by Lorch, Jeff
“In the last seventy years, we’ve gone from a society where a single-earner minimum wage job could support a family to where two full-time employed post-secondary-education families can barely pay the bills. And do you know what the difference is? Taxation, sister. That’s right, it’s covering the tab for all the pigs lined up at the government trough. And let me tell you, those hogs are lined up deep and wide, and they’re always hungry, and every day that goes by a few more of them sidle on up for their share of the slop.
“Every year it just keeps getting worse. Every year our freedoms are eroded little by little and just like the proverbial frog in the pot of water put on to slowly bring to a boil, we just sit there and take it. Every year the temperature rises just a little bit more, and yet we just sit there; sure we sweat and we bitch and moan about the heat, but year after year we just sit there in the hot water and we take it until one morning we wake up and realize we want to choose something other than just the wheel or the water bottle.
“And all of that rhetoric is just about when it comes to what you want to do. Now if you want to throw what you say and what you think into the mix, then it gets really messy.
“If you think we live in a world of free speech, try expressing an unpopular opinion sometime and see how long it takes the PC crowd to come down on you. If you say something even slightly negative about anyone, either in person or on one of your precious social media platforms, then suddenly you’re a misogynist, or a racist, or a sexist, or a hate-monger.
“Our society has devolved to the point where words hurt so today’s youth need to be coddled; we’ve created a world of victims who have no idea how to exist outside of a safe space where everyone agrees with you, and any opinion that might threaten their fragile bubble is suddenly hate speech.
“This sickness, this disaster, this dark cloud has a silver lining, and it’s this: it’s like the finger of God, and what it really did is push down on the giant lever of this toilet we call society and now the shitty water we’ve been swimming in is finally swirling the bowl.
“That world we’ve all been living in was yesterday, and believe me, yesterday is gone and it’s not ever coming back. This morning do you know what I did? I woke up, I crawled out of bed, I walked outside in my boxers and I took a piss up against a tree in my backyard, and do you know who was there to give me a ticket for it? No one. I grabbed and loaded the gun that I had zero permission to have, and I drove here in my stolen jeep without my seatbelt on hanging a cigarette out the window, and I didn’t get a ticket, not one. And tonight, once this is all said and done, and the fires burn out, and the bodies start to cool, I’m going to sit back and I’m going to light up a joint; and do you know how much tax I paid on buying the weed for it? Not one red fucking cent.
“Me and the people behind you in this room? We get it. The hundreds of others of us stationed out there around the camp that’s being flushed clean as we speak? They get it too. And the hundreds of thousands, or maybe even millions of us scattered across the rotting corpse of this country, and the millions of our brothers and sisters to the south that are still waiting in the wind? I can promise you that we all fucking get it; and just like those big football-pad-wearing cross-dressers from New Jersey said all those years ago, we’re not going to take it.
“And after all the bullshit, after all the posturing, do you know what that really means? That, more than anything else you or I or anyone else in this room has ever experienced before, that is real freedom. And that freedom is what I have waited my entire life for. It’s something I’m willing to kill for, and if needed lady, without a word of a lie I am willing to die for it.”
He took a deep breath and sat back from his desk. He stared at me, waiting for me to take it all in. His glare at me was challenging. I realized he wanted me to debate him; he wanted me to engage in an argument with him; this was something he had obviously been preparing for, for God knows how long.
It had grown quiet in the room again, Trey’s impassioned speech drawing the attention of everyone in there.
But I didn’t want to argue with this guy, and I didn’t want a debate.
So instead, I stared at him, deadpan, and asked, “did you seriously just super-villain monologue me?”
He stared at me in the silence, his face carved of stone. I waited for the shot to ring out, for him to say screw it and decide to use a bullet to put me to sleep. Behind me in the locker room, I heard someone bark out a coughed laugh, muffled for fear of the response.
He threw his head back and belted out a huge belly-laugh, one that went on for several moments.
Instead of the bark of a gun, from behind me I heard Brett, the walking hillside with arms and ears, clear his throat nervously. I turned and saw him standing with two coffee mugs in his huge hands.
“What did I miss?” he asked.
♦♦♦
Trey took a sip from his coffee, black, just handed to him by his bodyguard and he set my coffee on the table in front of me.
“See, I knew we were going to get along,” Trey said, smiling. He leaned forward on the desk, his smile fading, his face serious. “Listen, I’m sure you’re thinking everything I just said is a big steaming pile of crap, and that all of this,” he said motioning to the activity in the room around us,” is just a bunch of assholes who have spent too much time on YouTube watching prepper videos eagerly anticipating the zombie apocalypse.”
I had actually been thinking something very close to just that very thing.
“And in the big picture, I guess none of that really matters, not to you at least. I’m not expecting to convert you over to ‘our cause,’ if you will. But what I’m hoping is that I can rely on you to pass along a message and some information for me.”
I looked at him, genuinely confused for a moment.
“Pass along to whom?” I asked.
“Back at the camp on the road I heard you say you were planning to head to the base at Cold Lake; I have some information they really need to hear.”
“Seriously?” I asked. “You just seized one of their bases, I’m sure somewhere in there is a radio or two that you could figure out how to use.”
He ignored my sarcastic jab, and continued, calmly; he was being frustratingly reasonable, and it was seriously beginning to piss me off.
“Yes, well, due to recent events I have a feeling they might be disinclined to carry on a constructive conversation with me.”
‘Yeah, no shit, Sherlock,’ I thought to myself.
“Well what do you have to tell them that they could possibly be more interested in if it came from me instead?”
He leaned in towards me, his voice quiet for the first time.
“Believe me, they’re going to want to hear this just as much as you’re going to want to tell them.”
♦♦♦
Twenty minutes later I walked out of the rink into the cool darkness, into the quiet of the autumn prairie Saskatchewan night, and took a deep breath. Holding it as long as I could, I breathed it out into the blackness, my breath fogging before my eyes, becoming solid, becoming real.
I looked down at the small backpack I carried, the one Trey had handed to me. It felt alive in my hands. I wanted to run into the darkness and throw it away, or to drive back to the destroyed camp and throw it into the fire of a burning truck. I didn’t want it.
The doors to the SUV and the truck flew open and my family came running out to hug me, to hold me. My children, both born and adopted; I reached my arms around them, as many of them as I could, and I held them, but this time I had no tears in my eyes. I was cried out; I was done with that for now.
Behind us, off in the distance back towards the camp, we could still hear the screaming of the sick, of the dying, of the dead; we could see the light in the night sky of the fires burning, of the death of the old fueling the birth of the new.
And through it all, after all we had been through that night, even after everything I now knew, all that I could think was t
o thank a God I didn’t believe in that we weren’t back there with the rest of the dead.
We held each other for a minute or two, and I knew we were being watched, and that the people watching had guns in their hands, and still I didn’t care.
After a minute, I pushed everyone back; I told them to get back in the vehicles and to follow me.
“Where are we going?” asked Alex, his gaze intent, staring behind me at the rink. He held his shotgun in his hands, his grip tight.
“They’ve got a place we can bed down so we can all get a few hours sleep and wait out the night; as much as my skin crawls taking anything they have to offer, there’s nowhere else unless we want to sleep in the vehicles. We’re leaving bright and early in the morning; we’re going to Cold Lake, like we had planned, and we need to get there fast.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Day 12
Beside me in the SUV, Jamie sat with the map open beside him. It wasn’t the ring-bound Rand McNally atlas we had been using since leaving the cabin, it was a map Trey had given me, the kind you can buy at any gas station near a highway. On it was marked the route we took south around Saskatoon and north-west to Cold Lake; the path that Trey had given us that would keep us clear of the army of the infected that his people were controlling.
According to him they had tens of thousands of infected that they were keeping herded, corralled in a few different places in the city, to be used like they had used them against the camp last night. As we sat there in the rink, he said his people were herding them back away from the camp towards Saskatoon, but that process would take many hours and he didn’t want us distracting and redirecting his ‘army’.
“I know, they’ve got a limited shelf life,” he had said sitting across from me in the rink, “but they are effective.”
I had been horrified; the callousness of someone being able to treat ill human beings like that literally turned my stomach, and it must have shown on my face.
“Hey, don’t get me wrong,” he had said defensively, “I don’t take any pleasure in the situation, but I’m a realist. Those people are all sick and dying; there’s nothing I can do to cure their condition, or to even ease it, but if I can use the situation to our advantage, I will. If I can put one of them, ten of them, or a hundred of them in the path of a bullet meant for one of my people, I will do it in a heartbeat, and I’ll do it without one moment of remorse.”
Sitting in the SUV driving through the overcast fall morning, I tried to figure out just how in the hell I had gotten us mixed up in this mess, and more importantly, just how I was going to get us out of it.
The drive up to Cold Lake was almost a letdown, it was boring; Trey had marked out the areas to avoid, and which areas his patrols had cleared of groups of infected. I asked him if he wasn’t worried that I would show the map to the people in charge at Cold Lake, and that they might use some of the information on it such as routes and locations against Trey and his people. He had smiled at me and said that by the time we got to Cold Lake, everything on that map would be outdated and useless, so I could share away to my heart’s content.
As we got further north, the signs of the infected began to disappear, as did the evidence of violence and conflict. We saw less random damage, fewer fires. We still didn’t see any signs of people, which I found strange, but Trey had said that over the past two weeks since the outbreak, people had been grouping up, choosing sides. There were people who had flocked to the military base for protection, and others who had joined with Trey’s growing groups, and each day there were fewer left out in the middle, fewer people like us.
I drove along, silent, with Jamie and the kids in the SUV with me and Alex and my in-laws in the truck behind, Trey’s insane ramblings of doom echoing through my mind. No matter how I tried I couldn’t make his ideology fit.
Yes, I agreed that each day it seemed that our world had more problems than the day before, but that didn’t mean it was time to wipe the chalkboard clean and start over.
I could see some attraction to the world he envisioned, but no matter how I tried I couldn’t reconcile it with the cost.
Outside our vehicle the view gave way from the grain fields, some bare, some in the midst of harvest, and some still full, never to be harvested again, and morphed into the thick, lush green of the boreal forest; tall fir and spruce trees crowded the horizon, occasional gaps in the trees giving us glimpses of blue lakes sparkling like oases in a green desert.
By late afternoon we were crossing Beaver River and driving north into the town of Cold Lake.
♦♦♦
The first thing I noticed was how normal the town looked. As we drove slowly past the hardware stores and the car dealerships, we saw no wrecked cars, no broken windows. Other than the lack of people, it looked like a normal small town on a normal afternoon. I was tempted to turn into the Tim Horton’s in the Walmart parking lot to see if they had a fresh pot of coffee on so I could order a double-double.
Jamie patted my arm to get my attention and pointed up ahead to the turn-off we needed to take to get to the base. Two fighter planes mounted on tall pillars looked out over the road as we drove slowly past.
I wondered at the fact that we hadn’t yet seen any extra signage posted directing us to the base, as there had been at Fort Rapids and at Shilo, but then I realized that the population this far north was sparse enough that everyone would know well enough to go to the base, and the pre-outbreak road signs were sufficient to lead anyone there. Anyone driving here from the south was most likely already on their way to the base, so extra signage wasn’t really needed.
The road led us west out past the edge of town, with tall spruce trees crowding close to the road blocking our view; but looking ahead up in the sky we could see that we had made it.
“I guess we just follow where the helicopters are going, right?” I said to Jamie with a grim smile.
♦♦♦
We had been rushed directly to the base commandant’s office; the guards at the gate had been on high alert, understandably, but as soon as we told them where we had come from, they made a call and we were whisked away.
After two young men relieved us of our weapons, a young woman in fatigues ushered us into a conference room and introduced Wing Commander Col. Philip Scott, who stood as we came into the room. We introduced ourselves, and he asked us to be seated.
“I understand you people were at CFD Dundurn last night?” he stated, his face stoic, not really asking a question. “Then you’ll understand why I have some very serious concerns about what might have happened there, and how it is that today you’re on my doorstep. I’m hoping you can fill in some blanks for me.”
While the Colonel was being courteous on the surface, he wasn’t even trying to hide his anger, his borderline contempt.
It didn’t escape me that there were four other men in the room, all armed. Quite frankly I had expected worse; I had thought it very possible that we would be having this conversation with a set of steel bars between us, and if I didn’t handle this properly, I thought it more than possible that the conversation would still end that way.
I had expected that these men would have been aware of what had happened at Dundurn last night. I didn’t know military protocol, but I’m guessing a radio distress call or something had been sent out last night when the attack had hit the base. With their helicopters I thought it very likely someone from Cold Lake had even been to the camp already today to see it firsthand.
But they didn’t know the how, or more importantly, the why. Only I knew that; and not just the why of the attack on the camp; I knew the why about everything.
And to be perfectly honest, I was tired of being pushed around.
“Listen,” I said, leaning forward, my hands pressed flat against the table top, “let’s get one thing perfectly clear right off the bat.” The Colonel’s eyes widened noticeably, my attitude taking him by surprise. That was good. “I’m not here because I need you, I’m here because you nee
d me. You may not know it yet, but you do. So, how about you knock off the patronizing bullshit and let’s talk straight, okay?”
Recovering his composure, the Colonel’s eyes narrowed.
“You want straight talk? Fine, here it is. Last night one of our bases was attacked and destroyed, presumably by a horde of infected, but today my people flew down there to inspect and found an empty camp; not only are there hardly any infected there, other than the corpses, but the camp has also been stripped of a majority of the munitions stored there. Last I heard, the infected haven't figured out how to pull a trigger, so I hope you’ll understand why this leaves me somewhat confused. Then suddenly, lo and behold, I get a visit from a soccer mom and her brood in an SUV that looks like it’s been through WW3, who claims she was at the camp during the attack and has news for me. Plus, icing on the cupcake, this same woman matches the description of someone who reportedly broke the nose of a very good friend of mine only a few days ago at Shilo and then smashed her way out of the camp after a jailbreak. So, unless you have something to say in the next sixty seconds that changes my mind, you and your people will be leaving this room in handcuffs.” He glared at me, his face red, and yes, his nostrils were even flaring.