by Gareth Wood
There were tracks in the snow here. A single pair of boots had entered and then left the shed, walking back on the same path it had taken to get here. This was a very good sign. A zombie would have just staggered around, not gone in and then out, or would have just stood there, unaware, while waiting for us to come along. A living person had been here in the last few days, and had walked back onto the road and towards the structure we could see in the distance. I raised my binoculars and had a look.
It was a big structure with a peaked roof, and concrete pillars holding up tan coloured walls. There was a large observation deck on the west side, and on the east was the gondola bay, with a sloped roof to protect it from the worst weather. I could see lots of intact glass windows, and the service entrance underneath the observation deck. Three Parks Canada trucks and a civilian Cherokee were parked outside. All their tires were inflated and had snow chains, and they looked to be in good condition. I saw no movement, but I did see that there was a light on inside the structure, though I couldn’t make out any other interior details.
“Look over there,” Amanda said excitedly, pointing to the left.
It was a wind farm. At least a dozen small wind-powered generators were turning in a cluster near the edge of the plateau. A small electric light was glowing atop each one, and I would bet power lines were run from each of these into the building. The windmills looked cobbled together, but they were turning easily in the wind. Just beyond the farthest one was a tall pole with wires running up the side of it. Atop that was a large cone shaped light fixture, pointing down. I would have bet money, if it was still worth anything, that this was the light we saw from the highway.
To the right of the main building were a row of smaller structures made of wood and plastic sheeting. Greenhouses? At that moment the wind shifted and carried the faint smell of farmyard animals to us. Manure and other rich things.
“Nice set up, here,” Amanda said.
We kept going, following the tracks to the service entrance by the trucks. There were more tracks there, of several sizes, leading towards both the wind farm and the greenhouses. Darren was inspecting the four vehicles, moving from one to another, and looking inside the windows and truck beds.
“They’re clean, in good shape, and the keys are in all of them,” he told us.
I was about to reply when the service door opened a few feet away. I swung up the C7, and found a young Asian woman holding an armful of green garbage bags staring at me in stunned silence. I swung the barrel away from her, smiled, and said, “Hi there.”
She screamed, dropped the bags, and tried to pull the door shut. The bags blocked her from doing this, so she turned and bolted back inside, into the dark hallway. I heard her feet retreating, and then another door open and slam.
Amanda was laughing. “Forget to brush your teeth again this morning, Brian?”
“We should back off now,” Sanji said to me, “and get out where we are visible.”
That depended on whether they were bandits or not. I had a feeling it was the latter.
“That woman looked healthy and well dressed,” I commented, “and she forgot she was wearing a gun. I doubt these people are bandits.”
“She had a gun?”
“Yeah, she had a pistol tucked into the back of her pants. I think she forgot all about it.” I shook my head as we moved away from the door. It couldn’t hurt to be a little cautious, so I motioned for the others to spread out, and we all waited facing the building, standing in a wide line about fifteen meters back from the trucks.
Minutes crawled by. Finally, just as I was about to lose patience, we saw movement from inside the structure. Someone was moving around inside, behind the windows. The door of the service entrance was then pushed open all the way, and a man stepped outside.
He was about fifty, I guessed, with curly grey hair and a scraggly beard. He was wearing clean jeans, good winter boots, and a clean blue down vest over a grey fleece jacket. He didn’t look to be armed, and he paused in the doorway to look at us apprehensively. He had the look of a man who’s drawn the short straw for something unpleasant. He looked down and kicked the garbage bags away, and then stepped fully outside and closed the door.
I realized we must look fairly intimidating, four heavily armed strangers in military gear. I slung my C7 after putting the safety on, and took two steps forward.
“Hi there, “I said in a loud and clear voice, “my name is Brian. We don’t mean you any harm.”
His expression was doubtful, but he came forward. He still looked spooked, so I turned towards the others and whispered for them to shoulder their guns. The man stopped about six feet from me, holding his hands together and rubbing them back and forth. Yeah, he was spooked.
“Ah, look, we don’t have much here,” he said, and then flinched when I adjusted my stance a little. He went on. “Please don’t kill us. We’ll give you whatever we can.”
Oh hell, he thought we were here to rob his people. I’d have bet that there were guns pointed at us right this second from inside. This poor guy was the sacrificial lamb they sent out to see if we were assholes or not.
“No, it’s not like that! We’re not here to hurt you, or take anything of yours.”
“We’re here from the government, man,” Amanda said from my left, “We’re a salvage team.”
He didn’t look convinced, but said, “Where you from then?”
“Cold Lake,” I said, “where we have thousands of survivors, all safe and healthy. Teams like ours search for supplies and survivors outside the safe areas.”
He started to say something else, but I interrupted. “What’s your name? I’m Brian, this is Amanda, and Darren and Sanji.” I held out my hand, and after staring at it for a few seconds, he took it.
“I’m Joel,” he said, “Joel Parsons. Are you really from the government?”
“Yes. I meant it when I said we didn’t mean you any harm. We were passing through on the highway when we saw your light,” I pointed, “and we had to come up and investigate.”
“Had to?”
“It’s one of our policies to contact and assist any group of survivors we find.”
He was looking thoughtful now, but I was starting to get cold in the wind.
“It’s getting cold out here. May we come inside? I promise, we aren’t looters or thieves.” He looked about to refuse, but his eyes jumped to our guns. I hastily added, “Or how about just two of us, and we leave our weapons here?”
He agreed to that, and so Amanda and I handed our Brownings and C7’s over to Darren and Sanji, and followed Joel to the door leading inside. I hadn’t noticed the spy hole in the door, but someone must have been watching us. As we approached Joel waved at the door, and it opened. A blonde and bearded middle-aged man stood waiting. He was armed with a civilian rifle, and dressed in jeans and a red and black parka. He glared at us suspiciously, but stepped aside as Joel entered, waited for us to pass, and then shut the door again. I saw him return to watching outside as we followed Joel down the corridor.
The hallway was lit at the end by a single dim bulb, and we passed doors that had signs on them that read ‘Main Electrical Room’ and ‘Mechanical Room’. We climbed a short flight of stairs, and into another dimly lit hallway. He stopped at a door and ushered us through it. We found ourselves in a large room with two couches in rough condition, three tables, six chairs, and many windows showing a great view of the mountains to the north and east.
“Wait here,” Joel said, “and I’ll be right back with the others.”
While he was gone we looked around the room. It was large enough to fit twenty people around the tables, and there was a small set of bookshelves in one corner. It held old copies of Newsweek and Time, and a very worn copy of Stephen King’s The Stand. I tried the light switch by the door, and the light came on. It was a bit dim, and flickered, so I turned it off.
“Smells like farm animals in here,” Amanda remarked. She was right, there was a faint smell
of wet fur and manure, and the carpet was fairly filthy. I guessed that they were not going to waste electricity on vacuum cleaners. We sat down to wait.
A few minutes later the door opened again, and Amanda and I got up from the chairs we were sitting in. Joel came back in with several more men and women, some of them armed. There were a dozen of them in total, but the blonde man who had been guarding the door was not with them. The young Asian woman I had surprised at the door was standing near the back of the group, behind several taller men and women. The weapons were a mix of civilian rifles and a few pistols, probably police models. None were pointed at us.
Joel hesitantly started to speak. “I, ah, told them what you told me. You know, about being from the government?”
“Is it true?” This from a short, motherly looking woman, older and dark haired. Everyone else was looking at us uncertainly. “Is the government really out there?”
“It’s true. We’re from Canadian Forces Base Cold Lake, and we’re in touch with the Prime Minister’s office and a few other military bases across the country.”
This started an avalanche of questions, everyone asking all kinds of things at once. We stood there and let the voices roll over us, and I waited for someone to quiet them down. No one did. They all kept getting louder, trying to make their questions heard. Finally, I shouted, “Shut the fuck up! All of you!”
Silence fell, and a dozen faces stared at me. “Thank you. Let’s keep it quiet, and I’ll answer your questions as well as I can. One at a time, please!”
For the next half hour we talked. We told them about Cold Lake, the salvage and rescue teams out scouring the country for survivors and supplies, and the safe zones we had established. They asked about the government, and we told them what we knew. They asked about the rest of the world, but we had little information about anywhere outside the continent. The young Asian woman, whose name we learned was Keiko Toyotomi, asked us about Japan. She told us she had been a tourist, in Banff for a skiing vacation with some school friends, when the dead rose. She had barely spoken any English in May of ’04, but was fluent now. We had nothing to tell her about her homeland.
They finally accepted that we meant them no harm, and allowed Sanji and Darren to come inside. The door guard was introduced to us. He was a German businessman who had worked in the oil patch, and had moved to Calgary in January of 2004. His name was Nathan Jaeger, and he appeared to be the most charismatic of this group of survivors.
They didn’t really appear to have a leader among them. Joel seemed to be in charge, but anytime they had a serious point to decide there were all kinds of arguments. Joel was a farmer, and was also responsible for the care of the greenhouses, and the welfare of the sheep and goats.
Joel and Nathan and another man named Nicholas Miller took the four of us on a tour of the building. Nicholas was a carpenter and had arrived with many tools just after the dead came back. They showed us the rooms they had converted from offices to bedrooms, with mattresses lying on handmade frames. There was a communal area for games and meals, and a gym, once a store for tourists. They had a stockpile of fuel and food, and running cold water. They heated water for bathing in a large tub and for dishes on the wood stoves that Joel and Nicholas had rigged in the kitchen. They got fresh water from a spring, which eventually ran down to the hot spring pool at the base of the mountain. Outside they had greenhouses, currently growing winter crops, and a small barn that had not been here two years ago. It was made of two-by-fours and sheets of plastic and corrugated siding. Inside were a dozen sheep, two mountain goats, and eight farm goats. A small ginger cat squinted at us from atop a hay bale as we walked in.
This was as good a time as any to ask the burning questions that I had, so I turned to Joel and gave him a steady look.
“What happened in town?”
“What do you mean?”
“The bodies. The wreckage. It looks like a major battle was fought there. What happened?”
He shrugged, a great rolling motion of the shoulders, and looked away. I gathered that he was uncomfortable with any kind of confrontation. Still, the question needed an answer.
“It was a gang of bandits,” Nicholas told me. “They moved in about a month ago, in near a dozen trucks and vans, several motorcycles. They looted and shot up the town, killed a whole bunch of those dead things, and burned a bunch of buildings.”
“Which way did they go?”
“Keiko said she saw them come from the east. She was on watch that day. We usually have someone watching the town and highway from the observation deck. There’s some telescopes out there. Anyways, we watched them a while, they left going east, back the way they came.”
I looked at Sanji, and he raised an eyebrow. How far east had the bandits gone? We had apparently overlapped their route without knowing it, and luckily had not run into them.
We moved the vehicles up near the Parks trucks later that afternoon, and had dinner with the group, inside the communal area. We contributed some spices, pasta and tea, and helped with the preparation. Dinner was a happy time, and everyone seemed to be in a good mood, even the people who had to go and stay on watch. As dusk fell one of the men went outside and shut off the light we had spotted from the highway. It would be removed in the morning, and moved back to nearer to the building, so that its light was invisible from below the mountain.
After dinner, each of my team was surrounded by members of this group, and we each told them what we could about the outside world and Cold Lake’s reactions to the crisis. It wasn’t long before someone asked how hard it would be to relocate everyone to Cold Lake.
“There would be some risk,” I told them. “The undead are spread thin in the countryside, and are easier to avoid. It’s the towns you have to worry about. And the cities.”
“But we could do it? We could get there?” This was a woman named Rita, a blonde who looked a little bit like an older version of Cameron Diaz.
“Yes, we could get you there if the vehicles are in good shape. If there’s enough fuel. If we don’t run into a swarm of the things. But yeah, we have brought in larger groups of survivors than this before.”
“What’s life in Cold Lake like?” asked one man, the groups’ doctor, a biologist named Thomas Dand.
“Hard, but at least there are almost no undead in the area. The kids go to school, and the adults either work on the farms growing food, raising cattle, things like that, or work for the military, rescuing people, salvaging food and supplies from the countryside, or guarding the town.”
They weren’t happy with the ‘almost no undead’ statement, and Thomas asked about it.
“There are still instances of reanimation in town, but we have learned to deal with them as fast as possible. The sick and dying are watched, and when they die the disposal teams cremate them. We have had a few outbreaks where someone died without warning, but we dealt with those with minimal loss of life.”
“Does everyone who dies become a zombie?” asked Thomas.
“No, only some do, and we have no idea why. Unless they’re bitten. That’s a one hundred percent chance of death, usually within twelve to twenty four hours, and reanimation soon after.”
“So, of those who aren’t bitten, how many reanimate after death?” Thomas was showing his professional interest.
“I couldn’t tell you the numbers. All I know is that some people do reanimate, and some don’t. I have no idea what the reasons might be.”
“Is there research being done to find out what the reason is?”
“The Cold Lake base has a lab working on it full time.” I recalled something from early 2004. “The CDC in the States claimed it was a virus, but the World Health Organisation denied it. No one is sure what it really is.”
Thomas frowned. He looked deep in thought, and wandered away muttering to himself.
* * *
We bedded down that night inside the building, on cots laid out in a former office. Hot water had been provided, and we had al
l bathed. Amanda had been led away by Keiko and another woman to the room where several of the women slept. Apparently she couldn’t sleep in the same room as the three of us. She had smiled and gone along, and I imagined that they would be up a great deal of the night talking. I had offered to help with the night watch, and while Darren and Sanji got ready for some sleep in relatively comfortable beds, I stood in my parka outside on the observation deck with Nathan Jaeger, watching the snow fall. My C7 was slung over my shoulder, and I watched my breath in the air as the turbines turned and wolves howled in the distance.
Jaeger didn’t talk much. He seemed offended at the need to stand a watch, but also didn’t like anyone else doing it. He walked a slow circuit around the greenhouses, around the wind farm and power lines, and I followed, watching left and right, peering into shadows, pausing to listen carefully. Once we had done a full circle around the building we stepped back onto the observation deck, looking out at the darkness and falling snow.
“You are a businessman?” He asked me this abruptly, without turning to look at me.
“I was a stock analyst, before…” I replied. “Now I run a salvage team.”
“What of the others? The woman?”
“Amanda? She was a musician; she and her boyfriend were in a metal band you’ve never heard of.”
“Ah. Yes, there were many of those in Germany. What of the man? Sanji?”
“Sanji was a police officer in Vancouver, and a firefighter at some point as well. We rescued him, his brother Jay, and Amanda from Prince George last year.”
