After The Fires Went Out: Coyote atfwo-1

by Regan Wolfrom

  A married couple, maybe? Or two off-duty border guards?

  Kayla crawled in the snow beneath the window frame. Once she was past, she stood back up and looked perfectly normal.

  I was impressed.

  She walked toward the garage. She went around a corner and I couldn’t see her.

  I had to get closer.

  I grabbed her pack along with mine and followed the treeline toward the garage. I kept going until I could see her.

  She’d opened the garage door.

  No locks.

  She went in for a moment, and then she came back out.

  I started off toward her.

  She stuck a finger up to the tip of her nose and slowed her pace.

  “A snowmobile,” she said. “We could take it on the lake. People would just assume we’re cottagers.”

  “Not bad.”

  We opened the overhead door by hand, doing our best to make sure we didn’t make any noise. Then we pushed the snowmobile across the yard and around the back of a gray and white boatshed.

  We had trouble getting it through a clump of bush, but we eventually got it down to the lake.

  “I can drive,” Kayla said in a whisper. “You’re in charge of shooting people.”

  I nodded.

  We climbed on and she started the engine.

  Hopefully the couple in the cottage would think it was the neighbours going for a ride.

  Assuming they had neighbours.

  We drove along the lake, heading to a collection of lights that had just started to come on at the far side.

  I was hoping we’d find a cottage that was dark but not forgotten; if they were still used as cottages, there’d hopefully be some owners who weren’t home.

  It didn’t take us long to find just that, a small a-frame that seemed out of place among some newer builds. We found a shed filled with firewood, and so I gingerly broke into the back porch and we found a place to stay.

  I could tell they had electricity; everyone on that lake seemed to have it, even though I hadn’t noticed an overabundance of solar or wind installs. It looked like Aiguebelle still had their grid.

  We left the lights off but we started a fire after we ate, just big enough to keep us above freezing as we laid together on a couch by the fireplace, under a heavy enough blanket that we could take off our damp clothes.

  “Worst date ever?” I asked her as I ran my fingers along her shoulders.

  She laughed.

  And then we did what two people tend to do when their lying naked together by a half-roaring fire.

  I’m not going to bother writing about it.

  Today is Friday, January 18th.

  I was woken up this morning by the slamming of a car door.

  I poked Kayla’s shoulder.

  “I heard it,” she said.

  I got dressed and grabbed my SIG. I walked over to the nearest window.

  There was a car right outside, a green electric two-seater. A young woman was holding open the passenger-side door. She was probably twenty or so, blond hair. And petite. And wearing the kind of tight black t-shirt that you’d expect to see on a girl out on the town.

  “ Vas-y, ” the woman said.

  She started tugging on someone inside the car.

  A young man, about the same age but significantly taller and wider, stumbled out of the car.

  “ J'ai besoin de mon camion, ” he said. He needed his truck.

  They argued a little, too quickly for me to understand the words. He finally started trudging toward the door of the cabin, weaving as he walked.

  He was drunk.

  “ Tu seras okay?” she asked him.

  “Okay,” he said.

  And then I think he said thank you. That or shit . He was mumbling.

  She turned around and went back to her car.

  “We need that car,” I said.

  I heard the car door close.

  I rushed toward the door.

  The door opened and the drunk man stepped inside. I slammed him against the wall. It wasn’t hard to put him down and out.

  “What did you do?” Kayla said. Too loudly.

  “Theo?” the woman called out. “ Que se passe-t-il ?”

  I heard the car door open. She was coming to check on him.

  She probably thought he’d passed out. She obviously cared if he choked on his own tongue.

  “No,” Kayla said. “Don’t hurt her.”

  “I won’t,” I said.

  As she walked inside I wrapped my arm around her throat.

  “I have a gun,” I said. “Do you understand?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “We’re not going to hurt you,” Kayla said. “We just need your car.”

  I let go of her neck. She stepped back from me.

  “You’re from Timmins?” she asked.

  “Matheson,” I said. “What’s your name?”

  “Elodie.”

  “You live around here?”

  “This is our cottage,” she said. “My brother stays here when he’s too…soûlard for my parents to see.”

  “Your parents live where?”

  “ À Rouyn,” she said.

  “Please sit down, Elodie.”

  She shook her head.

  “It’s okay,” I said. “ S'il vous plaît. ”

  She sat down on the couch.

  I didn’t bother telling her what Kayla and I had been doing on it the night before.

  “Get our gear,” I said to Kayla. “Pile it up next to the car…uh, please.”

  Kayla started carrying things outside.

  “You’re going to need to come with us,” I said to Elodie.

  “Please,” she said. “Let me stay with my brother. I won’t tell what happened.”

  “Sorry…if you tell anyone they’ll track your car.”

  “I won’t tell.”

  “We can’t risk it.”

  Kayla came back inside for a second load. She went into the kitchen and started opening cupboards.

  “There’s some food in here,” she said.

  “Bring it,” I said.

  I motioned for Elodie to stand up.

  “ Je ne suis pas stupide, ” she said. “I know you will kill me. That is why you want to take me with you. Non …I won’t go.”

  I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t have time for an argument.

  I grabbed her by her hair and pulled her up from the couch.

  I pushed her in front of me, out the door.

  “What are you doing to her?” Kayla asked.

  “We don’t have time for this,” I said.

  “There’s no room in the back. Not for her.”

  “There’s room.” I turned to Elodie. “Climb in,” I told her.

  She shook her head. She was crying.

  I swept my arm under her legs and lifted her up. I lowered her into the back of the little car, her face to the floor.

  I pulled her hands behind her back, holding her wrists together.

  “Get some rope,” I said to Kayla.

  She ran back to the cottage.

  “Please,” Elodie said. “Please…” She wasn’t fighting me. I lightened my grip on her wrists.

  “You’ll be okay,” I said.

  Kayla returned with a spool of blue and white nylon cord.

  I bound Elodie’s wrists, and then I pulled her feet together and brought them up toward her hands, tying her ankles to her wrists.

  “I don’t like this,” Kayla said. “She’s terrified.”

  “She’ll be okay,” I said. “You know that.”

  “I wonder if that’s what they said to Tabitha and Natalie.”

  “What the fuck?”

  “Just…go easy on her.”

  “We need to gag her.”

  “Yeah, that’s just what we need. She’ll end up choking to death.”

  “Your scarf.”

  She frowned, but handed it to me anyway.

  I tied a double knot in
the middle. “Open your mouth, Elodie.”

  She didn’t.

  I shoved the knotted scarf against her mouth.

  She wouldn’t take it.

  I pushed harder.

  Kayla reached in and pinched the girl’s nostrils. “Hold it over her mouth,” she said.

  I kept holding it.

  After a few seconds Elodie gasped.

  I shoved the knot into her mouth and tied the scarf around her head. “That was a waste of everyone’s time,” I told her.

  We piled the packs and snowshoes on top of Elodie’s bound body, along with my tattered guitar case. She wouldn’t be able to see what was in it anyway.

  I stuffed the Mossberg in the passenger seat and climbed in. “You’re driving,” I said to Kayla. “Remember…if anyone asks your name’s Elodie and I’m your step-dad or something.”

  “Okay,” Kayla said as she got in. Once she was sitting, she craned her neck toward the back. “I’m sorry, Elodie. Everything’s going to be okay.”

  Elodie tried to say something in reply. Whatever it was it didn’t sound too friendly.

  Kayla drove us deeper into Quebec before we turned to head north. I’d figured that we’d have less chance of running into any kind of security checks if we were a long way from any borders.

  We hit a few farms not long after the cottages, and I was amazed at how normal everything looked. There’d been fires here, I could see, but wherever the flames hadn’t reached looked just like the farms around Cochrane used to look.

  We’d pass by pickup trucks and electric cars and even the occasional minivan, and everyone looked happy and healthy and a million miles away from the end of the world.

  We dipped into forests again, the edge of the clay belt, I guess, and then we turned north and soon we were in farmland again, more farms and houses and life than I think they’d ever had on the Ontario side.

  We drove through a beautiful little village with a church with a silver steeple, and they even had a gas station with an open sign in the window.

  “Wish we had money,” Kayla said. “It’d feel nice to buy something again. I don’t even care what.”

  “I doubt they use money,” I said. “If they do, it probably some kind of weird French money.”

  “They probably use something as currency…poutine, maybe?”

  “That or a smug sense of superiority.”

  I heard another muffled curse from the back.

  “We’re just joking, Elodie,” I said. “I used to date a French woman. She was Catholic and everything.”

  I was trying to sound friendly and non-threatening, but I had a feeling that she was probably chalking it up to some kind of serial-killer psychopathy.

  I decided to stop trying.

  We kept going through the towns of Macamic, La Sarre, and Beaucanton, all with official signs sitting beside cute wooden and handpainted ones.

  We’d keep heading north, so far north that no one would be expecting us, north enough that they didn’t think they had neighbours to the west.

  After two and a half hours, we arrived in the town of Val-Paradis, the last piece of civilization on our way home. It was not much more than a few houses and a church.

  “We should find a place to take a break,” I said. “Figure out our plan.”

  “Okay,” Kayla said.

  She turned north.

  “Wrong way,” I said.

  “Taking a break.”

  She drove up the road until the we reached a point where it was no longer plowed.

  “Guess no one’s living up this way anymore,” she said. She slowly turned the car around and stopped. “This okay?”

  “Looks good.”

  I opened the back and took our gear out.

  I untied the pink scarf and pulled it out of Elodie’s mouth.

  “Are you hungry?” I asked her.

  “Yes,” she said.

  I rummaged through the packs until I found a box of crackers.

  I held one up to her mouth.

  “Can you untie me, please?” she asked.

  “You’ll try to run,” I said. “Sorry.”

  She took a bite of the cracker. She didn’t seem to enjoy it. “ C’est fétide. ”

  “I think they’re a little stale. Blame your brother.”

  She took another bite. “Do you have water?”

  I found my canteen and gave her a drink.

  “ Merci, ” she said, thanking me.

  “ Pa de kwa, ” I said, automatically uttering the Haitian my father had taught me.

  “You two having a moment?” Kayla asked.

  I smiled. “We’re bonding.”

  Elodie started to cry.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked her.

  “I don’t want to die,” she said.

  “We’re not going to hurt you,” Kayla said. “We’re the good guys.”

  “My parents will be worried about me.”

  “You’ll see them soon,” I said.

  I could tell she didn’t believe us.

  It didn’t matter.

  “We can’t take this car much further,” I said.

  “What wrong with it?” Kayla said.

  “We can’t take any car. They’ll be blocking the roads. They’d be guarding them anyway, but I’m sure they’re looking for us.”

  “Too bad you don’t look like anyone around here,” Kayla said. “I could maybe pass for Elodie, but you’re a tougher sell.”

  “They wouldn’t let Elodie pass through, either. I’m sure it’s locked down to any traffic.”

  “So we need another snowmobile.”

  “You got it. Assuming we can get all the way home on a tank.”

  “And assuming we can find a snowmobile. Or a full tank.”

  “So you understand the challenge,” I said.

  “I do…and I know that I’ll have to be the one to find it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You stand out…”

  “I know…but it’s too risky.”

  “It’s not risky at all,” Kayla said. “ Je débrouiller assez bien en français. ”

  “I can help,” Elodie said. “I can go with you. No one would be suspicious of two girls driving around.”

  “We’ll all go,” I said. “Elodie and I will trade places. That way, if things go bad…well, I’ll be there.”

  “Okay,” Kayla said. “But please…oh pretty please…let’s stick that moist wad of scarf in your mouth.”

  I chuckled and started untying Elodie’s ankles.

  We found two snowmobiles on a trailer hitched to a running truck. The truck was parked outside a house not far south of Val-Paradis. Kayla dropped me off on the road a few metres away, and after she’d driven back north for a minute or so I made my way to the truck.

  The door was locked.

  I smashed it with the butt of my SIG.

  I climbed in and followed after the little two-seater.

  I don’t think the owner heard a thing.

  We went back to our resting place north of Val-Paradis.

  We repacked the best we could, using the saddlebags that came with our new snowmobiles. I had no choice but to strap the C12 over my shoulder and leave the guitar case behind.

  When Elodie saw the assault weapon she started to panic.

  “Please,” she said. “I helped you…”

  “It’s okay,” I told her. “I’m not going to hurt you.”

  “Can I have my car keys?”

  I shook my head. “Sorry, Elodie…you need to come with us.”

  Kayla grabbed my elbow. “What are you doing?” she asked me.

  “We can’t leave her here. She’ll drive into town and tell them about us. They’ll find us.”

  “We’ll be off the roads.”

  “Not really…just until we get clear of civilization. Then we’ll need to follow the road so we don’t get turned around out there.”

  “Then tie me up again,” Elodie said. “Leave me in the
car. It will be some time before someone finds me.”

  “That could work,” Kayla said. “As long as you don’t freeze to death first.”

  “It won’t work,” I said.

  “Why not?”

  “Why would we risk getting caught? We’ll take her with us and let her go just past the gate at Eades. By the time she makes it there we’ll be home free. That’s the best plan. For all of us.”

  “So just another couple hours or so?” Kayla asked. “Then we can let her go?”

  “A couple more hours. That’s it. Then they’ll take her back to her car and she can go home.” I turned to Elodie. “Then you can go home.”

  I went over to the trailer and tilted it, before pulling the first snowmobile down to the road.

  I checked the fuel gauge. Pretty close to full.

  “You’ll ride with me, Elodie,” I said. “No more rope.”

  But I did pack it in one of my saddlebags.

  The sun set while we were riding; it set just before we crossed what the map told us was the Pattern River. By the time we reached Abbotsford Lake I was half-frozen. Snowmobiling isn’t much fun when you aren’t dressed for it. To be honest, I’m not sure when snowmobiling is fun.

  We reached the intersection of the two logging roads, and we turned left, heading south toward the gate at Eades. We skirted around an unexpected steel and concrete barrier that would have been pretty effective against anything wider than a snowmobile, and then we came to the next junction, a little triangle of roads that probably hadn’t seen a visitor in two years.

  I stopped my snowmobile.

  Kayla pulled up beside and cut her engine.

  “Problem?” she asked.

  “What’s your gauge at?” I asked her.

  “Shoot…less than half.”

  “Me, too.”

  “We’re not going to make it.”

  “I’m not sure,” I said. “You know these gauges seem to jump a little. But we should adjust the route to make sure.”

  “Skip Eades?”

  “Yeah.”

  “But what about her?” Kayla asked, nodding toward our captive.

  “How far is it?” Elodie asked. “Can I walk there?”

  “Not safe,” I said. “It’s at least a couple of hours.”

  “Well it’s not your decision,” she said.

  “We should risk it,” Kayla said. “Take her down there, or closer at least…if we have to add an hour of walking to our trip…I think that’s fair.”

  “I’m not getting stranded outside our gates,” I said.