Rare Air
Part Twelve
The pre packed and canned stuff ran out and so did my patience, with everything. The most I had managed to do was snare squirrels and they tasted like shit. I never saw another deer or even a racoon. Everything that could, went down the mountain when the white stuff starting falling. Everything except me, and them.
Loneliness. I want to touch on it one more time before I wrap this shit up. I wasn’t in my right mind by the time they found me. Daily routines had already turned into week- and month-long trends. Wants and maybe even what most would consider needs were no longer on my list of priorities. Most everyone talks to themselves when they are alone, and you’re good to go with that knowledge but let me ask you, does anyone else ever answer back?
Isolation, like I said, cancer. You learn to live with it because you don’t have a choice but it still shows. The loneliness cuts at your mind and leaves scars running along the hemispheres of your brain and well, again, I was and most certainly am not, in my right mind.
Truth be told I was already fairly certain I had the plague and I was pretty sure I was going type two, slow and sloppy like my good buddy, Drew.
They didn’t try any stealth maneuvers as they came on the cabin. They probably didn’t think they needed to. Like I said, routines and the falling out of them. I never attempted any kind of retrofit on the cabin. I already knew that under all that lichen and crusted over mud I would find rotten logs and dry, chip away with your fingernails, calking. Why fuck with it if it was still upright. You could smell the rot in the place. Speaking of smells. I started by burying my waste but I burnt all and any trash I made for fuel and I had already run well out of that sort of kindling after I ran out of dry branches.
Have you ever tried to cut down a tree with an axe? How about after a few weeks of eating one part of an MRE and a few cups of water a day? Have you torn your palms open swinging a dull hunk of iron only to find out that once downed, that son of a bitch tree won’t burn because its wet? Once the trash ran out and the already dry limbs got hard to find in the immediate vicinity of the cabin, I didn’t bother with fires anymore. The place had a wood stove and a reserve of emergency logs. My new system involved burning one and keeping the place closed up for two or three days at a time. As for the waste I used to bury, dumped out of a pale off the side of the porch became the fall/winter norm.
Nothing to read, nothing to watch, hardly anything at all to eat, or drink. I rose when the sun finally came over the top of the mountain and I slept when it disappeared behind the trees. You sleep a lot when there’s nothing else to do.
They thought the place was abandoned. What little gardening I had done was already under the snow. The well out front had the cover back on, call it my vain attempt to try and keep the water from freezing until I realized there was no stopping that. I never heard their boots crushing in the packed snow. I never heard them as they reached the porch and found their footing and their way to the door. I didn’t even hear them push at the swollen thing until it finally creaked open.
I only woke when I realized it was cold and there was something alive in the cabin with me. I tried some backyard primitive living bullshit, using shoe laces to tie my knife to a semi-straight tree branch. I broke three of those worthless things and chipped the end of my knife before I gave up on that shit. My knife was an everyday tool, not a weapon of survival. It was sitting in the kitchen most likely and well, even if had been right there with me…
I heard a human being speak words, words that weren’t coming out of my mouth. They sounded foreign at first until the others joined in and I caught the gist.