The Last Rebel: Survivor (8 page)

Jim was not gamy. He had washed regularly in creeks, lakes, and rivers on the way down. But he figured that hot showers might not be too plentiful in his future and a cold river was not the same thing to bathe in as a tub with a shower.

He took a couple of the towels that Bev had found and went into the bathroom. He also took the AK-47. He didn’t want to, as it were, be caught with his pants down.

The hot shower felt good, and after he dried himself thoroughly and donned clean clothes, then he went into the kitchen. He saw that Bev had already heated up their supper and made a pot of coffee. She had also brought Reb in from the HumVee and fed him. He was polishing off the final bit of something in a bowl. Jim rolled a cigarette and smoked slowly. It had been a long time since anyone waited on him, and he liked the feeling.

They slowly consumed the supper, cleaned up, and then just sat there, relaxing, with Reb lying quietly near the stove, a classic scene of domestic tranquility, ironic given the world outside.

“We going to check out Jackson?” Bev said, referring to a large town in Wyoming that was directly north.

“Why not?” Jim said. “It’s directly on our way. I was there when I was a kid. But of course we’ll take back roads to stay out of harm’s way. There’s a limit to how big this Zone can be.”

Bev looked at Jim. He was growing on her by leaps and bounds.

“Aren’t you a little afraid to be with me?” she said.

“Oh no,” he said with a straight face, which she was learning was the way he was when he was being funny. “I’m not that afraid of you.”

Bev laughed so hard that Reb raised his head from sleep.

“You know what I mean.”

“Listen, Bev,” Jim said, “you don’t have to be a psychiatrist to figure these guys out. They’re bad. They want to kill. That’s their religion and like I said before, whether I’m with you or alone doesn’t matter.”

Bev nodded.

“What,” she asked, “exactly are you looking for?”

He smiled at her.

“I don’t really know, Bev. Just a place where I can live in harmony with nature. Peace. Be happy.”

“But you may have to fight to get it. That’s what Ben Raines said.”

“Not me. I’m tired of war—or at least the effects of it. I lost my brother and my father in wars. I’m just turned off by the whole experience.”

Bev nodded. She knew that Jim was a little shortsighted on this picture. But right now maybe he needed to think that he wouldn’t have to fight for peace. She changed subjects.

“You married?”

“No.”

“Girl?”

“No. Not much opportunity to meet someone where I’m from.”

Bev nodded, hiding her feeling, which was that she was very, very happy that Jim was not connected to someone else.

“How about you?” Jim asked.

“I had a boyfriend in Japan. But the commute was hellish.”

They laughed heartily. Then they went into the living room.

“There are two couches, “Jim pointed out. “All you have to do is turn the cushions over, torn-up side down. I don’t think that either of us feels like making up a bed.”

“You got that right,” Bev said. “I’m going to sleep. See you in the morning.”

They looked on each other for one lingering moment before they went to their separate couches. Jim sensed that it could have been a one-couch deal, but something inside told him not to. Bev had been through hell, losing her father, being pursued by the Rejects, had seen her friend Ida raped and murdered, had a pack of beasts after her. Jim knew that, beneath the laughter, she was in a very vulnerable state emotionally, and that making love to her wouldn’t be difficult. But he couldn’t do it, just like he wouldn’t hunt an animal with one wing, or an elk with a game leg, or fight a man with one arm. It was unfair, and he knew that being fair was a super-important thing in life. If you weren’t fair, somebody somewhere would have a bone to pick with you, and one day they might. Oh yeah, what goes around definitely does come around.

FIVE

Jim had a backup security system with him when he went to sleep: Reb the dog had come in to lie next to the couch that Jim was on. Jim was also a very light sleeper, and he was ninety-nine percent sure that nothing would surprise him as long as Reb was around. Dogs were hundreds of times more proficient than people when it came to hearing and smelling. Like his grandpa once said about his dog Brandy, “That old dog can hear a flea pass wind at a hundred yards. And smell it.”

Jim kept his firepower close, the AK-47, the tommy gun, and the Glock. He also made sure that Bev had her TT-33 nearby when she settled in on the couch across from him.

Jim had, additionally, formulated various scenarios before going to bed. He had reconnoitered the back of the house as well as the woods on the fringe of the open area, and had both front and back doors locked. If someone tried to come in the back way he would just stand his ground in the living room, to exit via the front door to the HumVee in the woods across the road.

Finally, he had found some Christmas decorations with bells that actually tinkled, and he had nailed these just above the doors so the bells lay against their tops. If someone succeeded in compromising the locks and opened the doors they would go tinkle-tinkle—and he would go boom-boom.

It was nice going to sleep on a couch. When he was traveling down from his home he would sleep in a tent, and once, when he was very tired, he had slept in the cab of the HumVee, but just to be in a house, on a couch, and with another person around was good.

Jim woke up three times during the night because of noises. But they turned out to be nothing. Once it was just the sound of the wind coming through the trees, once it was the occasional plink of the shower faucet in the downstairs bathroom, once it was because Bev was snoring, and she stopped when he awakened. Two of the times he was back to sleep within a minute. The third time he didn’t go back to sleep for at least five minutes.

He spent the five minutes looking at Bev, who was clearly visible thanks to the moonlight coming through the window. She was sleeping on her stomach, and he couldn’t help but notice her butt. In fact, he found himself focusing on it, but after a while he stopped looking at it because the sight was increasing his heart rate and it was taking him down a path that he didn’t want to go.

All told, except for the three times he awoke, he slept very soundly, and when he awakened at dawn he felt deeply refreshed.

He checked out Bev, which was a mistake Now she was lying on her back, her sheet and blanket had slipped down past her waist, and her shirt had hiked up a bit, exposing a flat bare belly including her belly button.

Jim felt himself about to sneeze, something weird given that it was what he always did when he felt sexual desire for the opposite sex. He shook the feeling off and got up, shoved the Glock in his waistband, and went—Reb following him—to the bathroom, then to the front door, Reb still behind him. He opened it a crack and looked out.

The pond was as flat and still as dark green glass. Even the relatively few leaves floating on it were not moving.

He stepped out of the house and closed the door quietly behind him, first letting Reb out, who promptly went into the woods and returned within seconds.

Jim really loved the house and wanted to take a better look at it, take another stroll around it and look at it in a more leisurely mood than he was in yesterday. He started out. He had only his Glock with him, but that was okay. His other weapons were his eyes and ears and Reb, who now seemed to have grown into his constant companion, which was fine with Jim.

As he had grown up in Idaho he and his family had lived in the plainest of circumstances, and it was fine. But occasionally he would dream about living in another kind of house, very much like this one, just he and his wife and kids. People would sometimes ask him: “Don’t you want more out of life than that?”

Jim’s answer was what he profoundly believed: “I don’t think there’s much more.”

Of course the house would probably be located in Idaho. Maybe he would do some farming or maybe something else, raise horses or cattle or sheep, but always something close to the land. He knew that he was not to return to Idaho for a long time, but he also knew that it would always be in his heart, and thinking about it every now and then sent a surge of joy, almost like a zap with electricity, through him. And, of course, a little sadness.

He stopped halfway along the back wall and examined the fine masonry work. The craftsman who did this was no beginner. All the rocks, smooth and about half the size of a bowling ball, had probably been gathered from the surrounding countryside, a job in itself. They had been laid up in an orderly manner, but they were still very natural looking. That was art, it seemed. He was no professional architecture or art critic, but it seemed to him that all the best art cut out the middleman—the artist—and just presented itself, simply and beautifully.

Jim continued on, basking in the beauty of it all, and then walked across the road, first looking each way—no one seemed to be in sight.

He walked toward the HumVee, and he was in the woods about halfway to it when he sensed—he couldn’t hear or see it—that he had company. Reb was busy doing something on the other side of the house, so he was no help in this instance.

Jim scanned the woods, just like he did when he was ten years old and hunting squirrels or some other small game. Animals were not stupid. To protect themselves they would stand stock-still and, given their coloration, would be almost impossible to see. But after a while Jim had been able to detect them.

He did not know if the visitor was animal or human. He drew the Glock, keeping it down, and walked forward. Then he saw it. It wasn’t human. It was a pronghorn antelope, partially obscured because it was standing behind a cluster of tree trunks.

It was standing as still as a statue, and Jim just reveled in watching it.

If Wyoming had a state animal, the pronghorn antelope was it. The greatest mass of them in the world lived within Wyoming’s borders and they were amazing animals. Though small as a deer they were super powerful with oversize lungs and the ability to turn oxygen into energy that was so efficient that they could run an astonishing sixty miles an hour for an hour. More than once he had watched a herd of them in full gallop along a flat plain in sagebrush country, and it was an amazing sight. It didn’t seem that they were expending much effort, even moving quickly, because they ran so fluidly, except when you heard the thundering of their hooves and saw the massive cloud of dust that was raised behind them, and watched the ground they covered disappear in great chunks.

But a pronghorn couldn’t outrun a bullet, and on the occasions when Jim had encountered them and had a chance to take one or more of them down he found he could not do it. They were too glorious a creature to have their head end up mounted on a wall someplace.

He used his open palm to slap a smooth tree trunk and that’s all the pronghorn needed to take off like a sprinter starting at the sound of a gun; within seconds the animal was gone. Talk about zero to sixty in ten seconds!

Jim proceeded on to the HumVee. It was still locked, and there was nothing amiss. The camouflage paint did a good job of concealing it in the particular stand of lodgepole pine where it stood.

Jim knew pretty much how much gas he had left. He was perhaps ten gallons shy of a full tank, so he opened the hatch in the back, got out his trusty funnel, and poured two full five-gallon cans in. As he did, he knew that he was lessening his risk just a little, because a full tank is less likely to blow than one half-full of fumes. It wasn’t a big deal, but you did what you could. At one point when he had earlier thought he might switch to a smaller, more gas-efficient vehicle, he immediately thought of Ben Raines. Raines had given him the HumVee. Somehow, to not use the vehicle anymore was to cut off any remaining contact. He had no obligation whatsoever to Raines, and yet Raines had, in his way, been as glorious an example of the human species as there could be. Jim was coming to realize that he wanted to honor that memory in any way he could.

On the way back to the house, he stopped on the road and looked east, toward the sun, which was not fully over a distant line of mountains. A wave of sadness swept across him. His eyes slowly closed and he remembered the days, endless, joyful days he had spent with his grandfather, waiting quietly in the forest for a bird or bear or maybe in a blind by a lake, him and Grandpa with shotguns, and then a gaggle of mallards floating on the lake would abruptly lift off, squawking and carrying on, and Grandpa and he would get a good shot, at least two and sometimes three. And it was then that he discovered that he never missed, and Grandpa would say that he never had seen anyone who could shoot as well as Jim. Those were good days. No, not good. Wonderful.

Back in the house, he rolled himself a cigarette from a diminishing supply of Prince Albert tobacco, and then made some powdered milk for cereal and a pot of coffee. He found some cat food for Reb, who ate it greedily.

Bev awakened about eight o’clock and wandered into the kitchen, yawning.

Her hair was a little mussed and her eyes looked sleepy, details that seemed to accentuate rather than diminish her beauty. In total, the sight of her made Jim’s stomach tighten.