Nightmare factory, p.25
Nightmare Factory, page 25
The man cocked his head slightly.
“When my mom comes looking for me…” Lux wasn’t sure what to tell her. He’d been expecting her to show up every day. “Please tell her I love her, and I miss her.”
Bill nodded and tried to give some advice on how to reach the main road. “You’ll probably be better on the main roads. Houses will have people in them, some may be bad. Anyone still alive will be desperate. Lux, you can’t just assume people are good.”
That was something Bill had been repeating over and over all week. It was almost like he knew something the rest of them didn’t. Lux hugged the man’s neck. “Please tell the others I said bye. It was nice meeting you all.”
“Look, little dude, this… this sucks. I mean…” he trailed off. “I’m no expert. Shit, Laurie tells me that every damn day. I guess I’m just saying you’re going to have to do stuff, stuff you may not want to, just to stay alive. That’s just the way it is now. Stay alive, survive. That’s more important than getting home. That’s more important than being a good kid. Do you understand?”
Lux put the pack on. “Yes.”
That was a lie. He really didn’t. Lux suddenly turned and began walking away. His eyes were filling with tears, too, but he refused to acknowledge them. He needed to be brave. He needed to be a big boy now more than ever. He walked until the houses were out of sight, then he began to run. He ran until his chest burned and his legs ached. Then he sat on the side of the road and cried. He would give himself this one time.
CHAPTER
FIFTY-NINE
KOVACH
I found Sumo almost a mile away from the campsite. He was tangled in what appeared to be a cargo net. From a hundred feet away, I could tell the dog was highly agitated. Someone had purposefully trapped him here. Why? Not only that, where were Carol and Damiana? Had they done this?
I had a thought, one I prayed I was wrong about. “Ada, status on the truck.”
“Truck is operational, fully charged.”
“Um... um,” I stammered. “That’s not what I mean. Is anyone attempting to do anything to it?”
“I don’t have sensors on the vehicle.” I was thankful she was at least beginning to sound like herself.
“Move the truck, take it down the road and back, just don’t let it sit stationary.”
If I was right, someone had led Sumo away, possibly just to get our supplies or our vehicle. Right now, I had two likely suspects.
“Unable to comply.” Ada still didn’t sound completely like herself, but it was closer. “The truck’s auto drive feature appears to be offline.”
Shit! It was an ancient system, one I had to manually update with current maps, but no reason it should be inoperable unless my worst fears were correct.
I finally had Sumo free, and he was blazing a trail back in the direction we had come. I scrambled over the last embankment and mostly slid down to the water’s edge. On the other side of the river, I saw both women doing something to my granddad’s truck. Carol glanced my way before saying something to Damiana, who nodded and got in on the driver’s side. Sumo was halfway across before I leapt off the rocks and immersed myself again in the icy waters.
Crawling out on the far side, I could see the campsite was deserted. They were gone. My truck was gone, along with all our supplies. I didn’t know how they had done it, much less how they knocked Ada offline. They shouldn’t have even known about her, unless Damiana had been read in fully on what had been done to me. Somehow, though, I’d been suckered. “Fuck!” I yelled. That’s what I get for trying to help anyone.
Sumo was sniffing around; he was just as pissed off as I was. I had been wrong about one thing. They hadn’t taken everything. My sleeping mat was still there and my backpack and water bottles. They mostly only took the things they had brought.
“Ada, can you track the truck?”
“No, Joseph, I’m afraid it is gone.”
I gathered up my gear and repacked it to keep the load low on my back. I also tossed several bulkier items that I didn’t consider essential, not essential if I had to carry it for several hundred miles. Ten minutes later, I was headed down the road at a fast trot. Damiana was right, I could maintain this pace almost all day as long as I didn’t dehydrate or overheat. Sumo could do almost as well, but I remembered to stop every hour or two to give his feet a break. I was definitely heading south now, toward Rainier, but also to pay back the two people I’d considered friends.
The afternoon of the second day on foot, I came up on a ranch. The field was jammed with black cattle, all looking at me like I was from another world. A man wearing battle armor probably does look that way, but I wasn’t wearing the helmet at least. I’d clamped it to the top of my pack. I soon smelled grilling meat. Hamburgers, I thought. How long had it been since I’d had real meat? Back in the Army, I guessed. The military did a lot of things wrong, but they fed us well. Nothing stalled a fighting force faster than hunger. But real meat was a high-end luxury now.
I saw what looked like a family up between two farm buildings tending a small fire. My water bottles were nearly empty, and Sumo was beginning to look like he wanted to attack some of the livestock. I shrugged. “We can see.” I moved up the dusty two-track drive with my hands raised high. Sumo somehow had physically transformed himself into the friendliest of puppies, dancing around in circles and looking like anything but the deadly weapon he was.
The act must have worked. The man visibly tensed when he saw me and made a move to send two little ones away before relaxing somewhat.
“Just passing through, mister. Wondered if I could get a water refill. I assume you have some with a herd this large.”
The man pointed toward a trough near a metal building and an old-style lever pump that seemed to be a recent addition. An ancient car’s hubcap lay on the ground, and I filled it for Sumo. I then repeated the process for the bottles I carried.
I washed the road grime from my face with a wet rag, and we moved over to thank the rancher. He was hovering over a large grill, flipping about a dozen of the best-looking burgers I’d ever seen.
“Thank you. I’m sorry if I scared your family.”
The man, who could have been somewhere between twenty-five and his early sixties, just eyed me up and down. “We don’t get a lot of visitors.”
Ada announced a threat coming from the upper window of what I took to be the main house.
“I suppose not. However, the smell of those burgers carries, and well, no one has much to eat anymore.”
The man gave a snort of a laugh. “You can have one, your dog, too, but if you try to take anything else…”
“I know,” I said, cutting him off. “Your wife has a bead on me right now. Upper window, second from the left.”
He turned toward the house, then slowly back to me. “You active duty?”
“More like reserve,” I answered.
“That’s a Glisson Rattler MK4, isn’t it?” he asked, studying me closer now.
I nodded. The man knew his weapons.
“Tell you what, let me shoot that a couple of times, and you can have all the burgers you both want.”
That was an easy enough trade and a good ploy on the man’s part to disarm me without seeming threatening. I unclipped the rifle and handed it over. Ada could block it from being used against me, assuming she didn’t go offline again. He called his family back out, and I put a burger into a bun and started wolfing it down while following him out behind his house to an improvised firing range. You have to love farmers.
Thirty minutes later, I was down half a pack of ammo, and the man seemed to be my new best friend.
“Goddamn, those things a work of art,” he proclaimed. “Sorry, Jesus, but you know… damn!”
Jimmy MacLeod said his family had been farming this land for almost two hundred years. “I don’t know what to do with the cattle. I have 250 head, almost a million dollars worth of working capital on the hoof, and it will die out there unless the trucks start running again. Add that to the mountain of bills I owe on the tractors, the seed licenses, and the carbon tax for the herd. Well, I’m finished… I know it.”
I was on my third burger by then. Sumo had at least as many and now was rolling around on his back so the two kids could rub his belly. Seeing him play was almost as good as the meal.
“I’m not sure there’s anyone to pay your bills to anymore. Might just be a clean slate.”
“I always pay my bills,” the man said, his conviction unwavering.
“Where ya headed?” the wife asked, seemingly eager to change the subject. She was a small, somewhat plainspoken woman with a fierce determination in her eyes.
“Sparta.” Saying it out loud didn’t seem wise, but I didn’t want to lie to these people. Ada had worked it out days earlier from some of the information Carol had provided.
“That’s over toward Knoxville.”
“In the general vicinity,” I said. “Middle of nowhere, really.”
“We saw a blue glow that night, Jim… you know. It was from over that way,” the woman said. “Thought it was lightning or something, but it was steady, you know. After a while, it just faded out.”
I’d already brought them up to speed on world events. What Ada knew, at least. They’d had practically no information since the lights went out. If the Nightmare Factory site also got hit by a Sapphire bomb, I could be in some real trouble. Iron River had been no picnic, and this one was already rumored to be considerably worse.
“So, what’s in Sparta?” Jimmy asked.
I didn’t feel comfortable answering that, and I told them so. They took it in stride and moved on. They were okay with respecting my privacy, unlike many people I knew.
The MacLeod’s offered to let me stay overnight in their hay barn. I was okay with that. My legs were sore from the last few days on the road.
The rest of the family went to bed, and Jimmy came out to the fire with a bottle. He never asked, just poured several fingers in two glasses and passed one over.
“You have a good thing here, Jimmy,” I said, sipping the excellent bourbon from a local distillery. “You’re in a lot better shape than most.”
“Not sure how long I can keep it, though. Not just all the damn bills I owe. I ain’t stupid. I know others will come.” He looked at me, a question already on his lips.
“Why don’t you stay on here with me, Sergeant? Help me protect the place until, you know, they get the lights back on and stuff.”
My hand was shaking. The tremors had started in earnest earlier in the day. I’d been ignoring it, but I knew the slide down to the end was increasing.
“I got orders, Jimmy. Besides, I won’t be any good on a farm. I know how to break other people’s stuff, not how to make it grow.”
“You would know how to keep it safe. How to help keep my family safe,” he said, disappointment evident in his words.
He did have a point there. This farm was so far out from any township, I doubted anyone would come all this way just to steal something. I had Ada run a security plan for the place, though. On our third glass of the good stuff, I shared with him what I would do in his shoes. Simple stuff like blocking the drive. Moving the cattle to a field that wasn’t visible from the road and having shooting blinds set up in the main compound. After being on the road for two weeks, I knew the best defense was making the place look abandoned and nothing of use to anyone just passing by.
“So, no more grilling out?” he laughed.
A few minutes later, he tilted his tumbler. “What kind of world are we leaving them?” His drink hand motioned to the house where in the candlelight I could see small shadowy figures moving inside.
“Same world, Jimmy, just going to take some getting used to.” I poured us both a splash more. “I’ve been in places around the world that have never had power, no cars, inadequate water. You know what? Kids there still grow up, they have fun, find love, get married, and make babies. Humans are a resilient bunch. If you don’t base your worth on what you lost, you’ll be fine.”
He nodded. “We have to survive the craziness first.”
“You got that right, friend, you do indeed.” I covered my shaking hand and repeated it to myself.
CHAPTER
SIXTY
LUX
Lux tried to think about how many days he had been walking. Three. He definitely remembered two nights, so this was the third day since leaving Bill and Laurie’s house. Honestly, they hadn’t been too bad. He found he was less scared this time and had found a lot of abandoned cars along the road. He checked these for water and food and had also found they made good places to sleep at night. Not all the cars were empty, though. Some had, you know… dead people in them. That was gross, but that didn’t bother him that much anymore.
The people he had stayed with had been good to him. He’d been furious when they sent him away, but things were just different now. Stuff like that was just part of it. The supplies Bill had made him take were coming in handy. It wasn’t a lot; he couldn’t have carried much anyway, but it had some food and a few supplies, including some fishing line that he was using now. He’d tied it to a long stick he’d cut off with the knife he’d found in the bag. He caught some crickets like the man had shown him, pierced one through the middle with a hook, and dropped it in the lake. In minutes, he had a fish up on the bank. It was silvery and kind of flat, with a reddish part right under the mouth.
Lux tied some twine through the mouth and gill and then looped it over a big rock, then let the fish swim until he caught another. This was pretty much how he and Bill’s family had done at the creek. He was less sure about building a fire but thought he could. He knew he needed to save the canned food. It took a while, but he caught two more fish. One was like the first. The second was black with whiskers and a white belly. He couldn’t feel any scales on it. He wasn’t sure about how you cleaned it, but he would work on it.
He moved into the woods to find what he needed to build a fire. Bill had made him and Peegee attempt it over and over. You had to be safe. Clear out a spot. Get dry, small stuff to start with, then bigger pieces of wood. It took him a lot of trips back to where the fish were still swimming. He knew he needed to be ready to cook them when he killed and cleaned them. That seemed so odd to him, to be killing something and then eat it, but it also made him feel good. While he was gathering wood, he wandered up to where the lake seemed to form and found that a fast-moving stream fed it. Water moving faster is safer than water moving slowly. That was something else Bill had said.
He filled up his two water bottles, then used the weird color light on the lighter pen that was in his pack. Supposedly, that would make any water safe to drink, and best not to take chances. Using the lighter part of the pen proved more challenging to making a fire. It shot out a small beam of light that would make the twigs smoke and turn black, but they never caught fire. He needed some paper or something, but hardly anyone used paper these days. He tried some leaves, then some dry grasses, but none wanted to burn. “Dang it!” he yelled in frustration.
Lux stood up, mad and hungry. The fish were swimming furiously now, as if they knew what was coming. The boy’s stomach growled. It was so much easier when his mom just had to push a button on the machine to get his dinner. The very thought of her brought tears to his eyes. He fought them back. Not now, you need to make a fire.
His eyes picked up movement, something small in the underbrush. Maybe a baby squirrel; there had been plenty of the adult ones around. Getting closer, he realized it was a mouse. The fur was almost black, and it was rooting around in some moss. Every so often, it would pull up something and eat it. When it noticed it was being watched, it took off running. Lux followed it. It scooted under a fallen log and into a hole at the base of a gigantic tree.
Lux took a stick and tried to dig the mouse out. Not to be cruel, but mainly just to have something to do. All he got was a bunch of fuzz and dry moss. He tried to figure out where the little rodent had gone, then realized he might be looking at the very thing he needed. He raked up the bits of wood shavings, fuzz, and moss and held them close to his chest. “Thank you, Mister Mouse,” he yelled over his shoulder as he ran back to his campsite.
He carefully placed his prize underneath the twigs and leaves and aimed the lighter once more. It sparked and a brilliant flame started almost at once. Minutes later, he was busy feeding larger pieces of wood into the flames.
He cleaned the two fish like he’d been shown and placed them on sticks near the fire to cook. The last one he just couldn’t quite figure out. He sliced up the middle and removed the stomach and stuff, then tried to cut the head off, but the skin was too hard. It felt almost like bone. He kept an eye on the first two. They were kind of small, but he knew they tasted good. Eventually, he just sliced the whiskered one all the way through and drove sharpened sticks through it to keep it spread apart.
The first two fish disappeared in just a few bites. They were more bone than meat, but Lux’s stomach felt a little better. He probably should have tried to catch more. He carefully rewound the fishing line around a small piece of wood and secured it with the hook. He listened to the fire crackling and the smell of the meat cooking. It was nice. Maybe that wasn’t the thing he should be feeling, but this wasn’t terrible. “I really miss Timber.” He also missed his mom, but not too much of the other stuff. He found he thought about his dad less and less. It just seemed like he had moved on, didn’t want to be his dad so much anymore.
This last fish was tough, he couldn’t bite through the skin even when it was cooked. When he went at it from the other side, though, that was a different story. The white meat was flaky and kind of sweet. It was so good, not as good as bacon—nothing was that good, but this might be like number two or something. It also seemed to have fewer bones. He wanted to catch more of these. He ate all he could, then tossed the rest into the lake. The sun was going down, and he’d already picked out a car to sleep in for the night. He kicked dirt over the fire and headed off to bed. This day had been a better one. Whisker-fish were now going to be his main focus when fishing.
