Authors: Keith C. Blackmore
“Holy shit.”
“Something, eh?” Collie said and rubbed at the corner of an eye. “These boys have been at this for a very long time. And they haven’t been too nice about it either. Along with stringing you up, that white motor home over yonder there had handcuffs hooked into the bed’s baseboard, so I’d hazard a guess these pricks have had quite a few guests in the past.”
Gus looked her in the eye. “Any sign of kids? Or… bodies?”
The dread in his voice wasn’t lost on Collie. “No. Nothing like that. Course, they could’ve done anything with regards to bodies. Dumped them somewhere.”
“Oh.”
“But Wallace did a short walkabout while you were getting a shower. Found nothing of the sort.”
“Unless they made it a habit to drag them off and leave them hanging,” Wallace added.
“Yeah,” Collie said, fixing on Gus once more. “You looking for someone out here?”
“Yeah. A woman and two kids.”
“Wife?”
Gus shook his head. “No. She’s a friend. A doctor. Saved my life once. The kids are orphans. A couple of days ago, I lived on a farm outside of Annapolis. Long story short, I left it to do a job, and when I got back, the place had been torched, and most of the people I lived with were killed. Four of them were missing. I found one left on the side of a highway. I’m looking for the others.”
The soldiers quieted at that information. Then Collie sniffed and moved in close.
“Lift up the sweater and shirt. I wanna take a look at that cut again.”
Gus didn’t debate and complied.
“Yeah,” she stretched the word out as she prodded the grisly cut. “I can do something with it. Good news is it doesn’t seem to be infected.”
“That is good.”
“Listen. I want you to shave your chest. At least the area around the edges of the slash. I’ve got some cloth bandages and a wad of duct tape. Not the best, but beggars can’t be choosers. You get that shaved, and I’ll slap something on it to keep it clean for a while. But no heavy lifting for you. How’s your hands and fingers?”
Gus held them out. “They hurt.”
“Yeah,” Collie said. “That’s just circulation restoring itself. How long they have you hangin’?”
“A day. Overnight. Outside.”
“It wasn’t the warmest last night either, but it wasn’t below zero. I don’t see anything bad here. No frostbite or nip. You can move your hands and fingers okay?”
“Yeah. With some pain.”
“Well, keep an eye on it. My guess is you’ll be fine in a couple of hours.”
“What are you going to do between now and then?” Gus asked.
Collie drew back and studied him with her unsettling eyes. “Well, I think we’ll take a look around for brunch first. Those IMPs are good for five years, and I saw a couple of boxes with curry written on the side. I don’t know about you, but I’m fuckin’ hungry.”
With that, she finally took off her ski mask.
Gus couldn’t help but stare.
Shovel sat and brooded, dividing his attention between the map of Ontario on his desk and the picture window at the end of the command trailer. The window offered a respectable view of the nearby mountain and the dismal digging efforts underway there. He sighed, filling his lungs with damp air, and glared at the slab of wilderness outside, feeling a wave of hopelessness rising inside. Distant shouts pierced the trailer’s hide, piping above the constant grind of a working engine. Hard hats bobbed in front of the window, growing into workers carrying pickaxes and shovels and pushing wheelbarrows, heading toward the mouth of a cave, herded by armed guards wearing balaclavas.
Shovel glanced at his watch and saw it was nearly four o’clock.
Second shift was going in.
He shook his head. It had taken almost six months to find Whitecap, the secret bunker where the Canadian government had hunkered down to wait out the apocalypse, located north of the town of Cochrane, roughly three hours along Highway 574.
Look for a crown of mountains,
the dying and delirious spec-op spook, a JTF-2 man, had revealed to him,
a crown consisting of five peaks. Then watch the left side of the road for a sign that reads Private Property, hanging from a chain. Then another two-hour drive over a dirt road that becomes asphalt.
And straight on until dawn.
Or so the fairy tale went.
That sounded easy enough, but in reality, it was a goddamn puzzle as elusive and mysterious as King Solomon’s mines. Finding Highway 574 among the maze of back roads had been bad enough, and it wasn’t made any easier by the fact that the road was a god-awful
long
one. Once they’d located the private property checkpoint, the special forces operative failed to tell them that the old road split into forks and split again. In fact, the roads branched off and ran all over the place, often nowhere, and several times the motorized convoy consisting of Shovel’s little army found itself at a dead end, staring at rivers or blinded by thick forest. Upon making that first mistake of leading his people into a dead end, Shovel sent scouts ahead to check out all the other side roads—more time wasted.
Even worse were the maddening glimpses of the five mountains between the treetops or just over the next hill, but several roads believed to lead to the bunker abruptly switched back and went in the opposite direction. Signs popped up at regular intervals, reminding them that they were trespassing upon government property and chanced being arrested.
In the end, though, they found it, concrete checkpoints and all—right up to the promised land.
However, the promised land wasn’t in very good shape.
That fact was another little gem of information the operator had neglected to divulge, just before Shovel shot him between the eyes—another mistake, but there was no way he was going to bring along a special forces operative, just waiting to raise hell. Whitecap, the country’s last bastion of civilization, wasn’t the paradise they’d hoped it to be.
Far from it.
Shovel stood up and walked around his spartan desk, clasping his hands behind his back. He carried himself well, despite being bulked up by bare hockey pads over his orange workman’s uniform. His hair had thinned out considerably, but that was more from genetics than stress. The beard coating his chin grew unchecked, and he even entertained thoughts of twisting the ends into war braids, as the Norse savages did. Scars covered his face as if he might’ve been whipped by barbed wire at one time, while half of his left ear was missing entirely. His brown eyes bordered on black.
Shovel stared through the glass at the Whitecap’s imposing mountainside, an enormous, forested pyramid set in the middle of nowhere. He stooped just a little so he could see its top superimposed against heavenly blue. The scale of the installation was huge, according to the JTF-2 man—a veritable hotel built half a klick underground, started around the end of World War II and completed around the same time the Korean War concluded. It possessed everything a surviving populace needed and was accessible to parliamentary members, their families, close friends, logistics and communication staff, and medical and scientific research teams—not forgetting, of course, a formidable military presence consisting of both regular and ultra-special forces.
JTF-2, or Joint Task Force 2, was the Canadian counterterrorism branch of the armed forces, arguably on par with the world’s best. JTF-2 had run covert operations alone—or in support of or in collaboration with US Delta Force or England’s SAS. Civilians had never heard of their missions. Shovel didn’t know much about the secretive branch. Government officials were quite guarded about the activities of JTF-2, whose official motto was “Facta Non Verba”
––
Deeds, Not Words.
Thank the Lord for the ramblings of one trooper on his way out, who was more than compliant when asked questions about where he’d come from and if there were more.
Whitecap.
Food, water, geothermal electricity, medical professionals, soldiers, and most important of all, munitions. All there. Enough to supply an army—or hold one off if necessary. Since the bunker was supposed to house the government through times of extreme crisis for years if necessary, the storage capacity of the installation equaled the living and work areas of Whitecap. The entire complex sounded like an apocalyptic Shangri-la, a remote, well-protected oasis in the middle of nowhere, everything anyone could ask for in these dark days.
Shovel had gone there looking to barter with the prime minister or whoever was in charge in that hole. He’d been prepared to fight.
What he found was rubble.
Something had happened to Whitecap, for the tunnel mouth leading, presumably, to the bunker’s entrance had been collapsed by explosive measures. For whatever reason, someone had destroyed the tunnel access, bringing the roof down as tons of rock and debris fell and sealing the bunker, rendering it a pain in the ass for Shovel.
But not impossible to access.
His people had brought up a backhoe from the nearest town and moved the camper and RV units that’d been parked in a wide ring around the base of the mountain, where the landscape had been leveled and paved in an area of about four football fields, all surrounded by deep ditches, razor wire, and heavy-duty chain-link fences. The place even had an empty helicopter pad and an accompanying hangar. The motor homes and trailers lent the area a shantytown look of sorts, but Shovel didn’t give a shit about looks. It was livable until they could dig through the garbage blocking the way into the bunker.
Miners.
He’d give a shaven testicle for a couple of people who knew what they were doing. Skilled tradespeople were in short supply. Training a few heads to operate the backhoe wasn’t a problem as Shovel’s own background lay in heavy equipment, but clearing a collapsed tunnel made him and everyone working inside the mountain quite nervous. He knew enough about digging to know he needed professionals. Trouble was, he didn’t
have
professionals. He had programmers, bank tellers, legal secretaries, janitors, lawyers, soda-pop-truck drivers, convenience store clerks, gas pumpers, car salespeople, and line assemblers—even a woman who actually worked on and conceived new artificial flavors.
That was the gene pool Shovel had to work with: factory workers, paper pushers, and chemical freaks; wingnuts and dingbats; lugnuts and assholes. For three shifts a day, around the clock, they were all put to work after joining up, with the more solid ones being granted tenure within Shovel’s clan and the privilege of becoming an armed soldier.
Shovel gazed out at the mountain base, taking in the dark maw that had already been cleared. It reminded him of a mouth with its teeth kicked in. A good two hundred and ten meters all told, it was a straight tunnel just a little bit wider than the backhoe itself. They had found the intact cement wall on the east side and kept to it as a guide, but Shovel worried: if an entrance might be on the west side somewhere, it was entirely plausible that they might dig right by it.
Miners
.
He needed miners—or even a geologist with a rudimentary understanding of the earth-clearing process. Even more equipment––bulldozers or hydraulic roof supports would make life easier. What he had was best intentions. Giovanni, his right-hand man, had even suggested a bunker of this size had to have air ducts or possibly even a back door of some kind, just in case the people inside had to evacuate for whatever reason.
Shovel liked that thinking. Trouble was, the bunker was situated underneath a fucking mountain, slam bang in the middle of goddamn nowhere, with ample vegetation growing up to effectively conceal any such hidden entrances. He actually sent people to search for those alternate entry points, but the ghosts of Whitecap had left a rude surprise for such search parties.
Land mines.
They weren’t just little antipersonnel mud bangers either, but the honest-to-God hammers of destruction, powerful enough to blow the unlucky bastard and anyone else in a twenty-foot radius to pieces. Mines had been banned from warfare decades before, but Whitecap had apparently deemed them necessary in holding off the undead and had authorized liberal sprinkling of the devices throughout the grounds beyond the wire fence. Shovel didn’t know if the weapons had been broken out of some ancient crate somewhere or if a line of professionals had sat down and line-assembled homemade improvised explosive devices.
In any case, discovery of the weapons cost Shovel two search parties.
But at least they had a greater sense of security, knowing the mines were out there.
A knock at his door broke his spiraling thoughts.
“Enter,” Shovel called.
Giovanni walked in, tight-lipped and nodding at him. Gio was thought of as a company “yes man” from way back, back when they had all been marooned up north on a drill site, when the food finally ran out and tar-sand beetles eventually became a treat. When the world slid into ruin, Gio was one of the few who kept his head and maintained order even when things got hairy among the rig pigs and the inevitable violent purge of the malcontents commenced. Tall, lanky, but with a bush of a beard wired with silver, Giovanni had shed his rig-pig profession and family-man history and evolved into a ruthless enforcer with a preference for regular hammers if he could spare the bullets.
Sick followed Gio inside. If Gio was ruthless, then Sick was goddamn unsettling. He was Shovel’s height, give or take a half inch, and as well built as any of the soldiers. Shovel believed the man still had a face—he faintly remembered having seen it once or twice two years or so before—but Sick rarely took off the black balaclava covering his head. The arresting green eyes staring out from that black slit were as flat and dull as beach rock—eyes that had seen horrific acts, probably performed by Sick’s own hands, and had discovered both a talent and a peace therein. Shovel’s clan had found the man in Brandon, Manitoba, back when they numbered in the fifties, running and fighting a pack of crystal-meth-baked crazies calling themselves the Norse. Sick didn’t speak much, if at all, but that wasn’t a problem for Shovel. Sick did as he was told, especially when the job necessitated killing. Whenever Shovel gave Sick the order to put someone down, he felt as if he’d unleashed the grim reaper. If they scouted out a group of survivors, Sick was the ghost sent in to eye matters up close. A pair of Glocks hung in holsters under his arms, but it was the prominent Bowie knife at his waist that demanded attention. Sick had a habit of squeezing the hilt as if it was a rubber tension ball. Shovel suspected it was damn near the only way the man kept his shit under control.