The Last Rebel: Survivor (3 page)

Despite the lack of an open threat, Jim stayed alert. He was sure that the medallion men on the barricade were not telling him that the Zone was dangerous as a joke. Jim knew that there was always the possibility—and it could be a strong possibility—of being attacked. He knew this was the time of the predator, because when people were down was when predators emerged. They preyed on the sick, the young, the old, the helpless. So, too, men. They would much rather attack someone who was defenseless than someone who was not. Such people always struck Jim as not only evil, but shortsighted, just plain stupid. He had always been raised to believe that far and away the most important person in anyone’s life was the one looking back at you from a mirror, and when you prey on the helpless, what did that make you? Of course people like that had a very simple solution to self-image. They never looked in the mirror.

But Jim also knew something else. That it was in bad times that always produced the best people, like Mother Teresa, who would work the streets of Calcutta where the dead lay out in the open even before the plague came, ministering to the dead and dying, the forlorn and forgotten. Or the doctor who would stand in some godforsaken place in Africa and use himself as a guinea pig for an experimental serum, or a guy like his brother Ray who had his whole life ahead of him but would die jumping on a grenade so others could live.

Jim swallowed hard. God, he missed Ray. He loved him and idolized him and he didn’t need a psychiatrist to tell him that Ray was his surrogate father. He remembered that one of Ray’s favorite TV shows was a very old one called
Superman
, where the father, as the planet dies around him, saves his son, and before he goes he tell him: “And all that I have is in you.”

Jim swallowed again. So it was with him and Ray. Jim had modeled his life after him—except for the war part—and knew that he would always be with him no matter what he did or where he went. Ray had been a model for the way you should live your life. That was his gift to his young brother, Jim, and it was as good as gifts get. And Jim hoped, someday, that he could pass on what was in him to his own son.

Despite his awareness of potential danger, Jim relaxed more and more as the miles piled up. Still, part of him remained alert, a quiet but observant eye inside him always scanning for potentially hazardous situations. Maybe, he thought, smiling, he was part wolf or some other animal. That’s how they survived: by staying alert always.

While there was no one to keep him company on his journey, he would occasionally have a “conversation” with Reb, who would invariably respond to his name by raising his head and wagging his tail.

“So how you doing, Reb? You’re lucky. Lucky that I found you.” Jim smiled. “A lucky dog.”

But Jim knew that he was lucky too. Dogs were wonderful creatures. As a trapper he once knew in Idaho had put it, “God was having a real good day when He made the dog.” Indeed, Jim had often thought that the world would be a much better place if people acted more like dogs and horses, another animal favorite of Jim’s. (Though, in truth, horses were not that bright. In fact when asked if they were smart, his grandfather had a standard answer: “If you were that big and that beautiful, would you spend your entire day eating grass?”) If you treated a dog or a horse a certain way, you could be sure that was the way it would treat you back. Not people. You could treat people as if they were the queen of Sheba and they would stab you in the back.

At one point, Jim pulled off the road onto the shoulder to stretch, take a leak, top off the gas tank by emptying two of the five-gallon gas cans into it. As he did, he thought again that he did not like carrying this much gas in the vehicle. It made him, in effect, a mobile bomb, but it was either that, at this point, or start walking. And the HumVee had too much going for it to make him want to look for another vehicle, which, he was sure, he could get. Many had been abandoned. Indeed, half of Nevada was now a used car lot. Jim smiled: with nothing down required, now or later!

Once back in the cab, the kinks gone, he rolled a cigarette, lit up, took a couple of drags, and was on his way again.

Besides the occasional animal, Jim also had the flora and fauna itself to view.

It was early June and the forest was in full flower, so he did not see as much as he would if it were another season. But the animals he had seen reminded him—if he needed that—that no animal, as far as anyone could tell, had come down with the plague. That gave him hope. More than that, if he were a medical investigator he would start looking into what kept animals well to try to determine what made people sick.

Occasionally, too, the forest would clear a little and he could see mountains and the big sky. As many times as he had seen the mountains, they still moved him. In fact, his favorite song was “America the Beautiful.” He loved the words. “Oh, beautiful, for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain, for purple mountain majesties.”

“There’s only one thing more beautiful than the mountains,” Ray had said, “and that’s a beautiful woman.”

That, Jim thought, was hard to argue with. And someday he hoped to be able to see if Ray was right!

Every now and then, Jim would also see narrow dirt roads leading off the road he was on to somewhere, either a house or nowhere, and he would be tempted just to follow it to God knew where. But he resisted the urge. The width of the HumVee said no. The roads were narrow and the HumVee was twelve feet wide. There might not be a turnaround and he did not relish having to back out.

What he did not see, aside from marauders or whatever this danger was, was more dead people. He was grateful. Christ, he thought. It must be a bitch to be a coroner. That’s all these guys and gals ever saw all the time: dead people. After awhile it had to get to you. Indeed, he had heard on the radio once that reporters who were involved in death scenes suffered posttraumatic stress syndrome, the problem first discovered in soldiers who fought in Vietnam.

And, thinking of death, what about the plague? What hope, ultimately, could humanity have if the plague wasn’t brought under control? Or, maybe, it would go away by itself. That’s what happened to the one in the fourteenth century. This one would too, though Jim knew that a far better answer would be to cure it through scientific means. Who wanted to be sitting on what, in effect, was a plague bomb that might go off again at any moment?

One thing Jim knew, he was immune. In some of the towns he had passed through, the bodies were everywhere. There was ample opportunity for him to come down with the disease. If he hadn’t by now, he wasn’t going to.

At another point along his journey, Jim stopped again, but this time for Reb to do his business. And as he watched, Jim thought again how well trained Reb was. Training was so important . . . so important . . .

Abruptly, Jim remembered a friend of his named Luke McGovern and his German shepherd, who was named Cap. People used to laugh at how hard Luke worked to train Cap, but one day it paid off handsomely—by saving the dog’s life. Luke had gone camping. He had let Cap run free—it was an unrestricted area—and at one point Cap wandered across a fairly well traveled road while Luke stayed at the other side at the camp.

It all happened in an instant. Luke was looking at some fishing gear and he glanced up to see Cap starting to run back toward his camp, maybe three yards from the edge of the road; and speeding down the road, not ten yards away, was a pickup truck. They were sure to collide, but in that instant Luke yelled the command that he had taught over and over and over again to Cap: “Down!” The dog dropped like a stone and the pickup went whizzing by, missing him by a foot.

Like the rest of the road he had traveled, most of it was straight, but there were some curves and he was coming around one when he got another surprise. Directly to his right was a two-story white building, on the side of which someone had painted—in huge red letters two stories high—god is dead.

The sign was stark. Not only were the words big, but the paint had run down from the letters, making it look as if they were bleeding.

And the sign writer or writers made sure that people would see the sign. All the evergreens that were in front of the side of the building and would have at least partially blocked the view had been sawn down, and lay in a jumble on the ground.

The building, Jim saw, looked like it had housed a business. In the front was a plate-glass window at street level—though it was knocked in—and a framework jutting out over a door that had held a sign.

There was also a road that ran past the building on the side where the sign was. This, he thought, was probably the road that customers used to get whatever the building sold; there was a packed-dirt parking area in front of the building. And across the road, to his left, there was a modest home.

Jim, Glock in his pocket, got out of the HumVee, still keeping it running, and took a few steps toward the building. The people who ran whatever was in the building, he thought, probably lived in the house.

Jim reflected on the words again: God is dead? he thought. I don’t think so.

Jim thought of what the medallion people back at the barricade had said to him, implying that there were people in “the Zone” who would not take kindly to someone who believed in God—like Jim.

Jim took out paper and the tobacco and rolled a cigarette, licked it closed, and lit up. He took a few more steps toward the sign and stopped and looked up, thinking as he smoked.

The thing about the sign, he thought, was that it was filled with hatred. People who would take that long to clear the area and deface a building with what was really a sacrilegious sign like that had a lot of hatred in their heart. And what could he infer from it if they truly believed it? True, he had not been that religious, but a world without God in it and at the end of it all was a world that was guaranteed to be in chaos, simply because there were no laws. It was Moses, Jim thought, who brought the Ten Commandments down from the mountain, but it was God who had handed them to him.

“Thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not commit adultery, thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife, thou shalt honor thy father and thy mother. . . .” These laws, Jim thought, were created because God recognized the weakness of man. He knew that people must be given laws to adhere to. But if “God is Dead,” the clear implication was that so were His laws.

Jim took a deep drag, let the smoke trail out his nose. It was, he thought, disturbing.

After a while, he went back to the HumVee. If nothing else, the sign had reinforced what the medallion wearers said, and his experience here confirmed that he was in an area where there were some very dangerous people prowling around.

He looked down at Reb.

“Hey, buddy,” he said, “we got some nuts around here. And not the kind squirrels gather.”

Reb wagged his tail rapidly in affirmation.

Jim put the HumVee in gear and moved forward. For a moment, he thought about turning around and heading back, but just as quickly realized that it was too late for that. The medallion wearers had told him if he went through the barricade he was on a one-way trip.

Jim hoped again that he didn’t meet anyone. The last thing he wanted was some firefight with nutcases.
Just leave me alone
, he thought,
and I’ll leave you alone
.

But another thing Jim knew was that life doesn’t care what an individual wants, it just plays out the way it wishes. A miles down the road as he rounded yet another curve he got another surprise, this one even worse than the barricade and the sign. Hanging from the lowest branch of an oak tree was a dead person.

He drove close to it. It looked like a woman—the body had long blond hair—and she had large breasts. Her thick tongue was protruding from her lips, her eyes were bulging, weird looking like people with the plague because the pupils were fixed and dilated, and her body was obviously bloated around the belly and feces and urine had collected in a pool beneath her bloody bare feet, two feet off the ground. Her legs and arms were cut and bruised. And she stunk. Around her neck was hung a crudely lettered sign: BELIEVER.

Jim got out of the vehicle, first shoving the Glock in his pocket, and walked around the body. He looked at its shape . . . and then something hit him in a profoundly sad way. The body was not bloated by death alone. The woman had been pregnant.

“God Almighty,” Jim said out loud. “God Almighty.”

No way, he thought, was he going to leave her like this. It was going to be a messy, stomach-churning job but he was going to bury her, albeit in a shallow grave. All he had to do was get up high enough so he could cut her free. Standing on the HumVee would allow him to do that easily. And he also had to cover himself or dress in some sort of protective gear, or wrap her, so that the oozings from her body would not get on him. Yes, it was not, he thought, going to be a pleasant task.

He was about to pull the HumVee next to the woman, calculating at the same time where he might bury here, when he heard a sound in the distance, like thunder. He realized it was approaching from the road to his right.

He had been so preoccupied with the woman that he had not really examined the area. Now he did, because instinct had told him to get away from that sound as quickly as he could. Directly across from the end of the road and set back somewhat was an ordinary-looking residence with beige vinyl siding, a brown asphalt shingle roof, a patch of grass in front, bushes lined up all around it, and all set on a crawl-space type of foundation. And—all important—a backyard.