Authors: Algor X. Dennison
Carrie cut off the diatribe. “How about a little slack in the chain, McLean? Okay? I’m tired of feeling useless around here. There’s nothing tying me down like there is for the rest of you. I can do this, so let me.”
McLean frowned. “It’s not that I want some kind of hold over you. I just… it’s more that you have a hold over me, I guess.” He started to move toward her again, but then thought better of it. “Just come back safe.” he added.
Carrie tightened the straps on her pack and nodded. Then she turned and walked off down the dirt road, past the Hendricksons’ place, and out of sight.
McLean watched her go for a moment, then got back to work. But for the next few hours he was quieter than usual, and the others left him alone. Even JD refrained from making any inane comments. If they’d been able to see Carrie’s face as she left the ranch, they’d have seen that she too had grown very thoughtful.
Chapter 4 : Solo Journey
The first six miles were uneventful. It was a clear day, a few degrees cooler than when Carrie had traveled overland to the ranch with the others. She saw a hawk circling overhead, and it seemed to follow her for some time. She imagined it curiously gazing down at her from its birds-eye view, wondering where she was headed and whether she’d scare up anything for it to kill and eat.
That reminded her of the drone they’d spotted in the skies over Breckenridge, and she kept an eye and an ear out for any other aircraft. But there was nothing, and she soon got into thick brush that kept her focused on the ground at her feet so she wouldn’t trip or tear her clothes on the blackberry whips, which were beginning to lose their leaves but not their thorns.
She came to an extensive blackberry patch with some berries left, and stopped to eat a few. Then she heard a grunt.
Her first thought was, bizarrely, that it sounded like a rhinoceros. The dark, fuzzy shape that rose out of the brambles several yards away was not quite as big as a rhino, but it was just as alarming. It was a young black bear also enjoying a snack, and it had reared up on its hind legs to get a good look at her. The added height made it twice as intimidating, and Carrie froze, physically unable to go for her gun.
The bear whoofed and grunted again, then dropped to all fours, where it was out of site again behind the thicket. Carrie had to decide instantly whether she ought to run for it and put some distance between her and the bear, or slowly back away and prepare herself for a possible fight. She opted for the latter, thinking clearly enough to realize that running wouldn’t do any good and might just attract the bear’s interest.
She moved slowly and cautiously backward, facing the bear’s blackberry patch and keeping her senses on high alert. With her right hand she pulled her gun out and took the safety off, and with the other she picked up a large stick that was underfoot. It wouldn’t do any damage, but she thought it might help dissuade the creature from attacking if it came to that.
But it didn’t come to that. She never saw the bear again. It went its way and Carrie went hers. After twenty more minutes of hiking around the area, she relaxed and even chuckled to herself. She put her gun away and dropped the stick in favor of a longer, heftier one that would actually be useful whether or not she encountered more wildlife.
As she went on her way she felt lucky, but also a tiny bit disappointed that the encounter had ended so anticlimactically. “I ran into a bear, but I just walked around him” wouldn’t make as good a story as if she’d had to run or fight for her life. That made her wonder what she was trying to prove with this solo excursion.
Hadn’t she come through the mountains, and even been the one to save the horses when it really counted? She didn’t need to become Rambo just so McLean and the others would accept her-- they had accepted her from the start. But whether they did or not didn’t affect her personally. She was Carrie; wasn’t that good enough?
“
I’m Carrie!” she said, with belligerent inflection. It came out louder than she had intended, and
she stopped, afraid someone would hear. Then the absurdity of that fear made her laugh. Who was out here to notice, except for the bear? She let loose, bellowing with laughter and figuring the bear would steer well away from a crazy laughing woman.
She trudged on, stopping to rest only once in ten miles. She was in good shape, better now than the previous month, and she’d paid attention to the terrain when setting her route. She kept off roads but didn’t try to climb steep slopes or cut across difficult ravines. By the time the sun was halfway on its descent to the horizon, she arrived at an overlook that gave her a view of the small valley that Crested Butte occupied.
The little town’s heart lay below in a neat grid, with streets and homes and a few stores clustered in the center with additional homes sprawling around the edges. Carrie lay on her stomach taking it all in, watching for movement.
Cars would have been easy to spot moving around the town, but at this distance she had to work to pick out the people standing, sitting, and walking below. Some were in their yards, gardening or repairing something, or just playing. Two kids on bikes rolled up and down the street freely, a good sign. A cluster of women had gathered in one backyard to wash clothes together, and were obviously deep in conversation. Carrie suddenly felt a pang of envy and longed for such social connection. She nearly jumped up to join them.
Then she saw a man in a uniform patrolling the street one block over. He carried a shotgun and had a dog with him. Now that her eyes were keyed in on guns, she spotted another man with a deer rifle standing near an intersection, and a woman walking out of a building in the heart of town with a pistol strapped to the hip of her jeans.
A roadblock had been set up on the south side of the town where a road came in. Two teenagers were sitting behind it. Carrie traced the streets with her eyes until she spotted another similar barricade on the opposite side of the town. As she watched, a man with an AR-model rifle approached to speak to them for a moment, nodded, and left.
It seemed that not all was as idyllic in this mountain village as she’d first assumed. She wondered what the town’s residents had seen, what they’d faced so far that made them lock down the streets and break out the guns. She didn’t relish the idea of being on the business end of one of those barricades, with all the gun-toting men in town rushing toward her full of suspicion. But did want to get down there and find someone to talk to.
She scanned the edges, looking for a house she could approach without alerting the armed patrolmen to her presence. There were plenty of houses outside the guarded perimeter, but they appeared mostly empty. One was even burned out, with blackened walls and a section of roof missing. An old man sat in the yard of one run-down home, spitting wads of tobacco and kicking at a dog that was chained to his chair. Carrie decided against that one.
That left one cottage that had smoke coming from its chimney. She couldn’t see who was inside, which made it very risky. But she was getting restless and couldn’t afford to stay on the ridge until the sun went down.
She got up and moved down the hillside through the trees, circling toward the house she’d picked out, hoping to get close enough to see who was inside before knocking. She had to cross an open road to get into more trees, which she accomplished without being seen after waiting to make sure no one was coming.
Slinking along a quiet dirt road on which several houses sat empty, Carrie approached the house with the smoking chimney. From the cover of a few trees she peered into a side window that didn’t have shades drawn, but could see only the foot of a bed. She reached up to grasp a thick branch and pulled herself up into the tree she was using for cover. From this height she could see someone lying in the bed. It looked like a teenaged boy reading a book. Nothing else in the house seemed to be moving.
Something wasn’t right. Carrie sensed that she was missing something. Why would a boy be lying alone in an unprotected house in the middle of the day? Was he some kind of outcast? Had the townspeople banished him?
Then it hit her: he was in quarantine. He must have had a contagious disease, and a very serious one if the townspeople wouldn’t even let him stay within their defensive perimeter. Of course, without access to a working hospital or a constantly-restocked pharmacy even a flu could turn deadly now.
Carrie waited and watched, figuring that the boy couldn’t be left alone forever. Sooner or later someone would come to check on him, and she’d be able to speak with that person safely.
She waited for half an hour. While standing up taller on the three branch to stretch her legs, she noticed that she could see the town’s southern roadblock from where she was perched. As she looked on, a woman walked up to the barricade carrying a basket. She pulled two items out of it and offered them to the teenagers on duty. They nodded appreciatively, and after a few more words of conversation, the woman passed the barricade and walked around the corner and up the dirt road Carrie was on.
As the woman came nearer, Carrie got a better look at her. She was heavy-set and wore glasses, with dark hair pulled up in a bun and jeans. She looked friendly enough, although Carrie wouldn’t want to tangle with her if she got defensive of her boy inside. Carrie waited until the woman had gone inside the house, and then climbed down from the tree and walked to the front of the house.
Sure enough, plastered across the front door was a large hand-written sign that said ‘Infectious Disease -- Do Not Enter’. A poor attempt at a biohazard symbol was drawn underneath that looked more like a squiggly skull, but was effective either way. Carrie waited by the mailbox.
Fifteen minutes later the door opened and the woman came out, still carrying her now-empty basket. She shut and locked the door behind her, then came down the steps. When she saw Carrie, she slowed to a stand-still and her brow knitted in consternation.
“
Hi,” Carrie said, trying her most winning smile. “How’s your patient?”
“
You aren’t from around here,” the woman said with an edge in her voice. Her eyes flickered toward the entrance to the town.
“
No, I’m not,” Carrie replied. “I actually hiked over from west of here. I just wanted to see how things are in Crested Butte, and feel out possibilities for trading or helping one another.”
The woman pursed her lips. “Well, you can go talk to the sheriff. I wouldn’t know what to tell you.”
“
I guess I didn’t like the look of those barricades you have up,” Carrie admitted.
“
Those kids won’t shoot you, not if you don’t make trouble. Why don’t you come with me and I’ll introduce you to the sheriff?”
“
Yeah, okay.” But Carrie didn’t want to be escorted into town just yet, where she’d probably have her gun confiscated at a minimum, and her freedom at worst. So she stalled. “What kind of sickness is it?” she asked, gesturing to the house.
“
We think it’s tuberculosis,” the woman replied, glancing back at the front door and frowning. “Haven’t been able to get a doctor out here since everything went down. My husband went to Gunnison, but their pharmacy was empty and the little hospital down there wouldn’t do a thing.”
“
I’m sorry to hear that,” Carrie said. “A doctor from Denver recently arrived at my place in the mountains. She’s a cardiologist, but she might be able to help.”
That opened up the other woman. They spent the next forty-five minutes chatting furiously about the new post-grid “normal”, what they had and didn’t have in Crested Butte, and what was known about Gunnison and the other mountain communities in the region. By the time Carrie looked up at the lowering sun and realized she had to get going, she and “Tess” were good friends.
“
I have to get hiking, or I’m going to get caught in the mountains in darkness,” she told Tess. “I promise you, though, I will be back within the next three days with my doctor friend.”
Chapter 5 : Taking a Prisoner
After leaving Tess, Carrie ran back up the hill they way she had come. It was a hard hike, but she wanted to trace her own steps as much as she could to avoid getting lost. The sun was slipping closer and closer to the horizon. If she wasn’t back to familiar terrain when darkness fell, it would be difficult to stay on the right bearing.
By the time she got back into the hills several miles, she was sweating twice as hard as on the way down even though it was cooler now. Judging that she had only an hour or two left until dark, she pushed on hard. No more bears presented themselves, but she saw a lot of deer and rabbits coming out for the evening.
She took a rest on a saddle where the trail she was following dipped down into a valley on each side. Watching her backtrail for a few minutes, she satisfied herself that no one was following from the town. Then she continued onward, keeping up her pace even though her calves and thighs were beginning to burn.
Six or seven miles away from the ranch, she had to stop again for a break. She was breathing hard and sweat was dripping down her face. The sun’s last rays were lighting up the peaks overhead, but the light in the valley had faded. Soon she would no longer be able to hurry for fear of twisting an ankle on the rocky ground.