Lakewood, Continued.

A History of the End of the World

Earl

The sky was a leaden white, clouds low and full. That first storm had dumped three feet over two days. Five days later the sun, in painfully bright and damn near smoke-free skies, had melted most of it, except the parts of the back yard that were in shadow. I ventured back out and stopped by the brewery and the trading post, then headed south to see about a shopping center that was still mostly standing, off of what had been C470. The road wasn’t in great shape, and the truck had to work a little in some of the shadier sections. How do you repair a road? I drove past a reservoir that was still intact and slightly iced over; I’d heard about it, and knew it had decent fishing. Eventually I saw the shopping center, and I arrived at the parking lot without any damage to the truck by picking my way slowly off the highway onto Kipling. Kipling bisected the shopping center, and it did appear to be full of mostly intact buildings. A Safeway with windows blown out probably had nothing of value, but otherwise some gas stations, a liquor store, restaurants that were boarded up. Possibilities.

And a pickup. Matte but bright red, jacked-up high on some unearthly suspension, festooned with light bars and brush guards, a matte putty colored camper shell. Truck’s front-end nose-down in a bar ditch next to the road. Flags: one Texas, one Don’t Tread on Me, flapping from the back. I’d been on the lookout for this truck for a very long time. And here it was. I stopped, and stared, and waited.

After thirty minutes, nothing had moved other than the flags and one gray rabbit. I rolled forward, slowly, keeping my right hand on the pistol I’d found at the house, a giant single action .44 revolver. Rolled within ten feet of the rear of the truck and stopped. On the ground next to the truck, a pair of legs. Abdomen rising, raggedly, shallow breathing? I got out of the truck, pistol ready.

“OK?” I shouted a little too loudly, “are you OK?”

A weak voice, raspy and phlegmatic replied. “Fuck you.”

“Hey man, I’m just here to…” and a hand came up, slowly, with a pistol. I heard a click as I pulled the trigger of the .44; his was empty. Mine blasted a hole in his lower abdomen, threw up a chunk of flesh and pink mist. The body jumped, the raised pistol flew as the arms spread wide.

I had never shot a human. I’d been prepared to, sure, but I’d never actually had to pull the trigger. It helped maybe that I couldn’t see its face.

I stood, ears ringing, hand hurting from the recoil. Pistol cocked again, just in case, but the body was still. Dead.

I walked slowly to the body, making my pistol safe. It was a bearded man, maybe in its thirties, wearing a black T-shirt and camo pants, a green and black neckerchief, a bright red baseball cap. It wasn’t terribly overweight, at some point may have been, the clothes overly large. The boots were tactical, the belt held thigh holsters and knives. One of its legs was wrapped with a tourniquet above an older wound still oozing bright red around a bandage just above his knee. The truck door was still open, and in it was a handgun and a semiautomatic of some sort. A quick glance inside and I saw there was a hole in the seat-front and through the floor.

The kinds of people who centered their lives around guns tended to die by them. This guy had apparently shot himself in the thigh, a life-ending wound if he’d hit an artery, exceptionally painful if he hadn’t. The trail of blood from the truck to where the body lay was too oxidized for me to know whether it’d been arterial, but the windshield had been sprayed with blood from the inside, and there was a significant pool of older blood around the body. He’d have been well dead if it had been arterial, though, in that 30 minutes that I’d sat and stared before I engaged it, I thought. Him. A person. A body. It.

My round had blown a furrow, cratering the torso on exit. I didn’t look at it for more than just a glance.

The truck held some weaponry, but few rounds of ammunition. There was a cooler with a few rabbits, a couple of six packs of beer, and two large bottles of water. There was a notebook, and a map; the map had been marked with locations including my house, the brewery, the trading post, the art museum, a handful of places I’d not seen that were apparently populated. My house. Next to the marked locations, brief descriptions: the symbols for male or female or both, with numbers. Dog. Chickens. Electricity. My house.

What gave me chills was, each location had a “difficulty rating.” My house was a 4. He’d been watching my house.

The body had a vest on, a sort of fishing vest with a lot of pockets. A few feet away, the torn and bloody vest had a name tag from Bass Pro Shops: Earl. I looked in the rear of the truck, careful to not open anything; I wouldn’t put it past these guys to booby trap their own vehicles, but I didn’t see anything too obvious through the smoked glass windows of the camper shell, no obvious trigger wires. Carefully opening the camper shell rear gate, I saw that the bed carried camping supplies, a couple of boxes of ammunition for a 9mm and a 5.56, and a box with photos and a bible. The bottom of the bed was covered with a foam mattress, and the inside of the small space smelled of body odor and stale tobacco smoke.

I grabbed the ammunition and the pistols and semi-automatic; the trading post could use them. Everything else I left in place. I couldn’t be sure about the water, didn’t need the beer, and the rabbits, I had plenty of and who knows how he’d found them.

I stepped over the body again and walked to my truck, pausing to pick up the 9mm pistol he’d raised. It was definitely empty, and I couldn’t guess why, but as I got back in the truck, I saw a pack of dogs about fifty yards away in the shade of a semi trailer, staring intently at me. Maybe he’d been trying to keep the dogs away. I couldn’t know.

I drove slowly back the way I’d come, no longer interested in finding supplies. I needed to talk to someone, and I headed back toward the trading post.