The cabinets have been rifled and all the canned goods taken except those sardines, some split pea soup, a tin of bean sprouts, and some low-fat coconut milk. There’s a locked, smashed liquor cabinet, but whoever looted the place took lightweight things: food and weapons easy to carry or valuable for trade.
Bananas have turned into a grayish sludge on the counter. The onions in the copper hanging basket are sprouting, but not spoiled.
I load a selection of my treasure, heavy on the beverages, into a bucket from under the sink and trudge back to the couch.
I don’t remember the next few days very well.
I dream of our last phone call. You offered to come find me. I told you to sit tight and take care of Casey. I told you I was coming home.
That’s not going to be a lie. I swear it. Lying on the clammy leather in a pool of my own sweat, struggling to gulp water from the jug, I swear it over and over and over again.
I learn why they call it the Fever.
The otter flu disproportionately kills the young—medically speaking—and the strong.
At first, I can stagger to the bathroom to pee. Later, the bucket comes in handy. More rigors. More hallucinations. I know I ought to do something to break the fever, but what, exactly, eludes me. If there were water, I could fill the tub.
That obsesses me, during my conscious half-hours. Through the daze of illness, of muscle aches, of sweat, I think about long, cool baths. I think about swimming, cool water parting before my body. I think about peace.
I think about you and Casey. Whether you’re safe. Whether there’s food and water in San Diego. Whether Casey got sick, or you got sicker, and—this scares me most—what happened to her if you did. I trust you to do everything right for her. But—as I’m proving right now—you can’t plan for everything.
You’ve been sick. You know how it is.
One afternoon I wake up with the green mountain light filtering through the windows overlooking the valley and the sky slopes beyond. My forehead is cool; my skin is dry. My joints ache only with disuse.
I lie on the sweat-stained leather, surrounded by a wasteland of empty pop bottles and water jugs. At some point, I must have made it to the kitchen for more water, because there are two empty and three half-full.
My bucket stinks.
I sit up, and nearly fall over. My waistband and shirt cuffs are loose. The skin on my face and hands feels as if it has shrunken over the bone.
I rest my elbows on my knees, put my head down between them, and try not to laugh because laughing makes the room spin. I had the otter flu and I lived.
Now I just have to walk a thousand miles across two major deserts, two major mountain ranges, and any number of smaller ones . . . and I can go home.
I rest for two weeks, foraging nearby houses for more scraps of food and water. I find corpses in two. You’ve never seen everything, but you can get used to anything.
One house has a generator and a working well, and after I siphon gas from several lawn mowers and chainsaws I do manage to fill up the bath tub. One has a hand-cranked radio, which tells me that the only thing on the air is emergency broadcasts.
At least we still seem to have a government.
Coloradans are an outdoorsy cohort. When I leave, I have appropriated a lightweight tent, some space blankets, a little freeze-dried food, two pairs of twenty-five-dollar socks and a merino wool base layer. A pair of good work gloves. A coat. Some trade goods—more ammo, jerky, candy, bags of freeze-dried fruit from Trader Joe’s.
I also have a large-scale topo atlas of the Western states and a dull-gray burro with a stripe down her spine, because this is Colorado and apparently a lot of people had livestock and left it behind when the world ended.
I don’t know how to ride. But she can carry a lot of supplies. I wonder if Casey will settle for a donkey instead of a pony. I bet she will.
I name her Asset.
She is. She can live on prickly pear and barrel cactus and eats cholla like churros, as long as I scorch the thorns off for her. She’s got a good eye for rattlesnakes.
We get to be old friends on the road, especially after we reach Grand Junction and the desert takes over. There aren’t a hell of a lot of people between Grand Junction and Las Vegas. There were pit stops, ranches, homesteads, last gas for three hundred miles. Now there’s wasteland.
The next nine months are about as dreary as you’re probably imagining. Asset and I don’t honestly have much trouble with other people, though we spend one night under a half-moon sneaking down canyons to avoid some men on horseback with guns—vigilantes or outlaws, I couldn’t tell you. We’re more invested in staying hidden than they are in finding us, but it’s cold and terrifying and I think of you and Casey while we huddle in the mesquite to keep my courage up.
We travel mostly by night in the summer, and we don’t make ten miles every day. We have to find water before we can move on, for me more than Asset, who can chew it out of plants. I’m grateful for my complexion: if I were pale, I’d burn to crisp out here. As it is, even with the hat, I spend some time thinking about skin cancer. Melanin is only good for so much.
The days are hot and the nights are cold and the landscape is breathtaking, and I’m too old for sleeping on rocks.
When we come through the Virgin River Gorge, we meet up with a caravan, and I pay them in bullets to let us travel with them as far as Las Vegas. The Virgin River itself is a blessing; all the water you want, all the time. It’s probably full of perchlorate.
From Vegas, the caravan master tells me, there’s regular convoys to Los Angeles. And in L.A., I can catch a train home.
The trains are still running on the coasts, in the population centers. There’s other news, too, but trains hearten me more than the woman who tells me that CDC teams are working across the country, or the guy who came all the way from Galveston who says that the ports are re-opening.
If there are trains, then there’s infrastructure. And if there’s infrastructure, then you and Casey probably have food and water.
We’re going to be all right.
Asset rides in a cattle car from L.A. to San Diego, and her fare costs more than mine. I pay it gladly; I won’t need the ammunition where I’m going. When I get off the train in my hometown, I can’t believe how quiet it is. The smell of the sea, the coolness of the air, the palm and coral trees swaying beside the streets.
No cars. No airplanes. Just pedestrians and a few carriage horses repurposed for dray.
I walk through the streets slowly, six miles home. From the bowl of the city up into the hills, where our house is. It takes two hours, and the idea of walking for only two hours and then stopping leaves me breathless with gratitude.
Our house was never fancy, never much by Southern Californian standards. Pricey enough—living in San Diego is anything but cheap—and not one of those modern stucco things with the red tile roofs that are all garage from the street.
It’s just a simple yellow ranch, overgrown with bougainvillea and bird of paradise. But it’s on top of a hill, and you can see clear to the next hill. There was a swimming pool in the back yard: From the front, I can see that you’ve tarped it, and I bet you’re using it as gray water. You were always provident.
I hitch Asset up to the queen palm by the front door, ease the cinches on her pack saddle, and put my key in the lock. I open the door.
You’re sitting on the sofa with a woman I don’t know, your arms draped over each other along the sofa back. Casey is curled up between you, leaning on the woman, her soft hair frizzed around her face. She’s holding a copy of The Black Stallion and the Girl, one of her favorite books. I can tell she’s been reading out loud to you, and I’m grateful that you’re keeping up with her education, even under the circumstances.