Humanaty's Blight

CHAPTER THREE

Our basic plan, meaning my plan which I hadn’t yet fully discussed with Sue, was to wait safely in the tunnels until the spring thaw. It was a good plan until the middle of the night when a shotgun blast erupted and echoed down the mountain and through the quiet valleys. We woke and leaped from the sleeping bag. With my little twenty-two in hand, I rushed down the tunnel in the dark wearing my underwear, too afraid to use the LED flashlight.

A wolf, or better said, the bloody, shattered remains of a wolf greeted me. The animal was nearly decapitated from the buckshot. My ears were still ringing from the blast when Sue came up behind me, a kitchen knife taken from the cabin held at the ready.

Her first words pulled me back to reality. “Do you think anyone heard?”

I thought everyone within five miles had heard the blast.

A glance outside the mouth of the tunnel revealed it was no longer snowing. The entrance was hidden by the small cedars and firs, but a thorough search of the area by anyone hearing the shotgun would find it. My only weapon to protect us was the small handgun, and of course, the shotguns. I’d decided that carrying a larger caliber would tempt me to use it and that would put me in more danger, so I had ignored the temptation.

The pair of shotguns was the result of a search of a single-wide mobile home hidden in the trees, down an overgrown driveway near where I’d parked my car. It was an accidental find. The scattered remains of a man and a woman were in the yard and I chanced slipping inside to the bedroom. That’s where most valuables are usually kept, and the shotguns hung on pegs attached to the imitation wood wall. A nearly full box of shells was on a dresser.

I grabbed the guns and shells and raced outside where I let the air escape from my lungs. Breathing inside didn’t seem a good idea. The bodies were outside, and nobody had definitively proved how the flu was transmitted, so I’d made the entire venture inside on one breath. Right now, the shotgun traps I’d set didn’t seem like as good an idea as when I’d set them. Neither did being attacked by a wolf, but it was too late to second-guess my earlier actions.

“We can stay here,” Sue said with a ring of desperation. “Rig a few more alarms, reload the shotgun, and if they get past that, you have your little gun. We’ll get some more guns, too.”

She had me almost convinced until she said the last two words along with mentioning my little gun. If an enemy made it past the shotguns, he or they would carry heavier firepower. Enough time had elapsed since the flu struck that many people would have secured weapons such as Sue had carried. Maybe leaving hers in the snow had been a poor idea. Maybe choosing to live in a mining tunnel with only one entrance was a mistake. There was no back door.

The few people who had survived the flu, and who were living nearby were most likely local residents, people who lived in and around Darrington. Almost all of them hunted deer, elk, and bear. They fished the rivers and were happy living in the dense wet forests at the edge of civilization. Most were uncomfortable on their rare trips to Everett, let alone Seattle, and all the people they would encounter there were exactly what they’d tried to escape. They would have scurried back to their mountains, trees, and privacy as quickly as possible, where they knew how to survive using techniques held over from the last century.

At the time I had first moved into the tunnel, locating where the smoke exited should have been more important to me. It may have provided another way out, a bolt-hole. The downside was that if I found it, I’d know of another entrance to worry over and try to protect. I’d rejected doing anything—a stupid decision, it seemed. I’d just wanted another basement to hide in—and if somehow there was Internet access, I’d have willingly stayed for months.

“No, we have to leave here,” I reluctantly told her, as my mind raced with details that I should have thought about two weeks ago. Prepared for. Only an idiot would not have had a “go-bag” considering the circumstances. I should have been prepared to run off in minutes, taking only what was critical to my survival. That’s the problem with being lazy by nature. I put things off until they became critical.

“How long do we have to stay away?”

She asked the damned hard questions. Her thinking was that we’d return after a few days and things quieted down. I wasn’t so sure. I didn’t know anything as a fact, so I ventured, “Two days? Three? Maybe more.”

Before asking for an explanation of my estimate, she gathered two sleeping bags, a little food we could eat cold, her boots, a warm coat, and I stood and watched like an invalid. She hissed at me, telling me to get my ass busy in a way that got me moving.

I got my boots on, a coat, and other warm clothing. On the way out, I grabbed two more shotgun shells, replaced the spent ones, and reset the tripwire. Then, because we wouldn’t be there and I didn’t want to be responsible for killing an innocent person a month or even a year from now, I disabled them both. We reached the entrance, but instead of rushing out and leaving fresh tracks across the clearing, we edged along the face of the cliff with our backs to it. The melt running down the rocks would soon dissolve our footprints. The warmer weather was already melting the snow, so it was only six inches deep.

Where a heavy stand of trees began, we hunched over and entered the forest, so it wasn’t quite leaving an obvious trail of footprints. A game path wound around the side of the hill and then upward. When we reached twenty feet of elevation and a small ledge, I unrolled an eight by ten sheet of tan plastic and placed it on the ground.

Since nobody was in sight in the predawn, I told Sue, “Move around and gather green branches from the backside of the nearby trees. Slice the limbs off, don’t hack. It will make less noise.”

I helped. We scattered a layer of green on the tarp and placed a pile a foot high at the front edge. While lying down, we could observe the clearing with the entrance to the tunnel and the trees beyond where I would expect people investigating the gunshot to arrive. From down there, they couldn’t see us.

If people came, we could move backward, remain hidden by the top of the hill, and quietly leave by a back way. Behind us were more miles of the Cascade Mountains and beyond them, even more. I hadn’t scouted the area extensively but suspected we’d soon run out of people and find deeper snow to move through.

Maybe a good idea, or a better one, would come to me while we waited and watched. The problem was not the initial escape. I felt confident about that. It was what came after. No shelter. No food. Constant cold. And of course, the daily fear of being discovered.

Shortly after dawn, a movement below drew my attention. Sue stiffened beside me, telling me wordlessly that she had seen it also. Shortly after, three figures appeared, moving ahead eight or ten yards apart, side by side, like the military would do. Each held a rifle as comfortably as if it was an extension of their arms. All the rifles had scopes, and their clothing were all variations of army camouflage, like a mix-and-match from a grab bag of leftovers. They were heavyset, all three wore beards, and they moved carefully, searching. They knew someone nearby had fired that shot.

Despite the weapons and military dress, they didn’t seem military. Each dressed differently, the camo patterns varied even on the individual, and their long hair and beards didn’t fit my image of troops. At the edge of the clearing, they paused and used their scopes to examine everything ahead before advancing into the open. I reached out and pushed Sue’s face into the tarp as I did the same to mine. Spotting hair and our hats behind the little brush we’d placed in front of us would be almost impossible if we remained still. They would spot our faces in their scopes instantly if we watched.

I used my ears. The men didn’t speak. I heard the snap of a branch and when I looked again, they were moving parallel to the hillside, away from us. They had missed the tunnel entrance. Their footprints were clear as two of them walked across the clearing, while the third remained under the cover of the trees protecting their backs. He used his scope to scan the entire area again as if suspecting they were in the right place, but he found no evidence of us.

If they had spotted anything out of place, they would have, at least, whispered to each other. In the crisp, cold morning air, we’d have heard that exchange, if not the words. From our vantage, I realized that if more people arrived to search for us, they would see the tracks of the three below and realize they had seen nothing in the clearing and quickly move on. They might even follow the three men and think them responsible for the shotgun blast.

That was my recent way of thinking. Everybody hunts everybody else. Kill them all. Avoid people if possible and if not, shoot to kill. My train of thought went back to the pair at the skier’s cabin. I’d let them go when I was so near them, I couldn’t have missed a shot and Sue had seemed to approve of that action. She had no idea of how close I had come to shooting both. I’d keep that to myself.

I whispered, “Good job.”

“Being too scared to move is cause for thanks?”

My smile was unintentional. We remained still and waited. I had to pee but held it. To give in and stand to find a place to relieve myself might get us killed if there were more searchers we hadn’t spotted. An hour later, emptying my bladder became critical.

Sue slowly slid away from me, to the edge of the tarp and slipped her pants down. She relieved herself in that position and pulled her pants back up. She saw me look and said with a wry grin, “I can wash later.”

She was right, and I had to pee. I moved to the other side and rolled to my side. Afterward, we grinned at each other like school kids who had enjoyed a smoke behind the fieldhouse. We were good for another few hours of watching.

Near midmorning, a shot rang out, breaking the crisp air like a sheet of glass breaking on the pavement. Then another. Then rapidly, two more shots. The last two were higher pitched—a different gun. The last shot we heard was the same tone as the first two. Five in all. Then nothing.

In my imagination, it sounded like someone had fired two times, a different person fired twice, followed by a final shot. If it had been only a single shot, I’d have thought the shooter hit was he aimed at, like a hunter taking down a deer. The series indicated either the second shots were returning fire, or more than one person firing at a single target. There was no way to tell without investigating. But it the circumstances said there were at least two shooters out there.

“What do we do?” she asked.

“We have to go find out what happened, but not right away.”

We waited a while longer, thinking the three who had passed this way might return and we didn’t want to run into them in the heavy underbrush. Nobody returned. I pointed to our right. “The shots came from over there in the direction they went.”

She was thinking about the same thing. “If we run into them, or others who were investigating them? What then?”

Sue’s perceptions and insights were beginning to annoy me, primarily because she was usually right. I’d already warned her about rushing to investigate gunshots and now I was about to do the same. After seeing three men we believed were hunting us, I needed to know. “We’ll be careful.”

“Why do it at all?”

This time I drew in a breath before answering. It provided enough time to hide my fears and true feelings, and it gave me time to determine the words I’d use. “The other time, the single shot we heard, didn’t really concern us. One shot, too far away to be a danger. This time, there are three men who nearly found our hideout. They were searching for us. They all carried similar rifles that should make the same sounds, more or less. That’s not what we heard, so there are more people out there who are shooting.”

“Searching for us?”

“I don’t know. What seems likely is that our three visitors met up with another person or group and had themselves a gunfight. We don’t know who won. Or what they are up to. I think we need to risk a little spying without getting involved.”

“Me too,” she agreed. “We don’t need those people sneaking up on us at night.”

I had made her wear a tan shirt of mine over the pink jacket she wore. I wore a red flannel shirt and a dark green coat over it. Movement is the first thing to give you away. Color is the second. We made sure our bright colors were hidden. “Leave our things here. We’re going to move fast and sneaky. We’ll circle around a bit and try to find out what happened. But no unnecessary talking. Not even whispering.”

She quietly followed me, wearing a slight scowl. It was impossible to tell who or what it was directed at. I decided it couldn’t be directed at me. I was just trying to help and keep us safe.

We traveled up on the higher ground where we had more of a view, then down the other side of the hill. We went quickly at first, then slowed as we neared where I felt the shots had been fired. There was less snow and we moved under the trees, heading in the general direction of the Sauk River. There were no bridges or crossings I was aware of in that direction, so I assumed the three who were searching for us were on our side, between the river and the mountains. That was a narrow stretch to search.

We moved undercover and watched carefully ahead, especially when we got nearer to the river. Sue’s hand lightly touched my elbow. I pulled to a stop and she leaned closer. I bent down to put my ear next to her mouth. She mouthed softly, “I heard talking.”

I hadn’t, but her ears were probably better than mine. An online site I had frequented said that most adults begin losing their hearing at about age sixteen and there were high-pitched apps for cell phone ringers that supposedly adults over thirty couldn’t hear. All that didn’t really count, but it flashed through my mind because what can be learned online was infinite. I missed it almost as much as having food delivered.

What counted was that Sue had heard voices. There were people nearby, friends or enemies. There was no way to discriminate. We moved at the pace of an injured snail. Through the trees, near the river’s bank, we saw movement. It was on the other side of the river, which was a surprise. The river was running low, the riverbed covered with rocks, but it was cold water, water that had been snow or ice hours earlier.

We moved closer and perched behind a huge cedar stump. That three had probably been cut for lumber a century ago.

Five men wearing black leather jackets covered with patches stood over three prone bodies. Beyond, at the side of the road were motorcycles. Big ones. Probably Harleys or those made by other companies trying to imitate them. At least two of the motorcycles had rifle scabbards attached, and all five men held cans of what I assumed were beer in their left hands, keeping their right hands free for their guns.

One biker held three scoped rifles by their barrels in his left hand, the butts dragging on the ground when he moved. Probably all three belonged to the men who had been hunting us at the mouth of the tunnel earlier. They seemed unconcerned about the three bodies. One laughed and pounded the shoulder of another. The third searched the dead men and came up empty, from what I saw.

After tossing the empty beer cans aside, they went to their bikes, fired them up and rode away. The noise was a deep growl that vibrated the nearby ground, or so it seemed. The engine noise didn’t carry in the thick forest like the crack of a rifle shot did. From now on, we’d have to be aware of the low growl, and the men on the motorcycles.

When they were gone, Sue said, “We need to see if they left anything for us.”

“The river is just above freezing.”

“And only knee-deep. We can build a fire and put on dry socks when we get back to the mine. Those three won’t be returning and the bikers, if they heard the shotgun, probably think those men were responsible for waking them last night with their rifles. If there are other survivors in the area, they are probably hiding from the bikers right now, so it’s as safe as it gets these days.”

Sue was a master at combining facts and coming to instant conclusions. And she was right. With a last look around to make sure the way was clear, we rushed across the fifty-foot expanse of cold, knee-deep water. Ignoring the stinging pain in our feet and ankles, we pulled to a stop on the far bank near the first dead man.

Darkening blood showed where the bullet had entered the man’s chest. I recognized him and his camouflage clothing, now that we were close enough to see details. It was one of the three who had searched for our tunnel.

“Stand back,” I ordered as my hands patted his pockets and waist. Sue didn’t need to be exposed to seeing death any more than she had been, and there was always the threat of contamination or infection of the flu. Touching a person might transmit it to me. Breathing the air near him might. I held my breath and searched quickly.

I didn’t believe he was infected, or he would look sick. When I found nothing, I looked up into her unemotional brown face and shrugged before moving on to the next. AT first, there was nothing of interest, but when I started to stand to move to the last body, a bulge near his ankle caught my attention.

I pulled his pants leg up and found a small Guardian 32 ACP pistol in a holster, one meant to be a hideaway gun, or for a small woman to use. It was a thirty-two caliber, I assumed from the 32 ACP stamped on the side of the barrel. Slightly larger diameter shells than my twenty-two, but not by too much. The short barrel told me it was probably accurate for twenty feet, but I was not familiar with many guns and could be wrong.

When I looked up, Sue had the same expression my old dog had worn when I forgot to feed him. I tossed the Guardian semi-automatic to her while I searched the last man. He had a roll of hundreds in his front pocket, probably three or four thousand dollars. I put them back. Even the bikers hadn’t wanted the money. It was useless in our post-pandemic world.

I supposed they would have been good to use to start kindling burning for our fires. The thought of the dead man stealing the money that was now worthless seemed almost funny. Three weeks ago, it made sense. Today it was a cruel joke. Could the dead man have been so stupid? A single can of beef stew was worth more than all those bills in the post-flu world. It firmly indicated that not only the smart survived. At least, to date. I suspected that would soon change when instead of fighting the flu, people fought each other.

To her credit, Sue examined the handgun and kept her finger well away from the trigger. My brief examination hadn’t revealed a safety. Like many similar handguns, it didn’t have one. The shooter simply pulled the trigger back until it fired. That was both good and bad in my opinion. I always worried about accidental firings, which are rare but do happen. I also worried about needing to pull and shoot a gun quickly to save my life and couldn’t do it. Fumbling for a safety when an instantaneous shot was required could cost a life. Mine.

The third man had a nine-millimeter Glock in the kind of nylon holster used by law enforcement. I pulled the Velcro opening for the belt with the sound of plastic ripping and worked it free from his limp body. The left side held a smaller holster with a pair of extra clips.

My little twenty-two was good for low noise. It wouldn’t stop a charging man, or even slow some down who were intent on killing me unless I made a headshot. Against my better judgment, I strapped the semiautomatic on and adjusted it as I reconsidered my choices. What I wanted was a light weapon that fit easily into a holster. One that made no noise but could take down a moose. Oh, yes, it also needed a scope because I hadn’t fired more than three guns in my life. Any idiot could place crosshairs on a target and pull the trigger, so that’s what I needed. My hand touched the exposed handle of the gun I now wore, and my mind cursed because it lacked my perceived needs.

His pocket held a jackknife. We had plenty of knives. I tossed it aside. In the end, we left the bodies lying there for the scavengers to eat. They had come to kill us, and I had no regrets in walking away. I followed Sue back across the river and into the trees, retracing our footsteps and feeling safer than at any time after the shotgun blast. Both of us were armed. The three searching for us were dead—and we hadn’t killed them.

We moved slowly, keeping watch ahead, using the same footprints we’d made coming the other way when possible and hoping for either more snow or another warm day to melt them away. As it was, the trail we left was like a giant arrow pointing to us. Additional vigilance for a day or two would be needed.

At the tunnel, we ate a southwestern flavored soup that was almost too spicy. Instead of remaining in what we called our “living room” I chose to remain near the entrance of the mine, watching the clearing, just in case.

Sue joined me. She said, “I never thought my life would come to this.”

Not knowing exactly what she meant by the statement, I hesitantly asked, “Come to what?”

“Living in a hole like a friggin rabbit.”

“A rabbit?”

“We’re in a rabbit hole. We will dart outside and grab a little food, then hop back into our hole again, while hoping a hawk does not swoop down and attack when we’re outside. I know we’re safer here than most people and all that stuff you’re about to tell me, but we may as well have cottontails on our butts.”

I saw her point. Said nothing. There was no way to change what we did.

She sighed, then added, “You know what the real problem is?” Then, she answered her own question before I could. “The problem is that all those little bunnies eventually get snatched by eagles, or coyotes, or foxes, or cats. Everything feeds off rabbits. They’re like the potato chips of the animal world. Other animals snack on them and there are never any old rabbits.”

There was no humor in her voice. While part of what she said struck me as funny, she hadn’t intended it that way and I managed to keep any humor from my voice as I said, “What are you trying to tell me?”

“As good as this place is for us for now, we’re just like rabbits. We’re going to be seen one day, someone will see our tracks in the snow, or someone will accidentally find us. Today, tomorrow, or the day after. Maybe we’ll shoot at something and draw them in. Or we’ll go in search of food or medicine, or for a pair of dry socks. Which reminds me, we need to carry that wolf body outside unless you plan to eat it or let it rot where it is.”

“What else are you really trying to say?” I asked, fairly sure the answer wouldn’t be to my liking. “Stop talking in circles like I’m smart enough to understand what you mean.”

She paused with a dreamy expression as her eyes went blank. “This is a good hideout for now. But only for now. Another day or two. What are our long-term plans? Maybe I should be asking what yours are and see if they include me.”

“Of course, they include you.” The answer spilled from my lips. Going on without the girl was hard to conceive. For the first time in years, I had a friend. Not a girlfriend, but a friend who I could talk to, express my dreams and fears, and feel safe around.

She shook her head sadly. “From your viewpoint, your plans include me, and for that I thank you. From my viewpoint, I have to decide whether to stay with you, go with someone else, or move on alone.”

My mouth wouldn’t work. I’d assumed a lot of things, and in that instant, I realized how wrong making assumptions can be. My social skills hadn’t improved a bit.