Jimmy always imagined he could provide for his family, if absolutely necessary, by heading into the hills. When he bought his rifle at the sporting goods store twenty years ago, that had been part of his economic justification: the rifle was the back-up plan in case “times got tough.”
Here he was, times were definitely tough, and there wasn’t a bit of the romantic, man-against-nature struggle he had dreamed of when he bought the rifle. Jimmy knew failure was all but inevitable, the deck supremely stacked against him. Not only was he failing to bring home meat, but he was failing to perform as a man and a father.
Contemplating his failure as he stumbled down the rocky hillside, Jimmy admitted that he had been lulled to sleep by fantasies: the fantasy that his successful career made him a man. The fantasy that giving in to his wife made life easier. The fantasy that he could live in the starch-and-plastic world of civilization, touching the wilds every so often, and Mother Earth would welcome him in his hour of need.
His hopelessness splashed over onto his faith. Even with his failures to follow the old commandment of food storage, how could God allow his family to suffer, even risk starvation, given his lifelong faithfulness? Had he not done almost everything he was commanded to do? He had served an honorable mission. He had married in the temple. He had served faithfully in the ward and always paid his tithe. How could this be the outcome of his hard work?
Jimmy’s thoughts were wrapped about him so tightly that he didn’t worry about what his neighbors might see as he crossed the street, dejected and confused. Dusk had come while he had wrestled with his soul.
He caught the smallest motion out of the corner of his eye and turned. Lo and behold, there stood a mule deer doe, eating his neighbor’s boxwood hedge. All the day’s frustration and self-doubt drew down to this single moment in time.
Without thinking, Jimmy threw his rifle to his shoulder and fired. The unexpected recoil jerked the scope up and away from the animal and, when Jimmy returned to look at where the deer had stood, it was gone. The shot rang up and down the street. A couple at a time, the neighbors peeked out their doors, then stepped out onto their lawns.
Jimmy had no idea what to do, so he went with his first instinct; he checked his kill. Sure enough, the doe lay dead in Brother Thompson’s bushes, blood spattered on his air conditioning unit and onto the stucco siding of his house.
Jimmy grabbed the back legs of the doe and dragged her toward his garage, leaving an accusing red streak behind the carcass. The neighbors stood awestruck, as though he was a sideshow freak, or maybe a hero.
Half-a-dozen worries hit Jimmy all at once: had he checked his back-stop before firing? What would Brother Thompson say about Jimmy killing a deer in his yard? What would the neighbors say to the bishop about the poached deer?
But the worries came through muted, diminished as he looked down and smelled the coppery blood bubbling out of the doe’s mouth.
He had killed a deer and he would feed his family, at least tonight. What the neighbors thought and what his bishop might think? Those worries suddenly seemed less significant in the shadow of death and providence. As he pulled the doe across the street, Jimmy straightened his back and slowed his rush.
Like manna in the desert, God had provided.
Road 216
Outside Albin, Wyoming
According to Chad, he was badass at everything.
In less arrogant moments, he would admit that he almost washed out of the SEALs because he sucked at land navigation.
In the Teams, new SEALs are put through a map-and-compass challenge where they’re given twenty-five waypoints and challenged to cover twenty miles in two days in a single-man overland scramble.
There were two ways to do the challenge: using brains or using brawn. Guys with brains marked the waypoints on their map, read the terrain and plotted the easiest route. Guys with brawn plotted a direct path from one point to another, then bulldozed their way through whatever terrain stood in their way.
While Chad undoubtedly scored in the genius range on IQ tests, he had chosen the “bulldozer path” because he knew he would otherwise fail the land navigation. Badass or not, he had to admit he couldn’t find his butt with both hands when it came to land nav. He was the guy constantly getting lost. He was the kind of person who could live in the same place for a year and still take the long way home every time. A map and compass might as well have been a duck and blowtorch to him.
In the end, he’d made it through the SEAL navigation course with just twenty minutes to spare—out of forty-eight hours. He almost dropped from hypothermia in the process.
Chad sometimes wondered if God gave everyone talents from a fixed budget—everyone with the same amount of talent, just in a different distribution. Some guys raged on the guitar, but they couldn’t do a single pull-up. Other guys benched three hundred, but they had zero game with the ladies. A Navy SEAL like Chad was supposedly “badass at everything,” except he couldn’t navigate his way out of a paper bag. And he couldn’t win for losing when it came to women.
Chad previously believed a woman couldn’t stay angry for more than a couple of hours. He’d been with Audrey for two days, and she’d been furious for forty-eight hours straight—even sleeping furiously. Chad looked over at his ex in the passenger seat, eyes closed, her head against a pillow against the window, and her face still appeared pissed off.
Tonight would be their first night of traveling “blacked out.” Chad wasn’t looking forward to the migraine that would come from driving with his NVGs.
Everything needed several names and at least two acronyms in the military. Apparently, there were half-a-dozen officers working ’round the clock in the Office of Redundancy Office coming up with better, more technical names for everything. His NVGs, or NODs, were also known as PVS-7s. Three acronyms for the same damned piece of kit.
Chad eventually figured out that the high-tech acronyms were just there to fuck with people who weren’t in “The Mil.” On a philosophical level, he was cool with that.
Tonight, there had been good news and bad news when it came to crossing the North Platte River. The bad news was that he couldn’t find a way to cross that wasn’t also roadblocked or a likely ambush. He had checked more than a dozen possible crossings.
The good news was that he might not have to cross the river at all. The closer he got to Wyoming, the more the North Platte River veered north, taking him away from the I-80 Interstate. He had been trying to parallel the I-80, staying alongside it but coming no closer than ten miles. Big roads, he figured, violated his First Rule of Post-Apocalypse Traveclass="underline" no interaction with human beings.
The other good news was that Nebraska and eastern Wyoming had more dirt roads than people. The endless flats were interrupted only by the countless dirt roads, which made it ideal for overland travel during Zombie times.
In the back of Chad’s mind, he worried that all those dirt roads would eventually funnel down to just a couple of roads as Wyoming became more mountainous and less agricultural. For now, he had dozens of east-west dirt roads to choose from, and no town could barricade more than a couple of them.
First on the agenda tonight would be gasoline. While he wasn’t out of fuel, he was the kind of guy who pulled over immediately when the “low gas” light came on. He didn’t like to run low on fuel. It was the single area in life where Chad was meticulous.
As he cruised steadily west, he reacquainted himself with his NVGs and picked up speed. At the same time, he searched for a farmhouse to rob.