by Noah Mann
Then there were the bodies. None parted and stripped for cooking by cannibals as I’d seen on my visit some miles to the north. These lay in gutters, or sat slumped behind steering wheels, bloated and decaying, what birds remained having picked skin and flesh from several.
Directly across the street from me, a near skeletal sculpture of mother and child leaned against a wall near the shattered entrance of the Post Office, holding each other, the both of them little more than bone and skin beneath layers of clothing. The blight had taken them, in its own way, its own time. Starvation. An agonized churning in their stomach. That’s how they’d gone. Their final days, hours, and minutes had been hell.
I stepped around the corner and looked away from the mother and child. Beings that could have been Sarah and her son, Jeff, had they not escaped from Whitefish, and then Eureka. It might still be the fate they found, but I hoped not. Looking ahead I scanned for movement and listened for sound. I saw only the remnants of the once charming burg. Heard only the breeze working on the torn flaps of an awning dangling from its frame outside a scorched structure.
Beyond the obvious devastation I saw two houses, unburnt, their doors open. Curtains whipped past the broken glass held jagged in the window frames. I approached, my AR at the ready, snow crackling beneath my boots, no stealth in my movement. No cover for it, either. Anyone watching, or listening, should they have any sort of serviceable firearm, would be able to end me. It was a risk, I knew. But there was no other way to the houses.
I reached the first one and waited, ears tuned beyond the wind to any sound that might be manmade. There was none. The house was newer, likely built as a getaway not unlike the one I’d planned at my property. Its front steps groaned ever so slightly as I mounted them and stood staring into the dark interior, flickers of light trickling in through shattered panes revealing the shadowed shell of a home.
Broken bits of glass grated between my boots and the tiled entry as I stepped inside. The place had been ransacked, but not looted. Items that might have been taken otherwise were toppled, but still on premises. A television. DVD player. Chairs and couches.
But every cabinet, and the silent refrigerator, was open, any semblance of edibles within gone. Calories had surpassed currency as the thieves’ target of choice in this new world.
I waded through the house, to the bedrooms at the rear, sprawling deck beyond the largest, a gorgeous master suite. Drawers of a toppled bureau had been jerked free in here and tossed about, contents scattered. Including...
“You’ve gotta be kidding,” I said aloud upon seeing the electric blanket, still mostly folded, its cord trailing away and dangling over the edge of an upturned drawer.
The first house I’d searched, with hardly any effort put into the act other than a moderate hike, and there it was. Luck, divine providence, whatever it was, I was thankful for the break I’d been dealt. It could just as easily been a day wasted, pawing through residence after residence.
I gathered the item up and, without thinking, brought the cord to an outlet to test it before the folly of that action set in. Power had likely stayed on for some time after the Red Signal. But those running and maintaining the generating plants, and the lines that brought electricity to cities and towns and outlying settlements like Fortine, were no different than the skeletal woman down the road. Some might have stayed at their jobs for a week, maybe two, as starvation became not something to worry about, but a reality to face. Beyond that, they would have weakened. They would have sought sustenance. Spent their waning hours with whatever family they still had. The power they once worked to supply would have disappeared, bit by bit, area by area, as components failed, or safety systems kicked in. Sabotage might have taken some grids down. But everywhere that did not have its own supply of energy would be dark, with outlets like the one I was looking at cold and useless.
I tucked the electric blanket into the small backpack I brought with me and headed out of the bedroom. At the door I stopped and looked to the light switch. It was in the off position. With a bit of nostalgia for the recent past I flipped it upward, but the fixture at the center of the room stayed dark.
“Home,” I said to the emptiness, ready to make my way south.
The man with the hatchet standing in the living room as I came down the hallway seemed ready to prevent that.
“Give me your food.”
What he said didn’t surprise me. It differed little from what Sarah had insisted from me. She, though, said it past the barrel of a gun. This man, wasted to angular bones beneath nearly translucent skin, was giving me an order with a dull, rusted hand-axe trembling in his weak grip.
“I don’t have any food,” I told the man, right thumb flipping the safety on my AR to fire.
“You...look at you...you have to have food!”
He raised the hatchet, the fifteen feet separating us uncomfortably close, even with his strength lacking and the implement less than ideal. It could do damage. Damage I didn’t want to deal with. Not if I could prevent it.
“Back away,” I said, raising the AR and taking aim at him. “Now!”
My forcefulness, I hoped, would compel him to retreat. Or, at least, reconsider any further advance. Long enough that I could talk him down from the precipice he’d been forced to.
He was beyond dialogue, however.
“Your food!” he shouted, and drew the axe back as he took a step toward me. Then another.
I fired before he could take a third. Three shots. All hitting their mark at this distance, drilling a triangular pattern of holes in his dirty sweatshirt. He stutter-stepped to the side, still holding the hatchet high, its weight seeming to drag his balance to the left until he toppled over the back of a chair and rolled to the floor, face gaping at the ceiling as bubbles of blood burst from his mouth.
“Dammit,” I said, resisting the urge to rush forward and help the man. He’d been willing to attack me, I had to remind myself. To kill me, almost certainly. He was either mad with hunger, or simply mad, driven to that state of mental collapse by what had befallen all that surrounded him. By things he’d seen, or experienced.
And despite whatever sympathy I felt for his plight, the hatchet still rested in his hand, fingers curled around the old handle, flexing open and closed, gripping and releasing, gripping and releasing. His gaze, though, was not directed toward me. Instead it drifted lazily at the ceiling, disconnected, as if he was trying to seize the vision of something beyond it. Some place. Or someone.
“I’ll get the food,” the man said, his voice softening toward a whisper. “I’ll get it, sweetie.”
My aim shifted off of the man. His hand opened, fingers unfurling from around the hatchet’s handle.
“We’ll have all the...”
He coughed, a shallow belch of air and bloody mist rising from his mouth.
“All the...”
Was this just a conversation the man was having with a memory? With the ghost of a loved one already gone? It had to be. It had to.
“Sweetie...”
That was his last word. The punctuation of his life. Then his last breath hissed almost silently out, and he was gone.
I didn’t move for several minutes. The sight of him, of the man I’d just killed, held me rapt. He lay there, anonymous. I knew nothing of him but his desperation. Did he live in Fortine? Near here? Was this his home? Or was he a wanderer, searching for food? Just a lost soul stumbling toward the inevitable.
Finally, I looked away, and moved past him, to the front door and onto the porch. I stood there and looked to the town in the near distance, roofs heavy with snow. The wind picked up, whistling through the naked trees as I began to weep.
Twenty Four
I stared at the floor in Del’s living room as he tipped the whiskey bottle again, adding a splash to the mug in my hand.
“More,” he said. “Go on.”
Already I’d had the equivalent of three shots. But the numbness I felt had nothing to do with the alcoho
l. I brought the drink to my lips and drained what he’d poured me in one fast swallow.
Del sat in a chair across the coffee table from where I sat on the couch. He screwed a cap on the bottle and put it on the table between us.
“You think you had another choice?” Del asked.
I shook my head. I knew what I’d done in Fortine was necessary. But I was shaken by the reality of it. By the necessity of having to kill a man.
“You know you didn’t,” my friend reminded me.
“I know,” I said, my hand clenching around the cup. Bearing down. An anger filling me. “I just hate that the world has come to this. And that I have to be part of it.”
I’d come straight to Del’s, bypassing my refuge. It was late afternoon and cottony flurries had begun to sprinkle from the sky. Beyond the window, in the wintry light, the downy flakes seemed to float like feathers.
“Yeah, you’re part of it,” Del said. “Still part of it. If that guy had taken you out, what would he have gotten? Anything? You didn’t have food. From how you described him he sounds like he was at death’s door already.”
“Are you suggesting I did him a favor?”
“No,” Del said, shaking his head. “You did yourself a favor. You survived. That’s what everything is about, isn’t it?”
You’ve gotta hang on, Fletch. Okay? You have to. Stay alive.
Neil’s words, almost his final ones to me, surfaced like some talisman.
Stay alive. Stay alive. Stay alive.
“Yeah,” I told Del. Maybe not fully accepting it yet, but agreeing.
He took the bottle and was about to pour me yet another when I waved him off.
“Have I mentioned that I don’t drink?”
“Neither do I,” Del said. “Why do you think the bottle was full?”
I laughed lightly. It felt good to do so. Some small bit of relief was washing over me. Not absolution for what I’d done, but a modicum of willingness to believe that I was in the right.
If there could be anything resembling ‘right’ in what had transpired in Fortine.
“You want to hear something odd?”
A distraction. I would welcome it, in any form, though I immediately wondered if Del was simply trying to help shift my thoughts from the day’s events. I nodded and sat back to listen.
“I took a little walk myself today while you were gone,” he said. “A couple miles west to an old friend’s cabin. Name’s Eddie Martin. I’d been curious about him since all this started. He was a part timer up here, weekends and summers. The rest of the time he spent in Kalispell.”
“Retired?”
“From the railroad. I didn’t expect to find him there, and he wasn’t. But something was.”
I leaned forward now, sensing some gravity to Del’s tone.
“The place was booby trapped.”
“What?”
“Yeah,” Del said. “Trip wire at the back, at the base of the stoop below the door. And some sort of pressure deal inside the front door. I decided to look through the windows after I spotted what was waiting out back.”
“What was it wired to?”
“The inside one, I never tried to get close. The one out back was hooked to four sticks of trinitrotoluene under the stoop.”
“TNT?”
“Blasting caps with one second fuses on each,” he said.
“Shit.”
“Indeed,” Del said, reaching for a small satchel next to the couch. He passed it to me. “Have a look.”
I looked at the bag, zipped shut, incredulous.
“You’re kidding.”
“Had to mess with the stuff when I worked in logging back in the day,” he explained.
I unzipped the satchel and parted the opening, looking in to see four sticks of TNT, the rusty paper wrapping each blotched by the weather.
“It had been there a while,” Del said. “A few weeks at least.”
“But after all this started?”
He nodded. I zipped the satchel back up and set it gingerly on the floor.
“Who set the trap?”
Del thought for a moment, no more clarity coming from the question I posed than the same he’d mulled most of the day.
“Eddie, maybe,” Del suggested, his heart clearly not in that scenario. “But I can’t come up with a reason why.”
“To stop someone from getting in?”
“And destroy the place in the process?” Del asked, shaking his head. “That’s pretty damn extreme.”
Del was right. What could the man expect to achieve through destroying his own property to protect it? So maybe...
“How close is Eddie’s place to the road?” I asked. “I mean, is it more accessible than either of our properties?”
“Twenty feet off the road,” Del answered. “You can see it driving by. Plus he’s got this big mailbox he carved to look like a grizzly head with its mouth open.”
I looked away for a moment, convinced that my supposition was likely fact.
“What?” Del asked, seeing the mental gears churning behind my eyes.
“Remember the woman, Sarah?”
“Yeah.”
“She told me that this Major guy wasn’t letting anyone leave Whitefish. He was telling them that if they tried to go anywhere, even to a cabin near town, they’d be killed.”
It was registering with Del. He straightened in his chair, the pain evident in his face, along with something else.
Fury. Cold, quiet, measured hate.
“He’s penning them up,” Del said. “And if the warnings aren’t enough, he booby-traps a few places where people might hide from him. Boom. What a message that would send.”
If this was true, if I was actually right, there was something that, especially now, didn’t make sense.
“What about me?” I asked Del.
“What about you?”
“The raiders, the ones who hit my place, if they were his...”
“Why haven’t they come back?” Del asked for me.
“They know someone is there. Someone with food.”
“The fact that they were chased off by an old man with a bolt action rifle might inform their decision to steer clear.”
“They had no idea who you were,” I reminded him. “They knew nothing about you.”
“They knew someone on this mountain was prepared to shoot back.”
He had a point. In the classic sense, the Major, and those allied with him, were bullies. When faced with a victim who fought back, bullies tended to reconsider their victim. Or their approach.
“So I get a pass?”
“For the moment,” Del said. “But once he feels secure, once he’s built up his forces from the locals, they’ll be back.”
“Wonderful,” I said, looking to the bottle on the coffee table. “I think I might start not drinking again.”
I held the mug out and Del poured me a splash of courage.
“I think maybe we need to lay eyes on just what’s happening down in Whitefish,” Del said. “Before it comes our way.”
I took a long drink and nodded.
Twenty Five
The train tracks that had led me out of Whitefish on the day the Red Signal appeared now led Del and I back toward the town. A mile from it, near two in the afternoon, we came upon the first horror that seemed to validate the fear Sarah had expressed.
“Christ,” Del said softly.
Both of us saw it at the same time as we emerged from the trees on the west side of Whitefish Lake, facing a house just inland from Beaver Bay. A galvanized fencepost had been driven into the earth in front of the residence, its upper end hidden somewhere within the man who’d been impaled upon it, his body inverted, pole disappearing into his mouth as if he’d swallowed it. His decaying hands were tied behind his back, feet similarly bound together, the dead holes where his eyes had once been seeming to stare at the sign affixed to the bottom of the post. One word scrawled upon the square placard.
HOARDER
“The new crucifixion,” Del commented.
“Sarah said everyone was supposed to turn in their food,” I recounted.
“He, apparently, did not.”
Cold had helped preserve the corpse somewhat, but it was apparent from the gush of frozen blood spilled down the pole and over the sign that the man had been dealt his fate while alive.
“They watched,” I said.
“My guess is they made others watch, too,” Del added.
I had to believe that he was right. What we were seeing was as much message as punishment.
“Major James Layton appears to be one piece of work,” Del said.
There was every possibility our presence would not be appreciated, particularly being that we were armed and unwilling to follow orders that had been blasted out over the airwaves. Turning back might be the prudent thing to do.
We did not. Both Del and I, as neighbors and friends, needed to know as much as we could about Whitefish. In no small way we were spies on a mission of our own making. And, like intelligence agents in both fact and fiction, were we to be discovered, our lifespan would be measured in minutes, not years.
Another hour it took us, moving from cover to cover, before we reached the western edge of town, beyond the golf course, where houses were spread over large lots of land. The whole of the land before us, dotted with snowy roofs and dead trees stabbing skyward from drifts, gave the appearance of some abandoned alien settlement.
Yet, clearly, what we saw on the road across a barren field proved it had not been rendered lifeless.
Two men, rifles slung on their shoulders, stood in front of a newer pickup, machinegun mounted to a metal framework rising from the bed. They talked, and across the distance we could both hear them occasionally laugh.
Del took his own pair of binoculars out and surveyed the scene, glassing the men, and the road both east and west of them.
