Survivors – A Novel of the Coming Collapse

Andy wanted to turn north, but he knew that he first had to travel west for more than a week to skirt around the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico. Every day he rode toward the sunset, hoping and waiting for the turn northward. That wouldn’t come until he reached Villahermosa, three hundred miles to the southwest. Andy hoped to make thirty-five miles per day, assuming he could find plentiful food and water for his horse. Theoretically, he could be home in New Mexico, 1,750 miles away, in just two months, but that was “as the crow flies.” More realistically, he knew that it would probably take at least twice that long. There were deserts and mountain ranges ahead, and many unknown perils.

Traveling entirely at night would in some ways be safer, but he was afraid that he’d stumble into an ambush, and the mosquitos swarmed by the thousands. It took a heavy application of bug juice to discourage them. Taking pity on Prieto, Laine daubed a bit of insect repellent around the horse’s eyes before sleeping each night. He dreaded leaving the mosquito-netted bivy bag each morning.

Laine close-hobbled Prieto every night and was pleased to see that the horse rarely wandered more than ten yards away from the bivouac bag. Some nights he hardly moved at all. The sound of the horse’s breathing and the regular swishing of his tail were comforting. Andy hoped that he might give him some warning if a man or jaguar approached the camp. Andy even became accustomed to the horse’s daily pattern of urination, defecation, and flatulence. Prieto often showed signs of anxiety for the first hour after Andy settled into the bivy bag each night. Then the horse would let loose a ripping fart, let out a loud breath through its nostrils, and finally stand still, often for the full night. This routine made Andy laugh the first few times that he heard it.

He got into the routine of grooming the horse twice a day, including picking his hooves. The most time-consuming part was searching for and removing ticks. He’d often find a tick on Prieto’s belly or in one of his ears. If the horse shook his head in the middle of the day, Andy would stop, dismount, and check his ears for ticks. This was usually the cause.

Andy’s first attempt at a radio contact from Mexico was two days later, on a Tuesday night. The propagation was so poor that he couldn’t even receive Lars’s previously strong signal. He gave up in disgust.

Prieto tried to linger with his hooves in the water after watering breaks. Andy would have liked to indulge the horse’s preference, but he considered it a security risk. After all, creek and river crossings were high-risk ambush areas.

He also worried about his horse eating noxious weeds and made a point of only stopping and letting Prieto graze in grasses that he recognized. Sometimes the horse would get into a particularly tasty bunch of grass and be reluctant to move on. When that happened, Andy would have to tug quite hard on Prieto’s reins, or if he was dismounted at the time, he’d ball up his fist with his thumb extended and dig his thumb into Prieto’s chest while ordering him backward with the words, “?Hacia atras!”

Despite Prieto’s few quirky habits, Andy was impressed with his intelligence and instincts. The horse had particularly good sense about snakes. Several times, Andy would be riding alongside the road at a trot and suddenly Prieto would come to a dead stop and lay back his ears. Each time there was a snake just a few paces ahead. If the snake was a fer-de-lance (called a “Tommy Goff” in Belize) or an unidentified snake species, Andy would simply guide the horse in a large circle around to avoid it. But if it was a large rattlesnake, Andy would dismount and tie up Prieto at a safe distance. Then he’d pin the snake’s head down with a branch and decapitate it with his pocketknife. Rattlesnakes were good eating. But Prieto was so frightened of snakes that he’d start to prance in place. Andy learned that the only way that he could get close to Prieto when holding a dead snake was if he first hid it in a sack.

Because of the space constraints of his backpack, Andy could only carry four or five days’ worth of food. By the time he reached the town of Escarcega, he was down to his last few bits of food. He saw a sign on a small masonry building with heavily barred windows: “Monedas Numismatico.”

A sign hanging inside the front window read “Abierto,” showing that the store was open. As Laine dismounted, a boy wearing a large sombrero approached and asked, “?Le cuido su caballo?” Andy nodded affirmatively. Andy handed the boy Prieto’s reins. Expecting the wait to be twenty minutes, he told the boy, “Aproximadamente veinte minutos.”

Just as at the coin shop in Germany, Andy had to be buzzed in.