by Gareth Wood
Shakey ate once his dinner was ready, savouring every bite. Afterwards he cleaned the dishes and kitchen, and put on the kettle for some tea. Finally he sat down in his chair in his room, turned on his single electric light, and read for a while. Tonight it was The Princess Bride, one of his favourites.
Half an hour later he was startled by a knock on the back door. Feynman raised her head and sniffed, then went back to sleep.
"Some guard dog you are," he grumbled. He got up and took one of his handguns off the wall rack, made sure it was loaded and looked outside where a figure could be seen standing on the back step.
"Who is it?"
"Jim Reilly," a familiar voice called. "Can I come in?"
Shakey pulled the door open and stood aside for the town Sheriff to come into his kitchen. Reilly hung the shotgun he was carrying on the hooks by the door. Shakey returned his handgun to the rack after he closed the door.
"Evening, Shakey," Reilly said, shaking his hand.
"Hey, Jim. Want some tea?" Reilly was a shorter man, heavyset and sturdy like a weight lifter. He wore a leather jacket and a pair of the new blue jeans that one of the shops down the road was producing. He was nearing fifty, and his brown hair was speckled with grey. He had what had once been called a lantern jaw.
"Sure, that'd be fine." Reilly sat in a chair that Shakey waved him to, and watched the older man set the kettle on the stove and throw a log inside. Soon the kitchen was warming pleasantly.
"This a business or social call?"
Reilly was a friend, longtime customer and occasional drinking partner of Shakey's. Many nights they had sat at this battered wooden table, talking long into the darkness. Both men were philosophers of a sort, and despite their very different backgrounds they understood each other well.
Reilly wore a black cowboy hat with a silver star pinned to the front. The word 'Sheriff' was engraved into the metal in block letters. He took off the hat and placed it on the table as Shakey handed him a cup of hot herbal tea.
"Thanks. Bit of both, I'm afraid." He watched Shakey pour himself a cup and add a spoonful of local honey to it, then sit down at another chair. Feynman walked in and laid her chin on Reilly's leg, and he absently scratched her head. Reilly and Feynman were old friends as well. "I need to knock some thoughts around."
Reilly had been elected Sheriff of the Mission Safe Zone two years before. His job was to uphold the law and enforce the Mission Emergency Provisions, voted into effect by the Town Council in June of 2004. He was in charge of twenty-three deputies, sixteen administrative staff, and twelve custodial workers. He was also the head criminal investigator and warden of the Mission Prison. He was one of only six people with keys to the Armory. In this town of three and a half thousand living human beings, he was the law.
"You know Jillian Sinclair?"
"Yeah, she's a nurse," Shakey said. "I know her from Neighbourhood Defence. She lives with Ron a few blocks away, on 1st Avenue and Cedar, does full time shifts at the hospital."
Reilly nodded. "Well, she's missing. Her husband reported her late back from work last night."
Shakey's eyes widened slightly, and he thought about what that could mean. He knew he hadn't seen her since the last Neighbourhood Defence meeting three days ago.
"Maybe she stayed at a friend's place?"
"No. We checked them." Reilly slurped his tea and continued to scratch Feynman, who closed her eyes in bliss.
"We checked her usual route home," the Sheriff continued, "talked to the Night Patrol about whether they had seen her. They had. So she was alright at 11:45 last night when she passed the checkpoint at Haig Street. We looked this morning again and checked her friends, talked to Ron to see if they'd had a fight or anything. He said they hadn't, and she should have been home by midnight. He called her in late at 12:10."
Reilly had been a police officer prior to April of 2004, when he had retired to Maple Ridge after twenty-five long years in the RCMP. His career had taken him all over Canada, and even abroad a few times. He'd met Shakey in May of that year, days after the dead first rose. Reilly had volunteered for the fledgling police force that was formed in Mission, and Shakey had opened a weapons store. Shakey hoped to get back to farming one day, but the truth was he enjoyed the constant stream of customers he had. Many of them were friends now as well.
Shakey, born John Terry Waterson in 1948 in Manhattan, was an aging hippie who had been 21 during the Summer of Love. He went to Woodstock and spent a few years as an anti-Vietnam War activist. He grew his hair long, smoked pot and participated in as much free love as he could. He moved to Canada in 1975 after an 'epic road trip' and married a woman named Noel Cooper on Vancouver Island in 1976. He spent many years there in a hippie commune before moving to Vancouver sometime in the nineties. By the time the dead rose Shakey was the owner of a Granville Island business called Shakey's Pizzeria and Ceramics Studio, where the ovens cooked pizza or fired ceramic pottery, sometimes at the same time. Noel had died of cancer three years before the dead got up, and Shakey was glad she hadn't lived to see what happened. He was still what Reilly would have once thought of as a 'dirty hippie', though after many long years Shakey discovered that he wasn't really a pacifist when it came to the undead. Over the last eight years they had gotten to know each other well, and had become good friends.
"So that's five, then?" Shakey asked.
Reilly nodded, an angry expression on his face. He ticked off names on his fingers.
"Karen Gilbert. Simone Wong. Dorothy Tremaine, and Kathy Durham."
"And now Jillian."
"Yes," the Sheriff growled, "and now Jillian."
They sipped tea for a while, each thinking much of the same things. Sitting at the table in the glow of the single electric light and the oil lantern on the kitchen counter, each remembered the list of women who had gone missing here in the last four years.
People had died here, within the Safe Zone. Usually they reanimated and had to be put down. Some people were killed by the undead if one happened to find a way in past the Wall, a never-completed, always-in-progress assemblage of chain link barriers, brick walls across alleys, high wooden fences, concrete forms, and natural rock faces that did an excellent job of keeping almost all of the undead outside the populated Safe Zone.
People seldom went missing, and if they did it was unusual for them to vanish without any trace at all. Often they were found at a friend's house, or at a lover's. People were careful about going places together, never alone. But familiarity with the risks of life these days had led to some lack of caution at times. If someone died somewhere alone they were usually found quickly, either having reanimated and gone looking for a fresh meal, or less often they simply rotted and the smell alerted searchers to where they were. The Town Council was very good about alerting people to problems like this, usually within twenty-four hours or less of the first report. Sometimes the Sheriff had the case closed and resolved before the Council even issued a warning, sometimes not. Shakey hadn't left his shop all day so he hadn't seen any public bulletins about Jillian going missing.
Five women were the anomaly. They had vanished without trace, if you counted Jillian among them, and it looked like Reilly was going to do just that. Four years ago Karen Gilbert had vanished from her home. She had lived alone and worked at the Essential Supplies office. Six months later Simone Wong, an administrator at the Mission Hospital, vanished while at work. She went for lunch and never came back. Eight months later another one vanished. Dorothy Tremaine was a salvager, leading a team of four who went out and hunted down the things that Essential Supplies needed. She reported back from a run, went home for a hot meal and a bath, and was never seen again. Another fourteen months passed before another woman, Kathy Durham, was reported missing by her family. She worked for Hobart's Salvage, a private scavenger operation that sold recovered supplies to the townsfolk. These were not things that fell into the Essential Supplies purview. These were considered luxuries, things like bottles of win
e, leather coats, fashionable clothing recovered from stores, or DVDs and computers. She worked in the warehouse, had a family to support, and had lots of friends. Now, twenty months later Jillian Sinclair had disappeared.
Even Shakey, with no law enforcement experience, could see some patterns. All the women worked either for health care or were involved with salvage. In Mission, the two professions were linked by the Essential Supplies office. They had all vanished without a trace, which Shakey thought meant that they had known whoever had taken them, since no signs of a struggle had been found in any of the cases. Physically, all of the women had long dark hair, but that was where it ended. They were a range of heights and weights, had different physical builds, and were different ages as well.
Three of the disappearances had occurred before Reilly had taken the job, and his predecessor had obsessed over them. Both he and Reilly were hindered by the lack of surviving professional police officers to investigate the missing women. It frustrated Reilly to no end, and Shakey shared his feelings, having heard Reilly talk about the cases many times.
The two men sat in the kitchen and sipped their tea. Finally, two cups later, Shakey broke the silence.
"So," he said, "what now?"
Reilly sighed. He shook his head and let out a humourless laugh.
"Now I go to the Council and tell those useless dog fuckers one more time that I think we might have a serial killer inside the Safe Zone."
CHAPTER THREE
Mission Safe Zone, September 6, 2013
Amanda
My favourite weapon for the longest time was a 12 gauge shotgun. It was very good at knocking the heads off the living dead at close range. While I was part of the Salvage Teams running out of the Cold Lake Safe Zone back in Alberta we used to use shotguns and military C7A1 assault rifles that had been permanently set to single fire. With one of those you could take out the fucking undead at a nice safe range, never letting them close to you. Now though, ammo is so hard to find that the Army rifles are nearly useless unless you can afford the reload prices, which for a specialty round like the ones the C7s use, is steep. My neighbour has a gun shop, and barters weapons for food or fuel or whatever he can get. He specialises in hard to find ammunition as well, and keeps me supplied with rounds for my handgun in exchange for some of the salvage I collect for Essential Supplies.
When I moved out here – or fled here if you want to be more precise – after some of my team members were killed and a whole lot of other people were dismembered and eaten by the corpses, I arrived with almost nothing. Three of us made it across the mountains, and we didn't even know that Mission still existed until we rolled up to the town gates in my no-longer-mint-condition Tundra, waved at the sentries like we were old friends, and asked if we could come inside.
That was four years ago. The other survivors I arrived with, Cole and Kristine, are still here somewhere, and I see them from time to time, but neither one is a salvager. I've since heard that Cold Lake survived what I thought at the time was the end of everything we had there. Some people I thought were dead turned out to still be alive. Lots of others were not so lucky. I thought about going back, but the trip here was hard enough, with the raider gangs and the hungry corpses everywhere. I didn't know if I could face that again, so I stayed here and started building a life.
Today was glorious and sunny, and I had the day off. The house I had to myself, a small bungalow that was right on the main street, needed cleaning and tidying, but for now I was content to lie in bed and watch the sunlight slowly crawl across the bedroom wall. My cat, a ginger tom I call Sauron, who allows me to feed and house him, lay on the bed in a patch of sunlight with his head upside down and his body curled into a tight ball.
After another wonderful hour I got up and went to the bathroom. I turned a tap, and saw that we had water today. Sometimes we didn't. I used the toilet and had a shower, keeping it under the three minute limit imposed by the Council. When I was done I wrapped myself in a towel and stood to look in the mirror as I applied homemade aloe vera lotion to my scars. Years ago I stuffed a burning rag into a car gas tank to distract some undead, and it blew up on me before I could get away. Not the brightest idea I ever had, I know. I was left with burns on my right cheek, neck and shoulder that healed cleanly but tighten up if I don't moisturise them daily. I also have spectacular shrapnel scars on my right breast, my ribs and my abdomen on the same side, all from that same ill-conceived attempt to get the undead to pay attention to something that wasn't me.
My hair is auburn and cut short, and I used to dye it all shades of red back when you could find hair dye. I've gotten used to it natural now, though sometimes I can get some henna. I brushed it out, watching the curls flop over my face. Finally it was time for music and breakfast.
Still in my towel I hunted through my CD collection for an old favourite, and slipped Broken Faith into the player. Some people use an electric lamp as the single powered device they can have. I have a small stereo. I went back to my room, threw the damp towel on the bed where it landed on Sauron, and pulled on clothes. In the kitchen, I pulled out breakfast supplies, then hit the play button on my stereo. The violin intro began, and I got familiar chills. When the thrumming bass line started I stopped cutting deer sausage long enough to bang my head a few times. Then all at once the guitars and drums kicked in, a stunning seven-four time blitz that lasted only a half a dozen bars before silence crashed down like a hammer, and Julienne shrieked out the opening line of the song in guttural German. A grand operatic swell began as she continued, and then the black metal journey began in earnest. I happily resumed cutting up sausage and vegetables while the song played out, pausing occasionally to listen to a particular riff or drum fill. Gemalte Leiche was my favourite band. Their last album came out literally days before the undead rose to global epidemic levels, and I was very fortunate to have a copy. My old boss in the Salvage Teams had found it for me, and I might have kissed him for it if he hadn't been hooked up with one of the scariest women I'd ever met. Having a copy of this album has earned me a few points with some of the surviving metalheads I've met since then, since this album featured the return of the legendary Julienne Hansen to the lineup, on lead vocals instead of backup as she'd done on the first two albums. It was this band that inspired me to become a musician, taking long months to learn several instruments, though I only keep a guitar around now.
I cracked some brown farm eggs into a pan, swished them together with the sausage and veggies, and made myself a nice omelet. This was sure different from life on the road, running from the undead and never knowing if you'd find another meal, more ammunition, or enough fuel to make it to the next desolate town. I admit the wasteland has its charms as well, but I took a few moments to appreciate the wonders of running water, enough electricity to run a stereo system, and the bliss of having living neighbours and a reasonably safe place to live.
After eating I grabbed my Browning 9mm, checked out the magazine to make sure of the safety, and strapped it to my hip. Then I grabbed my quiver and bow and went out the front door, having decided to spend part of my day at the archery range. The old guy who ran the gun shop next door was out on his porch with a cup of something, wearing a Black Sabbath shirt this morning.
His dog was sniffing around the yard, and barked at me happily.
"Hey, Shakey," I called, and waved.
"Morning, Amanda," he waved back, and I smiled at him before I rode away on my bicycle. He was a really nice old man, and never once complained when I turned the music up loud. I rode to the archery range on the south end of town. It was just behind the Wall, slightly north of the river. It had been set up as a recreational activity several years ago, but the archers had quickly realised that the silence of the bow made it a great stealth weapon. Now it was a serious part of the drills for salvagers and Wall guards. Rifle and handgun ammunition was gradually becoming harder and harder to find, and I could see a point in the future where bows and crossbows would be more common th
an firearms.
There were only a few archers here this morning, so I parked my bicycle and got set up for shooting. I slipped my leather bracer onto my left forearm, tugged a three-fingered leather glove onto my right hand, and strapped on the back-quiver. The nock ends of the arrows stood above my right shoulder. I strung my bow, a fifty pound draw Martin recurve that had been salvaged from an apartment in New Westminster. I liked it not only because it shared my last name, but because I was actually good at shooting it. It had a very smooth draw, the weight stacking nicely as I pulled it back, and the release was a dream. The arrows had a very flat trajectory, and with 175 grain bodkin points on the ends they pierced skulls with finality.
I checked my bow to make sure it was strung properly, and that the string was not frayed anywhere. The arrows were next, and I inspected each one to be sure the points and plastic nocks were still seated properly, and that there were no cracks or splinters on my wooden shafts. I take care of my weapons, so they were all fine. I went to see the range marshal, a thin, older man named Terry. He was standing at one end of the shooting line, watching the archers load and shoot.
"Hi," I said.
"Hi, Amanda," he said, his eyes very briefly flickering to my burns. That used to make me self-conscious, but really there are lots of worse injuries out there, so I don't care anymore. Most of the time.
"Lots of room today," he said, gesturing at the line of shooters. "Wait until they've retrieved and you can join in."
"Thanks, Terry."
I went to stand behind the line until the archers were finished. Downrange at various distances were target butts, made of cardboard or salvaged Styrofoam or foam rubber mats, or whatever they could find that would handle being punctured by thousands of arrows over their lifetimes. The bodkins tended to chew up the butts pretty fast. As soon as everyone was back I stepped to the line. Everyone picked up bows again and we all stood waiting for the range marshal to call clear, and when he did I drew an arrow over my shoulder and nocked it. I drew it back, feeling the bow flex as the weight stacked. I aimed, feeling my fingers just touch the right side of my mouth. I rolled my left elbow down to get it out of the way of the string as I released, and the string cut air with a thwip noise as the arrow flew off the shelf, a gentle arc ending with a deep thunk when the shaft drove heavily into the target, right in the sweet spot where the brain would be on a zombie.