Ness climbed up onto the bed and took hold of the window’s lower edge near the outer corner.
“On three,” Shawn said. He counted down. On three, Ness shoved all his weight against the edge. Shawn pushed in a series of hard jerks. Screws squealed against the wood. Shawn grunted. The hinges popped; the window flew open another foot. Ness spilled over the sill.
Shawn fell straight down on him, pinning him to the sill and preventing him from tumbling to the asphalt below.
“Hang on there, Jet Li,” Shawn said. “That’s what the rope is for.”
He flung the line out the window. Jeans and sheets unfurled, flapping in the frigid air. Ness wished he had his coat. Shawn gestured to the makeshift rope. Ness grabbed hold and slithered one leg into space.
“If you fall, try not to scream,” Shawn said. “I don’t want them coming after me before I’ve got a head start.”
“Shut up.” Ness’ heart thundered in his chest. He inched his butt onto the sill, grabbed the rope with both hands, and lowered himself out the window, inching around to face the outside wall. The sheet strained; his grip slid down the smooth fiber. He moaned and clamped down, arresting his descent. His feet banged against the wall. He was going to fall. It would be much easier to fall.
Shawn leered down at him. Ness clamped his jaw tight and let himself slide past a darkened window to the knot where the first sheet met the second. He laced his legs around the rope and climbed past the knot hand over hand. He slid again, reaching the jeans, and climbed down, fingernails biting into the denim, until his feet touched the ground.
Shawn gave him a thumbs up and bailed out the window, sliding straight down. He thumped into the asphalt, knees bowing, running three steps as he burned off momentum. He turned back for his knotted jeans and fished out his wallet and keys.
He started across the lot at a swift walk. Ness glanced back over his shoulders as if his head were on a swivel. At any moment, he expected men in black with sleek matte rifles to burst from the hospital and force his face into the pavement with their boots. He smacked into Shawn’s back. Shawn swore, unlocked his primer-patched pickup, leapt inside, and popped the passenger door.
The truck rumbled to life. Shawn whooped and backed up. “Here’s the plan. We head to the trailer, grab whatever we can carry, then hike into the mountains. No phones. We’ll come tell Mom what happened as soon as she gets back.”
“Why don’t we stay at the trailer?”
“They got satellite photos of the bacteria in your colon, dumbass. You think they don’t got your address?”
Their headlights splashed across the hospital walls. Shawn turned out of the lot without stopping. The truck trundled past the deserted downtown and Shawn stopped at the stubborn light on Washington. Ness craned his head, scanning for cops. The truck lurched forward. Shawn curved north onto Main and transitioned to the dark highway. At the trailer, he skidded to a stop, spitting gravel, and rushed inside.
Ness grabbed a pair of pants and stepped into the legs, Shawn doing the same. While Ness stuffed extra socks and underwear into a backpack, Shawn grabbed his toothbrush and shaving kit and added it to an already-full bag waiting in the corner.
“How did you know to pack?” Ness said.
“I didn’t.” Shawn stuffed a pistol into his waistband, slung the bag over his shoulder, and crooked a shotgun under his arm. “When it comes time to go off-grid, you don’t always got time to pack your boxers.”
“You’re retarded.” Ness grabbed his flossers and a razor and his hair gel and his cell charger. Shawn grabbed the charger from his hand and chucked it across the room.
“No phones.”
“How paranoid are you?”
“Men did fine without cell phones for 50,000 years. I think we’ll survive two weeks.”
“Well, I guess I’m ready.”
Shawn locked the door behind them and grabbed a heavy backpack from under the tarp in his truck. He shouldered it with a grunt. Far down the hill toward town, a siren shrieked across the night.
“Take this.” Shawn passed him the shotgun.
Ness held it awkwardly in front of him. “Why do I need this?”
“Because this shit’s heavy. And because you need something to fire back with if the cops catch up.”
Ness’ breath curled from his mouth. “You’re enjoying this, aren’t you?”
Shawn snorted. “I’m hiking up a freezing mountain crushed under sixty pounds of gear and the serious fear I’ve been infected with African blood-plague. It’s a real wet dream.”
“But this is exactly one of your end-of-days fantasies come to life. I bet you’d prefer it if it turns out there is a plague. I bet you have a cabin hidden away up here!”
“No I don’t.”
“Really? I would have bet money.”
“Just a tent.”
The smell of pines drifted from the slopes. The smell of coming snow, too. Clouds hid the stars. Ness hoped he was wrong. It normally didn’t snow past February except in the upper mountains, but Canada could belch a blizzard on them at any time. Shawn broke into a jog, pots jangling in his pack. He smoked cigarettes (along with weed; he tried to hide it from their mom, but came inside smelling of it nearly every night he had off work), and he was carrying half of Ness’ body weight, but Ness had to struggle to keep up. He had grown used to his body—his paleness, his poky ribs, the sad little pouch on his belly—but felt his cheeks flushing. He would not complain.
Shawn curved north up the slope. Ten minutes later, lungs burning, legs weak, a stitch tugging his stomach, Ness was ready to cry out. As if reading his mind, Shawn stopped on a level patch of ground and knelt in the pine needles. A chain tinkled. He drank from a canteen and passed it to Ness, who choked on the sweet taste.
“Is this Coke?”
“Burning a lot of sugar right now.” Shawn dug a pair of binoculars from his pack and peered down at the trailer. “They must be pretty serious.”
He passed Ness the binoculars. His magnified view swung dizzily past the trees. Three cop cars blocked the trailer’s driveway. Men in uniform tramped through the weeds, flashlights glinting.
“How you feeling?” Shawn said.
“It’s only been a few hours. I wouldn’t be sick yet.”
“I mean, you ready to run?”
His breathing had barely settled; still, he refused to complain to Shawn. “I’m fine.”
Shawn zipped away the binoculars and jogged up the slope. Needles slid under Ness’ feet. He was panting again in seconds. Shawn shot him a disgusted look and slowed to a walk. Ness’ face burned. How was he supposed to know he’d wind up racing up a mountain on the run from the authorities? He didn’t need to be fit. He viewed the fitness craze as a madness, a sickness of the mind. Starting in the ‘80s, the men in movies brimmed with muscle. Everyday guys had been racing to catch up ever since. He had gone to high school with boys who took steroids. Everyone was supposed to have a gym membership, lift weights for fun. All because a few actors had to look better and better to land parts over the other actors.
Ness had refused to take part in this cultural sickness. Instead, he read and learned, versed himself in the internet, where the body you were born with had no bearing on how strangers treated you. It meant he felt too self-conscious to go swimming, and that he’d never date a model—not that it stopped him from believing he would, someday, once he had his own business—but day to day, his brittle little body made little difference in the quality of his life.
Wheezing up the mountain was the first time he’d regretted this decision. It would not be the last.
He didn’t have a phone or wear a watch, so he didn’t know what time it was when Shawn finally stopped inside a stand of pines, swept the leaves from a small mound, and pulled away the tarp beneath with a plastic rumple, revealing three large bags. Ness clicked on a flashlight.
“Turn that shit off,” Shawn said without turning.
“I was just trying to help.”
“You need to learn to operate in the dark. Cavemen did fine with it. We haven’t had flashlights much longer than we’ve had cell phones.”
“Let me just tune up my echolocation,” Ness said.
Shawn dumped metal rods to the ground with a hollow rattle. “You think this is a joke?”
“I can’t believe you have all this here. What did you think was going to happen? Asteroids? Zombies? Asteroids filled with zombies?”
“We’ll see who’s laughing a week from now.”
Ness shucked the tent from its sack. “You think we’ll be up here that long?”
“Should be long enough to know whether there’s an outbreak.” Shawn found his hammer, the bag of stakes. “If there is, well, just be glad it’s March instead of November.”
Ness was virtually useless at helping set up the tent. After a minute of struggling with the springy rods, Shawn dispatched him to clear a patch of ground. Ness scuffed his shoe through the needles, sweeping them away, toeing up any stones embedded in the dirt. After the tent was up, he expected Scoutmaster Shawn to start a fire, but his brother peeled the lid from a can of beef stew and passed it to him cold, staring him down, daring him to complain.
When they finished, Shawn buried the empty cans and unrolled two sleeping bags across the floor of the tent.
“If you get too cold,” he said, diving into one of the fleece-lined bags, “that’s too goddamn bad.”
Way, way, way back at the start of the day, Ness had expected to sleep under the stars again. Well, he’d gotten that much right. It was everything else he couldn’t believe.
* * *
He woke several times to the rustling of the night. Bears? Wolves? Wolf packs had been back in Yellowstone for years; they could easily have pervaded Idaho by now. Could be cougars, too. Cougars had never left. Twenty feet from the tent, slow steps swished the field of needles. Ness stared into the pitch black. The tent walls felt terribly thin. He couldn’t see what was outside, but they could smell him, his unnatural human stink of soap and deodorant and gel.
Shawn shoved him awake some time after dawn. Ness’ head throbbed. His feet and legs ached.
“Wakey wakey,” Shawn said. “You got a latrine to dig.”
“Why do I need to dig a latrine?”
“Because I got shits to take.”
“Why do I need to do it? You’re the one who knows what he’s doing.”
Shawn yanked open the tent zipper with a metal whine. “You’re not building a Mars lander. You’re digging a hole for last night’s stew.”
Ness rubbed the crust from his eyes. “I haven’t even woken up yet.”
“Besides, I got to preserve my strength. I’m going to see Mom tonight.”
“Is that why you want the place all civilized? You really think Mom will be impressed by a literal shit-hole?”
Shawn shook his head. “I’m just going to let her know we’re all right. And that she needs to go out and buy all the food, ammo, and toilet paper she can—then get home and stay home until we know it’s safe to step out of the bunker.”
Ness climbed from his sleeping bag into the morning cold. He gritted his teeth and reached for his coat. “Do you really think there’s a plague?”
“Something killed the Rogerses, didn’t it? I don’t mind crapping in the woods for a week if there’s a chance this country’s about to turn into The Stand.”
Figuring there was no chance whatsoever of coffee, Ness found the canteen and took a long swig of flat, mountain-chilled Coke. He laced his shoes and crawled through the flap into the overcast morning. He was still cold from sleep and his muscles tightened and quivered. Away from camp, his urine steamed on fallen leaves.
At the tent, Shawn sat on a tarp, sorting supplies from one of his cached bags. “Where’s breakfast?”
“I don’t know where anything is.”
Shawn set down a Vietnam-era combat knife and looked Ness in the eye. “What’s your problem?”
“What?”
“Where do you think the food is?”
“Knowing you, it’s tied to the top of a pine tree surrounded by land mines and tiger traps.”
“It’s in the bags,” Shawn pointed. “The same bags everything else are in. You been living with Mom too long, Ness. I don’t have the time nor the energy to tell you every little thing that needs doing.”
“I was just asking where the food was.” Ness’ face tingled with heat. He crouched over the bags and pawed through them. “Now I know. And I don’t have to waste your precious time asking.”
Shawn went back to laying out his tools, rustling the tarp. Ness found the bag of canned food, searched until he saw a split pea soup, and handed it to Shawn. Ness hid his grin, but Shawn didn’t even look at the can as he located the opener from the pile on the tarp and cranked open his soup. Ness found himself a lemon chicken with wild rice.
“Weird how much better this is when it’s warm,” he said.
Shawn didn’t look up. “No fire.”
“I didn’t say I wanted a fire.”
“If you’re cold, go dig us our bathroom.”
Ness rolled his eyes, finished eating, and carried the shovel to a level spot a hundred feet from the tent where line of sight was blocked by the thicket of pines. The soil was hard, nearly frozen. He had to lean his foot against the shovel’s head to pry away each load of dirt. He didn’t know how deep or how wide to dig it, but if he went back to ask Shawn, his brother would just find one more way to call him a useless baby. He dug a shallow line five feet long and stopped to rest. His weakness forced him to stop three times more before he reached his goal, sinking the hole nearly two feet into the ground.
At the tent, Shawn had disassembled his shotgun for cleaning. Ness shook his stinging hands. “All done.”
“Good for you.”
“Don’t you want to come see?”
Shawn sighed and set down his grime-streaked rag. He followed Ness to the latrine and set his hands on his hips. “It’s about twice as deep as we need. And it’s uphill from camp. What happens when it rains?”
“I guess we die.”
“Do you have a ‘DUMB’ switch you flick in your brain just to mess with me? I thought you were supposed to be all logical.” Shawn squinted at the dull light filtering through the pines. “You know where we are?”
“On our own,” Ness said bitterly. “Where stupid gets you killed and black helicopters could descend from the sky at any time.”
“Where we are in relation to town. To the trailer. If I blindfolded you and dragged you a half mile off, would you know how to get back here?”
“Well, the mountains up north are pretty obvious. And the trailer’s...” He spun in a slow circle until he pointed at what he thought was the southwest. “That way.”
Shawn adjusted his arm by several degrees. “More like that way. Your next job is to learn where you are. If I send you off for firewood, I don’t want to have to come hunting for you three hours later.”
“Why would we need firewood when we aren’t allowed any fires?”
“Get walking.”
“Why should I? We’re not going to be out here for long. You don’t own the mountain.”
“These are things you need to know!” Shawn whirled on him, fists tight. Ness cringed. Shawn clenched his jaw and shook his head at the trees. “What do you think happens if something happens to me?”
“Fine,” Ness said. “Want me to make you a map, too?”
He strode into the woods before Shawn could say more. Shawn wasn’t in charge. Ness could walk off at any time. Go home, where he wouldn’t shiver in the morning eating cans of cold stew. He didn’t feel at all sick yet. Tim and his mom probably had been poisoned. This whole jaunt to the mountains was all about Shawn’s desire to be a big man. To justify his self-persecutorial delusions. To fulfill his stupid survivalist obsession with a world where he’d finally be worth a damn.
Angry as he was, Ness couldn’t convince himself it was poison.
The paramedics and the hospital staff had acted too weird. That level of radiation would have damaged the Rogers’ skin, their hair. If it were a disease, Ness probably should know his way around their mountain hideaway. But why did Shawn have to be such a dick about it? He acted like Ness was still some thirteen-year-old kid. In response, Ness did act like a child, which made him angry and ashamed, which made him all the more stubborn. That right there was why Shawn was unfit to lead. He had no touch for it.
Once he was out of sight, Ness cut southwest, maintaining elevation with the camp until he reached a clearing where Moscow lay spread out like a map: the highway, the grain elevator, the tall dorms and the tree-lined campus. The trailer lane was easy to spot, isolated on the northeast fringe of town, bracketed by weedy fields. He saw no sign of police.
He returned to camp, where Shawn ignored him, then walked in ever-expanding circles around it, finding landmarks—a fallen tree, a rusted-out pickup, a four-foot-deep gouge. By dinnertime, he could wander out of sight in any direction and find his way back with no trouble. As the sun departed and the cold returned, they ate a dinner of trail mix, popcorn, and beef jerky. With nothing better to do, Ness took one of Shawn’s pocket knives and started whittling a stick of pine into a sharp point.
After a while, he napped. Shawn shook him into angry wakefulness some time after midnight.
“Time for this bear to head back down the mountain,” Shawn said. Ness rolled his eyes. Shawn handed him the shotgun and shook a red box of shells. “I want you to stay awake and keep this close until I get back.”
“You expect me to have a shootout with the cops?”
“So you don’t have to have a claw-out with a mountain lion.” Shawn had his pistol on his hip. He shouldered a light pack. “I’ll be back in a couple hours.”
He crunched away through the fallen needles. Ness went inside the tent and zipped it up until it was nearly closed, leaving a two-inch gap to watch through. The shotgun rested over his lap, heavy and cold. As far as he could tell, there was no safety on it.
Owls hooted. Small creatures rustled the leaves. The moon fought with the clouds. It smelled like cold again, like leaves that had ceased rotting in want of warmer days. Ness shifted position to keep his legs from going numb. A long time later, steps shuffled through the needles. He brought the shotgun to his chest. A silhouette emerged from the trees, pistol glinting in its hand.
The Last Days: Six Post-Apocalyptic Thrillers Page 112