Well Fed - 05 (52 page)

Into the night, Wallace sulked, unresponsive to her questions, unwilling to partake in another evening of sharing memories.

He’d entered a dark tunnel of self-loathing, and Collie wondered if his mood swings were portentous warnings of the final change.

The shadows in the house became pits of palpable tension.

Collie maintained her vigil at the door.

Her weapon ready.

She opened her eyes in the morning, surprised that sleep was even possible. She’d rolled over onto the floor, the pillow mysteriously finding her cheek, hand still on her gun. From where she lay, the kitchen island grew out of the floor and towered over her.

No sound was coming from Wallace’s bedroom.

“Ollie?”

No response.

“Ollie, you okay in there?”

She jumped into a crouch and pressed herself against the wall next to the door, her gun at her thigh. She peered through the slot, keeping her face back a safe distance. The corners remained empty, as did the bed, which had been pulled out from the wall and yanked to one side during one of his outbursts.

“Ollie?”

Her mouth felt like a cavern of sun-scorched leather. Her eyes narrowed, and her hearing flicked to its highest setting. The boards on the window were untouched. She stepped softly to the other side of the door, scanning the opposite corners. The closet in the room was a small one, with no door, and offered no place to hide. Wallace couldn’t be seen anywhere.

That meant he was at the door.

“Ollie?”

She angled her line of sight to take in the ceiling, as silly as she felt for doing so, then stood on her toes to see the ground.

A boot stretched out, toes up as if he sat and leaned against the door.

“Hey, you… still here?”

Collie stepped in closer. The top of a head came into view, the hair shortened to a dark fuzz covering gray skin.

“Ollie?”

The head turned slightly. “Yeah?”

The relief flooding through Collie weakened her knees. “How you doing?”

“Still here.”

“You scared me.”

Wallace grunted and stood. He unlocked the door. “Let me out of here, Collie.”

“What?”

“I’m tired of this FK9 shit. If anything was going to happen, it would’ve by now. I don’t know why it slacked off, but it feels like it has. I’m good to go.”

Collie processed all of that before asking, “You sure?”

“Yeah. Muzzle me if you have to. But I’d rather be doing something useful other than this goddamn waiting.”

She could understand that.

So she let him out.

When they arrived at Pine Cove’s main gate and saw it open, they knew there was a problem.

But neither expected the horrors left in the street.

They got out of their pickup and wandered, stricken, as if forced to explore a nightmare. The bodies left frozen on the pavement stopped them in their tracks. Collie and Wallace
knew
these people, and their violent deaths rendered them speechless. Collie discovered the lifeless form of old man Phil, pale yet noble in death, the front of his shirt punctured in several places as if he’d been stabbed repeatedly through the rib cage with an ice pick or some similar tool. Ray Minglewood lay in a bloody heap near his office, the handicraft of an automatic weapon easy to discern. They inspected a few of the houses and left the rest, knowing no survivors were left in Pine Cove and realizing half the populace was missing.

Including Gus.

Tire tracks had ripped through small fields and left tufts of sod all the way back to the main gate. One set of monster tracks gouged the soil inches deep, drawing their attention. The vehicle’s massive weight left six-foot-wide prints in the degrading pavement, crushing the edges into crumbs the size of golf balls. Collie and Wallace stood at the gate, staring, marveling at the machine’s mass and wondering who had kidnapped Pine Cove’s people. They’d worked so hard to establish the town as a safe haven, bringing people to that little corner of the world and repopulating it, only to discover it
gone
in two days
.

They drove off, intent on finding whoever was responsible.

Craving retribution.

They hunted for two days, driving slowly, their windows down, studying the wrecked pavement and sides of the road with a grim appreciation of the force ahead of them. “An army,” Wallace stated, still cognizant, still in full control of his mind and deteriorating body.

The search for the missing Pine Cove townspeople focused and motivated him like no other therapy or argument Collie could have mounted. Those missing souls perhaps even aided him in ways not easily measured or identified, holding off the final stages of his condition. At least for a while. Collie hoped it would be long enough. Her man was dying beside her, getting closer with every passing second, and while she mourned for him inside, she reminded herself that he
didn’t
mourn, that he pushed on, despite his condition—so like Wallace. He didn’t lie down and surrender—certainly not when other lives were at stake.

Instead, Wallace concentrated on the task set before them, and so did she.

Whoever had killed half of Pine Cove and taken the rest, wherever they were heading, Collie and Wallace followed. Unerringly, they retraced a path, happening upon empty bottles and garbage tossed onto the shoulders of the road—the scraps of a massive, landlocked wake.

They discovered more bodies from a shoot-out, a handful of people who had set themselves up roughly four hundred kilometers from Pine Cove, close enough to be neighbors but small enough to escape notice. The army had found them, and the settlers had resisted. Wallace and Collie pieced together the progression of the battle, studied the dead, and picked up spent shotgun cartridges and the brass of military-grade assault weapons.

By evening, they found Jim’s body, barely recognizable, for half of his face had been picked away by crows. His throat had been torn out—by fingers, they concluded in dark disbelief. In all of their years and theaters of combat, neither one had ever witnessed such a vicious killing.

The discovery of Jim urged them to search faster.

Four days later, after some cautious driving through the wilds of Quebec toward the northern deep-woods country of Ontario, the feeling came over them that the trail was heading in a familiar direction.

A pickup rattled away from the base of Whitecap and soon disappeared into a forest redolent with the midmorning smells of cedar and fir and undercut with a hint of fresh water, running in hidden brooks. The temperature had dipped close to freezing the night before, and a frost coated the underbrush in a sprinkling of white. Three men and two women rode in the vehicle—two in the cab, three in the box. All traveled with newly found hardware locked and loaded, with safeties off. Weapons ready, the three in the box held on to welded side walls of sheet metal and bounced around, hoping to spot a deer or a bear––something
alive
, anyway, to test-fire the big guns in their possession.

Their truck rattled over the road, waddling through an encroaching wilderness, and low-hanging branches tried to slap the closest occupants.

Then they dipped into a gulley and came upon a pickup blocking the road.

“The fuck’s
that
?” the driver, whose name was Chris, asked as he braked hard, jolting everyone aboard. The truck lurched to a stop, facing its twin barring the way.

“The fuck
is
that?” Gertrude––called “Gertie”––added as she pulled up her assault rifle and opened the door. “Cover me.”

“There’s a driver.”

“Yeah, but he’s slumped over,” Gertie said and pulled her balaclava down over her rough features. “No zombie drove all the way up here.”

“Be careful then.”

Gertie didn’t answer because she always practiced caution. She hefted her rifle and nestled its stock against her shoulder, lined up the 1x-magnification sight, and stalked forward as if walking through a minefield. She wasn’t formally trained as a soldier––none of them were––so they got by on what they’d remembered seeing in the movies. As she crept closer to the obstructing pickup, with the sounds of the running engine behind her and the hushed murmuring of the surrounding brush, she could make out the person behind the wheel.

The driver’s window had been lowered. Inside was a soldier wearing a helmet, a man, head down and resting on the upper curve of the steering wheel. Tactical webbing hung around his shoulders. His mouth hung open as if he’d just finished projectile barfing all over the dash. Gertie smelled him and cringed. She kept her rifle trained on him, however, and glanced back at her companions. The three in the box lined the top of the cab and covered her with readied weapons.

“Well?” a man called out.

“Looks dead.” Gertie edged closer. She glanced around, scanning the woods before returning to the body at the wheel. “Guy’s a corpse.”

“He’s dead?”

“Been dead for a couple of days or so, I figure,” Gertie estimated.

“How the hell he get up here?” a woman asked.

“Is he a zombie?” questioned another.

“Wait.” Gertie reached forward and gripped the door handle. She pulled it open and took two shots to the belly that blasted her backward into the brush.

Collie rolled out from underneath the pickup and grabbed the rifle from the fallen woman, feeling the violent chatter of gunfire answering Wallace’s shots. Collie wound up on her chest, leveled the rifle at the truck, and blew out the windshield in a tracery of circles right where the driver would be. The three in the back responded in kind, muzzle fire lighting up the late autumn shadows, blazing into Wallace and their truck. Collie adjusted her aim and fired, making the scalp of a lowered head jump in a bloom of blood and hair. That target sank out of sight, his machine gun popping off a last barrage of shells before falling silent.

The woman in the box wildly returned fire, ripping up dirt and marching a trail of bullets right up to where Collie lay. Collie shifted, aimed, and shot her in the face, jettisoning the woman backward in a chunky halo of gray matter. She shifted targets in the split second it took for the last man to realize he was all alone and killed him with one bullet through the forehead. He flopped onto the roof like a marionette with its strings abruptly cut… and eventually slid out of sight.

The firefight ended in less than five seconds.

Collie searched for other targets while the truck continued to idle.

“Ollie?” she called out.

“I’m good.”

“Any of them get you?”

“Said I’m good.”

Grouch
.

Collie got to her feet, training her weapon on the opposing truck and sidestepped over to her husband. He’d shot the first raider through the midsection before flopping down across the cup holders and stick shift, just before the windshield went electric with return fire.

“Check on them,” he said as he clawed his way back into a sitting position.

Collie ran up to the opposing truck and quickly confirmed the kills. All had expired by head shots. She studied the road to Whitecap for a few seconds and, once satisfied that no one else was coming, returned to Wallace’s kill.

The woman still lived, holding her hands over her messy abs. Collie grabbed a shoulder and flipped her onto her back, eliciting a whimper.

“Are there any more?” Collie demanded. She got a wheezing grimace as a reply. Collie slapped her twice, hard, before gripping her chin and repeating the question.

“No more,” the woman squeaked through clamped teeth.

“How many of you are there?”

“Huh?”

Collie whacked her again, vicious palm strikes not quite up to full power, but with enough force to rattle teeth and clear a mind.

“I dunno,” her prisoner whined. “A hundred fifty maybe. Maybe two.”

“Lots of these?” Collie held up the rifle.

Blood outlined the teeth in the woman’s answering smile.

“Thanks,” Collie stood up, took aim, and put a single bullet through the wounded woman’s head with no more thought than she would give to cracking open a can of beer.

“You hear that?” she asked Wallace as he oozed out from behind the wheel.

“Yeah.”

“Recognize this?” Collie held up the rifle, and Wallace’s usually wincing face softened just a bit.

“Yeah,” he muttered. “German HK H-50Z.”

“Remember where you saw one last?”

Wallace didn’t answer. He knew. She knew too.

“One thing’s for sure,” Collie said. “These shitheads sure as fuck aren’t soldiers.”

“Think there might be some rentals among them?”

Collie fixed him with a
gimme a break
look, and he dropped the matter.

“What do you want to do?” he finally asked.

She glanced up the road. “Let’s strip these rat rags, get the rigs off the road, and get on our black Cadillacs.”

The dead gave up eight additional magazines, which were stuffed into pockets and webbing. Wallace appropriated a rifle for himself. They then drove the trucks off onto one of the many side roads meant to confuse drivers, left them, and started walking. They stayed close to the main route, ready to dive into the brush if they heard an approaching vehicle. Twice Collie led Wallace into the underbrush. Wary of mines, they approached advance surveillance stations constructed ten meters back from the main road. No one manned the camouflaged, two-person concrete boxes, nor did it appear anyone had in a while. Collie didn’t bother searching them. She and Wallace had already scrounged everything of use from the lookouts when they had previously left Whitecap for what they believed to be the last time. Satisfied that no one was monitoring their approach, they returned to the main road.

When Whitecap loomed up through the forest canopy, they entered the woods and stayed low. Collie moved like a two-legged eel through the brush while Wallace struggled. He snapped branches when he should not have, shuffling when he should have floated. Collie glanced back at times, zeroing in on his lumbering shadow five meters behind, cringing yet sympathetic.