Out of the cutting breeze, the barn, although old and rickety, was basically sound. Why it hadn’t been torched in the raid was anyone’s guess. Perhaps it hadn’t been the gang who had raided and torched it at all. There were enough abandoned properties where fire might start spontaneously for a number of reasons if the storms had brought down electrical cables, and a fire from the house wouldn’t have reached the old barn, Nathan knew.
And seeing the house already burned out from a distance might have had a similar effect on scavengers as it had on Nathan. No point in going there because it was already wrecked. And, certainly, what they found in the barn showed them something that looters wouldn’t have left behind.
It was the rich aroma of diesel and engine oil that drew Nathan to the tarp-covered tractor before he’d even registered what might lie beneath the strained green fabric.
While Donie sat on a deep bed of hay that was still on the dry side of becoming animal feed or silage, and Dave set up a base station to see if he could get a satellite uplink, Nathan uncovered a miracle.
The green John Deere 5020 tractor was fifty years old if it was a day. It had all the hallmarks of being someone’s weekend project, as it didn’t look like it had been a working farm machine for many years. There was no other farm machinery nearby—no plows or threshers, or seed drills—all but cementing the impression of it has a hobby vehicle for whoever had lived in the ranch house.
Maybe the guy who’d fixed it up was the same kind of ostrich as Nathan, he considered, and then he shook the thought from his head and got on with checking over the tractor.
The engine was clean, the fuel tank showed itself to be three-quarters full, and the tires, both front and back, seemed well pressured and sound. Nathan climbed up into the glass cab. It was a one-person vehicle with just a bucket seat, a steering wheel, and green-painted operating levers topped with black plastic spheres.
“This tractor is immaculate,” Nathan called down to Dave and Donie.
Neither of them seemed that interested.
“Guys! We can use this!”
“Go ahead. Plow a field. Have fun.” Donie’s sarcasm bit hard, but Nathan wasn’t deterred.
“There’s enough diesel to go a hundred miles. More.”
Dave looked up from the laptop where he’d been failing to get an uplink, suddenly interested.
Donie was still laid out in the hay with her eyes closed. “And? It’s a tractor. It’s noisy as hell. They’ll hear us coming from two counties away.”
“Maybe, but we know now they didn’t spend the night here, so they’re on the road. They’ll be moving now, and my Dodge sounds just as loud as this tractor. Then there’s their Ski-Doos. We’ll move faster over the snow because of the tires and they won’t hear us coming while they’re moving. I can’t imagine they’re going to stop moving if they don’t have to. They’re in a hurry, remember? That’s what we’re guessing? And they’re going to have to stick to roads. With this beauty, we can cut corners and go across country. Once we pick up their trail, we can use the maps to overtake them. Maybe plan an ambush.”
And to back up his idea, Nathan took two wires from inside the steering column and twisted them together. The hotwired tractor started on the first try, its rumble shaking the barn so that streams of old dust fell from the wooden rafters. “We don’t even need a key!”
With only the driving seat for occupants, it was so cramped in the glass-sided cab that Dave and Donie had to affix their packs onto the rear of the John Deere tractor, tying them on as tight as they could and making sure all the zips were secure. Saber was happy to trot alongside and sometimes ahead. Her leg was fine now. Occasionally, she would dive off into the woods to either side of the road, and she came back with bloody jaws and a succession of broken squirrels in her mouth. At least one of them was getting fed.
Donie and Dave crouched behind and to the side of Nathan as he drove. The only possessions they’d brought into the cab were their laptops and the shotguns. The glass cab gave them good all-around vision and would afford them lots of warning if anyone tried to sneak up on them from behind.
Nathan’s head wound was stiff and felt hot to the touch around the pad, though he could deal with the pain well enough now that he had other things to focus on, and felt they were actually getting somewhere with the tractor. He knew the wound pad would have to be changed soon, however, as it was soaked through with exudate—if the fissure below wasn’t cleaned regularly, he’d be in a whole heap of trouble.
The John Deere ate up the miles easily, and Nathan estimated they were averaging ten miles an hour over the virgin snow. Saber kept up a steady trot nearby, and while Nathan knew nothing about the breed, he guessed all working Arctic dogs had travel like this as their bread and butter. That said, he would slow the tractor occasionally so that Saber could catch up. She’d bark happily and jump up when she reached them, and then fall back into step as Nathan pushed forward.
The morning wore onto afternoon, and Nathan knew that they only had a couple of hours to pick up the Seven-Ones’ trail. He’d been recognizing the country for some miles now, too—they’d traversed it in the other direction only a few days before on their way towards Detroit. That glittering haven of enclosed plazas and swimming pools had never felt more distant that it did now. Without his family, there would be no sanctuary for Nathan there. If his family was gone, then he didn’t know what he would do… other than to keep looking for them, to find out their fate one way or another.
“Look!” The signal had come from Dave, pointing past Nathan’s ear. He’d been so lost in his reverie that the uniformity of the road had become something he’d processed on automatic pilot, and he hadn’t noticed what Dave and Donie had already seen up ahead.
It was Freeson’s Land Cruiser.
And it was now a burned-out wreck.
16
Walking to the Land Cruiser was the longest walk Nathan had ever taken in his life.
Even jumping down from the cab of the tractor had been near impossible. He’d almost had to tell his legs to move before they would, he’d been so frozen by the fear of what he might find within the burned-out wreck.
The stink of the dead truck was thick in his nostrils before he could see inside, the stench of burned rubber, charred plastic, seat foam, and hot metal having become a concoction that clogged his throat and stung his eyes.
Or were his eyes pouring preemptive tears?
Nathan didn’t know.
Dave and Donie hung back as Saber caught up. The gravity of what they were witnessing had even been picked up on by the dog. She sat by the steaming tractor, her ears pricked up, attentive, but she didn’t venture forward as Nathan moved on his mechanical legs, fear gripping him with a steely stranglehold.
All the windows on the truck had burst as a result of the flames which had engulfed it. Chunks of glass glittered on the ground where the intense heat generated by the car’s end had melted all the snow and ice back to nothing but a wide circle of blackened earth. The back section of the Cruiser, where Freeson had stored the diesel cans, was empty. The vehicle had been thoroughly looted before being torched.
Nathan edged forward a little more, needing to bend his head to see through the charred metal skeletons of the seats, both front and back, all the way up to the melted dash.
The car was empty.
Whatever Nathan had imagined he’d find there—some dead horror of charred skin and split red, limbs tortured into impossible shapes—it wasn’t within the Cruiser.
The relief rushed through him, bursting the dam of fear in a gushing of released terror, his bones scoured clean and his heart released. “Thank God,” he whispered to himself, not knowing if there was anyone or anything to hear him.
And then, looking through the Toyota to the heat-uncovered patch of ground beyond it, he saw the body.
Nathan’s knees collapsed beneath him.
It was only the nearness of the Toyota, and his instinctive move to throw out his
hand to steady himself, that stopped Nathan from crashing to the ground in a heap of pain.
Dave jumped from the tractor and ran to Nathan. Relief was evident in his voice when he spoke. “Man, I thought you’d been hit by sniper.”
Nathan shook his head, trying to point at the burned carcass on the other side of the Cruiser, but he was just unable to get his muscle memory together enough before he vomited caustic bile from an empty stomach over the door of the Toyota.
Dave saw the body. “Is that…?”
“I don’t know,” Nathan managed to say between breaths. He wiped the remains of the foul-tasting liquid from his lips.
Dave waved Donie down from the tractor and went around the Cruiser. Nathan forced his back to straighten, and then he followed.
The smell of roasted meat was enough to turn the most enthusiastic carnivore vegan. The body was adult, and charred black, but streaked yellow-pink where the flesh and fat had roasted through. White bone poked out at both elbows, and what clothes there had been were just black tatters of material. The skull at the back of the head had been scraped clear of hair and split down to the bone. Nathan hadn’t seen a burned-up person before, and the corpse’s face—seen as Dave bent, reached across it, and turned it over stiff as a surfboard—was a study in agony.
Nathan forced himself to stare at the face, with its cooked eyes and rictus grin pulled back severely from the teeth. And it was only then he could be sure it wasn’t Cyndi, Lucy, or Freeson.
The face, although scorched and burned, wasn’t so charred as the rest of the body. Perhaps the person had managed to pull himself from the burning car and push his face down into the snow before the end. The rest of the body had been left to burn, but the face at least still had some remnants of humanity about it—the skin around the chin suggesting a thick beard had been burned away, with a silver nose ring on top of that and tattoos of sparrows on both sides of the neck.
Nathan sagged in his flesh, feeling like he was being loosened from himself. Whoever the person was, his end hadn’t been easy. Nathan could be sure of that. But at least until he found evidence to the contrary, his family were still notionally alive.
Dave let the body fall back onto the ground with a smart crack. It was already frozen through. “Been here a while. Enough for the frost to settle. Hard to tell, but I’d say at least five hours, maybe more.”
Nathan wondered how Dave could be so matter-of-fact, and the look he gave him must have unlocked a little shame in the young man’s eyes. He shrugged and answered, “Life goes on, dude. If we’re gonna catch up with them, we can’t afford to be sentimental.”
Nathan nodded. “Yeah. I just… I just thought the worst.”
Dave clapped Nathan’s shoulder like a teacher comforting a slow pupil in class. “Yeah, man. I get that.”
Donie, who had gone into the trees, was returning. She had a red plastic gasoline container in her hand, and she put it on the roof of the Land Cruiser, where it sat incongruously intact among all the destruction.
“Found it in the trees. Empty.” Donie added, “Guess we can rule out the truck catching fire by accident.”
Dave had gone forward to where the snow hadn’t been melted by the heat and was studying the tire tracks that remained.
“There’s the Dodge and the trailer, two Ski-Doos, and another truck. Going east.” He looked back at the charred Land Cruiser. “Guess they had another truck waiting here and decided to leave the Cruiser once they’d transferred the supplies.” Dave pointed at the body, commenting, “Maybe Chuckles here wanted to keep the Cruiser for himself. The boss man objected. There was a fight. Chuckles and the Cruiser get barbequed and the caravan continued on.”
“Nice people to do business with, if they’d kill one of their own so cheaply,” Donie said.
Nathan was still riding a wave of nausea and disgust at what he’d seen. “You two sound like you come across this sort of thing every day.”
“We’ve seen our share,” Dave said.
“It doesn’t get any easier,” Donie finished.
And that was a statement that Nathan could get on board with without any trouble. None of this was getting easier.
Not even close.
The terrain became even more recognizable as they moved on.
The tracks led them back onto the highway, and within an hour, they had passed Lucy’s burned-out limo.
The echo of the sight against the burned-out Land Cruiser wasn’t lost on Nathan. Each vehicle, burned for very different reasons, but with the same outcome.
“You torched that one?” Dave asked incredulously as they passed the wreck, and Nathan explained how they’d met Lucy.
“She’s a piece of work, that one,” Donie said, and Nathan felt the ironic burn of her non-self-aware and judgmental attitude rising like lava within him.
He didn’t feel like he had the headspace to use up on an argument with Donie, though. It wasn’t his place to tell her how much of an asshole she sounded to be. In any case, would it make any difference? Dave, he had warmed to, but he still felt a chill distance between him and Donie. It was a bridge that he didn’t know if he’d ever be able to cross… maybe if things had been different and they hadn’t been on the edge of desolation, she might have been a whole different person, but he couldn’t know.
Then again, maybe Nathan would have been, too. He just didn’t know. All he did know was that he didn’t like himself very much right now. He wasn’t impressed with himself at all, and wondered how his daddy would have dealt with the situation.
Family First.
Okay, sure, but where did that leave him?
Nathan hated that he was wallowing a little in his own self-pity. He needed to shake it loose and get his ducks in a row. Saving his wife and his son was not going to allow him to just go back to being the old Nathan. Old Nathan had to break, slough his skin, and come out bigger, stronger, and harder.
And if he didn’t do that, everything would be lost.
“Well, that’s just great.”
The tracks they’d been following, which Dave seemed to have a real skill at doing—he called it his only “real-world skill” as opposed to his “virtual skills as a White Hat Hacker” (Whatever that was, Nathan had thought)—had led them to the highway off-ramp leading to Marty’s Trucker Love.
Nathan wouldn’t risk taking the tractor down the ramp and pulling into the parking lot before reconnoitering the area first.
The three of them tramped down the snowy slope, through the young pines and the thick brush, looking out over the windswept parking lot maybe sixty yards to the truck stop. The scene was pretty much as it had been before, with the two big rigs and the tanker. Parked closer to the diner, though, was Nathan’s Dodge, still yoked to the Airstream, with two Ski-Doos and a chunky black, late model Ford F-350.
As Nathan scanned from the diner to the gas station, a movement by the pumps caught his eye, and what he saw there made the breath still in his throat like a solid mass.
Freeson had been tied between the two pumps, his arms outstretched as if he’d been crucified. His head lolled to one side. His knees were bent, and his feet were naked and folded up beneath him. There wasn’t enough give in what had been used to tether him to the pumps to allow his knees to fall fully to the concrete, and it was his rolling head, moving near deliriously from side to side across his chest, which had caught Nathan’s attention.
His best friend, hog-tied outside in the freezing cold. No anorak, no gloves, no hat, no shoes.
If he’d been there more than a couple of hours, he wouldn’t be far from frostbite or a fatal case of hypothermia.
“Free…”
Dave and Donie stared forward at Freeson as his head moved.
“We gotta get him down,” Nathan breathed out as much to himself as to the others.
“No. Wait,” Donie hissed, and with that she pointed back to the diner.
Three men were coming out from the glass-fronted building. They were dressed in ga
udy, brightly-colored ski jackets. And they had balaclavas rolled up over their faces, sitting on their heads like beanie hats.
Nathan labeled them automatically as he took them in. Mustache was rangy, and sharp-faced, like a rat walking on his hind legs, a bushy frontiersman’s handlebar drooping from his top lip. Redhead had a thick rope of hair tied behind his skull in a ponytail. He was fatter than Mustache and walked with his head and eyes down, like he was in a permanent state of submission to the others.
The third was the tallest, and as they walked towards Freeson’s crucified form, he pulled off his balaclava to scratch at his massive, bald head. The skin of it ran with tattoos, the content of which Nathan couldn’t define from this distance, but the near fully covered expanse of exposed skin reminded Nathan of a hardened gang member from a death-row documentary on National Geographic. Bald walked with a swagger that marked him out, if not within the whole group then certainly within this trio, as the top dog.
Mustache reached Freeson first and, without any preamble, punched the stricken mechanic in the face, snapping his head back and sending up a spray of blood from his nose.
The deadened acoustics of the snow-laden surroundings carried the men’s laughter across to the brush where Nathan and the others hid. Dave and Donie both had their shotguns in hand, but if they fired from this range, the spread of shot would pepper everyone—including Freeson.
“My turn!” roared Redhead with a throaty laugh, and he kicked Freeson in the guts.
It seemed the gang members had come out just to beat up Freeson. They weren’t asking him for information, and they weren’t trying to gain tactical knowledge of where he might know of supplies hiding. They just wanted to hurt him and make his last moments as painful and terror-filled as they could.
Nathan felt torn, watching it all unfold. Yes, they could burst from the brush and, with some element of surprise, get close enough to the torture scene to open fire from a more advantageous range—but if they did that, then what about Cyndi, Tony, Syd, and Lucy? There was no way they were unguarded in the diner.
After the Shift: The Complete Series Page 18