The Road Home by Clifford Beck - HTML preview

Chapter 58

The morning passed uneventfully as Eli, Maya, and Aurora nursed their inflamed hands, applying more snow as needed. Preparing lunch was ordinarily a simple task, but their injuries forced them to eat only what they could manage to handle. As the afternoon wore on, Eli decided he could no longer deal with the pain that seemed to be spreading into his wrists and loudly voiced his reaction.

“God damn!” he yelled. “I can’t deal with this shit anymore. Do we have any first aid supplies?” This was something else they had forgotten, but Eli had a solution. Throughout his time as an undergraduate student, he had more than occasionally partaken in the consumption of cannabis and knew that it was sometimes used for pain.

“I’ve got an idea,” he said.

Cradling his hands against his chest, he entered the RV and walked back to a cabinet where he had stored the bounty of cannabis he had procured and, taking out a small zip-lock bag, examined it carefully.

“This is it,” he said.

The girls followed him in and Maya, seeing what he was preparing for, scolded him harshly. “Oh no,” she began. “You’re not smoking that shit in here! I know what that stuff smells like. Take it outside!”

With his pain increasing, Eli turned and snapped at her, pointing out that he had no intention of ‘smoking weed’ in the RV.

“I know!” he yelled. “I’m going out to the woods, okay?!”

Unable to roll a joint, Eli took out a glass pipe and a grinder. Finding that his hands were too painful to hold the grinder, he called to Aurora for help. Walking back, she sat across from him and watched as he explained the process of preparing the dried flower for consumption. However, she had her doubts.

“I’m not sure I can do this,” she said. Despite his heightened degree of pain and frustration, Eli managed to calmly show her how the grinder worked by gently placing it on his palm.

“Put it between your palms and turn the lid against the bottom, but just for about twenty seconds, okay?” he said.

Starting the process, she found it far easier than she first thought and soon produced enough for Eli to use in hopes it would treat his pain.

After filling the pipe with the ground flour, Eli grabbed a lighter and started for the door. “I’ll be right back,” he said.

His painful hands prevented him from closing the door, so with a moment of hesitation, he asked Maya for help and she did so without a moment’s pause. As they watched him walk into the woods, the girls briefly discussed where they would go next.

“I think we should go to Colorado,” Aurora said. “Why Colorado?” Maya asked.

As someone who was more than familiar with survival skills, Aurora knew that Denver was a Mecca for skiers, campers, hikers, and mountain climbers, and she was certain that the ‘mile-high city’ would be covered with camping stores. It was the perfect destination, even if the world had not been plunged into a biological nightmare. Maya agreed completely.

As the two sat, waiting for Eli to return, something caught their attention. It was a very faint sound, but somehow familiar. “Did you hear something?” Maya asked. They continued to listen, straining to hear something they were not able to identify. Still, there was a feeling of familiarity. “I don’t hear anything,” Aurora replied. “Maybe it’s just the quiet playing tricks on us.” The silence surrounded them, plowing its way through their minds. Living in a world of sound, nothing is more frightening than silence, and they had many times before, the sound of empty air began to create sounds of its own. “Do you hear the sound of traffic?” Maya asked. Aurora strained to detect it but heard something much different.

“I hear a river,” she replied. “Or a stream.” They paused, trying to listen to what the other was hearing, but the encroaching night suddenly reclaimed its sinister music.

“That is so cool,” Maya said.

Aurora’s sense of wonder at the mystery of nature expressed itself only in a smile and a playful nod.