Sympatico Syndrome Trilogy Box Set

by McDonald, M. P.

  As the door opened, Hunter recoiled, turning away as he coughed and wiped the back of his hand across his eyes.

  “What is it? Dead bodies?” Cole hated finding corpses but he was becoming used to it. At this point, the presence of one didn’t automatically make a site a no-go. Most would be decomposed now and what was left, frozen.

  Hunter shook his head. “No. Worse. It smells like a hundred cats pissed in here!”

  Cole moved forward as Hunter grabbed a clean lungful of air in the garage. Prepared for the stench, he still blinked hard as the ammonia from what reeked like giant litter box assaulted his eyes, making them burn. Whatever was in the house was ruined by the stench of cat urine. Just as he turned to leave, a pitiful mewl caught his ear. Could a cat be living inside? There was no way one would have survived this long. Feeling silly, nonetheless, he called out a soft, “Here, kitty!”

  “You heard a cat?”

  “Maybe. I heard something.”

  They listened for a moment. Nothing. But it wouldn’t hurt to have a quick look around. The odor wouldn’t kill them.

  With Hunter close behind, Cole moved forward into the home, surprised to find everything neat and tidy except for the smell. The kitchen counters had a thick layer of grime, but unlike many of the other homes he’d been in, only a scattering of rodent droppings. Most of the other homes they had been in had been a mess.

  With so much food available to mice and rats, the population of both rodents had exploded since the virus. It had been one advantage to being on the island. While mice had hitched rides to the island over the years in boxes or what have you, what they had was just a routine infestation. Occasional traps had taken care of most of them.

  The mainland was a different story. The combination of dead bodies to feed on, unprotected cabinets, and pantries full of boxes and bags of food had allowed the rodents free rein. But here, it was different.

  His hopes rose and he opened a cupboard. The top shelf held boxes of cereal, but all three had been opened at some point. He looked at them more closely— from the way the tops were tucked closed they had to have been opened before the virus. However, the bottom shelf held large plastic canisters of flour, sugar, and rice. He opened the canisters, alert for signs of contamination, then grinned. They looked pristine. What he found wasn’t something that would last them more than a week or so, but he would never pass on padding their meager supplies. He hefted the flour canister and guessed it held at least five pounds. He did the same with the others.

  The occupants of the house must have tried to stock up to some extent because all of the containers were full with about five pounds of white sugar, three one pound bags of brown sugar, and the last canister held five pounds of brown rice in bags. All were unopened and stuffed in the canister. As a bonus, he spotted a large bottle of molasses, one of corn syrup, and the best of all, a large jar of honey. These people really must have had a sweet tooth, and he imagined a dollop of honey on one of Piper’s biscuits. His mouth watered as he set his finds on the counter.

  Before taking anything from the shelves, he grimaced at the nasty condition of the countertop, unwilling to set good food onto a dirty counter. He checked under the sink, and sure enough, there was a spray bottle of disinfectant. He gave the counters a few squeezes, the orange scent filtering through his mask but not quite eliminating the urine stench.

  A roll of paper towels still hung on a holder attached to the cabinet beside the sink and he reached for it without thinking. Until he did think. He thought about the person who put the roll on the wooden dowel and set it back on the brackets. He could almost feel his or her presence, imagining them hanging a roll of paper towels, making sure the roll spooled from the bottom, not over the top. It was such a mundane action and yet someone had put the roll up months ago probably with no inkling it would be the last one they would ever hang. His throat tightened for a few seconds before he shook off the melancholy thoughts. He ripped off a wad of towels and wiped the countertop.

  “Hey, Dad—cans!” Hunter carried an armload of canned food over to Cole’s clean counter. “Look.” He tapped the tops of the cans one by one, reading the labels with each tap. “Beans, pumpkin, tuna, salmon, and even cherry pie filling!”

  There were more but Hunter didn’t recite all of the contents. He dashed back to the pantry, returning with a dozen more cans. Tuna, baked beans—large cans—and, Cole peered at three of the cans. Butter? He didn’t even know butter came in a can. He added butter to his imaginary honey-topped biscuit. Now Cole was certain that the owners had tried to stock for at least a short time. Perhaps they had hoped to survive for a few weeks, praying the virus would have run its course by then.

  “And the piece de resistance…” With a flourish Hunter set two large tins down, their teardrop shape instantly recognizable. “Ham!”

  Cole laughed. “Well done.” His own finds were boring in comparison. “I found flour, sugar, and rice.” He opened the cabinet beside the one with the canisters and found an array of baking goods. These sort of evened the score, if they were keeping score. He slapped the back of his hand against Hunter’s shoulder as his son blew dust off the tops of the cans. He pointed to the bottles in the cabinet. “Check it out.”

  There were a fair number of little brown bottles of various extracts and flavorings, and a large bottle of vanilla. Piper would be thrilled. He added a can of baking powder, another of cornstarch, and large box of baking soda to his collection on the countertop. They’d have to start moving these out to the SUV or he’d have to clean another countertop.

  “Cool. There are more cans, too. I think I saw soups and chicken stock. They haven’t even expired yet.”

  Cole threw his hands up in mock surrender. “Okay, I give up. You win.”

  Hunter’s eyes danced above the edge of his mask. “I didn’t know it was a competition, but if it is, then you win hands down because you picked this house to stash your buck.”

  “True.”

  The day was proving fruitful as they carried their finds out to the SUV. There were no signs of the homeowners, but Cole poked his head into an office off the kitchen dining area and noted the diploma on the wall from a medical school. Another was for physical therapy. So, the couple who had lived here had worked in healthcare—that would have put them on the front lines. Now the minor stockpiling made sense—they had an inside look at what was happening, but it also explained why the owners weren’t here to use their supplies. They had probably succumbed in the first wave.

  Sorrow pressed against the back of Cole’s throat again. He had to stop doing this. Stop trying to piece together victims’ last moments and what they had been like. It would drive him slowly insane if he let it. Every time he tried to fall back on his training and consider the victims casualties—statistics—he was confronted with evidence that real people with real lives were gone. And right now, he was faced with the evidence from this home when his eye landed on a photo perched on the desk of a smiling, middle-aged couple. Other pictures around it included small children. From the look of the images, some were probably their own children and the newer images, grandchildren. Cole shut the door, wincing when it slammed harder than he’d intended.

  “Everything okay, Dad?” Hunter poked his head out of the pantry, where he continued to rummage through rodent damaged boxes of pasta, cake mixes, and other items.

  “Yeah. Just expected the hinges to be rusty or something, I guess, and pulled harder than I meant to.”

  Hunter tossed aside a can of cat food then seemed to think better of it. “Buddy might like this.” He reached into the cabinet and found a dozen more cans.

  “I’m going to head upstairs and see if there’s anything useful up there—there could be some medications in the bathroom or something.” Middle-aged folks might have had a lot of medication on hand for ailments. At least, he hoped they had.

  He took the stack of clean sheets in the linen cabinet. Since they had plenty of room in the vehicle, he wasn’t a
verse to taking items that weren’t necessarily important for survival, but these sheets were in great condition and it would allow them to tear some of the ragged sheets that had been on the island when they arrived, into bandage strips, or cut them down for crib sheets. He grinned at the thought.

  After ransacking the medicine cabinet of the usual assortment of pain meds, left over antibiotics, sleeping aids, and ointments for a variety of skin conditions—all tossed into a pillowcase he’d pillaged from the linen cabinet, he turned to look in the bedrooms when he heard it.

  This time there was no mistaking the noise. It was the sound of a cat, or possibly a young kitten judging from the weak sound. He set the pillowcase and other linens on a hutch at the top of the stairs and headed towards the meow. It seemed to come from one of the bedrooms, and from the look of it, the main bedroom.

  The bed was unmade, but not torn apart. It looked as if it had been slept in just the night before, and Cole stilled. Was someone still living here? Were they stealing food from other survivors? But he hadn’t seen any other signs of life and the deer hadn’t been disturbed since he left it there last night. This couple was never coming home again. If they could have, they would have been here. They must have been out, perhaps at work or even out getting more groceries, when the virus had hit them. They even could have been caught in one of the many pileups on the highways. The bedroom looked so eerie though—like he had stepped into a time warp from the year before.

  The covers of the bed were tossed back on each side and one of the pillows was still hollowed out in the middle. The other pillow had a matted ring of fur. There was so much, at first he thought it as a dead animal, but then he realized it was only fur that had been shed.

  The moment it sunk in, he put the pieces together. A cat must have lived in here since the virus. There was no other explanation for the sound and for the ring of fur. As neat as this home was, there was no way the owners would have slept on a pillowcase coated in cat fur.

  “Hey, Dad! Look what I found!”

  There was a note of excitement in Hunter’s voice. As he turned to head back downstairs, he caught the twitch of an orange colored tail beneath the end of the bed. He got on his hands and knees and spotted a dangerously thin orange tabby.

  He held out a hand but the cat hissed and backed further under the bed. Cole straightened and sighed. The last thing he wanted to do was scare the poor thing, but he couldn’t leave the animal here to starve.

  Hunter entered the doorway, his arms crossed over his abdomen. “Look! I found a kitten!”

  Cole did a double take. Two of them? He glanced at the little head that peeked over Hunter’s forearm. A scrawny gray cat with green eyes stared back at him. “I think I found his friend under the bed.”

  “No way! Really?” Hunter started to enter, but Cole waved him back.

  “Wait. This one is scared. Can you grab one of those cans of cat food and bring it up here? I might be able to lure it out.”

  It took Hunter only a minute to return, two cans in hand. “One for your cat and one for mine.” Already he was claiming them. Cole chuckled as he popped the top off a can of salmon, or rather, delicate salmon pate in natural juices. He shook his head at the absurdly fancy description—as if a cat cared.

  As soon as the top popped, Hunter’s cat meowed and squirmed to get down, and so Cole pulled the top off the second can and set it on the floor. Hunter let his cat down and the feline went straight to the can, gulping it down.

  Cole’s cat meowed plaintively but it took her a full minute to finally come from under the bed and approach Cole. He took a scoop of the food out with a couple of fingers and held it out to the cat. “Here, kitty. I won’t hurt you.”

  The cat licked its lips and finally stretched its nose out to smell his fingers, a tiny tongue darting out to get a taste. Overcome with hunger, that was all it took before the cat was literally eating from Cole’s hand.

  The cats slowed them down as one of them had to stay with them in the SUV while the other loaded, but they took turns and soon, they were on their way to check on Steve’s group.

  “How do you suppose they survived so long?” Hunter cuddled the gray cat while the orange one lay in a makeshift container created from an open plastic bin with a light blanket over the top.

  Cole grabbed his sunglasses from the holder on the roof of the car, squinting as the sun glinted off the snow. “When I went downstairs to look around, I saw what was left of a huge twenty-five pound bag of food in the only dry corner of the basement. I think they ripped into it and ate that.” He remembered the frozen patches of ice on the cement floor, but not all of it was frozen—there was a little bit of water melting around the edges. Even unheated, the basement wouldn’t be as cold as the outside. The ground would add some insulation. “I think the basement suffered a flood recently—probably during one of those big storms we had last fall—they must have survived on that.”

  “I bet they caught a few mice too.”

  Cole nodded. “You’re probably right. I guess we can thank them for some of the items we were able to salvage today.”

  Hunter scratched the gray cat behind the ears and the animal appeared to love it. Their former owners must have taken excellent care of them for the cats to have survived ten months in the house on their own. “These little guys definitely have used up a few of their nine lives, that’s for sure.”

  4

  Cole wished he had Google maps available or, at the very least, a paper map of the town, but with roads choked with snow, vehicles, and now, the occasional downed tree limbs, he probably wouldn’t be able to follow the directions anyway. He chuckled as he imagined the voice re-directing him over and over every time he adjusted his course. Instead of Google, he had Hunter, who did his best to remember what streets they had come down.

  “Dad, why don’t we just follow our tracks back to the lake and pick up the tracks from Steve’s plow? They had to have left a big-ass trail.”

  “That was my plan originally, but I got turned around going to collect the deer. I’m not sure which way the path went.” Cole checked out the street names, wishing he had paid more attention to the layout of the town. They’d designated areas more by what sector of town they were in rather than names. They had explored the areas closest to the lake and knew where most of the stores were located because those were the first places they had looked for supplies in the fall but since homes usually contained bodies of the dead, they were mostly avoided except for a few that were carefully explored. He’d wanted to make sure all were unoccupied before breaking in; not just to avoid the virus, but out of respect for possible survivors.

  According to Steve’s directions, his group was staying at a place halfway between the highway west of town and the lake. He backtracked to where he had followed Steve’s plowed path up onto the mainland, and turned onto it. The street wasn’t perfectly clear, by any means, with the plowed path winding around accidents left abandoned months ago, but it was close to appearing similar to how it would after a major blizzard when there were often cars left in ditches even in the best of times.

  These glimpses of familiarity were both comforting and disturbing. He knew life would never be like it had been. That world was gone, but the glimpses allowed him to momentarily forget about their current circumstances. For some reason, that was comforting.

  He followed the path around a corner onto a street that ran parallel to the river for a short way. The homes that backed up to the river were slightly bigger than the surrounding homes and it was in front of one of them that he spotted several vehicles that he vaguely recognized from the night before. More importantly, they had definitely been driven recently with snow cleared from windshields and ruts in the snow leading up to them. He pulled in behind one.

  As he scanned for any danger, the orange cat nuzzled his hand, hungry for attention. Absently he scratched under its chin, and glanced at Hunter, who stroked the gray cat’s head. “I guess we need to put these guys in th
e back for now. I don’t want them dashing out when we open the doors.”

  Hunter nodded. Twisting, he set his cat on the floor behind him. Cole handed him the orange one, and they both exited as quickly as they could. Cole hesitated. He had his sidearm as did Hunter, but he considered grabbing the rifle too. Then he shook his head. These guys could have killed him last night and hadn’t. He did fish a mask from his pocket though, and nodded at Hunter when he did the same.

  They cut across the lawn to reach the front door, and Cole pressed the doorbell. Nothing happened. Duh. No power. He pulled his glove off and knocked instead. While he didn’t hear anything, he had the distinct feeling that they were being watched. Just as he hadn’t actually seen any of these men before, they would have only seen him bundled up, so he called out, “It’s Cole. I just came to update you on your friend, Mike.”

  A voice came through the door. “Yo, dudes. Leave your weapons on the porch.”

  Hunter looked at him and mouthed, “Do we do it?”

  Cole shook his head. “No.” Louder, he replied to the voice, “No dice. We’re only here as a favor to Steve and Mike but …” He shrugged and motioned for Hunter to head back to the car. The guy’s tone hadn’t sounded threatening, but they had no real reason to trust him either.

  What a waste of time. They could be back to the island by now if he hadn’t searched around, wasting precious gasoline, just to find these guys.

  A sound from the porch made him turn, one hand on his gun. The door opened and a tall blond-haired man with a bushy beard stepped out. “Wait! Come on back. I’m sorry about what my cousin asked you to do. We want to hear about Mikey.”

  Cole turned but studied the man, noting his stance and demeanor then swept a gaze over the house for any signs of deception. A face parted the curtains in the living room window, the man beckoning them to come in too.

  “All right. Let’s talk to them, but stay alert.”