Hey, finally making some good headway on A Warm Place 4! If I’m very lucky, I might actually manage to get it done by the end of the week, but that’s a big if.
For now, here is the first chapter. If you want to also see the second chapter, check it out on my Patreon!
I was alone.
Alone was nothing new to me. I had been alone a lot of times in my life. But this time, it felt different.
I was alone and I was thinking of chemotherapy.
Carefully stalking a deer through a snowbound, heavily-wooded hinterland somewhere in northern Kansas, or maybe even southern Nebraska now, I wasn’t sure, I tried to make as little noise as possible, and keep my mind from drifting too far.
But that got difficult, I was learning, when you spent too long in hard isolation.
Icy trees surrounded me in all directions and I was careful to keep the deer in my sights, my rifle at the ready. I wasn’t too keen on my odds of bagging this deer, but I was kind of desperate right now because my food was really low.
As in, I had like a meal left low.
But chemotherapy kept creeping into my brains the same way I was creeping up on this deer, trying to ignore it all: the cold, the hunger, the encroaching darkness and storm. I knew a storm was on the way and I’d have to get in soon.
I was thinking about how, in some cases of extra bad cancer, they sometimes tried something desperate: double chemo. But they weren’t supposed to because it carried all sorts of crazy risks, but it had a better chance of wiping out the cancer.
That was what I was doing right now, though to be completely honest, I wasn’t sure exactly what the risks of what I was doing entailed.
I mean, some were obvious.
That I could starve to death, or freeze to death, or get mauled by an animal, or killed by another human looking to rob me, or worse.
But that was just a fact of life nowadays. Those risks were risks I had faced, endured, and ultimately triumphed over time and time again over the past year and a half, ever since I’d decided to set out into this new, frozen, post-apocalyptic wasteland on my own. I was used to being by myself, I was used to wandering for long stretches of time alone.
This, however, was different.
Abruptly, the opportunity to make the shot appeared and I knew it was now or never. I froze, took aim, and fired.
And missed.
Just barely, I saw some of the deer’s fur fly off in a puff, but I had missed. The deer took off in an instant, vanishing from sight into the trees, galloping away to safety. I let out a long, heavy sigh of disappointment as I lowered the rifle, my breath appearing on the air in a haze.
Well, shit.
There went food for the next few days.
I looked around, knowing that I was either going to have to find manmade shelter of some kind, or a cave, or make some sort of really miserable lean-to, because I’d lost my tent to a scrap with a pair of wolves three days ago. It had been shredded all to hell.
My bow had also gone during that battle, snapped into pieces after my big ass fell on it. Not that it mattered quite as much, as I was out of arrows at that point anyway. I’d been doing some hard living over the past month, and my supply level reflected that.
Finally, I saw what appeared to be a lone structure up ahead, barely visible through the trees and the dim gray fading light.
I set off, and as I began walking, it started to snow.
I glanced up, a little startled. That always freaked me out a little bit, the way it could just begin to snow in perfect silence. Sometimes it was obvious, mostly through the winds, and I knew that some kind of storm was coming, but sometimes I’d wait three hours for it to actually manifest, and then just abruptly, big fat snowflakes were falling out of the sky in all directions, not a sound to be heard. It was oddly creepy.
In some vague way, it reminded me of spiders, and how they were perfectly silent.
You only noticed them when you saw them or, God forbid, felt them.
Spiders largely dying out as a result of this apocalypse, or at least dying out on the surface and in a lot of buildings, was one of the things I put under ‘benefits of Armageddon’. Yeah, I know, I know, they’re crucial to the ecosystem and they aren’t inherently evil or anything, but I fucking hated them and the world was fucked anyway, right?
As I headed through the falling snow, picking up the pace, my body already most of the way to numb thanks to all the time I’d spent outdoors today, I kept thinking.
It had been three months since I’d helped bring Pine Lake back from the brink of death, since I’d gotten shot and damn near gotten myself killed.
I had healed up and settled nicely into my new home. Honestly, the motel room at Pine Lake was the closest I’d ever come to a home since I began wandering, and it had felt nice. The first month was good.
Lindsay moved in with us, and they got a second bed, really more of a mattress they put in the corner, where she and Delilah tended to sleep. They had definitely become a couple, though it hadn’t stopped either of them from having sex with me regularly. Delilah more than Lindsay, I think she was intimidated by me, though she at least didn’t seem threatened by me. So that was nice. Elizabeth really liked me, and we’d spent a lot of time together.
The same was true of Megan.
Lisa wasn’t sure how to feel about us. She’d been awkward in the days following my recovery, but finally, after some hot sex and then some more hot sex, she’d eventually settled into a casual relationship where she tended to jump me once or maybe twice a week if she was feeling really up to it. The same thing had happened with Melanie.
God, I loved fucking that woman.
And that was my life for the next month, and it was really fucking good.
I helped out. I built things. I hunted. I protected people. I harvested and gathered and salvaged from the countryside and the dead part of the city.
I had great sex with the women in my life.
All the while, living in fear of the wanderlust bug.
It left me alone for a solid month, but near the end of that month, I felt the first tickles of that urge. That intense desire. That lust to wander, to just get out and be free and explore uncharted lands. Meet new people, see new places, do new things.
Test myself against the untamed wild.
For two weeks, I ignored it, but it got worse. During the third week, I began trying things, going out camping or staying up at the hunting lodge with the hunters. It helped, but only a little. The fourth and final week was the worst.
I felt anxious and irritable and sometimes like I couldn’t breathe.
I felt somehow caught.
It didn’t occur to me until Elizabeth gave birth that I was waiting for some event to transpire, something to somehow give me the go ahead to make a decision.
That event was it.
I ended up talking with the women about the problem, listening to suggestions, bouncing ideas off each other, and ultimately, this was what I had come up with.
I would leave, I would head north, into deep isolation, and then I would come back after, at most, two months.
That was about one month ago.
I didn’t want to just do what I normally did, although that was what I had done during the first week. I was exuberant and blissful as I hit the highway and headed north. I ran into a caravan of people, traders and travelers who seemed on the level, heading south. I spent the night with them and had amazing sex with the forty-two-year old platinum blonde who used to be a schoolteacher after being a model and now ran this group.
She could suck dick like few others I’d run into.
I pointed them towards Pine Lake and told them they’d find kind people and good trading there, then I’d gone on my merry way.
Shortly after leaving the caravan I began to feel guilty for feeling so good. I was practically high I felt so damned good.
I ran into a few more traders, and finally I stopped at a small simple encampment that seemed kind of like a way-station for travelers along the highway. It was built into the remains of a partially collapsed warehouse of some kind, and half a dozen people maintained it. Now it served as an inn. I’d spent the night and after flirting, took one of them to bed. She had been pretty hardcore, had a scar down one side of her face, and more on her body when I’d gotten her clothes off. She had muscles, and short brown hair, and she fucked rough.
It was a good night, and she was the last chick I’d hooked up with.
The next morning, I’d gathered my things, ate breakfast, made a few trades, and then I’d struck off in an almost totally random direction, into the nearest woods.
I was out here to burn out this need to wander, and after thinking on it for awhile, I had decided that the best way to do it was to go into total isolation.
And it had worked.
I had yet to see a single human being, let alone speak with one, since leaving that way-station.
Three solid weeks.
It was the longest I’d gone without human contact.
“Here we are,” I muttered as I reached the structure. It was some old, very old cabin, something that looked like it had been built a century ago. It had a chimney, it was dark, and it looked intact. Those were the only three things I actually cared about at the moment.
“Let’s make sure we’re safe,” I murmured.
I had learned that for whatever reason, talking out loud helped offset the...negative aspects of the isolation.
I walked around the exterior of the building, checking for threats and to see if it was as intact as it looked. The windows, I saw, were boarded over, but this looked to have been done a long time ago. Perhaps even before Armageddon. I didn’t see any people around, nor any wolves or bears or cougars. I thought I was far enough north that they might be a problem. Or mountain lions. Or were those the same thing?
Shit, I didn’t know.
I walked up to the front door and knocked on it firmly a few times.
“Is anyone in there?” I asked. Waited. Nothing. I knocked again, harder. “Is anyone in there?” I asked louder.
Still nothing. The place felt like a mausoleum.
I tried the handle. It turned, and the door opened when I pushed. It was dark inside, the thin twilight not nearly enough to help me see. With a sigh, I reached onto my belt and detached the miniature lantern there. It was solar-powered and really useful. I’d found it on a dead man a week ago, probably just someone like me, way out in the middle of nowhere. He’d been mauled to death by wolves, I assumed, and left to freeze in a lot of blood.
The kill had looked old, months at least.
It occurred to me that this would be an extremely lonely and miserable place to die.
The light came on and seemed to fill the interior of the single-room structure. I quickly played it across the inside, finding myself looking at hardly anything. There was a mattress on the floor, no bedding or pillows. A single chair. A fireplace. A toilet and sink off in one corner. I saw the remains of some cabinets that had no doubt been chopped up for firewood, and the scattered remnants of other random stuff on the wooden floor.
It was empty of life, at least.
I got inside, closed and locked the door to the best of my ability, then set my shit down on the floor beside the mattress with a loud groan. I was tired. It had been a long damn day, even though it really hadn’t, it just felt like it.
It was December now. Actually, by my count, and I could be wrong, we were nearing the beginning of 2039.
As if that meant anything anymore.
The only thing it meant to me was that at this point I was another year older, (my birthday was in November, oh what a birthday Megan and Delilah and the others had made it), and that the days were shorter than ever.
I think we were past the equinox, which meant that technically the days were beginning to get longer now, but that wouldn’t matter practically to me for at least another few months. It got dark at five fucking PM and that sucked shit.
Plus, it was winter.
Although it was winter all the time now, it still did actually get generally colder and more miserable during this time of year. Blizzards and snowstorms and absolutely bleak frozen days seemed more common during winter. Like today. It had to be below zero.
I saw that there was still a bit of burning fuel left by the fireplace, so I arranged it all as best I could and got a fire going. I sat there for a few minutes, not thinking of much at all. In fact, I considered that a luxury. As that warm washed over me and took me momentarily to heaven, it was like my brain and all my worries and anxieties and bad feelings were put on hold. It was really nice, and I now looked forward to it immensely.
But soon enough, the bad thoughts began leaking back in, so I got back to work.
First thing was first: I went back outside while there was still daylight left, though not much of it, and quickly began gathering up enough firewood to last me the night. It took me fifteen minutes and by the time I headed back inside, the last of the light was totally gone, and darkness swallowed the world with a gloomy absolution.
Stacking the wood a safe distance from the fireplace, I then set my thermos beside the fire so that it could heat my last meal that I had on me.
Tomorrow was going to be an…
Interesting day. If not a desperate one.
In the past, I’d gone for about two days at a stretch without any food, just water, and it fucking sucked. I knew I could go a lot longer, the problem was, hunger fucked with you. It fucked with your ability to focus and concentrate, it made you weak as it sapped your strength, made decision-making difficult. So it tipped the odds out of my favor, the longer I went without food. Once the thermos was in place, I began the process of methodically searching the cabin over.
I wondered who it had belonged to and why it was out here. Maybe some old miner or factory worker had it built, or built it himself, way back in the day so he could just fuck off and be by himself when he wanted to. Maybe there was a nice pond or river nearby, good hunting, (though that wasn’t my experience right now, that deer was the first I’d seen in days). Maybe he’d retired out here. I’d heard enough of those ‘disappear into the mountains when I get old’ stories and fantasies. I wondered how long it had been since this place had seen a human.
There wasn’t anything worthwhile in the cabin. Nothing tucked away or hidden or shoved up under something.
Nothing in the roof or ceiling, as far as I could tell.
The place didn’t even have a closet.
With a heavy sigh, I made my bed, wanting to get the physical labor out of the way as quickly as possible. I was exhausted, but I knew I’d stay up for a few hours more, then wake with dawn’s first light. Hopefully earlier, so I could get a jump on the day’s chores. I put my pack down for a pillow and got out my thermal blanket.
With that done, I took off my boots and sat down in front of the fire after dragging the chair over. And there I just sat for awhile.
It felt good to sit, and to know I didn’t have to get up if I didn’t want to for at least an hour or so. Unless there was some kind of emergency.
But I felt fear creeping over me.
This was the worst part of the day. The absolute worst. This was the part of the day where night came on and I was winding down and the loneliness set in.
I wasn’t normally a lonely person. I mean, yeah, sometimes I missed people. Sometimes I missed my family. Sometimes I missed some of the women I’d slept with who made an impression. I missed Mary. I hoped she was okay, wherever she was now.
But after the first week in absolute isolation, the loneliness had really started to settle in.
It had caught me off-guard, and after a few days it was so bad that it made me want to go home. I’d actually almost seriously considered heading back to Pine Lake. I knew enough to figure out how to get back, between the basic cardinal directions and a map I had of the larger area and my knowledge of a few highways, I knew I could do it.
But I’d held out.
I’d been a little skeptical at first, wondering if maybe this intense loneliness was a thing that would fade, if it was some anomaly. But it wasn’t. After another few days, I realized that it came on at night, usually around bedtime. I’d lie in bed, whatever bed was that night, and miss Megan and Delilah and Elizabeth terribly.
Sometimes I’d missed them so horribly it hurt and I damn near wanted to cry.
Crying wasn’t exactly easy for me.
But as bitter and miserable and wretchedly lonely those feelings were, in a way, I actually relished them intensely.
Because it meant something.
It meant this was working.