Black Autumn Travelers Page 14

  Cameron lurched forward to call the girl back for more questions, but she had already moved on.

  He found himself in a medical bay with ten or fifteen other patients, a scene more akin to World War One than modern America. His head swam with the effort of lifting it and he dropped back to the pillow and faded back into unconsciousness.

  Wallula, Washington, “Starbucks Camp”

  The Starbucks Clan skipped breakfast. Penny still felt sick and now Tyson, Condie, and three of the new girls were sick as well. As best as anyone could tell, none of the others had drunk water that hadn’t been filtered and boiled. Sage scratched his head; could boiled water still be infectious? He couldn’t imagine how.

  Considering how filthy they had let the camp become, anything was possible. Sage thought of a list of ways people might have gotten sick. They could have eaten something bad. They could have gotten a flu from the new people. They could have come in contact with rodents and vermin. Everyone was hungry, and hunger lowered immunity, his dad had told him. The camp was so dirty and out of control that he would have been surprised if people didn’t get sick.

  One time, Sage met a homeless guy who had been camping outside for six straight years: winter, spring, summer, and fall. The guy clearly demonstrated what his dad had called “obsessive compulsive behavior.” The homeless guy cleaned his campsite over and over again, enforced double and triple checks on his water, and managed his human waste like a city sanitation engineer. Sage figured the guy was nuts. In retrospect, maybe that was exactly what it took to keep from getting sick in the wilderness: obsessive compulsive behavior.

  Truth was, he didn’t know. Sage’s experience of backpacking and camping hadn’t extended past a few days at a time. Camping for more than a week raised hard questions. Would people get sick from wearing the same clothes every day? Would people get sick from not cleaning their dishes with hot, soapy water? Could people get sick from eating too many onions?

  He had the finest private school education Salt Lake City could offer, but there were so many unanswered questions out here in the dirt. How much did he really know about camping or sanitation? Looking back, camping had been an amusement, done under artificial circumstances for short periods of time. Living outdoors turned out to be a lot different than camping.

  Sage checked his traps and snares as soon as sunlight hit the ground. He had set up four deadfalls and six snares. It took him an hour to check them, and he had walked three miles.

  Nothing.

  It wasn’t as though animals had defeated his snares, it was just… nothing. The snares and deadfalls looked just the way he had left them the evening before. On the end of the figure-four traps, the bait remained untouched.

  He had burned about two hundred calories checking the trapline, and he had nothing to show for it. Even if he had killed a mouse or squirrel, how many calories would that have delivered? A hundred at most? A rabbit would be almost worth it, maybe delivering as much as a thousand calories.

  Sage sat down and thought it through. He had seen signs of animals. He knew rabbits were hitting the alfalfa field because the low trails in the grass were almost certainly created by rabbits. But the field itself was acres, and rabbits could enter the field at any point. Why should they choose his particular trail?

  Why would the animals he was trying to bait with deadfalls show up to take his bait? They probably spent the night scouring broad swathes of land, and they wouldn’t necessarily come past his little traps. The scent of the bait would reach out maybe ten feet or so, but apparently it would take more stink to draw predators. He had never trapped game before. It was a lot harder than the movies made it look. But that was no excuse for quitting. If he kept at it, he would eventually learn how the animals behaved.

  He decided to leave the traps and snares where they were. Tomorrow he would move some of the rabbit snares to other trails. The bait would continue to rot and maybe attract animals from farther away.

  Wrapped in his thoughts, he made his way back toward camp. He crossed a field of stubbly grass and movement caught his eye. Something primordial in his brain knew instantly what he was seeing: a rattlesnake.

  His first reaction was to back away. His second reaction won: easy food.

  Rattlesnakes seemed terrifying because a single bite can lead to crippling sickness and even death. Land animals usually gave rattlesnakes a wide berth. As Sage watched the snake coil up, it dawned on him that the snake’s defensive strategy didn’t work particularly well against people.

  Keeping one eye on the location of the big rattler, Sage hunted around and found a few hand-sized rocks. He hurled the first rock at the snake and missed entirely. The second rock hit the snake mid-body and did nothing but piss it off. The snake uncoiled and began to make its escape. Sage stepped closer and threw the last rock, walloping the snake on the head.

  The snake writhed about, making no further progress. Sage busted off a bitterbrush stick and broke off the branches, except for a fork on the end. He moved up to the snake, wary that it could still bite even with its head smashed. He pinned the head beneath the “Y” in the stick and reached down with his Leatherman tool, carefully sawing off the head. Still the rattlesnake twisted, flicking his rattle from side to side, but the fight was over. Sage guessed he was looking at seven hundred calories. It wasn’t a lot, but it would be a welcome addition to onions.

  “Just goes to show you, Mister Rattler,” Sage spoke to the severed snake head. “You gotta keep evolving. Once someone comes on the scene who can throw a rock, you best reconsider previous strategies. Making yourself into a bullseye and then rattling… not the best plan.”

  This was the first rattlesnake he had seen in Washington, but it seemed like there might be more in the chaparral. Sage took note of the time and the position of the sun. He had seen a lot of grasshoppers bouncing out from underneath his feet as he walked back from the field, especially as the morning warmed. Maybe the rattlesnakes came out as soon as they warmed up enough to catch grasshoppers. Maybe in that brief window, when the rattlers were slightly warmer than the grasshoppers, they could chow down and take the rest of the day off in the shade.

  “Ain’t nature just the cleverest little bitch?” Sage mused out loud, talking to himself again.

  He decided to test his theory by opening the rattler’s belly when he got back to camp. In any case, this was good information about the fauna of the region. Rattlesnakes were present, at least for the season, and they came out to hunt at the first rays of sun.

  Happy with the new information, and feeling like he was making progress, Sage tromped into camp.

  Everyone freaked out.

  It took Sage a moment to realize that they were screaming and jumping to their feet because he had a big snake dangling at his side.

  “What the fuck!” Justin jumped back from his chair as the women shrieked.

  Sage didn’t know what to say. “Check it out. I brought lunch.”

  “The hell you did.” Justin put the chair between himself and Sage. “Nobody’s going to eat that.”

  “Everyone knows it tastes like chicken,” Sage tried.

  “I’m definitely not eating that, Mountain Man,” Penny said, still sick and wrapped in a blanket on one of the lawn chairs. Sage noticed a cloud passing over Justin’s face when Penny called him “Mountain Man.”

  “I’ll cook it up, and you guys can try it. We’re going to have to get used to eating things that aren’t normal,” Sage said.

  “Whatever, little dude,” Justin replied.

  Since they didn’t have a frying pan, Sage cooked the snake directly on the coals in its skin. He had to admit, the meat was bland and had an “off” odor about it. But calories were calories. Ironically, Sage had thousands of calories stashed up in the rocks, yet he was the only one eating rattlesnake meat. Even though he wasn’t particularly enjoying the flavor, he choked down the entire thing.

  Nora approached him as he knelt by the fire forcing himself to eat. “
I’m sorry we didn’t eat your snake with you. It’s cool that you knew how to hunt like that. I appreciate what you’re doing. Maybe let me try a tiny piece?” Sage knew she didn’t really want to eat it, but he pulled off a flake of the bland, alien meat anyway.

  Nora slowly raised the meat to her mouth and winced as she set it on her tongue. “Tastes like chicken,” she said before chewing.

  “Liar,” Sage said, smiling. They both chuckled as she managed to chew twice and swallow.

  “That tasted awful. Not the way I imagined breaking off being a vegetarian.” Nora grinned. “Snake meat.”

  “You’re a vegetarian?”

  “Until today. Well, thank you for sharing your snake. I know Justin can be a douche, but I don’t want you to think we don’t see what you’re doing for us.”

  “We?” Sage asked.

  “Well, I don’t want you to think that I don’t see what you’re doing for us.” Nora put a hand on Sage’s shoulder, then drifted back toward her lawn chair.

  As he chewed his way to the last quarter of the snake tail, Condie pointed to the road and spoke. “Check out those guys.”

  A crowd of dozens of people shuffled up the road, kicking up dust. They moved like zombies—probably refugees from the highway. The group came into camp and barely reacted to the Starbucks Clan, moving without a word of explanation or consideration. The new people began pawing through their gear.

  Sage dropped the snake and made a run for his backpack. He ripped it out of an old guy’s hands, zipped up the pocket and slung on his back.

  “Do you have food in there?” the old guy begged with a glazed look.

  “It’s not yours,” Sage shouted.

  All over camp, desperate people picked through boxes and bags. One of them pushed into the tent, tossing the sleeping bags, looking for food. Justin, Tyson, and the girls screamed and pushed, but it was like pushing water. The mob kept coming, picking through everything, searching listlessly for anything to eat. The Starbucks Clan was stronger and healthier than the intruders, but they were hopelessly outnumbered, maybe twenty to one.

  Sage watched as one bedraggled woman snatched the remainder of the rattlesnake off the ground and set to work feverishly on the last shreds of the meat. She even tried to eat the charred skin.

  “Sorry, man. Sorry, man,” a guy in his mid-thirties kept saying. He wore jeans and a filthy gray teeshirt with the words Don’t worry, Be happy below a Rastafarian happy face with dreadlocks, smoking a joint. “We’re so hungry. Sorry, man.”

  After half an hour or so, the mob slowly moved off down the road. The camp was destroyed. Every last piece of food was gone, including their trash. The starving people had even eaten the skins of yesterday’s onions. Others of the mob drank water straight out of the pond. The dawning reality was that they had just witnessed the walking dead.

  “Who the hell were those guys?” Tyson asked.

  “They’re from the highway,” Justin guessed. “Damned idiots.”

  Sage wondered how the Starbucks Clan saw themselves since, from Sage’s point of view, they weren’t any more prepared or capable than the people from the walking dead.

  The lack of calories was starting to show in the Starbucks Clan, as well. It took them two hours to put the camp back together.

  “We should go collect some onions,” Justin said. “I’m slowing down.”

  The very idea of onions made Sage sick. He could barely eat one without gagging, but onions were calories. As best as he could tell, there were maybe two thousand calories in ten pounds of onions. That meant they would each have to eat ten pounds of the cursed things to cover the caloric requirement for a single day. The thought made Sage want to vomit.

  His irritation about eating onions blossomed into an admission that he was burning time and calories trying to help these doomed people. He had begun to see the Starbucks Clan mostly as incompetents—by choice, not by necessity. It was hard to ignore the fact that they were dying right before his eyes, but they still weren’t willing to eat strange things or listen to cold, hard reason.

  Didn’t this all come down to the same argument he had been having with his dad for years? If his dad were here, he would point out that Sage had little to gain and a lot to lose by staying with the Starbucks Clan. He would argue that there was no profit in the relationship for Sage.

  Sage would argue back that he didn’t care about profit. That he thought everyone could win. That he was holding out for something better than a world where some were winners and some were losers. He could help them to survive, even without giving them his grandparents’ food. He could help them to see truth and to make better decisions so that everyone would make it.

  In the wake of the zombie mob, Sage couldn’t deny the thinness of his argument. Considering the beating their equipment had just sustained and their complete lack of food, the Starbucks Clan had maybe forty-eight hours before they were rendered to the walking dead themselves. There was very little Sage could do to stop it, especially since the group still resisted his input on the matter of survival.

  But one factor overwhelmed all reason, rising up in Sage’s mind at every turn of argument: Penny.

  Her smile. Her hips. Her breasts. She had been kind to him. She had relied on him.

  Even though she had been crapping her guts out for two days, Sage still wanted her, and he felt an obligation to her. There was something about rescuing Penny—and getting in her pants—that overrode all argument. And Nora had been kind to him. They could be saved.

  Sage knew he was being foolish and it might get him killed. There was nothing about hanging around the Starbucks Clan that amounted to a survival advantage. But he couldn’t see a way to get Penny and Nora away from them. If he asked them to leave, the three would have to go to his hidey-hole to collect his gear and then the jig would be up. They would be seen making their getaway, and Sage would have to face the group, admitting that he had lied to them about sharing his supplies. If he even just told Penny about his stuff, she might force him to tell the others. He simply could not see how to get away from this sinking ship with Penny and Nora without tremendous risk of losing his stockpile.

  But what good was survival if he was alone?

  Sage shook his head, deciding to stay for now. Without him, the Starbucks Clan was doomed, and Sage couldn’t live with himself if Penny or Nora ended up dead because he had been too selfish to share, at the very least, what he was quickly learning about survival. Heck, they would have already been dead already if Sage hadn’t found the onions or devised the water filter.

  Now that they had been decimated by the wandering mob, they would listen to reason. They would accept Sage as their leader—the only choice in order to survive. Even Justin couldn’t fail to see that now.

  Highway 150, Outside of Mount Washington, Kentucky

  Mat stared into a skyline twined with a thousand tendrils of smoke. He stood atop a mountain and he should have been able to see the downtown high rises of Louisville. All he could see were smoky cords and a sickly haze with a few tall buildings poking through the soup. To him, it looked like Mosul, Iraq.

  “Can we please go get them, Mat?” Caroline begged. “I have a really bad feeling about this.”

  “Babe, if we go rushing into that mess, we will lose everything and maybe get ourselves killed. Without my Raptor, we’re just another pair of helpless refugees.”

  “I don’t care about our gear. I care about my parents and my brother.” Caroline didn’t seem to understand Mat’s training or his reluctance.

  “Where do they live? In what part of the city?” Mat pulled out the Kentucky map.

  “They live in Beechwood Village. I think it’s right about here.” Caroline pointed to the east side of the metropolis on the map.

  Mat tried to picture the big city and how danger would develop after a collapse of civil order. Gangs would probably hit their own areas first, but then fan out into surrounding suburbs to scavenge, eventually ranging far into the co
untryside. He had seen it happen before. Gangs eventually figured out that the countryside was rich in resources and isolated in terms of defense. Ultimately the gangs would see that the countryside gave them the easiest pickings. But they would first hit the areas they knew best.

  “Where’s the ‘wrong side of the tracks’ in Louisville? Where’s most the crime?”

  “I didn’t live there more than a year before going off to school. I grew up in Charleston.” Caroline thought about it for a moment. “I’m pretty sure most of the crime comes from the west side of the 65 Freeway. Right here.” She traced a line through the map of the city.

  “And your parents live here?” Mat pointed to the area, maybe twenty miles to the east of the 65 Freeway.

  “Yes. It’s a really nice neighborhood. A long way from the bad spots,” she said, obviously doing her best to convince Mat that a rescue could be accomplished.

  “It’s been over a week since the collapse of the stock market. Anything could be going on in that suburb.” Mat sighed, exasperated with how little he knew about the tactical situation. “We’d be going in totally blind. We can’t afford to lose this truck. If we do, we die. I’m sure your parents would want you to live. Let’s just consider that for a moment.”

  Based on the look on her face and the way her hands kept wringing, Mat didn’t think she heard a word he said.

  She countered. “I trust you. Let’s give it a try. We can always turn around and head back out if things look too dangerous.”

  “Actually, no. We probably won’t be able to turn around and head back out if things go south. When you stumble into an ambush, it’s usually already too late for anything but the crying. Trust me, this is a game I know.”

  Caroline stood in front of him, pleading with her big green eyes, her dark hair framing her perfect face.