That really hurt.
There was a movie a long time ago called Drugstore Cowboy, and in it the lead character gets beaten up. The voice-over while this is happening says, “There’s something life affirming about getting the shit kicked out of you.” I’m here to tell you that there is nothing life affirming about it. It just fucking hurts. Everything hurts. Dolly checked me over and determined that nothing was broken, but that didn’t make me feel any better.
If you haven’t had the shit kicked out of you, there’s no way to explain how it feels. It’s like trying to explain how it feels to be sober to someone who’s never had a drink.
We stayed an extra day to let me recover, and there was no contact from our new playmates.
Then we left on the next leg of our journey which would take us to Gardnerville NV. On this whole trip, I kept thinking back to the pandemics. Almost no one was worried about those until it was too late, and they were kind of overshadowed by flashier events like massive heat waves, hurricanes, fires, and tornados. Very little attention was paid to something you couldn’t see. I had a friend that sold me my first motorcycle, and he told me that the first rule of staying alive, and that’s how he worded it, was to imagine, every time you got on the bike, that no one could see you, but they could still kill you and that’s kind of how the virus was. No one could see it, but it could still kill you.
So, while every one was ignoring it, it became more and more deadly until it was an even match whether climate change or the virus killed more people.
We’ll never know for sure, but if I had to bet, I would say it was the virus. Covid alone killed an estimated 30,000,000 people in the first five years, and when the bird flu came along it just took off. That’s kind of a pun. I’m surprised that I can even make a pun, feeling the way I do, but I guess I had enough practice making puns that it’s second nature.
We had left Coaldale, NV, a charming ghost town, like most towns now, and were headed toward Gardnerville which was where we were going to turn west, and head up into the Sierras on our way to Lake Tahoe. We were about 3 hours out, and it was almost time to stop for the day. No one was sleeping very well, but on the plus side, winter, such as it is, was coming, and we were at around 4,500 feet so it was getting a little cooler during the day.
There is nothing that truly qualifies as winter anymore. The temperature drops from a high of well over 110 degrees in the day to around 90, and then it meanders down to around 80 in the night before it starts going back up again.
We were all in much better physical shape now that we were getting our steps in every day, closer to 50,000 than 10,000. All I’m capable of now is one foot in front of the other for as long as I can. Dolly says we have to keep moving and maybe when we get to areas that were more populated, we can enlist a few more travelers.
It’s hard for me to think about all the places that we have travelled through and all the places we are going to travel through as having no people, but it is a possibility. I mean, we couldn’t be the last people on earth, could we?
What has happened, and this is only a guess, is that the initial acute phase of the end ended, and the chronic phase started and continues and that most people had either died or found a place to hole up in until they decided it wasn’t worth the trouble anymore and offed themselves.
It seems like a fine time for the emergence of a bunch of Jim Jones type of characters, telling folks that he could free them of their suffering if only they would drink from the holy fount of Kool-Aid. My guess is that there are piles of dead bodies rotting in the sun, still waiting for the promised redemption.
We are close enough to Gardnerville for today and decide to make camp outside of town because we have seen the flickering of fires in the distance, and we don’t want to get anywhere near any groups without doing some surveillance first.
We found ourselves an old rock building to sleep in and drew sticks, we didn’t have any straws otherwise we would have drawn them because drawing the short straw sounds better than drawing the short stick, although someone could get the short end of the stick which sounds better that the short end of the straw. I got the short stick and took the first watch.
A note on writing The Priest:
I have an outline and an end game, but the individual entries are what I imagine our hero would put in a journal. So I write each one with that in mind.
I love this series! 💕🖤