Rare Air
Part One
The wind howls at the peak, it is a breathing monster that shows no remorse, forcing everything to move aside or be swept away. This wind is a banshee come to life from some old tale only to wreak havoc on all beings great and small. It whips and howls and drives sharp sheets of ice down on all beings without mercy. There is no quality to a life had up here. No quantity of life either unless you came early and carved out some small cave or shallow shack for yourself before the second and third wave of miserable refugees came along clutching their suitcases full of worthless memorabilia.
For months we survived up here on a regimen of five hundred calories and two liters of recycled water per person, per day. At first you sleep a lot, you don’t move around anymore than you have to, the need for latrines nearly disappears. Camp fire or lantern talk runs dry of people lamenting over cheese burgers or pizza. Then no one much sees the point in the fires either. Best to keep to oneself anyway. Best to be alone and let others do the same.
Up here at the peak you’re already friends with death, up here it’s been by your side for years now.
Most of us who first came to the mountain started down at the camp grounds, living along the trails in trailers and tents, some stuck sleeping in their cars. We were leery of one another, and rightfully so. As time went on though small communities got going and so did civilized concepts like trade, and theft. At one time there were probably a hundred thousand of us draped around the mountain, maybe more, then it found its way to the camp grounds.
No more gasoline for the generators, no more electricity, cars stopped running. First the canned food got scarce, then it ran out altogether. Half ass attempts at farming and hunting started in earnest. We were all so fucking useless. Some fled, I’m not sure where they thought they were going to go. Most just died though, some it took, others got weak and the thirst got them, many just decided that being hungry was too much.
You would sit around a fire, if someone had enough energy to collect wood, or little battery operated lamps otherwise, and no matter who was telling a story or how many people were laughing and putting on a brave face you just knew you would be woken in the middle of the night by a single gun shot or the sounds of the bereaved as they found someone dangling from a tree or choked on pills.
Easy to call it the coward’s way out, hard to know we were all already survivors by the time we reached the mountain. The cowards, not that I ever really met any, but the ones who went out easy or hard depending on how you look at it were the ones who checked out before people started evacuating to the mountain.
The human animal is an extraordinary creature, insightful, stubborn, capable of working out the most complex equations yet largely incapable of figuring out the staples of simple survival. Above anything though, hardy. Where even rats will die a person will learn to swim and gulp. We will adapt and learn to bargain with and our executioner. Even before the sickness came along consider what we were as a people.
A man will let you into his house and he will grimace and grip while you take pieces of him away with you, just as long as you do so during the commercials, just ask Jeff Bezos. Eventually though the television stops working and so does the absent complacency of the masses. Eventually, so much slower than you would have hoped for the sake of countless millions of dead, eventually that inevitable everyman wakes up and looks around and says, “Hey, now, wait a minute.”