by Lorch, Jeff
He looked at me, and for the moment it was like there was no-one else in the room with us.
“I thought I could stick it out without seeing to my family,” he said, solemnly. “You know, do my job, do my duty.” He looked down at the table again, then back at me. “But after meeting you nutjobs, and after getting to Shilo behind you and hearing about what you went through to get home to your family, I knew I couldn’t do anything less.”
I reached out across the table and took is hand. It meant so much to me that this man had made it out of the attack at the convoy, and that he might yet make it home to be with his wife and his sons. It meant to me that maybe there was something beyond all this; something that wasn’t just running and fighting and dying.
Suddenly something occurred to me. “How did the guard at the gate recognize me?” I asked.
Kelley say back, his face turning sour for a moment; he glanced over at Private Reed, who sat back in his chair, a look cocky of challenge on his face.
“What?” said Glen, shrugging his shoulders with a smile. “A civvie soccer-mom who likely goes a buck-twenty handing out a broken nose and two black-eyes to a Lt. Col., then pulling a gate-smashing jailbreak isn’t a story worth telling all of a sudden? I’ll be able to drink for free for months on that!”
♦♦♦
The guard at the gate hadn’t been kidding: they really weren’t equipped to house civilians here. There were no sleeping quarters other than the temporary barracks they had set up in the middle of the camp, and everyone here had a job to do that didn’t include babysitting us. It looked like most of the work being done was building the wall of shipping containers around the camp. Everywhere, you could see soldiers working with heavy construction vehicles moving containers into place, being showered by the bright sparks of welding equipment at work.
After telling us how he made it first to Shilo and then here to Dundurn, I got a fresh round of coffee and hot chocolate for everyone and told Cpl. Kelley about our journey, and most importantly about the raiders’ attack on the reserve in the valley. I explained how they had collected a group of infected and launched them at the defenses like a battering ram, and how we had redirected the swarm away from the school giving them a chance to regroup.
“Smart thinking,” he said. “Someone had their head on straight.” He looked at me frankly. I mumbled something about it being dumb luck.
He said he thought this intel was something that the camp commandant should hear, so he left us to see if he could get in to see the Colonel, and to hopefully find us some temporary lodging at the same time.
While he was gone, Private Reed brought us up to speed on Camp Dundurn.
“It’s more than just a supply base,” he said, “it’s an ammunition depot, the biggest one in Canada. This camp supplies all the ammo for all of Canada’s armed forces all over the world. I couldn’t even begin to guess how many hundreds of thousands of rounds of ammo are here, and armaments coming out the wazoo; it’s literally enough to supply an army, so you can imagine how important security here is. I’m really glad they let you guys in here, but I wouldn’t count on being allowed to stay.”
“What about Moose Jaw?” I asked.
He shook his head, “nope, it’s been shuttered. All the aircraft and personnel have been relocated to Cold Lake. The two closest bases that are housing civilians are Suffield and Cold Lake, and from here it’s almost exactly the same distance to both bases. You can likely choose which one you want to go to.” He leaned back, a sideways grin on his face. “After Shilo, I highly doubt anyone would try to stop you from going where you want to go.”
I smiled and said I figured that was something we would have to discuss as a family. We hadn’t really considered going to Cold Lake, but if that’s where Cpl. Kelley was going, maybe we should too. That way we would be travelling with some extra muscle instead of going alone. And after all, we didn’t know anyone at Suffield, so one was likely as good as the other.
“I know Cpl. Kelley said he’s heading north to Cold Lake,” I said, “but what about you? Are you going to stay here or go with him?”
“I had planned to head north with him, but now that I’m here, I think I need to stay,” he said. He leaned into us and spoke quietly. “Raider activity is getting pretty bad here. We don’t have much intel to go on, but it seems like over the last week the groups raiding Saskatoon and looting the surrounding area are either getting bigger, or joining forces, or both. So far, they haven’t made any direct attacks against the camp, but patrols that have been out and around the area have been involved in some pretty nasty firefights. Many of them simply haven’t made it back.”
I couldn’t imagine a ragtag group of raiders that would be crazy enough to attack a military base, let alone one as well armed as Dundurn, and I said so.
Glen shook his head, all false bravado gone. “There just aren’t enough of us to go around,” he said, “which is why I’m going to be staying; they need the manpower. And from what I’ve heard from some of the guys here, these raiders are a lot more organized than you would think, and they’re getting more organized,” he said. “We’re not talking about a group of starving civilians; these people are well armed and they’re smart, and from what we can tell, there are a lot more of them than there are us. If they somehow managed to take this base, they would be the most heavily-armed force in the country.”
That was a scary thought. So far everything in my mindset had been that this was a temporary thing, something in the short-term; now that we were together as a family, all we had to do was make it to a support camp and wait it out.
But what Glen was talking about was something I had a hard time wrapping my head around.
If there were bases set up like Suffield or Cold Lake that were sheltering civilians, why would they not just go there? Why fight for food and shelter when it would be provided for you free for the taking?
I thought back to Capt. Meyers at Fort Rapids, how he had said that some people now found themselves ‘unfettered by society’s chains’, people like the ones we had run into at the roadblock north of Barrie. Those people wouldn’t want things to go back to the way they were, and they certainly wouldn’t want to live under the watchful eye of the military.
I imagined what people like that would do with the kind of firepower Glen had been talking about. I tried to think what kind of world it would be like with them in charge, and I shuddered.
♦♦♦
It didn’t take us long to settle in to the routine of the camp, it seemed.
Cpl. Kelley was back within the hour; he had arranged for a tent for us to be set up not too far from the dining hall where we would be allowed to stay for a day or two until we figured out where we would be going from here. I told him how grateful we were as he led us to our quarters and asked that he pass my thanks along to his commanding officer, which he promised he would do.
Jamie and Alex went with Glen for a tour of the camp, eager to help wherever they could. With their family gone, I wondered where the twins would wind up. It wouldn’t surprise me if I found out that they wanted to stay with Glen, maybe even enlist. There was really no need for them to continue along with me and my family, and that thought brought a deep sadness; in the very short time we had been together, those boys had become like family to me.
Once we found out where our tent was, Pauline and I went with my kids back to where we had parked our vehicles by the command centre, despite David’s argument that he should be allowed to go with the twins and Glen. We drove the trucks around to our tent and began unpacking our gear.
Cpl. Kelley took Tom and Pauline to show them where the latrine and showers were, and he promised to arrange a time when we could have the showers to ourselves and not have to share with a bunch of ‘grunts’. I sent David with them along with our water jugs with instructions to fill them and put them back in the vehicles. Karen and I went through our gear from the truck and SUV and organized our temporary ‘home away from home.’
Unlike at Fort Rapids, no one had confiscated our firearms. My guess it was because they weren’t really set up for admitting and housing civilians, there was no protocol for it, so it had simply been missed or forgotten.
I chose one of the cots to use as a table to organize our food supplies, and another for the guns and ammunition. What with the pistol Kevin had grabbed from the airport, the rifles, shotguns and pistols from the store in Barrie, and now with adding Tom’s guns from the cabin, we were collecting a fairly impressive little arsenal.
When it came my turn to use the shower, it was as if I had died and gone to heaven. Cpl. Kelley had told me that Dundurn had its own natural gas reservoir that ran their generators and heaters, plus it had a large well system, so electricity and hot water were basically unlimited. I decided to put that theory to the test.
I wasn’t paying attention to the time, but by the time I got out of the shower, my hands and toes were very wrinkly, so I knew I had been in there for a while.
Earlier this afternoon Cpl. Kelley had asked if any of us needed to see the medical personnel, but we had said no. No one else in the group had been injured, luckily, and my hand was healing nicely.
“We could likely make use of the laundry facilities though,” I said. I hadn’t thought to ask the boys, but I knew I had run out of clean clothes days ago, and recycling only went so far when it came to dirty laundry.
So now, freshly scrubbed and in a fresh set of clean clothes, I made sure I belted my knife at my left hip and my pistol holster at my right. I was amazed at how quickly I had adapted what I thought and how I felt about firearms. I checked my Glock’s magazine and slotted the gun into the holster. ‘No such thing as an atheist in a foxhole, I guess,’ I thought to myself, flexing my right hand.
Earlier in the afternoon, the twins had come back from their tour with Glen and had given us a quick run-down on the camp. They had been told that meals were served in the mess hall for breakfast, lunch and supper, plus a midnight supper for the night owls, but if we were hungry outside of those times, we were welcome to pop into the mess hall and they’d be happy to give us some MREs. I had to ask what an MRE was.
“It’s a Meal Ready to Eat,” said Jamie. “Alex and I ate lots of them when we were in France, you can get them at lots of camping stores. Basically, they’re like the backpacker meals Kevin grabbed for us at the Cabela’s store, except you don’t have to boil water for them.”
He reached under his cot and pulled out a couple of plastic pouches. “I figured as long as we’re here and they’re handing them out, I’d stock up on a few. These ones even have a self-heating system; you just add water to the pouch, and it gets boiling hot in only a few minutes.”
Now, late in the day, we were all showered and laundered and fed, and no longer smelling like an old gym locker. After organizing all our gear, we packed it all back in the vehicles, both to keep it secure and so we would be ready to move on a moment’s notice.
We were all relaxing in the tent waiting for it to be late enough to call it a day when the sound of gunfire ripped through the camp.
♦♦♦
Almost as one we jumped from our cots in alarm. Seconds later, a droning siren could be heard coming from the direction of the main gate and I went nervously to the entrance of the tent and looked out. In the dim lighting afforded by the yard lights I could see soldiers running out of buildings scrambling towards the main gate, and again the sound of gunfire rang out, this time from a way behind our tent out by the west wall.
“Mom, what’s happening?” cried David from behind me.
“I don’t know baby,” I said from the doorway. I held him and Karen close behind me.
The sound of engines roaring pierced the night as trucks loaded with armed soldiers raced by headed for the gate. I could hear other trucks going by to the west of us. The west fence of the compound was maybe seven or eight hundred feet behind our tent, past a couple of large buildings. This area hadn’t yet been converted over to the steel container wall and was still all chain link fencing.
More explosions ripped through the night around the camp, seeming to come from every direction at once. Flames leapt up to the north. I could hear soldiers shouting and gunfire; flashes of light split the darkness as blasts around the perimeter of the camp shattered through the night.
All at once, the blasts ceased, and the sound of gunfire slowed, and then stopped. I heard shouts to hold fire, and the droning whine of the siren wound down, dying.
Then, filling the void, came the deep, roaring wave of thousands of infected converging on the camp, coming out of the darkness like ants swarming from a disturbed anthill.
Suddenly it seemed like they were everywhere all at once, filling the roads and the yards, pouring around every corner.
Chaos reigned. The sound of gunfire was almost non-stop, as were the shrieks of the infected and the screams of the dying. I turned and looked behind me into the tent, at my family. Like me, they were all stunned, in shock, frozen with fear. Their looks of horror, of shock, of helplessness, it all combined to snap me out of it.
And as fast as that, the camp was lost. Whoever was out there in the night that had been blasting and shooting at the walls and the gates and the fences had used the same tactic as the raiders in the valley back at the cabin, only this time they had used the cover of darkness to hide their approach. All they had needed to do was get the swam of infected within sight of the camp, and then blast some openings in the walls and fence line. At that point they could fall back and hide in the darkness while the thousands of infected were drawn to the noise and the light of the camp like moths to a flame.
“Grab any gear you’ve got in here and get in the trucks, now!” I whispered in a near panic. “And don’t make any noise!”
I turned back outside, and in that second the need for quiet evaporated. Two infected charged around the corner of the mess hall around eighty or so feet away, saw me standing in the lit doorway of the tent, and charged at us, teeth bared and eyes full of fury.
My ears rang as the roaring bark of gunfire tore through the tent once, and then again, and a split second apart both infected were hit square in the chest, blowing them backwards and spinning their lifeless corpses to the dirt. I turned to see my family staring at me in awe.
In shock I looked at the smoking pistol in my bandaged hand, then shook myself clear and turned to usher my family out to the vehicles.
“Holy shit, Mom,” said David in a whisper as he ran past me, his eyes wide.
“Not now,” I said, pushing him along. I had no idea that I had even pulled my gun, let alone aimed it and fired. Twice.
Tom grabbed a shotgun from the floor of his truck and walked quickly around to the passenger seat. He indicated that Alex should get behind the wheel while Pauline ran and jumped into the seat behind her husband.
My kids ran and climbed into the back seat of the SUV, and after a moment’s consideration, I told Jamie to drive. Keeping my pistol pointed at the ground, I made my way around to the passenger’s side.
I aimed and fired at an attacking infected almost without realizing it, and again, and again. Two more twisted, snot-covered bodies fell lifeless to the dirt road. It was almost like I was riding along in my own body, but someone else was at the wheel; someone calm, someone collected. someone who had eyes in the back of her head.
I knew we couldn’t go for the main gate; there was a good chance they were open enough to allow the infected in, but unless the trucks had been moved, there wouldn’t be room to get a vehicle through. The boys had told me there was another gate at the north side of the camp they had seen on their tour with Glen, but I was afraid it would likely be the same.
I turned to look behind us in the darkness, to the west fence where we had heard blasts and gunfire coming from, and where waves of the infected had poured in. I was kicking myself for not having paid closer attention to the camp layout in the daylight, and I tried to remember what had been back ther
e. It was a dark night, and outside of the lights of the camp, I couldn’t make out anything. We still had the night-vision goggles Glen had given us to help with our escape from Shilo, but they were packed away along with the gear in the back of the SUV.
We were near the south-west corner of the camp, in the field beside the mess hall. I knew that behind us near the west fence there was an outdoor swimming pool, long since closed for the season. Beyond that, I thought I remembered seeing a ditch running around the perimeter of the camp.
But between the fence and the ditch, there had been a hundred or so metres of flat, open field; I thought if we could get through an opening that had been blasted in the fence line, we would have some room to maneuver. If we ran dark, keeping the lights off, once away from the camp we would disappear into the darkness and stood a chance of maybe getting away.
“Stephanie, look,” cried Jamie, pointing towards the command building.
Stumbling in the darkness, Cpl. Kelley ran towards our tent, his pistol gripped in his right hand. He saw us in our vehicles and ran over.
He didn’t see the infected coming at him from in front of the mess hall, but I did. I leaned out of the SUV and let my instinct take over, squeezing the trigger twice. He ducked and spun, bringing up his gun, but so far, I was batting a hundred. He turned back to us and came to my door.