Chapter 2
Panic or Madness?
For the record, unicorns aren’t white, magical, prancing visions of elegance. Rather, they are the size of lean-muscled Shetland ponies, are mottled brown in color, have a single black spiral horn, and tend toward aggressive possessiveness. They had grazed peacefully until I gasped loudly.
Once I had made that noise, the dominant unicorn charged me, determined to drive away an imminent threat. Apparently I hadn’t been snoring, and I startled them. I was lucky because the head of my sleeping bag faced the culvert that led under the highway. I was also lucky because I was able to scuttle inside before the beast stomped all over my sleeping bag and backpack with his deadly looking black hooves. When the animal was reassured that the threat was gone and that I was suitably subjugated, he paused to hiss at me with solid black eyes flashing. I moved further into the culvert, not at all certain that he couldn’t reach me. (And although I couldn’t speak unicorn, I thought he was saying, “Showed you, bee-otch.”)
With a swish of his multihued mane, the stallion wheeled about and rejoined the herd. Then with a trumpeting bellow, he nipped and roared until they galloped into the forest at his obvious behest. Astonished, I stayed where I was.
Shaking visibly, I waited for long minutes until I was certain the unicorns weren’t coming back. The sound of their movement had faded into a brisk wind that moved the branches of the trees around me. I retrieved my belongings, throwing away half the food and a few items that were no longer of service. Then I returned to the road with my knees still trembling.
My logical mind wanted to make sense of the occurrence of what looked like unicorns. Certainly, they were horse-like. Their subtle forms were lighter in weight. But there was a foot-long black horn that spiraled up from the center of their foreheads. They looked similar to horses, but they were oh so plainly, not.
I pinched my arm viciously and discovered that I still bruised easily.
The passing mile markers and the occasional road sign returned me to a state of normality. My father would have called it a state of shock. I wasn’t laughing. I wasn’t crying. I wasn’t anything. I just put one foot in front of the other, ignored the blisters that reopened, and continued on my way. If someone had appeared before me at that moment, I would have thrown myself at their feet and cried with relief. They would have had to drag me around because I wouldn’t be able to let go of their legs. Even if that someone happened to be Hitler or Charles Manson.
However, there was no one, and no one appeared.
I passed three campgrounds and only stopped at the first one. The story was the same as everything else I had discovered. There were cars, trucks, RVs, and campers. All were parked in spaces that showed they were there during the dead of night when little was going on. Nothing worked. No one was there. Just outside one of the smaller campers I found an empty set of men’s pajamas and slippers. There was a flashlight lying on the ground next to the clothing and a roll of toilet paper. He’d been on his way to the public restroom.
Even though sunlight was pouring down on me, I shivered. I nudged the flashlight and bit my lip. I found three other cell phones within a half-hour and none of them worked. There was a public emergency phone in the campground that was as dead as everything else.
I sat at a picnic table and decided I must be in hell, although I wasn’t sure what I had done to put myself there. It was just me and some ornery unicorns, which thankfully seemed to be herbivores.
Then a chipmunk chattered demandingly at me. I jumped as if I had never heard such a noise before. He or she perched on the end of the table and squeaked and peeped at me. After a single minute of being in deep freeze, I let my arm slide back through the straps of the backpack and brought it to the table. The chipmunk stopped its vocal admonishments and tilted its head interestedly. With my hands still shaking, I found a pack of crackers and slowly fed nearly half of it to the chipmunk. I put the cracker as far away from me as I could. The animal would wait for my arm to withdraw, then would rush in to collect its booty. Finally, the chipmunk would withdraw to the far end of the table to eat its prize.
I kept expecting more chipmunks to come running for the dinner bell but I got nothing. It seemed as though I added a single creature to my count. It was me, the unicorns, and a chipmunk.
When the chipmunk was full of crackers, it squeaked and ran off. I wondered if it was looking for compatriots. “Good luck,” I said softly and winced at the sound of my own voice. I hesitated before I put the backpack on. I couldn’t catch the little guy or girl, and I knew it wouldn’t want me to catch it, so I left the rest of the crackers on the table.
I was nearly out of the campground before another chipmunk ran across the road. It paused to chatter at me. I paused and watched as it ran toward the table with the crackers on it. The first chipmunk rushed back. They chattered and chirped at each other, and I could almost put words to the conversation. “Where have you been?” “I’m not sure.” “Where are all the humans?” “Well she’s here, isn’t she?” “Yes, well, where are all the rest?” “Beats me.” “Let’s eat.”
I watched silently and took a deep breath. It wasn’t exactly relief that coursed through me. I don’t know what to call it. Chipmunks were normal. Then I swatted away a mosquito before I realized what I was doing. My list was getting bigger. Me, unicorns, two chipmunks, and a mosquito. Whoo-hoo!
It was nearly nightfall when I walked into the first small town. It wasn’t much bigger than the name on its sign. There was a general store, a gas station, a tiny post office, and three houses. The general store and the gas station were locked. The post office was too, I assumed.
It felt as though I was standing in a ghost town. There were cars parked at the houses, but no one was moving, and all I could hear was the whistle of a breeze. I stood there for a long time before I knocked on one of the doors of the houses. Then I knocked on the door of the next house. I tried the doorbell too, but I couldn’t hear it ring inside, so I resorted to my fist on the wood of the front entrance. Finally, I knocked on the door of the third house.
I suppose I should have peeked inside the windows. I should have looked in the bedrooms to see if I could see flattened blankets and empty bed clothing, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. These houses had belonged to someone who wasn’t there anymore. They were empty, yet they were full of the memories of those who had once walked there.
It felt like a cemetery.
I slept in a storage shed behind the third house. It was pleasantly cozy with the smell of freshly cut grass inundating it. I made a pallet between a lawn mower and a kayak and slept poorly through the night. Deep in my subconscious, I was expecting someone to fling the door open and scream at me for trespassing.
In the morning, I broke into the house to get food and water. I ate Vienna sausages with my fingers and drank a lukewarm coke from the fridge. It almost felt like a feast when I chased the coke with a package of Oreo cookies. Then I took about a half hour to find what I wanted. The garage of the second house had it. It was an old-fashioned Schwinn bicycle. It had a rear rack and was simple enough that I thought electronics couldn’t come into it. I fixed my pack onto the back with a bungee cord and took off to the west once again.
Being on the bike was almost heavenly to my blistered heels. What hiking would have taken all day, took me two hours on the bike. I made the next town well before noon and found more of what I had already seen. Just as I rode into the next spot on the map, I passed a police cruiser planted cockeyed in the road. It had hit an electrical pole. I slowed enough to see the hat on the seat and then disregarded it.
This town was a little bigger. It even had a drug store. What it didn’t have, was any people.
I stopped for lunch, eating my pilfered goodies, trying to keep my mind blank. Not that that was hard to do.
The only stop I made was when I saw an empty Ford pickup truck that had run into a billboard’s supports. The billboard had canted forward but still remained upright. The tr
uck had a set of clothing in it, too. Flannel shirt, jeans, boots, and a cheap watch that was no longer ticking. No underwear, but maybe that had been a personal preference. What the truck did have was a rifle in the back window rack. I took that and hung it over my shoulder. I couldn’t find any bullets but could have slapped myself for not taking the police car’s weapons. I didn’t want to ride back, so I continued west.
I couldn’t have told myself out loud where I was going, but I knew all the same. My family had lived in Springfield, Oregon. It was about sixty miles from where we had parked our VW Jetta at the Santiam Pass. I couldn’t find anyone here, but there was a niggling of hope that prodded at me. My mother stayed at home because she didn’t like to hike. I hoped, no I prayed, that I would ride up to our house and find her there, waiting for us.
The next car that I found on the side of the road was a Lexus. I stopped because I wanted a map. The topographical maps that I had stopped at the edge of the Three Sisters Wilderness Area, and I needed something to give me a frame of reference. Instead, I found a dash-mounted GPS that was as dead as everything else. I also found an empty suit with an Armani tie. There was an Omega watch, too. Pretty for a man’s watch and just as useless as a rock. There weren’t any paper maps inside the car.
I rode thirteen more miles on the bike, until my bottom became numb, and stopped at another wide spot in the road. On the way I saw several birds, squirrels, and heard a dog barking off in the woods. At least I thought it was a dog. Because of my experience with the unicorns, I was apprehensive enough to decide not to go looking for the animal. Reason number one for that was that there could be all kinds of newly interesting things in the woods, any number of which might see me as an entrée. Reason number two was that the barking might not be coming from a…dog.
My list was growing. Because of that, I was somewhat relieved. There was life here. There wasn’t just me. So far I hadn’t found another human being, but there were other things alive. The chipmunks, for example, hadn’t come from another place. They had been in that campground when the world had changed. They were little mooches who were used to getting goodies from campers. They knew a human being and knew a soft touch when they saw one. I wasn’t the only living thing who was still around after something very strange had happened. And if that was true, then there might be others like me.
I limped around the town for a little while and then helped myself into the diner. There was a faint smell of something going bad. I hadn’t considered it, but without electricity, all the food was going to spoil. In the houses, in the grocery stores, and restaurants. I found an apple pie that didn’t smell bad and cut a thick piece. I sat at the counter on a stool and calmly ate the pie bite by bite with a fork I had snagged from a bin nearby. When I was done, I started to take the plate to the kitchen to clean up after myself, and then grimaced.
I was standing there at the end of the counter, when I looked up and saw someone watching me. I was frozen in place. So was the other person. When I dropped the dirty plate to the floor, we both jumped. Then I realized I was looking in a mirror. I had been looking at my own reflection, and I hadn’t recognized myself. My hair was still black and shoulder length. My eyes were still gray. I was still five foot five inches tall. I guessed I was still a size six although I hadn’t been eating well, and my jeans were sagging at my waist.
The girl in the mirror looked…hollow. She was as empty as the world outside the little diner. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe I had changed that night, only it took a mirror to reveal it to me.
I bit my lip until it bled. (Of course, that added color to my face.) Then I fled the diner.
I slept that night in a barn outside a modest ranch house. I didn’t bother knocking at the door. But I did pull the wooden ladder up into the loft with me so that no one would climb up after I was asleep.
The next morning I let a horse out of its pen. It was a regular horse with spotted pattern. It didn’t look sick or bothered, other than being a little skittish. However, the horse, a girl horse I think, didn’t want to have anything to do with me. She stayed on the far side of the corral even while I secured the gate to the fence to keep it from closing back on itself. I left the barn door open so the horse could help herself to the hay on the bottom floor. The water trough was full due to the rain of the previous week.
If I’d had a measuring gauge to estimate how I was feeling, the freeing of the horse would have brought the gauge up one notch. There, freed horse. Sophie, one extra notch. Life wasn’t great. In fact, life pretty well sucked, but it didn’t mean I couldn’t do something good for some other living creature. Maybe it didn’t make me feel quite so…hollow inside.
The horse nickered at me as I rode away. Maybe she could hang out with the unicorns.
By the end of that day, I saw more animals. A lot of birds. There were some dogs. I saw one cat slinking into its yard. I felt sorry for the animals. They were going to have to learn how to exist without humans. Apparently, just like I was going to have to do. I stopped to unlock gates and propped doors open for animals as I got closer to the Eugene area. Two larger dogs snarled at me as if I was the enemy, a pair of pit bulls of some kind, and I was forced to flee before they could attack me.
There were a lot more vehicles that had simply come to a stop wherever they happened to be. It looked as though engines had basically died, and the wheels of the cars rolled to a stop or collided with something or other. One minivan had crashed into a Jeep. There had been a fire, and the vehicles were blackened with soot. One car had through the window front of a dry cleaner’s store.
As I got closer to home, I didn’t stop and look anymore. I worked a little harder on the pedals and moved through familiar city streets. A block away from my house, I let the bike roll to a shaky stop and shuddered as I put my feet to the ground.
For two days my thoughts had been on my mother. Certainly, there were others to think of as well that I hadn’t previously considered. I had two good friends, Cherie and Kady, who lived a mile away with their mother, a postal worker. The twins went to my high school and were in several of my classes. My uncle, Avery, lived in Corvallis and was close to us. His son, Jeffrey, was two years younger than I was, and I loved him like he was my brother. I didn’t have a boyfriend, but there was a boy named Nate whom I liked. We’d gone on two dates. We were supposed to go the movies when I got back from the mountains. We hadn’t even kissed yet.
But it was my mother who drew me to Springfield. We had a nice three-bedroom bungalow in a middle class neighborhood. The yard was landscaped, and there wasn’t even a yard gnome to be found. She liked her rose bushes. She had ten different varieties in the front yard alone. She tried and tried again to teach me something about roses, but I hadn’t wanted to listen about stupid old plants.
I shuddered again and asked myself the anticipated question. What if she’s there? And the worst question, the one I didn’t want to think about, slithered through my mind like an evil creature of night. What if she’s not? What if her gold band and diamond solitaire are in the bed next to her silk night gown? What if I’ve lost them both?
In the end, my aching, overstrained muscles didn’t let me get back on the bike. I left the Schwinn in the middle of the street and walked around the corner. The third house on the left was ours. Brown with white trim. Brownish brick façade on the lower half. A white picket fence that was made from vinyl, so neither Mom nor Dad would ever have to paint it again. My home.
The sun was starting to slide below the horizon, but I had enough light to discover the door was locked. I dug the keys out of my backpack and opened the door.
The house smelled slightly musty. I knew before I went a single step that no one was there. I looked for a note or a sign or anything. The last thing I looked for was Mom’s wedding set.
It wasn’t in the bed as I had expected. Instead, it was in the kitchen on the tile floor next to her favorite peach-colored night gown. There was a broken glass of milk on the floor nearby. She had been
having trouble sleeping without her husband and child in the house.
As I looked at it, I reached inside my jeans and retrieved Dad’s wedding band. The three rings were clasped together urgently in my hand. When I finally broke free of the trance I was in, I found it was complete darkness and that I was crying desperately.