"Just answer his question," the white-painted thug on his left sneered, when there was too long a pause.
The lead barbarian shot back at the guy, "Shut the fuck up."
"No, it's only us two," Cooper finally said, backing up a couple of steps. This wasn't going to end well, his gut told him. He needed his Swiss Army knife; he needed to unfold it and jam it into this animal's thorax.
"We're like everybody else," he said evenly. "The lahars took us by surprise. We're lucky to be alive. All we want to do is move onto the next town down there. Find some help."
"Find some help," the man muttered, and licked his lips. "You found it right here. So it's just you riding around with this blind chick. Somehow that doesn't seem right. What are you, her seeing eye dog?"
"The seeing-eye dog!" the other white-faced one slurred vacuously. He seemed juiced-up on something, or juiced down. He carried a crude pike with feathers tied onto the end. The white face-makeup made his teeth seem blacker. "Why don't you lie down on the ground and scratch yerself, pooch," he leered.
"Didn't I tell you two to shut your traps?" The man turned and whacked the guy with the pike with the butt of his gun, which deposited the man whimpering to his knees. Then the fearless leader hitched up his pants and grimaced, as though he'd betrayed something, a lack of cool. Then he told the third gangbanger to confiscate Cooper's bow. "And leave the rifle…" he added.
Also with his face smeared a chalky white, that man carried a deer rifle similar to the one Cooper had back in Telluride, with a scope. He set it on the ground. Seeing the other man holding his crossbow made Cooper feel more hollow and empty.
"I should just kill you two right now," the man said, impatiently, turning his head to Beatrice, who was now sitting in the back of one of the pickups. "And leave with the car."
"What's the purpose? Of all this," Cooper said. "It's a waste of time, and energy. All of us survivors need to work together." Then he noted how ludicrous it was to appeal to a humanity where none existed.
"We have orders to take you folks back to headquarters," the man said, with a sudden tone shift, as if he represented a calm restoration of order. He pocketed his pistol, picked the rifle off the ground, and aimed it at Cooper, staring through the scope.
"Yeah, you do look familiar," he murmured, moving the scope slightly back and forth, from one of Cooper's eyes to the next. "I seen you somewhere before." Then he swiveled the rifle over towards the hillside, where a group of deer lingered. He squeezed the trigger and the barrel issued a loud report; one of the deer in the distance shivered in its tracks, then its legs collapsed and it slumped over. The others fled in all directions. Pleased with himself, the man looked at him and laughed.
"Dinner! Go get the carcass and throw it back in the truck," he barked to his companions. "You, follow me. And give me the keys to that wagon."
Cooper had no options. He was scared, and pissed at himself. For not seeing this coming. He dug into his pocket and handed the man the car keys. When he wasn't watched, he scanned the woods nonchalantly, but saw no sign of Mikaela, Amy, and Turk.
The man made him walk in front.
"What's your name?" he grunted.
"Shane Cooper."
"Alright, Cooper. You run for it, I'll shoot you in the back. No hesitation. Kapow! We're going to take everything you own, then you're going to work for us. Unnerstand? You know how it is here in the valley, labor is in short supply. Its tough to stay alive. Tough to make ends meet." Then he giggled. He seemed out of his gourd too, which made Cooper believe they could escape.
What a crazy world this is. Absolutely nuts. Then he thought,
Blow. Blow now…
He had Mount Rainier in mind. He wanted the primary eruption to happen now. Then he could run for it, fetch the others. And the bulk of this vermin would be wiped from the surface of the earth.
"Hey this doesn't make any sense," Shane said. "You should be getting your ass out of this region. Not wasting your time with me. The big blow from Rainier is coming, anytime…" It was then the butt of the rifle came down on the back of his head. Cooper felt the burst of pain and saw a shower of sparks before he blacked out and pitched forward into the long grass.
CHAPTER 17
"Is this the one?" he heard. An older woman's voice. His head pounded with a dull ache. His vision was blurry. The voice had a smoker's husky tone.
He leaned forward, lifting his head off a wall, focusing his eyes.
"I'm Gladys." She paused, expectantly, as if formal introductions were in order.
"Shane. I'm not from these parts. I'm trying to get home asap, so if you can…" He shuffled his feet, but they were restrained at the ankles. He heard a male howl of pain through sheetrock walls, but Gladys pretended not to notice it.
"This is my place Mr. Shane, my palace. Welcome." She waved at the surroundings with an extravagant flourish. This gesture was followed by a phlegmy laugh.
When he was sure he wasn't still unconscious, having a nightmare, he took a good look at her. Jeans, brand-new spotless white tennis sneakers; a flowered, buttoned-down shirt with a cheap red ribbon on the breast pocket. Pouffy hair and a wrinkled, late-middle-aged, not unfriendly face.
"I got you a cup of tea, a bottled water, and a hot-dog. How's that sound?" The phlegmy laugh came again. "It took me a minute, or so, until I figured out that you're the one who's been spearing my boys. With that crossbow of yours, over in the corner there. What are you, The Last of the Mohicans?"
He saw his weapon, in a cluttered pile of varied belongings. He wanted to sprint to it, seize it, and head for the exit, but for the zip-tied ankles.
"Apparently, you're pretty good at shooting. But these guys are like sons to me, and killing them well…I can't abide that. No, not at all.
"You must be smart, skilled. I'm trying to figure out how I can use that. You see, we're a team here. That's why we're still around, during the catastrophe. Hell and high water has broken loose, in case you haven't noticed. Polite society has failed–everyone else is gone. No police, fire, Army, ambulances, hospitals. Maybe a little like Katrina, remember that? The people were scared. Every man for himself. The unfortunate, the desperate. You don't want to find yourself in that category. The unprepared."
I always prepared, he thought, with more than an ounce of regret. "We're filling the void," she added, as if she had to explain her gang to him.
Cooper thought, Power loves a vacuum. Or is it venality and crime?
He looked around. He felt behind his head to the lump, which seemed to grow in his fingers. The place was some kind of warehouse. "Where is this?"
"Don't you recognize it? Why, it's America's emporium, everyone's favorite go-to weekend destination. Walmart. We've occupied all the Walmarts, and the Lowe's, and the Best Buys. Whatever's left. The Whole Foods, never liked that place," she said as an afterthought. "But alas, the food has run low. We're emptying the last of the shelves and food-supply trucks. When that's all gone, we'll just have to, well, scavenge what we can."
"You just got clobbered by that lahar."
"Not everything," she said.
"Where's Beatrice?"
"You mean the gentle old blind lady? Beatrice…she seems a Beatrice. We've got her in the pen…pardon me, a room…yonder over on the other side. It's where you'll be sleeping."
He reached over on the floor where a man had placed them on a paper plate, and began chewing the hot dog slowly. He sipped the tea in a Styrofoam cup. Might as well.
"Have you looked at the sky lately?" he said, as Gladys still lingered.
"For what, divine inspiration?"
"Rainier's just getting started. Those lahars, they came from minor eruptions. The big one's coming; no one's going to survive that. It'll wipe out everything in this valley, like a nuclear bomb. Those dark plumes, they presage a massive eruption." He finished the hot dog, kept going with the inspiration. "You better move everything out of here. Get closer to the coast."
"How kind of you,
to look after our welfare."
He shrugged and kept eating. "When are you going to take this thing off my feet, so I can move to your pen."
"Soon. We have plenty of work to do. You're going to be involved. I don't believe in wasting brains and brawn, but you have to know who the boss is. Who's the boss?"
He looked at her silently. She smiled, wrinkles spreading from the corner of her mouth, eyes narrowing. She turned to shuffle away, with two other men in tow. A subset of the men walking around, seemingly with jobs to do, like in any old Walmart, had their faces painted. It was unsettling; a costume party gone mad.
"By the way, Gladys," he said, still blurry to the point where his voice sounded, to him, like a mumble. "What's with the white makeup?"
"Our brand."
Soon enough, two guys sauntered up, grabbed him by the elbows, and dragged him into a nearby room, full of other captive people. He made a note of where his crossbow leaned against a wall, hoping they wouldn't move it. He felt naked without it, and everything else, like his trekking gear and Swiss knife.
He was too light-headed to resist, but that would come later, he vowed.
When the two guys dropped him on the floor, one of the painted ones drew out a hunting knife. Cooper wondered if the lunatic was going to cut him. But in a twisted way he believed Gladys, that she was saving his talents for later. The man laughed, bent down, then severed the zip-tie on his ankles; then they both left and locked the door behind them.
He lay a moment under the flickering fluorescents, then stiffly stood to his feet.
He thought he'd find Beatrice crying and distraught. But he saw her quietly leaning against a wall across the room, sunglasses on, appearing stoic and dignified.
"Beatrice!" he whispered hoarsely, walking over to her. A smile crept across her face. "It's Shane."
"I knew," she said. They hugged.
"We're getting out of here. Soon. I'm taking you with me. I don't know who the fuck this Gladys whacko thinks she is, but she's psycho and she's going to get us all…" Then he realized he was venting his own anxiety and only making matters worse for Beatrice. Yet, she read his mind.
"Don't worry," she said. "This man, he's been telling me everything about this place." She nodded her head to a man who sat glumly against the wall nearby. "He took me under his wing when he realized I was sight-impaired. I have faith in my fellow man. She is, of course, the Gladys I was telling you about; with the lengthy rap sheet, and list of grievances and resentments towards the local authorities.
"One thing you'd be interested to know."
"What?" Cooper began to feel his head clear.
"They weren't able to start my car. The Subaru."
"You mean back on the dirt road, with the horses?"
"Yeah. And I left a second set of keys under the front seat. Yes I did. You can be sure of that."
CHAPTER 18
According to Beatrice's friend, Gladys commanded a sizable labor force. They had commandeered Walmart's truck fleet, and were using captive labor to loot and load the trucks with the contents of every mall and warehouse in the valley. They planned to sell the stuff on the black market in California and Mexico. They were scooping up new people, kidnapped along the way.
There were rumors that a man had been beaten to death and hung from a pole in the parking lot, as an example to the rest.
Others said that Walmart refrigerators contained dozens, perhaps hundreds of bodies. Some of them killed for storage. Cooper didn't believe that part; he chose not to. Rumors were only rumors.
Cooper knew the lahar had probably killed thousands, but that didn't completely explain the emptied out towns they'd encountered.
He guessed the room they occupied was some kind of staging area. There was no furniture. Or windows. So he slumped down and leaned with his back against a wall, beneath a jaundiced, flickering ceiling lamp. He wondered, and regretted, how he'd ended up in this sorry place. The string of events–if only he hadn't taken that climbing job. He could still be at home in Telluride, reading but only reading about these horrors on the news, maybe even in the arms of Alexis. He wouldn't have fallen into the clutches of an opportunistic psychopath. That only pissed him off. It felt like failure. But he realized, this was also a defeatist train of thought. It wasn't going to help him escape.
A man about Cooper's age stood nearby, pacing, on pins and needles, like everyone else.
"How long have you been stuck here?" Cooper asked.
"Since yesterday. I came over from Tacoma, looking for my girlfriend…and my dog."
"Did you find 'em?"
"No. I didn't have a chance to. These goons took me off the highway." The man had a neatly trimmed black beard and hair, faded jeans, sneakers. He was dressed "academically casual." He made Cooper think of Mikaela and her Egyptian boyfriend.
"Is your name Muhammed?"
"No, Philip. Yours?"
"Shane. What was happening in Tacoma? That's where I'm headed, or trying to."
"I don't know, exactly."
"What do you mean, you don't know? You just told me you came from there."
"I mean, it was a normal reaction when I was leaving. People saw Rainier erupting. There was panic, gridlock. Voices on radio and cable saying to sit tight and 'await further instructions.' About half the city was trying to leave; the other half thought it was cool to ride it out, didn't think Tacoma or Seattle was affected, or they couldn't leave because they didn't have a car. Now, I couldn't tell you what's happening. The lahar could have gone that far. The situation is fluid."
No pun intended, Cooper thought.
"Did you see any trucks, helicopters, Guard troops, anything like that, on your way over here?"
"None."
"Odd. The valley's been virtually empty since I got here. Very odd…"
"Maybe they got diverted," Philip quipped. "I've heard that all the valleys radiating from Rainier have been destroyed; 360 degrees."
"Christ. That's probably it."
"I thought the most I'd be doing is seeking higher ground from the lahars. I was trying to reach my girlfriend by cell phone; couldn't. Hopefully, they made it to Seattle. I heard the lahar warning signal go off in Sumner. An eerie sound, disturbing. You don't have a lot of time, maybe 30 minutes. A lot of people didn't make it."
"I'm afraid of The Big One," Cooper said. "What if Rainier really blows, in a major eruption? We'll all be goners."
"Rainier isn't like Mount St. Helens," Philip said, shifting into an expert mode. "It doesn't have the massive lava dome buildup, so it's less likely to have the kind of eruption that's like a nuclear bomb, obliterating everything within 20 miles. The lahars are bad enough, though. What Rainer has is a lot of hydrothermically altered rock. This is sulfur that mixes with water and makes sulfuric acid, which degrades the rock into a kind of clay. That mixes with the massive amounts of snow and ice in Rainier's glaciers, and you have the perfect cocktail for an epic lahar, which even a minor eruption, like this one, sets off. Like the Osceola Mudflow, 5,600 years ago. That made it all the way to Puget Sound."
"Are you a scientist?"
"I write G.I.S. software. I had to research the Cascades once. It was interesting, then."
The explanation made Cooper's head spin, more than it was already. He exhaled heavily. "Do you know where we are now?"
"Just outside the city of Puyallup. We're still in the lahar zone, right in the bull's eye. Do you have any food?"
"No."
Cooper stole a glance at Beatrice. Chatting with another woman, she seemed to be holding it together. He felt responsible; he didn't want her to be drawn into the hideous plans of these maniacs. She wasn't able to do all the physical work, because of her blindness. Any escape plans had to include Beatrice.
"When we get out of here," Cooper said. "You can come with us."
"How are you planning to do it?"
"I don't know yet."
At around dusk, a group of louts came into the room and moved them, like a
herd of sheep, into a large, emptied out conference area, where they slept on the equivalent of wrestling mats. Cooper couldn't sleep; he rolled over and over fitfully, until he finally got up. Pissing had to take place in a trash bin tucked into the corner; it smelled putrid and tart. No one guarded the locked door; they appeared to have fallen asleep. He walked over and looked out a window and saw only impenetrable darkness, with a few fires licking in the distance.
He wondered what Mikaela, Amy, and Turk were doing. He was grateful they hadn't been seized, and he mulled over what Beatrice had said about the car.
He didn't want to spend another day in this prison. It made the devastated landscape outside beckon like freedom.
CHAPTER 19
The following morning, Cooper was herded onto the roof of the building with a group of downtrodden men. A stocky thug with lurid tattoos on each side of his bald head grunted orders at them. It was scary, the unrestricted authority given to mindless men.
Cooper contemplated hurling him off the rooftop, but resisted the temptation. He bottled up his escape plans until the right time.
They were supposed to rip out the copper pipe from the Heating, Ventilation, and A/C machines that nearly covered the rooftop. It was back-breaking work, on breakfast which consisted of peanuts and a rotten banana, but he was grateful, in a grudging way, to be outdoors and to get a higher view of their position.
On his way out of the conference room, and to a flight of steps that led to the roof, he spotted his crossbow. It was in the same place, leaning against the wall amongst the clutter.
From the rooftop, he looked at the sky. The sun fought through a yellow, sulfurous haze, which edged west, toward the sea. He ran his fingers along a railing that encircled the rooftop, and came away with a peppery brown stain. He wondered what it would do to their lungs.
The view, he expected, would answer some of his questions, such as why this building and its environs were still standing. He spotted the lahar just over the railing, not 200 meters away. It was dark green, like moss, and reflected the muted sunlight with the swampy glint the slime on a rock would. It looked like the surface of another moon, but for the trashed human artifacts embedded in it.
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