Ranger (The Bugging Out Series Book 5) (2 page)

A narrow but plain path was worn between the stands of fir and pine trees. Not wide enough for a vehicle, it was nonetheless a way that had been traveled before. By someone. Going somewhere.

Since before the blight, I thought. There was evidence of lower limbs having been chopped away, possibly for firewood. Or, it appeared, to make a clearer way through the once lush woods.

I was looking at a trail.

To take it, and head south by doing so, was one half of a choice to be made. To continue west with the daylight that remained was the other. The way through the forest might lead to shelter. An old cabin. Or an abandoned hunting camp.

Or it might be nothing more than a hiking path meandering through the grey wilderness for tens of miles.

I was cold. The constant rain had beaten a chill deep into my bones. Walking was growing more difficult by the minute. In another mile my bare feet and wobbly legs might be able to carry me no more.

My mind was not far behind. Every thought was a struggle. Moments of clarity were few and far between. A quarter mile up the road my senses might be dulled enough that I wouldn’t see something similar to the path off to my left. I might miss my best chance at staying alive.

I took a few steps toward the path, pausing where it began at the shoulder of the road. It might lead to nothing. And it might lead to everything.

There’s always hope...

My friend’s words, spoken first to me even before the blight ravaged the land where I now stood, both buoyed and stung me. His simple encouragement had become a mantra of sorts, spurring me on when faced with difficulties. When faced with uncertainties like what lay before me.

But his abrupt departure, under the most inexplicable circumstances, hurt every single time I married that desire to persevere with his memory. I didn’t want to forget him. No. That wouldn’t erase the pain of what he’d done. What I wanted was to understand the why and the what of his leaving.

“You’d take the path,” I said aloud, referencing what I knew my friend would do.

And what I would, as well.

I left the road and walked along the soggy trail, mud caking my feet and legs up to the ankles, soaking and staining the loose cuffs of my sweatpants. I didn’t count steps here—I just walked. Moving forward. Up a gentle incline the path crossed, and then down into a hollow beyond, bare trees and small boulders filling the natural depression, the tangle of features thinning out as a clearing opened up, something at its southern boundary.

A building.

It was a cabin. Not a shack. A true stone chimney rose from the wall nearest me, and as I moved quickly toward it I saw a window, intact, set into the western wall of the small structure. Its walls were made of aged logs, stacked decades ago, I guessed, and the low roof, simply shingled with split wood, bore spots of wear where the elements and neglect had taken their toll.

My pace quickened, bringing me nearer to the old getaway. Someone had spent time here. Using it as a base for hunting and fishing excursions, I imagined. A place of solitude off the beaten path. It was a place where someone had enjoyed life before the blight.

And it was a place where that someone had died after the apocalypse had raged its way across the globe.

I stopped near the back corner of the cabin and stared at the body beneath a dead pine. The parts of the body, I corrected myself. Beneath a noose that had been suspended from a high limb the remains of a man lay, head in one spot, body from which it was severed in another a few feet away. For a moment I was confused by the sight. Then I was not, the images of what had happened tumbling into my head like a disjointed film playing at some advanced speed.

The man, the unfortunate soul, had retreated here, to his getaway, after the blight struck with full force, much as I had retreated to my property in the north of Montana. He’d hung on here, wherever here was, until doing so was no longer an option. Some fear of going on, of starving, of wasting away had cemented his decision, and he’d looped a hangman’s noose over a limb close to both his cabin and the meadow. Maybe last spring, I thought. That was when he’d stepped onto the fat log positioned beneath the rope and stared out at the open space, imagining it as it had been when the world was green and fresh and alive.

Then he did the deed. Took control of his fate, on his terms.

And from that moment a year or so ago, nature took over. Nature and decay. At some point, as his body decomposed, tissue and muscle and bone was no longer stout enough to maintain the integrity of the human form. A separation occurred at the neck, body dropping one way, and head another, leaving what I was witness to.

He was gone. Dead. But I was alive. And I planned to stay that way. What the man, a good man, I told myself without any knowledge of the truthfulness of my estimation, had left behind would be my salvation. I believed that until I came around the front of the cabin and saw what had happened to the structure.

The entire front wall was gone, logs snapped and blown outward, as was half of the west wall, leaving the interior open to the elements. Above that devastation the roof on the front half of the cabin was shredded, rain pouring in, soaking the interior. I peered in and, with daylight fading, took stock of what remained.

Bits of metal were embedded in the remaining log walls, evidence of some explosion within. A propane heater, perhaps. Or one running on kerosene. The man might have left it running as he ventured out in search of supplies, or other people, returning to find that some malfunction had resulted in a gas-fueled blast. Maybe that had led to his decision to end his life.

Maybe...

All I was doing was giving time to maybes. To possibilities. I needed to deal with the certainty that at that moment I had to get out of the rain, and get dry, and, somehow, warm.

I stepped into the weakened shelter of the cabin, just that move stopping the drumbeat of cold rain upon me. I looked around the simple one room building, but found little of use. No clothes, nor bedding had survived the explosion which had torn through the place. Cut logs that had been stacked by the fireplace were scattered about along with the rest of the contents.

Something, though, had not been shredded or tossed from its place. Atop the thick and sturdy mantle jutting from the fireplace’s stone structure was a small box. It rested there, tipped on its side, but even in that position I knew what it contained.

“Matches,” I said.

I hurried to the fireplace and took the box in hand, my excitement ebbing almost immediately. What I felt in my hand bore almost no weight. I shook the box and heard just a small rattle of matchsticks. Opening it I saw three of the wooden sticks, their tips a bright red.

Three matches.

All around me the wood, which included no kindling, was damp. Soaked, even. The old, dead wood that the man had cut down on the verge of falling apart. It would burn, I knew, but not with what heat a single match would produce. Or two. Or three.

Then something I’d seen but hadn’t noticed struck me.

The logs he’d gathered for burning were not chopped. They were cut. I went to one and examined the ends.

“Chainsaw,” I said.

The thick branches and lengths of tree trunk hadn’t been processed with a saw or an axe, but with the ripping blade of a chainsaw. A motorized tool that should still be here. Or near. And though I had almost no hope that such a tool would still work after being exposed to the elements for as long as it must have been, there might be something more than useful I could extract from it.

Gas.

I scanned the battered interior of the cabin quickly, then moved outside, circling the structure until I was near the man’s body. The coat he’d worn, soaked and shredded now, was useless to me, but it had been tossed back on one side, exposing his belt and a sheath attached there, the bone black handle of a Buck knife protruding. I approached and crouched, gingerly retrieving the blade, its steel marked with signs of rust, but a slow draw of my thumb along its edge confirmed that it had held its sharpness.

Standing again, I looked into the woods across the clearing, an oddity immediately catching my eye. A shape that should not have existed in any area of natural growth.

A straight line.

Holding the knife, I jogged across the narrow meadow, rain soaking me once again. At the far side I stopped and looked upon a row of wood that had been processed for burning, stacked and laid end to end, with precision and care. The man who’d done this had been meticulous.

Except with his chainsaw. It sat in the open behind one of the low piles of wood, a quarter of it submerged in the soggy muck. Part of me mused as to why a man so ordered had let his tool remain exposed to the elements. Perhaps he’d been where I stood when the explosion rocked his cabin. That event might have been what pushed him to the decision he made. Lacking in food, his shelter suddenly compromised, he’d reached his limit.

Physically, I was not at mine, but I could see it on the horizon. Hypothermia would drag me down to a sleep I would never wake from. I had to get warm, and dry.

I had to make fire.

I went to the chainsaw and crouched next to it, twisting the gas cap counter clockwise, the dry, wispy vapor that hissed from the tank as I uncapped it telling me what I’d found before I even looked.

Nothing.

It was empty. There was no gas. I lifted the impressively light tool a few inches out of the mud and rocked it gently back and forth, confirming my suspicion. There was no gas. If there had been any when the man last set the chainsaw down to rest, it had evaporated.

On a last hope I checked the reservoir which held the lubricating chain oil, but it, too, held nothing.

Panic didn’t set in. Not yet. But it became very clear that I needed a plan B. And fast.

Frustrated, I shook the chainsaw lightly, a brief admiration of the tool’s lack of heft slipping through the grim seriousness wrapping me.

Light...

The thought didn’t come from nowhere. It came mated to a memory. A recollection from my old life. My years as a business owner. A contractor. I’d witnessed dozens of accidents on jobsites in that time. Maybe hundreds. From the impossible to foresee to the bonehead moves of workers not paying attention to their environment. Cuts. Falls. Broken bones. Toppled equipment. Snapped beams. I’d seen it all.

Including fire.

One in particular seized my thoughts as I held the surprisingly light chainsaw in one hand. A subcontractor’s pickup had burst into flame. The reason why, I didn’t recall. But I did very clearly remember the fat rear tires of the dualie popping, their rubber feeding the blaze, turning the bed of the truck into an inferno before the firefighters arrived.

And I remember sparks. Erupting from the bed like a shower of silvery fireworks going off. It was only after the red engines rolled up with lights spinning and sirens blaring did I learn from the battalion chief aboard that what I was seeing was magnesium igniting in the hellishly hot fire. Probably, he suspected, from a chainsaw, whose frames were often made from the material, or an alloy containing it. Used because of its lightness.

I looked to the tool in my hand and set it back down into the mud, kneeling in the soggy dirt as I used the knife I’d taken to pry away the synthetic body that concealed the guts of the device. When I’d finally exposed the dull metal frame I ran a finger across it. The lack of heft, of density, was almost discernible to the touch.

“It might work,” I said to myself.

Might being the operative word here. If I could use the knife to shave off a good pile of the magnesium, hopefully pure enough, it would take a flame easily. And if one of the three matches would strike. And, of course, if I could process some of the wood remaining in the cabin into kindling that would dry and catch fire. All those variables needed to align so that I could, without any drama, live. So that I could find my way home.

I gripped the chainsaw in my free hand, knife in the other, ready to stand. That was when I glimpsed the man through a narrow space between the stacked logs.

H
e stood across the clearing, just outside the cabin, peering past one of the remaining walls to the dim space within. He held a rifle low, but ready. It was no modern weapon, but a throwback. Lever action, walnut stock, topped with a scope. Were it not for the blighted world all around he would have looked like a deer hunter out to bring home a buck.

But that world no longer existed, and seeing the man, the stranger, in proximity to me did not give me the relief it might. I didn’t jump up and call out to him in hopes that he would help me. That very natural instinct was suppressed by the reality of my situation, what I knew about it, and, more importantly, what I did not know.

So I stayed low, hidden by the stacked logs, watching the unexpected visitor. Appraising him. Beyond the weapon he carried, and a pistol he wore on his hip, a somewhat large backpack was cinched tight to his frame. His head was topped by a simple cowboy hat, its brim and crown softened by time and the elements. It was a Cattleman style, I knew, my life in Montana ingraining in me that bit of seemingly useless knowledge. Not a Gambler, a Gus, or a Tom Mix. A Cattleman. Rain ran down its brim and spilled near the dead man’s severed head as the stranger turned his attention from the cabin and looked to the mangled body lying on the ground beneath the noose.

Who are you?

I wondered silently about the man. Could he have been one of those who’d taken me? And left me out in the elements to fend for myself? Possibly. But...

But why let me go and then track me? Because tracking was precisely what this man was doing. I knew this as he crouched near the body and studied the muddy earth near it, reaching with a free hand to trace indentations in the saturated soil. It was unlikely, I believed, that he would note any indication of my passage through the area. The weather was almost immediately erasing any hint of footprints in the soaked earth.

Still, that he was looking at all meant that he wasn’t just wandering aimlessly. And I feared that one of my first estimations of the stranger, incongruous as it was in this new world, might be more correct than I’d allowed.