“We’re ready,” the stranger said.
The man nodded and then glanced at the woman. She was badly shaken, anguish and horror scored into the flesh of her features so that she looked old beyond her years. Her eyes were swollen, her hair lank and prematurely greyed. The hands that clutched the tails of the blanket tight around her were coarsened and reddened. Beside her husband she looked very small and frail.
“I’m sorry about your son,” the man said softly.
The woman glanced up at him and for a moment it seemed that she might break apart. Her eyes brimmed, glistening with tears, and her lip trembled. She swayed on her feet for an instant and then leaned against the bulk of her husband. “Thank you,” she choked.
“What happened?”
“He fell,” the husband spoke up, wrapping his arm around the woman’s shoulder. “Two days ago. He was on lookout at the top of the stairs. He fell through the ceiling. That’s why we ran into trouble. We couldn’t move him. We were waiting for him to regain consciousness… but he never did.”
“How did those men find you?” the boy asked, his tone made respectful and subdued by the couple’s tragic sadness.
The husband shrugged. “The smoke,” he made the statement sound like a guess. “I heard them smash open the front door. I was in the back yard, burying my son. They caught us unawares.”
There seemed no more to say, nothing that could take away the couple’s grief or the horror of their ordeal. The man picked up his canvas bag and went out through the front door of the ruined house, never pausing in his stride or looking back until he was across the road and deep into the cover of the trees.
One by one, the boy, the husband, and the wife followed silently.
* * *
They trudged across the open field of snow in single file, four dark hunched shapes against a landscape of white, and when they reached the broken fence line of the nearest property the man dropped into a crouch and waited for the others to join him. He was breathing deeply but steadily, his eyes narrowed and wary.
“Wait here,” he told the boy and the couple. “I’m going to take a look around.” He had the Glock in his hand. The ramshackle farmhouse stood in the near distance, grey and silent. The windows had been boarded over and the rusting corrugated iron roofline was sagging.
The boy’s eyes became flinty specks. “If there is someone waiting, they’ll shoot you down,” he said harshly. “It’s not like you’re going to take them by surprise. Anyone in there would have been watching us all the way across the field.”
The man nodded. “That’s right,” he said. He got to his feet and stepped over a loose tangle of fence wire. He could hear the soft crunch of his boots on the icy ground, and the sound of each drawn breath became louder in his ears. He had the Glock held out in front of him at eye-level, slowing his steps as he came closer to the corner of the building.
The man reached the farmhouse and pressed his cheek against the cold wall. The wooden slats were buckled and dappled with green moss. The man heard nothing but silence and the hoarse sounds of his own relieved gasps. He edged sideways towards a window and braved a peek through a criss-cross of warped boards that had been nailed haphazardly over the casement.
The interior corners of the farmhouse were gloomy, but against the opposite side of the structure he could see that part of the roof and wall had collapsed. Buckled sheets of iron and rotting grey timbers lay broken on the floor as though the building had taken a direct hit from shellfire. Chunks of grey rubble and plaster were covered in a thin white veil of dirty snow.
The man let out a sigh of relief. He turned and waved his arm to where the others waited and they came forward slowly.
“It’s empty,” the man said. “And it’s a mess, but it will do.”
“What about in there,” the stranger said. He nodded in the direction of a two-story barn with a pitched iron roof standing forlorn and decrepit on the far side of another broken fence. The man noticed that the stranger’s gun was in his hand. “Someone could be hiding up.”
The man shook his head and took a guess at the distance. He figured it was close to a hundred yards between the two buildings. “Maybe,” he conceded, “but if there is anyone in there, we’ll let them be. They won’t bother us,” he said. “And if they do, we’ll see them coming in plenty of time.”
* * *
“If you’re heading west, you ought to be prepared for trouble,” the stranger declared. He made the statement as a harsh growled warning, and then frowned thoughtfully down into the empty bottom of a cold can of beans. The couple and the man were huddled on the floor in a corner of the farmhouse, the man with his back leaning against a wall. Only the boy stayed standing, walking slow prowling circuits of the interior, pausing at every window to stop and peer out into the snow-covered landscape.
“What makes you say that?” the man asked.
The stranger shrugged. “We heard things,” he said elusively. “Marauding gangs… run by a man named Gideon.”
“Gideon?”
“Yeah. Don’t know his last name, but he’s trouble. Bad trouble.”
The man arched his eyebrows. “Go on.”
The woman spoke then. She was sitting close beside her husband, the two of them touching, with her knees drawn up beneath her chin, and her arms wrapped around her legs. Her face was pale. She glanced sideways as if to be sure the boy was out of earshot and kept her voice low.
“We’ve been traveling south for a few months, looking for somewhere we could settle, maybe even find work,” she began. “But we always came across people who were streaming the other way – heading towards Canada. Some of them were fleeing Chicago because gangs had taken over the city.”
“At first we didn’t think anything of it,” the husband picked up the thread of the conversation with a shrug of his big bony shoulders. “There are gangs everywhere these days, right?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “But it’s getting worse, and the gangs are roaming the countryside to the south and the west of here.”
“How do you know it’s getting worse?” the man was curious. He was a stranger in these parts and now he sensed his own journey might be leading him and the boy directly into harm’s way.
The woman stared at him as if the question was impossible to quantify. “The army has abandoned the city,” she blurted with wide-eyed scandal. “We saw the trucks about a month ago: a hundred, maybe more, all trundling along the expressway, heading north in a convoy. We heard they couldn’t maintain law and order. The gangs were too big, too strong. So the Army pulled out and left the city to burn.”
That shocked the man. He remembered telling the boy on the overpass how the battle for Chicago had been the turning point of the apocalypse – the first time the dreadful zombie tide had been stemmed and then hurled back upon itself. Now the Army had surrendered, not to the undead, but to the criminals.
“The gangs have control of everything,” the husband went on. “They’re scouring the countryside now that the Army has abandoned the area. They’re a law unto themselves.”
“What are they looking for?” the man asked.
“Slave labor…” the stranger shrugged. “There’s a new war going on between rival mobs. They’re dealing in people. It’s like a new slave trade.”
“What do gangs need slaves for?”
“The farms,” the stranger said as though the answer were painfully obvious. He looked hard into the man’s eyes for long seconds. “Food, my friend. It’s the most valuable commodity in the new world. The gangs are taking over farms just like this one.”
The man suddenly remembered the hostage girl in the passenger seat of the truck who had told him in a trembling voice that she was to have been sold… He sat up straight and he frowned. “Is that who you thought those thugs that attacked you were? Gang members?”
“Maybe,” the stranger looked doubtful. “Maybe they were working for Gideon. But maybe they were just bounty hunters looking for bodies to sell on to him
– the gangs are offering rewards for women and men who are fit enough to work.”
“Are you sure about this?”
“Yes,” the woman cut into the conversation. Her tone was emphatic. “We saw an entire family taken a week ago just four hours to the west of here. Two truckloads of men cornered them in a house near where we had been hiding. They marched the family out onto the street. There were six of them,” the woman’s eyes became dark. “They shot an old man in the back of the head, and then they tied the hands of a husband and his wife, and a couple of teenage boys. They had beaten the husband badly. He was bleeding down the front of his shirt.” The woman paused then for a long moment and the man thought she had finished talking. “There was a little girl too,” the woman suddenly spoke again. Her voice had dropped to a whisper. “The child was crying, wailing hysterically. She tried to run to her mother but one of the bandits caught her. He picked the little girl up by her heels, still wriggling and kicking, and swung her head against the back of a truck because they didn’t want to waste a bullet.”
“Someone did that to a child?” the man gasped.
The woman looked impossibly sad, her eyes still traumatized by what she had witnessed. “I guess she was too young to be of any immediate use or value to them.”
The man slowly shook his head. “The Army will come back,” he said.
“If that’s the case,” the husband growled, “then why did they abandon Chicago in the first place? The Army doesn’t retreat in order to launch a counter-attack. They reinforce. If they had wanted to hold the city they would be pouring men into the area and taking on the gangs.” He shook his head as though the suggestion was absurd. “They’ve gone. Or what’s left of the army has crumbled and the troops we saw were actually deserting.”
The man lapsed into troubled thought. “I refuse to believe that…” his words drifted into more silence.
“Accept it,” the stranger got slowly to his feet, his body moving like a bag of stiff bones. Out of habit, he went to the nearest window and peered across the open space of the field, and then turned back to face the man with his hands propped on his hips and his jaw thrust out. Soft light through the wooden boards, painting his face in a striped zebra pattern of muted shadow. “No one came to help us,” he said. “The Brits, the Canadians… none of our old allies. We fought the zombies to a standstill, and even now, twenty years later we’re still on our knees as a nation. That’s what the rest of the world wants. What’s happening here in Chicago is the beginning of the end for America. If our Army falls apart, the government goes with it… and we’ll have the Ruskies parachuting into Washington within a matter of months.”
“Invasion?”
“Why not?” the stranger said hotly.
“You can’t possibly know that.”
“Well who is going to stop them?” the stranger’s voice became belligerent. “Our armed forces have been decimated. It’s like the Wild West out there,” he shoved a stiff finger through a gap in the boarded window. “It’s every man for himself.”
The man scowled at the ground, wondering whether to let the tirade of despondency go unchallenged, but he was becoming offended by the stranger’s defeatism. He drew himself to his feet.
“I don’t believe you,” he said calmly. “I don’t believe our Army will collapse. I know men and women who served during the apocalypse. They were the bravest of the brave. We might be on our knees, but the fight isn’t over and it won’t be until the last man who ever wore a uniform and carried a gun to defend this nation is dead in their grave. You might be right. The gangs run by men like this Gideon might be taking over, but it won’t last. Sooner or later order will be restored – even if it takes years.”
The stranger laughed derisively, and there was just the faintest note of something that might have been hysteria or panic in his voice. The man glared at him for an instant of defiance, and then he softened his expression and looked down at where the woman sat.
“I wish you a safe journey back north,” the man said stiffly.
The woman became alarmed. “You’re leaving?”
“Yes.”
“Now? Can’t you stay just – ”
He shook his head and glanced across at the boy. “Sorry, but it’s time we were on our way. We still have quite a distance to walk.”
The man bent at the waist and picked up his canvas bag, let it hang heavy in his grip against his side – and waited for the boy. But the boy did not move. He glared across the room at the man, his face pale and his lips peeled back from his teeth in a snarl.
“We’re going?”
“Yes,” the man said.
“Just like that. You’re walking away again?” He jabbed his finger in the direction of the stranger, suddenly hostile. “This man just said America is on its knees and you won’t even defend your country in an argument?”
The man said nothing. But the boy was not finished.
“Where are we going?” he demanded. “Where are we running to now?”
“To where we need to be.”
“And where is that?”
“I’ll tell you when we get there.”
The boy stood trembling with rage and pent up hatred. For so long the emotions had simmered, but now he felt the festering canker of everything he had suppressed suddenly erupt in a poisonous tirade.
“You make me sick!” the boy spat. “You’re a coward. A fucking coward!”
The man said nothing. The boy’s face became blotched with angry color. He was panting, his chest heaving like a bellows. “You would have let these people die today. You would have let them be murdered… because you were too scared to shoot. Too scared to confront their attackers. So you ran – and you put their lives at risk.”
The man’s eyes turned black, and his face became rigid, carved in granite. He glared at the boy his lips thin and bloodless.
“Is that all?” the man’s voice was impossibly calm. “Anything more you want to say?”
“Fuck, yes!” the frustration and resentment came spilling from the boy. “I have no respect for you.”
“Why?”
“Because you are a man without honor,” the boy growled.
“Honor?”
“Yes honor! You left me in a refugee camp alone with mom for five years. Five years, dammit. We never heard from you – not once. You weren’t there for us. Mom worked her fingers to the bone, went from corner to corner begging for extra food… and you weren’t there!”
The man nodded his head. “I am truly sorry for that.”
“Sorry?” the boy looked incredulous. “Is that all you can say? You’re a deadbeat! You left her alone to fend for both of us. We lived in the filth and the mud and never heard a word from you. You abandoned us. Mom cried herself to sleep every night. Did you know that? Do you even care?”
The man nodded. He could feel his throat thickening with emotion. “Yes,” he said hoarsely. “I cared for your mother. I loved her.”
The boy laughed, but it was a cruel, cold sound. “Bullshit!” he snarled. “If you loved her – if you loved us – you would have come back for us. You wouldn’t have left her with a child to raise on her own. You would have come back.”
The man nodded slowly. “Are you finished?”
“No.”
“Then finish!” the man suddenly roared and the sting of his voice made the boy recoil in shock. For a second he was silent, almost cowered, but his hatred was too strong, too long pent up.
“I have no respect for the man you are,” the boy’s hostility came back like a blazing fire, burning out of control. “I hate you and I have always hated you. You’re not a man – not a man I could ever admire.” His face was wrenched in agony and hostility, his hands bunched into white-knuckled fists. “Mom died alone and afraid, and I blame you for that.”
“I did what I had to do,” the man said. “One day you might understand.”
The boy shook his head vehemently. “I’ll never forgive you,” his voice sh
ook with his loathing. “Never. And I’ll never understand!”
* * *
They walked for two hours, until the sun had reached its winter apex and begun to slowly sink towards the bleak horizon: they walked with more than a decade of bitter resentment and acrimony separating them. Finally the man reached a low rise in the road and he stood silhouetted on the crest, his legs buckling for a moment, his body wavering like one who had trudged through a vast parched desert and at last come to a watery oasis.
The boy followed to where the man waited, still simmering with animosity, and stared ahead at a building that looked like a restored factory nestled amongst the debris of an abandoned, neglected suburb.
“Are we resting?” the boy was sullen.
“No,” said the man. “We’ve arrived.”
* * *
From the outside the building was a massive two story square structure that the man imagined might have once housed some kind industrial workshop. The windows were high up in the walls, narrow frosted glass covered with a mesh of wire, and the brickwork design projected no flair, no architectural imagination. It was a big, brown box, unremarkable from many of the other surrounding structures, except for a sense that it stood alone and removed from the sad air of unloved neglect that permeated across the rest of the urban chaos. Here there appeared no obvious damage, no telltale signs of vandalism or mindless destruction. The sidewalks that bordered the building had been swept, the walls scrubbed clean of grime.
The man and the boy stood for a long time in the empty parking lot simply staring, before at last they stepped onto a path that wound around the side of the building and led them to a set of wide smoked glass double doors. The man let the strap of the canvas bag slide from his shoulder and kicked mud off his boots.
“We’re here,” he said softly.
The boy looked up. Above the door was a sign that had been chiseled into a block of polished dark marble.
“Museum of the Apocalypse.”
Brink of Extinction Page 6
