Alberta

Dylan Summers stood in the dirt of what used to be a front yard, the plush green grass long since dead, listening as his prospective landlord set out the terms of the proposed lease.

“Just keep the poachers out,” the man said.

“How much is the rent,” Dylan asked.

The man looked down at his boots, shifted his weight from one leg to the other and gave a small kick to the dirt.

“Mr. Summers,” the man started, still looking down at the point of his own boots, “you’re not listening to me.”

Dylan looked at him as the man, head bowed, concluded, barely audible, “Keep the poachers off my property.”

Copper Cruise suddenly looked up, grabbed Dylan’s right hand and stared at his eyes. “We got a deal,” he asked, smiling as if though he had heard a yes.

Now it was Dylan’s turn to look down at the ground, Copper’s stare too intense for him, especially in this heat. “Well,” Dylan started, looking up, squinting, “yes, sir, I guess we do,” breaking the grip of the man’s handshake.

“Keep the poachers off your land,” Dylan said, the disrepaired house behind him, a slight breeze moving the dirt underneath their feet.

“I’ll be back in one year,” Copper said. “But there’s one more thing,” he said, reaching into his right pant pocket.

He pulled out a black heart-shaped locket on an impossibly short chain. It looked like the chain would barely fit around Copper’s thick middle finger. Once again, Copper took Dylan’s hand in his, this time forcibly prying open the younger man’s fingers as he placed the locket in Dylan’s palm. Dylan looked at it and then made a fist around the locket and dropped his hand to his side, assuming the locket was his to keep.

Copper continued, “You’ve got kerosene lamps, one upstairs, one downstairs. I have a shit-ton of hand sanitizers from the plague—“

“Pandemic,” Dylan interrupted.

Copper stared at him and Dylan tightened both fists, the one with the locket cutting through his thin skin. He had had to fight—literally—over this one before. He had voted for Landgrebe before and, if elections could ever be held again, he would do it again.

“You know what,” Copper said, pausing for the “what“ to sink in, “you believe whatever you want to believe. I need to head out,” he paused, squinting at the sun behind Dylan’s shoulder, “looks like about an hour ago.”

“If you have an emergency pee situation, there’s a shallow cistern in the back; anything more complicated, you need to use the public.” Copper lifted his right hand and pointed down the street. “You can shower once a week there, too, but don’t push it; the hall monitor is a vicious bitch. Shower once a month—fast—here. You should be fine. Water’s a little brown but clean. Questions?”

“No,” Dylan said and the men fell into silence.

“Actually,” Dylan said as Copper bent down to pick up his beige backpack, “one.”

Copper looked at him, waiting.

“Where are you going,” Dylan asked.

“Wyoming” was the answer but Dylan was certain that was a lie.

Copper adjusted the backpack over his right shoulder and asked Dylan, “You remember what the locket looks like?”

Dylan remembered he was still holding the locket, sweating and bleeding on it. He involuntarily brought his hand up into his vision, opened his palm and looked at the black locket, his bodily fluids invisible on it.

“Yes,” Dylan replied, “yes, sir.” He felt like an idiot staring at the locket, saying “sir,” his reactions instinctive.

“Give it back,” Copper said.

Dylan silently handed the black locket back to Copper, successfully resisting the urge to say “yes, sir” again.

“If a woman comes around here with this locket,” he said, dangling the locket off his right pinkie, “before I get back, the house is hers. Understand? You can stay downstairs until I get back but I’ll expect to find her in better condition than whatever condition she shows up in. Understand? There’s two revolvers, one on the table by the stove and one in the freezer. Ammunition is in the upstairs bedroom. Water jugs in the basement. There’s plenty to last you unless there’s another zombie plague.”

Copper was clearly joking but neither man laughed. Copper didn’t even smile.

Copper Cruise turned around, said, “Take care,” and began walking away from his ex-wife’s house.

The conservos believed that the government created a plague to wipe them out. If that was true, the government (not surprisingly) was truly incompetent and imprecise because the pandemic killed just as many libbos. Of course, thought Dylan, it was the pandemic,  vicious and unrelenting, the vaccines no longer effective against the rapid virus mutations, that killed off  half the population and destroyed the government, the riots and racial hatred and endemic poverty at last undoing the lower laces as the second shoe slowly dropped. The Union—such as it was—was now just a compendium of states on one political side tied to the federal system and, on the other side, the other states taking money from China. The former united country now lived side by side, state by state, in an uneasy co-habitation, like a slowly failing marriage, each one too exhausted to take shots at the other.

Dylan was ready to kill a poacher.

He assumed, without asking, that Copper had coin buried somewhere on the premises. It was of no concern. He had doors that locked and guns. Water. Damn, even a private shower once a month if he wanted.

There was still Union money left over from the Pandemic Relief Act and Sendera City was handing out one meal a day at City Center, alternating between soup one day and sandwiches the next, except on Sundays. Sundays, Dylan found out, Sendera City citizens were on their own. He started scraping together leftovers during the week to get through those long Sundays. The only thing City Center had to offer on Sundays was crackers and toasted bread. By ten hundred hours on Monday, however, the trucks would roll in and everything would be back to normal.

City Center was about a mile from Dylan’s. He was hoping he could do some odd jobs on the north side, just past City Center, scrape together some coin in a few months and buy a bicycle at Academy. Three coins would get him a functional ten-speed.  Then he could start riding the mile to City Center instead of walking. On the other hand, Academy was three miles away and this summer was getting hotter. Maybe he would wait until September to make that trek.

When September rolled around, it was still hot and Dylan was short one coin. He made a perfunctory search of the premises but even if he found coin in the house, would he really steal from Copper Cruise? The man was good to him and he knew Copper didn’t believe in “borrowing.” Dylan wasn’t on the street. Granted, he didn’t have electricity or steady running water but no one south of the Canadian provinces did anyway.

October came in cold.

On the first Sunday of that month, Dylan finished two leftover sandwich quarters and some cold soup from the preceding week. He drank down his bottled water to the half way mark, leaned back in his chair, stretched his arms out, then got up and put on a well worn hoodie over his blue and yellow UCLA tee shirt. He grabbed a jacket from Copper’s old couch, put it on over the hoodie, leaving the jacket open and stepped out on to the back porch, feeling warmer. Used to be, he would light up a joint, pop a Xanax and drink a few of his girl’s White Claws, watching the sun set. This particular Sunday in October, the 4th to be exact, sitting on the back porch of another man’s house, he just watched the sun set. He was a former addict. But so was everyone else.

He allowed his eyes to narrow, then close, as time drifted in and out of his memory. He envisioned Copper narrowing his eyes, looking in the direction of the blazing sun. “Bout an hour ago,” he had said. Dylan allowed himself to relax, remembering the Xanax.  “Bout an hour ago.”

“Dude’” Copper Cruise said, “someone is kicking your door in.” That’s fine, Dylan thought.

Then he heard it. Bam! Bam! Bam!

Now his spine was erect and the hair on the back of his neck was straight out.

CRACK!

This motherfucker was inside.

Dylan, one half instinct, one half adrenaline, sprinted around the outside of the house, forming a plan. The poacher would be in between him and the revolver that he had foolishly left beside his dinner paper plate, leaving only one option. He would have to sprint upstairs behind the poacher’s back, grab the weapon off his nightstand, then jet back downstairs with the revolver in hand and reason with the poacher to leave. I got this, he thought, silently rounding the front corner of his house at a three-quarter sprint.

By the time he sprinted through the gaping doorway, they were both, invader and defender, enshrouded in darkness.

Dylan stumbled on his way upstairs. Loudly. Twice.  (Fuck!) Grabbed his weapon.

When Dylan made his way back downstairs, revolver cool in his right hand by his hip, planning on taking a turn into the main room, he ran straight into the poacher at the foot of the steps and fell backwards onto his ass. He brought the revolver directly in front of his chest and indiscriminately fired into the darkness.

His aim was true.

After the trigger pull, Dylan stood up on the stairs, ears ringing, leaning against the side wall for support and looked down upon the shape of his interloper, violently reacting to the gunshot.

Eventually, blood pouring from the middle of the poacher’s face, the poacher’s arms and legs stopped flailing.

Annoyed, Dylan stepped over the poacher’s body, walked to his kitchen table and grabbed the second revolver.

That night, Dylan slept downstairs on the couch, his arms, revolvers in each hand, forming an “X” over his chest, ready for a wave of zombie-poachers trying to kill him and live in his house. They did not come.

Morning arrived.  Busy day, he thought, sitting up, the sun serene upon the left side of his face.

1. Move the body outside.

2. Re-secure the front door.

3. Re-load the upstairs revolver and put one in the hot freezer downstairs, one on the night stand upstairs.

4. Bury the body.

5. Lunch.

Dylan got up off the couch, walked to his vacated front doorway and looked down at the body of the poacher. He could not tell if the poacher was a man or a woman. This motherfucker. One by one, that October 5th, he checked items off his list until he was done.

One night, several months later,  he dreamed about the poacher, the poacher’s brain spilling out on the kitchen floor while Dylan ate his left-over sandwich for supper.  In the dream, Dylan, tired, then went to bed and in the morning he woke up, went downstairs and ate breakfast, having decided to let the body rot there on the floor beside him. When he looked up from his pancake, Copper, seated across the table from him, smiled at him, proud. Keep the poachers out. Good job, Copper’s smile seemed to say, just before all his teeth fell out.

After another few months, the heat slowly returned. Dylan figured Copper was about two, three months away. When Copper returned, Dylan would ask him if he could stay on. Copper did not need Dylan’s help—or company. If Copper said no, then he would either barter Academy for a new tent or take a used one from City Center. He would be residing outside the mess hall with about a hundred other Sendera City residents and two portable bathrooms, cleaned once a month. This, he was not looking forward to. Maybe, if Copper came back with coin, he could do odd jobs for him.

Months passed.

Now, it’s Thursday night and Dylan, lying on the downstairs couch, hears the front door knob twitching, followed almost immediately by a pounding on the door. He grabs the revolver next to him, exits the back door, rounding the back corner.  The coolness of his stealthy demeanor did not match his accelerating heartbeat, his burgeoning adrenaline. He picks up his trot as he rounds the front corner, unexpectedly bumping bodies with the poacher and each party takes a step back.

Alberta was expecting a bit more welcoming reception. Alberta, in spite of the warm evening air, is cold, tired, hungry. She has been walking all week. She was promised safe harbor.

Now irritated at getting bumped, she looks at Dylan as the dark shadow of the house falls upon them and screams, “Who the fuck are you!”

Dylan has been through this drill before.

Dylan stepped back and aimed his revolver at the poacher’s chest. The gun was out of reach of the poacher. Even so, he takes another step back.

“Let me in the house, fucker,” the poacher said, pushing her hands forward as if she was pushing on Dylan’s chest.  Her  voice was deep, thick with exhaustion.

Dylan took another step back. He knew his hand was shaking and it pissed him off. Come on, man, he thought, you’ve  done this before; stop twitching. “Don’t take another step,” he said, his voice deeper than usual.

Dylan wanted to scare the poacher away.  Avoid this all together, not wanting to go through it again.

Instead, the poacher took a step forward. Wrong.

Dylan’s twitching finger pulled on the soft-touch trigger of the six-shooter in an immediate explosion of regret. The poacher, roughly Dylan’s size, was no match for the bullet and the body fell, crumbling to the dry soil.

Dylan walked to the still body in the unmoving dirt, not far from the space where he first met Copper Cruise. He said, “Are you okay,” tears forming in his eyes, knowing the answer to his question, judging from the blood spreading on the poacher’s chest, was “no,” maybe “no, asshole, I’m dead.”

He took the poacher’s right hand in his. The fist was clenched around something. He pried the poacher’s fingers open. His vision was blurry with water in his eyes and, at once, he understood the deal he made with Copper. The poacher had it coming but that didn’t make this easy. He longed for the return of Copper Cruise.

In the middle of Alberta’s palm was a heart-shaped locket. Black. On an impossibly short chain. Dylan’s nascent tears now flowed freely. Without effort, the locket opened. He could see an inscription by the light of a full moon as his tears began drying. He slowly read the inscription: “I Love You. Literally Forever. C.C.”