Steps

WiD
ō
Publishing
Salt Lake City, Utah
widopublishing.com

Copyright © 2015 by Eric Trant

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without the written consent of the publisher.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, organizations and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or organizations is entirely coincidental.

Cover design by Steven Novak
Book design by Marny K. Parkin

ISBN: 978-1-937178-68-0
Library of Congress Control Number: available upon request

Printed in the United States of America

As always, to my family:
Amanda, Brianna, Connor, Dastan, and Baby Finn.
We miss you, Daz.

Chapter 1

Cabin Fever   
(Edwin)

E
dwin Peacemaker flipped the switch to the generator. It coughed, kicked, and died. Silence filled the cabin like a held breath. The lights winked out but for a few candles left burning, one on the kitchen counter, another on the coffee table in front of the couch, and several more upstairs in the bedrooms. Their yellow flames flickered, and the cabin suddenly felt very haunted and very old.

“Lord,” Edwin said. His wife and children stared at him as if they expected him to keep speaking, but he was out of words. Even the television had run out of words.

He moved through the living room and sat on the hearth. “We have water. But if we keep using diesel like we have been—”

“We won’t,” Amalie said.

“Well, we better not. We need to cut the generator back to half-hour a day. No more TV. Just enough to check the news, if that message they’re showing counts for news. The generator should run about sixty more hours, so that’s a couple of months if we ration it.”

“I don’t care about the generator, Ed,” Amalie said. “What about food? We need to get back home, not make plans for ‘a couple of months.’ We can’t stay here.”

“We won’t make it in the Tahoe, Amalie. Not until after it dries up, and even then it could be a while. I bet those bridges washed out.”

“We could walk.”

“In the rain? With Shelly Lynn? With the floods? Junction City is fifteen miles away, and that’s if there’s anything left of it. We may not have a home to go home to.”

“We were fools to stay here,” Amalie said. “We should have gone home when the rains started, when your sister called and said they weren’t coming because of the weather. We should have left when I said so, but you didn’t listen. You never listen. Said you liked the sound of rain on a tin roof, said we had plenty of food for two weeks. Now we’re stuck here, food’s gone, I’m starving, the kids are starving, and you’re worried about the
generator.
Oh my God, really?”

Amalie slid off the loveseat and stared at Edwin. He waited to see if she would speak again, but all she did was huff and stalk by him like the passing of a pajama-clad wraith. She said something under her breath and disappeared into the shadows of the master bedroom at the front of the cabin. The door closed behind her, followed by the creaking of bedsprings.

Edwin sat in silence with his children and watched the rain. He put his hand to his mouth, rubbed his nose. Perry stared out the window, but Shelly Lynn’s eyes bore into him with that childhood stare of absolute innocence, which sums your sins and negates them. It unnerved him, and when she refused to look away, Edwin rose and slid next to her onto the couch.

“You okay, Baby Bird?” he said.

“Mmm. I hungry.”

“We’ll have some food soon, don’t worry.”

“Are we going to war, Dad?” Perry said. He tapped his fingers together and nodded toward the television.

“It’s martial law, son, not war.”

“But they could shoot us.”

“We’re Americans. They won’t shoot us.”

“But they could if they wanted.”

“They won’t.”

“But they could.”

“Don’t worry about that stuff, son. It’ll be all right. Now you two head on to bed. No sense staying up worrying.”

Edwin walked up to the third floor loft, tucked Shelly Lynn into the bottom bunk, and said goodnight to Perry in the top bunk. He prayed for the rain to let up and for them to get home safely, and he left a single candle burning at the head of the stairs to see by, should they rise in the night.

He found his bedroom door locked and heard no movement on the other side. “Amalie.” He thumped his knuckles on the wood. After a few seconds of silence, the words, “Go away,” drifted under the door.

“Fine,” he said. Edwin slipped through the kitchen, checked the pantry as if food might have appeared. He closed the pantry door, opened it, closed it, said, “Poof,” and still no food appeared. He made a slow sweep of the candlelit cabin, dragging his fingers across the furniture and pondering whether the leather couch could be boiled down into a broth. “You’re spinning in circles, buddy.”

He opened the patio door and stood in the rain-spray and darkness of the back porch. “You could hunt. But, hey,
You’ll shoot your eye out
.” That had been Amalie’s almost-joking tone when he insisted on buying a pair of shotguns and two over-priced Arkansas hunting licenses. The receipt was still in the ammunition bag next to several boxes of mixed rounds and the Remington pumps, one with a youth-model stock.

Edwin slunk to the closet, hefted his shotgun, chambered a slug at the end, loaded the rest with four-shot, pulled on his hiking boots, and dove headlong into the rain. His feet sank to the ankles. He peered into the darkness, but saw only a hint of the trees and ground.

The rain soaked him. He searched the shadows as he cleansed his thoughts with the purity of rainwater. He wiped his eyes and face against his shoulder, and drank what fell on his lips. Nothing moved in the treetops. At some point the sky became less black, and the raindrops luminesced with a soft-white sparkle as they fell. He must have hunted until morning, though there was no way to tell the time because he could not see the sky.

He hiked until he heard the creek raging down the mountainside, meaning he had either wandered two miles, or the creek had widened by several hundred feet. He guessed the latter, and he steadied himself against a tree. The murkiness of the air and the unsteady ground disoriented him in the manner of a funhouse as he searched the limbs; except in a funhouse he’d be able to find over-priced food beyond the slanted door.

“Shit,” he said. Then he screamed, slipped, and almost fell. A low thrum of thunder pulsed in answer.

“Bastards,” he said. “Oh come on. Food, food, come out and play.”

He considered hiking up the road to the next cabin, or maybe forging all the way to the base of the mountain to the camp store. Somebody must have food. Edwin worked through a few of these details, namely the water crossings blocking his descent, when another thought yanked the soaked hairs on the back of his neck. “What if we’re not alone up here?”

Edwin glanced the way he had come, toward the cabin where his family slept unguarded. They did not have food, but nobody would know until they knocked, assuming they knocked. Downhill awaited martial law sparked by flooding and a viral outbreak, along a path of washed-out roads and bridges. “So that’s no good,” he said. “We’re up here with whoever else got stuck.” He checked the shotgun and hurried his pace back the way he had come.

Chapter 2

Mountain Songs   
(Man)

I
t rained and rained. The sound of it drove him insane, and when Man said so, Woman answered, “Insanity would be a mercy. The Father has no mercy for us.”

Man shored up their shelter with buckskin and the small pelts of rabbits and squirrels he had killed before the rains began. Woman sat in the middle of the shelter, chewing the hides, softening them before he roped them to the wood and tried to drive away the rain. She sang and hummed as she worked. It reminded him of the way it used to be, in a simpler time they now called primitive. He
was
primitive, he thought, and so was she, arcane, even.

The rain soaked the hides and leaked through the holes in the shelter. Man overlapped the skins, standing in the rain with his only light the blazing lightning sparking between the clouds. It shook the mountaintop with its thunderclaps.

The rocky ground turned to a deep mush. During the bursts of lightning, when they stood outside their shelter and searched for a cloud break along the horizon, he counted long swaths of the mountainside that had melted and slid down the slopes. They moved once when the river swelled and cut away too much of the mountain, and from here, standing with Woman shivering beside him, cold from lack of fire and warmth, he heard the raging rapids threatening. They’d need to abandon another camp and move higher on the mountain.

Matted hair hung around Woman’s face and down her back, her body framed by a thin rain mist and utter darkness where the gray light stopped. She stroked his whiskers and said, “I remember when your beard came down to here.” She touched his sternum above his heart, and the heat of her spread through his chest like rippled pond water.

She cuddled next to him as they rested. He held her for warmth, and neither of them slept. He saw nothing in the darkness, so dark he could not see his wife’s head nestled against him, and when the lightning flashed, it burned a ghost-image red into his eye-memory.

The ground shook beneath their heads. He heard pieces of rock rip away and rush down the mountain, felt long aches pass through the ground as the ceaseless rain carved at the rock.

He had no way of gauging the hour, but Man rose and said to Woman, “We need to move higher.” He laid out the shelter’s skeleton onto a travois and tied the hides to it, and with his wife leading, made his way farther up the mountain. Tree limbs clapped with the thunder as they ascended.

Man followed her until they reached dryer ground. He pitched the shelter in the open, away from the trees and cliffs, and left only the rain to crush them. Inside their new shelter, he fell with her into the mud.

“You should hunt, soon,” Woman said. She held the last of their dried meat for him to see, and she smiled at her joke. Lightning flashed and seared her image into his eyes. He closed them so the next flash would not erase her face.

He slept, exhausted, until an overwhelming silence woke him. He felt around for his wife, found her, and said, “Listen.”

After a while, she said, “Has it stopped?”

“For now.”

He found the door to their shelter, pushed through it and stood in the mud. The darkness lingered oppressive and thick, but quiet of rain. A sticky layer of grime covered him, and without the constant wash of the rain, the mud on his arms and face dried into a crust that yanked at his hair and skin. A distant murmur of thunder reminded him of the storm’s passing. The river rumbled away in the woods, mixing with the drips and the creaking of wood swollen to bursting.

“Is it over?” she said. Then she answered her own question. “I think it is. How long was it?”

“Too long,” he said.

Dawn arrived in a gray haze. Clouds clung to the mountainside in a stagnant fog, limiting his vision to a stone’s throw in any direction. They listened to the unnatural silence as they breakfasted on a handful of pine nuts Woman collected. A lone squawk caused him to glance up, followed by another squawk, and another. He heard the crows call from above them, gliding up the mountainside, a murder of them slicing invisible veins through the fog.

Leaving her, Man followed them up the mountain, ankles deep in the muddy ground until a stand of trees emerged from the fog. He crouched beside a log and waited. A few crows flew in and out of the fog, circling, and when one found a limb, he launched a rock in front of its perch. As the crow fell from the limb and spread its wings, startled into flight, the rock buried itself into the bird’s chest. Its wings grew slack, and it corkscrewed to the ground.

Man beheaded, winged, and gutted the bird as he ran. He added two more to his belt before he reached the road.

Before the rains, he had found a set of vehicle tracks leading up the mountain. The rain washed away the tracks along with the road, but Man knew where the tracks ended because he had been here many times before. Throughout spring, he watched them build the cabin and stuff it with the things his children seemed compelled to collect. All summer the cabin sat empty, filled with the smell of fresh paint, lacquer, and sawdust. Every new moon he checked the cabin, waiting for his children to reappear, until his last visit rewarded him with a glimpse of a family with a yearling boy and a young girl. Then the rains locked him away from this part of the mountain. He waited with Woman in their shelter until the skies ceased tormenting the ground.

His feet sank in the road, leaving deep prints despite the lightness of his movement. He skirted through the woods until he came to the cabin. The woman sat on the back porch with the young girl playing at her feet. “Shelly Lynn,” the woman said, “put that down.”

Shelly Lynn dropped what appeared to be a bent nail, and her mother added, “Your father should have cleaned all that up when they built this cabin.” The woman shook her head and called out into the yard. “Edwin, I told you I don’t want him carrying a gun.”

“He’s a big boy, Amy,” the man said. “You’re a big boy aren’t you?”

The youngling boy shouldered a shotgun matching his father’s, but with a shorter stock. He nodded to his father and said, “Yes, sir.”

“Well come on, then,” Edwin said. He seemed to consider leaving the woman and girl alone, because he gripped the shotgun and searched the tree line.

Edwin waited until the boy said, “What is it, Dad?”

“Nothing,” Edwin said. “Come on. Let’s go kill us a squirrel or something.” The man stalked into the woods with the boy in tow, both of them crushing limbs and leaves.

Man considered leaving them food, but this was the way of things. They would live or perish with the Father’s will. His chest tightened, but he had no say in the matter.

He made his way back to his camp, where he found Woman chewing her hides and singing her songs. He laid the birds next the fire and sat. As she skewered the crows, Man said, “They will not survive. They have lost their knowledge of living.”

“And you would watch them perish?” Woman asked.

“I would not watch.”

“You cannot intervene.”

“I would not watch,” Man said. His ears picked up the distant thump of one of the shotguns. They hunted, or perhaps they turned the guns on one another as they did at times. He waited for more gunshots, and when none came, he settled himself that they had found food. Tomorrow, he would find out for certain.