Cruel World (31 page)

“No, that’s fine,” she said.

“Thanks.”

He moved to the reclined lawn chair and lay down, covering himself with blankets. His hands were shaking. Halfway through situating himself, he began to rise again, but settled back down, staring up at the clearing sky and the cold sprinklings of stars that winked at him as if they knew secrets that would never be told.

~

They woke with the first morning rays that streamed through the trees to the west. Quinn avoided Alice’s gaze as much as possible as they packed every useful item in the house they could find. Quinn found a smart phone and charger, and after bringing the device back to life, saw that the satellites still worked somewhere miles above the earth. Each of them took a short but welcome shower, and Quinn shaved off the heavy growth of beard that had accumulated over the past days. He avoided his reflection, slicing away the scruff by feel alone. Afterwards they ate a mostly silent breakfast and loaded the Challenger. Soon the massive house dwindled in their rearview mirrors.

“I liked that place,” Ty said as they reached highway speed and took a route that bypassed the valley town.

“Yeah, why’s that?” Alice asked, glancing back at him.

“It felt safe.”

“Nowhere’s safe,” Alice said. Quinn glanced at her, but she held her eyes steady on the road.

The Challenger growled, pulling them on through the day. They stopped once for gas and had to detour three times. Twice because there were bridges out, blown wide by what appeared to be explosives, and the third from an impassable tunnel jammed full of dead cars and darkness. The last time they backtracked for forty miles before finding another route.

When they stopped beside a lonely field of dandelions to relieve their bladders, Alice held Quinn back on the side of the road while Denver led Ty to a stand of narrow trees.

“I’m sorry about last night,” she started. “I had a lot to drink, and my tolerance is way down.”

“Nothing to be sorry for. I overstepped my bounds; won’t happen again.”

“Quinn—”

“No, it’s fine. Everything’s fine. We’re making good time, huh?” he said, walking away. She didn’t reply, and he crossed the ditch and relieved himself before coming back to the car.

They reached Fort Dodge in the late afternoon. The town grew above the treetops in a smattering of brick and brownstone squares. A clock tower gazed down upon the streets, its cyclopean form looming above the rest of the buildings.

They entered the town from the east, idling into a barren industrial park lined with chain link fencing around its border. They waited, scanning the rows of buildings.

“Where is the military installation supposed to be?” Alice asked.

“It looks like there’s three mining locations according to the map. One might be a processing plant. That one’s on the southwest side of town.”

“Where are the other two?”

“One’s southeast and the other is northeast. The last one’s out in the middle of nowhere.” He glanced at her. “That’s where I’d put a refugee center if it were me, get out of the city and off the beaten path.”

Alice nodded, still staring at the buildings.

“Strange that we didn’t see any of them again today,” she said. “Kinda gives me the creeps.”

“It gives me the creeps seeing them,” Quinn replied.

“So what’s our plan? Do we try to find the army before dark, or do we overnight in one of the buildings here and go looking in the morning?”

“I’d hate to be without cover when the sun goes down,” Quinn said.

“Me too,” Alice said.

“Me three,” Ty chimed in.

“Okay. Let’s find somewhere secure and get inside. I’m starving,” Alice said, pulling forward.

They glided down the aisles of buildings. Many were barricaded by the same chain link that surrounded the rest of the park. Others were wide open, overhead doors gaping, windows shattered and jagged.

“Damn, I vote for that one,” Alice said, drawing even with a distributing company. The garish, electric signs advertising liquor and beer above its main entrance were dark, but the building looked solid with only a single, unbroken window in its front.

“I’ll take a walk,” Quinn said, opening his door. He brought the rifle with him, checking its load before crossing the business’s yard. The front door was locked, and when he peered in through the window, he saw it was also barricaded. A second steel door within the entry was shut tight. Quinn moved around the side of the building, pacing along its seamless block wall. On the backside there was a single door that wouldn’t budge. When he looked closer, he saw that the latch had been welded solid to the frame. The opposite side of the building was an open loading dock for trucks to back into, its long promenade of concrete empty save for a stack of pallets in one corner. Quinn took two steps onto the loading dock and stopped.

A smeared bloodstain ran in a swath to one of the overhead doors.

He knelt beside it, dipping his fingers into one of the larger blotches of gore. It was still wet.

Quinn stood and moved to the door, following the blood trail. Smeared handprints covered its bottom edge, jets of crimson spattered near its base. Quinn stood to one side of the door and pushed upward.

It slid easily.

He dropped into a crouch, flicking the rifle’s light on. Cases of beer stacked on pallets glowed in the glare along with a river of blood that led away into the darkness of the warehouse.

“Shit,” he said, glancing over his shoulder at the sun. It was nearly touching the horizon. With two deep breaths, he pushed the door up its track enough to crawl beneath it and went inside.

The ceilings were high and lined with rows of darkened fluorescent lights. With the stacks of spirits on every side it was like being in a cavern of some sort, their heights soaring above him like stalagmites. He swept the area, the fresh blood shining back at him from the floor. He walked beside it, glancing up and around with each step. His boots clicked on the polished floor, the loudest sound besides his heart. The trail wound through two more stacks of booze and then dribbled into a narrow stream before ending completely.

Quinn shone the light into an alcove straight ahead of where the blood trail ended.

A middle-aged man with short blond hair lay in the shadows beneath a large shelf loaded with vodka, his shoulders propped up against the wall. His eyes were partially lidded, and he held a dark handgun in his dripping fingers.

“Stop,” he said, his voice weak and hollow in the air of the warehouse.

“I’m not going to hurt you,” Quinn said, keeping the AR-15 trained on the man’s chest.

The man laughed, a quiet, wet sound. “Good; that’s good.”

Quinn lowered the rifle enough to illuminate the man’s legs.

His left foot ended in a ragged stump that oozed blood into a broad pool. As Quinn watched, the man’s arm slumped to his side, and his eyes rolled up into his head.

~

They ate a cold dinner of cheese and sliced sausages along with several cans of beer they’d taken from an open container. They sat in a semicircle on the floor, Denver lying between Ty and Alice on his side, soaking in the coolness of the concrete. Quinn kept glancing over at the man’s prone form, his head resting on a rolled up blanket, leg elevated and secured on a steel chair they’d found in the front office.

After the man passed out, Quinn had seen he’d been holding a makeshift tourniquet with his free hand, and without the pressure, the stump began to bleed freely again. He’d retied the bootlace the man had used, staunching the flow to almost nothing, before running outside to direct Alice to the rear loading dock. Once they were all inside, they’d repositioned the injured man and poured a small amount of water in his mouth that he managed to swallow. After that, he’d become completely unresponsive, the rising and falling of his chest the only movement.

They’d found a stockpile of food, weapons, and ammunition in one of the offices along with a meager first aid kit that had already been pilfered of anything useful. A hiking backpack leaned against one wall near the food and weapons, its many pouches bulging with enough supplies to keep a single person going for more than two weeks.

Alice drained the last of her beer and set the can aside before motioning to the man. “What do you think happened to his foot?”

Quinn glanced at Ty and then back to her, lowering his voice. “I think it was bitten off.”

“Me too.”

“Yeah. Looked like teeth marks in the flesh around the wound. Not that you can really tell since infection’s already setting in.”

“He’s not going to make it,” she said.

“No, I don’t think so.”

They cleaned up their wrappers and cans and checked on the man again. His face was pale and dry, but when Quinn put a hand to the man’s forehead, he nearly yanked it back with shock.

“He’s burning up.”

They tried drizzling more water in the man’s mouth, but he merely coughed it back out. His breathing began to take on a liquid wheezing, so they let him be and made their own beds up for the night.

“You think one of us has to keep watch?” Alice said, tucking Ty into a sleeping bag.

“I think it’s okay if we all sleep tonight. This place is locked down really well. Any problems and we can scoot right out the door and into the car.”

They were quiet for a time as they lay down on their own blankets. The darkness around them was complete.

“Wonder what he was doing here,” Alice said finally.

“Surviving, like the rest of us.”

“Almost looks like he was planning something.”

“Like what?” Quinn asked.

“Like a trip.”

He listened to the man’s labored breathing a dozen yards away. That could be any of them lying there, wounded, dying. How would it feel to know beyond any doubt that you were going to die? The idea was one thing, but the fear, the fear was all encompassing.

“This fort-bed thing is getting kind of old,” Alice said, breaking the silence.

Quinn chuckled, and she laughed too after a moment.

“I can’t believe we made it,” Alice said.

“Me neither.”

“Not really what you would’ve picked for your first road trip, huh?”

He smiled. “It’s not what I had in mind, no.”

She was quiet for a long time. “Thank you for everything you did to get us here.”

“You’re welcome. Thanks for saving my life a hundred times.”

“Ditto.” Her blankets rustled, and he imagined her turning toward him in the dark. “What if there’s no army there tomorrow?”

The question caught him off guard. Not because he’d never thought it but because he’d been thinking it for days.

“Then we find a safe place somewhere else.”

She settled again with more shushing of blankets.

“Goodnight, Quinn.”

“Goodnight.”

Sleep eluded him like a beggar with a stolen scrap of bread. He would begin to drift off then the steel loading doors would shift in the wind letting out unfamiliar clanks and clicks. Each time he would bring his hand to the butt of the revolver before relaxing again. Much later, when he’d finally found a position that was partially comfortable, another sound roused him. It was reedy and low, as if it were coming from the bottom of some pit. He sat up, images of a thousand stilts surrounding the building filling his head. Instead, he slowly made out words filtering through the darkness.

“I Royal.”

Quinn rolled to his feet and found the rifle. He flicked the light on, and it brightened enough of the space for him to move without the fear of sprawling over a low crate. He walked to the man’s side and saw that his eyes were open, the irises obscured by a thin membrane, like a fog hanging over a valley.

“Here, have some water,” Quinn said, picking up the bottle sitting nearby on the concrete. He tried to bring it to the man’s cracked lips, but he turned his head away, refusing.

“I Royal,” he breathed again, and tried to raise one of his arms.

“Your name is Royal?” Quinn asked leaning closer.

“Royal.”

The man opened his mouth wide and took in a long shuddering breath before letting it wheeze out. He spasmed several times as if trying to cure a case of hiccups, and then fell still, the last of his air leaking from between his teeth.

“Damn it,” Quinn said, checking his pulse. Nothing. He put his hands on the man’s chest in the CPR position but then sat back. He was resting now. How cruel would it be to bring him back?

He stood and found a dusty sheet draped over a stack of whisky cases. He shook it out and gently spread it over the man’s body.

Royal
.

Quinn retrieved the rifle and moved past Ty and Alice toward the front offices. Denver’s dark head rose, and after a moment, the Shepherd padded silently after him.

In the office with the supplies, Quinn sat down and began to open the heavy pack leaning against the wall. There were fire-starting materials, extra clothes, emergency blankets, spare magazines for the two pistols and four rifles that sat on the floor, along with a bladder filled with water. All of the pockets contained similar survival items, except for the topmost. When he opened it, he first thought that the man had packed sheaves of paper for more fire-starting fuel, but after a moment of inspecting them, he saw he was wrong.