As she drank deeply, Allistor heard a curious sniffing noise. Looking through the passenger window, he saw a pile of brown fur scrunched down behind the driver’s seat, with a just a nose sticking up above the back seat.
“My hero! Come on out, Fuzzy. The monster’s dead. You were a big help!” He opened the door, and the bear cub stared at him, in no big hurry to leave the safety of the truck. “Come on! Out you go, oh fearless grizzly companion!”
Fuzzy attempted to move, but couldn’t. He looked at Allistor again and huffed.
“What? Are you stuck down there?” Allistor reached in, pushing his hand between the back of the driver’s seat and the bear’s shoulder. He tugged gently, but the cub was wedged in there tightly.
Moving forward to the driver’s seat, he reached underneath and triggered the release, sliding the seat forward. A grunt from Fuzzy, and the cub freed himself. He tumbled out onto the road as Allistor moved the seat back again.
Looking down at his bear cub, he said, “You grew! Fuzzy, you must have leveled up when we killed the snake! No wonder you were stuck down in there.”
Fuzzy mostly ignored him, strolling over to the snake’s corpse and growling the whole way. When he reached its head, he sniffed it thoroughly, then licked some of the exposed and burned flesh. He took a tentative bite, pulling away some stringy bits with his teeth.
Rolling his eyes, Allistor motioned for Helen to follow him. He touched the snake’s head, looting it. She followed his example and her eyes went vacant as she reviewed her loot notifications. “This is cool! And I leveled up to six, by the way!”
Allistor congratulated her as he reviewed his own loot. Two hundred klax, six stacks of infant ophidian queen meat, twenty pieces each. Four stacks of infant ophidian queen hide, one envenomed fang (he assumed Helen received the other), and as he had begun to expect when killing these bigger monsters, her heart.
When he saw that she was done inspecting her loot, he pulled out a knife. “We need to skin this thing. Take as much as we can with us. A little bonus we discovered a while back. I assume you got some hide in your loot?”
“Yup. A whole bunch! Which, I guess when you look at the size of this thing, isn’t a big surprise.”
“Well, we can harvest even more. I’m assuming as a ranger you’ve skinned a snake before?”
Her answer was to walk up to the head and drive her own knife into the flesh under its chin. “This thing is huge. We’re not going to be able to skin it like a normal snake.”
He agreed. He watched as she made a long slit that extended several feet down the ophidian’s belly. Then made a cross-cut at the top, making a T under its chin. She stopped and looked at him. “How big should these pieces be?”
“I don’t know? Um… when my mom used to sew she bought fabric in yards? Does that help?”
Helen nodded once and resumed carving at the corpse. Allistor left her to it, moving to the monster’s jaw. The two venomous fangs were gone, but inside the jaw were two ridges, upper and lower, that each held dozens of much smaller (by comparison) teeth. Each of these was six to ten inches long and razor-sharp. Carefully grabbing hold of one, he used his knife to pry it loose. Hoping they could be used to create some kind of weapon with his Improvisation and Weaponsmithing skills, he removed the teeth one by one.
When he was done, he went to check on Helen. She’d cut and peeled six long strips of skin from the body. Each was about two feet wide and ten feet long. Her hands and forearms were covered in blood, and she was sweating. As he watched, she unconsciously wiped some sweat from the tip of her nose with a bloody hand, then cursed when she realized what she’d done.
“That should be more than enough, I would think.” He watched as she rolled up each strip into a neat tube of snakeskin, then he stepped up next to her and pulled the canteen from her belt. He motioned for her to hold out her hands as he slowly poured out the water for her to wash. When she was mostly clean, she thanked him and took the canteen back for a drink.
Fuzzy, meanwhile, had taken full advantage of the freshly exposed snake meat, pulling huge bites of the stuff from the body and chowing down. His muzzle was slick with blood, and his belly seemed to be getting rounder.
“Enough, pigbear!” Allistor bumped him in the side with a knee. Clean yourself up before you get in the truck!” Fuzzy obediently stepped away from the corpse, sitting on his haunches and commencing to clean his face and paws by licking them, much as a cat would do.
Leaving him to it, he walked back toward the truck. Helen was standing next to it on the driver’s side, looking down. When he saw what she was looking at, he laughed.
“Yeah, there’s a Helen-shaped dent right there. It’s like one of those old cartoons!” he giggled slightly. When he saw the look she shot him, it erupted into uncontrollable laughter. He managed to gasp out, “You… got… pancaked!”
Eventually, she stopped glaring at him and chuckled. “It hurt. A lot.” Then she started laughing as well.
She laughed even harder when he said, “Who are you?”
Finished with his cleanup, Fuzzy ambled over to stare at the two humans who were making strange noises and holding their bellies as if they were sick. When he tilted his head to one side and made a questioning chuff, both humans laughed even harder, rendered helpless by the fuzzy cuteness.
Eventually, they got themselves sorted out and back into the truck. Back at the wheel, Helen took them the rest of the way down one back road after another until they reached the outskirts of Cheyenne.
She’d brought them in from the northwest quadrant of the city, along a road with a sign that named it as Hwy 211. “We’re close to the Air Force base here. I figured you might want to check that out as a potential Stronghold.” She nodded out the window with her chin, directing his gaze. When he looked in the indicated direction, he didn’t see much of anything.
“Um… I didn’t know there was a base here. Aren’t Air Force bases mostly runways and hangars and better-than-average military housing? I was thinking something sturdy, like maybe an old stone building, a steel high rise, or a stadium or something.”
Helen coughed once. “Warren air base is… was a missile base, my friend. Like, silos, bunkers, that sort of thing. Sturdy enough for you?”
“Hell yes!” He offered her a fist to bump. “But… um, if there are bunkers, there might be survivors. Are we going to get shot if we trespass on the base?”
She stopped the truck. “Well, shit. Good question. I mean, we have this official truck, and I’m a ranger, so maybe they’ll wait and ask questions before they shoot?”
Allistor looked at her skeptically. “You don’t look like a ranger.” She had put on jeans and a flannel shirt before they left that morning. “Any chance they’d be listening in on that radio?” He pointed to the microphone on a curled cord clipped to the dash next to the steering wheel.
She thought about it for a minute. “They might be - if they’re scanning channels. As for the ranger bit, stay right there.” She threw the truck into park and jumped out, walking around back to retrieve her bag. Pulling out a folded uniform, she said, “No peeking!” and turned her back to him as she stripped down to change. Allistor turned to face forward, and he did his best not to look. Which meant he only peeked a couple times. Quickly. Just glances, really.
When she returned to the driver’s seat all uniformed up, she grabbed the radio and began calling out. “United States Park Ranger Rodgers to F.E. Warren Air Force base personnel, is anyone listening, over?”
They listed for a response, but there was only static. She said, “We’re close enough that if they’re listening, they can hear us.”
She repeated the message a few times, adding in phrases like “We’re in your back yard, looking for survivors.” When there was still no response, she changed channels and repeated her message. After she’d gone through a dozen channels, she stowed the microphone and sighed. “If they were listening, they should have heard us on at least one of those channe
ls.”
Allistor shrugged. “What do you want to do? Drive on and see what happens? Look for another place and maybe try the radio again?”
She drummed her fingers on the steering wheel for a bit, then said, “If there were survivors, chances are the buildings we’d want are locked down. So even if we don’t get shot, we probably can’t get in. I mean, they’re designed to withstand nuclear strikes ‘n such.”
Allistor nodded. “Right. So that’s that, then. Let’s find ourselves a good safe spot for the night, and once that’s established we can spend the rest of the afternoon exploring and foraging. Maybe we can find an even better place.”
Helen looked askance at him, but she put the truck back in gear. “I might know a good place. Over by the airport.” She drove down a couple more roads, which remained mostly clear. There were some abandoned cars blocking parts of them in a few places. Some accidents with a few burned out cars, but for the most part, the city just looked like everybody bailed.
They crossed over Interstate 25 headed east, and Allistor could see the airport control tower. “You’re not actually taking me to the airport, just to mess with me, right?”
“Nope! Relax, we’re almost there. I think you might like this.” A moment later she turned off the road into a parking lot. There in front of them was a big, sexy shopping mall. The sign out front read Frontier Mall. He could see a movie theater, a few big box stores, and signs for many more, including a few fast food restaurants and a candy store.
Excited now, he hopped up and down in his seat a bit. “Yesss! Well done! Sturdy structure, clear line of sight all the way around, filled with loot! Now let’s hope there’s nobody in there to keep us from claiming it. I wonder if it’s too big for an Outpost.”
She rolled her eyes at him. “Slow down there, hot pants. I thought we were going to try the base again? You know, the place full of nuclear missiles? How much could you sell those for on the market?”
Allistor drooled a little bit. “Much. Many klax. Oodles. And if we could figure out how to fire them, nobody would ever screw with us.” He thought about it for a second. “Unless of course, the dicks who brought us here have the tech to nullify them. Still, worth a shot. That’s why I was thinking Outpost for the mall. That way we could still make the bunkers a Stronghold if we get in.”
“Fair enough.” She was driving them in a circuit around the mall, looking for any signs of habitation. There were a few dozen cars still parked within view, some with doors wide open or broken windows and old blood stains. Others still closed tight and mostly undamaged. Almost all of them had dents and scratches on them.
As they reached the end of their circuit without coming across any sign of life, friendly or otherwise, Helen pulled up right in front of the double glass doors leading into a major chain store. The two of them exited the truck and spent a little time surveying the area, watching and listening for any motion at all. Other than a few birds, nothing moved. Allistor tried the door and found it unlocked. There were actually two sets of doors, outer and inner. A quick test of the inner doors unsurprisingly showed them to be unlocked as well.
He stepped back outside and opened the back door of the truck, letting Fuzzy out. “Stay behind me, okay, lil buddy? We’re going to explore the great big cave.”
They all entered the first set of doors, then the second. Fuzzy caught his own reflection in the glass and licked at it, but he made no sound. Allistor scratched his ears to thank him.
Inside the store, they found themselves in men’s clothing. Allistor looked around the wide open expanse full of shelves and clothes racks, and fear gripped him. There could be a dozen canids within fifty feet of him, and he’d never see them coming. A quick look at Helen showed a similar worry written all over her face. She whispered, “Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea?”
Allistor didn’t answer right away. He crouched down in front of Fuzzy and asked, “You smell anything, buddy? I mean, I know you smell lots of things. There’s all kinds of perfumes and people scents in this place. But do you smell anything that might eat us?”
Fuzzy looked at him for a moment, then licked his face. The smell of snake corpse was unpleasant, but Allistor took it as a good sign. Standing straight, he looked back at the doors, considering.
“Fuzzy says we’re good for now. Grab some belts off that rack over there.” He pointed, and Helen moved to comply while he went back to look at the doors. He’d worked retail for a brief period as a kid, and had been responsible for locking similar doors when he worked the evening shift. As he expected, the right side door of each set had a lever you could pull down that dropped a pin into the floor, and another for the top of the frame. He quickly locked both of those, leaving only the left-hand doors. The outer door could only be locked with a key, which was discouraging. But the inner door had a deadbolt-like knob that could be turned on the inside.
Helen arrived with the belts, and Allistor used one to tie the outer door handles together. Then he used a second belt to reinforce the first. He tried the doors, and they barely moved. “It’s not perfect, but it’ll do for now.” Stepping inside, he turned the deadbolt, then just to be safe he wrapped a belt around those handles as well.
“You realize you just cut us off from our escape route?” Helen snarked at him, nudging him with an elbow.
“Yeah. But I can’t have things sneaking in behind us from outside. Let’s clear this place and lock it down.” Allistor raised his shotgun and took the lead as he walked to the main exit into the mall itself. Here they found a roll-down gate that stretched the entire twelve-foot width of the doorway. Allistor found a metal pole with a hooked end leaning against one wall and used it to pull the gate down. It made a huge racket and scared Fuzzy into backing up and hiding inside a circular rack of ladies coats. Once the gate was down, one needed a key to lock it.
Allistor shrugged. “Good enough for the moment. Anything tries to get in, we’ll definitely hear it.”
Over the next twenty minutes, they moved through the store, first closing the other set of glass doors exiting the opposite side of the store, then clearing the main floor area and the restrooms, dressing rooms, offices, and finally the stock room. The stock room had two more exits, one a standard metal door, the other a roll-up loading dock door. Both were securely locked.
“If we need to, we can sleep in here tonight. We can secure the door leading out to the store, throw some blankets and pillows down, and sleep in shifts.” Helen observed, echoing Allistor’s exact train of thought.
“Yep! You read my mind. Okay, let’s see if we can find some keys. Check the office first, then start searching the drawers at the cash registers. Some supervisor might have left keys we can use to lock up. Those glass doors won’t stop humans with guns or any of the large monsters, but they should be fine for canids and killer rats.”
Helen found keys sitting atop the very first desk she checked. Along with a hand-written note dated two weeks earlier.
I’m leaving the store open for anyone who needs it. There are warm clothes, shoes, and other things you might need. The dog-things took my wife and daughter yesterday. I should have brought them here instead of keeping them home. This place, the whole mall, seems clear so far. I’m going out to hunt those things. If you are reading this, make yourself at home, and good luck to you. May the Lord protect you, if he’s still watching over us.”
Tears flowed down Helen’s face as she read the note aloud. Allistor found himself a little choked up as well. He lifted the keys from the desk and cleared his throat. “Maybe he’s still alive out there somewhere.”
Helen nodded and followed him out of the office. They quickly made the rounds, using the keys to secure all the doors and big gate leading out to the mall. Then they grabbed a couple of chairs and sat near the gate, watching and listening. Fuzzy stuck his nose between the links and sniffed, then just sat down and looked at Allistor.
“I say we wait until tomorrow to try and clear this place,” Helen said. Sh
e was still bummed by the letter. “That’s a lot of open territory for two people to cover.”
Allistor nodded. Leaving the gate area, they made their way over to the household section. There were actually four beds set up as displays, along with a few sofas and recliners, dressers, and such. They grabbed a bunch of sheets and blankets and worked together to make a couple of the beds. Then Allistor piled blankets on the floor between them for Fuzzy. The cub wasted no time, a few quick sniffs, and he curled up and closed his eyes.
Mentally tired, Allistor and Helen did some quick shopping. He grabbed a few pairs of jeans, T-shirts, and sweat shorts to sleep in. She returned with similar items, plus a full pair of silk pajamas. “Always wanted a set of these, but rangers don’t get paid much.” She grinned at him and headed for the dressing room. He changed where he was while she was inside, plopped down into one of the recliners. A quick look at the glass doors showed afternoon sunlight outside.
When Helen rejoined him, they talked for a few hours, sharing stories about family and their past lives. Catching each other up on all the events since the apocalypse began. When Helen yawned widely and caused Allistor to do the same, they retired to their beds for the evening. Allistor said he’d take first watch, but Helen shook her head. “With the doors all locked, we’ll hear anything trying to get in. And Fuzzy will let us know if anything gets close. We both need the sleep.”
Too tired to argue, Allistor said, “Good enough. Sweet dreams.”
It wasn’t five minutes before they were both sound asleep.
Chapter Fifteen
Ditch the Twitch
Fuzzy woke them early in the morning, poking his nose at Allistor with the Fibble doll in his mouth, looking to be let outside. Allistor was impressed with the request, though he supposed it was in a bear’s nature not to want to shit in its own den. Still, he talked to the cub as if he were a human as they unlocked the set of double doors by the truck. “You just gonna carry that thing around everywhere?” He caught himself waiting for the cub to answer.
Shadow Sun Survival: Shadow Sun Book One Page 30