He’s on a square landing just big enough for one person, standing in front of an exquisitely carved wooden door. He’s never been particularly appreciative of art, except for acknowledging its monetary worth, but even he can see the craftsmanship and dedication that went into creating this. What he can see of the detail in the dim light is astounding and he runs his fingers over what looks like a battle scene, with fierce dogs on the attack, arrows flying and corpses in gruesome piles on the ground. He tries the door, quietly turning the smooth metal knob, but it’s locked. He considers knocking but doesn’t, just turns his head and leans in close enough to put his ear to the wood.
There’s no sound, not for a long time, but finally he thinks he can hear soft snoring. He hopes that if there is someone behind the solid door it's Matt and Luke, and not just for the obvious reason that he really isn't up to getting into another fight right now. He hopes it's them because they saved his ass, because Emilie has been head-over-heels for Luke from the moment she set eyes on him, even though she doesn't stand a chance. And well, because he likes them. They're good guys with specialised skills, like the ability to fatally maim any and all manner of creatures, to pump gas when there's no power, and to find a beer in the most hostile or simply unlikely of places. He's learnt a lot from them, he can only hope he has a future in which to forget it all.
~..~
Leaving Gabe to start a fire, Joe shrugs off his jacket and hangs it on one of the hooks next to the front door before heading into the kitchen. He finds the light switch on the wall just inside, a tiny metal flicker that he pushes upwards to turn on a naked bulb hanging on a short flex in the centre of the off-white ceiling. It’s a huge room, wood-stained cabinets lining the walls, floor-standing and wall-mounted, under and over a black granite worktop. A large, bare window looks out over the front yard, two Belfast sinks set into the surface under it. A solid oak kitchen table stands just off-centre of the room, with a metal grill suspended over it, pots and pans hanging from heavy metal hooks. There’s no dust or damp in here either and like in the hall the window isn't broken.
Joe’s wife, Babs, used to admire other people's kitchens while he was more inclined to appreciate a well stocked tool shed or a properly maintained garage. But even he can tell that it's a good, functional room. At home, back when his life held some semblance of normality and most days made sense, Babs did the cooking. It wasn’t that he couldn’t cook, just that he worked and she didn’t, so he never had to wait for his supper to be on the table when he got home and how fucking antiquated did that sound? He would cook when tradition demanded it; Christmas and Thanksgiving, when there was a bird the size of a house to deal with. Only after Babs died did he have to learn how to look after himself and as it turns out he’s more than capable.
He walks over to where a heavy kettle sits on a hob over the oven and experimentally he tries the gas. It takes a couple of seconds before he can smell it, but it’s definitely on. It’s the same with the water when he turns the faucet over one of the sinks. Somewhere above him he can hear the pipes, banging and groaning like the un-dead, but a splash of surprisingly clear, cold water is finally coughed out followed a moment later by not so much a stream but definitely a constant dribble. Letting it run, he starts opening cupboards. His first discovery is a jar of coffee. It’s not freshly ground, so it won’t make their resident coffee addicts happy, but it’ll do for starters. There are packets of custard, sugar and dried soup, beans in tomato sauce, tinned vegetables and fruits in syrup. There are even stews although from the pictures on the front of the cans they do not look appetising.
There’s a white door on the other side of the kitchen and, curious as always, he has to open it. It’s his curiosity that landed him here in the first place, opening doors he should have left well alone. But once he started it just wasn't in him to quit and even though this door just leads to a pantry it’s still a discovery. Luckily, not one of the nasty ones.
In Wallace, seriously hungry, he and Gabe had opened up the pantry of a house whose dead occupants were still in the kitchen, only to find something had eaten everything in sight and was lying distended on the floor of the cramped room surrounded by empty packaging and half-regurgitated, unidentifiable bits of food. There was nothing left but then, after seeing that, they really weren’t hungry anymore.
In this pantry there’s fresh food: cakes and biscuits, fruit and veg. It isn't right, it shouldn't be here, but there's enough food to feed them all for at least a couple of months and none of it is rotting or mouldy like half of everything else they've tried to eat recently. Somehow, someone must have stocked this place not much later than yesterday, if not for the long haul then definitely for an extended stay. But whoever did that, they’re gone now. At least, he hopes they’re gone. They’ve all had enough surprises for one lifetime, they deserve a break. They deserve some good cooking too. But first things first. Closing the pantry door and spying the free-standing fridge against the opposite wall, he calls out into the hall,
‘Anyone for coffee?’
~..~
Despite his addiction – he craves coffee more than he needs to smoke – in all honesty, right now, Gabe would prefer an ice cold beer in a frosted glass with condensation running down the sides. Matt and Luke have an uncanny knack of finding beer, but most of it has been warm and although he's never once complained he yearns for the cold fizzy stuff he used to drink back home. Not that he likes to remember the past, even the recent past, because it makes him ever so slightly suicidal. It isn’t because he misses anything or anyone in particular. He isn’t married; he’s never met that one special person. He doesn’t have close family or friends to mourn. But he was living the good life when everything went crazy. He was having fun and it upsets him in a very shallow way to think that he’ll never have it that easy ever again.
He lived in the San Pedro area of Los Angeles before the madness started. He drank in a basement bar where everyone knew everyone else. Although he wouldn’t have referred to any of his fellow drinkers as ‘friends’, he did know several of them by their first names and he enjoyed the many nights he spent there, sinking a couple of cold ones after work. Maggie, the girl who worked behind the bar, knew him, knew his poison and his usual food order. He liked her right up until the moment he watched her rip a man's arms off for complaining that his beer had too much head. Gabe’s own joke, that it wasn’t possible for a man to have too much head, unfortunately left his mouth a moment before the arm ripping incident and almost cost him his own limbs. He narrowly escaped the bar before the blood bath that ensued. It was the start of the carnage that had torn his little slice of ideal life apart.
He misses the little things, the clack of pool balls on green baize, hearing Rascal Flatts playing on a jukebox. While he’s been on the road with Matt and Luke, as part of their little posse, they’ve spent a few nights in roadhouses even if they’ve had to step over the remains of previous patrons to reach the bar and serve themselves. Matt's a demon with a cue. He and Luke make money hustling unsuspecting players. It never seemed much, not the games Gabe saw anyway, but it was often enough to buy essentials so they didn’t need to steal absolutely everything. And he did hear What Hurts The Most on the radio in the jeep one afternoon before the last of the local stations stopped broadcasting. Still, he mourns his old life. He was good at what he did, selling extravagant sports cars to anyone who could afford one and, on a particularly memorable and celebrated occasion, more than one. He led a mostly meaningless life for which he’s never felt the need to apologise. He drove a different car home every night.
Everyone loves an expensive sports car. They’re sleek, sexy and fast. They’re the ultimate status symbol, a suggestion of power, a very blatant display of wealth. They make women, and men, of a certain persuasion go weak at the knees. He used his access to the cars mercilessly to get laid, happily swinging either way, and it was a lifestyle he sold to everyone who stood undecided in the showroom worrying about balancing their company'
s accounts at the end of the year or explaining the dent in the trust fund.
Not everyone needed persuading, of course. But Gabe’s strength was being able to sell to anyone he approached. His bosses loved him and rewarded him well for his high sales figures which meant he could afford life’s little luxuries. He treated every one of his dates like royalty, men and women alike. He took them to dine in restaurants where well-known chefs cooked only the most exquisite food, where tables were scarce and securing one required a Gold Card. He booked only four-figure suites in five-star hotels with Egyptian cotton sheets and discreet room service. He lived by just one rule; he never took anyone back to his home. That was a different life, a different side of him. San Pedro, Maggie’s Bar, the deli he frequented on Sunday mornings, that was the Gabriel his mother brought up. The city, the extravagant food, the great sex in impersonal hotels, that was the Gabe who emerged from Business School with the hope of finding a job that didn’t involve so much hard work.
The bar is almost certainly gone now. Maggie and his fellow drinkers are undoubtedly dead. The last time he saw them was the night before he saw the devil, before he left town, leaving a two hundred thousand dollar car on his driveway. That was eight weeks ago, so it’s little wonder the thought of a cold beer is making him salivate. There have been so many times since that night when a warm beer has tasted like the finest wine, when any liquor, the stronger the better, has done the trick and enabled him to sleep. Some might even ask, when his story is eventually told, how he made it through without turning into a habitual alcoholic. Gut-wrenching terror is the best hangover cure there is. He's poured everything from neat vodka to low calorie Coors down his throat in the last two months, yet in all that time he hasn’t wrapped his hands around a cold beer. Most bars were looted empty, cold stores left open and power disconnected. The chances of there being beer, never mind cold beer, in this house are minimal to none because it looks – at least on the outside – as if it was abandoned months ago.
Not so much on the inside, which is a little disconcerting, but then again he’s been living with disconcerting since late July.
He’s built a fire in the grate with the kindling and logs stacked either side of it. It takes a while with a disposable lighter to get a flame to catch but eventually it blazes up. He sits back, pleased with his efforts, listening to the pop and crackle of the dry wood. There are other sounds too, coming from the kitchen; the unmistakable clatter of a man inside a fridge. Then he hears Joe call out again,
‘Or a beer? Anyone for a cold beer?’
~..~
Emilie crawls forward and kisses Gabe on the cheek, eternally grateful as she sits herself down in front of the fire, knees bent, hugging them to her while she warms up. She glances up at Rick as he steps away and heads for the closed door across from the kitchen, poker still in his hand. He’s complaining that it’s already too warm in the house. He’s insane. She’s freezing. More often than not over the last few weeks she’s been in someone else’s coat; sometimes Gabe’s when he's let her borrow it because a suitable alternative hasn't been available. She stole a fleece from a man in Mina, but some asshole demon got blood and guts on it in Middle Gate so she had to dump it. After that she picked up a biker’s jacket in Stillwater, managing to hold on to it for a week before one of the un-dead went for her heart, literally, during a fight in Susanville. In the ensuing struggle the jacket got filthy from the mud on the ground. Finally, after a succession of coats, jackets and the odd fleece, she stole a beautiful black leather number from a smashed store front in Plymouth only to have some living bastard steal it from the back of her seat in a bar in Pioneer. Every neighbourhood has fallen apart. The state, possibly the whole country and maybe even the world, has gone to Hell. She misses the Malibu sunshine.
As a trauma intern at the Inter-Community hospital she saw some terrible things. She was in her ninth month of working there. She's certain she'll never go back. Up until six weeks ago she thought she'd seen the worst damage one human being could inflict on another: the carnage caused to the human body by a bullet, the chaos wrought by a knife blade, the wreckage left by the impact of a car. She was wrong. There are much worse things. She isn't squeamish, wasn’t even as a child, but she had imagined that when faced with living, breathing people rather than med school cadavers she would feel something for them: sorrow, sadness, worry, pity. Anything. Working at the hospital just didn't affect her that way. She’s certain that when they first laid eyes on her four weeks ago, Matt, Gabe and Joe wanted to leave her behind, despite the shotgun in her hands and the group of expired un-dead at her feet. Luke vouched for her but chances are the others saw her as a potential burden not an asset, a girl forced to grow up into a woman real quick. She knew her own worth and all she could do was prove it over the weeks that followed. She knows how to kill with a multitude of household objects but that doesn’t make her a tracker like Luke and Matt.
The same way the injuries she saw as an intern never bothered her, watching one guy rip the guts from another and stuff them into his mouth like premium steak didn't either. She half-thinks there's something not right with that but she's too exhausted and too relieved to care. She made it through; she’s alive when so many others aren’t. At least, she hopes she is.
Joe leans across her with a stemmed glass and she stares at it.
‘Wine?’
He sounds smug, like he’s made it himself and for all she knows he has, because why would there be wine in the house when the world’s gone crazy? Never mind what looks and smells like a very nice, cold Californian Chardonnay. Still, she takes it, smiles a ‘thank you’ and watches as he hands Gabe a glass of cold lager. The gratitude on Gabe’s face is palpable and for a second Emilie thinks he’s going to throw his arms around Joe and hug him. He doesn’t though, just takes a gulp of the fizzy stuff and closes his eyes in bliss.
She’s seen them hug before. There’s no false bravado between the men, they’ve been through too much for that. It’s likely they saw the comfort Luke and Matt were to one another every single minute of every hour of every day and wanted to feel it too. There have been hugs and not all of them involved her. There have been tears and not all of them came from her. They’ve experienced horror in all its forms but it looks as if they’ve struck lucky for once with this place. She can only hope it is luck and not something else.
For the last week they’ve been living in a diner at a gas station out on I5, just outside Five Points, to the east of the Diablo Mountain Range. They stopped there because Matt said they needed to. They found the diner empty and well stocked and stayed for five days. There was fuel in the pumps and they filled up the cars; the jeep that the four of them travelled in, along with Luke and Matt’s Mustang. They filled themselves up too, Matt proving a dab hand at the diner’s griddle, making pancakes for breakfast and burgers for dinner. They slept to recharge, stretched along the PVC seats in the booths at the back, and took it in turns to keep watch in pairs: Luke and Matt, Joe and Gabe, she and Rick. They didn’t talk much while they were there but there was only one real topic of conversation and it wasn’t something they wanted or needed to discuss. She thought they would rest for a few days, a week at most, then get back on the road and head north. She was wrong.
~..~
With the fire lit and the perfect beer in his hand, Gabe watches Rick try the locked door across the hall again with no luck. He half-expects him to kick it in like they've kicked in so many other doors lately but he doesn’t seem inclined to and instead he goes into the kitchen. Gabe hears him say a few words to Joe then hears drawers being opened and rifled through and he gets that Rick’s trying to find a key. The house seems secure, they don’t have weapons but they do have drinks, and Joe’s cooking up something in the kitchen using culinary skills that haven't been in evidence during their week’s stay at the diner or indeed at any other time. It means that the important stuff is under control so when Rick comes back with a bunch of keys to try, Gabe goes into the kitchen.
For a minute he just stands in the doorway and watches Joe work. He considers the guy a friend and while he doesn’t know very much about his life before they met, he doubts cooking has ever been one of his fortes. Now, though, he’s working the kitchen like a man possessed, which Gabe can only hope he isn’t. While he’s no idea what Joe’s cooking up, it’s starting to smell great, like the best thing he’ll have ever eaten, although a McDonalds cheeseburger would possibly taste heavenly right about now.
‘What are you making, Chef?’
Joe looks up and smiles. ‘Garlic Chicken with crunchy fries.’ He beams proudly for all of two seconds before it starts to slip. ‘Don’t look at me like that.’
‘I’m just amazed you found chicken!’
‘You’re not the only one.’
‘Are you sure it’s safe? I mean... we’ve no idea what this place is.’
“Honestly, I don’t know. But it was in the fridge, it smelt fine and I’ll charcoal it to make sure anything that was living in it isn’t by the time we eat it. We’ve eaten riskier things, I promise you. As to this place... I’m actually too tired to care what it is or even how we got here. Until something tries to oust us, I don’t see why we shouldn’t take advantage.’
The House at the End of the World Page 2