Humanaty's Blight

CHAPTER FIVE

We both sat in embarrassed silence as we ate a can of peas for breakfast. Sue seemed sheepish at speaking so harshly about her nightmares during the night. I was crabby from lack of sleep. We were facing the tedium of another day where we couldn’t leave the mine without leaving tracks in the snow anyone could follow. The warmer days had melted more of the snow. Bare patches appeared where the sunshine struck the ground between the trees. We might or might not have seen the last snow of the season.

We felt safe enough in the tunnel but living below ground and being restricted from leaving because of telltale tracks in the snow was already getting old. We were not the sort of people to bury ourselves in a dark and damp hole for the rest of our lives, even if we could locate the required food to survive.

Well, that was not entirely true. In fact, it was a total lie about me. I was exactly the sort to live in a dark basement or cave and ignore the rest of the world. I’d already done it for two years—however, my perceptions of the world had changed since the flu struck and even more dramatically once I’d met Sue. Or maybe it was the influence of Sue. If nothing else, I had a live person to talk to.

Staying another week in the tunnel would be hard to take, now that we had a goal. A month seemed impossible. A year unthinkable. Logic said that the number of people we’d encounter would increase—including those who would want to do us harm when we left the tunnels and moved closer to population centers. We had to prepare ourselves to kill or be killed, an idea that turned my stomach sour and threatened to bring the canned peas back up.

There were also the rats, feral dogs, and insects that fed on the dead, along with a certainty of other diseases that could kill us as easily as a bullet. Sicknesses other than the flu that had killed so many were a dire warning on the Internet. Towards the end, before the Internet died, more were referring to it as the “blight” instead of the flu.

All bloggers and chat rooms were certain there would be a resurfacing of diseases from long ago, especially ones transmitted in the air and foul water. I suspected that more than just the new flu was killing people by now. Especially in populated areas. My mind spun in circles. No matter how much I tried to improve with my ideas, the single item of truth that stood out was that we could not remain where we were.

The following thought was that a sailboat was the perfect solution and our lack of experience with them be damned. If we were only trying to live for another month, we could remain in the tunnel. If we intended to live another year, or ten more, the boat was our best chance.

The third thought was the possibility that we couldn’t get from our present location to a sailboat.

“You’re awfully quiet,” Sue muttered as if she thought I was upset with her.

“Just thinking.”

She tossed the empty tin can into the growing pile behind me. I’d have to get rid of them daily when the weather warmed or live with insects crawling and breeding in the stink. For now, they could remain. Mentally, I shook myself to focus my thinking on the newest reality. It was a small incident. We wouldn’t be here when the weather warmed so the cans didn’t matter. How we would accomplish that, I didn’t know, but I firmly believed it. I raised my eyes and found Sue’s locked onto me.

She said in barely a whimper, “I stayed awake thinking about the sailboat last night.”

“Me too.”

“Don’t you know anything about them?”

“I’ve only been on a powerboat a few times, twice with my uncle in a little aluminum rowboat with an electric motor. A long time ago. Sorry.”

“That’s more than me. So, I don’t know what you’re thinking, but my sleepless night told me one thing. As good as we have it now, that will quickly change in the next few weeks and then get worse as more people arrive from the cities. Then it will get ugly and it may be impossible to leave as more survivors are about and looking for their next meal or a place to stay. In my opinion, no matter what we do, we will not be alive long if we try to remain here until next winter. Someone will kill us, or an animal will, or we’ll get sick, or break a leg, or starve.”

Spreading my hands in surrender, I told her, “I’m an orderly sort of person. Most programmers and computer geeks are like me. We like things that way. With computers, you can’t skip steps or eliminate them, and usually, you cannot write a script or program that is out of sequence, even one line.”

“I don’t know anything about that stuff.”

“Like now, we’re sitting. If our goal is to run in a race, we have to tense the muscles in our legs, balance, stand and turn to face the direction we want to go. Then we can begin to run by lifting one foot and using the other to brace our start.”

“What’s that got to do with a sailboat?” Her brows furrowed as she waited with her arms crossed over her chest.

“I’m trying to explain how my mind works. Before we go, I need to know the sequence of events. If we don’t stand up, we can’t run. In our case, if we leave here but don’t reach the city, we fail. If we get there and can’t travel through the maze of rats, dogs, and gangs of crazed people, we fail. If we can’t figure out how to sail, we fail.”

“That’s a lot of failing and we still haven’t gotten anywhere.”

“I’m sorry, but sailing the boat away to a better life where the sun shines daily, and unicorns visit every evening is way down on that list of things to come first.”

I expected an angry retort. It didn’t happen. She turned inward and avoided looking my way for maybe ten minutes before saying, “Makes sense. If we just take off, we’ll never make it. Got any good ideas?”

“Not good, necessarily, but some eliminations, which are ultimately good. They will keep us from making certain mistakes.”

“Anyone ever say you talk in circles?”

She had me there. Many had said that in one way or another. I ignored her comment and continued, allowing my mind to prioritize in its own fashion, “First, there are boats tied up to buoys all along the coast near Everett. Most are open boats or fishing boats. Not what we want and not worth our effort to investigate, from what I remember. There is a sailing club in the Everett harbor that has hundreds of sailboats of every kind. Small one-person boats right up to small ships. So, we eliminate the chance of maybe locating one somewhere else. And of running into trouble while searching, and we go for the place where most are located. That’s our best chance of finding a good boat. In short, a place where we can select what we want and are most likely to succeed.”

“Any sailboat will do, as far as I’m concerned.” She snapped, ignoring my effusive explanation as if she didn’t understand a word.

I still disagreed. “Grabbing the first one we see is a total mistake. Taking a boat too small because it is easier to handle will hurt us in the end. The boat will become our home. We need it to carry enough supplies to live on and to give us room to move around. Imagine living in a little space the size of a walk-in closet at home and storing all our supplies in it.”

“We don’t even know how to sail. We should start small and get a bigger boat if we do okay.”

She had a valid point. However, going to the docks twice invited twice as much risk. We wouldn’t be the only ones stealing sailboats. It was such a perfect solution to avoid the conflicts and dangers that others would think of it too. That last thought, I kept to myself. Changing the subject seemed prudent. I said, “Okay, the exact boat will depend on what we can locate. The bigger problems are how we are going to travel from here to Everett, then through the city?”

“When we went there, my family and I, we always crossed a river. A big one. What about that?”

I pictured Everett, remembered the few trips there years ago in my mind and didn’t remember a river, especially a big one. That could radically change things. We desperately needed the map I had dreamed about. “Proceeding without a map is dangerous and foolhardy. We have to get one before we can do much more planning.”

“The cabin where we stole the food? It may have one.”

“Too exposed, I think. At least one couple already knows about it and knows we were there, and they might be watching it and waiting for us to return. There could be others.”

She wrinkled her nose and curled the edge of her lip. “Why do you think they would do that? Are we so important?”

“We’re alive and may have supplies they don’t. We’re a danger to them, from their perspective. Besides, we may attack them at any time for what they have. Again, from their perspective. If they can kill us, what we have is theirs and the threat is removed.”

She glanced around at our stores. “It isn’t much.”

“They wouldn’t know until they got here. Besides, what will that can of peas we ate this morning be worth to a starving person in a few months, or a year? Will it be worth killing over?”

“We’ll go to the cabin at night. Then they can’t see us.”

“And how will we see if there is a map once we get there? Light a lantern and attract every person within miles?”

“Okay, your turn to use your orderly brain and think of something constructive.”

“We go to the outskirts of Darrington, where there are only a few houses and they are spaced farther apart for privacy. We look for cars, first. Many will have paper maps in gloveboxes, at least I hope so.”

“So, walking up to a parked car and assuming it is locked like most are, we’ll just break a window in the middle of the day, ignore the sound of breaking glass and the people it will bring running, while we leisurely search for a map. If there is not one, we’ll just walk down the street and do the same to the next car?”

Her tone was that of a fourteen-year-old who believed someone older had made a bumbling error. I laughed. Her attitude struck me as funny, and laughter was precious. There hadn’t been much, lately. I said, “How about we slip into a garage and search a car in there where we are out of sight?”

“Ah, that sounds a lot better,” she said with a sudden smile that revealed white teeth almost too large for her mouth. “Do people with garages lock their cars? I don’t think so. If we’re seen going inside, the danger will be to find who is waiting when we come back out.”

I hadn’t thought of that, but wouldn’t admit it. As if that had been my plan all along, I said, “One of us stays outside to watch.”

She seemed to accept that. “When do we go?”

That answer took me by surprise. “I was expecting more input from you. Maybe a little resistance.”

“My input is that we need that map right away. Without one to help us make plans, you won’t get off your butt and move. So, why not go look for it today?”

She was completely right again. It was becoming a trait of hers that bothered me more and more. I sat and considered both her knack for seeing what I didn’t and that her observances were not better than mine, just different. She complemented me. Where I failed to consider important aspects of a situation, she filled in the details. Together, we were more than either of us alone.

I stood. “Okay, grab what you need and let’s go find a map.”

Her eager grin made her appear like a ten-year-old at her surprise birthday party. My new gun belt went around my waist, my twenty-two tucked into the front of it at an angle so I could bend but still retrieve it quickly. The brown coat covered the red flannel shirt that had a funky smell and was beginning to bother even me. That’s what happens when you don’t shower for a couple of weeks and wear the same clothes. However, I would have to do something soon or I couldn’t stand being close to myself.

“Sue, do I stink?”

“Oh, yes.”

“You do too,” I shot back instinctively.

“Do not. I washed two days ago. Everything.”

Maybe she had. I didn’t know. She didn’t smell, so it was probably true. “Let’s go scout around and see if we can find a car or two. Afterward, I need to wash a few things, including me.”

She held up her little thirty-two to assure me she had it with her, then slipped it into her coat pocket. I wished I had had time to make a silencer like mine for her. A little PVC pipe filled with cotton balls, a couple of rows of holes drilled on the sides, and duct tape to hold it in place. In an emergency, a toilet paper tube would work. Another valuable bit of information gained from the Internet. Or not.

It had seemed like it might work when I read about it. Maybe not cut the noise by half, but a third would be great. Twenty percent was acceptable to people who were trying to keep their presence hidden from others on the same mountain, like us. However, the little gun she held couldn’t make that much noise without a silencer, could it? I didn’t think so. And if we proceeded carefully, neither of us would have to fire our weapon.

On the other hand, just to be fair, I’d once tried to double my internet speed with a little tinfoil as revealed in a video. It was a solution guaranteed to work by the person who posted it. If anything, it slowed the speed. Then, another time, there was a job offer to make fifty dollars an hour, easily, and in the comfort of my home. I’d eagerly given my credit card number and agreed to pay a hundred bucks they needed to set me up and get the process going. Never heard from them again. So, a toilet roll silencer might or might not work.

We left the tunnel and moved in a general direction to our right, crossing the river further away from town than the last time. Avoiding where the three men had died and what had happened to their bodies since. Seeing that was something both of us could do without.

As we moved, light snow fell, large fat flakes, which was good for covering our tracks. I didn’t want to actually enter town. There were too many hidden eyes watching, the people too well-versed in fending for themselves, and they all had weapons and skills that translated to the situation. Some locals may have relished the end of civilization coming.

We approached a small, unpainted, shingled house from the rear. The sides were weathered dark gray. Inside it, a little dog yapped, and a voice growled for it to shut up. Good dog. Stupid owner. Still, he would watch out the window to see why the dog had made a fuss, so we eased back into the forest.

I didn’t want a confrontation. Many of those survivors we had seen were as bad as wild animals. There was no way to know which were which, who would help us and who would kill us on sight. At the beginning of the pandemic, as soon as the cops started to get sick along with everyone else, fewer people reported for duty each day. Things rapidly got worse. And then there were fewer cops, firemen, repairmen, and the rest. Even my packages ordered from online dealers quit arriving, and the phones for local restaurants went unanswered, so I went hungry as soon as my chips and bowl of candy were gone.

The fewer police that patrolled, the more crime increased. It’s just a fact, as anyone who has lived through a hurricane or natural disaster can attest. When there is nobody to stand up to a certain class of people, criminal tendencies rise. They roam the streets in gangs, killing, robbing, and looting at leisure.

A few days earlier, many of these same people had been carpenters, mechanics, or worked at the supermarket. Others sold stocks or worked in banks. By my estimation, it took about four days for it all to change—along with the thin veneer of civilization to peel away. Everyone was out for themselves. Including me.

We moved on to another house a few hundred yards away. From our vantage on a small hill, we waited and observed. Empty houses have a different look about them, but a few minutes of additional observation could mean all the difference. We searched for things less obvious than lights in windows, men ordering their dogs to be quiet, and loud music playing.

Sue said, “No footprints anywhere.”

No lights. Undisturbed snow remained on the shaded porch of the doublewide, and a hundred other clues said nobody was home. Make that, probably nobody home. Inside were most likely two or three dead people, victims of the blight. It would smell. Enough to gag a person.

There was a garage, detached from the house by fifty feet. Beside it was a neat stack of cut and split firewood, probably harvested late last summer. Normally, there would be a path from the house to the wood. I said, “I’m going to sneak into the garage.”

“No.” She placed her hand on my arm to delay me. “You are a better shot, have two guns, and I’ve never even fired this little popgun and don’t know if I can shoot anyone if it comes to that. You stand guard and I’ll go.”

Before I could protest, even if I wanted to, she slipped away. There was a side door to the garage. It was locked and she moved around to the front and I heard the cold springs protesting the lifting the big garage door. Then, the side door suddenly swung open from the inside. Sue darted away and ran to where a large cedar hid and protected her from sight.

I guessed she had opened the large garage door enough to roll under it and let it close again. Then she unlocked the side door, ran and hid. Now she waited to find out if someone came to investigate the noise or sighting. She was laying where I could protect her. Smart. There was no other word to describe her.

No dogs. No people. No shots. She gave me a curt nod, stood, and ran toward the open side door where the front fender of a green pickup was clearly visible. I saw the increase of light inside when she opened the truck’s door and the interior light came on. A moment later, she was racing in my direction, a fistful of papers in her left hand.

Oddly, she didn’t appear happy. She glanced over her shoulder and kept running. I slipped the twenty-two inside my waistband and pulled the nine-millimeter in response. I racked a shell into the chamber and waited. Something had spooked her.

Sue ran past me, into the forest well off to one side. Her footprints were clear in the snow and anyone could follow them. I dropped to one knee and then went down to the ground on my chest, ignoring the cold and wet. The pistol was held in front of me, aiming at the corner of the garage when two men simultaneously rushed into sight. Both carried handguns and wore black leather. Bikers.

One called out, “Halt or we’ll come get you and that won’t be pretty.”

The other didn’t waste his breath. He looked at the footprints she had left, pulled up and aimed somewhere to my left, nowhere near where Sue was and pulled the trigger three times in rapid succession. The sharp sounds split the quiet air. The other man was also pointing his gun at the same location, and I assumed they had seen an animal, maybe a deer. Sue was behind me, to my right.

They were only forty or fifty steps away and were intent on watching for her as they slowly advanced in my general direction. Another dozen steps and they would almost step on me. Both held pistols in front of them, ready to fire at the slightest provocation. I’d stand no chance when one of them spotted me. They would both fire and I’d be dead.

They kept walking at a slow pace. Neither saw me before I fired twice at the head of the leading man. From that distance, I couldn’t miss. Without waiting for him to fall, my barrel shifted slightly, and I fired twice more, then shut my eyes.

Both were on the ground when I opened them.

I managed to get my feet under me as Sue reached my side. She asked, “Are you wounded?”

“No.” My eyes were locked on the motionless bodies. My mind was on the seven shots that had been fired. The first three were much louder than mine, thus larger caliber guns. Anyone within a couple of miles would have heard them and they would know the difference, if not the specific calibers. Then people, probably more bikers would arrive. They would follow our footprints.

I didn’t move. Sure, I was scared, but it was more than that. My mind was spinning with information and what to do with it. The house had been empty. I was sure of it. So, where had they come from?

Sue tugged my coat, trying to get me to run, and said, fear in her voice, “Come on!”

Turning, I almost followed her back into the forest. In a flash of inspiration, I hissed, “No, you come with me.”

My thoughts had caught up with the circumstances, sorted things out, and devised a plan. Running to the mine would get us killed. They would follow and hunt us down. My mind also dredged up assorted facts and provided inspiration.

My cousin Harry had self-named himself Harry the Hog when he had bought a used motorcycle a few years earlier. At first, he had ridden with friends on the weekends. They wore leather jackets with mean-looking patches of devils and death-heads and acted the part of bikers. During the week, he sold mattresses at one of the discount stores in the mall. He wore a suit and tie at work, leathers on the weekends.

Our family had laughed at him. He’d been the butt of endless jokes. Eventually, he was fired from his job and rode off one day, never to be seen or heard from again. Those two dead men lying in the snow hadn’t known how to shoot. The one that shouted at Sue to stop had said halt. Neither had shouted a swear-word. None of their words began with the letter F. What kind of badass biker uses words like halt? And shouts a warning before shooting? My cousin, Harry the Hog, would do that. That’s because he was a pretender. A wanna-be biker.

Not that I thought either of them was him. But Harry never got more than a few steps from his bike until the day he rode off. He was so proud of it. The bike turned him into something special. Even while eating with us at a picnic, he’d placed himself where his bike was right in front of our table. A worker in the park had made a big deal about moving the motorcycle off the lawn to the parking lot instead of the picnic area and they had almost come to blows.

The two men who chased after Sue were pretenders. I was convinced of it.

I remembered that and more. So, instead of running away to hide in our tunnel, I went the other way. Sure enough, a pair of large motorcycles sat at the edge of the blacktop, hidden from us by the house. One was rakish, pinkish-purple around the edges, like it glowed, what I’d call a crotch-rocket. Low and overpowered. The other was huge, painted glossy black and trimmed in chrome. It had a windshield and saddlebags with a leather fringe. The muffler was as big around as my upper arm. Behind the seat for the driver was a higher one for a passenger.

I took it all in within seconds and made my decision. The seven shots would bring more bikers hunting us. They would follow our footprints in the snow if we went that way. The bike was our answer to escape.

Before Harry the Hog bought his big bike, he’d ridden around the neighborhood on a little Japanese dirt bike. I’d been almost sixteen and he had talked me into riding it, laughing hysterically when I fell and left part of my skin on the road. But after a few more tries, I managed to stay upright. That summer, I must have ridden a hundred miles on his little bike in our yard and street.

No, I’d never been on a large one such as the one that faced me now. I’d never ridden any other motorcycle beside his, and that only for one summer. But the bike ahead beckoned. It called to me.

With Sue at my heels, I leaped on, my thumb found the starter-button, and nothing happened. I looked down and saw the ignition key dangling from a fob of some sort. After turning the key, I calmed myself, squeezed the clutch with my left hand and touched the starter again. The engine softly growled to life.

Sue leaped on behind me. I tapped the floorplate a few times with my toe and let the clutch out slowly. We moved forward and turned away from the center of town. My feet insisted on skidding along the pavement as we turned, but when pointed straight ahead, and as I gained confidence, my right hand twisting the throttle, we accelerated smoothly, and I put my feet where they belonged.

I felt Sue twist around behind me and in other circumstances may have wondered what she was doing, but the motorcycle was huge, and I was busy trying to control it on the patches of snow that covered the road in shaded places. The engine pushed us through the snow as if it didn’t exist, but the slightest turn of the handlebars threatened to crash us. I fought to keep the bike going directly down the center of the road.

A pop of sound told me what kind of a noise a thirty-two semi-automatic makes. Sue had fired her gun. Then she did it again. My eyes found the rearview mirror. In it, I saw the three bikers that were probably investigating the earlier shooting.

They had seen us. She fired again.

One bike swerved and fell, the rider rolled in the snow. A second pulled up to check on the first. Only one continued in our direction. I had no illusions about Sue having hit the biker that fell, not with a two-inch barrel from the back of a bouncing motorcycle. It was more likely the rider had seen the muzzle flash and it had scared him enough that he tried to turn too fast on the slick roadway. That told me he was also a pretender, as far from being a bad-ass biker as my cousin was. The one that stopped to help was no better. In doing so, he allowed his prey to escape. And the third one hadn’t accelerated to catch us, despite me riding in third gear about twenty-five miles an hour until finding the right sequence to shift into the next higher gear.

The road we followed was closed ahead with barricades, probably closed each winter when the snow fell and got too deep to plow since nobody lived up there. So, I slowed, downshifted, and turned slightly. The wheels found the right shoulder, then slowed more as I made a U-turn.

When the bike threatened to fall to one side, I walked it forward on my tiptoes and stopped when straight again. Now I faced the third biker, still coming at me—but slowly. I pulled my Glock and held it in both hands like they teach the cops to do in the movies.

He saw my action and instantly understood my intention. I squeezed off a shot. He twisted his handlebars in one direction, then the other to try and recover his balance. I fired again, to upset him more, if not to hit him. He was maybe fifty yards away when he lost all control.

Killing him and the others was not in my playbook. I replaced the gun in my holster and twisted the accelerator. The bike leaped ahead, gained speed, heading right past him and back into town. The bike we rode made very little noise. We blew past all three bikers that had chased us and reached the edge of town where there were tracks from motorcycles everywhere in the four-inch deep snow. Most bikes were parked in a ragged row outside a community center or something similar. A few men were lounging outside, and as one, they turned to look at us. One bearded biker raised a beer in silent salute as we accelerated past. Two or three shouted insults or whatever. None shot at us.

We kept riding.

In the rearview, none mounted up and chased us. My suspicion was that they were too drunk or doing their best to get there. They didn’t care about us. We hadn’t done any harm to them individually, and they didn’t yet know about the ones we killed or caused to crash.

Sue shouted in my ear, “I used to live right up ahead.”

“Want to stop?”

There was a slight delay before she shook her head. I felt the shake, but she didn’t say anything out loud. I understood. If she had said yes, I’d have tried to talk her out of it. Instead, I increased our speed.

The depth of the snow became less as we rode away from town until there were more bare patches on the road than snow. No vehicle had passed this way in a day or two because there were no tire tracks. We zipped past a few cars and trucks, all abandoned, half of them burned. At one place, a man either heard or saw us at the last moment and reached for a nearby rifle. By the time he raised it, we were out of range. He acted more like he was willing to protect himself than that he wanted to shoot us.

Sue shouted in my ear, her voice laughing. “This is how to make a ten-to-twenty-day trip in an hour.”

She was right. That fact hadn’t dawned on me, but she was giving me full credit. It hadn’t been my intent to ride all the way to Everett, and it still wasn’t, but the bike made very little noise and as long as we kept the speed up, we were past people before they knew we were even in the area. A person with a good rifle and a scope could probably shoot at us if the shot was hurried, but why should they? We were not doing them any harm, in fact, we were trying our best to get away. Besides, shooting at us would reveal their location to others.

We rode on dry pavement as the elevation dropped and I studied the bike between my legs. We had plenty of gas. It almost drove itself, riding soft and smooth. Someone had chopped down a couple of trees across the road ahead, but I steered the bike around one end without hardly slowing or seeing anybody. Later, there were two small groups of people, one in an RV parked beside the road, and another had pitched a tent beside it. A woman waved.

That told me things hadn’t deteriorated as much as I had expected. Not yet. One old man waved in a friendly manner as we cruised past another wide spot where a small tent had been pitched.

The North Fork of the Stillaguamish River ran along the left side of the highway. I only knew that because of a road sign. After passing through three or four communities too small for stop signs or red lights, we topped a slight rise and ahead of us flowed the river. Sandbars marked every wide turn, and the water was clear enough to see the rocks on the bottom.

We’d already traveled half of the fifty miles I’d estimated to reach Everett. Right ahead was Arlington, the town where I’d lived. Like Sue, I would avoid my old house. After that came Marysville, then Everett. Before going on, I wanted to examine the maps in detail. Make plans. Operating without plans simply felt wrong, especially after my impulsive theft of the motorcycle.

On our right were empty fields and farms, one after the other. However, on the left side of the road was the river, and across that was forest for a far as I could see. A dirt road went down to the water and I turned on impulse. A quarter-mile took us to a slight slope, and a sandbar made of fist-sized rocks. We slowed and bumped over them until we reached the water’s edge.

The river was only twenty feet wide, and less than a foot deep. I got off, and Sue did the same. I kept the bike in first gear while steadying it and working the throttle to move ahead. Sue leaped to the other side and helped me balance it until we reached the other side, then we moved into the forest and along a trail barely wide enough to fit the big bike.

I turned the engine off, leaned the bike against an alder tree, and we faced each other. She grinned. I grinned back and sighed. My heart hadn’t slowed since Sue had raced from inside the garage clutching the maps.

As I said to her earlier, I’m a planner. I like to know what’s happening next. Shooting two men, followed by a gunfight with three more, stealing a motorcycle and riding it through a town controlled by Hells Angles, or whatever new motorcycle club it had been, was not my style. Yet, we’d already moved half the distance to our objective in an hour instead of five or ten days where every day meant increased lawlessness and more roving bands of desperately hungry people.

We’d also abandoned our food, sleeping bags, and everything else we owned in the mine tunnels. The river provided plenty of cold water to drink.

Some things were looking better. Others not.