Evan Arden 01 Otherwise Alone

Copyright
©
2012

Shay Savage

All Rights Reserved

Cover
design
by Rosalía Lizardi

For everyone out there who has
read my writing in the past and offered me their continued encouragement to get out there and actually publish something
, it is to you my first real publication is dedicated
.

I would never have
gone this far
without all of you!

And
for Tamara
, who has been there through every step of this crazy
being a writer
journey for a long, long time.

Table of Contents

Dedication

Preface

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

In blazing heat and almost complete isolation, I hide in the Arizona desert
and wait
for the day my boss tells me I can come back home.  My only companion
s are my Barrett rifle and
a
Great Pyrenees named
Odin.

I check my email regularly – it’s my only link to what has become the outside world.  Everything in it reminds me of what is currently out of my reach, and I wonder if I will end up rotting here after all.

Maybe it
isn’t
exile.

Maybe it
is
an execution.

The days are long and the nights are longer, until
a young woman suddenly appears on
my
doorstep.
  I’m all for getting a little – it’s been ages – but she makes me long for more.

It’s fucking hot.

Even though
I’m naked,
I’ve kicked all the blankets off in the middle of the night
.

T
he sun isn’t even up yet,
and
it’s still blisteringly hot in
the middle of the desert, somewhere west of
Pinon
,
Arizona
.   I roll over on my back and try to blow air down my chest, letting the sweat there mix with my breath to cool me down a bit.  It helps, but only
when
I’m actually exhaling
.

The bed squeaks as I drop
my legs to the side
and
hope
I don’t end up with a
nother
fuckin
g splinter from the ancient
wood floors. 
My eyes fall to my
Barrett
,
a
long barreled
rifle with
an
elaborate scope
,
which is
propped up
in the corner of the room, next to the bed.
  It is my constant reminder of how I ended up here.
 
I
stretch and moan a little
before I
take a quick piss and dig around for a clean pair of boxer shorts, my jeans
,
and a faded
Jesus and Mary Chain
concert
T-shirt.  Once I’m dressed
,
I
go outside and
check the level of gasoline I still have for the generator.  If I don’t run a fan and only use the electricity for
cooking and
checking my email, I’ve got enough to keep me going another week or so.

Internally I h
ope
that will be enough, b
ut I know in the back of my head that it
probably
won’t be
.  I will have to
mak
e
the one-
hundred mile trek to
a
gas station where I have
yet to b
e seen.
  Lots of people pass through th
e
area on the highway several miles from here, but they don
’t ever
stop twice in the same place.  Even if they did, chances are no one would notice, but I’m not one to take chances.

Before I can head back through
the
door of the small,
two
room house, I hear a magnificent sneeze followed by the thumping of four canine feet across the dusty ground.

“Come ‘ere,
Odin
,” I say with a yawn, and the Great Pyrenees lopes over to get his head scratched. 
Though his
white
coat is still pretty close to his skin, in this heat h
e needs another haircut
. 
I wonder if I have enough juice to charge up the electric trimmers. 
If there isn’t,
I’m going to have to do it by hand with a pair of scissors
. 
Odin
isn’t going to like
it
much
, and it will probably end up looking like shit
, but it’s better than overheating
.

I fill his water dish from the pump outside and wipe my forehead with the back of my hand.  There’s just
enough light to see by as it
streak
s
across the barren landscape
while
the sun
decides to make an appearance.  I
do a quick look around
,
check the wires hooked up to the battery of the old Chevy truck in the back of the house
,
and verify they’re still connected.  The wire runs the perimeter of the tw
o acre property and would set off
the
vehicle’s
horn if breached.

It’s not the best security around, but I’m supposed to be dead anyway.

I stretch out, do a few pushups and sit ups, then jog around the shack a few times before I head back in. 
Odin
follows me b
ack inside,
and
I take quick inventory of the place
out of habit,
not because I don’t know what I will find
.  There isn’t much to go over – a bathroom with rusted out fixtures, a kitchen
area
with a mini-fridge full of
room temperature – that is, warm – bo
ttles of
water,
and
a small
electric
stove.  The main room is mostly occupied by
my
twin-sized bed
with a cast-iron frame
,
once
painted
white
,
but is now chipped and falling apart
.  Pushed against the wall is
a card table with two
folding
chairs
.  There isn’t even room for a full sized chest of drawe
rs or anything, so the small amount
of cloth
ing
I do have
is
folded up in the drawer of a short nightstand. 
I showed up
here
with a single
duffle bag
, so
I
don’t have that much, anyway.

“Fucking
paradise,” I grunt to myself.

Odin
looks up at me and snuffs.   He hardly ever barks but seems content to huff through his nose and occasionally whine at me. 
I’m not one to talk to the dog a lot either, though he is my steadfast companion. 
He’s
eight
years old, and I’ve had him since
half way through his first
year.  I don’t know why I decided to walk into the
county animal
shelter that day, but he was with me when I left, and he’s been by my side just about constantly since then.

After making myself a peanut butter sandwich, I pull one of the warm bottles of water out of the fridge and drink it down. 
I stretch again, rub
Odin
’s wooly head, and grab the
rifle
before
I go out to the front porch to sit in the rocking chair and watch.

It’s not like I really think I’m going to be found at this point – I’ve been out here in this Godforsaken place for
a quarter of a year
– but I don’t have much of anything else to do, and I can’t leave until I get the go-ahead to do so. 
Watching
at least gives me the feeling that I am doing
something
because I find it difficult to
do nothing at all
. 
I wish I could read, but I tend to get very lost in a good book, and that would drop my defenses to a completely unacceptable level.

Just because I
haven’t
been found doesn’t mean I
won’t
be.
  I know this from experience.

I pick up one of
Odin
’s rubber bones from the corner of the porch and toss it out into the dust.  He stands and looks out at it, wags his tail a few times, and then drops back down at my feet.

“You used to want to play fetch, you lazy thing.”

Another huff through his nose is all I get in return.
  I’m fairly certain what he means to say is it’s too damn hot for that shit.
 
I sit and tap the run-down front porch with the toe of my boot as I rock back and forth with the sniper rifle across my lap and
Odin
at my feet.
  The heat continues to be oppressive, but there is at least the hint of a breeze in the air today.  It’s still unbearable, but it’s a slightly better version of unbearable tha
n
it was yesterday.
  It’s
a hell of a lot
better than a bunker in
the Middle East even without the
breeze.

Lunchtime.

I fire up the generator and the stove to boil some water, add
part of
a box of pasta
to the pot
,
and heat up some sauce.  I let the fan run while I eat because the afternoon is just too fucking hot a
n
d I need a little
temporary
relief.  The pasta is nicely al dente, b
ut the sauce comes out of a jar
and sucks.  I remember homemade sauces from
Rinaldo
’s kitchen – his wife slapping my hand away as I tr
ied
to get a taste before dinner
was
on the table.

While I eat, I fire up the netbook PC and wait for it to acquire enough of a satellite signal to download my email.
 
Odin
watches for cues from me, but when he gets none he just drops at my feet with his head
on his front paws.
  The fan shuffles the hair on his head around, and he huffs again before closing his eyes for a bit of a nap.

The electronic beep tells me my email has loaded.  There i
s one message from Pizza Hut, offering me my choice of any pizza with any topping for ten bucks – fucking
tease that
email is – and three
additional,
similar advertisements.  I ha
ve
also apparently won the Swiss Lotto four times, c
an
obtain Canadian prescriptions for Viagra at a discount, and the President of
a country I have never heard of
want
s
to give me
one-point-
two million dollars
from
his
off-shore account.