During the next three days, Luk and I cross a barren and blasted landscape of rocks, stunted trees, and dry riverbeds. The land seems tortured and battered by the sun during the day, while the night brings wind that rips and tears at any living thing that dares to traverse this hellish terrain. Everything seems bleached out, like old bones lying in the sun. Sera didn’t mention this place when she told us about her trip from Denver, perhaps she was trying to forget it.
For some reason the sun seems ten times hotter than normal as the sweat just pours off us, including the horses. Grit pants with his tongue hanging out all day long. We travel as fast as we can without pushing the horses too hard and at times we walk, just leading Ashen and Raven instead of riding them. Grit trudges alongside us, his head down with a look of steely determination on his face. There's no shade, no break from the sun and literally no sign of life anywhere. The landscape reminds me of pictures I saw in a book once of the surface of the moon.
In many places, for miles, the road is non-existent. The pavement has been completely eroded by the relentless power of sand, earth, and wind. Several times we simply keep heading in the direction that we assume is east, unsure if we're still following the highway, or not. We waste precious time here and there backtracking when we completely lose the trail. Even the metal guardrails and mile markers are either rusted away or buried under tons of blowing dirt.
At night we're forced to huddle together in our jackets to try and stay warm. Normally, I don’t complain whenever I have the chance to be close to Luk, but in this place, it's not the wonderful sensation that it normally is. Grit tucks himself in between us down by our legs with his head buried in the blanket. I begin to worry that if this is anything like the Deadlands that I won’t be able to make the crossing, but then I look up at Luk’s slumbering face and my worries dissipate and my confidence is restored.
On the fourth morning we finally start to see some signs of life. A few trees with green on them, a rabbit or two scurrying out of our way, and even the occasional wildflower. I look at Luk and shake my head.
“Thank god,” I say as I pull off my hat and shake the dust off it.
“You can say that again, I didn’t think that was going to end.”
Grit looks up at me and wags his tail. I think even he knows that we're finally out of the worst of it. The roadway reappears out of the dirt as it climbs slowly into the mountains ahead. Luk seems lost in thought the further we go, staring into the distance with a blank expression on his face. I reach out and touch his arm and he turns his head slowly to look at me.
“You okay?”
“Yeah,” he says groggily, and after a long pause he speaks again. “Do you feel weird?”
For a second I want to say no, but when I think about it I do feel a little odd, maybe winded is a better word. I remember something my Dad told me about; as you climb into the mountains around Denver, the air is going to slowly become thinner and you need to let your body become used to it.
“It’s the air Luk. There’s less oxygen up here,” I say and for the first time I notice how steeply sloped the road has become.
If we'd been walking I think I would have noticed it immediately, but the horses are doing all the work. I look at Luk, and I'm not even sure that he understands what I'm saying.
“We should stop for a few minutes, try to get used...to it,” I say, having to take a breath before the end of my sentence.
I reach over and grab Raven’s reins and I lead us both over to the side of the road where a few small pines trees are growing. I slip off Ashen and walk around to help Luk when all of the sudden, my legs feel weak. I lean up against the big black mare.
“Whoa,” I say, taking a few deep breaths.
Luk looks down at me and then slowly climbs down, holding onto the saddle horn the entire time. He turns and looks at me with a weak grin.
“How long...is this going...to...last?” he asks slowly, taking a breath between the last few words.
“Not too long, I think,” I say as I reach out my hand and grab his arm. “I have an idea; let’s sit down before...we fall down.”
Luk nods and we walk, arm in arm over to one of the trees and literally flop down onto the soft bed of needles, rolling onto our backs, staring up at the bright blue sky. I can hear Grit walk over and lay down next to us. After a few minutes of forcing myself to stay awake even though my eyes feel like lead weights, I finally start to feel a little better. Luk turns his head and looks at me.
“So, where are we?”
“As far as I can tell, we're probably about five miles from the border between Utah and Colorado,” I say.
“And that means what?”
“Didn’t you ever study anything at school?” I ask, laughing.
“Just you,” he says, flashing me a smile.
“Yeah, nice try. Anyway, I think the next closest town is going to be a place called Fruita and after that Grand Junction.”
“How far to this Fruit-place?”
“Maybe fifteen miles from the border.”
“Is there actually fruit there, or is it just a name?”
“No idea,” I say. “It lies in a valley between the mountains, so I'm hoping that there might be some water there and some place to hunt.”
“Okay. How are you feeling?”
“Good enough to get going again,” I say as I sit up slowly. The lightheadedness is gone and I can breathe normally again. “How about you?”
“Good as it’s gonna get,” Luk says as he gets to his feet. He offers me his hand. I take it with a smile.
“Thanks, babe.”
“Anytime,” he replies as we walk back to the horses, hand in hand.
We cover the miles to the border in about an hour and as we continue down the highway it slowly begins turning to the southeast. We come up over a small rise and the floor of the valley opens up in front of us. I can see a few small houses in the distance surrounded by fields of green and brown. The highway stretches away to the southeast until it runs out of sight.
“I think it might be a good idea to go down and check a few of those fields,” I say, pointing off to the left. “You never know what might be growing in them.”
“Let’s do it,” Luk says as he turns Raven and heads off the highway and down the small slope towards the fields, a cloud of dust drifting up into the sky in his wake.
Grit runs alongside Ashen as we follow Luk off the highway. He dashes out in front of both of us, chasing a few birds out of the tall grasses. Any roads that used to run between the farms and fields are long gone, replaced with low grasses that serve as the only delineation between the various meadows. The houses that we pass have given up the struggle against the vines, trees, and other plants that have slowly enveloped them. It doesn’t take long for us to come across a huge field of wild corn. We gather several armfuls, storing them carefully in our packs before feeding a couple to Ashen and Raven. Most of the other fields are filled with what looks like wheat, barley, or some other grain.
“I think we should head to town and see what we can find before it gets too dark.”
Luk nods in agreement. “Good idea, lead the way.”
Grit, who was walking alongside me, takes off into a field ahead of us and after a few seconds comes back with a very large rabbit dangling from his jaws. I look at him and smile as he drops his prize in front of Ashen. I jump down and pick up the rabbit, tying it to the back of my saddle before kneeling down and petting Grit’s head.
“Good boy.”
He wags his tail and then jumps up and licks my face. His long wet tongue swiping across my cheek. I start laughing as he continues slobbering on my cheeks.
“Come on, stop Grit,” I say, gently pushing him off me.
Luk is sitting on Raven smiling at me. I climb back on Ashen and turn him around so I'm facing Luk.
“Now we just need three more of those.”
“Well, he did his part, now it’s your turn,” I say, laughing as I start heading back to the highway.
“Funny,” Luk yells as he rides up next to me. “You are a funny lady.”
I look at him and smile, tilting my head to one side. Our horses climb the small slope up to the highway and we start heading south again towards town. It only takes an hour or so for us to spot the little city in the distance. We turn off the highway and head down the exit ramp towards the tiny village. From the road we can see a dozen or so low buildings standing among a grouping of tall oak trees. The town itself is in much better condition than the various farmhouses that we passed. Most have broken windows and weeds grow uncontrolled, but the structures themselves seem in fairly good repair.
I stop Ashen as we turn onto what looks like the main street and climb down, leading him over to a lawn of green grass in front of a house with a sign hanging on it advertising a hair salon. Luk rides over and then hops down, letting Raven join Ashen on the lawn where they immediately start grazing. Grit wanders over and sits down at my feet, looking up at me, his tail wagging. I reach down and scratch the top of his head.
“Search and then get some dinner ready?” I ask Luk.
“Sounds good, let’s go.”
I step over to Ashen and pull my pistol out from under the back of the saddle. I pull the slide and then tuck the gun into my belt.
“You can never be too careful.”
“Agreed,” he says, pulling his knife out and carrying it in his left hand as we head down the street.
The first building looks like it was empty even before everyone left; a faded For Rent sign sits inside on the windowsill. The one across the street looks the same, except that the big window is smashed out and a small tree now grows out across the sidewalk. The next building looks more promising with its “Sporting Goods & Tackle” sign hanging crookedly above the front door.
“I’m going to go check that out.”
“Okay, be careful,” I reply.
“I will, you too,” he says before he darts across the street to the derelict store.
Meanwhile, Grit and I wander down the sidewalk on our side, past an old bank with no doors and broken windows to the last building, which is full of appliances like stoves, refrigerators, and clothes washers, sitting idle all gathering dust and slowly falling to pieces. I look down at Grit who's been walking alongside me the entire time.
“Let’s go see what Luk found,” I say as we cross the street.
We find Luk inside the little sporting good’s store going through a pile of arrows that he has laid out on the old grey countertop. He looks up and smiles at us as we step through the doorway.
“Hey baby! Look what I found,” he says, gesturing towards the selection of arrows spread out in front of him.
“Nice.” I walk up and look over his find, a huge smile on my face from his easy use of the word “baby”. “How did these get left behind?”
“I found them on the floor, under one of the shelf stands, so I guess it’s just luck.”
“Well, luck is better than nothing, which is what we found by the way.”
“Oh well, not everyone can be as awesome as me,” he says with a playful wink.
“Apparently not,” I shoot back.
I decide to search the rest of the ransacked store, just to be sure we don’t miss anything, but after twenty minutes of searching under all the shelving, backroom, and even the bathroom the only thing I come up with is one roll of fishing line. I slip it into my pocket and look down at Grit who takes the opportunity to lick my face just like he did every time I kneeled down to look under a bookcase or shelf.
“Maybe we’ll get lucky next time,” I say to him and he just wags his tail and looks at me with his big brown eyes.
Luk examines each arrow; checking the shaft, head, and fletching, and he ends up with ten nice quality projectiles and three that he says are “primo”. We wander back outside over to the horses and Luk slips his new ammunition into his quiver. Ashen and Raven are just standing quietly in the shade of a large oak tree casually grazing on some of the shorter grasses around the trunk.
After some discussion, Luk goes off to see if he can bag a few more rabbits or something else to bulk up our meal. Grit and I gather firewood and search the area for anything else we can add to dinner. After a few minutes we come across a small bush behind the bank in a grassy area with some bright blue berries growing on it. I pull one off and carefully bite it and my mouth is flooded with a sweet and tangy juice. I pick a few small handfuls and drop them into a little plastic sack from the drugstore back in Richfield. A little more searching yields a few plump mushrooms and some nice dandelion greens.
“This’ll work,” I say to Grit as we head back to our campsite across from the old hair salon.
After a dinner of two large, plump rabbits, Luk and I lead the horses a little way from camp and let them wander around a large field at the edge of town. I stand there, holding his hand as Grit leans his head against my leg. The sun is setting in the west, just dipping below the mountain ridges. Luk turns his head, looks at me and then cups my chin in his hand before kissing me gently. For a while we just watch Raven and Ashen graze before wandering over slowly and taking their reins, leading them back to camp.
“I wish we'd found some sort of water around here.”
“I know, but our supply is still pretty good. Hopefully we can find a good source in Grand Junction.”
“Yeah,” I reply, but I'm starting to get worried and I don’t relish the idea of searching, or staying long in Grand Junction. Larger cities make me nervous.
By the time we're ready for bed, the light is fading quickly. We both lay down in front of the fire, on our sides with Luk behind me, his arm resting comfortably on my hip. Grit is curled up at our feet, snoring happily, his belly full of rabbit. I stare at the fire as bits of wood glow orange and then drop off into the white-hot ashes.
“Have you ever thought about having kids?” I ask out of nowhere.
“Whoa,” Luk says. “I just got a girlfriend, slow down a little.”
He laughs and his hand moves slowly back and forth across my hip, sending electric shocks up and down my spine.
“Ha, ha. I don’t mean right now. Have you ever thought about it?”
Luk pauses for a few moments before answering.
“I guess I have, but I don’t know if I could go through what our parents have gone through.”
“You mean us leaving?” I ask while doodling in the dirt with a small twig.
“Yeah. It was hard for me to leave, but I can’t imagine how hard it was for them to let us go. I don’t know if I could handle that.”
“I know what you mean, but do you think that your parents would lose all the happy moments they had with us for sixteen years because of one bad one?”
“Probably not, but still,” he says. “What about you, do you want kids?”
“Maybe, but only one. Like you said, letting a child go on their Sojourn has to be torture, but to have to do it for more than one would probably kill me.”
“Yeah,” he says, nodding his head.
“But who knows Luk, things could change by the time we're ready to have a child,” I say.
“You really think they might? I haven’t seen much change for the good.”
“I don’t know. I always have hope that someday we'll be able to leave the Enclaves and reclaim at least some of the planet. I mean, look at us, we’ve been able to find food and water without too much trouble. There is life outside the walls.”
“True, but there’s just two of us, imagine if there were hundreds of people. There’s not near enough here for that, and look how much trouble we're having finding a decent water supply.”
“I know all that,” I say, pressing myself back against him, needing to feel him near me. “I just want to be happy.”
“Me too, Rayn. Me too.”
* * * *
Before the sun is up, Luk and I leave the little city of Fruita, Colorado behind as we rejoin the highway heading southeast towards Grand Junction, the last big city before Denver. It only takes us about two hours or so to catch sight of the first few buildings. It's probably the largest city we've seen so far. There are several tall buildings sheathed in mirrored glass that sparkle in the sun, although many of the panels are missing, especially on the upper levels.
“I don’t like the looks of this place,” I say as I swing the scope across the cityscape.
We're hunkered down behind the cab of a derelict eighteen-wheeler lying on its side in the median. The doors of the trailer are hanging open, the interior is empty expect for a thin layer of sand and debris. I peer through the scope as I raise the rifle to let me view the top floors of one of the few tall buildings. They aren’t nearly as impressive as the old hotels in Vegas, but they're pretty tall compared to what we have been seeing lately.
“What do you think we should do?” Luk asks.
I sigh quietly as I set the rifle down against the hood of the truck.
“I don’t know.” I sigh. “On the one hand I hate to pass up anything we might need, especially water, but on the other, a big city like this has plenty of places where someone could set up an ambush or trap.”
“Yeah.”
“The Colorado River is just off to the west, we could check for water there, although who knows if there is any anymore. Besides, I don’t know how hard it might be to get down to the water’s edge.”
“Hmm, our food supply is good at the moment and I think we have pretty much everything else we need for now. If water's our only concern, I say we bypass the city as much as we can and check the river.”
I nod. “I agree. Our biggest problem is that the highway runs along the northern edges of the town, so unless we head east right away and cut across country we aren’t going to be able to completely avoid it.”
“Well, we can do what we can,” Luks says as he walks back over to Raven and pulls himself aboard.
I follow him, taking another look at that one tall glass building. Something inside me tickles the back of my brain, telling me to be careful. I climb onto Ashen and we prod the horses back up onto the road and start heading past the city. Grit walks a few paces in front of us, checking behind each abandoned car and truck that we pass. More and more vehicles clog the roadway the closer we come to the city. Some are in the northbound lanes while others are sitting on our side, an obvious scene of chaos where no one really knew where to go. I try to remember the best place on the map to access the river, but even with my memory, I can’t see it.
The highway begins to slowly turn to the east and I ride across the shoulder on our side of the road to the peak of a small ridge and peer down over the edge. I can see what looks like water, pretty far down a fairly steep slope, but it’s hard to tell if the water is fresh or stagnant from here. Luk rides up next to me, Raven stomping her hooves on the dry and dusty ground.
“Well?”
“I guess we should go down and check it out. We do need a refill,” I say.
“I say one of us goes, and that would be me.”
“Why not me?” I ask, protesting his decision.
“No reason, I just called dibs.”
I look at him, my head tilted to the right. “There’s no dibs on this.”
“Not anymore, I called it already,” he says laughing as he slides off Raven. He tosses me the reins and rummages through both packs for all of the empty bottles and canteens.
He winks at me as he slips over the edge and scrambles down the slope. I sit on Ashen and boost myself up in the stirrups to watch his progress. It only takes him a few seconds to reach the bottom. I watch as he walks across the sandy floor of the riverbed towards the thin ribbon of water. Suddenly, the sandy brown soil just to the right of me puffs up in a little cloud and then the sound of a gunshot reaches my ears. I immediately flop off Ashen onto the ground, grabbing my rifle and slapping him on the ass to make him move. Someone is shooting at me but I don’t want the horses killed either. Ashen and Raven gallop a little ways back towards the road into the short brown grass in the median.
I scramble across the ground on my hands and knees towards a small red car with shattered windows. After wrapping my arm through the strap of the rifle, I set the barrel on the edge of the hood of the car, searching the city below for the source of the gunfire. I start with the tall glass building that had bothered me from the first moment I saw it, mainly because I know that if I was going to snipe someone, that would be my hiding place of choice. I sweep my view across the top floor, stopping at each missing window and waiting for any movement. My heart is racing and my blood pressure is rising as I search. I need to find the shooter or shooters before Luk comes back over the ridge. Whoever it is obviously saw him go down, so they may be waiting for him to come back up and I'm sure he heard the shot and will probably be racing back up the slope right now.
Out of the corner of my eye I catch the glint of metal or maybe glass within the darkened outline of a missing window panel and then the car window to my right explodes in a shower of tiny shards. I hear the sound a few seconds later. I know he's trying to draw Luk out; that was a pointless shot. I take careful aim at the shimmer of metal and fire, immediately ejecting the cartridge and chambering a new one.
“Yes!” I say to myself as I see my target move from the current window to one just to the right.
I can’t make him or her out, but the color of their skin gives them away, almost glowing against the darkness behind them. I poke my head up and I'm rewarded with another shot that buries itself in the hood of the car, just a few inches from my head.
I know the moment I do it, that it’s a mistake.
I stand up to get a better shot, figuring that I have at least five seconds before he'll fire again. Every single fiber of my being is screaming at me, but I need to save Luk. I spot the reflection of the shooter’s scope through mine and I adjust up a few inches and to the right. My finger squeezes the trigger slowly as I hold my breath. I hear my shot before it even leaves the barrel and a split second later, I feel a sting in my side just before the sound of his shot echoes across the terrain. I look down at my shirt. A small red dot appears on my left side just above the belt line. It starts out about the size of a dime, but a second later, it's the size of my fist and growing quickly.
“Rayn!” I hear Luk yell as he tops the ridge just behind me.
I turn slowly, looking at him. I drop my rifle and I take two steps in his direction with my arms stretched out towards him.
“Luk,” I say once before blackness envelops me and I know nothing more.