“Do you see the trail?” I asked after Susan and I had brought the ATVs to a complete halt and killed the engines.
The immense silence that always fell after riding around on them for long stretches of time always felt heavy, somehow intense.
“...maybe,” Susan replied.
“Look slowly.”
“How do you look slowly?” she asked, and I could hear the annoyance creeping into her voice.
“I mean move your eyeballs slowly, don’t dart your gaze around,” I replied evenly. She was walking that razor’s edge where she was sliding towards a bad mood but was still far away enough that she could be brought back from it.
Honestly, I was amazed at how much I had managed to learn when it came to reading the women I now shared my life with.
“Okay yeah,” she said suddenly, perking up. “I see it. Them. Two trails of boots. It looks like they’re going up to that hill.”
“Let’s walk up there,” I replied, getting off the ATV and looking around, taking stock of the area surrounding us.
A whole lot of frozen Kansas desolation and not a lot else.
I popped the little hood and detached the starter from the engine. I was lucky these things didn’t run hot.
“We’re gonna be like right there, do we really gotta take them out every time we’re gonna go more than five feet away?” Susan asked as she stood and stretched.
I stared at her from behind the darkened goggles I’d taken to wearing while riding.
She heaved a sigh. “Yeah, yeah. Risks are stupid, playing it safe is playing it smart. All right,” she said, walking around and repeating my action on her ATV.
“You’re learning,” I replied. “As stubborn as you are about it. Remember: you asked for this. You asked me to take you out here. You were adamant about it, actually.”
“I know,” she muttered, pocketing the starter.
The ATVs were an absolute game-changer when it came to getting around. They were a bit dangerous to drive around in the snow, but if you were careful, and with a bit of luck, they were mostly just fantastic to have.
I could cover so much more distance so easily.
And they were solar powered. The way the panels worked meant that they were pretty much always passively gaining energy so long as they were in the sun.
I looked up and around.
Today was a bright sunshine kind of day.
It felt like a good omen.
“Come on,” I said, heading off towards the hill, “let’s see if there’s anything obvious.”
Susan followed after me, our boots crunching in the snow.
A week. I’d been working for a solid week now.
After all the shit with the bunker, getting it back home, and helping give Pine Lake a reprieve from our impending doom, I’d taken a break for two days because I’d been so physically and mentally exhausted, and battered, that my body had almost given out. I probably should have taken three or four days off, but there was too much to do, and I was getting restless.
I had at least agreed to light duty for the first few days.
That largely meant bouncing between meeting with Lisa and Melanie and Hannah actually, (Lisa had partially taken her on as an assistant because she seemed to have a mind for organization on top of being just generally sharp), figuring out precisely how fucked we were, and doing smaller things like gathering firewood or helping the people hunt through the ruins of the township. Lisa was getting a little desperate and had most of the population going over the fire-gutted ruins of the buildings that remained for anything useful.
We had found a few things so far, but we were over halfway done and didn’t have much to show for it.
After that, I’d personally gone out to visit both the junkyard outpost and Brandy’s inn to make sure that had our agreements were ironed out and actually get our operations flowing.
The ‘contract’ with the junkyard was simple: they dedicated themselves to hunting game and picking any eatable plants they could find and gave us the excess, and in return we helped them with any problems that might crop up, but mostly we promised to absorb them into our population once we had a permanent solution for our ‘staying alive longer than a month’ problem.
Right now, that was looking like resettlement.
To where, no one knew.
There were options, but moving an entire population of people across the snowy wastelands of the Midwest was a risky proposition at best.
Our deal with the inn-owner Brandy was a little bit different.
She and her crew were happy where they were, and happy to amass a store of stuff to trade. And because she had an odd fondness for me, (I think I was the only guy to have sex with her who actually got off on her general badass attitude and facial scar), she gave us a sweet deal: we brought her shit to trade, they gave us any excess food they could scrounge up and would start dedicating more time to hunting game and foraging as well.
So that was another thing we were trawling the ruined town for: anything worth trading.
I had learned over the past two and a half years that this could mean so very much. There was obvious stuff: guns, bullets, medicine, food, tech. But there was other stuff like jewelry and scrap metal and even money.
Yeah, some people still used it. Or wanted it, at least.
Although I was wondering if that was beginning to fade. Even though she liked me, Brandy hadn’t seemed too impressed with the five grand we’d managed to come up with, saying fewer and fewer people seemed to give a crap.
Couldn’t blame them. Personally I’d just use the stuff as fuel for a fire.
My trip up to see Brandy had been solo and I’d ended up spending an extra hour out there making good on a promise I’d made her.
I had to do that again sometime soon. And bring one of my girlfriends with me this time.
After those initial two trips, others had taken over the ATVs and the jobs of going out and hauling back food once every three days.
When that was out of the way, I was still recovering, (I was bruised and battered and cut from all the falls and fights I’d had going after Megan and that stash, even now I still ached), but I had energy to burn so I ended up spending time with the girls on their jobs because for now, Lisa didn’t really have an immediate use for me.
Everyone was pitching in, somehow, someway.
Lara, Susan, Delilah, and Lindsay tended to go on foraging expeditions. Lisa had begun systematically having teams search the areas for traces of life that had survived the storm. Not all the plants had died, we’d found, but too many of them had, and all that was left was to find the survivors and harvest them in the hope of extending our lifeline a bit longer.
Every little bit helped…
But I was still worried.
I’d gotten good at hiding it, I think a lot of us had, but this really sucked.
Susan and I made our way up the hill. I glanced back briefly at the ATVs out of habit, reassuring myself they were still there, and no one was creeping up on them.
While having those ATVs was indeed an absolute game-changer, it also painted a huge potential target on your back.
A lot of people would most definitely kill to get their hands on even one of them.
Or at least try to take off with it. Taking the starter out was my little insurance policy. Couldn’t even hot-wire the damn thing without a starter.
“Okay, that looks like a place they might go,” Susan said as we finally got up to the top of the hill.
It gave on a large snowbound field that was covered in big lumps about as tall as I was, things buried in snow that I recognized as bales of hay. A farmhouse, a decent and expensive one by the looks of it, even from this distance, sat within the boundaries of a wooden fence that had long since lost its integrity to time, weather, or desperate hands looking for fire food.
I took a long, sweeping look around the area.
At the moment, we were tracking a pair of wayward people who’d gotten lost during a storm.
Just yesterday, a group of about a dozen had shown up out of the blue. They were hungry and in poor health and low on supplies. Apparently they were the only survivors of another settlement dozens of miles away that had suffered a fate not too dissimilar from Pine Lake’s, although their fire had been an accident it seemed.
They’d been wandering, desperately looking for a place to live ever since.
Lisa was reluctant to accept them, and even more reluctant to send out a search party, but in the end she did both.
Especially when she learned that one of the missing people was a nurse, and that two of the new arrivals were veteran hunters.
Hannah and I had gone out on the ATVs, trying to pick up a trail, but hadn’t had any luck last night.
This morning, Susan asked to go, and Hannah had taken a little convincing, but she’d relented when she saw how much Susan wanted to and I’d asked her to say yes.
She was still learning about compromise, something she was taking a furiously fast crash course in given the fact that she was sharing me with six other women.
I was still wrapping my head around that, so I could just imagine how she felt.
She wasn’t really in a relationship with any of the others in the same way I was, except for Megan. There was something there, but I wasn’t sure what yet.
I think they weren’t either.
Right now, there was too much shit going on anyway.
I brought my binoculars up after raising my goggles and studied the farmhouse. I didn’t see anyone moving around, but the front door was hanging open.
Don’t know why but that pinged my radar.
“All right, yeah, let’s check it out,” I said, heading back to the ATVs.
Susan followed after me and after reattaching the starters, we fired the vehicles back up and drove up over the hill, down the other side, and crossed the big field separating it from the farmhouse. Personally, I was eager to find these people and get back home. We’d been using these ATVs for hunting expeditions during the off days, driving out past the perimeter of the dead territory we were now at the center of to try and do some hunting of our own. I wanted to go on one of these expeditions and I was finally feeling up to it.
I subconsciously clenched most of my muscles as we got through the fencing and headed for the house.
I was expecting a gunshot to ring out.
The ATVs weren’t exactly what you’d call subtle. Their engines weren’t overwhelmingly loud, but certainly they were kind of annoying, and with snow blanketing everything, they announced you from a fucking long way off.
We got up to the front lawn without a problem though, and I saw no activity in the windows or the open front door.
No one peeking out at us, from what I could tell.
When we’d started out again today, I didn’t like our chances of tracking them down. But we’d gotten lucky, found a shack that showed clear signs of occupation not that far from where they’d last been seen.
Susan had climbed a nearby tree and spotted a half-collapsed cabin in the distance.
It was enough of a trail to go on.
Now it had led us here.
We killed the engines as we parked near the porch, making sure to turn them around first so they were facing back the way we had come, (in case we needed a quick getaway, yeah, I know, the starters, but even the few seconds of having to reverse and turn around could be the difference between life and death), took out the starters, and then pulled out our pistols and set to work. We made a quick perimeter sweep, finding more evidence they were here, or had been here. So that was what prompted me to do what I did next.
I cleared my throat as we walked in through the front door. “Is anyone in here?”
I waited, listening. Couldn’t hear a thing, but that didn’t always mean it was empty.
“My name is Chris, I’m looking for two people named Marty and Opal! Your friends sent us to find you!”
I waited and listened again.
Still nothing.
“What do you wanna do?” Susan asked.
“Stay here and watch the door and the ATVs. If they are here they might be freaked and stressed. Don’t want them to try and run while I’m searching.”
“I’ll yell if I see anything,” she replied.
I nodded and then headed into the house. It looked like it had once been pretty decent, but the environment had not been kind to it. Or maybe just passing people. A lot of windows were broken out, and there were holes in the wall.
Snow had gathered in piles in most of the rooms.
I definitely found evidence that people had been through recently. Disturbed stuff, bootprints in the snow.
Frozen blood.
Not a good sign.
I searched the first floor, then moved up to the second story. Both of them looked pretty damn ransacked, and both of them revealed no hiding or dead people.
There was some evidence that they had begun setting up camp, but had abruptly stopped in the middle of it.
Why?
Two ideas came to mind: someone or something dangerous had abruptly arrived, or they found a better place to make camp.
Since I couldn’t find any corpses, they obviously hadn’t died in the middle of making camp. But all that was left was a shed out back.
I mean, it was a nice shed, obviously a lot of work had gone into it, but I didn’t think it would be that much of a better place to stay than where they’d initially set up. The living room had a fireplace and its window had been boarded over pretty firmly, keeping out the cold for the most part. Well, no other choice.
“Nothing,” I said as I rejoined Susan and began leading her to the back of the house. “They might be in the shed, though.”
“Why?” she asked.
“No idea, but it’s the only place left to search.”
We got up to the shed. It looked like one of those you could buy from the bigger industrial stores, have shipped out and put together. The kind of thing made of durable material. Given we were now in permanent winter, it had held up pretty well.
I peered cautiously in the single window, but I couldn’t see much. It hadn’t broken, but it had iced over.
Walking up to the door, I knocked on it a few times. “Anyone in there? I’m here to help! Jay sent me!” I waited.
No response.
I had Susan back up and carefully opened the door. Moving cautiously inside, I cleared the shed. There wasn’t a lot in it, not a lot of places to hide, but something immediately leaped out at me: there was a cellar door built into the floor at the back.
If that led to what I thought it did, then yeah, this would be a way better place to camp out.
There was blood on the floor, and faint prints of snow heading towards the door. I quickly checked any potential hiding places, then had Susan come in.
Just in case someone was standing on the other side with a gun, I made sure we were out of the way as I pulled open the cellar door.
It wasn’t locked, but I could tell the lock had been broken.
“Anyone down there? I’m looking for Marty and Opal! Jay sent me!”
This time, I was almost positive I heard something. Harsh whispering. Peering cautiously over the edge, I saw a stairwell leading down into the earth.
Something shifted deeper in.
“Seriously, I’m here to help. Your group found me and sent me to find you. And if you have no idea what I’m talking about, just tell me so and I’ll go away. I don’t want problems.”
After a pause so long I began to try again, a reply finally came.
“How do I know you aren’t full of it?” a man asked.
His voice was hoarse and tired.
I had actually prepared for this.
“Your name is Marty Sanders. Your group leader, Jay Peterson, sent me. He’s got a scar on his forehead. He says your favorite food is sardines and to prove he sent us, to remind you about that one time the two of you found that pink cellphone.”
I had no idea what the fuck that meant, but Jay had seemed sure it would work.
It did. I heard a faint laugh, then a groan. “Shit, that’s Jay...what’s your name?”
“Chris. I’ve got a friend named Susan here with me.”
“Me and Opal are in bad shape, how far away is it?” he asked.
“About forty five minutes. We’ve got rides. ATVs.”
“...for real?”
“For real.”
“All right, we’re coming up.”
“Okay.”
I stepped back and we waited for them to come up. I had to admit, I was intrigued by whatever was down there. Either a storm shelter or a prepper bunker. If the lock was broken, then there was a good chance it had already been plundered, like the house, but people missed things. Or one man’s trash was another’s treasure.
Unfortunately, we didn’t have time to search it, our priority here was these two.
After a lot of shuffling, two people finally emerged. A tall, decently built, dark-skinned man appeared, supporting a pale woman who did not look good. I knew fever delirium when I saw it. I’d been through that shit before.
“She’s sick?” I asked as they came up.
“Yeah. Fever. And we don’t have any medicine. I think I’ve got an infection now, too. Wolf got me on the run,” he replied. “Cleaned it best I could.”
“All right, you trust us to help?” I asked. “Because we have supplies and knowledge.”
He eyed the MP5 slung across my chest nervously, but finally nodded. I think he just knew it was this or death for both of them, which was a shit situation to be in.
“Yeah,” he said finally.
I helped ease Opal down into a sitting position against the nearest wall, and then Marty sat down, wincing. The bite was obviously on his leg, as his right pant leg had a fair amount of blood on it. He pulled up the jeans he was wearing.
“Fucker got me on the calf, hurts like hell,” he muttered.
“I can do a decent patch job,” I said as I set my pack down and dug out the medical supplies. Susan was doing the same, looking at Opal.
“Is she hurt?” she asked.
“No, just sick. Caught a bug a few days ago, but it’s gotten a lot worse,” Marty replied.
“Okay. I’ve got a few things for that,” Susan muttered.
“We’ve got an actual doctor that can look at you,” I said.
“So you have a settlement?” he replied.
“Technically yes. Your people made it there.”
“Why technically?”
“It’s no longer sustainable. Storm came in and froze everything to death. The plants, the animals, some of the people. We can’t hunt or forage enough to realistically sustain even a relatively small population right now. We’re working on a more permanent solution. But try not to worry about it. For now, just know that we’ve got a secure location with reasonable people and decent supplies, and we’re working on the problem.”
“Fine by me,” he muttered, then winced as I worked.
“Quick question, what did it look like down there? Were there still supplies or was it looted?” I asked.
“Looted pretty thoroughly from what I could tell, but it was dark,” he replied.
I nodded and kept working.
It took another ten minutes to patch them up and get them onto the ATVs, but we did it.
As we drove away, I was already formulating how I was going to word coming back here to more thoroughly check the bunker to Lisa.
