Devastated Lands: A Post-Apocalyptic Adventure Read online

  "I find the Bible reassuring," Beatrice said.

  "Keep pushing, higher!" Amy called back, curt and urgent.

  "Hold your horses there, you frisky filly."

  "What did you call me?" Amy looked back at Cooper, her mouth wide open in a gasp. Beatrice caught the swing and gave it a good shove.

  "You know, you're really good at that," Cooper said. "I mean, you can't even see the swing."

  "You get this sixth sense, about everything," she said wistfully, without bragging. Cooper thought she'd grown more faculties, ones we don't have, after God took one of her's away.

  "What do you think of this house?" Cooper asked, kicking at what was left of the sand bed beneath the swing-set. "Kind of a cozy place, for a time."

  She paused a moment, holding the swing still. "It's not a home, in the strict sense of the term. It's a box full of treasures. I wish I could do more. I wish I could search it with a fine tooth comb, like you and Mikaela do."

  "I noticed they had a basement. You can go down there with me, kick around a bit, before we leave."

  He was impressed that Beatrice already understood the essentials of survival. Nothing found is useless; nothing is wasted. Scavenge, scavenge, and keep scavenging; you never know when some seemingly useless piece of scrap will prove invaluable, save your life.

  But how were they going to carry the stuff that they find, once they finally leave?

  ###

  He wandered over to the back of the house, where he'd seen the tipped-over grill and ruined fencing. After a brief inspection, he found, tucked into the home's foundation and under a tarp, a large wooden canoe. At the stern of the canoe was an attachment with small rear wheels.

  He removed the tarp, and pulled the bow of the canoe away from the house. He felt like a 90-pound weakling all of a sudden; pulling the canoe was bulky and laborious.

  The boat was full of wet leaves; he scooped them out with his hands. He didn't find any rot, yet. The boat still appeared sturdy. Muddy water had collected beneath the leaves.

  He unfastened the wheels from the stern of the canoe, set them aside, and with great difficulty, overturned the wooden boat and let out some of the water. He left the boat leaning on its side.

  He also found two mountainbikes leaning under the eaves against the foundation. One of them had flat tires; the other had tires about half inflated. Both had rusty chain-rings and chains. He pulled the one with viable tires away from the house and wiped the seat off. Where there are bikes, there are bike-tire pumps, he thought.

  He laid the good bike on the ground next to the boat. He stood up, weary, hungry, and faint, and scanned the eastern horizon through fading daylight. Rainier's gouged-out higher reaches, still partially snow covered, were draped with a cloud which surrounded it like a skirt. Over above the trees, near the flood waters and where they'd left the car, he saw a column of black smoke snaking into the sky.

  CHAPTER 32

  They all walked back to where the high water ran roughly over the fringe of the lahar. Dusk had arrived quickly. Cooper carried the crossbow, armed. Beatrice, Mikaela, and Cooper clutched some empty plastic bottles that Mikaela had found and emptied out of rotten or soured contents. They could be washed out and re-used. Even Amy carried one.

  It took them more than half an hour to climb back up on the lahar and walk the mile back to the river. The water raged over the debris–higher, faster, and more frothy than before. They walked along its edges for quite some distance, at least 50 meters of ragged ground, until they found a flat area for reaching down and dipping the bottles into the rapids.

  "Did you see that blue shimmer, out on the horizon?" Cooper asked. Beatrice stood back with Turk and Amy.

  "It's gotten more prominent," Mikaela said.

  They both were on hands and knees and holding the open nozzles into the rushing water. The water pressure was so hard it took longer than you'd think to fill a bottle. Most of it spilled over the sides.

  "Don't drink it," Cooper said, as much to himself as anyone else. "It must have a lot of contaminants and pollution, from all the crap in the lahar. We're going to have to disinfect it."

  The black smoke still rose above the trees. He was glad the water was violent; it was much harder to cross. It was the reason, maybe, why they hadn't encountered Gladys' henchmen again.

  They filled the bottles with at least six liters, and by the time they were finished a thick fog had rolled in. It came from the west, toward the coast. He thought he smelled the briny ocean in it. He slung the crossbow over his shoulder and gripped a liter in each hand.

  He felt like crap, as if the distance, only a mile plus, back to the house was going to be a slog for him.

  Even Amy had to carry a bottle, and when she instantly tipped it up to drink when they handed it to her, they made her spit out the mouthful. They would have to spend the night in the house, Cooper thought, and they could come back in the morning for more water.

  The fog was impenetrable; it wrapped around them like a wet blanket. He was afraid that they'd go off course, and if that happened, they'd be spending the night outside. He wished they'd marked the trail. Carrying the bottles, they tracked back to the part of the floodwaters they'd encountered first; where it was steep and dangerous.

  He knew the floodwaters ran east-west, and the house was due south from there. Damn! He didn't even have the compass, which was in the rucksack, which in his spaced-out condition he'd left in the kitchen.

  "Pea soup!" Mikaela declared. She clicked on a flashlight, but it was a fog like smoke; you might as well aim a beam onto a curtain.

  They began to follow Mikaela. The sun was blocked and it felt, to Cooper, like it had dropped 20 degrees Fahrenheit. The moist, knobby ground had a sterile sameness, like a desert where nothing grows. There were no landmarks with which they could keep their bearings. It was white-out conditions, and he thought of Arctic explorers stepping out of their tents in a blizzard, losing the lifesaving wands.

  "You think you know where you're going?" he called out. He stumbled. He heard, "I think so."

  Amy and Beatrice walked hand in hand, with Turk beside them. If someone veered ten feet either way, he thought, they would disappear. He thought they all should be connected by a rope. It had begun to rain, a fine mist. He shivered. He watched veils of mist drift in the smoke illuminated by Mikaela's light beam.

  He felt engulfed in a viral paranoia. He dropped both his bottles and turned with the crossbow; loud splashing, the crunches of footfalls. He raised the bow and through the scope, he saw a bulky form run toward them in the fog.

  CHAPTER 33

  Shane centered the man in the cross-hairs of the crossbow's scope.

  "Get on your knees, now!" he said gruffly, still feverish and sweating from the forehead. The man knelt down in the fog, both of his hands raised over his head. The fog had thickened. The two of them were suddenly alone. Magnified, Cooper could see a wet man with a bloodied face, in shirtsleeves.

  "What are you doing here? Were you following us? I'll kill you right now." It would be easy, a release of tension, to let the arrow go. Cooper was getting used to it, the ease of firing.

  "I'm on the run! Like you! I gave you water, back at the compound. Remember? I helped you escape!"

  "How come I don't recognize you?"

  "Let him go, Coop. I know him." It was Beatrice, appearing behind him. "He's the man who helped me. That's you, Luca, isn't it?" The man began to stand up unsteadily, arms still in the air.

  "Yeah, yeah, it's me. Luca." Luca wiped the mist and blood off his face with the back of his hand. His eyes had a desperate, fearful gape. Cooper lowered the crossbow.

  "How did you find us?" he said.

  "By accident. I mean, I just made it over those wild waters."

  "How?"

  "A fallen tree. I crawled over it. Almost dropped in–got killed."

  "Are they behind you?"

  "Who?"

  "Gladys's retard brigade. Aren't you one of them?
Because if I find out you're lying to me…"

  "I'm not, I swear. I'm on the run. They want me dead, after what I done. I think I lost 'em. They found your car. They siphoned the gas, then set it on fire."

  "Cooper, let him go. He's a good man." Beatrice reached out and touched Cooper's arm. Cooper shivered and lowered the bow all the way to the ground. My lips must be blue, he thought. We have to get out of the elements.

  "Okay, get going. Walk in front of me. I don't trust you. Sorry, man. I can't afford to."

  "Let's go!" he heard Mikaela shout from somewhere in the fog. Cooper motioned with the crossbow, and Luca shuffled ahead.

  They rejoined the others, who'd waited for them a short distance away.

  "Are you hurt?" Beatrice asked Luca.

  "Just beaten–nothing broken."

  "How far behind you are they?" Cooper said.

  Luca looked behind him, into the opaque curtain of mist. "Not sure if they went over that river, the flood." They could hear the unseen water rushing, louder. It flows from the east, Cooper thought, where the lahar debris backed up rivers and lakes and made a giant reservoir, whose boundary was only temporary. It's not like it had a shoreline.

  "I don't think they'll try too hard. I think you might be in the clear," Luca muttered as he stumbled along. "I mean, they have more important things to do, than wear themselves out looking for you."

  "Like what?"

  "Like moving goods to the coast. Getting out of this Godforsaken place. People like you, laborers…"

  "Slaves," Cooper corrected.

  "…Are expendable. They can always be replaced."

  They hadn't seen the house yet through the dense fog. They weren't even sure they were going in the right direction. Cooper found the water bottles he'd dropped; he thrust one to his lips and guzzled it down, compulsively.

  He knew the water needed to be boiled. They needed a fire. He needed to sit beside it and dry out.

  Mikaela strode ahead. The fog rose like swamp vapors. Cooper trusted Mikaela to find her way back to the house; he felt too sick to be confident in his own sense of direction.

  She kept walking with the dog and Amy, then Luca right behind her.

  They couldn't feed Luca, he thought. A bitter side of him, one drained of the energy required for gratitude, wanted to throw Luca back out into the night, let him fend for himself. He was dead weight. He hoped he wouldn't have to kill him.

  He did help Beatrice escape. He'd propped the exit door open; fled down the hallway with Beatrice, putting his life on the line. He gave Cooper some water, when he was hanging from the pole back there.

  He saw Mikaela drop down from a dark plateau and hold out a hand for Amy. Turk stood on top of that hillside of debris; he barked once in recognition of the darkness.

  Luca held out a hand for Beatrice. "We're here!" Mikaela cried out.

  CHAPTER 34

  The sun had begun to set over the distant sea. They could see it like a lamp light permeating a dirty shade. Cooper collapsed again on the small couch, but not before he'd changed out of his wet clothes. They'd rummaged around upstairs in the house, and he'd found an old paint-stained, University of Oregon, extra-large hooded sweatshirt, plus some blankets. He hung his pants and socks up to dry on the pole of a shower curtain, ate some more Saltines, and fell deep asleep.

  After delirious dreams in which he spent a lot of time underwater, deep in the ocean amongst sea creatures, and people he didn't recognize, he rolled off the couch, put the pants back on, and ambled barefoot into the kitchen. He picked the instant coffee off the counter. He opened the kitchen door. A fire roared, just outside, in the darkness. Pots and pans of water lay about. Mikaela and Luca stood by the fire, supervising the boiling.

  "Where's Amy?"

  "Sleeping."

  "Good."

  "How do you feel?"

  "Weak as a kitten…" He felt rundown, and fraudulent, as though his sickness had betrayed an essential weakness. The night air was cool, no longer suffused with mist. He smelled a mixture of the rot that rose from the lahar, and the minerals he recalled from the floodwaters. The white noise from the raging waters now filled the darkness beyond the flames.

  He walked over to the crackling fire, upwind of the cinders and black flecks of ash, and held his hands out to the warmth. Mikaela and Luca had broken up some furniture and used it to feed the fire.

  "Can I use some of this water?"

  "Of course." He poured some grounds into a small tin cup, and filled it with hot water. He found a spoon and stirred it around, then sat down on a stool they'd moved from the kitchen onto what was left of the lawn. The weak coffee revived him, somewhat.

  "You guys have been hard at work–good job."

  "We thought we should put together a couple of gallons, before we leave," Luca said. He stood looking into the fire with his hands in his pockets.

  Cooper looked at him warily. So he thinks he's making decisions now.

  "Thanks for helping with Beatrice," he began diplomatically. "Where did you come from, anyways? I mean, before you started working for Gladys?"

  "I didn't work for her. I was, like you put it, one of the slaves."

  "But you had guard duty. That's a responsible position, like they promoted you. You were part of the team. You could have run away any time you wanted to." There was silence, only pops from burning wood and the white noise of water. Cooper realized what was missing, crickets. A lone hawk was the only bird or wildlife he'd seen since they'd narrowly escaped the lahar in the car.

  "I had nowhere to go, until you guys showed up." Luca tossed the splintered leg of a chair into the fire. He was skinny with a dark, unshaven face and awkwardly trimmed black hair. The fear, when Cooper first had him in the scope, had given way to a bleak fatigue. He has to earn my trust, Cooper thought. I have to know he's on our side.

  Luca cleared his throat. Mikaela watched both of them silently.

  "I was on holiday here, with my wife, Claire. She was with our son, Ryan. See, at that time we were separated. We weren't divorced." He wanted to emphasize that point.

  "We're from Bellingham. She drove in with Ryan, to meet me. I told her, I'm going to take him into the mountains. See, he's 10. He likes hiking, canoeing, archery, that kind of stuff. 'Meet me in Sumner and I'll take Ryan for the weekend,' I told her. But I was hoping she'd come along, too. We could give it another chance. Another try. That's what I was thinking.

  "So she gets into the van, with me and Ryan. We leave her car in the park n' ride in Sumner. We had lunch outside, on a picnic table in the sun. Sandwiches, ice tea, chips, and cupcakes. We were getting along; Ryan was excited, about hittin' the trails. I can still hear his laugh. It was like the old days. Life is like that sometimes, isn't it? It's good, just purely good. Nothing gets in the way. It sticks in your memory that way.

  "We get into the van. We start driving east, towards Rainier National Park. I see that thing coming, the lahar, the first one. I thought it was a local mudslide, a flash flood. Then it just gets bigger, grows in volume. I put the van in reverse and I try to outrun it. Then I know I can't go that fast in reverse, so I pull a U-ee, turn the van around–Ryan's screaming in the back…it catches me broadside…"

  Luca paused, choked up. "I don't even know why I'm telling you this…"

  "You don't have to," Cooper said.

  "They didn't make it," he said, his eyes glistening in the firelight. "I saw the van, what happened to it. I was standing up on these rocks; I'd had Claire's hand, but it slipped out. Then I walked away. I walked for…I don't know how far. I was a zombie. Then those criminals found me. 'Come with us.' In a weird way, I wanted to do their dirty work, to forget."

  "Sorry about your family," Mikaela said.

  "Hey listen Luca, I found some stuff in the backyard here," Cooper said. "I think we can use it. I could use your help with it."

  "I worked on maintenance for UPS. I fixed trucks. That was my thing."

  CHAPTER 35

  The
y set up the canoe as a storage container on wheels. They were in silent agreement that they could get maybe one more night out of the house. The waters were rising to the north, almost as you watched. Besides, they weren't more than 12 miles from Tacoma and the coast. They could make that, Cooper figured, in two days, at a slow pace.

  In the morning, they got to work. Cooper was well enough; he'd slept again, having sweaty, delirious dreams. He woke up and pissed the color of rusty water. He didn't know what was happening to him. He just wanted to gut out the remaining miles, like a worn-out man in an extreme endurance race, and hope that Tacoma or Seattle had a working hospital.

  Luca proved good with his hands. They took the bow of the canoe and fastened it to the rear hub of the mountain bike using a crude, ad hoc harness made up of some wadded up bungee cords, wood, nails, and screws they'd found.

  Luca tightened it up, using only the tools that came with Cooper's Swiss Army knife. They searched everywhere, first outside and then through the equivalent of a back porch, until eventually they found a rusty bike pump. They pumped up the mountain bike's tires until they were rock hard. This effort exhausted Cooper, even though he split it with Luca.

  Then they moved the boiled, disinfected water, in containers, into the stern of the boat. Mikaela had found some trash bags, which they wrapped the rest of the food in. They didn't have much to eat, the left-over peanut butter, powdered milk, beef jerky, stale flour they had to pick the flowerettes of mold out of. The plastic food bags went into the stern, along with clothes, blankets, splintered wood for fires, Millie and Tom, and two books. A John Steinbeck anthology that included The Grapes of Wrath, and the Holy Bible, King James Version.

  Cooper found the Steinbeck choice ironic. They were like the Joads, a threadbare, ramshackle crew headed out across the wasteland. The Bible was Beatrice's choice, primarily.

  Everyone agreed that Cooper had contracted some infectious organism or parasite, or he'd been poisoned back at Gladys'; this wasn't the run of the mill flu or sinus infection. With urine the color of diluted root beer, Mikaela posed a kidney infection. Luca thought it might be malaria; he had a friend that got it in Panama. Whatever it was, there was no medicine save the aspirin and ibuprofen from the med kit, which he used to bring his fever down.