Authors: Keith C. Blackmore
Gus nodded and leaned toward his window, rolling it down.
Most of the roads led to a house or two, scattered along the highway on a whim. Those that could be seen from the road appeared deserted and not deserving of further inspection. What might have been a livestock farm came up on the right.
“Bet it’s a chicken farm,” Collie smirked.
A green sign appeared, informing them of the turnoffs for Londonderry, Debert, and Belmont. The names didn’t mean anything to Gus, and another bolt of despair hooked his guts. So many places to look—so many to get lost in or hide.
But what choice did he have?
A slow minute later, they rolled to a stop at a crossroads.
“One of many,” Collie said, scanning left and right as she switched off the motor. “Lots of little towns around here, and I haven’t been through a quarter of them yet. Your call on what you want to do.”
Gus gazed beyond the windshield. The left road went straight up a small knoll and hung another left, disappearing behind a row of fir trees. The right dipped into a forested gulley before rising, turning left, and vanishing as well. Gus huffed and rubbed his forehead.
“How about we just stop here for a minute? Roll down the windows and listen? Something might come our way.”
Collie regarded him, and he had to force himself not to stare at the mess of her nose.
“Army of Christ crazy bit it off,” she said.
That jolted him. “What?”
“You were trying hard not to look at my nose.”
“I was?”
To that, she only smiled.
“Sorry.”
“No need to apologize,” Collie remarked. “You didn’t do it, and I don’t mind telling you the background. Better than having you sneak peeks all the time.”
“Sorry.”
“You say that a lot.”
Then Gus smiled. “Yeah, well, I mean it. Army of Christ, you said?”
“AOC. Operated in Eastern Mali some ten years back, causing hell for the local government. Anyway, the guy actually dropped on me from the ceiling while I was clearing a room—just like a goddamn spider. I pinned him to the ground, but he kicked out one of my feet, and my face dropped into his and…” Collie snapped her teeth twice, a disturbing picture. “Needless to say, I lost my mellow.”
“Fuck me gently,” Gus breathed.
She scratched at an eyebrow. “Yeah, took it off in one bite. Surprised the hell outta me. Right through my balaclava.”
Gus shook his head. “What’s a bala-clava?”
“That’s a ski mask. British troops wore them originally during the Crimean War in 1854. Or ’64. One of them years. My military history is getting rusty.”
“Never heard of it before.”
“What? The war or the balaclava?”
“Both,” Gus chuckled.
“You watch action movies?”
“Well, yeah. Used to, anyway.”
“You’ll see special forces wear them a lot.”
Gus knew what special forces wore, but a spark went off behind his eyes, and he regarded her in a disbelieving light. “You’re special forces?”
“Was SF,” Collie answered. “Now… I’m freelance.”
“I didn’t think women could be, ah, special forces.”
Collie smirked. “ Not true, though the old guard used to think that way. They used to say women weren’t capable enough mentally or physically to carry out covert objectives. Wrong, of course. Hell, I knew some dykes who would throw down in bars with broken bottles if it came to a fight, and they’d use them too. As the world went on, it got clear that female operatives were, in fact, more valuable than a man in certain situations.”
“Why is that?” Gus asked.
“Because we’re girls.” Collie smiled coldly. “No one expects an unarmed woman to rip out a throat with her bare hands or thumbscrew the eyeballs to the back of an attacker’s skull.”
Speechless, Gus’s mouth fell open.
“Well,” she clarified. “Not
every
one.”
Gus still had nothing to say.
“Don’t worry,” Collie assured him. “Just remember to drop the toilet seat when you’re finished, and we’re good.”
He’d definitely remember to do that.
“What about you?”
Gus glanced over at her. “What about me?”
“What happened to your face? Since we’re disclosing history here. Quid pro quo.”
“Parts of my face were burned in a house fire. My nose was busted by an ex-girlfriend. She knocked out my teeth too. Happened about two years ago.”
Collie chuckled. “She didn’t take kindly to you dumping her?”
“She dumped me.”
“And she hit you? Wow. A right vengeful bitch.”
A moment’s hesitation. “Yeah.”
Collie shook her head. “Women, eh?”
“Well…” Gus shrugged and stared at the road. “I did shoot her back.”
That earned a
what the fuck?
look.
*
Wallace’s fingers clenched the steering wheel with growing impatience until he caught himself.
Control
, he told himself.
Control.
What were they yakking about up there? And why had they stopped dead on the road? He turned off the engine and cracked his window, listening. He picked up nothing but soft birdsong. Birds. He wondered how they tasted.
Control
flashed across his mind like a red warning light. Food wasn’t an issue then. Not right then anyway, but in a day or two, it might.
Wallace opened his mouth as wide as possible, making his ears pop, and noticed that the aches in his joints had reached his hands—his fingers in particular. He released the steering wheel and shook them out, making and releasing fists. Usually, the pain wasn’t so bad after he’d eaten, but that time, his aches sparkled dully, letting him know they were still around.
Perhaps he’d slipped another degree?
That thought rattled through his mind. Yes, he concluded with a pinch of glumness, that might very well be the reason.
Wallace considered getting out and walking over to Collie’s window to check on their status, but his fingers made him wary of doing so. His joints continued to ache, but were they worse? He wasn’t sure, still too preoccupied with the development of his fingers. Part of him didn’t want to find out.
Control
, he vowed.
Hearing nothing but far-off birds, Collie started the RV and drove on down the highway. Wallace dutifully followed, bringing up the rear. A few more houses sprang up along the road, nestled amidst wild-growing lawns and backyard jungles. Most of the structures appeared to be in reasonable shape, considering the apocalypse was into its fourth year. Some homes had boards nailed over their first-floor windows. Others had cars parked haphazardly in paved driveways.
Gus noticed an open door on the third house they drove by and realized darkly that the previous front doors had also been left open.
“You better pull over,” Gus said.
“See something?”
“Maybe. The houses on this side. Their doors are all open. How about yours?”
“Only passed a couple, but yeah—why?” She stopped the huge vehicle.
“Well,” Gus smiled, “that’s what I’m going to find out.”
“You okay doing that?”
“Yeah. Yeah, I think so.”
“Just holler then if you need any help.”
“I’ll remember that.” Gus thought about all the times he’d cleared a house by himself. He hopped out and unzipped his jacket for easy access to the twin Sigs under his arms. He looped the baseball-bat scabbard over his neck and checked his boot knife. After a second, he checked his jeans. He wished he had something thicker covering his legs.
“You okay?” Collie asked.
“Yeah, just wishing I had something for my legs. Leather pants or something.”
“You’ll be okay,” she assured him. “You didn’t make it this far on just leather pants. As weird as that sounds.”
Gus supposed that was true. “Be a few minutes.” He closed the passenger door.
Dead weeds pushed through gaping cracks, exposing frozen earth and conjuring an image of something massive forcing its way up underneath the paved driveway. Gus walked along the pavement, keeping his eyes on the tall grass. The motor home huffed behind, moved, and stopped again in a squeal of brakes. An empty pool lay to the right, dull green ringing its cement edges. The front door to the house loomed closer, a brass knocker fixed in the center of a glossy wooden design. The home was two stories covered in bright yellow siding. A blue Mustang and a forest-green Jeep were parked before a garage with its door heaved high, the interior gutted.
Gus’s boots scuffed to a soft halt, and he studied the garage, knowing full well the difference between sloppy and ransacked. Whoever had gone through the place wasn’t being particular. Someone had taken anything there to be had.
That left the house.
Gus crept up to the front door and placed his back against the right side, stepping into what might have been a stomped-out flowerbed. He inhaled and wished he had a helmet. The door itself didn’t appear forced.
“Fuck it,” he grunted and peered inside the house. “
Hey, anybody home?
”
He shouted perhaps a little too loudly, but what the hell, he’d get back into form eventually. “Anyone?”
No answer. No sound at all.
“All right, listen, I’m coming in. If someone’s in there, let’s talk first, okay? The door was open, and I’m just checking things out. Just want to make sure all’s well, so don’t shoot me, okay? No shooting. And don’t club me upside the head, either. Already had my bell rung enough this week, and I look like shit because of it. My chest too, for that matter. Don’t want to get slashed again or stabbed or strung up by the hands or feet. And since we’re on the subject, don’t be grabbing for my goddamn balls either, okay? Hear me? Don’t. Grab. My balls. Damn things are dangling to my knees now anyway, but I’d like to keep them a little while longer. All right? Got all that? Okay, then.”
He took a deep breath. “Here I come.”
Fully expecting to hear that dead-lung rasping he’d heard so many times before, Gus stepped into the doorway, hand on his bat, and saw nothing inside the naturally lit mud room or the corridor beyond. A white-carpeted staircase had soaked up a wide gash of blood, some of which splashed spectacularly against the wall. Two plastic twelve-gauge cartridges, blue, lay at the base of the steps, and he nudged one with his boot. Hearing nothing, he sniffed and got only cold, fresh air.
“I have a bat, and I’m taking it out, just in case you’re a dead fucker…” He scolded himself, suddenly feeling uneasy about the profanity. “
Undead
, I mean. I meant
undead
. Jesus.”
Bat in hand, Gus eased into a gutted living room. The guts of sofa and chair cushions had been ripped out and strewn across the floor while a coffee table had been chopped into ugly chunks of fiber. A shotgun blast had killed a flat-screen TV while the corner behind the device had broken beer bottles piled quite high. The fireplace at the far end might have been lit up with a flame thrower, the hearth twinkling with smashed glass.
But no bodies.
It didn’t bode well in Gus’s mind.
The rest of the house was clear though in disarray, obviously searched for goods. Even the renovated basement, which he descended into without a flashlight, had been trashed. More destruction had been wreaked on the downstairs bedroom and rec room, and the toilet in the washroom was full of dried fecal matter. Gus wasn’t an expert on shit––a notion he reckoned some might dispute––but it looked as though he’d missed whoever had used the basement john by days. No more than a week, tops. They’d come into the home, and whatever they couldn’t take, they destroyed.
The back deck and yard didn’t reveal any wrongdoing and was untouched in comparison to the house. Gus wandered over to the pool and saw that its sea-green depths were filled with dead brush. He lingered at the edge and looked up, seeing Collie walking cautiously along the driveway, her hands on her sidearms. Wallace moseyed far behind her.
Scanning a tree line of elms and the odd fir, Gus stepped back from the pool and meandered along a patio walkway, meeting Collie at the front of the house.
“Thought I’d get out and stretch my legs.” She studied the staring dormers of the home. “See anything?”
“No,” Gus replied. “Anything happened here happened days ago. The place’s been looted. And lived in for a night at least. There’s a fireplace in the living room that looks like it might’ve been lit up with gasoline. No one’s in there. No bodies, nothing. Though there’s plenty of blood on the walls and dried shit in the cans.”
Collie made a face, and Gus immediately regretted his words.
“Ah, sorry, I mean––”
“It’s okay,” she said, amused. “I’m not a saint, so don’t worry.”
Wallace’s grin, however, even though it hadn’t changed at all below the visor, suddenly struck Gus as smugly pleased.
“Something on your mind?” Gus asked him.
Wallace stopped in the driveway, and a person could almost hear the squeals of his joints. The soldier gazed around, his visor taking in the deserted landscape. “Nope.”
“You seem pretty happy about something,” Gus observed.
“It’s just the way my face is these days,” Wallace explained with eternal patience. “So fuck off.”
That relaxed, delivered-under-the-radar expletive straightened the slouch in Gus’s back. “What did you say to me?”
Instead of replying, Wallace shook his head. “Whatever happened here, we missed it.”
“I think I just said that,” Gus pointed out.
“Now it’s official.”
“Ah, I see.”
“I’m heading back to the machine,” Wallace stated. “We should get rolling. See if this pattern continues along the road.”
The soldier took his time returning.
“Did I say something?” Gus asked Collie.
“No. Don’t worry about him.”
“He told me to fuck off.”
“Just let that one go.”
“Yeah, but…” Then Gus dropped it and switched from Collie, to Wallace walking back to his RV, to the house just searched.
Collie scanned the sky. “He’s having a hard time these days. For reasons that are obvious. Some days, he’s fine; and other days, he can be a little grouchy. I know you don’t mean anything by the looks, but he picks up on them, and it puts him off. Just keep that in mind.”