The bad news was that daylight was almost gone before Jonas rolled out.
He wrapped a couple of heavy metal chains through the gate and locked them with equally heavy padlocks. The last thing he wanted was to return to a compound full of zombies that were morphing into the likeness of his dead girlfriend. Nor did he want to be spotted on the road by the Flying saucers, but all things considered, there were no perfect conditions, and waiting for perfect conditions was a bigger fool’s mission than the one he was about to undertake.
It had been one of those days when the moon, which was still full or almost full, could be seen like a giant semitransparent balloon in the sky during several hours of the day. And it would be a full moon again or almost full again that night. Jonas decided he would drive the tow truck without headlamps for as far as he could in hopes of not drawing attention to himself. That part of the plan was ruptured pretty quickly when Jonas spotted a deer off the road, in a field on the passenger side, just standing there, facing his direction.
As low as Jonas was on food, he felt that he had no choice but to pull the tow truck to the side of the road and stop; take out his rifle and harvest the animal if possible. It was an 8-point buck and would provide venison for him and Iris Vandertrout for a while if he could take it down, and it seemed to be fully cooperating: standing totally motionless transfixed perhaps by the sight of a human being.
Jonas cocked Big Medicine before he slowly got out of the truck to avoid making any noise or sudden movements that would frighten the buck way. He then tiptoed around, more or less, to the hood of the truck and steadied the rifle. He did not want to miss. The very thought of venison stew, jerky and roast made his mouth water and his stomach growl. And he wanted to place the bullet in such a place that the buck would drop immediately and not run as deer were known to do.
If Jonas had thought about it, he might have considered it peculiar that the deer stood so perfectly still and didn’t flinch or blink or flip its tail one time as he steadied himself against the fender of the tow truck in prep to deliver the kill shot. But he didn’t think about it. He just thought about slowly squeezing the trigger to perfectly deliver instant death to the beautiful and tasty-looking animal.
And he fired.
But nothing happened, except a sort of pinging sound when the lead bullet hit the deer just behind the right shoulder blade where it should’ve passed through skin and muscle into the animal’s heart. The big buck should’ve either dropped dead on the spot or bolted, but it did neither.
Jonas slowly racked another round into the chamber and moved the barrel of the rifle until the deer was once more in the sights of Big Medicine and fired again. The sound of the gun was booming. It echoed for miles down the road that Jonas was on. He was sure he hit the big buck in the heart but again, nothing happened, except the odd pinging sound.
“Dammit!” Jonas said and walked around the front of the tow truck and basically stomped through the field to where the 8-point buck continued to stand, frozen in place as still as a statue, which it sort of was.
It was a robo deer, a mechanical decoy that game wardens and sheriffs sometimes place in plain view in open fields to attract poachers, etc., hunting out of season.
Jonas knew that he’d been duped. He wasn’t certain if the decoy had been placed by a sheriff or game warder who was likely dead from the purple haze dropped by the Visitors to wipe out mankind or if it had been placed by the aliens themselves. In either case, the deception had cost Jonas some time: darkness had settled in like an illegal homesteader in a gated community. He hurried across the field back to the tow truck and got in and hauled ass.
If the robo deer was the first unanticipated rendezvous he would experience on this prepared obstacle course, he reckoned he would encounter the next gizmo or gadget or stratagem soon enough. And he reckoned correctly.
He’d not traveled more than a couple of miles when he came upon a pileup... of caskets ...and milk cans. Fortunately for Jonas, he’d flipped his headlamps on despite the fear of being spied from overhead, otherwise he would likely have struck the first casket he came upon- a dark rich mahogany casket, appropriately hued to respectfully hallow the dead, but difficult to see on a moonlit backwoods highway.
It appeared that a vehicle transport trailer stacked three or four deep with the coffins had collided with a big dairy truck and there were caskets and 15-quart stainless steel milk cans all over the highway. Whether it had been staged or not for his benefit, Jonas of course could not be certain. The accident could have occurred when the EMPs from the Visitors’ craft first took out everyone’s communications before dropping the purple haze. Of course, everyone in the United States thought it was the Russians and everyone in Russia thought it was the United States that had activated the EMPs but soon enough and sadly enough everyone would realize that the entire planet was under siege and then they would all be dead.
Jonas weaved and zig-zagged the tow truck through the weird snarl of coffins and milk cans and found he was becoming anxious because his forward progress had become thwarted again and because he anticipated that this was not the last of the delays. And he’d anticipated correctly.
Only a couple of miles further down the road, he came upon another transport truck used for hauling pigs to market that had become victim to either the EMP or the driver succumbed to purple haze.
Being transported in individual cages, or sometimes two per cage, depending on their size, when the truck driver was incapacitated and crashed into another vehicle and the truck flipped over, the pigs spilled onto the highway like jellybeans out of a torn bag. Many of them died instantly in their cages or not long after. Others, however, not killed upon impact, were set free to escape into the woods. And others still stayed to feed upon the bodies of their dead pig brethren.
When Jonas steered the tow truck to the side of the road and got out to examine the dead pigs to determine if he could salvage some of the meat, the few survivors who were dining on their dead... fled. They didn’t like being lit up by the truck’s headlights but they didn’t go far either. Because of fear of the wild dogs or other creatures or critters that might go bump in the night, they stayed at the edge of the darkness in that shadowy neutral zone between light and dark and waited.
The smell told Jonas that it was likely most of the meat was putrid already and not fit to eat anyway, even though the pigs were eating it. And he started to take down one of them with his handgun since he was close enough, and the rifle was still in the tow truck. But he decided against it because, most likely, he would only wound whichever swine he shot and leave it to die a malingering death or to the mercy of its swine compatriots. And since pigs are intelligent creatures, they’d likely figure out that he was going to his truck for something that would not be agreeable to their well-being.
The door of the car the truck smashed into, an older Prius, was a pulverized hunk of metal. The driver-side door had been ripped open and almost off its hinges. There were no human remains in the vehicle: The pigs got them, Jonas figured. The driver-side door looked like an elephant had kicked it: the glass from the window was shattered out, and the driver’s corpse was gone. And even though Jonas reasoned that the pigs had eaten the dead bodies from both vehicles, he was struck with a peculiar realization: He’d never seen human remains in all the wrecked automobiles and trucks he’d observed on the road since the arrival of the Visitors.
Jonas rummaged around for any type of comestibles he might be able to scavenge from the wrecked vehicle and finding none came to the conclusion the pigs had likely rutted out anything to eat and eaten them. He was about to climb behind the wheel of the tow truck again and continue his journey when he became aware of a soft grunting sound that sounded almost pathetic.
At first, Jonas thought it best to just let it be: leave whatever it was to its fate and get on with the rescue mission that might likely be ill-fated and cost him his own life. But he couldn’t do it. The more he listened to the pitiful grunting noise the more he was moved to take action.
He had to lift away some of the debris from the accident and move around some of the creates but after a few minutes uncovered a piglet trapped in one of the cages that had fallen off the truck and not broken apart enough for the young animal to squeeze and wriggle out of. It was approximately the size of a full-grown English bulldog, maybe 45 or 50 pounds. It was surprisingly clean considering it had been trapped and not able to piss or shit anywhere other than through the bars of the cage it was imprisoned in. The only logical reason that the piglet could still be alive was that one side of the animal’s crate was jammed into the body of a dead sow, which appeared to be fully grown, and the piglet had been eating. It crossed Jonas’s mind that the forsaken piglet may have been consuming the body of its own mother.
Despite the fact that Jonas enjoyed a good pork roast and the scarcity of food, he couldn’t bring himself to putting a bullet in the brain pan of the forlorn piglet. He busted it out of the cage instead and placed it on the road and waved his hands at it to make it run away, however, it didn’t. What it did was follow a few steps behind Jonas when he walked back to the truck.
He waved his hands at the little piggie again, more vigorously to shoo it away. But again the piglet didn’t flee. It stood and stared at Jonas and took steps toward him every time he attempted to walk away.
“Shit!” Jonas said. “Just what I need, a baby pig making doe eyes at me! Shoo! Shoo!”
But it didn’t, “shoo”, it wouldn’t “shoo.”
Jonas finally gave up the fruitless effort to make the piglet run away and hide itself in the woods, or whatever the other sensible pigs were doing. And He turned away from the animal and walked to the tow truck and climbed inside and drove away... sort of.
Unfortunately for Jonas but fortunately for the piglet, Jonas looked into the rear-view mirror as he was driving away and saw the piglet running after him.
“Shit! Fuck! Dammit!” he said and stopped and grabbed the dog crate out of the back of the truck and went back for the animal.
At first, it seemed the piglet would cooperate and go into the dog crate. The animal didn’t run away from Jonas, at least: it gave the impression it felt okay being near him. But feral animals do that sometimes: act at ease around humans until one attempts to touch them. So every time Jonas would open the door to the crate and attempt to maneuver the little piggy into it, it backed away. So then finally, after several attempts and as many failures, because the little piggy failed to cooperate each time at the last second: Jonas said, “Fuck it,” and began to walk away. However, the little piggy followed Jonas again.
It was then Jonas noticed a thin black collar around the little piggy’s neck, decorated with small diamonds, spaced about an eighth of an inch apart.
“Son of B!” he exclaimed. “You belong to somebody! I mean, you did.”
There was a small, rectangular, metal plate attached to the collar with the word MISTER engraved upon it. “Is that your name, Mister?” The pig reacted to the word “Mister” with another small grunt, and for an instant seemed he would nuzzle Jonas.
“Son of a B!” Jonas said again. “And I was thinking about eating you.”
Jonas walked back to the tow truck and opened the glove box and looked inside and sure enough, a dog leash was neatly wound around itself and stored beneath some of the paperwork.
Jonas grabbed the leash, unrolled it, and went back to Mister Pig who behaved like a dog that thought it was about to be taken for a walk. Once he’d leashed Mister, he was able to get him in the crate and then hoist him into the back seat of the tow truck.
Either he was stolen from his owner and sold to the guys who were hauling him to market or his owner sold him... Jonas thought. Either way... fucked up situation.
Jonas also reconsidered what he’d decided about Mister’s age. Since he was a pet pig and not one of the feral pigs, it was likely that he was fully grown.
That’s fucked up.
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