by Duncan, Ian
Brandon passed a hand over his goatee.
The brunette made an almost philosophical gesture with her meat cleaver and said, “Yeah, but if you survive, I mean, you’re set for life.”
Cole hardly knew how to respond.
The bearded man with the axe shrugged. “It’s all a game. Same as any other show. All scripted. All about the money. End of the day, it’s the same old shit. Rich gettin’ richer and the poor gettin’ even more poor.”
Brandon looked at Cole. “What do you think we ought to do?”
Whatever the man’s profession before the outbreak had been, it seemed to Cole that he had naturally taken up the role of intermediary between the two groups.
“I’m not sure what to tell you,” Cole admitted. “If they followed us here, that means we’ve got hours, not days. Minutes, maybe. These people, they’ve got an armored vehicle, mercenaries with machine guns, aerial drones, and from what you just told me, this very conversation might be on the next episode.”
Every eye was watching Cole. “You want to know what I think? I say we give those fuckers out there exactly what they want—and then some,” he added cryptically.
A few of the survivors grunted or nodded weakly. It wasn’t exactly a plan, or even much of a rallying cry, Cole knew. He was so exhausted and hungry he could think of little more than the prospect of finding something to eat among the litter-strewn shelves. The group dissolved back into the aisles, rummaging and foraging, except for Brandon, whose curiosity about Cole and Emily, it seemed, was not yet satisfied.
“I have to say,” he said, “it’s pretty bizarre to see you guys on a show, and then watch you step through that door a couple hours later.”
“Yeah, well, it’s pretty bizarre to us, too,” Cole said. “Is there anything left to eat in here?”
“Plenty,” Brandon said. “We’ve stashed most of what we’ve found so far in the back room.”
He led Cole and Emily down one the aisles toward the back of the store, following one of the bloody drags through the litter Cole had seen earlier. “You guys must’ve had quite the fight in here,” Cole said.
“They did,” Brandon answered without looking back. “I just got here last night, but they told me about it. They’ve been through a lot.”
At the end of the aisle, Brandon departed from the bloody drag, which continued toward a set of double doors, Cole noticed. Brandon pushed through a single swinging door into a room faintly glowing with artificial light. Cole followed, seeing a battery-powered lantern set on a table in the middle of what appeared to be an employee breakroom, a pair of white refrigerators, a vending machine, and a bank of metal lockers the only other furniture in the room. On the table, and piled in the seats of the chairs surrounding it, were cardboard boxes full of all sorts of durable foodstuffs, everything from granola bars to marshmallows, bags of oranges to jars of peanut butter.
Brandon fell into a chair against the wall and waved Cole and Emily toward the table with all the benevolence of some proverbial king beckoning the outcast of the world to a post-apocalyptic feast.
Cole propped his AR against the wall and ripped into a box of blueberry granola bars, devouring two of them without pause, letting the wrappers flutter to the floor. Any other time he might have been self-conscious of the lip smacking and chewing noises he made in the silence of that room while a stranger watched.
Emily seemed to relax by degrees, removing her respirator and mopping her face with a wipe she produced from a zippered pocket on her backpack.
“How far along are you?” Brandon asked.
“Forty weeks yesterday,” Emily said, discarding the wipe.
Brandon nodded thoughtfully. “You’re feeling okay?”
“I’m not going to have the baby right this minute, if that’s what you mean,” Emily said, her accent rendering her tone somewhat sharp.
Brandon held up his hands and chuckled. “Hey, don’t mind me. I’ve got three kids. I know a little bit what it’s like.”
“I’m sorry,” Emily said, “I’m afraid I’m a bit hangry.” She reached into a bag on the table and pulled out a tangerine that seemed to glow in her palm in that dim light. She dug her fingernail into the peel.
“No worries,” Brandon said.
The break room door opened and the bearded man appeared, carrying the fireman’s axe, and, incongruently, an open box of Lucky Charms. He set the handle of his axe by the wall, leaned his shoulder against it, and began to pop individual pieces of cereal into his mouth, chewing them thoughtfully.
Cole had found a pouch of peppered beef jerky and was chewing it with relish.
“Who’s watching the front?” Brandon asked.
“Chick with the tats,” the bearded man answered.
“Chloe,” Brandon said.
“Survivor number four,” the bearded man corrected.
Cole found a bottle of beer, sure to be lukewarm, but he twisted off the top and downed several glugs nonetheless. The effervescence of the brew tingled in his mouth and burned in his stomach and almost instantly seemed to leach its carbohydrate energy into his muscles.
The bearded man continued to watch, eating the Lucky Charms slowly and automatically, as though he were watching a movie in the theater. “So you’re the great Cole McGinnis,” he said at last. His voice was rich and baritone and he could make it boom dramatically when he wanted to, like a black preacher.
Cole raised his eyebrows and took another bite of jerky.
“You ever think, Cole, what might happen when the rich run outta food, down in their bunkers? When they realize this thing’s not gonna end? You figure they eat their own first, or make all this their hunting grounds”—he gestured broadly with a pink bit of marshmallow before dropping it into his mouth—“and anybody lucky enough to survive Cordyceps is still nothing to them but meat?”
The last word still hung in the air when a muffled concussion seemed at first to mix with the sound of the man’s voice, as though he had caused it, and then, with their eyes locked together as they listened, Cole heard it again, thunderous and world-ending.
A shotgun blast.
Cole, Brandon, and the man with the axe burst from the break room brandishing their weapons, and Cole, even in those fleeting seconds, had already envisioned what they would likely find: Cord zombies forcing open the doors at the front entrance and streaming down the aisles of the grocery store, one on the heels of the next and the next, coughing and grappling for position in the world’s last foot race.
Instead, they saw nothing.
Cole panned the AR over the nearby aisles, gray with shadow. Littered metal shelving units, trash on the floors, and along the back wall, the dark, open refrigerators where shrink-wrapped bricks of hamburger were slowly turning putrid.
Brandon held the big revolver with both hands. The man with the axe, whose name Cole would never know, gripped the hickory handle with the anticipation of a major leaguer at bat.
No movement.
The three exchanged nervous glances. Cole jerked his head and started briskly down the nearest aisle in a half-crouch, the AR up and ready. Brandon and the man with the axe followed.
It was nearly impossible to walk quietly through the litter, empty plastic trays and cartons crunching under Cole’s boots and even louder, it seemed, under the feet of the two men behind him, reverberating in the empty shelving units and the dead air of the store. Cole jerked his weapon right and left at the end of the aisle, seeing nothing, the inner pair of doors at the airlock still open only a foot and the outer doors still closed. On the opposite side of the store, though, beyond the many check-out lanes, Cole saw the woman with the shotgun standing looking at something she held in the palm of her hand, something the size of a tiny bird.
“What happened?” Brandon yelled.
The woman cackled, a phlegmy smoker’s laugh. “You’re n
ot gonna believe this shit.”
Cole lowered his rifle and the three men hurried across the store, the scent of burnt gunpowder still pungent in the air when they reached her. The other survivors began emerging from the far corners of the store and crowded around to see. Emily appeared at the end of a far aisle, carrying the AR pistol, her face white as a specter in the faint light.
Cole waved her over.
“You shot that?” the man with the axe said.
“Hell yeah,” the woman said, laughing. “Lucky I had birdshot in this thing after all.”
Cole saw that the thing in her hand was not a bird—nothing God had made, anyway—although it was cleverly disguised as one with etched lines on its belly to mimic feathered plumage. From its back rose a small turret and atop the turret was one blade of the shattered rotor, black and thin as a dragonfly’s wing. The tail rotor was still intact, preserving the look of a tiny toy helicopter.
But it was no toy. On its nose and belly were arranged several tiny eyes smaller than the lens of a smart phone camera.
“I saw it up in the rafters and thought it was a bird or a big ole bug at first,” the woman said, “but it didn’t fly like anything I ever saw.”
“That’s a UAV,” the teenager said. “A pretty damned expensive one, too.”
They all looked at him.
“They’re in a video game I play,” he said. “The military uses them. Special forces.”
The man with the axe reached out and took the drone between his fingers, gingerly. “This is spy shit, here.”
“Can you believe how light it is?” the woman said, cradling the double-barreled shotgun and admiring her kill. Cole didn’t know what was more disturbing about her, that she seemed nonplussed by the fact that a military grade UAV had been observing them, or that she was content to take on the apocalypse with a glorified salt and pepper shaker.
“Congratulations,” Cole said dryly.
Now it was his turn to receive everyone’s puzzled stare.
“You’re all going to be on the show,” he said.
Cole reached for the UAV and held the little flying machine in front of his face, letting the cameras get a good look. For all he knew it was still recording.
“I’m coming for you, Walsh,” Cole said. Without further ceremony, and with only a murmur of protest from the woman with the shotgun, he dropped the drone to the floor, raised his boot, and crushed it.
Cole hoped it was the last thing the son of a bitch ever saw.
He ground the little wreck under his heel, turned, and had begun to walk away when he looked up and saw Emily staring at him, her mouth open in shock.
Cole stopped dead.
Emily only raised her hand and pointed one finger toward the windows at the front of the grocery store.
Cole looked.
Out in the parking lot, perhaps one hundred yards from the entrance, sat the hulking boat-like shape of the armored vehicle. And then, with timing only a Hollywood producer could pull off, and in perfect rebuke to Cole, the air horn sounded.
Twenty-Six
THREE FLARES rose in rapid succession from the armored vehicle and arced into the sky in snaking contrails before they exploded in bursts of crimson phosphorescence and floated slowly to the ground.
“This wasn’t on the show,” wondered the tattooed brunette.
“Get away from the windows,” Cole said.
For a moment the other survivors stood looking out the windows, transfixed, either in disbelief or morbid curiosity.
“Come on!” Cole shouted, already turning Emily toward the nearest aisle, “Get to the back of the store!”
“That might actually be a really good idea,” Brandon said, without taking his eyes off the armored vehicle.
Cole and Emily ran the aisle back to the employee break room, where Cole shouldered the door open and held it for her. “Stuff as much food as you can into your pack,” he said.
Cole retrieved his pack from the far wall and ripped it open. He needed to top off several of his AR mags. He was thumbing 5.56 shells against the follower of the first magazine and Emily was tearing open a granola bar wrapper with her teeth when the other survivors filed into the break room and found places to sit or lean against the walls. For a moment they watched him load the magazines, and Cole noticed several of them looking at the AR with hollow and envious eyes, the way a beggar might watch someone eat.
The man with the axe squatted by the wall and rested the butt of the handle against his lips as though kissing a talisman. Brandon turned the cylinder in his revolver, extracting one spent shell and replacing it with a live one from his pocket.
Cole finished loading the magazines and secured them in the pouches of his chest rig. Every thirty seconds or so he heard either the air horn or the flares shrieking, and at each of these intervals a weight and silence even more profound seemed to come over the little group.
“What’s our game plan here?” Brandon said at last, speaking once more for everyone, and apparently addressing Cole.
Cole looked them over. The woman that had downed the drone stood with the breech of her shotgun broken over her arm like some earl out for a holiday in the English countryside. The Latino with the tire iron stood by quietly and possibly didn’t even speak English, but Cole had no doubt he understood what was happening as well as any of them. The teenager had found a shovel somewhere and stood holding it upright by the rusted steel collar like a parody of American Gothic. An instinct from Cole’s days of coaching high school soccer told him they could use a rousing speech, but his time in the quarantine zone assured him motivation was the least of the things that would save them. What they really needed was better weapons.
“We take that armored vehicle, is what we do,” the man with the axe said.
Cole shook his head. “They’re heavily armed. Machine guns, body armor, the works.” He reached into his pack and brought out the dead police officer’s full-sized Glock and backup pistol. “Which of you knows how to shoot? I’ve got a couple of nine-millimeters here that aren’t really doing me any good.”
“I can shoot,” the teenager offered.
Cole looked at him.
“Not just in video games, either,” he said. “I used to go to the range with my dad all the time.”
“This thing never has to be reloaded,” the man with the axe said, sliding his hands up the haft and admiring the gleaming head.
“I can handle a gun,” the brunette with the tattoos volunteered.
Cole passed the larger framed pistol to the boy that had spoken first and the back-up pistol to the brunette. “Here, you can split this box of ammo between the two of you. Start loading.” Cole rummaged some more in the bottom of the pack and found a small box of five buckshot shells, and offered them to the woman with the shotgun, who smiled.
“In case they’re bigger than birds,” Cole said.
He looked the group over again. It was all he had to offer. The way things were likely to go, the ones that were poorly armed weren’t necessarily worse off.
“Does anyone have any military experience?” Emily said. She looked at Cole and held up the AR pistol apologetically. “I haven’t really got a bloody clue how to use this thing, if you think there’s someone here better qualified. I still have my pistol, anyway.”
Cole bit his lip. Part of him wanted to keep the AR pistol as a back-up, but it was selfish, really, and Emily had a point. These were good people, they’d shared their shelter and food with them, and who was to say they didn’t deserve as much of a chance to live as he and Emily?
“Por favor,” said a voice from the back of the break room, closest to the door. The Latino’s dark eyes fixed on Cole and he gestured somewhat awkwardly at his own chest. “Miguel. En mi pais, yo era un official de policia,” he said, emphasizing the last word, and then he added, in an apparent attempt t
o explain, “En el Salvador.”
Cole knew enough Spanish to have an idea what the man was saying, though his words came more fluently than Cole could perfectly follow. He looked at Emily and nodded.
Emily held the weapon upright for him and Miguel stepped forward humbly the way a man might accept some token of public recognition, nodding and smiling kindly at Emily, and when he took the AR pistol—although he took it from her gently—the attitude of the weapon changed in his hands, becoming at once the deadly thing it was intended to be, and Cole did not fail to notice the deftness of his movements, how he quickly turned the muzzle downward and pulled back the bolt carrier just far enough to confirm the chamber was loaded. He checked the safety selector, and then, satisfied, nodded again to Emily.
Cole ripped open one of his magazine carriers and pulled out another thirty-round magazine and held it out to him.
“Gracias, amigo,” Miguel said, his eyes shining with gratitude.
Cole laid it in the man’s open palm and nodded. It would prove to be one of the best decisions he ever made.
Outside the store, the air horn sounded a long blast, followed by several quick bursts.
“We don’t have a lot of time,” Cole said, picking up his backpack and slipping into the straps. “Does anyone know if there’s a roof access in this place?”
The man with the axe lifted one finger. “I’ve seen it.”
“Show it to me,” Cole said.
Twenty-Seven
TRUBILINSKI’S EYES NARROWED when he heard it: a discordant ruckus blasting from the open CJ-7 bouncing down the wooded drive, what the general wouldn’t have cared to know was actually a song called Thickfreakness by The Black Keys.
The Jeep rolled to a stop in the gravel outside the cabin they referred to, in their coded communications, as Checkpoint Charlie. Trubilinski sat the porch in a battered piece of wicker, the silenced pistol balanced on one arm of the chair, and a tumbler of bourbon on the other.