Wilderness Apocalypse

Chapter 1

The buck came down to the creek just after first light, and Burner had been waiting for him since the stars were still out.

He lay flat in a shallow depression behind a deadfall pine, elbows dug into frozen needles, the AK-47 resting on a folded strip of wool blanket so the metal would not click against the wood.

Cold had worked its way through three layers into his ribs an hour ago.

He had stopped noticing it around the time the sky turned the color of old iron.

Yak lay beside him, chin on his paws, ears forward.

The dog had not moved in forty minutes. That was the thing about Yak. Other dogs whined, shifted, gave you away with a tail thump at the worst possible second. Yak had a stillness in him that Burner had never trained into the animal. It was just there, the way some men are born patient.

The buck was a four by four, heavy in the shoulders, maybe two hundred and forty pounds on the hoof.

He came out of the aspens with his head high and his nose working.

He stopped at the edge of the gravel bar and stood there for a long time, doing the thing deer do, which is nothing at all, for so long that an impatient man would stand up and stretch and lose everything.

Burner was not an impatient man. Not anymore. The world had beaten that out of him along with a lot of other things.

He breathed out slow through his nose and let the front sight settle low behind the shoulder.

The AK was not a hunting rifle. Purists would tell you that.

The optics were iron and old, the trigger was a piece of gritty Eastern European nonsense, and the round was built for killing men at three hundred meters, not for dropping clean-tasting meat.

Burner had heard all of it in another life, in gun shops with fluorescent lights and coffee machines and men who had never been hungry.

What the AK was, was reliable. It did not care about mud, or river water, or the eleven months since the last box of oil had run out. He had fed it ammunition scavenged from four different houses and two overturned trucks and it had eaten every mismatched round without complaint.

Reliability was worth more than elegance now. Everything else had proven that.

The buck lowered his head to drink.

Burner squeezed.

The shot cracked across the drainage and came back off the far ridge a half second later, doubled, like two men shooting. The buck went down on his front knees, then over onto his side, and kicked twice against the gravel and was still.

Yak did not move. He waited for the word.

"Go on," Burner said.

The dog went, low and fast, splashing across the shallow water, and circled the animal once before sitting down beside it and looking back up the slope as if to ask what was taking so long.

Burner got up slowly. His right knee had never been right since the winter he wrecked the truck, and cold mornings made it worse. He stood there a moment with his hand on the deadfall, listening.

That was the part people forgot. The shot was not the end. The shot was an announcement. Anybody inside two miles now knew there was a man in this drainage with a rifle and a fresh kill.

He counted to sixty. Then he counted to sixty again.

Nothing. Just the creek talking to itself and a raven complaining somewhere up the ridge.

He went down to the water.

The work took him most of an hour. He had a good knife, a Finnish blade with a birchwood handle he had taken from a dead man's belt the first spring, and he had gotten fast with it out of necessity.

He opened the buck, saved the heart and the liver in a plastic bag he had washed and reused so many times it had gone soft and cloudy.

He quartered the animal and bagged the meat in the game sacks he carried folded flat in his pack.

Yak got the scraps. The dog ate the way he did everything, efficiently, without drama.

Burner buried the offal under a slab of rock, not because it would fool a bear but because it would slow one down, and washed his hands and forearms in the creek until they burned.

The water was so cold it made his teeth ache.

He sat back on his heels for a second and looked at his hands. They were not the hands he had come out here with. The knuckles were bigger. There were two scars across the back of the left one he could not remember getting. The nails were black at the edges no matter how much he scrubbed.

Thirty-five years old. He did not look thirty-five anymore. He had not seen a mirror in seven months, but he did not need one.

He shouldered the meat, roughly ninety pounds of it across the frame pack, and started the climb back.

The camp was three miles up and eight hundred feet of elevation, and he did not take the same route twice. That was rule one. He had a rotation of five approaches and he picked them by a system that was not quite random but close enough that he could not have explained it to anybody.

There was nobody to explain it to. That was rule two.

The forest changed as he climbed. The aspens gave out and the lodgepole took over, close and dark, the trunks rising like the bars of something.

In summer this country was so green it hurt your eyes.

In September it was starting to turn brittle at the edges, the underbrush going yellow, the mornings hard with frost that did not burn off until nine.

Winter was coming. Everything he did now, he did with that arithmetic behind it.

He caught himself. Bad word. He had gotten superstitious about certain words, the way men in trenches got superstitious. Numbers were fine. Counting was fine. It was the abstraction of it he had lost patience with, the idea that you could figure the world out on paper.

He had been good at figures once. He had sat in an office in Billings and looked at spreadsheets for a living, and when the lights went out he had learned within about nine days that a spreadsheet would not keep you alive or warm or fed.

Calories would. Firewood would. A dog that could hear things you could not would.

Eleven months. He still measured time from that night, the way people used to measure it from a birthday. Eleven months since the sky over the Bitterroots had lit up pale green and violet, three separate flashes, high and silent, and every light in the valley below had gone out at once.

He had been on his deck with a beer in his hand. He remembered dropping the bottle. He remembered the sound it made on the boards, absurdly loud in a world that had just gone completely silent.

No hum. That was what he had noticed first. Not the dark. The absence of the hum, the one you never hear until it stops, the refrigerator and the well pump and the power lines and every other small mechanical thing whispering underneath everything all the time.

It stopped. And it never started again.

He shifted the pack higher on his hips and kept climbing.

Three days without power, people were annoyed. Ten days, they were scared. Three weeks, the highway out of town was a parking lot of dead vehicles and men were fighting over the contents of a gas station that had nothing in it but warm soda and lottery tickets.

Six weeks, the first bodies.

He had left in week two. He had been smarter than most, and luckier, and he would be the first to admit that luck was doing most of the work in that sentence.

His truck was an eighty-nine diesel with no computer in it, and it had started, and he had loaded it with everything in the house and driven north until the roads turned to logging tracks and then walked.

The truck was still down there under a camouflage tarp in a gully, out of fuel, useful now only as a steel box that kept mice out of things.

He crossed the bench where the old burn had come through, twenty years back by the look of it, standing snags gone silver and the new growth thick around their feet. From here he could see forty miles south down the valley.

He stopped and looked, the way he always did.

No smoke. No dust on the switchbacks. No glint of glass.

He had seen smoke twice in eleven months. Once in spring, a long gray smear far to the west that had burned for four days. Once in July, closer, a single thread that had gone up for one night and then stopped.

He had not gone to look either time.

That was the thing people would not have understood about him before. They would have called it cowardice. Burner had turned it over enough nights to have made his peace with it.

Going to look meant meeting someone. Meeting someone meant a decision, and the decision was never as simple as good man or bad man. It was: does this person need something I have. And the answer was always yes, because everyone alive needed everything, and there was not enough of anything.

Two men in a forest with one bag of food. That was the whole world now. He had watched it play out four times in the first three months and he had not liked what it did to the men involved, and he had not liked what it had almost done to him.

So he had made himself a rule and the rule was: alone.

Alone was not happy. He would not have called it happy. But alone was clean, and it was quiet, and at the end of the day the only person he had to look at was himself, and he had gotten used to that face.

Yak trotted ahead, checking the line of the trail, coming back, going out again. The dog had an orbit, and the orbit was Burner.

"You don't count," he told the dog.

Yak did not respond to that, being a dog.

The camp was set in a fold of ground below a rock rib, a spot Burner had spent four days choosing. It was invisible from the drainage below and from the ridge above. It had water seventy yards away and a natural rock overhang that threw back the heat of a fire and hid the glow from three sides.

He had built a shelter against the rib out of deadfall and a green canvas tarp, packed with moss and duff along the north wall, and over the summer he had improved it until it was closer to a cabin than a camp.

There was a sleeping platform off the ground.

There was a stone hearth with a flue of stacked rock that pulled smoke up and out along the rock face where it broke apart in the pines.