Journal (21 page)

About
sunrise the rain let up and eventually stopped altogether.  A few minutes
later, my shadow, a companion not seen in many days, fell into step beside me. 
My face and left shoulder registered warmth and the reassurance that nature can
be as kind as it is cruel.   I looked up at that point and saw that the
umbrella of gray that had been so constant a presence in our lives, had split
apart into billowing tufts, with sharp, well defined edges, against a brilliant
blue sky.  The change in temperature and spirits was almost immediate.  Petra
reached out and held onto the pocket of my coveralls, the ones I’d found the
night before, just like she had with Gabriel a couple of days earlier.

We
continued to walk for what I would guess was another hour.  The heat, my
fatigue, and the steady pace lulled me.  My mind turned to Anna.  These
thoughts of her were dogged; they seemed to have their own will, and they
inserted themselves into my brain and refused to be controlled by any attempts
of reasoning on my part.  Once again — desire, infatuation, love, what?  All
this became a continuous loop of unresolved feelings.  So preoccupied was I
with them, I almost missed it, but there it was like a traffic cop with his
palm out halting cars — the outside edge of a sole and most of a heel.  The
footprint was oriented in our same direction of travel, too, well defined in
the mud.

I
squatted down against the protestations of my banged up knee and tested the
edges of the tread pattern with my finger.  It easily gave way.  In the center
of the heel impression, a newly sprouted weed had been pressed down and
crushed.  This meant it was recently laid, sometime after the rain had stopped.

I
had Petra stay where she was, and I retraced our steps the distance of a city block
or two, looking for other tracks.  I did find five or six more, here and there
in muddy spots between clumps of weeds.  But the last of these weren’t as well
defined as the first ones I’d seen.  They also appeared to have been made by at
least one, maybe two other shoes.

I
went back to the print I had originally found and walked south some more, this
time with Petra at my side.  I found several more this direction, all with
sharp edges and all recently made.  I counted at least three different sets of
shoes.

I
reasoned that since the rain had stopped about an hour earlier, and since the
tracks I was standing over were likely laid after the rain had stopped, we were
about an hour’s travel behind those who put them there.

I
also reasoned that at least three people, it could have been more and I just
didn’t find their prints, were walking ahead of us.  That mean it wasn’t
Gabriel and Anna.  But it also meant that they could be headed right toward
Gabriel and Anna, an unsettling thought.

I
don’t need to explain in any great detail the dilemma this presented.  First, I
had to assume that if we encountered them, they would try to do us injury, and
I had only a measly screwdriver to defend us pickup truckwot with.  Secondly, I didn’t know if
their objective was miles ahead of us or right up the road.  So we could easily
bump into them, or discover that they were lying in wait around the next curve,
or behind the next bush.  I also didn’t know if they were part of a larger
group in the area.  All things considered, the only strategy for us was to
avoid them at all costs.

Of
course, to avoid them meant using available cover to conceal our movements.  If
we did that, we would inevitably have to move further away from the river.  But
that, too, had its consequences.  The further we were away from the river the
bigger risk we would incur of not connecting up with Gabriel and Anna.

I
decided that we would continue to follow the shoeprints for another half hour
or so and, after that, start taking evasive action.  It was a risk, I know, but
so was not finding Gabriel and Anna, who had food, shelter making material, and
weapons.  I needed a weapon.  As it was, we were walking victims.

So
we walked on, slower, much slower, our eyes probing every conceivable hiding
place.  We also stuck with the shoe tracks.  That way our own tracks would be
commingled with theirs and might confuse any others who traveled the same
direction.  I also hoped that we might learn more about the people we walked
behind.  Did they meet up with anyone else?  Did they split-up and go more than
one direction?  Do they have food?  Would their pattern show they were stopping
periodically and looking for people trailing them?  All these things could be
learned from the muddy footprints and it eventually paid off.

After
about fifteen or twenty minutes of walking, we began to hear dogs barking way
off in the distance, to our east.  A few minutes later, the shoeprints just,
poof, disappeared.  I once again backtracked and discovered that they turned
east, and so most likely the owners of those shoeprints were the cause of all the
barking.  I looked at this as a window of opportunity to be taken advantage
of.  If the dogs were any indication of how far away they were, we could get at
least a half hour jump on them by moving on.  If we picked up the pace and
pushed on, we wouldn’t have to necessarily abandon the river and our chances of
finding Gabriel and Anna.

So
that’s what we did.  We continued south along the river.  I let Petra set the
pace, and she actually did pretty well, sometimes even jogging a bit.  I kept
my eyes to the east as we went and eventually noticed several buildings that
were maybe a mile away.  I assume that’s where the group was heading.  It left
me wondering if that was where they were originally from (in other words their
home), or if they went that way in search of something — like us for instance.

Sometime
about midday, the river made a big S turn.  It was wide in this particular
spot, and the flow was much less determined.  Great portions of its banks,
especially on our side, were a morass of vines, bucksaw sharp and as thick as a
garden hose.  As I looked out over it, we kicked up a jackrabbit and watched
him run a muddy path into the closest patch.  Something also slapped the water
near its centerline and left a ripple that was quickly washed away by the
current.  I noticed, at this time, a small cutout or cove, where the water
lolled around the base of a stand of cattails that lay brown and twisted like
last year’s cornfield. Definitions */
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Food
.  We could quickly harvest a few
and be off, eating them on the move. 

We
made our way down, and Petra watched as I went about pulling up a dozen or so
of the stalks, the ones just showing above the surface.  These are the most
tender, and when stripped of their outer leaves they can be eaten like celery.

As
I went about my labor, I became aware of Petra moving closer to the water.  I
then heard a cry well up from deep down inside her, but it was quickly choked
off with a series of gulps and moans that prickled the skin on the back of my
neck and caused me to look to her distress.  I rose up and saw her zombie-walk,
two or three more steps, before stopping and pointing to the far side of the
river with a most painful expression pulling at her face.

It
was our boat, the bow pointing skyward, straight up out of the river like a
tombstone marking a grave.  Somehow the current had wedged it stern down,
against a grouping of rocks, just a swim stroke or so from the river’s edge,
opposite ours.  Its hull chronicled a pounding that crumpled the aluminum from
front to back, including a twelve inch gash that gaped like a crooked smile. 
When I saw that, I knew that neither the boat nor its occupants could have
remained afloat for much longer than a few seconds.  The knowledge of that and
its consequences was like a chokehold that left me struggling for breath.

Desperately,
I scanned the immediate area for some sign, any sign, that one or both had
somehow survived.  No such relief was forthcoming, however.  I didn’t see any of
our belongings lying about or, for that matter, evidence of any footprints
either.  The acknowledgement that they were dead wasn’t an easy thing to
accept.  It fought back and forth with hope, much in the same way that a
terminal man at first denies his fate but eventually surrenders to it.  I just
couldn’t excuse the extent of damage to the hull, though.  They most surely
would have been thrown overboard.

I
stood there for I don’t know how long, but long enough to feel this awful thing
grow from ember to flame.  At some point, my certainty of their death, and the
loss I felt overwhelmed me with a sense of complete and utter defeat.  They
were the only two people in this damn new world I knew.  We had struggled so
hard together.  We had sacrificed bits and pieces of our precious humanity and
discovered others we didn’t know we had.  They had given me purpose and
belonging; now, there was none of that.  Just when I thought of giving up, of just
sitting down and waiting for our pursuers to put me away, Petra put her hand in
mine.

A
breath or two later, I said, “We better move on.  We have a long way to go
before we’re safe.”  I was thinking of Woburn when I said that.  We’d at least try
to warn them.  It would also be a place for Petra.  They’d never turn Petra
away – would they?

I
picked up the cattail stocks, rinsed them in the river, and we started on our
way once more.  My mind wasn’t on what lay ahead of us, though.  I was thinking
about Gabriel and Anna and how I should have let them know how important they
had become to me.

“My
biggest regret, silent words and idle deeds shared not with those I care for most.” 
Claire Huston, October 2051

As
we labored on, the stuffing knocked out of us, our surroundings began to creep
in on my consciousness.  All around, songbirds swooped, bathed, and cheered the
sun.  My face, set hard by our circumstances, warmed from the sun.  Twice we
saw deer and often enough roughed grouse gravelling near the road and flushing
to the trees on our approach.  I carried Petra’s raincoat over my arm.  She
held my hand.  We ate our stalks and later found more.  It was a good day to be
sad.

About
an hour before dark and with perhaps twenty miles to our good, we turned east
next to a row of trees, deep green and dense, twenty five yards wide, ten times
that in length, separating two fields of many acres.  It was a hedgerow or windbreak,
planted many, many years before.  We walked to about the halfway point and
found a place to stop for the night.  I pushed and piled the underbrush around
us, forming not so much a shelter but more a screen to our presence.  So thick were
these trees and our makeshift fort, that I felt we were safe.  But there’d be
no fire from my broken lighter and scraps of paper; too dangerous.

After
we settled, Petra and I talked awhile before sleep brought us to silence.  I
told her we were going to a place where we would be safe.  She asked me how far
away this safe place was, and I told her five or six more days of walking.  She
asked me what would happen to her.  Would she have a family, and a house, and
friends?  I told her I would make sure she had all of those things and more,
even though I knew I might not be able to see that promise through.  She smiled
at that and, before dozing off, talked about books, cats, baby dolls, a room of
her own, and a bed to sleep in. 
My
thoughts were about Anna and a wish
for someone to give me back
my
hope.

I
slept fitfully, waking, shifting, listening into the night.  On one of the
occasions when I awoke, I think about ten or eleven o’clock, though I really
can’t now say with any certainty, I heard raised voices.  They were shouts of
men, adult men, sounding angry about what I could not determine, but back and
forth they went at each other, swinging clubs of hard words.  Their sound
seemed to come from the west of us, in the direction of the river, and not that
far away, either, yet far enough that I had no fear of immediate discovery.  They
were apparently stationary, too, because their voices got neither closer nor
farther away.

I
raised myself and thought about sneaking up on them to see what they were about,
but when I looked at Petra, who had stirred at my rising, I reconsidered this
plan.  I felt we were safe here.  In the dark, someone could be literally standing
right next to us and not know we were there.  And what if she woke and found me
gone; what then?  She would be frightened senseless for sure, perhaps even cry
out and reveal our presence.  If I were discovered and killed, she would have had
little chance of survival on her own.  No, I decided that the smart thing, the
safe thing, would be to wait out the night and do something about it in the
morning.

Of
course, I assumed they were the people whose footprints we had followed earlier
in the day, but how was I to really know?  They could be a separate group
altogether; after all, I could se people want you so bad?”

The
argument broke off and silence returned.  I heard tiny feet move nearby in quick
little starts and stops.  A hawk soared and shrilled somewhere in front of us,
and I pictured the panicked scramble of its prey down below.  A coyote yipped
and his companions gave back their locations.  And to all of this, crickets and
frogs played a symphony in background.

So
I lay back down and turned on my side, only to hear the angry shouts return. 
They quickly rose and grew in intensity and with fewer pauses between accusation
and rejoinder.  It soon became clear that a physical struggle was taking place. 
There were no sentences; only words, and even those were partially said.  This
went on for only a short time, little more than a minute, before someone cried
out in pain.  Then another short pause, a word maybe, and then one shot, and
another.  The devil doesn’t sleep.