by Gareth Wood
* * *
Amanda drove, and I sat still in the passenger seat and tried to keep my hands from shaking. Now that we were relatively out of danger, I had the shakes. Not bad, but they worried me. I spilled the water bottle I was drinking from. Was this what the soldiers called shell shock? Post Traumatic Stress Disorder? I guessed it could be. I shouldn’t have been surprised, but I was.
I laughed bitterly. This was ridiculous. World civilization had fallen to a plague of flesh eating dead people, there were maybe a few hundred thousand people left alive on the entire planet, I had shot my own friend only hours ago to prevent him from becoming one of those undead creatures, and I was surprised I was getting the shakes?
I was more surprised that I wasn’t completely insane. We had actually had several cases of insanity amongst survivors up in Cold Lake. Some people just couldn’t take the strain. Was I one of them? I took a few deep breaths, and they were fairly steady coming out. The shaking in my hands was better. I suspected I’d be alright, but I made a mental note to go and see a counselor once we got back to Cold Lake. I closed my eyes and listened to the tires running over pavement.
* * *
Several hours later, I sat in the bed of the truck holding a steaming bowl of curried chicken and rice. We were parked on the road near the first turn off for Banff, a deserted and lonely stretch of highway that was clear of the undead for the few kilometers of it that we could see. Amanda and I had repaired clothing, cleaned weapons, and performed general maintenance while Darren cooked and Sanji walked the perimeter as a sentry.
When Darren called us for dinner I took my bowl and sat in the bed of the truck and tried to eat. My mind kept drifting, however, to images I really didn’t want to envision. Eventually I put my half eaten dinner aside and went to relieve Sanji. The sun was going down fast as I walked the route around the two vehicles. There were still no undead in sight, but we were very close to the town of Banff, which had fallen to the corpses long ago. There were many tall pines between the town and the highway, so we couldn’t see the actual town from here, but I knew where it was. Behind the town rose Sulphur Mountain, a dome shaped rock slowly eroding to wind and water.
A gondola rose from the base of the mountain just south of town up to a cash trap tourism center at the top of the peak. I looked up at the mountainside with my binoculars to see if I could spot the gondola. It took a moment, but I could just spot the cable cars rising in a line. They were painted red and blue, and stood out a little from the grey granite of the mountains, the green of the trees. The cables themselves were invisible at this distance, and in the thickening darkness the towers up the slope were unseen as well. How long would they last? Three years? Five years? Would rust and wind and water claim them this very winter?
It was getting colder. I zipped up my coat and pulled on my gloves as I walked. I started to regret leaving a bowl of hot food.
Three more laps around the vehicles, and I looked up at the gondola every time, trying to make it out in the gloom. On the fourth lap I looked up again, and for the second time that day I stopped dead. At the top of the mountain, near the tourist trap gift shop at the peak, there was a light shining.
* * *
The light was still on just before dawn when Amanda shook me awake. It had dimmed and flickered occasionally, but had never gone out. As Darren and Sanji stirred I took out my binoculars and looked up at the light, but like last night I was unable to make out much detail. The light was not in the building at the top of the mountain, but nearby. What it was illuminating was anyone’s guess.
None of the undead we suspected to be in the area had wandered this way during the night, so we had passed the night peacefully. When my shift on watch ended I had climbed into the back seat of the F-250 and stretched out as well as I could. I left my C7 in the front, and hung my Browning on the back of the passenger headrest. Sleep was uncomfortable and cold, and I dreamed of skyscrapers filled with cheese, for some reason.
After a quick breakfast of oatmeal and tea heated on a camp stove, we gathered between the vehicles to discuss our options. I looked up at the mountain top, and saw that the light was off. I wasn’t sure when it had gone out, but there was sunlight about a quarter of the way down the mountain now.
“It could be automated,” Amanda said, “just running on wind or solar power.”
Darren disagreed. “Nah, I bet there’s survivors up there. They got a generator running or something.”
“Where would they get food? I doubt much grows up there.”
“They could hunt,” he replied, “and get supplies from town if they’re careful.”
“And get it up there how?” Amanda asked skeptically. “I really doubt that the gondola still works.”
Sanji said, “There’s a service road that goes up the northwest side of the mountain. I’ve been up there, but it was years ago.”
We pulled out an old map of the area, with the highways on one side and local towns on the other. There was a small insert map of Banff there, but it wasn’t very detailed. I wished we had picked up more of the military topographical maps before we had left Cold Lake.
“It leaves from behind this parking lot, here at the end of Cave Avenue, and winds up the side of the mountain along the west. This way it was out of sight of the tourists.”
The road he penciled in connected to a parking lot at the end of the avenue. It ended at the top in a parking and loading area beside the building.
“So the question is, how badly do we want to go up there and see if there are survivors?” I asked.
They all looked at each other, then back at me. Darren spoke up first.
“Pretty fuckin’ badly, man.” He was practically hopping with excitement.
“I agree,” said Amanda, “It would be nice to see something good come out of this fucked up mission.” She was looking at the ground as she said this.
Sanji just nodded.
“Okay,” I said, “let’s think about this. Banff is very likely to be completely overrun. The only way to find out is to go in there.”
“Can we get to that road any other way?” Amanda asked. “This looks like we have to go right through town.”
Sanji pondered, and pointed to the map again. “We could go down Mt. Norquay Road, take a right at the train tracks here, and cross the river at the narrow point here.”
Amanda shook her head. “I’m not going in the water again. Once was enough.”
“Then the other option,” Sanji told us, “is to follow the Trans Canada back a few kilometers, across the river, and then try to get to the road on foot through the forest. That does not sound like fun to me.”
“Nor to me,” I said. I wanted the vehicles with us if at all possible. “What about a flare? Let them know we’re here. The zombies would never know where it came from.”
We pondered this, and no one had any serious objections except for Darren, who asked, “What if they’re like those raiders we met?”
He had a good point. Last winter we had run into a group of people east of Cold Lake. They had been a bandit gang, living by moving from place to place and stealing what they needed to survive. What set them apart from the other survivors we had encountered was that these bandits preyed on other living people.
Cold Lake’s policy was that any living human should do whatever they could to aid and assist any other living human they met. The zombies preyed on us because it was in their nature to do so. For living people to prey on other humans reduced them to a level below that of the undead, according to those in authority at Cold Lake and elsewhere. That meant that if we had proof that someone was guilty of preying on other living humans to survive, we had the authority to kill them. The actual written policy was a lot more politically correct than that, but that is what it boiled down to.
In the old days, before the dead rose, I had been against capital punishment. I had never believed that the state had the right to end the life of its own citizens. Now though, I agreed with capita
l punishment wholeheartedly. After what I saw last winter, the way the bandits had nearly killed Jess in a shootout, how they treated the women in their camp, and had even kept souvenirs from previous atrocities… well, if there were a group of like minded individuals atop this mountain, we needed to know about them so they could be neutralized. What I really hoped, though, was that they were just a group of normal survivors who had managed to survive all this time.
Ultimately, we decided to drive as far as we could down Cave Avenue, and then as far up the access road as the vehicles could go. How far we got would depend on whether the road had been maintained or not. I hoped it had been well maintained.
Clouds were moving in from the west as we discussed our options, and the temperature was falling. It looked like we might be getting more snow overnight.
I got into the F-250 with Sanji after we packed up, and we followed Darren and Amanda, who led the way in the Highlander. We turned onto the off ramp that led to Banff, and a few minutes later we came into sight of the town.
Just ahead of us was a two-lane bridge with a cattle guard on either side of it. The river beneath was ice covered and mostly in shadow. On the far side we stopped and stared, looking into the town ahead, completely stunned by what we saw.
Normally a town this size has quite the population of the undead. Small towns usually have a few dozen of the former residents walking around, or travelers who were trapped and died in them. Larger towns can have hundreds or even thousands of the undead, and the cities are nightmares with endless swarms of the walking corpses wandering through darkened streets and alleys.
Banff was different. There were corpses everywhere, but not one was standing, sitting or crawling towards us. Bodies lay everywhere. From here we could see a few blocks south to where the road curved away, and there were easily hundreds of bodies lying in view. Some were skeletal, and others still had frozen flesh clinging to icy bones. I didn’t bother counting the dead, there were just too many.
I took out my binoculars and looked at some of the nearer corpses. They all had massive head injuries or catastrophic burns. My stomach churned to look at them, and I lowered the binoculars and took a few deep breaths. The thought of how this slaughterhouse would smell in summertime made my skin crawl.
That wasn’t all. The destruction here wasn’t limited to the bodies of the dead. There were seven burned out cars and three torched minivans within view. A building to our left was a scorched wreck, and another looked like an explosion had blown out all its windows, and buckled the roof and doors. These were not houses, but the town’s RCMP offices and administration buildings. Other buildings were in similarly poor condition, and I wondered if the battle—for a battle it had to have been—had spread to the rest of the town as well.
Sulphur Mountain loomed before us, and after a few minutes of looking at the damage I got on the radio and called Amanda in the Highlander.
“Let’s move on. If we stop for anything, don’t get out. If we have to get out anyway, try not to touch anything.”
“Worried about disease?” she asked, her voice distorted and clipped by the radio speaker.
“With this many dead around, yes. Very much.” I was considering aborting this investigation, in fact. The subzero temperatures were the only reason I didn’t turn us around right then.
She started forward, and we drove through the scattered bodies, at times having no choice but to drive over them. We made a turn to the left, and came to the main commercial strip of Banff, the place where all the tourists and ski bums, snowboarders, and hikers eventually came to spend holiday dollars. It was in the same shape as the rest. Everything was wrecked, burned, or demolished. Bodies, hundreds more of them, lay all over the place. The snow that had fallen a few days ago was unmarked and lay like a pure white shroud over them.
What the fuck had happened here? The place was in such bad shape I doubted that any of the buildings were habitable. We passed three cars that were literally stacked one atop the other, leaning against a building wall. A police car was a burned hulk atop the pile, and there was a body inside, curled into fetal position, and charred black. Further down the road, a small pile of corpses lay in a tangled heap behind a makeshift barricade of furniture and sandbags. What could only be a huge spray of old blood and grey matter stained the front of a candy store, and just past that we could see hand prints on the walls of a fast food restaurant. Lots of prints, all bloody smears. Finally we reached the bridge above the Bow River, with Cave Avenue a right turn on the other side. It was here that we saw a few moving zombies. They staggered towards us, three of them, down a side street. They were a few hundred feet away, so we just kept going. The bridge shook unsettlingly as we crossed it, and I guessed that the battle here had damaged it. Adrenalin surged in my veins as the deck trembled, and I was extremely glad to be off of it.
We turned on Cave Avenue and drove towards the utility road at the end of it. There were only half a dozen or so bodies here, lying mute and still under snow and frost. The only tracks on this road were ours and those of small animals. The bodies of the dead were avoided, I noticed, by the animals.
Experiments in Cold Lake under very careful safety conditions had shown that almost all animals—from cats to weasels, dogs to birds—would avoid the undead if they caught scent of them. Attempts to train dogs to attack the undead had failed, but they could be trained to bark if they sensed the creatures. This was a mixed blessing, since the barking drew the undead to the sound while alerting the human handlers. Some dogs had been trained to nuzzle their handlers rather than bark, and that training was quite popular.
We reached the parking lot at the end of Cave Avenue less than a kilometer later. This used to be the jumping off point for tourists who wanted to hike, see the river, and take pictures of the small caves in the mountainside. There were five abandoned vehicles, parked near to each other on the river side of the lot, which was big enough for about fifty vehicles. Tall trees surrounded the lot on all sides. At the far end of the lot was the entrance to the utility road that ran up the back side of the mountain. A hinged metal gate stood open, and was prevented from swinging by two large cinderblocks placed on either side. The service road, like Cave Avenue and the parking lot itself, was free of tracks except those of birds and whatever small animals happened to not be hibernating. The snow here was fresh though, so it was possible that vehicles or people had passed this way fairly recently.
We had plenty of daylight still, so we all got out and looked around. The faint smell of decay caught my attention, and I started towards the abandoned cars, waving for Darren to follow me. Four of the cars were empty, with smashed windows and very old bloodstains on the seats and dashboards. Between the third and fourth cars there was a pile of bones, some splintered and broken. Inside the fifth car were the decomposed remains of a man, slumped over the steering wheel. His inanimate remains were nearly skeletal, with only a few bits of rotten flesh still clinging to his bones, covered by the uniform of a postal worker.
We took advantage of the stop to fill our fuel tanks from the last of our gas cans. We’d need to find more fuel if we were going to be out much longer. As it was, we had enough to get to the fuel depot just west of Calgary, but not too much farther.
We elected to take the vehicles as far as we could, but that we would stop before coming into sight of the clear area at the top of the mountain. From that point we would approach cautiously on foot. At the first sign that the undead had swarmed the area we would retreat to our vehicles and return to the highway. Sanji warned us that if this service road hadn’t been maintained it was highly likely to be impassable because of rockslides, fallen trees, or deep snow. On the other hand, if it had been looked after, it would be a good indication that there was someone alive at the top.
The clouds to the west had thickened and come a lot closer, and the indicator on the dash declared that the outside temperature had reached -9 Celsius. It had fallen five degrees in the last hour or so. I estimated i
t would be snowing on us by mid-afternoon at the latest, still several hours away. We set off again, in the same order as before, with Darren and Amanda leading the way. The snow was fairly thin on the road under the trees, and the surface was unpaved. We bounced a lot, and had to go fairly slowly. We passed piles of brush that had been pushed to the side of the trail, and I thought that if we had to turn around it could be a problem, since the road was only a single vehicle wide.
We drove for a few kilometers, startling birds, one small brown bear, and several deer. The deer fled, but the bear sat on its rump and watched us pass from its position a few dozen meters into the trees. After more than forty minutes of slow driving over roots and stones, we came to a fork in the road. The left fork went up the mountainside, and the right led deeper into the woods. We turned left.
The road began to climb the side of the mountain, doubling back on occasion. Fallen trees had been pushed aside in places, and piles of rocks and brush were seen to either side. We still saw no tracks marking the snow.
The trail switched back on itself halfway up, and we were treated to a fantastic view of the valley to the west. The road ran fairly straight now, and steeply up the side, with the mountain to our left and trees all around. The surface was still bumpy, but nothing these vehicles couldn’t handle. I checked the temperature again, and it said -11. Definitely chilly, but our winter gear was more than capable of keeping us warm in this.
We finally stopped near the tree line, just before the road left the cover of the pines. Sanji and I got into our cold weather gear, took up our weapons, and stepped outside. Our breath was visible, and the air was cold and dry.
We joined Amanda and Darren after locking the vehicles, and we all started walking up the road, through ankle deep snow. Amanda was carrying Eric’s C7 now, and we each had ammunition, spare food, water, and tools tucked into our packs, and I had my binoculars slung under my shoulder. Once we were out of the trees the road continued over windswept open terrain covered in small shrubs, rocks and boulders, and more snow. The road vanished over the crest of the rise ahead of us, and was unmarked by any tracks. We could see a chain link fence ahead of us and to the right of the road. It surrounded a small shack with a steeply angled metal roof. As we passed it we could see an intact padlock on the door and a single small window facing the gate in the fence.