by Noah Mann
After a moment, maybe seizing upon the hint of doubt in my gaze, Del realized I wasn’t being fooled.
“In the bones,” Del said. “Found out just before everything went to hell.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I tell you what,” he said, sipping from the mug before continuing, “some oncologist somewhere is going to lose out on a boatload of cash from Medicare.”
He laughed. A true laugh. Some ability to make light of his mortality flavoring the gesture.
“I’ve had sixty-seven years, so far.” He wrapped the side table with his knuckles. “If I make it to sixty-eight, that’s just gravy. Life’s been good.” Then his mood darkened, almost instantly. He stared at the fire crackling in the hearth. “Life’s different now, though. A year doesn’t mean the same thing. Hanging on another three-sixty-five is a lifetime, considering so many are dead and gone.”
I leaned forward, cupping my coffee in both hands. We talked for the next twenty minutes about our lives. Where we’d been and how we’d gotten here. Del had moved to his remote hideaway forty years ago, and worked logging crews in both Montana and Idaho for the better part of the last thirty years, until retiring a few years back. He’d been married once, for a short while, but the isolation, which he favored, wore on her, and on their union. It was odd—here was a man nearly twice my age, who lived a mile away over a stubby mountain, and, without ever laying eyes on him before this, I felt I knew him, I understood him, better than most people I’d called friends for twenty years.
All but Neil.
“How’d you figure it out?”
“Figure what out?” I asked, and Del smiled, which was enough to set me on the right path. “Yeah, this.”
“Tell you how I knew,” Del began. “Toilet paper.”
I chuckled.
“Go ahead and laugh, but a readily available supply of toilet paper is the indicator of a stable civilization. When I saw folks hoarding that on a trip to town before I hole up, I knew. People were worried about this.”
People...
One species of many on this rock spinning through space. We used to count our number in billions. And now...
“How many do you think are left?”
Del thought for a moment. Not like someone performing any calculation derived from points of accuracy. But like a man peering into some nightmare made real, its consequences plain to know.
“Most everyone’s met their maker by now,” he said solemnly. “Good and bad, old and young. Starvation favors the last man with crumbs, and the crumbs are nearly gone.” His gaze shifted toward me. “You and me, we’ve got some crumbs. That’s why we’re still here. But you’re gotta learn from your mistakes.”
“What mistakes?”
He tipped his head toward the fire, its flames licking furiously upward, tossing a welcome warmth into the room.
“That’s how they found you,” Dell said. “In this wasteland you can smell smoke ten miles away. And what you’re putting out that chimney is easy to spot against the daytime sky. All they did was follow their noses, and then use their eyes.”
I looked to the fire. It was sometimes my method of cooking, to conserve what propane remained. My sole source of warmth.
“Harder to see smoke on most nights, so a smaller fire is usually okay after dark,” he said. “Smell will still carry.”
“Wonderful,” I said. “I put a damn target on myself and didn’t even realize it.”
“Well, they were looking.”
I sat back again and sipped at my coffee.
“Pretty sure I saw ‘em before,” Del began. “Coming up from Kalispell, I thought. I was doing a little multi-day recon down south past Whitefish when I spotted them. Whole gypsy train of people. Mostly men, all armed. They had three vehicles pulling trailers. Scavenging then, I suppose, just like they were when they hit you.”
“When was this?”
“A few weeks back. Around the time we got our first snow.”
First snow...
“I heard some shooting around then,” I told him. “Helluva firefight south of here.”
“I heard that, too.”
“Was that them?”
His brow shrugged. “I split off from watching them just outside Kalispell to head back this way. No point in taking a chance on them seeing me.”
“Why?”
“On the roof of one of their trucks they’d mounted a machine gun,” Del said. “Probably stole it off a wrecked Guard vehicle. There’s enough of them and their weaponry laying around to...”
He seemed to not want to say what had to come next.
“...equip a small army?”
He nodded and I told him about what Sarah had shared. About someone calling himself the Major exerting authority in Whitefish. And maybe beyond that, if his people were the ones who’d raided my refuge.
“Could just be rumors,” Del suggested.
“She seemed pretty freaked by this guy.”
“I haven’t ventured into Whitefish, so can’t say one way or another,” Del said. “So, you took this woman and her son some food, did you?”
I nodded. Then I told him about my truck, which was her truck now.
“Was wondering where that disappeared to,” Del said, some slight glint in his eyes. A visual grin. “Heard you leave in it. Didn’t hear it come back.”
“Ears of a cougar,” I commented.
“That’s how I knew you were being hit. I heard trucks rumbling up the road and then spotted them from the hill between our properties. You didn’t appear to be home, and I suspected that they were not invited, so I drilled a couple rounds close enough to scatter them. If I’d gotten to the hill sooner they might not have gotten away with any of your supplies.” He held a palm out toward the roaring fire, its blasting warmth a fading luxury. “One of them took some shots back. Just wild blasts. He had a rifle like yours.”
My AR. Resting on the table behind us. Del’s choice of long gun was far more basic. A scoped bolt action Remington 700 in .308. Damn fine weapon, equally capable caliber, but nowhere near as able as my semi-auto to lay down fire fast on multiple targets.
“Old school,” I observed, gesturing to the Remington, and Del nodded.
“Distance is your friend,” Dell said. “It’s best to avoid threats. If you can’t, it’s best to deal with them before they get close.”
Wise words. They seemed to come naturally to Del Drake. That was an appraisal based on all of the hour I’d known him, but I believed it to be true. I believed him to be true.
“I’m glad you stopped them before they cleaned me out,” I said, smiling. Thinking. Remembering. The sensation I’d had after erasing my driveway’s connection to the road. That feeling that someone was in the woods. Watching. “You’ve been keeping an eye on me, haven’t you?”
“I wouldn’t call it that,” Del said, smiling, an almost impish grin ducking behind the mug as he drank.
“What then?” I smirked a bit. “Just a recon of the neighbor?”
“There’s an old saying: good fences make good neighbors.” Del let that hang for a moment. “Bullshit. Good neighbors make good neighbors. I needed to know that you were that.”
He was smart. And honest. Those were two qualities I’d learned were increasingly uncommon in the world. Or the world that was. Now the ratio had been skewed, the pools of the right-minded and the foolhardy oversampled. It seemed to me that, among survivors, there would be a fair amount of smart ones to be found.
If only that also meant they weren’t dangerous.
“You fixed my propane regulator,” I said, the realization coming quietly, born of the obvious.
“Didn’t know if your place was going to sit vacant,” Del Said. “Until you showed, I thought you’d end up like most folks. I figured if that was the case, your propane shouldn’t just bleed out.”
“Hell, I’d want you to have it,” I told him. “If I kick tomorrow, feel free to whatever I’ve got. No sense in it going to waste.
”
“Likewise,” Del said, and that was it, an agreement no different than a last will and testament. Made by two men without a lawyer so much as breathing within miles. No paper. No handshake, even. Just our words, and, more importantly, our understanding of what we both faced.
The fire began to quiet, log splitting atop the pile, a flourish of embers swirling up the chimney. I could already feel the night’s coming chill working to tame the heat.
“I’ve got to admit,” I said, “I’m going to miss a fire at night.”
“Iron stove in your bedroom?”
“Yeah.” It was an ancient thing, made when objects were art, crafted by someone with an eye for scrollwork, ribbons of pounded and shaped metal brazed to the door and around the rim to contain any pot one might place upon it to be warmed. The most I’d done on it was heat a kettle of water for tea when I was sick one day, preferring to stay in bed and nurse the nasty bug away with copious amounts of chamomile. “I’m going to need a pile of blankets to replace what it puts out.”
“I wouldn’t say that.”
I looked to Del. He raised a hand a bit and extended his index finger.
“Just one will do.”
“I’m not following you.”
Del smiled and pushed himself up from the chair.
“Feel like taking a walk?” he asked.
I looked through the window. The blizzard had waned. Just the fluff of a wintry sky drifting down now. Still, Del could spot the doubt in my gaze.
“The walk will warm you up for the night,” he said.
“Okay.”
I had no idea what Del Drake wanted to show me, but after what he’d already done for me, indulging him with a trudge through a mile of ankle deep snow was the least I could do.
Twenty Two
Forty five minutes it took us to reach Del’s house, following a trail worn thinly through the dying woods, bare branches above shielding enough of the forest floor from the storm just ended to allow the path to be made out. He’d been careful to not leave obvious tracks, just nonspecific tells of the way to go. A twisted sapling. A rock on its end. But even in the dark, moving only by the meager glow of our headlamps, Del never lost the trail. These woods were his woods. He was intimate with them. In them every day for four decades.
He likely knew them better than any person.
He took me straight through his modest house, its walls roughhewn lumber, rustic and warm, like someone had slapped a roof on the forest, to the only bedroom in the back.
“There you go,” he said, gesturing at his old bed, a thin layer of comforter atop it.
Then I saw the wire. It snaked from beneath the comforter to an electrical inverter in the corner, deep cycle battery wired to it. A pair of cables were tacked to the wall and disappeared through a precisely cut hole in the timber ceiling.
“Electric blanket?”
Del nodded.
“I have it set on a timer,” he explained as I went to the bed and examined the setup he’d constructed. “It runs fifteen minutes every hour through the night. Keeps me toasty. The battery’s good for a full night, then charges the next day. I don’t have it wired into the rest of the circuits. That way if the timer craps out and it turns on, it will only drain this battery.”
“You hooked to solar?”
“That and a hydro impeller,” Del explained, revealing that at least part of his energy needs were being met by a pint-size version of hoover dam. “I have it set in the creek out back. Even when it freezes there’s enough flow under the ice to keep a few lights on and keep me warm.”
“Unbelievable,” I commented. “This is stupid simple, which means I should have thought of it.”
“You could rig one up at your place to keep the smoke signature down. I have an extra timer thingamajig you could wire in. All you’d need is the electric blanket.”
That I didn’t have. And I wasn’t sure where to get one.
“I could try scavenging a store, I guess.”
Del shook his head, not keen on that idea.
“You’d be better off trying some abandoned houses,” he suggested. “Away from any sizeable population. Just in case that Major fella isn’t a rumor.”
It was a good idea. Glancing at the method of staying warm he’d crafted, I could see that Del Drake was brimming with them.
“Wanna see something else?”
“Sure,” I said.
Del led me down a shirt hallway, to a door that, if the implied layout of his house was correct, should be a second bedroom. It was and it wasn’t.
“Holy....” I exclaimed in a slightly truncated fashion as he opened the door.
“My favorite place in the whole damn universe,” he said.
I stepped past Del and marveled at the array of amateur radio equipment that filled the room he’d led me to, its modernity so conflicted with the basic, Spartan existence he’d constructed that it was almost jarring.
“Unbelievable.”
Every display, every light, every dial was dark, but it took little effort to imagine the space as something close to mission control at NASA.
Del stepped to a breaker box on the wall and threw a switch, then powered up the radios and their corresponding devices so that I didn’t have to imagine anymore.
“This beats the radio at my construction yard,” I told him.
“About all she’s good for right now is looking at.”
I puzzled visibly at Del’s statement, and he lowered himself into the chair at the center of the station and turned the volume dial up. All that came through was the insidiously familiar.
“Red... Red... Red...”
He turned the volume down and switched the array of electronics off.
“At least when that stops you might be able to contact someone,” I suggested, and to that Del half shrugged.
“If it stops.”
“It can’t go on forever.”
“Doesn’t have to,” he said, smiling. “Just has to outlast you, and me, and anyone else who was smart enough or tough enough to hang on. You see, it’s really us who can’t go on forever.”
He had a point. A cold, brutally blunt point. We were an endangered species.
“Besides, reaching out with my rig is no different than you sending a plume of smoke up from your chimney. That just announces that someone’s here.”
“So, you won’t use it if the Red Signal stops?”
He looked past me, to a closet in the corner, the door partly open, stacked spools of thick black wire within.
“If I do decide to, I’ll reposition the antenna off over the hill to the south,” Del explained. “I’ve got about two thousand feet of coax cable and a half dozen signal boosters. Anyone tracking the signal would zero in on that, not where we’re standing.”
“Still pretty damn close,” I said, and Del nodded.
“Too close, probably. It might be necessary to just remain a voyeur of the airwaves,” he said. “Never seen, never heard, but always listening.”
That would require someone to listen to, an increasingly doubtful certainty.
We chatted for a few minutes, then I thanked Del. For defending my refuge, the peaches, his idea on how to stay warm without giving my location away. In a way, though, I was expressing my gratitude for his presence. For the first time since the Red Signal, I could truly say that I did not feel one hundred percent alone. There was another person like me. To talk to. To help. To seek help from.
I needed to act on the suggestion he’d given me. An electric blanket was top of the list of needs now. Traveling to Whitefish was out of the question, and there was no guarantee in any case that what I was seeking would exist there in any of the stores that had certainly been looted. Eureka, too, would likely be a fool’s errand. As Del said, a house was the most likely place to find what I sought. North of my refuge, some miles before Eureka, there was a place I could try. That I would try. A hopefully simple errand that would take half a day at most.
I had no idea someone would die because of it.
Twenty Three
The weather was doable as I set out in the morning, but the air had that feel to it, cold on top of cold that hinted at another storm moving it. All I could do was hope that it would hold off until I made it back home.
I reached the railroad tracks where they curved west from the highway, then followed their gentle arc north. Every few hundred yards I’d stop and survey the way ahead through my binoculars, especially when the landscape opened to fields, dead grey skimmed with winter white. Where once I might have seen lines of tracks crossing the snowy expanse, or seen hawks circling above, there existed now just pristine frozen fields. Unmarked. The hollow flatness yet another sign of death.
The plants had died. Then the animals that ate the plants. Then the animals that ate those animals. Along with humans who ranched them and cut them into steaks and chops. Every living thing, it seemed, was paying the price. The blight ruled.
Somewhere, I imagined, there was still animal life. A hearty squirrel subsisting on what he’d stored. A grizzly, maybe, who’d made it to their winter den before wasting away. Some birds, I suspected, would hang on, at least those that could pluck fish from the lakes. Until, of course, whatever plant-borne nutrients the fish needed were ravaged, if they hadn’t been already.
But the scarcity of life was welcome, at least to me. At least during the time of my quick trek northward. I did not want to run across anyone. Anyone at all. Odd as that might seem, in a world where contact and companionship was the holy grail of existence, my experience, other than Del, had been marked by danger and deceit. By conflict. By threat. To do this, alone, and encounter no one, be they benign or otherwise, was my plan.
Fortine, Montana. That’s where the tracks led me before they stitched on toward Eureka. It could hardly be branded a town. Fifty or sixty people had called it home. I’d expected it would be far less jarring a sight than what I’d encountered on my trip to Eureka.
I was wrong.
Fortine sat still and ravaged. Peering down what passed for the main drag through town, with the railroad tracks behind, I took stock of the devastation. Most of the hamlet’s few buildings were blackened by fire. Windows shattered in those that still stood. Furniture stripped from business and home alike and strewn about yard and street. Abandoned cars dotted the street, some parked nonchalantly, and others nosed over gutters, or plowed into trees, windshields riddled with bullets.
