Go-Go Girls of the Apocalypse

II

Using the sled he’d made to haul firewood, Mortimer took the bodies a mile or so away for burial. If the strangers had friends, Mortimer didn’t want the blame for the killings. It had not been his fault, he’d convinced himself. He’d wanted to talk, and they’d drawn on him.

He still felt sorry about it.

Mortimer soon developed a little routine. He flailed at the frozen earth for a few minutes with shovel or pickax. Then he’d catch his breath by the small fire he’d built and search the pockets of the dead men. They carried precious little. One had a condom in his wallet and nothing else. That’s optimistic, Mortimer thought. He discovered that each man had only one bullet in each rifle and carried no other ammunition. They could not possibly have been coming for him and must have been hunting.

All three wore red armbands.

He’d exhausted himself by the time he put the first two into shallow graves, covered them back over with dirt and rock. Another heavy snowfall would completely obscure the deed.

He leaned the third body in a sitting position against a young pine. He liked the look of this guy, the same brown-red facial hair except his moustache had been curled up into friendly handlebars. The face was pudgy and jolly in spite of the fact that all life had gone dark in the eyes, which were wide open, round and glassy.

“I’m sorry I had to do that,” Mortimer said. “It was the other guy, almost got me with that deer rifle. Just wasn’t anything else I could do.”

Mortimer nodded and shrugged as if listening to the corpse’s reply. “I know, I know. I should’ve yelled at you from the cabin instead of creeping up on you. But see it from my point of view. I had to make sure you guys were square first, right?”

The man’s dead eyes appraised him unblinkingly.

“You were surprised to see me up here,” Mortimer said. “A good place to hide, this far up. I’m probably the only fellow in East Tennessee who was ready for it.”

The fire crackled. Mortimer put on another fistful of sticks. Nothing stirred on the mountain.

“If it hadn’t been for my wife,” Mortimer admitted, “I’d have never come up here. It took both the end of the world and Anne riding my ass to sign those divorce papers. One wasn’t enough to run and hide. At the time, the divorce seemed worse. Can you believe that? I guess because it was personal to me.”

Mortimer took the pickax and started on the third grave, stopped when he felt winded again and threw more sticks on the fire.

Mortimer resumed the conversation. “Her name was Anne. She wanted a divorce. I didn’t. We were both angry. We didn’t know why, just that our unhappiness had to be the other’s fault, and damned if I was going to pay her one goddamn cent of alimony, you know? I was raised to work things out.”

He got up, dug some more, came back to the fire.

“Anyway, you could see it all coming. I don’t think anyone really thought it was the end, not the absolute final end, but just that it would be bad. And so I found the cave and started getting it ready. But really, I was leaving Anne. I was going to take the top of this mountain for myself and let her have the whole rest of the world, and all the trouble was just sort of an excuse. And I would just be gone, you know? And if she wanted those divorce papers signed, she’d damn well have to come find me. She’d have to earn it.”

He finished the hole, but didn’t put the body in right away. He still wanted to talk. He realized he was practicing. It was a time for talking again, and he wanted to remember how, wanted eventually to talk to someone who would talk back. The crushing loneliness had crept up on him so gradually that he hadn’t even noticed it until he’d stood over the men he’d killed. He could have asked them so much, and maybe they’d have known some jokes and he could’ve laughed.

Mortimer laughed out loud to see if he recalled what it sounded like. It felt fake and tin in his throat, and he seemed to remember that a legitimate laugh came up from the belly. He decided not to practice laughing.

He conjured Anne’s face in his mind, the sharp angles and bright, alert eyes, hair a rich brown. Skin so clear and white. “Huh.”

Mortimer kept talking as he grabbed the man by the wrists and dragged him toward the hole. “I don’t guess any of this makes a damn bit of difference to you. I wonder if you have a wife. I sure am sorry for her if you do.”

Mortimer dropped him in the hole. “Again, sorry.” He covered him up.