Humanaty's Blight

CHAPTER FOUR

The idea that Sue might not accompany me in the future was a lot like a spring thunderbolt that seemed to come from nowhere. I turned to her. “What do you want?”

“Don’t be silly,” she said. “I want things to go back to normal. They won’t, I know that. But other than living minute to minute and doing a wonderful job of it, you have told me nothing about your future plan.”

“It’s only been two weeks,” I protested. “We’re been together for two days, depending on how you count them. You can’t expect me to have it all figured out or share it with you.”

She didn’t look at me. Her attention was somewhere inside her mind. “Fair enough. Let’s talk. What are your short-term plans? I mean, if you could safely leave here and do something in the world as it is, what would you do?”

“Seriously?” The word came out unintended. It was a stall, so I didn’t have to answer before thinking it over. She ignored it, and waited, her eyes now centered on mine. I thought quickly. “I would go find a laptop.”

She giggled.

“No, I mean it. Computers are one thing I know. They’re my friends.”

“What Internet would you connect it to? And where would you plug it in?”

“I’ve been thinking.”

She grinned and motioned for me to continue making a fool of myself. I plunged ahead, “I read somewhere that an idle server uses only about as much power as in one of those flat batteries the size of a nickel, you know the ones?” At her nod, I went on, “For a month, maybe more, the servers maintain their memory after the power goes. Besides, a lot of them are connected to battery backups of one sort or another and will last longer. I don’t know how long, but longer. Even then, most do not lose their memory, they just shut down.”

“Missing your video games?” she teased.

I was getting a little angry. She had asked me to share my thoughts and now she was making fun of me. “Listen, this flu may not be a worldwide thing. Or others may be holed up and trying to contact survivors via the internet. There might be a sanctuary city and we could go there. Besides, they contain a lot of knowledge. There might even be a cure for the human blight.”

I had her interest.

She said, “Your laptop needs power.”

“I had a sleeve to carry my old tablet in. The sleeve was a poor excuse for a solar panel, but a full day in the sun charged it to half. There must be better ones. Or maybe connecting it to one of those solar panels on the roofs of houses will charge it.”

She said with cautious optimism, “Wi-Fi? Where you gonna get it?”

“Maybe the cell phone grid is still working, and I can use a phone as a hotspot. Or a sat phone if we can find one and get a signal from a satellite. I’m sure they are still up there circling the Earth.”

She crossed her arms over her chest and made a phony scowl, but she was still interested. “Then you will call people in England and tell them to come to rescue us? Tell them where we are?”

“No, I had another idea. Most big depositories of digital information have backups for power and access. Many are self-repairing. Imagine how much easier it would be if we could download a few eBooks on how to survive, what to eat, how to trap animals in the northwest, and how to make shelters. If I could log in to one of them and find the right information, it would make our lives so much easier.”

“You know what?”

I shook my head.

“You’re a stupid geek who only looks at the world through a dumb-ass computer screen. You look like a geek and you think like one.”

Offended, I snapped, “You don’t think my plan will work? Or that information won’t make our lives much easier if I’m successful?”

“This sort of thing is why you need to talk to me, Bill. Tell me about your ideas. Think of all the obstacles you’re going to have to climb over to use a laptop and access data behind a firewall if it is still there. That is if you’re a genius that can get past their firewalls. Yes, I know a little about computers.”

“It will work,” I persisted. “I’m pretty good with a computer.”

“Just stumble on any one of those steps and it will prevent you from succeeding. While you think you’re a master gamer or guru, trying to read a database with all the protections money can buy will be difficult or impossible, and you know it. They’re programmed by the best in the world to keep people like you and me out of them.”

“That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. Even now, their batteries are running down, information is becoming harder to reach and download. You asked for my plan and that was it. Unfortunately, we need to do it quickly. The window of time is shrinking.”

She sadly shook her head from side to side slowly as if correcting an errant second-grader. “Or… we could just visit my school library and take the books we need, you silly geek.”

I was stunned.

She was right. It was a perfect answer, right there in front of me. She was right, I was a geek and had taken a simple problem with a simple solution and expanded it to fit our lives before the fall of civilization. Her nearby school or the city library held all the information I required and taking a book or three with me made it portable information I could access anywhere.

As my mind went to work, it filled in more blanks and made more suggestions, the first of which was where we were located and the sort of people who had lived here at the very edge of the mountains. They avoided city life in all ways, including their reading material. It was the exact information we required.

Most of the local residents had fished and hunted. They lived in what I called “the end of the road” not because they had to, but because they wanted to. Almost every home in Darrington would have a gun or even several. And fishing poles with lures. And books on the first residents to settle here, others describing useful local plants, and how to successfully hunt, preserve food, and a hundred other useful things we could put to use.

It was all right there in front of me, easily accessed without a sat phone or hotspot for a laptop I didn’t own or have electricity to provide. The only problem was getting into the houses to search for what we wanted when others were breaking in and stealing food, sleeping bags, and warm clothing—exactly like we had done at the ski-cabin.

A silence followed. Sue appeared restrained and perhaps ashamed at her outbursts and simple solutions to problems I’d muddled over for a week. I’d thought myself so advanced and capable of reaching the great digital storehouses. Yes, there would have been problems, but in the back of my mind, I was fairly certain it never would have worked. I was a gamer, not a hacker.

All that cutting-edge technology and a top of the line laptop was surpassed in today’s world by a tattered backpack filled with a few well-chosen books. Oddly, I didn’t feel stupid or upstaged. I felt proud that the girl who was sharing my life who had contributed significantly.

“Sue?” I asked.

“Bill?” she used the same tone but refused to look at me as if ashamed of either her or me. I couldn’t tell which.

“Thank you,” I said simply. “My plan may have worked. At least, I like to think it would have. Yours is better.”

“Really?” she asked in a brighter voice.

“Absolutely. I made the entire thing so complicated it would have taxed my knowledge to the limit when the right answer was right there in front of me. We are changing our plans and going on a book search.”

“Then what?” she asked. “You still have not told me about your future plans.”

Then what, indeed? I’d barely gotten used to her latest bursting of my technical bubble and now she wanted me to read the future? “Exactly what are you asking?”

“After we find the right books, what then? Back to our tunnel?”

“Yes.”

She snorted. “No, silly, we can’t live here for the summer and certainly not next winter. Not enough food and we’ll be killed by others. Think about it. Can we really survive here through spring and summer—and then fall and next winter? All that time and nobody sees us? And we find enough food for a year? No. We need a plan, a better one.”

Like living in my basement for a couple of years, I said in my lazy way, “I guess I was just thinking of going along and seeing what happens. Take it day-to-day.”

Sue shook her head. “The mine tunnel is okay, for now. Better than what most people have, but it’s a waystation. A temporary stopover.”

“Why?” I asked, suspecting she had figured out something else a semi-hermit like me had missed. Actually, I had seen the problems she already pointed out. I just didn’t want to face them.

While living safely in my parent’s basement in the last few years, I’d had food and necessities delivered, as well as anything else I needed. The fact was that I’d stayed inside that house, mostly in the basement with my computers, for over two years. I rarely interacted with people during that time, even online. I saw the world differently than the girl/woman with the round, brown face sitting beside me. Hoping to change the subject, I asked, “Can you speak Spanish?”

The question escaped my lips before I could stop it. She rolled her eyes in disdain. “I was born here. So were my parents, and theirs, too. Can you speak Irish?”

“A little,” I admitted while suppressing a grin. “But English has been the official language of Ireland for a couple of hundred years, so I can get by.” We both laughed. That breached the wall that had slowly built up between us.

She said, “We need to get out of these mountains and the snow. Next winter there will be no food to steal from local houses and I can’t depend on you to provide it by fishing and hunting. You’re worse than me about knowing nothing of farming and stuff like that. Besides, someone is sure to find our farm and kill us for the crops if we try that. We need something more permanent.”

Her thinking was proceeding right where mine had been for a week. I was willing to chance that she and I were immune to the deadly flu, or that it had run its course. I hadn’t encountered any recent deaths by flu but hadn’t seen many dead lately.

The very real problems came in two varieties, which she’d just identified. She had realized the problems of surviving the first month or two were one issue, and the problems of long-term survival were different. They were not the same. The immediate ones were easier in many ways because they were defined by a daily goal, and we’d accomplished most of them. “I can see your point. So?”

“It rains all the time here, so we need a drier place to live. Where we can hide out but move around. We need food and supplies for when they get scarce because others will have cleaned out all the good places. By the end of the summer, food is going to be difficult to find and people will kill over it.”

“You’re not thinking of an RV, I hope.” It was like she had taken all our critical needs and wished for a tornado to whisk us away to a magical land. It was my turn to be down to earth and set her straight. What she wanted and what was possible were two separate things. I was deciding how to phrase more of my response when she turned to face me.

“Not an RV. We need a boat.”

“A what?” I mentally pictured a little, leaky rowboat with her sitting in the bow while I fought the oars, and enemies took potshots at us from the banks.

“A sailboat, Bill. It’s the perfect solution!”

“Sailboat?” The single word was forced from me as if she’d punched me in my stomach. “What the hell are you talking about? We’re in the mountains. Besides, do you know how to sail?”

She smiled delightfully as she shook her head.

I shut up.

“Let me talk,” she said. “We can refine the idea later but listen. The wind pushes a sailboat. No fuel. No noise. The cabin is dry. There are hundreds and hundreds of islands in north Puget Sound; we studied about them in school. There are salmon, clams, crabs, mussels, and different fish we can catch and eat. We could take seeds and plant little gardens on different islands and revisit them when the food has grown. Many islands are too small for people to live on, but we’d have a boat.”

“Have you ever even been on a sailboat?”

“No. But there must be books that say how to do it. Just like the ones that tell us how to survive here.”

I tried to maintain my scowl, but it seemed I knew a few things she didn’t, and the first was that I knew larger sailboats also have motors. If the engine would start, and there seemed to be no reason to think it wouldn’t after being idle only two weeks, it would be easier than driving a car. Just steer it where you want to go, and you don’t even have to stay on your side of the road.

Not only did I like the idea, but my mind also expanded upon it. We could have several rifles with scopes and any boat coming too close would get a few warning shots before we sank them. Her idea solved a thousand problems. Gangs of roaming looters acting like animals on land wouldn’t find us. That was number one. Like the three men this morning. We didn’t know what the three had done, if anything, to cause the motorcycle gang to kill them. We didn’t know and didn’t want to find out.

My new goals in life were to avoid everyone else and gather enough food to last until things settled down. Eventually, the bad people would all kill each other off, and good ones would be left. Or maybe all the good ones would die and there would be only bad ones remaining. If we were on a boat where we could sail away from trouble, we might live another year or two and feed ourselves with fish.

The idea had taken hold instantly and a vague memory rushed in. Columbus’s smallest ship, the Nina, was less than fifty feet long and it had crossed the entire Atlantic Ocean. Many new recreational sailboats are over well thirty feet, probably most of them. At thirty feet, they are more than able to cross oceans, not that I wanted to attempt that. But that size could, even with me at the helm—yes, I was already thinking in seaman-talk—we could sail out of Puget Sound and into the Pacific where we’d be out of sight of land and the eyes of others. Nobody remaining on land could see us or come kill us.

If a primitive fifty-foot wooden ship built before 1500 could sail across the Atlantic, a modern fiberglass hull with 500 years of improvements could surpass its performance. Somewhere, I’d heard or read that modern sailboats, if properly secured for hard weather, were like corks. They couldn’t sink. The lead in the bottom fin, or whatever it was called, made them self-righting. They might lose their masts but seldom sank.

I couldn’t think of a safer place to be.

So, that left us with a few minor details to resolve. We needed food and weapons to travel and locate a suitable sailboat to steal. To do that, we had to move through what we’d call hostile territory on land for at least fifty miles, avoiding hordes of well-armed scavengers, and finally locate a boat. Then we had to take it from that place to the northernmost part of Puget Sound, almost to the Canadian border—and maybe beyond.

I explained all that to Sue. The problems sounded impossible to achieve as I laid each one out, the objective and the reasons to attempt it, along with the hurdles.

“How long does it take to walk fifty miles?” she asked.

“At least fifty miles, maybe twice that if we avoid population centers.”

“How long?” she asked again as if the answer went unheard.

“Before the pandemic flu, a good hiker on the side of a road could do it in a day. Two at most.”

“But not now, and you are not a good hiker. So, don’t tell me how it used to be, tell me for today.”

I considered and talked as I thought. “Excluding gathering food and weapons as we go, and unexpected encounters that will delay us, we could probably stay in forested areas as we moved and maybe go five miles a day if we don’t run into others who are hiding out in those forest like we are doing. Ten to twenty days. Minimum.”

“But we’ll encounter others who are unfriendly?”

“They probably have their own tripwires and alarms, as well as lookouts. Maybe dogs, so add a few more days and a lot of danger.”

“We might slip past. I think I have some Indian blood in me.”

“I don’t. And we might end up dinner for a hungry group of flesh-eaters or packs of starving dogs gone wild.”

“We’ll shoot them.”

“Which will bring all the rest of the starving creatures on two feet running to get their share of the dead. The noise will bring the worst of humans our way as it did for those three today.”

She scowled. “So, my boat is a bad idea.”

“No! It’s a wonderful idea. The sailboat, I mean. We just have to figure out how to make it work.”

“Really?” Her brilliant smile could have provided the light for the tunnel we sat in.

We talked the afternoon and evening away as if we were actually going to do it. I knew where there were sailboats. They were in a city called Everett, at the yacht basin. I’d been there a few times with my parents and once we’d eaten in a restaurant overlooking the boats. There were hundreds and hundreds moored at floating docks.

So, that became our destination for the sake of discussion. Getting safely through a city of a hundred thousand residents, or more realistically, the survivors of that hundred-thousand, became our largest problem. Reaching that city to begin the dangerous trek through it was the second problem. The fact neither of us knew anything about sailing—if we actually reached a boat—was not even discussed.

With both of us throwing out ideas, most of which had no possibility of succeeding, we eventually decided there were the two critical areas to resolve before anything else. Lesser problems could be worked out only after those two. Travel from the mountains near Darrington to Everett, and then travel through a city full of dangerous, hungry scavengers, packs of rats, wild dogs, illness from the flu, and a dozen other diseases since sanitation had ceased. Even worse than all those were the unknowns.

It is impossible to evade what you don’t know. The unknowns in the city far outweighed the knowns. However, that didn’t mean we give up.

We didn’t need to stockpile food before reaching the boat. If nothing else, we could go hungry for a while, and maybe even catch a fish or crab. But more likely, there was at least a limited amount of food already stored on each sailboat. Carrying extra weight while traveling would only slow us down, and if there was one certainty, it was that I didn’t want to remain in Everett any longer than required.

So, we tried deciding how we could cross more than fifty miles of rural terrain and suburbia while remaining alive. The second step would be to enter a city full of unknown dangers and eventually reach the waterfront. I fell asleep with those things on my mind, believing them impossible to resolve, but perhaps we would either find a way or adjust our plans.

At least we now had a goal, thanks to Sue. We just had to figure out how to implement it instead of looking forward to months of sneaking around the tunnel and nearby mountains hoping we were never spotted and that we could locate enough food to stay alive.

I woke with images of manned balloons floating in my head, like those that I saw floating over Arlington one time when there was a balloon festival. They were colorful, some created to look like cartoon characters, and all carried a basket below with smiling, happy people. In the dream, the two of us flew right over the problems on the ground.

Right, like that would happen. Where would we get a manned balloon and how did we make it go where we wanted when who knows what direction the wind would blow? Maybe we just needed to steal a plane and learn to fly at the same time, and then go over the top of the dangers. Like I could fly a plane. I could hardly drive a car. Sue couldn’t do that much. I forced my mind to be realistic.

We needed a map. That was obvious, but that small detail had escaped our attention the evening before. I knew in general terms where Everett was. I had never driven there by myself, and there wasn’t GPS on my phone to guide me. On the positive side, north of Everett was spread a lot of rural areas. It might be possible to travel on foot in the forests and avoid fighting our way through. We could move silently. Maybe.

I considered recruiting more people to help stand watches at night and protect us during the day, and quickly rejected the idea. While they might join us initially, and perhaps even help, they would want to sail north with us and there was nobody I trusted to be awake while I slept except for Sue. Besides, more people meant more compromised decisions and more mouths to feed.

I went back to sleep, only to wake again with the determination to search a nearby house or two for a map. A few days after I’d left my car on the road, it had been burned to a rusted, blackened hulk. All that remained was an outline of the chassis. However, even deserted cars might have a map or two in the glovebox. I congratulated myself for thinking of that one and went back to sleep. It was step one to solving problem number one. There were plenty of deserted cars. And plenty of additional problems to solve.

Sue woke me a short while later with a blood-chilling scream. I left the sleeping bag we shared like a piece of popcorn popping in a hot pan, my twenty-two in my hand, ready to shoot anything that moved. There was nothing in the tunnel. No intruders, no wolves, nothing.

“What was it?” I hissed, my eyes wide, my ears perked.

“Just a bad dream. Sorry.”

She had two more nightmares before dawn. I asked her what was the problem since she hadn’t been having them, and she answered angrily, “Really? What a stupid friggin question. A wolf came in here last night and tried to eat us. Then, three men came along with guns and wanted to shoot us, and then they were shot dead by bikers. All in one day and you’re asking me, what is the problem?”

I said nothing out loud but silently determined to find a way to obtain a sailboat as soon as possible. Not because of her nightmares; I had them too. It was because she was right again. We were rabbits afraid to venture out for fear of a hawk swooping down on us.