by North, Geoff
It was a bold move, but she didn’t have any other hand to play.
The mask began to bob up and down slowly as Roy nodded his head. He lowered the gun and finally tucked it into the waistband of his tattered pants. “That’s the way it was with me and Louie… before he became a backstabbing prick. We worked pretty good together. Maybe keeping you alive wouldn’t be such a bad thing.” He pointed up to the cab of the grader. “Climb up in there.”
“So that’s it? Were partnering up again?”
Roy shrugged. “I don’t see why not… We can work together until I decide otherwise.”
Grace shook her head and remained where she was. “Not this time. I’m not going anywhere with you until you promise we’re a team. No more death threats, no more saying what you’re going to do with my dead body. From now on we—”
Roy did something completely unexpected. He handed his gun over to her. Grace took it, trying not to look too surprised, but failing. “Go ahead,” he said. “Shoot me if you have to. But this should prove how serious I am... It should show you that you can trust me.”
Shoot him. Shoot him in the chest, in the neck, and in the face. If he was dumb enough to give you his gun, then he deserves to die where he stands.
Grace tucked the gun away into another pocket of her parka. She climbed up the steps into the grader’s cab and sat off to one side on a toolbox squished up against the window. Roy followed her up and settled into the driver’s seat.
“This just might work out between you and me. We’ve both been screwed over.”
Roy fired the grader back up, and the big machine continued down the center of the highway towards the town of Rokerton.
Chapter 14
Louie and Dwayne drove through the remains of Rokerton. It wasn’t far to where they were going, less than a mile, but the streets and back lanes were cluttered with the burned out shells of military vehicles and piles of dried-up corpses. Louie’s window was open, his head stuck halfway out from Dwayne’s stench. They were headed for the town’s abattoir, where—according to Dwayne—the army had set up a massive generator to run the slaughter house’s cooling facilities. Food needed to be stored safely for the survivors until power could be restored. LDV-3 had interfered with those plans, and the vast majority of survivors, military personnel, and relief effort volunteers were now dead, or worse than dead.
“What exactly are dragons?” Louie asked as he manoeuvred the van slowly around a tangle of dead soldiers in the center of Main Street. He couldn’t clear the carnage completely; the van’s right front wheel climbed up a few inches onto someone’s chest, crushed it, and collapsed down with a thump.
“Dragons were mythical creatures that could fly and breathe fire.” Dwayne could see Louie didn’t find his answer at all funny, so he answered seriously. “Men in fireproof suits equipped with big-arse flame throwers. They’re traveling from city to city, town to town, and farm to farm, burning up any trace of the outbreak the cold didn’t kill over winter.”
“They dropped more nukes on Winnipeg,” Louie recalled. “The Tenth was behind that, weren’t they? It was an attempt to stop the ticks from spreading out any further.”
“Yup.” Dwayne pointed to a service road approach. “Turn there.”
“But they were too late... the disease moved too quickly.”
“Right again, but the follow-up strikes weren’t a total loss. The majority of the LDV-3 victims were still in the city. They got most of them. It could’ve been a lot worse.”
Louie almost laughed. “Look what it did to this town. I’ve seen animals and frigging birds infected with the little fuckers. How much worse could it get?”
Dwayne didn’t answer. He directed Louie off the service road towards a large, windowless, single story building. A sign ran along the metal siding. Rokerton Meats. It was where that tick-infested sow that had attacked him on the highway would’ve likely ended up eventually, Louie thought. He parked the van at the front entrance and exited quickly.
They went inside. Louie could hear machinery chugging along somewhere. “How often do you come here to refuel the generators?”
“Every day, right around this time. I like the walk. It clears my head, and the fresh air is good for me.”
Louie wanted to inform him there was no such thing as fresh air anymore, but maybe he meant it as a break from his own foul smell. He followed him past a sales counter and old fashioned cash register. They went into a darkened back room. Dwayne clicked up some switches, and fluorescents flickered to life overhead. The area was lined with sinks and preparation tables. “The dragons in these parts are making one last push along the US border, throughout western Manitoba and eastern Saskatchewan,” Dwayne explained. He sat on a metal stool at the end of the room in front of a six-foot wide cooler door. “They’ll burn whatever’s left in the next few weeks and then reassess the situation.”
“What will there be left to reassess?”
“The spread of LDV-3 from Ground Zero. You were absolutely right about them not being able to contain it completely. The dragons are burning up any population clusters left, and the white knights are gathering the healthiest survivors. When all that work is done, the Tenth are going to nuke the hell out of this entire region again.”
Louie pointed the gun at him. “Then the faster you give me the vaccine, the faster we can both get out of here.”
“Relax, the dragons are still a few days from here.” He tapped a small radio receiver hooked to the belt at his waist. “I can still hear pretty much everything they’re up to. The next bombing run won’t happen for at least five more weeks. Plenty of time for you and me to get to know each other better.”
“I don’t want to know you any better. You fucking stink. The farther away from you I am, the better.” He aimed the weapon at Dwayne’s face, six inches away. “The vaccine. Give it to me now.”
Dwayne leaned forward on the stool until his forehead was resting against the barrel of the gun. His grin widened. “Don’t you want to know about the white knights?”
I can’t win with this guy. He knows I won’t hurt him until I have the vaccine. Or maybe he’s just too goddamned crazy to care.
He lowered the gun and Dwayne continued talking. “The white knights precede the dragons. They come to small towns like this seeking out survivors, but not just any old survivors. They’re only interested in saving the children.”
“Why only kids?”
“Because they’re our future. The Tenth’s scooping them up wherever they can be found. Today’s children will run tomorrow.”
Louie leaned against the big cooler door. “So what about all the adult survivors? Are the Tenth saving any of them?”
Dwayne shook his head. “No need. There are enough of them hidden away already.”
Something thudded up against the other side of the cooler door. Louie jumped away.
“I keep the vaccine in there,” Dwayne chuckled. “It’s the safest place I could think of.”
There was a small glass window set into the upper part of the cooler door. Louie went to it and peered through. It was pitch black inside. He pressed an ear against the cool metal surface and heard something scratching on the other side. Dwayne flipped another switch up next to the door and the cooler room lit up.
Louie looked through the window again and saw an obese naked woman sitting twenty feet away against a far wall, squeezed between boxes of packaged beef and pork. One of her fat legs twitched. Her entire body spasmed as she pushed away from the wall and started crawling towards the door. Louie saw other bodies slowly convulsing back to life throughout the rest of the cooler. Two black hooks suddenly scratched up against the window, inches from Louie’s nose. They scraped along the glass and caught in the plastic frame. Louie looked down and saw a grotesquely swollen tick pulling itself up along other side of the door. Its face rubbed along the glass, mandibles snapping silently.
Louie backed away from the door slowly, dimly aware that Dwayne was still t
alking. “Not everybody died when the ticks came to town. The people stuck in there came to the abattoir to hide. After everything settled back down—after the soldiers and the disease killed everything in town, I came here and found them. LDV-3 had gotten to them as well. Whatever there is left up in their brains is too dumb to open the door from the other side.”
Louie wiped his hands down his sides, trying to rid himself of microscopic ticks he imagined already crawling on his skin. “We have to get out of here. They can still get to us... the cooler isn’t sealed well enough to keep them locked in.”
“We’re safe. The smallest ticks can’t live in the cold, only the bigger ones... the ones golf-ball sized and larger, only they’ve survived in the lower temperature. And even the big ones won’t last forever. The cold slows them down too much.”
Louie had backed his way into a counter. “That’s not true. A pig infested with larger ticks charged at my van on the highway, and it wasn’t moving slow. Damn near knocked me into the ditch.”
“That’s impossible, it’s still too cold outside.” Dwayne sat on his stool and pulled thoughtfully at his beard. “Unless the pig had just come from somewhere warm.”
“It had come from a pig barn less than forty kilometers east of here,” Louie confirmed. “The whole operation had been lit up. There were burning little piggies running everywhere.”
Dwayne jumped up from his stool. “Forty kilometers? The dragons are a lot closer than I thought.” He reached for the cooler door handle.
Louie yelled. “Don’t open it!” He forgot the gun was in his hand as he backed away further.
Dwayne opened the door. The tick on the other side dropped to the floor with a wet smack. The glistening greyish-black skin of its fat belly had almost burst upon impact. Its claw-like legs began digging into the floor, pulling itself slowly towards Louie. Dwayne bent down and picked the thing up. He giggled, pressing it in close to his face. The tick’s legs became entangled in his beard as it attempted to push away.
“See how harmless these things are when you’re vaccinated? See how desperately it tries to get away? Once the vaccine is introduced into your bloodstream, a toxin is created and released back up through the pores of your skin. You basically become a walking can of bug repellant.” Dwayne rubbed his cheek against it.
Louie thought he could hear the high-pitched whistle of a kettle boiling in another room. Not a kettle, he realized. It’s the sound the tick makes. The thing is screaming.
One of its sharp claws caught in Dwayne’s wrist and broke through the skin. Dwayne yelped and threw the tick away. It struck the wall over one of the cutting tables and exploded. The sound was like a balloon popping. Thick blood jetted out, smacking against the table’s surface and onto the floor in pools and strings of syrupy black. Larger chunks moved amongst the viscera. They looked like meatballs crawling in rotted tomato sauce. More ticks, smaller ones feeding inside the larger one, growing—just like the ones Louie had seen escape from the pig he’d run over on the highway.
“Whoops, my fault.” Dwayne stomped down on one of them, and more blood shot out in a stream from the side of his boot. He jumped down on another, and another. They were rushing to get away from him, but still heading straight for the next closest source of warm blood—Louie. Dwayne ground the last one into the tile inches from Louie’s foot. “There, all done. You’re safe.”
Louie couldn’t speak. He pointed with the gun at the obese female corpse exiting from the cooler room on its hands and knees.
Dwayne forced the weapon down. “Don’t shoot... I need her alive.” He chuckled again. “I mean I need what’s left of her to remain as undamaged as possible.” He got in behind the crawling corpse and hoisted her up by the ankles. He pulled on her, straining with all his might, dragging her back into the cooler room. Her basketball-sized breasts and rolls of belly fat slid backwards along the floor. She clawed at the air with blackened finger nails, her eyes not seeing Louie, but the ticks inside her knew he was there. They could sense his warmth, they could smell him nearby. “Come on back, Judy,” Dwayne said with a grunt. “You’re not going anywhere today.” He staggered back, and the bloated corpse went with him. When her body was totally inside, he stepped on her fat ass so she couldn’t move forward again. He grinned at Louie through the open door. “I like to see what the ticks are up to. I’ve been watching them evolve the last few months. Keeping them in here where it’s cold but not frozen is the best way to study them.”
Louie was coming forward now, the gun aimed at Dwayne. “Just give me the vaccine, I’m done with you and this place. Give me the fucking vaccine right now.”
“Sure, no problem. It’s right over there.” He pointed to a rack of metal shelves along one wall inside the cooler. Louie stepped in slowly and saw a black briefcase sitting on the highest shelf. It reminded him of the attaché cases criminals were always opening on the movies, the ones stuffed with neat little stacks of cash always equalling a million dollars. It looked out of place on the shelves with its fancy leather stitching and gold clasps amongst the vacuum-packed meats and rolls of butcher’s wrapping paper.
More naked bodies were crawling towards Louie. They were slower-moving than the fat corpse, but they were headed his way nevertheless, drawn by the warm hemoglobin coursing through his veins. He kicked the body of an older male away from him. It ended up on its back, thrashing slowly at the air with its fingers and toes. Its pale grey stomach and chest had a bumpy look, like monster-sized goose bumps. The bumps were moving, swimming around beneath the skin. The ticks were searching for a quick way out of their host.
“Please don’t hurt any of them,” Dwayne pleaded. “They’re all I have left... they’re like my pets... I take care of them.”
Louie snatched the case from the top shelf and stepped back to the cooler door. He considered shooting Dwayne Chubey for a few moments, but decided against it. Every bullet in his gun was precious. They could save his life further down the road somewhere. And he was definitely heading further down the road. He was leaving Rokerton and this bat-crazy, shit-stinking mad man behind.
“They’re all yours.” Louie fled from the abattoir and returned to his stolen van. Only hours earlier he was freezing to death on the side of the road. Now he had wheels, warm clothes, a weapon, and the cure to a plague he had helped release into the world. His luck was continuing to ride high.
Chapter 15
Caitlan opened her eyes and felt a throbbing pain in her side. She tried to sit up, but hands pushed her back down gently.
“Easy... you’re nowhere near ready to start moving around like that.”
She looked up at Fred. “What... What happened?”
“I just finished cleaning out the wound in your side,” the doctor started to answer. Caitlan tried to move again and he held her in place to the bed she was lying on. “The bullet went right through, didn’t hit anything vital. You should be back up on your feet in a few days.”
She looked about the small room where she could. An oil painting of ducks flying over a marsh hung on the wall opposite her. There were smaller paintings and framed photos on the other walls. They were pictures of places she’d never seen and people she didn’t know. There was an end table next to her and a dresser beyond that. It was the only other furniture in the room besides the bed she lay in and the chair Fred was sitting on. “Where are we?”
“Four miles south of Rokerton, in my home.”
Caitlan managed to smile. “I always figured you were a dirty old man, Doc. You finally managed to get me in your bed.”
He winked at her. “You got me. Being with a lesbian black woman young enough to be my daughter has always been high on the old bucket list.”
The smile on her face suddenly vanished. Fred knew it wasn’t from he’d said, but what she had just remembered. It all came flooding back. “We were back in that town. Everything was burning... they were stealing a baby.”
She tried rising again, but Fred held her firmly in pla
ce. “Yes, that’s when you were shot... Hayden as well.”
“Is he alright? Where is he?”
“He’s fine.” Fred hiked a thumb towards the bedroom door. “He’s outside with Angela keeping an eye on things.”
“The baby... did we save the baby?”
Fred shook his head. “There was nothing any of you could’ve done. There were men with guns and flamethrowers, the whole damn town was on fire.”
“What about the kids, are they okay?”
The doctor remained quiet. He didn’t want to lie, but he certainly didn’t want to tell her they had lost all three of them.
There was no stopping Caitlan this time. She pushed him back and struggled to her feet. “I can’t believe we left Tarantan without the children.” She leaned against the dresser to catch her breath and glared at him. “The twins and Nicholas? All three of them? Did they... were they—”
Fred held his hands up, tried to slow her from reaching what seemed like the inevitable conclusion of what happens to children left inside a burning town. “They weren’t killed... we just couldn’t find them in time. Hayden and Angela both think they were taken by the men in the white suits.”
She didn’t want to believe what she was hearing. “You left them there. You left them there to die... or worse.”
“We had no choice. There wasn’t time. There just wasn’t enough time.”
Caitlan moved towards the bedroom door, bracing herself along the dresser and wall. Fred was at her side in moments, but she pushed him away. “Keep away from me.” She found Angela and Hayden in the doctor’s modest little living room, sitting side by side on a couch. They were leaned forward, studying an open laptop set on a coffee table.
Angela saw her first. “Should you be on your feet?”
“Somebody’s gotta do something,” Caitlan snapped. “The three of you sure as hell aren’t getting much done. I’m going back to Tarantan... going to find those kids and get them out of there.”