The End Is Now

Passing Copper Mountain on the second day, I pick up the bike trail. At least it’s a nicer walk than the interstate. As night is falling, I hike up the hillside over the highway to find an out-of-the-way place to lay my sleeping bag.

* * *

On the third day, I wake up in my sleeping bag shuddering with cold and body aches, and I know I’m not going to make it to Vail today, either. I’m close enough that there are scattered houses, and a road or two off the south side of 70 leading down into some settled country. Beyond, the ski slopes still gleam with manufactured snow, though it’s patchy and unrepaired. I wonder how long ago they stopped making it.

I wonder how many of these houses are inhabited, and how many belonged to movie stars and Silicon Valley types who used them for a month or two out of the year.

I wonder if anybody will take in a footsore wanderer who just woke up with the Fever.

* * *

Somehow, I bundle up my sleeping bag, although it’s not what you’d call a tidy roll. I can’t manage to get my pack up on my shoulders, so I half-drag it across the deserted highway, hop the K-rails, and stumble down a brushy hillside to a secondary road. There’s a sort of retaining slope made of round boulders shoved into the earth. I stagger-slide-tumble down it and roll onto the shoulder of the street.

There’s a house across the road. If I walk up to it and it’s inhabited, whoever lives there might just shoot me as a public health hazard. If it’s not inhabited, I don’t know how I might get in.

I could just lie here and die on the side of the road. The neighbors, if there are neighbors, might come put me out of my misery if I get lucky.

The house is probably empty. I can’t imagine a lot of people stayed in Vail when the food trucks stopped running. The ones who did probably have generators and hunting rifles, though. But when I haul myself to my hands and knees, collect my pack, and push myself upright on it, nobody shoots at me. That I notice. And still nobody shoots at me—that I notice—as I drag the pack and the now-torn sleeping bag across the road and up onto the wraparound porch of the wood-timbered house. I have to pause halfway up the four steps to rest, so they’d have plenty of time, too.

I stagger to the back, thinking maybe I can pry a window open with my pocket knife. But when I get there I discover the sliding door has been wrenched out of its tracks, then leaned back up against the house next to a top-of-the-line propane grill. I push it aside—this takes minutes of fumbling—squeeze through the gap, and collapse, along with my sleeping bag, onto the musty-smelling couch of a big room with an empty fireplace and a leather-upholstered conversation pit. I curl up, shuddering, aching, chest heaving, so cold my body won’t stop shaking. So cold my nipples ache and my teeth chatter.

I only stay like that for maybe half an hour, maybe only twenty minutes, but it feels like a year. When the ague eases—it’s like something out of Little House on the Prairie—I manage to stagger to the kitchen. I locate the bathroom—no water, but there’s a half-full bottle of NyQuil and some Excedrin in the medicine cabinet. A gun safe in the hallway has been pried open with something like a wrecking bar.

The weapons are gone. But whoever did it spilled a box of ammunition in their haste. I squat to pick up the bullets. Heavy—and I don’t have a gun—but each one is worth significantly more than its weight in calories. With those swaying in the pockets of my cargo pants, I follow the smell of rotting fruit to the kitchen and steel myself to open the fridge. It reeks, but there are two gallon jugs of water in there, and one is completely full. The cabinet beside it yields a half dozen more gallons, and a sealed bottle of cranberry juice, and two bottles of Mountain Dew. I score some protein powder, some weevily crackers, an unopened package of Oreos, an unopened box of granola bars, two tins of sardines, and a mason jar full of lentils that lurks behind an infested bag of flour. A small treasure trove of ramen packets lies scattered across the pantry floor. I almost weep with gratitude.

The cabinets have been rifled and all the canned goods taken except those sardines, some split pea soup, a tin of bean sprouts, and some low-fat coconut milk. There’s a locked, smashed liquor cabinet, but whoever looted the place took lightweight things: food and weapons easy to carry or valuable for trade.

Bananas have turned into a grayish sludge on the counter. The onions in the copper hanging basket are sprouting, but not spoiled.

I load a selection of my treasure, heavy on the beverages, into a bucket from under the sink and trudge back to the couch.

I don’t remember the next few days very well.

* * *

I dream of our last phone call. You offered to come find me. I told you to sit tight and take care of Casey. I told you I was coming home.