by Lukens, Mark
To the left there was a set of living room furniture situated in front of the stone fireplace, a window on each side of the column of stone that rose to the ceiling. In the corner a flat screen TV stood. The flooring was wood planking. Handwoven area rugs were placed under the furniture and around the room. The whole place had the musty smell of a locked-up house, but the strongest odor was the scent of fresh-cut wood. Drapes and thick curtains covered the windows, blocking out the afternoon light.
The other end of the large living room opened up to a kitchen. There were three rooms off of the kitchen, to the left. Ray and Luke explored the three rooms: one was an office, the next room a guest bathroom, and the third room a bedroom. The furnishings were sparse and basic, but also looked comfortable. The bed had a quilted blanket and two pillows on it. The small closet was empty. A few paintings hung on the exterior log walls, mountain landscapes and wildlife art. The interior walls were wood-framing and finished drywall, painted beige.
The office had a desk and a desktop computer, a bookshelf crammed with books, and a globe of the world set in a wooden stand. A deer’s head hung on the wall along with a few more oil paintings. There were a few framed photos on the desk. Ray picked one of them up. It was a younger Doug with two older people, most likely his mom and dad. There was another photo of Doug and his co-workers. Ray stood right next to Doug in the photo. They were all smiling. Ray couldn’t remember when the photo had been taken, but Doug had kept it along with his family photos. Ray felt a pang of regret.
The kitchen was rustic and functional. There were stainless steel appliances, cherry cabinets, and granite countertops, two deep sinks. Ray checked the light switches, but there was no electricity. He opened the fridge; it was bare except for an opened box of baking soda. The cabinets had dishes and kitchen utensils and cookware. Luke turned on the faucet but no water came out. He opened the cabinet doors under the sink and turned the valves on. He stood back up and tried the faucet again. Still no water.
Ray entered the pantry just off of the kitchen, a large room with an empty freezer against one wall, a washer and dryer against another, and shelves along one wall that held an assortment of canned and boxed food. Not too much food. Not enough for all of them. Not even enough for a few weeks.
Ray’s heart sank when he saw the lack of food. “He must’ve kept the food and supplies down in the basement,” Ray told Luke as he pointed at a door that must lead down to a basement.
Luke nodded. “I’m going to check upstairs before we go down there. I don’t want someone sneaking up behind us while we’re down there.”
Ray nodded in agreement.
Luke hurried out of the living room and bounded up the stairs.
Ray went back through the downstairs rooms again, searching drawers and closets, looking for anything that could help them, but he found very little except for the barest of necessities.
The rest of the stuff is down in the basement, Ray told himself. It has to be.
Ray was back in the pantry again, eyeing the food, doing some quick mental calculations. He stepped into the kitchen. There was a door near the pantry door that led outside. It was a solid metal door like the front door. Ray peered through the peephole and saw a small wooden deck out there through the fisheye lens. He didn’t bother unlocking and opening the door.
He walked to the basement door, waiting for Luke to return.
“There are two bedrooms and a bathroom up there,” Luke said when he was back a few minutes later. “Not much else. Just like the bedroom down here. Some beds, empty dressers and closets.”
Ray nodded and opened the basement door. He shined his flashlight beam down the dark stairwell, and then he descended into the darkness. Luke followed him. The wooden steps barely creaked from their weight, everything still fairly new and solidly built.
When they got to the bottom of the stairs, Ray shined his flashlight beam around the basement.
“You gotta be kidding me,” Luke said.
CHAPTER 41
Luke
“There’s nothing down here,” Luke said as Ray kept shining his flashlight around the basement.
But that wasn’t exactly true. There was stuff down in the basement: cabinets and countertops built against the block walls, tools hung on a pegboard, a workbench with a vise mounted to the end of it, a double sink in one of the countertops. There was also a futuristic-looking A/C and heating unit in the middle of the basement with ductwork running up from it to the low basement ceiling that also had wires and pipes snaking across the joists. But that was it. No supplies. No boxes and crates of food. No pallets of bottled water. No cache of weapons and ammo.
“This doesn’t make sense,” Ray whispered, still shining the flashlight beam around like he might spot something, like he might have missed something.
The basement wasn’t really that large compared to the house above it, and the furnace and water heater took up much of the middle of the room. There were a few thick glass block windows at the tops of the walls that let some light in—the windows had tiny curtains that could be drawn across them.
“Maybe he kept the stuff in the garage,” Ray said, but even he didn’t seem like he believed his own suggestion.
Luke didn’t think it was very likely. He thought it was more likely that Ray’s friend had been busy building this cabin over the last few years, but he hadn’t gotten around to stocking it yet. Maybe the guy had planned on quitting his job, retiring and moving here, and he didn’t want to leave thousands of dollars’ worth of supplies in the house until he actually moved in.
“There are some sheds way out back,” Ray muttered, but he didn’t finish his thought about them.
“Yeah,” Luke said. “We could look.” What harm was it going to do? But Luke still didn’t think it was likely that Ray’s friend would have stored food and weapons in a pair of sheds where those supplies could be stolen or where rats and insects could get to them.
Luke spotted an electrical panel box on the wall near the stairwell. Thick wires ran from the top of the box up to the ceiling. He marched over to the box and opened it. There were lines of breakers inside the box with a main breaker at the top. Luke flipped all the breakers and then the top breaker, the clicking of the breakers sounded loud in the basement.
Nothing. No electricity.
“I can’t believe this,” Ray said.
“It sucks,” Luke agreed. “But at least we have somewhere relatively safe to stay for the night. There’s gotta be enough food for at least two weeks. Maybe three.”
And then what? Ray’s eyes said.
Luke didn’t have an answer for him.
“There’s no medicine here,” Ray said. “We can check the bathrooms again, but I didn’t see much of anything.”
Luke knew Ray was talking about Josh’s arm. Soon they were going to have to unwrap those bloody strips of cloth wrapped around Josh’s forearm and take a look at the wound.
“He’s been on painkillers,” Ray said. “He found them yesterday in that town where we met. They were in the Dark Angels’ truck. Somewhere in the cab. I saw him pocket something when I went up there to see what was taking him so long. But he said he hadn’t found anything. But I know he found something. Some kind of pills or drugs, whatever those Dark Angels were taking, probably.”
“I know he’s high,” Luke said. “Anyone can see it.”
Ray nodded, letting out a long sigh.
“I know you don’t like Josh popping pills,” Luke said. “He told me that he used to have a drug and alcohol problem. But right now, with his wound, he might actually need them.”
Ray didn’t say anything; he didn’t seem ready to admit that Josh needed the painkillers.
“Maybe we should stay in this cabin for a few days,” Luke suggested. “Try to figure out what we’re going to do.”
Ray nodded, still looking around at the nearly empty basement.
“We’re probably going to have to stitch Josh’s wound up,” Luke said. “An
d if it gets a lot worse. If we can’t save his arm . . .” He let his words die in the cold air; he didn’t feel like he needed to expound on it.
Again Ray nodded like he understood.
“We’ve still got a little daylight left,” Luke said. “Let’s get Josh, Mike, and Emma inside.”
“We’ll check the garage first,” Ray said.
Luke could tell that Ray was hoping they might get lucky and find at least a few stacks of supplies in there, but Luke didn’t think that was going to happen.
CHAPTER 42
Emma
Emma sat on the bench seat in the van, listening to Mike and Josh talk to each other.
“They’ve been in there for a while now,” Mike said. He sounded worried.
“Everything’s okay,” Josh told Mike. “They’re probably checking every room, every closet, making sure the place is empty.”
“If someone’s in there, Luke will shoot them,” Mike said. He mimicked the spitting noise of Luke’s gun and silencer.
“Yeah, he’s a good shot,” Josh said.
The van was getting cold quickly now that the engine was shut off and the heater wasn’t running. Emma shivered just a bit. But she had to admit that it felt good to finally be somewhere that could be safe, at least for a while. It seemed to her that since Friday morning when everything collapsed, she hadn’t been anywhere safe enough to even relax. From her condo, to the streets, to Craig’s house, they had always been running and at risk. Even though they’d been able to stay a few nights in Craig’s house, they hadn’t really been safe there from the rippers. They had been no safer in Craig’s house than they had been in her condo. She thought of the town they had driven into yesterday, when they had run over the spikes in the road that the Dark Angels had left there. She thought of how close they had come to getting abducted, or even killed.
But now they were here. Now they were safe. There would be food and water here. And medicine for Josh’s arm.
Yes, safe for a while. But this place wasn’t totally safe, either. She knew bad things were still coming. Maybe not right away, but they would be coming. Nowhere was ever going to be completely safe again.
When she had slept earlier in the van, sleeping in spurts an hour here and there, she had dreamed. Her dreams were more like flashes of colors and lights now, more of feelings than actual images, and any images she saw in her dreams now were often blurry, just shadows of what they used to be when she could see. She guessed that she still saw things in her dreams, memories from her childhood, but the older she got the more those memories had faded in her dreams, turning people and objects into those shadowy blurs. And maybe her mind reconfigured what she’d seen and felt in her dreams after she woke up, trying to rationalize things and make sense of them.
In the dream she’d had a few hours ago, she’d been in that gray vague landscape where her dreams took place. She remembered seeing the shadow of a man in that grayness; the outline of the man was blurry so she couldn’t make out many details, but the one detail she could make out was the man’s eyes—they shined brightly in his face. It was him, the Dragon Lord as he called himself. He had come to find her.
But he couldn’t find her, couldn’t see her. Not yet anyway.
She’d felt that sense of oppression weighing her down throughout the dream, which had seemed to stretch out for hours—another mind trick from the Dragon Lord. He had been out there wandering in the grayness of her dream, searching for her, searching for all of them. She had evaded him somehow, but she wasn’t sure how. But it would only be a matter of time before he locked on to one of them, before he entered their dreams, manipulated them. It would only be a matter of time before he found this place.
Emma didn’t want to say anything to the rest of them right now. They should all have a chance to revel in the temporary salvation of this cabin. Yes, they could celebrate and be happy now, but at some point she was going to have to tell them that they weren’t completely safe here. They would never be completely safe anywhere until the Dragon was dead.
CHAPTER 43
Josh
“They’re coming back out of the cabin,” Josh said.
The pills had finally started really kicking in; the pain in his arm was fading away into the background of his mind. He felt that energy beginning to course through him, that wave of euphoria washing over him, relaxing and energizing him at the same time.
Josh opened the side door of the van and got out, meeting Ray and Luke as they walked towards the van. “Guess everything’s cool in there,” he said.
“Not exactly,” Ray said as he walked past him and the van, heading towards the garage.
“What’s wrong?” Josh asked, turning his attention to Luke since Ray obviously wasn’t going to say much to him.
“We need to check the garage,” was all Luke said.
Mike stood just outside of the van now, already helping Emma out. Emma had lost her cane back in that town, but she seemed to be doing okay without it. But Josh swore to himself at that moment that he would make her a new cane. He would carve one right from a tree branch. He was tempted to look for a tree branch right at that moment, the drugs making his thoughts a little scattered.
But first, the garage. He needed to focus again.
Josh followed Ray and Luke to the free-standing garage. Luke pulled up on the handle of one of the garage doors, but it didn’t budge. Ray rounded the corner of the building to the smaller door on the side. He jiggled the doorknob, but it was locked, the door as solid as the ones in the cabin, but this door had a glass panel in it. Ray cupped his hands to the sides of his face, blocking out the afternoon light so he could see inside.
The snow was still swirling a little, but the flakes were melting as soon as they touched the ground.
Ray turned away from the door in disgust.
“What do you see in there?” Luke asked.
“Nothing,” Ray answered. “There’s another truck in there, some kind of Jeep or something. There’s some cabinets, some tools. Plenty of room for the van.”
Luke looked through the glass for just a few seconds and then moved out of the way.
Josh looked next. The garage was exactly as Ray had described it. The place looked clean and organized. It didn’t seem like someone had actually lived there, it almost felt like something from a movie set, a typical garage interior for a sit-com.
When Josh turned away from the door, Ray was already walking towards the back yard and the two large sheds in the distance. This time Luke wasn’t following him.
“What’s wrong with him?” Josh asked.
“There aren’t any supplies in the cabin,” Luke answered as he watched Ray, his eyes scanning the woods in the distance, always keeping watch for any threats.
It took a few seconds for Luke’s words to really hit home inside Josh’s mind. “No supplies,” he said. “What do you mean? There’s no food or water in there?”
Luke nodded, still keeping his eyes on Ray and the woods all around them, still standing sentry at his post. “There are some boxes and cans of food in the pantry, enough for a few weeks maybe, but definitely not the stockpile of food, weapons, and supplies that Ray had been told about.”
No extra food. No other weapons. No ammo. No medicine. This last fact hit Josh hard. Even with the buzz from the pain pills, Josh could feel the ache of infection in his arm. If he didn’t get some kind of antibiotics soon, then this was going to end badly. The buzz blanketing his mind kept him from panicking, but he could feel that panic right at the edge, hovering there like the pill imp with a smile on the little demon’s face.
Ray was at the sheds now, trying to open the doors. One of the doors was unlocked and Ray entered the building. A few seconds later he was back out, and judging by his body language he hadn’t found a pallet of food and supplies in there.
*
A few minutes later they were all inside the cabin. It was cold inside, but at least they were out of the wind and snow. They had brought al
l of their weapons and supplies in with them, which consisted only of their backpacks. Mike was wandering around after Emma sat down on the couch. Luke had gone upstairs, making a second sweep of the cabin.
Josh was still lost in a fog, feeling like he was trapped in a dream, like all of this was some grand illusion. But he knew all of this was real—the pain in his arm told him that, and the pill imp would be hovering behind his left shoulder at any moment now, whispering into his ear, tempting him, trying to get him to take another pill to ease the pain, to ease the anxiety, to ease the depression.
He needed to keep moving around, so he walked over to the windows, drawing the drapes open to allow the gray afternoon light inside. The gray light wasn’t too appealing, but it was better than the cold darkness of the interior of the cabin. He turned and looked at the massive living room, the ceiling of logs, planks, and braces that angled up sharply over the curving stairs, each step a rough-cut log with the flat side up—the balcony above led to the two bedrooms and the bathroom upstairs. The place was so clean and neat, but still dusty, like it had been uninhabited for quite some time. Yet it was furnished with the bare necessities. And again Josh had the feeling that he was on a movie set (even though he’d never actually been on a movie set in his life), like this place was a set made to look like a mountain cabin, but it wasn’t really what it was pretending to be.
Ray had said that Doug, his friend from work, was a doomsday prepper, but this place didn’t look like a prepper’s place; this place looked like someone’s retirement home or a vacation cabin, a wealthy person’s hunting retreat. Still, there were things that didn’t make sense, like how the front door and door frame were constructed from steel.
He looked back at the window where he had just pulled the drapes back. He walked back to the window, drawn to it. He touched the window, running his fingers along the glass, then all around the steel frame of the window. Something was bothering him about the window, and it was taking a moment for his fuzzy mind to see what it was.
