The No Where Apocalypse (Book 1): Stranded No Where (8 page)

I needed to clean this thing up so I could gut that deer, hopefully sometime today.

I used a generous coating of cooking oil and a dirty rag to work on the rust. Happy with the results I searched for something to tackle the last problem.

This knife was duller than my first find. While I was excited to get back to my kill and clean it, I knew I needed an edge that would cut something other than water.

Fortunately, someone had left a sharpening steel here at the cabin. At home, I did a lot of cooking, well actually more like the prep work. Steely did most of the actual cooking. But I knew how to slice and dice. And that began with a sharp knife.

Drawing the metal against metal, I felt the dull edge give up some of its coating. This wasn’t going to be a quick job, but with each pass I knew the knife was getting closer to being useful. And how sharp did it need to be?

My dad always claimed that a hunter’s knife needed to be so sharp that he was scared of it. Well, this wasn’t going to be that sharp. This would eventually end up somewhere between scared and concerned. Probably more on the concerned end of the spectrum.

The entire time I ran the blade down the steel I tried to recall the process of cleaning a deer. I knew the guts needed to come out, that much was common knowledge. Even if I messed it up, which I would undoubtedly do, I couldn’t make that much of a mess, could I?

After poking a hole just below the sternum, the next slice went up the rib cage. And I had to be careful to stick to the cartilage. Slicing through ribs would take the edge off the blade.

I as a little fuzzy on how to cut around the hindquarters. That was going to be an issue. But I shrugged it away, testing the blade on a piece of scratch paper I’d found. Perfect; I was ready.
 

The pelvic bone ran across my mind. I did a quick scan of the room. An ax would come in handy. Seeing none I decided to play it by feel. I’d figure out a way once I was inside the bloody mess.

Day 50 - continued -
 
WOP

I stood over the gut pile winded. Sprinting back to my kill, I’d almost tripped twice. I guess I was anxious to get at this…the process.

But staring down at where my deer had been, the only thing left was a mess of blood and entrails. The deer itself, the one I knew I had killed a half hour ago, was gone.

My eyes squeezed tightly shut before I let out a low guttural moan. Someone had swiped my deer.

Hustling back to the road, I first looked left then right. Left — south — was nothing but a gloomy empty road. To my right, I spied a single soul, trotting down the middle of the blacktop. And if I was seeing things correctly, he had something slung over his shoulders and around his neck. Something large. Something that looked similar to a small deer.

It took a few minutes of running, something I wasn’t really good at, to catch up to the man. Well, I assumed it was a man. Twice he had looked back and picked up his pace. Each time I saw his face and swore he had a beard.

“Where you going with my deer?” I shouted ahead when I was within 50 yards of him.

He slowed and then stopped. Turning, I noticed his grin.

“This is my deer,” he answered in a friendly way.

Yeah, that wasn’t gonna happen. I stepped within 20 feet of him, winded but ready for action.

“My deer that I killed back there, just off the road,” I continued, studying my thief. He was a little shorter than me, but otherwise we could have been kin I thought. We both had longish sweaty hair, each had a scruffy beard, and neither of our clothing could be called anything but filthy.

“I have to warn you,” he stated, laying the deer on the road. It was then I noticed the fresh blood running down the front of his tan leather jacket. “I have a knife. So before you think about anything goofy, just be warned.”

I shook him off. Pulling the Glock from my pocket, I held it at my side.

His confident expression changed to one of guilt. “Huh,” he said, his eyes moving from the gun to my face. “Guess you got me beat.”

“I just shot that thing,” I said, pointing at the deer. “What gives you the right to come take it?”

He shrugged first and then scratched at his face with a bloody hand. “Heard you shoot, came to see what was happening, and saw you run away from the woods, back towards that cabin on the other side of the road. When I came and checked, there was the deer.”

“And it didn’t dawn on you I was coming back?”

He laughed, wiping blood on his pants. “Me and my family ain’t had much to eat in a week now.” He pointed north, behind him. “We’re camped up on the edge of the lake, about a half-mile in from the road. Safer that way. I was out foraging, heard you shoot, saw the deer. Well, you know how desperate things have become.”

To be honest, he looked more ragged than I did. And I did understand his desperation.

“How many in your family?” I asked.

He held up four fingers. “Me, the wife, young daughter, and son. We had to leave Covington last week. Things have gotten a little unruly up there. Not safe for a family right now.”

I wished it had just been him. That would have made it easier to chase him off. But a wife and two kids? Chased from their home?

“Make you a deal,” I said, stepping between him and the deer. “You can have a front quarter.”

The disappointment in his eyes was obvious. “How about a half?” he begged. “I did clean it after all.”

How about nothing, ran through my mind. But that wasn’t very neighborly of me and I knew it. If not for the generosity of my three new friends, I might already be dead myself.

I let him cut one of the back quarters away. Ten minutes later he headed north, a deer lag and ham hoisted over his shoulder and I carried the remainder back towards my place.

A thought kept running through my mind: What if he didn’t have a family? What if he was just some road bum looking for a free lunch?

I made up my mind to investigate the lake and his cozy sounding setup. Not today, but sometime in the near future.

Day 65 WOP

Frank praised me for my generosity when I saw him next. People needed to help one another at a time like this, he claimed. Turning on your fellow man wasn’t the way to act.

A few days after that Lettie affirmed what Frank had said. She even gave me a hug, and a hearty one at that. I’d never taken the old gal to be much of a feeling person. Goes to show everyone can surprise you.

Lettie canned a good amount of the meat for me in glass jars. I dropped it off one morning and picked it up three nights later. Packed in each glass jar was a good amount of venison, half an onion (cut into smaller pieces) and one smashed bulb of garlic.

I dragged sixteen one-pound jars back to my place in a pull-behind carrier that was usually used to haul deer from the woods. Something my father and Bud
did
manage to leave behind that was of use to me. I figured that if I could make each container last three days, I had enough meat for a month.

Added on that were the dozen or so containers Lettie had given me earlier. Two months down; at least two more months of winter to cover, she warned.

Dizzy had agreed that the deer, taken a little more than a week back, was mine and I needed to tell that bum to pound sand. Winter was going to be tough enough without sharing with strangers. But it still made me think, weren’t we all strangers a mere few months back?

I helped Lettie harvest the last of her garden just as the first snows arrived. As best as I could tell it was late October, third week maybe. Snow in Chicago sometimes came in late November, but typically later than that. But watching the small white flakes dot the back of Lettie’s dark blue barn coat reminded me where I was. And that was most certainly not Chicago.

Dragging the final bag of potatoes down to her small smelly root cellar, I searched in the near darkness for the jar she said I would find down there. Turns out, they were easy to find. Hundreds and hundreds of mason jars lined the far wall, in a way that made grabbing them easy.

“Were gonna need more lids come spring,” Lettie said as I hauled 20 or so into her kitchen. There, over a wood stove, she prepared the last of the early spuds for canning.

“And where do we find those?” I asked, slightly winded from all the steps.

She smiled as she began to clean the dusty clear jars. “Covington. And we’re gonna need a big bag of salt too. Fifty pounds I suppose.”

I stared at her from a chair on the opposite side of the stove. “And you have money for this? Cause I sure don’t.”

“You and Tom will have to get busy killing deer,” she replied, more interested in her canning than the conversation.

“Who’s Tom?”

“Dizzy,” she answered, sounding like I was a fool for not knowing that.

I had always wondered what his actual name was. It just hadn’t come up in conversation yet. And I really wasn’t much of a conversationalist when it came down to it.

“Tom Dizzienski,” she answered as if I had asked for his full name. “We just always called him Dizzy. Like his dad was called.”

“What’d you do for a living, Lettie? Before you retired?” As long as new info was abounding, this seemed like a good time for more questions.

“I worked at one of those nudie clubs up in Iron River,” she answered, a sly grin rising on her lips.

“What’d you do there?”

I saw her roll her eyes at me. “I was a dancer,” she answered with a slight giggle in her words. “That was years ago. But I made a lot of money in the 12 years I worked up there.”

Now it was my turn to laugh. “I would have never guessed.”

She glanced at me, still working on her jars. “I’m surprised Frank hadn’t told you already. He was one of my regulars. When he wasn’t out on Superior on a ship.”

“You ever marry?”

She shook her head, pausing for a moment. “Never had much of a need for a regular man,” she answered, scratching at some dirt on one of the containers. “Been so long now that I’m not sure what I’d do with someone else here, stepping all over my feet, getting in the way.”

Outside I noticed the snow picking up. “I should head back.” I had a number of items in my cart and it was going to be slow going. Besides, daylight was dwindling and I didn’t want to be out after dark. I wasn’t ready for that yet.

“With the snow there’ll be more trouble,” Lettie warned. “People will be getting desperate. You need to watch the road and around your place well.”

Stories were beginning to abound of weary travelers, desperate for food and shelter, breaking into occupied cabins and trying to roust the current owners. Sometimes they were fought off; other times things didn’t end so well. But the increase of people on the highway brought tales of these escapades and the vermin themselves.

“You keep safe too,” I called back to Lettie, pulling my coat back on.

Her head tipped towards the corner of the kitchen. “My 30-30 is in fine working order,” she replied, packing white potatoes into jars. “I just touch a shot or two off anytime someone approaches, and trouble avoids me.” She shot me a peek. “You do the same now. Don’t trust no one.”

Those words and the thought of someone kicking me out of my warm cabin into the cold winter surrounding gave me food for thought on the five-mile journey home.

Day 65 - continued - WOP

Hauling my goodies back from Lettie’s, I passed the lake. I had yet to try my hand at fishing, though I had discovered rods and tackle in a cramped corner of the bedroom back home. Maybe next spring I’d have a hankering for fish.

I paused at the road leading west along the north shore of the narrow lake. Down this road, I’d discover the man who had tried to steal my deer, along with his family. Or so legend had it. In the two weeks that had passed since our encounter, I had wondered about his story many times.

Most likely, he was a single man, making his way from one town to another. There’d been a number of men like that in the past few weeks. All seemingly trying to get somewhere before winter came.

He’d been lucky and stumbled across my fresh kill. He probably watched me in action and swooped in for the taking when the time was right.

Hunger causes a man, or women or child, to do things they wouldn’t normally think of. I got it, I understood it, but I sure as hell didn’t like it.

The snow had let up; just a few spits of white balls now and then. I was going to take that road to the west, go back a half-mile or so, and find this camp. Maybe I’d even discover his family just as promised.

Leaving my cart behind, I felt the gravel crunch beneath my pink boots. Something told me I wasn’t going to find anything at the end of this road. Perhaps a deserted pace or two, maybe even an old used up camp spot where the man had squatted, enjoying my kill.

But I needed to find out if I was as big as sucker as I believed.

As far as I could tell the smoke wafting into the heavy air came from a small fishing shack about 100 yards to my west. A set of three similar low-roofed dwellings sat in a row: one red, one yellow and one light blue. The blue shack had smoke coming from the chimney.

I supposed that some family owned all three. And just to make their cheery lives a little brighter, one of them came up with the idea of painting each similar hut a different color.

‘Bradley and Mel’s is yellow, Kim and Chuck’s is red, and mine and Trevor’s is blue. Isn’t that just darling?’ The voice of a thirty-something housewife rocked my mind as I inched closer to the drive leading to them.

There was someone here, but that didn’t mean it was the man I’d met. And even if it was him, there was no guarantee of a family. I wondered how his face would show the shame when I realized I had busted his lie in half?

I noticed movement nearer the lake so I circled wide, not wanting to spook anyone. As I stepped closer, the man looked up. I knew it was the same fellow; there was still blood on his jacket, though a little darker and obviously dried by now.

The moment he saw me I noticed his smile. He waved. “Welcome,” he called out, lowering his wheelbarrow full of sticks and twigs to the ground. He came right to me and shook my hand.