Hunter's Haven

II After the Plague

II

After the PlagueThe night was deadly silent.

The road it overlooked was even more so.

There was a time when this road was an artery clogged with holiday makers, truck drivers and just plain ordinary folk, a community of travelers moving from one place to another in a seemingly endless cycle. In those days the highway was seldom dark. There would always be street lights bouncing off the tar surface and headlights crisscrossing the night. Sometimes, it would come from parked campervans pulled up along the road or from the truck stops along the way. Even the windblown dust glistened under the streetlights or the moon, sparkling like fireflies.

In those days, the highway was a living thing, the circulatory system of the great American landscape. This was Route 50 and its main purpose was to take travelers across the Rockies into Washington State and then farther north to Canada. These days, only the tall redwoods that flanked the winding passageway of tar and rock remembered that glorious past.

In the darkness, their majesty felt imposing instead of inspiring, like an ever-looming black tide, threatening to overtake the lingering remnants of civilization. In some ways, it was almost poetic. For centuries, man had ploughed his way through the land, laying waste to everything in the name of progress.

Now, he was the endangered species.

The end of human civilization had been inevitable since the turn of the millennium.

Now pockets of humans gathered in small communities to protect themselves, like tribes in the Stone Age. Some survived and thrived, most did not. The need to be led after two thousand years of bureaucracy drove many to flock to charismatic men who promised safety and order in exchange for allegiance. The results were mixed, and warlords with delusions of grandeur began to appear too frequently where large groups of humans gathered.

Hunter had seen enough of this in the past year and wanted no part of any of it.

As he drove down the winding highway, the roar of his Harley Davidson motorcycle seemed out of place in the stillness of the night. The single headlight cut through the darkness on this open and forgotten highway, and it struck him then that he could not recall the last time he had seen another human being.

The Canadian border was about a day away, and he knew he could make it all the way to Samish without stopping. The Harley had been the only thing on the road and he had a full tank of gas. Besides, he did not know the area and saw little to recommend stopping. If the last two years had taught him anything, it was the wisdom of selecting a good place to bunk down for the night. With the supplies he had on his cycle, he was an attractive target to anyone who had less.

These days, it was every man for himself.

* * *

Once upon a time, John Francis Hunter was a war hero.

He enlisted in the army straight out of high school because in those days, people still believed wars could be won. Leaving behind his middle-class family, with parents and a baby sister who was still riding a bike with training wheels, he was an ocean away before he realized how completely wrong he was.

Not since the Vietnam War had the stakes been so unclear, with alliances shifting constantly and tin pot dictators jockeying for position with neighboring governments to destabilize the region even further. Each superpower seemed hell-bent on disrupting the other's interest in the area with little ground gained by anyone.

Whatever the reasons for the war, it mattered little to the young soldier he had been. He took an oath and would serve his country. There was plenty of time for his idealism to disintegrate into apathy. He started out in the infantry, and it wasn't long before Hunter impressed his commanders enough to be recommended for Special Forces training. Once there, he performed every morally ambiguous thing they asked him of him, carrying out assassinations, destroying insurgent strongholds, carrying black ops behind enemy lines, and burying more dead comrades then he'd care to count.

Three years after he left home, Hunter began receiving letters from his sister, Sydney. She was seven years his junior and only thirteen when she started writing to him. Accustomed to emails from his mother and father, Hunter remembered the s**t he put up with the first time a pink, strawberry-scented envelope was delivered to him. Sydney, who had been a freckle-face little girl in ponytails the last time he saw her, was now a teenager wanting a relationship with her barely remembered older brother.

She wrote frequently and never seemed to mind that he did not keep up with her correspondence. In an age of social media, Sydney appeared to be the only teenager in America who actually wrote letters on stationery. When he asked her about it, she wrote back telling him that a letter was something personal. Emails couldn't show him how much her handwriting had improved or let him see the teardrops against the ink when she wrote him about a bad breakup.

He could have done without the details of her first period, though.

Still, she was right because when the burden of what he was doing became too much to bear, Hunter could read those letters and be reminded that there was purpose to what he did. If he had to get his hands dirty making the world safe for her, he could live with that. Without realizing it, her teenage musings kept him from completely disconnecting from the world.

He came home two years before the Plague.

During a mission to free a group of civilian hostages, Hunter took two slugs to the chest and lost half his team. Even though they completed the rescue, it was enough to take him out of the war indefinitely. Sent home for his convalescence, Hunter was in a VA hospital when he learned that a drunk driver had taken out his parents. The first time he saw Sydney face to face since he'd left home, he had to console her over their shared loss. He promised her that everything would be okay. He would take care of her.

And then he utterly failed her.

* * *

The Plague began with a group of gangbangers, already high on homemade narcotics, breaking into a BSL-4 facility in Austin, Texas. Drooling at the prospect of all the valuable lab equipment and drugs they could sell or use, they promptly gunned down the group of stunned scientists and security personnel working in the research facility. Once they had free run of the place, they began ransacking it for everything of value.

By the time law enforcement could mobilize a proper response, it was too late.

The gangbangers reached the containment area where highly virulent strains of diseases were stored for research purposes. Already high from the looting carried out in the dispensary, they were convinced that the vault would contain even more interesting drugs than the dispensary did. Disappointed to find only uninteresting vials and canisters, they proceeded to smash everything in sight, splattering shards of glass and microscopic drops of fluid against exposed skin.

The contents of the shattered receptacles escaped into the air like trapped wraiths, riding the air molecules throughout the building's air conditioning system, finding warm bodies that would carry them to the world outside.

Once unleashed, the pestilence spread quickly.

As the chaos spread beyond the gangs, ordinary citizens fell victim to the microscopic onslaught, but not always with the same affliction. By the time the numbers had risen to the point where the outbreak was traced back to one privately owned facility, it was too late. Suddenly, hospitals were overrun with cases of everything from Ebola to the Bubonic Plague. Typically, the panicked population scrambled to leave the cities, inadvertently hastening the Plague's spread to new victims. Within two months of the facility's breach, the world was gripped in a pandemic the likes of which it had never seen.

Air travel was suspended but not quickly enough to keep the virus from escaping the continental United States. Subsequent mutations made treatment difficult because as the bodies began to mount, the ability to find those who could produce vaccines dwindled. Once infected, a victim could expect to die in a matter of days. Eighty to ninety percent of those who caught one virus or another died.

Some did recover, possessing a natural immunity that allowed them to emerge from all illnesses with little or no lasting effects. Unfortunately, these were few in number and not many of them were doctors or virologists. In the end, the pandemic reached every corner of the globe and the death toll became too high to track.

* * *

With virulent diseases running throughout the country, Hunter stayed away from populated areas in the hopes that it would reduce his chances of contracting any illness. His plan had been to keep riding until he hit Canada and then lose himself in the wilderness. Unfortunately, there was no place safe from mutated viruses and despite his precautions, he entered a town in the midst of an outbreak of Ebola. Even though he had vacated the area promptly, the damage was done.

He made it as far as a deserted gas station and took refuge there, convinced he was going to die. There was a moment when he considered ending it with a bullet to spare himself the indignity of dying in his own piss and s**t. Death did not frighten him. He knew that he had been living on borrowed time for years, and a bullet was as good a way as any to end it. However, his desire to live was stronger than he realized, and every day he found a reason to hold back on that thought for just a little longer.

And then, miraculously, after days of dehydration and delirium, after the fever had burned him inside out, Hunter felt better.

A week after it began, Hunter found he was able to stand up and keep food down. Two weeks later, he was able to leave and resume his journey north. Somehow, he had become one of those lucky few who recovered and went on. His survival astonished no one more than himself. Somehow, he had drawn a winning ticket in this tragic lottery.

Realizing that his survival was a second chance, Hunter decided he was not going to waste it. He was going to find himself a place where he could just live, without danger of some asshole trying to kill him and where he could be forgotten. He saw that goal in the Canadian mountains, where he could disappear in the good, clean air, without people and lots of solitude.

Since Chicago he had done nothing but run. It was time to stop.

* * *

It was Gary who told him about Haven.

Hunter encountered the old man on the highway almost a month before. Gary had swerved to miss an animal in the road and ended up running into a telephone pole. By the time Hunter found him, he was almost dead. With no way to get him medical help, Hunter hadn't felt right about leaving the man to rot, so he stayed with Gary until the old man passed.

Gary had been trying to contact anyone on his CB radio when he picked up a transmission from someone broadcasting from Vancouver Island. It was sent wide for anyone to receive and that Gary had picked it up at all was sheer luck. The voice on the other end said they were from Haven and it was a good place, where people got along and lived like they did before the Plague. It was enough for the man to pack up his truck and make the journey to reach it.

After he died, Hunter had done the proper thing and buried him. However, his curiosity was piqued and since he was heading in that general direction anyway, he figured it was worth a look. While he doubted everything was as harmonious as Gary claimed, a safe place where he could hang for a while before moving on was enough.

Perhaps he also wanted to see if it was possible that people could rise to the occasion despite adversity. There wasn't much in him that still had faith in anything, especially after what had happened in Chicago, but he liked to think that the people he had spent most of his adult life defending were worth the effort.

It would be a nice change.