Well Fed - 05 (28 page)

Wallace’s sickly face entered his mind—the soldier’s haunting grin and diseased gum lines.

And he hadn’t eaten.

At least, the soldier didn’t eat when he and Roxanne had sat down to eat.
What was up with that?

Gus rattled his head. He’d meant Collie, who didn’t look a thing like the woman out of his violent past.

Up on the overpass, the tarp rose and fell, waving, beckoning, wanting him to walk on up there and investigate a mystery easily solved. Everything else around the edges blurred. After a short hike, all would be revealed—Comeau and company… or their remains.

Their
animated
remains.

He took two steps toward the top.

“Where you going, Gus?”

Wallace’s voice smacked him hard upside his senses, and he jerked around as if poked with a live wire. The man stood between two motor homes, head cocked to the side, eyes hidden behind his visor, waiting patiently for an answer. Gus’s attention flickered from the top of the overpass to the unwell soldier.

“Ah,” he sputtered and stretched his back, spinning his mental wheels through lies. “Just, ah, looking there.”

Wallace casually regarded the overpass, untroubled with the world, it seemed. “You wondering what’s up there?”

Gus composed himself. “Yeah, I am, actually.”

“What do you think might be up there?”

“I think Comeau and his boys might be up there.”

“Comeau and his boys.”

“Yeah.”

“The same men who tortured you and left you for a zombie to feed upon? The same good ol’ boys who appeared to rape their victims as well as kill and rob them? Those are the men who you’re wondering about?”

Gus had nothing to say to that, so he just screwed up his face and stared, unable to get a read on Wallace.

“Well, they’re up there,” the soldier reported with laid-back casualness. “Right where Collie shot and left them… and searched them. But after being left out for a day and change, they aren’t the prettiest to look upon. Fair warning—unless you don’t mind looking at decomposing bodies.”

Gus had nothing to say to that either. “No, I don’t. I mean, uh…”

“Don’t let me keep you, then. But personally, if I were you, I wouldn’t.”

With that, Wallace walked away, working legs that might have had cement poured into the joints.

Gus watched him disappear around a corner. A motor started nearby.

He hesitated a few seconds more, pressing a hand over his duct-taped slash wound, before walking off in search of the SUV. Wallace was right about one thing. Comeau and company deserved whatever they had coming to them. All the same, that fluttering piece of white tarp hung in his mind, drawing his attention with sinister implications.

Ten minutes later, Gus located the SUV and inspected its metallic carcass with all the mute reverence an old gunslinger might muster for a reliable horse. They’d shot him off the road, and he’d crashed into the small roadside pond. His hands hung off his hips, staring at the scrunched-in front caked with dried weeds and at the blown-out windshield. Every door lay open, and glass fragments glittered like diamonds on the front seats. Deployed airbags, deflated with a knife perhaps, sagged off the steering wheel and passenger dash. Dirt coated the cookware where it’d been tossed out and kicked.

Shaking his head at the rape of his ride, he peered into the front and back seats before moving to the rear. The toilet paper was all gone, which didn’t surprise him, as was the water and food––even the bag of muffin mix. The long-neck lighters he’d gathered were still there, still functional. The duffel bag was in a dusty heap five feet from the rear, which surprised him because it was a duffel bag, so Gus picked it up and shook it out. Frowning, he gathered up everything possible, which wasn’t a lot, and tucked it all away in the bag’s cloth folds. He found the Nomex gear in a clump of dead grass halfway to the pond.

It all went into the duffel.

But no bat.

Gus scoured the area until he felt time dragging, hoping the weapon might be in one of the RVs. Lugging his gear back, he returned to the encampment. Collie and Wallace hung out in the doorway of a white rig, the one chosen to be a roving pack wagon.

“There he is,” she chimed. “Find what you were looking for?”

“Some of it,” Gus answered and dropped the duffel. “You see a bat around?”

“A bat?”

“Yeah. Aluminum one.”

“Check out the bar.”

“Huh?”

“The bar,” Collie repeated. “That’s the Winny over there. You’ll see. Saw a bat in a leather scabbard hung over the back of the driver’s seat.”

Gus turned in the direction pointed. “That one?”

Collie nodded.

“You guys ready to move?”

“Waiting on you, civvie,” Wallace answered drily and with a twinge of impatience.

Gus cocked an eyebrow at the reference.

“What he means,” Collie stepped in, “is that we probably have less than three hours of daylight left, and then we’re stuck for the night. Not that it’s a big problem now.”

“What do you mean?”

Collie smiled. “We’d usually camp out in someone’s house or even a hotel if we came across one. Never in the open. And there’s plenty of comfortable places to stay––if you don’t mind the occasional cleanup. Welcome to the apocalypse.”

Gus knew what she meant by cleanups.

“How many of these are you taking?” he asked, referring to the motor homes.

“We’ve stocked up two. Hooked our pickup to the rear of one. You can ride with me or Ollie, your choice.”

Gus had already made his choice. “I’ll ride with you. No offense, Wallace.”

Instead of commenting, the soldier inspected the unzipped duffel bag.

“Is that turnout gear?”

Gus looked at the Nomex. “That’s firefighter gear, yeah. Boots and all. What’d you call it?”

“Turnout gear. Bunker gear.”

“Never heard it called that before,” Gus said.

“You never hung out with firefighters,” Wallace remarked pointedly and went on with his inspection. “Good idea, though. Thick-layered material. Fire resistant and puncture proof. The older stuff wasn’t, but this can stop most things outside of a nine mil. What’s it weigh? Ten kilos?”

Gus shrugged uncertainly. “Yeah, I guess. About that.”

Wallace managed a horrid smile. “Adapt and overcome. Very good, civvie.”

The mellow approval almost made Gus feel good about himself. “Uh, well, thanks. Give me a few minutes, okay?”

He walked away. Gus pulled himself aboard the motor home Collie had called “the bar.” The place had been rudely remodeled, for in the center of the interior was a poker table with accompanying chairs. Gambling chips of various colors littered the surface. In disbelief, Gus spotted the bat, still in the leather sheath Adam had made for him, hanging off the driver’s seat. He took it and slung it over his shoulder and looked around further.

His mouth hung open.

“Jeeezus Christ and Mary.”

The rear of the motor home, where the bedroom would be, was full of cases of alcohol. Gus stopped on the threshold, stunned cold in his tracks, and simply stared at the cursed oasis. Open and closed boxes of assorted bottles lay about, all full, some stacked tall and some lining shelves. Colored glass gleamed. The
bar
, Gus’s inner voice whispered, laying eyes on the unit with three tall stools bolted into the floor. The bed had been ripped out, and in its place… spiritual goodness.

“Holy… holy,” Gus whispered as he inspected the labels. Liqueur, whiskey, rum, vodka, gin… and those were just the visible ones. There were boxes stacked behind and underneath each other, to the point that, if someone was sitting at the bar and fell over backward, his head would crash into a glorious bounty.

And, goddamnit, did the ferocious urge to partake ever come over him—just for luck, just for the ceremonious gesture of well wishing. Shot glasses and beer mugs rested on shelves behind the bar, and a small fridge propped on milk crates contained beverages he didn’t even recognize right away. It wasn’t like the liquor shops in Annapolis, but it would put a smile on the faces of the desperate and thirsty.

He didn’t drink anything, however. Instead, he went behind the bar and stared, shocked once more.

Grinning at him was the Captain, the same Captain stuck on the side of a plastic bottle that had traveled with him up to this point, taken from the SUV wreck and placed among its distilled cousins.

Gus studied the Captain’s smiling features and felt his own face lighting up. “How you doin’, old buddy?”

The sailor did not respond.

Gus figured that was a good thing. He still had all of his marbles in place. The amber rum sloshed around as he picked it up and tilted the bottle this way and that. Same bottle. Had to be—he
wanted
it to be. With the stash of alcoholic merriment in the bar, Gus could see why this little flask of rum had been tucked away in the fridge instead of being downed right away.

A length of leather twine dangled off the knob of a drawer. Gus pulled it off and ignored the extra poker chips, but a good three feet or so of the material hung there, begging to be used.

So he used it.

“Find your friend?” Collie asked when Gus emerged.

The smile on Gus’s face answered that. “The bat was where you said it was, which is great.”

“Nothing beats a solid bat,” Collie agreed. “And one for the road?”

Gus held up the bottle, the Captain’s face pointing outward. “This is an old house-and-road buddy of mine. Same bottle. Untouched. Never thought I find that in there. Forgot about him, to tell the truth.”

“He a good luck charm or something?” Collie asked.

Gus regarded the naval officer. He’d taken the twine and tied it around the bottle’s base and neck, strapping everything in place with gobs of duct tape found in a utility drawer. Only the Captain’s head appeared, but now he had a little extra protection with the molded layers of tape. The twine dangled from his hand and, if he wanted, he could slip it over his head as a heavy necklace.

“Big medicine,” Gus declared. “It’s a good thing.”

Wallace looked at Collie and cleared his throat, the sound like a wet phone book being torn in two in front of a bullhorn. Gus hated to imagine what was moving around in the soldier’s chest, making that noise.

“You didn’t take any of the other stuff?” Collie asked.

“Wha’? The booze, you mean?”

“Yeah, the booze.”

Gus shook his head. “Don’t need it.”

“Well, don’t fret any. I loaded up a few boxes. Good trade goods even if we don’t get into it.”

“Well, I’m set,” Gus said.

“Any idea of which direction to go?” she asked.

“None.”

That left Wallace and Collie quiet.

“I’ve just been following my nose,” Gus offered. “But that bottled deer meat, that’s from our farm. How these guys got it, well, that’s obvious. Someone gave it to them while passing through.”

“I ask the question because we’re at a crossroads here,” Collie pointed out, “where the 102 runs into the 104. Now, we came from the east and haven’t seen or heard anything. So by default, we could keep rolling west. See if we cross anything. It’s a long shot, really, knowing how many side roads and smaller highways there are, spread out over a very,
very
big piece of territory. But seeing what’s at stake, it’s still a shot. We got a lot of supplies here, but our folks can wait for a bit, so we don’t have to head back there right away. Least, not until we see what’s what. See if your nose is on. If you’re willing.”

“I am,” Gus said.

“Let’s go, then,” she said to Wallace. “I’ll take the FNG.”

“Let’s hope they don’t turn stateside,” the zombie-ish officer rumbled.

“Why’s that?” Gus asked while puzzling over what FNG might mean.

“Because that’s where the fallout was the worst,” Wallace said. “When the machines stopped being monitored, things started falling apart. The containment measures for radioactive cores at every nuclear plant eventually failed, north and south of the border. Just so happens most of our facilities were built along the border. I’d advise against traveling down there. Anyone in, say, Toronto or thereabouts, who weren’t turned into something dead and walking, who actually lived, pretty much died from fallout. Don’t even drink the groundwater from anything within a hundred klicks of a plant.”

“So, what do we do?”

“Realistically,” Wallace continued in that trancelike voice of his, “we drive on, drive slow, and keep our eyes open for signs of people. Maybe we’ll luck out. Personally, I give us a ten to fifteen percent chance of finding your pecker checker. That’s ‘doctor’ in your tongue. But like Collie’s said, she’s worth it.”

“I don’t think she can help you,” Gus said after a pause, confronting that dark visor.

The skeletal grin underneath widened.

“Civvie,” Wallace said, “no one can save me.”

A pair of motor homes—one towing a flatbed trailer with a battered wooden shack built on top, the other dragging a white pickup—moved westward on the 104 TransCanada Highway, gradually curving north. Gus sat in the passenger seat while Collie drove, taking the lead as Wallace followed. The usual detritus of vehicles plagued the highway. Some stopped in a mesh of traffic, while others rested on the shoulders at interesting angles.

Collie slowed the monster motor home and threaded through the worst of the tangles, sometimes scraping the sides. At times, she drove across the dip of a median and rumbled the unit up the other side to bypass knots of stranded vehicles.

“Should’ve expected this,” she muttered, checking her available mirrors.

“The highway?” Gus asked.

“Yeah. We’ve got a fat ass—made worse by hauling along that generator.”

Gus didn’t ask why they’d brought it along. A working generator meant power and creature comforts—for a while, anyway.

“Whereabouts you from?” he asked her.

“Originally Odessa. Just outside of Kingston, Ontario. You?”

“Annapolis.”

“Never been. Yet.”

“I’ve never been to Odessa.”

“Well, you never know. Way the world is now, you can travel as much as you want until the gas runs out. Then it’s waiting for someone to figure out how to power up and operate an oil refinery.”