On Route 40 nearing Amarillo, Texas, Walt saw a mile marker for a town called Panhandle. Maybe that's why he detoured the opposite way just minutes later, angling south from the highway towards something called Greenbelt Reservoir. More likely he diverted because he already had a collapsible fishing pole and hadn't seen anything more exciting than a soaring hawk for well over a hundred miles, and if he didn't change it up soon, the boredom would do what the plague, riots, U.S. Army, and 1,500 miles of bandits and madmen couldn't: strike him dead.
The same green-yellow prairies and soft hills followed him south. He sweated lightly, then shivered as it evaporated in the cooling dusk. By nightfall, he still hadn't reached the reservoir, but a full moon lit the disused road well enough to continue. He would go on until he got tired, then camp and sleep a ways from the road; if the reservoir wasn't visible when he woke in the morning, he'd turn back and get back on track for LA.
He couldn't have planned it better. After another hour's walk through the dark grass, he crested a modest hill. Moonlight rippled on the surface of the wide, low lake. Birds cooed from shifting reeds. He descended slowly, smelling the mud of the shore and a humid sweetness he hadn't encountered since somewhere east of Oklahoma. The ground stayed hard until he reached the banks. The breeze was too soft to trouble the waters, but small ripples arose from breaching fish.
He spread out his blanket and unfolded his rod and dug out his jar of bait, ridiculous, garlic-stinking, nuclear-colored artificial marshmallowy goo that supposedly brought the fish leaping straight onto shore. He cast, somewhat poorly, then squinted at his bobber, losing it repeatedly amidst the black water.
Either the nostril-hair-withering bait lived up to its billing, however, or the fish had been screwing their fish brains out in the few months since there were no longer any humans around to catch them, because Walt landed two within twenty minutes. He cleaned them inexpertly, flinging the guts back into the water. He slipped the cleaned fish into a Ziploc bag and walked away from the green shore, flashlight in hand, to gather dry grass, twigs, and small sticks, which he tented on the bare ground and lit up with a faltering lighter. He'd shot enough small game along his walk to have picked up a couple pointed metal rods which he used to skewer and roast the fish.
He slept under the stars. That was nothing new. He slept outside more than most dogs. The constellations had grown familiar to him, though he didn't know what they were: the tiny kite, the squashed W. When he got up he ate some stale Rold Gold pretzels, then stashed the bag and pulled up a handful of cattails instead, stripping away the husk around the base and chewing up the clean, pulpy stems. Minnows flicked in the shallows, retreating when his shadow crossed them. Red-tailed blackbirds chirred from the reeds. For a while he simply wandered along the lake's edge, overturning stones, poking at waterstriders and snails with a stick, staring beneath the surface for trout. Flies buzzed disinterestedly. By noon, it was warm enough to drive him to peel off his shirt and wrap it around his forehead.
He suppressed the nagging feeling he should get back to the highway and on toward LA. A line weaved through the grass; he froze, waiting for the snake to slip away. Ahead, a short, flat spit of land projected into the lake. Weeds swayed in the shallow water between it and a minor island some thirty feet from shore. If he lived here, he could build a simple bridge to it, or find a rowboat somewhere and paddle to it at night to stay safe from animals and survivors. It was an idle thought. Still, he could swim there right now. See what there was to see. But he'd get wet. He might step on something sharp. Anyway, it was just a little circle of land. It wouldn't be any different from everything else around him.
He snorted, peeled off his clothes, stepped into some flip flops, and, otherwise naked, waded into the water. In the shallows, it was calm and warm. Slimy fronds waved around his ankles. Rocks ground underfoot. A school of minnows turned and beelined for the shore to his left. The water rose to his thighs; another step dropped him to his hips. Two more and he was forced to swim, the water warm around his shoulders and neck and frigid when his feet kicked too deep. A few feet from the island, he halted to paddle and extend his legs. Stones turned in the mud. He waded ashore and wiped the extra water from his body.
The air cooled his wet skin. He walked the perimeter to work off the water, turning over riparian stones. Worms squiggled into the mud. Nymphs waved pincers and paddled away. Waterstriders skimmed over the ripples. Red glinted from the mud. Walt poked it with a stick, dislodging a tarnished, algae-swamped Coke can.
Besides a bird's nest containing three ruffle-feathered gray chicks, the can was the most exciting thing he found. He pulled up two more cattails and ate the stems. Fish rose lazily. He swam back across and toweled and dressed.
It wasn't yet noon. He shouldered his gear and circled the lake until he found its source, a modest creek oozing between a jumble of smooth rocks. Trout as long as his palm swatted sunlight from their tails. He cast his line a few times, but the fish did little more than glance the neon bait's way. Light woods surrounded the stream, fuzzing the short hills. After a couple miles of tramping along the trickling water, he stopped to build a fire, fill a pan with water, and fish while he first boiled the water, then moved it off the fire to cool. He gazed at the hills where the creek must source. When the boiled water stopped steaming he refilled his empty bottles and started back for the lake.
He hadn't thought much in the hours since he'd been awake and moving. There'd been too much to see. Exploring the lake had reminded him of a real-life version of The Legend of Zelda, the last of which he'd played a couple years ago. It wasn't exactly the same, of course. The Zelda dungeons had a designed, logical procession to them. You went into one room to drain the water to reach the lower levels of the next room where you found the small key to unlock the door to the next room where you climbed across the vines on the walls to reach the grappling hook you needed to cross the chasm to reach the big key to open the door to the boss you defeated in order to increase your life meter and make you that much tougher for the next dungeon and the boss at its end.
He didn't know what the real-life equivalent of that would be. Something like searching the grounds of a nearby house to find the key to get into the garage to find the scrap wood he needed to build a raft to float to the island in the lake where he'd find the Coke can he needed to trick the baby rattlesnake at the foot of a tree to slither inside so he could climb up to the one branch suitable to make the fishing pole he'd use to catch the trout that would nourish him through the next leg of his walk. Faced with that, you'd just go smash in the window of a Big 5 instead.
But the feel of the worlds was the same. Walt was alone in the woods to explore lost lakes simply to see what was there and what he could do with it. A mundane find like snagging a trout or stumbling into a strawberry patch felt like a blessing. The discovery of a bottle of Ibuprofen or Jim Beam was an outright miracle. Even when there was nothing special to find, when the fish wouldn't bite or Busch Stadium was nothing but an empty crater of grimy seats and patchy grass, the finding of these places, the witnessing of their existence, was holy, in its way. Perhaps when he made it to LA he'd travel America's backroads, mapping lakes and rivers and woods for their own sake. He could go far south, too. Witness the old places, the temples and ruins and ziggurats enfolded in the jungles of the Yucatan.
Walt returned to the highway. He headed west. Some ways past Amarillo, tilted monuments jutted from the plain. He stepped into the wind-swept grass. Amid the dust and sunlight, cars rose from the soil at uniform angles. Each was wrapped in a skin of graffiti. Wind whisked through fenders and side mirrors. There was no sign of smoke or tilled fields in sight. Walt walked down each row of painted cars before doubling back to the highway.
He'd done a fair amount of exploring as a kid. A few blocks from his back yard, the fenced properties disappeared, replaced by forests on uneven hills and dark canyons laced with weedy trails. Squirrels barked from the boughs. Rabbits burst from the brush, kicksta
rting his heart. No doubt the land was owned by someone, but there were no fences. No signs. No shacks or roads or parking lots or barns. Walt didn't even know how far these backyard wilds stretched—he'd once followed the trails all the way to a two-lane highway, a walk that lasted until the sunlight gave no warmth and he worried his mom would be home from work before he returned. The sun set minutes before he slipped in the back door.
Another time, he cut west from the trails, hoping to reach an empty stretch of beach. A couple miles into his walk, he descended a slope into a shaded stand of trees. Water rested in the muddy footprints across the path. Overhead, a treehouse spread across the branches of the oak.
Walt stepped off the path. Horizontal boards were nailed across the trunk in an easy ladder. "JV + KM" had been carved inside a heart scratched into the bark. Above it was a word Walt had heard on the playground but didn't understand. Crumpled beer cans rested in the weeds.
Cold stole over Walt's stomach. This was a place where the older kids came. He knew they carried knives and drank beer. He didn't know what they'd do if they found him in the treehouse he desperately wanted to climb to. He'd be hurt and miles from home. He saw his bleeding face pushed into the mud and the treehouse took on a sudden weight of shadows and mystery, a violent unknown where strangers did bad things far from sight of their parents and police. Walt turned in a circle. The sunlight couldn't fight past the leaves. He turned and ran for home.
The Stonehenge of cars brought back whiffs of that same feeling. They had clearly been planted and painted as a whimsical gesture, as strange, stark art in the middle of an equally stark prairie. But whoever'd put them here was dead. They were now symbols whose meaning was lost, steel gravestones to an unknown intelligence.
A bend in the road eclipsed the upright cars. Days began and ended. Sometimes he didn't think of Vanessa for hours at a time.
Except when he ran low on supplies, he approached most cities by night; not all the bodies in the street were long dead. He liked the night better anyway. Late morning was the worst of all: though the heat was less than what would later cook the prairie, the heat of pre-noon was an itchy kind, a stifling closeness that woke you, dehydrated and cramped, through the walls of a tent that smelled like hot, musty plastic. It was a time for death and regret. Early afternoons were far better. He never felt bad for sleeping through their dozy warmth, and if the morning had been chilly, as they'd been back East, the sun's high strength was welcome. Late afternoon to dusk was a busy time, a time for assembling kindling, mending clothes, catching fish, and studying maps. It was productive and confident.
Sunset he didn't much care for, except after storms when the skies looked sharp and bright as shattered glass. Otherwise, they were too portentous, a bad, gusty border-time when it was too dark to work but too light to walk without fear of being spotted on open ground. Early night rarely saw harsh cold. It had an electricity to it, a charge that spurred animals and self to lean forward and cover ground. There was a foreboding to late night, when a weary brain saw looming strangers in place of mailboxes and heard lurking leopards in every shuffle of the wind, but the time made him feel like night's agent, too. Something to be feared.
But he liked the minutes before sunrise best of all. The sun wasn't yet visible, but its foremost rays were strong enough to clarify the shadows into grayscale reality. It was a vanishing time, just long enough to put away your knife and pretend you've been good all along. It was in the predawn that he most fully felt his survivordom. He felt more alone then than at 3 AM, but pleasantly so, the last witness of darkness and the first to touch the new day's dew. The time and the feeling it produced burnt off so quickly. Within minutes, the sun was up and you could forget at once there had ever been a buffer between night and day.
The miles rolled on and on, forgotten lands and leftover homes. Walt started smoking again. It passed the time. He spent entire weeks traversing the hard beauty of the grasslands, scrublands, and deserts of Oklahoma, Texas, and New Mexico. By that point, according to his maps, his trip was more than two-thirds complete. He didn't consider delaying. Instead, he perspired his way through a range of dry, yellow mountains, pausing to towel his sweat from within the shade of rest stops and under the sickly-sweet smell of pollen-swollen trees. On the far side of the pass, pines and green meadows carpeted the old stones. He knelt in the grass around a soggy-banked stream and stripped naked. Rather than the punishing, can-feel-the-UVs-cancering-my-skin burn of his trip through the desert, the day's sun felt simple and soft on his shoulders and face.
He soaped himself up, rinsed off, and sat naked on a rock to hack at his beard and hair with scissors, navigating through touch and his blurry reflection in the blade of a knife. Reasonably manicured, he lit a cigarette and sat back on the rock to dry himself in the sun.
Rocks clattered among the trees where he'd left his bags. He squinted through the sunlight. Smoke trickled from his nostrils, dry and sweet. The stream jangled among the smooth pebbles. Back near the trees, the rocks clicked again. Walt had left the guns with his bags. Stupid. Weak. He hadn't expected anyone else to be out in these wilds. Now he would pay for it. He reached for his knife.
The pines' lower branches waggled. Walt was struck with vertigo as the nearest tree appeared to lean forward. Brown-gray rods emerged above the waist-high wall of grass. Walt breathed out, smiling. Could he take down a buck with just a knife? His bare feet wouldn't be a problem. His soles were as thick as gardening gloves.
The antlers glided forward. Beneath them, what should have been a lean tan deer resolved into an angular, ridged mess of beaks, multi-jointed limbs, and hard skin the bright gray of wind-churned waves. Round, irisless eyes goggled from an oversize bulb of a head. The creature slid away from the trees on somewhere between four and eight legs—some also lifted from the ground to waver like antennae or a questing hand. It looked part crab, part squid, part dinosaur, part nothing. It paused, limbs lifted to the air, as if testing the wind.
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