We had a day of house-hunting ahead of us – a type of house hunting that didn’t involve over-eager realtors or nit-picking about bathroom tile selections. I badly wanted some coffee – not instant garbage or stale shit made from old, worn-out beans, but a nice, rich cup of Portland coffee, proper pour-over style, with cream. You’re doing it to yourself again, I admonished, and tried to put my mind onto something else. The fire was out, and I didn’t wish to take the time to relight it. We all moved with a galvanizing sense of purpose, aware that we needed to get moving and secure some shelter. Yesterday had ended with our confidence at an ebb, each of us nursing our fears separately and hanging on by a ragged thread. In the new day, the group’s resolve seemed to be returning, and we got our supplies and our spirits together without needing much discussion. 

The new morning routine of knife-edge self-sufficiency took over, and I took quick stock of my backpack – a few cans of food, first aid kit, antibiotics (I double-checked those separately), fuel cans, knife, ammo, smartphone. This last item seemed pointless now that there was no power or cell service or internet, but none of us could bring ourselves to get rid of them. After years of attachment to the things, they were hard to let go of. I told myself that perhaps the power would come back on and the phone would be usable again, but I knew it wasn’t true. Still, I held on to this object that was useless without the modern systems it relied on. Nosily, I checked the others’ bags. It would probably be obvious if we left anything behind, but I couldn’t rest easy until I made sure.

“Ready to go?” I asked when it seemed that we had all gathered ourselves and our things.

“Head ‘em up, move ‘em on!” Aaron called out with a put-on drawl, and Daniel came back with, “Rawhide!”

We set out south, a long tan-grey ribbon of beach stretching out into the distance for miles. The gentle sea breeze and cool clean air cleared the bad dreams from our minds and even gave us a bit of peace and serenity which was long overdue. Sarah and I walked together a little ways behind Daniel and Aaron, who were talking and getting to know each other. It turns out they had both lived, at different times, in the same little town in Louisiana, and they laughed about the coincidence, and Aaron said that it’s a small world, and I thought to myself, it’s a hell of a lot smaller now. We had known Daniel for years in Portland and had spent many summers camping together, exploring the mountains, forests, and rivers of the Northwest.

Aaron had only joined us a couple of weeks ago, after we rescued him from some trouble around on the 53 approaching Mohler, after spending days hiking towards the coast from our camping spot, trying to avoid trouble and figure out what had happened to the world in the few days we had been off the grid. Crashes in the road had stopped his progress, so he had gotten out of his car to walk, but before he could get too far he was stopped by a couple of rednecks in an old Ford pickup with a shotgun on the dashboard. They were acting menacingly, calling him a four-eyed nigger, about the time we came upon the scene, and I had intervened and escalated the situation by calling the two locals “fatass crackers.” When I saw the fatass cracker in the truck reach for the shotgun I got the drop on him and shot him through the windshield with the big .45, splattering blood and brains all over the back window just like the scene in Pulp Fiction when Vincent shoots Marvin in the face, and when his friend put his hands up and started to say, “Hey, man, I didn’t…,” I shot him right in the face, and then again for good measure. Two forty-five rounds to the head don’t leave much above the next, apparently.

Then Sarah and Daniel and Aaron had all backed away a little and stared at the bodies for a while with mouths open, and Aaron looked like he didn’t know if his situation had just improved or worsened, but then he managed a quiet, “Thanks,” and we introduced ourselves all around and shook hands awkwardly. He must not have been too put off by my trigger happiness, because he joined up with us. He told us he was a schoolteacher and going to the coast for the first time since moving to Oregon to teach in the new school year. The most recent non-digital pandemic had died down enough to resume in-person school in most places, and everyone was desperately hoping for a sense of normalcy to return. They would never get it. When Aaron left Portland, the “geopolitical situation” had been bad, though nowhere near apocalyptic, but on his way out the self-driving cars had started smashing themselves into other cars, and the power had gone out, and everything had happened too quickly to be able to piece together what exactly had happened. So here we were still trying to figure that out.

He told us that there had been reports of scattered internet and power outages in the days leading up to the collapse, and Russian cyberwarfare had been suspected. A number of companies, many of them with links to the Ukraine, had their operations crippled by some new kind of malware. But then everything broke down, news became scarce and unreliable, and a cloud of mystery and uncertainty had formed and was still lingering. Sarah and Daniel and I had been camping out in the remote forest for a few days, and that had been all it took for the world to finish falling apart. As soon as we got back to the highway after our camping trip ended we knew something was drastically wrong. We didn’t even get a mile before were blocked by one of the smash-ups, a bad one between an autonomous car and an old Clark Griswold-style Family Truckster station wagon with the puke green and wood panelling. All of us turned our phones on to dial 911 but there was no service, and then Daniel pointed out that the flies on the bodies meant that they had been there for a little while at least, so why hadn’t anyone else done anything? The realization that something big had happened started to set in on us, and then we had to decide what to do. Going back to the city was clearly a bad idea – we knew it would descend into chaos in a matter of days with no electricity. We had crossed the coastal range, and it was downhill to the coast from here, so we had headed west on foot, picked up Aaron, and were now approaching Garibaldi from the north.