After The Fires Went Out: Coyote atfwo-1

by Regan Wolfrom

  “Thanks.”

  “Fiona made it with her new breadmaker. The one Graham got from Marc.” She sighed. “It was nice of Marc to find that for her.”

  I nodded. I hadn’t heard any of that before, and I didn’t want to hear it then.

  She sat down beside me, putting her hand on my knee. “You’re a good guy, Baptiste.”

  “That’s what they tell me.” But I didn’t believe a word of it.

  “I haven’t been the same old Kayla lately…I’m sorry for that.”

  “I don’t know why you’d need to be sorry.”

  “I…I just feel like I haven’t been able to add much to the group.”

  “Don’t ever doubt how much you do for us, Kayla. Or how much you mean to us.”

  She leaned over and kissed my cheek. “Thank you,” she said. She took a deep breath and squeezed my knee. “I've never told you about my older brother.”

  “No, you haven't.”

  “He died when I was seventeen…around five years ago. He rolled his car on Highway 101 just outside of Timmins. He wasn't drunk or anything…it was just icy and he lost control…” Her words trailed away as she took another breath, tears starting down her face. “That's who the tattoo is for.”

  “What tattoo?” I asked, not that I didn't know about it.

  She pulled her shirt down off her left shoulder, showing it to me: a bald eagle clutching a rose, under a banner that read “My Heart, Undone”.

  “I like it,” I said. “I always have.”

  “It was icy. He was tired, too; we both were. He'd driven me down to Timmins to pick up Mom's car…first time I'd taken it out of town and I'd had to leave it there when the battery went. We were driving back home and I was following right behind him…”

  She dropped her head into her hands, her whole body shaking as she started to cry.

  “You don't have to tell me,” I said.

  “I couldn't bring myself to get out of the car. I just pulled over and sat there. I didn't call for help or nothing…I just stared at his license plate, reading those upside-down letters over and over again. He was already dead, but I didn't know that.”

  “I'm sorry…I’m not sure why you're telling me this.”

  “I don't know…I just thought it might help you to hear it.”

  I put my arm around her shoulder. “It does help,” I said. “Thank you.”

  “I've never wanted to be that girl who lost her brother. Maybe I try too hard to be someone else…I don't know. I know it's not the same for you, since you didn't know Marc that well…but I just…I don't want you to carry it.”

  “I don't have a choice. Every time we lose someone I'm going to carry it. But I'll be okay…really.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I'm sure. I was just an accident.”

  It had been an accident. I had just wanted to stop him; I hadn't meant to lose my temper, to hit him so hard…

  She leaned in and kissed me on the cheek. “Take care of yourself, Baptiste.”

  “You, too.”

  She smiled once more as she left the room.

  I didn't feel like eating, but after all she'd shared I felt like I couldn't risk her thinking I didn't appreciate what she'd done. Once I'd finished the bread and jam, I started in on whatever was in the flask. I think it was rye, and it wasn't very good. But as I fell asleep, I was grateful that Kayla had trusted me enough to be herself with me, if only for a few minutes.

  Today is Monday, December 17th.

  Yesterday I decided to ride up to Silver Queen Lake with the Porters. I didn’t want to be anywhere near McCartney Lake and the mourning Tremblay family.

  I remember Justin and his wife Rihanna from before the fires, when they would come to the town meetings at Tim Horton Centre and sit near the back. I hadn’t known more than their faces, since they’d never raised their hands to speak and they’d always left right when the meeting adjourned, ducking outside before most people had even stood up from their chairs.

  I think the first time I’d spoken to either of them was on the morning they’d come to the gate asking for our help. I didn’t even know that Justin had served in the Forces, and I certainly had no idea what he was capable of. Back then I didn’t even know about the things he and Marc Tremblay had done.

  It’s over an hour and a half to Silver Queen Lake, and the route the Porters took was on gravel that was in pretty bad shape. We skipped Cochrane entirely, but we didn’t have the same option for Clute; there’s only one road to Silver Queen Lake and it goes through Clute and whatever roadblock that might be there. It’s the same road Matt and Ant were taking on their way to bring eggs to the Smiths, the same road where Ant was killed and the man with the tiger striped helmet laughed his head off.

  I don’t miss that truck.

  The Tremblays’ truck also had only the front bench, so it was pretty tight up there with all three of us, especially since we all wore riot suits and I insisted on keeping all three helmets and vests up front along with my shotgun and their hunting rifle.

  We were ready to suit up and run through whatever opposition or barricades we found.

  But Clute was quiet, and we continued on.

  We listened to Green Day of all things on the way up, with Rihanna quietly starting to sing along every once in awhile as she drove, before she’d catch herself and glance over to me with a slightly embarrassed look in her eyes.

  We didn’t really talk at all, and I was okay with that. The truth is, I know full well that Justin and I would still get along if I wasn’t careful, that I’d start forgetting how much I wanted to stay angry with him. I remember how much I hated them both before, when all I knew of the Porters was that they’d turned Sara away when she’d begged them for help.

  Justin hadn’t even made the offer to take her somewhere else, to trade her for diesel or a box of condoms. I still wonder why he hadn’t. Maybe he’d thought Sara wasn’t worth anything. Maybe he’d known enough about Lisa to stay clear of the whole bunch.

  I know Sara’s done her best to let the past go, not that it doesn’t flicker back from time to time. At first I’d hated them as much as humanly possible, like I was hating them double because Sara didn’t. But it didn’t take long for Justin to start acting like a friend, and after a little while I guess we were friends.

  I don’t want the same shit happening again. I’ll work with the Porters, sure, but I can’t afford to like them.

  Silver Queen Lake is a lot bigger than McCartney Lake, and it has enough cottages that I was already feeling winded when we arrived, thinking of how much work there was to do. Usually when you scavenge you spend more than half your time just wandering around looking for stuff, especially these past few months, so there isn’t that much loading in a day; it’s more like a scavenger hunt than helping someone move. I had a feeling this job was going to be quite a bit more intense in the amount of lifting and carrying.

  “We’ve been working from the north shore around to the south,” Rihanna said as we dressed in our gear inside the cramped cab of the truck; she’d stopped at the junction right before the woods gave way to cottages. “We’ve done six, so that leaves just over fifty to go.”

  “You’re kidding me,” I said. “There’s no way we’ll be done in the next few days.”

  “It’s taking longer than we expected,” Justin said. “That’s good, actually. We’re finding more than we first thought.”

  “I thought you already took inventory of the supplies.”

  Justin laughed. “We checked out a couple of cottages, sure. But we haven’t even been inside more than a dozen so far.”

  “So we don’t even know what’s inside.”

  “That’s what makes it exciting,” Rihanna said. “Maybe we’ll find some videos or books or something. I’m getting pretty tired of watching the same six movies on my tablet.”

  “To be honest, guys,” I said, “I’m worried about safety here.”

  “You weren’t worried before,” Ju
stin said. “Isn’t that what the helmets and vests are for?”

  “How sure are we that these cottages are all empty?”

  “The Smiths had a roadblock here. A big old Dodge truck. They would have noticed if there were other families trying to get in and out.”

  “We don’t know enough about how the Smiths handled things,” I said. “We don’t really know what was happening up here.”

  “We know the Smiths pretty well,” Rihanna said. “I’ve known that family all my life.”

  “That’s not what I mean. There are probably two dozen families left around here right now. How do we know that someone else didn’t know the Smiths well enough to know they were leaving? Maybe someone else has already laid claim to these supplies.”

  “We were here first,” Justin said.

  “So you think. But I don’t think that would stop anyone either way. And considering that the Smiths weren’t at the last Supply Partnership meeting, I’m sure more than one person has wondered if they took off.”

  “So what is it you want us to do?” Rihanna asked.

  “Let’s take a tour around both sides of the lake, check for any vehicles or signs of life. Maybe we’ll be able to tell if there are different sets of tire tracks visible.”

  “Other than ours?” Justin said. “There’s no way to know for sure if someone’s been here.”

  “Well obviously. Look, just humour me for an hour, and then we can get back to work.”

  “I didn’t realize bringing you along would suck up so much of our time.”

  “I’m such an asshole wanting to keep us alive.”

  Rihanna laughed. “Good point,” she said. “Guess I’d better check if we’ve got something to listen to that isn’t Green Day.”

  We followed the road along the south shore of Silver Queen Lake, our vests strapped on and our helmets on our laps. There appeared to be more than a few sets of different tire tracks along the road; I climbed out at a few points and checked the impressions from the treads. There were at least two different vehicles, maybe more. It was hard to tell. And for all I knew they were from the Smiths. I just didn’t know.

  It didn’t look to me like anyone had stopped in at the first few cottages. The first one had an overturned tree blocking the front driveway that would have been too big to drive over but small enough to move. A good number of them had their doors and windows boarded up, with no sign that anyone had tried to pry the boards off.

  It made me uneasy. If another family had come to scavenge, I would have expected them to have stopped at the first cottage, or if the impromptu tree barricade had scared them off, they would have tried the others. I didn’t make sense to bypass the boarded up buildings; they had the best chance of having the most supplies.

  In my little notebook I keep a list of all of the families we know about, whether they’re part of the Supply Partnership or not, along with where we think they’re living and what vehicles and weapons we know they have. Sometimes we’ve visited other families ourselves, particularly around Christmas and New Year’s, but other times all we know about a family is second- or third-hand knowledge. And even with that I know we don’t have a full list.

  There could be other families that we think are long gone, or new arrivals from Smooth Rock Falls who aren’t big on Ryan Stems and his Mushkegowuk elders, or even refugees from Timmins who’d rather scrape by up here than sign their lives away to Sons of Flesh back home.

  I checked the pages for any mention of families up near Silver Queen Lake. The Barrs, the Shiers, the Vezeaus…all of them were stationed somewhere around here, but like Justin had said, the Smiths were supposed to have had full control over Silver Queen Lake.

  “Could be the Chapleaus,” Justin said as he looked over my shoulder.

  “I think they live on Bentley Lake,” Rihanna said.

  “No, no…Bentley’s where the Barrs live now.”

  “I don’t think that’s right…”

  “It doesn’t matter,” I said. “There’s no way to be sure. But if someone’s living up this road, we’ll find out soon enough.”

  “I think this is a waste of time,” Justin said.

  “I don’t care. We’re doing it.”

  “Let’s just do it,” Rihanna said. “It’ll be fine.”

  Rihanna kept driving, slowly enough that we had time enough to scan each yardsite. Over a dozen empty cottages so far; I knew we’d be at the end of the road soon.

  “There,” Justin said, pointing out ahead of us on the right. “A pickup truck.”

  I looked at the truck, an old gray Toyota pickup, parked in front of a two-story A-frame cottage with a glass front. The bed of the truck was covered with a large green tarp, and under it was an uneven bulge that reached higher than the roof; it reminded me of Afghanistan and of a very different time. I already knew from what Matt had described that there was probably a machine gun mounted under that tarp.

  “Looks like an old-fashioned technical,” Justin said. “That’s gotta be Stems.”

  Rihanna stopped the truck.

  “Put on your helmets,” I said.

  Neither of them argued with me.

  “They probably know we’re here,” I said.

  “What do we do?” Rihanna asked.

  “We need to go,” Justin said. “We’re not prepared for a fight.”

  “Keep your heads down,” I said. “Let’s see if they come out.”

  I couldn’t detect any movement aside from smoke rising from the chimney.

  “They aren’t just scavenging,” I said. “It looks like they’re living here.” I noticed footsteps, not just heading from the truck to the door of the cottage, but in several trails leading around to a shed and back toward the lake. They’d been here for a few hours at the least; my gut told me they’d been here for at least several days. “So do we really have a reason to think this is Stems?”

  “I think the Chapleaus have a Toyota pickup,” Rihanna said.

  “Are you just saying that because you think the Chapleaus live here?”

  “I’m not sure. I think that’s their truck.”

  “It’s Stems,” Justin said. “I know it is.”

  “I guess it doesn’t matter who it is,” I said. “I’m going to assume they’re dangerous.”

  “We need to go.”

  “This isn’t worth getting killed over,” Rihanna said.

  “We’ll go back and bring up a second vehicle and some help,” I said. “We throw up a roadblock of our own on the north shore while we empty out those cottages.”

  “So we waste more fuel we can’t spare?” Justin asked. “Let’s just go back to the north shore. There’s plenty of stuff up there.”

  “It’s not safe.”

  “It was safe enough before you came along.”

  “Sure it was…do you even remember if there was smoke from that chimney yesterday? Or the first day you were up here?”

  Justin shook his head. “We need those supplies.”

  “We need to do this right.”

  I started to think it over in my head. The little electric car could make the trip, but I’d feel safer finding something more sizeable to bring up. A new grain truck or maybe even bigger. And then we could fill one truck up while the other stood guard, and then we’d switch. Five or six people could get the work done quickly enough.

  But I wondered if I was being overcautious. If Justin and Rihanna hadn’t noticed the Toyota and the chimney smoke before, whoever it was may have just arrived in the past day or so. Perhaps by the time we returned they’d have their own roadblock set up. I didn’t know for sure what was under that tarp.

  But the outline was just too familiar.

  Was I about to waste time and fuel for no good reason?

  “I need to know more,” I said. “Rihanna, turn us around and head back up the road…slowly.”

  She nodded and turned the wheel.

  “I’ll meet you guys up at the mile road,” I said.

  “
Don’t do this, Baptiste,” Justin said. “You’re no good to us dead.”

  “Have a little faith in me.” I looked to Rihanna. “Turn us around…please.”

  As Rihanna drove the truck away from the cottage at a snail’s pace, I slowly opened the passenger door and lowered myself out onto the gravel, taking my pistol but leaving the shotgun behind. I ran in a crouch toward the trees, across the road from the cottages and the lake.

  I waited there until Rihanna and Justin were well past the next few cottages. Then I threaded my way through the woods until I was about two hundred meters from the cottage. There I crossed the gravel as quickly and quietly as I could, sheltered from sight by a sharp bend in the road.

  I wrapped my way around the garage and the shed, until I was crouched beneath a small window on the east side of the cottage. I waited there, listening for the people inside.

  I heard a door open, and then several sets of boots walking down the wood steps. I peered around the corner to see two men walking towards the Toyota, dressed in black armour with painted helmets.

  A tiger and a bear. Two of the men who’d shot Ant.

  Both men had assault rifles slung over their shoulders.

  One of them pulled off the tarp while the second man climbed into the box, placing his weapon down. The gun mounted on the back of the truck was much heavier duty than I’d expected; it looked closer to an anti-aircraft gun than something like the guns we used in Afghanistan. The first man then climbed into the cab, and backed the truck back down the driveway toward the road.

  They were headed after the Porters, just far enough behind that Justin and Rihanna wouldn’t know what was coming.

  I grabbed my handheld and pushed for Justin.

  “Justin…you there? Over.” I tried to speak softly in case someone was left in the cottage. A man with a shark helmet had died at the airport, but what about the one with the coyote?

  “I’m here. Is everything okay there? Over.”

  “The Toyota’s coming for you. They’ve got a bigass machine gun mounted on the back. You need to get out of there.”