Bitter Cold Apocalypse | Book 1 | Bitter Cold Apocalypse

by Connor, T. W.

  Once Marlon got the fire going, I helped Angie stand and hobble over toward it, keeping her weight off her bad leg. We dropped down at a distance where we could feel the heat of the fire on our skin but weren’t in danger of any flying embers or burning, and we both took sticks from Marlon.

  “Fresh rabbit,” he told us quickly. “Courtesy of my traps.”

  “And of very good planning,” I said.

  I watched as he skinned and gutted two of the rabbits, then skewered them, positioning them over the fire to allow the meat to start cooking.

  The corners of my mouth ticked upward. “I’m starting to think this isn’t your first time.”

  “Not my first time,” he agreed carefully. “And probably not my last time, either. I’m just glad it’s coming in handy, allowing me to save the MREs and other rations I brought along. If this event is as serious as I think it is, those supplies will be worth their weight in gold.”

  “How much food do you have in there?” Angie asked. “Just out of curiosity, I mean. If all goes well, I’m guessing we’re planning to get to Ellis Woods tomorrow. Right?”

  “If all goes well,” Marlon agreed with a nod. “But I’ve brought enough food so we won’t need to stop and hunt on our way. But regardless, we’ll need to make it there tomorrow, for a number of reasons.” Marlon gave me a knowing look.

  Right. Nothing like a hard deadline. Then again, if we hit the river within three miles and managed to make good time on the other side—or even use the river somehow—I thought we’d make it. The map indicated that Ellis Woods was two miles away from the river.

  That would be within our scope. We might have to walk into the night, but that would be doable as well. Anything to keep from spending another night in the forest.

  We cooked our meals until the rabbit was spitting and sizzling over the fire, the juices dripping into the flames, and then sat back and prepared to enjoy the first hot food we’d had since breakfast.

  “So tomorrow we reach the river around mid-day, or so,” I began, taking a bite of my meal. “Since we have the sleds, I’m guessing we can use them as a sort of raft. Not the cracked one, obviously, but the other one is whole enough to hold us all, I think. Are we thinking we just cross it? Or do we actually want to use it? Maybe raft further down the river until we get closer to town?”

  “Depends on if it’s frozen or not, really,” Marlon said. “It’s early enough in the season that it might not be. If it’s still running, it makes it more dangerous, but also increases our options.”

  “And if it’s frozen, it makes it easier—but also gives Randall and the others a way to track us,” I added. “Our footprints will show in the snow on the ice just as easily as they do in the snow on the shore. Is it worth going all the way to the river only to find that out?”

  He gave me a shrug. “The river is on our way to town. Whether it’s useful or not… Well, that remains to be seen. Besides, wind will be picking up across the river, even if it’s iced over. No trees out there. The snow won’t be as deep as you think—and it won’t be obvious to anyone if certain parts of the ice are…shall we say, swept clean?” He lifted one eyebrow in emphasis, and I almost laughed.

  “Wiping the joint of fingerprints, eh?” I asked.

  A nod and a grin, and Marlon took another bite of his rabbit. I frowned, though, considering the man in front of me, and before long, he was returning the frown.

  “What is it, John?” he asked. “You’ve got questions written all over your face.”

  “More questions than you know,” I confirmed. “And I’m smart enough to realize that you won’t answer most of them—and that maybe you can’t answer most of them. So I’m trying to find the ones that you might be able to answer. And they sound…well, silly.”

  Marlon put up a hand. “No silly questions. Go ahead.”

  “These sleds. It’s weird to find kids’ sleds in a place where no kid lives. Do they belong to anyone who actually lives there? Did we leave someone behind?”

  How many people stay in that house? I didn’t ask. Why are there so many rooms? Why were you set up for a disaster that might mean a lack of electricity? Why do you have vehicles that include comms devices that I suspect not even my Special Ops unit had access to? Why were you out in the middle of nowhere, with the training you obviously have? What happened to make you leave the intelligence or military life? And how did you come to be in that exact spot, when we needed you?

  I kept all those questions to myself. I sealed them inside me and put them into a chest that I would open later. Maybe. When we had time. When we were safe. When I thought he might actually answer one or two of them.

  Until then, there was no point asking any of them. No military man would give up his position. No intelligence officer would let go of his cover. I still wasn’t sure which of those Marlon was. But I knew enough to know that he wasn’t going to give me the information I wanted until he was sure he could trust me—and until we were out of danger, at least for a moment.

  Marlon grunted and smirked at the question I had asked. “Like kids?”

  “Yeah. I know it’s none of my business, but you have to admit that these were a strange find.”

  The comment was waved off. “My niece and nephew. They used to come with my sister when she lived in town. I didn’t put them away after the last time they were here.”

  “Did something happen to them?” Angie asked, sounding worried. “To keep them from…coming back?”

  Marlon looked haunted—and also angry. “She moved to Detroit last year after a run-in with Randall and his boys. We didn’t talk about what happened to her, but I didn’t need to ask many questions. With that man, there are only a certain number of possibilities, if you get my drift.”

  So the hairy menace had spread his insane anger beyond his realm. And though I couldn’t have done anything to keep him from attacking Marlon’s sister, I couldn’t help feeling responsible for the man still being alive at all. I should have finished him off. I should have taken more care with that bullet.

  I should have stuck around to make sure the job was done. My training had told me to do just that, and I’d ignored it in my hurry to get Angie out of there as quickly as possible.

  The problem was, in doing that, I might have cursed us all. Because now, instead of dealing with him in a cabin that, while it belonged to him, had at least been a stable situation, we were now going to have to deal with him out here in the wilds.

  In his territory. By his rules.

  Marlon woke me when it was my turn to keep watch, and I sat up from where I’d been laying next to Angie in the bed we’d built of several sleeping bags on the bottom and several more quilts on the top, shivering as the cold air reached me. The fire was still burning brightly in the middle of the cave, and I could feel the heat coming off of it, but it couldn’t match the warmth Angie and I had achieved in our own bed.

  A part of me felt guilty, for a moment, that Marlon would be going to his set of blankets on his own, without the benefit of another person helping him to heat the space—or having already been under the blankets, acting as a natural heater. Then I put that thought quickly away from me. I wasn’t going to volunteer Angie for the job, and there was no one else.

  Besides, if my suspicions were correct, Marlon had plenty of experience figuring out how to see himself warm alone in the depth of winter, in the wilderness.

  “Nothing out there that I can see,” he whispered, backing up a bit to give me room to leave my bed. “Just your typical cold, bright winter’s night in Michigan. Lucky it’s a full moon tonight. Gives us a ton of visibility.”

  I nodded, steadied myself against the cold I was about to feel, and dragged myself fully out from under the blankets, then turned and made sure Angie was completely covered up again. I might have to deal with the cold. She didn’t. And I wanted her body putting all its energy into healing. We were already going to put her under enough pressure asking her to stand on her own while we dealt wi
th the river. She needed her rest.

  Marlon followed my eyes down to my wife and, it seemed, my thoughts as well. “I’ll keep an eye on her for as long as I’m awake,” he said softly. “But I don’t think she’s going to be waking up any time soon. She might not have worked as hard as us today, but her body is going through resources quickly as it tries to heal itself. The more rest she gets tonight, the more successful we’ll be tomorrow. And I suspect she knows it.”

  “I suspect she does,” I echoed, staring down at Angie.

  I knew she’d come through for us tomorrow. Even if it killed her. And that was what worried me.

  I turned toward the front of the cave and bent over to strap on my boots. A moment later, I reached for the hunting knife I always kept strapped to my calf—which I hadn’t taken off, even when we went to bed. Once the knife was in my hand, I felt more secure. More prepared. Like I would be able to take on whatever came for me.

  Yes, it was an exaggeration. But we all have our security blankets, and that knife was mine.

  “Don’t suppose I’ll be needing a gun, then,” I told Marlon quickly. “Long as it stays quiet out there, I don’t want to be making too much noise.”

  “Right you are, my boy,” he answered. “Besides, I left something up there for you. If you need to protect us, it’ll give you the best possible chance.”

  He turned and made his way to his blankets, then, and I noticed that he’d placed them closer to the fire than I would have—but had also put his feet toward the fire, with his head facing away. Smart man. If the fire got too high or the heat became too much, he’d experience it with his feet first. No danger of his face blistering or his hair catching on fire.

  It was a natural alarm clock, and it increased my respect for him by quite a bit.

  I glanced down at my watch and marked the time—just past eleven—and then set an alarm for one. We’d agreed on two-hour shifts for standing guard, since it would give us each enough time for quality sleep in between and would keep the one standing guard from being so tired that he might fall asleep. Then I turned toward the mouth of the cave and made my way to the boulder that lay about three feet into the cave. We’d seen the boulder when we first started talking about guard duty and had agreed that it was the best spot. Whoever was standing guard could shelter behind the boulder and still see most of the area in front of the cave—without being seen by anyone or anything that was looking in. I was hoping that we would have a quiet night and wouldn’t have to deal with any incursions, but if we did, it was far better to catch the intruder by surprise.

  The boulder gave us a way to do that.

  When I arrived at the flattened spot behind the rock, where Marlon had obviously been spending his time, I huffed out a laugh. There, sitting up against the wall, was a sturdy, compact crossbow. I couldn’t see well in the darkness, but I thought it might be a Ravin of some sort. It had that narrow aspect that usually marked that brand.

  That made it a top-end crossbow. One of the most sought-after labels. Here in our cave.

  “No noise, indeed,” I whispered to myself.

  The crossbow would be virtually silent and just as deadly as a gun against both predators and people. Next to the weapon, he’d left a quiver full of arrows, and I wondered for a moment how the hell he’d hidden that from me up to this point. I wasn’t sure, but I thought it was too large to have fit in his pack—which I’d helped to pack, in any case.

  Then I realized that it didn’t matter how he’d gotten it out here. I didn’t care whether he’d shoved it into his pants to carry it that way or if he’d already had it in this cave, just in case he ever needed it. The only important thing was that we had it—and we had it because we’d happened to find this man in the middle of nowhere, and he happened to have not only training but an almost paranormal sense for what we’d need and when.

  Yes, I was glad to have him on our side. I knew for a fact that without him, we would have died in the snow outside of Randall’s house. Even if we hadn’t, Randall would have caught up to us at some point, and I would have been too weak to fight him alone.

  With Marlon and I fighting together, though, I thought we just might be able to pull it off.

  I settled down onto the ground, turned my eyes to the cold, moonlit world outside, and settled into the monotonous, important task of standing guard against unknown terrors of the night.

  18

  Marlon showed up at my side before the alarm on my watch went off, and I jumped about a mile high at his whispered “How are things looking out there?”

  I swallowed my heart back down to its rightful position and turned my eyes up to him.

  “Ever heard of giving someone a warning before you sneak up on them?” I asked, only half joking.

  “If I gave people a warning before I snuck up on them, it would rather defeat the purpose of sneaking, wouldn’t you say?” he replied, his tone of voice indicating that he was definitely laughing—at my expense.

  I smiled despite myself. “Sorry, I’ve been tense all night. Just wasn’t expecting you to show up on your own. Figured you’d want to stay in bed as long as you could.”

  He stared out into the night for a moment, his eyes roving the landscape for anything that looked out of place. “I’ve been tense all night, too,” he said finally. “Didn’t get much sleep, though I did enjoy being under a bunch of blankets rather than out here in the cold.”

  “Then why did you get out from under them before you had to?” It wasn’t a rhetorical question. I truly wondered what he was doing—and a part of me had started to wonder why he was doing it. He could have gone on more easily by himself, and I didn’t believe for one minute that he couldn’t have defended himself from Randall in his home. We were in the middle of the forest and he’d still managed to pull out a high-tech, extremely expensive crossbow. I didn’t think this even scratched the surface of what he had, when it came to toys.

  He hadn’t needed to run from Randall. Why had he?

  “Like I said, I couldn’t sleep,” he said simply. “I’ve had quite a lot of experience with Randall, and none of it good. I don’t trust him for a moment—and that includes not trusting him to act the way we expect any normal human being to act. Yes, he should be hunkered down for the night somewhere, keeping warm and waiting until daylight breaks before he ventures out into the cold. That doesn’t mean he will. Maybe because he’s not smart enough. Or maybe because he’s just that crazy. Either way, I didn’t want him to show up when you were alone. We have a better chance of beating him together.”

  A wry smile crossed my lips. “You don’t think I can take him on my own?”

  His look was just as wry as my comment had been. “John, you’ve seen combat, and if I’m guessing right, you’ve been up against people that civilization would classify as zealots. People who didn’t care what it took as long as they accomplished the chaos they were aiming for. You know that there’s no guarantee when you fight people like that. The best way to beat them is to have numbers.”

  I huffed in agreement—because he was right—and then turned my eyes back to the forest before us. It was still quiet out there, though the shadows had changed with the movement of the moon. The mouth of the cave was less lit, now, and I could see more of the forest itself. Not that there was anything to see. It was all flat out there, black and white and some gray areas. But a completely lack of dimension made the entire scene seem either fake or like something from another planet.

  It could almost have been majestic, except for the danger I knew was lurking in those shadows.

  “You want me to sit up with you, then?” I asked. “Don’t really see how I’m going to go lay down and go back to sleep with that particular idea in my head. Now I’ll be worried about leaving you here to deal with the maniac alone.”

  “It wouldn’t be the first time I’ve dealt with a maniac by myself,” he returned. “And it certainly wouldn’t be the first time I’ve mixed with Randall without backup.”

&
nbsp; “Only this time he has at least one of his cousins with him, and maybe more,” I pointed out. “And though he can’t sneak up behind us, it doesn’t mean you’ll be able to see him coming. Not until the last second, if he’s as crafty as you suspect.”

  Marlon grew silent, and I could imagine what he was thinking. He might have fought maniacs before, and he might have tussled with Randall in the past, but we were at a disadvantage here, no matter how secure we were in the cave. No sane man would want to take on those odds.

  “You don’t mind?” he finally asked.

  I scooted over to make room for him in the lee of the stone and patted the ground next to me. Then I held up a hand to stop him.

  “Go get one of those blankets you were using for your bed,” I told him. “I don’t mind staying up and helping you keep watch. Having two sets of eyes gives us a better chance of seeing him before he gets here. But I’d rather be at least a little bit warm while we do it.”

  When he returned, he had two thick quilts and a box of hand warming packets that I also hadn’t packed in his bag. He tossed the box down in front of me and motioned to it with his chin.

  “Tuck one of those under your shirt, at your chest, and keep another for your hands,” he said quietly. “It’ll give you a little bit more warmth, make it easier to sit out here near the open air.”

  I glanced at the box, and then back up at him. “You had this cave already set up with supplies,” I finally said. It was the only possible answer. He couldn’t have carried the crossbow without me knowing about it. It was too big. And the same thing went for this box of goods. I knew he hadn’t had access to his pack before we left, and I’d packed that thing myself.

  Marlon didn’t even try to argue with me or deny my statement. “I did,” he said quickly. “I’ve been trained to think about all possibilities, and I’m sure you can understand why I might have thought that I’d like to have a place to escape to, if it ever became necessary. A place that already had at least some of the supplies I would need.”