They all stood looking at him expectantly so he let out another deep breath. “If you’ll have me, I’ll come and help.”
Josh’s face split into a grin and Emily gave him a cool nod but Alex reached across the table for his hand.
“Of course we’ll have you, Cooper! It wouldn’t be the Maple Leaf Mafia without you!”
Before he could reply, Quinn barked out, “Alex!” and grabbed the arm she had reached out to Cooper. He pulled her away from the table and through the door of the staff room. As soon as the door had swung shut behind her, she wrenched her arm from his grip and whirled to face him with a furious expression.
“How dare you! Who do you think you are?” She practically spit at him in contempt.
His expression was full of frustration when he said, “Do you really want to go down that path again? You broke the guy’s heart the last time he was with us!”
Alex barked out an incredulous laugh. “Yeah, because I chose YOU! Clearly that was the wrong choice! I might have broken Cooper’s heart but you broke mine so you have NO say in what I now choose to do or who I hang out with.” She reached up and tugged the chain around her neck until it broke and then held out the ring that he had given her until he finally took it.
“Just go home, Quinn. I don’t need you anymore.”
Alex spun away, yanked the door back open and sailed through it without a backward glance so she didn’t see Quinn’s face crumple with grief.
Dead silence greeted her when she entered the room and everyone except Cooper kept their gazes away from her. He stood tall and his expression was fierce.
“I would like to join you on the trip to Calgary but I don’t want to cause a rift between you and Quinn.”
Alex’s shoulder’s slumped wearily and she tiredly shook her head.
“Cooper, I would love for you to join us. There’s already a rift in place between Quinn and I and it has nothing to do with you.”
She felt the draft from the door behind her opening and stiffened at Quinn’s voice. “She’s right Cooper. It has nothing to do with you. It would be good to have another fighter with us if things go sideways in the city. You’re welcome to join us.”
Cooper stared hard over Alex’s shoulder before finally giving a brisk nod. “Alright, then let’s go.” He broke eye contact with Quinn and turned to Josh.
“I don’t really know if they’d let me leave so it might be better if I just slipped away. I’ll need to go grab some gear from my barracks and change out of this uniform. Where’s a good place to meet up with you?”
Josh filled him in on where they had stashed their sleds. They agreed that it would be best if the group left the same way they had come in and Cooper would slip out of town from a different area. He knew where all the sentries and road blocks were placed so he shouldn’t have any problem slipping through.
They left the warehouse by the front entrance and went separate ways. As the main group worked their way back the way they had come, they noticed that things had changed in the short time since they had passed through. Earlier, people had been milling about all over the place. Now, everyone was standing in long, semi-organized lines waiting to get into different buildings. Every person in a line was holding a bowl and a plate. Alex guessed it must be lunchtime. That was confirmed when a few people started to come out of the doors with steaming bowls of what looked like thin watery soup. They all clutched their bowls tightly and avoided looking at the hungry people eyeing them from the lines. It almost seemed like they were afraid that someone would rush them and steal their food.
Alex could only say a thankful prayer as they passed by that none of her loved ones were forced to live in such conditions. Hard stares met them as they passed by the many lines but no one spoke to them or tried to stop them. It was a huge relief to finally round the bend and come to the empty stretch before the roadblock in the distance.
The soldiers that had let them past earlier were still in place. They looked hopefully at Alex to see if she would part with any more of the home baked goods that Josh’s mom had sent but she just nodded and moved past them. The fight with Quinn was weighing heavily on her shoulders. Her emotions kept bouncing back and forth between fury and despair.
The head soldier who had made the decision to let them pass earlier called out. “That didn’t take very long! Didn’t you find your friend?”
Josh nodded at him but kept moving. “Yeah, we found him. He just wasn’t as interested in visiting as we had hoped. No point sticking around wasting time.”
The soldier frowned with a knowing expression. “That’s too bad. This world we have now, it changes people. It was nice of you guys to try and look him up. You all have a safe trip home and maybe we’ll see you again this spring.”
Josh just nodded and gave him a sloppy salute before trudging on through the snow away from the roadblocks.
Dara fell back and murmured a few words to him. He nodded and picked up his pace until he was up in the lead with Quinn. Emily, Lisa and Dara flanked Alex and slowed their pace down until there was a decent gap between them and the boys.
Emily was the first to speak. “Are you okay, Alex?”
Alex narrowed her eyes and gritted her teeth. “I’m FINE!” She snapped and stomped her next step into the snow.
Dara made an “hmm” noise and that’s all it took to open the floodgates for Alex.
“Seriously, seriously? Who does he think he is? I certainly don’t know who he is anymore! As if he thought he had any right to speak to me about Cooper! Argggg!”
Emily patted her on the back sympathetically. “Well, if you and Quinn are finished, Cooper clearly still has feelings for you.”
Alex angrily shook her head. “This is like a big joke! Every time we have something important to do, the universe has to throw in boy drama? Why does this keep happening to me?”
Lisa cocked her head and kicked at the snow in front of her before speaking. “You know, it is kind of funny.”
Alex sent her a harsh look and spat, “FUNNY?”
Lisa nodded slowly then went off in a rapid-fire rant. “Yeah, it goes like this, Boy meets girl. Girl bosses him around for ten years. Apocalypse happens. Boy declares love for girl. Girl’s like, yeah but look at this other boy, he’s cute. Other boy’s like “How you doing?” she said in a Joey Tribbiani parody from the Friends TV show voice. “Girl finally chooses boy. Other boy leaves with a broken heart. First boy turns into a jerk. Other boy’s back with “How you doing?” Girl has enough and shoots both boy and other boy. Problem solved!”
The three girls stared at Lisa incredulously until a snort finally escaped from Alex. Her snort turned into a gasping half laugh that then turned into a full-on belly laugh and caused the other girls to break out into their own laughter. The girls laughed so hard that they ended up just sitting down in the snow.
Josh and Quinn stop and turn back to watch the girls. The confused expressions on their faces caused the girls to just laugh even harder until they all gasped for breath.
Dara was the first to recover and catch her breath. She wiped the tears of laughter from her face and gave Alex a semi-serious look.
“Listen, Alex. In the big, overall picture of things right now? The two boy-crazy is nothing. They’ll figure it out or you will, but it’s not life or death. All that really matters right now and IS life or death, is our mission. We have to find the medicine to save our town and no boy drama is worth getting in the way of that.”
Alex looked at her friends and nodded with a better attitude. “You’re absolutely right. None of that matters at all compared to what we have to do.” She rubbed hard at her face. “God, sometimes I feel so old and then I remember I’m only eighteen! I hopefully have years to figure out who I’m going to spend my life with.” She rose up to her feet and helped pull her friends to theirs. “Come on, let’s get this done.”
They all shared a hug before turning and moving up and then past the boys who still stood looking at them i
n confusion. As Lisa passed them she shot Quinn a wink.
“Come on, Boy. We have a town to save!”
When he heard the other three girls giggle, Josh just shook his head with bemusement and muttered, “I will NEVER understand women!”
By the time they made it back to the burned-out office building, Cooper was waiting for them. He had changed out of his uniform but still wore a camouflaged snow parka. There was a pack at his feet and a military issued rifle hanging on a sling from his shoulder.
No words were spoken as he hefted his pack and fell into line as they made their way around the building to where they had stashed their sleds and the Ranger. Cooper’s eyes flared wide in surprise when Josh pulled the tarp off of the new UTV.
“Man, I’m not even all that surprised you found something like this. I mean, I had some long boring nights when I was laid up healing from that gunshot wound to think about our trip home from Cali. Do you realize just how incredibly lucky we were? Think about all the supplies we managed to get right off the bat and then we just stumble on not one but two working vehicles. We crossed a country that was full on anarchy, made it home then managed to free our town from roughly one hundred gang members. All with none of us dying. There’s an Angel watching over this group!”
Josh just shrugged and smirked. “OR, I’m just that good!”
Dara bumped him aside with her hip and tossed her pack onto the front seat. “OR, we can NOT tempt fate by saying thank you to whoever or whatever is looking over us. Oh, and, shotgun!”
Josh looked up to the sky, raised his hands and mouthed the words thank you before turning to the others.
“Okay, who wants to ride with me and my babe in style and who’s going to be eating the wind?”
Alex wanted some time alone so she secured her pack in the trailer of the sled she had driven here and climbed on waiting for the others to get sorted. Emily and Lisa decided to ride in the UTV with Josh and Dara so that left Quinn and Cooper to drive the other two sleds. They had already mapped out what roads they were going to take to loop around Red Deer and avoid any more road blocks before hooking back up to the main highway that ran straight into Calgary.
It was an easy ride in the warming temperatures and it got warmer the further south they traveled. Alex had always marveled over how the temperature could change by ten to fifteen degrees in as little as one hundred kilometres in her province. She knew it had something to do with how the mountains channelled the wind but not exactly why. All she cared about right now was that they were headed to even warmer weather. She just hoped that the temperature was the only thing hot they were headed towards.
Chapter Eleven
There were exactly nine exits from the highway between the two cities and Alex figured if trouble was waiting for them it would most likely be at one of those exits. The one-hundred-and-thirty-kilometer stretch was wide open prairie that let them see for miles. A few gentle rises along the way but with hardly any trees, it left the big divided highway open to the wind. Before the lights went out, this stretch could be treacherous in the winter causing many huge pile-ups every year. With no natural windbreaks, the blowing snow would pile up in drifts when it wasn’t causing deadly black ice.
Cooper had told them that the military had moved all the stranded vehicles off the highway as far south as the town of Bowden but stopped there, planning to continue clearing the main artery sometime in the coming summer. It made for a smooth forty-kilometer ride for the group until that town and then the real challenges began. With cars, trucks and many transport trailers scattered all over the highway, it was a minefield of massive snow drifts of all different heights. Add to that the warmth of the chinook making the snow unstable and they ended up having no choice but to leave the highway’s surface and drive in the more stable ditches and secondary service roads that ran parallel to it. Of the five towns between Bowden and Calgary all but the last one was set five to ten kilometres west of the highway. It was also the worst stretch of the trip, before and after lights out. What would have been an easy hour-and-ten-minute drive before, now took them almost two-and-a-half hours due to the slower speeds and having to constantly work their way around obstacles.
By the time they reached the last town before Calgary, they were all exhausted from the tense ride. They pulled over at Josh’s arm waving out the window and shut down their machines. When Alex swung her leg over her sled’s seat to dismount, she staggered a few steps away on noodle-like legs. Cooper was closest to her and grabbed her arm to steady her. He helped her take off her helmet and brushed a few sweaty red curls back from her face.
Alex gave him a tentative smile but seeing Quinn’s stony face over his shoulder had her turning away from them both with an eye roll to dig out her pack and water bottle. She guzzled down half of it in one go before looking over at the rest of her friends.
Lisa was also unsteady as her feet hit the snow and her face was pale. She met Alex’s eyes and shook her head.
“Ride in style, he said! Yeah, if style means almost tipping over like twenty times! I’m not getting back into that thing again. Alex, can I ride with you the rest of the way, pleeeeease?” she begged.
Josh threw his hands in the air as he climbed out. “I had complete control the whole time!”
Lisa shot him a look like he was insane and moved further away from him and the UTV. Alex just laughed and handed the girl what was left of the water.
Josh just shrugged. “Whatever! So that’s Airdrie ahead. It’s a decent sized suburb city. The highway cuts right through it. After that, it’s straight into Calgary. Does everyone agree to try the Foothills Hospital first? If that doesn’t pan out, the Sick Kid’s is just down the road from it. If we strike out at both of those, we’re going to have to find shelter for the night. The other hospitals are too far to make today.”
When everyone had nodded or verbally agreed, he continued. “All right, then lets…”
Alex threw up her hand and cocked her head to the side. She took two strides past him and scanned the field to the west. Everyone else turned to look that way to see what she was looking at. Dara stepped into the UTV while hanging on to the roll bar to give herself more height, pointed into the field in the distance.
“There, three snowmobiles headed south into Airdrie on the next road over!”
Josh rushed over to the cargo bed and opened his pack bringing out a pair of binoculars. He hopped up into the cargo bed and panned the area Dara had pointed out.
“Uh, guys? They’re stopping and looking this way!” Dara called out. “Now they’re pointing this way! Annnnnd, they’re moving again!”
Josh jumped down muttering “Crap, crap, crap!”
Everyone could hear the high revs of the engines across the field as the other three sleds raced towards town faster than they had been before spotting them. It either meant they were scared of them or they were coming for them.
Josh quickly zipped up his pack and tossed the binoculars onto the seat.
“Alex, help me pull the rifles out and pass them around. I don’t know if those guys are headed our way or not but we should gear up now. We should have our AK’s out before we hit Calgary anyway. Anyone who has to heed Mother Nature’s call should get on that, too. Once we get to the outskirts of the city, we probably shouldn’t stop again if we can help it. With over a million people pre EMP, there’s bound to be some still left looking for trouble.”
He passed out the assault rifles along with extra magazines of ammunition that had traveled with them all the way from southern Utah where they had taken them from a biker gang. As soon as everyone had a rifle and taken a quick bathroom break, they loaded up. They kept their speed up as much as they could with all the obstacles in the way. Whoever the other group was or their intentions, they wanted to get as far away from them as possible.
With a day of warmer weather, the snow on many of the stranded cars and trucks had started to melt letting patches of shiny metal roofs show through. Alex had to con
centrate on her driving, but when she occasionally glanced back, she could see Dara, Lisa, and Emily scanning in all directions from the Ranger. She let out a relieved breath when they finally passed the last commercial building at the small city’s edge and open fields were all she could see ahead, but they continued to keep the speed up for a few more kilometres.
On the east side of the highway was a huge outlet mall that they had all shopped at before. It was anchored by a massive outdoor hunting and fishing store and Alex wondered if they should stop there on the way back. Remembering that Calgary was only a few miles away she realized that the place would have been stripped bare if even a fraction of the city’s population had headed this way.
Once they passed the mall and the exit for the city bypass, they had no choice but to slow right down. The road was filled with snow covered vehicles - more vehicles than they had seen since they had traveled out of the Los Angeles area. Alex thought back on the timing of the EMP and remembered that it had happened pretty early in the morning. All these cars would have been in the morning rush hour carrying commuters to work. When they came upon a jackknifed transport trailer they left the road completely and drove down the center median.
It was four lanes of snow buried cars going into the city but the outgoing lanes weren’t as congested, so they slowly wound their way back and forth from the median to the northbound lanes as they watched the exit signs for the route they would take to get to the first two hospitals on their list. Alex was concentrating on the road but still kept looking to either side of the highway for signs of survivors. So far, the sky had been free of smoke trails and she hadn’t seen any movement to suggest that there was anyone living nearby. It was incredibly lonely knowing that less than a year ago, this area was a bustling city that had action twenty-four hours a day.
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