Page 45 of The End of the World As We Know It
The bike had a headlight. He clicked its switch and the light came on. It was risky to have the light on, but he felt it was a chance he had to take. He mounted the bike and rode across the highway and down a narrow blacktop road he knew that led toward the Sabine River. There were some old fishing and hunting trails he had used a few times, and he might find a place to hide for a while. Until he could figure out what to do. He was reasonably handy in the woods and along the river. It seemed like the right choice.
Along the road he went, pedaling steadily. He didn’t so much as see one car. Not that he expected to see many out here, but not even one struck him as odd.
It was the disease. It was sweeping through East Texas like a pack of hungry weasels through a henhouse. If Gene West felt comfortable shooting people, fulfilling a lifelong dream, most likely everything had gone to hell.
As the night cracked open with a bloody explosion of sunlight, Ricky stopped pedaling and got off the bike, pushed it along the side of the road until he found a narrow trail on the other side of a poorly maintained barbed-wire fence. He lifted the bike over the fence, then carefully parted the wire and climbed through.
He went into the woods and found a place where he couldn’t be seen from the blacktop road, rolled out his bedroll, and lay down. His legs vibrated, felt as if he were still pedaling, but finally the nerves settled and so did he.
When he awoke late morning, he had a breakfast of one of his packed items. A small can of beanie-weenies. He hardly remembered eating them.
He sat with his back against a tree where the light came through solidly from above, pulled out his book, trying to pass the time until night.
The book helped, but it didn’t completely remove his mind from all that happened; how could it?
From time to time, a car did pass by. He could hear it out on the blacktop. Once or twice, he thought he heard heavy trucks. Military, maybe. Were they picking people up, doctoring them? He had a feeling that might not be their mission. He had heard the shots after they arrived.
When night came, Ricky packed up and got back on the road. He kept his bike light off, as the moon was bright enough to show him the blacktop, which looked like a large, well-licked strand of licorice.
He passed houses. None of them had lights on. He saw cars in driveways, and once he saw two people staggering beside the road, coated in shadows. They stuck out their arms, imploring him to do something he couldn’t do. He pedaled faster.
By the time he came to an old fishing trail, planning to sleep out on one of the docks hanging over the river, he was tired, sad, and nearly defeated.
He wondered why he, too, didn’t have the disease. He had certainly been exposed enough times. The dock he chose for a resting spot was occupied by half a dozen water moccasins, so that was out. He pushed the bike along the water’s edge. He was using the headlight beam now, hoping he was deep enough in the country not to be seen.
Now and again, he would pause, pull out his flashlight, and shine it into the woods. He could hear deer moving through the trees, and once he saw a lone hog standing on a wooded hill, staring out at him.
You left them alone, they pretty much left you alone. But not always. And when they did decide to be nasty, they were a load. A few hundred pounds of stinky pork that could run at enormous speed with tusks as sharp as a samurai sword.
The hog grunted at him. Perhaps a note of courtesy, or a warning.
Finally, in the beam of his flashlight, purely by accident, he saw a large deer stand positioned high on the hill between two trees. It stood fifteen feet off the ground. There were cables on either side of it and they were fastened to the trees for support, secured that way against wind and rain. Had he not been standing at a certain angle, flicking the light in just the right place, he doubted he would have seen it.
It was hard to get himself and the bike through the undergrowth, but he managed. Besides the cables, the stand had thick wooden supports and there was a metal ladder that led up to it.
He turned off the light and leaned the bicycle against one of the deer stand’s support trees, on the side away from the river below. He repositioned his backpack and climbed the ladder. There was a closed door, just wide enough for a person. He pushed it open. It was surprisingly large and clean inside, and there were some shelves and some canned goods. A sleeping bag, not too unlike his own, was rolled up and on a shelf. There were three boxes of ammunition for a rifle, but no rifle. There was food and big plastic jugs of water, as well as a wilted Robert B. Parker novel and a box of unopened crackers. Opened, they proved stale inside their wax paper.
The interior was tall enough he could stand up. There were sliding slots that served as windows on all four sides. He slid one of them open and looked out toward the river. A deer below, possibly pausing for a drink, would never know what hit it. And from the other windows he could look into the woods.
For now, Ricky had found a home.
And so, the days passed.
Ricky wondered what was going on out there in the real world, but not enough to investigate. He figured the disease had claimed most, but there had to be others like himself, unharmed, naturally immune; or so he assumed, considering he hadn’t even experienced a telltale sniffle.
Chief West would be an example. He hadn’t looked sick at all. Of all the people to be immune, why that asshole?
He ate canned goods cold, and those awful crackers. He used his Boy Scout mess kit to boil water from a little spring he discovered higher on the hill. Its water trickled not a hundred feet from the deer stand. There was also a deer feeder without anything in it. Ricky always hated the idea of feeding deer as if making a pet, then shooting them as if you were a mighty hunter. Bullshit.
Ricky found a place in the woods where he could pile some loose rocks into a fire circle and use his flint and steel to make a spark in dry leaves, then feed the fire natural tinder and finally larger sticks as the fire swelled.
He would now and again use this spot to heat up his food, cooking with his mess kit, which contained a frying pan with a fold-out handle and a boiling pot. He feared the smoke might attract a rover of some sort, but he cooked low and the smoke was mostly under the trees and thin due to his limiting the size of the fire.
Ricky’s slingshot brought down more than a few squirrels, which he tried to dry fry with poor success, and finally decided on boiling the meat. It wasn’t great, but he became accustomed to it. His family had been squirrel hunters from way back, and he enjoyed a good tree rat now and again.
As time passed, he practiced shooting with his slingshot, finding more rocks in a break by a creek on the hill that dipped down and into the Sabine. He got good again quick.
He boiled water in one of his mess kit pots and, once cooled, poured it in the plastic water jugs to keep them topped up. He read his two books,Moby-DickandDon Quixote. He had never taken the time to read them before, but now with little to do during the day and only his dick to play with at night, he had learned to appreciate the languid prose of the two old novels. When they were finished, he started on the Robert B. Parker paperback that had been left in the deer stand. It was so good he read it in short time.
