The end of the world was supposed to be gradual. There was supposed to be warning. A long, slow slide. What we got was punctuated equilibrium: a stately wobbling, then a sudden tipping point.
There was plenty of warning, I suppose. We just weren’t paying attention.
They give me a mask and bring me in to see the patients, who look even worse than you’d expect. Whether their natural skin tone is light or dark, they all have that grayish cast. The conscious ones move and stretch restlessly, trying to ease aching limbs. The semiconscious ones toss—if they have the energy. Some moan or whimper. Some lie still, breathing raggedly, their skin slick with sweat. Some shake in ragged agues.
I have no idea what to do to help any of them. But I pay my tunnel passage the only way I can—boiling willow bark in water and dripping the bitter decoction down swollen throats.
Denver’s been turning people out when they get sick. I knew that. I didn’t know where they were going.
Here, apparently. The Eisenhower Tunnel. Softball Bat, Empty Hands, and Gun were among the first to find their way here.
They’ve survived the Fever. The otter flu, as I prefer to call it. Now they’re trying to help others.
So this isn’t what my racing heart told me to fear at all.
It’s something much more frightening than that.
Wonder of wonders, the aspirin helps. Two days later, as I’m packing to leave, Empty Hands—turns out his name is Ryan—comes up to me and says, “If you want to stay, you’d be welcome.”
I glance back into the depths of the underground kingdom. “I have a partner and kid in San Diego.”
Ryan licks his lips. “You’re going to cross the Great Basin and the Mojave on foot?”
I shrug. I shoulder my pack. I sigh and look back at the tunnel. I could hole up here, wait for cell service or landlines to come back up. It’s bound to happen eventually. The infrastructure’s still there: it’s just a matter of running it.
Hell, eventually there might even be buses or something.
“I said I’d come home.”
He doesn’t say anything else, but I feel Ryan watching me as I settle into my boots with each stride west along 70.
At least it’s stopped snowing. And the snowing stays stopped for two whole days, which is what I budgeted to get to Vail. It’s only about thirty-nine miles over roads, and I’m fit.
But I’m not moving as fast as I’d like, and the road—well, it isn’t flat, exactly. And it sure isn’t easy going, though I’m grateful again and again and again that you can’t get gasoline for love or money, and the highways are devoid of anything but pedestrians and military vehicles these days.
Well, it’s what they were built for. Civilian uses are—were—well, not just a bonus. Because the economic impact of the interstate system was huge. But they were secondary to military needs. Just like Rome.
Why am I thinking about this? Some combination of the Eisenhower tunnel (get it?), military convoys, and hypoxia. Low blood sugar, too, as I’m trying to go easy on my food supplies.
End of the world as we know it or not, it’s beautiful up here. The mountains hump like spruce-scaled snakes on either side of me, generally rising on the right and dropping into a valley on the left, though that varies. I can see the train tracks on the abandoned right-of-way, and the sky above bright and fragile as a sheet of cobalt glass. I’m getting used to walking. I’m even getting used to the inclines, though my quads and hamstrings and glutes and calves have words with me when I lie down at night.
Vail Pass is only 10,000 feet and change. Piece of cake, right?
Passing Copper Mountain on the second day, I pick up the bike trail. At least it’s a nicer walk than the interstate. As night is falling, I hike up the hillside over the highway to find an out-of-the-way place to lay my sleeping bag.
On the third day, I wake up in my sleeping bag shuddering with cold and body aches, and I know I’m not going to make it to Vail today, either. I’m close enough that there are scattered houses, and a road or two off the south side of 70 leading down into some settled country. Beyond, the ski slopes still gleam with manufactured snow, though it’s patchy and unrepaired. I wonder how long ago they stopped making it.
I wonder how many of these houses are inhabited, and how many belonged to movie stars and Silicon Valley types who used them for a month or two out of the year.
I wonder if anybody will take in a footsore wanderer who just woke up with the Fever.
Somehow, I bundle up my sleeping bag, although it’s not what you’d call a tidy roll. I can’t manage to get my pack up on my shoulders, so I half-drag it across the deserted highway, hop the K-rails, and stumble down a brushy hillside to a secondary road. There’s a sort of retaining slope made of round boulders shoved into the earth. I stagger-slide-tumble down it and roll onto the shoulder of the street.
There’s a house across the road. If I walk up to it and it’s inhabited, whoever lives there might just shoot me as a public health hazard. If it’s not inhabited, I don’t know how I might get in.
I could just lie here and die on the side of the road. The neighbors, if there are neighbors, might come put me out of my misery if I get lucky.
The house is probably empty. I can’t imagine a lot of people stayed in Vail when the food trucks stopped running. The ones who did probably have generators and hunting rifles, though. But when I haul myself to my hands and knees, collect my pack, and push myself upright on it, nobody shoots at me. That I notice. And still nobody shoots at me—that I notice—as I drag the pack and the now-torn sleeping bag across the road and up onto the wraparound porch of the wood-timbered house. I have to pause halfway up the four steps to rest, so they’d have plenty of time, too.
I stagger to the back, thinking maybe I can pry a window open with my pocket knife. But when I get there I discover the sliding door has been wrenched out of its tracks, then leaned back up against the house next to a top-of-the-line propane grill. I push it aside—this takes minutes of fumbling—squeeze through the gap, and collapse, along with my sleeping bag, onto the musty-smelling couch of a big room with an empty fireplace and a leather-upholstered conversation pit. I curl up, shuddering, aching, chest heaving, so cold my body won’t stop shaking. So cold my nipples ache and my teeth chatter.
I only stay like that for maybe half an hour, maybe only twenty minutes, but it feels like a year. When the ague eases—it’s like something out of Little House on the Prairie—I manage to stagger to the kitchen. I locate the bathroom—no water, but there’s a half-full bottle of NyQuil and some Excedrin in the medicine cabinet. A gun safe in the hallway has been pried open with something like a wrecking bar.
The weapons are gone. But whoever did it spilled a box of ammunition in their haste. I squat to pick up the bullets. Heavy—and I don’t have a gun—but each one is worth significantly more than its weight in calories. With those swaying in the pockets of my cargo pants, I follow the smell of rotting fruit to the kitchen and steel myself to open the fridge. It reeks, but there are two gallon jugs of water in there, and one is completely full. The cabinet beside it yields a half dozen more gallons, and a sealed bottle of cranberry juice, and two bottles of Mountain Dew. I score some protein powder, some weevily crackers, an unopened package of Oreos, an unopened box of granola bars, two tins of sardines, and a mason jar full of lentils that lurks behind an infested bag of flour. A small treasure trove of ramen packets lies scattered across the pantry floor. I almost weep with gratitude.