier when you know what you’re looking for. Then we just needed something heavy. More on that in a second.

  It would’ve been safer to wait until the sun was setting so we felt we had sufficient cover to ride into the settlement. They didn’t have much by way of street lamps, which would be to our advantage. But we really wanted to get a good look at the bank in the daylight.

  I wasn’t too concerned about Pace getting recognized this time actually, which was part of our plan. He’d done a nice job straightening himself up beforehand. Put on a suit he’d picked up back in Lewistown. Didn’t fit him quite as well as the tailored one he had back in Great Falls but it did what it was supposed to do. Lost the white hat. Needed a haircut though. Oh, and he’d picked up a pair of spectacles too which he wore. Looked downright civilized. More like a banker than he did when he was a banker.