by Barry Napier
“So…Minnesota?” Olivia asked, handing Chen her sandwich on a little paper plate.
“The last I heard, it’s safe. But I also know that if certain people were in the airport in Minneapolis, there is a good chance they are either currently being relocated to a government facility somewhere or they will be soon.”
When she said ‘certain people’ they all looked at Joyce. She was taking scoops out of her can of Spaghetti-Os like she was on some grand expedition, digging for treasure. As far as Olivia was concerned, the fact that Chen had not said there was a very good chance Mr. Bates was dead was enough motivation for them to keep going.
“And now that I’ve spread that good cheer,” Chen said, “I think I’ll go enjoy my dinner.”
“Thank you, Claire,” Paul said.
“Yes,” Olivia agreed with tears in her eyes. “Thank you for everything.”
“Of course,” Chen said, her eyes trailing over to Joyce.
She then took her sandwich and a bottled water with her into the storage closet. When the door was closed, Olivia could hear her painstakingly removing bits and pieces of the suit. She could also hear little gasps and shuddering sighs as Chen became free of the suit for the first time in Lord only knew how long.
“You think she understood just how much she was risking when she helped us get out of there?” Olivia asked Paul.
“I don’t know,” Paul said, looking to the door. Olivia wondered if he was thinking the same thing she was thinking—that she may very well be breathing in the virus as she was eating her meager dinner.
“You think she’s regretting it now?” Olivia asked.
“I don’t know that, either. But I’ll tell you one thing.”
“What’s that?”
“I don’t think I’d want to ask her—because I’m not sure I could handle hearing her answer one way or the other.”
Chapter 26
Katherine arrived in the very small town of Hoop Spring shortly after 3:00 that afternoon. To call the place a town seemed a bit of a stretch, though. She figured there was probably a post office somewhere, but that was probably going to be about it. Hoop Spring was nestled along a series of roads that wound up into the Blue Ridge Mountains, not quite high enough to be considered mountainous terrain by any means but also far enough up to no longer be considered within the foothills of the mountains. She passed a few condemned houses and a mom-and-pop convenience store tucked into the folds and nooks of the rising mountainside, but that was all. The plus side of this was that the limited number of roads allowed Katherine to find George Kettle’s address rather easily. His address was 226 Otter Road, and Otter Road was the second turn-off she saw once she passed into Hoop Spring.
Katherine turned down Otter Road and felt the slight upward slope of the road right away. The motorcycle strained with the effort, but she came to a black mailbox with silver sticker letters reading 226 less than two minutes later. The entire property, like all of the other homes she’d passed for the last fifteen minutes or so, was surrounded by trees, sloping hills, and the overwhelming presence of nature. Half an hour from any city of considerable size and out in the middle of nowhere, Katherine once again got the feeling that she might very well be the last person on the planet.
In other words, it seemed like the perfect place for someone like a George Kettle or a Terrence Crowder to escape to.
She turned onto a thin gravel driveway with a steep slope. There wasn’t much gravel remaining on the road and Katherine wondered how on earth a large truck hauling gravel would even begin to navigate up and down these mountain roads. The incline was so steep that Katherine had to take the entire thing in first gear and even then, the motorcycle strained significantly. Near the top, it evened out and she came to what looked like a zombified version of a Thomas Kincaid painting.
The cabin was small and though it had clearly not been well-maintained, there was still a rustic sort of charm to it. One of the boards along the meager front porch railing was crooked and the clutter of fallen leaves and tall grass in the front yard made the cabin seem as if it were being protected by nature. It also gave Katherine her first clue that there was likely no one living here. The second clue came in the fact that there was no vehicle in the driveway. She parked the motorcycle at the end of the driveway, and killed the engine.
Having heard the grumbling of its engine for several hours on end and now standing in the peace of the low-mountain forests was almost Zen-like. She could hear birds chirping and the rustling of branches and leaves overhead as a cool summer breeze passed through. The air smelled fresh and crisp; she smelled something almost fragrant on the breeze—maybe wildflowers or honeysuckle. As she walked slowly towards the cabin, she took a moment to breathe it all in, to allow herself to feel that the world had not only never changed, but that it might be even better than she remembered it.
Even after she stepped up onto the old rickety porch and saw the rotted acorns, foliage, and a scattering of dead bugs, the place did not lose its charm. She figured it was probably a waste of time but she knocked on the door anyway. She waited a moment, knocked again, but there was still no answer…just the singing of birds back and forth in the towering trees all around her. She tried the front door and found it locked. She weighed her options, figuring an end of the world event might make it okay to break in. She drew back and gave the door a kick, finding it reasonably sound. She walked to the edge of the porch where the only window along the front of the house was positioned. She looked inside and found the place vacant and almost eerily tidy. She saw a small couch, a television sitting on a table, and the edge of a modest kitchen.
Katherine withdrew her Glock and used the butt-end of it to smash the glass. It made a surprisingly pleasant sound in the bright, cheerful sounds of the afternoon all around her. The glass seemed to almost dance down to the floor as she broke more of the glass away, making a hole big enough to stick her arm in without cutting herself. With this done, she re-holstered her gun, reached into the window and angled her arm to find the lock. It was only the third time in her career she’d done such a thing but this time it felt more dangerous—which was odd because the longer she was here, the more certain she became there was no one else in the cabin.
She turned the lock and slid the pane up. There was some resistance to it as the frame was slightly warped, but she was inside twenty seconds later. It was out of nothing more than habit that she closed the broken window behind her as she took her first good look at what might very well have been one of George Kettle’s residences.
The furnishings were sparse. There was a small couch and a folding chair in the living room. The hardwood floors were mostly covered by a very old rug. The television she’d spotted through the window was an older model, one with the bulbous backside that made it impossible to push up against a wall. There was a DVD player hooked to it, the wires dangling down from the TV to the player sitting on the floor. The kitchen had only a small round table and a single chair. There was nothing sitting on the small area of kitchen counters. A quick inspection of the cabinets revealed only an old, opened pack of paper plates and a lonely-looking can of beef stew. Katherine picked up the stew and looked at the Sell By date on the can; it was good for another year, suggesting that someone had been living here—or, at the very least, staying for a while—in the last year or so, she supposed.
She started to explore the remainder of the house, which did not occupy much space. There were two bedrooms, a bathroom, and a small coat closet on the main level. She also found a door that led down into a small, cramped basement. She checked the upstairs first, mainly because the idea of venturing down into a dark basement after all she’d endured as of late was not at all appealing.
The first bedroom was totally vacant, just a square of blue carpet. There were slight indentions in the carpet where a bed had sat long ago, but that was all. In the second bedroom, there was a bed and a nightstand. She checked the drawer in the nightstand and found a Bible and a pen.
The small closet in the bedroom offered only a coat and an empty carboard box in the floor. As she closed the closet door, she saw that the box wasn’t completely empty. Pushed against the side, there was a small sketchpad, the pages roughly the size of a postcard. She took it out and looked it over. There was handwriting scrawled on a few of the pages, just a random line here and there, none of which made sense on their own.
One entry read: parking garage, fountains, old buildings, little town charm. Another said: Billionaires hauling out billionaires, we sleep comfortably in the fire so why can’t they?
While she could make no immediate sense out of any of it, she could not shake the fact that it meant something. If Rollins had believed George Kettle might have something to do with the current state of their country and these scribblings were potentially from his hand, surely they meant something.
Still holding the sketchpad in her hand, Katherine exited the room and walked back to the door that led to the basement. She kept the door open as she went down the stairs. She tried the light switch on the wall and was a little surprised to find that it worked. She wasn’t sure why she’d assumed all of the power would have been out. Maybe it was just her mind dredging up the countless movies she’d seen concerning the end of the world, where there always seemed to be no electricity.
She walked down the narrow stairs and came to a concrete floor. The basement itself was quite small and she wondered if it had originally been put in to one day remodel into an office of some kind. As it was now, though, there was only the concrete floor and cinderblock walls. However, the few things sitting on that concrete floor gave her a sense of hope and dread all at the same time.
A table larger than the one upstairs in the dining room had been pushed into the far right corner. A chair had been pushed up and tucked under it. There were a few notebooks, some printed sheets of paper in stacks, and more small sketchbooks like the one she had discovered in the closet upstairs. A laptop sat in the center of all of it.
She went to the table and tried to turn on the laptop, only to find that it was dead. There was no power cord on the table, rendering the laptop useless. She stood over the table and looked at the papers and books one by one. Some of them had more obscure lines like the ones she’d found in the sketchbooks upstairs. But these weren’t nearly as alarming as some of the other things she found.
She saw print-outs of maps, almost all of them along the east coast. Some of them had a series of numbers drawn out on them. She saw two that had New York City circled, each one with a different mark trailing out from under it. What really concerned her about these maps was that in addition to the lines coming out—which almost looked as if someone had been planning a trip out of the city—there were also a series of circles radiating out away from the original circle. These outward circles were shaded in, with a number drawn inside of them. The numbers were in the millions.
In one of the sketchpads, she saw where eight pages had been filled with strange entries. The first page of the entry was labelled Routes and beneath this all-caps heading were entries that made no sense to her. The entries all started with an “option” and then gave an email address and password. There were twenty on the list she was reading and they had all been crossed out.
She set it aside uneasily and then looked to the first notebook. She counted eight, and they all looked fairly worn with tattered edges and creases along the covers. She opened one up and saw what looked like the rushed notes of a bored student. One and two word sentences filled the pages and only a few lines on, Katherine began to feel that George Kettle had indeed lived here. She started to read, her hands trembling a bit as she held the cover of the notebook open.
Stage 1A on water. Northeast. (NY likely)
Stage 1B, Texas. 6 hours later.
Stage 2A – Decimation: Richmond, Atlanta, Louisville, Boston (?)
Stage 2B – Decimation: ??? Dependent on success of Stage 1???
Chaos Dawn timeline: 3 weeks? 4?
Safe places? Southwest VA. Most CA and NM desert? Great Lakes?
Reading through it all was oddly fascinating even though it was like a slap in the face. New York, Texas, Richmond. The exact timing of six hours later…it couldn’t just be a coincidence. But Louisville? She wondered if something had happened in Louisville while she’d been in transit from Richmond to here?
She was sure the answers to those questions were here, in the rest of these books and sketches. But she doubted any of it would spell it out for her. So far, it all seemed to be in code. And she was also getting the idea that this might be stuff that had accidentally been left behind. Anything of importance would have surely been taken when Kettle left. And that begged the questions: when did he leave, and why?
She had just started to fixate on these questions when she thought she heard something overhead—not something inside the cabin, but perhaps something outside. Was that an engine? An approaching car, perhaps?
She closed the notebook and withdrew her Glock. She hurried to the stairs and hurried up them. Before she entered the hallway, she paused and listened for more noises. She could no longer hear the engine but as she waited, she did hear a thump sort of noise that was easy to identify: the sound of a car door closing.
She quickly swiveled out of the doorway and back into the hall. She came to the end of the hall and dropped to one knee, taking a shooter’s stance. She waited to see where the person coming out of that car was headed, already wondering if it might be George Kettle. She focused on her breath, keeping calm, trying to project herself into the many situations she’d been in like this before the world had gone to hell. She had to remind herself that she was good at her job, that she was among the best in her division. It was a little harder to feel that way, though, when there were so many unanswered questions and so many dead people beyond this cabin in the mountains.
She waited for the sound of footsteps to come up the porch steps but never heard them. She then supposed if it was Kettle, he’d likely see the broken window and freak out. But if he left, she’d hear the sound of the car door again and the engine coming to life. Curious now, she leaned her head out of the hall, peering into the living room. She looked to the window she had broken and saw no movement. She hurried across the living room and pressed herself against the wall. She wasn’t sure what she was being so timid about. She had a gun and she was more than adept at physical confrontations.
Thinking of the implications in the notebooks in the basement was all Katherine needed to get her courage up. She took three quick strides to the front door and unlocked it. In a quick motion, she turned the knob, opened it, and swung out toward the sunlight, dropping low to once again resume her shooter’s stance.
She found herself looking directly at a figure that was also holding a gun. Katherine barely saw the gun, though. She was too distracted by the odd Hazmat-style white suit he was wearing. She could barely see his face through the face covering within the mask. She saw that a small tube was feeding into the back of the suit, presumably to some sort of air filter.
The man was holding his gun—what looked like a run-of-the mill Glock not too different from her own—directly at her. It was clear that he wasn’t surprised to see her, presumably tipped off by the motorcycle she’d parked in the driveway.
“George Kettle?” Katherine asked.
“No,” the suited man said. “Who the hell are you?”
“Special Agent Katherine Fowler, FBI,” she answered.
Surprise flickered in his eyes for a moment. “And George Kettle isn’t here?” he asked.
“He isn’t. What concern is it of yours?”
“I…well I know him,” the man said. “I need to speak with him.”
“That makes two of us,” Katherine said. “Who are you, exactly?”
The man seemed to consider something for a moment and then, very hesitantly, he raised his hands into the air. The suit made a slight whoosh of noise as he did so. She noted that he still held his gun.
&n
bsp; “Who are you?” Katherine asked, steadying her gun and never taking it off of him.
“My name is Terrence Crowder,” the man said. “And if you’ll let me come inside and talk, I think we might be able to help one another.”
Chapter 27
Paul felt that something wasn’t right almost immediately after they’d left the drugstore. He didn’t want to say anything at all about it, though, because they had officially started their journey to Minnesota. Claire Chen had risked her life to get them out of that military facility and then had busted her rear end to patch him up after being shot. He really did not want to be the whining member of the group that slowed them down.
But forty-five minutes after pulling out of the Walgreens, he knew he had to say something. He didn’t think it was the Blood Fire Virus, but something was certainly not right. He felt feverish and was starting to sweat. There was a slight ringing in his ears and he could taste something akin to metal in the back of his throat.
“Not doing good,” be croaked from his place in the back seat.
Olivia was behind the wheel. They had traded the military truck for a Honda Odyssey they’d found a block or so away from the Walgreens. Chen seemed to still think no one would waste the time or effort coming for them but she also did not want to tempt fate by cruising around in a military-issue truck. At the sound of his voice, Olivia slowed down. He peered ahead and saw Chen, still dressed in her protective suit, looking back at him.
“Are you going to be sick?” she asked.
