I was just about to give up on my new friend when he finally came around (I saw his movement as he crept by my window, shadowed by the moonlight on the curtain). At first, I thought I was only dreaming as I had been drowsing in and out of sleep for what felt like hours, but I realized very quickly that it was real when I heard his feet scuff outside. There were several moments that felt like minutes to me as we both struggled to make decisions about what would come next. I could almost hear him arguing with himself out there, and I came very close to saying, “Just go away, okay? Just go away, and we can pretend you never came by.” I didn’t. It wouldn’t have mattered.
Having apparently decided, he pushed the door open and slunk into my room, hardly breathing. He saw the chair and blanket almost instantly gasped and dropped into a crouch. Almost as quickly, I saw the silhouette of his head cock to the side as he uttered, “…the fuck?”
I shot him three times in the chest, and he dropped straight down onto his rump like he had been cut from a noose. He continued to breathe deep, slow, and ragged for a few remaining moments while the knee of his left leg flexed in and out rhythmically—two seconds to bend, two seconds to straighten, and so on. I think whatever was left of his conscious mind was still trying to run away as he died.
I got up from my spot and moved over to him, groaning as I went (my legs and back were killing me from all the time spent on the floor); checked his neck for a pulse. There was none.
“God damn it,” I muttered. “You couldn’t just give it a night?” Silence was my response.
Sighing, I shouldered the rifle and cautiously left the room. I know now that he was alone and so I feel a bit ridiculous now to think of myself creeping back down the line of rooms like some Recon guy out of a war movie, but this is what I did, looking for anyone else who might be there to jump out at me. When I made it to his room unchallenged, I loosened up.
I pulled a small flashlight from my back pocket and had a look around. I was able to actually focus on things now that my attention wasn’t completely occupied by a half-crazy transient reaching for a gun. He wasn’t exactly sitting on a survivalist’s gold mine, but there were several useful items stashed away including several boxes of protein bars. Additionally, he had a hand ax, some clothes as nasty and ratty as he was, and a partial box of hollow point 9mm rounds. The ammunition had my interest—there was no gun to go with it, but I had a good idea where I could find it. I rolled up the protein bars, ax, and bullets in a tattered sweater and headed back to my room.
I patted him down and found the pistol a foot away from his hand just outside of a spreading ring of blood. Shining the flashlight on it, I saw that it was a Glock 19. After fiddling with it, I was able to discover the button to extract the magazine, which I pulled from the grip and inspected. At the time, I didn’t understand that many magazines will actually show you how many rounds they hold if you know where to look. It was dark, and that was a detail I missed, so I started spitting bullets out onto the carpet with my thumb, counting fourteen. I then pulled back on the slide and was rewarded with a fifteenth round popping out of the gun and dropping onto the carpet next to the others. With the chamber emptied, I pointed out toward the door, and dry fired to confirm that the mechanism functioned.
Finally, I started loading the loose rounds back into the magazine. I was able to get all fifteen in, though my thumb took a real beating towards the end. I slid the magazine back into the pistol and then examined it all over looking for some sort of safety mechanism, which I obviously didn’t find. This made me a little nervous as I intended to stash the gun in the back of my jeans waistband like you see in the movies, but I didn’t want to shoot myself trying to haul it back out again. Understanding the reality of the situation, I opted to not chamber a round and placed the gun in the small of my back, shifting it around until it sat comfortably. The goods wrapped up in the sweater were placed in my bike trailer.
Finally, I pulled the jumbled blanket from the chair and used it to cover the body. I collected my things and left the room in search of a new place to pass the night.
The morning found me well quit of Primm and headed North again up the I-15. I wasn’t having any luck finding another ride despite my best efforts (well, in this case, “best effort” means I was checking anything in my immediate path) so it looked like another full day of walking, which it very much turned out to be.
If you have ever driven through a long desert, you probably know how boring the activity can be when there is nothing to occupy your attention. I was fast learning that walking through a long desert is psychologically demoralizing. The horizon simply does not move. You walk for what feels like hours and, as far as you can tell, you haven’t made any real progress. Nothing moves. All the waypoints that you pay attention to out on the horizon just stay where they are, refusing to come any closer as you labor on. If you focus intently on objects far away, you’ll begin to get the sense that you’re not actually moving. I found this to be unnerving and began to put my attention only on those things that were close to me as I was able to perceive their change in position relative to my own. The problem with this, though, was that whenever I looked up again to the far away things, they were always exactly where I left them. All in all, the two realities from which I had to choose were to look up and never make progress or to look down so that I could perceive progress only to look up later and discover that progress was an illusion.
It was at one such transition from looking down to looking up towards mid-day that I first noticed the speck on the road at great distance ahead of me. I couldn’t even guess at how far away it was; once a distance is great enough, the best a human eye can usually do is tell you “it’s waaaay over there.”
At first, all I could tell was that it was something and that, over a few hours of steady walking, it seemed to be maintaining its distance from me (I was using landmarks like hills and so forth positioned laterally to the object to determine that it was not stationary). It was at this time that I began to suspect that I was looking at a person. I mean, I guess it could have been a howler monkey, but another person on the road seemed the most likely explanation.
You will more than likely call me a fool (I certainly kick myself every time I think of this) but it never once occurred to me to use the scope on my rifle to get a better look at what I was seeing. I was not uncomfortable around firearms at the time but I also certainly was not familiar with them either; the optic on that rifle was the first one I had personally ever looked through. I thought of it only as a mechanism used to sight and shoot at a target. When I realized later that it would easily stand in as a replacement for binoculars, I was so embarrassed by my own stupidity that I actually cringed.
My suspicions regarding what I saw on the road were more or less confirmed when night fell. I kept walking into the evening. Far, far away in the distance, I saw the light of a campfire off the road.
I resolved to keep going. There was still a pretty good moon up in the sky, so I had plenty of light by which to see as long as I kept to the road. I only had a sleeping bag with my gear and no tent, so I didn’t have much to set up when I finally decided to stop for the evening. I wanted to catch up to that howler monkey, and this seemed like the best way to do it. By the time I quit walking I’m sure it was into the wee hours of the morning. I pulled my cart a short ways off the road, pulled out the sleeping bag, and bundled up. I must have fallen asleep almost instantly despite how uncomfortable the ground was. Given the lack of sleep I enjoyed at Whiskey Pete’s, and the long, miserable day of walking, there wasn’t much left in the tank.