The shot
After the Apocalypse chapter 4
The old man sat hunched on the hot asphalt grit of the roofing shingles. Alternatively watching the Lion preening itself and glancing at the woman who lay on her back beside him. She had one arm thrown over her eyes, forearm blocking the sun, a hand reflexively clenching and unclenching in thought.
He straightened and looked around, gathering as much as he could from the view. They were a couple hundred yards from the gravel road. The hills sloped up behind the farm in dense thickets behind a tall fence.
He looked at the woman lying there, thinking, and thought to himself, “Here’s another one of those leadership moments.” He had learned through his life that people naturally turned to him and expected him to lead, to decide, to choose a way forward.
At first, he’d recoiled from it. Who was he to decide the fate of others? He tried to collaborate, to share the leadership, to find consensus. But, people hated that. People were for the most part sheep. They looked for strength and wanted to be led.
Now he saw it here with this woman. As capable as she was. She just saved his life in fact! He knew what she was thinking. She was waiting for him to come up with a plan. To set the tone. To save the day. That’s the way it had always been for him. Part of why he ‘wandered the apocalypse alone’ – like Kwai Chang Caine, he chuckled to himself. He didn’t want to be responsible for others fate.
She lay on her back, head resting on the 30 degree angle of the roof peak, one arm covering her eyes and thought it through.
“Another shitty situation to get out of.” She thought. Like some many others. This world was just a constant parade of shitty situations, and shitty, horrible choices. It was becoming a bit of mental game. How would she get out of this one? Would she? Or would the game win this time?
Todays challenge was a humorless lion bent on homicide. Directly, she thought about the obvious. Throw this cackling idiot to the lion and use the distraction to move on down the road. The idea had merit. On other days the lion would be sated by now and she would be carrying her self-preservation off into the sunset.
But there was the foot. She had the antibiotics in her pocket, but would they be any good after all this time? She could run much. That made the lion-bait and switch plan a bit less probable. It wasn’t clear whether the foot was healing or whether it would need more work. As nutty as this guy was, he was apparently a doctor of some sort.
The logic gears and probability trees ground to a halt. Shit. She needed him. For now.
She sat up, stretched her long arms over her head, interlocked her fingers and leaned from one side then the other like a sleepy, dangerous cat.
He watched her as she shifted her weight and stretched her long, strong frame, waiting for the conversation that he knew was coming.
She turned to him, locked eyes, “What’re you looking at Gomer?”
He held her gaze and didn’t flinch, “I’m looking at you.” Matter of factly, “Ready to figure out how we get off this roof and get on with our lives without becoming cat scat?”
She smiled inwardly recognizing the persona of a classically trained ‘old-white-guy’ emerging. “Ok, Bubbah, wahtcha got? Can we kill it?”
“Well, thinking it through, we might be able to distract it and make a run for it, but with you being hobbled, that might be a risky proposition.” He continued. “This roof isn’t much of a position to be in. That cat could probably get up here if she really wanted to and we don’t have food or water. We could improve our situation by getting to one of the other buildings and barricading ourselves in, maybe find some sort of weapons.”
“What about your dog?” she asked. “or your crossbow?”
“I thought about that. Bill would be a gamer certainly, but a 40 pound dog versus a 300 hundred pound lion wouldn’t end well for the dog. Even if I could get to the packs my crossbow probably would just make it mad. I’d rather find a way out of this that doesn’t involve any of us getting shredded.”
“It’s a fucking dog. And I don’t have any deep feelings for our hungry lioness friend either.” She said, maybe a tad to harshly.
“Hey, have you looked at her?” He gestured to the dozing cat. “She’s healthy. She’s not starving. Ironically she’s found herself back on top of the food chain. It’s not a bad thing to have an apex predator population hanging around to keep the wild pigs in line…”
“I’m stuck on a roof in the apocalypse with a fucking pacifist environmentalist.” She spit at the lion. It raised its big head and gave her a disinterested look. “Yeah, that’s right” she said to it and spit again.
“I could hit it with the jaw bone of an ass.” He said, a bit grumpy now.
“You’re an ass.” She countered.
“I think I might have something we could try.” He said.
“Do tell?”
“If you own a wild animal farm how would you mitigate the risk of an animal becoming violent or escaping?”
“A big fucking gun.” She said.
“You’re close.” He nodded. “What other kind of gun? Did you ever watch Mutual of Omaha Wild Kingdom? No of course not, you’re too young.” He shook his head. “OK, let’s go at it this way… In any wildlife show how do they capture the wild animal to put a tracking tag on it or something?”
She brightened. “Tranquilizer. They hit them with a tranquilizer dart.”
“Right. I bet there’s one of those in the office below somewhere. I saw a bottle of Ketamine in one of the locked cabinets that we went through.”
“So we get that, shoot the lion and move on?”
“It’s not that simple, but, yeah, basically. It’s going to be in a case of some sort and have what looks like a long barreled air gun in it with some of those syringes with the feathers on the end.” He looked at her.
“You want me to swing back in there and get it.”
“You’ve got the proven ability to monkey in and out. I can keep it busy and distracted and be your lookout.”
It wasn’t easy. She had to make multiple trips in through the end vent across the rafters and back into the veterinary area. He had to figure out how the pressure syringe worked and guess at the dosages.
There were 4 air-worthy syringes if the pressure cartridge held up. They wasted two with comically inaccurate misses. Finally he hung down from the eaves and taunted the animal out of its repose so that she could get a close up broadside shot.
Then they weren’t sure if it had worked. For another 20-30 minutes the lion was just pissed off. Eventually it started to stumble a bit and finally fell over into a fitful anesthetic trance.
They kept an eye on it as they wrangled any additional supplies they could into a cooler and snuck back out the way they came.
“I hope she’s ok.” He said as he pushed the cart down the gravel road at a fairly brisk pace.
“I’m less concerned about that lion’s health than you are. Are we going to be able to put enough distance between us?”
“We’ll be fine. Lion’s aren’t vindictive. She won’t range that far and Bill will let us know if something comes in close.”
“Yeah, he’s batting 1,000.” She said. Adjusting her long frame in the cart.
“Listen, lady, I’m thinking we got off fairly well in this adventure. We got some useful supplies, including some antibiotics for your foot, we didn’t get eaten and the day’s not even over. Look on the bright side.” He winked at the back of her head and gave the cart a big shove.
“And I didn’t have to kill you.” She granted.
The sun set low behind the kudzu covered fir trees, glinted off the river and highlighted the cloud of dust trailing this unlikely tribe. Each day was even parts a puzzle, a challenge and a gift in these days after the apocalypse.