Chiappa pt1: An update? Is it the end of the world?

I bought it a long time ago, threw it in the back of my truck with a few cheap accoutrements, and then promptly forgot about it. It was something I got on a whim after getting on a survivalist kick. Back when the idea of a zombie apocalypse was still fresh and exciting, back when I would spend erstwhile hours daydreaming of endless hordes of the undead and my lone stand against them, back when I combed through the latest videos online of one so-called prepper or another while sipping on iced coffee for what felt deep down like useless trivia, it was back then that I bought it. I already had my “real” guns squared away. From my Beretta 92 to my WASR to my Ruger 10/22 and beyond, I had what I considered a formidable arsenal. Every evening I would bring out one of my beauties and fiddle around with it. Cock it, dry fire, drop magazine, insert another empty one and start again from the beginning; I even would whisper to them softly, as if those weird stories I read about sapient guns were real. I practiced with, fantasized with, and even on especially lonely nights cuddled with my guns.
Except that one.
 I thought it was an awkward thing, a break action with rails, some weird amalgamation of obsolete and tactical technology designed to confuse the owner long enough to sign the paperwork for it. But it was cheap, I already had a nice stock of 22lr, and the bonus I just got was burning a hole in my pocket. So I bought it on a whim. It didn’t make too much of a dent in my finances so I got a cheap little scope for it and a box of 22 ammunition as well. I only opened it enough to pull it from its packaging, slap the scope on it unsighted, wrap green paracord around the wire stock, and then tossed it in some cranny to be forgotten. All on a passing thought of having a “survival” rifle for my usually short commute from work and back. In the back of my mind, I jokingly called it my “shit hits the fan” gun as if I wouldn’t take literally anything else over it.
Then the world ended.
When the nights aren’t so cold and the wind howls just enough to where the silence can be ignored, I can almost find it funny. God’s last joke was that the world really did end in a bang, figuratively. Deep down, I never believed in a quick societal collapse like from nuclear warfare or an asteroid or Yellowstone exploding. Those kinds of disasters were always what I thought of when I imagined a world without humanity; a vicious flash of light and then poof, goodbye man. But I always expected a slow decline, a puttering out of the old evolutionary engine until we destroyed ourselves in a period of centuries, if not millennia. I mean, after conquering and dominating the whole earth including ourselves, you’d expect that we would just hold on to that position until us as a species grew old and died. I expected us to simply go down the drain in the behavior sink like Calhoun’s mice.
It happened while I was travelling up for a work visit, although I still haven’t found out what or how it happened. I work for, no, used to work for a small company. Management was pennywise pound foolish; no expense was spared to service our customers all across the state, but no work vehicle was provided so I had to drive my sorry ass for hundreds of miles in my truck. I had my field kit with me, a smattering of tools, odds and ends, and measuring sensors. A pain in the ass to haul around, especially in the tight corners where I plied my trade, but I made due. Field work in the middle of nowhere stopped being daunting after the 10th or so time, but the areas I serviced always seemed to be the ones with the most convoluted setup, as if some random desk jockey turned in his child’s doodle as a PID. I still think it was my boss, the prick, who sent me off to the worst places. Even then, I miss him. I miss everybody.
I drove to a small, gated structure in the middle of nowhere, deep in no-man’s land. A temperate forest sprawled all around me, verdant green sliced in twain by a narrow dirt road. The only way in to or out of civilization, I spent the better part of two days getting there. I hardly remember what I did on the last day of my normal life. Did I immediately get to work? Did I first pitch my tent and relaxed from the arduous drive? In any case I know that the world had passed me by while I was on the clock.
I think it was an EMP, from what I don’t know. But the first thing I noticed was that the lights went out. It wasn’t odd for them to shut down during a maintenance visit, but it was unheard of for the emergency lights to go out too. Cursing the darkness I stumbled out back towards the light outside. Everything else I can only barely remember, but even now I can see it clearly.
The sky was a hazy purplish-gray. It didn’t really register at first. I thought it was just the color of the setting sun. But I’ve used to watch the sun set beyond the horizon with someone I used to know, so I knew it wasn’t natural. There was also no way for it to have been dusk either; I got to the worksite in the middle of the morning. But there it was: a roiling sky of sickly purple. Looking back, it must have been a cruel trick. Did Prince really foretell the end of the world?
I tried to go back to work. I didn’t want to look back at that ominous sky, that sickening tumbling and rolling of what looked like a far-off swarm of locusts led by Abaddon. I tried to ignore the low rumbling overhead that I could feel deep within my chest. I close my eyes as purple gave way to a burning, nuclear red and rumbling to the roar of a furnace burning seven times hotter than ever before. I went back into that station, down the stairs to where I had my tools and I stopped, sat, and closed my eyes against the darkness.  I let the dark cover me, like a child pulling the blanket over his head to ward off the bumps in the night, and I pretended that my life hadn’t ended.
I don’t recall falling asleep. I don’t think I did at least. My mind wandered through dark, through the stages of grief and loss. Something deep within me bore witness to the cruel fact that I wasn’t crazy, I wasn’t overreacting. The world died, Armageddon came and went. Was there a rapture? Was it divine or manmade? I think it was manmade to be honest. I had tried to get back, get home, but the engine wouldn’t start. None of the tools I had would help either; my kit was specialized and minimal to what I needed to do. So I sat in my truck, wondering how I would go on, what I would do, what would I see if I made it back to whatever remained of the life I had left.
It was almost evening when I arose from my stupor, hunger gnawing and clawing inside. My joints creaked as I finally made my way to my makeshift campsite, the green mulch of vegetation trampled down by my work boots doing little to soften the pain deep in my bones. I sat for too long. Gears ground together in my head, ancient machinery sputtering back into movement. I had to get back. I survived something momentous and I refused to die until I knew what it was, what happened. A propane stove came to life and soon I was waiting for my first hot meal since the end blew by.
Hot meal. My truck was dead and I had limited food and water. My cell-phone was dead so even if help could be found I had no way to contact them. I had to make my way down but the last town I passed through was around four hours away by truck. If I had to guess, that would translate to about 180 miles away by road. Even if I could cut that down by traveling in a straight line, which would lead me up and down the mountain range to the south, I would still have about an 8 day trek to the small town where I bought a coffee and donut. I could probably make it, but I only had a three day supply of food and water.
I ate my dinner and started tallying up my gear. This was no time to just lie down and die. I didn’t have much in the way of family, nor did I have any friends I was particularly close to. Still, I had people I wanted to see again or at least to give a proper goodbye to. Luckily, or perhaps unluckily, I didn’t have too much to take. My tent, sleeping bag, camping stove and mess kit, canteen, and the dinky survival kit I had bought that had a cheap first aid kit, some food and water, one of those survival knives with a compass and little fishing kit screwed into the bottom of the handle, and a backpack. I dug through my field kit too, but like before it had very little I could scavenge for survival. The electronics were all fried, from the calibration equipment that cost more than I made in a month to the dollar store flashlight. I pulled out the 9 volt battery in the flashlight and put the two terminals to my tongue.
Dead.
By then, night had fallen. I huddled up in my sleeping blanket and tried to fall asleep but thoughts raced through my unclouded mind. Could an EMP do this? What caused that purple sky? Or what were those weird locust-like clouds? The night passed and dawn arose while I was still lost in thought. Still, I rose.
I wasn’t hungry yet, but I started cooking my now obviously dwindling stockpile. I needed to use my daylight as best as I could. I had already gathered my most obvious supplies together the night before, but I scoured the area for anything of use. I went back to the station where the lights were still dead and I looked through everything to find anything worth taking. My search yielded another first aid kit and more importantly a map. I didn’t fancy taking a left at Albuquerque and ending up dead of dehydration. The map indicated a river about 10 miles west of the station so that’s where I would start first. River meant water and maybe some chance at fresh fish.
By the time I got back up to my camp, breakfast was ready and I was starving. I inhaled my meager meal in moments and threw everything of worth into the backpack I had. I attached some of the bigger items, namely the sleeping bag, with some cordage I had in my truck. Everything seemed ready, but a nagging feeling reverberated in my mind. I was forgetting something. I turned to my truck and I still remember the smile that pulled at my face, the first since the end of the world.
My truck might be dead, but it was still near the top of a hill. If I just happened to throw the gear into neutral…
It was a stupid idea, but for some unknown reason I was compelled to do it. A little off-roading never hurt anyone, at least no one I knew. It was the last time I would see this old thing anyway, why not go out with a bang? And I didn’t know how much distance I could cover, so why not. I threw my pack into the passenger seat and shifted gears into neutral. It was time to blow this scene, I got everything and my stuff together. I pushed against the truck forward with one hand on the steering wheel to aim west, towards the river. This was of course, not in the direction of the road. But hey, isn’t that what brakes were for?
“Okay. Three, two , one, let’s jam.”
I kicked off and jumped into the truck. It went from a slow, lumbering roll faster and faster until I had to keep my foot on the brake and swerve for dear life as outcroppings and trees raced towards me. It was at this point I knew I fucked up. I was going too fast to simple throw myself off this deathtrap, I didn’t have enough distance between trees to stop safely, so my only hope was to slow down just enough and find a soft enough tree to wrap my truck around. I remember thinking that I hoped the airbags weren’t affected by whatever killed the engine. A boulder the size of the station whizzed to my right and my eyes automatically looked at the rear view mirror as I pondered whether or not crashing into that would have killed me.
And that’s when I first saw her, as I was racing down a mountain side dodging death like a gangbanger dodges child support, a bespectacled, tiny little girl wearing a verdant green sundress, a wide-brimmed hat and a bandoleer belt. The instant I saw her, I could only wonder why an awkward-looking girl like her would even be in this situation with me. She did notice my gawking and the first thing I heard out of her mouth didn’t make sense until a split moment later.
“River.”
Looking back at it now, I’m impressed I made it 10 miles to the river in that situation. Of course, when I crashed into the bank I didn’t have time to admire my own skill and was too busy passed out from the collision. I guess I was lucky to not have run straight into the river; I would have drowned since I later discovered it was fairly deep. Still, by the time I was conscious a good hour had passed. I didn’t have any major injuries, thank God, but I had a massive headache. I was safe, my gear was still in one piece, and I found water. All in all, it was a good time. Since then, I’ve never done that again and never plan to.
In the confusion born from a concussion, I determined the girl in green was not, in fact, a figment of my imagination. She called herself something that I didn’t quite understand, a waffle ghost or something, and said she decided to show herself since she didn’t really want to spend the rest of her life rusting away at the bottom of a river, although she said she didn’t quite care for spending that long time in the truck either. That discussion took a while though; Chippy still doesn’t speak at more than a word a minute.
That’s what I called her, my little taciturn badger. Chippy, the Chiappa Little Badger. My gun girl. My sole companion these last months.
If the world could end like it was 1999, why couldn’t I befriend what was once what I believed to be an inanimate object? It worked for Tom Hanks.