by Gareth Wood
By the end of the day we were all numb. We were all emotionally drained and physically exhausted. We returned to the house and just sat around the table in the kitchen. Darren made coffee, but we barely tasted it. After a while Jess declared she needed a bath and went off to draw and heat enough water for a good soak. I put my head down on the table and fell asleep.
Part Two
The disappearance of our team member, and the mystery of the semi-trailer gnawed at all of us. In the late afternoon we went looking for Chris around the farm. I had woken up at the table with stiff muscles and a sore neck, and the activity helped loosen my tension. Sanji and I walked out to the yard and went to search the barn again in daylight, while Darren and Jess walked a circle around the property. Eric stayed behind to guard the house.
There was plenty of useful machinery and tools stored here, but no sign of Chris. The horse was still fine, and we took a moment to open the gate and let it outside to graze.
We spent the next few hours searching the fields and the woods within sight of the farm, calling to Chris every few minutes. We searched carefully and were cautious of what we were stepping on. We found nothing, and came back to the house as the sun was setting.
“I don’t get it,” Darren said as we sat around the table, “How could he just vanish?”
“He can’t have gone too far,” Jess said, pushing her hair back from her eyes.
Dinner was some hastily made sandwiches and a pot of tea. We took out some preserved fruit from the basement stores as well.
“We’d have heard him fire his rifle,” Eric said. “Those things, the sound carries a long way.”
“Maybe he got jumped and dragged off somewhere?”
“No,” Eric said, and sipped his tea.
“That’s not how they feed, though,” Jess protested. “If they kill you they eat right there. They don’t drag you off someplace. We’d have found his body if that had happened.”
Sanji raised a hand. “Then he might have walked off somewhere. Both of our vehicles are here. He’s probably walking along a road.”
That supposition begged the question, why? What would he have accomplished by going for a walk in the middle of the night in countryside infested with the walking dead? I said as much to the others.
“There are easier ways to commit suicide,” Eric said.
It just didn’t make any damned sense.
“This isn’t going to make anyone happy,” I said, “but I think we have to search the forest within a reasonable distance of the house.”
“What’s a ‘reasonable distance’?” Jess asked, her cup halfway to her lips.
“Hold on,” Eric interrupted before I could answer. “I’m pretty good at wilderness survival and Search and Rescue. We could search for days out there and not find him. We could get lucky, but that is a lot of terrain out there. If we don’t find him within a few hundred meters of the edge of the forest, we probably are not going to find him at all.”
“We still have to look,” I said.
“I agree. We just have to be smart about it, and practical.”
“What is that supposed to mean?” Jess asked.
“It means we have to decide right now when to stop looking.”
There was a moment of silence as we digested that. Sanji nodded his head slowly, but both Darren and Jess looked like they wanted to argue the point. The logic and reality of the situation, however, was something we had talked about before. Something like this happening was always possible, so we knew what we had to do. Jess accepted it first, and then Darren finally agreed with what Eric said. That didn’t mean any of us liked it.
“Alright,” I said, “we look in the woods tomorrow. We stop when the sun sets, and then the next day we go on up the road.” It was a hard decision to make, but it was mine to do.
“Where do we start?” Darren asked.
“Eric?” I said. He had the most experience with this sort of thing, so it would be his show. We made plans and then went to bed. No one slept well that night.
Starting early in the morning light we walked in a line about sixty meters wide through the woods. We circled the farm in a slow spiral, stopping every dozen paces or so to look around and listen carefully. We paused for lunch and then kept going. It took forever, it was cold and quiet, and we saw little wildlife. In the end we found nothing.
We called it off as the sun began to set. We hadn’t seen a single undead all day, and only a few wild animals. We returned to the house downcast and tired.
“Tomorrow we lock this place up and go on. We’ll head west along the highway and see what we can find,” I said to everyone as we ate our dinner and sat in the light cast by oil lanterns.
Sanji and Eric got up to clean their plates. Fatigue showed in every step they took, and Eric groaned when he got up.
“This sucks,” Darren said disgustedly. He was as tired as the rest of us, and I was reminded that he was only seventeen.
“I know,” I said, “but you have to remember we have a lot of people relying on us.”
“Yeah, I know. Still sucks.” He took his plate into the kitchen to clean it.
“I agree with him,” Jess told me.
“You think I don’t? You think we don’t all want to find him?”
“I didn’t say that, Brian.”
“We have to go on. I don’t want to, but I really don’t see how we’re going to find Chris now.”
She leaned over and kissed my cheek. “I’m going up to bed. Wake me up for my watch, okay?”
“Alright,” I sighed. There was no point in being mad about this at all. “Love you.”
“I love you too, Brian. See you in a few hours.”
* * *
The next day was the 12th of September. We packed the vehicles and left the house early, heading west along the highway. It felt a little like a betrayal, leaving before we found our teammate and friend. Dead or alive, it would have been a relief to locate him, but the mission had to come first.
Jess and I rode in ‘Stop’ together, leading the way. My thumb traced the scars on the back of her hand as we drove. That far into Canada’s north, Highway 2 was a wide road cleared of trees and brush that saw a lot of oilfield traffic and logging trucks. Now the road is in bad shape. The winter frost heaves had not been repaired, small plants and even a few determined trees were finding ways to come through the cracks in the pavement, and there was evidence of flooding as we came nearer to the small town of Faust. We had passed the turnoff for a place called Kinuso earlier, but the road that led north there was blocked by a dozen trucks and cars, all neatly turned on their sides. They were not close enough together to stop foot traffic, and there were several of the undead standing nearby when we slowly drove past. Fifteen kilometers later, after driving over a rough patch of the highway that was partly frost heaves and partly dried mud that looked like it had been deposited when the lake flooded earlier in the year, we came to Faust.
Located between the Lesser Slave Lake and Highway 2, the town was once a major fishing settlement. Small houses with steeply peaked roofs sat amidst trees that were now growing unchecked on roads and lawns. Nature hadn’t taken long to reclaim land that humans were no longer using. We turned north off the highway and drove towards the lake on Spruce Street, edged in on both right and left by trees and brush. There were two abandoned cars pushed off into the ditch, rusting and filled with mud where the floods had washed over them. There was a trace of frozen mud on the road, and the potholes were filled with it as well. The town had not fared well from the combination of zombies and inclement weather and floods. Many houses we saw were leaning, a few were off the foundations and one had collapsed entirely. There were no undead or even regular dead bodies to be seen, and the whole of the ruined town was unnaturally quiet.
As we reached the intersection near rail lines, we saw a garage off to the right, and through the partly open service bay doors we could see a heavy duty truck inside. I pulled into the lot beside a rusting
Impala and sat looking around while Jess checked our weapons. She handed me my Browning and holstered hers, and I opened the door after seeing nothing moving. We got out, and Eric came up beside us from the other vehicle.
“What’s up?”
“Tell Sanji I want to check out that truck in there,” and I pointed with my handgun to the service bay. Eric turned and waved at the others, and they got out.
Sanji could drive large vehicles quite well, so if this heavy truck was in good shape we could salvage it. He came up with his shotgun and together we went to look at the station. Behind us, Darren and Jess had climbed onto the roofs of our vehicles, and Eric stood nearby, slowly turning to watch all around.
The door was intact and closed, but filthy with grime and several seasons’ worth of wind-blown grit. I pulled on it while Sanji covered me, and it opened with a squeal of rusted hinges.
He stepped in, sweeping left to right in case anything came up at us, but it was empty. The shelves inside were full of oil bottles, fan belts, deodorant hangers for cars, and there was a full shelf of old magazines that it looked like the mice had been into pretty badly. There was a section of candy bars and gum, none of which I would trust to eat, and a cooler at the back full of pop bottles, mostly Coke, and most of which had popped their tops in the freezing weather. What a mess.
The cash register was open, but there was still money in it—what looked like the remains of several hundred dollars and a fistful of coins. Mice had made a nest in the paper money.
To the left was the door to the service bays. I aimed my Browning there, and Sanji leaned forward and pushed the door open with his shotgun. Again it squealed, but opened freely. We stepped in, but saw nothing moving. The heavy truck was a flatbed, and we walked around it. There was nothing alive or dead in here with us. There were mechanics tools scattered about the floor, and an air compressor and some things I didn’t recognise, as well as tools of all kinds hung on the walls or in metal cabinets. This was a gold mine for us!
“Clear!” I called, and saw Eric speak to Darren and my wife through the filthy glass of the bay doors. Sanji found the chain that opened the bay door and pulled on it. It protested but moved, and soon light flooded in and the door was open above us.
“Is there anything out there yet?” I asked my wife.
“Nothing,” she replied. “Quiet as a grave.”
We examined the truck. It appeared to Sanji that the mechanic had finished servicing it, and then left it here. We couldn’t find keys, and the fuel tank was empty, but Sanji thought it would probably start if it had fuel. The bad news was that it was a diesel engine, and we had no diesel fuel with us.
“The mechanic would have drained the tanks before starting work,” Sanji told us. “The fuel might still be here somewhere. Look for a red gas can or a metal drum.”
It was Eric who found it in a small shed behind the station. It was locked, so we had to use the bolt cutter to open the shed. Inside was a metal drum that sloshed when we shook it. There was a plastic spout in the top, and it was painted with a red fire hazard symbol. We rolled it back inside. I went out to ‘Go’ and brought back a hand pump, and we spent about twenty minutes with a hose transferring as much diesel as we could back into the main tank of the truck.
There were still no keys, and even a search of the station didn’t turn any up. In the end we had to hotwire it. It grumbled and shook on the first try, sputtered and coughed on the second, and blew a cloud of black smoke out the back on the third.
“Come on, baby,” Eric muttered, lying across the seat with his head under the console, fingers in the wiring. He tried again.
On the fifth try it caught and started to run, and loud AC/DC music blasted out of the cab. Someone had left a tape in the cassette deck inside the cab, and it was playing Highway to Hell. Eric slammed his head on the underside of the console, and then cursed as he sat up and ejected the tape. Silence. He climbed out and threw the tape into a nearby garbage bin.
“I always hated AC/DC,” he said, grinning.
We spent the next hour loading as many tools as we thought we could use onto the flatbed and tying everything down. We left the truck in the parking lot and ate some lunch as we decided to explore the rest of the town and see if anything interesting could be found.
“Hey,” Darren said suddenly, pointing east of us along the railway tracks, “look over there.”
A pack of wolves was watching us from a hundred meters away. They were hard to spot unless they moved, but they were definitely watching us. I borrowed Jess’ rifle and looked through the scope. There were seven that I could see. They were timber wolves, with dark mottled coats and equally dark eyes. I set the crosshairs on one that had a brown and reddish coat, and had a feeling this was the alpha male. I watched him for a while as he looked at us, and then I handed Jess her rifle. She looked at them as well.
“Pretty,” she said.
“Probably wondering what the monkeys are doing back here,” Eric said, “and when we’ll be leaving them alone again.”
It was a good sign that there were no undead nearby, to see wildlife, since wolves had a great sense of smell and most animals would avoid the zombies if they sensed them. A pack of wolves would have driven the deeply conservative farmers in this area insane a few years ago, but now it was just another sign of nature reasserting itself now that people were few and far between. I wondered what the planet was going to look like a hundred years from now.
After lunch we got up to explore the town, and the wolves moved away from us, back into some nearby trees. I was sad to see them go, and admired their sleek beauty as they ducked out of sight.
We moved west on foot down a street that apparently had no name, passing the ruins of houses filled with mud and debris from the lake. A few small trees had been uprooted and lay half-buried in the grime. A few blocks on there was still nothing moving, but the town had less of an eerie feeling to it since we had seen the wolf pack. We knew now that there was life here.
A single-storey cinderblock structure to our right had a sign on steel posts advertising it as the town general store, and the widows were all covered with sheets of plywood that looked intact. The glass of the windows lay broken on the sidewalk in front of the store. The front door was covered with plywood as well.
“Want to check it out?” Eric asked.
“Absolutely,” I replied. “Let’s see if there’s a back door.”
I led the way to the alley behind the store. An old, once red, Ford Escort was sitting sunk to the floorboards in the dried mud in the alley right behind the store, its tires flat and plants growing around it. A quick look inside showed it was empty.
There was a single metal door to the building that was chained shut, the chain covered in rust. There was no lock, merely a length of wire that was holding the chain together, twisted around itself several times. That would be sufficient to keep the undead out, and the living would be able to figure it out easily.
Sanji loosened the wire while the rest of us covered the area, but all stayed quiet. He pulled the wire out and then the chain, which made a clanking noise as he dropped it to the ground.
“Ready?”
“Do it,” Eric said, aiming at the door.
Sanji pulled it open, revealing the darkness of the interior. We waited, stepping back from the door, for anything inside to come to us. After a few minutes nothing had appeared, so Eric and I took flashlights and stepped inside. It was the stock room at the back of the store, and someone had set it up as a shelter. The room was small, but set up for emergencies. There was a camping cot propped up against one wall, and a pile of neatly folded blankets next to it. A small wood-burning stove was in the far corner, but I didn’t see any wood to burn in it. There were two more open doors, one leading to the front part of the store, and another that opened on a small bathroom. Hanging on nails next to the stove were three pots and several kitchen tools, all clean. A shelf next to that held some soaps, a bottle of multivitamins, and so
me dishcloths. There was also a chair with magazines sitting on it, and a small first-aid kit. There was a thick layer of dust on everything, evidence that nobody had been here in some time.
Sanji came in behind us, and Eric and I went forward into the main part of the store, shining lights ahead of us and checking our corners. There were two aisles of metal shelves that reached from floor to near the ceiling. The shelves held plastic tubs with labels, and the lids were secured with duct tape.
“Look at the ground,” Eric whispered to me. I looked down, and saw the dust on everything here as well. Then I realised what he meant. There were no footprints other than ours. No one had been here in a long time. At the front were two cash registers behind a counter, and a huge pile of cut logs that was stacked behind the plywood covering the windows. Fortunately there were no undead in here. We checked carefully, every little nook, but we were alone. Everyone but Darren came inside and we began checking the shelves.
Closer investigation revealed that the tubs held food and supplies. Someone had planned ahead and stocked this place. Reading the labels, we found ammunition for a variety of weapons, more first-aid supplies, tubs filled with bagged rice, oats and barley, cans of beans and fruit, bags of soup stock, dehydrated vegetables, cans of salmon and tuna, several cans of coffee, and even some powdered milk. There was enough for a single person to live on for several years, if they didn’t mind a bit of diet repetition.
“Oh my God, tampons!” Jess cried, and then laughed, “And toilet paper!”
“Toothpaste over here,” Eric declared, holding up a tube.
There were other treasures as well, including some batteries and flashlights, a camping lantern, and three rifles that Sanji found behind the bathroom door. They were all bolt-action .308 hunting rifles, wrapped in canvas bags and oiled cloths, and Jess and Eric both declared them to be in good condition. There were over a thousand rounds of rifle ammunition in one of the tubs.
