Carter’s kitchen was old fashioned, Hughes thought, or out of date if he was feeling a little less charitable. The lime green cabinets dated back to the ’60s at the latest, and the fridge with its rounded corners looked even older. Hughes was surprised it still even worked, but it must have because Carter opened it and poured two glasses of cold water from a chilled plastic pitcher.
“Thanks, man,” Hughes said.
They sat on folding chairs in the kitchen at what Hughes figured must be a card table covered with a yellow cloth. The room was warmed by a space heater in the middle of the kitchen floor pointing at the table.
He sipped from his glass of water. He expected it to taste like the desert, but Lander’s water was surprisingly sweet.
“Is this bottled water?” Hughes said.
“Tap,” Carter said.
“Pretty good for desert water,” Hughes said.
“Got some reservoirs up in the Wind Rivers,” Carter said. “Off the desert floor. No salt. No heavy metals. Fed by snowmelt and rain and by streams even in winter. But we’re not here to talk about water.”
“No,” Hughes said.
Carter paused for only a moment then said, “This town ain’t right anymore.”
“I gathered that,” Hughes said.
“Used to be,” Carter said. “Nice people, nice little downtown, decent schools, a bit of a tourist economy. Nothing like Jackson, of course, but people liked to come down here once in a while for fishing and hiking. Incredible mountains. Remote as all hell. Go off trail up there and you’ll swear you’re the first human being ever to set foot wherever it is you’re setting foot.”
“What happened?”
“You already know how it started. Where you coming from, anyway?”
“Seattle.”
“You shittin’ me?”
Hughes shook his head and told him part of the story, how he’d grouped up with Parker and Kyle, hunkered down in a grocery store off the Interstate south of the city, sailed up to Orcas Island hoping to find refuge, then headed east over the Cascades and through the desert to Wyoming in a Suburban. He left Annie out of the story. He didn’t want to even suggest to Carter that he was traveling with a naturally immune person. Nor would he tell Carter that Parker had tried to kill Kyle and that they’d tied Parker to a chair, injected him with Annie’s blood and then infected him on purpose. Hughes doubted he’d ever tell that story to anyone, no matter what happened, even if God himself came down from the heavens and fixed everything and everybody lived happily ever after. None of that would ever happen, of course, but even if it did—nope. He was never telling that story.
“Shame the island didn’t work out,” Carter said. “Good idea, though. Me, I’ve been thinking of heading up into Canada.”
“Why Canada?” Hughes said.
“It ain’t here,” Carter said and shrugged.
“What’s going on here, Carter?” Hughes said.
“The mayor. He ain’t right. Used to be great. Hell, I even voted for him.”
“So he is the real mayor.”
Carter just looked at him.
“He didn’t take over after the outbreak,” Hughes said.
“No, man, it ain’t like that,” Carter said. “Steele’s been mayor for years. But when shit went sideways, so did he. How long you been here?”
“Got in yesterday.”
“And you get a vibe from the place already. You thought Steele took over in a coup?”
Hughes nodded. “Seemed like a possibility.”
“Might as well have,” Carter said, “way he’s been acting.”
“What’s he doing? And what happened to the police?”
Carter took a sip of his water. “We all saw the news reports from Seattle and Portland. Took us a while to figure out what the hell was going on, but soon as we did we knew it was only a matter of time before what was happening out there would start happening here. So we did pretty much what you’d expect. Organized neighborhood watch groups on every street. Everybody was carrying. Whole town looked like an armed camp in less than a week. Understand, there are more guns than people out here. Always have been. Within two weeks, every neighborhood had a commander, pretty much all of them military vets. Inside two weeks, they had a commander in charge of all the other commanders. They pooled their weapons, ammo, surplus uniforms, all that shit.”
Hughes took another sip from his water. He assumed Carter lived alone. No one else—no wife, no kids—came into the kitchen at the sound of voices. He wondered what the man was doing in Lander. Sounded like he was from somewhere else.
“Cops didn’t like it,” Carter said. “All of a sudden, they were irrelevant. Not even like a fifth wheel. More like a seventh.”
“What did the mayor think?”
“Mayor had no problem with it. Most of us didn’t, not at first anyway. All these guys with guns made us feel safer, you know? The infection came here, as we all knew it would. Several people been bit showed up from out there and infected people here, including kids. The militia took care of it. Cops tried, but they were pretty much useless, not because they didn’t know what they were doing, but because they were outnumbered by the militia. Town could get along just fine without them. Everybody could see that, including them.”
“So what happened?”
“Well, it was fucked up. One of the commanders shot a kid.”
Hughes didn’t move.
“The kid was bit,” Carter said.
“But he hadn’t turned yet,” Hughes said.
“He hadn’t turned yet,” Carter said.
“How old was he?”
“Teenager. Guy named Swenson put two rounds in his chest. Poor kid just lay there in the street with a sucking chest wound for almost five minutes. It was clear that it might take the kid an hour to die, so Swenson put one through his forehead to put him out of his misery. The funeral was closed casket.”
Hughes closed his eyes and wiped his hand with his mouth.
“So the cops arrested this guy Swenson. They weren’t sure what to do with him. Charging him with murder woulda been a bit much since the kid had been bit and would have to be put down anyway, but they arrested him.”
“They should have waited for the kid to pass out and turn.”
“That’s what I said. I’m not sure what I woulda done if I was the cops, but they were feeling like a seventh wheel, you know?”
Hughes nodded.
“It was as much of a political move as anything else,” Carter said. “A way of reminding everybody who was supposed to have the monopoly on the use of force. Never heard that phrase before, then started hearing it all the time around town. Damn near started a war.”
“And the mayor sided with the militia,” Hughes said. It wasn’t really a question.
“The mayor sided with the militia,” Carter said and nodded. “Most people did. Me, I wasn’t so sure. Kid’s family took the cops’ side, you can imagine.”
Carter took a deep breath and gulped down half his glass of water. Hughes’ own glass was almost empty.
“You want more?” Carter said.
“I’m good,” Hughes said.
“Sorry I can’t offer you coffee. Or beer.”
“I’m good.”
Carter sighed. “Something else you should know. By way of background. Guy in charge of the militia is named Temple.”
“Met him,” Hughes said. “When we first got to town. He met us at the checkpoint on the way into the city and took us to the hospital and checked us for bites.”
“None of you’d been bit,” Carter said.
“No,” Hughes said, deadpan.
“Anyway, this man, Temple, been Steele’s best friend since they were kids. Mayor’s office always had a bit of tension with the police department. Didn’t get along. Always bitching about each other behind closed doors. Didn’t make the newspaper or anything, but word gets around in places like this, you know? But now? Steele and Temple? They run this town together.”
“W
hat did they do to the cops?”
Carter blew out his breath. “This is where it gets crazy. And you should understand something else too. It’s not just the cops.”
Carter got up and retrieved the pitcher of water from the refrigerator. His hands shook as he refilled both glasses. He said nothing as he returned the pitcher to the refrigerator, closed the door and sat back down.
“I moved here from Oakland little more than ten years ago,” Carter said. “Life’s easier out here, you know? Least it was. Quieter. Less stressful. Find a decent job and you can afford a pretty nice house. Much nicer than in Oakland. That’s for sure. This place is much bigger than where I lived in Oakland. Furniture’s old, but I got three times the space.”
Hughes wanted to hear what happened to the cops, but he didn’t want to pump the man for information. Carter would get there.
“What kind of job did you find here?” Hughes said.
“Post office,” Carter said. “Same job I had in Oakland.”
“How’d you find this town, anyway?”
“First found Jackson Hole,” Carter said. “Never heard of it until the president went there once on vacation. It was in all the papers. President of the United States said it was his favorite vacation spot in the country. I was young then, but I always remembered that. Figured Jackson Hole must be a hell of a place. The president probably been everywhere. And if Jackson Hole was good enough for him, it had to be good enough for me. A long time passed and I’d still hardly left California and was itching to see something new. Oakland was getting me down. I finally said, fuck it, I’m gonna check out this Jackson Hole in Wyoming. Took two weeks paid vacation and drove out there. Place was incredible. Like I’d died and gone to heaven. You wouldn’t believe those mountains. Nothing like them anywhere else, not even here. I didn’t know such places existed. I looked around, saw houses and a nice little downtown and realized, shit, people actually live here. I didn’t have to spend the rest of my life in run-down Oakland. I could live in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. I asked the post office for a transfer and they said no. Had no jobs available in Jackson. A year later they had one here in Lander. Lander is only three hours south, so I took it. And here I am. Not quite in paradise, but near enough, and Lander is nice enough. Nicer than Oakland anyway. Oakland got better after I left, like a lot of cities in America. It’s mostly an okay place now, least it was before all this shit started. It also got a lot more expensive. That’s how it goes, right? Soon as a place gets real nice, regular people can’t afford it no more. Never regretted my decision to come here, but now I think it’s time to move on again.”
“There’s nothing but death out there now,” Hughes said. “I think you should stay where you are.”
Carter stared at him. “You planning on staying?”
“What’s going on here, Carter? What is Steele up to?”
Carter leaned back in his chair and sighed. He hadn’t touched his second glass of water, but the water was going right through Hughes.
“Hold that thought,” Hughes said. “Mind if I use your bathroom?”
“Through the dining room, down the hall and first on the left,” Carter said.
The dining room and the living room were a single huge space delineated only by furniture. Another space heater was plugged into the wall and set up in the middle of the space, but it was much colder in that part of the house. The furnace seemed to be on the fritz.
Carter had stacked piles of unopened mail—bills mostly, and also flyers and junk mail—on the dining room table. Detritus from the old civilization. It was just trash now, but Carter didn’t want to get rid of it. He hadn’t even opened most of it. Hughes supposed it reminded the man of how things used to be, and in any case Carter was a career post office employee. Perhaps the piles of mail on the table reminded him of who he used to be.
On the far wall was a set of built-in cabinets with glass doors for storing dishes and such. Carter had propped up several framed photographs there. Hughes saw a woman who was probably Carter’s mother in one photograph and a man who was probably Carter’s father in another. He saw a couple of elderly people, grandparents most likely.
Another photo stood out. Hughes saw a much-younger version of Carter on a beach, in California apparently, wrapping his arms around a smiling young boy of maybe three. The kid had a plastic bucket and shovel in his hand. Carter had bits of sand on his face. The boy was almost certainly Carter’s son. He could have been a nephew, but Hughes didn’t think so. He could see the father-son bond right there in the photograph.
Where was the boy now? And where was his mother? Hughes saw no photographs of anyone on that cabinet who could plausibly be the boy’s mother.
Had Carter lost his family like Hughes had? Did his wife leave him? Was he ever even married? Or did Carter run out on his family? Was that the real reason Carter moved to Wyoming?
In the corner of the living room, Carter had set up a Christmas tree and strung it with red and green rope lights. There were no presents beneath it. Hughes felt a pang of emotion that he couldn’t quite put his finger on. Carter had moved all the way out to the middle of nowhere from California—by himself, apparently—and lived in a cluttered house with rundown furniture at the end of the world, yet he put up a Christmas tree. Hughes wasn’t sure if that was an act of desperation or hope.
The temperature dropped again in the hallway and it plunged dramatically in the bathroom. There was no heat at all in the far end of the house. Hughes doubted it was even fifty degrees. He could see his breath when he exhaled.
The bathroom hadn’t been cleaned in a long time. Hughes noticed that Carter’s tube of toothpaste was almost empty and that squares of newspaper were piled up next to spent toilet paper tubes. At least the toilet still flushed.
Hughes returned to the kitchen.
“It’s freezing back there,” he said.
“No gas,” Carter said.
“For you or for anybody?”
“For anybody. Gas company went offline a month ago.”
“No one here can fix it?”
“Not about fixing it,” Carter said. “No gas left. There’s plenty still in the ground, sure, but it’s in North Dakota and Canada. And there’s apparently nobody left in North Dakota and Canada. At least not enough to make sure we get gas here in Wyoming. Month or so ago, the pipes just went dry. Some of us knew it was going to happen. Most folks were surprised.”
Hughes understood the surprise. People got used to things working without really knowing how or why. We flipped a switch and the light came on. We flushed the toilet and everything in the bowl just disappeared, as if it went through a hole in the dimension. We turned up the thermostat and the house got warmer. These things just happened—or they used to just happen—as predictably as gravity pulled a tennis ball back to earth after you tossed it into the air.
Hughes was a little surprised himself. The lights in Lander still worked, and so did the plumbing. He just assumed, without really thinking about it, that the heat would work too. But it didn’t.
He should have known, but he just hadn’t considered it. The heat in his room at the motel worked just fine, but that’s because the motel used radiators.
“So you use space heaters,” he said.
“Those of us who have ‘em,” Carter said. “Some have electric baseboard heaters. Those work okay. Others use fireplaces, but wood is getting scarce.”
“What about everyone else?”
“They use blankets. Or freeze. Couple of old folks have already frozen to death. This place looks good, but it’s dying, bro. Even if the infection burns itself out—and that’s a big if—two or three years from now, this town will be back in the stone age.”
Hughes didn’t know what to say. He was thinking about the rest of the world, how there might still be entire cities intact somewhere—like Honolulu perhaps—but how long would they manage to keep themselves modern and fully functional without any of the world’s global infrastructure to keep them
going, without any new shipments of anything whatsoever from anywhere? How long until even those kinds of places broke down into anarchy or tyranny or both?
“You know much about East Germany?” Carter said.
Of course he knew about East Germany. During the Cold War it was basically just a big jail. Everybody was trapped by the Berlin Wall, everybody spied on everyone else and everybody was equally poor.
“Sure I know about East Germany,” Hughes said.
“Then you understand this place,” Carter said.
“What’s going on here, Carter?”
“Started with the cops. Steele got rid of them. Filled the whole jail to capacity. He keeps this up, he’s gonna have to let the criminals out.”
“What for?”
“There’d be no room for anyone else.”
“How many cops did this town have?”
“Cops aren’t the only ones in the jail.”
Carter refilled Hughes’ water glass and took a deep breath before finishing his story. Hughes heard no sound during the pregnant pauses but the rattle and hum of the refrigerator, the soft whir of the space heater and the ghostly moan of the icy wind in the attic.
“Bunch more people down in that jailhouse,” Carter said. “Almost 800 in a town of 8,000. Every single one of them because they’re against Steele. No other reason. Complain about what’s going on in this town, and into the prison you go.”
“The kid’s family?”
“The one who got shot?”
Hughes nodded.
Carter nodded back. “They’re in there. They were the first to go in there after the cops. Worst part is, we got people ratting their neighbors out to the mayor’s office. Least a dozen so far have been dragged into the jailhouse because of it. They weren’t throwing rocks at City Hall. They weren’t even protesting. They were taken away for complaining in private.”
“Why are you telling me all this, Carter?” Hughes said.
“Two reasons. First, you watch your ass. Second, we could use your help.”
Hughes sized Carter up carefully. The man was motivated. And he wasn’t stupid. Perhaps he was a little bit paranoid. At the same time, he was also careful enough to be free in the world instead of locked up.
Resurrection (Book 2): Into the Wasteland Page 13
