Survival Log, Edward Collins 10/5/2012
When I stop to eat, I pour the high-proof liquor from my trunk into the gas tank. I’ve been running my car off of alcohol for a while now. It took weeks of scavenging to find all the parts I needed, and days more of pouring over old service manuals and books on engine conversion. The old world, tied together by electricity, gave way to an almost entirely digital culture. We let hard copies of even basic information fall by the wayside.
Now, we’re barely a step ahead of primitive man and information is life. The meek inherited a world that no longer coddled them, and it took them less than a year to begin eating each other. Men like that wretch back at the gas station? I see them everywhere I go: scared, starving…
Alone.
Evening approaches. One of my headlights is dead; I should change it the next time I find a spare bulb. There’s a condominium complex up ahead. I park outside the broken gate and reach into the back seat for my rifle.
It’s quiet. The deep purple glow of the sun through the clouds grows ever darker. I grab an empty backpack and head towards the first building I see. It’s locked; I work with my picks quickly before the light is completely gone.
It’s a haze inside. Nobody’s been in here for years. I shake my flashlight, giving it a charge before turning it on, the blue beam barely cutting through the cloud of dust.
The floor has a substrate of pest droppings and mold that skirts the edge of each wall. Each step crunches against peeling linoleum tile. Cabinets lay open, their interiors like twisted dioramas; a cluster of dead cockroaches, a tiny mouse skeleton pasted to a sprung mouse trap. Out of reflex I flip the switch on my Geiger counter, but the radiation has long dissipated. A can of kidney beans lays in one of the cabinets. I stuff it in my bag and open the refrigerator, and the sharp odor of rot hit his nostrils even through the particle mask.
I make my way through the condo. Other scavengers are a threat: starving, displaced wanderers willing to do anything to live for one more day. I rifle through the bedroom and the closet. Old clothes, moth-eaten and covered in rodent droppings; a few stale, dusty shirts. I could always use more shirts. A safe sits on the top shelf and takes me a while to crack, but when I do, there’s a pistol inside with two magazines filled with ammunition. Grimy dust sticks to the exposed bullets in the top of each magazine. The slide still works; maybe needs to be cleaned, but it’s in good condition. I tuck the weapon in my waistband and pull out the rest: a jewelry box containing what was once a small fortune in gold, several hundred dollars in cash, a bag of fossilized marijuana…
A couple in their thirties lived here. Professionals; mild-mannered, but indulgent upon small vices. There’s a certain intimacy here, things that weren’t spoken about outside of this house. I roll the bag of weed between my fingers and imagine what they must have been like…
It doesn’t matter. They’re dead. I’m like an archaeologist without a museum, collecting fragments of a world I’ll never see again, for no purpose other than refreshing what has become a vague and distant memory.
I pull out the wad of money and think to myself how people had once gone their entire lives seeking its acquisition: working for it, dying for it. They traded their bodies, their principles, their beliefs for it. It had once been the driving force for all of humanity. Now, as I light the fire for the evening, I watch the clumps of green, fibrous paper burn away. Their printed faces stare back at me in their final moments before becoming ash, filling me with a strange sense of dread.
It’s just paper now. Fuel for the fire.
In the firelight, the gun is cleaned. The can of beans is cooked. Urine is distilled into potable water. Daydreams of first dates, grasping for that levity. I look up at the ceiling and think back to the past. How much is memory and how much is imagination filling in the gaps? Did she have green eyes or blue? What was it you called her?
