Dead in Her Tracks Read online

  THE REMNANTS

  Part Two: Dead in her Tracks

  by

  Jonathan Face

  © 2018

  CHAPTER ONE

  1

  The woman walked west across the great prairie, following a desolate highway which neither rose nor fell nor turned for three hundred miles; a straight line of pavement bisecting a vast, frozen grassland.

  It took her most of the winter to cross.

  When the snow came it draped the land in white and turned the stunted scrub trees into sparkling, brittle ice sculptures. The lack of color disoriented her, and black spots danced on the edge of her vision. She had troubled gray eyes, dull and restless, and when the sun rode high, its reflected radiance sometimes rendered them snowblind.

  She found a pair of polarized sunglasses in the glovebox of a wrecked Altima. They helped, a little.

  When it didn't snow, the sky was vast and blue and empty. When it did snow, it was hard and gray and all-knowing.

  Nobody plowed the highway that year, and when the drifts piled up past her thighs, she went down on all fours and dragged herself over the worst of it until the snot froze on her nose and her hands bled and her malnourished arms trembled from the cold and the exertion. But she never gave a thought to stopping, or turning back, or falling down in the snow and weeping guilty tears.

  She kept going. There was nothing else to do but keep going.

  She had never been a particularly lovely woman, and now she knew she must look haggard, like a crusty old hermit woman stumbling along the interstate. She hadn’t inherited the sultry eyes of her mother, nor the seductive curves of her sister, but she had gotten her mother’s fair skin, and now that was red and cracked and ruined. Skin and bones and dirty hair — that was who she was now, and she didn’t care.

  The tight muscles of her legs were in a state of perpetual, wailing revolt. She felt their anger whenever she stood, and their jelly-like fatigue when she laid down to sleep. She sensed that her body had grown to hate her, and was maybe rooting for her to fall down and die in the snow. Hissing at her to do it, begging it.

  But she wouldn't – not now, not until she'd finished her walk. Then maybe, maybe they would talk.

  She ate snow when she was thirsty, and when the hunger got bad enough to make waves of nausea ripple up her sternum, she would drift off the highway and rummage through deserted podunk towns of looted convenience stores and cowboy bars and rusty trailer homes on cinder block feet. When she needed to sleep, she did it in empty cattle shacks, or on the back seats of abandoned cars along the shoulder of I-90.

  One gray morning, hunger jabbing daggers in her gut sharp enough to bring faint tears to her eyes, she ate from a cow carcass — a snow-covered lump she'd found sprawled behind a barbed wire fence. She tore strips from its flank and ate them raw and was mildly ill afterwards. But it was enough to keep her on her feet another day. Enough to keep walking.

  She barely saw anyone, and that was okay, too. She didn’t want company, wasn’t sure she even remembered how to speak. She’d been a guest lecturer at the university one year, and she’d bored entire army divisions of undergraduates on such gripping subjects as The Biology of Neoplasia and Molecular Medicine and, most notoriously, Introductory Biostatistics. Language had come easily enough, then, but now the very thought of it made cold bumps rise on her forearms.

  What would she say? What was there left to say?

  Silence was her refuge; her weapon.

  There'd been a curly-haired man in a fur-lined parka passed out at the bar of an empty saloon in the town of Murdo, muttering drunken, hateful gibberish in his sleep, and she'd quietly backed out of the building, leaving him to his stupor.

  There’d been a man and a woman on a snowmobile one morning, the braaaaaap! of its engine alerting her long before they’d come zig-zagging around some freeway wreckage. She’d crouched behind an overturned RV and waited until they’d passed, praying they hadn’t seen her.

  They would want to talk. About the road, about the weather, about the dead people in the towns.

  There’d been a pair of butch lesbians coming up the eastbound lane, their heavy, mannish bodies plodding grimly through the snow like it was so much paper confetti. She'd waved at them, feeling more inclined to talk to other women, but they'd only eyed her suspiciously from across the median, and one of them had pulled back the flap of her parka to reveal a pistol on her hip. She’d put her head down and hurried on her way, and the two silent women soon evaporated into the brilliant white of the prairie behind her.

  She walked on, alone.

  Her longest period of solitude was the thirteen days she spent crossing the badlands west of Murdo, the endless procession of billboards her only companions. Wacky advertisements for family campgrounds and Wall Drug and The World's Only Corn Palace! over and over again. She marveled at their perfect absurdity, wondered how such things had ever been.

  She'd been trailing the interstate since leaving Sioux Falls, and the pavement was beginning to feel the way crumbling Roman aqueducts must have looked to medieval peasants. Elaborate and towering interchanges of concrete and metal, designed with knowledge lost to war, to famine, to pestilence. Triumphs of modern engineering whose construction would no doubt be mysterious, maybe even supernatural, to future generations.

  Someday, she thought, people will gather at the billboards and the road signs to puzzle at the wisdom of the ancients. O wise elders, what must we do at Lane Shift Ahead? How much weight is required at Weigh Station? What mystical place is Yogi Bear's Jellystone Park Campground and RV Resort?

  The Wall Drug billboards promised free water to travelers, but the entire town had been a smoking ruin when she finally passed the exit. There'd been a fire, a pretty good one by the look of the remnants of Wall, South Dakota. She'd stared briefly at a cock-eyed sign standing over a smoldering pile of ash that read Old-Fashioned Ice Cream Parlor, and had simply moved on.

  She talked to herself so she wouldn’t forget how. Conversations with her late husband, mostly, but a lot of mad babble, too. Half-remembered TV theme songs from childhood. The first four stanzas of a Longfellow poem she’d memorized in 7th grade. The Pledge of Allegiance. Casey at the Bat. A clipped latin phrase she’d picked up somewhere.

  She began to wonder, in a detached, scientific way, if she'd lost her mind. She’d read that extreme isolation could lead to dementia, and even hallucinations. She mulled it over in her head from a dozen different angles, but without a clear frame of reference, found it impossible to gauge. She stopped thinking about it.

  The days and weeks and months bled together. The snow began to recede, and she added a canteen to her gear as her water source melted away. She supposed that meant spring was here, and spring meant rebirth, right? New life? Ha.

  The wasteland of the prairie gave way to the Bighorn Mountains when she crossed into Wyoming, and her level walk turned steep and uneven. The temperature kept going up, and one day she noticed she was sweating, and she took her coat off and tied it around her waist. It felt good, and she let her hard pace relax.

  Three days out of Sheridan she'd come across a woman eating lunch on the hood of a dusty LeBaron convertible. A Harley-Davidson was parked alongside it, laden with blankets and camping gear. She'd mustered the will to say hello, thinking maybe to find out what was north of here, but mostly just to say anything.

  But when the biker chick heard the crunch of her boots on the asphalt, she'd hopped on the Harley and kicked it to life. The last she'd seen of her was a fearful look over the shoulder and a cloud of blue exhaust.

  She ate what was left of the biker chick's lunch – a bag of stale Fritos and half a peanut butter sandwich. Enjoyed it.


  She'd proceeded up into the mountains, slogged through washouts where snow had melted and sent muddy rockslides cascading over the road, and marched through the inky blackness of highway tunnels whose emergency lighting had long-since sputtered out. Now she was descending; the ground gradually levelling off and the boulders and cliff faces sinking into the earth. The fir trees had disappeared, giving way to scraggly junipers and cedars with misshapen limbs like crippled old men.

  She began to think about ending her walk.

  It was the longest she’d ever been on — sometimes she’d thought she would keep on trucking until her feet stopped working and she fell over dead, but something had changed in her with the warmer weather. It was a fluttery feeling in her heart. It swelled when she saw the sunrise and settled, peaceful, when she sat on the side of the road at the end of the day and watched it sink below the horizon. Maybe it was time to rest, to pick a spot and stay there for awhile. A time for something new. Change.

  She kept walking, though, for there was yet more walking to be had.

  The woman had grown up under long clouds of neglect, and she'd been a walker from an early age. She’d gone on them to get away from her parents — her mother’s sharp, pretty eyes, and her father’s bristling, bespectacled ones, both of them always probing, always looking through her. They were maddening, her folks, and more than she was equipped to handle.

  Other parents might’ve said she’d run away, but hers always said she was off on one of her walks. Walks that sometimes took days, where she drifted around the streets of Sioux Falls as a sad and silent specter. Sometimes the police would bring her home, and other times she'd find her own way. She never got in any trouble for it — her mother didn’t care about her long absences, and her father hardly noticed.

  But she’d dropped the habit around the time she’d moved out, and hadn’t so much as thought about it since her high school years. She supposed that was because she’d been happy.

  Walking had been the farthest thing from her mind when she'd come home from work that evening three (four?) months ago. She'd dropped her purse on the kitchen table, poured herself a glass of orange juice, and listened to the drone of the television news from the living room. What had the story been? Something out of Chicago, crazy people attacking the staff at Mercy Hospital. Grainy cell phone footage of patients in a gurney-lined corridor screaming as someone opened up with a submachine gun.

  She remembered picking up the OJ and sauntering into the living room. She'd had something on her mind, something she wanted to say to Colin. Some triviality about work, or what they would have for dinner — something. She’d started to voice it, but then there was Colin, sprawled dead on the couch. She'd dropped the glass, it shattered on the floor, and her mind had buckled as though suddenly burdened with a crushing load.

  The shotgun had been propped between his legs, and she saw that one of his brown boat shoes was off his foot and laying on its side. The clinical part of her mind had coldly informed her that he'd kicked it off so he could press down on the trigger with his big toe, and that idea particularly horrified her, because she thought that if you could be bothered to take your shoe off, you really must be determined.

  Her brain had repeated that little tidbit as she'd stared at the body, echoing it in a hushed whisper, like a breathless gossip: He took his shoe off! He took his shoe off! He took his shoe off! – until she thought she might go mad right there in the living room, stuck in this repeating loop, and so to break it, she'd brought up a fist and gave herself three quick and good raps in the mouth.

  A single, powerful urge had rushed to the forefront of her thoughts, scattering all other considerations like an NFL running back through a Pee Wee League defensive line, and that urge had been WALK.

  Before she could hit herself again, she’d made herself turn around and leave. She’d gone past her purse without bothering to grab it, still dressed in the lab coat and the plain skirt and the sensible work heels. At some point she must’ve found more suitable attire, because now she was in jeans and a pair of good hiking boots, but she had no recollection of when or where she got them.

  There'd been a note pinned to his chest. All it said was Forgive me, Elle.

  Well, fuck that.

  The shotgun in his mouth had been a gift from her mother-in-law, who had never approved of her, and who had stared unblinking daggers at her when she unwrapped it at her wedding shower. The old lady had come from old money, and she had grunted something about skeet shooting, a proper hoity-toity pastime for Professor Stetler and her affluent social circle. She’d given her a stiff clap on the shoulder and an icy congratulations, dear, and Elle knew what she meant just fine. Congratulations on marrying up the ladder, peasant.

  Colin's mother had chaired the philosophy department at the same university her son taught at, and the shotgun had come inscribed with a Latin motto on the barrel. She remembered it well, because it had been face-up when she'd seen it propped against her husband's body: Ama Et Fac Quod Vis.

  She didn’t read Latin and had never learned what it meant, had assumed it was something underhanded and snide from the old bitch, but the phrase had lodged in her skull, and she muttered it at least once a day. She didn't know why, except that it had a nice cadence. It bounced and rolled around in her head with every faltering step she took.

  She'd been only dimly aware of the changes in the world around her, which seemed to come roughly a month after she'd left home. She'd observed the dead here and there, avoided them mostly, hid from them when she had to. There weren't many on the highways, and unless she needed food, she avoided towns altogether. She wasn't particularly interested in what they were, or where they'd come from; she knew only that they were best avoided.

  On her third day out of the mountains her stomach began to gnaw at the walls of her ribcage. She hadn't eaten in days, and knew that she'd soon have to forage. Her last meal had been raw potatoes from someone’s untended garden patch. The plants had been wild and rather pathetic; she’d only found three tiny spuds, and she ate those raw.

  Soon she was lightheaded, and the need for food grew more desperate. There was less population in this part of the country, and therefore less ruined vehicles and empty towns to pick through. Her legs itched to keep moving, and they demanded regular calories which she could no longer guarantee. She began to fear her walk would end.

  By midday the sun was out in force. Winter was over, and the weather was mild, but she overheated easily and now she had to worry about her canteen running dry. She was dependent on creeks and rivers, now that the snow was gone, and they were few and far between.

  That evening she slept up a tree on the side of the highway. In the dead of night she awoke to a pack of coyotes circling its trunk. They huddled below her for what felt like an hour, sniffing the places where she’d left her scent and nipping at one another before finally moving on. Later she heard their high, warbling cries coming from the mountains south of her, followed by the distant, echoing growl of a dead man.

  When morning broke she eased out of the tree and walked on. She had nothing to eat for breakfast, and an icy pain enveloped her stomach.

  Hours later she saw a gleam of reflected sunlight – something metal up ahead on the side of the road. She hoped it was a car. A lot of people had been on the road when things had changed, and they'd tended to travel heavy. The cars she picked through were often laden with snack cakes and Slim Jims and half-drunk Gatorade bottles. Junk food was good, trail mix or army rations were better. Anything loaded with preservatives that wouldn't have spoiled.

  The glittering on the road intensified as she drew nearer, and soon it took solid form. It was a row of gas pumps, she saw, standing before a lone building of stained timber and unfinished log pillars – that faux rustic motif that became prevalent around the time you crossed into Mountain Standard Time. They were mock-ups of old pioneer general stores, but instead of cornmeal and gunpowder inside, there'd be racks of
T-shirts, souvenir coffee mugs, refrigerator magnets, straw cowboy hats, cheap pocket knives under a glass display case.

  And, like any other gas station, lots of cheap food.

  The gas pumps were antiquated by at least forty years, the kind with chromed faceplates and spinning mechanical readouts. Someone had taped a flap of cardboard to one of them, and NO GAS was written on it in black magic marker.

  Wood-carved letters hung above the storefront: CUSTER'S LAST TRADING POST.

  Beneath that was a hanging banner, red text on white: WELCOME TOURISTS! TRY OUR “CUSTER” PIE.

  A porch ran along the front of the building, stacked high with barbecue grill propane tanks, bundles of cut firewood, and a hulking white freezer with ICE emblazoned on the front in frosty blue letters. She saw a three-legged patio table with a stack of dog-eared newspapers on it, and next to it was a man

  He was sitting on a director's chair, legs crossed and reading a newspaper through a pair of old lady bifocals. He hadn't looked at her, though he'd surely heard her approach, and when she stopped in her tracks with an audible whoosh of sand on rubber soles, he only turned to a new page without so much as a glance. His nose stayed in his paper, his lips moving silently as he read.

  “Good morning,” she said, when it was clear she wouldn't get an acknowledgement. Her voice sounded like a rusty screen door.

  He didn't look up from his reading. He was an older man with close-cropped salt-and-pepper hair and a handlebar mustache, wearing a flannel shirt rolled to the elbows. Three days of beard ran across his jawline, and the flesh beneath was deeply tanned and crinkled around the eyes.

  “Morning,” he said absently, not lifting his gaze. She started to say more, but he raised an I'll-be-right-with-you index finger and kept reading.

  The woman, who hadn’t uttered more than a sentence to anyone in weeks, was perfectly fine with this

  “This world's gone straight to hell,” the man suddenly announced, putting heavy emphasis on each syllable. He shook his head, disgusted, and finally looked up at her.