Authors: Brian Hodge
FOURTH EPOCH
WASTELANDS
March – August 1988
1
Every year there comes the day when you know that spring has truly arrived. No more false starts, followed by another blast of Arctic air. This time you know it’s here to stay. You can feel it in the air, as steady as a friendly hand.
Jason felt it, and knew the time had come to head south. Not only in search of a safer place to live and rebuild and work for a better future than they could attain in St. Louis, but someplace warmer, where winter couldn’t grip to the bone and hold tight for months on end. He’d spoken of it weeks ago to Rich Patton and Jack Mitchell, both of whom agreed that yes, such a trip was necessary for the good of all. Not something that they could force anyone into doing, but if he was volunteering…
It had been St. Louis’s worst winter in memory, relentlessly cold and icy and snowy, windy and gray and bleak. Jason figured the only reason they hadn’t had any more trouble from Travis was because he and his group were busy enough keeping winter at bay themselves. But the sun and the promise of warmth had returned to the city again, and like a bear emerging from hibernation, they would no doubt step from their cave hungry.
“Tomorrow,” Jason said. He lay on his back, one arm behind his head and the other around Erika. She was curled in close to his side. “Part of me wishes it would never get here. That tonight would just keep stretching on.”
“You won’t change your mind? Let me come with you?” She said it with a distinct lack of conviction.
“We’ve been through all that before.”
“I know.” She burrowed in closer and he felt the hot trace of a tear. “I just keep wishing I’d heard you wrong, that’s all.” Erika turned and rolled onto her stomach, propping herself on her elbows. “Why’s it have to be you, anyway?”
“Man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do,” he drawled.
Erika hit at his shoulder with a loose fist. “Don’t make fun of this.” She drew a shaky breath, held it, exhaled with a huff. “Why can’t it be somebody else?”
“Because I guess once I was dumb enough to volunteer, that shut down anybody else’s impulse to step up.” He craned his neck to kiss her bare shoulder. “Funny how that works.”
She crawled closer to rest her head on his chest. “Promise me something.”
“What’s that?”
“Wherever it is you end up, don’t do anything stupid and piss anybody off this time.” She ran her finger along a rough ridge of scar tissue creeping around the back of a rib.
Jason chuckled. “I’ll try my best.”
“Try harder.”
He promised, and soon they made love again. Urgently, sadly, with heat and fear, as if trying to brand one another into deeper memory. Because it was the last time, and it would have to do them both for a long while.
* *
Morning dawned too early. After breakfast, the entire population of Brannigan’s met on the fourth-floor parking level. Gusts of wind blew through the open sides, and Jason pulled the front of his nylon jacket together to keep it from flapping.
His Mustang was ready. A couple of them who really knew their way around the inside of a car had worked on it over the past days, changing the oil, coolant, belts, points, plugs, filters, tightening everything they could get a wrench or a ratchet to. It was gassed up, and the trunk held a quartet of five-gallon polyurethane gas cans, all full. A siphoning pump lay next to them. Food and clothing stocked the back seat, and his shotgun and a revolver lay in the passenger seat beside a small case of cassettes.
“I got something I want you to take with you,” Rich said, and stepped up closer, away from Pam. He held a folded paper.
Jason unfolded it and found it to be a page covered with a series of small calendars, none labeled as to year, simply marked A through N. A grid at the upper left listed the years 1900 through 2100, and each had a corresponding letter: a perpetual calendar.
“Nobody’d put out new calendars last summer. I tore this out of an astronomy book. Only thing I could find.”
“But why?”
“Keep track of the days, Jason.” Rich rested a big hand gently on his shoulder. “I got to thinking last night that none of us knows how long this’ll take. Or what might happen here while you’re away.”
He was starting to get the idea.
“And if something happens that we have to leave here, go someplace else, hide, maybe, you gotta know how to find us. Keep track of the days, and we will too. And if we’re not here when you come back, we can at least set a time and a place for someone to meet you. Say once a week?”
“How ’bout under the Arch?” Caleb said.
Jason nodded. “Sundays at sunset. Just in case.”
“Sundays it is.”
Jason hugged Rich then, hard, as he might’ve once hugged his father, or after his father, Kelly. He moved to Pam, to Jack. Juanita, Colleen, Farrah, Nicholas. Diane and Caleb and all the rest, one by one, leaving no one out, because they were
all
family now, in ways that went beyond blood ties.
He saved Erika for last, and the longest. There was only so much anyone could wring out of a too-brief moment, a clasping of hands, an anguished locking of eyes. Only so much. The trick was carrying it with you, close to the heart, ready to be pulled out like a photo from a wallet, and remembered, and cherished.
He did the best he could. And then he moved on.
* *
They drifted back across the bridge and into Brannigan’s, alone and in twos and threes. They’d all watched him leave, gearing up his car and driving off toward a destiny of unknown destinations, a future every last one of them had a stake in. When the drone of his engine was nothing more than a memory, they went back home. Except for the last two.
“You think he’ll find anything out there much better than what we’ve got now?” Erika crossed her arms over her chest, tilted her face up to meet a breeze that dried the tears on her cheeks.
“I couldn’t say,” Caleb answered. “But if something’s out there to be found, I’d put my money on him being the one with enough gumption to get to it.”
She stepped closer to him, tracing one fingernail down the zipper of his jacket, then leaning her head against his shoulder. He patted the back of her head and then she drew back, pulling her blowing hair back from her face. “I always hoped I’d meet someone that could care about me the way I am…all of me, you know. And I finally do, and look what happens. We get a few months together, and he gets taken away like this. And I don’t know if I’ll ever
see
him again. Of all the un-fucking-fair things that have ever happened to me, that’s top of the list.”
He patted her head again. “Nothing was ever guaranteed. Not before. Especially not now. At least he’s doing something he knows in his heart is right, something that’s gotta be done by somebody. Something he believes in. Something for everybody. You included.”
Erika nodded weakly. “I know, I know. I guess…I must sound pretty selfish.”
“You love him. You got a right to be selfish.”
“Well, good. I’ll probably feel that way a
lot
until he comes back.” She wiped at her nose and looked up into Caleb’s eyes—their age, their understanding. “You know, I think I can talk to you easier than I can anybody else here. Even Pam, and that’s saying a lot.”
“An honor I’ll take you up on anytime.”
“Do you ever wonder what
really
drew us together, that day you and Diane were first driving through?”
“All the time, girl. All the time.” Caleb pushed his hands into his jacket pockets, rocked on his heels. “Never met no one who had the same thing show up in a dream of theirs that was in mine too.”
“One time I was complaining to Pam about this.” Erika tapped her head. “She told me that maybe the reason I can’t control it is that
it only kicks in when I need it. Or when something’s really important. So maybe it was important that you be here, for all of us. I mean, you
have
done a lot of things no one else could do. The water well, and Jason’s back, and everything else.”
Caleb scuffed at the concrete with his boot tip. “Just glad to be useful.”
“And that’s something I actually envy about you. Okay, granted, what you can do with your little knacks isn’t as strange as what I have to deal with sometimes. But at least you’ve had the satisfaction of knowing you’ve done some good. Mine, well, I’m not so sure.” Erika hiked herself up onto the concrete retaining wall, sitting back against a support pillar and dangling one leg down the inside wall.
“But I
think I can deal with it better now than I used to. I used to hate it that I wasn’t normal. So did my mom, for that matter. Who wants her daughter seeing things that aren’t there, and doesn’t leave the wake-up-screaming-nightmares behind after she outgrows her Barbie dolls?” She shook her head. “I used to wish I’d been born in the future, that maybe by then people like me would be, you know, understood. That I wouldn’t feel like such a freak.”
“Aw, don’t be looking at it like that.” Caleb hunched his shoulders, turned his palms up. “For what it’s worth, I always had this idea that God gave something like that to everyone. A knack. A big one for Erika, a medium one for Caleb, and so on. Everyone. Only it was just a few of us that didn’t lose the instruction books.”
Erika beamed and clapped her hands. “I like that! That’s a neat way of looking at it.”
“You ain’t some supernatural freak,” he went on. “You’re just a normal, pretty young lady that most everybody else hasn’t quite caught up with yet.”
“Super
normal,
” Erika said.
“There you go.”
She tapped her foot against the wall, thinking. Smiling at first, then looking more somber as she turned her gaze back on him. “I’ve been having another dream. Every two or three weeks, it seems. I’ve been having it ever since last summer. I think you’re there in it, only I can’t see you. It just feels like you’re there. You know, when you first walked up to me under the Arch, it felt like I’d already been around you.”
“What’s the dream about?”
“I’m standing by a highway. Interstate, I think. There are a few others around me, it feels like, but I’m not facing them. I think Jason might be one of them. But it’s hot, soooo hot, like the worst part of summer. And there’s this road sign, the big green kind, and I don’t know what it says exactly, but I think the place starts with an N. All these birds are sitting on the sign, and then they fly away all at once. And…” She raised a hand and let it fall in futility. “That’s it.”
“Doesn’t give you much to go on, does it?”
“No. And I don’t know if that’s good or bad.” Erika slid off the wall, wandered over to him for another hug, a strong and paternal shoulder to lean on.
What a shame. He would’ve made such a great dad for someone.
March winds blew, bearing the promise of warmth. Of life.
“Caleb,” she said softly. “What’s going to happen to us all?”
“Don’t know, hon. We’ll find out when we find out.”
Except maybe I’ll find out sooner than the rest of us,
she thought.
“I know it ain’t easy living with what you got inside,” he told her. “But nothing much worthwhile ever comes out of easy anyway.”
2
For Jason, the highways soon turned into an endless maze of wide, gray rivers. Constant and eternal, they led inevitably onward. Stolid, they gave no hint as to what lay in wait a little farther along, be it good, bad, indifferent, or nonexistent.
He was reminded of maps he’d seen of the Amazon, the thousands of tributaries emptying into the main river. Such were the secondary roads to the interstates. Only when he looked at the full U.S. map in the front of his atlas did he appreciate how vast it all really was, and how enormous his task.
It felt like a fate out of myth: doomed to forever wander dusty highways in search of a sanctuary that may not even exist. Talk about impossible tasks. No way could he cover it all. Not in a year. Not in five. Maybe not ever. Only three things could end it: death, surrender, or blind luck.
March quickly slid into April, which turned into May. Jason watched as his beard sprouted anew, as his hair grew long again. He took to wearing bandannas once more. As the weeks passed and the days lengthened and the temperatures climbed, he went without a shirt much of the time, and grew brown, except for the scars on his back.
The passage of time was not without its consolations. It was good to be warm again. Hot, even. Sometimes when he was still, and all was quiet, lying under the stars or sitting beneath a shade tree eating from a can, he thought back to the winter, remembering, and could still feel its cold, bony grip.
As he passed through hamlets and towns and small cities, he found the common denominator that was the toughest of all to grow accustomed to: he still wasn’t used to the silence. The stilled voice of Man left only the birds and the wind, the chirr of insects and the howls of pack animals. It was easy to stand still and close his eyes and realize that the earth now sounded the same as it must have a hundred thousand years ago. And in doing so, he soon felt insignificant, an amoeba crawling across a rock in the ocean.
Best to keep moving then, and not dwell on it.
South…
It wasn’t simply a matter of finding someplace livable. Housing was there for the taking everywhere he went. But merely transplanting himself and the rest wasn’t the answer, because they’d one day run into the same problem there that would someday face them in St. Louis: a finite stockpile of food and supplies. To survive, to live free again, they had to become self-sufficient. Evolve into an agrarian community instead of a bunch of scavengers, human buzzards living off a dead world. Caleb was the only one among them with any knowledge of farming. Maybe he would be up to the task of converting them solely on his own, and maybe he wouldn’t. Best not to pin all their hopes on such a chancy proposition. Caleb wouldn’t live forever, and they could get it wrong only once.
Better, then, would be to find such a community already in existence and, if it was willing to accept them, roll up their sleeves and try their best to blend in.
And there pass the rest of his days. He had to laugh and shake his head. A year ago, still in college with illusions of a future paved with gold, such a lifestyle had been the farthest thing from his mind. Jason Hart, Gentleman Farmer.
But he saw no other way. It would take time, time to repopulate. Time for the dreamers and thinkers and doers to find each other and put their heads together. Time to figure out how to reactivate those simple rectangles set along the baseboards, make them hum with electric life again. To make fuel that would keep the engines running.
People…they were scattered nearly everywhere, only the numbers had been vastly reduced. A great culling had occurred across the land. And being human, these remaining folks were pretty much what they’d always been, just to greater extremes. Some he found approachable, some he found otherwise.
Near Tupelo, Mississippi, someone in a house fired a rifle at him when he got too close. He got a hole in his fender before he could clear out.
In the Shoals area of northwestern Alabama, he came upon a sizable group living on the UNA campus in Florence. Nearly all were students, and they readily took him in. One of them, a lanky comedian named Clark, had been keeping a daily chronicle of events since last summer; a thick box of pages sat next to a manual typewriter. With a wry grin he told Jason he was doing it for the next history book to be written, whenever that would be.
Everyone warned him against going to the southern edge of Florence, where the bluffs overlook the Tennessee River. Smoke from cookfires had often been seen rising from the bluffs, and while no one knew just who was there and what was being cooked, human bones had been found washed up downstream along the Tennessee’s banks.
He sensed a legend in the making.
Jason stayed on the UNA campus for four days. It was a chance to clean up and catch his breath before moving on, and more importantly to recharge his mental and emotional batteries with others more like himself than not. But there was no future here…only another day-to-day present.
In Laurel, Mississippi, after he’d gone even farther south and turned west again, he came across a black couple, a man and woman in their mid-thirties. They’d been on the move since Meridian, where a local landowner and his sons had tried to reinstitute slavery. They’d failed, and the would-be slaves had triumphed in blood. Jason took them to Natchez, their destination.
As he moved on, lifting his eyes to the rearview mirror and watching these two new friends dwindle to stick figures on the horizon, Jason felt a curious reaffirmation inside. People were indeed much the same as they’d always been. Those poor dumb rednecks in Meridian with their slit throats were proof of that. They were anachronisms, throwbacks to an earlier age. And at the same time something new.
Did people ever really learn from the mistakes of the past? He doubted they did. And if that was so, then history was at best a cyclical concept.
The western world had gone through a Dark Ages once before. It looked like those days had finally rolled around once again.
* *
Thursday, May 26
Hi babe,
Pretty silly, huh? I’m writing you letters you won’t have a chance to read until I can deliver them in person. But I’ll try anything to keep my sanity out here in the wastelands. It’s been over two months since I’ve seen you, heard you, touched you. But here I am putting a Bic to a Mead notebook and I already feel closer to you. A little, mind you. Not nearly enough.
I’m just one state away right now. Just outside of El Dorado, Arkansas. Didn’t know there was actually someplace really called El Dorado except for an old John Wayne movie. It’s about fifteen miles from the Louisiana state line. I say I’m “outside” of it because I prefer passing the nights in the country. It makes it seem a little more like normal, instead of being in some town where the few people left scuttle like roaches when you scare them by turning on the light. When I’m out like this it’s more like I’m on a camping trip, by choice instead of by necessity.
I did go in last night to stock up. Just like the old pioneer movies… “I’m a-goin’ to town fer supplies, Pa. Be back around sundown.” That’s when I grabbed this notebook. I had to fight a rat for it. We compromised. He let me take this one, and I gave him the rest of the store.
Morning now. Gorgeous sunrise. I was wishing like hell you were at my side so we could enjoy it together. And then maybe I could tear off your clothes and roll around with you in the dew. Damn. I’m making myself horny again.
Had a decent breakfast. Coffee, three fried eggs fresh off the campfire, and the last of some homemade bread. Back in Mississippi I met this lady of at least seventy and her sheepdog Max. She’s been trucking along business as usual ever since the plague. She keeps her chickens fed and happy, and she gave me a couple dozen eggs, and two loaves of bread. I’m not sure, but I’m betting that was some sacrifice for her. She told me her teeth don’t fit anymore. Wish I could’ve helped her out, but a dentist I’m not. I chopped a bunch of wood for her cookstove. Bless her heart, then she killed one of her chickens so she could fry it up for me. I felt really bad about that one. It’s like that chicken looked at me when she was coming for it with the hatchet, and blamed me for showing up. I wondered if she had names for them all, like those loony women with fifty cats and they know every one of them by name.
I ate it anyway. I’m not crazy
.
It’s amazing what you learn about human nature when you’re out like this. It’s one of those things that’s too hard to put into words. It’s just something that has to be experienced. You see the poles, people at their worst and people at their best. The old lady in Mississippi? She’s the latter. The more she did for me, the better she seemed to feel about it. And me, well, the more I wanted to reciprocate. But I mentioned people at their worst, too, didn’t I? Yeah, there
is
that, unfortunately.
A month ago I was at a rest stop in Alabama, midway or so between Birmingham and Montgomery. I was sitting on a picnic table with my ghetto blaster on (best I recall, it was a Stevie Nicks tape…she was the love of my life until you came along). This other car pulled in, a woman and a boy around six. I don’t know if it was her child or not. She looked as Anglo-American as you and me, and he was Hispanic, didn’t look a thing like her. The two of them sat as many tables away as they could get. She seemed wary of me at first, and we yelled small talk back and forth. I guess eventually she got used to me.
I went off behind the building a little later to take a leak, and while I was indisposed somebody else came along. And they stole her car. Knocked her in the head, and pushed the boy down and skinned up his knees and elbows, and drove off with it. I couldn’t believe it. All this stuff just lying around, and they had to have something that already belonged to someone else. I kept thinking it wouldn’t have happened if I’d been in sight, if I hadn’t picked that moment to hose down the weeds.
I helped them out with my first aid kit, and took them to the next town so they could grab a new car and stuff, but they’d lost things that couldn’t be replaced, ever. The last few keepsakes from the way life used to be, pictures of her family. All gone now. Each of us has so little from those days it seems like an especially terrible crime to rob someone of what’s left. I hated these guys for it, and I never even saw their faces.
Enough for this morning. It’s time to pack it all up and hit the road. This is getting to be a very monotonous ritual. I keep wondering if what I’m looking for even exists. And if it does, the odds of finding it. The old quest for the needle in the haystack.
I think I’m needing a vacation, in the worst way. The kind where you come home and stay under the same roof for a week.
More later. Count on it. Miss you. Love you.
Jay