Harvest of Ruin (Book 2): Dead of Winter

by Mongelli, Arthur

  “Yeah,” Tim said, laughing, finally releasing the anxiety of the last few hours. “I think I remember something about that.”

  Two hours later, after much doubt and consternation, they found their way back to the group, nestled into the copse of trees. The joyous reunion was short and sweet, before the two men sought the warmth of their tents. They slept better that night with the trees trapping some of the heat among their boughs and blocking a portion of the terrible wind that swept across from the northwest.

  When the morning came, they decided to head northwest. They had all studied the atlas intently and came to the consensus that they had hit Canada somewhere between Port Stanley and Rondeau Park. From here, assuming they were correct, they would head northwards to sneak between Sarnia and London, Ontario. That was the worrisome part of the journey and they needed to take every precaution to avoid both cities. According to their map, there were some towns scattered across the swath of land they were headed, some that they would assuredly stumble upon, though, for the most part, it looked to be very sparsely populated. Unfortunately, without a compass, the few days they had spent on the ice left them with little sense of where they precisely were. Short of finding a town marker or road sign, they would remain in the dark regarding their exact whereabouts.

  Nick, Jen, and Christine left on the snowmobiles after a quick breakfast to scout ahead and set up the camp for the next night’s rest, just as they had done on the ice. The rest of the group milled about the trees, chatting lightheartedly. They were all glad to be off the open ice. The cold alone stole the strength from their muscles and the merciless, stark landscape sapped the hope from their hearts. From the look of the map they perused, they figured they would spend two nights on land before making the transition to Lake Huron. Will had warned them that Huron would not be frozen solid, as it was a much larger lake. As nervous as the idea of the open water made them, they were comforted by the lack of any metropolitan areas north of Sarnia. If they needed to travel on land, the towns past there seemed to be no larger than a thousand or two.

  *

  The winter’s snow setting in on Donner was both a blessing and a curse. The town averaged over six feet of snow annually, and without wasting gas on the gear needed to move and dispose of it, they were expecting drifts of up to twenty feet as the wind whipped through the valley. The first snowfall of over a foot made the roads leading in and out of town impassable to all but the most dedicated people. This meant that, with any luck, they had seen the end of attacks on the town.

  The undead, however, were not deterred by the weather. They continued to stream towards the town, providing a constant feeling of danger and unease among the townspeople. The undead stood out boldly against the endless white of the prairie, making those few that shambled up from the west easy to spot and dispatch. Unfortunately, most of the dead wandered in from the east and southeast, the direction of Fort Collins, Boulder, and Denver. The forested areas complicated things, making the dead harder to see against the earthen tones of the tree trunks and the shadows they cast.

  With the community’s food situation nearly settled, Tar was determined to get started on a perimeter fence to keep these roaming dead out, regardless of the weather. He sent out crews of men and women into the forested areas around the town to fell trees and create a barrier of sorts. There were a good amount of people skilled in the art of felling trees, so the results were better than he anticipated. The wall of overlapping timbers came together nicely, although painfully slowly. Along with the tree crews went a handful of ATVs to push and pull the trees in position, a couple people to keep hot food and drink available, and a few other hangers-on would invariably tag along.

  The construction wasn’t perfect by any stretch of the imagination. As it progressed, they could clearly see that the dead would still slip through in places, but they were satisfied that it would turn most of the dead away from the town. In the springtime, after the melt, they would get the earthmovers out to complete the wall and build the rampart.

  Tar knew that sending dozens of men out to labor in the cold would further strain their limited food, but now that Linda had found the root of infections, they had the opportunity to completely eradicate the undead from their town. That was an opportunity that Tar couldn’t pass up. He also figured the winter-long project might prevent one of the biggest problems that the long winters created. Cabin fever was always a problem in the winter and now, needing to conserve fuel, it would be much harder for people to venture out and be around others. The wall was an attempt to give people purpose over the long winter and prevent idle hands from doing the devil’s work.

  He knew that they would need to plow the main roads, the ones leading to the barricades and Heartland, and if Linda got the school up and running, but that would come later. For now, Tar, and most of the people in the community, wanted to relish the quiet onset of winter. Tar did so while smoking a cigarette and sipping some whiskey on his front porch. He intentionally pushed the thoughts of his impending visit to speak with Tyler Peterson from his mind and breathed in the silence of the snow.

  *

  It was to their great surprise, barely two hours later, when they heard the sound of snowmobiles coming towards camp. They got their weapons ready in case there was a problem. As soon as the first machine came over top of the hillock, they saw Jen waving frantically to them. Bjorn and Tim started running towards her as Christine and Nick crested the rise. About fifty feet north of the trees, the two groups met.

  “Oh fuck, we gotta go!” Jen yelled at them over the sound of the motor.

  “What is it?” Bjorn and Tim yelled back simultaneously.

  “A fuck-ton of them, fast ones and slow!”

  “Where is the gear?” Tim yelled at her.

  “We left it! We were setting up camp on the south shore of Huron when a ton, A TON - “ She paused as Chris and Nick brought their noisy machines up alongside her own.

  “There’s no way you made it all the way to Huron in that time,” Bjorn said accusingly to Jen. “Did you see any towns on the way?”

  “One…What was its name?” she asked looking at Nick and Chris.

  “Lakeshore, I think it was called…about twenty minutes southeast of where we started setting camp,” Chris replied

  Nick nodded in agreement of the facts.

  “I don’t remember that name from the map,” Bjorn said.

  “Well, you guys kept the fucking map! What the fuck were we supposed to reference?” Jen barked back, getting angry at receiving the third-degree from Bjorn. “Whatever the fucking place is called has no direct bearing on the shit-load of fucking undead that are headed this way. Now, can we get the fucking camp broken down and get the fuck out of here? Please!”

  She finished her tirade by screaming out the last sentence. First Nick, then Christine, and finally Jen pulled their sleds away from the men, moving back to the cluster of tents. Bjorn and Tim followed after, on foot.

  “Any idea where Lakeshore is?” Bjorn asked Tim.

  “Nope, doesn’t ring a bell.”

  By the time the two friends made it to the camp, everything was being broken down in a ramshackle mess. Nick was wadding up his tent as if it were soiled laundry going into the wash. Tent poles were strewn about everywhere. Will, who missed out on the panicked conversation, was yelling questions at everyone from where he sat. By the time everything was thrown haphazardly on the toboggans for transport, Will was having a borderline hissy-fit. He kept screaming “Answer me!” over and over again.

  They didn’t bother to sit on the snowmobiles by weight distribution; with most of their gear parked on some unknown lake, it hardly mattered. Tim rode with Laura and Luna, Will with Jen and Christine, while Bjorn rode with Sophie and Nick. As they all got settled in their seats, Bjorn grabbed the atlas they were arguing about twenty minutes earlier.

  “Which direction do we go? They will be coming from the northwest,” Jen called over.

  Bjorn held up a fing
er, scanning lower Ontario for a town called Lakeside, scanning the shoreline first then moving inland after nearly a minute of searching his finger jabbed hard into the map.

  “Fuck!” he growled.

  “What?” Jen asked with an edginess in her voice.

  She wasn’t normally the confrontational type, but after having to abandon most of their gear when an enormous crowd of undead descended on them, she was feeling a little defensive. Bjorn’s tone grated on her nerves. He flung the atlas in her direction, the pages flapping in the wind as it sailed through the air. She caught it under her elbow, pinning it against her side.

  “Twenty minutes northwest of Lakeside you said?” he asked derisively.

  Silence greeted him as she fumbled with the atlas to find the page. Finally, Nick spoke quietly.

  “Yeah, that’s what we said, twenty minutes, give or take.”

  Bjorn shook his head sadly.

  “Well, our gear is now resting comfortably on the south shore of Lake St. Claire just off the beautiful shores of sunny Detroit, Michigan.”

  Mouths dropped all around. Chris mumbled something from behind Jen and Will.

  “What?” Nick asked softly.

  “Five point seven,” she mumbled again, this time a bit louder.

  “Speak up, please,” Bjorn said, irritated that his self-righteous tirade was being interrupted.

  “Five-point-seven million people,” Christine said quietly. “That’s how many people live in the greater Detroit, Windsor area. I did a presentation about it last year. Five point seven.”

  The girl looked petrified as the words came out of her mouth. All of them did as the information settled, even Bjorn who had a full sail of outrage was silenced by the grim statistic. Finally, Jen broke the silence, her finger tracing a route on the atlas.

  *

  Three days had passed since Tar had given his rousing speech at Elsie’s when Sam Sr. walked into the ER of the clinic, where Tar was waiting patiently to speak to Linda. Linda was cleaning and stitching up Darla, who had gouged herself with a knife while cooking.

  “Sam,” Tar said, nodding in acknowledgment to the man’s presence, but turning back to the conversation he was having with Nala at the nurse’s station.

  “So, people outside, at the refugee camps are free to come and go. Isn’t that dangerous?” Nala asked.

  “You and Linda are two peas-in-a-pod, aren’t you?” Tar grumbled. “Listen, our resources are already spread too thin between manning the barricades and patrolling the town. Daltry is nearly on his feet again; maybe he can figure things out.”

  “And in the meantime, how many robberies, rapes, and murders are we turning a blind eye to?” Nala barked, angry at the man’s seeming indifference.

  Tar sighed heavily. It wasn’t that he hadn’t considered what the woman was stating; he just refused to send the townspeople outside the barricades since their completion. It was bad enough having random undead staggering in from the landscape around town, without sending his people out to them. Not to mention the risks inherent they would encounter with the people desperate to get within the safe confines of the town.

  “You’re right, Nala; those things are happening. I hope not often, but I’d be a liar if I said they weren’t. At the risk of sounding calloused, my primary focus is on saving this town, first and foremost. The people that I’d be sending out there to address these problems, into danger, are the people I’ve known either my whole life, or I’ve known them for theirs. I don’t know those people out there. That’s not to say I don’t care about them, but I can’t risk spreading us out any thinner.” Tar threw his hands up, exasperated. “If you can figure out a way to make them safer without placing my people in danger, I’d be glad to hear it.”

  “Tar?” Sam spoke quietly from the side.

  Nala, who was about to speak, deferred to Sam.

  “Yeah, Sam?” Tar said at length.

  “I think we need to talk.”

  “About what, Sam? I think I was pretty clear where we all stood in the meeting.”

  “About Tyler and his clan.”

  Tar spun to take a measure of the man at the mention of Tyler. Sam looked nervous.

  *

  “North. We head straight north until we hit Quinn,” Jen stated, never looking away from the atlas. “Then we cut northwest so we can avoid Tilbury. Hopefully, the dead will sweep south of us, leaving a clear shot to get back to the gear.”

  Finishing her statement, she closed the atlas and slid it under her butt and hit the throttle on the snowmobile. The others followed behind, using her track-marks to have an easier ride. The anxiety about their proximity to Detroit was palpable. After the tense bickering leading up to their departure, it was good that the sounds of the engines drown out any attempts at conversation. Each was left to their own worries and sorrows about what lay in the next pasture or over the next hill. As the morning dragged on without event, the tension began to dissipate, and was slowly replaced by the weariness of nearly a week of travel in the barren wastes. They had been traveling for close to two hours when they broke for their first rest.

  “What now?” Bjorn asked Tim.

  “Jen’s course seems spot on, so far,” Tim replied, shrugging his shoulders.

  “Are we really going back towards Detroit?”

  “Hmmm…” Tim trailed off.

  With the panic and rush of their departure, he hadn’t considered the ramifications that their lack of supplies presented them with. None of them wanted to risk going back towards Detroit, even though that was the course before them. To avoid it, though, would mean resupplying somewhere else. Along with their fuel, three out of their four tents and most of the rest of their supplies they had gathered to make their way across the ice was now sitting on Lake St. Claire. Thinking about it clearly, he recognized they were only left with two options.

  “Our only other choice is to resupply elsewhere, meaning we’d need to make a trip into a town,” he offered meekly.

  Bjorn nodded, having already come to that conclusion.

  “What are our chances of coming across a well-stocked outdoor shop here in rural Ontario?” Bjorn replied, taking a hard look at his friend before continuing. “My guess is that we would need to go to Windsor to find what we need.”

  Tim walked off in silence to digest. Either of the two options meant bringing their families closer to that dreaded number that Chris had been chanting like a mantra earlier that morning. Five-point-seven. Jen moved over to Laura to check on her and Luna as Tim moved across the barren snow-scape, towards a line of trees edging the pasture they were resting in. He needed a few moments of solitude to breathe in peace and let the fatalism he felt leave him before he returned to his family.

  Bjorn watched his friend with a look of sadness, wondering how many more miles they had before their luck ran out. They had survived, barely making it out of danger so many times that at this point it just seemed to be a matter of odds. Now, their only chance of surviving another day seemed to be by driving their noisy snowmobiles to within a mile or two of a few million undead. Bjorn shook his head clear and stalked off to spend some time with his daughter, the only family he had left.

  Tim stood amid the line of trees at the pasture’s edge and stared into the horizon. His thoughts were much the same as Bjorn’s, pondering how long and at what sacrifice he would be able to keep his family safe. A moan drifted to his ears, immediately snapping him from his laments. He looked down into the irrigation ditch a few feet in front of him. At the bottom was one of the dead, its legs frozen in ice up to the knee, it clawed weakly at the walls of the ditch. The thing turned its rotting head, the skin pulled taut over its skull and its milky eyes stared blindly about. The dead eyes fixed on him and the thing let out a moan, louder than the ones previous.

  The sounds of a flock of birds taking flight from a nearby copse of trees snapped Tim’s attention from the dead thing in the pit. Looking toward the cluster of trees, he could see the silhouette of
a human form outlined against the snow-clad conifers. As he watched a few more indistinct shapes became clear, all facing him. The ensuing series of roars snapped him out of his curiosity and he ran, as fast as he was able through the knee-deep snow back to the snowmobiles.

  “Go! Go! Go!” he screamed as he ran.

  There was a flurry of activity ahead as everyone scrambled to get back on the machines. As he neared, two of the snowmobiles tore away, leaving Laura with Luna nestled securely in her oversized coat, frantically yelling for him to hurry. Tim leapt on and Laura twisted the throttle, nearly toppling him off the back as the thing roared to catch up to the others.

  Tim watched as nearly a dozen fast dead tore across the field as quickly as any human through the deep snow. The tension and anxiety of his flight from the dead started to ebb, and the relief washed over him in the form of nervous laughter, drawing a scathing look from his wife. Bjorn led the pack, pulling atop a raised roadway. A sign indicated that it was Route 4, and with the windswept road virtually clear of snow, they were able to increase their speed greatly, leaving the pursuing dead far behind. Ten minutes later, Bjorn stopped his machine at an intersection with Route 1 where he waited for the others to pull alongside. Jen had the atlas out and, after a moment of study, led them straight across the intersection, into a snowy pasture. They rode on for another hour like this, stopping at nearly every road they came across so Jen could realign their course.

  Each time they stopped, they could hear the telltale roars of the dead to the south and sometimes to the west of them. Were it not for the speed of the machines on the open roads, they would have thought they were being paced by the things. The knowledge that the speed they traveled far outpaced the dead, even the fast ones, told them of a mass of undead greater than anything they had seen thus far.

  The urgency they felt was reflected in the speed they traveled at, and just west of Saint Joachim, they turned straight north. This was the last leg of their trip and they made for Lake St. Claire as fast as the machines could take them. Finally, only a row of houses stood in the way of their final approach to the lake. Bjorn picked a course and tore through the shrubbery between two homes, not slowing as he came out onto the ice beyond. He was followed in rapid succession by Jen and Laura’s machines. The ice ahead was clear and free of any sign of the dead.