ONE
I was oddly suited for the end of the world.
Or, I should say, I was oddly suited for this end of the world. The one where everything turned to ice and snow dumped from the sky all year round.
Before it happened, before the snow started to fall and ice began to creep over every last thing in a pitiless, ceaseless tide, I don’t remember feeling like anyone special. If anything, I had the distinct impression that I was painfully average.
I was a shift leader at a grocery store. I played video games most nights with some of my friends, but some weekends I went camping and hunting. It was something I’d done with my father and uncle growing up, and I’d discovered that I was actually half-decent at it. Sometimes I’d go out camping by myself, but mostly I went with my friends and whatever girls they roped into going to feel like a badass and get away from the city for a few days.
Okay, yeah, and to get pussy. I’m not going to lie.
But as the snow began to fall and the weather started getting freakier and freakier and shit started getting more concerning, like on a global scale, I began to learn that I did have something a bit more unique to me.
I wasn’t panicking.
I’d like to believe that it’s because I’m a born hardass and flourish under pressure, but that would be a lie. Or at least twisting the truth. I mean, I was fucking scared, yeah. But I think, as I watched the layers of civilization start to peel back as it became more obvious that the world was getting colder and it wasn’t going to stop anytime soon, I knew that if worst came to worst, I could survive. I mean, provided it didn’t get down to a new average of like negative one hundred.
Then we’d all be fucked.
But it didn’t, and it hasn’t.
The new normal seems to be, basically, pretty damned cold. Below freezing. Dangerous definitely, but not if you know what you’re doing. And you’re careful to keep clear of any hostile humans or wildlife, and you don’t let yourself get caught in a whiteout. And you don’t get too sick. Or run out of food. Or have a serious medical condition.
Okay, so, yeah, it was kind of hard to stay alive.
I guess that was my point, I’m oddly suited for this frozen apocalypse.
I still don’t know whether to feel good or bad about that.
~
I had been making my way along the same road for almost six days when I finally caught sight of a building up ahead.
It felt a little like an omen, a good one. Although I didn’t believe in anything superstitious beyond random chance and luck, I had to admit, this shitty new world was making me kind of lean into that. It had been a really lousy week. I’d been run out of a little village built around some truck stop and a few outbuildings around it. I’d liked it there, but some jackass had been fucking with me since I’d shown up and I finally had had enough.
When he came up to me to talk trash while I just trying to have a goddamned drink after a long day of hunting game and chopping wood, I warned him. Flat out. But he just took that as an invitation to finally throw a punch my way. I don’t know what the fuck possessed him, but he was probably wasted.
We tangled, then his buddies jumped in, and after I knocked two of them unconscious, it became clear that they were out for blood.
One of them damn near blew my head off.
It was pure luck I’d been too tired to drop my pack off in the room I’d been renting. I snatched it up and booked it when it became clear that the people watching weren’t going to get involved and help me, and I’d already taken a beating at that point.
So, with a black eye, a split lip, and more bruises than I’d care to admit to, I ran into the woods and didn’t stop until I found a place to crash for the night. It was some old shit shack that at least had a bed and a really simple jury-rigged wood-burning stove, and there was a storm coming on. I’d counted on the storm to keep my ass covered and stop them from coming after me, but starting any kind of a fire was a hazard because you can see smoke from miles off. Without the fire, I’d die, though, so it was kind of no contest there.
But they’d never shown up. After sleep, I’d left and walked until finding this stupid road that led through, apparently, fucking nowhere.
I’m pretty sure that I was somewhere in the Midwest now, but I had no idea where. Possibly Missouri, but maybe I’d wandered as far as Kansas.
That would sure explain the total lack of fucking anything.
On top of a lack of finding anything except for the occasionally long-abandoned vehicle or empty shed for the past six days, there’d been hardly any wildlife, and very little of the grow-anywhere fruits and vegetables they’d started sprinkling around everywhere when it became obvious that the snow was here to stay.
I was running very low on supplies.
Of course, I might be fucked anyway. That building could be totally empty. If it was...I wasn’t sure what I was going to do. Keep going, I guess.
I listened to a sound that had become almost meditative over the past year or so, ever since I’d finally struck out on my own and said fuck it to what was now laughingly referred to as ‘city life’: my boots crunching in the snow.
The cold air burned in my lungs, as it always did now, and my heavy black boots crunched through the recently fallen snow as I made my way along a road that I did not know the name of, between vast fields of ice and snow. I was glad to see that there were trees now, in the distance. Forests, as skeletal and bare as they were nowadays, still heralded wildlife. Rabbits and wolves and deer and other things still gathered there. A threadbare facsimile of the natural order still played out with a sort of manic desperation among the frigid wastelands of Earth. And I was there to take my own place in it, ready with a rifle, a pistol, or sometimes a bow and arrow.
I’d gotten quite proficient with all three by this point.
There was maybe a day’s worth of food left in my pack. Just some rabbit meat I had in a plastic container and an old candy bar. At least water wasn’t a problem. There was always more damned snow to melt, provided you had the proper equipment, which I did. I had to admit, I was still pissed about the stuff I’d left behind in my room. My rifle had been there, so that was gone. And the ammo. Several paperbacks. A lot of clothes. Some food. This was why I carried as much as I could around with me all the time, you never knew when you might need to just up and go.
As I made my way down the road, keeping an eye out for, well, anything, I tried to get a feel for what I was looking at. But as I finally got close enough to get even a half-decent look at it, I could tell by the things sticking out of the ground in the middle of the parking lot that I was looking at a little, middle-of-nowhere gas station. That was good. Besides the fact that this place seemed relatively untraveled, even now, gas stations tended to have a lot of shit. Of course, that didn’t necessarily mean anything.
You were always playing the odds.
And despite what some people believed, you aren’t ever due for a lucky break, even if you’d been getting your ass whupped for weeks.
There was nothing anywhere saying you couldn’t keep on getting the ass-whuppings piled on for weeks to come.
Anything could be in there. Bare shelves and empty cupboards, a camp of cannibal assholes looking for some fresh human jerky, fuck even a damned bear could’ve made the place its home. The only way to find out was to walk in there and see what was what. As I planned to do exactly that, the surreality of my situation struck me, as it sometimes did. This far into the apocalypse, it happened with less frequency, but it could still creep up on you.
I think the thought that came to mind the most was that, in a twisted sort of way, I had gotten my wish. My wish being, when I was younger, I would look around at all the buildings in my city. The houses, the stores, the restaurants, the apartment complexes, the warehouses, everything. I’d look at each building and want to go inside and look around. I wasn’t interested in breaking and entering, or stealing, or even people’s secrets.
No, I just wanted to explore.
There was a...not exactly a thrill, maybe closer to a satisfaction, or even just a simple gratification, or a joy, in exploration. Now, with some exceptions, obviously, if I saw a place, typically, I could just go inside and poke around. If anything, it was practically mandatory to my survival at this point to take the time to thoroughly investigate every structure I came across. After six days of damn near nothing, I had exploration blue balls.
I also had real blue balls because I hadn’t managed to get lucky once in that town, although one of the women who worked at the bar was eyeing me, I didn’t get a chance to make a move. That night I was actually going to hit on her and invite her back to my place. And before that, I hadn’t gotten in good with any woman for another two weeks.
Fuck, when was the last time I’d been laid?
Over three weeks now. Yeah, it had been with a woman who was part of a little caravan I’d run into. They had made camp at some big house in the middle of nowhere and the only serious hunter among them had apparently frozen to death a week ago. So I traded my wares: hunted and killed a deer and two rabbits, even skinned and prepared them for the group. All they had to do was give me a fair cut of the meat and, to sweeten the deal, one of them had offered to fuck me. She was a hot blonde with a trim body, and I couldn’t say no that.
It had been sweet, but quick.
I’d wanted more, and I was even willing to work for it, but apparently she was only comfortable with doing it as a quick one-off thing because the place they were heading for had her husband waiting for her.
So...yeah.
Still felt kind of bad about that one.
Again, I don’t believe in shit like karma, but...maybe I’d earned what happened in that town. I sure as shit wouldn’t want that happening with my wife. Not that I’d ever had what you might call a serious life partner.
The gas station was close now, and as I made a final approach to it, I saw that there were two cars in the lot. One of them was a shitty old green car with busted windows and no wheels. The other, however, looked to be a pretty sturdily built jeep of some kind. Holy shit, if I could find a fucking car, like a real car…
It’d invite new challenges in my life, but it would eliminate certain others.
I came to stand in front of the gas station, hand settling on the pistol on my hip. Could be anything in there. I looked through the plate glass windows, one of which was boarded over halfway, and didn’t see much of anything in terms of life. That didn’t mean much. People were good at hiding. Intact windows always surprised me. It seemed like humans got so much satisfaction out of shattering glass. I don’t know why, but I knew it was true. I’d done it often enough myself in the beginning, just pick up a brick or something solid and just fucking hurl it through a window. Listening to that shattering sound was so oddly gratifying.
I’d stopped after it occurred to me, I mean really occurred to me, that I could be killing people, or at least making it way harder for them. What if someone came upon that building I’d smashed the windows out of during a blizzard in the middle of the night, looking for shelter, and froze because all the windows were smashed out? I don’t know, but I stopped being destructive at some point. I think it occurred to me that it might lead me towards worse, more violent tendencies. So far, it seemed to have worked.
Not that I couldn’t be violent if necessary.
I walked slowly towards the gas station. It was a clear day out, the sun wasn’t too bright, so I could see through the windows. Careful to keep an eye open for any movement of any kind, I checked out the cars first. The torn-up green one was clear, no one ducking down, hidden in the back. The jeep was in surprisingly good condition. It was obviously very weather-worn, but the damage I saw to it seemed pretty superficial. It made me wonder what was truly wrong with it. While it was possible an intact jeep could have been abandoned here for a year or longer, it didn’t seem likely. If it worked, or was easily fixable, it would be somewhere else by now.
Though it was obvious now that it was leaning to one side, and sure enough I saw a slashed tire on the left front end. Not too hard to fix, provided I could find the proper gear. I looked in through the windows, but they were too frosted over, so I tried the handle. The driver’s side rear door stuck a little, but it wasn’t locked. I opened it up and looked in the middle seat. Some clothes tossed onto the back, but nothing else. It took a quick peek in the back, the trunk space that was easily accessible from the middle seat, and saw some suitcases. The front seat was empty. I would have to look for keys and pray for luck later.
Time to check the gas station.
I pulled my pistol out as I approached the door. Carefully, I pushed it open. I expected that irritating ding! that all gas stations seemed to have, but there was nothing. Just the distant cracking of ice and the occasional whisper of the wind. It was dead silent in the store. I stood in the doorway, waiting, pistol in hand.
It was like stepping into a tomb.
Half the building was in my view right then. A long, double-sided shelf divided the main area, left-to-right, and it had obviously been cleared out. More shelves to the right, and some cold-cases to the left. Also pretty cleared out. I could do a more thorough investigation later. For now, I just wanted to know if I was alone. I took a step in, closing the door most of the way behind me. The place was decently warm, if only because the sun had heated it up above freezing today. I moved carefully around the large shelf and was happy to see that not only was there no one hiding behind it, but there were a few food items gathering dust.
I moved back to the counter and slipped behind it. There was enough light to see beneath the counter, thanks to a pair of little skylights in the ceiling. No one under there, either. I began to head for the opposite end of the counter, towards the door that would let me behind the coolers, but as I did, I checked down a little hallway I found that led to the second half of the building, no doubt where an office or bathroom would be.
I froze. There were bootprints tracking snow in from the door at the back. They tracked a little ways down the hall, and in through another door to my left. It was closed. I stood there, considering it. Okay, so, I wasn’t alone. Those were recent tracks. Someone was almost certainly still in here. How to proceed…
I walked slowly down the hallway to the door, not standing in front of it, and tried the knob. It wasn’t locked, so I twisted and pushed it open. It swung open slowly, began to come back, and then stopped.
Nothing happened.
I decided to try a reasoned approach. “I know someone’s in there,” I said, keeping my voice neutral. “I’d rather not have any kind of fight right now, so I think you should come out to me so we can talk.”
I waited. Nothing, though now I could definitely hear someone breathing.
I sighed, getting frustrated. I had a lot of patience, but it had been a tough week. “Look, can you just come out here? I’m not looking to hurt you. If I have to go in there to try and find you, and you step out at the wrong moment or surprise me another way, you’re liable to get shot, because I do have a gun. Like, we’ve all seen this movie. So...can we just talk? I’m not looking for problems.”
I waited, and just when I had decided to walk in anyway, because I couldn’t just leave this situation alone, I heard a timid: “Okay.”
A woman. She sounded scared, and cold. I didn’t blame her. All of us were nowadays. She cleared her throat. “I’m coming out.”
“Okay,” I said, retreating a few steps to give her some space. I heard hesitant, slow footsteps and kept my pistol out, but pointed at the floor. I waited. Finally, her shadow fell across the floor and she pulled the door open, then stepped out into the hallway.
She looked...lost.
She also looked very attractive. She was average height and weight, her skin pale, her brown hair shoulder-length. She looked at me with anxious green eyes. She was wearing a heavy brown coat, jeans, and boots. I didn’t see the straps of a backpack on her, which was uncommon. Practically everyone had a backpack now.
Her eyes dipped to my gun and she tensed.
“What’s your name?” I asked.
“Mary,” she replied, her voice tight. “Mary Walsh...what are you going to do to me?”
“Nothing,” I said, and holstered my gun slowly.
The movies are hit-or-miss about a lot of shit, but they were right about how dangerous a post-apocalyptic environment could be thanks to your fellow human. I don’t think that everyone, or even most people, are monsters. That wasn’t the reality. No, the reality was that it was shockingly easy to become a monster, under the right circumstances. I think I even remember seeing some new school of thought before this all went down that anger was a form of temporary insanity. You know, if that was true, it would explain a lot.
But I knew that Mary had an extra layer of anxiety about running into someone like me out here in the middle of nowhere. I was obviously bigger and stronger than her, and I probably looked intimidating. A lot of people told me that. Like I said, oddly suited for this new world. Unless she had a knife or a gun on her, in her mind, there was probably not a whole lot she could do if I assaulted her and tried to force her to do things she didn’t want to do. Of course, I had zero intention of doing that, but too many guys would if they knew or even thought they could get away with it. I continued trying the reasoned approach.
“My name is Chris Weston. I’m alone. Are you alone?” I asked.
She hesitated, then sighed softly, her breath puffing on the air. “Yeah. I’m all alone.”
I considered it. She could be lying. This could be a trap. Some pretty brunette, scared and all alone, pretending to be terrified and vulnerable while her boyfriend or whoever crept up on you from the back to smash your skull open or pop a round into your brain and steal your stuff. But I had gotten good at sniffing those out, and this had all the markers of a genuine situation.
“What are you doing here?” I asked.
“I’m lost,” she murmured after a moment. I waited. She sighed again and looked down. I couldn’t quite tell if she was ashamed or embarrassed. “I was with a group. We were traveling. I thought I saw something in the woods we were traveling through and fucking stupidly went off on my own. I thought it was a rifle leaned up against a tree, which,” she said, looking back up at me almost defiantly, “would be an amazing find.”
She looked back down again and hugged herself, rubbing her arms. “Wolves showed up. I panicked, ran. The leader of the group came back to get me. The wolves got him instead. Killed him. The others drove off the wolves, but they were really pissed. They didn’t like me too much anyway. They told me to leave or they’d kill me. So I left. That was two days ago. I wandered until I got here. As I was coming in the back, I saw you heading up the road and...panicked. I ran in here and hid. Then you came in,” she murmured.
I thought about it. How had I missed her? She should have been fairly obvious...then again, I had the impression that the land behind the gas station sloped off, so that might have done it. I kept studying her.
“So where does that leave us?” I asked finally.
She sighed. “I don’t suppose you’d be willing to help me?”
“It depends on what you mean by help, I guess. That’s a pretty general word.”
“I guess it is,” she admitted, studying me. Something changed in her expression as she looked into my eyes. A kind of shift between anxious to...devious? No, coy, maybe. It looked good on her. Calculating, maybe, and a little smirk, like she was examining the odds and liked them. “Maybe we could strike a deal.”
“What kind of a deal?” I asked.
Oh fuck I hope this was going where I wanted it to go.
I would love to have sex with this woman.
“You take care of me,” she said, crossing her arms and standing up a little straighter, “get me food, keep me warm and safe, and ultimately get me to civilization. Some form of it. A village, anything. In return, for as long as we’re traveling together, I will be your...mistress.”
“Mistress, huh?” I replied, unable to keep from smirking just a little.
“Yeah. I’ll fuck and suck you as much as you want. That will be my end of the deal. Any time, night or day, you want sex, you want your dick sucked, I’ll do it, no complaint.” She hesitated. “Okay, I’ll probably complain, but I will do it...what do you say?”
“Show me your tits,” I replied.
She laughed. “Fine,” she said as she unzipped her coat, “but just for a few seconds. It’s fucking cold in here.”
“Fair’s fair.”
She opened her coat, then pulled up a sweater and a tanktop beneath that. Then she pulled up the sports bra she was wearing and oh man…
The thrill of lust that slammed into me and rolled through my body, giving me an erection immediately, was intense. She had a goddamned sexy rack. Nice, round, pale c-cups with excellent pink nipples.
“You got yourself a deal,” I replied.
She laughed and began pulling everything back down. “Good. Now, if you don’t mind, can you make it warm in here? I’m fucking freezing. Also, I’m starving.”
“I’ll get right on it. But as soon as I’m done, I’m wrecking that pussy,” I replied.
She gave me a coy smile. “I’m looking forward to it.”
TWO
Everyone has a weakness.
Mine is women.
I’m sure a lot of guys say that, and have that said about them, and I’m certain it’s true a lot of the time. A lot of guys get fucking stupid for women.
In that regard, I had been at least decently lucky. Although I didn’t think I was much to look at, I had managed to adopt a minor obsession with lifting weights and running cardio in high school. Already being a good six foot two, I managed to get a pretty good physique by the time I graduated. I always thought that my disposition never really matched my body. I was an awkward silent type in the body of a jock.
Everyone thinks I’m a douche-bro just by looking at me.
The upside of that is that it’s a lot easier to convince women to spend time with you. I didn’t actually fully realize this until maybe two years before the apocalypse began. The upshot of this is that waymore of the women I ran into were willing to have sex. Either to trade, or just for fun. Or desperation. There certainly was something about looking down the barrel of the end of the world that made you want to just kind of fuck all the time, if only because you know it was way likelier that you’d die tomorrow.
But when I say weakness, I really mean that.
Before, I indulged in shit fast food and drinking occasionally. Sometimes I smoke weed, but not often. I never got into any of the harder stuff, it just struck me as too dangerous. I’d seen people with drug addiction and that shit fucking terrified me. Besides the obvious physical side effects of prolonged drug use, I was uncomfortable with the notion of ever becoming heavily reliant on anything. Another bonus: I valued independence in its many forms. I think, in the back of most people’s heads, they like to imagine that they could just pick up and go live in the wilderness if the situation demanded it. Most of us are delusional in this regard, and I’m not saying it was easy for me, but I think I was better positioned to do it when reality forced my hand.
But once it became obvious that I might actually have to fight, literally and in every sense of the word, for my basic survival, I cut everything out.
I stopped drinking, stopped smoking weed, stopped eating crap.
I knew how to eat healthy by then, and got right to work on learning how to be more self-sustaining, making whatever fruits, vegetables, and meats I could find last longer.
But sex…
My desire for it had only grown since the snow began to fall. Over the past two years, I’ve found myself doing some kind of stupid shit for sex.
I wasn’t crazy about it. Like, I wouldn’t kill someone just for the opportunity to fuck some hot chick. I wasn’t going to rob a place in exchange for pussy. But risk my life to keep someone else safe or get someone somewhere that would be a huge pain in the ass and make it that much harder to survive? I mean, I like to think I’m a decent person, I help people as often as not, but...yeah, I have to admit, if there’s a hot chick involved and she promises sex, I’m going to do it.
With my head already beginning to swell with visions of what Mary looked like naked, and how awesome her tits looked with her standing there flashing me, I prepared to finish the process of searching the gas station. Just to be safe. Even stupefied by the promise of good sex, I wasn’t about to abandon the usual procedures I had.
“What first?” Mary asked as she hung around in the hallway.
“First, I need to finish checking this place out,” I replied. I looked into the room she’d been hiding in and found a little bathroom. Just a toilet and sink and trashcan, nothing else. Where the fuck had she even been hiding? There was nowhere to hide. I left it and checked the door at the back. Here was an office that seemed to have doubled as a storage room. The shelves were mostly bare, the desk had an old PC on it with a boxy monitor. Holy fucking shit, I didn’t even know they had those anymore. It was the 2030s for fuck’s sake, how old was this place? The back door Mary had come in through was ajar.
I walked over to it, opened it, took a look around. Yeah, the ground did kind of slope off at a steep angle there. I guess she would have gotten up to the top and seen me, I’d be pretty obvious, maybe when I was looking down at my feet or studying the scenery in another direction for a few seconds, and then slipped in. The land spread out away from the gas station for a few miles before eventually hitting a broad forest. I had hoped to see something useful in all that wilderness, but all I saw was a simple shack way out, maybe half a mile off, between where I was now and the snow-capped forest.
Closing and then locking the door, I went back and checked out the last room. Just a break area, though it looked like whoever had run the place had turned it into their own little living space. I guess, when you lived this far out, maybe sometimes it was easier to just spend the night. Or maybe even it was a retreat from a life that sucked. I had come across too many people who would literally rather sleep at their jobs than go home to their spouse or family. So, as a result, we now had access to a little twin bed that might just be big enough for my giant ass and her. It would be a tight fit but, well, that was a good thing right now.
“Oh, nice,” Mary said as she poked her head in.
“Yep,” I replied, looking around. Besides the bed, there was a simple trio of cabinets in one corner which supported a sink and a microwave, neither of which would provide much use, I was sure. Everywhere had frozen pipes or non-functional utilities, and it was hard as hell to find power fucking anywhere now. Generators were rare and half the time they were broken. There was a table and a pair of old metal chairs with cracked seating that might hold up if you sat in them. There were just two windows, both of them high up and small and frosted over. The most important thing in the entire building, however, was a little metal contraption squatting in the far corner.
“Oh thank you,” I muttered as I walked over to the wood-burning stove and checked it over.
“That’s good, at least,” Mary murmured, lingering in the doorway.
“I’ve got a job for you,” I said as I looked over the stove.
“Another one?”
I chuckled. “Yeah. Not that fucking me isn’t appreciated, but I would like some help. Don’t worry, I won’t ask you to do anything dangerous.”
“Fair enough,” she replied. “What is it?”
“Go around the store and start gathering anything useful you can find. Food, supplies, whatever you manage to find. Bring it here and set it on the counter.”
“Okay, I can do that.”
She set off to her task. While she did that, I concluded that the stove was in working condition and tossed what few bits of wood were left in there. I’d have to find some more, make a little stockpile. I wasn’t sure how long I planned to be here, but if I could somehow get that vehicle working, I’d take as long as I needed.
I got a fire going, then went to work.
~
The daylight drained from the gray overcast skies as we worked.
I took a walk outside, moving around the perimeter of the building, checking for any useful supplies that might’ve been dropped by past visitors, signs of dangerous wildlife, or landmarks in the distance. There was still that shed off a ways behind the gas station. Out front, the two vehicles still waited, and off in the other direction, nestled up against a cluster of trees, was a house. Could be something worthwhile there.
I also gathered up some wood from a little bin out back and some twigs that had blown this far, gathering it by the fire.
I checked out the wrecked car top to bottom, hunting around in any possible hiding spots, though really all there was to check was beneath the seats, in the glovebox, and the trunk. Nothing. Not one damned useful thing. That was how it went sometimes. A lot of times, actually. I was good at sniffing out hidden caches, no idea why, stuff other people had missed or overlooked but sometimes there just wasn’t one damned thing left.
The jeep on the other hand had some shit. There were those clothes in the middle seat. I checked them out. They could be useful, always great trading supplies, though none of them really looked like they were meant to stand up to cold weather. Nothing beneath the seats and nothing of any real value in the glovebox. Just some pamphlets, old receipts, a few pens, hey, those might be useful. I took them and slipped them into my pack. After that I popped the trunk and walked back around. Opening it up, I looked into the back section.
Probably the most appealing thing about this vehicle was that it could easily be used as a kind of mobile outpost. If you laid down the middle seats, you’d have just about enough room to lay down and sleep for the night. Set up a sleeping bag and find some sort of mobile heater, and you’d be pretty set. Of course, those were rare, but even so, the car was a big find. I checked the pair of suitcases back there. One had clothes, the other had more clothes. I sighed softly. So, not the worst find, per se, but it definitely could’ve been a lot better.
I grabbed both of them and set the cases down on the snow, taking an opportunity to look around me again. Although it’s hard to sneak up on someone in snow, as the crunching gives you away when there’s no wind, it’s possible. Plus, I might be being observed from a distance. I didn’t see anything, and my instincts weren’t saying anything, but it never hurt to double-check. I pulled up the floor of the trunk and checked the compartment underneath. My hopes sank. No spare, no axle, no jack. Well, that sucked kind of hard.
Closing the trunk, I grabbed the suitcases and set them inside the gas station, then returned to the car and started hunting for a key. I might be able to hotwire it, but I didn’t want to have to do that every damned time I wanted to start the fucking thing. I checked the glovebox again, under the seats one more time, the dashboard, the sunvisors, and turned up nothing. Finally, I started reaching up under the wheel wells.
That did it.
Luck had found me again. I found a little magnetic box tucked up under the back driver’s side wheel well and, popping it open, discovered the key. Just to make sure, I slipped into the driver’s seat, inserted the key and turned it.
Nothing. Not a damned thing. Just a click. The engine didn’t do shit.
Okay, so…
I’d at least have to replace the battery. I reached down and popped the hood, pocketed the key, got out and headed around to the front. Propping it up, I studied what I saw. The engine block was frozen over, as expected. I didn’t really have much in the way of mechanical knowledge. What I did know, however, was that this was a newer model, probably built within the last few years, which meant it would have a more efficient engine. And maybe no gasoline. The batteries, though, were said to hold onto a lot of power. After the whole Peak Oil thing started happening in the mid-2020s, they’d really started investing in electric cars. Finding power was hard, but not impossible.
This could actually work.
But if it did, I’d need a jump or a new battery, and new tires. Even ignoring the flat, it was obvious these tires weren’t snow tires, and I wasn’t planning on driving far without some of those. After a bit, I had a checklist in mind:
-Axle
-Jack
-Four snow tires
-New battery
-Gasoline?
And I probably should find some new oil, though I wasn’t too concerned. They’d started mass-producing some kind of synthetic oil or whatever the fuck they branded it as that, among other things, lasted a lot longer and also took way colder temperatures to freeze at.
As I stepped back inside, I had to admit to myself that it wasn’t just the heat from the fire I’d lit calling me back. Mary was crouched down to the right, checking out the lowest shelves, and hot damn if her ass didn’t look absolutely incredible in the jeans she was wearing. Honestly, it was hard not to make good on that deal right here and right now. That was another way I guess I was suited to several aspects of the new world. I found a lot of different types of women attractive. On the one hand, yeah, I could really appreciate a woman who put on a lot of makeup and effort into her appearance. But most the girls I’d seriously dated couldn’t be bothered with makeup and did little more with their hair than brush it and put it into a ponytail.
There was something really appealing about that.
And almost no one wore makeup anymore. The only ones who did were the women who were well off for one reason or another, or high class prostitutes. But now the world was starting to be populated by more and more rugged women. There was something immediately attractive about a competent, confident woman.
Although, I had to admit, I was getting the feeling that Mary wasn’t super competent. Not that I was judging, I mean, this whole thing was bullshit. How many people who were just trying to live their lives were thrown screaming into this frozen hell? Most didn’t deserve it. And, like I said, I was still a sucker for traditionally attractive women. And even miserable, exhausted, and half-frozen, Mary was still a very attractive woman.
And, I mean yeah, I’ll own up to the fact that there’s certainly a part of me that likes having an attractive woman look to me for safety and survival. Call it sexism or caveman holdovers or whatever, the end result was a good one. I was always careful not to extort sex out of anyone. The closest I came was paying for it, and it’s not like I was ever paying some asshole who had women chained up somewhere.
I had seen that.
And more than once I had stopped that.
That’s where some of my worse scars came from.
I shook my head. There was work to do. Surely there would be time enough to ruminate on the miserable past soon enough. For now, I actually had something to do, and that was fucking awesome. Not just something to do, but something I could actually do right now and see actual, meaningful progress being made.
Not like walking fifteen miles down a fucking road through the snow and it never seeming to end.
With the car’s to-do list now tucked firmly in my mind, I got to work helping Mary. For a reason that I had never quite understood, I was good at searching places. I mean, there’s obvious stuff. Mainly it’s just: look everywhere and be diligent. But I’d figured out that there was more to it. For whatever reason, stuff kind of jumped out at me. Like hidden panels in the floor or the ceiling, furniture that was moved, hiding places, nooks and crannies, stuff other people overlooked more often than not. I’d managed to find some really cool shit that way.
Neither of us spoke as we picked through the front of the gas station. That was something else I had noticed. Overall, people seemed to talk less. I’m not sure if it was one thing or a combination of things. For me...I guess I had just gotten used to the quiet, and come to prefer it. Not always, for me, a good conversation was a new form of currency, and certainly there were times where the need for human contact crept up on me and, occasionally, cracked me over the head. It was weird what isolation could do to you.
One minute you’d be fine, even happy, then suddenly this wave of loneliness that seems unlike anything you have ever felt before hits you with such intensity that you fight not to vomit or burst into tears.
It was unreal.
Though the front shelves and the cold cases were totally cleaned out, even the area behind them, for some reason, there were still some goodies tucked away on the remaining shelves and beneath the counter. Altogether, we managed to collect half a dozen canned goods. Three cans of beans, a can of peaches, and two tins of tuna. That was as far as the search got before my stomach got the better of me. Okay, and maybe my cock.
The sooner we ate, the sooner I could fuck Mary.
She was already fucking teasing me.
“All right,” I said after we’d put the food back on the counter, where I saw she’d managed to find a can of ravioli and a container of salt, “I’m going to lock this place down and we’ll wind down for the night.”
“What’s for dinner?” she asked.
“Rabbit and beans,” I replied.
“Yummy,” she murmured, and I couldn’t tell if she was being serious or not.
While she cautiously took a seat on one of the old chairs in the break room that was now our new home, I moved around the store, checking the windows. They were easy enough to lock, and most of them were, the locks frozen over, actually, and they’d serve their purpose. If someone wanted in bad enough, they’d have to smash the windows. The back door and the front door were the only real ways in, and they still had deadbolts, which I put to use after going out and taking a good, long look around to see if I could see any figures in any direction.
But we might as well have been the last people on Earth for all I could see.
I locked the store down as best I could and came back to the break room and the fire, where I shrugged out of my backpack, slung it around, and unzipped it. Digging around in it, I pulled out the little collapsible pot I cooked in, then I pulled out and set three bottles of water out. Two on the table and one on the floor near the stove. That one was going to be washing water in the morning. Setting the pot up, I pulled out my can-opener.
“Pass me a can of beans,” I said.
“Okay...what kind?” she replied, picking two up and looking at them. “Kidney or black?”
“Which one do you want?”
“Black beans are definitely better,” she replied.
I held out my hand. “Black beans it is.”
She passed the can to me and I opened it. The process of preparing dinner went smoothly and methodically.
In the beginning, when I’d actually begun settling into some semblance of this new life, it was...taxing. Mainly because I hadn’t even begun to realize how fucking stupid and scatterbrained I’d gotten thanks to my phone. Although I didn’t get super into social media and those dumbass little mobile games and all the other bullshit they crammed onto every phone, it had definitely worked its way into my life. There were people I texted, a few channels I checked, and, okay, yeah, I’ll admit to actually finding and liking a few good mobile games. It occurred to me that I couldn’t do fucking anything without needing to check my phone.
It was optimization, I eventually realized. The myth of optimization. Why just cook your meal or take a shit when you could also be playing a game, texting, or watching something? In fact, if you weren’t doing that, then you were wasting time.
I guess it’s not that I disagree with the notion. It makes sense to, say, sharpen your knife or make conversation or wash your clothes while your meal was cooking or water was boiling. But now it was like...the dial had been turned down, back to something saner. Something that wasn’t constantly screaming at you to do more and more and more.
I dumped the beans in, pulled the wax paper out of my pack and dumped the rabbit in, then pulled out a spoon and stirred it up. Then I let it sit.
“So, Mary,” I said, “where are you from originally?”
She laughed. “Nebraska. You?”
“Florida.”
“Oh wow. Fuck, you must’ve gone insane when this started.”
“Close to,” I replied.
“So, like...were you a fireman or something? A cop? Like, before all this?” she asked, staring at me intently. Her eyes were sodamned green. They caught the light of the fire from the stove and seemed to sparkle. Inside her pale, weather-worn face, they looked like precious gemstones.
“What? No,” I replied.
“A Marine?” she asked.
“No. Why do you think that?”
“You just...have that look, I guess. I don’t know, you’re fucking tall and you look built under your clothes and you just seem so...confident, I guess.”
“Fuck, I worked at a grocery store,” I replied, for the first time in awhile actually feeling kind of embarrassed.
Her eyes widened. “Are you kidding me?”
“No, I was a shift leader at this dumb little store called Marge’s Mart. I think. Maybe it was something else, fuck it’s been two years now. But yeah, I got the job after high school and, I don’t know, I was good at it, I guess. They liked me. Gave me a few raises, a promotion. I think I was on my way to running the liquor department when the end of the world happened.”
“Fuck, you were either one hardcore shift leader or you reallychanged when the snowfall happened,” she muttered.
I considered it. “A little of both,” I replied after a moment. “What about you?”
She looked down, again that embarrassed look. “I...don’t know,” she said after a minute. I stirred the meal, she toyed with some debris with her shoe. Finally, she sighed. “I guess probably not much chance of scaring you out of sticking your cock in me, huh? Or is that really arrogant?” she asked, looking back up at me.
“No, it’s accurate,” I replied. “You’re really pretty and I’m really horny.”
She laughed. “I kinda thought so...and thank you. You’re, um, like really fucking hot.”
“I’m glad you think so,” I replied. I still didn’t know how to take fucking compliments, especially ones that I felt weren’t even true. It was one thing if someone complimented my strength, or my aim, I mean I am strong, and a great shot actually, but even then it just made me feel awkward. But I’d never felt attractive.
More like I got into the attractive club on a technicality because I happened to work out.
“Then fuck it,” Mary said, letting out her breath in a long sigh and blowing at a few errant strands of brown hair. “I think one of the coolest things about meeting so many people thanks to how we live our lives now, is that you can just be brutally honest with them. You can tell truths to some people that you couldn’t tell your closest friend or relative.” She laughed softly. “You’d think after saying something like that, I was about to confess that I was like a prostitute or a murderer or something.
“I used to tell myself I was a free spirit. I drifted from job to job, often from boyfriend to boyfriend, sometimes to girlfriend, across several cities in Nebraska, after dropping out of high school. I guess what the apocalypse showed me was...I wasn’t really a free spirit. I just was afraid to commit to fucking anything. Not even like a relationship, but a job, or a life. You know?”
“I actually know exactly what you mean,” I replied. “You grow up hearing that you can do fucking anything, and you believe it for a little while, and then it becomes this problem. Like, fuck, if I can do anything, why would I do something I don’t like? Where’s this perfect job that’s going to make me money and satisfied andfulfilled? Not to mention how long it takes to actually learn and get good at a job. What if you piss away five years at a job and find out it sucks?”
“Fucking exactly! Fuck!” she snapped. “I thought maybe I wanted to be a vet in the beginning, because I love animals. But I could tell right away I just wasn't smart enough for that, or dedicated enough. Or have the fucking money for college! Ended up working for a pet store, but that didn’t last because I kept getting into fights with the people who ran it because they were basically abusing or neglecting the fucking pets! And fuck, it’s like, what can you do? Even if I somehow had the money to get in there and buy every pet and give them great lives, they’d go replace every last one of them and keep abusing and neglecting them! I could open up my own pet shop, but even if I was successful, there’s still all those other stores! It’s like...” She shook her head angrily. “It’s like they showed us how big the world was, and how big the problems were, and at the same time let us know that it was beyond impossible to fix it all, or even most of it, or even some of it. I always felt like...an ant trying to move a mountain or something.”
“I know how you feel,” I said, stirring the meal again. “It’s a little different now, huh?”
She laughed bitterly. “You could say that. Now I get to be a useless drifter and somehow try to survive fucking snowmaggedon.”
“Why do you think you’re useless?” I asked.
She heaved a sigh. “I don’t know, I’ve just never...gave a shit about anything. I don’t even know how I’m still alive, like for real.”
“You never gave a shit about anything?” I tasted the food. It seemed to be about as ready as it was going to get so I took it off the stove and held onto it, stirring it to release the excess heat before we dug in.
“I mean, you know, I had movies and songs and some books I loved. My friends, a few pets. But everyone likes that shit.”
“What about something not everyone likes? I mean, you said you liked animals.”
“Yeah, but I don’t think I liked them enough for it to matter.Fuck, I don’t know...I’d have to think about it,” she replied. She frowned and stared at me as I set the food down on the table between us, then pulled out another spoon from my pack. “What are you asking for? Why do you care, anyway?”
I shrugged. “Making conversation,” I said. “I like hearing about people. People like talking about themselves. It’s human nature.”
“Yeah, that’s true,” she murmured, accepting the spoon. “Thanks,” she added quietly.
She studied me as we started eating. Outside, the wind was picking up, and the light was pretty much gone now. The only light in the room came from the fire, providing a sullen glow. She looked very beautiful in that glow. Something occurred to me and I silently turned and pulled out a second bottle of water from my pack and set it beside the first that rested on the floor by the stove. Then I went back to eating.
“You’re weird,” she said quietly. I looked up at her. She blushed. “I mean, not like in a bad way. It’s just...this isn’t like how it goes when I meet new people. I guess...you’re nice. And you don’t look nice.”
“I don’t, huh?” I asked.
She sighed. “I guess this is coming out weird. You look like a hardass, you know. Most guys play at being hardasses nowadays, especially the ones who already look the part. It’s a lot more effective when you look like, well, you. I guess I expected you to be more, you know, controlling.”
“Do you want me to be?”
“No.” She paused, considered it, then a small smile appeared. “I mean...maybe a little...” she murmured.
“I’ll keep that in mind.”
