Now it was all too late. And even though Wendell denied it, Charla couldn’t help but wonder if Chris’ hiding of this secret from Wendell had cost Chris his life. Wendell may not even realize his feelings had possibly swayed him in his actions – or inaction. But subconsciously, had Wendell used what he thought were feelings between his wife and another man as a deterrent to squeezing the trigger that could have saved Chris’ life?
It was a question she might never be able to answer. It was a question that even Wendell might not be able to answer truthfully. But he’d have to live with it. Both of them would.
Now, the revelation of Chris’ sexual preference could save her marriage. The problem was that Charla didn’t know if there was anything left worth saving. And if there was, did she even want to save it?
CHAPTER 3
Outside Riverport, Illinois sat a lonely single-story structure on the banks of the Illinois River. It was painted a chocolate brown that blended almost seamlessly with the river on which it sat.
A gravel parking area in front of the building bordered an ice-covered county road, devoid of traffic for months. Even before the Carchar Syndrome outbreak, the road was seldom traveled. It was mostly traversed by the occasional weekend recreation crowd. They used the pothole ridden road mainly to reach a nearby river rental business for tubing, canoeing, and kayaking, as well as to frequent this lowly brown building. The somewhat dilapidated structure was formerly a bar and restaurant named Rusty’s River Roadhouse – aka, Rusty’s.
In its current state, Rusty’s was just “Rust”, as the roadside signage had lost its last few letters due to neglect over the winter. And the appearance of the building certainly fit the bill.
Rusty’s was the only place that Dan could think of to lead his group of survivors after being ousted from their sanctuary in downtown Riverport. The spot was close to town, but not too close. And it was off the beaten track. Dan hoped this meant that the invaders wouldn’t stumble on the place unless it was through sheer dumb luck.
The tiny band of survivors, now the only survivors from Riverport, arrived at Rusty’s just as a grayish dawn began to break over the wooded landscape surrounding them. A vaporous mist rose from the river like the ghosts of former Riverport residents stretching themselves toward the heavens. The group was cold, tired, hungry, and disheartened as they straggled across the rutted gravel parking lot toward the roadhouse.
“So this is home?” Marta asked in her husky Polish accent.
“For the moment, I guess,” Dan replied.
“Looks good to me,” Ben said.
“Me too,” his wife, Jill, concurred.
“I’ll take just about anything at this point,” Brandon Durfner breathed heavily, carrying his dozing daughter, five-year-old Louise.
Even in the chilly morning air, Brandon was sweating. Louise had given up walking on her own about a half mile back. He and his wife Cara had traded the little one back and forth, sharing the burden of her slight, 35-pound frame.
The couple had been worrying for weeks about how the diminished diet on which the Riverport residents had been surviving might affect their daughter’s growth rate. Now, they found themselves simply hoping to be able to provide her with enough food to fill her belly.
The front door to the roadhouse stood wide open. The building’s front exterior was plastered with an array of antique road signs, motor oil and gas station advertisements, and other vintage bric-a-brac. Some of the decorative elements had detached and lay fallen on the ground. Several shingles had been torn from the roof or flapped forlornly in the wind.
“Careful, people,” Dan warned quietly as they approached the structure. “I doubt anyone’s here, but you never know with biters. They pick the damnedest places to bunk down.”
Everyone gripped their weapons tightly, ready for anything, especially after the night they’d just had.
“Cara, you and Louise stay back until we clear the place,” Brandon instructed his wife.
She accepted her daughter from Brandon and allowed the others to go ahead of her.
It didn’t take them long to clear the roadhouse. The place was indeed as empty as it appeared from the outside.
The group entered into a large barroom, the right side of which was filled with dusty chairs and worn tables, many of which had been knocked over or sat askew. To their left was a rectangular bar set against one wall. To the left of the bar were the restrooms. To its right was a swinging door with a circular window in it that led to the kitchen, walk-in refrigerators, and storeroom.
At the rear wall of the roadhouse’s main room, two glass doors exited to a sizeable wood deck overlooking the river.
“Any booze left over there? I could sure go for a drink right about now,” Ben asked as Dan inspected the bar area.
“Sorry. Bar’s closed,” Dan shook his head, holding up an empty whiskey bottle.
“Uh,” Cara, who had now made her way inside the abandoned roadhouse, hugged little Louise close up to her. “It’s freezing in here! I think it’s just as cold in here as it is outside.”
“Figures that it would be,” her husband said. “We’ll have to see if there’s anything we could use to heat this place…an old grill or something.”
Marta had come inside from exploring the attached deck. The space contained an array of patio furniture for outdoor seating, much of which was covered in twigs, fallen leaves, and un-melted ice and snow. Several umbrella-topped tables had succumbed to wind and lay toppled on their sides.
“There is fire pit outside,” Marta announced to the group. “We might gather wood and use for heat.”
“Good idea,” Dan said. “We can bring it inside and use it as our fireplace.”
“Gonna be hard to heat this big room, maybe we should think about setting up camp in the back portion of the building, where the kitchen and storeroom are,” Jill suggested. “The smaller space might make it easier to heat.”
“Help keep us out of sight too,” her husband added.
“Okay,” Dan nodded. “Let’s get the fire pit inside and a fire going. Then we should scavenge this place from top to bottom. Look for anything that might be of use before we go through the supplies we brought with us. Then we can start formulating a plan for how best to ration stuff once we have everything together.”
The group worked for the next twenty minutes, clearing out space in the kitchen and storeroom areas, collecting burnable material for their fire, and bringing the fire pit inside. But it didn’t take long for them to reach the conclusion that a fire pit indoors might work well for heat, but it wouldn’t make for the best air quality. Trying to vent the smoke out of the enclosed kitchen area from the circular fire pit was impossible. There was only one small window in the kitchen, facing out over the river. And without electricity, there was no way to run a fan or utilize the exhaust system over the kitchen’s commercial stove.
“When outside, I saw something might work better,” Marta spoke up. “There was big metal barrel by river.”
“I’ll check it out with you,” Dan offered.
After fifteen minutes of clearing away debris and struggling to get the barrel righted and up the riverbank, the two had the barrel inside the roadhouse. It was a steel, 55-gallon-drum with the top still intact.
“Must have floated down the river and washed up on the bank during a storm or something,” Dan offered.
The group maneuvered the drum inside the bar’s kitchen area.
“We can’t just leave it on the floor if we want to burn stuff in this,” Ben said. “If the bottom gets too hot when we’re burning stuff, it could set the floor on fire or burn right through it.”
“Hold on a second,” Dan hurried back outside.
He came back two minutes later carrying a cinderblock in each hand.
“If we put these underneath, it will elevate the barrel from the floor but still keep it stable.
“Good idea,” Ben said. “But what about venting the smoke from the fire?”
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“I was thinking about that,” Dan nodded. “We’re lucky that the barrel still has its top. See this?” he pointed to the top of the barrel at a three-inch opening that was filled with a metal plug. “We knock that out,” he gestured to the plug, “attach a metal tube, and run it out the window. We’ll knock another hole or two in the barrel for venting, and we should be good to go. It’ll be a pain in the butt to load wood into the thing, having to take the top on an off, but it’ll work for now. And try to use only dry wood. We don’t want to be sending out smoke signals to the world,” he added.
After nearly an hour of finding enough metal tubing or metal that was flexible enough to form into tubing, the group had a smoke stack formed for their drum stove, and a good fire burning inside it. They’d also accumulated a large pile of firewood that they’d stacked inside the nearby stockroom.
“All right people,” Dan announced. “We should probably take some time to search this place a little more thoroughly. Let’s start back here and work our way out. Grab anything you think could be of use. And if you aren’t sure, ask.”
The group broke up, scouring the deserted roadhouse, searching shelves, cabinets, drawers, beneath the bar, in and around refrigerators, and around tables and chairs.
They didn’t come up with much. The place had pretty much already been picked clean.
Their paltry take was laid out on one of the prep counters inside the kitchen. There was a box of small candles, a box of four AA batteries, two D batteries, a working flashlight, several books of matches, a few cigarette lighters, a couple six-packs of gel fuel, and two jars of olives discovered stashed underneath the bar.
Alongside these supplies, the group unloaded their packs and set out the goods they’d brought with them during their escape from Riverport. The six adults had managed to haul a combined 45 assorted canned goods, eight containers of dried pasta, beans, and rice, 26 bottles of water, six flashlights, and just under 300 rounds of assorted ammunition for their various weapons.
After everything was laid out, the group stood solemnly staring at their goods.
“Kind of a meager spread,” Cara ran a hand through her frazzled, shoulder-length brown hair.
“At least we have a steady water supply with the river just outside and plenty of pots and pans to boil it in,” Jill observed.
“Let’s get this stuff stashed somewhere safe,” Dan said. “We’ll leave out enough food for tonight and that’s it.”
“Why bother hiding it?” Brandon frowned. “Why not just put it in the walk-in refrigerator. Not like anyone’s around to take it.”
“Not right now,” Dan said. “But the walk-in fridge will be the most obvious place to look if we aren’t around or we’re temporarily forced out of here for some reason and people search the place. We want to make our stash as difficult to find as possible. And if we are forced out, we might be able to come back later, once the place is clear, and reclaim the stuff.”
“That’s a good point,” Brandon agreed. “But where do we stash it?”
Dan’s eyes floated to the ceiling.
Brandon followed Dan’s gaze up and over to a small access panel near one corner of the room’s ceiling. “Good thinking,” he nodded. “I’ll go get a chair to stand on so we can get up there.”
“Good,” Dan agreed. “I’ll repack the supplies we won’t be using into a couple packs that will make it easier to stash up there. Hopefully they won’t be so heavy that they come crashing back through the ceiling.”
Ten minutes later, the men had the supplies stashed in the ceiling and the access panel back in place.
“Not perfect, but it’s better than just leaving the stuff out in the open,” Dan dismounted the chair and moved over closer to where Marta stood beside the fire.
“I wouldn’t think of looking up there for food if I was searching the place,” Brandon admitted.
“Finally starting to warm,” Marta announced as she stepped closer to the fire barrel.
Dan picked up a chunk of broken tree branch from the floor beside the barrel. Then he found a set of metal cooking tongs placed on the counter nearby. He used them to lift the lid of the barrel just high enough to slip the wood inside, careful not to dislodge their jerry-rigged smoke stack in the process.
Suddenly there was a sad whine from behind Dan and a sniffling sound.
He, along with the rest of the group, turned to see Louise, clutching her mother’s leg, sobbing.
“What’s the matter, sweetie?” her mother knelt to hug her daughter close.
“Mommy,” she whispered into Cara’s ear, “I forgot Timmy. I left him on the bed.”
Timmy was Louise’s favorite stuffed animal, an eight-inch tall blue bunny with floppy pink ears.
“Oh, it’s all right,” her mother did her best to console. “I’m sure he’ll be just fine. He’ll probably be right where you left him when we go back home. I’ll bet he thinks we just went on vacation for a little while, like we did last year when we went to see Mickey Mouse. Remember that?”
Louise nodded, wiping a tear from her wet red eyes with the palm of her hand, and then using the back of her hand to rub at her runny nose.
Dan and Marta exited the kitchen along with Ben and Jill to give the parents some alone time with their little one. They could only imagine what Louise had gone through during the past few months. In a way however, they almost counted her lucky. She still didn’t have enough of a grasp on the situation to comprehend entirely what was happening to the world around her.
“Kids,” Marta shook her head with a quizzical look as she blew away a lock of hair that dangled down in front of her face. “Hours ago thirty of our people die, and she worries for her doll.”
“Must be kind of nice in a way. Wish I could forget a lot of the things I’ve seen over the past few months,” Dan said wistfully.
Ben stood a table up from where it’d been tipped on its side. Then he drew several chairs up around it and set his weapon on the tabletop before tiredly taking a seat.
The others joined him, slumping exhaustedly into chairs around the table.
“What I wouldn’t give for a warm bath and a glass of wine right now,” Jill groaned.
“So how long we here?” Ben asked Dan.
“A few days at least…maybe longer,” Dan answered.
“We should come up with a watch schedule then,” Ben sighed tiredly. He took a black knit-cap off his head and ran a hand through rumpled hair, pausing to scratch at his scalp for a few seconds in the process. “God only knows if those assholes back in town will come looking for us. They know people escaped. How bad they’ll want to find us is another question. They may not care that we got away. Then again…” he left his sentence unfinished with a shrug and a frown.
Suddenly, from the still unsecured front door, there came an all too familiar sound – a chattering, clattering type noise.
Those seated around the table instantly jumped up from their seats, screeching chairs back across the floor, knocking several over in the process.
“Biters!” Dan yelled toward the kitchen, grabbing his gun and aiming it toward the mass of biters crowding in through the roadhouse entrance.
CHAPTER 4
The metal fishing boat had washed up on the island directly across from the tower overnight.
“It’s a sign,” Ms. Mary said to Michael as they stood on the tower rooftop, staring out over the river.
It was bright, sunny, and the temperature was in the mid-40s. At their elevated position atop the tower, the stench wafting from below was less overwhelming. Even then, the scent of rotting waste and biter bodies below was detectable.
“It’s more than that,” Michael said. “It’s an opportunity. We need to find boats for our journey downriver; well, here’s our first. We just have to get it.”
“Yes,” Ms. Mary nodded. “That could be a problem considering it’s in the middle of the river.”
Michael pointed just past the remaining concrete of the f
ormer dam that led from the tower’s edge and jutted partway out into the river. “If someone walked along the remnants of the dam, I think the water gets shallow out there toward its end. Those rapids there,” he explained to Ms. Mary, “see how small and white-capped the waves are?”
“Mmm hmm,” she nodded that she did.
“That means that the water is relatively shallow there. I wouldn’t think that it’s more than two or three feet at its deepest point.”
“Deep enough to sweep someone off their feet if the current is strong enough or they slip,” Ms. Mary said.
“True,” Michael agreed. “We could tie a rope around them as a safety line.”
“And even though it has warmed up outside, that water is still going to be darn cold,” Ms. Mary went on. “Somebody falls in, and they’re risking hypothermia in minutes if we don’t get them back inside the tower fast.”
“I’m not saying it’s going to be a cake walk, but if they can get across, they could tie their safety line to the boat, climb in…”
“As long as the boat is in good shape,” Ms. Mary added.
“Right,” Michael conceded. “And then we could haul them back in the boat.”
“Sounds like a plan,” Ms. Mary nodded. “Question is, who will do it?”
“I will,” Michael said.
* * *
It turned out that Josh actually made the trip out to the island. And it worked out just as Michael had hoped. There were no problems from the biters that milled about the area. Michael had put snipers at several of the fourth-floor windows just in case the biters made an attempt to reach Josh, but none did. Some of them paused to watch Josh traverse the chilly waters, coming to stand near the river’s banks, but as Michael had surmised, none of them made an effort to enter the water.
There were no slips and falls by Josh into the river’s frigid waters. The water was actually shallower than Michael had thought. It only reached Josh’s knees at its deepest point.
The Last Bastion (Book 4): The Last Bastion Page 3