Before I understood what was happening, I felt a hand on my back rubbing gently along the length of my spine, and there was another, much larger hand resting on my shoulder. I realized Lizzy was standing next to me saying, “Mom? Mom, what is it?” and Billy was soothing her, telling her, “It’s okay, Girly. This was gonna happen at some point. It just had to shake loose and work its way out. This is normal. She’ll be okay.”
I realized I was sobbing uncontrollably and rocking in my chair. Billy was down on one knee next to me with his arm around my shoulder. He stayed like that with me until the worst of it was passed, reaching out every so often to squeeze Elizabeth’s hand.
“What the hell?” I said after things had calmed down a bit. “I wasn’t even feeling sad. I don’t know where that came from.”
“It’s fine,” said Billy. “It turns out the part of you that makes you laugh lives right next to the part of you that makes you cry. All that stuff is controlled by the same buttons. You just went through a hell of a thing. You gotta give yourself some time; this will happen every so often. You’ll have to let it work its way out of your system.”
I looked up; saw an empty chair in front of me across the fire. “What happened to Jake?” I asked. Billy was heaving himself up off the ground to settle back into his seat.
Some paper towels materialized just to the right of my face from behind me, and I jumped. “Jesus-FUCK, hijole!” I yelped.
“Mom!”
“Sorry, Mija. Sorry.”
“Pardon…” Jake said as he walked back to his chair.
“So getting back to the point,” I continued as I wiped my eyes and blew my nose, “call it three days’ worth of food from this point and three days’ worth of driving. Would it not make sense to just push through with what we have right now and get where we’re going?”
“You have a valid point,” Billy said. “I’ve been thinking about this myself. I guess it’s not a bad idea if we all just discuss it right now and agree on it. What I was thinking was this…” He held up his hand and started extending fingers as he talked, beginning with the thumb and working his way down, as he listed off points. “This is the Spring/Summer period right now. It’s been, what, three months? Four months? Since everything really went south? So that means Northern Utah and the great state of Wyoming has just been through a winter period. We don’t know what the state of the roads is or even if any road crews had begun repair work before it all went to hell. California and Nevada were more or less okay because they don’t get a lot of rain to begin with but, the further North we go from here, the nastier it’s going to get, I think.”
“That’s a good point,” Jake agreed. “Roads fall apart a lot faster than anyone realizes. You have to constantly be repairing them.”
“Yap. Give it a year. You won’t be able to get anywhere far without four-wheel drive. This brings me to the point. The Dodge can handle some mild off-roading if it comes to it.” He pointed over at the van. “I don’t know about that Transit. It’s long, looks kind of top heavy, and is close to the ground. I don’t think the path can get very rough before we have to abandon it.”
I saw Jake give Billy a pointed look in response to his statement. Billy nodded and sent a calming “it’s cool” gesture back his way.
“If that happens, we won’t be able to haul everything we have plus ourselves. The truck bed is already overloaded as it is.”
He eased back into his chair and took a sip of coffee. “We prepper types have a saying that we ripped off from the military: Two is one, and one is none. So, applying that math to our situation, we really only have one vehicle. I’d like to have two—what you would call three. I don’t want to leave anything behind and I sure as hell don’t want to find myself hoofing it again.”
“On top of that, we have time, guys. My place isn’t going anywhere. It’ll be waiting for us whether we get there three days from now or one week from now. It won’t hurt to take it a little slow and collect things as we go.” He took another sip. He had given up on tracking points with extended fingers by now; I think he preferred to keep them wrapped around the warm coffee cup in the cold morning air instead of extended out in space.
“The more supplies we have when we get there, the better we’ll be as well. We’ll be able to take a few days to settle in before we have to head out again.”
“Head out why?” Jake asked. I was curious as well.
“We’re going to have to go out and get everything we can get our hands on,” Billy said. “Everything. None of the things we rely on to live are being manufactured anymore. At some period, all of this stuff that we need is going to run out. Maybe not for a year or two but it is coming. We need to get as much of it as we can to our home base like apocalyptic squirrels. This will buy us the time we need to develop a more permanent situation. The main thing will be food; living on a subsistence basis. There’s definitely enough land to support us, even if we start cultivating livestock. The main thing is that we have to get it planted and producing enough so that we can wean ourselves off all the manufactured shit. Oh… excuse me, Girly.”
“That’s alright,” Lizzy said. “Mostly, I just don’t like the F-word.”
“What? Flapjacks?”
Lizzy giggled.
“So, yeah,” Billy continued without missing a beat, “it’s like the man said: ‘the best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago and the second best time is right now.’”
There was a bit more chit-chat after that, but we had all come over to Billy’s way of thinking. Wyoming wasn’t going anywhere within the next few days. Additionally, I have to admit I was a little excited about getting a new vehicle. I guess that, by definition, whatever we found would end up being “used,” but any car I had ever owned in my life up to that point had been at least an eight-year-old beater. This was probably going to be my one chance to own a relatively new car or truck (or whatever) and drive it before all the fuel expired. Who knew when humanity would figure out how to start refining gasoline again?
I leaned back in my chair and sipped on my own coffee while Billy and Jake planned out the first place we would stop over an old, dog-eared Thomas Guide. Sunrise over Utah was just at an end; that in-between point where the clouds stop being dark-blue and pink and start being dark-blue and white. The sun was up over the East looking out at a red desert shot through with vast expanses of muted green sagebrush and the more vibrant green of the defiant juniper trees holding themselves overall. The clouds in the sky were stretched into the distance for miles in long, fat ropes made hazy at the edges, as though they had been pulled across from one horizon to the other by God. I will remember the look of that morning for the rest of my life. It was a morning on which I was free after a time when I thought I would never be free again. Elizabeth sat next to me and held my hand (she would still hold my hand at that age), and I thought of how much I loved and missed my husband. The only thing that could have made that morning any more sacred to me is if he had been there to share it with us.
The main guideline we set for ourselves was to never go backward or deviate too far from the main path. It was north of St. George that we had met up, so the next big location on the map along the 15 was Cedar City (the real one this time, not the tent city). I was relatively familiar with the area so our idea was that no matter who was going out looking for a third vehicle, I would be going along with that person filling in as a local guide/navigator. There was no way that I was allowing Elizabeth to come into the city with me (just based on past experience alone) so we would swing out left on the outskirts of the city itself and take the Cross Hollow Road up and around the densest area; we assumed that the 15 would be slammed with traffic once we got to the city’s edge and all but impassable as it made its way through the center of Cedar City. At or about the point that we hit the airport, we would set up a staging area as a base.