Pox (6 page)

She didn’t take the time to grab anything. Instead,
she turned right around without taking even one more step inside.
She locked the door and hot-footed it, zig-zagging, careful to
check to see if anyone followed.

She stopped, waited, listened, peered around corners,
backtracked and carried on, never moving in a straight line. Always
she watched her back. Always she expected to be surprised at any
moment.

It took hours to get anywhere close to my place.

Nothing and no one appeared to follow her. As she got
closer, she began to relax just a bit. When it came time to pound
on my door in the dark, she went on heightened alert. Caitrin knew
I’d be on high alert, too. When I opened the door without so much
as a word, it shocked her into a panic attack.

She knew she’d be safe once inside. She still had an
inkling in the back of her mind that she was taking a chance that I
would even go to the door without knowing who was there.

Her story had come out in a mad spatter of words,
hurried, as if she stopped to take a breath she’d forget what came
next. I had a solution for that. I opened a bottle of brandy and
poured her a shot. Caitrin gulped it down and asked for another. I
obliged, and she downed that in an instant, too.

—That’s enough. Go on over to the sofa and try to
relax. I’m going to clean up.

She collapsed on the sofa. When I came back she was
asleep, quietly snoring. I covered her with a blanket and sat
beside her. Whether on purpose or not, she fell over and her head
ended up resting against my shoulder.

I arranged the blanket to cover both of us and
watched the fire die.

It was the sound of water running in the bathroom
that woke me. I was unaccustomed to waking up so late in the day. I
also wasn’t accustomed to having company two days in a row.

Caitrin must have fired up the generator on her own.
The only sounds I’d grown used to hearing were my own, and they
didn’t include a hairdryer doing its job on Caitrin’s long, dark
hair.

For some reason, that simple act on her part, that
starting up the generator, pleased me. I began to think that there
might be some hope for us to work together more often.

She must have rummaged around my room, because she
came out wearing an old t-shirt. A pair of great-looking, long legs
hung out from the bottom of the thigh-length shirt. She caught me
looking for longer than I probably should have.

—Don’t you be getting any ideas. It’s been too long
since I last relaxed in safety. That’s all I want to do today.

—That’s all right with me. Whatever the look you were
trying to achieve, you’ve captured it. I’ve missed that, too. I’ll
tell you what. I’ll wash my sheets for you, and tonight you can
crash in my bed.

She raised an eyebrow.

—Will I be alone in there?

—That’s up to you.

—Then there’s no sense in washing anything.

I would have grinned like someone who had just won
the lottery, but for the fact that there was no place to spend the
money. Instead, I grinned like a fool. I didn’t even try to hide
it.

—And stop grinning.

I couldn’t. Instead, I put on the coffee.

I rummaged around in the back of a closet and came up
with a couple of board games that the previous occupants must have
had for their kids. For the rest of the day and well into the
night, we competed for the best properties and tried to stay out of
jail.

Strip poker was out of the question, because by now,
purposely or not, it was evident Caitrin had absolutely nothing
else on under the t-shirt.

When we tired of the board games, we talked. We
talked long into the night and well into the morning. We realized
there would be no going back to the world we knew before the
purges. We knew too that there was bound to be more people just
like us, whether single or living in groups.

There had to be, otherwise Caitrin’s place would have
remained untouched.

We also knew that they might not be law-abiding. Knew
that they might not be friendly. That they might not be so willing
to help others in the same situation. That they might want to loot
and steal everything we had collected up to now and take it for
their own.

It took us until just before sunup to talk it out and
come up with a partial solution. We were just about dead in our
tracks from fatigue and nervous exhaustion.

Neither of us slept on the sofa.

I didn’t do the laundry for a couple of days.

We agreed to work together to expand our cache of
houses and goods to as many as we could manage to fill over the
next months. We planned on an additional three or four places in
different neighborhoods. If we outfitted them just like mine, we’d
be able to go on the run at a moment’s notice.

By the time we finished developing a basic plan, we
knew it would take months to get everything set up. And that was if
we could find the right locations already equipped with fresh water
reserves. If we didn’t locate those places right off, it would take
us even longer.

It didn’t take much convincing to agree on the need
for two trucks, radios to stay in contact, and maybe even a dog
with a good nose to sniff out danger. At least we were thinking of
danger, even if we weren’t prepared for it beyond a couple of
shotguns and a knife.

Caitrin climbed on the motorcycle and we took off. We
began slowly working our way to her place. To throw anyone off who
might be watching, we worked the streets off the main drags and
zig-sagged as though we were scouting more gasoline reserves.

We arrived in the early afternoon to a wide open
front door.

—This isn’t right. I locked it before I left. I’m
sure of it.

My alarm bells started to ring. I suspected there
were some things Caitrin hadn’t been honest about, and probably
more she didn’t want me to know. I thought I knew why. I pushed it
into the background and concentrated on right now.

I went around the back of the house to the pool.
Food, canned goods, chairs, tables - anything light - had been
tossed in. It started to look like maybe a jealous boyfriend had
wanted to send her a message.

—If there’s anything you need in there, you’d better
collect it. I won’t be bringing you back here. You’d be wise to
keep away.

She started to close the door.

—Don’t do that. Whoever it was will know you
returned.

—You’re right. Let’s just go.

She climbed on the back and we re-traced our route.
At a safe distance from her house I stopped at a small park.

—We need to talk.

Caitrin fished through her backpack and pulled out
sandwiches.

—I’m not completely useless.

Maybe not, but she was trying too hard.

—I never thought that you would be.

I took my time pouring coffee from the thermos. It
was the last thing I could do to delay the inevitable.

—Who was staying with you, Caitrin?

She hesitated. Her eyes moved in every direction but
mine. I had all the time in the world. She did too, until she
didn’t.

—My boyfriend.

Her admission wasn’t a complete surprise. I wanted to
know if he was an actual boyfriend, or someone she had only hooked
up with for convenience - hers, not his.

—For how long?

—Since before the purges.

So he was her boyfriend. That was good to finally
know.

—He’s been getting weirder and weirder in the last
month. Maybe he found a cache of drugs. He wanted to move us back
into the center of the city. Why, I don’t know. He wouldn’t tell
me.

It seemed more like the two of them had had a
knock-down, drag-out fight, judging by what had been deposited into
the pool. One, or both, had stomped off when they didn’t get their
way.

—So you two had a fight and you took off back to my
place?

—No. Not at all. When I left, the place was just as
neat and tidy as it always was. I’d been alone there for a couple
of days. And yes, we had a fight, but that was a week ago. Konnor
took off and I thought I wouldn’t see him again. In fact, I was
certain of it.

She wasn’t so certain now. For all I knew, the poor
chump could have his eyes on us and neither of us would be the
wiser.

—Well, we’re into it now. What do you want to do?

If she was smart, she’d recognize that there was
safety in numbers. And if she was real smart, she’d know I was
definitely hooked by now. Hell, even I knew that, and I was one of
the dumbest sons of bitches on the face of the earth when it came
to women. Perhaps by now, I was the last one.

—Will you take me back to your place? I feel safe
there.

There it was. The old,
I feel safe with you
routine
.

—Let’s get going.

Who was I to question it?

I let Caitrin help push the bike into the garage, and
then I started talking.

I re-hashed last night’s conversation. I reminded her
about what we had decided. I explained that from now on, we’d need
to be more careful about our safety if we were going to be a team.
We’d need radios to stay in touch. We’d need to get vests and more
guns. From there, we’d increase the number of safe houses we could
relocate to if need be. We’d begin our search for the trucks we
needed.

I led her to the map pinned on the wall in one of the
spare rooms. It covered a radius of a hundred miles. It had roads,
rivers, railways, power lines, waterways and lakes, everything we
needed to know, plainly marked. I showed Caitrin where we could
move to next if we had to.

She didn’t think it wise until we did a recon of each
of the areas.

She was right. I agreed.

And that’s what we did over the next ten days. We
found two trucks with good rubber and loaded them to the tailgates.
We kept in touch with two-way radios. We did our recons. We locked
suitable locations into the GPS and marked them on our paper
maps.

Through it all, we got to know each other better.

It surprised both of us how easily we got along. At
the end of the day, if we weren’t too exhausted, we’d watch a cache
of old black and white movie DVDs we had found about the end of the
world. We’d fall asleep on the sofa. One or the other would wake
and we’d stumble off to bed to make frenzied love, or, more often,
fall into exhausted sleep.

After suffering through months of loneliness, it was
a good feeling to finally have a sense of routine with someone
other than myself. Perhaps it had come too easy, but even it had, I
welcomed it. I enjoyed it.

I wasn’t so sure about Caitrin. I was beginning to
get a sense that she was becoming distant. I didn’t say anything
through her long periods of silence. When I had a question, it
seemed like it took her forever to come up with an answer.

—Is there something I need to know? You’ve been
getting more and more distant these past few days. What’s going
on?

—I want to go back to the house.

—Your old place?

—That’s the one.

—We’ll saddle up first thing in the morning.

—No, I’m going alone. There’s something I have to
do.

I wanted to know why. I wanted to know what was left
for her there. I wanted to know why I couldn’t take her. I didn’t
ask those questions, or the dozen more I had.

—I won’t be long. I’ll leave first thing in the
morning. I’ll be back before dark.

I tried one last time to convince Caitrin to let me
take her on the bike. She insisted on going alone, and she insisted
on walking. In the end, I wasn’t surprised at her stubbornness. I
hadn’t spent the last two weeks not learning that about her.

—I’ll see you tonight.

She allowed me to check her gear. When I was
satisfied, I pulled the hoodie over her head and smacked her ass,
hard. She turned back at the door and grinned, and rubbed her rear
in the tight jeans.

—I’ll get you for that.

I closed the door behind her, locked it, and went to
the window. I pulled up the curtain. She disappeared around a
corner, just as she had done all those weeks before we met.

I let the curtain drop and wondered what I could do
to take my mind off of my concerns. I’d become attached to the
woman in the short time we’d been together. She’d been reluctant to
tell me much about her life before we hooked up. I didn’t have a
problem with that. I wondered how long we’d last together, though.
Even though we were alone, I knew she had the capability to take
care of herself, even if she wouldn’t admit it.

I went to the garage and readied the trailer with an
empty drum and the pump. There was still plenty of gas to collect,
and empty 45-gallon drums to fill. I checked the curtains and the
doors and headed out to a new area I hadn’t yet been to.

There weren’t a lot of vehicles, but they all had
plenty of fuel. I had the drum filled by noon, and made for home.
Just as I rolled into the garage, the battery died.

I fired up the generator and used the forced break to
make lunch.

I didn’t stop worrying.

EIGHT

A team of two

The key scraped in the lock. I bounded to the door
like a puppy happy to see anyone. Waiting for her in the dark had
me nearly at wit’s end.

She didn’t say a word. Instead, she gestured for me
to follow her into the kitchen. She pulled the Velcro back on her
vest. She could barely lift it from her shoulders. When she dropped
it on the table, it landed with a heavy thud.

—Take a look.

Gold. Her vest was filled with gold bars in different
sizes and denominations.

—Where the hell did you find that?

—I’ve had the gold almost since the beginning. I
stumbled on it months ago in a basement of one of the houses I
raided.