by Gareth Wood
Oh yeah, it was going to be a good day.
CHAPTER FOUR
Safe House, September 6, 2013
Nick woke with a start, sweating and tangled in his bag, reaching for his sidearm. Sunlight shone through the heavy bars over the window, and he was alone in the bed. There were noises coming from the kitchen downstairs, but not the hungry noises of the undead. It sounded like a spoon stirring a cup, and he smelled… coffee? He remembered where he was. Nick groaned, closed his eyes again for a moment, then sat up and reached for his clothes.
He made his way to the washroom, a gravity system that emptied into a septic tank with the aid of a bucketful of river water. He wiped the gunk from the corners of his eyes, splashed some water on his face, and stared at himself in the small mirror on the wall.
"What are you doing here, Nick?" he whispered to himself.
His tired eyes stared back until he shook himself and stepped out into the hall. He was on the first step when he remembered he'd left his gun by the bed. Cursing silently, he returned to the bedroom to grab it, knowing if he'd come downstairs without it his trainer would rightly give him shit.
Robyn and Nick had spent the night in the same room, but not together. They slept in separate sleeping bags on the queen sized bed, after carefully triple-checking all the locks and bars on the doors and windows. As hot as Nick thought Robyn was, he had a very hard time even imagining hooking up with her. Not that he didn't want to, because she was hot, but he just felt like she looked at him like he was a mess on the carpet she had just stepped in. She was older by a few years, and his boss, and from what Nick had seen at the hospital when the undead had chased them onto the roof, utterly fearless. She didn't treat him badly or anything, which was better than some of the bosses he had had so far living in the Safe Zone.
Nick was terrified of the undead. The sight of them, the smell of rot that you just couldn't escape, the cold, mushy flesh, it all combined to stir his deepest fears. Worst of all, though, were the eyes. For Nick, the dead eyes, empty of any thought or feeling or awareness as they lumbered slowly forward, driven by deep instinct to devour the living… that was the part that sent shivers of icy fear along his spine. It had been all he could do not to piss his pants when the first one had looked right at him yesterday. His dreams all night had been of the thing’s eyes.
He shivered a little on his way downstairs. Robyn was in the kitchen and facing the window, dressed as she had been yesterday, blowing gently on a cup of coffee she held in both hands. Nick was treated to a view of her ass until she turned around, at which point he instantly looked up at her face.
"Sleep well?"
He moved past her to the coffee pot and started pouring the hot liquid into a cup she had obviously left out for him. There was no milk, no sugar.
"Fine," he said, yawning. The first hot sip scalded his tongue, but he didn't care. He hadn't had coffee in far too many months, even if this was ten-year old instant. He sat in one of the chairs around a small table while Robyn went back to looking out the window. He could hear birds outside, singing to each other. A crow cawed noisily somewhere nearby.
Halfway through the cup he remembered it was his job to make breakfast this morning, and got up to see what he could find. He didn't use the safe house supplies, and instead mixed some of their own beans and dried vegetables into a pot of water, added a few spices, and let it simmer for a while after it had boiled. While the ad hoc stew cooked he gathered his things and cleaned up, getting ready to eat and then leave. He had another cup of coffee while Robyn served up the stew into bowls.
"We'll head back the same way," she said between bites. "If that group is still there we'll have to find another route."
"Okay," he said, in what he hoped was a calm and mature voice. Inside he was scared, but he could not admit that to Robyn. Nick wasn't sure this was a good job for him. Being a salvager was not what he had been expecting. Somehow, the fact of encountering the undead up close and in person hadn't occurred to him when he applied to work for Essential Supplies. He realised it should have, and felt a little stupid.
They cleaned up and left the safe house in the same condition they found it, and prepared to get back on the road. Weapons were inspected, the bikes were checked, and they looked each other over for loose straps or frayed clothes, anything that could be a risk or that an undead hand could grab hold of. Finally they left the house behind, taking the bikes outside, hitching up the small trailer, and pedaling off into the morning.
They didn't see any undead until they were almost at the place where they had turned back yesterday. Ahead of them Nick saw a single figure standing beside the road, a naked and withered form that made his flesh crawl. It had only stumps of arms that ended in bony shards and ragged blackened flesh. Skin had rotted away from the left side of its head, leaving bone exposed, and a long flap of scalp had fallen over its shoulder. It stood there until they were nearly upon it, only then reacting and walking forward. Nick watched Robyn stop her bike and get off, and he did the same, reaching for his rifle.
"I got this one," she said calmly, pulling out a heavy knife as Nick shuddered. He carefully looked around at the treeline and high grass, watching to be sure more of the dead things didn't appear. He glanced back in time to see Robyn dart around the thing, avoiding the bone shards of its arms. She kicked it precisely behind the knee, and it fell over. He watched her drive the knife blade down, piercing the temple with a sharp crack, her foot pressing down on the spine. The exposed bone of the skull was brittle, and the heavy blade destroyed the brain inside. It ceased moving, and she pulled the knife free to clean it, wiping it with a rag and pouring alcohol all over it.
Nick was thankful that he hadn't frozen yesterday. He had actually been able to pull the trigger, and hadn't been paralysed with fear, though he'd been far from calm. Still, he doubted he'd ever be as cold about it as Robyn was. Her face had showed no emotion at all as she killed the things at the hospital, and Nick found that a little scary. His first encounter with the undead had been when he was eleven years old, and he'd been protected by adults then. His father had managed to get him and his sister to Mission when the Wall first started going up, and he hadn't even seen any of the dead things for years after that. Nick hadn't gone near the Wall, or ventured outside the Safe Zone, until yesterday.
"What makes them keep going?" he asked. It was something he hadn't thought of in a few years, but was on everyone's mind at least some of the time.
"No idea," she said, without looking up. "You hear all kinds of things, but ultimately it doesn't really matter."
"Sure it does. If we know what makes them keep going, maybe we can figure out how to stop it."
She smiled at him, and held up her clean knife.
"That's not what I mean," he said. "I mean, we'd know how to stop it all, maybe cure it."
"Cure it? You think there's a way back from this?" She gestured at the corpse on the road a few meters away.
"Not for them, the ones who are dead already, but maybe the living? People who get bit?"
"Yeah, they were working on that back east for a while, I heard. There was someone who got bit and survived."
They got back on the bikes and started pedaling again. Soon they had built up speed and the rough pavement passed quickly beneath them.
"Where did you hear that?" Nick asked. He was skeptical, to say the least. Someone surviving a bite would be huge news.
"There's another salvager," Robyn replied, "a woman who came in from Alberta a while ago. I heard her talking once in The Step."
"Did you believe her?"
Robyn only shrugged.
They came to the wrecks where they had seen the small swarm the day before, and slowed. They carefully scanned the land on either side of the road for any activity, but the grass stood undisturbed in the sunlight. Birds still sang, and Nick watched as a squirrel crossed the road ahead of them. They passed the wreckage and saw that the road before them was clear.
Nick
stopped his bike and shaded his eyes, looking in all directions. "Where did they go?"
"I don't know, but let's not hang around waiting for them to come back." Robyn pedaled harder, and Nick kicked off again to catch up. There were still many kilometers ahead of them before they reached home and safety.
CHAPTER FIVE
Essential Supplies Warehouse, September 1, 2013
Alexander Corrone reported for work early. His shift began at seven thirty in the morning, but he was there by seven. He was the foreman of one of the two warehouse crews for Essential Supplies, the day shift, and he ran his crew efficiently. He was lean and dark haired, just slightly greying. Like most people in the Safe Zone, he was thin but not starving. His height was slightly less than average. His features were blunt and forgettable, and he blended into a crowd easily, unless he spoke. He wore locally made jeans with a handmade leather belt, a long-sleeved cotton shirt from the time before, and a decent pair of re-soled black leather shoes. His age could have been anything from thirty to fifty. He was, in short, average in almost every way.
Alexander stood outside the warehouse in the warm morning sunlight and greeted his team as they arrived. He knew them all by name, knew the names of their families (if they had any), and knew their cares and worries. He was considered a great boss by everyone on the crew. He was known as a leader and a team player. His team thought he liked them, and genuinely cared about their lives and problems.
It was all a lie.
"Morning, Bob," he said, as one of his team came in. Bob made small talk for a few minutes and finished an incredibly rare tobacco cigarette.
"Helen," he greeted his forklift operator when she arrived, "how is Sandy doing?"
He listened to the replies and filed them away, tucking the memories inside his head to be evaluated later. Soon everyone was there, all of them on time and happy to have jobs in such a prestigious place. Essential Supplies was the place to work if you weren't a salvager or a Wall guard.
As the last member of his team arrived, Alexander went inside, listening to them shooting the shit, watching them gesture and touch and catch up. Alexander smiled and nodded as they engaged him in conversation. He spoke words of encouragement and got his team to work. None of them suspected that beneath his affable and kind exterior, his well practised expressions and calm manner, Alexander felt nothing.
Nothing at all.
He had come into his position through a combination of what appeared to be good luck on one hand, and terrible tragedy on the other. Alexander had become foreman of the day shift crew when his predecessor had been killed and eaten by a wandering zombie. At least, that was how it appeared to everyone but Alexander. Arranging that 'accident' had been one small part of his ultimate plans.
He had been working his way up the ladder of command in Essential Supplies for some time, nearly six years. Unfortunate but not always fatal things tended to happen to those in his path. He was very careful, and no one yet had managed to guess that it was him behind the scandals, accidents, and deaths.
Alexander’s goal, ultimately, was to be in charge of Essential Supplies. That was the high seat on the Town Council he aspired to. Not to serve the interests of the population, or to help people, or protect the town against the undead, but purely so that he could have the pick of the salvage for himself, to make himself more comfortable and affluent. One of the few challenges he knew anymore was the risk of skimming something out of the incoming salvage. His reward would be tenfold, he knew, when he was in position to take anything he wanted and make it his own.
Every few weeks the list of salvaged items was prepared for the Council meeting, and it went through the head of Essential Supplies, but not before Alexander got it and looked it over for choice items. Once a month or so he would select a few things and put them aside, then delete them from the list. There were no further records kept below his own, since he made sure the salvagers were subtly discouraged from keeping records. If they took a little initiative and made a list of everything they had recovered, Alexander would take the list and then ignore it, making his own list right in front of them on his own clipboard. His people would explain that they had to go over everything that came in themselves, even if the salvagers came in with a typed, double-spaced, and in-triplicate inventory of their haul. Most of them took the hint and just dropped off the goods at the warehouse.
He planned to take his team with him to the top, not because of any loyalty to them, but because he needed well trained minions to do the hard work. He had absolutely no interest in doing the work himself. So he got to know the crew, made sure they were loyal to him, and made sure they were taken care of. A little something to help them out now and then, like a few extra cans of food, a pack of cigarettes, or antibiotics for a sick child. Whatever it was, it always came from his hands, so they thought he cared and they stayed loyal. Useful to him.
All the while he was cold inside, quiet like a grave.
Two weeks ago he had had to deliver supplies himself to the hospital when Helen called in sick. It had been inconsiderate of Helen to be sick and throw the team into disarray, but driving over to the hospital in the truck he had seen the curious glances of the townsfolk. He had been driving, so he was clearly someone important. At the hospital he had had to unload the supplies himself. They were shorthanded, they said, and couldn't he help out? A single dimwitted helper had come to take the supplies away, and Alexander had let him do most of the work himself. On the drive back to the warehouse he had thought, Helen wasn't useful if she couldn't bother not to be sick. It was time to replace her with someone more able.
He had decided how to remove Helen for her uselessness. He hadn't even had to set anything in motion; the parts of the action had just fallen into place in a huge coincidence. A few words with the night shift team foreman yesterday evening had supplied exactly what he needed.
The day went on, and the sun beat down, chasing away clouds until the warehouse was unpleasantly warm. Alexander sat at his neat desk in the shared office and looked at the endless lists of things that the Council had decided the town needed.
A small electric fan blew the warm air around without cooling it, rustling the stacks of papers on the other two desks. The door to the warehouse floor was open, and he could hear the sounds of the crew working. He almost reacted when the forklift pulled up near the office. He bent over the papers and tried to look like he was doing something important, so that she would feel that she was interrupting his important work.
There was a knock on the door frame, and he looked up.
"Mister Corrone? You wanted to see me?" Helen was a tallish red haired woman in her thirties. She had come here from Nelson, a small town in southern BC. She was his forklift operator. Her daughter Sandy was seven years old. She had no other family. Alexander smiled his practised smile and waved her inside.
"Did you hear about Walter?" he asked, rehearsed words falling from his lips, even as he waved her to a chair. She sat, and he watched her think about his question.
"Walter? No, did something happen?" Walter was the night shift fork operator, not one of Alexander's crew, so someone he hardly paid any attention to. Except for now.
"He broke his ankle last night," Alexander said. "The doctor said it takes six weeks to heal." And here it comes, he thought.
"Oh, that's terrible," she said, with the automatic sympathy that had so long puzzled Alexander. She paused just a moment as the realisation of what he was leading to struck her, and she started to open her mouth to say something. Alexander had waited for just the right moment, and was quick to interrupt.
"They need a night shift fork driver starting tomorrow, Helen, and I told them you would take Walter's spot until he healed."
"What? I can't! I have Sandy! I-"
"They need you to work, Helen. It will only be until Walter comes back." But of course, Alexander would have someone else on the crew fully trained by then, and no need for Helen to come back.
"But I can't
leave Sandy alone at night! She's seven! Please!" Alexander noted the slight panic in her voice, and stood up to walk around the desk. He found that physical height in circumstances like this made other people feel intimidated. He remembered to make his face look like he was concerned as he sat on the corner of the desk and looked down at her.
"I've already told them that you would start tomorrow. There really is no one else. Are you sure there is no one you can leave Sandy with?" Alexander knew there wasn't. Helen had very few friends, and none who would be willing to watch a seven year old all night for the next six weeks.
"I told Dave that I'd let him run the forklift on this shift while you're away. He's trained already, but doesn't have the experience they need on nights. You do."
Her face paled. "But… you can't replace me! I'm n-"
"Nobody is replacing you, Helen," he lied, leaning slightly toward her, his voice entirely reasonable. "Unless you really can't find a way to work the night shift. They really do need you."
He watched her closely as panic and despair warred, and made a mental note that his timing had been correct. He almost looked away, but remembered he was trying to look sympathetic. He leaned back slightly.
"Well, Helen? I'll need your answer."
INTERLUDE ONE
