The orange hat poked around the edge of the bridge, and a pair of gloved hands beckoned for us. Michelle and I nodded at each other, and then guardedly sidestepped out of the shallow stream bed. When we crested the low overpass, it became much more apparent over what had caused the traffic jam. There was an upside down station wagon sandwiched between a pair of pickup trucks—the trio further complicated by somehow wedging themselves halfway in the body cavity of an old panel van. The smell of automotive lubricants—transmission fluid and gear oil primarily—still reeked in the area. On the back side of the panel van, the boy with the orange hat stood warily next to another young man of about the same age . . . maybe a little younger. The younger one sported a bomber style jacket that looked a few sizes too large, and a leather hat with a pair of furry flap ear covers. For the moment, the other two that we had noted remained hidden.
I studied the pair of them briefly as we all stood in silence. Both of the boys were scruffy, and came fully equipped with faces and hadn’t seen a bar of soap in a long time. Orange Hat stood tense but still as our eyes met. The boy in the bomber jacket, however, looked extremely jumpy and ready to bolt in a flash.
“Where’s your friends?” I asked.
Bomber Jacket shifted his eyes briefly to the right toward the station wagon, but neither said anything.
I tried again. “Boys, I’m Officer Coleman, this is Officer Owens.” My words were at a normal level for conversation, but the one in the orange hat widened his eyes and raised a finger to his lips. Pointing with his other hand to the binoculars that still hung on their cord around my neck, he motioned for me to look to the south. I slid to the side and immediately saw what was causing the boys anxiety. The traffic snag continued on for at least a half mile, but my eyes were immediately drawn to a churning pack of infected that spiraled and gushed in a loose mob about 200 yards away. There were easily over 150 individuals in the swarm, and they seem to undulate and pulse around a central core of . . . something.
I slid back and silently indicated for Michelle to take a look. The expression on her face when she pulled back mirrored mine.
Turning toward the boy in orange hat, I whispered, “I see what you mean.”
He nodded curtly, and his eyes searched both Michelle and I in a split second, lingering briefly on the ammunition in our tac vests.
“Got any .38 ammo you can spare?” The boy’s voice was slightly shaky, and reminded me of someone who was too young to wear the crown of authority that had been placed on them.
I shook my head. “No, neither of us are carrying a .38.”
Before I could continue, he blurted out, “What about .270 . . . or 20 gauge?”
I shook my head to both.
A frown appeared on his face, deepening into a scowl of resigned disappointment.
“We’ve got some .22 and 5.56 ammo. We might be willing to part with a very small percentage of it if you have something that will shoot it.
He shook his head no, and then cast a sideways glance toward the boat. “What about food . . . can you give us some food?”
Michelle and I looked at each other, both of us obviously calculating all we’d already given away to Tater and Mia. I held her eyes, silently willing for her to make the call. After a moment, she turned toward the boy with the bomber jacket. “Have all of your friends come out here, and we’ll make a trade for some food.”
The two boys stared at each other briefly, and then the one in the orange hat low-whistled a passable imitation of a Ring-necked pheasant. Another pair of boys, both of them wearing tattered baseball caps, crept out from behind the station wagon. They were younger than the two in front of us, although not by much, and both were armed—a bloody bat and machete dangled loosely in their hands.
Michelle repeated our names, and then turned toward the orange hat leader. “We can give you four of our freeze dried food pouches. Do you have a way of boiling water?”
All four of them nodded briskly.
“In exchange for the food, I’d like a quick—really quick—rundown of what you’re doing here.”
The boys traded fleeting looks with each other before the one with the orange hat spoke. “Ma’am, we’re just trying to find some stuff that we can use. Food and whatnot, I mean.”
“Where are you staying?” I asked.
The boy with a machete chimed in. “At that farm over there. There’s a basement in the backyard with a metal lid that we can lock from the inside. That’s where my sister and the others are.”
Bomber Jacket gave an exasperated whisper. “I told you, it’s not a basement, it’s a root cellar.”
“What others?” Michelle and I echoed.
The boy with the orange hat pointed towards the one with a machete. “His sister is there, and two other kids that made it out of the traffic last week.”
“There’s seven of you in the root cellar?” Michelle asked.
The haunted look in the four boys’ eyes accompanied the pause before their leader answered. “We have seven left.”
I let that settle in. Like so many other things that were erupting through the chaos of my mind lately, it briefly tugged at my heartstrings before becoming lost in the limbo of unreality.
We walked with the boys down to the creek bank, careful to not expose ourselves any longer than necessary to the swarm in the traffic jam, and Michelle fished out seven Mountain House food pouches. I reached into one of our dry bags and pulled out a box that contained 100 rounds of .22 ammunition. “Have any of you shot a .22?”
Three of them nodded.
“If you happen to find one, this ammunition should work for it.” I looked south, once again enough below the grade that the large group of ghouls was out of my vision angle. “Don’t go anywhere near them, and don’t go anywhere at night. There’s a chance,” I continued, “that Officer Owens and I will be back through this way sometime in the next day or two. If so, we’ll stop at the farm and knock on the root cellar door to check on you, okay”
“OK . . . thank you, sir.”
The four of them stood on the bank and watched as Michelle and I stepped into the bass boat. One of the boys with a baseball cap whispered after us. “Mr. Coleman . . . why is this happening?”
I looked from eye to eye along the line of boys, silently shaking my head. “I don’t know, guys . . . I just don’t know.”
Silent waves from their dirty hands followed us as we drifted out. I let the current catch hold, and we laid down and used the paddles to push off the underside of the bridge as we drifted through with barely a foot to spare. On the other side, the creek narrowed and deepened, and we let the water pull us silently downstream. Neither of us spoke until the bridge was lost in the distance behind us.
“How much food do we have left?” I asked.
“Are you mad at me?” Michelle didn’t turn around as she answered.
“Not at all, I just want to keep it squared away in my head.”
“We have three packs of hot chocolate, about a dozen tea bags, one freeze dried portion of spicy enchiladas, and a foil packet with about two-thirds of a strawberry Pop-Tart left.” I was still looking at her back as she replied.
“Frosted?”
“What?” Michelle half turned.
“Is the Pop-Tart frosted?”
“Of course.”
I reached behind and pulled the starter. The engine chugged to life and idled steadily. “I’ll take the Pop-Tart,” I said . . . “you can have the enchiladas.”
This time she turned to face me. The slight smile creasing her lips was a welcome sight, but it wasn’t reflected anywhere else on her countenance.
I tried again. “How about if we play rock paper scissors, only the loser has to eat the enchiladas?”
This time her smile was genuine. “Deal,” Michelle said.
I dropped the motor into gear and increased our pace downstream. The pangs of hunger that already ricocheted from my gut were swallowed down. A short time later they were forgotten a
s we passed the first body that bobbed in the shallow riffles at the edge of the creek. It was a child—an infant—still strapped in its car seat. But the time we reached Silver Lake, we had lost count of the dead.
Chapter 46
I took the blade of my paddle and nudged the drifting form that rippled at the lake’s surface. It was an adult female dressed in a water darkened, pastel flannel shirt and long skirt. Her forearms and calves were visible below the breeze-chopped swells of Silver Lake, and the exposed skin still had a putty cast to it. Most of the bodies that we passed were concentrated where the mouth of the creek entered the southwest edge of the lake. Some were visibly wounded, others were unscathed as far as we could tell. Looking northward, the small lake stretched out for over a mile, but our path was going to take us eastward toward the narrow fingers that widened into bays as they entered Pelican Lake.
“They had to have washed down from the bridge,” Michelle said, her face crinkled in disgust at the sight of so many corpses.
“Maybe. I saw a couple that looked like they’d been hit by gunfire, but most of those,” I poked the paddle toward the dozens that lined the reeds near the mouth of the creek we’d come out of, “look like they drowned.”
I idled the boat further away from shore before dropping it in neutral. Michelle swiveled on her seat to face me as I reached into my backpack and fished around, coming up a moment later with a pair of granola bars that were perhaps a bit flatter than when they left the factory. Another dive into the pack scored my one and only Dr. Pepper. A final reach brought up a bottle of root beer—Michelle's favorite brand coincidentally. OK, maybe not so coincidentally. I watched as her eyebrows rose at the sight of my smuggled goodies, and then I tossed the granola bar and root beer towards her.
Turning to the east I said, “From here we should be able to cruise. The engine on this boat is way undersized . . . twenty-five horsepower isn’t going to make it plane, even with the light load we’ve got, so we’re looking at a top speed of maybe twenty miles per hour, but it will suck fuel if we keep it pegged, and we’re not sure if we’re going to have to take it all the way to your dad’s cabin and back. We won’t know that until we get to the ranger station and see if we can ‘acquire’ a patrol boat. Anyhow, I’m going to try and keep it around fifteen to save gas. From this point, we’ve got about a mile and a half until we reach a narrow bay. From there we’re going to shift to the southeast through the bay for about two miles until we reach the main body of Pelican Lake. From that point, we’re still going to head basically southeast across the lake for about, oh, almost five or so miles I guess. There’s a large island—actually, it used to be a peninsula until the lake level rose—that sits right in our path. North Dakota Highway 19 crosses that island. If we work our way around the upper side of the island, we’ll cross underneath the highway and into Oswald’s Bay. From there we’ll continue curling to the south, and then a little bit west until we come to the point on that island where the Pelican Lake ranger station is.”
I took a bite of my granola bar, chewed it a few times to get some saliva flowing, and then washed it down with a generous swig of my soda before I continued. “From here, not counting any detours—which I hope we don’t have to make—it should be a total distance of about a dozen or so miles to the ranger station.”
Michelle finished her snack and nodded, swishing a mouthful of the caramel colored, foamy liquid between her cheeks before she answered. “Twelve miles . . . fifteen miles an hour give or take . . . we’ll be there in about an hour.” She glanced upward as she finished. “We should still have a little bit of light left.”
“I hope so.” I dropped the engine into gear and twisted the throttle. Immediately, the boat leapt forward and accelerated, smoothing out into a comfortable cruising speed as we headed east. I finished off my Dr. Pepper, belched once, and then zipped up my jacket and ducked my chin against the cold wind.
Chapter 47
Pop . . . . . pop-pop-pop-pop . . . The gunfire in the distance sounded disturbingly impotent, like a pack of dew-dampened firecrackers you’d give to a younger cousin on July 5th. As the latest series of tiny explosions echoed across the bay, Michelle turned to me. “That’s got to be rimfire . . . you think they’re out of any heavy artillery?”
“Actually, I’m wondering who ‘they’ are. Unless somebody had the same idea that we do, there shouldn’t be anybody there.”
We were both studying the ranger station through our binoculars. It was still about a half mile away, and the rapidly fading light hinted that our arrival would coincide with darkness.
“I don’t see any boats . . . do you?” Michelle asked.
“No, but you wouldn’t from here. The dock from the ranger station juts out behind that bank of cattails. We won’t be able to tell if any of the patrol boats are there until we get right up on it.”
“But if they’re there, you have the keys for them, right?”
“Um . . . no. I said I had keys for the ranger station. The keys for the patrol boats should be inside hanging on a wall . . . also the keys for the fuel depot . . .” I trailed off as I tried to picture the exact set up in my mind.
Another pair of tiny pops traveled faintly across the water as I frowned in concentration.
“What?” Michelle jabbed quickly, obviously as tired of complications as I was.
“I don’t know why I didn’t think of this earlier, and it might end up being a non-issue, but it takes two people to refuel the boats, although I suppose you could do it with one if you had to.”
Her silent stare greeted my eyes as I continued. “The fuel depot used to be located right next to the dock. Last summer, one of the tanks developed a leak and dropped about 200 gallons of gas. Most of it was caught by the containment wall, but enough got into the lake that the EPA got involved. Anyhow, they made us put in a new fuel depot. It’s now about sixty feet away from the dock, and one person holds the nozzle while the other person turns the crank.”
“Well, let’s just hope that the boats are there and already fully fueled.” Michelle sighed as a solitary gunshot made it to our ears. I nodded and opened the throttle, turning the boat in a tight half circle before bee lining toward shore.
The last vestiges of twilight faded as we nosed around the cattails, and I kept the motor chugging along at a crawl as Michelle searched the area with her night scope. When we crested the point where the thick clumps of russet colored stalks finally gave way to the deeper lake bottom, the squat silhouette of the Pelican Bay Ranger Station came into view.
Rebuilt just a few years ago at a minimal cost to taxpayers, the station was a simple block construct about thirty feet on a side. The sloping metal roof dropped from a height of twenty feet at the back to only a dozen or so above the front, and only, door. Two pairs of windows broke the monotony of the blocks, and were interspaced on the front side, halfway between the door and the corners of the building. A single mast antenna rose above the metal roof, eclipsing it by at least eight feet. Surrounding the building in a haphazard oval pattern was a thick spray of coarse gravel that served as the station’s parking area, and branching off from the gravel was another chert roadway that followed a slow arc before ending at the storage facility—a metal sided pole building with a pair of large garage doors in the front. It was used to store the patrol boats during ice over, and housed the snow machines and ATV’s that were brought in for seasonal use. Surrounding the complex were a half dozen metal light poles topped with high intensity floodlights—another similar light was mounted at the roof peak of the maintenance building. Like everything else, they were dark and silent.
The murky shadows of the cattails and my memory were enough for me to navigate into the cove, and I backed off the throttle entirely, letting the boat drift for a moment.
Michelle’s excited voice came back in a hissed whisper. “Both of the patrol boats are here, although one of them is beached pretty high up on the bank, like somebody ran it straight up the launch.”
As I powered up my night scope and tried to steady myself in the slightly rocking bass boat, Michelle kept up her descriptive play by play. “I don’t see any movement, but if I’m looking at this correct, there’s a form—a body—crumpled below the far right window. Check that—I’ve got movement coming around the left side of the building.”
Fade to Grey (Book 2): Darkness Ascending Page 47