Alive! Not Dead! (28 page)

She needed to get away from them.

They had stopped her.  Told her he was looking for her and she needed to come with them.

He was insane.  He was out of his mind!

She didn’t know how he managed to find her, but he had.

She needed to get away. 
Fast!

Her SUV was on the side of the road.  She jumped in, sped away from the cops.  In the rearview mirror, she saw some of them turning around.  They had
seen
her get in the car. 
Why did they let her get in? Why did they let her
leave? Maybe they didn’t know who she really was.  Maybe they didn’t know about the connection she had with him.

Maybe they were afraid of him.

They probably didn’t know the magnitude of their connection.

She sped away, eastward, out of Salt Lake City.  Hopefully she’d get far enough away.

She needed to get away.

She had to.

He’d kill her if she didn’t.

He’d kill everyone if he had to.

LESSONS

Mindy started her period the day after we crossed into Oklahoma.  Her attitude never really changed while she was on her period, but this time around she seemed to complain a
lot more.

Maybe it was me.  Maybe it was the continuous dull ache in my groin.  Maybe it was the countless hours of weaving in and out around stalled cars as we headed south on I-35.  Maybe it was the lack of food, the lack of safety and never knowing what might be waiting
around the next corner.

In Oklahoma City we stopped.  We had been driving for a long time.  My crotch ached like a bitch and Mindy was tired.  We pulled off the highway.  We found a Holiday Inn Express hotel.  We both went to sleep immediately on the dust covered bed.

The next day we woke up tired and hungry.  We didn’t get a very good night’s sleep.  I hadn’t slept well since leaving Concordia.

There wasn’t any food in the hotel that we would dare eat.  Most of it was so covered in mold that it was unrecognizable.  Kitchens always looked the same way:
looted.  No food.  Empty boxes.  Maybe a crumb in one or two.  Nothing that would satiate the hunger.  And no water.  Empty bottles would line the shelves or would fill trash cans.  Trash was everywhere. 

Mindy on her period made it worse.  She would complain about cramps or being hungry or being too tired to go looking for food.  I told her to stay in the hotel and I’d go looking for anything.

She wanted to come.  She didn’t want to be away from me.  She was scared.

We took a side street off the main drive, drove down a few houses, got off the bike and we headed into empty homes.

They were small cracker box homes.  Maybe a one or two bedroom house.  No basements.  Small yards, some with fences, some with yards overgrown with weeds.  There were few trees.  This was Oklahoma, after all.  Not much here but dried wind and tumbleweeds.

It was already starting to get hot.  Late April. 
Maybe upper 80s already.  The sun shined down on our shadows as we went from house to house.  We found nothing.  Emptiness.

Days passed. 
Then weeks, over and over, the same thing.  Looking through empty houses.  Going through shopping centers.  Going into empty grocery stores.  It was solid emptiness.  There was barely anything to eat.  We were always so hungry.

We finally found some food in the dark reaches of the Firehouse buffet in the WinStar World casin
o on the Oklahoma Texas border.

It was Mindy’s idea to check it out.  I really wanted to pass it by.  I didn’t want to go into a place that would remind me of days past in a casino.

The place was in shambles.  It looked like it had once been a very beautiful place with different themed areas in the casino.  One area resembled New York City.  Another looked like Beijing.  Now, everything was wrecked.  Glass littered the carpets under our feet.  Signs hung at odd angles on the walls.  Statues lay broken across carpeted floors.  It was dark in here.  Our flashlights stabbed through the darkness as we looked around.

We passed a few abandoned restaurants.  Owners had locked the places down when the disaster hit.  The doors were barricaded with heavy iron fences that came down from the ceiling.  Windows were broken behind the fences.

The Firehouse buffet was accessible.  The only thing blocking the entrance was some booths and tables that someone had set up to keep the place blocked off.  It had been broken through by…someone or something.

Deep inside through some swinging doors we went into the kitchen area.  Memories of the kitchen in the casino at Billings kept popping in my head as we walked over the dirty floors.  Mindy kept trying to open doors throughout the kitchen area, but many were locked or jammed shut.  Finally she opened one.  Cold air ushered out.  We stood there side by side looking into the darkness as cold air rushed past us.

It was a freezer.  Inside we found boxes full of wrapped pre-cut steaks, chicken and pork. The food had been prepared and wrapped well.  It looked perfect.

There was also a room stocked full of
many different wines.

We spent the next few hours going through the boxes of steaks.  We would need a fire to cook them and somewhere to store it as we drove.

On the outside of the casino, there was a large Conoco gas station across the highway.  Inside the attached food store we found a large cooler sitting in the back room.  The cooler was sealed.  Inside there was only stale water which we dumped out.  The cooler would be perfect to carry our food.

I siphoned some gas from the vehicles around the store.

I built a small fire behind the gas station.  We cooked some of the steaks on tree branches that I whittled into small spears.  Mindy drank wine while we worked.  She said she was feeling a bit tipsy by the time we ate our first steaks.

They were delicious.

After we ate, we got back on the motorcycle and explored the area.  Back on the other side of the highway on the rear side of the casino there was an 18 hole golf course.  On the far side of the golf course there was a wooded area with a few nice homes.  Beyond that there was a large fresh water lake.  We drove our bike to the edge of the lake and got off.

“I think we found a home,” I said to Mindy.

She was smiling and nodding.  “I think so too.”

We spent the rest of the day and the next two days going from the casino kitchen
back to one of the homes on the lakeside.  We cut up a lot of the meat and chicken, and left it inside the freezer.  We only took enough food out of the freezer to last us one day.

The house was a nicely furnished 5 bed
room home.  All of the food in the house had gone bad.  We emptied the fridge and threw all of the bad food into a large dumpster on the other side of the casino.

The weather was warm enough for us to bathe in the lake even though the water was still cool.  We got used to it pretty fast.  We would splash around in it together, giving each other baths, using shampoo from the convenience store.  We didn’t wear
bathing suits – why should we? This was our place.  No one was around.  We ran around naked by the lake.  We made love on the shoreline.  Mindy asked me every time if I still hurt, but I told her no.  The pain was going away.

It was as if we had the world to our
selves.  I cooked steaks every night on the barbecue in the back yard.  Mindy would watch me, slowly sipping wine from a glass, some days sitting nude in a reclining lawn chair, some days wearing a light blouse with shorts.

The home was perfect.  The weather was perfect.  The food was perfect.

We could have easily made a life there.

But then, Mindy wanted to learn how to drive the motorcycle.

I told her that she didn’t
need to, but she wanted to learn so that I wouldn’t hurt my groin any more.  I said that the pain had pretty much gone away.  She still insisted.

I drove her back to the casino.  The main front parking lot was empty of cars.  There was a pickup truck by the entrance and a few other cars further down to the south.  The only real obstacles she would need to steer clear of would be the light poles sticking up here
and there in the parking lot.

The parking lot was large.  There was a rounded drive that went right to the front doors of the casino.  In the middle of the rounded drive there was a bricked garden area with assorted plants.  They had overgrown with weeds.  I told Mindy to drive around the circle and not go out into the parking lot very far.  There were more cars stalled further out there.  I didn’t want her to bump into one by accident.

She got on the bike.  I showed her how to operate the hand brake, clutch, accelerator.  She said she understood how it all worked because she had been watching me for a long time.

After buttoning on the helmet (which was loose by the way), she took off slowly, like I instructed her.  She went around the big circle
then stopped next to me.  “See? I got it,” she said with a big smile on her face.  I was standing near the front entrance of the casino.

“Just be careful.  Don’t get too cocky.”

She gave me a smart-ass quirky grin then gunned the engine.  The bike took off a little too quickly, but she got it back under control.  She went around the big circle again, quicker this time.  She swerved out into the parking lot, showing off really, and then came back to me.  The second time around the circle she was driving with one hand.  The third time around, she swerved out into the middle of the parking lot instead of coming back to me.  I ran out to her, smiling, thinking to myself that she really had a good grip on driving the bike and I shouldn’t have been so worried.  Then the bike tipped over.

She was right next to a light pole when she turned.  When the bike tipped, Mindy went to the left with it.  The handlebars of the motorcycle missed the pole by bare inches.  The light pole slammed her hard in the upper chest.  Her hands were jarred off of the throttle.  The forward momentum of the bike caused the light pole to slide up past her chest and smack her hard in the chin.  Mindy’s head snapped backward from the impact of the pole.  Luckily the pole didn’t hit her nose.  The bike continued forward.  Mindy was shoved off the
back of the bike.  She fell hard on her butt onto the cement.  The bike went a few more yards then fell over and died with a sputter.  Mindy lay motionless at the bottom of the pole.  She was nearly wrapped around the base of it.

I ran over to her.  She was lying still.  I thought she was dead.

“Mindy!”

She didn’t move.  I leaned down to her.  I got on my knees, my hands reaching for her but afraid to touch her because I didn’t know how badly she was hurt.

“Mindy are you ok?”

Slowly she shook her head no.  Her face was covered in blood.  Her forehead was gashed open.  The helmet had cut her.

I took off my shirt, gently wiping the blood from her face.  For a second I thought it looked like her bottom two teeth had been knocked out, but it was only dirt mixed with the blood.

“Can you move?” I asked her.

She tried to move.  She hollered in pain.  “No!”  Her breath was raspy.

I was at a loss.  I had no idea what to do.  I didn’t know anything about medical proce
dures.  I started to panic.  I couldn’t yell for help because there was no one around to hear me.  I kept asking Mindy if she was ok.  She kept telling me no.

I couldn’t call an ambulance.  I couldn’t dial 911.  It was just me here.  There we
ren’t any emergency personnel.

“Can I move you to the house?” I asked her.

She didn’t answer.

I stood there feeling so stupid because I didn’t have a clue what to do.

I ran over to the pickup by the entrance of the casino.  Maybe there were some medical supplies in the glove compartment. 
But who has medical supplies in their
fucking
glove compartment!
I screamed at myself.  Shaking my head, I saw keys dangling from the ignition.  Quickly I ran around to the other side, got in, fired up the engine and drove over to Mindy.  Gingerly, I tried to lift her up again but she screamed in pain.  I didn’t know if she had broken bones or not.

I
couldn’t just leave her here on the cement.  I sure as hell wasn’t going to leave her to go back to the house to get blankets.

I lifted her into the back of the pickup.  She screamed in pain.  She begged me to put
her down.  I couldn’t.  I couldn’t leave her here.

I drove her back to the house.  Carrying her inside, I laid her down on a couch in the living room.

The drive to the house had knocked her out.

Late day sunlight came in through the windows.  I ran to the bathroom.  I grabbed as many towels as I could and went back to her.  She was motionless on the couch.  Blood had already saturated the pillow her head was on.

“Mindy,” I whispered to her. 
“Mindy stay with me.”

I wiped
her face clean with the towels.

Her breath was rough in her chest.

What could I do? I tried as best as I could to keep her comfortable.  Her breathing became labored.  I knelt beside her on the floor and held her hand.

What to do?
I kept asking myself. 
What can I do to help her? There has to be something! No doctors. Rosita’s too far away. No emergency room personnel…emergency room.  Where is there an emergency room around here?

“Emergency room,”
I said out loud.  “There has to be something like that in the casino…I mean, what if someone had a heart attack when they won poker! There has to be something there!” I glanced down at Mindy.  She was still knocked out.  “Baby, I’m going to go look for something to make you feel better.  I’ll be right back!”

I drove back to the front of the casino.  Surely there would be something
right inside the front door letting people know what to do in case of an emergency.  There would
have
to be!