The Apocalypse Club (24 page)

“Excuse me,” the man said. “But if you don’t mind, do you think it might be possible that you return my weapon to my possession?”

Max looked at the rifle. It appeared to hold only one bolt at a time. The man didn’t look like he had any spares on his person and the only one we did know about was currently lodged 20 feet up in a tree. Unless he was planning to try and hit us over the head with the thing, handing it back didn’t appear to increase his ability to cause injury.

“Okay,” Max said, handing the rifle back. “I guess. So long as you don’t try to shoot us again.”

The man took the weapon, checked it quickly for damage, and then slung it over his shoulder. His movements were fast, economical and purposeful. If we did come down to a fight, I had no doubt he could kick both of our butts. Possibly outrun us, too.

“Do not fear me, gentlemen,” he said. “Now that we appear to have reached an understanding or at least a détente, I have no reason to harm either of you.”

We watched in disbelief as he scrambled up to the tree like a monkey, grabbed the bolt and yanked it easily out of the tree with one arm, and jumped down again.

“Who the hell is this guy?” Max gasped as the man landed.

The man reloaded the rifle, checked something on the handle, and then tossed it back over his shoulder. I could tell from the way that Max had been holding it that the rifle, or bolt gun or whatever it was, it was quite heavy. But the man tossed it around like a twig. Apparently satisfied that it was still in working condition, he nodded to us and started walking.

“Fare well, gentlemen.”

“Wait!” I said, unable to resist. “Who are you? Really?”

He stopped and looked back over his shoulder. “I’m afraid that such information would not profit you in the least, but would be extremely costly to me. I would ask that you say nothing of our meeting to anyone. Anywhere. Ever.”

There was a subtly threatening undertone in his voice that caused me to nod my head like a private receiving orders from a four-star general. “Yes, of course. Absolutely not.”

We watched him go without a word. We never told anybody else about the meeting. Who would’ve believed us? If we’d told my parents, they would have put a permanent kibosh on our wilderness expeditions. They might even have started talking about how crazy it was to think that there were secret GDI black sites being set up in the woods. If chatter like that ever reached the wrong ears, I was convinced that we would all wake up one night to the sound of a heavily armed incursion team slipping black bags over our heads and throwing us into the back of a stealth helicopter.

“Do you think Lord High Shitty Shorts was on the level?” I asked after the man walked out of the clearing and disappeared into the trees.

“Yes,” Max said, nodding. “You?”

No. Except, well, yes, I kind of did. “I don’t know. But I don’t think I want to hike out to that old mine site anymore.”

“Me either. You know they’re planning to build one of those weather stations in town, don’t you?”

“What,
our
town?”

“Yeah.”

“No. When?”

“Construction already started,” Max said. “I think we should make that our priority number one when we get home.”

“I don’t know, Max. He said anyone who got too close to the place just disappeared.”

“We’ll be careful,” Max said, stroking his chin. “But if we’re going to bring them down, we’ve got to start somewhere.”

I wasn’t sure that bringing down a massive shadow corporation with a private army and control of the weather was going to be the number one item on my to-do list when I got home, but if it meant that we were not going to hike out to the old mine right then and there, I was willing to go along with it. Although we often referred to that bizarre encounter later, we never talked about it with anyone else. In fact, until I saw those four initials carved into the top of the desk in Max’s room, I never thought I would see another reference to Lord High Shitty Shorts ever again.

If nothing else, I now knew where I needed to start looking.

I
got my first surprise when I checked the map to refresh my memory on how to get there and found that Lake Nimegan wasn’t on it.

It was the morning after my visit to the rehab centre. I knew that I didn’t want to get lost wandering around in the woods in the dark, so I had decided to drive up first thing in the morning and retrace my steps to the hidden cabin in the high light of noon. But when I brought up my map app and scrolled to the spot where I knew (or thought I knew) the lake to be, there was nothing there. No lake. No roads, no rivers, no town, no hotels, no items of historical interest…nothing. Our former vacation getaway was now just a plain green square of empty space. The satellite view was the same way – nothing but trees, trees and more trees – at every level of magnification within 50 miles of where I was pretty sure the lake was supposed to be.

Puzzled, I did a web search on the place.

Nothing.

I tried another search engine and another map.

Nothing.

I thought about trying to find one of our old paper maps, but they had all been stuffed into the glove compartment of my parents’ car, which was now probably small enough to fit into a glove compartment on its own. That wasn’t going to be any help.

Was I crazy? Had the whole trip just been a figment of my imagination? Had my parents’ death sent me into some fugue state spiral of psychotic disconnect from reality?

For a moment, it seemed like a real possibility. I forced myself to recall details of the three trips we had taken to the place. The bugs. The smell of mould. The cut on my ankle from the time in the first year when a rotted piece of wood gave way and my foot went through the dock. I pulled down my sock. Yep. The scar was still there. I definitely wasn’t imagining that.

Okay. So the lake existed. The cottages existed. Even the crazy man who climbed trees like a monkey and carried a spear gun probably existed.

Where had they gone?

I pondered the matter for some time. Had the place just been missed somehow? Maybe the map apps only featured places that paid to be on them. It was crass and irresponsible and stupid, but then, that was the very definition of unrestrained capitalism in action. Working for a financial services company had certainly taught me that. Although it wouldn’t be surprising, it didn’t seem likely. Somebody would actually have to go to the trouble of removing the place from the satellite view, and what was the monetary incentive in that? Besides, it was missing from all the search engines, too. Everything in the world was in there. If someone had ever used it as a mailing address at any point since the invention of electronic records, it would have showed up on at least one of them. It wasn’t a popular tourist spot – certainly not Paris or Disney World – but people did go there. If there were still cottages for rent, there would probably be dozens of websites complaining about how lousy they were.

No, I thought, it seemed much more likely that the place had been left off the map for less prosaic and more ominous reasons.

Somebody had erased all record of the place. I took a deep breath and made myself think it:

They
had erased all record of the place.

Considering the possibility did not give me warm and cozy thoughts about trying to drive there. In fact, it made me shudder. It occurred to me that I could always pretend I had never seen those letters carved into Max’s desk at the rehab centre. Or that if I had, I had no idea what they meant. I didn’t need to do this job. I could noodle around on the web for a few days, return to some of our old haunts in the city (assuming they hadn’t been erased as well), and then report back to the giant face on the screen that my search had yielded nothing. After all, I hadn’t seen Max in years and he had made no effort to contact me even though we worked for the same company. What obligation did I really have in circumstances like that?

Except I couldn’t do that.

My parents had been killed. Violet had been driven away. Max was onto something. I knew revenge was out of the question. How do you smack a face that doesn’t exist? But I wanted to know what was going on. If I could find Max, maybe I’d finally get some sort of answer.

I thought back to the rehab centre. It didn’t seem like the kind of place where people were strongly encouraged to come and go as they pleased. It didn’t feel like any kind of hospital I’d ever set foot in before. It felt more like a prison. Especially with that tyrannical and Ratched-like “administrator” roaming the halls with the only key that could open all those doors.

Maybe Max hadn’t been wounded overseas. Maybe he’d found out something they didn’t want him to know and they’d thrown him in jail. But, Max being Max, he’d managed to escape. And now they were using me to try to find him.

I got up from the desk and went to the closet, where I grabbed my old university backpack. The straps were frayed from the weight of all the textbooks it had carried over the years and the zipper didn’t close all the way, but it would do. I stuffed three bottles of water, some beef jerky and some crackers inside and threw it over my shoulder, where it sat with a comfortable familiarity. I pulled my cell phone out of my pocket and turned it off. If they wanted to track me, there was no reason to make it easier than necessary. Once it was off, I stuffed it in my jacket pocket and headed out the door.

I looked up and down the parking lot carefully to make sure there was no one watching me. It was almost ten and there was no one out except for the old guy in the string vest who liked to sit on the balcony of the apartment building next door and watch the world go by. I didn’t know his name, but I’d seen him sitting out there since I had moved into the building. He liked spying, but that didn’t make him a spy.

I reached my car and made a show of “accidentally” dropping my backpack on the ground so that I could get down and make sure there were no tracking devices (or anything more sinister and explosive) attached to the underside of my car. As usual, the only thing hanging down was part of the heat shield, which sometimes popped loose and flapped in the wind. So far, so good.

It was a long trip and I needed to get gas, as the gauge was reading only a quarter tank. I didn’t go to the usual place and stopped by a station on the edge of town instead, where I paid cash. I didn’t know if all the precautions were necessary, but after what had happened to my parents, I wasn’t taking any chances. With my cell phone off, I was stuck listening to the radio. As I got further out of town, the stations started fading in and out and the only thing I could pick up was a career retrospective of Celine Dion. I shut it off and drove the rest of the way in tense silence.

The first part of the trip was easy. Things got tricky at the 90-minute mark when I had to turn off the main highway and on to Rural Route #521 North. It was still there, but I almost drove right past it. The sign post had been removed and the gravel road had not been maintained, allowing nature to encroach on all sides. Hanging tree branches brushed the roof and enormous weeds tickled the undercarriage. A couple of times I had to get out to move aside a fallen tree limb, one of which was so large that the best I could do was to sort of roll it to one side and drive over the thin part like a speed bump. Each time I got out of the car I eyed the roadside nervously. Had the limbs just fallen there or were they traps designed to catch trespassing motorists? Was someone crouched in the tall grass just waiting to throw a black bag over my head and cart me off to some top secret black site torture facility? Apparently not, because both times I made it back to the car unmolested, each time grabbing the steering wheel with clammy gratitude.

I was driving on memory now, and things didn’t look anything like I remembered them. I got lost twice at exactly the same place my father had all those years ago.

“Fuck the pope,” I growled, not really able to manage a smile. “Who signposted this sodomizing Appalachian hick highway?”

A large pothole – really more like a sinkhole in that it was the size of a swimming pool and almost two feet deep in places – forced me to stop and back up to the previous turn. The road wasn’t wide enough for two cars and I didn’t trust that I wouldn’t get stuck or roll off an embankment if I tried to turn around. I’m not good at driving backwards and did the whole thing with one white-knuckled hand gripping the steering wheel like grim death. When I made it back to the turn, I had to sit for ten minutes before my hand would un-cramp enough that I could let go of the wheel.

I found the lake a few more wrong turns and half an hour later. The first cottage I spotted was a permanent house that used to be owned by some guy who ran some sort of off-the-rack designer dress shirt business. Everybody knew this because it was the largest house on the lake and usually the loudest, because he threw a lot of parties for his drunken society friends from the city. I don’t recall knowing what his real name was, but everybody called him Gatsby.

I slowed down to examine the place more closely. There was a Mercedes in the driveway, but three of the four tires were flat and one of its back windows was smashed. It was rusted and didn’t look like it had been driven anywhere for quite some time. The house was the same way. Large sections of the siding were hanging off the walls like peeling wallpaper and the decorative ivy had swallowed the back deck like a thousand creeping pythons. Although I couldn’t see the large arched windows at the front – the ones that towered three stories high and were visible from one side of the lake to the other – I was willing to bet that many of them were no longer intact. The place looked wild and overrun. If someone or something was living there now, I was pretty sure it wasn’t the original owner.

I continued down the ring road. The cottage we had always rented was on the southeast side of the lake. It was surrounded by trees and sat at the bottom of a hill, which made sure that it received very little morning or afternoon sun. If the fanciest place on the lake looked like that, how was our old place going to look? Our place had looked abandoned and overrun when we rented it. If a big, new expensive place was half in ruins, then our old vacation spot was probably nothing more than a hole in the ground.