The world exploded in sound first, thousands of voices suddenly yelling out across the air as fire fell. Denys cried loudly across the television that he was this nation's savior, that he would singlehandedly be the one to pull us out from under our troubles, even as he dropped death down on us. The world went dark, voices snuffed out one by one, floating into the early evening.  CB radios went silent. Cell phone service disappeared. 

On that day, I looked at my husband and without a word started packing. 

In two weeks he was gone, pulled away by a group of men who seemed both hungry and eager. I heard them tell him that they wanted me, that gravel in their voices that said to me this was more than wanting me in their group. When I heard him sobbing, I crawled through the underbrush with only the clothes on my back. When I heard him scream, I felt my shoulders twitch back, and I turned my head.  My father's voice screamed inside me, "Elda, leave him. This time it is about self-preservation." 

So I ran, and ran and ran, until the air in my lungs tasted like blood and my muscles quivered underneath my skin. I buried myself under pine needles that night on the edge of winter. It all happened sometime early in November. We had Halloween but no Thanksgiving - but what would there have been to give thanks for that year? 

How long ago was that?

I stand in the middle of the forest, looking around. It’s close to midday, the light tucked quietly behind the fog but streaming in here and there; the sun is nearly in the middle of the sky. The fog has stubbornly clung to the earth, blanketing me in its cool embrace. All around me, birds squawk and scream and sing, chirping from the branches. Chickadees huddle in little lines along the branches, and blue jays cling to the bark of the tall aspens, glaring down at me, the crowns on their heads standing tall. They expect a tribute, and I’ve forgotten to bring anything.

In the highest canopies, crows sit peering down at me on the faded earth, their heads cocked in half inspired curiosity.

I readjust the pack on my back, and pull my water bottle out from the side pocket as quietly as possible. These birds make it known to the ghosts of their gods that I’ve invaded their space.

The world is quiet now, and I travel alone because it’s easier than dealing with the people this plunge has left behind. Dictators tore down the world they tried to build in their image when the world fought back. I look around me. There’s a fallen tree, still fresh. The wood is green and wet from the rain that’s fallen for two straight weeks. I walk to it and sit down. I close my eyes, and listen to the noises around me. So absent of humanity, there’s a peace here in the mountains. I fled the valleys and the flatlands to avoid the roaming bands of raiders. No one comes to the mountains anymore. As ironic as it was, it seemed people feared less the further they could see.  In the depths of a forest, even on a mountain, visibility was degraded. I can see the whole world from the summit but until I reach it, I am confined to the impeccably carved lines of trees and boulders all hunched together. 

I hear rustling in the bushes behind me and snap my eyes open. It’s an animal, low to the ground, shuffling through the ferns.  I watch with interest and a taste of fear, always aware that my end could come from the wild I’ve confined myself to rather than from the humans I run from. A lone red fox peeks his head out from the underbrush and looks at me, lifting his nose to sniff the air. I sit still.  The fox seems healthy.

He avoids me, moving to the far side of the downed tree and moving slowly around its broken trunk and peeks at me again. He sees that I have as yet not moved and sniffs the air again.

He is wary of humans, as most animals still are. Perhaps in the future they will no longer need to fear humanity. 

I continue to watch him. Some small birds flutter near the underbrush, and he turns his attention to them.  He is looking for food.

I watch as he crosses the old hiking path and slips back into the heavy ferns that drape themselves lazily over the earth. I decide to move on.

I move up the northern face of Camel’s Hump.  I am headed south, towards warmer weather. Since I’ve resolved to stay alone I try to avoid the places where I've noticed groups congregating. Most people take the easiest most open route, especially when they're in large groups. It is harder to move through the mountains when there are numerous people to lead, and there are no more well-maintained paths to follow. It is easy to get lost up here. 

I know that the summit is only an hour away, maybe half an hour if I can pick up my pace.  I move slow now, taking my time.  There is no urgency in the mountains, not like there is in the valleys.  I often find myself tracing my fingers along the bark of trees that are now free to grow tall, unobtrusively leaving the trail to sit for a while among the ferns. I realize, with more reality than before, that my life is fleeting. For so many others it fled at the beginning of this tyranny, but I was lucky enough to find my way out.  I say I was lucky because that’s truly what it was. I knew enough of surviving outdoors to make my way through the blooming wild in the valleys of the new world, but I survived by trial and error. I still survive by trial and error. This is all calculated chaos, and I am at its mercy.

I am lost in my thoughts as I wind up the path, sometimes opting to venture off track and appreciate the lack of humanity. In the summers, this mountain used to be covered in people, tourists, like leaches, sucking its lifeblood out by stealing its spirit. Seeing it now, no longer obfuscated by mankind, the mountain’s spirit has perforated the air and the trees around me. Everything sways and dances with any breeze. The trees always stood so stiff and stern while we moved among them before, and now they are relaxed, free from our chains of bondage.

I start to climb up to the top, rounding a corner and coming upon the last rocky ledge before the summit.  The fog is a shifting curtain, with blue sky and sun now shifting carefully between thick swathes of the mist. It’s eerie to watch clouds move around me, moving upwards into the sky. I step carefully on the ledge, pressing my back against its craggy face and shuffling along, careful to make as little noise as possible.

I reach the end of the ledge and move carefully up the smoothed rock summit, still wet from last night’s rain. I sit down, unconcerned with the dampness. For a moment, I think that I can hear the mountain humming, but it stops as soon as I try to listen. I smile. The earth has taken to communicating with itself again.

I look out at the valley, still blanketed in places, moving swiftly here and there to reveal thick swaths of healthy pine and aspen trees, the white birch in the lower valleys sticking out like great totems, bones of the earth marking passage to a new world.

In the old days, I would come in the dead of winter to the mountains. Sometimes this one, but more often I would travel to the small mountains farther north – the ones that weren’t defiled by tourists and ski season. I was not a religious person, but those mountains were my churches.  In the dead of winter the mountains are silent, lacking the consistent humming that humanity seems to insist on making. I never liked the sounds of the “civilized world” infiltrating my space. 

I wrap my arms around my knees, letting my eyes drop their focus as the fog moves across the forest below. I am almost sleeping with my eyes open when I hear noise. 

Pop-pop-pop

BOOM

I sit up straight and peer into the gray mist. It is so hard to tell if the noises are loud or if they are close. I am on the top of the mountain, and even loud sounds from the valley will reflect off of the walls of the hills and make it sound like they are right next to me.

I squint into the early morning brightness, the sun peeking out here and there irritating me. It reflects off the fog and makes it even harder to see beyond it. 

“Shit,” I whisper, too afraid to continue sitting there. If someone is close, I would rather move up and over. I am exposed on the bare face of the mountain, and while I would rather sit here and enjoy the new world, I can’t take the chance that one of these assholes isn’t close by. 

I crawl down the south face of the bare summit and kneel down, listening closely.  Now that I’m away from the very top of the mountain, I hear the same noises, echoing like the voices of giants, deep and resonating, reflective of the old world.  I lift myself onto my haunches and peer carefully around a boulder left behind when the glaciers receded twelve-thousand years ago. 

The fog breaks for a moment, and I see it; in the valley just to the north, where the Winooski flows unassuming and black against the gold fields that are no longer plowed, there is a large moving mass trampling the singing grass into the ground. 

Pop-pop-pop

BOOM

Maybe there are still landmines hidden underneath the long, overgrown grass, and someone with a semi-automatic weapon. 

The weapons themselves do not actually concern me.  What concerns me are the number of people in this group.  They are like a giant, amorphous mass moving across the flat bottom of the valley, towards the mountains.

I survey the scene.  I wonder if I should wait and watch or if I should go now while the fog still offers me some cover. I know the buckles on my bag sometimes reflect sunlight, glaring across long distances.  Once, at the very beginning, I was followed for weeks by a ragged man because of the damn buckles.  I still have the scars on my forehead where he smashed my face in to knock me out before he raped me. 

He was the first man I killed. I regretted it then, but I don’t regret it now. In the old world, we would have argued mental health and political correctness and narcissistic tendencies, but none of that even mattered now. We were all just surviving and if you picked the wrong person to take advantage of, you ended up dead. The simplicity was astounding.

After that incident, I did try to reduce the glare of the buckles by caking them in mud. 

I peek up over the boulder again.  The fog cover returned and I clench my jaw, stick my thumbnail between my teeth and bite down on it. I glue my eyes to where I last saw them, but the fog refuses to move.  I growl at it. “Fuck,” I whisper. I look around me again. It's useless to stay here.  Now that I'm descending the other side, I can use speed to my advantage, putting as much space between myself and their huge band as possible.  If they come over the mountain, I will need that distance. If they come around, there's a chance we will meet face to face if I am not alert and savvy.

They tore my husband away from me at the very beginning. I am not sure if they killed him, but I fear that he has joined them and I will come face to face with him if I meet these groups, and that he will be one of them.  He will be the one making mothers beg for their child's life, and he will be the one snuffing it out with a laugh.  

Or he is dead, and I will have to face the violence on my own, with no one left to think of me as I die. 

I wrap my hands around the sturdy shoulder straps, clenching my fists until my knuckles lose their blood and strain white against the dark fabric. I take a deep breath. 

The south face of Camel's hump is steeper, less friendly terrain. I stare at it.  I know the trail will bring me down to a steep and deadly drop, the ledge falling away to the tops of tall aspen trees and bare white birch.  The ledge is open, so the wind often whips past anything clutching ferociously at it, trying to tear humanity off its beautiful face. 

Mom used to tell me and my brothers that if the wind started to boil and tear at us while we hiked, that we should say a small prayer to it. Just give our love and thanks to the wind which brought us all of our seasons. There was one autumn when we climbed the south face together, descending back down, and the wind grabbed all of us. We all leaned into the ledge, grabbing onto anything we could find.  We gritted our teeth, too afraid to speak.

Until my brother Adam looked at us we all stayed quiet.  And then, in his usual manner, he started yelling to the sky. “Thank you, wind, for everything that you do. Thank you wind, for what you bring.  Thank you.  Forgive us. Thank you. Forgive us.”  Adam was bigger than life.  If we had lived in a world where there were still gods instead of a god, there might have been rumors that he was the son of one, he was so grand without intention.  In the wind which tore all of our voices out of our throats, Adam's was the only one to rise and crest on that ledge, breaking through the high pitched whine the wind forced over us as it whipped through the tiny cracks in the rock just above the ledge. 

And then it stopped. The wind fell.  Adam, at the back of the line was the first to recover, pushing us carefully towards the other end of the ledge.  We all shakily released our death grips on the rock before scuffling carefully back to the safety of the trail.  When we had all finally made it back onto solid ground, Adam laughed loudly. “Mom was right!” He whooped, throwing his fist in the air. “Thank you!” He cried again, his face turned up to the blue sky.  

I know that ledge is waiting for me down there, about a quarter of a mile down the path. I bite my lip.  I know that I have no other choice.  I rub my eyes, and sit at the top of the trail, just inside the cover of the stunted, wind-blown trees near the summit. 

Okay wind, please help me. I need to put distance between me and them. I need to move quickly.  I would like to live.

I open my eyes. I hear the wind howling across the southern valley before I see it shaking the trees violently, moving up the southern face of the mountain like a living creature. I watch, eyes wide, as it passes through me.  It steals my breath, and I gasp quickly, turning to watch this ethereal thing move up over the top of the mountain, diving down the northern face.  I swear for a quick moment there is a voice in the wind.

Go.

I feel the goosebumps rise on my arms.  I shake my head. Impossible.  I turn back again for a moment.  I stand on tiptoe and look down the side of the mountain.  The wind seems to move unnaturally, like a serpent slicing through the trees, which part and move and bend like dancers in a storm. 

Focus, I scold myself.  I need to get down the south face as quickly as possible without injuring myself.  I take another deep breath and brace myself. 

Go, I tell myself. I let my legs carry me down the steep path, moving over branches and downed trees without thought. I know it's better to let my natural instincts take over. My palms touch the rough bark of fallen trees, the lines that grace their surfaces tracing ancient paths over my skin.  I run on the balls of my feet, leaning forward down the hill.  In some places, where the path falls away, my feet barely touch the ground.  In others, for brief moments, the wind whipping by my face and the fog spreading its fingers through my hair make me feel like I'm flying.

I slow briefly as the path levels out, my body instinctively rolling out of its forward motion back up into a straight line. The air fills my lungs with a burning, insatiable thirst as I redefine the oxygen levels in my blood and fight off rising lactic acid levels in my muscles. 

As I relax back into steady motion, I think of my father. He used to tell us that the world would fall to greed and power. We would humor him and wave off his fears as conspiracies, lost in large tidal waves of the post traumatic stress disorder he came back from the Gulf War with. 

It was my father who told us how we should survive if this happened. I don't know where any of my family is now. My brothers and I spread across the country in search of jobs before this happened.  I was the only one to stay in our home state.  My parents are dead.

I stop for a moment and realize that my cheeks are wet.  I cry quietly, the sound blending seamlessly with the noises of the new earth. I wipe them away and look at the trees.  The wind caresses them, their needles and leaves swaying slowly against it. 

I pull my water bottle from my pack again, careful not to let my wild thirst take over.  I need to ration the water long enough to get to the brook at the bottom of the southern face.  I have a half a bottle left, which should be more than enough to get me through.  I would rather not take any chances in case I end up spending more time on this mountain than previously planned. 

I take one large sip, letting it sit in my mouth.  I swallow slowly, hoping that will eliminate the dryness that plagues my throat.  It doesn't, not really, and I sigh.  I look around.  The fog still clings to the earth like a frightened child and I am grateful.  It provides the best daylight cover, only bested by a hidden cave.  Those are hard to find on this mountain, although in some of the mountains farther north they are abundant.  They can be equally as dangerous though, especially if they are already home to something else: Bear, catamount, fishers. 

I push the water bottle carefully back into my pack, my body screaming for more.  I spend a few more minutes walking in silence, my mind suppressed long enough to listen to the quiet world around me. Now that I've descended at least half of the southern face, I can't hear the moving mass of people who were headed towards the north face along the valley floor.  This concerns me, but they seemed to be unconcerned about announcing their arrival.  I have decided they are either very stupid, or extremely dangerous.
    I move off the path carefully, descending the slope heavy with ferns and underbrush with light feet, careful not to leave a discernible path.  The earth does not need a pernicious humanity. There are still plenty here, entitlement palpable in their very existence, burning and chopping and killing forests purely for a few more years of chaotic survival. Killing people and animals because they can or because they find enjoyment in it.
    There is not much difference from the world before, but we have descended into such tangible chaos that there no longer seems to be a pattern.  Survival is the end all, be all.
    The wars of the 20th century continued because of ruthless dictators with an obsession for the taste of murder, copper and red, filling their eyes and nostrils, their legs strong underneath them with a misguided stolen power. I was always told that history couldn't repeat itself, not with one launched so forcefully into the public eye – and yet over and over, we watched them come to power, unleash their rage on an innocent populace until they died or were killed. 

And here we are again.
    When Geoffrey Denys was elected as the New Republic president, after the second civil war tore the Old United States apart, we expected that he would lead us to salvation, a shimmering hope in front of us that the world would become euphoric and we would lead the way to a new world order, one of utopian content.  Instead, he led us into darkness, where shadows stole anyone who disagreed with his legislation and drones dropped bombs on anyone who was involved in spreading “propaganda.” And soon the plague of righteous wrongs spread across the oceans and new Mao Ze-Dongs and Sadam Husseins and Adolph Hitlers erupted into the public eye, ripping up out of the streets and into power so quickly it seemed as if it were a nightmare.  We thought that something so tragic could not happen so rapidly.
    It did, though.  And while it happened most of us stood aside, slack-jawed, terrified, our eyes cauterized by televisions that showed non-stop casualties, day and night, hour after hour.  Newscasters vanished when they compared our news to the atrocities breaking across the face of the rest of the world.
    Denys became so enraged by the revolts that he set off what seemed like hundreds of thousands of bombs across the country. Fifteen landed in Vermont. CB radios worked for awhile, and at some point during the mayhem he unleashed on the country, Denys was reported to have been killed. I rejoiced alone out in the middle of the woods, my dad's 1985 Toyota pickup sitting silently and rusted in the middle of a stand of trees at the end of a steep and winding logging trail.  I cried too, leaning on the steering wheel. It was then I was forced to accept that my entire family was probably lost to me.  Even if they weren't dead, I would never see them again. We grew up in an age where communication was so easy, literally at the tips of our fingers. Now humanity's greatest achievements lay dormant and silent, littering the paved roadways, the forest floor, the abandoned homes that lined the abandoned streets and the abandoned factories that stood surrounded by abandoned parking lots with abandoned cars.
    That was the day I left the CB radio in the truck and walked away, accepting the silence of the new world and releasing the chaos of the old one. I accepted that with the new world would come a new kind of chaos, but leaving those two pieces of my former life behind, the last dregs of the life I had known, that was a freedom I tasted realistically. My whole life I had lived in the illusion that I was free, but walking away that day I knew what freedom really was. 

I cross a stream and step into an overgrown pasture. I see a large body moving slowly across it, a haunt in the dense fog which reaches its fingers into the distance, the sky an unimaginable being above it now. A rotting fence peels up out of the hazy horizon, and I move slowly underneath it, squirming on my belly through the grass.  I freeze, my hands moving out in front of me as if maybe I can push the fog away. Slowly, I push myself up and kneel in the wet grass.  The fog stands around me, guarding me with its fierce spines pointing straight to the sky.  I watch, and the figure grows larger, and I realize with a slow smile that it's a horse. She snorts, throwing her head back and forth.  She looks at me and sniffs the air audibly, moving towards me slowly.  I wonder how long it has been since this horse has seen a human.  Does she remember what humans smell like?
    She saunters up to me slowly, her nose pushing against my temple, gently at first, and then a little harder. I stay as still as possible but she knows I am breathing and is frustrated with my attempt to avoid her attention. I have to fight not to laugh. I wonder again how long it has been since she's seen a human. 
    I move past her and I hear her snort, her hooves pounding down on the damp grass and before I can turn she nudges my shoulder. I look at her sadly.
    “You are safer without me,” I say nearly silently, my words swallowed up into the air nearly as soon as they are out of my mouth. She shakes her head again. I shake mine.
    I walk away slowly, listening carefully for her hooves. When I hear nothing, I start to run.      I am too exposed here out in the open.  Behind me, I hear her whinny, and I suddenly taste the salt in my own tears as I imagine this is her cry, her wail to the loss of the world she had always known. 

For an abrupt moment I smell a memory of the ocean in the taste of salt, of Bar Harbor, where my parents took me and my brothers on vacation. I vanish for a moment into the fog, remembering the fog that rolled with the waves, carefully concealing itself before dawn, the love between ethereal and water vacant to the eyes of the humanity that felt itself entitled to their slavery. I wish for a moment as I inhale in through my nose and out through my mouth that I could smell the ocean again, as it was then; that I could watch the waves and fog dancing with each other one more time.

Instead I focus on my breathing, my eyes steady on the next treeline, the next mountain pass. My arms and legs move automatically, my feet barely treading on the earth. Somewhere on Camel's Hump behind me, I hear an eastern coyote howl, his cry of freedom echoing off the mountains that surround me.  Underneath that there is the low growl of a humanity I have so longed to forget following me through a pass haunted by a living wind and a growling summit which tries so hard to swallow up the last of its enemies, and yet fails in its half sleep. But just below my breathing I hear my heart beat, I taste tin in my mouth as my muscles burn through what little fuel they had, I watch the world blur and focus, back and forth, as I fight more tears.

I tried to leave the past behind in my dad's '85 Toyota with that CB radio, and yet it follows me still, a specter across mountains and pastures and rivers and forests, a haunting whisper always behind me.

I stop at the edge of the forest on the far edge of the pasture, and look back.  There is a black streak in the very center, running in circles - the horse. I watch her.  She gains speed, circling around the inside of the barrier.

Behind her, the large group of people emerges, silent now, their steady march their only noise, a rhythm in the fog, haunting, a tactical heartbeat. I freeze, and watch the horse with fear.  My eyes flick between her and the group. She snorts loudly, balking at the fence, running in circles while they come closer.

She circles one last time, streaking towards the fence and jumps, a slash of negative space against the dark fog, and runs west. I wonder why she chooses west, but I smile. They will not get her. She recognizes the beauty of freedom over the tangibility of safety in a tiny square, with the whole world wide and open and quiet. It is hers now. 

Behind her, I hear the group, rabid excitement at the horse bringing life back to their voices and cutting through the open air.

BOOM BOOM BOOM

One man at the head of the group.  He seems to be looking towards me, gun raised in the air. He lets off more shots.

BOOM BOOM BOOM

I hesitate again for only a moment while squinting at the group, before slipping carefully into the dense underbrush, a human for a moment and a part of the fog again just as quickly.