“Oh, better not go out looking for more, Jake,” he said as I moved over to my trailer.
“It’s fine. I have a flashlight here somewhere.”
“Sure, but you don’t know what’s out there,” he warned.
I stopped and looked back at him over my shoulder. “What’s out there, Billy?”
He threw his hands out. “Well, how the hell do I know? Coyotes and shit, maybe. Point is: neither of us knows. Could be people out there drawn to our fire and waiting to see if one of us does something silly like walking off into the distance looking for firewood. Could be nothing, I guess. Hell, you could put a foot wrong and twist or break an ankle in the dark.”
I couldn’t help but smile at him. I was just getting to know who he was, but I got the impression that he tended to get agitated when people resolved to engage in what he considered to be “foolish behavior.”
“I’ll keep to the road. You can usually find trash along the highway. I might get lucky.” I pulled the flashlight and rifle out of the trailer.
“Say,” Billy said, “where’d you get that AR?”
“Is that what this is? I took it from a friend who passed away back home. He was a soldier.”
“Oh? Would you mind if I had a look at it?” he asked. He seemed pretty interested.
“Sure,” I said. I took the rifle by the barrel and stock and passed it over to him.
He took it and looked at the grip closely by the firelight. “Damn. This is an M4. You know this thing’ll fire full auto?” He pulled the rifle into his shoulder, looked through the optic, and whistled softly. “ACOG,” he whispered. “Nice.”
“I suspected but wasn’t sure,” I said, crouching down next to him to look. I hadn’t been much of a gun person before and knew next to nothing about modern weaponry. It had taken me longer than I care to admit to figure out how to extract the magazine when I acquired the rifle.
“Yeah, it’s the safety selector here. Lever-back is safe, straight down is normal single fire. All the way forward in this direction will shit a whole mag before you know what happened.”
“Huh,” I said. “I’ve always just been leaving it down.”
He looked at me with a blank face. His Disapproving Face was always a blank stare. “I’ll have to show you a few things, it seems. For now, keep the lever back if you’re not planning on going to work, okay? I’m not interested in being shot.”
“Gotcha,” I said. I took back the rifle and set the switch as instructed.
“How many rounds do you have for that?” he asked as I straightened up.
“I have six magazines for it. They each had twenty-eight rounds. I have a number of loose bullets in the trailer here, too, in a box.”
“Pretty good,” he said, nodding. “You certainly lucked out with your choice of rifle. The Stoner platform ended up being just about the most popular rifle in the country before the world shit itself. We should be able to find you plenty more rounds in Vegas.”
“You think a hundred and fifty or so isn’t enough?”
“One hundred sixty-eight,” he said promptly, “and, no, I don’t. They’re not making bullets anymore, and you’re always going to run out. The world is such now that you want to be looking for bullets as much as you’re looking for water. It’s a challenge because everyone else will be looking too. 5.56 is a popular round though, like I said. We should be able to find some even if we have to go door to door to do it.”
“What about yourself?” I asked. “I don’t know very much, but I know a 12 gauge when I see it. Any reason you have one of those instead of one of these?” I gestured to my rifle.
“Yeah, there are a few,” he nodded. “I’ll tell you about them later. For now, you better go looking for that fuel if you’re going at all. I’ll start heating us up some food.”
“Sounds good,” I said. “I have some edibles in my trailer as well. Feel free to rummage around for anything you think you might want to eat tonight.”
He pinned me with that blank stare again. “You know, some asshole’s going to kill you if you don’t exercise a little more caution.”
I was sure now. I really liked this guy. Smiling despite myself, I said, “Are you an asshole, Billy?”
“I am,” he responded without hesitation. “I’m not a murdering asshole, though. Even so, you can’t know that.”
“The fact that you even bring it up gives me a pretty good idea. Besides, suppose someone does kill me because of a lack of caution? God forbid I miss out on a moment of this veritable paradise we’ve all inherited!”
“Wiseass…” I heard him mutter after I turned my back to leave.
I wasn’t searching along the highway very long before I got lucky and found an old wooden pallet on the roadside. I hauled it back to the fire where Billy still sat with a couple of cans of food cracked open and sitting near to the embers. The look on his face was rather priceless.
“The hell did you find that‽” he exclaimed.
“Further North up the 15. I told you: you find a lot of garbage by the roadside.”
“Huh,” was all he said. The wood was old and dry, and there wasn’t much holding it together anymore. There was a moderate amount of effort with the flat end of the hatchet to knock the thing apart. When I was finished, I threw a couple of planks on the fire. They didn’t flare up like the sagebrush, but they did get burning fairly well in short order and continued to do so evenly for much longer.
Billy and I sat back to eat the canned food (beef stew, in this case—he advised waiting to eat the MREs until we had a situation where no fire was available). We talked about more things as we finished off the whiskey, some important and some not. We laughed from time to time at our own nonsense and pretended for the evening that the world was still sane. When the whiskey was gone, we set down sleeping bags close to the fire, put some more planks on, and turned in for the night.
4
SELF-RELIANCE
We were up just before dawn the next morning, which was actually a lot easier than you’d think. Dry desert ground is quite uncomfortable when you have nothing but a sleeping bag. This all took place a couple of years ago now, but I remember that morning vividly. I had been so exhausted the night before that getting to sleep had been easy—I don’t think I could have stayed awake if I had tried. On the following night when I met Billy, I had a hard time drifting off due in large part to the novelty of having company again. That and the hard ground meant that I only found sleep in brief, thirty-minute stretches before parts of my body started aching enough to wake me up and force me to move.
The Nevada sun was just coming up over the horizon, turning the blue-black sky blood red, when we were rolling up our sleeping bags. I was stuffing mine back into the trailer and Billy was strapping his back onto his hiking rig; a massive backpack that hung lower than his backside and peeked up over the top of his head.
He looked to the sunrise and said, “Dawn stretched out her fingertips of rose.”
“How’s that?” I asked.
“It’s Homer,” he said, standing up and setting his hands on his hips. “The Iliad. It was just one of those lines that always stuck with me. The phrase is used in the story almost every time a sunrise is described.”
“What, you mean over and over? That’s a pretty flowery line to go around repeating all the time, isn’t it?”
Billy chuckled; pushed his fists into the small of his back and leaned into them, growling as he responded. “Yeah, well, Homer didn’t actually write the Iliad. He composed and recited it. It was an epic poem, and he was a famous poet of the day, sort of the equivalent of a big-time actor or rock star. People like him would be invited to entertain important people. Kings, wealthy landowners, you get the idea. The performance was the recitation of sections of these heroic poems that were kept memorized. All written down, the things span hundreds or thousands of pages, but Homer kept it all in his head.”