Regan Wolfrom: After The Fires Went Out: Coyote

“Don’t tell me my job,” I said.

“That’s not your job, Baptiste. Your job is security, not supplies.”

“Well…when I die in six months I’ll be taking on a new job as weed fertilizer. That sure as hell won’t do you guys any good.”

Graham shook his head. “You have pills for now. We don’t have enough batteries.”

I laughed. “There are probably three hundred car batteries left in this town. We can pull those out once we’re done checking the hospital again.”

Graham started slowing down.

“We’re going to the hospital,” I said.

“There are a half dozen school buses over there,” Graham said, pointing toward a gravel lot on the south side of the highway. “Let’s yank those batteries at least…just to get started.”

“You can yank whatever you like, Graham. But I’m taking this truck up to Lady Minto with or without you.”

He turned to glare at me. I assume it was a glare; all I could see was his helmet.

“I’m not kidding,” I said.

Graham seethed a little, but eventually he gave me a long sigh and a slow shake of his head. “It’s selfish,” he said quietly.

“That’s your opinion.”

He started us moving again, not saying anything more about it. I could tell that he was pissed, and I knew that he’d probably run right to Lisa when we got home to tell her what a big bad asshole I am. It doesn’t make a difference what he says about me; he’ll keep mumbling but we’ll keep working, because that’s really all there’s left for us to do.

Graham pulled us into the empty parking lot of burnt-out Lady Minto.

Beside a curb we found her.

The first body of the season if you don’t count Ant.

She’d been pretty once, early twenties, with short brown hair and thick purple-rimmed glasses, but her face was bruised and battered now. Someone had beaten her to death and I didn’t know why.

“Pauline Yarrow,” I said. “Wasn’t she shacked up with the McIvors?”

I wasn’t as horrified as I ought to be. As I used to be with this type of thing.

“I thought the McIvors left,” Graham said.

“They did. Over a month ago. Guess she decided to stay behind.”

I heard Graham sigh. I looked over and saw tears in his eyes. At least one of us still felt something.

I looked at the trail of blood that marked a path behind her.

“Looks like she stumbled over here from somewhere. She’s been here a couple hours,” I said, realizing that I’d become an expert on dead people.

“She thought she’d find help at an abandoned hospital?”

“I guess she wasn’t thinking straight. You know, since she was slowly bleeding to death.”

Although it was possible that she’d been hoping to find something to treat herself, like bandages or painkillers. If we’d left before sunrise we might even have found her before the end.

“I wish we had time to give her a proper burial,” Graham said.

“I wish we had time to figure out who killed her.” I climbed down from the cart. “Are you going to come in and help me look for supplies?”

“I don’t need any heart pills.”

“Maybe we’ll find some pills that’ll make you into less of a whiny bitch.”

He ignored that. “I might go grab a few batteries.”

I looked around the parking lot. There wasn’t a single car.

“I wouldn’t,” I said. “It’s not a good idea for us to split up.”

“But it’s a good idea to wander around looking for pills in a place that’s been picked over by a hundred scavengers?”

“Just wait here, okay? I’ll be back in…I don’t know…twenty minutes.”

Probably enough time for him to dig a shallow grave for Pauline; I hoped he wasn’t stupid enough to try.

“Don’t rush on my account,” Graham said. “I wouldn’t want you to overtax that fragile little heart of yours.”

“Wait here,” I said.

I left the shotgun with Graham and made my way to what was once the emergency department; most of the building was burnt almost to the foundations, but there were still parts left standing, including an old folks’ wing that was close to whole.

I was surprised to see what looked like fresh paper and garbage on the floor, floating on top of the ash and shards of burnt plastic and broken glass. I’m sure there have been other visitors to Lady Minto since the first time we’d scavenged there, people looking for painkillers and syringes and whatever else they thought they’d need for their homemade clinics. I was hoping that most people wouldn’t even know what Laneradine is or why they might need it someday. Maybe they’d just tossed it off the shelves and I’d find a box of it lying under a soiled bedpan.

I still expect to see dead bodies there, which makes no sense since Lady Minto is about the only place in town where you won’t find them, aside from poor Pauline out there in the parking lot.

We actually moved the patients out of Lady Minto a couple days before The Fires started; we knew that the hospital was a tempting target for marauders, so we started moving people and supplies into the green zone, to a couple of doctor’s offices downtown along with some of the equipment we thought we’d need. I know that decision saved some lives, but I wish we’d had enough time to bring over all of the drugs.

Of course, Fisher Livingston had commandeered all the drugs we had managed to store up for his caravan of fools, so either way I’d still be up shit creek these days.

I searched through a pile of ash and what looked like pill boxes by the remains of a nurses’ station, glad to have a pair of heavy gloves designed to protect against stray needles. Antacids, laxatives, antifungals…nothing I needed…just every drug on the planet that wasn’t connected to getting high.

The MDMA must’ve disappeared right away, likely before The Fires had even gone out. Some quick-thinking kids had probably realized the world was ending and had decided that it was the perfect time to throw a rave in their basement with the last few boxes of E.

I would’ve liked to try some.

I wasn’t surprised that the first place everyone looked was out of goodies, and I moved down the charred and roofless hallway towards the still-standing wing of the nursing home. That part of the hospital had made it through the fire for the most part, but it hadn’t been treated well by the scavenging.

Graham and I tiptoe around when we scavenge, almost like it’s a crime scene, trying to leave things just as they are. It’s a waste of time and energy to make a mess, and you never know if what you glanced over today will be something to try and come back for tomorrow.

But there are definitely a lot of guys who do things differently, with a heavy duty garbage bag in one hand and a crowbar in the other, wanting to make every place they visit look like the tent cities of San Diego.

All it would have taken was one visit by the worst kind of scavenger to make Lady Minto what it is today. There are holes in walls that serve no discernible purpose; someone just wanted to waste a little time and energy busting through drywall and so they did.

But I had hope for the nursing home; people may have torn through the emergency room nurses’ station and the pharmacy, but there was always a chance that they hadn’t bothered with the old folk’s portion, thinking that they had no need for pills to help them pee or build up their bone density.

Maybe I’d get lucky.

I found a set of wood cabinets behind a desk; it looked more like a pantry than a nurses’ station. The lock on it hadn’t been broken.

Most of the locks I’ve picked are wafer locks, the cheapest of the cheap and the ones you get in most houses and offices. I’ve got a small set of lockpicks on my belt that lets me open a wafer lock in around ten seconds. But the cabinet was secured with something stronger, a heavy-duty tubular locks on each drawer; I didn’t have anything to pick that.