The first light of dawn washed over the mountains, turning the ridges to pale gold and making the treetops glow. I crouched low behind a scraggly bush halfway down a hillside, bow already strung, waiting.
A morning breeze slid cool across my face, carrying with it the scent of damp earth and pine. My legs had gone stiff from the long crouch, but I ignored the ache. The woods demanded stillness. If you moved too soon, you went hungry.
The game trail stretched out below me, narrow and well-worn, leading toward a pool where the mountain stream gathered before spilling downhill. It was the kind of place deer liked to pass through, especially at this hour. I’d been here since before sunrise, and I could feel it in my bones: something was coming.
The brush ahead shifted. A buck, big-bodied and heavy, stepped onto the trail, head high, nostrils flaring as it tested the air. My heart beat faster. I raised the bowstring, arrow nocked, the line of my shot clear.
From the ridge above, a blur of tawny fur streaked down. The buck snorted, leapt sideways, and vanished into the trees as a mountain lion bounded after it. In a heartbeat, both were gone, the trail empty once more.
“Damn it,” I muttered, lowering the bow.
The hunger twisting in my gut reminded me what the miss meant. I still had rabbits in my snares from time to time, and I’d been living off a scatter of berries, mushrooms, and wild roots. But my supply of smoked meat was down to scraps. Without protein, everything else ran short. Strength, focus, the will to move when moving was the only thing that kept you alive. I had enough pemmican for maybe three more days.
The camp I’d set two months ago had been close to perfect. Water from the stream. Good forage nearby. Brush thick enough to hide the lean-to I’d thrown over the tent. For a time, it felt like safety.
But nothing lasted.
I’d seen bear tracks a week back, a big one passing through. Not enough to worry me. Even the walkers were less of a concern up here in the mountains. They moved in two kinds.
Runners, the freshly turned. Loud, fast, twitching things that could sprint like wild dogs and tear you apart if they caught you. They were dangerous but obvious, giving themselves away with every jerky movement and guttural sound.
Roamers, the longer dead. Slower, quieter, sometimes silent as a shadow. Easy enough to put down one-on-one, but you never heard them until they were too close.
Both were predictable in their own ways. Animals were too. People, though, people were the true danger.
Animals didn’t lie. They told you when they were hungry, when they wanted you gone, when they were ready to fight. People pretended. They smiled, made promises, and then slit your throat when your back was turned.
Two days before, I’d spotted smoke curling from a valley campfire below. Yesterday, it was closer. Whoever they were, they either had numbers enough to flaunt themselves, to risk being seen, or they were stupid. If I stayed put, it was only a matter of time before they got too close. A week maybe. Less, if they decided to climb higher.
That was the trouble. No matter how well-hidden, how secure, every camp turned sour eventually. The game grew scarce. The land was picked clean, or someone saw something they shouldn’t.
Still, if I could bring down one deer, just one, I’d have enough to keep me fed on the move. A few good meals would buy me strength for the days ahead. I’d salt and smoke what I could carry and leave the rest for the scavengers. Nothing ever truly went to waste.
The trail below remained empty. I shifted slightly, careful not to break cover, and listened. The forest whispered around me. Leaves rattled softly in the breeze. A jay screeched once, then went silent. The stream murmured unseen through rocks.
I breathed in, slow and measured. Survival was patience. Waiting until the moment was right, and only then letting the arrow fly.
###
The sun climbed higher as I stayed crouched behind the brush, bow steady across my knees. Patience always paid off. If you waited long enough, the forest gave you what you needed.
Minutes stretched until finally movement flickered down the trail. A deer stepped into view, smaller than the buck from earlier but solid on its legs. A yearling.
Not ideal, but I wasn’t in the business of being picky anymore. Before the fall, I would have let it walk, waiting for a larger kill, something worth filling a freezer. My uncle used to drill that into me. Take the strong, leave the young. The herd stays healthy that way. But freezers were a relic now, same as rules that belonged to a world that no longer existed. Out here, the only herd I cared about was me.
I nocked an arrow, raising the recurve. My arms strained against the full draw weight, the string humming with tension. A compound bow would have been easier, but I had traded mine away years back when the pulleys wore down. This one had no moving parts, nothing that was likely to break under stress.
The deer stepped closer, its head down, muzzle twitching at the leaves. My breathing slowed. I shifted slightly, finding the angle. A heart shot would be quick, merciful, but harder to land from above. The lungs gave me a bigger target. I lined it up and let the string roll off my fingers.
The arrow flew. In the quiet morning, the release sounded sharp as a gunshot to my ears. The shaft buried itself deep into the deer’s chest. The animal bleated, stumbled, and bolted.
I was already moving, scrambling down the slope, pulling another arrow free. The trail bent through brush and loose dirt, my boots sliding as I ran. My heart hammered, not just from the chase but from the weight of need pressing on my ribs. If I lost this deer, if it ran too far, it would mean wasted strength, wasted time, wasted chance.
A hundred yards down, I found it collapsed, foam and blood at its mouth. Its legs still twitched weakly, trying to push itself upright. I circled behind, keeping clear of the hooves. With my hunting knife I ended it quick, one clean cut across the throat. The twitching slowed, then stilled.
I crouched beside it, one hand pressed to the damp earth. “Thank you,” I whispered. It was something I had never broken myself of. Maybe it made no difference to the animal, but it mattered to me. Life for life. Mine at the cost of its own.
I hauled the body to a nearby tree and strung it up by the hind legs with rope, letting gravity help me. The knife went to work, splitting hide from muscle, peeling it back in sheets. Steam rose faint in the cool air, the smell sharp and metallic.
Field dressing was second nature now. The heart and liver I pulled first, slipping them into a waxed cloth pouch with a little salt water. They’d spoil fastest otherwise, and those organs held the kind of strength you couldn’t afford to waste. The rest of the meat, I sliced down into portions I could carry, stacking each cut carefully on cloth.
The sinew came next, stripped from the back and legs. Stronger than cordage if you knew how to dry and twist it. I bundled as much as I could into a pouch. The bones I split where I had time, cracking the larger ones for marrow. If I’d been staying here longer, I’d have boiled it into fat or ground it into paste, but that luxury was gone.
The hide I scraped clean, but tanning would take days. I would cut it into rawhide strips once I was back in camp. Rope, bindings, even makeshift armor if it came to it—rawhide had too many uses to abandon.
By the end, little went to waste. That was the rule of survival. Waste meant weakness. Weakness meant death.
I lowered the carcass, gathered the rope, and packed the bundles into my bag. The straps bit into my shoulders as I heaved it upright, the weight a solid reminder of why the work mattered. With meat on my back, I had bought myself time. Time to leave this place, to put distance between me and the firelight down below.
Before I left, I split the skull and left it open for scavengers. Foxes, birds, even other deer would pick the remains clean. Nothing stayed wasted in the wilderness, not even the dead.
I scrubbed my hands in dirt and leaves until most of the blood was gone, then pulled out a small vial of aloe mixed with moonshine. The sting of it on my raw skin kept me grounded. Infection killed faster than teeth.
When I finally slung the bow back over my shoulder and adjusted the pack, the sun had climbed higher, and sweat prickled across my back. I spared one last look at the clearing, then turned toward camp.
The deer had bought me a reprieve. But the clock was still ticking.
###
The deer meat pressed heavy across my back, dragging at my shoulders with every step. I shifted the straps tighter, biting them into the muscle, and kept moving. The trail back to camp climbed in slow curves, a ribbon of packed dirt and roots weaving through the trees. My bow stayed strung in my hand. Normally I would have stowed it away to spare the limbs, but not now. Not with strangers somewhere below, bold enough to let their smoke show.
The rhythm of my boots on the trail gave my mind room to wander. I let it run through the list again. The list was always there, even when I was still. What to take. What to leave. Things to look for when away from camp.
The bundle of raw shafts I’d cut for arrows—those could stay. They were still green, needing time to dry and straighten. The twenty finished ones would come with me. Straight, fletched, waiting only for broadheads. The sinew I had stripped and dried would come too, twisted into strong cordage. Feathers, carefully bundled, couldn’t be replaced easily. And the broadheads.
The broadheads had started as spoons. Dave’s idea.
I could see him as clear as if he were standing across a fire from me again, that box of silverware between us. His grin had been wild, almost boyish, when he hammered one flat on a rock and showed me the thin sheet of metal. “Look here,” he’d said, holding it up to the light, “you cut it into triangles, sharpen the edges, and you’ve got yourself broadheads for days. Nobody fights over spoons, Zane. Nobody.”
I had thought he was out of his mind. “What are you going to do, set a table for the apocalypse?”
“Better than starving through it,” he had shot back. Then he cut down the flattened spoon, shaped the edges with a file, and held up a wicked little triangle of steel. “Quick, easy, and when you lose one in a deer or a walker, who cares? Plenty more where that came from.”
I hadn’t laughed when the first of those arrows brought down meat. Spoons kept us alive more than once, and I still carried the pouch of cutlery tips like they were treasure. I still had one of the first ones Dave had made. I’d punched a hole in it, dulled the edges, and strung it on a cord around my neck to remember my friend by.
The trail dipped into a shady cut, the air cooler there, damp with the smell of moss and water. My shoulders ached, but the ache felt clean. It meant the deer was real, not a dream. It meant the hours crouched behind that bush weren’t wasted.
Two weeks ago, I’d found a forest service cabin on a scouting trip. The paint had peeled down to gray, the boards weathered, but the door had still been sound. I’d stood in that doorway a long time, staring at the bunk and the stove, tempted. Four walls and a roof, a bed that wasn’t canvas. But it was on every map of this region. If I knew about it, so would anyone else. Comfort was bait. I stripped it instead, hauling away rice, beans, salt, vitamins, and a small medical kit that still had bandages sealed in plastic. Even found a box of silverware in one drawer, the real prize. Forks and knives stayed behind. The spoons went into my pack.
I pushed on, sweat running down my back, my boots crunching on gravel. The trees opened briefly to a slope of bare rock. I stopped there, squinting out at the land rolling away below. Somewhere in that sweep of hills, smoke had risen yesterday. Faint, but enough to mean trouble. Whoever they were, they were moving closer.
The weight of the pack pulled me back into memory. The fall.
It had started small. Coughing. Fevers. People said it was a flu, the kind that ran hot and burned itself out. Except it didn’t. First came the hospitals filling, then the lockdowns. Then the numbers climbed until half of everyone you knew was gone. And then the dead stood back up. That was when the world stopped pretending.
I had loaded a big hiking pack the day it became clear town was finished. Food from the pantry. First aid. Jerky, dried fruit, a water filter. All the ammo I had for the Glock. Too much useless weight, too. A six-man tent I could barely carry. A big flashlight with spare batteries that drained faster than I could replace them. A radio that screamed static more than voices. All of it was traded or abandoned in time.
I had tried to find people before I left for the mountains. Stacy’s apartment was empty, her car covered in pollen in the lot. Her favorite places, the creek bend where we used to sit, the little cabin we’d borrowed once—all of them empty. I’d left notes under stones, hoping she might pass through and see. She never did. By the time I found my drinking buddy dead in his house, I stopped searching.
Stacy had loved the woods more than anyone I’d known. She could find mushrooms like she was a scent hound. I used to watch her crouch down, knife flashing quick as she sliced chanterelles or morels, grinning as though she’d found treasure. She had taught me half of what I knew about foraging. When the fall came, I carried that knowledge forward. She had been gone eight years, but she still walked beside me every time I bent to the ground and checked a plant for color, shape, smell.
The pack shifted as I crossed a slope of loose stone, reminding me of the deer bundled inside. It grounded me back to the moment. I had meat, water, and a plan to leave. That was more than most people had managed.
I hitched the straps tighter and pushed up the last incline, breath loud in my chest. Camp lay beyond the next ridge, tucked away where brush and rock made it vanish to anyone who didn’t know where to look. By the time I reached it, the sun would be sinking, and I’d have work to do.
###
The last climb before camp took the wind out of me, so I stopped where the trail widened into a shallow clearing ringed by scrub oak and young pines. A wind had picked up, steady out of the west, cool enough to wick sweat from my neck and send a chill under my shirt. The fallen trunk of a storm-toppled tree made a low bench. I slid the pack off carefully and set it behind the log where it would be hidden from a casual glance.
My instinct said keep moving. My legs said take a break. The weight of the deer had worked its way into my hips and lower back. I eased down onto the trunk and rolled my shoulders until they popped. The bow stayed in my lap with the string toward my chest and an arrow resting against the grip. Relaxed, but ready.
I took a sip from the canteen. Tea, not water. It tasted faintly of mint and bark, a blend I had settled on months ago for steady energy and comfort. Coffee was a memory and a bad one at that. Coffee hurt more than it helped when you could not count on the next cup. Tea steadied the hands without making the mind jumpy. I cracked open a waxed pouch and pinched off a square of pemmican. Dried meat and rendered fat, cut with dried berries and a pinch of wild garlic. It softened on my tongue and spread warmth through my belly. Plain food, but it kept you moving.
That tea shop in the little town a year back had been the kind of luck you do not expect twice. Front windows broken. Shelves stripped of candy and boxed sweets. The wall of jars left sitting like they were worthless. Loose leaf black and green. Dried roots I had not recognized until I found the shopkeeper’s notebook under the counter. She had written out recipes in a tight hand. Notes on fevers. Notes on sleep. Notes on blends that made boiled creek water taste like something more than a chore. I took what I could carry, then went back the next day and took more. I still had a majority of that haul sealed in bags back at camp. They weighed nothing and gave more than they took.
Another town a few months later had provided a book on herbalism that gave me a better idea of what the various roots, herbs, and barks I salvaged from the tea shop could be used for.
I let my shoulders drop. The clearing felt safe enough. Birds chattered in the brush. A beetle clicked on the log beside me and trundled along as if it owned the place. The high branches of the pines shifted like a slow tide when the wind pressed them. I gave myself three more mouthfuls of pemmican and another swallow of tea, then set the canteen down and began to repack the pouch.
The sound came low at first. A rough clatter hidden under the wind. Then it rose and fell in a quick rattle that crawled under my skin.
Chittering.
My muscles went tight without asking. The bow stayed in my lap, but my right hand slid to the knife at my belt and settled on the handle. I did not move more than that. Movement draws eyes. Stillness keeps you invisible.
The chittering came again, closer now, cut with the scratch of brush pushed aside and the drag of a foot that did not lift quite right. Runners announce themselves whether they mean to or not. It sounds like hunger has a voice and is trying to form words. You hear it once, and you never stop hearing it. On clear nights, I still wake with that noise in my ears.
I slid the pack tighter behind the log with my heel. The Glock stayed holstered. A gunshot would punch a hole in the quiet and carry down the ridge. Walkers might hunt the sound. People might too. A knife was safer. Up close, but safer.
The clearing narrowed to a darker tunnel where the saplings grew close together. Branches swayed there in a pattern that did not match the wind. I kept my eyes on that motion and breathed through my nose to slow my pulse. The runner came out of the green like it had been pushed forward.
Fresh. Too fresh. Clothes hardly torn. Skin still the color of a person, not the gray of a long dead Roamer. A deep slice cut across the ribs of the left side, dark and sticky, like it had bled out from a fall or a sharp rock before whatever made them made it stand up again. It rolled its head like it was listening for a sound only it could hear. Its hands opened and closed at the ends of jerky arms. The chittering clicked through its teeth.
I held still. Runners shine when you give them motion to lock onto. Their peripheral vision is not much. A still shape might be a stump to them. A moving shape is a meal.
It drifted a step, then another, cutting across the clearing toward the fallen tree. I let it pass the thickest part of the trunk so the wood would block a straight rush. When its head cleared the end and its shoulder lined up with the open space, I moved.
One step forward. Left hand catching the back of its skull. Right hand driving the knife in hard and true. The blade found the soft spot with a wet crack that jolted up my arm to the elbow. The runner’s legs went slack and the body folded like the bones had been pulled out of it. I let go and stepped back, knife already free again, ready for another strike if it needed one.
It did not. The limbs twitched once and then lay still.
I stayed there and counted ten slow breaths. Then I crouched and wiped the blade in the dirt until the worst of the mess was gone. A fistful of grass took care of the rest. The glass vial came out of a side pocket and I shook it once to mix the aloe and the moonshine back together. A splash on the blade. A smear on both hands. The sting told me the small cuts on my knuckles were real and needed watching.
The face did not look like anyone I had known. Twenty or thirty years old. Hair still clean. Boots good enough that I glanced at them a second longer than I should have. Taking boots from the dead is a hard habit to break when you know what distances do to your feet. I left them. Taking time on an open clearing for a pair that might not fit was the kind of choice that stacked risk on risk. Besides, the thing that used to be a person lay downhill of me. If anyone looked up from the valley and had eyes, a moving silhouette against the sky would read like a target.
I dragged the body by the ankles to the edge of the clearing where the saplings thickened and left it there. Animals and time would take care of the rest.
I checked my surroundings again. The wind had shifted a hair, and the tops of the pines leaned east. The birds had gone quiet during the fight. Now one started up again with a harsh call. Another answered from deeper in the trees. The forest had already started to forget.
There was a reason I preferred the mountains. Runners did not like climbing unless something drew them, and most of what drew them was down where people still tried to live behind walls and fences. This one was an exception. Maybe it had been someone like me, hiding out in the mountains before it got hurt and died. Maybe it had chased noise uphill and lost whatever it had been following. None of those maybes mattered. What mattered was how fast the quiet could turn.
I lifted the pack onto the log and slid my arms through the straps. The weight settled into its old place. I tightened the waist belt until it bit, then pulled the shoulder straps until the load climbed up center. I slipped the bow back into my grip with the arrow riding light on the shelf.
On a different day I might have stayed with the quiet a few minutes longer. Today I moved. The trail toward camp ran under a stand of jack pines and along a rocky shoulder. I kept to the darker ground where fallen leaves and pine needles swallowed sound, and I stepped on the stone when the path offered it so the soles would not print clear for anyone tracking.
The mountain fell into its evening colors while I walked. Gold slid toward orange, then cooled as the sun tipped toward the ridges to the west. Somewhere down below, people were lighting a fire for their own supper. I could not see them from here, but I could feel their presence like a pressure change in the air.
The deer on my back had bought me weeks. The runner in the clearing had reminded me what those days looked like if I wasted them. I put my eyes on the line of brush that hid my camp and kept moving until the trees closed around me again.
###
The sun had slipped westward by the time I crested the ridge above camp. Evening light slanted long across the hollow where I had hidden my shelter. From up high the place looked like nothing but brush, stone, and a tangle of scrub oak. That was the point. I stood still at the overlook and let my eyes sweep the ground, slow and careful. Nothing moved. The snares I’d strung at the edge sat as I’d left them. No tracks cut across the slope. No broken branches. Satisfied, I stepped down toward home.
The clearing felt smaller knowing I would leave it behind soon. For two months it had been a nest carved out of the hillside, tucked safe under the trees. It had kept me dry through storms, hidden me from eyes, and held my fire low enough that smoke rarely betrayed me. Now it would be just another camp I abandoned. The thought pained me, but I pushed it aside. Attachment had no place in survival.
I eased the pack down and spread the waxed cloth on the ground. The deer meat came out piece by piece. The liver got trimmed and set in a bowl of salted water. The heart I salted heavy and wrapped tight. The rest I cut into thinner strips, laying each on fresh cloth, sprinkling salt over the surface, then folding and tying it into neat bundles. The process carried a rhythm. Cut. Salt. Fold. Tie. Again. I had done it so much that my hands worked without thought. In the end, I had about ten pounds set aside for smoking, and fifteen salted and ready to go in my pack.
By the time I finished, sweat ran down my back despite the cooling air. My shoulders ached from hours of carrying and cutting. I set the bundles aside and turned to the rest of my supplies. That part was harder.
The bundle of unfinished arrow shafts went into the pile to be left. The twenty finished ones, I wrapped in cloth with feathers and sinew, ready for travel. The broadheads made from spoons I stowed in a pouch. The big cooking pot I had carried up from the valley weeks ago stayed behind. Too heavy. A smaller tin one would do. My extra tarp went into the keep pile. So did the little copper wire I had scrounged from a garage. The heavy radio I had held onto too long got left. The small rechargeable one stayed.
I worked slow and steady until two piles grew at my feet. One neat and tight, the other broad and scattered. One for the trail. One for the camp I would leave behind.
The fire pit waited until the last of the light had bled from the sky. It was a narrow hole, two feet wide and three deep, lined with stones I’d hauled from the creek bed. A second tunnel angled in from the side to feed air at the base. A Dakota fire hole, the kind that burned hot and bright below ground while giving off little more than a whisper above. I had dug it weeks ago, and now it would serve me one last night.
I splashed a capful of camp stove fuel on the tinder and lit a sliver with my Zippo. The flame caught fast, then sank into a low burn. I coaxed it with thin sticks until the glow spread into the stones.
The liver went onto a spit above the embers, the smell sharp and heavy as it cooked. I chopped the root vegetables I’d pulled earlier in the week and tossed them into the small pan with a scoop of rendered fat. The pan rested on a flat stone shelf over the fire, sizzling as it heated. The air filled with the smell of food, rich and real, and for a moment it almost felt like the world before. Like standing in a kitchen instead of crouched over a hole in the dirt.
Dinner was plain but filling. I ate every bite of liver and scraped the pan clean of the roots. The food steadied me, warming the knot of worry that had taken root in my stomach. Meat in my belly, meat on the rack to smoke overnight. Enough to keep me going. Enough to walk away from this place with strength in my legs.
When the last morsel was gone and the pan scrubbed clean with dirt, I laid strips of venison on a rack above the embers. From the bowl of water, I pulled hickory chunks and scattered them over the coals. They hissed and smoked, curling thin trails into the night air. The smell was sweet and sharp, drifting low and steady. Perfect for smoking.
I sat back on my heels and watched the smoke rise. The night pressed close around me, full of sounds. Crickets sang. Leaves whispered in the wind. The creek murmured below. Somewhere, an owl hooted, low and steady. Each noise was familiar, a chorus I had grown used to. It was the silence that worried me—the places where sound should be and wasn’t.
The memory of the runner’s chittering earlier still clung to my ears. That sound would haunt me long after tonight. And the strangers in the valley… I couldn’t see their fire from here, but I knew it burned. People like that didn’t stay still. If they were moving closer, tomorrow could be the day they stumbled across my trail.
I fed the fire another handful of soaked hickory and stood, looking around the camp. The tent sat beneath its brush lean-to, small and dark. Tools and supplies lay sorted in their piles, ready for morning. The bow leaned within easy reach of where I usually lay. Everything was in order, everything where it belonged.
It felt final.
I took a slow breath, let it out, and gave the camp one last sweep with my eyes. This place had kept me alive. Tomorrow, I would walk away from it and never look back.
The fire smoked steady, the meat hanging above it, and I knew I had done what I could. Tonight the work would finish itself. Tomorrow I would pack the smoked meat, shoulder the weight of my pack, and head into the mountains.