The No Where Apocalypse (Book 1): Stranded No Where (5 page)

He insisted on $45 for the mountain bike. Some yuppie, his words not mine, had a problem this past summer and couldn’t get his bike attached to his Volvo properly. Rather than risking a scratched gold exterior, the young man left it with Dizzy saying he’d be back in mid-September for it. He wasn’t coming back, I told Dizzy. Not this September, or next, or anytime in the foreseeable future.

Thus, a machine I knew cost $1,200 new, was placed in my care for $45. Best deal of the day.

Day 20 WOP

My plan for the future was simple, perhaps crazy, but straightforward. I was going to take my new expensive toy and pedal all the way back to Chicagoland. My plan wasn’t short in critics though.

“You’re gonna need a weapon,” Fred warned my one chilly September morning. “I don’t have an extra gun, just a nice compound my nephew leaves here. I think there’s four dozen arrows to boot.”

Thoughts of Daryl Dixon, the crossbow-wielding survivor, ran through my head. When I mentioned the name, Fred just stared back at me blankly. I guess he wasn’t a
Walking Dead
fan.

“I don’t think I need a weapon,” I answered, taking a hit from the brandy bottle we passed back and forth. “I just need to get back to civilization, my wife.”

He scratched his scraggly gray beard and stared out the front window. “You think a ham radio would work without electricity?” he asked.

“No, they need to be plugged into some type of power source.”

His lips twitched for a few seconds. “You think that fellow I talked to back at the start of this was filling me full of hog manure maybe?”

The thought had never crossed my mind. But his words made sense. “Why do suppose he’d do something like that?”

“If they had an old generator, one without all that new-fangled circuitry, maybe they could get it to work,” he added.

We were on two separate thought patterns. Two vehicles traveling the same direction, just on parallel highways.

Sitting quietly, passing the bottle back and forth, I noticed his eyes narrow. He nodded to himself several times.

“Radiation,” he finally huffed out, almost sounding like he used his last breath to do so. But he was still alive, another swig of the cheap brandy showed.

I opened my hands, confused.

“What about radiation?” I asked.

He shook his head. “Gonna be everywhere. That nephew of mine works for some nuclear company. Talks all the time about how close to Chernobyl we could be. Always claims if the power grid ever went down, we’d all be screwed.”

I hadn’t thought of that. I knew the Chicago area had several reactors. Most large metropolitan areas did. But something as bad as what happened back in the mid-80s in Ukraine, that I doubted.

“Have to take my chances,” I replied, feeling the effects of the liquor work through my mind. “I’d really like to get home.”

Fred finally glanced back at me. “Don’t blame you. Just that we don’t have radiation up here.”

He shrugged and went back to the bottle. “If you leave, be sure to stop by,” he stated. “Spend the night. We’ll drink up the rest of my stash and you can start out with a hangover. That’ll make you think.”

But I already was thinking. My plan needed refining.

Several days after my sobering visit with Fred, I pedaled up to Lottie’s place. There I found her, resting in a chair in a small patch of shade. The cool weather of a few days prior had passed, leaving us sweltering in heat again.

A smoke in one hand and a glass of water in the other, Lottie saluted my arrival with the tip of her glass.

“Let me get you something to drink,” she called out cheerfully. Moments later I too held a flowered Tom Collin’s glass of water. She offered me a cigarette, which I waved off. There was no reason to start another bad habit at a time like this.

“Got a question for you, Lottie,” I began, taking a large swig of the clear liquid. Instantly fire filled my mouth and throat.

“What the hell is this stuff?” I coughed, sniffing the contents.

“Expensive Russian vodka,” she answered with a chuckle. “I was saving it for when my time came to be with a man. But I decided today was as good as day as any to sip on it.”

Trying to shake the caustic fumes from my head, I sat back in the green garden chair. Though the chair sat in the shade, the back was still warm against my sweaty shirt.

“Wow, good shit,” I said, taking another, smaller, sip.

“You think you can get me another couple cartons from Dizzy?” she asked, tossing the spent butt into the gravel near her feet.

It was funny. Three weeks ago I had never even met these unique folks. And they all accepted me as is; albeit they saw me as their personal errand boy, but that was okay too. “I’ll see what I can do. I want to run my plan by you, see what you think.”

“Leaving here is a bad idea,” she said, looking my way. “Here is safe. Out there,” she waved her loose-jointed arms before her, “is the unknown.”

“I haven’t even told you what I was going to do yet,” I countered, playing with the tall tumbler of firewater.

“I got lots of time on my hands,” she replied. “Nothing but time, and tending to my garden. Once I saw you on that fancy bike, I knew what you’d be thinking.”

Day 22 WOP

I heard the putt, putt, putt of something coming down the road from the north and stopped in my tracks. Hauling brown water inside to boil on the stove could wait. I needed to make sure I wasn’t dreaming and that the sound was an actual vehicle, of some sort, coming my way.

It was a vehicle all right. One that only a very unique person would use for travel. And it moved slower than anything I had ever seen on a highway.

Dizzy grinned broadly and waved, pulling the old Simplicity garden tractor right up next to me. With several sputters, and one loud pop at the end, the engine finally died.

“Damn thing runs,” he shouted, climbing off the seat.

“Does it go any faster?”

He laughed, slapping my shoulder with his dirty paw. “About the speed of spit it all it gets up too. But it beats walking my fat ass all the way down here.”

He grabbed a satchel from the back of the tractor and handed it to me.

Surprised to receive a gift, I half expect a hand-written bill was coming next. I cocked my head.

“What is it?”

“Venison,” he claimed, pulling a pack of smokes from his shirt pocket. “Figured you were running low, and I’m not sure it will keep much longer. Cook it right away, and cook the hell out of it.”

For the last two weeks, my diet had consisted of venison, a few vegetables from Lottie’s plot, several dozen cans of pork and beans from Fred, and lots more venison.

I never had much of a taste for deer growing up. Too gamey for me, especially the deer from this area. Absent any decent farm crops, the wild things mostly ate browse. Pines cones, twigs, green weeds; everything that tasted like the ground it came from. And I decided with the first pack from Dizzy, that ground must have been spoiled up here.

“I’ve been cooking the hell out of most of it,” I answered, leading Dizzy inside my cabin. “Still tastes the same. If I had seasoning I could maybe improve the palatability of the stuff.”

Dizzy looked at me funny. “Isn’t there anything in the pantry?”

I shook my head at his strange words. “What pantry? There’s no pantry here. None that I’ve found at least.”

He pointed north, towards my bedroom. “In the closet, in there.”

“Show me,” I demanded.

Shrugging me off as the stupidest man he’d ever met, Dizzy trudged into the bedroom and tossed aside the curtain covering the small offset opening. There, on the left end, he removed a panel. Peering into the dark area, he smiled.

“You got all kinds of shit in here,” he exclaimed. “Grab me a flashlight and I’ll show you.”

I didn’t have a flashlight, so a candle had to do. Staring at the small, yet stuffed area, I felt my jaw loosen for the first time in weeks. Utopia.

Dizzy and I emptied the contents of the pantry onto my bed. There I took an inventory.

12 cans of spam
 

6 cans of cocktail wieners

4 boxes of mac and cheese

3 massive cans of pork and beans

2 jars of mayo

1 gallon of cooking oil

Various spices, nine containers

4 sealed boxes of strike anywhere matches

18 tall candles

2 flashlights, no extra batteries

2 cases of shotgun shells

4 boxes of handgun shells

9 mm Glock

Lifting one of the cans of wieners Dizzy studied the label, licking his lips as he did.

“Man, I love these things,” he whispered as if having a food fantasy right there in my bedroom. “Can I have one?”

I pointed to the pile. “You can have all six,” I declared, watching this face light up. Those were my least favorite food in the world. One time, back when I was maybe 12 or 13, I got sick on an overnight camping trip with the neighbor kid and his dad.
 

The only reason I had gone to the camp out was because Timmy Glassner had said his mom was coming. And I had one huge crush on that woman. She didn’t come, and his dad brought the cocktail wieners to cook over the fire. Somewhere in the middle of the night they all made a mass exodus through my throat.

Dizzy laughed openly at my idea of leaving. He found no logic in my plan.

“You don’t know these people up here like I do,” he said, already enjoying his second can of delightful miniature wieners. It wasn’t so much the meat that grossed me out, it was whatever was in the sauce that made my stomach roll.

“And I’ll bet ya a hundred bucks it will take you a month to get there…if you ever do,” he added, licking the remaining juice from his fingers. My stomach did a back flip noticing how greasy his hands still were.

“It’s about 400 miles, Dizzy. If I average as little as five miles an hour, that’s 80 hours. Pedal 10 hours a day, I’m home in 8 days.” I could see the doubt in his eyes still, there was something he wasn’t sharing.

“The first guy who sees you on that bike will try and take it away from you,” he replied, wiping his hands on my bedspread. “Eventually, someone will probably kill you for the bike and whatever supplies you take with. And what you gonna do for water? You need a gallon a day, ya know.”

The water didn’t worry me. The news of someone wanting to kill me for the bike was rather disturbing. I pressed him for more information.

“There was this guy, Al Acorn,” he began. “I know, funny name. Anyways, Al lived up on the way to Covington. He had a thing for gals. As far as I knew, he kept it under control…except when he drank. And he drank a lot.”

I didn’t like where this was headed, but I nodded to keep the story moving.

“So some people up there, some backwoods hicks, decided to have a talk with Al. One day he’s around, the next he wasn’t.” His eyes stared at the patterned bedspread as he recalled the incident from some years back. “Rumor is they took him out in the woods and slit his throat open. No more trouble from Al after that.”

My ears began to ring, contemplating rumors and ghost stories recalled by a man who probably hadn’t seen the inside of a school building since 8
th
grade — if that. I wondered how much was true. And I wondered what his ulterior motive was, if any.

“You don’t want to get yourself killed over something as stupid as a bike, Bill.”

I shook my head. “Bob.”

He looked at me with a stupid expression. “Who’s Bob?”

“I am. Bob Reiniger. Me.”

“I thought your name was Bill,” he replied, rising from the bed, pulling his pants up somewhere near his sizable waist.

“Nope, it’s Bob.” I had no idea where he got Bill from.

He shook the mistake away. “Whatever. I just think you’d be better off staying here. We’re friends now, and friends don’t let friends make dumb choices.”

Dumb choice or not, my mind was made up.

Day 26 WOP

I spent the next few days preparing for my trip. I had a few changes of clothes that I washed, as best as I could without soap, by hand. I ate extra meals, making sure I put the maximum amount of protein I could into my body, which meant venison. I even loaded up with extra water; drinking a glassful every time I passed the clear bottle I left on the counter.

The pump worked, eventually, and I had plenty of water. But I still felt the need to boil it in large batches on the two-burner stove in the small kitchen. Though it remained stained with the impediments from the ground, I knew I was killing most of the bacteria that might try to do the same to me.

Lettie gave me a backpack one of her nieces had left behind. I wasn’t crazy about the color, pink, but I needed something to carry supplies. And it was a sturdy, if not rather effeminate, carrier.

One afternoon, Dizzy showed me how to load and fire the handgun we found in the closet. I didn’t want to use it ever, but he convinced me it was the safe bet. Even if I only fired over people’s heads, they’d get the idea rather quick that I was armed and ready to use force.

The morning I decided to leave was a cool one. A thick fog blanketed the area, giving a look of mystique to my surroundings. Aside from a few blue jays calling for one another in the woods, the only sound for miles was the gravel crunching beneath my tires.

Taking one last peek at the cabin, my home for almost a month now, I mounted up and headed down the road. Eight days would lead me to Chicago: home. I wondered about the look of shock and surprise on my wife’s face. Would she have stories like I’d have? Was Chicago suffering like this area; and if so, was she safe? Or was this an isolated incident, caused by some device from the cold war, stored in a remote northern Michigan location?

Only time would tell. Eight days of time.

I was just settling into a good rhythm when the loud pop broke my concentration. At first, I wasn’t sure what it was. Perhaps a rock shot from under my tire and struck something in the woods. Or maybe an animal had stepped on a dead branch nearby alerting me, and all of the woodland critters, of their presence.

The front of the bike started to wobble. Leaning forward, I searched for the problem. Trouble struck then, and it struck hard.