Alone

I wiped the juice from my chin and put the empty can back in my pack. I knew I’d find another use for it. At the very least it could be used to lure ants. I usually take a can with me when I go out because they travel easily. I pulled the scarf back up over my face and continued on through the burnt-out woods. I was looking for game. It had been at least a week since I’d had meat from anything other than an insect. I wanted a deer, but those were rare now. A lot of the bigger animals had been gone for a while; it was harder for them to find food.

Something caught my eye off to the left as I was cresting a hill, a bright blinking flash coming off the hill across the valley. That was strange. I knew the hills around my trailer intimately. There shouldn’t have been anything over there to reflect the sun. I paused and waited, scanning the hillside with my scope for any sign of what might have caused it, but there were no other flashes. I returned to my hunt.

I spent the rest of the afternoon among the trees. Eventually I scared a rabbit out of the scorched brush. Before it could find another hiding place, I loosed an arrow that caught it through both eyes. It was a scrawny little thing, though of course most animals are now, myself included, and it wouldn’t last me very long, but it would be good enough for the night. I tied it onto the strap of my pack and headed back for home.

I got back to the trailer and did my best to work the rigor out of the rabbit’s joints before I skinned it. I stretched the hide on a metal frame and put it outside to cure. With the sun as intense as it is now you don’t need chemicals or anything to treat a hide, although the fur will probably bleach and might become so brittle that the wind carries it away. Not that that matters. There’s no need for furs these days. It never gets cold.

I quartered the rabbit and seasoned it with some of the fresh herbs that I have growing in cans on the table and then I stuck it in the electric oven with a little water in the pan so it wouldn’t dry out. Water is hard to find anymore, but there’s a spring-fed stream not too far from the bunker, and I’d rigged a condenser to extract some water from the air. It doesn’t yield much but it can save you a trip to the stream in a pinch.

While I was waiting for the rabbit to cook, I sat down at the table where I keep the radio. It used to be in the cabin of the truck back when I could still drive this rig, before the battery went dead and all the diesel went bad. Now it’s hooked up to the solar panels that I’ve collected over the years . That’s one good thing to come out of all this. No shortage of sun.

I sent out a quick message on each channel as I cycled through, waiting a minute before I switched, just in case there was a response. Nothing but static. That didn’t surprise me. It had been eight winters since I’d gotten anything but static, and ever since then I’d assumed I was the only one left.

But still, something must have caused those flashes.

When I found the truck I was sure it was a dream. It was just off the side of the road, barely hidden by some brush and twigs. I wheeled my bike into a stand of trees, the leaves of which were brown and dry even in Spring. The truck must be empty. No one would just abandon a truck full of canned goods.

Turns out I was right, I wasn’t the first to find it. But a truck like this holds thousands of cans, more than anyone could hope to carry. It was sweltering inside, the noon sun beating down on it, the heat trapped inside. Like an oven.

I tried to start it. No luck. But there was gas in the tank. The battery was dead. Not an insurmountable problem.

I put it in neutral. It started rolling backwards slightly along the embankment of the road. I let it coast for a little bit, steering it awkwardly, trying to align it so it was facing the embankment head on.

Just when I had it adjusted the way I wanted, someone appeared at the top of the embankment, with his rifle aimed right at my chest.

The next day, after breaking my fast with a leftover rabbit leg and a room-temperature can of baked beans, I set back out. I wanted a deer.

I retrieved my knife from the bedside table and took my bow and quiver off the wall near the entrance before I hauled up the trailer door and was hit by the wall of heat. It’s never easy to leave my little air-conditioned home, but this time I had another motive besides the desire for meat. I was certain someone else was out there.

I scouted the hillside where I had seen the flashing light, found nothing, and instead went over to the stream. I waded in and got my clothes nice and saturated and took a few deep gulps and then I stopped short. There was a deer drinking about fifty yards upstream. The little doe must not have heard my splashing around over the gurgling of the water.

As quietly as I could, I made my way to the bank. I paused and got the direction of the wind, wanted to make sure I stayed downwind of her, didn’t want to scare her off with my smell. I placed my feet deliberately, not wanting to rattle the dry, dry brush or snap a twig. I got to a position where I had a clear shot, nocked an arrow, drew, aimed, waited. Waited for the doe to raise her head. She did. I checked my aim and loosed, but there was a loud crack and the doe was down before my arrow ever got to her.

I stayed where I was and crouched, trying to conceal myself as best I could. I watched until the other hunter came in to finish the job. He cut her throat and bled her into the stream, ribbons of red billowing out into the water. I nocked another arrow and moved stealthily behind him.

“Stop,” I said. My voice came out hoarse from lack of use. “Stop,” I repeated, more forcefully. He looked back over his shoulder, saw I had the drop on him, raised his hands over his head. He was young, much younger than me, maybe twenty-three. He still had the knife in his hand. “Drop it. The gun, too. Throw them both away.”

He chuckled. “Well which is it, bud? Drop ‘em or throw ‘em?”

“Throw them.” He did. “Turn around. No! Don’t get up, just turn around.” He did. “That is my deer.”

“Hate to contradict you, man, but this is my deer,” he said. “I’ve been tracking this thing for days, and seein’ as I ain’t seen you anywhere around I don’t think the same can be said for you. Unless you’re really good at hide-and-go-seek.”

I couldn’t know if he was lying or not, but I knew that I hadn’t truly tracked this deer. And he had been the one to actually kill it.

“We’ll split it,” I said. “This is my land. It’s been my land for years. You’ll pay a tax for hunting on it. And I’ll let you live. Fair?”

He shrugged. “You win, bud. More than I’d want to lug around anyhow.”

I picked up his knife and his gun and stuck them in my belt. “Come with me,” I said. “I’ve got a place with some supplies not too far from here. We can divvy up the meat there. You’ll carry her,” I said, gesturing at the deer. He hefted her onto his shoulders with apparent ease. I could tell he was stronger than me, too. I was glad I held all the weapons. 

I was taking a risk letting him come back to the trailer, but I took pity on him. He was just a kid after all, and I had more canned food than I could realistically eat in my life. As we marched back to the trailer, I was just hoping I wasn’t making a mistake. 

I put the truck in park and hopped out of the cabin. 

“Hands!” the man shouted at me. I raised my hands. The man approached me and took my bow and quiver off my shoulder and threw them a good distance away. He started to pat me down. “Any other weapons?” I shook my head.

“Hey, I’m sorry, I thought it was --”

“You thought someone would abandon this much food? Are you stupid?”

I didn’t have a good answer. “Look, I really didn’t mean to cause any trouble. But you said it yourself you’ve got plenty. Can’t you just let me take what I can carry? And I swear I’ll be on my way.”

He looked me over. “No, no. Can’t do that.”

I wasn’t sure what he meant. Couldn’t let me take any food, or couldn’t let me leave?

When we arrived at the trailer he shrugged off the doe and I went inside to stash my bow and arrows and his gun. I kept the knife so I could skin the doe and brought out a water jug for the both of us and a tarp.

I found him sitting on a log. “Nice place you have here. This is a truck trailer, right? How come it’s buried like this?”

I handed him the jug and he took a long draft. “I did that. Temperature control. A big metal box like that will bake you alive if you let it sit out in the sun.”

He laughed through his nose and licked the moisture from his upper lip. “Yeah, that would blow. Must have taken a while, huh?”

I grunted in the affirmative and set to work preparing the deer. I started with a neat slash down the length of the belly

“Hand me that bucket,” I said. The boy did as I asked and I scooped the offal into the bucket. The boy made a face. “I never cared for organ meat either, but you can’t let anything go to waste anymore.” I removed the legs, one of which would be the evening’s meal, and split the torso lengthwise. I separated the chuck and the ribs from the loins on one of the halves and wrapped those pieces and two of the legs in the tarp and tied the bundle with a length of rope. I heaved it over to the boy. “That’s your share, unless you want some of the guts, too.” He declined.

A whole leg doesn’t fit very well in the oven, even with the feet off. I tied it to a roasting spit and set it over the fire pit. The boy and I gathered up some wood and piled it into the pit. Everything is so dry now that it lights easily.

The leg took a few hours to cook fully, so we talked while we waited, periodically interrupting our discussion to find more fuel for the fire.

“How long have you been on your own?” I asked.

“Few years now. I had a kid brother but he, uh, he died.”

“I’m sorry.”

He told me he hadn’t been settled down since he was a child, that he taught himself how to drive and that he and his brother had traveled around in an old Pontiac until the engine failed and they hadn’t been able to find a replacement. They had scavenged mostly, resorting to eating bark and roaches in the leanest times. The brother had died of dehydration, unable to hold out long enough to reach water again. The boy himself had just barely made it. Since then he had been following one river after another, camping on their banks until he had to move to find more food.

“Seriously though, man, before I met you, I wouldn’t have been surprised if I was the only one left.”

It had been so long since I had had any kind of companionship. He seemed safe enough. Trustworthy. I invited him to stay a while.

I took matters into my own hands, quite literally. I slapped the barrel of the gun aside and somehow he lost his grip on it and it fell to the ground. He lunged for it and I kicked him in the ribs, sending him sprawling. I picked up the gun and turned it on him. I was ready to pull the trigger, but I didn’t have it in me. I spun the gun around and knocked him out with the butt.

I opened the truck trailer again and filled my pack with cans. I retrieved my motorcycle from the trees and was about to mount up and ride away when I had a thought. I went back to the truck and searched the cabin and found what I was looking for, a set of jumper cables.

I wheeled my bike close and made the necessary connections. Of course, I didn’t have the key, and it didn’t turn up when I tossed the cabin, so I had to hotwire it, but it started.

I left it running and dropped the ramps, got out and rolled my bike up into the trailer, then I got back in the cabin and drove away.

As I got back onto the road, I looked out to my left and saw some children playing around a tent in the middle of a desiccated wheat field. A woman looked on, turned, saw the truck making its way down the road. Her face became a mask of terror and in the rearview mirror I could see her sprinting across the road to the man I'd left behind.

After I’d gone a few miles I glanced down at the seat next to me and saw the gun. Out of curiosity, I cracked it open. It wasn’t even loaded.

I tossed it out the window and kept right on going. I knew that I’d probably condemned those people to death. I didn’t care.

We passed a long while peacefully and happily. I showed him how to cure meat, pointed out some of the better wild herbs, taught him to fish, though there’s not much in the stream larger than a minnow. He showed me how to disassemble and reassemble the gun, which was slowly becoming the worse for wear from the lack of proper oiling. I took him to some of the old abandoned storefronts where I had gotten many of my supplies and I demonstrated for him some of the subtly useful items that weren’t snatched up in the initial looting binges: twine, steel rods or wooden dowels for building simple structures or tools, like my roasting spit, soccer balls for waterskins, forks and spoons that can be reshaped into spear- or arrowheads. We finished the deer and went out and found some more game when we could. Otherwise we dipped into my stockpile of cans, which were going much more quickly now that they were being shared.

We were content, or so it seemed. 

There was only one bed in the trailer, but it wouldn’t have been very decent of me to leave the boy out in the heat to be awakened every morning by the scorching sun while I stayed in my air-conditioned paradise. He slept on a makeshift leather cot on the floor in the kitchen area, so I wasn’t at all alarmed to hear him moving around at night. Not until I felt his hand on my mouth.

I don’t know what it would have mattered if I’d been allowed to scream. No one would have been able to hear me. My only guess is that my noise would have disturbed him, made him unable to continue with what he was planning.

“I’m sorry, old man. I don’t have nothing against you, but you gotta know that these cans ain’t gonna last forever. Maybe there’s enough for you, or enough for me, but there ain’t enough for the both of us. And I’ve got a lot more life left to live.”

He pressed the barrel of his gun against my chest, pressed hard enough to keep me pinned down. He eased back the firing pin. I held my breath, and I think so did he, as he pulled the trigger.

The sound of the misfire was deafening as it echoed in the big metal chamber. The boy dropped the gun and clapped his hands over his ears and I was on him. I snatched the knife from the bedside table and brought it down towards his chest but he recovered in time to catch me by the wrist. He certainly was strong. I pushed down with both hands and could still hardly get the blade to move. He was using both hands now and kicking and writhing so hard I was afraid he might buck me off. But I leaned into it, felt the tip of the knife touch his chest, heard him gasp as it slid between his ribs. His arms dropped and his eyes rolled back but he was still drawing breath, however labored.

I made it quick, aiming my next strike more carefully so the knife pierced his heart. The boy’s breathing stopped, and once more I was alone.