The Black Seas of Infinity by Dan Henk Page B

the
car down to the Mexican border and disappear. If I traveled largely
at night, within the speed limit, I should make it. My first
obstacle was to devise a method to get gas. I wouldn’t need many
supplies. Maybe if I went to a gas station, grabbed a bunch of
containers, and filled them… although everything about that would
look suspicious. How could I avoid prying eyes and dangerous
questions? That deserted gas station had been a stroke of luck, but
I knew better than to expect another one. Not to mention the
quantity of gas I would need to grab. I was stupid for not having
foreseen that and stocked up here, but hindsight is always
twenty-twenty.
    I figured my best bet would be to don
clothes, wrap my face in bandages, and take bucolic routes the
whole way down, hoping to avoid detection. Maybe make a midnight
run to some local stations to steal some gas. I figured I’d wait a
week for things to cool down, then try my luck. I wondered if any
of my adventures had made the news. I switched on the small TV and
it crackled to life. But garbled static was all it showed. I
flipped the channels, but there was no signal. I didn’t have cable
hooked up, but I should at least have been able to get the local
news. The one other time I had tried in the past, a few channels
had worked. The “antenna” consisted of a mangled clothes hanger,
rammed into the stump of what had originally been a retracting
metal rod. I slowly twisted the hanger, but nothing changed. I
clicked the TV off and went to try the radio. It was a huge
antique, waist high and mounted into a carved wooden cabinet. I
turned it on, noticed the red button light up, and slowly turned
the knob. Nothing but white noise. Strange. I glanced over at the
bookshelf. It was beginning to look like I would be reading to pass
the time. I needed a distraction. I had bought this cabin as is.
The original owner had died, leaving the detritus of his old life
behind.
    Crossing the burgundy rug strewn across the
floor of the rustic living room, I stooped and examined the
bookshelf. A Bible. A book on the guns of World War II. A complete
twenty-five volume set on aviation. A huge tan book entitled The
Volume Library. It was going to be a long week.
    After a few hours spent looking over books on
“The Epic of Flight,” I decided to do some exploring outside. I
stripped off my clothes. They were unnecessary, and I didn’t want
to get them dirty in the woods. I strolled out onto the front
porch. The overhead awning sheltered me, the bright midday sun
drenching the landscape, bleaching out the rolling carpet of leaves
into leafy islands of brilliance. I descended the steps, scanned
the area, and on a whim, decided to head off to the right. There
probably was nobody within miles of the cabin, the woodlands
providing a soothing wilderness of isolation.
    I spent a couple of hours walking through the
forest, passing groves of birch trees, outcroppings of moss-covered
rock, tangled nests of thick vines. I tromped onto an incline and
ended up climbing a tree-covered mountain. Normally, I would have
been forced to bend over with the effort and take frequent breaks,
but I felt fine.
    Nearing the top, I spied a clearing with an
outcropping of boulders, their slate gray edges jutting up from a
blanket of moss and leaf. Surmounting the peak, I climbed a
straddling rock and looked out over a heavily wooded valley. My
cabin was off to the left somewhere, way down the mountain. I tried
to spy it, picking spots I thought might afford a view, and focused
my vision. Many of the deciduous trees were barren of leaves, but
with distance their sheer volume clustered together into an
inscrutable mass. My vision amplified with each new spot I chose,
focusing in and magnifying my view until I could see every tree
branch, the tightly wound limbs veiled in small clusters of fiery
leaves. I focused in and out of a few spots when suddenly I noticed
a small curl of smoke wafting up through the foliage.