The Apocalypse Club

by McLay, Craig

“Quiet!” Max said. He had just managed to get the binoculars lined up with his eyes, but they were still stubbornly refusing to come anywhere within three inches of them. “Don’t go anywhere.”

  “Sorry, Commander,” I said, getting up. “But duty before duty.”

  I got up and jogged down the small hill, ignoring Max’s hissed protestations. I really did have to pee quite badly, and stopping the march had only made me more keenly aware of the fact. I made my way to the bottom of the slope and walked into the tree line, lining myself up in front of a trunk as thick as a Vatican pillar. Seemed silly to pee behind a tree, really. We had to be the only people for at least five miles in any direction. As the stream hit the bark, I leaned sideways to look at the cabin.

  What I saw gave me pause. The roof was in rough shape and the front step appeared to be broken, but other than that, it looked to be in good condition. All of the curtains were pulled, so I couldn’t see inside. It certainly didn’t look like it had been sitting out here abandoned for years. Did somebody still live in it? Who? Was it an old miner’s cabin that somebody had held onto for sentimental reasons? You’d have to have a lot of warm feeling to hold on to a place like that out here. There were no roads, not even a path. In winter, the place would be totally inaccessible. There was no sign of a generator, so that would mean no electricity. Where would you get fresh water? You could probably chop wood for a fire, but who the hell wanted to do that? I had done it once the year before when my parents had insisted on trying out the fire pit, and I’d managed to get blisters on my palms after only fifteen minutes’ worth of chopping. The trees around here would probably not be quite as dry and easy to get through.

  “What in the devil do you believe that you’re doing?”

  At first I thought it was just Max doing a silly English accent. Who else would be standing behind me in the woods in the middle of nowhere? So I didn’t even turn around.

  “Pissing on a tree. Fuck’s it look like I’m doing, Chauncey?”

  Chauncey Uppercrust was my default name for anyone who either possessed or pretended to possess an English accent. Paddy O’Shitely was reserved for the fake Irish, Mel McGibson for fake Scots, Steve Clouseau for fake French and Roberto Banana for fake Italian. This one was so over the top that I didn’t give it a second thought.

  Until I heard a sound that was most definitely not a fake rifle being cocked.

  I quickly finished what I was doing. I raised my hands and turned slowly around to see a small blond-haired man dressed in clothes that looked to have been quite fancy about fifty years before they were used to fight in the muddy trenches of two ugly world wars. His age was impossible to guess. He looked like he was in his thirties, but he could be sixty for all I knew. He had pale skin and strange blue eyes that burned with an almost unearthly intensity.

  What he was pointing at me was undoubtedly some sort of gun – it had a barrel and what was probably some sort of trigger mechanism – but not any type of weapon I had ever seen in a movie or video game. It had an elaborate grip and a scope that looked like it was better suited to spotting Napoleonic privateers. It was so strange-looking that I actually broke my rule about not mouthing off to anyone pointing a gun at me.

  “What the hell is that?”

  His cheeks flushed slightly. “This is a most fearsome cannon that shall without doubt re-arrange your transverse colon all over that tree you have just this moment finished soiling.”

  “It looks like something you would use to apply an oil spray.”

  “Well, I can assure you it is not. The only thing it will spray will be your miserable innards all over this meadow.”

  “Who are you?”

  He coughed. “My identity is of no concern whatsoever to one such as yourself.”

  “Is that your cabin?”

  He looked back over his shoulder in a possessive way that I believed answered my question. “I have no idea who may possess that rustic domicile. What are you doing here?”

  “That is your cabin.”

  “I insist that it is not!” he yelled. “I further insist that you answer my question!”

  At that point, Max showed up out of nowhere pointing the pellet gun at the back of the stranger’s head.

  “Drop it, old man.”

  It was odd, but at that point I felt a strange combination of gratitude and fear. Gratitude to Max for stepping in as decisively as he did and fear that he might actually shoot the man. I was pretty sure that the guy wasn’t really going to shoot me with whatever that thing was he was carrying, but I didn’t feel the same certainty that Max wouldn’t do likewise with the pellet gun. Would a pellet gun kill somebody at that range? It knocked holes in beer cans, but could it actually puncture somebody’s skull? I didn’t want to find out. What would we do then? If the man died, somebody would find the body eventually, even way out here. It would become this great, horrible, overbearing secret that Max and I would agonize over for the rest of our lives, probably driving us to addiction and multiple marriages and visions of the man’s ghost causing us to throw ourselves off bridges. And what if he didn’t die? What if he just rolled around on the ground in extreme pain before finally recovering as some sort of brain-damaged husk of his former self? What if he had no speech and trouble walking? We couldn’t just leave him out here to fend for himself. How in the hell would explain that to my parents? This is our friend…uh…Lenny. We found him out in the woods. He’s going to be staying with us for a while if that’s okay. Yeah, he was already shot in the head when we found him.

  Somehow, I didn’t think they would just blindly accept such a story. At least, not without asking a lot of other questions we might not be able to answer.

  All of this went through my mind in the half-second between when Max appeared and when the man whirled around, tripped over his own feet, and fell to the ground. The gun he was carrying discharged with a loud popping sound, sending what looked like a spear shooting straight up into the air where it nearly took the head off a squirrel and stuck in the trunk of a nearby tree.

  “What the hell!” I shouted. Had I not just peed, I probably would have wet my pants.

  Max rushed over and grabbed the spear gun out of the man’s hands. “Who is this guy?” he asked me.

  I shrugged. “No idea. I went to take a whizz and he just showed up behind me. Thanks for stepping in, by the way.”

  “No problem,” Max said, examining the confiscated weapon with a mixture of bewilderment and admiration. “What is this thing?”

  The old man looked peeved. “It is designed to deter polar bears.”

  This was not the answer either of us had been expecting. “Polar bears?” Max said. “Hate to break this to you, pops, but I don’t think we get a lot of them roaming around this area.”

  “I am aware of that,” sniffed the man.

  “So who are you?” Max asked. “You look a little too white to be a lost Inuit elder. They put you on an ice floe and push you out to sea and you landed here?”

  “If you are not going to shoot me, I would prefer to stand,” the man said. “The grass is rather damp.”

  “By all means,” Max said, waving the pellet gun. “The last thing we want to be accused of is soiling his lordship’s shorts.”

  The man stopped, his eyes narrowing. “How did you know I was a lord?”

  Max and I looked at each other. We just automatically called anyone who seemed haughty “your lordship.” Our chemistry teacher was Lord Gingrich of Burn Bunsen. Our school custodian was Lord Shitcan of Lesser Cafetorium (our cafeteria doubled as the school auditorium, hence the awkward neologisms). Never in our lives had the term been applied to someone who possessed the title in reality (with the exception of Conrad Black, whom I still refer to as Lord Asshat of Barbarabuttocks). This guy certainly didn’t look like a lord. Based on his clothes and apparent lack of a manor house, he looked more like a man who had spent more time alone in the backwoods than was mentally healthy. His voice, however, was a different matter.
That was the thing that made me believe, despite all other evidence, that this guy was telling the truth.

  “Lucky guess?” I mumbled.

  The man got slowly to his feet. “Please excuse my avoidance of the usual pleasantries, but I’m afraid I cannot tell you my name. They’ve been looking for me for some time.”

  This was another eyebrow raiser. Maybe I was mistaken and this guy really was just a backwoods nut, posh voice notwithstanding. “They? “ I asked. “Who’s they?”

  Instead of answering, he squinted in the direction we had been travelling. “It appears you gentlemen are travelling west. I would not venture any further in that direction if I were you. They are building another Weather Station out on the old mine site. It is not…advisable…to stumble upon their works in progress.”

  “You’re talking about GDI!” Max said, suddenly excited.

  The old man shook his head. “GDI is one of the organizations they, or rather he, owns. Not the root. Just one of its many poisonous weeds.”

  Max stuffed the pellet gun in his shorts so hastily that I worried he was going to shoot himself in the testicles. “You know about them, too!”

  “They’re building them all over the world,” the man said. “Ostensibly, weather-monitoring stations. That’s what they’re designed to look like, at least. In reality, they are built to control, not to observe.”

  “I knew it!” Max exclaimed, poking me in the ribs. “You never really believed it, but I told you, didn’t I?”

  “Mmm hmm,” I said noncommittally. I didn’t think the claims of a self-professed “lord” rampaging through the wilderness with a spear gun designed for polar bears constituted evidence in any empirical sense.

  “What would they do if we got too close?” Max asked.

  The man looked nervous. “They have several GDI units guarding the site. I myself am preparing to leave this place. I would advise you to do likewise. More than a few errant hikers have already been officially ‘disappeared’ after straying too close for their liking.”

  Max’s eyes lit up. I could see that he was thinking about modifying our plans slightly by turning them into a recon (possibly even sabotage) mission. Although I didn’t really believe a word the man was saying, my beliefs weren’t quite solid enough that I was willing to bet my life on speculation.

  “Excuse me,” the man said. “But if you don’t mind, do you think it might be possible that you return my weapon to my possession?”

  Max looked at the rifle. It appeared to hold only one bolt at a time. The man didn’t look like he had any spares on his person and the only one we did know about was currently lodged 20 feet up in a tree. Unless he was planning to try and hit us over the head with the thing, handing it back didn’t appear to increase his ability to cause injury.

  “Okay,” Max said, handing the rifle back. “I guess. So long as you don’t try to shoot us again.”

  The man took the weapon, checked it quickly for damage, and then slung it over his shoulder. His movements were fast, economical and purposeful. If we did come down to a fight, I had no doubt he could kick both of our butts. Possibly outrun us, too.

  “Do not fear me, gentlemen,” he said. “Now that we appear to have reached an understanding or at least a détente, I have no reason to harm either of you.”

  We watched in disbelief as he scrambled up to the tree like a monkey, grabbed the bolt and yanked it easily out of the tree with one arm, and jumped down again.

  “Who the hell is this guy?” Max gasped as the man landed.

  The man reloaded the rifle, checked something on the handle, and then tossed it back over his shoulder. I could tell from the way that Max had been holding it that the rifle, or bolt gun or whatever it was, it was quite heavy. But the man tossed it around like a twig. Apparently satisfied that it was still in working condition, he nodded to us and started walking.

  “Fare well, gentlemen.”

  “Wait!” I said, unable to resist. “Who are you? Really?”

  He stopped and looked back over his shoulder. “I’m afraid that such information would not profit you in the least, but would be extremely costly to me. I would ask that you say nothing of our meeting to anyone. Anywhere. Ever.”

  There was a subtly threatening undertone in his voice that caused me to nod my head like a private receiving orders from a four-star general. “Yes, of course. Absolutely not.”

  We watched him go without a word. We never told anybody else about the meeting. Who would’ve believed us? If we’d told my parents, they would have put a permanent kibosh on our wilderness expeditions. They might even have started talking about how crazy it was to think that there were secret GDI black sites being set up in the woods. If chatter like that ever reached the wrong ears, I was convinced that we would all wake up one night to the sound of a heavily armed incursion team slipping black bags over our heads and throwing us into the back of a stealth helicopter.

  “Do you think Lord High Shitty Shorts was on the level?” I asked after the man walked out of the clearing and disappeared into the trees.

  “Yes,” Max said, nodding. “You?”

  No. Except, well, yes, I kind of did. “I don’t know. But I don’t think I want to hike out to that old mine site anymore.”

  “Me either. You know they’re planning to build one of those weather stations in town, don’t you?”

  “What, our town?”

  “Yeah.”

  “No. When?”

  “Construction already started,” Max said. “I think we should make that our priority number one when we get home.”

  “I don’t know, Max. He said anyone who got too close to the place just disappeared.”

  “We’ll be careful,” Max said, stroking his chin. “But if we’re going to bring them down, we’ve got to start somewhere.”

  I wasn’t sure that bringing down a massive shadow corporation with a private army and control of the weather was going to be the number one item on my to-do list when I got home, but if it meant that we were not going to hike out to the old mine right then and there, I was willing to go along with it. Although we often referred to that bizarre encounter later, we never talked about it with anyone else. In fact, until I saw those four initials carved into the top of the desk in Max’s room, I never thought I would see another reference to Lord High Shitty Shorts ever again.

  If nothing else, I now knew where I needed to start looking.

  -22-

  I got my first surprise when I checked the map to refresh my memory on how to get there and found that Lake Nimegan wasn’t on it.

  It was the morning after my visit to the rehab centre. I knew that I didn’t want to get lost wandering around in the woods in the dark, so I had decided to drive up first thing in the morning and retrace my steps to the hidden cabin in the high light of noon. But when I brought up my map app and scrolled to the spot where I knew (or thought I knew) the lake to be, there was nothing there. No lake. No roads, no rivers, no town, no hotels, no items of historical interest…nothing. Our former vacation getaway was now just a plain green square of empty space. The satellite view was the same way – nothing but trees, trees and more trees – at every level of magnification within 50 miles of where I was pretty sure the lake was supposed to be.

  Puzzled, I did a web search on the place.

  Nothing.

  I tried another search engine and another map.

  Nothing.

  I thought about trying to find one of our old paper maps, but they had all been stuffed into the glove compartment of my parents’ car, which was now probably small enough to fit into a glove compartment on its own. That wasn’t going to be any help.

  Was I crazy? Had the whole trip just been a figment of my imagination? Had my parents’ death sent me into some fugue state spiral of psychotic disconnect from reality?

  For a moment, it seemed like a real possibility. I forced myself to recall details of the three trips we had taken to the place. The bugs. The smell of mould. T
he cut on my ankle from the time in the first year when a rotted piece of wood gave way and my foot went through the dock. I pulled down my sock. Yep. The scar was still there. I definitely wasn’t imagining that.

  Okay. So the lake existed. The cottages existed. Even the crazy man who climbed trees like a monkey and carried a spear gun probably existed.

  Where had they gone?

  I pondered the matter for some time. Had the place just been missed somehow? Maybe the map apps only featured places that paid to be on them. It was crass and irresponsible and stupid, but then, that was the very definition of unrestrained capitalism in action. Working for a financial services company had certainly taught me that. Although it wouldn’t be surprising, it didn’t seem likely. Somebody would actually have to go to the trouble of removing the place from the satellite view, and what was the monetary incentive in that? Besides, it was missing from all the search engines, too. Everything in the world was in there. If someone had ever used it as a mailing address at any point since the invention of electronic records, it would have showed up on at least one of them. It wasn’t a popular tourist spot – certainly not Paris or Disney World – but people did go there. If there were still cottages for rent, there would probably be dozens of websites complaining about how lousy they were.

  No, I thought, it seemed much more likely that the place had been left off the map for less prosaic and more ominous reasons.

  Somebody had erased all record of the place. I took a deep breath and made myself think it:

  They had erased all record of the place.

  Considering the possibility did not give me warm and cozy thoughts about trying to drive there. In fact, it made me shudder. It occurred to me that I could always pretend I had never seen those letters carved into Max’s desk at the rehab centre. Or that if I had, I had no idea what they meant. I didn’t need to do this job. I could noodle around on the web for a few days, return to some of our old haunts in the city (assuming they hadn’t been erased as well), and then report back to the giant face on the screen that my search had yielded nothing. After all, I hadn’t seen Max in years and he had made no effort to contact me even though we worked for the same company. What obligation did I really have in circumstances like that?