by North, Geoff
The man called out from behind him. “Please! Hurry with the water!”
Louie ran the back of his hand across his dripping nose. “Where did you say it was?”
“Front seat, on the floor. Right in front of your eyes!”
Impatient dipshit, aren’t you? He saw the water bottle sitting in a pile of garbage on the floor mat. Civilization may have come to an end, but Louie couldn’t see the need for people to devolve into messy slobs. “Got it!”
He closed the door and turned. The woman was making another horrible noise. Her body shuddered with the effort. Louie stood there for a few more moments, watching the husband rub her back ferociously. As if that’s going to help. He leaned back against the running van, felt the vibrating comfort. He unscrewed the cap from the water bottle and took a long swig.
The man turned towards him again. “Don’t just stand there, hurry!”
Louie screwed the cap back on and tossed the bottle down to him. It landed in snow a few feet from the heaving woman. “Thanks for the ride. I would take you with me, but you haven’t left any room for passengers.”
The man’s mouth dropped open but he didn’t say a word.
Louie jogged around to the driver’s door and got in. He cranked the steering wheel back towards the road and drove away. He looked in the passenger side mirror and saw the man in the ditch, still hovering over his wife. He hadn’t even tried to stop Louie.
He cranked the heater dial up to full and patted the dashboard. “Just you and me now, baby. No dirty, disrespectful owners, no fucking Fiona or Grace, and no goddamned Roy fucking Rodger.”
Louie drove along with a satisfied smile pasted across his face. He was beginning to feel the heat working its way through his wet shoes. His feet were beginning to tingle. Ten minutes later they were hurting like hell. He squirmed uncomfortably in the seat. “Pain’s good,” he told himself. “Means they weren’t frozen all that bad. Little bit of frost bite, but I’m not going to lose any toes.”
Too bad he couldn’t lose the stink inside the van. It reeked of spoiled food and sickness. The woman in the ditch had probably spilled her lunch in here as well, more than once. Louie lowered the window a few inches, sacrificing some of his precious heat to clean the air.
He went on for another ten miles, heading west, and talking to the steering wheel. Eventually he got tired of his own voice and turned the radio on. Dead crackle came through the speakers. He hadn’t expected any more. There was a litter of dusty, scratched CDs jammed up where the windshield met the dashboard. Louie grabbed a handful and tossed them onto the passenger seat. He kept his eye on the road and inserted a disc. It was some kind of orchestrated-opera piece with violins and piano. Louie hit eject before the singing started. He glanced at the marker writing on it—a bunch of foreign names he’d never heard of—and tossed it over his shoulder into the junk pile. Probably Ditch-Woman’s music. She looked like the fat-lady-opera type.
He put another disc in and ABBA started to play. The Winner Takes it All.
How fitting, Louie thought. Kind of gay, but fitting.
He tapped his fingers and sang along. It wasn’t until the homemade CD started to repeat, and he had traveled eighty miles, did Louie notice the fuel gauge. The needle was sitting on empty, perhaps a sliver under empty. “Fuck!” He was riding through the desolate plains of eastern Saskatchewan on fumes. Towns were far and few between, and the chances of finding a fully functioning gas station in any of them were about as high as patching things up with Roy and Fiona.
Louie pulled over onto the snowy shoulder of the highway and put the van into park. He didn’t dare turn the ignition off for fear it wouldn’t start again. He began a panicked survey of the items stored behind him. I saw a red plastic container back there with all the other shit… I’m sure I did. He pulled at some loose clothing closest to him and shoved it into the front passenger seat. Don’t have to worry about anyone sitting up here with me. Old Pukey Guts back in the ditch won’t be needing it again, and I sure as hell ain’t picking up any hitch hikers. Two more garbage bags were yanked from the back seats and stuffed over the clothes and CDs.
The minivan began to sputter as Louie tore into the couple’s belongings, pulling and pushing, and digging for the gasoline container he’d thought he’d seen. It only made the mess bigger and more disturbed, leaving him with even less room than before. The van chugged, rocking Louie in his seat with its starving protests. Louie pushed down on the accelerator, hoping it was just a bit of condensation working its way out of the line. It stalled completely. The hot air blasting out from the vents at his feet continued. Fernando was still playing on the stereo. Louie turned the ignition off and pulled the key out. He couldn’t afford to kill the battery as well.
He ripped into one of the softer garbage bags and more clothing spilled out like intestines from a cut belly. Louie winced at the stink. Pukey Guts had undoubtedly soiled most of them. He found a fur hat—the kind stupid Russians all wore—and placed it on his head. He fished some more inside and found a pair of pink, woolly mittens. They were small but he fit them over his hands.
He took a deep breath and went outside, back into the cold that had almost killed him two hours earlier. Louie lifted the back hatch and a forty-inch television fell out. The stand landed on his foot, causing him to cry out. He kicked it over and heard the screen crack on the frozen asphalt with great satisfaction. He grabbed onto a piece of electrical cord and pulled. A microwave oven appeared, and Louie heaved until it became dislodged, falling on top of the broken television. He held onto the cord and backed away from the van, spinning the oven around twice like an unusually shaped, single-ended bola. He let it fly across the highway into the other side of the ditch.
“Where’s the fucking gas container?”
More junk was spilled out onto the highway. Louie got rid of the coffee makers and the vast majority of books. A banana box filled with what felt like a ton of photo albums fell sadly into the snow. One of them opened, and pictures began flying off in the breeze. He spotted the red container when the van was half emptied. “About time.”
It was good and heavy. Louie removed the cap and smelled the fuel inside. His luck on this day had varied from incredibly good to unbelievably bad. It was spiking up good at the moment, and he didn’t want to give it time to shift back down. The container was the kind with the built in hose with filter that screwed on. He drained the entire thing into the van’s tank, shut the hatch, and jumped back into the driver’s seat.
Louie pulled the stinking mittens off with his teeth and placed the key in the ignition. The engine turned over three times but didn’t catch. “Shit.” He waited a few seconds and tried again. It whined and chugged but nothing more. Louie continued to try until the whining and chugging started to slow. He cursed some more and stopped trying. He wasn’t a mechanical genius but Louie knew if he kept at it, the battery would die altogether, or the starter would go.
He sat there in the quiet, staring through the windshield, down the depressing grey strip of highway. Something dark appeared. It was growing bigger, coming his way. At first he thought his luck was about to change yet again. He thought it was a car. Not a car, he realized after a few more seconds. Wrong shape, no headlights.
The thing came into sharper view. It was running on four short legs, and it was coming fast. Too fat to be a dog, moving all funny. Louie remembered the diseased cow smashing its way into the toolshed. This animal on the highway—whatever the hell it was—reminded him of that, moving erratically from side to side, but with a determined destination in sight. Fear began flooding through him. It’s sick… already dead. It’s got the ticks in its veins.
His shaking fingers were on the key again, twisting hard over. The starter whined, began to slow at an even faster rate. “No! You piece of shit! Start for fuck’s sake!” Louie continued turning the key and smashing his other fist into the steering wheel.
The thing bearing down on the van was a pig—the biggest, fattes
t, most grotesque sow Louie had ever seen—and it was less than a hundred feet away. A gigantic tumor was growing out at the base of its thick throat, the size of a basketball, and as heavy as a watermelon, judging from the way it swayed back and forth.
Louie fought the panic back and concentrated. He had filled two vehicle tanks with gas that day already. The ATV had likely been sabotaged by Fiona. Why wasn’t the minivan starting? It was completely out of gas. He was no automotive genius, so he made a best guess. I have to do what I did when the thing stalled out. I have to work the fuel through the lines. What do they do on the movies when they’re trying to start a stalled car? They stomp down on the gas pedal.
The pig was less than forty feet away. There were two black holes above the blood-encrusted snout where the swine’s eyes once sat. It couldn’t see where it was going, but Louie knew there was nothing left in the animal’s brain to keep it moving. LDV-3 was driving it forward now—all eight-hundred pounds.
Louie stomped down on the accelerator and turned the key. He thought it was about to die, then felt a vibrating shudder under the seat. He pumped the gas pedal up and down, hard enough to rock the entire vehicle. The van started.
There was no time left to back away. Louie could hear the pig squealing over the running engine. It was a high-pitched, frenzied scream. The last thing he saw was the curly tail before it slammed its head into the front grill. The beast hit with enough force to snap Louie’s head forward. He went into reverse and backed up twenty feet. The pig’s neck had obviously broken, its head was lying at an unusual angle. The basketball-sized tumor had ruptured open. Black ticks, swollen to the size of a grown man’s fists, crawled out from the gore. Louie counted ten of them, all slow-moving, but definitely headed for the van.
Louie reversed the van a little further and studied them from a safe distance. They had wintered well, he thought, feeding and growing off whatever hosts they could find. I did that. I released LDV-3 out into the world. He wasn’t proud, but he wasn’t exactly ashamed either.
An eleventh tick suddenly appeared in front of him, digging its eight sharp legs into the hood of the van. It crawled over the hood ornament, and scurried towards the windshield. Louie searched frantically for the windshield wiper controls. The tick had made it to the glass, and was heading to the four-inch gap of open window on the driver’s side. Louie found the lever, smacked down hard, and snapped it off. The wipers engaged. The left one thumped into the swollen arachnid and paused. There was a second-long struggle, but the wiper won, and the tick was brushed clear of the windshield.
Louie had studied them long enough. He put the van into drive and stomped down on the accelerator again. The front wheels spun on black ice. It continued to spin down into the pavement, and the vehicle shot forward. Louie gripped the steering wheel in both hands and swerved slightly to the left where the fattest tick of the bunch was advancing. It made a wet exploding noise under the tire, like a thick-skinned balloon filled with syrup being popped. The dead pig was attempting to rise up again on its hooves. Louie swerved hard the other way to avoid hitting its hanging head and the sack of ruptured hide that was still spilling out ticks. The tires wouldn’t cooperate, catching on more thin ice. The van smashed into the pig, tearing its head off completely, and almost tipped the vehicle over onto its side.
Louie recovered control. There were four more loud pops as he drove over the remaining ticks, and then the van was accelerating down the open highway. He shot a middle finger up to the rear-view mirror. “Fuck you, assholes.”
Heat was blasting out over his feet again. Fernando had just finished playing on the stereo and Dancing Queen was starting up. He had a van filled with junk and a half tank of gas. Louie grinned. Luck had made another swing.
There was a thick column of dark smoke billowing up in the distance. Louie slowed the van as he approached. A giant fire was raging a quarter mile south of the highway. The flames had engulfed three massive buildings and a series of storage bins next to them. Dozens of dead pigs were scattered about in the melting snow, hundreds more were running through the fields and ditches. Louie drove carefully past the conflagration, avoiding any more collisions. He passed by a big sign.
Matlachuk Farms
High Production Swine Facility
Porkulation: 5,000 and Growing.
There was a cartoon image of two pigs dancing off to the side. He laughed out loud. “Oh, it’s growing alright, but I wouldn’t recommend the bacon.” Another sign appeared a little further on.
Regina 254
Rokerton 37
He didn’t think he’d have enough gas to make it to the bigger city, but Rokerton was obviously large enough to warrant a distance indicator. His luck now seemed stuck on the good side. Louie would stop in and see what the town had to offer.
Two men stepped out from the raging inferno of the pig barns as Louie’s stolen van receded into the horizon. They were covered from head to toe in heavy white fabric coated with black ash and grease. One of the masked men nodded to the other, and trudged off to a van parked away from the intense heat. He lowered the massive flamethrower into a puddle of melted snow and reached inside for his phone.
Chapter 7
The pain erupted inside Roy’s head, deep at the center of his brain. Everything was white. He had suffered from horrendous migraines since young adulthood, but this was worse, much worse. It felled him to his knees. He crawled forward on his hands, and realized after a few seconds the pain wasn’t coming from inside his head, it was in his eyes. He had shut them tight, but he couldn’t keep the whiteness out, lids closed or not.
Light!
Roy’s black-filled world was filled with piercing light. He covered the glass lenses of his gas mask with the palms of his hands. The relief it brought was instantaneous. He spread his fingers open slowly, allowing the white-yellow lasers to filter in. Roy blinked once, twice, three times. He looked away slightly from the light source, and the pain lessened. His eyes were becoming accustomed to it.
I’m not blind anymore. There is light. I can see.
He sat up against the rock tunnel wall and remained quiet. The light was moving, bouncing up and down.
Someone’s there. Someone with some kind of lantern… No, a flashlight.
There was only one someone Roy knew of that could be down here in his black universe. The bitch had come down to check up on him.
Stupid woman. Come on down and take a look. I won’t make a peep.
The bobbing line of light became weaker. It bounced and fluttered away from Roy, down the other end of the tunnel he was in. Oh no you don’t. I see you now.
Roy followed, coming back up onto his feet and padding along the hard earth like a stalking cat. He was breathing hard—too hard inside his mask. He undid it quietly and let it hang from the strap against his chest. Roy closed the gap between them forty feet, thirty, twenty. He could hear her breathing now—fast, jagged sounding. She was scared, he realized. Roy couldn’t imagine Fiona being scared of anything. She thrived in this environment, almost as much as Roy had come to thrive in it. Maybe something had gone wrong up top. Perhaps some new catastrophic emergency had driven the woman down here. More bombs? Or had those terrible bugs that infected cattle and humans alike overwhelmed the Odessa mining facility?
It didn’t matter much to Roy. She had come to him, and that was good enough. It was time to reintroduce himself. He felt the erection in his pants growing again.
Grace came to a stop. This was a mistake. All the promises of water bottles and canned food weren’t enough. She would rather die a long, painful death next to the locked elevator than venture deeper into this hell hole. She needed to get back to the main shaft.
She leaned up against the rock and attempted to catch her breath first. “Easy does it, Grace,” she whispered. If she spoke out any louder, the muffled, dead sound of her voice would drive her insane. She hated the way things sounded underground. The tunnels went on ahead and behind her for miles, but everythin
g had an immediate closeness to it. Her boots scraping on the ground were like nails scratching across her eardrums. Words spoken louder than a whisper sounded like someone speaking inches from her face.
The sounds, real and imagined, were closing in. The rock scratching into her shoulder was moving, pressing in. The earth had ingested Grace—it had pulled her whole down its throat. The walls, the ceiling, and the floor were closing in, preparing to chew her into a compact little ball.
Grace forced her right foot back. She trained the light on her left boot and made it do the same. “There… You did it… Now keep on doing it… One step at a time.”
She was making too much noise. I’m going slow—why does it sound so damned loud? She had stopped again, but realized a second too late the sounds hadn’t. Something was moving up behind her. Something big.
Rough skin closed over her mouth and nose. It yanked her head back. Grace thudded into something almost as hard as the rock wall. The hand covering her face squeezed. Calloused finger tips dug into her cheek. A thumb pressed into her temple. She feared her skull might collapse inwards after a few more seconds.
“Hi, bitch. Missed me, hey?” Roy grabbed between her legs with his other hand and forced the woman’s rear end against his aching crotch. “I’ve missed you.”
He clamped down on her mouth even harder, and bit into her shoulder. She tried to scream, but the sound was caught in her throat. His big hand was covering enough of her face that she couldn’t even breathe. Roy pressed her up into the wall and sucked some of the blood down. He pulled his face away finally, his lips made a popping sound as they released from her skin. “Don’t go thinking I’m some kind of weirdo… I’m not a vampire or anything like that. I just wanted to get a good taste. I think maybe that’s why you came back down here, isn’t it?” He squeezed himself up against her, rotating his hips clockwise, panting into her ear. “You couldn’t control yourself, you had to come back down here after all this time because you wanted me. That little fucking pipsqueak couldn’t get the job done. You wanted a real man. You wanted Roy.”