by Lopez, Rob
Rick didn’t really know what to make of the Judgment-Day talk scattered among the memories of delirium, but again, for whatever reason, he felt on the same wavelength about the sense of approaching doom. He wondered if that made him crazy too.
Harvey snapped the spark plug into a cable and yanked the chainsaw’s pull handle. There was a crackle as the plug sparked.
“Where’d you learn to do that?” asked Rick, surprised.
“Used to work in an auto repair shop. I had a lot of jobs. It was Sally who got me the job in the hospital. We’ve been friends a long time. I owe her a lot.” Harvey looked up. “Still think I’m crazy?”
“Completely,” said Rick. “But I guess we all are if we think we’re going to get through this. Maybe we need that.”
*
The boardroom was the only place in the building where Rick’s breath didn’t come out as a cloud of condensation, but it was still cold. Daniel and Lizzy wore their coats and hats as they practiced their letters on the polished central table. Everybody lived in coats these days. Janice had wrapped a heavy shawl across her shoulders as she supervised the school lesson. Rick thought she’d aged since coming to the clubhouse. In their small house, she and Chuck might have had a better chance of staying warm, and Rick wondered if it was a good idea to have invited them. Security concerns aside, the big old clubhouse might not be the best place for them in winter. Against his better judgment, he wondered if they were going to have to light the log burner during the day as well. Even if the chimney smoke acted as a beacon to desperate wanderers.
A few stragglers weren’t exactly a threat to them now, but Rick was no longer keen on inviting more into the clubhouse. Not without serious vetting. He made a note to discuss with Scott the idea of outfitting a nearby house to direct refugees to. A minimum of food and wood would be enough to start them off. After that they were free to scavenge for themselves or trade.
He had a good idea what Scott would think of that move, but it could act as a safety valve against a sudden influx of people into the area, and avert conflict until it was absolutely necessary. If it was managed right, it could work.
There were enough downsides to it, however, that Rick opted to postpone the likelihood of it happening by maybe lighting a fire only on days with poor visibility. He decided to give it some more thought.
“You’ve always got your head in a cloud,” observed Janice.
“Mmmm,” murmured Rick, distracted.
“Always walking around with the weight of the world on your shoulders,” continued Janice. “Take a load off. Sit down and see how smart your children are.”
Since he didn’t recall adopting Daniel, he assumed she was speaking figuratively. The children weren’t worried about such minor distinctions, however, and proudly held up their pieces of paper: Lizzy with her name perfectly written, and Daniel with his assiduously drawn 'D’. Rick tried to look pleased, but it was a tough act. He didn’t see the value in such lessons apart from keeping the children occupied until they were old enough to do more productive work. Good grades weren’t going to get them good jobs anymore.
Focused as he was on short-term survival, it was hard to imagine what kind of world they were preparing the children for. Maybe, after the initial shock, society would start to rebuild, and then they’d need knowledge and the ability to read instructions laid down in scientific or engineering tracts. Perhaps even to learn lessons from history. Or maybe they were just raising the kids to take over from them when they got too old to do much themselves – that was the more common justification in times past. If Rick made it to Janice’s age, would he be sitting teaching letters and lore while Josh and Lizzy took over the running of whatever community there was left?
It was a stretch, but perhaps it was better to cover all the bases. Just in case.
“Keep up the good work, guys,” he said.
“Do you think Josh would like to keep up his schooling?” asked Janice.
In theory, he was, but Rick hadn’t seen him so much as glance at a book – not even that dumb zombie tome he’d picked up. If he made it to full adulthood, though, it wouldn’t benefit him to just become an uncultured grunt. The smarter people tended to be the ones who got to order the grunts around, and in Rick’s experience, they gravitated easily into becoming self-serving manipulators. Better educated grunts was the only check on that likelihood.
“He’s kind of busy right now, but I’ll look into it,” said Rick.
Continuing his rounds, he sought out Chuck in the greenhouse. The cumbersome structure had survived its journey from its former home and had been placed by the green waters of the pool, from where Chuck drew its irrigation. The plants that Rick saw in the pots, however, didn’t look to have made it.
“Nah, that’s normal,” Chuck assured him. “Their growing season’s finished. Got some kale and garlic over there, still doing fine, and some onions here waiting to shoot. It’s the tender stuff that’s dying off. Getting too cold, even in here. There’s some bad weather coming. I can feel it.”
Bella, taking time out from barking, sniffed at Rick’s boots. Chuck shuffled a little awkwardly between the trays, and Rick realized he had a touch of arthritis too.
“Chuck, are you going to be okay in the clubhouse this winter? I mean, it’s pretty bad in there, and it’s no place for … well, it’s just that it might not be ideal.”
“For us old folks, you mean?” said Chuck wryly.
“Basically, yeah. It’s not something I thought about before.”
“I thought about it plenty,” said Chuck. “I knew this winter was going to be tough. Especially for Janice.” He fell silent for a moment. “She took sick real bad last winter. And that was when we had a doctor we could call.”
It was the first inkling Rick had of Chuck having any doubts at all. About anything.
“Is there anything we can do?” he asked.
They were interrupted by the sound of a chainsaw starting up. Turning, they saw Harvey taking the saw to a tree in the parking lot, sawdust spraying out from the cut.
“We’ll be fine,” said Chuck. “It ain’t us you should be worrying about. That boy there’s going to work himself to death. Sooner if that tree falls on him.”
Bella barked at the noise, and Rick watched Harvey tackle the tree. He was in two minds whether to rush out and stop him.
If he could get more wood cut without harming himself, though, it could solve the problem about keeping people like Janice warm. And since the chainsaw could probably be heard halfway across the city, it didn’t make much sense worrying about the visibility of the chimney smoke now.
31
The first snowflakes fell swirling on the heels of a biting cold wind. As the raider column marched, the snow fell thicker and thicker. Dee pulled the drawstrings on her hood until she only had a small porthole to look out through, and even that was too much as her cheeks stung. Jacob was wrapped permanently against her chest, under the coat. She worried sometimes he might suffocate, but it was out of the question to expose him to the cold. Two babies had been lost already: one in the worst way possible.
It was Margaret who lost the first baby. Her little Sean simply failed to wake up one day. There was no explanation why. And there certainly wasn’t likely to be an inquiry. Margaret carried her dead baby for two more days, fearful of the consequences of being found out. The raiders discovered it in the end, and Margaret was taken from the little group, her usefulness as a scout terminated. She was handed over to the raiders for use as a comfort mattress, as they termed it. The last time Dee saw her, she looked like a walking corpse.
Brenda’s was an even more tragic case, however. Brenda had been sent out to infiltrate a small town in their path. She never returned. Axel took her crying baby out of the camp. Once out of sight, the baby ceased crying and Axel returned empty handed. There was no sound of any gunshot, and Axel was humming to himself, the heel of his hand rocking on the handle of his large sheathed knife.
&n
bsp; The raiders attacked the town anyway. Dee listened to the distant cracks of gunfire. It didn’t last long. The town fell within minutes, it seemed. When Dee and the others arrived, three bodies hung on ropes from the street lights. One of the bodies was Brenda. Dee wasn’t able to get any information on what happened, only that the few remaining survivors had been driven out of town and left to take their chances on the road. In the town park were a lot of recently dug graves, with little wooden markers. The raiders moved into the houses, looking for hidden supplies. Dee found the bones of a dog in the room she was pushed into. When she uncovered Jacob from his layers, she saw he was developing sores around his crotch from his soiled diaper. It was simply a cloth that she wasn’t given a chance to wash often, and she worried about the sores getting infected. She didn’t expect any sympathy however, and after seeing the callous treatment of Brenda’s baby, she wasn’t about to report it either. Ripping up the sheets of the bed she’d been allocated, she fashioned new diapers and hoped the sores would clear up.
Desperately tired from the constant walking, she struggled nevertheless to sleep, expecting to be woken at any moment to be told to scout out the next settlement. Shocked as she had been at the sight of Margaret, she realized she probably looked the same herself. The march took its toll on everyone, especially the prisoners pulling the wagon through the mud. Two had dropped dead so far, and a couple more looked like they wouldn’t last much longer. The cart was getting lighter, however, as the supplies were consumed, and they were finding less and less to replace them.
Within two days, the meager hidden stores in the town were used up and the column set out again. Once the snow started, it kept falling, and the going got harder and harder until they were forced to take to the highway. They stopped the night at an abandoned gas station that had already been comprehensively looted. The prisoners and the remaining mothers were locked in a shipping container, and Dee shivered the whole night even as she was pressed against other bodies. The babies moaned and cried, the sounds echoing between the steel walls, and the sick prisoners coughed and sighed. Come morning, they found that one of them had breathed their last, and when the container was opened, they were greeted by the sight of ever thicker snow. The dead prisoner was left where he lay, and the column trudged sullenly onward, the mood grim even among the raiders. Dee walked in a trance, focusing on simply putting one foot in front of the other, and the miles dragged by. By the time they spotted smoke ahead, she’d ceased to care about anything.
The column halted, and Axel pushed through. “You,” he said, pointing to Dee. “Building up ahead. Check it out.”
As he unzipped her coat and took Jacob from her, she nearly swooned. Dropping to her knees, she began to cry.
*
Bella’s barking alerted everybody in the clubhouse. As Rick rolled off the mattress and slipped into his boots, the alarm cans rattled. Lauren was on watch. Grabbing his rifle, Rick dashed through the pitch-black corridors, feeling his way along the familiar walls. Doors opened and candles appeared as the others woke. Rick didn’t need to tell them what to do. Everyone knew the drill. Running to the loft space, Rick climbed the ladder to where Lauren had left the lit lantern. Ascending farther, he emerged onto the rooftop outpost, drifting snowflakes sticking to his face. Lauren was a dim shadow in the blackness, crouched behind the sandbag wall.
“What we got?” he whispered, trying to avoid slipping on the packed snow.
“I don’t know,” she whispered back.
With the heavy overcast, the darkness was total, and Rick could see nothing over the parapet. They both listened for a moment, and caught the sound of heavy scratching.
Something was trying to get into their smokehouse.
“Stay here,” breathed Rick.
Sliding back down the ladder, he retrieved the lantern and moved toward the side door. Scott was waiting there, his rifle ready.
“What we got?” said Scott.
“No idea,” said Rick, unlocking the door. “Cat, maybe.”
Holding his lantern and drawing his pistol, he stepped out. Several pairs of green eyes stared back at him in the dark.
They were dogs. Abandoned strays collected into a pack. Rick stamped his foot to shoo them away, but they growled and spread out to circle him. The pack leader, a German Shepherd, dropped its haunches, preparing to leap. Before Rick could pull the trigger, Scott had already shot the dog, the rifle flashing twice in the dark. The animal dropped and the other dogs scattered, the green eyes extinguished.
Rick examined the fallen dog. It was lean, and its jaws were still drawn into a snarl, but it didn’t respond to being kicked.
The tracks in the snow led out onto the greens, but Rick didn’t bother following them farther. Driven by hunger, he knew the dogs would be waiting out there. He wouldn’t be able to do anything about them until morning.
Apart from some deep scratches, the smokehouse, which looked like a roughly hewn outhouse, was fine. It was still warm to the touch, and the earthy smell of wood smoke lingered around it.
“We’re going to have to reinforce this,” said Rick. “It’s going to draw anything with claws from miles around.”
“I’ll start wrapping chain-link around it tomorrow,” said Scott. “What about the dog?”
Rick looked at the corpse. It didn’t have a lot of meat on it, but he wasn’t about to waste none, even if he preferred to get straight back to his bed. “We’ll skin it and gut it. Tomorrow it can go in the smokehouse.”
“Kind of where it wanted to be anyway,” mused Scott. “Maybe the others can come back to join it sometime.”
Rick stared into the darkness. “Shots like that are going to bring a lot more than just dogs.”
32
After two more days of thick gray overcast and intermittent snow, the skies cleared and the sun shone brightly. The effect was blinding. From the lookout post on the clubhouse, the greens were bright white, and the landscape looked like a picture postcard, clean and fresh – except to the north, where the charcoal towers uptown stood as rude interruptions to the winter wonderland. Strong gusts drifted the snow against walls and vehicles, and an overnight frost crisped the surface. Rick’s boots crunched loudly through the snow layer as he made his way across the golf course. Josh moved more quietly a few yards behind, placing his feet in his father’s footsteps. Rick was anxious to leave as few prints as possible. If someone was to discover their tracks, at least it might fool them as to the number of people who had made them.
Provided they didn’t check the prints too closely, that is.
Both Rick and Josh wore ponchos made from white sheets in an attempt to blend in. Josh had left the air rifle behind and was proudly toting the .22 rifle, a Ruger 10/22. Rick had acquired a box half full of .22 rounds from Packy. At the height of the bad weather, with the wind howling around, he’d set up an indoor fifty-yard range in the central corridor of the clubhouse, encouraging Josh to get used to the rugged rifle. Josh was pleased at last to be allowed a real rifle, and was looking forward to taking down small game with it.
Rick wasn’t interested in shooting squirrels with it, however. They still had too few rimfire rounds to waste on that when an air rifle pellet would do the same job. No, Rick had other potential targets in mind – like the dogs he knew were around. Their prints crisscrossed the golf course, and their sniffing and scratching near the walls of the clubhouse alerted Bella every night, disturbing everyone’s sleep.
That was merely a nuisance, though. Rick was more concerned with the two-legged variety of wolf, and the thick snow was an opportunity to see how numerous they actually were in the neighborhood.
They tramped south through a surreal landscape, the cracking of snow beneath their feet and the whistle of the cold wind in their ears. Laundry that had been left out on washing lines hung stiff as boards in the yards. Gazebos that hadn’t been blown down sagged under the weight of accumulated layers of snow. Small cuneiform prints showed where birds had circled shrubs,
looking for elusive patches of bare soil where they could peck for food. It was the only sign of life they found, as the birds themselves, along with squirrels and other small game, were conspicuous by their absence. Conserving their energy against the frigid cold, the creatures were hidden away, and Rick knew that hunting game would be harder now. Even the geese on the lake were getting scarce now that there was nobody to scatter crumbs or drop garbage for them. Lean weeks lay ahead.
Shaded porches and frosted windows drifted by. Garden pools and ornate ponds gazed skywards through thin panes of ice. Glancing ceaselessly left and right, Rick led Josh onward over picket fences and mesh wire, the boy never faltering. When they reached a four-lane highway, Rick signaled a halt. Josh immediately sank down into the ready position. Rick would have nodded his approval at how disciplined his son had become if he wasn’t distracted by a more pertinent sight.
Along the highway that stretched east to west, there were human prints. Staying in the shadow of a garage, Rick took his binoculars out to examine them.
There were several lines of prints, most half covered by fresh falls of snow, and they all headed west. Rick estimated them to be about a day old. The length of most of the prints indicated the dragging of tired feet. They were barely three miles south of the clubhouse, but, as Rick feared, refugees were on the move through the suburbs. He estimated that maybe seven to eight people had passed by in the last couple of days. Whether this was something new, however, or whether this had been going on for some time, was impossible to tell.
One set of prints was definitely new, though. A pair of walkers had passed by recently. The smooth edges of the footprints indicated they’d dragged themselves past during the night, before the surface of the snow had hardened. Rick tracked the prints through his binoculars, seeing them veer off the road and toward a house on the other side. Windows had been smashed and the front door hung open.