Timothy Long: Beyond the Barriers

The guy on the radio was at a loss for words, and I wondered how often that happened. He told the boy, after a moment, that he had called the police, and when the men in uniform showed up, he should let them in.

I flipped to a music channel and drove toward the hills.

The trees grew thicker along the side of the road as I drove on into the night. A fine mist of rain dropped from the sky, but didn’t stick around long enough to get the car wet. I beat at it with the windshield wipers and cranked up the brights as the car hummed along the old highway. I had the window open, and the smell of fresh, clean air with a touch of pine rushed into the car. We drove this way a few years ago, Allison and I, but it looked just like every hilly road I had ever been on.

A group of motorcycles shot by. They had been drawing closer in my rearview mirror for a few seconds before they caught up and passed me. They slowed for a mile or two then sped up. When I got to the area where they had slowed, I found a big yellow sign with a ‘Falling Rocks’ warning.

For the next few hours, I drove steadily upward as my car sought the top of the pass. I lost myself in thought, and changed the channel like a kid with ADD. Sometimes I tried to focus on what was being said, really said. There was a virus of unknown origin; it made people sick and most died. Within moments, sometimes seconds, the dead came back to life. It was the stuff of nightmares and late-night B movies. I couldn’t stand to think it was serious, and yet I had killed two men with my own hands in the last six hours.

I came to the cutoff, and saw the familiar sign for a deer crossing. I took the turn and came to a fence with a big padlock on it. The fence itself was old and rickety, but the lock was shiny and new. On either side of the dirt road, trees reached into the dark. There was no way I could drive around it. I shut off my lights and let my eyes get used to the dark.

The moon was out, but it was barely visible through the clouds that had rolled in over the past hour. I stared into the night and thought about my day. It ran through my mind in slow motion—the trip to the store, the dealings with the clerk at the gun counter. I wondered if he had taken my advice and gone home to protect his family with the shotgun I pulled out.

I eased the car forward until the bumper kissed the gate, and then gave it a little gas. The fence, from what I had seen, was an old wooden pair of slats that someone had nailed onto much larger chunks of wood. It may have been a better gate at one point, but now it was just a makeshift barrier that I hoped wouldn’t stand up to much pressure.

I gave it a little more gas. There was a snap, and I was through. The car gave a little bounce, like I had ridden over something. It sounded loud in the confined space, like I had done some real damage.

I pulled up about ten feet, hopped out of my Honda, and tried to inspect the underside. The car was sitting flat, so there were no popped tires. I couldn’t see anything underneath, so decided to trust luck rather than spend much time crawling under the car. I would have to get in and dig around in my backpack for a flashlight if I did that.

I ran back to the fence and inspected the damage. The gate had pulled away on the left side and fallen to the ground. The lock was still in place, so I picked it up, set it on the remains of the old post, and wedged it between two large nails.

It wouldn’t hold up in a stiff wind, but until I came back to fix it, the jury-rigged thing would have to do. I drove slowly for the next minute, trying to remember how the road curved. It was difficult to see in the dark, so I rolled down my front window and stuck my head out. When I felt like I had made it far enough around a curve for my lights not to be seen, I popped them back on and sped up the hill.

The SUV bumped over the gravel then larger rocks as I got farther from the road. Once I had a clear view, it was just a matter of maneuvering around the larger rocks and branches that lay in the way. No one had been here for a long time. I came to one large branch and got out of the car. I had to drag it, grunting and straining the whole time, until there was a clear path. It looked more like a small tree had fallen down, and it was long and inflexible.

I drove the car past it, then got out again and dragged it back to its original spot. I was being ultra-paranoid now, but I didn’t know what to expect in the coming weeks. Maybe it would all end with the world back to normal in a few days. All the footage on TV over the last week had led me to believe, at least in the beginning, that the virus was contained and the authorities were taking care of it. Footage leaked out on the web, slowly at first, of attacks all around the globe.

The ports and airports into the U.S. had been shut down first. A strict policy of checking every arriving passenger had gone into effect. After a day of that, they put a stop to flights altogether. I remembered watching the video, just a few days ago, of a plane landing and the emergency slide opening while men and women streamed out of the plane. Some were bloodied, and when they reached the bottom, one dropped her bag, turned to her companion, and tore his throat out. Then it was chaos, as more of the things went down the slide and poured away from the plane in a full panic.

“I can’t believe what I am seeing here. Now, this is live footage from Sea-Tac airport where a plane has landed, in distress, and the passengers seem to be attacking each other. Folks, I have never …” then his voice cut off, and one of the newscasters was caught staring to the side in shock. She turned to face the camera again and, in a calm voice, started talking about the sports world. I should have left then. I should have planned this better.

The road ended in another mile. It came up against a copse of trees that were at least fifty feet tall. I got out and stretched, glad that I had arrived. Assuming no one was in my old friend’s cabin, I had made it to my home of isolation. I took a deep breath of the cool air, which smelled like pine and upturned dirt. It was a clean smell. Earthy. I almost smiled.

I guess I have always been somewhat of a loner, but now I planned to cut all ties to civilization for a while.

I walked straight past the road until I came to a massive boulder. It looked like a tiny mountain had fallen from the sky and landed here. It was the landmark that told me to cut right and walk about a hundred yards. I had to trust my sense of direction, which was usually pretty good. It kept me in a straight line, until I heard water and knew I was by the tiny lake. My flashlight held up pretty well, although the LED light didn’t seem to be as bright as the halogen one I used to have. I shook it again to charge it, feeling ridiculous as I did, like I was jacking the thing off.

I almost walked into water. I stopped at the shore, then shone the light up and down the edge of the lake until I saw an upturned boat about thirty feet to the left. It sat there like a beached whale—just a curve in the dark that told me I was close to my destination.

As I got closer, I saw the edge of the cabin in the woods. A space had been cut in the trees, forming a square around the wooden structure. In the dark of night, they rose like giants into the night sky.

Ray let me use his place a few years ago. Allison and I had come back from our honeymoon in Belize, but we had a few days left before we had to go back to work—her teaching accounting software at the Payco Inc. and me as a security consultant at Hamnar Enterprises. He gave me the key and a hand-drawn map on a Wednesday, and said we could stay for as long as we wanted. A couple of days turned into a week in which we fished, skinny dipped, and jumped in the sack several times a day.