The Apocalypse Club (25 page)

As I came around the corner, I saw that I wasn’t far off.

The cottage was gone.

I pulled alongside the edge of the property and stopped. The cottage had never had a proper driveway, just a rough patch of hardened ground that you could pull the car onto to get it off the ring road so other vehicles could pass. All of the ground was overgrown with three-foot high weeds. I wasn’t about to try to drive over them, but I figured that there wasn’t an abundance of traffic on the road, so nobody would care if I parked there.

I peered through the windshield, but there was no sign of any other living thing except for a couple of squirrels that had been scared into a nearby tree by the unexpected sound of the approaching engine. I took a long chug of water from one of the bottles in the backpack and turned off the ignition. The only sounds I could hear were my own breathing and the faraway high-pitched squeal of tree frogs.

I opened the door and got slowly out of the car. My legs weren’t as stiff as they would normally be, as I had exercised them to move the fallen tree trunks out of the way, but they didn’t seem to be entirely sure about carrying my weight again. Either that or they weren’t entirely sure about where I expected them to carry me. I closed the door and took a deep breath. The air was sweet and dank at the same time, as it often is next to large bodies of water.

I walked through the weeds to the spot where the cottage used to be. The foundation slab was just scorched concrete covered with charred debris. A jagged section of wall still stood in the far corner, blackened and weather beaten. The ground around the cottage looked mostly untouched, although some of the nearby trees were obviously missing branches. The fire – because that was certainly what it looked like – was intense and extremely localized. The cottage next door, although dilapidated, was still standing, and it was only 20 feet away at the most.

I walked down the hill to the old dock. It was still there, but only barely. I wasn’t about to set foot on it, but it hadn’t been torched. I stood at the edge of the lake and scanned the shoreline. All of the other cottages appeared to be still standing. Although some were in worse shape than others, none of them appeared to have been burned down.

What could have caused it? Lightning? That was always a possibility. Electrical short? Also not impossible. The wiring in the place would probably meet the 1897 building code, but any inspector who examined it during the time we stayed there would probably have had a cardiac arrest and then ordered the building condemned. A vagrant could have decided to stay in the place and tossed a cigarette the wrong way. But why stay there when there so many other less-run-down options within easy walking distance? Or a couple of bored kids could have torched it for fun, but how many bored kids would be wandering around a deserted lake in the middle of nowhere?

No. I was pretty sure I knew what had happened.

I was suddenly furious. I had never been all that fond of the cottage when I was there, but it was now one of the last tangible connections to my childhood and the bastards had burned it to the ground. Who in the hell did they think they were? What right did they have? I reached up and was not at all surprised to find tears pouring down my cheeks. I sat down hard on the ground and bawled like a baby. I cried until my face was raw and my ribs ached. When I was done, I stood up, wiped my face on the sleeve of my jacket and took a deep breath. I closed my eyes and heard a splash out on the lake. I opened them again to see a spreading circle of ripples about ten feet beyond the end of the dock. It must have been a fish jumping.

Can’t destroy everything, you assholes.

I picked up my backpack and took stock of my position. The mine site was to the northwest, which was on the other side of the lake. Driving to the other side and parking would be faster, but I had spent enough time in the car and walking seemed more appropriate, so I decided to hoof it. I walked back to the ring road, checked to make sure the car doors were locked, and then set off.

It’s a strange thing to revisit a place you knew as a kid. I remember wondering who all of these people who lived around the lake were and what kinds of lives they led. Were they happy? Did they look forward to coming up here as much as I (kind of) dreaded it? Did they aspire to better things? Better places? Whatever the answer, it didn’t matter now. The only traces of them were these empty buildings, and soon those would be gone, too. Mine already was. As far as I could tell, I had nothing left to lose.

I made my way around the lake and cut through the vacant lot between the metal trailer, now lying on its side, and the squat cement brick cottage with tiny windows that we’d nicknamed The Bunker. Max had speculated that the windows were so small because the owner was a vampire. It reminded me of the pumping stations that sit on residential streets that cities try to camouflage so that they look like an ordinary houses. You admire the effort, but the place never looks like anything less or more than what it is. We never did see who lived in the place. Of all the cottages on the lake, it was the most unchanged. Concrete, after all, doesn’t tend to crack, peel and mildew quite as easily as wood, stucco and shingle.

Turning off the road and heading out into open terrain gave me a feeling of freedom that I realized I hadn’t felt since Max and I made the same trip all those years ago. I had sort of grown up in that time, but I wasn’t sure that it was worth the trade-off. I had gone from being picked on in the shower by Ida Melendez to persecuted by a giant, evil, all-knowing and all-seeing corporation with some sinister hidden agenda that imprisoned my best friend, blackmailed my (kind-of) girlfriend, and dropped my parents through the roof of a waffle house. Not a great improvement in the grand scheme of things.

I tried to remember how long we’d been walking when we stopped the last time. None of the countryside really looked familiar. I remembered a valley with a lot of fir trees, but there were dozens of those poking between the sloping green hills. Had we been going for an hour? More? Less? My memory of what happened when we stopped was so clear that the walk itself was almost entirely forgotten.

Just thinking about it did have one effect, though: I needed to pee. I had consumed almost all of the bottled water in my backpack and had been too tense on the way here to drop my pants, but it was certainly top of mind on the issues chart right now. I climbed down a narrow embankment and found a cluster of trees. This definitely wasn’t the same place we had stopped the last time – the trees were mostly bushes and there was no cabin in sight – but it would do.

I had only just unzipped my pants and started the evacuation process when I felt something sting the back of my neck. Figuring it was a bee, I reached up to swat it away. Instead of an insect, however, my fingers came away with a small metal object with what looked like purple feathers sticking out the back. I just had time to look confused before my vision went blurry and my legs did the same.

“I
can’t believe you shot me! Again! You asshole!”

Max smiled. “I had to make absolutely sure you were on your own. And I had to check you for tracking devices.”

I woke up on the floor in some sort of cabin. The only furniture I could see was a rickety wooden table in the kitchen area next to an old wood stove and a couple of worn camping chairs with fabric hanging from the seams. Thin black curtains were closed over the small front window, but I could see enough light streaming in around the edges to tell that it was still afternoon. I hadn’t been out of it for long. I sat up stiffly and rubbed my neck. I could feel a small, mosquito bite-sized swelling where the dart had hit me.

“Hell was in that dart?”

“Whaddayou care?” Max said. “You woke up, didn’t you?”

“What?”

“Well, we have different colour darts for different things. Blue’s for snooze and red’s for dead.”

“But it was purple.”

“Eyewitness testimony is notoriously unreliable. Especially from those who’ve been under the influence of military-grade tranquillizers.”

“But I’m pretty sure it was. Am I now gonna be awake for twenty-four hours and then suddenly drop dead?”

“Nag, nag, nag.”

“How long were you following me?”

Max crouched down and shone a penlight quickly into each of my eyes. “From the road. You drove down the same wrong turn three times again. I had a little side bet with myself to see how many times you would keep doing it. You owe me fifty bucks.”

I blinked madly, trying to get the residue of the flashlight out of my eyes. “I would say it’s good to see you again, Commander, but now I can’t see a damn thing.”

Max yanked me to my feet and pulled me into a hug. “Damn good to see you again, too, Commander Simms.”

We stepped back and I looked at Max more closely in the dim light. He looked thinner, but I could tell from his bear hug that he was probably strong enough to bench-press a jeep. He was dressed in a long-sleeved green shirt and khaki pants that looked to have approximately fifty pockets on them.

I wobbled slightly and Max steered me toward one of the ratty camping chairs.

“I knew you would figure it out,” he said. “Faster than I thought, too. I was worried you might rack your brain for days.”

I opened my mouth to say something and found my throat too dry. Max passed me a canteen and I chugged several gulps before handing it back.

“Okay,” I said. “I’m really hoping you can explain what the hell is going on. Where have you been? I haven’t heard from you since the JD and the next thing I know the CEO of Firmamental’s calling me in to his office and asking me to track you down because you walked off with something that they want back? Why didn’t you tell me you worked for the same company? They told me you were wounded overseas, but you look fine to me.”

“I wasn’t wounded, I was arrested.”

“Arrested? For what?”

“Are you hungry? I mean, for something other than the expired beef jerky you were carrying in that excuse for a backpack?”

“It was expired? I didn’t think beef jerky ever expired.”

“By three months. Is that the same stuff we had out here when we were kids?”

“And what do you mean excuse? That backpack served me quite well through university.”

“It’s not even waterproof. And it doesn’t have any ammunition storage pockets.”

“Yeah, I don’t know what I was thinking when I bought that to trek into the hostile terrain of liberal academia.”

“So that’s a no to food.”

Now that I was starting to get my legs back, I had to admit that I was hungry. I hadn’t eaten anything since the morning. “What have you got?”

Max paused. “Actually, here…nothing.”

“In that case, I’ll have a large bacon cheeseburger with a side of
why the fuck did you ask me, then
?”

Max sat down opposite me and grinned. “Sorry. There’ll be food at our next stop.”

“Next stop?” I thought about getting up to look out the window, but wasn’t entirely confident that my legs would get me there just yet. “Where are we going?”

“There’s somebody I think you need to meet.”

“Who?”

“It’ll all be explained when we get there.”

“Can you explain any of it now?”

He glanced at the door. “We shouldn’t stay here too long. They’ll be looking for you.”

“Who? Firmamental?”

“No. Firmamental’s just one of their many front organizations. It was an insurance company a long time ago. Now they just use it as a glorified data warehouse.”

“That would certainly explain all the cutbacks. Most of the time, I felt like I was the only one working there. Well, me and Gotoguy.”

“Who?”

“Never mind. What the hell were you doing there? Why didn’t you ever try to get in touch? Where have you been for the last, like, eight years or so?”

“Can you wait until we get to our next stop before I answer some of that?” Max asked. “The sooner we get going, the better.”

“How about you give me the episode recap now and the full season whenever we get where we’re going?”

“Fair enough,” Max said. “As you probably guessed, I didn’t join the GDI because I wanted to be the ultimate GI Joe.”

“Actually, I didn’t guess that. It did seem like kind of a natural fit for you, though.”

“The night we tried to take out the Weather Station, I realized we were in way over our heads. If we were going to take them down, the first thing we’d need to do was find out how big they were and how they really worked. The only way to do that was from the inside. Given my skill set, that meant going to work for the GDI.”

“I guess that explains why I ended up working for an insurance company. I don’t really have a skill set. What kind of things did you do?”

“Not much in the beginning,” Max said. “Security details on construction projects. Guarding mid-level executives in hot zones. Boring shit like that.”

“Boring? I bet it was probably more interesting than explaining to Herbert J. Sternhauser the Third why we were adding a rider to his policy to limit our liability in the event his pigs were ever involved in a Ponzi scheme or similar attempt to defraud shareholders of rightful earnings.”

Max laughed. “Not really. Mostly it meant tagging along with their girlfriends when they went on shopping trips. Or standing around in hotel hallways while they fucked. Just another day on the farm: grazing, breeding.”

“I guess.”

“Once I’d done that for a while, they moved me up to the infiltration units. These are the hit-and-run units they send in to remove potential threats. Every once in a while, some group of idiots – such as ourselves – tries to blow up a Weather Station or similar target. They’re not well-organized, but they are out there.”

“Violet said she provided intel for units like that.”

“You saw Violet again?” Max said, surprised. “When?”

“My last year of university, mostly. She said she was going to quit, but then they used a tornado to pick up my parents’ car and drop it through the roof of the Denny’s on Route 24. With my parents still in it.”

“Sorry about that,” Max said. “I heard about it just after it happened.”