him. The first spring of the Now Time he’d been amazed at how bad the roads were. Cracks had formed. Weeds had pushed through in some spots already. Winter swelling had buckled the asphalt in some places and pulled it apart in others. Without constant traffic and road crews, the elements and nature went to work. Each year after that, erosion undercut some parts. Wind-blown dirt or mud overflows from rain covered other sections, and plants rooted in every crack and every deposit of soil, so that even if he had a car now, he wouldn’t be able to drive a quarter of a mile without falling into a gully or stopping at an obstruction. In Europe, he’d read, the Romans built a road called the Appian Way, and some sections of it were still passable 2,000 years later, but they built with stones. Asphalt was too biodegradable.
He pushed through a line of weeds a yard wide that cut all the way across the road. Weeds and grasses skirted the next thirty feet of relatively clean asphalt, then a grass peninsula covered the path, and if he didn’t know better, he could have sworn that there had never been a road. Glass crunched behind him. He twirled again. Grasses, weeds, scrub oak, but nothing else. He sniffed: a hint of Pinyon and ozone in the air, a remnant of last night’s storm. He wet his finger and held it up. The sound was downwind. If it were animal, it’d be smelling him, not the other way around.
He’d left the outskirts of Littleton and although ruins no longer dotted the landscape, he’d reached the line of gutted and rusted cars that ended at the C-470 intersection. All were rust red or brown and resting on their rims. Not a speck of paint left on them. Eric knew of at least four big grass fires in the last fifty years that must have burned any paint that weathering alone wouldn’t have removed. Through open doors and broken windows he saw black seat springs and bare metal. All the vinyl, rubber, leather and plastic were long gone. Tumbleweed filled some cars and poked out so that they looked like weird planters in need of watering. Eric guessed that in the panic to flee Denver, a monstrous traffic jam gridlocked this road west. People must have abandoned their cars and walked. Later, the civil authorities, or the army, had cleared the road with bull dozers or tanks. Pieces of safety glass glittered wherever he looked. He kept to the middle, as far from the wrecks as he could. The empty headlight sockets, broken grills and dangling wires kept a somber witness. A breeze whistled hollowly.
Eric picked up his pace and glanced quickly side to side. It couldn’t be the wolves, he thought. Too noisy. And not dogs. Not noisy enough. Then ahead he saw what he’d been hoping for: a bus. When he reached it, he glanced over his shoulder, then bent low and ran behind the crumpled metal mass. He gasped; his heart throbbed solidly in his ears. Ruefully, he admitted to himself that although he was in fine shape for seventy-five, he was seventy-five. Dots circled through his vision. He braced himself against the bus’s cool bulk, and rust powdered his hands. Then he crept to the back of the bus so that he could see the road without being seen. Why do I want to know? he thought. It’d be best to keep going and let them play their hand. He wasn’t worried about death by violence, he realized. It was more like idle curiosity, or the challenge of turning the tables on whoever was following him. Not feeling fear was wonderful, liberating. He realized that staying at home he had become afraid. Fighting with Troy over how to direct the town, he’d become a shut-in. The only reason to leave the house was to go to town meetings, and all he’d thought about for the last few years was how afraid he was for the future of humanity, or at least that segment of humanity he knew. Cut off from other groups, salvaging manufactured goods, making nothing for themselves, he feared their death by ignorance. As he lay in the shade of the bus, half buried by a tumbleweed, miles from home, followed by who knew what for who knew why, he felt glad. He smiled.
A half hour passed. Eric pinched the back of his hand to stay awake. A mouse ran across the road. A bird sang the same six notes over and over. A meadow lark, he thought. He smiled. He’d never forgotten his dad’s bird calls. The breeze stopped and heat waves shimmered off the asphalt and broken glass. Eric thought about a hunting trip he taken when Troy was twelve. Carrying compound bows, they’d left before dawn for a blind set near a salt lick by McLellan Reservoir. Rains had come down hard for several weeks before, softening the ground, and a visit to the lick the day before showed deer used it. With luck, there’d be fresh venison on their table. But nothing went well. At the blind, Troy refused to stay still, jumping up at every sound, notching and un-notching an arrow, rummaging through his day pack, and when a deer did come, he scared it off with a hasty, ill-aimed shot. Eric thought, I was too rough with him. I shouldn’t have yelled. But the missed meal was too real in his head, and Troy was crushed. He didn’t speak to Eric for the rest of the day, and the next day, when Eric called him in for his reading lesson, Troy said, “I don’t need to read, I need to hunt.” A week later Troy brought in a deer he’d shot on his own. Exhausted, he dropped it at Eric’s feet. Dirt covered his face. A long scratch ran down the side of his cheek, but he didn’t look proud; he looked angry, and Eric didn’t know what to say. Confronted with this new version of his son, this defiant hunter, he felt at a loss. Finally, Eric put out his hand. He wanted to hug him, to pull him close to his chest and say, “Ah, son.” But he didn’t. He knew now, at the time when he most needed to show he loved him he’d made a mistake: he only offered to shake his son’s hand. Troy kept his own hands at his side for a long time before he reached out and shook with Eric. He never read with his father again.
Eric’s chin rested on his forearm, and he knew he’d been sleeping. Whatever had been following him had either been a figment of his imagination, or it had spotted him leaving the road and was now holed up on its own waiting for him to move. He rolled onto his side and dug into his backpack for a jar of preserves and some bread. He decided he had no need to rush. Traveling in the heat drained him. If he reached the intersection by evening, he could find a good campsite on the hill beyond. There used to be a stone hut above a gully a few hundred yards up the hill, and if it still stood, he would sleep there. When he spotted a coyote trotting up the road, he paused in mid-bite. He thought, this is my day for the dog family. No wind now to carry my scent, he’s probably tracking me. As if to confirm this thought, the coyote paused to smell the asphalt before continuing towards Eric. Then it stopped a hundred and fifty yards away, perked its ears, and stepped toward a car on its side. A rock sailed from behind the car; the coyote ducked and sprinted away.
Got you, thought Eric. He moved his backpack to the corner of the bus where it’d be visible, put his hat on top of it, as if he’d decided to lay down, then crawled into the underbrush, carefully keeping out of sight of whoever hid behind the car down the road. Out of the shade, the sun beat hard on his back. He partially stood, and, using bushes for cover, maneuvered himself closer to the car. I’m on a stalk, and we’ll see just who you are. He felt strong, springy, like a twenty-year-old. He slipped a rock the size of an egg into his pocket, and when he found another about the same size, he kept it in his hand. Slowly now, he crept closer. Twenty yards away, he squatted behind a Volkswagon Bug with Colorado plates. The embossed mountains still showed in the metal. The rock he tossed over the other car clattered loudly in the silence of the afternoon. Somebody said something and somebody else hissed a loud “Shhhh!” Eric weighed the second rock in his hand. After considering what to do with it for a moment, he threw it directly at the other car. The “clang” still echoed when a head popped up, looked around, then dropped out of sight.
Eric yelled, “Dodge! You can come out now.” He heard frantic whispering. “You too, Rabbit.” Sheepishly, the two boys stood. “How’d you find us, Grandfather?” asked Dodge. Rabbit said, “I told you he was too smart for us.”
Eric smiled at them. “You boys eat yet?”
When they finished lunch, Dodge showed Eric their inventory. Dodge had packed five one-pound packages of beef jerky, a roll of dried crab apple leather and a package of rock candy. Rabbit’s pack, which Eric decided must weigh sixty pounds, had twice as much food, two knives, a first-aid kit box filled with various herbs, a tool kit complete with hammer and saw, a hundred-foot length of rope, a tent, a shovel, and a complete change of clothes for both of them. “I like to be prepared,” he said.
“You can’t come with me, boys,” said Eric.
“I knew he’d say that,” said Rabbit. He scowled and turned his scarred face away. Dodge wasn’t bothered. “Where you going to anyway?” He sucked on a piece of candy. “Dad don’t even know your gone. He’s going to bust a bow string for sure.”
Dodge told him that they’d discovered him missing the day before, probably only minutes after he’d left, and they decided to go after him. They’d run home, packed, and been on the road for an hour when nightfall came. They’d slept in a Chevy van that was partially protected by a collapsed garage. “Old man will kill himself if we don’t catch him,” is what Dodge said that Rabbit had said. “Said no such thing,” said Rabbit.
“Did to,” said Dodge. “We figured you know some great scavenging, like a treasure trove we talked about. Caught up to you this morning. Still don’t know how you guessed us out.” Rabbit turned back to them. “All the good stuff’s gone.”
Eric chewed on a tough piece of jerky thoughtfully. “You hear anything last night?” Dodge blanched. “Nothing.” Eric recognized Dodge’s lie. At ten, Dodge didn’t have a poker face. Rabbit said without flinching, “Some thunder.”
