by Jason Ross
“So what are you proposing we do about the dam? We barely have enough energy to walk across the yard,” Cameron argued.
Isaiah nodded. “I know. Hear me out. We don’t need to rebuild the impoundment to stop the river. We just need to scoop a little water out of the river and run it down the old bits of pipeline, then channel water into the stock tank at the top of the pasture.”
“Then what do we do with the water once it’s here?” Cameron felt ornery at the thought of work, so he made Isaiah explain.
“We dig a greenhouse into the ground and run water to it from the stock tank. We use the seed bank to start a garden,” Isaiah said.
In the back of Isaiah’s hastily-loaded pickup truck had been a can of “survival seeds;” an assortment of pre-packaged, vacuum-sealed vegetable seeds for a typical American garden. Neither Cameron nor Isaiah knew anything about gardening, but Ruth had kept a little garden in Wacko Wonderland. Growing a garden in the middle of winter seemed far-fetched, but an ear of corn sounded like Jesus in a gold chariot right now.
When they arrived at Grafton, Ruth had planted a dozen corn kernels, some tomato seeds and several squash beside the pioneer house on the sunny side. Each morning, her two boys carried water from the river in five gallon buckets.
A few of the seedlings had sprouted, and the tiny, green shoots looked like the first fruits of salvation punching through the dark, red soil. But the weather shifted. A few nights after the shoots emerged, a chill descended upon red rock country, and the morning mist froze to the ground like fairy dust around the tender seedlings. When the sun came out, it turned the crystals to vapor and the tender shoots twisted and crumpled, surrendering their energy back to the soil.
The daytime temperatures often soared into the sixties, but the night returned with the chill of the distant, snow-capped mountains. The awkward clan of straight-necked polygamists and jaded Southern California urbanites clung to the edge of Nevada desert on one side, and Utah alpine on the other. They broke a sweat working in the day, but chilled to the core at night. It was early December, and the life-robbing cold of night would likely worsen in the months to come. A garden seemed all but impossible.
Isaiah continued with his history lesson. “Mary Allen Mayfield grew turnips in the winter in Rockville. That was 1892, I believe, before the big flood of ‘95...” Cameron sighed forcefully and Isaiah hurried to his point. “Anyway, Mary Allen Mayfield dug trenches in the dirt and covered them with panes of glass. She had glass left over from the cabins that the flood destroyed. She glued the pieces together with clay.” Cameron sighed again. The nerd was unstoppable once he started. “Anyway, she built glass boxes over them and the sun warmed the ground enough for the shoots to survive the night frost. She grew turnips for Christmas dinner for everyone in town, which was only four families at the time.”
Turnips sounded very, very nice, but his reaction to anything out of the wife-grabber’s mouth was always the same. Disagreement and argument. “Even with miniature greenhouses, we would need water, and not water from the river. We’d burn more calories carrying water than we could grow in vegetables.”
Isaiah shifted in his seat and Cameron could guess what he was thinking. Carrying water was a sore subject. The polygamist kids always did the work while Cameron and Julie’s two boys watched.
What else would they expect? Isaiah and Ruth’s ten year-old daughter and twin eight year-old sons had grown up in a farming commune. Cameron’s boys were raised in a sea of tract homes. They didn’t know how to do chores. To get them to work, Cameron had to watch over them every second. Now that his boys were starving as well as incompetent, their usefulness had diminished to the level of house-cats. But they were still Cameron’s sons, and if his boys got to save precious calories while the polygamist brats did most of the work, that was no skin off his ass.
The polygamist kids were slowing down, too. Work and hunger went hand-in-hand in a downward spiral. The more the polygamist kids did chores, particularly carrying water, the hungrier they became.
Health issues arose. That afternoon, Ruth fell and hit the table in a dizzy spell. Several of the children were suffering from dry, flaky skin, and everyone was dragging ass. Rebuilding the dam sounded about as likely as getting the Umpa-loompas make a candy forest.
“We could partially dam the river and channel some water with metal pipe. We could run it down the old canal bed.”
There was a lot of galvanized corrugated pipe laying around the river, rusting into oblivion. Cameron chalked it up to past attempts at damming.
The highway on the other side of the river led to the Zion National Park, ten miles up the road past Rockville. Steep escarpments and pink sandstone monoliths framed the green, winding riverbed. Titanic stacks of boulders dotted the landscape. They stood out ruddy and bulbous above the desert grasses, thick stands of saltcedar and the towering willow trees. It would’ve been beautiful if it wasn’t killing them.
When the power stopped, so did the water to the towns up the Virgin River. An ancient truth emerged: a man can have water at his feet, but unless he has water pressure in pipes, he’s got squat-nothing. As the unlikely family of refugees discovered firsthand, carrying water was slow suicide.
“If we can channel the water from a hundred yards upriver,” Isaiah continued, “we can fill the cattle cistern at the top end of the pasture. We can run PVC tubing down to the garden and water vegetables. I have a roll of clear plastic sheeting in the back of the truck, and we can use it to make half-buried greenhouses, like Mary Allen Mayfield.”
It took Cameron a second to remember who that was. The greenhouse lady. Turnips.
The candle guttered. It was one of their last. Soon, their days would end with the setting sun.
Like the candle, Cameron could see their energy failing. They would have one more chance to get ahead of starvation, if that. The pantry was down to a bucket and a half of raw wheat, eleven cans of beans, two cans of spam and a bottle and a half of home-canned peaches. It reminded him of his bank account when he’d been out of work six weeks. Down, down, down—less every time he checked it, which he’d done ten times a day.
They would stretch the food pantry, but calories were calories were calories. Energy out required energy in. Every twitch of their muscles drew down the pantry, and very little was being done to add back.
They had no electricity, no refrigeration, no cooking gas and barely enough sleeping bags if they spread them out and slept in family stacks. There was sage brush and cottonwood firewood nearby to last them months, maybe even the winter, if only to cook and to take the edge off the coldest of nights.
They were refugees, plain and simple. Cameron knew from personal observation: refugees were the walking dead. The supplies Isaiah and Ruth had tossed into the back of their truck as they fled Colorado City were the only things standing between Cameron’s family and the same, slow death that’d devoured the rest of America.
They had this ghost town. The forty acre spread didn’t hold any wildlife to speak of, but it was protected by the bridgeless river. They could ignore the pop-pop-pop of small arms fire, but they couldn’t go anywhere. It was a prison, and homicidal, small town prison guards wandered the outside world ready to shoot on sight.
Cameron tossed out his pride days ago. He’d admitted the truth to himself: the weirdo polygamists were his only hope of surviving until spring, but he would have to make them work. If he let them sit around like rag dolls, they’d all die.
He’d begun to think of them as slaves. This bright-eyed fool across the table from him was a calorie bank for his family, and it was up to Cameron to work him down. The weirdo had put his blond-haired dink in Julie, and that had sealed the deal. Cameron would use the man as a workhorse, get as much out of his horseflesh as possible, then let him perish. The polygamist had been living on borrowed time, anyway.
Cameron sighed and closed his eyes. He didn’t enjoy being the madman, the slave master. He couldn’t help it. It was a mad wor
ld, gone back to the ancient ways of survival. If Cameron had gleaned anything from a dozen documentaries on the Roman Empire, it was that slavery got it done.
His dreams of slavery thinned when he considered the polygamist wife and kids. They were being worked down too. His wife Julie wasn’t a tenth as useful as Ruth, and Julie had a bad habit of disappearing when work needed to be done. Cameron had no idea where she went.
If he was going to use this man up, it might as well be to get water to a garden. Cameron didn’t have any better ideas.
“We can go look at the wreckage of the dam tomorrow. We’ll see if anything can be made of it.” Cameron slapped his knees and got up from the table.
Five minutes later, the candle flickered out on its own.
It took them a half-hour to walk the river to the old dam. It was the first time Cameron ventured so far off the property. They moved slowly, deliberately, like the starving men they were.
They’d eaten a quarter cup of boiled wheat kernels each, with a small pour of peach syrup. Cameron guessed it amounted to three hundred calories. His stomach snarled as it pounced on the little knot of nutrition. He could swear he was hungrier after eating it than he was before.
As they picked along the riverside trail, the winter sun strengthened. It might’ve reached seventy degrees—enough for the crickets to animate, move around, and dine on the dried algae on the edge of the water. The men scrambled for the crickets, then shoved them into their mouths straightaway.
“We shood cash sum for da women and kiz,” Isaiah spoke around a mouthful of insect.
“We’ll get them on the way back,” Cameron replied. He flipped over a rock and found five crickets. Four made it into his mouth.
“Eeeech!” Isaiah screamed. Cameron stood. The polygamist pointed at the base of a red boulder and danced from one foot to the other. “Rattler!”
Cameron stepped back. “Kill it so we can eat it.”
“No way. I’m not getting near it,” Isaiah gasped as he backpedaled, as though the snake might launch itself at him.
“Don’t be a wussy. We can eat that. Kill it,” Cameron commanded.
“Hunh-uh, urgh.” Isaiah stumbled over the river rocks and danced back toward the trail.
Cameron didn’t want to get near it either. He’d never seen a rattlesnake outside the zoo, so he didn’t know what to expect. Did they chase after people?
He picked up a rock and approached. The polygamist’s screaming had sent the rattlesnake into a coil. The beaded tip of the tail had the unmistakeable hallmark of a rattlesnake, but it hadn’t yet rattled. It raised its triangular head, seemed to change its mind, uncoiled and slithered toward a stand of reeds.
As soon as the head stretched out, Cameron threw. The rock struck the neck and the snake coiled again. This time it rattled furiously. Its head hung crooked. He picked up a sun-bleached stick and approached the angry, damaged creature. The broken head followed him warily, but didn’t uncoil. Cameron reached in with the stick and smashed the head to the rocks, pinning it against a river stone. The body writhed and the fangs gnawed at the air. With his free hand, he grabbed another rock and hammered at the head until it fell away from the body. Still, the headless serpent twisted and fought.
Cameron pinned it with the stick. Without the head, he wondered if there was still poison, somewhere. Isaiah was on the trail watching the thick, writhing rope with eyes the size of teacups.
No, Cameron concluded, there couldn’t be any venom outside the head. He was safe to treat it like any other dead animal. Cameron grabbed the still-rattling tail and lifted. It stretched from the top of his hip to the ground and weighed several pounds. He could scarcely remember what meat tasted like, and his mouth watered. The severed end splattered blood on the rocks and his shoes. He didn’t know if reptile blood was edible. He let it drain.
“Stay away from me with that,” Isaiah said, shuffling along the trail. “I don’t like snakes.”
“Yeah. No shit.” Cameron waved the dangling body up-river. “Let’s see this impoundment of yours and get back to the house for some real food.” He held up the writhing cord of flesh.
Isaiah nodded without conviction, and skittered away up the trail.
Cameron waited to gut the rattlesnake until they returned to the homestead. He wanted it seen by the clan before he diminished it by removing the guts. He’d made their first kill in weeks and Isaiah couldn’t claim to have anything to do with it. The polygamists weren’t the only valuable members of the group after all.
Everyone except Isaiah gathered and watched as he gutted. Ruth handed him a paper plate for the entrails, one of the last plates that hadn’t fallen apart after being washed in the river a dozen times. Cameron had no idea what they were supposed to do with guts, but he dumped them onto the plate as directed.
From the inside out, the snake was ribs, muscle and skin. If he removed the ribs and the skin, there wouldn’t be a whole lot left.
“We lay the skin down on coals,” Ruth spoke, in answer to Cameron’s hesitation. “We’ll pick the meat off the bones with our teeth.”
The skin would act as a frying pan of sorts. Cameron cut the snake in eight-inch sections with Isaiah’s knife, so they wouldn’t have to coil it to fit in the skillet. Ruth piled up some dry sagebrush in the fire pit off the wood porch. She cooked outside unless it was raining or snowing. It was easier to work over a fire pit than to work inside the cramped fireplace in the one-room house.
The sagebrush burned down quickly, and Ruth laid the sections of meat, skin down, on the glowing coals. Everyone sat on the porch and watched while the rattlesnake meat cooked in its strange smell. Cameron considered taking an extra portion for himself, or demanding an extra portion for his boys. But, an innate understanding of the pack intruded, wordlessly, on his thoughts. He would give them all a portion equal to their size. He didn’t know why, but he felt certain. As the sections of rattler sizzled, he divided them up in his mind in a manner he knew would be seen as fair.
As Ruth pulled them off the coals, Cameron received them on the paper plate, then cut them into precise portions, and handed them out, each according to the person’s size.
As Julie, and then Ruth, took their piece, a brute electricity crackled between he and the women. Cameron’s eyes focused and he understood a little better. The women and children were a pack of sorts. He and Isaiah stood apart from them, and not necessarily as compatriots. In the darkening shades of sundown, the cold returned, as did a primitive gloom. Each person retreated to a corner, to gnaw down their portion of snake flesh until it was just charred skin and gleaming bone. It was a profoundly personal ritual. The raw loneliness of starvation cast a feral contention in their midst.
The group skipped eating from their stores that night, as though two hundred calories of snake meat apiece was enough. As Cameron stumbled to the edge of the river to take his nightly piss, Ruth approached out of the shadows.
She said nothing, but walked right into Cameron, breast to chest. She looked up into his face, and he saw the flash of something ancient and bestial in her eyes; the meat had awakened another feral hunger. She shoved her fingers into his hair and pulled his face down onto her tits. She wore her high-necked dress, as always, but the message was clear. He breathed hot breath onto her nipples through the fabric, and she moaned. The sound fired blood into his cock and he went hard in an instant. She turned, laid her head back on his chest and pushed her rump against his penis. They pressed against one another like animals in a pen, possessed by the carnality of male and female. She grasped at her skirts and bared her ass. Cameron shoved his pants to the ground and seized her hips. She’d already discarded her underclothes before seeking him in the dark. He penetrated her from behind, and reached around to cup her clitoris. He probed into the damp crevasse with his fingers and pressed hard. She groaned again and instantly tripped a cascading, helpless collapse. He filled her with molten life, arched against his grip on her hips and loosed an animal shudder from the b
ase of his spine to the back of his throat.
He couldn’t care less who might hear.
5
Sage Ross
South of Lowden, Washington
Southeastern Washington State
* * *
As so often happens in the wilderness, a seemingly small problem became a life-threatening problem within an hour. Sage’s boots had filled with ice-cold water. His socks slurped and sloshed in his boots and on the skin of his feet. Water-logged and soft, the skin of his feet was wearing into fleshy pulp at an alarming rate. He could feel wet blisters bulging with every step.
The tongue of his boot had been scooping up the slightest scrim of snow with each boot rise. Then the snow wicked its way down to his foot via the sock. Even the tiniest kernel of snow, scraped with each step, thousand of footfalls a day, eventually became a boot-full of water.
He’d dumped his boots and wrung out his socks a dozen times so far that morning, and even so, he hiked in a constant state of wetness. There was no way his feet would tolerate even a hundred miles of backpacking like this, much less six hundred.
After two and a half days of hiking through the snowfields of eastern Washington, Sage’s feet had reached the end-of-the-line. He’d learned that his brain, not the contents of his pack, was the ultimate survival tool. He needed to stop and think.
A rough circle of vehicles sat ahead under a cluster of giant elms, and the snow around it remained smooth and untouched. It looked good for the night, but he stopped and waited anyway. An ironclad rule; Sage always spent ten minutes glassing an area before approaching.
He counted down from 600 while watching the cluster of cars through his binoculars. Nothing moved. If he could shelter in one of the vehicles for the night, it’d partially block out the light of a fire. He didn’t need the warmth to sleep—he had many layers of clothes for that—but fire was the only way to dry out his socks and boots.
