Big River

Big River, by Johnny Cash.

(All music featured on this blog belongs to its respective owners. If you find you like a song, please support the industry by purchasing it.)

I started this morning staring up at the overcast sky from the floor of my boat, which was beached on the side of the river. Looks like rain again. I haven't been keeping track of the days I've been on Mississippi, but it has to have been a while. My scruff has turned into a bona-fide neckbeard, and my nails are long enough to constantly have dirt under them. All of my clothes stick to me, partly because they're dirty, partly because I'm dirty. Any attempts at washing off in the river would be like trying to get clean by scrubbing down with a brick of coal. I'm hungry, but I'm out of food, and the river's been scarce on wildlife ever since the infection arrived. I think this search has been killing me, bit by bit. If I could've ever caught up, I'm sure they have food on the Southern Drawl.

I first saw the boat at the St. Paul colony, back in Minnesota. It was a Super-Yacht that some guys had decked out with weapons, solar panels, fishing gear, provisions, everything they needed to go out to sea and establish an island colony in the gulf- probably on an oil platform or something. They'd come upstream looking to recruit some muscle to help them do it. At the time, everyone pinned them as con-men, and all but chased them out of town with torches. It wasn't but a day or two after they left that a lot of people, myself included, found themselves wishing they'd gone with the alleged con-men. Some dumbass managed to lead a horde of vectors straight to the colony gates. Vectors- or infected domestic cats- as the name implies, were the primary carriers for the virus during the initial stages of the outbreak. Individually, they're not a big problem, but there's never just one. Vectors only traveled in hordes and swarms, which made them the deadliest of all 'undead' threats. The St. Paul colony fell in less than an hour.

Out of options, I decided to take my boat and head down the river, after the Yacht. I seem to remember hearing her horn in Davenport, some time later. I never laid eyes on her, though, which left me to watch the dead city as I floated by. Out of everything, it's not the weird silence, the heaps of bodies, or the burned out buildings that creep me out. It's passing under the interstate bridges. The arteries of the nation, as they were once called, now stagnated with gridlocked, stalled cars. Evidence, as it were, that a nation died with its people. As disappointed as I was that I hadn't caught up, I was glad to leave Davenport.

More recently, I almost literally ran into a freighter full of traders- at least that's what they claimed to be. I don't know how well they could be trading with so little commerce. It was probably best that I only had a can of beans and an oar to my name at the time. They were visibly saddened by my lack of things to trade, but seemed to perk up a little when I asked them about the Southern Drawl. That's how I came to lose my can of beans, a sacrifice to get a trader to spill his. "She been here," he said, with an almost indecipherable Cajun accent, "But she gawn, lawd she gawn."

A couple of days ago, I think I saw her, up in Memphis. As I came around one bend, I saw a gleaming white mass disappearing behind another turn in the river. That was the most excited I'd been in a long time- I could feel my eyebrows raise, my heart rate pick up. I started up my outboard motor for the first time since St. Paul and took off after her, but I guess that little engine just wasn't enough. I ran out of gas before I ever caught another glimpse. I beached my boat not long after that. I'd had enough. There was no sense going down into Louisiana and getting lost in the swamps and mangroves, or worse, getting pushed out into the gulf in a flat-bottom boat. I decided that they could have it, I didn't need an island paradise anyway. Even though I sat on the bank and cried for the rest of the day, unable to bring myself to do anything else, I was productive. I moved on. I'm looking to other things, like eating again.