Maybe someday someone will read these journals. Hopefully by then there’s more people, and they are in a better world.
Some mornings, I wake up disappointed that the world has not been ended by the Giant Rock from Space, or some similar planet-killing calamity. Instead, the world hangs on, persistent, insistent, annoying, as we all slowly, fitfully die.
I think I turned thirty-two today. It's not really very easy to know the date for sure, but everything I have at hand says it's Wednesday, August 8th, 2035, and that means birthday. When I was a kid, it meant a whole lot more than just staring at the cobwebbed ceiling of the house of the moment, it meant way more than just being annoyed that I was still, for now, breathing.
But now, well, now is now, and now isn't much the place to celebrate.
I’m writing this to help me keep track, more than anything. I don’t know if anyone will ever see this, and I don’t much care, but I suspect that if someone does, they’ll probably dispute everything I state as fact, and that’s fine. That hatred of facts is part of what got us here anyway, but I’m just trying to give voice to my history. My voice, my history. I’m also going to rush a bit through the recent past, since I’ll approach it in detail as needed along the way, but it will be important for you to know some groundwork, some base facts about where I am and how I got here.
First, the end of civilization, briefly.
California
It started in 2020, this demise, but really it started in the 1900s, but really it started when folks stopped trying to exist in nature, instead tried to exist in direct and violent spite of nature. In 2020, though, the first modern global pandemic started, and it took two years for it to become an endemic, seasonal thing. By then about 150 million people had died worldwide that would have lived otherwise. Vaccines were created, changed to fit mutations, plans to vaccinate with boosters semi-annually. A striking number of people in developed countries chose to die for political reasons, taking quite a few people with them as they refused science and the good of their fellow man, extending and complicating the pandemic. The virus itself couldn’t survive sunlight, but enough people ignoring basic human kindness meant it could cripple giant systems of government and economy.
The second pandemic afterward was fast and far more brutal. Exceptionally deadly, I read it was killing at least 10 percent of the people infected initially, that it had an R0 value of something stupid like 18, up there with measles. By then the world population, fatigued and despondent, just kind of stopped trying. By then, the effectiveness of antibiotics, unrelated to the pandemics and already trending downward, was lessened to the point of also having a deadly impact on the population. By then the number of dead included a whole bunch of folks who cared for the sick; the healthcare professionals still alive avoided hospital work in large enough numbers that, in the US, a government mandate was drawn up and executive powers were put in place, instituting a draft, complete with fast-tracked EMS and nursing training. People with existing skills were pressed into service by threat of prison. That was the start of the very rapid slide for the large, developed countries. Millions died.
I'm not sure, to this day, why I survived. There wasn’t much analysis of the third and subsequent pandemics; most of the scientists who could study and understand these things were either already dead, politically silenced, or quieted by fear of murder (several prominent doctors and epidemiologists were straight-up lynched by angry mobs during the second pandemic). Those that wanted to pursue the viruses simply didn't have resources to do the task. The diseases that killed most of humanity could have been the mutations of any number of existing strains or could have been entirely new bugs. I remember seeing threads on social media about the sudden thaws of permafrost in Siberia releasing clouds of methane and new pathogens at the same time; I never knew if any of that was true, but plenty of folks decided it was. There were rumors that engineered bioweapons had been accidentally released when facilities were overrun, or governments were overrun by zealots who were determined to end things. There were rumors, deepfake videos, unbelievable news. By the end of it, when civilization started to flicker out, the threads on social media platforms were entirely populated by bots, little pieces of not-very-intelligent AI that would seed discussion with keywords from whatever ideology spawned them. I'm pretty sure they're still there, autonomous, robotically emptying panic and threat into the void, no human eyes left to read them.
Thirty-two, today. I guess survived because I was lucky for parts of it, vaccinated for parts of it, and I was apparently immune for parts of it. It helped that I was young but not too young, and relatively fit. I did get sick, I was exceptionally ill in the summer of 2027, when hospitals were rare and the world was on fire, literally. Wildfires and entire urban centers up and down the west coast burned, uncontrolled. I remember that time as being the very worst thing I had experienced, in a lifetime of pretty bad things. I'd holed up in a state supplied apartment, plastic sheeting over the closed windows and the door, sealed with tape, trying to keep the smoke out enough for a cheap air purifier to work. No air conditioning, alone, very little medicine, and a steady high fever that rocked me for days on end, came in waves. I have no idea what I had, had no idea what it would do to me. I didn’t know if I would survive it. There was no help, any hospital camps were overrun anyway, and I could hardly stand. I stayed as hydrated as I could between bouts of vomiting and diarrhea, I took cold showers, passed out in cold baths only to wake choking on the now warm water sliding up my nose and down my throat as I slid into the bath. After ten days, I was well enough to drink potato broth, strong enough to pack most of what I still owned into a backpack as the fires closed in. The first day I was able to think somewhat clearly and coherently, I grabbed my pack and bag, and slowly headed to the evacuation center in a deep flurry of falling ash, one of the very last to leave.
The town, Healdsburg, gone. Santa Rosa, Petaluma, Novato, pretty much all the little cities all the way down 101 to southern Marin county, gone.
I was lucky. It didn't feel like it was the good kind of lucky. By the end of 2027, part of a bedraggled group of refugees heading for a camp near Vacaville, it felt like it was the bad kind of lucky. We got to the camp and hunkered down, but things kept getting worse. The outbreaks of disease got serious. A whole lot of the folks around me refused to wear masks, refused to take part in their own survival, even while in a camp with only rudimentary services knowing that there was no hospital. They protested, violently clashing with the government forces outside the camp, staging escapes that cost lives and spread illness. They fought the newly drafted and terrified medical personnel. They attacked vaccination centers. They died in huge numbers as new and old strains of disease whipped through the camps.
I used a mask, kept my distance, got vaccinated when I could, and paid closer attention to my health and what food I could get. Heavily guarded vaccination pop-ups were staged, unannounced, in the camp. Vaccinations had moved on to using colors and numbers rather than strain names: had you already been vaccinated for Blue 4? If so, you only needed Orange 1 and Yellow 1. The little news I could get from the public terminals and the very spotty cellular connections (overwhelmed by the large concentration of customers imprisoned in one tiny spot) wasn't good; the entire world seemed to be enduring the same things as I was while leadership postured and maintained their cash flow from invested masters. The US government didn't really fall in any classical sense. It was instead like Lebanon was in 2020: It ignored solutions and problems as members of congress played mediapathic statements in loops to the hungry data streams. Blame, threat, fear, claims of being unable to do anything while the Other Side sabotaged progress, the congress people eventually started dying from the same diseases they said were fake, denying, to their last breath, that they were dying at all. There were rumors of assassinations, unfounded rumors of foreign takeover. Political power filtered down to secretaries and clerks, chains of continuity stretched thin to the point of argument, and by the time the national government was no longer equipped, nothing changed. I didn't notice a bit of difference, standing in a mostly empty camp that had once been filled with refugees. How could I care? It made no difference to my survival.
There was, around this time, a long period of heavy violence, extreme and ugly and at the time it felt endless. I heard rumors that it happened everywhere, like a signal had gone out and people jumped into war. Citizens versus citizens, the military, the police. Ugly and brutal, it eventually burned out from attrition as waves of illness, disaster, and in-fighting broke ideologies and killed the remaining faithful. In our camp, I was lucky; I kept my head down, I stayed in at night and most of the day. I stayed because I expected…something? I wasn’t sure what was happening and hoped that something would arrive to help. Our camp, in any event, was well stocked, years of supplies available. “We love the devil we know,” I think is how that saying went. A small number of us stayed, but that number slowly dwindled as we were whittled down by illness, escape, and suicide. I held on as long as I could, wanting some better sign or some confluence of events, some improvement before I tried to get out. Waiting for the right time. Paralyzed by fear of the unknown and a routine, I stayed.
I waited too long. The people left over started seeing me, eyeing me, and watching the exits. Finally, one night, when someone kicked the door to my shelter in, they found me dead. They ransacked my room, found nothing useful, and moved on as I stared. Obviously, I wasn't dead, but I certainly looked and smelled the part, having greased my skin with a yellowing putrid animal fat that I'd been squirreling away, mixed with ash to make me look, well, dead. I'd planned it for a few days by then, never sure when the day would come, and practiced, choking on the stench, biding my time, and squirreling away food and water and waiting for the few people around me to lack interest in my existence. That day, I’d seen and heard enough that my gut told me, it was too late to leave safely. I was in trouble. That night I'd heard someone kick a door, and then a gunshot, then a few moments later another door, another gunshot...methodical, moving my way. I'd hoped a dead body wasn't worth a bullet. I was lucky.
Hours later, quiet except for a bonfire at the northern edge of the camp where several men were drunkenly shouting and singing, I slipped away, and found a town nearly empty, half burned. I saw dogs, coyotes, and sometimes people, very occasionally and very briefly as they ran looking for cover. I approached no one, looted as much food as I could find, and holed up where I could. In the dark red and yellow air, I hid anytime I sensed any sort of movement or heard noise. I bedded down in abandoned back yards and abandoned houses. I lost track of days, then weeks, then seasons. Fire raged past or through, I moved and survived. I needed to get out of California, and I needed the guts to do it, to take on whatever that was that existed outside of the smoke. I had to actually have the desire to move on, to live outside of this. One day, it just occurred to me to finally, finally, finally leave home.
I found a diesel pickup parked in front of a house. I camped out in their back yard for a day, watching the house for movement. Satisfied that no one was there, I broke in, ignoring the impotent but loud alarm, and found keys for the truck. I packed it with what non-perishable food I could find, whatever medicines and bandages they had, and a few bottles of Vodka that I could use to help sterilize wounds or my overactive thinking.
I was mobile.
Looking back on it, the biggest challenges in those first months at the camp had to do with not knowing. I couldn’t know what was “actually happening” to the area around me or the world at large. Once I’d made my move and left camp, things didn’t improve, information-wise. In pockets and subdivisions that had some power, emergency broadcast radio messages would sometimes play, lighting up nearby phones, that creepy grinding electronic noise punching out of televisions left on in abandoned apartments and houses. I would find a place that had electricity or a cell signal and try to get some news, some meaningful signal. At times I could connect to the internet, and at times I could get to pieces of services on pieces of content delivery networks, but this was mostly useless, broken content, outdated and unusable.
I couldn’t know if the water still running from some taps was potable. I couldn’t know what the smoke carried. I spent all my time with a head full of noise, all of it some emergent higher frequency, an overwhelming blast of questions that, if I stopped for a moment to pay any attention to it, would kill me by decision paralysis. Instead, I relied on newfound animal instincts, slowly learning to trust my gut, and mitigating risk as much as possible. I avoided people and found that the very few people I did encounter were side-glancing, terrified animals like me. We had no interest in attacking anyone or in any sort of communication. We had a wealth of stuff from what was left in the city; food and shelter were not an issue. There was no battle for resources. And yet, gunfire was still present, and at night sometimes it would be long, drawn out bursts.
I moved, a lot, initially. With no real plan, I decided to try and go east. In moments of quiet, lying in someone else’s bed, when I could think enough to form a plan, I had a vague recollection of an article I’d read online about how, when civilization fell (at the time, they’d given us 30 years), island nations like Ireland, Iceland, New Zealand, and even Great Britain, would be the more likely survivors due to a long history of self-sufficiency and a relatively recent, not fully bedded-in, reliance on global trade. In my late night, edge-of-sleep imaginings, I formed a plan to head east away from the fires, hopefully eventually finding a boat. Along the way I’d have to learn how to sail a boat, and navigate a boat, and how to survive on the ocean. It was pretty darn crazy, as far as plans went, but I wanted to see Ireland. Had always wanted to see Ireland. If I made it, I could possibly farm, and live. I’d need to learn how to do both.
By the time my parents were my age, they’d already been to Ireland (and a whole bunch of other interesting places) on vacation. They’d had houses and careers. They’d started thinking of having kids. My mom was 36 when she’d had me, and 38 when she’d had my sister; my dad was two years younger. They both died in the second year of that first big pandemic; she was unable to take the vaccine because of reactions, she’d said. My father was vaccinated but died after a car accident; he’d have survived had the hospitals not been choked by the infected unvaccinated. My mother died three months later, alone in a parking lot of a hospital, in a makeshift shelter. She drowned in her own fluids as oxygen went scarce and SARS-CoV-2 wracked her body.
My sister killed herself shortly after that. And that’s all I’ll say about that.
When I left home at 19, it was because the town we grew up in was being destroyed by fire. I made it to Healdsburg, into an apartment provided by the state. Back when government still functioned at the local level, hotels, long abandoned by shrinking tourism, were turned into housing for fire refugees. I was there when the inevitable wall of fire showed on the northern horizon.
Things happen fast when things happen. The end of civilization was sped along, it seemed, by the rampant desire that some folks had to just let things go, to give up. I never felt like giving up and would have fought harder than I did had I had any idea about what to fight or how. When the violence came, I was already an adrenally empty shell, terrified and incapable of any longer-term thinking. Hollow, hungry, sick, and alone, I concentrated on the moment in ways that would have impressed the Buddha himself. I lived each breath, and nothing more.
After escaping the camp in Vacaville, I moved east to Sacramento, by then a hint of a city in a flaming horizon. For months I’d not seen the sky, the sun. Ash rained down, and the air, superheated, would at times crack with lightning and thunder. I wore masks, layers of cotton or poly and cotton 24 hours a day. I saw a few groups of people, never more than ten, moving west. We would approach carefully, fearfully, on the road; me in my stolen diesel pickup, them on foot or in buses or cars. Slowly creeping by, at times I would be facing a rifle or pistol aimed at me, more often just a sooty, hollow stare. West was a more natural destination; water and structure were there, boats maybe, but Ireland was a long way from the Pacific, and while in my mind Japan would be still standing and working, it was just as likely that I’d make it across the country and find a boat. Just as unlikely, anyway. I couldn’t know what the conditions were on the coast in California, any more than I could have known what the conditions were on the east coast, but the buffer of the time it would take me to cross the country would maybe change the nature of things, maybe.
Sacramento was mostly a loss, and most of what was left standing was looted. I’d stolen a hand pump, the kind made for diesel tanks in the back woods. I found a diesel tractor trailer and siphoned out enough fuel to fill my truck plus a couple of gas cans, and drove very slowly through town, picking my way around obstacles, always looking for a place to stop and spend a night. Not very many people. I didn’t know at the time that most of the population wasn’t killed by violence, but the violence certainly didn’t help, and now there just weren’t people anymore in any concentration. This was true throughout the country, maybe throughout the world. I found in Sacramento a thin newspaper from years before that claimed, in front page panic news, that sixty percent of the world population had died from the latest virus as best as anyone could tell, that war was everywhere, that New York City had suffered huge explosions, and that the newspaper would cease printing, this was it, so long, have a nice survival. I still have that newspaper, as it represents some of the only organized information I’d seen in months, the last of its kind that I would see. I couldn’t know if it was real, but it fit what I saw, or rather, didn’t see.
When I think about it, I can probably count all the people I’ve seen since leaving the camp. It’s less than two hundred, and who knows how many of those folks have since died. Who knows what new infectious things we carry.
It wasn’t just the viruses and violence that killed us. Way before any of that, we’d done ourselves in with pointed ignorance on a grand scale, ignoring the environment, refusing to try and curb our greed. Without the viruses, without the violence, we’d have ended anyway. Small, systemic failures like antibiotics and modern electronics, and large systemic failures like climate change, had disabled our survival. We’d grown to expect failure, been trained to accept it, since all the devices and systems that we relied on, all failed as a normal course of action. Failure wasn’t designed in, but it wasn’t fixed, there was no attempt to root cause failures. It was easier to just replace things when the failures got too frequent. Our phones, our computers, our networks, our insurance, our government all failed in various ways that were unsurprising and well taught. We’d grown used to things moving fast for reasons of commerce, without regard for things like reliability. We desired constantly expanding capability like we’d been trained by the folks who created the stuff, and we accepted that everything didn’t work, and that’s just how things were. Using that as a foundation for reality, it turns out, was a bad idea. We’d decided long before the end that things were going to fail anyway, so why bother.
Rising seas swamped Florida, and Miami was under something like six feet of water at any given moment. The shift in currents and jet stream patterns had made bits of the northern US uninhabitable eight months out of the year. Drought wrecked California completely, driving food prices up as most food was grown there. Alaska experienced heat and drought unlike anything in recorded history, and what was left was on fire. Texas started seeing temperatures as high as 130F in places like San Antonio, and Houston was largely flooded, mostly abandoned as reams of hurricanes and tropical storms bore through it. New Orleans was gone. New York City was hit by heat waves and gigantic tropical storms back-to-back, then apparently attacked by southern zealots with huge trucks made into bombs. Across the nation, routed by viruses and lack of medical care, crushed by violence, drowning in heat and flood, choking on smoke, the population thinned drastically and very, very quickly. Things happen fast when they happen. So much death so quickly made already crippled supply chains fail completely. Routes disrupted by new weather meant remaining supplies dwindled. During the heaviest violence, I was safely in the middle of a refugee camp that had been stocked for a large population to last a significant amount of time. In that way, I was lucky, again. I had food and water while the world fell. The population in the camp dwindled, and those supplies stretched out. By the end, the guys who’d forcibly taken the camp had most likely done so because it was still well stocked and easily defended.
Violence was weird, though. With cities emptied, there was plenty of stuff. It was relatively easy to find food and water and shelter. There may have still been tribal ideology, a desire for protecting of turfs, some sort of proto-government or militia, something that tied folks to their guns, but that didn’t seem to last long. The kind of people who are well supplied in weapons tend to use them, and the risk associated eventually caught up to them. At one point in Sacramento, I narrowly avoided getting shot approaching an intersection; to my left was an on ramp that was blockaded by a handful of men in trucks with guns; they fired a few rounds into the air and the bed of my truck as a warning, puncturing one of my gas cans, while I slowly drove past. The next day, as I was leaving town on that same stretch of road, prepared now to evade them, the blockade appeared to have been burned or blown up or both, and there were five bodies there. They died for less than the nothing that was left, and whatever had killed them had moved on.
Nevada
When I finally decided to get gone, I drove toward Lake Tahoe. The roads were a mess and fire had overrun the highway outside of Nebelhorn, buckling the asphalt, so I had to back-track. With no GPS and an older map, I couldn’t risk leaving the marked roads. It took days, but I finally made it to highway 395, then 208 and into Nevada. The desert couldn’t burn, but the smoke persisted, which meant the temperature wasn’t as much of an issue. It was September, and 113 degrees. I was on my way east. My pickup, a diesel Chevy Colorado, sealed up with tape on all but the driver’s door, air filter plugged into an inverter, was running just fine. I felt a little confident, out there, alone in the smoke.
You might be curious what I was carrying. By this point, I’d whittled my stuff down, in case I had to abandon the truck. I had a large Kelty backpack that I’d stolen from a Big 5 sporting goods store. In it: a small REI tent, three pair of jeans, five pair of socks, five pair of underwear, five light T shirts, five heavier long sleeved T shirts, a couple of fleece shirts, and a pillow. Attached were two water bottles with filters, stolen from the same Big 5. In another duffel bag I had three days’ food, water purification tablets that I would never use, a first aid kit, extra bandages, two bottles of rubbing alcohol, a bottle of hydrogen peroxide, my phone, five maps, an orienteering compass, a book on orienteering, and a book called “When There’s No Hospital” about field medicine. In both bags I had multitools and I carried a large folding knife. Both bags had a few hundred feet of paracord. If I had to abandon the truck, the Kelty and the other bag would be all that I would take.
Outside of those dire essentials, I had a couple of hats. I also had some vitamin C and vitamin D, five tubes of toothpaste, and five toothbrushes, plus four packs of floss. I’d become obsessive about taking care of my teeth. I was careful about what I ate, paranoid of cracking a tooth. Same went for sunscreen; I had sixteen tubes of SPF-80 that I applied religiously, as well as zinc oxide, trying to avoid skin cancer. Taking control of what I could of my health felt vastly more empowering than it actually was; it really felt like I was doing something for myself. Odd to me: the Walgreens I stole most of my supplies from had plenty of toothpaste and toothbrushes on the shelves, but no sodas. I had vodka, six 1.5L bottles.
In the passenger seat I had a home air filter plugged into an inverter, sitting on a couple of books about plants and foraging. On the passenger floorboard were parts for the truck, a spare air filter, and a light wool blanket. I’d ransacked four different NAPA and AutoZone locations, raided their remaining supply using their (thankfully still printed on paper) catalogs, looking for anything that would work on my truck. Radiator hoses, belts, a battery, light bulbs, tire repair kit, air compressor, an oil filter (not for oil changes, but in case the filter got punctured), oil (ditto), and a single bottle of antifreeze.
In the back seat with my bags was a single Remington 700 bolt-action rifle in .308, about two hundred rounds of ammunition, a Winchester 12-gauge pump and about a hundred rounds of 12-gauge #4 shot. Strictly intended for hunting, I’d not used them at all outside of zeroing the scope on the big Remington, which I’d stolen from a house outside of Sacramento. I did carry the shotgun with me when I went into houses and stores, but I’d never encountered another person on any of those trips. I was careful to stake out a location, watch for evidence of people, avoiding anyplace that wasn’t obviously entirely abandoned. I avoided risky encounters using patience and my rapidly developing gut instincts.
I had a few five-gallon water bottles, a case of Pedialyte, and in the bed of the truck I had two 10 gallon cans of diesel, three five gallon cans, my hand fuel pump, another five gallons of water, and a bicycle. The bicycle was there for when the truck either died, broke, or failed in some predictable way. I’d gone for a diesel because they tend to be pretty flexible with fuel, have stout motors, and they can get decent mileage, but I had no idea what was out there for diesel vehicles. I had to break into a dealership and paw through scattered literature to finally find a brochure for the Chevy that would work. Then I spent a few days driving around in a stolen Kia until I saw a truck that matched the brochure. It had performed well so far, no surprises. The mileage was decent even with the extra weight of the fuel and all, and I had not run into a need to fuel too much from my cans yet; there were always semi-trucks or truck stops where diesel could be siphoned.
That was my day-to-day, those first few days on the road: slowly driving the abandoned highways, avoiding other cars (abandoned, some burned out) driving around old blockades, and generally taking as much time as I needed to safely get down the road. My pace was deliberate, unhurried. My phone, with attached USB cable, wasn’t good for anything but music, and the stereo and my phone could communicate, though the two would often disconnect randomly. I had been in Nevada for a day, driving on highway 50, when I decided to pull off near a partially filled reservoir in what the signs said was the Lahontan State Recreation Area. I’d pulled off up the road a bit from a marina, and parked. The night was settling in; the sky had been milky at best, gray and layered with smoke at worst, and the darkness was swiftly coming. I had enough time to light a small fire and start to prepare my dinner.
Just south of where I was camped, I noticed a light. LED and firelight, another camp, and fairly close, at the edge of a parking area next to the marina. I’d seen a few cars in there, but I was so used to seeing abandoned vehicles that it had not occurred to me that there would be someone here. This being the only water I’d seen in a while, it made sense. I’d figured animals would show, maybe I could bag something, but seeing another camp had me on edge. I debated packing back up and had started to do just that when a headlamp-equipped person started heading my way. I could make out the silhouette of a man carrying a long gun, casually, in one hand.
“You can stop right there,” I said, maybe a bit louder and more panicky than I intended. It’d been a while since I’d used my voice. The man stopped, holding his free hand up. “I’m not sure what you need, but I can assure you I don’t have much. I’ll give you what I can spare, but I don’t want any trouble” I said, picking up the shotgun.
“Sorry to bother you, sir,” said the man, his voice even, raspy. “I just wanted to see who was over here, make sure there wasn’t going to be any trouble.” Trouble, we both euphemized. He’d stood, the rifle still just casual, it’d be a deliberate motion to bring it up. I held the shotgun barrel down, loose, but ready to use.
“Well, it’s just me. I have to say I’m surprised to see anyone out here, or anyone at all really. If you’ll give me a second, I’ll put on my mask and you can come over.”
The headlamp nodded. I placed the shotgun in the crook of my right arm and awkwardly held it while I fished my mask out of a pocket and over my face. I set the gun down, then, and sat. If he wanted to shoot me, he’d had plenty of time.
“C’mon over. I have ravioli,” I said.
He walked to the edge of the circle of light thrown by my fire, and sat down, placing the rifle next to him. He was a thin man, older than I, maybe in his fifties. Clean shaven, head shaved like mine, he was not wearing a mask. On his belt was some sort of automatic pistol in a holster.
“Name’s Barry. Weird to meet you,” he said, holding his hand out. I shook my head.
“Not to be rude, I don’t shake hands. My name is Cade. Coming through from California, started out in Sacramento,” I said. “Heading to Denver, for now.”
“Well sir,” he’d put his hand down, unoffended, “I dunno how Cali is and I’m curious, but Denver is mostly burned out. Huge buildings there, burned for months. Most of the surrounding area is OK, though. The mountains are mostly burned out by now. They’ve had some hard winters there, but things seemed to be evening out when I left,” he said.
“If you don’t mind me asking,” I said, awkwardly aware of how formal our exchange had sounded so far, “can you tell me about the trip so far? I’m hoping it won’t be too…eventful.”
He looked at me, eyes watery like mine with smoke. I wondered if I had the same ancient, deep stare, some pre-human thing behind his eyes reaching out. I’d glimpsed it in the mirror, but his seemed a permanent fixture. Anyone not from this time and place would see two people in a barely contained full panic. “The trip I took was a bit round about. I’m not sure what you’ve heard, and I’m happy to talk about it, but first I need to ask you something.”
“Sure, go ahead.”
“I don’t mean to surprise you but there’s someone else with me, and she’s kind of hiding over in the bushes just there.” He said, motioning with his head. “Is it OK if she comes over? Understand that, if she comes over and you try anything silly, it’ll end poorly.”
I looked over. I’d heard nothing in the bush, couldn’t imagine how someone could have snuck up to my camp.
“I…yeah, she can come over. No worries, but I respect you asking” I said. He motioned to the bushes, and a girl about ten walked over.
“This is my neighbor’s daughter. When all hell broke loose, she showed up at my door in St Louis, and told me…she didn’t ask, she told…that I had to take her to California. She has family there, and they had a plan. So we’ve been on the road for what feels like a decade now, but it’s maybe been a months. She doesn’t much talk, but her name is Katrina.”
I wondered if Katrina was aware of what had happened to California. Maybe we’d get to that. She stared at me, half behind Barry, holding him.
“Welcome, Katrina. I have ravioli,” she’d been eying my can of Chef Boy-Ar-Dee. “You can have a few cans, if you’d like?” She nodded, staring at the can. I reached into my pack and pulled out three cans; I had a half case in the back of the truck. She thanked me with a small nod, and crouched next to the fire, opening a can and scooping the contents with her fingers before I could offer a spoon.
We settled in, filled in some gaps with small talk and quick info, before I asked him again about Denver and the trip here.
“Hopefully you already know this, but this highway, 50? This highway was called ‘The Loneliest Road in America’ and that’s a good description. After a bit, you won’t see much in abandoned cars anymore. You’ll find roadkill,” and I nodded. I’d been driving slowly to mitigate this risk. “Nothing big enough to stop a truck in these parts; the cows and deer, if there are any, seem to be staying off the road. Plenty of coyote and packs of dogs. It’s taken us days to get here from something called Hinckley in Utah. I think we’ve seen three people, counting you. One I had a bad feeling about, and he’s ahead of you about two days in a big ol’ red four by four. Obnoxiously tuned, I don’t know how much extra fuel he’s carrying, but he’s dragging an RV trailer behind him.” I’d toyed with the idea, but it seemed pretty stupid, when I could bed down in just about any shelter. The extra weight and maintenance were troubling at best.
“Hopefully you have plenty of fuel. I suspect you’ll want to get it where you can when you can. Ely is probably your best bet,” and I nodded, Ely was the plan. He continued, “Utah is pretty bleak. I’m not sure what happened to some of those towns, but they look like war moved through them. Maybe the people in them took sides, maybe they couldn’t let go of something, but every little dot on the map looks like it was the scene of heavy fighting. We avoided spending too much time in Utah. I missed some sleep there.” Katrina looked up and him, eyes wide, acknowledging the moment. She’d seen some things in her short life, born into this failed world.
“Ultimately,” he said,” the Colorado part of the trip wasn’t too terrible. I think we saw one guy, one lady travelling together, they were heading down to New Mexico. I hear New Mexico mostly made it. Apparently not a lot of folks there to start with, and a bunch of ‘em are Navajo and other natives, and they just already knew how to do stuff. Might be the most populated state, now, I hear. I heard from those folks, they’d talked to two other folks who said Albuquerque is still lit up and night, that power is still there, that there’s forest fire but the cities still stand for the most part. To me it sounds a bit too good.”
I nodded. “I doubt,” I said, “that anywhere is paradise. Near as I can tell there’s just not enough of us left to qualify for a whole paradise.” He laughed, bleakly. We were quiet for a moment.
“How’s California,” he asked, glancing at Katrina. I looked at him, steady.
“You sure you want to know?” her eyes on me, big. He nodded, solemnly.
“Well alright. Sacramento is gone. The whole run of towns along 101 north of the tunnel, gone. I heard northern California, the very northern part of the state, well, it’s all forest. It’s been burning for years. I heard rumors that Oakland was pretty bad during the violence. San Francisco had huge fires. One of the bridges, I hear, was hit by a ship. Maybe on purpose. It’s tough to know what was real. I was in a camp in Vacaville back when. Rumor was that all southern California was on fire, a fire that stretched from the coast to the border. Anything that could burn, was. No way for me to know for sure. Whoever is left, they’re scared. I saw a couple of groups of people early on when I left the camp, and they were all headed to the coast.”
Katrina was just staring at me. I couldn’t read her face at all.
“We kind of knew, once the smoke didn’t clear, that California was still burning. Seems like it’s been burning for so many years.” He looked at Katrina, nodded toward her. “She’s not sure what’s left there. We’re heading toward Fort Bragg…”
I stopped him, shook my head. Katrina looked at the two of us. No tears, but something back there clicked. We were quiet, staring at the fire.
We talked more about the road and what news and rumors we knew. Talked about the past, the immediate past, the distant past. I pulled out a bottle of whiskey, and he a small flask. I got my pillow and a blanket for Katrina, and she lay down next to him. We drank a little, talked a lot. By the time he picked her up and returned to their camp, it must have been 2am. I still had words to say and hear, hungered for it, but my eyes were closing on their own, mid-sentence.
The next day I woke up some hours into the day, unsure how many. I was a little chilled. The air was particulate, fine, milky. I’d woken up because I’d heard something nearby, and clearing a breath-fogged window, saw a coyote sniffing at the contents of the fire, licking at an empty ravioli can. I started the truck, startling it. Got out and stretched, watching him watch me as he trotted off. The parking lot where Barry and Katrina were staying was missing a truck, I assumed it was theirs. I’d not heard them leave, but he’d left me a map of Nevada and a map of Utah annotated with dangers and warnings, descriptions of vehicles they’d seen written in the margins in small girl handwriting. I cleaned up, smothered the embers of the campfire, and headed east into the milk-white bright morning.
Denver was where I’d decided to tell people I was going, until I got there. It sounded far less crazy than Ireland, for one, and I didn’t have a need for anyone to know my actual destination. I’d been to Denver with my parents and sister when we were kids. I’d been maybe nine, ten years old. She’d have been seven or eight. It was a fall trip, taken when schools had been closed for viruses. We’d flown in a nearly empty plane, wearing masks (well, my sister and I had to remind our mother, constantly, to wear hers properly, much to her annoyance), and arrived in a cold airport on the edge of the plains. I’d had it in my head that Denver was a mountain town, but it wasn’t. It sat on the edge of the mountains and the plains, a huge metro area. California had hills, and unless you went east or southeast, there was no far horizon. Denver, the view east seemed to go on forever. The hotel was a high rise, technically not Denver, but only a mile or two from the Denver zoo. The views of both the mountains and the plains were amazing despite the smoke (fires had been happening year ‘round by then), and I’d stare through binoculars I’d bought with birthday money, looking at everything I could. We drove up to Rocky Mountain National Park, which seemed to take forever, and followed traffic on a drive to a place where the road was above the trees, where it was below freezing and had already snowed a bit. Normally the road would have been closed by then, but weather was weird, and heavy snow had been happening later and later when it happened at all. We drove back down through the mountains, it really did take a full day to do so, and we were exhausted by the time we arrived in Golden, on the very edge of the mountains, west of Denver. I’d carried the memory of that trip with me. It wasn’t our first or our longest or even our best road trip, but the mountains had been otherworldly, and the city itself felt older, more settled than anything I’d seen in California.
Denver seemed as good a place as any to set up camp for a while, sit out the winter and read up on the things I would need to know, but hearing that it had been burned out was discouraging. I’d have to see it with my own eyes.
The loneliest road in America was straight with wide desert views. Initially I drove no faster than 45 miles an hour, and even that speed was risky versus a large animal, not that I’d seen any recently. I really should have known more about what animals were out here, on this drive. Visibility was decent, though, and anything big would hopefully be easy to spot. I settled into the drive.
Before we got burned out of home, before the pandemics, America had created a division, politically and socially, that echoed into Great Britain, Canada, and Australia. Looking back, there’s little surprise to this pattern; these countries were defined by their media, and the same media companies were prevalent in each. Opinions were shaped, then entire lifestyles and belief systems were groomed into being. Old ways of approaching the world and processing facts were thrown out in favor of new, less exacting, irrational ways of being. In their day-to-day life, people seemed to stop caring about whether they were objectively, factually correct, right, or wrong, and instead were satisfied with simply being louder, winning every conflict using less logic and more brute, hormonal force. Regular people who would never have a need to define and defend any life philosophy took up a shaky new reality and loudly proclaimed it as true and worth dying for in the face of all fact. The people who fell for these new belief systems could not be reasoned with using anything approaching logic. Everything was emotional, a belief system sold to them, something that was designed using the framework of things like religion to be immune to reason. Lines of thought that required someone to be both for and against an idea existed, untroubled, in the minds of the believers. It made things far worse that these believers held such strong opinions that they lived in a different conceptual reality, like some odd multiverse stitched into the fabric of the citizenry. Having irrational thoughts requires a divorce from the shared reality. These folks lived and died for a system of belief that had no basis in the shared reality of our universe. Ultimately, this cult-like mindset killed millions of people. Before the end, it created what would have been long term havoc in the lives of families and communities. Looking back, it’s sadly hilarious that any human being could be so susceptible to the equivalent of an online ad that was so brutally, simply constructed and so poorly thought out. Something subterranean, some ancient mammalian thing, had been entirely shuttered by irrational devotion, and people died in states of utter confusion and shock as the cold reality settled into their lungs and drowned them: they were wrong, they were wrong, they were wrong. Endless iterations of this scenario played out in the social media of the time: someone who refused to believe in vaccines and masks lay dying, and moments before being intubated, would deny to their last conscious breath that they had this disease. Worse still was the schadenfreude of the victims who recanted at death’s door and begged for the vaccine that it was far too late to give them, begged to be saved by the very people they’d spit on, mocked, and laughed at. Exhausted medical personnel had gone from disbelief and grief to shock, a numb inability to empathize with people who’d committed suicide and murder, spreading infection with a lack of understanding that was, simply, criminal. The Internet was created as a way of levelling knowledge, giving everyone access to the libraries of the world, to information that they’d never have had access to, to enable them to be better humans. In the end, the Internet created entirely different realities that were crude and deadly, realities impossible for some folks to even picture, much less understand. These alternate realities were derided as conspiracy theories, fantasy, philosophical jokes, crazy, stubborn ways of thinking, backward and ignorant. The results of those realities living among us, though, wasn’t imaginary, could not be conjured away with words or reason. Now that the population of the world had so heavily been impacted by the actions of a significant minority of humanity that simply didn’t live in the same reality, it seemed even more excessively odd, but hardly worth any effort to analyze, to ponder; bumper sticker jingoism had cost us the world. It was, in the end, sadly hilarious what people thought was important. When faced with the fires and pandemics, when faced with a planet that would no longer support human life, a significant number of people decided that it was all fake and chose to expend their lives and the lives of their communities for trinkets, for memes, for nothing, for less than nothing. In the end, however many of us that survived did so in the face of a conflict with an incompatible reality, a belief system that was incapable of supporting life for any long term. In the end, we had death chosen for us by a cult of ignorance.
Ahead on the horizon, a blockade of burned-out trucks and trailers. The location had been marked on the map Barry had given me, so it was expected, but still deserved caution. I stopped a hundred yards away and used the open driver’s door of my truck as a mount for the rifle, to steady the scope. The wreckage was older, years older. No animal movement, just oxidized, twisted metal and melted plastics. I started down the road, slowly, and drove to the barricade, stopped, and walked around the edge of it, making certain that the dirt didn’t hide anything, was undisturbed. I didn’t know what I was looking for, or how to process what I saw. I guess I expected something like a mine or trap to be easy to spot. The barricade had the melted red, white, and blue remnants of Chinese-sourced nylon Trump and American flags, and I put nothing past the believers. They’d proven that life meant nothing, especially the lives of anyone who would cross their path. Seeing nothing obvious, I got back in the truck and slowly pulled around the wreckage. For miles after I stared in my rearview mirror. It’s not like I’d never seen a barricade, but I couldn’t figure out why, out here in the middle of nothing, someone would bother. I was far into the state, this wasn’t a border control. It was far away from Utah. There wasn’t anything nearby, no towns or settlements. Major interstates would be choked with these, where people sought money or goods or violence during the end, but this route would have been mostly avoided. I chalked it up to the irrational, ill-fitting reality those folks tended to wear with pride. Someone had simply wanted conflict. It was impossible to know why or what had happened.
Not knowing was unusual, having been born and raised in a world that knew how to search for and instantly extract any arcane data. We’d evolved to externalizing our thinking, dumping the contents of our lives, however interesting or mundane, into the stream that fed everyone around us. We relished in shared experience over wireless data flows, shared jokes and tragedies, lived our lives outside of ourselves, our tribal instincts digitized. Every moment had a hashtag, every event was photographed and filed away for later perusal. So many people felt defined by their data presence that they became specialized activists, capable of deep dives into topics that were of interest to a select few, relatively. Eventually this way of thinking broke stock markets, started to change the nature of the economy that defined us, created quantum processing and heady VR, promised extensive artificial intelligence, un-made and re-made communities. Before any of the promises could be realized, the insistent throbbing engine of greed coupled with the new, tacked-on alternate realities created a set of conditions that quickly and decisively asserted how fragile life could be. It had taken years for my brain, fed so insistently by the river of data I’d been born in, to settle back into something more animal, more capable in many ways. I was focused, and that focus felt like a superpower when, really, it was just common human animal stuff. The less exposure I’d had to the data, the more lost and free-falling I felt, the better I got at being human. In my teen years I’d heard about people taking time off, “unplugging” for a weekend or a week, people who had the luxury or the lifestyle to do so. This now permanent state was forcing me to quickly adapt, and my brain and body were surprisingly good at it. Millions of years of evolution are hard to defeat when allowed to flourish.
I drove, looking ahead, the road shimmering in the milky heat. By the end of the day, I’d reached the outskirts of Ely, what would have been a 4-hour trip in the old days had taken 8 hours. Even at that pace, I’d been driving faster than I would normally. I was road weary, and Ely had my nerves back on edge. I’d grown comfortable with the lack of civilization on the road. Being confronted with it was a bit of a shock. Ely had burned, partly. All the hotels were razed or broken badly, curtains and blinds fluttering, exposed to the elements. I had slowed to a crawl, and moved my entire upper body left and right as I looked for signs of people or animals. A pack of dogs, three medium sized and a couple of small “purse sized” ran down a side street, glancing back nervously at my truck. Dogs worried me more than coyotes. They had less fear of humans, in most cases. I tried not to think about pets or zoos. I’d heard rumors that some zoos, the animals were culled en masse to prevent them starving in their cages as their caretakers died or fled. I’d heard folks crying themselves to sleep over their pets. I didn’t like to think about it. At times in the camp, awake or in a twilight daze I would be consumed by the thought of my own dog. I can’t think about it.
Ely was quiet, and I expected it to be, since most small cities and towns had been ravaged by the second pandemic. There’d been some rioting and fighting here, barricades and scorch marks from conflict were evidence, dead hulks of national guard vehicles, piles of black ash, rusted steel, and melted asphalt where cars had burned. At an intersection of the highway and something called Great Basin Blvd, in the parking lot of a sporting goods store, there were pockets of brass shells next to barricades and dead cars, evidence of an intense firefight. Just down the road, a gas station with burned out pumps. I stopped and opened their in-ground diesel tank. It smelled strongly of fuel, but my hand pump, with a six-foot source hose, could not reach fuel. Further down the road, another gas station, this one almost entirely scrubbed from the earth, but the tanks were fuller, and my pump reached; I filled my tank and topped off the cans in the back. I drove back over to Great Basin, as it appeared to be the only main road that wasn’t highway 50 and drove south looking for a grocery store. Always worth the risk, food wasn’t an emergent issue for me yet, but I didn’t know what sort of problems I’d find in Utah. After driving slowly south for quite a mile or two, I pulled into the parking lot of Ridley’s Family Market. The store front was missing glass and doors, and the pharmacy attached was burned out. I sat in the truck, watching. Nothing animal moved. I honked, one very long blast of the horn, then waited. Nothing. I backed the bumper to the edge of the building and walked in with the shotgun and my headlamp. The shelves were mostly bare. There were some spices, so I grabbed salt and pepper, along with a bottle of hot sauce. The can section was mostly emptied, some fruit and some mushrooms. I found a bag of beans mostly intact, a little evidence of a rodent having chewed into it. The store smelled like every grocery store I’d been in since the camp: burned, molded, a tinge of rot under the smoke. I was able to find a few more cans of beans and tomatoes before leaving.
Ely was skeletal. It had probably always been. Wide vistas, huge horizons, and a town that just insisted on existing, wrought into place by stubborn humanity. The desert had already started to cover the roads and fill in the gaps of bare, burned remnants of houses and stores. I stopped at a residential intersection, avenue D and 13th, and staked out a ranch style house there. It had been someone’s pride and joy, that house, and it was well cared for. Untouched by fire, most of the houses on this stretch were standing and unbroken. An odd phenomenon that I saw in many suburban areas, I suspect such houses were either defended or were simply skipped over by any remaining humans. I sat and watched the house, eating from a can of black beans. After an hour, as dusk started to get serious, I grabbed the shotgun and my headlamp and headed in. The doors were all locked, and I pounded on each one, loudly. “I mean no harm, and have food and water,” I shouted to nothing. I felt self-conscious at times like these, my voice, raspy and unused, suddenly making my situation external and real. Speaking myself into existence. “I just need a place to stay for the night,” I shouted to no one. After a few minutes of this, looking around at the houses next door for any signs of movement, I kicked the back door in.
The house was stuffy and hot. It smelled of old decay, an underlying dryness. It did not smell of fresh anything, which was a good sign. No body odor, no animal smells, not even rodents. I closed the broken door, taped it shut with duct tape. The headlights of my truck shone in through the side window curtains. I flipped a light switch; it was worth checking, as the house had solar, but nothing happened. I unlocked the side door, nearest my truck, parked under a car port, and unloaded my things, opening windows, airing the house out.
Breaking into an empty home was something I just didn’t think about in any detail. The morality of using a dead person’s home as temporary shelter didn’t occur to me. It wasn’t a moral decision, really; the dead owners had no interest in their house any longer. I’d only done this a few times, but each time I would start looking through the former occupant’s things, looking at all their secret places and their public places, their pictures and diaries and checkbooks. Look through their drawers, contemplate their cabinets and unopened safes. It was a distraction that felt a little guilty at first, but became something like meeting the people, became a conjuring of sorts. I honored them as much as I could, brought them and their lives back to their houses.
I’d set up an LED lamp in the middle of the living room. As it had become dark, I’d looked into every room and the attic, shouting and banging around. In the master bedroom, the bed was deeply stained around human bones; someone had died there, then decayed, their bones not quite clean of their muscle and gristle. I closed the door, taped it shut. I’d seen plenty of dead bodies in passing, and some in detail in my time since Healdsburg. It was still creepy and sad, and my heart rabbited in my chest, looking for a place to hide until I calmed back down, the adrenal rush making me shake. The other rooms were all empty. Bedrooms were neat, beds were made. An office was sharply arranged. The layer of dust on everything was thick but not terrible, and I spread a stack of sheets and blankets out on the floor in the living room, rolled out my sleeping bag, and looked through an old photo album, one of a number at the bottom of a shelf. A family, a vacation, Christmases and birthdays, the visual history of their lives between 1979 and 1981. I fell asleep with their noises in my head, the room echoing.
A decent night’s sleep meant getting a few hours of deep sleep punctuated by vigorous panic and effortless fear. I would jerk awake, positive I’d heard something or someone. I’d dream of drowning, dream of being in out-of-control elevators, of being in driverless cars heading toward traffic. I’d wake to my ears ringing from sounds of crowds, sounds of war and violence. I’d wake briefly, then slowly and fitfully fall into a twilight slumber.
In the morning I searched through the kitchen cabinets and found them well stocked with canned goods. At camp I’d grown fond of what the residents called “cat food,” a salty, mushy, greasy potted meat product. I’d eat it on crackers with a touch of mustard or mayo, and it was easy to trade for; I wasn’t much for candy or sweets, and most folks hated the cat food, believed it to be actual cat food. The silver cans with fine black print: potted meat product, pork. A pull tab revealed the top layer of white fat, congealed over a pink mince. I admit, it wasn’t great looking, but it was a fine, salty, fatty snack. Fat was important. By now a lot of fats in storage had putrefied. Oils had oxidized. Fat sources that were preserved, I could really appreciate. Without fat, you die.
In the pantry, I found a pack of three cans of Deviled Ham, which was basically the same as the cat food I’d grown to love. I couldn’t believe my luck. There was a sleeve of tuna cans, pouches of instant soups, cans of beans and cans of soup, boxes of broth, and a twenty-pound bag of pinto beans. While food was relatively easy to find in the world, I knew to get what I could, when I could. I found vinegar, salt, pickles. I left the pickled pig’s feet but grabbed the pickled eggs. A stack of sardine cans, another favorite thing. The flour had gone molded and bug filled, the sugar had ants, a can of green beans was bulging weirdly, but there was a lot there I could take. I’d spotted a plastic storage tub in the closet that was filled with lace and satin, dumped it, and emptied the useable food in the pantry into it. Good haul. I searched the office and found a Baretta 9mm and four boxes of ammunition. I grabbed batteries, lotion, bandages, soap, and all the distilled alcohol I could find. Finally, on my last walk through before leaving, I grabbed a large stock pot, a cast iron skillet, a cast iron griddle, and four of the photo albums. I’d borrowed a couple of chef knives and a bowl as well, and a stack of dusty but clean towels. In the car port I found a blue nylon tarp, and I secured it over the load in my truck bed.
Loaded up with supplies and fuel, I started my trip east, putting Ely in my rearview. A single cattle dog stood in the highway watching my taillights.
Utah
When I arrived in Utah, I only knew two things about it: it was filled with Mormons, and it was exceptionally scenic and beautiful. I’d played a video game when I was a kid, and one of the settings was in Utah. I looked up the locations on Google at the time and was blown away that they were more amazing in real life. As a family we’d talked about going to Utah, possibly as part of a larger road trip, but we just never got there.
The highway took me through Sacramento Pass near Windy Peak and Wheeler Peak in Nevada. The change of texture to the land was welcome after the hug stretches of open emptiness. Great Basin National Park, where Wheeler Peak was, suggested the Rockies in a tantalizing way. I toyed with staying there but had been on the road less than two hours and needed to slow down in case of deer which was going to add plenty of time to the trip.
Risk management looks very different for me these days. Driving cannot be taken lightly; the odds of getting into an accident and injuring myself or being stranded aren’t super high, but they are high enough that any risky behavior like speeding or even cruise control needs to be avoided. I need 100 percent of my attention on the task at hand. At times when I found myself getting bored or paying more attention to the music than the road, I would pull off and do some jumping jacks, try to clear my head.
When not driving I had to be very aware of my surroundings if a predator or human threat emerged. Vigilance is tiring, hyper-vigilance is exhausting. There’s no good balance there that I’ve found, and while my being alive is mostly attributable to luck and circumstance, I’m still alive.
Utah was desert punctuated by mountains on the horizon. Initially things looked bleak, the landscape a kind of desert I’d not seen much of, salt flat and scrub. Just outside of Hinckley the road was cratered as though something had dropped a handful of bombs there. Rust coated, twisted hulks of burned vehicles (impossible to tell if they were civilian or military) lined the highway. Something big and ugly had happened here. I slowed, found a twisted path with tire tracks from at least one previous vehicle (probably Barry) and passed through. Charred bones, broken and scattered, lay around. Once past the wreckage, I could see Hinckley, to the south, had been subject to the same treatment.
Between Hinckley and Delta, the road remained littered with signs of heavy fighting. Agricultural, apparently, before the end, Delta was surrounded by brown and sunburned fallow fields, the desert taking over the former industrial agriculture. West of Delta the road quieted, with less sign of battle. It was slow going, and I arrived at Scipio Pass nine hours into the trip. The town of Scipio didn’t seem worth the effort, having seen how settlements looked in these parts, so I decided to pull off on a dirt road past a cemetery, in the desert foothills, and set up camp. There’d been no signs of life, no wildlife, no human life. I set up a small fire pit, found some scrub to turn into fire, set up my tent next to the truck, and made camp.
I’ve never found out exactly what happened in Utah (though I’ve heard many rumors), and I’ve not seen anything like it since. I know things must have been very rough in the world outside of the refugee camps. Things were rough in the camps. Every day, we’d hear rumors of Bad Things. We’d heard rumors of rape and murder, kidnapping, enslavement. I’d kept my head down, though, didn’t get to know anyone, stayed to myself, and even with those precautions I was robbed once, and beaten up once. The robbery was stupid; the guys that did it were in shelters not more than a hundred yards from mine, and all they took was my mostly useless phone. I didn’t understand it at all; they behaved as though the world wasn’t actively ending around us. I waited a day, then walked into their shelters while they were out and about and took my phone back. I didn’t see them much after that, maybe twice, both times we ignored each other. They must have been part of some escape, or had succumbed to disease, either way they disappeared. One night I heard a woman screaming like I’d never heard before, a stark, terrifying scream that drilled through the background noises of the camp. I got up and went to locate her, and when I did people were already there. A group of people had a man pinned down, and another group were trying to comfort a sobbing woman. I didn’t hear too much of it, but the woman’s scream and resulted the man being caught in the act, trying to rape her. People were looking around for any security forces, anyone in authority, someone to solve the problem. By the time security got there, the problem had been solved. The man was dead.
In camp, there was a constant low-level threat of something, and the grinding, forever present threat of fire and the world itself. None of us slept well, and to this day I do not sleep with any real comfort. In my time at the camp, I physically aged. My hair went gray, and my body, never super heavy to begin with, went lean. I looked, in my early 30s, like a man in his 60s, and I felt like an ancient thing, battered, and beaten.
That first night in Utah passed without issue. The sky was still milky from the west coast, and the sun was hot through that haze. I packed up, and got back on the highway, now identified as I-15, then headed south and west through Salina back on 50, and over to I-70. I-70 would take me to Colorado.
Then I hit a deer. Or rather, a deer hit me.
The damage was minimal. I was only doing about 20 miles an hour when the idiot thing leapt from a stand of bushes into my right front fender and bumper. The impact sent it skittering, tumbling, suddenly an ungraceful collection of limbs and ligaments, eyes wide and tongue out. I stopped and jumped out of the truck and the deer stared at me, then shakily tried to rise. I couldn’t stand, and the terror in its eyes mixed with confusion, a blaming sort of look. It tried to get up again, when I saw that its front leg had been broken, badly, and it slumped to its side, panting.
I reached into the back seat and got my rifle. A round through the front of the chest, the deer died quickly, violently shaking. I felt like shit, my ears ringing, shaking my head at the stupid thing. “Why the hell,” I said out loud, “would you try to jump over my goddamn truck?” I made the rifle safe and loaded it back into the cab, then crouched and stared at the dead deer. My hearing still blooming back in to use from the gunshot, I closed my eyes and waited.
After my hearing had returned, mostly, I approached the animal with a knife and a book. I’d never killed or butchered anything this large. When I was a kid, we’d been hunting and fishing, but the hunting was for ducks and quail and dove and was largely unsuccessful. I’d picked up a book about back woods survival that included a chapter on how to clean a deer or elk, and I’d read through it quite a lot during my time at camp. Still, I kept it with me for reference, and I did have to turn to it a few times as I cut into the deer. It was bloody, ugly work, and the results weren’t much, but they were enough to supply a couple of days of food. I put everything in the pot I’d stolen in Ely and slowly drove down the road looking for a camp site, so I could cook and partly smoke the meat.
Camp ended up being a wide spot in the road on the eastern slope of the pass I’d hit the deer on. There was evidence of a campfire there from some time ago, and I used that fire ring, built a tripod, and used sticks and twine to assemble something like a smoking rack. Directly over the fire I used cast iron pan. It was my first fresh red meat in years; meat had not been any kind of priority for me, and other than preserved stuff at the refugee camp, I’d once had some kind of fish I’d caught a pond in what had been a ritzy neighborhood outside of Sacramento. The deer smelled fantastic, and I stayed alert to any coyote or, what, bear? Mountain lion? I had no idea what kinds of things were out there. It was mid-day, and I planned to drive further down the road once the meat was cooked. Some sizzling in the pan, the back strap. Lean, almost no fat on this animal. I cooked it well done, risk avoidance again dominating every action; I couldn’t risk some parasite. What I didn’t cook in the pan, I heavily salted, then half smoked, half roasted it. After about two hours, the meat was dry and stringy, but edible. I packed everything and moved on, thinking, well, that deer didn’t suck. Down the road another hour, I pulled off into the high desert and made camp.
Colorado
My last night in Utah, I can’t say what it was that woke me. I became aware that I was moving, quickly, to the truck. I had it in mind that I had to, at all cost, get inside the truck. My hand hit the door handle and I became aware of the noises around me. Something guttural, a snuffing, a low growling coming from everywhere. I opened the truck door, and the cabin light caused a startle around me. I made out eyes, in my peripheral. In, door closed, locks locked, I hit the headlights.
Some deeply nested animal thing had heard the noises and woken me in full flight: wolves. Huge, and a lot of them.
One looked at me through the driver’s door, a bit of a snarl. Ears up, aware but not skittish, they circled the truck, sniffing my tent and the fire. They found the deer meat that wasn’t in the cooler in the truck, and tore into it, three of them getting the bulk of it. They tore into my camp and went through all my things; thankfully most all of my food was in the truck, secure. After an hour of me just sitting, I started the truck and honked the horn, a long loud blast, the noise causing some of the wolves to bolt. Except for one of them…he (most assuredly, he) slowly walked off, looking over his shoulder at me. Jogged off, calm, assured. Then one more, a female, that I had not seen came from the back of the truck and jogged off as well. I sat for another twenty minutes, waiting while the sun rose, before packing what was left of the camp. They’re torn through the tent into my pack, which had some energy bars. They’d scattered most of my stuff. I picked up what was still useable, and packed the truck with one hand, shotgun ready in the other. I hit the road, shaken.
Thompson Springs, the sign read. I’d been on the road a while, my nerves still rattling. All the what if and what for. I’d not experienced anything like those wolves, and my reaction to them. It felt like some sort of strategically tuned luck. I already trusted my gut; I was unafraid of looking like an idiot and I was unafraid of being too careful. The ego, never super helpful, was entirely useless in this situation. I wasn’t in civilized society. I existed somewhere in a liminal space between falling and fallen, where the situation changed you, and could not be mastered. Thankfully all that ego noise, all the desire and want of comfort and care, all of that was overruled by the animal coding running underneath. Thankfully, some subterranean thing had moved me, and I listened without question.
Welcome to Colorful Colorado, a deeply ironic sign. The desert around me tinged gray with smoke-filtered sun, the horizon a line of smoke and scar, I entered Colorado knowing that I was still at least a day, possibly two, from Denver. I’d have to make it over the mountains, roads that had now existed without maintenance for some time. I’d decided to find a place with walls and a roof; the wolves had spooked me out of wanting to camp in the open ever again. I’d spend my first night In Grand Junction, a rugged little city that was mostly intact. Major storefronts were mostly broken out and burned, but the bulk of the town seemed to still be in one piece.
It would seem common sense that if you were a person hiding from other people, you’d choose to be at the edge of a town and not the middle of it. I wasn’t actively avoiding anyone, though I wanted to be very careful about who I approached and how. I drove slowly through a few streets, narrowing down to an area near the river that ran through town. A pair of houses on Skyline Dr were quiet, had decent sight lines, and were not burned or broken. I sat outside of them in the truck, looking for motion or any signs of life. After an hour, I honked, long and loud, and rolled the windows down.
The town was quiet, some cicadas grinding and wheedling in the still air. I could hear a dog barking, but it was pretty far off. I walked to the first house, a corner lot, with my shotgun and a headlamp, and I banged on the door. Nothing. I asked, loudly, if anyone was home, and if they were, could they please let me know that they are inside? Overly polite, speaking to nothing. I walked to the back of the house and looked through windows. Inside was dusty and still. A pair of French doors, deadbolted to one another, made for an easy kick-in. I walked through the house, slowly, calling out “Hello? Hello?” and heard nothing. The house was hot, smelled dusty. No signs of recent life, except for some rodent droppings on the linoleum in the kitchen. Someone had been here in the course of things getting dusty; rows of handprints and footprints were on some surfaces, themselves filling with dust. I searched the whole house and found nothing living. Then the usual routine: find linens and blankets, line the living room floor, and set up camp. No electricity, I opened the house to any breezes, swapped out my mask for a cleaner one, and got the truck secured in the garage, where it shared space with a trailer loaded with jet skis.
The house itself had been looted for shelf stable food. Water ran from the taps, so I started a stock pot to boil on a propane grill outside; once boiled for 20 minutes I could filter it further. Looking through the house, I found children’s books, and two bedrooms belonging to children. In the master bedroom, I found a box of 9mm and some masks that were still sealed, but not much else besides clothes. I guessed that the owners had bugged out to somewhere, and the subsequent looting cleaned up whatever was left. That single box of 9mm was hidden in the very back of a top shelf of the closet, behind some old showboxes filled with old shoes. Nothing my size. I did get winter coats; there were two nice North Face parkas, and some mittens that fit me. I took both parkas, just in case one failed. They were both larger, and I could fit bulky layers under them, so I grabbed some wool sweaters, and some wool socks.
The rest of the evening went by. I ate Ravioli head on the grill. I threw darts at a dartboard found in the garage. I listened to the neighborhood, hearing coyotes and dogs; I suspect they smelled my camp, but none approached that I saw.
I slept fitfully on the living room floor on top of my sleeping bag. The sunrise was muddy red, the air growing thicker as some wind shifted somewhere. No ash falling, but the air hung in smokey layers. I closed the house up, and set off east, toward Palisade and De Buque. The mountains were my next big hurdle.
As things had failed in the United States, we’d all heard rumors about other countries either thriving or failing in spectacular fashion. The camp I lived in was populated by many people who had families in Asia, in south and central America. I lived, for a while, in a shelter next to a family of Chinese Americans, a couple and their 13-year-old son. The son was shy, quiet, and often just sat in the shelter and read books. The couple tried to raise their family in California, and their far-flung family in China, but had little luck; cell phones weren’t working reliably, and all we had were cell phones. They’d been able to get some texts through to local family who were in the process of trying to get to Portland from San Francisco. The rumors were that San Francisco was overrun by fire and looting and violence. The rumors were that in China there were entire provinces that had gone dark. Rumors of the Fujian province being attacked by, or attacking, Taiwan. Locally, I’d heard of communities being hit hard by racially motivated attacks, or by fundamentalists flying Trump flags out to speed the ending of things. We kept close eye on people who appeared to be ready to burst, and we tried to isolate or engage them, depending, to try and keep some peace. The fighting in the camp was bad, but the biggest losses were people escaping and being killed by armed militants, militia that believed we were spreading disease (and to be fair, we were, but we were not the only source of viruses), or local gangs. The government forces that handled security would lose people mainly to desertion and sickness. The population decline in camp was fast enough that it felt like magic, people just disappearing. My neighbors, the woman didn’t survive the illnesses that spread among us, so the husband and son fled in the dark of night, and I hope they made it to something safe. By then the population was starting to thin in earnest, and the dead were burned in huge pyres in the Costco parking long next to the camp, until there were no more volunteers left to carry the bodies and burn them.
By then the rumor was that the United States Government had gone dark. We couldn’t really tell since nothing really changed. The things that were important to a governed society were not important to a society at odds with survival, a society drowning in emergencies. It was no one single thing that did it. The confluence of radical climate change and unchecked disease, the social and mental fabric ripped apart by well designed, targeted efforts from foreign governments and the natural progression of social media, the overwhelming fear felt by a people who had nothing to fear, all of that and more bled into the daily grind. People died in huge numbers, and by the end no one could account for how, who, or what. There was no way to know.
As I wound my way around the towns and recovery areas that littered the highway, I saw that one of the recovery areas (really these were just smaller and less useful versions of camps like the one I lived in) was primarily Texan. A burned and shredded Texas flag flew over it, and the fences that lined it were festooned with Texania: Come and Take It flags and Remember Houston banners. Passing slowly, the double gates that led to the camp were open, and numerous piles of bones and clothing lay in the dust. The outer perimeter was ringed with holes in the fence, with scorched remains and burned-out military vehicles.
Texas had been particularly hard hit by the first pandemic, and by the time the Iota variant was ripping through the country, entire towns died off in weeks. The news from Texas in those early days served as a warning to the rest of the country. New Mexico closed the roads from Texas, setting up elaborate and well defended checkpoints. Mexico sealed the border as well as it could but accepted many migrants into camps that were as well equipped as any in the US. The leadership in Texas devolved into armed convoys threatening any federal vaccination attempts or federal camps and recovery areas; Texas wanted the world to know that it would not bend, bow, or break, that no virus “with a death rate less than the flu” was going to stop it. Cut off from surrounding states, “Fortress Texas” was the last-ditch effort by the state government to rally citizens who were being quickly and efficiently killed by the iota variant and each other. The last I heard from news, the state leadership died relatively early on, and a string of successive forces materialized to assume control, inevitably leading to gigantic fights in the streets, Texans versus Texans. The violence there was a forerunner to the national troubles but was also a bespoke event: exceptionally well-armed and well-trained militias went at one another to the delight of left-wing observers. The state fell in a series of violent clashes. By the time that rumors replaced news, the rumor was that Texas forces had led charges into New Mexico, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Kansas, Nebraska, and Colorado. By the looks of the recovery area I’d seen, the rumors were at least partly true. There was no way to know what had happened, but the net result was the same as any effort: depopulation.
Glenwood Springs was the first town of any size I’d seen since Grand Junction. It was badly scarred, buildings mostly burned down, evidence of a very large fight. Possibly the Texans, possibly just the world at the time, there was no sense in stopping. I saw one pack of dogs, varied breeds, running near the river that ran through town. Raccoons and rats rounded out the extent of what I saw that was alive. There was no sense in stopping in town. I pulled off the road once out of town and filled my fuel tank from one of my cans and settled back into the road. It was slow going and the roadside was littered with dead vehicles in little pockets all along the way, but those pockets got to be further and further apart, and eventually it was just a road. The mountains grew around me, and I decided to try and push to Denver, which would normally have been two or three hours. By the time I reached Frisco, two hours had passed, and I needed to stop. Breckenridge was at one point a ski town, and Frisco may have cashed in on that somewhat. Both Breckenridge and Frisco had been relatively untouched by the exceptional wealth that bought into places like Aspen. Frisco was at the roughly southern end of a lake, probably a reservoir. I’d had to steer clear of a handful of rockslides, and there was a major slide blocking the highway a few hundred yards past the intersection that lead to Frisco and (eventually) Breckenridge. At that first exit, the remains of a Whole Foods, a Walmart, a sporting goods store, some restaurants all blown out and burned. The Walmart was gutted by fire, and the Whole Foods had at least burned a bit. Across the main road, though, a small grocery store looked mostly intact, one window blown out.
The risk versus reward calculations that I had to make from moment to moment were colored by having lived through a lot of violence, death, and disaster. Any sane person previous to the pandemics would look at the dark, smokey hole where a window used to be and think, no. I sat in the truck, honked, listed, waited. Honked, listened, waited. No movement, no other traffic, nothing evident. I grabbed the shotgun and moved toward the store. The risk was minimal; if there were people in the store, they were hiding. If they’d planned an ambush, they’d been waiting a while and that sort of behavior didn’t make sense. No animals that I could see. It “felt” OK, and I’d learned to trust my gut.
The door was splintered layers of safety glass crazed by an impact. The broken window in the all-glass front made for easy entry. Dogs or coyotes had been here, maybe other animals. The air smelled mildewed and dry. In the canned section, a few cans of soup and beans. A few containers of oil that might still be good, and a whole section devoted to vitamins, maybe half the store or more. I grabbed vitamin C with a year or so left on the expiration date.
Back to the truck, I traveled south on the main road, pulled into a neighborhood, and found a house. The usual routines, and after an hour I was set to camp in the living room of a house that had been occupied by a younger couple and their kids. In one of the rooms, remains. I taped that door shut, and after looking through the house, fell to sleep.
The morning presented the problem of getting further down the road with a landslide in the way. At least two of the boulders were as large as the truck, and debris was piled in thickly around the rocks. My maps, not very detailed or new, showed that the main road through town led to a road around the lake. The road was a two lane, claustrophobic after the open sky and highway, overgrown, strewn with smaller debris. I had to stop and get out of the truck to clear some larger branches and smaller rocks, pick my way through. Some hellacious storm had been through this part of the world. The road eventually spilled back to the valley and to a feeder highway that led back to 70. The highway was strewn with large and small boulders, and I had to backtrack and drive the wrong way on the highway to get to the tunnel.
It had not occurred to me about the tunnels. I had a vague memory from the childhood trip that the Rockies were shot through with tunnels, and they now presented a relatively daunting task. If the tunnel was blocked, this first one was wide enough to accommodate turning around, but to what end? I’d have to become proficient at finding, starting, and running a bulldozer if I could locate one, potentially creating more of a mess that I’d started with. I very slowly drove into the inky black of the unlit tunnel, navigating a bend in the middle that explained why I’d seen no light at the other end. That and the length of the thing; the tunnel seemed to go on forever. When I finally got to the opposite end, the way was mostly clear, well enough to get through with only a scrape down the right side of the truck.
The road was in a little better shape, and I was able to cross back over to the correct lane and pick up a bit of speed, doing about 20 down the mountain. Another lake, another small town, and at slow speeds, another few landslides and remains of large accidents. I did see lights through the trees, houses that were either occupied or had long-lasting off-grid capability, or maybe reflections. Nearing Idaho Spring, though, I came to a roadblock. A manned roadblock.
Jersey barriers narrowed the road gradually to one lane that twisted to a late model sedan, blocking the road. From a hundred yards away, I stared through binoculars at a man in an orange high-visibility vest and a yellow hard hat, sitting in a chair under an umbrella, up about ten feet on some sort of scaffolding. He was staring back at me through binoculars. I waved and he waved back. My choices were: go back up the road, and find some other route, or confront the situation. The man appeared to be alone but there could be any number of people hiding in or behind cars that were being used to pen the roadway. I sat for ten minutes, then shut the truck off, locked it, and walked toward the barriers with my shotgun held in the middle, loose, relaxed. Once I got within shouting range of the man, I yelled out.
“What’s the toll?” a half-joke.
“No toll, sir, but the road ahead is completely out, one of the tunnels choked off from some accident or some shit,” he yelled back. “I’m here to warn folks off it, you can probably get around it in that truck of yours, it’s marked but it’s slow and steep. If’n you turn back a bit though there’s a road what goes around Evans mountain and it’s in OK shape, take a few hours,” he said. “I’m also just here to meet people, really, see who’s driving through” we’d gotten quieter as I’d walked closer.
“How many people drive through here? You’re the first person I’ve seen in Colorado,” I said, a few yards from him.
“Well, you’re not entirely alone, there’s a man what come through here about three days ago in a big pickup who pointed a gun at me the whole time, didn’t believe me about the road, and hasn’t come back through so I suspect he figured out how to get around that tunnel. It’s really not a bad trail, leads through an old parking area but there’s some dead cars and some trees down.”
“I talked to a man in Nevada said there was some guy in a pickup headed east. Guess we’re on the same path,” I said. Now that I was closer to the man, I could see he was in his sixties. I’d not seen anyone much older in a very long time. “How, uh, how long have you been up here?”
“Here in this chair? About ten minutes after I heard your truck. Here in this town? Well sir, I was born in Colorado Springs, but I guess we moved up here right about 2020, right at the start of that China virus,” he said “but we’ve been coming up here for decades. My wife and I, we’d bought a place and fixed it up, it’s a cabin from the early 1950s. Made for a fun project on weekends. When everything started going to shit why we came on up, us and the dogs, and waited for my son and his wife and kids.” He looked down at his feet. “Well, anyhow.” He trailed off.
“Would it be OK if I pulled by truck through? I assume you can move this, what is this, a Lincoln?”
“Yeah, yes it is. Still runs. I’ll get it out of the way for ya,” he said. Starting to rise and stretch.
“Thanks. I’d actually like to just sit and talk a while if you’re OK with that, sir,” I said, looking up at him. He slowed, looked at me.
“Well sir, I think that’s a fine idea so long as we’re both understanding that nothing stupid happens.”
“I fear all the stupid may have already happened to the world, but I’ll certainly not do anything dumb,” I said, smiling. “It’s just been a long road with no people.”
He got off the perch and got the Lincoln out of the way while I walked back to my truck. I pulled it through and parked off to the side. I joined him without the shotgun, and we sat behind the scaffold, with a clear view of the road. I introduced myself and offered him some of my jerky.
“Name’s Art,” he said, taking a bit of the jerky. “Decided someone needed to be on this road letting people know about it. There used to be someone up in Frisco would check on folks, but no one has mentioned him in a while now,” Art said.
“Yeah, I didn’t see anyone in Frisco, though I think there were some lights in the mountains out there. Might be someone. Haven’t seen anyone though. Didn’t see anyone in Utah, at all. No idea what happened to Utah.”
“Well, now, I heard some things about Utah, about people deciding they’d had enough of that last president’s overreach,” Art spit onto the ground, “and well, there was fightin’ and the other stuff. I don’t know the details, but the rumor is that the government flexed, in a big way. Turns out crackers and Mormons with rifles can’t do all that much to a fleet of drones and tanks. Where y’all from?
“California. Most recently San Jose, I was at a camp near there while the northern part of the state burned down,” I said.
“Have any people?” he asked.
“None left, no sir. Just me,” I said. He stared at the ground.
“Yeah, all my people are gone. My son was going to try and make New Zealand, but who knows. How bad was it in California?”
“Well, in the camp it was pretty bad, but the violence wasn’t too much compared to what I’ve seen. I had to escape some bad guys there, but it’s been mostly diseases. Not sure why I lucked out, but I’ve had about six vaccinations over the years,” I said.
“You trusted that vaccine stuff, eh? I did too. My wife didn’t, and the third wave killed her,” he said, his voice quiet and calm. We all had faced so much death, we’d all dealt with it.
“Yeah, my mom was like that. Got all of her health info from Facebook and Parler,” I said. “Weird that we attached so much importance to that shit, you know? Like, all of that stuff was gone pretty quickly, all that data, it wasn’t useful. Couldn’t breathe or eat it, couldn’t make anything with it. Useless almost immediately,” I said. I’d never been a proponent of the kind of social media use that lead people to forming cults, and that’s all it had all become by the end.
“Yessir, I do believe it was part of what poisoned my wife,” he said. “She just found so many other people who echoed what she wouldn’t say out loud. It was a lousy way to die,” he said. “It didn’t help that the virtual nonsense was parroted out here in the open at diners and truck stops. Wasn’t until her lungs failed that she stopped believing those lies. I didn’t get to talk to her when she passed, but they say she was regretful. That broke my heart more than anything else,” he said.
“My mom was in a tent in a parking lot, lying on a bed on her stomach, tubes fed into her. She barely regained consciousness at the end, so I don’t know what she was thinking, but it hardly matters, does it? She’d made her reality, propped it up and lived in it like some sort of movie set. That was her reality, hers and a lot of others,” I said. I’d not spoken to anyone about my parents. It felt good to say it all out loud, the reality of it. Adding weight by adding words.
“Well, here we are,” he said. “Not sure how many of us are left. I have a book where I mark down how many folks traveled through. Heading east, it’s been 127 people in the last three years. That’s not many,” he said. “I hear from people travelling west…now there’s only been 86 of those…that there’s maybe a hundred people in Denver. I know for a fact there’s a little trading post down the road a piece, on the edge of what used to be Lakewood. I’ve traded some stuff with ‘em and they have a good supply of fuel. They don’t insist on trading either, they’ll give ya stuff what you need, but it’s best to trade, I think.”
We talked for a bit more about the local weather, how there used to be fall but now there were just fits of summer and winter butted against one another. He said the last winter was mild, almost no snow (“Only three feet or so once or twice” which doesn’t sound mild, but he lived in the mountains), but two years ago there were blizzards back-to-back all season, and he’d almost run out of firewood.
I then took my leave, trading out some of my leftover venison for a six pack of Coors. He told me that the track around the tunnel was passable, but if I ran into any problems, he’d welcome me back, and we could figure out a solution. As I drove away, he waved for a pretty long while.
Lakewood
To get around the blocked tunnel, someone had cleaned the path up pretty well; downed trees were sawed and moved, and a few larger boulders dragged out of the way. It took being in four-wheel low, and the tilt toward the canyon was alarming, but it wasn’t impassable. I very slowly picked my way to a parking lot, which lead to a steep drive to the highway. From there, the roadway was littered with debris but clear.
Dropping into the metro area, the highway offered a vantage point that would have been excellent had it not been for the smoke. The smoke wasn’t as bad, but it was tough to make out the skyline of Denver. Closer, a series of open spaces were intersected by the highway. There were hand painted signs advising a “trading post” ahead and advising that highway 6 was blocked. Following the signs, I exited toward Colfax Avenue, and a little further in, to a gutted mall. Signs for the trading post led toward the parking area of the mall, at one time Colorado Mills Mall. It was a shell, some walls still standing but mostly a burned-out husk. The trading post was a series of large tents, and there were two people there. I pulled toward them very slowly. One, a woman, waved, while the other, a clean-shaven man with a bald head, held an automatic rifle at the ready. I parked, got out of the truck without any weapons, and walked slowly toward them.
“Heard about y’all from up the road,” I said, maybe a little too loudly. “I’m coming through from California. I have some venison, should probably be smoked a little more or eaten soon.” I gestured toward the truck. The woman continued to smile. The man didn’t raise the rifle but didn’t lower it any. “Anyhow, saw the signs, figured this was either a really elaborate trap…” the man smiled at this, “or maybe y’all might be alright.”
The woman spoke up. “Well I think we’re alright,” she said, “but I don’t even know hardly what that means any more. We have some food, some winter clothes, some water, and some word about the roads ahead, if you’re interested.”
I relaxed, the man with the rifle appeared to as well, but the rifle stayed at the ready.
“Would y’all like some venison? It’s still good, near as I can tell. It’s only been a couple of days, and it’s salted and smoked,” I said.
“We’d love some. I have some jerky here, or some eggs.”
“Eggs? Oh my goodness. Ma’am, I would love some eggs,” I said. I had entirely, completely forgotten that fresh eggs existed, really. There were things I’d see ads for on the road, like McDonalds, and I would have a vague sensation that I knew what that food was, but I couldn’t really remember. Tangy, sweet. Most things when I was younger: salty, sweet, tangy all at once. The mention of eggs immediately brought them to mind. “I’ll go grab the venison,” I said, and turned back to the truck. When I returned with the cooler, the man with the rifle had visibly relaxed.
I exchanged most of the venison for two dozen chicken eggs. I then asked if they minded if I sat with them for a bit.
“Sure thing,” the woman said. “It’s been busy here,” she motioned toward the empty roadway. “I mean, I laugh at that, but we actually saw someone drive by just a couple, maybe three days ago?” she looked over at the man with the rifle. He nodded, spit, stared at the horizon. “Yeah,” she said. “About three days ago. Dan here didn’t like the look on him, but he didn’t stop, just cruised by real slow. Didn’t even wave.”
“I’ve heard about that guy since Nevada,” I said. “Red truck?” She nodded. “Two other folks I’ve run into, they mentioned him.”
“Well, I think he’s probably gone on down the road. Took off back toward 70,” she said.
“So other than him, anyone else lately?” I asked.
“New? Not so much,” show paused, frowning her memory into action. “Maybe two months ago, a car with four people in it, they were real friendly. They lived in the mountains and were heading south a bit for the winter. We expect it’ll get cold here in the next few weeks. Then maybe a month before that a guy come through in a semi. He’s staying in Boulder now. Other than that, we have about fifty, maybe sixty folks in the immediate area and a number of them trade with us. The chickens belong to a woman who lives about ten miles away, and these sweaters are made by the guy who gives us the Coors. He lives in Golden, I think he’s actually taking the whole Coors plant, tell you the truth. We have some .hiskey, we have some weed, and once a week we have some fresh produce,” she said.
“That many people? I don’t think I’ve seen that many people since I was at the camp in California,” I said. Her eyebrows raised. “Not a sick camp, at least not at the time. The fires. It was a refugee camp.”
“Oh, man,” she said, her voice dropping. “We heard about those camps, how rough it got.”
“You know, it wasn’t as bad as outside the camp, really. When the violence really started, no one was interested in breaking into a camp, you know? The folks in the camp kept breaking out. That first year I was vaccinated maybe three times, and then maybe once after, a whole bunch of us, so we were in decent shape, really. Lots of supply. Finally when it was pretty obvious that we were well stocked and had a perimeter, well, someone decided to make a stand and kill anyone that wasn’t with them, and I got out, but the really bad stuff must have missed us completely. You heard about people escaping the camp and being killed. Why would you want to leave that?” It was a question that hung in the air every day while I was at the camp. Why the resistance to help? It didn’t make sense.
“Here we had some refugees from California and from Texas. The ones from California weren’t bad. Those Texas folks,” she looked over at the man with the rifle. He rolled his eyes, and spit again. “They were something else. Had in mind to conquer whatever. Drove up in caravans with Texas flags and megaphones and all this obnoxious behavior. Dan here,” she motioned to the man, “was just back from his first ever deployment, comes home and his neighborhood gets attacked, basically, by these Texas jerks in these trucks. They just went door to door and were either taking people or shooting them. Tried to put a perimeter around the block, but Dan and his neighbors, they dealt with it.” She looked at Dan, his gaze now on far horizons. “Things were really bad then,” her voice quiet.
“On the one hand,” I said damn near cheerfully, “I’m glad I missed that. I don’t know if it’s good or bad luck, but I’ve been lucky.”
“You know the thing that got me?” she looked back at me, intense. “It was how one day, things were just grooving along, everything seemed like it was going to shit but it was always going to shit. Then on like a normal Wednesday, just out of nowhere, we’re shooting at each other. Like there was some sort of signal, some tear in the fabric that started, and it was all unravelling all of a sudden. I drove home from work, I was 16, I was working at a pizza place, driving my dad’s old car. Drove home from work and my house is on fire, my mom in the driveway shocked, my dad dead. All at once, everything changed and not just for me! That would have been bad enough! But no, all over, so many things at once. There were riots and the military and the new virus and the rumors of invasion and all sorts of crazy, frantic behavior. It all went to hell so damn fast,” she said. Her eyes, intense, no tears, just a look right through me.
“I get that,” I said. “One day there was the normal rhythm of things, crappy as it was, and the next day half my camp was dead from that last virus, and the other half were fighting the army, or getting ready to die from illness. A few of us kept our heads down, and I like to think some folks made it out, but yeah. All of a sudden.”
We both stared at the ground for a while, quiet. There’d really been no one to share the misery of the previous years with. Back in 2020, with that first virus, there were moments where we would get together and talk about the lockdowns and the protests like it had happened years before, this bizarre need to force the current thing to become nostalgia, to force it to become distant, something we’d already defeated while we were in the earliest stages of it. I remembered quiet streets, the smoke thinner in the air as a million acres burned northeast of us, but no traffic, schools empty. The quiet of it.
That quite becoming the overwhelming thing as voices died, as the audience for our stories and our fears disappeared in the maw of outbreaks and violence.
It was nice, in a very sad way, to have someone to share with and witness. I was very aware, right then, of how much I missed human contact, what it would mean to get in my truck and just keep going. To what end? Some arduous journey to the east coast, but then what? Learn how not to die on the ocean?
“Ma’am, I’d really like to thank you,” I said. I could feel tears pressing the backs of my eyes, the rush of emotion burning my vision. I’d not cried in a long while. “Also, I would like to ask if you think it would be OK for me to settle down somewhere near here?”
She beamed at me. “You don’t need my permission, but of course. Dan here will want to know where, but once you get settled somewhere come back and see us. If anyone asks you about anything, tell them to talk to Dan or Susan,” she said. I introduced myself, finally, then, and we shook hands. Dan now seemed relaxed, and while he still didn’t say anything, he shook my hand with a smile at the corners of his lips.
I walked back to the truck with my eggs in the cooler nested in with the remaining venison. I started rolling, stopped, and rolled the window down. “Any place you all would recommend?”
Susan spoke up. “If you go down Colfax a ways, there’s a cross street called Wadsworth. Much east of that, things were on fire for a long time, and it’s hard to find much. There’s still some stuff standing downtown, and one of our regulars has a bar set up, if you can believe it. Also there’s a fella’ staying in the art museum in downtown Denver, but you’ll want to work your way up to meeting him, he’s a lot. Otherwise most folks are west of downtown, one guy is living in the stadium, ya know. I’d say, any neighborhood is alright but drive through and try to introduce yourself to anyone you might see. I’ve not heard of anyone or any place being bad, necessarily, but you might not want to be right on the I-10, like Bill over at the Stadium, you never know who’s coming through.”
“Thanks very much! I’ll drop back by when I find a location.”
Something in my heart had shifted. I can’t explain what that impulse was, but seeing someone, and hearing about more people, changed my intent, at least for the short term. I wanted to just stop for a bit. It felt like everything had been about running away from things, and I’d forgotten the very basics: that we’re tribal, and that we need other people. Maybe it just took driving across an entire desert to get to that point, mentally or spiritually or whatever. I can’t really say. I just knew that I wanted to keep talking to people, and keep hearing stories, and finally maybe relax just a fraction, get rid of that bare tooth rictus grin that had been plastered onto my being for years.
I needed to stop and settle, and where I stopped had been called Lakewood, and I found a home there.
The House
After driving up, down, and around the area near Wadsworth and Colfax (I’m not sure why that stuck out to me, but nearby was Casa Bonita, made famous by a cartoon that I used to love) I found a neighborhood with older houses, built in the 60s and 70s. Not so old that they were falling in, and not so new that they were built in ten minutes for five dollars. The houses sat on an acre or more of land, and some had been small farms at some point. The neighborhood was shot through and ringed with irrigation ditches that were all running, had likely been running for years; some places the road had been worn by the water. I didn’t see any sign of other people, and drove very slowly with my windows down, listening and sometimes shouting out to nothing.
That first day, I spent the night in an empty church, a mid-century modern building with sweeping rooflines for the cathedral. Following my usual steps, I sat and stared at it and the surrounding houses for a couple of hours. No movement, though a pack of dogs wandered by, ignoring me in that way that coyotes and dogs could notice a thing, but not pay attention. I then honked my horn, loudly, in the SOS pattern this time. No movement anywhere. I got out of the truck with my shotgun and my headlamp and walked to the church. The doors were mostly closed; at some point they’d been opened but something had poorly closed them. I walked in, removed my mask, and sniffed the air. There was a tang of rodent smell, but nothing too recent or overwhelming. The pews had been pushed to the outsides of the room. Pillowcases, batteries, a tattered teddy bear, clothing, empty water bottles and soda cans were in the middle of the room. At the front where the pulpit would be, a fire pit was set up; the ashes cold and scattered. I yelled out that I was there, “if you need anything, I have water and some food and medical supplies, I am willing to share.” Nothing in response, the breeze making the leaves outside rustle.
That night, I got to the roof (the roof line nearly touched the ground in places) and sat, looking out over the neighborhood, eating scrambled eggs cooked over a fire that I’d made on the sidewalk, drinking from the half bottle of communion wine I’d found. The area was quiet. I could hear coyotes and dogs in the near distance, but nothing too close. The eggs were the very best thing I’d ever eaten, scrambled with chunks of venison. The wine was the very best wine I’d ever had in my life. I stood, slightly dizzy, on the crest of the roof, a precarious and risky place to be even if I were sober. I stood, and I yelled out, screamed into the sky. The coyotes and dogs got quiet, and some joined me, yelping and yipping into the smokey fall air.
The next morning, my tongue dry and furry from the wine the night before, I awoke to something snuffling outside of the cracked-open door. My head a bit foggy, the sleep not leaving me as quickly as my adrenaline wanted it to, I thrashed for a bit finding the shotgun and had just enough time to consciously realize what was happening when I pulled the trigger.
The boom was deafening in that space, exerting a sharp and immediate slap to my eardrums, cutting my hearing. Ears ringing, eyes not quite clear of sleep, I stumbled fully upright, pumped another round, and fired again at what my brain had interpreted as a threat. I’d finally started to be able to see and think clearly when the big cat fell. My arm hurt where the recoil had punched me, my ears were uselessly ringing, and my eyes burned. The mountain lion was huge lying there, panting its last, eyes going dim.
Rattled to the core, I stood, shaking. Too terrified to move, I watched it die while I tried to concentrate on my ears and on what might be outside the door. Did big cats hunt in packs? In the moment all clarity of thought was gone, and sheer panic rooted me to the spot. The sharp sulphur sting of gunpowder, the pungent odor of cat urine filled the air. Time suspended in gelatinous panic; I don’t know how long I stood there before I realized, with a nervous laugh, that I really needed to pee. My hearing had started blooming back, fading in. I walked, carefully with the shotgun pointed at the mountain lion, to the door. Kicking it open, I brought the shotgun up and frantically pointed it around me like an idiot. Taking a moment to look around (and seeing nothing threatening), I walked a short distance to a tree and urinated, shaking, nervously looking around. I walked a few feet and sat hard on the sidewalk. It was a few minutes more of shock before I started to laugh and breathe and let the panic rattle out of me like so much steam in a teapot. I walked back to the church and to the lion. It was definitely no longer breathing, the eyes already devoid of life and beginning to glaze, the smell of blood and cat urine overwhelming. Still shaking with residual panic, I packed my things and, walking wide around the cat, packed the truck.
My legs were still shaking as I got the truck going. I needed a secure place, something behind closed and lockable doors. The church doors had not closed cleanly, and the cat certainly had smelled my fire or food or me and the door had posed no barrier. To this day I don’t know how I recognized the threat. Living in a high threat environment for years, I’d assumed my ability to spot predation and put an end to it was blunted by the kinds of panic that created my sleeplessness. Go figure, the first time I’m able to sleep, the very first time I allow myself the luxury of getting a bit drunk, and I nearly end up Cat Chow.
I drove, still shaky and hollowed out. I’d spotted a house that had no huge trees in front of it, a house that had a view of the streets it was on. It looked ideal: next to a large empty lot, backing up to an irrigation ditch, back yard had trees for shade but good visibility. It looked intact minus some bullet wounds (most of the houses in this neighborhood had a few bullet holes and some were burned out), with the windows boarded up like many houses. I pulled one of the boards down and the window behind was intact, with sheets of plastic covering it. The doors were all locked and intact.
The house was oriented with the front door on a long wall facing south, and on the eastern end was a sunroom, sliding doors boarded up. In more of a hurry than I’d have been had it not been for that lion, I didn’t spend as much time knocking and yelling and honking; I was certain something was staring at me and hunting me, an echo of my morning panic. The house was built with a garden level basement of sorts; the front of the house, the basement was 2/3rds in the ground, and the driveway led to a garage at that level, sort of dug into the hill. It was the garage door that I was able to get into. It was an automatic door, not mechanically locked, and prying it open I was able to strip the frangible gear that the chain was fed through, and the door shot up, startling me. In the garage, a Honda Accord and a bunch of tools, boxes of stuff, all covered in dust. I switched the headlamp on and walked through the garage into the basement. Catching my eye: a Tesla whole house battery, LEDs lit with green. The house had solar, and apparently had a whole house battery.
The basement was dusty, but completely furnished; a dining table, a sectional, a television on the wall, and a full bar built out. Two rooms at the back, another room, smaller, to my immediate right with washer and dryer, some LEDs lit. The stairs to the main level bisected the basement. I talked, loudly, describing what I was doing as a warning to anyone listening, as I walked loudly up the stairs.
The inside was dark, with all the windows boarded up. Plastic sheeting inside, as well, covered the windows. The headlamp stabbed the darkness, a dry, dusty dark. The stairs landed next to the kitchen on the right, a bathroom on the left, and a back door directly in line with the stairs. I walked through the kitchen. Dusty but everything was orderly, nothing lying around. No smells, just dry and dusty. The wood floor was a bit creaky, and no footprints anywhere. Next to the kitchen, an open countertop with a view to the sunken living room; the kitchen also had a cut-out over the sink, looking to the entry foyer, tiled in slate. The front of the house was a large window, boarded up, with a dining room lined with bookshelves, and a HiFi system. Down the darkened hall, three rooms and a bathroom; the very back to the rear of the house was a master bedroom with a bathroom. No bodies. Nothing disturbed. Quiet, solid.
The taps had running water. I knew better than to trust it for drinking, but it was handy for cleaning up. The back yard was large, with huge trees and two levels. The upper level appeared to have a small house. I’d have to investigate. There were cleaning supplies. On the kitchen table, a large envelope with “CHRIS: READ THIS”.
I dusted off a chair, blew the dust off the envelope, and opened it up. Inside, a sheaf of papers, addressed to Chris. I dusted off a chair, opened the envelope.
The first few pages were written to someone named Chris. From the writing, it was apparent that Chris was family in some way to the person who’d written the documents.
Under the letter were printed manuals or quick start guides for the solar and boiler, about ten maps of the area with notations, names next to some of the houses. Another map, this one New Mexico with a line showing a route to a tiny town in the southern mountains. Then another, closeup quadrant of the tiny town itself with a location marked.
The last page was a map of the house I was in, and the property itself. What looked like a house in the back yard was some sort of workshop. The map of the house showed an X in the library marked “Journals and notes.”
I placed everything back in the envelope and looked at the board around the window in the kitchen. It was going to take a Phillips screwdriver. I tested a light switch, and the LEDs came on. There were spiderwebs and dust, but the house was quiet and solid. Having a bit more knowledge of the house, I headed back into the garage where I’d seen a couple of toolboxes, and finding a Phillips, started removing boards and plastic from the windows that faced the back yard. Mid-morning light through dusty webbed windows, the back yard was overgrown into a prairie, grasses and about six dozen saplings of a tree I’d been seeing everywhere, with some sort of vine (small white flowers, small leaves) climbing each one. Both the vine and the trees had been rampant all over the area.
The backyard was divided into a lower section and an upper section, separated by stairs and a small fence, with some hedges overgrown into the fence itself. I walked onto the back deck, and into the yard. Tons of movement right then, and I jumped a bit grabbing for my shotgun while rabbits scurried. Probably twenty rabbits there, wild small gray hares. Calming down but still holding the gun, I walked to the upper yard via a set of concrete steps. The workshop, locked up tight, backed up to a very large cottonwood, and one of the massive tree’s branches had fallen onto the workshop roof, puncturing it. Movement within, the scurrying sound of squirrel or racoon, the rodent smell. The rest of the upper yard was several garden plots, fenced off but overgrown. Some of the vines looked familiar, but I suspected not much would have survived the weather. Back down to the house, I noticed a black coaxial line running from the house to the grass in the yard. Buried in the tall grass, overtaken by vines, was a Starlink dish.
I spent the rest of the day opening windows and cleaning. By nightfall, I’d cleared most of the dust from surfaces on the main floor and had emptied dozens of muddy buckets of water into the tall grass. That evening I explored the house more fully. Found the hidden room under the stairs, behind a sliding panel. Found the still. I also found a wildly overgrown but desiccated mushroom planter made up of two seven-foot-tall racks. Everywhere I walked, I did so with a broom in front of me, clearing webs. So many webs. I spent that first night in the living room, windows opened a crack, listening to the outside world. Quiet, mostly dogs and insects, and the sound of rabbits scurrying.
For a week I stayed entirely in the house, cleaning. The furniture was all wrapped in plastic and it cleaned up quickly. The stereo system in the “library” was entirely analog, and I listened to a Miles Davis record at a low volume while working. I’d heard no other people and had only one night where dogs showed up in the back yard, but they were quickly chased off.
The house’s battery was monitored by an app, apparently, so there was no way to know what shape it was in. The second day, I climbed a ladder to the roof and washed the solar panels, which were largely intact, only two of the panels had cracks crazed across their glass faces. There was an inverter on the back wall (I only knew this because it read “Inverter” on it) that scrolled statistics and had a row of LEDs, all covered by gaffer tape to obscure them. All the lights did indeed still work, and though the deep freeze badly needed de-frosting, it, too, was still working and was fully loaded with very, very old frozen goods. I disconnected it, dragged it to the top of the driveway, and let it defrost, capturing the water just in case.
From the roof, I was able to see a good distance, all the way to downtown Denver which seemed to be only ten or so miles away to the east. The high-rise buildings of downtown were badly scarred, blacked in places. I was in no hurry to see downtown. There was movement out there, in the near and middle distance, that could be people. It was tough to say. At night from the roof, some twinkling lights visible out there, a handful.
The car in the garage was a plug-in hybrid. No way of knowing what shape the gas in the tank was in, but it started right up. I drove it around the neighborhood, slowly, looking for people. Figured if it stopped running, I wasn’t that far from the house, but it ran just fine. The only things in it were the manual and a package of masks.
The days passed more slowly. After that first week, I ventured into the area around the neighborhood, looking for people and for food. The house was well stocked with older canned goods and freeze-dried stuff, along with bags of beans and rice that were old but seemed fine. The freezer contents were a wash, I couldn’t trust any of them, but I could use a working freezer. There’d been no meat in the house at all. Along with the Windham AR-style .308, I found a high-powered air rifle and a case of pellets. I used that to hunt rabbit in the back yard, cleaning the rabbit and butchering it, using my battered reference book as a guide. Things were OK. The air was milky with fine particulate smoke, mountains usually not visible. The days were almost relaxing, as I read and cleaned and listened to the record player.
What brought me to the brewery was Casa Bonita. As a kid I’d been a huge fan of South Park. Finding out that Casa Bonita was an actual brick and mortar place when I was older just made me want to see it. I’d heard it was in Denver, but it was actually here in Lakewood, and only about two miles from the house, so I’d headed over, slowly, to see it. In the parking lot, though, was a couple of trucks and, next door to Casa Bonita, a brewery with people. I sat and watched them for a bit, feeling a little more conspicuous, until finally someone walked out and waved to me. None of the three people in the place was armed, but I brought along my shotgun just in case.
Westfax
The brewery had been called “Westfax” because it was on West Colfax. It had been one of the seemingly thousands of breweries in the area; Colorado had been known for beer. The front wall to Westfax was a garage-style rolling door, and it was completely open. Inside were three people, all men. The one who had waved me in was wearing an apron and cleaning a tap by the time I walked in.
“What’ll it be?” he asked, eyeing the gun. The two other men were indeed unarmed. One had a dog on a harness, a black and white cattle dog that wagged its tail at me. I set the gun down, propped up against the bar.
“Uh, I’m not entirely sure,” I said through my mask. “What…what?”
He laughed at my confusion, at my dis-used voice, at my general demeanor. “We have three different kinds of beer,” he said, grinning, his voice a deep baritone. “Made from stale barley and relatively fresh hops. Tell you what, I’ll spot you your first round. It’s a lager, and it’s alright.” He grabbed a pint glass and poured me a beer.
“Sorry, it’s just…this is not something I expected at all. And there’s more people here than I’ve seen in a pretty long time.” He set the glass in front of me, and then pulled himself a half pint from the same tap.
“I know, right? When I first opened this back up, it was me and my wife and a friend from down the street. We didn’t expect anyone to ever show up, tell you the truth. Thought it was all done, that we were it,” he said. He drank a bit of beer, a pointed gesture that mine was safe to drink. I took a sip. I wasn’t particularly a fan of beer at any point in my life, but this was fantastic. He smiled at my reaction. “So where’re you from?” he asked.
“California,” I said. “Started from near Sacramento but I’m from a little town in Humboldt County. Or what used to be…anyhow. All burned out, I spent a few years in a camp, made my way here.”
“Whoa,” he said. Looked over at the guy next to me. “Phil here’s from California too,” he said. “Guess even now at the end of the damn world we can’t get rid of Californians.” This last, he said smiling.
“Now I ain’t from California,” the guy with the dog said. “Just lived there. I’m from Oregon.” He scratched the dog’s head. He was some age under 60. Most of us that were left would be.
“Where at in California?” I asked, taking another drink. He was weathered, looked like I’d looked before I cleaned up.
“Keenbrook, on route 66, north of San Bernardino,” he said. “It all burned up like northern Cali.”
“Keenbrook, never heard of it. I never had much to do with southern California though. Went to Disneyland as a kid and went to San Diego once, but that’s about it.”
“Yeah, it was a small town in the canyon there. Not much to it. I moved to there from Eugene, working on wind farms.”
We each drank, contemplated for a bit.
“Where ya at now?” the bar tender asked. “Name’s Bud, by the way. Like the beer,” he said.
“I’m about two miles away, staying at a house,” talking around what I was really doing, which was squatting, or stealing a house, or something like it. I had a hard time admitting that to myself, much less saying it out loud. “It’s just northwest of here, Morse Park.”
“Alright, I guess we’ll be seeing lots of you then. That’s good. Look, there’s only a handful of us. I’ve driven all the way down to Monument, and all the way up to Ft Collins, and I can count the number of folks I’ve seen on two hands. I’ve seen maybe thirty people come through here. I have signs up on the highways, too, but I’m just not sure there’s much of us left.” He looked down at his hands. “It’s been weird.”
“I saw two people on the road,” I said. “One in Nevada at a campground, and one in Colorado…”
“At the tunnel? Yeah, that guy’s a good guy. He comes into town now and again, found us last spring. He’s a nice guy.”
“Yeah, he was pretty nice.”
“So the way we do things here is, we trade stuff. I’m looking for fresh produce, fresh meat, fish, oil that isn’t rancid, eggs,” here he grinned, “and barley,” he said. “I know no one has barley, but I’m always looking, always asking. I’m positive someone somewhere has barley that isn’t fifteen years old.”
We sat and chatted a bit more as we drank. There was a constant tension in being alone and being terrified and letting that shake off was a process. As the beer worked it’s way into my bloodstream, my shoulders lifted, I relaxed a bit. Still painfully, microscopically aware of where I was, where my gun was, and where everyone else was.
“What was it like here?” I asked. I didn’t need to clarify what I was asking about.
“It was rough,” Bud said. “I got sick twice. Once was in March of 2020, I was one of the very first Covid cases. We didn’t know anything about it then. I had a mild case for being one of the first; I was in the hospital for two weeks. Never developed that full blown pneumonia, but it was bad. My lungs haven’t recovered, even now. The second time was that ‘iota’ variant, and I’d been vaccinated, but it was still bad, and right about then was when some of the violence started,” he said. “I wasn’t in great shape for that. My wife got together with some volunteers; she’d been in the military and helped put down some stuff in the neighborhood. We live just south of here. Anyhow, once I was healthy enough to be up and around, we started going door-to-door, started trying to find and help neighbors. Then that new virus hit. Still not sure if that was one or two or ten viruses, but that new one, ones, whatever, was rough. Whole lot of people just dying, no hospital capacity, some folks dying in just days, the media carrying every kind of rumor about Chinese biological warfare or dirty bombs from middle eastern terrorists. It is so weird to think now about what seemed so important then. We had that news from Washington about the senate basically dying. Turns out old people who don’t believe in science tend to die.”
Phil chuckled, a dark gravelly ironic laugh. “Yeah,” he said. “Some kind of leadership. Dying just to own the Libs,” he said, shaking his head. “Life and death no longer were as important as winning.”
Bud nodded. “It was around that time that Texas closed up. You’d hear all these rumors about Texas. How it was a paradise, no one dying. That they’d sealed their borders and somehow beaten that next wave of sickness, but then you’d hear that it was actually an apocalypse, that there was terrible fighting, bombings and troops, and then Hilda.” Hilda, the hurricane that had wiped New Orleans off the map, had sat over Houston for 32 hours. Twenty feet of oil-slicked water downtown, fire ravaging across the surface of the new sea.
He continued, “the worst of it was happening, no news, no idea what was going on, so many people just dying. One day there they are, talking and alive, the next day their house is stinking. That’s when the Texans started showing up, driving those goddamn trucks and stolen military vehicles. We had a Texan camp just south of here near Castle Rock, a few thousand of them showed up. I heard, a year later, that it took four months, that it was mostly the last wave of viruses that turned the tide. Denver by then was on fire, mostly, but by then everyone was dead or dying, and there were explosions from gas leaks. The zoo…I hate to think about the zoo. They had keepers living there hold out as long as they could, but in the end they killed all the predators and any animal that couldn’t make it. My wife volunteered for that, too, they had to do it in shifts, have people that had not cared for those animals to put them down. My wife, she’s former FFA, she raised farm animals only to have to cull them, and she still came home every night that week crying her eyes out. Denver dwindled in months.”
Quiet, then, while the echoes of the suffering rang in our ears. I’d missed so much, being in a camp and sealed away from it. Missed a lot by being necessarily myopic. It’s hard to be anything other than selfish when the world around you is on fire, when all you can see is the world ending a few feet away from you. Starting at some point right around 2016, we all lost our empathy. That was the thing that did us in, more than anything. The sudden and forceful realization that the people around us who we thought were our neighbors were the equivalent of an alien species: disguised as humans, but nothing like us. Our care and concern being spent on a mechanism that could not accept it, would not recognize it. For every one of us that tried to help the community, there were two of these imposters, people wearing their self-centered ideology like a twisted badge of courage: they alone stood up to the forces that cared about them and wanted them to care as well. It was sociopathy writ large, an invasion of the soul perpetuated by decades of being told that self-reliance was the only thing that mattered, period. That year marked a turning point where people’s unspoken bad thoughts became their loudly shouted bad behavior once they realized there weren’t any repercussions, that there was no God that would smite them.
I cleared my throat. My voice was still long disused, and it was a chore, at times, to speak. Gave me headaches. “I didn’t see much of anything in the camp,” I said. “We had some news, some internet, my phone worked for a little while, but we’d really only hear the big rumors. The ones about the government, we heard that it’d fallen months before we heard about it, and everyone was just kind of, meh. The sicknesses, we’d hear all sorts of stuff. Lot of the camp was Asian, and they’d get harassed, beaten, a few got killed. They escaped as quick as they could. I heard about some of the later viruses and strains, but we had vaccinations,” and Phil laugh/coughed. I looked over at him.
“We heard about the camps,” he said, “and what you had were tests, apparently. They were trying out vaccines, new stuff spun up using mRNA and crispr and all kinds of new ways of doing things. I’d heard…look, I don’t know what sort of use any of that information has. Curiosity, I guess. I heard an entire camp was wiped out by one test.”
“We had those rumors, yeah,” I said. “A wall of fire a hundred miles north, I guess some of us just didn’t care? Me, I wanted some protection, and while I knew that what they were giving us could be nasty, all the times I was vaccinated, all I got was tired and achy. And I didn’t get sick once I was at the camp. I’d been sick before the camp, really bad. My mom had died of not being vaccinated. I didn’t want that death, alone, terrified, and helpless.”
Phil looked down at his dog, scratched its head. “I had two of those early vaccines, the first one for Covid and one after for variants, four shots total. I didn’t get sick, but I think it had to do with being in a tiny town and staying away from people. Once the traffic picked up on the highway there, I went camping for a couple of weeks. When I came back there wasn’t as much traffic and it just kept being less and less. One day I realized it’d been a week since I’d seen a car. I went into town and everything was shut up, houses smelling of death. There was a hand-painted sign on the Chevron, said that folks should head to Barstow.”
“Barstow,” Bud said, “we heard was one of those cities that the anti-vax people had claimed. Got a whole slew of nutjobs together online and just invaded. Closed off the town, you had to prove somehow you were not vaccinated to enter, who knows how that worked. That was toward the end of reliable news. I heard that one of the early variants killed them off, and those that didn’t die from the disease went Jonestown and did themselves in, claiming that God was going to transport them to a new reality.”
Phil laughed. “Oh man,” he said, “that’s right! That was at the time when those cultists who followed that ex-president started claiming that reality was just a piece of software, that we were all in a simulation, and they could step outside the simulation by dying what they called ‘an honorable death.’” He laughed. “Dying of disease was honorable in the face of a cure, I suppose.”
I thought back to my mom, and her refusal to take part in the consensus reality we all shared, right up until she was choking on her own fluids. Then, the regret, echoed back to me in HD video on my phone screen from an iPad held up to her face by a kind nursing student. The regret hurt more than anything.
“There were supposedly blocks of cities, and whole towns that became these ‘pureblood’ havens,” Bud said. “Each and every one racist as a motherfucker. Pureblood, like we’re not supposed to get what they mean. I hated that, the way folks would defend their evil shit by just implying it, not saying it out loud. Cowards and racists all wrapped up in one, like you expect. ‘That’s not what I meant,’ but with a smirk like, motherfucker, you know what you meant, I know what you meant, we all know.” Bud had worked himself up, took a sip to slow down. “There was a man through here a couple of weeks back, drove one of them huge Texas style trucks, flying a goddamn flag. Walked in holding a gun, like you,” he said, pointedly, “but held it, wasn’t relaxed. It was my wife at the bar, and he just stood there, didn’t say anything. She asked what he wanted, he asked what she had, she called back to me. I walk out and he said, and I am not joking, he said ‘Oh, you have a slave.’”
“Fucking hell,” I said, shaking my head. “What the fuck?”
“You’re, yes. That’s what I thought, right there. All this death and loss and stupid shit and one of the few survivors is a racist redneck shit heel.” Bud shook his head. “I told him to get out, and if I saw him again there’d be problems, and he sneered, said ‘Just joking my brother’ like trying to be even more of a dick. I pulled my shotgun up and pointed it at him and he laughed and walked out. Got into that truck and drove off slow, staring me down, grinning like an idiot. I saw you, I wasn’t sure, you know?”
Phil laughing, “All us white people look the same to Bud.”
We all laughed, Bud saying “Well you’re not entirely fucking wrong there.”
“I heard about that guy, everyone who has seen him gets a bad vibe,” I said. Bud pulled another pint for me. “I assume he’s on his way to somewhere else, but that could be dangerous thinking.”
Bud nodded, pushing my pint to me. “If he’s still in the area,” Bud said, “he don’t like me any, so I’m a little less safe. I haven’t had to use my weapon on anyone, but him, I’m not sure.”
“I wonder how that is?” Phil said. “I mean, we all have guns. I’ve had guns, a few, all my life. Hunted and whatnot, but always figured if terrible things started happening, Americans would just shoot the shit out of everything. And we did! Hell, I heard the gunfire from miles away. At night sometimes it’d be these long strings of shots, figured no one ever ran out of bullets. I’d drive into town and there would be a bunch of cars shot to shit at a barricade, and a handful of dead bodies. And you know that’s when I knew that everything was done. When a body just lays there for weeks, that’s when you know.”
Bud nodded. “Even ancient civilizations would clean up the dead. You knew there wasn’t a civilization.”
Phil pushed his empty glass to Bud. “If you could,” he said, and produced a bag. “Got some jerky here, from that buffalo.” Bud took the bag, picked up a notebook from behind the bar and started writing.
“You are square for the next ten pints, my man,” he said. “Those eggs last week, they set you up good.”
I reached into my pack and brought out a bag of jerky. “This is store bought,” I said, “but I’d like you to have it, maybe it’ll cover me for part of today.”
“Well like I said, you don’t owe me nothing for today, but we’ll put this on credit,” and he took the bag. Asked me my name, and we talked a bit more about the area as the light turned to afternoon warm. A woman walked in, and Bud smiled. He introduced her as Sarah, and caught her up on what we were discussing.
“Can we not talk about the end of the world?’ she asked, laughing. “It’s getting old.”
“You know, that’s what was weird about the whole thing,” Phil said. “It seemed like it started a few weeks into lockdown during that first wave. After maybe two weeks of that everyone started talking about what they were experiencing, but with some nostalgia.”
“I used to hear about how there was no traffic,” Bud said. “That and how the sky was so clear.”
I laughed. “Certainly for a week there maybe,” I said. “But fire season being year ‘round in California, we weren’t clear for long. I think my parents were just immediately trying to put it behind them, mentally, so they were talking about it like it wasn’t happening right then, talking about it like it had happened years before. How it felt like it’d been a year in that first few months, willing it along.”
Sarah looked thoughtful. “Makes sense. Trying to wish the trauma away.”
We talked a bit more about the “jerk in the truck.” Sarah said that they’d seen him again up at the trading post, he’d just sat there with the truck idling, staring at them from about fifty yards.
“I heard from them that there was someone living in Casa Bonita?” Phil asked.
“It’s true! About eight months ago, there were two younger guys living there. They’d had a truck with this huge generator, took the whole bed area of the truck, and they’d done this sort of thing before, they wired it into the building. Turned everything on. It was hilarious and weird. Cleaned it all up, invited us over for dinner. They were here about six weeks. It was really funny, those guys. They were going to all these different places. Last time I was near town, someone had one of the rides at Elitch lit up, and I’m pretty sure it was them. They were fun.”
Bud laughed. “Fun, sure, but they didn’t have any kind of plan.”
“Not everyone needs a plan that looks like yours,” Sarah gently scolded him.
We talked for hours, and in the early afternoon I took my leave, giving them all my location information. “Just, you know, if you come by? Honk five times. If I hear you honk five times, I’ll not shoot.”
Back in the truck, heading home. Being with people was exciting, but adrenalizing and exhausting. I felt full, content in some ways, but also like I’d just been through a very, very long test that I had not studied for. A hollow nervousness now, wondering if I’d said anything regrettable. My throat was raw and my voice hoarse. I was a little drunk, but the house was a few blocks up, a few blocks over, and I took it a about five miles an hour. Got to the house, re-secured everything, and fell into bed, exhausted.
Incognito
The first few weeks, the first month, I set about trying to find a rhythm to being in one place. I started to feel more welcome in the house and had found piles of useful information: books about growing food, canning, cooking, preserving. Books about woodwork, metalwork, sewing, crafting. A set of notebooks with precise handwriting describing the use and operation of the still in the basement, and the mushroom farm, which I’d cleaned up as well as possible. There was a page describing the network in the house, and the Starlink connection seemed to be able to connect at times, but there wasn’t much to see out there; my phone connected, and I was able to get to some broken content but not much. Found a news site frozen in time, front page about the collapse of the United States. Apparently at that time, Russia was starting to become a warzone, and Australia’s civil war was starting, and Canada had sealed its borders again. Almost every story was rumors, hearsay, conjecture.
Ads seemed to work just fine. A limited time offer for a pillow “hurry only 19 left!”
The battery that the house ran off was holding steady, never seemed to run out, but I had not stressed it. The freezer was connected and working and was probably the heaviest load at any time. As the days got colder, I relied on the pellet stoves to keep the house warm. The gas line may or may not have been working, but I’d closed it off at the meter, and had driven around doing the same to every house that was still standing in the immediate few blocks. It became part of my daily routine until I’d done every house in about four blocks: no sense in risking a fire or explosion. If I stopped to think about it for a few minutes, sure, it made no sense, but at night with a racing mind and a day of threats, you do some things that don’t make all that much sense. Plus, I had a chance to see every nearby house, and look for people or supplies. One house, a large pine had fallen into it, and I spent two days cutting the tree up using a collection of chainsaws and hand saws. It was as dry as processed lumber, and I filled the bed of the truck twice with firewood.
The brewery also had purified water, and I relied on their supply as much as my own, trading rabbits for water. I’d not yet looked at the detail around setting up the still in the basement; there was a serious set of risks there that I’d not liked the sounds of. Talking to Bud about it, there was a lot involved, and many steps where life ending mistakes could be made.
One milky bright October morning, I decided to head into downtown Denver. I’d heard that the art museum was inhabited by a guy who welcomed any visitors, a “weird little guy” of indeterminate age. I packed the truck, locked the house up, and slowly headed east on Colfax. There were sections of road near Sheridan and another near Federal where the road had been blocked, and someone had gone through towing burned out vehicles and clearing debris. I picked my way through, keeping my head on a swivel in the event of an ambush. No reason to be this paranoid, but it hadn’t failed me yet.
Crossing over I-25, a river of burned out and wrecked vehicles. The overpass had one lane completely collapsed on the west-bound side. The Broncos stadium inhabited by someone who kept to themselves. The South Platte river running cleaner than the air. I drove against one-way signs and picked my way over to the art museum building, a piece of angular stainless architecture cutting into the sky. The front doors were open.
I parked on the street and watched the front of the building. Inside, a guy on a couch, reading. The only other movement was outside, pigeons and a dog. I approached, shotgun slung across my back out of reach.
“Excuse me,” I called out. “Hope I didn’t startle. I was told you, uh, run the museum?” The man’s head snapped around at my voice, he looked surprised, looked to my truck and to me.
“How the hell did I not hear you drive up?” This mostly to himself, then louder “Yes, sorry, I can certainly show you around. Lovely to have a visitor.” He’d set the book down and placed his right hand on the butt of a rifle that was sitting next to him. We stared at one another, waiting.
“Well OK then,” I said with as much of a smile as I could muster. “Bud, over at Westfax? He told me about the museum.”
He visibly relaxed. “Bud is a good guy. We’re lucky, you and I, to have him around.” He stood, straightened his tie. To that: he was dressed impeccably. A vintage British three-piece suit, a checkered plaid of primarily very dark but vibrant blue. I’d not seen anyone in a suit in a decade. He picked the rifle up casually, not as a threat but as a necessity, one of those items that we now find ourselves burdened with. His hair was perfectly styled, short, and crisp. He smelled like cedar. I felt like the wild person I was becoming, he looked like he’d just materialized here from civilization.
We introduced ourselves, bumped elbows replacing the shaken hand. A bit of small talk, he asked me what brought me, how I got to Denver, the sorts of things I was used to telling people. We were sitting in what would have been the foyer, where roped-off lines for admission would have been. We sat and talked while he made tea. I asked him about his life.
“My family moved here when I was sixteen. My father was an executive in an energy company, my mother was a stay-at-home mom. My older brother had already gone off to the Naval academy, leaving myself and our younger sisters here. When things fell apart, my parents both had that first illness, but my father recovered. Then the second one, it seemed like everyone was suddenly ill. I remember the difference over just a week, the sound levels in our neighborhood, things got very quiet very fast. The ambulance service here ran without sirens because they were running all the time, it was terrifying to only hear sirens twenty-four hours a day. The state brought in those semis to handle the bodies, tried to keep up. My sisters and my father died, I was left in a hospital just over there,” he motioned toward the north. “The staff, there weren’t enough of them. Relatively healthy patients were pressed into service, so I walked around checking things, cleaning things, feeding people as they died.”
We both quietly contemplated. The way things had fallen apart during that second illness, I felt now luckier than ever that I was in a camp, sequestered from that. At the time it felt like a genuine hell, a prison of choice, a selective torture. Now I saw it for the gift that it was.
“It’s odd, that first six months when it started to become clear that this was really it. There were still enough people that there was a general sense of disbelief that any of this was happening. I came to this museum, walking home from the hospital because I didn’t have a car and the roads were choked anyway. I came to this building and there were people in their uniforms, a few anyway, and someone selling tickets. On the way out of the hospital I’d seen the news about the president and vice president, and I had seen pictures of riots and Texans at war with America, and yet, here they were, wanting to sell tickets. I walked in, in my dirty clothes and my hair askew and smelling like rubbing alcohol and Pine-Sol, and bought a ticket from an unsmiling, robotic employee. I walked the rooms, one of maybe five people. I think that’s when I decided that this needed to exist.”
There’d been the violence. “When I got to my house, I spent the next few weeks in the basement trying to stay quiet, hidden. I would leave through the back, over a fence, incognito. I started carrying the rifle,” he patted it, “my grandfather’s lever action. Never had to use it, stayed away from the sounds of people or shots. One night, someone broke into my house, I could hear them ransacking the place, and when they got to the basement door I yelled, loudly, that I was armed and would shoot them. I could hear them whispering, telling each other to shut up, so I yelled it again and worked the action on the rifle. They ran, laughing, and I smelled smoke about ten minutes later. Now, I had already put together a pack of some stuff, but I had a few minutes to get everything that I could out into the yard. I didn’t save much. The house burned, and it burned houses around it. I ran to a checkpoint, where a state cop told me that downtown was completely on fire, but I could stay with him, we’d figure something out. I stayed with him at his house for a week. One night he didn’t come back. I lived there for a pretty long time, in his little brick bungalow, windows boarded up, trying to lay low.”
The tea was excellent, and the museum’s air handlers were somehow still running (“I don’t know how or why, but why not leave them be?” he said).
“So then it was a long time of sitting out the fighting and sneaking around and trying to stay healthy. That last stay at the hospital, I’d not come out of it totally OK. I still get these rashes, sometimes get feeling super sleepy, my back aches at times. I had that to deal with, and no idea what was happening in the larger world when everything sort of stopped working. Winter that year was quiet and almost easy. I hunkered down. I had a dog for a while, he’d just come by and sit, and I fed him. Not sure where he ended up. I used the fireplace and the grill for cooking. At one point, the entire block was closed off by those Texan mofos, and there were maybe three of us in the neighborhood. They had bullhorns and said they were going house to house to get volunteers and supplies, and if you didn’t have either, they’d ‘sort you out.’” He paused, staring into space. “That was pretty scary. They pounded on the door, and I told them to fuck off or I’d shoot. They laughed, being armed to the teeth and all, and worked on kicking in the door. The cop that lived there, he’d reinforced it somehow, and the door didn’t budge. They shot through it, tried to reach in. I’d packed what I could already, and they had folks in the back of the house, but no-one between me and the neighbor, so I climbed out a window and ran. Had a few shots go out over my head.” He sipped his tea. “The whole thing was surreal. We’d made it that far, only to be shot at by fanatics? I ran to a park next to a school and hid in a culvert. Stayed there overnight, cold as, didn’t sleep. Next day I worked my way back to the house, and found it ransacked but still standing. My neighbors, one was hanging from a tree with a Texas flag hanging from a spike in his chest. The other was just gone. I hope she made it somewhere.”
We talked a bit more about the Texans. I told him I’d not seen any in California, but we’d heard about them. When there was still some news, they were the feature. I’d seen evidence along the way.
“What news we got was mainly from other people, word of mouth, rumors. Initially because Texas was so completely ravaged by the first infections, then by a huge amount of internal violence, a train of immigrants started. The ones that got here had fought through New Mexico but been beaten pretty badly, mainly by the complete lack of population in that state and the fact that the desert wants to kill you. That and the Navajo, who apparently weren’t going to take any guff from anyone ever again. The Texans drove huge pickups, stolen military trucks, RVs that were sort of armored but really were just cosplaying Mad Max. There’d been a fight in Colorado Springs, some locals friendly to their nutty cause got together with them and apparently it was the Air Force that stopped that. They made it all the way to Wyoming from what I heard, but by then it was maybe a handful of them. They carried who knows how many viruses, on top of being fond of dying in a fight. They were a brief, very overbright flare signifying the end of a thing.”
“I wonder how many of them might be left?” I asked.
“Given that there’s only tens of us here in this area, I suspect maybe one or two. There was a fairly unpleasant fellow in one of those type of pickups driving around here a few weeks back. He didn’t bother to stop by, but I’d have been ready.” He patted the rifle again. “Not yet used it against a person, but I’ve taken some deer, and I’m pretty comfy with it.”
“I keep hearing about that guy. Heard about him since Nevada. I wonder if he’s still out there?”
At that point, pondering, he offered to walk me through the exhibits. “I lock up down here, not that it would help in the event of, but it seems like the prudent thing to do.” He closed and locked the doors, and we proceeded up the large, sweeping stairway to the first floor of exhibits. As we walked, he pointed out some of the works that were his favorites, and delved into detail, but we mainly talked about us and now, in the midst of the art.
We were standing in front of a pair of photorealistic paintings of a desert at night, with a blank billboard in one and building falling in on another. “My absolute favorite pieces in this whole place,” he said, standing back with his hands behind him. For a brief moment, it was like any normal scene in any normal art museum in any normal reality. “From when I was a teen, these paintings just stopped me in my tracks. And our new world now? Not very different from these dread empty spaces. I’ve driven south of here, down to the southern border. Saw maybe two homes out in the plains with lights, no idea if there were people. I avoided the Springs but made it as far south as the Raton Pass. It was midsummer, hot and smokey, the air mostly gray and yellow. The pass blocked, some native Americans with rifles that I looked at from a healthy distance. They didn’t seem particularly worried, or worrisome, but I turned back and headed home. The stretches of nothing weren’t far removed from these canvases, but also weren’t far removed from the before times. There’d never been many people out there, never much sign of life. All that lack, it was comforting in a way. Seeing the burned-out cities was so much worse.”
I thought about Utah. “You know, Utah made me curious about larger cities….” And he stopped me.
“Utah was full-on gonzo crazy. Utah was Afghanistan. Zealots dug in, including support from Texas. They actually had an air force! The fighting there was insane. We heard rumors and had streams of refugees, and the stories…oh goodness, the stories. Walls of flame, the government dropping massive ordnance. Everything short of nukes, and the rumor was maybe small nukes. I’d heard Salt Lake was completely gone, burned to glass with fuel-air bombs, suicide and a program of eradication. Parts of Alaska, too, apparently.”
I thought about what I’d seen. “There’s nothing in Utah,” I said. “No signs of people. Lots of scorch marks. Wolves.”
“I shudder to think. It must be horrifying.”
“You know what? I’d seen California up close and personal. Compared to that,” I said, raising my eyebrows.
“Yes, compared to that,” he said, nodding.
We walked through a few more exhibits. He told me about his life before, I told him of mine. We talked about things we missed, like outside information, like new music. He told me the art museum had huge audio collections in various formats, some he could play.
“I appropriated a very nice stereo from a nearby condo,” he said, starting to laugh. “I left a note!”
We walked the footbridge over to Ponti Hall. “Some of the indigenous art was stolen,” he said. “No idea when, it was broken into when I got here. I’ve boarded up the windows there, but nothing’s bothered to try again.”
We continued to tour and talk. He knew all of the art, a lot of background on some of the pieces. He’d been teaching himself from available material.
“Worst case, we’re it,” he said. “But if we’re not it? If some younger generation somehow shows up? We shouldn’t lose all of these things, what they mean, how they got here.”
“I’ve been thinking about that,” I said. “Assuming there’s future generations, what sort of responsibility we now have. I have no idea how to make a solar panel. I can’t build a computer from, what, sand and copper? I can’t wire a city or feed a neighborhood even. Vaccines? Medicine of any kind? I’m pretty limited there,” I said. “I’ve picked up some butchering skills, some sheltering, I can reload bullets if I have bullets and powder, but at some point, that will run out. How do you make a car? How do you make a gun? A knife I can maybe figure out. How do you build water filtration for a community? It’s an endless stream of things, things we’ve mostly lost.”
“It does feel hopeless from here,” he said. “I imagine that in a hundred years, if there’s anyone, it’ll be a very bleak thing that they face each day. Husks of cities, no resources.”
“I’m reading as much as I can about how native Americans lived, how they grew things and gathered things. Primitive stuff, how to grow a crop. The house I’m staying in,” politeness prevented me from saying anything as crude as ‘stolen’ for my living condition, “is loaded with books on homesteading. There are journals filled with notes about how to grow stuff there, literally right there: what the soil needed, what to plant where, what to water. An obsessive set of notes. And I’m keeping a journal of what I experience. I’m hoping all of it can be carried forward, the same way I’m carrying what I’ve found.”
“I’ve raided libraries and bookstores. I grow beans! It’s very exciting,” he said. We’d made it back to the foyer. The now afternoon sky was milky and low-lit. The sodium lights around the museum and a few blocks nearby turned on.
When I left, we agreed to meet at the brewery and maybe go back to the house I was staying in for dinner and more conversation. My head spinning a little, it was always a giant mental task to form words and tell stories these days. I drove home slowly, avoiding a pack of dogs on the way.
Winter
November. Milky skies, snowing (ash and actual snow), stove lit, windows sealed with plastic and tape, doors to unused rooms closed and covered with blankets. The solar hasn’t been able to generate enough to charge the battery, but the freezer is doing fine covered in the driveway, where the outside temperature has only been as high as 22 degrees.
I have a pile of batteries and a pile of LED lamps, plus an indoor propane heater and a stash of propane tanks that I store outside on the rear deck. The snow has been light, and I can still get out and around, but I’ve been holed up in the house, staying warm, reading.
In the last week of October, I’d gone into a few broken-into and burned Home Depot and Lowes stores, and found insulation, tape, tarps, and caulk. Over a week, I dragged insulation back to the house and installed it in the attic, making a gigantic mess of things. I caulked around every window and sealed most of the windows behind plastic sheeting and tape. The house was noticeably quieter and warmer, afterward. I found a few propane heaters just in case the one I was using died and found a warehouse that had sacks of wood pellets that would work in the stove. Between the wood stove, the propane, and the fireplace, I was well prepared for a long winter. The people I’d talked to at the trading post and at the brewery had talked about the previous winter, which set in all in one day and stuck around for nine months. Fall and Spring were sacrificed to climate change and no longer existed. One day it was 90 degrees, then next day it was 20, then on the back side there would be a 90 degree day with half a foot of snow still on the ground.
As I battened the house down, sealing the basement windows and doors, stacking leftover insulation against the garage doors behind plastic tarps, I found a shelf of books that were labeled “House Journal” and numbered, one thru three. They each had a couple of hundred pages of handwritten notes, stories, drawings, and glued or taped pictures. I brought them upstairs to read during any downtime I’d have, which would soon be quite a lot.
The day the first very large storm kicked up I’d spent scavenging water. I’d found a couple of unused plastic cisterns, each rated for 500 gallons, and I’d been slowly filling them, one with distilled and the other with “purified” water. I’d put them in the basement, where a dining table had once stood, on a heavy-duty metal and wood workbench that I’d stolen from a local welding shop. My water options were limited, but I was learning about local water sources, and I’d found a few that ran clear; I then boiled the water at a rolling boil for a few minutes, and would let it cool, covered, then run it through a filter. The steam helped with the heat in the house; things were warmer with the added moisture. The pellet stove had a single surface for placing a tea kettle or pot for just this purpose.
The storm started really raging, a surprising howl rising outside as I finished topping off the purified cistern and securing the house. The distilled water cistern was only about a quarter full. Denver’s winters usually included days of thawing, according to the locals, so I wasn’t super worried about running out of water. Even the really bad winters, there would be a break after a few weeks and the sun would clear things up. I was hoping to not have to restore to melting snow for water, but it was a possibility, so I staked out a tarp in the back yard to collect snow; less dirt and mud leaching into it that way.
The snow falling so heavy and so fast was something I had never seen, and I spent hours staring out of the one window that wasn’t sealed over in plastic (it was in decent shape and didn’t seem to be leaking air, though the glass would radiate cold). I watched the back yard fill over the course of the early afternoon, getting 20 inches in no time at all. I heard branches breaking in the neighborhood, loud snaps and cracks. There were no trees over the roof of this house, but the giant cottonwood at the very edge of the back yard could, if it fell just right, brush up against the back wall.
The day was filtered blue-white through snow and smoke. I made tea, cracked open a bottle of whiskey from a case I’d stolen recently, and settled in for a long winter.
From House Journal 03
(The journals were handwritten, mostly, but had some printed news clippings, and some printed photos taped to the pages. They were apparently written by the man who had lived here, the one who wrote the letter to Chris. Unlike his wife’s notebooks, which were precise and unornamented, these were messy, diary-like, passionate, angry at times, filled with sketches and poetry and music. From the third of three journals):
We’ve been subject to Covid-19 for a few lifetimes, it feels like, and there’s that new pandemic, the Crimean Fever, and despite all the cool vaccines and well-known ways to mitigate the spread, more people are dying right now than were when things first hit. There are new variants of the diseases, indications that having a combination is immediately deadly. Covid iota plus the flu means dead. Crimean beta plus Covid delta means three days to spread the thing, then raging fever and death. There are huge advancements in vaccines with mRNA and CRISPR, huge breakthroughs were happening nearly daily last year. The people primarily doing the dying are completely unvaccinated, and of those a vast majority are people who just don’t believe they can die, apparently, and who don’t understand how science works. They live in a reality that was created for them by a foreign intelligence service.
It’s an amazing story: decades ago, around the time of the Vietnam war, the Soviets and the Chinese started working, independently, on destabilizing techniques using psychology and advertising-like campaigns, subtle, not propaganda. They closely observed the way the United States was dealing with its first modern challenge: an unpopular war that was splitting the country in two. From this, they worked on the ground with activists and students and peaceniks and hippies, but also with conservatives and Christian fundamentalists, and of those groups, they found that the latter two, the conservatives and the fundamentalists, were the easiest to sway and control due to their weakness for the appeal to emotion. While the FBI was engaging in things like MKUltra on its own citizens, the Soviets had pumped billions into the antiwar movement in the US, leaking this data as a source of emotional control of the “other side,” the conservatives and pro-war hawks. That’s the thing the right never understood: all the effort to sway the lefties was intended to engage the right, to enrage them, to destabilize the country; the result was never intended to be peace or communism, the result was intended to be civil war. Reactionaries react. Creating instruments like the World Peace Organization, the GRU banked on the reaction. And they were correct in that assumption, and their plans were fruitful. Things slowed while the Soviets collapsed, but the GRU never loses data, and the effort picked back up in the early 1990s under their dictator / leader for life. These Russian “Active Measures” started to include political campaigns and memetic, psychological warfare. The environmental causes of the 1990s were heavily financed by Russia, and the resulting memetic warfare was a weird one: people who didn’t believe that man could affect the environment and that environmental causes were political, were convinced that something something one world government. Possibly due to the way the previous world peace efforts had been framed as Communist, the environmental efforts were also identified as Communist. I have a hard time imagining thinking like one of those people without dropping into an entirely unbelievable fiction, so I can’t really guess what they think, and asking them only results in defensive linguistics, nothing fruitful, no place to meet and agree.
That’s where we are: the country fractured by a foreign intelligence effort that is the culmination of decades of careful engineering, combined with the fortuitous (for the Russians) rise of social media to amplify those ideas, and the sudden influence of pandemics. The origins of the pandemics are being argued, still, and the arguments are especially fervent in the corridors of the minds of those people who need this to be something planned and man-made, since their God would never, ever. Yet here we are, and while it now really doesn’t matter where the pandemics originated, it never did matter. That line of thinking was a programmed script from a handful of memetic machines, posts on social media by warehouses of bored Russian prisoners. The pandemic wasn’t the danger. The people were.
This split divides realities. It’s hard to grasp, but the folks on the other side of the fence aren’t living in the reality that we are. Every part of their reality was rebuilt starting with Trump and ending with civil war. They are on the side of right, no question, no amount of actual visible reality sways them. They’ve been blinded by Russian science.
During the most recent completed election cycle, even the most gerrymandered districts, the ones with voting laws that restricted all but the most affluent from voting, voted Democratic. The consensus from the media was that the population of Red Leaning Individuals had been heavily thinned by the pandemic. In areas that had been swing districts, for instance, the solid majority was now Democratic. Districts that had lost 35,000 or 80,000 or 100,000 to the pandemics couldn’t make those voters back up out of a dwindling supply. This all of course led to the Election Fraud Riots, insurrections, incursions, terrorism. Out of shape fat sickly white men with goatees and guns who decided they no longer liked democracy; they wanted a Republic or a Dictatorship. Even after Trump died, they didn’t believe he died. You could not convince them, and they went to the funeral, upended the hearse, opened the casket, pulled the body apart to prove that it wasn’t their demigod. Before the National Guard was called in to the riots in Austin, for instance, 220 people had already been murdered by right wing terrorist cells in that city alone. Miami, before the Marines? Something like 500 people dead from terrorism. It’s not fair to call it a riot or an insurrection; it’s open war. Small and mobile factions of lunatics moved into towns and cities and started taking lives. Their Russian masters would be proud, if they weren’t drowning in their own bodily fluids from pneumonia. It seems like we were damn near a country just a few short years ago.
One night, we heard a ruckus outside. The dog went a little more nuts than usual and I armed the cameras to see if anything showed up. Nothing moving near the house, but we could hear a tinny voice, amplified poorly, indistinct. I stood out on the front porch, and sure enough there was some idiot in a pickup at one end of the block, forming a little blockade with a second truck. At the other end, another two trucks.
Texas had been ravaged by three monster storms and fifty different kinds of variants and combinations of diseases, so a lot of Texans were already dead before the remaining started shooting each other. West Texas had splintered off, and places that already had border checkpoints became vaccination checkpoints; refuse a vaccine, you get turned away. Refuse to turn away, you get shot. Groups of “Texas Irregulars” and “Texian Shock Troops”, convoys of refugees in stolen military vehicles, beat to crap RVs, huge pickup trucks, and semis, all filled with overweight men and guns started pouring out of Texas. They brought war and attempted kidnapping anywhere they ended up. They were ugly and brutal and stupid, and thought they were invincible. The skirmishes were grim.
The news that we could get, the pictures we saw, the radio traffic on the shortwave, it led us to start fortifying the house. At first, we sort of laughed about it, how ridiculous it was, as we were doing it. Our next-door neighbors initially thought we’d lost our minds, but slowly and surely, the whole neighborhood, the folks who stayed, all started doing similar stuff. We’d boarded up all the windows that face the street. We’d hear bursts of gunfire every night. The fire trucks didn’t really run any longer in Denver, and while we seemed to be OK in Lakewood, we’re not that far from Denver.
Then, Texans. On our block.
The guys in the trucks were armed with rifles and loaded down with the sort of stuff you’d wear if you were a Texan headed to war, their trucks loaded with useless flashing lights and flags, Texas and Trump and bullshit. They’re shouting…something, I’m not sure what. That first house, the owner is a black guy, and I watched as he stepped out, shotgun in hand, one hand raised as if to wave, and they opened up on him, cutting him down before he could react.
I ran back inside and got the wife and the dog into the basement, into the utility room furthest from windows, behind a heavy iron tub, like we’d planned. Goddamn garden level basement means two windows looking onto the front yard, and though they were boarded, boards don’t stop rifles. (I still need to put in some sandbags). We cut the power to the house, I grabbed a headlamp and my rifle.
I’d spent a few years as a hobbiest long range shooter, and our family was always weirdly good with marksmanship. I had a 6.5 Creedmore custom rifle based on an Accuracy International chassis and a Remington bolt action, with a rebuilt custom trigger, Brux barrel, and Nikon glass, and I trusted it all out to 1200+ yards. I also had a 308 semi-auto that I trusted to about 500 yards; it could carry further but I was much happier with the 6.5 and stuck with it. Hand loads, logged barrel time, the whole shebang. I’d been crazy about the hobby for a long while but had stopped going to the range in the last few years, had stuck with a pellet rifle to keep my muscle memory.
I grabbed my rifles, screwed hearing protection into my ears, and headed for the balcony; we have a weird little porch / sunroom thing on the east end of the house, see, and it overlooks the entire neighborhood through a sliding glass door. I quietly slid the door open, then moved a part of the wood panel that boarded it up. I’d designed this as a place to shoot from, lying prone. From outside, it was all dark; the wood was painted a dark gray, and I had a backstop in the same color.
Think about that. This once quiet urban home, now fortified. Known distances to neighborhood landmarks, 85 yards to that mailbox, 120 yards to that corner lamp post. That’s the kind of world we live in now. Once a sunroom, now a shooter’s hide, this reality drawn ugly across the face of what was America.
The optics were in good shape; I’d laser zero’d my rifles with an Axeon, which would be close enough for center mass at what amounted to less than 100 yards. From this distance my optics made faces easily legible, and I centered on the lower neck / upper chest of the guy on the bullhorn. The goatee, the double chin, the fat pushed up tight from the body armor, the yellow wrap-around shooters shades, the confederate flag neckerchief, a pair of tubes connected to an oxygen cannula running to his nose. He was like a prototype of the idiots who did just this sort of thing. The two men who’d opened fire on my neighbor were walking across the street to a duplex from my right to my left; as soon as they’d crossed the plane of my shot, I fired.
Right then, just as the guy’s head came loose, my neighbor at the end of the block (a tried and true, dyed in the wool American Redneck) opened up on the trucks in front of his house. I’d been friendly-in-passing with the guy for years, but we weren’t friends. Just friendly. I have no idea what sort of ordnance he was using, but it was brutal, sounded like he and maybe his wife and possibly all the kids and his brothers and sisters and maybe even the dogs were just opening up all hell on the trucks there. My target dropped dead, though, and in the chaos as the Texans tried to figure out where the shot came from and what the other end of the block was doing, I dropped four more, mainly hitting upper thigh and lower abdomen, to stop them. The remaining two were now hiding behind a truck; I could see their headlights stabbing the air around them in panic as their friends bled out.
Next to me was my other bolt action rifle. It lived, these days, under a gray tarp in this room. I hated the fucking thing. My father-in-law had given it to me, it and a few hundred rounds. It was ugly, stark, dumb, but stupidly accurate, and was intended to disable vehicles. A fifty caliber, it was carrying quite a bit more weight than my 6.5, and each round hit with the force of a small car being dropped from a large height. There was nothing elegant about it, it was never fun, ever, and now it was precisely at home. I shuffled over, sighted the truck, and knocked down one of the two remaining people through the truck. From the other end of the block, my neighbor was cleaning up, one shot here and there. Then he and his wife and maybe ten other neighbors between us gathered, started walking down the block, toward my house, toward the other truck, toward the one remaining guy.
He stopped out from behind the truck, hands in the air, a panicked smile on his face, shaking.
The way the world works, I can’t abide having a person who is infected by a memetic virus, infected by a different reality, possibly influencing and infecting others. I can’t abide treason. He dropped like a bag of sand; the round split him nearly in half.
The neighborhood got together after that. We set up barricades at either end of the street, we talked about who drove what sort of cars, who we could expect to see. We got radios. We rotated watch. The trucks from Texas were shoved to the sides but left as a warning. We replaced their Texas flags with black, and flew American flags on our porches. Two days passed, and more Texans, more of the same results. Day after that, one more Humvee with Texans, and we disabled their vehicle with a planted device…one of the neighbors was a little crazier than the rest of us, and he’d designed a few zones on the street where people or cars could be exploded, using what amounted to a dozen claymore-style mines connected to a remote trigger. He’d been waiting his whole life for this thing to pop off, truth be told.
It was weeks before anyone tried anything again, and they failed in the same fashion every time. It was months before the city exploded, and Denver added its smoke to the fires. We lost some neighbors. Some packed up and moved off. We linked with the next few streets, then the next few, exchanging food and supplies, keeping in touch, careful but personal contact. Weeks, and we started packing, and arranging, and getting ready to leave the house. I’ve not heard anything from family in New Mexico, but I assume we’ve lost some or all of them. Still, I know a cabin in the woods in the Sacramento mountains, south of Circle Cross Ranch, where we can sit for a while. Wait for Chris, if he shows. Get the greenhouses running.
If my nephew finds all of this, he can add to the story. I think we’re the historians now. It’s not like it was a few years ago, where everyone had an amplified voice, and everything was noise and so little signal. I think we need to let people know; I think we’re the people who must now do that. It’s a burden, a duty. It’s all on us, to log the last of this civilization. I hope others are doing the same. We’re all historians now.
Good luck. God speed. Keep the faith.
(This journal ended halfway through the pages, with a hand-drawn map of a path between the city and some location in southern New Mexico)