After The Fires Went Out: Coyote (Book One of the Post-Apocalyptic Adventure Series) (56 page)

I had Fiona call on the handheld to see if Lisa and Graham had found anything.

Nothing.

“Do you think there are still coyotes out here?” Fiona asked me.

“Maybe. You remember what we read about them. They’ve got quite a range... they could be anywhere.”

“They could be following her.”

“I doubt it.”

Since Gwyneth was maybe a hundred pounds on the outside, anything more than one coyote wouldn’t have to stalk her long before deciding to make the kill. If they’d tracked her, she was already dead.

“We’ll find her,” I said.

That was all I could think to say.

We reached the green mailboxes that mark about halfway down Birchill Road. There was a little waiting-for-the-school-bus shack that looked like an outhouse with an aluminum door and windows.

I saw footprints.

I stopped the cart.

“I’ll check,” Fiona said.

I nodded.

She climbed down and walked toward the shack.

The door opened and Gwyneth stepped out.

“You can’t make me go back,” she said.

“We care about you, Gwyneth,” Fiona said. “You need to come home.”

“I’m not going home with you.” She looked over and glared at me. “And I’m definitely not going home with him.”

“We can’t force you,” I said. “If you don’t want to come back with us, you can stay out here and freeze to death.”

She looked back to Fiona. “I’ll only freeze because they stole my supplies,” she said. “You need to make them give me my stuff back.”

Fiona looked up at me. “Baptiste,” she said, “we need to bring her home. She’s not thinking clearly.”

“You can’t force me.”

“What do you expect me to do?” I asked. “Tie her up?”

“I don’t know,” Fiona said.

“I’m not forcing anyone to live with me.”

Fiona looked back to Gwyneth. She held out her hand.

Gwyneth took it.

“Please, Gwyneth,” Fiona said. “Please come back with me.”

“I can’t,” she said. “I can’t go back with him. You shouldn’t go back with him, either.”

“I trust him. I love him like a father.”

“He’ll hurt you. They all hurt you in the end.”

“Let’s go, Fiona,” I said. “She’s made up her mind.”

“I’m not leaving her,” Fiona said.

“I’m not forcing her.”

“Then I’m going with her.”

I almost laughed. “That’s crazy, Fiona. You’re not even halfway there. You won’t make it.”

“She’s my friend. I can’t just abandon her.”

“I can’t let you die out here. I’m not above tying you up.”

“That’s it,” Gwyneth said, “right there. He’s going to tie you up and then he’s going to rape you.”

I didn’t even know where to begin. What could I even say to something like that?

“He wouldn’t do that,” Fiona said. “Baptiste loves me like a daughter.”

“Ask my father about that,” Gwyneth said. “Ask him what that means. I came up here to get away from him. But I was too stupid to realize that I really needed to get away from all of them. He
will
hurt you, Fiona. He
will
rape you. He may even kill you one day.”

Fiona looked back up to me. “We’re going to keep walking,” she said. “I’d really like you to stay with us. But even if you won’t.”

“I’ll stay,” I said. “I’ll follow behind.”

She smiled. “Thank you.”

Then she and Gwyneth started walking down the icy gravel road.

I called Lisa on the handheld and told her the story, and I asked her and Graham to catch up with us as soon as they could. Lisa was a nurse and not a psychiatrist, and I wasn’t supposed to know, but I knew that she’d have to have better luck with Gwyneth.

Or at least better luck convincing Fiona that there was no point in humouring that crazy girl for one more minute.

The two of them chatted with each other up ahead of me, sometimes even laughing together.

I kept a good fifty to a hundred paces behind, stopping the cart every few minutes just to keep from catching up.

Occasionally Fiona would look back and give me another smile.

Sometimes Gwyneth would look back and give me another glare.

She was starting to wear on me.

Lisa and Graham arrived within twenty minutes. Lisa left her snowmobile in the ditch and jogged to catch up with the girls.

Graham dumped his snowmobile as well, but climbed up on the cart to join me.

“Fiona’s lost it, too?” he asked.

“She feels like she’d be leaving Gwyneth to die,” I said. “And she’s right.”

“So what do we do?”

“We hope to hell that Lisa’s more persuasive than I am.”

“To be honest, I’m surprised you didn’t try and force her to come home.”

“I don’t want her to come back with us,” I said. “She’s almost as crazy as the fucker I had to shoot.”

“Fiona cares about her.”

“You are such a woman, Graham.”

“Come on, Baptiste. Doesn’t that matter to you?”

“Of course it matters, idiot. I love Fiona. I don’t want her to be upset.”

“She’ll be more than upset...”

“Then go hogtie the crazy so we can get home before Matt decides to try and cook dinner. We don’t need another forest fire.”

“Lisa will figure it out,” Graham said, sounding like a total fool.

“Yeah... maybe...”

Lisa jogged back to the cart.

“Nope,” she said. “They’re not interested.”

“Neither of them?” I asked.

“Fiona seems like she just wants to keep Gwyneth happy.”

“For how long? Are they going to set up at Helena and start some kind of Amazon collective?”

“They’re both too short for that,” Lisa said. “Let’s just go with Feminazis for now. I think we should just let them walk for a while. Eventually reality has to set in.”

“I think Gwyneth left reality in her other pants.”

“I can’t believe this,” Graham said. “How did I end up being the one who wants to brutalize these two girls and drag their butts home?”

“You have a dark side,” Lisa said. “And I like it.”

“I’m not going to put up with this,” I said. “I’m not interested in holding this crazy bitch’s hand.”

Lisa nodded. “Then go. We can handle this. We’re relieving you.”

“I stand relieved.”

“Is that a pee joke?” Graham asked.

“We’ll keep the cart,” Lisa said. “I don’t want us to have to hump these girls back on the machines.”

“Sounds good,” I said.

Graham handed me his key.

I didn’t wait around. I hopped down and started walking back toward the snowmobiles.

I went back home.

I didn’t see Sara when I got back, but I didn’t worry about it. If she wanted to hide out at the Marchands or wherever, I wasn’t going to try and stop her.

Kayla and I made dinner in the kitchen while Matt sat on the chair by the porch, holding the shotgun and looking exactly like the overzealous idiot he is.

Has he ever seen me on watch with the shotgun? Is that how he thinks this is done?

It was awkward at first with Kayla, neither of us talking about what I’m sure both of us were thinking. We hadn’t seen each other since she’d been half-naked on my bed, about to let me pull down her pants. I wasn’t sure what to say.

“I miss apples,” Kayla said as she opened up a can of mandarin oranges for the salad. “More than bananas, even. Probably because we’re just a little too far north to get them.”

“We’ve got applesauce by the buttload,” I said.

“It’s not the same. That feeling of biting into an apple, that mixture of skin and the... er... apple guts...”

“Are we going to talk about it?” I asked.

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because there’s no reason to. We’ll just move on.”

“Move on? Like try and be friends?”

She laughed. “Move on like the next time we get a chance we’ll fuck like bunnies and that’ll be that.”

“So that’s still the plan?” I wasn’t disappointed.

“That’s the plan.”

“I’ll bet there are apples that can be grown here,” I said. “I’m sure I’ve seen apple trees.”

“You’ve seen them? But you don’t remember where?”

“It didn’t seem important at the time.”

“I didn’t start this because I want to hurt Sara,” she said. “It just happened. Hurting Sara would just be a happy side effect.”

“She wouldn’t care. She’s done with me.”

“Yeah, right.”

“I’ll keep an eye out for apple trees. We ought to have an orchard.”

“Yeah... our canned fruit won’t last forever.” She stopped making the salad and grabbed my hand. “What happened to those girls, Baptiste? What did they do to them?”

“They wanted to hurt them,” I said. “To get back at me.”

“No... before that. When you first found them in that cabin on Silver Queen Lake.”

“You don’t want to know.”

“I’m asking. Just tell me, okay?”

“They stripped them down and tied them to a bed.”

“They tied them? To the bedposts?”

“With zip ties... why does it matter so much? It’s not going to happen here, Kayla.”

“Were their ankles tied? Were they blindfolded?”

“I don’t want to talk about this...”

“I can’t imagine what that would be like.”

“Stop it, Kayla, okay? Just change the goddamn subject.”

“Okay... sorry... I just wanted to know.”

“Yeah,” I said.

We finished making dinner without talking about much else, and I set the table and wondered why no one was back yet.

The three of us sat down and had dinner, Matt finally putting the shotgun down.

With the way Matt still looks at Kayla, I don’t think he has any idea what she and I have been up to; I doubt he’s been given a copy of that plan of hers.