Big Eats

Berry’s list of things that could be mistaken for people at a distance of fifty feet or more grew longer as his isolation continued - and as his vision worsened. During the day, it was the typical Hollywood misdirection: young trees with spindly limbs looked a hell of a lot like tall strangers with arms reaching out to him in the noontime shade; a mop leaning through a broken second-floor became Juliet appealing to her Romeo as the light broke. 

But at night, when he could rely only on the stars for direction, the horrors that the darkness could show him were limited only by his own imagination. 

Regardless of the lengths Berry mind could go to, the conclusion was always the same: it was just a facade, an effigy made by happenstance and his own fading eyesight. The trees rose on either side of him in a solid green wall; he could not discern where one ended and the other began. They stretched in an unending corridor along the flanks of the defunct railway he walked. The weight of Berry’s pack strained his broad shoulders but he stepped carefully between the pockets of marigolds growing rampant on the tracks. The rusted metal cracked off in pieces beneath his heavy feet and crunched like autumn leaves. The railroad was the only thing straight and artificial in a landscape otherwise overtaken by nature, one last punctuation mark almost swallowed by the forest’s hunger.

Berry walked until he was tired. He made camp, ate, slept, then awoke to repeat the process. It was an endless, mindless circuit of days only given meaning by the yellowed map folded up in his backpack. He could no longer rely on streetsigns that had long since rusted into illegibility. No, the tracks were still the best way into town.

The first signs of what had once been civilization was the station. It was a simple, rectangular building that Berry hadn’t entered since the roof caved in some years back. Even earlier than that, someone had carved a pair of initials into a drainpipe that was still visible even beneath the rust. Since the roof’s collapse, it had leaned against the station at an angle that - to Berry - looked just like those metal porch decorations cut out to look like cowboys at rest. To that effect, he always stopped and tipped his baseball cap in greeting.

“Howdy, Cleetus.” Berry’s voice scraped worse than wind through the rusted metal. He had to clear his creaky vocal chords with a few quick coughs before hiking up his pack and continuing down the tracks. By now the other buildings, all equally as dilapidated as the station, had begun to appear as dark grey outlines against the lighter grey sky. 

There was only one place worth going to in the entire town and it stood out visually against this dismal backdrop. Its peeling red paint was a bright burst of color; it was sprawling, almost twice the size of the other buildings and remarkably intact for its age. But its single most striking feature had to be the giant sign shaped like a cheeseburger with a single bite taken out of it, above which the once-neon letters BIG EATS could still be read.

It was resplendent. When it came into view, Berry smiled. His smile, like his voice, was cracked and unused - but still worth seeing. He covered the last fifty feet with such urgency that, by the time he made it to the front, he was panting from the exertion. Berry folded his arm and pushed in to open the door without stopping. 

“Sheeeeoot! Ugly morning out there, innit fellas?” His question echoed into the abandoned diner before settling down somewhere in the dust covering the empty tables. Berry stood by the service counter with his hands on his hips, shining his grin on every corner of the building. He swaggered over to whisper to the cashier who no longer stood at her post: “Rough bunch in here today.”

His comments once again elicited no answer. In the silence, Berry’s nostalgia began to ebb. He slowly worked his way over to the nearest barstool, sat down, and spread his arms wide along the countertop. It was only after he had sat there a moment, allowing the stillness of his surroundings to percolate into himself, that he began to hear the noises.

At first, they were soft enough that Berry mistook them for the shuffling of rodents. But as soon as he focused on them, the weight and rhythm of each sound were so unlike rats that all the hair on his arms and the back of his neck slowly stood on end.

His head turned towards the closed kitchen door - the source of that soft, even padding. Whatever was in there, it had to know from his stupid play-pretend act that it wasn’t alone. 

Berry reached into his pack and pulled out the long, serrated blade he used for gutting fish. He shrugged off his heavy pack and hid it behind the service counter. Berry then crept silently towards the kitchen, one arm outstretched so that his fellow Big Eats patron would see the glint of the knife before anything else.

The shuffling sounds went completely silent when he was about a foot away. In their place was the erratic wheeze of someone else’s panicked breath.

Berry’s boot slammed just beneath the knob and forced the entire door open with a bang. In the kitchen there was the din of clattering pans and a very loud, very human scream. Out of his periphery, Berry saw something large race behind an island in the middle of the room. It crouched there to hide as Berry slowly approached from the side.

“C’mon out,” Berry said, taking a chance that whatever he was speaking to understood English. To his amazement, a voice immediately rose above the island.

“Put the gun away first!”

Berry blinked. He looked down at what was very clearly a knife in his hand and said, to that effect: “I don’t have a gun.” Then, after some consideration, he continued with a question. “Are you a real person?”

A few seconds of puzzled silence on both sides followed. Eventually, a crown of frizzled grey curls rose like dawn above the kitchen island. A face followed shortly afterwards. This face was lined by the passage of years and tightened by terror, but still instantly recognizable to Berry. 

Two words like a thick effusion of magma boiled up from his throat and spat out a spray of pure vitriol: “Calvin. McDaniel.”

The man's watery blue eyes bounced between Berry’s face and the exit as fitfully as two trapped flies. Rather than lower his knife, Berry held it up like a barrier between himself and McDaniel, who backed up against the nearest counter.

“You know me, man? I swear I don’t know you!” He said, speaking almost too quickly to be intelligible. He was younger than Berry by several years but was prematurely balding, strong across the shoulders but weak in the chin. True to his word, there was absolutely no recognition in the fear on his face.

“My name is John Berry. B-E-R-R-Y, Berry. You remember that part, McDaniel?”

He did. His pupils exploded and he began to inch along the edge of the countertop as though he could slip past Berry’s notice again. He could translate his emotions into out a single word: “Shit.”

However visible his rage, Berry had barely moved. His teeth didn’t unclench even as he spoke. “I spent … so long, wishing I could talk to someone, thinkin’ about everything I could say if there was just someone to listen… and the first living person I meet after all that time is the one person on this earth I want nothin’ to do with!”

McDaniel flinched at the bitter hatred in his tone, but he hadn’t run yet. A gulp slipped down his neck from his bulging Adam’s Apple. “I’m real sorry about your wife, Mr. Berry.” He sucked in a quick breath and continued despite the strain of tears in his voice. “I...I was just a kid, y’know? Just nineteen. I made a bad decision, I hurt people, and I did my time for it.”

John Berry spat on the floor, directly in McDaniel’s path. “Fifteen years, they gave you. Fifteen years is all my Jessica’s life was worth. How did you spend that time, McDaniel? Did you think about her daily? Because buddy, I sure did.”

To his surprise, McDaniel halted in his pitiful escape attempt. He turned his eyes to Berry, who found he could barely meet it. “I thought about having taken a life, yeah. But I never met your wife, Mr. Berry - though I would have liked to, I’m sure she was a fine lady.” 

He dared take a step closer. Berry lowered the knife an inch, then two, then finally put it away altogether. He and McDaniel stared at one another, waiting to see what the other would do now.

When Berry spoke again, his voice echoed all the more loudly in the silence. “Go if you want. World’s empty enough already.”

McDaniel hovered on the edge of leaving and staying, his entire body tensed in anticipation of a choice he seemed unwilling to make. “Listen, Mr. Berry… when I got out, I’d spent almost half my life in jail. Big Eats was the only job willing to take me on. I ain’t got much connection to any other place. Do you mind if I stay here? I promise I’ll keep to myself - you’ll never see me.”

Berry considered this. Big Eats, however bursting with nostalgia, was still nothing but another empty building to him. It would cost him nothing to avoid it, give McDaniel the space, and continue on in isolation. 

So he said, “Fine.” McDaniel’s relief was palpable - he thanked Berry enthusiastically the entire way to the door, but still never got any closer to him than that same spot by the counter. Once the door closed, it cut off the sound of his voice and left Berry in comforting silence. 

Outside, little had changed. The sun was a little higher, a little brighter to cut through the morning’s gloom. Berry kept his face turned up towards its warmth while his feet found the tracks nearly of their own volition.

After ten minutes of walking, the trees formed a corridor indistinguishable from its mirror on the opposite side of town. Berry’s gaze raked the landscape, struggling to find something to differentiate it from the path he’d taken into town. Nothing, nothing, nothing - just trees and more trees.

Normally, he would have set up camp by now. But a reluctance to turn back seized him like rabid jaws and kept his feet moving. He didn’t stop even as night deepened the shadows on either side, even as his feet stung and ached in protest.

In the distance, just within the range of his poor vision, Berry saw the squat outline of a building. Steps that had been steady slowed to a stroll, then to a crawl, then to a total stop. Berry stood there on the tracks for moment, then raised a shaking hand to the brim of his baseball cap to the familiar silhouette of a cowboy at rest.

“Howdy, Cleetus.”