Chapter Four
Time to go a’Viking
I woke the next morning my headache and the ordeal it always entailed over and done with. I packed mostly weapons and food. My fingers traced the curved patterns of my sword’s handle. It was a bit bulky not to mention old-fashioned to take along and I decided to leave it behind. I turned away, but then turned back and picked it up.
Old-fashioned or not a sword was likely to be a handy thing to have around in an apocalyptic typesetting such as the US had fallen into. My pack ready I gave my little home one final glance. Time to go and get a woman.
I had to admit to a certain amount of pleasurable excitement at the prospect of bringing a woman back to my island. She was likely to be more trouble than she was worth, but I was committed to the task regardless now.
I ducked under the camouflage netting I had woven over a small jetty along the shore and tossed my pack into my small, but sturdily built sail craft. I hopped in and threw off the mooring lines and pulled out the oars, as I began to back slice my craft out from the shoreline into the more turbulent waters of the breakers ahead.
It was a bit of a struggle, but I made it eventually out into more open waters. It wasn’t the first time I had gone out in my boat. I’d explored the other islands near to me and I’d done a good bit of deep-sea fishing in order to add variety to my diet and for lack of have anything else better to do.
The breeze was in my favor so I stored the oars away and let out the sail. The sale was constructed of the parachute material from when I had been dumped on the island five years previous and the care packages that I had received for three years. It was a little tattered, but it would still do for a few sails yet.
I stepped back into the tail of the boat and manned the rudder, as the sails slapped and caught the breeze. The boat took off at a good clip and I sat back against the stern smiling to myself, as I caught sight of my sword strapped to my pack. Time to go a’ Viking and rescue a damsel in distress.
My ocean voyage was an uneventful one, which I was grateful to experience, in these often turbulent waters. I put ashore just north of Vancouver by my calculations. It was eerie not seeing any lights at all along the coastline.
I did my best to camouflage the boat in the darkness, but I couldn’t help but think that my efforts were inadequate at best. I left the boat and headed in land and away from the rocky cliffsided beach.
The night was still, as I stepped onto the cliff top highway now littered with cars rusting in the sea breeze. The moonlight was enough to travel by and I started down the road. I saw and sensed others of my own kind on several occasions, as they huddled back in the bushes away from the stalled out cars.
Whether they were fellow sojourners or foes they left me alone, perhaps sensing that I was a bigger predator than they wanted to deal with in the dark of the night. Something shone white in the middle the road up ahead and I brought my sword from off my shoulder in preparation of an attack of some kind.
It was a human body now no more than a bleached skeleton, left to rot in the middle of the road like common roadkill. I stopped and looked around at the moonlit landscape. My how things had changed in my absence!
I left the road not liking what I had found there and headed across country using the stars to navigate by. As the sun came up I made my way more cautiously. I saw little game, no doubt a result of the voracious appetites of a population that no longer had supermarkets stocked to the gills with everything one could imagine.
I skirted by a small town in the late morning. It looked uninhabited and there were suspicious lumps lying around on the streets and among the broken windowed stores. I didn’t want to know. It became clear to me that in many ways being on my island for the past two years had been a blessing in comparison to the harsh wake-up call that the rest of this once proud nation had experienced, when the lights had gone off.
By the next day I left all signs of settlement gratefully behind, as I headed out into the wilds of British Columbia. I found a good many traces of man, but I saw no one. Once, I narrowly avoided a nasty snare meant for bigger game. As much as I wanted to believe that the trap had been meant for a deer or wild boar or perhaps even a bear I couldn’t acknowledge it. Most likely the trap had been set for both beast and man alike.
Cannibalism was one of those sins that mankind pulled out of the closet when the circumstances became dire enough. It had been around for a long time, since the colonization of North America by the supposedly enlightened non-savage Europeans. There was historical documentation that Jamestown, one of the very first settlements in the New World, had survived through the early harsh winters as a cannibalistic society.
It had been stated in the journal, of one early town founder, that while it remained illegal to kill and eat those still living, it was permissible to eat those who died from natural causes, even those long since buried in the ground. Personally, if things got that bad I’d cut my own throat. Humanity sometimes went way too far overboard in the quest to survive.
Some things just weren’t worth doing, in order to survive, in the quest to retain one’s mortality for a little longer. A queasy thought went through me. Had my little Asian chick turned man-eater on me?
That was a disturbing thought! If that was the case I would be finding a different island to live on, while she spent the year cracking the Code on my former island. I’d toss a fish onto shore for her from time to time that would be about the only interaction I would have with her.
My entire mood soured at the prospect that my playmate to be might already be untouchable. Why had I gone and spoiled everything with that likely scenario? Here I was rushing off to rescue a damsel in distress and instead of a look of yearning for something more intimate between us, she might be yearning to see and experience me Delmonico steak style. Life really sucked right now! I should’ve stuck with the Eskimo girl idea. About the most socially unrequitable things on their menu and attire were cute little fluffy polar bear steaks and baby sealskin boots.
Two days later in a remote valley I found the bush pilots airfield. Everything was as specified. No one seemed to have found this little hamlet in a forgotten valley of the wilderness. The plane had been out rigged with extra fuel tanks and hopefully it would be enough to both get there and back. I fired up the engines and build up RPMs, as I taxied to the slightly overgrown runway of weedy grass.
I saw three men run out of the cover of the surrounding forest with little more to their name than spears. They didn’t look too friendly and in some ways they seemed more beast-like than human. They apparently had been tracking me.
I let the plane lunge forward down the runway away from the charging men, “Asta lovista losers!”
One thing was for sure, I wouldn’t be landing here again. I’d crash land in the sea first. I stayed low over the land in an attempt to dodge any radar that the Code may have in play. There was no point in alerting them to my presence. All navigation and beacon type equipment had been deactivated and I was largely flying blind except for my own handwritten chart plotting.
If the wilds of British Columbia could be this bad I could only imagine what it was like further south in the big cities.