by K. M. Fawkes
Brad didn’t argue the point. It was only his first day. Instead, he simply followed the man to the farm section. There were five cows and several goats, as well as a chicken house. He raised his eyebrows at seeing that.
“I built that in the fall,” Ben said. “My grandparents had a farm that I basically grew up on.”
“Impressive,” Brad said, and he meant it. It was surely the best chicken house he’d ever seen. The chickens inside it were a little scrawny, but Brad didn’t see any obvious health problems. All in all, it was a pretty good little farm. It would almost certainly mean eggs and milk this spring. And maybe next year, if the herd grew enough, there would be meat.
He ran his hand over the velvet nose of the cow closest to him and she nudged him on the shoulder with her big head. The cows that they’d managed to catch were all very docile—which explained why they’d managed to catch them, Ben admitted.
“We found a farm a few miles away back in the fall,” he said as he thumped his hand on the fencing that surrounded the paddock. “That’s where this came from. The cattle were all there, too. They seemed just as happy to see us as we were to see them and we managed to drive them here pretty easily.”
Brad knew that Ben meant “drive” in the cowboy sense, but he couldn’t help the mental picture he got of the cows lined up patiently in the front seat of one of the military trucks. Sammy and Martha would have gotten a kick out of that. He cleared his throat and turned his attention back to Ben’s story.
“I guess I’d better meet up with the hunting party now,” Brad said once he’d examined everything to the best of his ability.
“Sure,” Ben agreed. “Come with me.”
“I hope they don’t expect too much,” Brad said as they walked closer to a group of men cleaning their rifles and leaning against one of the big trucks. It wasn’t a big crew—just two soldiers and one other man. “It’s not exactly the right season for this kind of thing, you know.”
Ben nodded. “Sometimes they don’t come back with anything,” he admitted. “That’s why the crews are pretty small. But the Major wants us to look every day. Sometimes, somebody gets lucky.”
Chapter 8
“You ever been out on a hunt before?”
Brad looked across at the man riding in the back of the truck with him. The two soldiers had taken the front seat, which made sense. They had the most firepower. If they ran into anything strange, it was better for them to be the first to handle it.
“Well, yeah,” he said with a half-smile. “It would have been kind of hard to survive if I hadn’t.”
“Right, right.”
The man ducked his head again and went back to cleaning his nails with his pocket knife. It seemed like a really dumb thing to do in the back of a moving vehicle, but Brad didn’t point that out. The other man seemed like the nervy type and Brad didn’t want to cause him any added stress by questioning his hygiene habits. He did wonder why they’d given him a gun, though.
“Where’d you come from?” the man asked, once he’d finished with his right hand and moved onto the apparently-easier left hand.
“Bangor,” Brad said, deciding to be honest for now. “What about you?”
“Searsport. I was a tax attorney.”
Now that was a surprise, but Brad tried not to show it. It wasn’t that the man didn’t look like a tax attorney. In fact, he fit the stereotype pretty well with his sly glances and meager frame. But how the hell had a tax attorney possessed the skills to survive both a nanobot virus and the EMP apocalypse that had followed?
“Really?” Brad had to ask.
“Yeah.” The man snorted. “It’s okay. I can see it on your face.” He twirled the knife in a quick gesture. “You’re wondering how I survived, right?”
Brad shrugged sheepishly. “I mean…a little, yeah.”
“The fact is, my old man loved to hunt. I mean, really loved it. Mom said he was obsessed with killing things and he was always trying to mount deer heads and make rugs out of bear pelts. She wouldn’t let him bring any of them into the house.” The guy looked off into space for a second and then shook himself free of his memories. “Anyway, once I was old enough to hold a gun, he started dragging me out with him every weekend. I guess it paid off.”
“I guess so,” Brad agreed. “Sorry, I didn’t get your name.”
“Caleb,” the man said. “I know your name is Bradley.”
“How did you—”
“I pay attention to who comes in,” Caleb said. Then, in a lower voice, he added, “and who goes out.”
“What—”
“We’re here,” the soldier at the wheel said and Caleb stopped speaking abruptly, looking furtively up at the front seat.
Brad opened the back door of the truck and walked around to the front as quickly as he could. Then, he dropped down to tie his bootlace. The two soldiers moved on into the woods, talking to each other in low voices.
When Caleb walked by, he looked up and said, “What exactly did you mean? Everyone who leaves?”
“Nothing,” Caleb said quickly.
“Come on,” Brad said, standing up and catching the man by his sleeve when he stepped back. “It wasn’t nothing. I want to know—”
“Are you two planning to hunt or talk?” the driver asked, turning back to look at them from the edge of the woods.
“I’m hunting,” Caleb said, swinging the rifle up. Brad barely heard his mutter of, “Not now, you moron,” before he headed off after the soldiers.
Well, that’s a little personal, Brad thought, remaining where he was while he checked his gun.
“Brad!” the driver called. “You—”
“I’ll be there once I’ve checked the gun,” Brad said pleasantly. “Don’t worry. I’ll be able to find you.”
And that was the God’s honest truth. The soldiers were stealthy and Caleb was quiet, but they were both elephants compared to Lee. Brad wasn’t one bit worried that he wouldn’t be able to find their trail. After a moment of silent staring from the soldiers, during which Brad began to break down the rifle, they finally headed off. Apparently, they weren’t used to people who didn’t ask how high when they said to jump. But Brad hadn’t survived this long by going along with what the military asked him to do.
He shook off the annoyance and got down to business. The gun he had been given was a fairly standard rifle, and one that he recognized. It didn’t look that fancy, but he knew that it was amazingly accurate. It also wasn’t that heavy, which was a good thing because who knew how long he’d be carrying it? It would be one thing if they’d been heading to a deer stand to talk shit and wait, but they weren’t. They were in for several hours of walking. There was nothing worse than dragging around a heavy gun with you when you were wandering around hoping that some animal was going to be dumb enough to cross your path.
Thankfully, the gun looked like it had been cleaned recently and when he checked, it was loaded. It wasn’t likely to blow up in his face, and in the event that he found a target, he knew he’d be able to hit it. After a few more minutes of checking the gun over, Brad wandered into the woods after the other three men, looking at the ground for new tracks.
There weren’t any. At least, none from animals they were likely to be able to track down and eat, which was exactly what he’d expected. He glanced up at the sky after about half an hour of staring at the ground as he walked. That constant looking down had cramped his neck.
He sighed in relief as he looked upward, even though the view wasn’t anything spectacular. The sky was a uniform iron gray. The good side of that was that there was no sign of snow.
Which didn’t mean that his feet weren’t completely freezing. He looked down at his boots with a sigh. There was a huge crack in the sole of the right one. That probably explained why his toes were already numb. He made a mental note to look for some superglue as soon as he could. And to wear two pairs of socks in the meantime.
He could tell by the tracks that Caleb had gone to t
he left when there was a break in the underbrush. The two soldiers had gone right a little way up the path. Brad went down the middle, but he veered left as soon as he was reasonably sure that the soldiers wouldn’t hear him.
He walked deeper into the woods, checking for a different trail, now. It wasn’t too hard to find and he followed it. Within twenty minutes he found what he was looking for. Caleb was down on his knees, looking intently at a set of tracks on the ground.
“Tell me what you meant back there,” Brad hissed.
Caleb jumped and stood, turning to face Brad with his hand over his heart. “Jesus fuck. You scared the shit out of me!”
“Sorry. But I want to know what you were talking about.”
“You can’t wait until—”
“The soldiers are off to the right,” Brad said. “I made sure they were pretty far away. If you talk fast, it should be fine.”
Caleb snorted softly. “Fine. Since you’re not going to let it go, I guess I might as well. I’ve been here for a while now. Since the end of the summer, actually. I’ve seen plenty of people come in. And some of them…” he shrugged and made a helpless gesture with both hands. “Some of them just disappear.”
“What do you mean, they disappear?” Brad demanded.
“I mean that one day they’re in the facility, living their lives and doing the chores they’re assigned to do. And then one day they aren’t anymore. And there’s no funeral for them.”
“What’s the official story?” Brad asked. “Do they say they died? Or do they say they deserted?”
“Aren’t you listening? There isn’t an official story, man. They just disappear.”
Brad thought it over for a moment. “No one asks what happened to them?”
“No,” Caleb said with a shake of his head. “No one asks.”
“Why not?” Brad demanded. “They just watch people disappear and they don’t even think to ask what might have happened? It’s a close community; even if they just thought that a neighbor was sick, it would be worth asking around.”
“Because maybe they’re wondering the same thing I’m wondering,” Caleb said.
“Which is?” Brad was getting tired of yanking information out of the other man. He decided to be a bit blunter. “Just tell me what the hell is going on, okay?”
“I don’t know what’s going on!” Caleb snapped. “I’m just trying to figure out what the hell happened to the old folks.”
Brad blinked, not connecting the two issues for a moment. “What? I mean, didn’t they all die from the virus?”
“Then where were the bodies?” the other man asked.
“I guess they buried them,” Brad said. “Why the hell would they just leave them lying around?”
“Sure, that sort of makes sense. Except that the Major never said a damn thing about a cleanup when he talked about moving into the facility with his soldiers. From his story, they just walked right in and set up. And does it look like those apartments had someone die in them?”
Caleb was warming to his subject now, speaking more quickly.
“I mean, you remember the virus and the things it did to people. It wasn’t exactly a clean way to go, you know? I mean, people hacked up blood like they were fucking fountains. Remember the CDC warnings? Hell, there were bodily fluids everywhere during the peak of it. And my apartment back at the facility is kinda spick and span for anything like that to have happened there; what about yours?”
Brad frowned, digesting the sudden onslaught of information. “Well…yeah. It is.”
His apartment really was very clean. Which didn’t really mean anything. The residents could have been moved out to a safe house. He thought back to the earring he’d found in the bathtub and the lady he’d invented in his head who might have worn it. Had she died of the virus? Or had something that was somehow worse happened to her?
“You said you’ve been here since summer?” Brad asked. When Caleb nodded, he went on. “Did you happen to find any personal effects of the residents?”
Caleb nodded again. “One of the first jobs I was assigned was helping them go through the apartments and separate what we could use from what we couldn’t.”
“Did it look like any of them had packed a bag?”
Caleb tilted his head. “What do you mean?”
“I’m wondering if they might have ended up at a safe house. When the army came to take me to one, they let all of us have one small bag. That’s pretty fucking different from what the power-crazy soldiers did.” He remembered Anna’s story of the military coming to Island Falls and how very different it was from what had happened to him.
“I’m no expert,” Caleb said. “But it didn’t look to me like they’d taken a damn thing. Their luggage was still in the closet and all of their clothes and toiletries were the apartments, too.”
“Then the Army didn’t take them,” Brad said. “Or if they did, they treated them a hell of a lot differently than they treated us in Bangor.” His jaw tensed. “Do you have any ideas about what might have happened to them?”
Caleb sighed. “No. I wish I did, but there’s nothing I can pin down. There’s just a feeling…I don’t think they left because they wanted to.”
“It doesn’t sound like it,” Brad agreed. “Maybe we can work on getting the truth out of the Major.”
“I don’t know. I thought that I could trust him, but now—” Caleb broke off suddenly, going pale as he looked over Brad’s shoulder. “Hey, Mason. Did you need us?”
“No. I’m just wondering what you found that’s so interesting that you’re standing around.” Mason’s dark eyes were steady on Caleb, his voice as cold as the gray sky over their heads.
“Yeah, Caleb found some deer tracks here,” Brad said, pointing down at them so that the soldier could see that he was being honest. “The tracks aren’t all that fresh, but we thought we’d head over and see what we can find.”
“Then get to it.”
Mason accompanied them, effectively ending the conversation. Brad wondered what, if anything, the other man had heard. Caleb seemed nervous and Brad wished that he’d loosen up. If they hadn’t looked particularly guilty before, they certainly did now. Brad did his best to look nonchalant, pointing out a bear’s den and a source of water as they walked. The soldiers weren’t interested in the first, but they took note of the second.
After several hours of walking, Mason sighed and said that they could turn around. The sky was going from a pale gray to a darker, blacker color. Brad had been worried that it might be about to rain, but then he realized that it was simply growing dark. He still wasn’t used to how early it happened, now.
Brad handed his rifle back to the other soldier before he got into the truck. He sat down, resting his head against the back of the driver’s seat and pulling a blanket around himself. This was basically the same position he’d taken when he’d regained consciousness on the ride in. He glanced across at Caleb, but the man pointedly looked away from him. That avenue of conversation was clearly at an end.
With a shrug, Brad grabbed another blanket and balled it up, thinking he might as well try and catch some shut-eye. The hunt had been a long, cold, waste of time. He wasn’t interested in more of the same for the ride back.
Chapter 9
Four Days Later
Brad’s eyes popped open at dawn. Groaning, he pulled the pillow over his head, burrowing deeper into the blankets, but it didn’t make a bit of difference. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t seem to go back to sleep. He stuffed the pillow back under his head and sighed.
It made him think back to the time he’d spent with Anna. He would have given anything to sleep in during those frantic weeks before they’d found Martha. Now that he didn’t have anything standing in his way of an entire morning in bed, he couldn’t even manage to stay still.
Brad hadn’t gotten lucky the first day they’d gone out to hunt. Or the second day. The third day had been the worst of all. He hadn’t even found any tracks. H
e’d started to worry that they were going to think that he’d oversold himself.
But yesterday, he’d managed to bring down a moose. It was apparently the biggest kill anyone at the compound had made so far. Neal had come by his apartment last night and said that the Major was impressed. And he’d given Brad the whole next day off for his accomplishment. It had sounded great at the time, but Brad was very surprised to discover that now that he had it, he didn’t want the reward.
He got up and headed to the bathroom, where he changed the bandage on his ankle before getting dressed. Pleased that the cut was healing well, he wandered around the apartment, unsure what to do with himself. None of the books looked interesting to him at the moment. He grabbed the broom and swept the kitchen and bathroom and then sighed when that was over much too quickly.
A critical look around told him that the carpet was starting to look a little dingy, but there were nothing he could do about that. It wasn’t like he could plug in the vacuum cleaner and fix it. He couldn’t take a bath either because he needed the water he had left to last for three more days.
Brad dropped down onto the couch, facing the useless television with a frown. He wracked his brain, but nothing came to him. He’d already done everything in the house that he could do except for reading. He pushed himself up again after a moment and grabbed his coat, scarf, hat and gloves. He’d go out. Surely there was something that he could do out there. Anything had to be better than staring at the four walls of his apartment all day.
He started with the animals.
“I thought you had the day off,” Ben said as he scattered some grain for the chickens.
“I do,” Brad said.
“Are you one of those compulsive types who thinks that no one else can do their job?” Ben asked.
“Nope,” Brad replied easily, sensing that he’d offended the man. “You took care of them before I got here. I just wanted a little walk and I’m used to heading this way every morning.”
