Rare Air
Part Fifteen
Well, I’m here to tell you. I abandoned the burnt ruins of my cabin and I continued to march up the side of the mountain until I found a tiny weatherproof crevice to call my own. Little more than a washout underneath a large rock. Surely when the snow began to melt once again, I would be in some serious shit but until then I had a dry floor, an overhang away from the weather. No food though.
I made do with squirrels when I could, the occasional crow or small bird otherwise. Both were damn hard to catch and all of the above tasted awful. The new area of the mountain, although thinly wooded, had a lot more to offer in the way of already dead wood and branches. When I had the energy, I dug deeper at the side of the rock, using well…other rocks until there was a suitable place to sleep and a small stone ring to cook my meager meals over. That was the tale end of my life folks.
I became a cave man, a primitive. Not the excellent hunter/gatherer type though, not the, “years of experience, watch me make an axe using nothing but some rocks and a cut length of tree limb” fuck no. I lived like one of those cheesy reality t.v. twats without the camera crew or the sat phone to come save me. I had already been down the road of trying to live off the land and I already learned that the land didn’t give a fuck about me. I laid around on a bed of pine boughs and spent most of my time watching the white stuff fall and build up. I only left that burrow to collect snow melt for water or to try my feeble hand at hunting until the snow began to melt. That first trickle that washed through my burrow told me all I needed to know so it was time to pick a direction. Down the mountain was people, up the mountain was nothing, so I tried my hand at just walking roughly west of where I was.
I found a refugee. What remained of them anyway. The snow had turned them pure white and animals had already chewed at the exposed fingers and face. The clothes were too small, boots too. They had a backpack and what joys and splendors I hoped to find inside. More clothes, too small, shoes, too small and not made at all for mountains. A photo album. A portable music player. No food, nothing of use.
I walked away from that corpse, disgusted and cursing my luck and the vanity of humanity in general, never mind that I still had Kelly and Drew’s licenses, when I saw the rest of them.
The scene played itself out. Most of them already had it. Some type one, some type two. One did for the other while the few uninfected ones tried to run away only to fall to their deaths into the ravine below all of it. I stopped being squeamish a long time before that day. I would have done Drew proud and anyway; they were all long gone and frozen stiff. Gun to my head I had to assume the scene was a few weeks old. Many were nearly buried by the snow.
I came away with a few sets of clothes. New and better boots. A few still good morsels of food and a few proper canteens to hold water in. I even had a hatchet and a new knife. I also came across the mayor of Nothingsville. I could see that shitty, “let me speak to your manager” haircut poking out from the ruins of a jacket hood. I looked beyond her and down the ravine and although I couldn’t swear by it, I thought I saw Jerry’s bright red beanie down there peaking up through a snow bank. There must have been near fifty of them. The last great migration of my old camp.
That night as I slept bundled up under a pile of dry pine boughs I woke to the awful pain in my head I have known every day since.