Coyote (27 page)

“But how?” asked the Mule.

“I don’t know. That’s the hard part, I suppose. Sabotage? Or maybe something they put together was stronger than their security measures?”

Beast looked unsatisfied. “But that doesn’t explain the electricity going out.”

“No, it doesn’t. But I’m betting the explanation is related. Think about it. There’s some big government lab cooking up weaponized monsters. There would be other research going on there, too. Lasers, other advanced weapons systems, all sorts of exotic, high-energy stuff, I suppose—plasma weapons, gravity waves, whatever. What if it’s one of those experiments that went wrong? Maybe they were testing some high-energy force field and the unpredicted effects got away from them. Maybe they were trying to create on-demand miniature black holes and the burst of energy got loose.

“Whatever it is that went wrong, and I’m guessing we’ll never find out, maybe that’s what let loose the monsters. Maybe they were all in cages with electric locks when suddenly all the electricity stopped working. Or maybe these monsters are from someplace else, and we accidentally let them in along with whatever burst travelled across the world and knocked out all the electricity. Or maybe that burst happened accidentally in the lab and it tore a hole open to somewhere and all these monsters poured out. Honestly, I don’t think we’ll ever know. But still, that seems like the simplest explanation to me. One giant screw-up. And the simplest explanation is usually the correct one.”

Beast and the Mule were staring at the Professor, considering his points. Even she found herself listening to his speculations instead of eating. There was one detail in the Professor’s theory that she thought the others might not have noticed.

“You said ‘the whole world,’ when you spoke, assuming that everything is like this. How do you know it is not better elsewhere?” she asked.

The Professor sighed, suddenly looking weary. “Have you seen any airplanes? Anyone coming to our rescue?” he asked. “If was just this area, or maybe just Oregon, or even just the whole United States, well it might take a long time for the rest of the world to respond, but we would have seen something. But have you looked at the sky? Not a single contrail on a sunny day. No echoes of jet engines. No thumping helicopter blades.

“If, somewhere, life was still going on as normal, we would have seen evidence of it by now. People would at least be flying over to investigate, and more likely would be dropping aid packages on us and rolling in with whatever armies they had. There is only one reasonable explanation for why we might not have seen any of that: the whole world is in the same boat. We haven’t seen any rescuers because the rest of the world needs rescuing as well.”

It was a logical explanation when thought through. It was reasonable. It was undeniable. The whole world was like them: dying in droves, living off the scraps of a society wiped out in moments, headed for a return to the Stone Age. Each member of the group sat in silence, lost in their own thoughts, absorbing the implications of the Professor’s simple logic. No one spoke against it.

No one had the desire to talk anymore. But they all kept eating. It was all they could to right now to work on their own survival. The rest of the world would have to take care of itself the best it could.

---

As the afternoon wore on, it became plain that neither she nor the rest of the group were ready to move from the lodge. Bait remained in bed, waking up occasionally to eat and drink a bit but too weak to do anything else. Nobody knew how serious his condition might be. None of his wounds were serious by themselves, but they were many. She knew the march up the road to the lodge had done him no good either. With Medic gone, there was no one to diagnose what was wrong, but everyone knew Bait’s major problem must be blood loss. All they could do now was ply him with food and water, then wait and hope.

As for herself, she had several wounds, but the most serious was on the back of her thigh. She could hardly walk on it, and the wound continued to seep blood. She could inspect it using one of the mirrors in the bathrooms but there was nothing she could do herself to treat it, and by the time evening came the group had convinced her to let them help. Unfortunately, there was no way to do that without physical contact.

She ended up lying on one of the couches in the same nook they had eaten in that afternoon—she had no desire to try the stairs again—biting on a strap from somebody’s backpack and making groaning noises as the Professor used a knife, a sewing kit from the front desk, and duct tape to close the circular puncture wound. His initial touch made her shudder, and it only became worse from there.

It wasn’t the pain. It was the contact. Feeling his fingers poking and prodding at her thigh, once the leg of her pants had been cut away, brought back feelings and shadowy memories from long ago—memories from before her life in America. These were memories that she thought she had gotten rid of—that she had tried so hard to get rid of. And even now she didn’t let herself remember completely. She knew there had been another man, in another place, and she had felt his hands on her bare skin. But that was all she would allow herself to remember. The rest must be put away.

Three times she almost came shooting off the couch, her own knife in her hand to defend herself from her attacker, but she restrained herself. She remained in control or her emotions and her self—always in control.

He worked as quickly as he could, with a minimum of touching, but she was still in no mood to talk when he stepped back, wiped his hands, and told her the wound looked clean, at least, and that he hoped it would heal neatly now that it was closed.

Then he paused. “I know that was hard… I could see it. And I don’t think it was just the pain. You’ve told us before that you don’t like to be touched. And, well…” here he almost trailed off. “If you ever want to talk about it. You know…”

She just glared at him, unable to see the kindness in his words. Able only to feel the prodding of his fingers on her bare skin.

It was too soon to say anything after such a painful and intrusive experience. She looked away, staring out the window, watching the sky fade to night over Oregon. For her, it would always be too soon to talk, because to talk is to remember.

Soon he left her alone.

When she woke in the morning, still on the couch and still sore, she looked out across the parking lot below the lodge and saw a light dusting of snow. Winter was coming, and here on the top of the mountain it would arrive first and hardest. With winter closing in they would have to make a decision soon. No, she would have to make a decision. She knew the others would not decide. They would wait and would almost certainly do what she decided to do herself.

She spent that day on the couch. Occasionally, she rolled over or switched position, and four times she made an agonizing trip to the bathroom down the hall. She could do no more. Each time she stood, she broke out in a sweat, and by the time she came back from the bathroom she was weak and trembling, barely able to make it back to her couch.

The dog mostly stayed by her side, except for a few times when one of the others coaxed it downstairs to let it outside. Occasionally someone would come upstairs and half-heartedly try to make cheerful conversation with her. She had never liked cheerful conversation when healthy and had even less interest in it now. Soon enough, each visitor would make their way back to wherever the others were spending the day. At lunch and at what must have been dinner time, the whole group, minus Bait, who still drifted in and out of consciousness in a bedroom on the first floor, came up and sat around her in the nook, eating from the piles of food they had scavenged the day before.

After they had all eaten their dinner, and the stilted conversation had degenerated to an uncomfortable silence, it was the Mule who brought up what they were all obviously thinking.

“So,” he began, “Now what?”

She turned her head from the window where she had been gazing out at the sky, and rested her cheek on the cushions as she looked at him for a moment. The question had been to her, not to any of the others.

“Now what? She is not sure. She is not ready to leave today, and maybe not tomorrow either. Beyond that, who knows?”

“So, we’ve been talking about it a lot, about what’s next. And, well, winter’s coming soon. It seems like we need to choose: either we stay here for the winter and hope that the food lasts, or we get down off this mountain and keep moving…” He trailed off after that, looking uncomfortable under her gaze.

“And what did you decide?” she asked.

He looked surprised at the question. “Nothing, really. Just a lot of talk about it, one way or another. We kind of, you know, we’re kind of waiting to hear what you think.”

“You are waiting for what she thinks?”

“Yes.”

She looked to Beast and the Professor. “And you two?”

They both just shrugged. Closing her eyes, she cursed the others for taking her choices away by giving up their own freedom to choose.

“She does not understand why you follow her—why you think she has any more idea what to do than you.”

She looked to the others, but got no answers—just more shrugs. Beast frowned, and she knew he was anxious to go out and continue his quest to destroy the things that had taken over his world, but even he said nothing.

She turned her face away from them, heaving a sigh.

“She is not sure. Tomorrow, she will stay and rest more. But after that? She isn’t sure yet.”

She didn’t know if the answer satisfied them, but there were at least no more questions. Soon she heard the others rising and shuffling off to other parts of the lodge, leaving her alone with her thoughts again.

She never did decide. The decision was taken from her. When she awoke the next morning there was more than a dusting of snow on the ground. It seemed closer to a foot, coming at least half-way up the wheels of the cars outside in the parking lot. In the days that followed the snow got deeper, eventually burying the parking lot, turning the cars into nothing more than extra drifts in the snow. There was no way they could travel through that, even if they were all healthy. They were staying.

The weeks that came were slow ones. After several days, her wound began to pain her less, and she began limping around the lodge, familiarizing herself with all its nooks and crannies. The Professor wanted to remove the stitches from her wound after a few weeks, but she had no more appetite for letting anyone touch her, so the stitches stayed. She did replace the duct tape with a cotton pad held on by an ace bandage, part of the first aid supplies that were scattered in convenient places throughout the lodge.

Bait improved as well. Within three to four days, he was up and about, first moving slowly and obviously weak, but looking his normal self a few days later. They were all grateful for this chance for their bodies to heal.

They were grateful, too, for the abundance of supplies that the lodge held for them. The lodge was like a retreat, a fortress, built specifically to cater to their most basic needs: food, shelter, and safety.

There was plenty of shelter, with perhaps a hundred empty guest rooms for them to choose from, and they were all surprise how the heat from the huge fireplace in the center of the lodge radiated slowly out to all parts of the lodge. It wasn’t warm anywhere but in the central room by the fireplace, but it wasn’t too cold unless you went into the basement or opened up a room that had been closed for several days. After the first few nights, most of them moved into their own rooms, taking the nicer suites on the upper floors. She stayed in the room she had occupied that first night, needing nothing more than a bed, and liking the fact that being on the first floor made the trip to let the dog out shorter. She also preferred the solitude that settled over her first floor hall as the others moved on.

Bait was the other one who bucked convention, initially deciding that instead of occupying a top-floor suite he would occupy a different room every night. He said he loved the feel of the fresh, crisp sheets, made up for him by some member of the housekeeping staff on the day before the Fall. Soon, though, the layers of dust settling onto everything meant that any new room he went into wasn’t so fresh and clean any more. In time, he settled into a guest room on the second floor, at the end of a hallway. He said he liked the aura of the room, but the others believed he had just gotten tired of having to clean up the rooms he moved into.

Their second need, food and water, was also taken care of. The several kitchens scattered through the lodge had an abundance of dried goods, and there was another kitchen across the parking lot in the day lodge that they began to raid as well. After several days of gathering food, they had their supplies stacked all together in one of the kitchens, with the piles sometimes rising to the ceiling. The menu was a little odd, at times, since it was constructed entirely of canned or dried goods that wouldn’t spoil without refrigeration. But at least it was plentiful. (There was plentiful refrigeration outside in the winter air, but by the time they arrived at the lodge, everything that would benefit from refrigeration was already beyond saving and had to be either carted outside and thrown down a nearby gully to rot, or closed into walk-in refrigerators and freezers that nobody intended to open ever again.)

As for water, there was an almost unlimited supply of it right outside any door in the form of snow, which merely needed to be brought in and allowed to melt in large pots and containers. At first they boiled the water, worrying about contaminates, but they soon decided that snow freshly fallen from the sky had to be about as pure a source of water as there could be. For the rest of their time in the lodge, they drank the snowmelt straight from the pots and no one got sick from it.

Their third need, clothing, was largely supplied by the shops in the day-lodge across the parking lot. Since this was a ski resort, the shops had everything from long underwear, to snow boots, to jackets, hats, and goggles—everything a person could want to keep them warm if they left the lodge. Caches of abandoned luggage found in several of the lodge’s rooms provided anything people couldn’t find in the shops, such as underwear, toothbrushes and deodorant. With baths being more of a weekly thing than a daily one (nobody was a fan of bathing in cold snow-melt water), the deodorant became especially important.

Being so well-equipped, there were times that the group discussed gearing up and heading down off the mountain in the sunny days between snowfalls, but the idea never gained much traction. They were safe and warm, so why risk getting caught in a storm if they left? There were always a few who wanted to strike out and move on, but the rest found it too hard to contemplate leaving this place of warm fireplaces, comfortable beds, and plentiful food.

The days spent in the lodge were uneventful, shortened by the early darkness of the winter months but made long by the simple fact that the lodge was so well stocked for their comfort that it left them almost nothing to do. For a while, they all simply rested, grateful for the safety they had found. But there is something in human nature that resists stasis, no matter how comfortable. In time, their gratitude faded, and the lodge was looked at less as a fortress than as a prison.

As weeks in the lodge turned into months, each of them found their own ways of passing the time.

Beast had been unhappy with their location from the beginning. He didn’t like “hiding,” as he called it, in the lodge, and wanted to be out fulfilling his mission, hunting the things that had invaded his world. He didn’t want to bother himself with excuses like the several feet of snow outside the windows. As the weeks passed, he became increasingly foul-tempered. Much of the time he could be found lying about on one of the many couches the lodge offered, staring out the windows at the world below. In these times he seemed like a bear, to her, shorn of its heavy fur so that its great size and powerful muscles were uncovered, on display for all to see. He was hibernating, waiting for spring, when it would be time to hunt again. As he stared out the windows, unmoving, he seemed to be in another place, and was likely to respond only with grunts, if he said anything at all, when people spoke to him. Once, Bait asked him why he still had muscles if he didn’t ever work them out.

“Working out was a prison thing,” he responded. “I’m not in prison no more. Now if I exercise, it’s gonna be for a purpose—like killing things.”

He said this last with an irritated look at Bait, who wisely let the subject drop after that.

It was worse when he did gain a spurt of energy. Then he would get up and begin stalking the halls, haranguing whomever he encountered in an attempt to convince them that the group should move on. It got to the point that others, seeing him coming or hearing him railing at his latest victim in a nearby room, would turn away and find somewhere else, anywhere else, to be. Several times, having grown tired of his ranting, she invited him to go on and leave by himself, pointing out that the doors were unlocked and nobody would hold him back. At this he always gave her a frown and stalked off to sulk, but he never left. It seemed that he, like most of the others, had no desire to face the world on his own.

Bait had come out restless the day he was born, it seemed, and shutting him up in Timberline Lodge for several weeks did nothing to improve that. The man seemed unable to sit still or be quiet. Most of the others found something to do with their time, and Bait was no exception. His interest was in their supplies—specifically their food and water. At first, this was useful. He began gathering the larger pots and pans from the kitchens in the two lodges, some so large you could almost fit a person in them. (What else could you cook soup for a hundred people in?) He would take these pots and pans outside and fill them with snow, leaving them in a downstairs hallway to melt, and providing the group with a ready source of fresh water. When he awoke in the mornings, the first thing on his daily agenda was to go to the hallway where they kept the largest pots of snowmelt. If any were running low, and there were always a few, he would step outside the door at the end of the hall to refill that pot. Soon the group was assured that they would always have what seemed like a few weeks’ worth of water stored up for them.

He also collected food. He was the one that did most of the work gathering the salvageable food from the various kitchens, vending machines, and other nooks and crannies it had been stored in. He also convinced some of the others to help him ferry over all the food he could find in the day lodge across the parking lot, gathering it all in the kitchen of their lodge’s main dining room, which soon had piles of dried and canned goods filling it.

But at a certain point, it was obvious that all the food had been collected, and then sorted, and that all the water they could possibly need was waiting for them in the downstairs hallway. With no more real work to do on his self-appointed project, he looked for other ways to keep himself occupied. For a few days he tried cooking meals for the group, but even allowing for the handicap of the limited ingredients on hand the meals were awful. They were a mixture of clashing tastes, with some things burned over the fire and some raw from the can—an unpalatable mess than no one could tolerate for long. Soon it was decided that everyone would fend for themselves in the kitchen.

A few people suggested other projects he could involve himself in, but Bait wouldn’t consider anything aside from the supervision of the food supplies. Soon he was doing nothing more useful than counting their supplies each day, coming up with his best guess as to when they would run out. No one knew what his guesses were based on, or how he estimated how much they had in the almost-f kitchen. His guesses ranged anywhere from several months, to a somewhat alarming two weeks, and changed daily. She began to suspect he wasn’t very good at math. After a few days, people noticed the inconsistency in Bait’s guesses and stopped paying attention, contenting themselves with the knowledge that each time they went into the kitchen there seemed to be a whole lot of food there.

The Professor spent most of his time alone in his room, brooding. He came out for meals, and was always available if somebody wanted help with a project, or simply wanted conversation, but when left to his own devices he would inevitably retreat back to his room. If anyone went looking for him, they would find him sitting on a couch or one of the chairs in the suite he occupied, not looking out the windows or reading a book pillaged from the bookshelves in the common room, but simply, as he said, “pondering things.” He didn’t share what those things were.

The Mule was restless, too, though not to the same degree as Bait. He initially spent his time fortifying windows and doors with tables, spare wood, and other furniture nailed across them, until the lodge was a veritable fortress. After a week or two, everyone slept soundly at night, sure that it was unlikely anything that came up the mountain could get at them, and if something did try to get in, it would at least make a hell of a racket. None of them would be surprised in their beds.

After the lodge was secure, the Mule shifted his efforts to splitting endless piles of firewood for the group to use in the central fireplace. The great fireplace in the center of the lodge was the only source of heat they had in the winter. They soon discovered that keeping a moderately-sized fire going in it twenty-four hours a day kept the lodge somewhere between warm and mildly chilly, depending on where you were in the building and how long it had been since somebody stoked the fire. To keep the fire going, of course, they needed a large supply of wood. Fortunately, the former occupants of the lodge had thought of this and there was an enormous pile of logs outside a maintenance garage next to the lodge. Inside the shed were several chainsaws and a wood-splitting machine that, of course, no longer worked, but there was also a collection of axes and hand-saws. The Mule took the maintenance garage over as his own area, and could be found out there most days, either splitting wood or, when he became too tired, sitting down to read one of the paperback books that he had looted from the lodge library.

Like Bait, the Mule’s efforts were at first appreciated. In time, though, as the weeks wore on and the pile of split logs grew, it became obvious that there was already enough wood to last them the winter, and soon might be enough for two winters.

And yet, each day, the Mule still retreated to his garage, where he alternately chopped and read, and each day he would come back weary from his work, almost stumbling, often unable to hold up his end of any conversation with the others as he passed through the kitchen and filled a plate with whatever he found. He would crash down onto a couch or chair and shovel the food into his mouth as if he hadn’t eaten all day, finally sighing, full and exhausted, as he dragged himself off to his bed.

She went out to confront him one day, intending to ask why he was pushing so hard, or what he thought he was accomplishing. She pulled on the heavy coat she had appropriated from the ski shop, and followed the well-trodden path from the lodge to the maintenance garage. It was only perhaps fifty feet, but enough to allow her eyes to begin adjusting to the bright sun as it reflected off the snow. She had only been out to the maintenance garage a few times herself, when they had been scavenging and getting to know the property, and she remembered it as a cold and dusty place. But there had been changes in recent weeks.

The Mule had moved an iron barrel with a large, square hole cut in one side to the center of the room, and lit a fire inside it. It made the room feel luxuriously warm after coming in from the cold outside. The light coming through the high windows at each end of the peaked roof combined with the flickering light of the fire to create a shifting illumination that was enough to see by, but seemed dim after the brightness of the sun on the snow.