Hunted (Collapse Book 2)

by Riley Flynn

  “But what if Timmy’s right? Doesn’t that mean we’ll be spotted?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “It wasn’t the drone that saw us before; it was that man. He called us in. The original plan was working.”

  “But what if they don’t have the drone anymore?”

  “You’re absolutely positive you saw it crash?”

  “I saw it go down.” Alex winced as Joan checked his leg over. She seemed to be squeezing extra tight, staring him in the eye.

  “But did you see it crash? It might have been returning to base for all we know.”

  “Possibly. But I shot that satellite thing they had and I shot their car to pieces. I saw the drone drop out of the sky. That means they can’t chase us and they can’t see us.”

  “Why would the drone crash? You got it wrong, I bet.”

  “And what if they jack another car, man? The feds don’t have to drive Cadillacs, you know.”

  Staring out of the back of the car, Alex had been certain the drone had crashed. The culmination of his clever planning. Even in his mind, the word ‘clever’ seemed to be giving himself too much credit. He was reacting. He was lucky. So far, things were working out. Taking out their advantages. Playing soldier. Battlefield general.

  But the more he talked to Timmy and Joan, the more the plan seemed to deflate. Eventualities he hadn’t thought about. Maybe it had just lost altitude as the autopilot kicked in.

  “Okay,” Alex began, standing up tall and holding his hands in front of him. “Let’s just say what we know. We’re being followed. They want something from us. They’re prepared to kill to get it. That includes us, it seems. They know we’re heading south. Their drone might be taken down – yes, Joan, I said might – and their car is out of order. What do we do?”

  “I vote we carry on as we were.” Timmy raised his hand. “Who’s with me?”

  Joan lifted her hand.

  “I think Timmy’s right. Slow and careful. We can’t be sure they’re not behind us. And I don’t trust this car to keep going if you push it too hard.”

  Outnumbered already.

  “That’s two of you. I vote we drive on as quickly as possible and try to make it through to Virginia. We’ve got a head start. We can vanish now. So that’s one vote for me. Cam, what do you think? Did you hear all that?”

  “Yeah.” Cam’s voice boomed along the deserted road. “I’m with you, Alex.”

  Timmy kicked the ground.

  “A tie then. Unless we get the dog’s vote.”

  The comment earned a humorless chuckle.

  “How about a compromise? We take it slow. We carry on as normal. But we stop. Wait. Look back and see who’s behind us. If we don’t see anyone, we’ll know we’re in the clear. Then we can speed up. We should have enough supplies and food for that, right?”

  A general nodding of heads.

  “Food, sure. Gas, maybe not.” Timmy said. “Should probably find a way to deal with the windows, too.”

  “Doesn’t matter if we’re not driving too fast,” Alex told him. “I just hope it all holds together.”

  “I just hope we’re safe.” The smear of dried blood sat on Joan’s cheek. She hadn’t noticed. “I just want to be somewhere safe.”

  “I think we all do, Joan. I know I do.”

  “But why are they chasing us? Why can’t they just leave us alone?”

  “We don’t know yet.” Alex thought back to the conversations he’d overheard. “They want to get paid. Someone’s pressuring them. But we can find-”

  “We’ll never find out, Alex. Come on.” Joan removed her glasses and rubbed her forehead with the palm of her hand. She was annoyed. “This whole conspiracy thing is getting old. We should just focus on reaching the farm in peace. I don’t want anything to do with that nonsense.”

  “You don’t want to know what’s happening? Why all this is taking place?”

  “I don’t think it makes any difference.” She took the plastic wallet from her pocket. It held the code sheet Alex had pulled off the dead man in Rockton. “You can take this. It won’t help us survive. Just dump it on the road and be done with it.”

  Alex took it.

  “Even if this is the reason they’re chasing us,” he told her, “they want more than this. There’s no chance they leave us alive afterwards. They’ll still chase us down. They’re worried we know too much.”

  “We don’t know anything!”

  “But they don’t understand that. And they wouldn’t believe us if we told them. What’s four more dead civilians to them?”

  “Guys, please.” Timmy stepped between Alex and Joan. “It doesn’t matter. We’re all tired, right? We should get some sleep. Eat. Cam, you want to eat?”

  “Sure thing.” Cam’s voice was distant and cold. Alex could tell he wasn’t keen on the conversation.

  “Good. Then that’s settled. We sleep here or we move on?”

  Alex didn’t answer. He stared at the objects in his hand. He was so sure that this was the key. The answer to the riddle of the world collapsing. But the others weren’t so sure. Joan didn’t care. Her priorities were elsewhere.

  But Alex’s mind was awake now. He wanted to know. People were chasing him. People wanted to kill him. The clockwork cogs in his brain were working themselves into a spin trying to figure out why. If the answer was on these drives, then they had to find a way.

  There was a conflict brewing in the group. A tiny crack which was spreading wider and wider, opening up resentment between the parties. Those who wanted to know and those who just wanted to get away. Sooner or later, Alex knew, they were going to have to choose a path.

  “You stare at those things,” Joan whispered, “you’ll only be disappointed. They won’t tell you why things happened.”

  “But they might tell me how things happened,” Alex told her, “and that’s a start.”

  Find a computer, Alex thought. Find a way to get these devices running. Find a way to understand the world, he told himself, and there might be a way to fix it. That was what the others were missing. Maybe, if they had enough information, they might not need to escape. They could stop running. Maybe.

  There was no end to the possibilities of what might be on the drives. Right now, he knew, there was no beginning, either.

  Chapter 26

  They sat beneath a sickle moon. A few miles down the road, after Timmy had turned the map the right way, they’d found a place to camp. Set back from the road, just enough of a clearing for the tent and the car.

  “Hey, what day is it?” Timmy said as he chewed through a cracker.

  No one answered. Minor details – dates and times – had stopped meaning anything. Sun rises, sun sets. The weather gets colder. New truths.

  “See, I ask because… well, it’s November, right? Is it Thanksgiving yet? Christmas soon.”

  “You got any turkey in those meals?” Cam asked, a playful flourish in his voice. “Bet they don’t have cranberry, right.”

  Taking his mind off everything, Alex thought. Taking all our minds off everything.

  “I don’t even know how many we’ve got left. We’ve got more space in the trunk now, I know that.”

  “You didn’t count them out?”

  “I just grabbed everything off the crate I had. It was meant to be a kind of taster kit. You know, some from every country. Like a wine club.”

  “We ate these things all the time, I’ll tell you. Not like this though.”

  “Yeah, I didn’t want the American ones. These are from…” Timmy checked the packet, sucking air through his teeth. “Austria. Not bad, right?”

  “I like the American ones better.”

  “Figures.”

  Alex watched the two men talking. He took cheer from their conversation, the way they found delight in the tiny details, even against the backdrop of everything that was happening. He could just about make out the lines on their faces, their shoulders hunched up and around to keep warm. Everyone wo
re all the clothes they had. Everyone wrapped up tight, bundling their emotions even tighter, unwilling to show any weakness. When winter really arrived, they might have a problem.

  “So, we going to make this a real camping trip, or what?” Timmy rubbed his hands together. “Alex? Joan? Got any ghost stories for us?”

  “You would not be able to handle the horrors of my stories, Timothy Ratz.”

  “Hit me, Joanie.”

  “One day I’ll tell you the story of the deadbeat husband who left me with child and ran away with a younger woman. A more chilling tale will never be told.”

  “Ah, come on. That’s not a real campfire story. That’s a bar story. I want people with hooks for hands. People rising up from the dead. People hearing knocks on the door at midnight.”

  “It’s all a bit redundant now, Timmy,” Alex told him. “Real life’s got better special effects than any movie.”

  “That’s the truth,” Timmy agreed. “Damn, you remember that dude in the restaurant? We parked the bikes up, go searching for a bit of food and then – boom – dead guy, just sitting there.”

  “I don’t think you actually saw him, if I recall correctly.”

  “But the smell, man. The smell. I knew right away.”

  Alex knew what he meant about the smell. Evocative odors. Whether it was the crumbling fire lighting cubes from the meal packets, the wet damp of the dog after he’d run through the forest, or the rotting stench of an abandoned body, the world was awash with a new set of smells.

  Just six months ago, Alex would be able to list the flavorsome steam of the processed meat at the diner or whatever it was they used to package his internet deliveries. Silica crystals or something. Every sensation in his life had been blended up, repurposed, mixed together and sold to him.

  These new smells were not always welcome. But they were different. They made him feel alive.

  “You thought it was hamburgers. You thought the freezers had shut down.” Alex laughed.

  “Dead dude, Alex. He was dead. Nasty.” Timmy exaggerated a shiver. “That’s a real ghost story. The Dead Dude in the Fast Food Joint. In theatres soon. Take a date.”

  A ripple of laughter. Timmy continued, happy to have the floor.

  “How about you, Cam? Bet you’ve seen some gnarly stuff. Got any good war stories?”

  “Nothing like that. No frontline stories. Was never really posted for all that.”

  “Ah, yeah. You were back office?”

  “I was plenty of things. Been a cook, drove trucks, worked in comms. No campfire stories.”

  “They let you do all that?” Joan blew into her hands. “Why not just keep you in one position?”

  “They needed the bodies, I guess. Not many people signing up these days. Experienced hands like mine? Probably pretty useful. Got to fire a gun occasionally, too.”

  “Man, they’re that itching for people?”

  “Been like that for about five years, I’d say. After the whole China situation. Never was the same after that.”

  Alex felt the gears in his mind ticking over. The Chinese trade war. The border skirmishes in distant lands. Might not look like much in the history books, but it had changed the country. Everyone had known at the time. The end of an empire. Cam continued.

  “We’re pretty good at keeping quiet, you know? Bet you didn’t hear much about the virus till things got serious, eh?”

  Mind racing back, Alex tried to remember. Sitting in the office. Hanging out with Timmy. And then, out of nowhere, the world was ending. His phone hadn’t rung once.

  “See,” Cam continued, “see, I can tell you’re all thinking back now, trying remember whether you read anything. Yeah, we was ahead of you. Couple of days, maybe a week. I was on the inside, got called up to a new position. All those people getting sick and then the computers went down? That’s when we couldn’t really hide it anymore. That’s when I knew we were in trouble.”

  “So you saw people get sick?” Timmy’s eyes were wide. In the dark, it was impossible to tell that one was gray. “You saw all this go down from behind the scenes?”

  “Nah, you’re giving me too much credit. We knew something was up. Didn’t know what. We still work under orders, right? Need-to-know basis. We didn’t need to know.”

  “No one told you anything? I find that hard to believe.”

  “No, ma’am, they didn’t tell us anything. Well, they didn’t need to after a while, right? Bodies start piling up, you can fill in the blanks.”

  “But you said there were camps, that there were sick people there.” Alex could remember listening to the story, sitting in the cabin in the woods.

  “Don’t remind me, my friend. Please. The things I saw that day, crawling through a pile of bodies. The orders those men gave? That’s not the military I remember. Not the country I signed up in. That’s your horror story.”

  Cam stared at the ground. No one spoke.

  “I saw things that day,” Cam continued in a hoarse whisper. “Things you won’t ever want to see again. I was there, I watched… I… There’s never going to be a horror story like it, every time I shut my eyes. We were expendable. Innocent. None of us asked for that. There’s still blood on my hands, you know? On my face, on my neck. That’ll never wash off. Some things just don’t wash away.”

  Ghost stories.

  Joan stood up, walked across, and sat next to Cam.

  “Do you want to talk about it?”

  “That sound.” Cam was cold, shivering. “That sound. Mechanical clack-clack-clack of the guns. We’re all lined up. Get our orders. Then there’s that sound. That’s it, right? That’s the sound. I gotta carry that sound with me the entire time. No, I don’t want to talk about it. But I gotta hear it.”

  “That’s a hell of a story, man. I’m sorry.”

  Joan reached her arm around Cam. He looked up, the flat stare returned to his face.

  “Don’t worry about it. Forget about it.”

  “Yeah, but, you know? Like, knowing what we’re capable of doing? Just like that? It’s horrific, man.”

  “Yeah. I know. So I’ve got first watch, folks? Let’s get some sleep.”

  Cam stood straight to his feet, back flat and heels together. Joan’s arm fell away.

  They watched Cam pick up the rifle, walk to the edge of the camp, and take up his position. No one spoke.

  * * *

  Timmy stood opposite the dog. He’d wrapped a tarp around his arm and was trying to make Finn attack him. He’d been taking any opportunity to test the dog, all building up to this. They had the simple things down. Sit. Stay. Roll over. Now it was time for the real lessons.

  “I’ve seen them do it on TV,” he insisted. “This is how they train attack dogs.”

  “What if he knocks you onto the floor?” Joan sat next to Alex, both of them watching. “You think you can take him?”

  “I want to get him thinking like that. Come on, Joanie, think of how much better it’d be if Finn was an actually, fully trained lethal weapon.”

  “I like him as he is.”

  The dog wagged his tail and watched the tarped-up arm as Timmy encouraged him.

  “He thinks you’re playing.” Alex tried to rub the weariness out of his face. “I don’t think he’s ready to fight you.”

  Timmy stopped waving his arm at the dog. He paused, considered Finn, and then threw himself forward. Man and dog rolled around on the floor, playing. After a minute, they untangled.

  “Okay.” Timmy’s breathing was heavy and labored, Alex noticed. But he was having fun. “This time, try and get him to do it on command.”

  “What command?” Alex asked, stroking the dog’s head. “You want him to attack on command?”

  “Dunno, man. You pick. Attack? Bite? Kill?”

  “Kill seems a bit much.” Alex looked at Finn. Even if he was a puppy, he was getting bigger. He could seriously harm someone. Actually, he remembered, the dog had already attacked, mauled, and hurt people. Wonder if he has the same
bad dreams?

  “Let’s go with ‘strike’, right? Seems like it would work.”

  Timmy’s breathing was back under control. He set himself in a pose, adjusted the protective clothing.

  “Hold him back, now.” Timmy whispered to Alex. “When you’re ready, shout strike and see what he does.”

  Taunting the dog, slapping his hand against the padding, Timmy stared down Finn. Alex held on to the dog’s loose neck skin and could feel him tugging and heaving, trying to lunge.

  “Finn!” Alex spoke authoritatively. “Stay!”

  The dog sat down, his tail rigid and his legs tensed.

  “Okay, man. Do it!”

  “Strike!”

  As Alex said the word, he let go of the dog’s neck. Finn leapt forwards, flying into Timmy’s outstretched arm and knocking him to the ground. They rolled around together again.

  “He seems to be picking it up,” Alex spoke as the man and the dog wrestled. “Maybe he’s had some training in this.”

  They tried it again and again, laughing and sweating. Finn could do it all night. Timmy was struggling. But he was having fun, something Alex was keen to keep going. Not everything had to be so serious all the time.

  “Hey, stop. Who’s that?”

  It was Cam’s voice, carrying over from outside the campsite. As one, Timmy, Joan, and Alex stood to their feet. They could hear quiet, amiable talking. Then footsteps.

  Cam entered the camp, pressing his rifle into the spine of a smiling, middle-aged man who walked in front.

  “Good evening, everybody!” The man’s smile was relentless. “And who do we have here?”

  No one answered. They looked to Cam.

  “I found him walking around the camp. He says he’s friendly, just wants to talk.”

  “I only want to talk.” The man held up his hands, surrendering himself. “Name’s Theodore but most folks call me Ted.”

  Alex looked Ted up and down. The smile was the man’s most striking feature. His teeth were bright and shiny, all perfectly formed. A Hollywood smirk, impressive given the state of the world.

  Ted wore black denim pants and two sweaters. An oversized jacket dangled down over his wrists and covered up his hands. His hair was overgrown, his chin covered in a pale fuzz. Alex hadn’t shaved in a month, and his face was now a tangled, unkempt mess. This man seemed like he was taking much better care of himself than most.