Regan Wolfrom - After The Fires Went Out - Coyote

I pulled her hands behind her back, holding her wrists together.

“Get some rope,” I said to Kayla.

She ran back to the cottage.

“Please,” Elodie said. “Please…” She wasn’t fighting me. I lightened my grip on her wrists.

“You’ll be okay,” I said.

Kayla returned with a spool of blue and white nylon cord.

I bound Elodie’s wrists, and then I pulled her feet together and brought them up toward her hands, tying her ankles to her wrists.

“I don’t like this,” Kayla said. “She’s terrified.”

“She’ll be okay,” I said. “You know that.”

“I wonder if that’s what they said to Tabitha and Natalie.”

“What the fuck?”

“Just…go easy on her.”

“We need to gag her.”

“Yeah, that’s just what we need. She’ll end up choking to death.”

“Your scarf.”

She frowned, but handed it to me anyway.

I tied a double knot in the middle. “Open your mouth, Elodie.”

She didn’t.

I shoved the knotted scarf against her mouth.

She wouldn’t take it.

I pushed harder.

Kayla reached in and pinched the girl’s nostrils. “Hold it over her mouth,” she said.

I kept holding it.

After a few seconds Elodie gasped.

I shoved the knot into her mouth and tied the scarf around her head. “That was a waste of everyone’s time,” I told her.

We piled the packs and snowshoes on top of Elodie’s bound body, along with my tattered guitar case. She wouldn’t be able to see what was in it anyway.

I stuffed the Mossberg in the passenger seat and climbed in. “You’re driving,” I said to Kayla. “Remember…if anyone asks your name’s Elodie and I’m your step-dad or something.”

“Okay,” Kayla said as she got in. Once she was sitting, she craned her neck toward the back. “I’m sorry, Elodie. Everything’s going to be okay.”

Elodie tried to say something in reply. Whatever it was it didn’t sound too friendly.

Kayla drove us deeper into Quebec before we turned to head north. I’d figured that we’d have less chance of running into any kind of security checks if we were a long way from any borders.

We hit a few farms not long after the cottages, and I was amazed at how normal everything looked. There’d been fires here, I could see, but wherever the flames hadn’t reached looked just like the farms around Cochrane used to look.

We’d pass by pickup trucks and electric cars and even the occasional minivan, and everyone looked happy and healthy and a million miles away from the end of the world.

We dipped into forests again, the edge of the clay belt, I guess, and then we turned north and soon we were in farmland again, more farms and houses and life than I think they’d ever had on the Ontario side.

We drove through a beautiful little village with a church with a silver steeple, and they even had a gas station with an open sign in the window.

“Wish we had money,” Kayla said. “It’d feel nice to buy something again. I don’t even care what.”

“I doubt they use money,” I said. “If they do, it probably some kind of weird French money.”

“They probably use something as currency…poutine, maybe?”

“That or a smug sense of superiority.”

I heard another muffled curse from the back.

“We’re just joking, Elodie,” I said. “I used to date a French woman. She was Catholic and everything.”

I was trying to sound friendly and non-threatening, but I had a feeling that she was probably chalking it up to some kind of serial-killer psychopathy.

I decided to stop trying.

We kept going through the towns of Macamic, La Sarre, and Beaucanton, all with official signs sitting beside cute wooden and handpainted ones.

We’d keep heading north, so far north that no one would be expecting us, north enough that they didn’t think they had neighbours to the west.

After two and a half hours, we arrived in the town of Val-Paradis, the last piece of civilization on our way home. It was not much more than a few houses and a church.

“We should find a place to take a break,” I said. “Figure out our plan.”

“Okay,” Kayla said.

She turned north.

“Wrong way,” I said.

“Taking a break.”

She drove up the road until the we reached a point where it was no longer plowed.

“Guess no one’s living up this way anymore,” she said. She slowly turned the car around and stopped. “This okay?”

“Looks good.”

I opened the back and took our gear out.

I untied the pink scarf and pulled it out of Elodie’s mouth.

“Are you hungry?” I asked her.

“Yes,” she said.

I rummaged through the packs until I found a box of crackers.

I held one up to her mouth.

“Can you untie me, please?” she asked.

“You’ll try to run,” I said. “Sorry.”

She took a bite of the cracker. She didn’t seem to enjoy it. “ C’est fétide. ”

“I think they’re a little stale. Blame your brother.”

She took another bite. “Do you have water?”

I found my canteen and gave her a drink.

“ Merci, ” she said, thanking me.

“ Pa de kwa, ” I said, automatically uttering the Haitian my father had taught me.

“You two having a moment?” Kayla asked.

I smiled. “We’re bonding.”

Elodie started to cry.

“What’s wrong?” I asked her.

“I don’t want to die,” she said.

“We’re not going to hurt you,” Kayla said. “We’re the good guys.”

“My parents will be worried about me.”

“You’ll see them soon,” I said.

I could tell she didn’t believe us.

It didn’t matter.

“We can’t take this car much further,” I said.

“What wrong with it?” Kayla said.

“We can’t take any car. They’ll be blocking the roads. They’d be guarding them anyway, but I’m sure they’re looking for us.”

“Too bad you don’t look like anyone around here,” Kayla said. “I could maybe pass for Elodie, but you’re a tougher sell.”

“They wouldn’t let Elodie pass through, either. I’m sure it’s locked down to any traffic.”

“So we need another snowmobile.”

“You got it. Assuming we can get all the way home on a tank.”

“And assuming we can find a snowmobile. Or a full tank.”

“So you understand the challenge,” I said.

“I do…and I know that I’ll have to be the one to find it.”

“What do you mean?”

“You stand out…”

“I know…but it’s too risky.”

“It’s not risky at all,” Kayla said. “ Je débrouiller assez bien en français. ”

“I can help,” Elodie said. “I can go with you. No one would be suspicious of two girls driving around.”

“We’ll all go,” I said. “Elodie and I will trade places. That way, if things go bad…well, I’ll be there.”

“Okay,” Kayla said. “But please…oh pretty please…let’s stick that moist wad of scarf in your mouth.”

I chuckled and started untying Elodie’s ankles.

We found two snowmobiles on a trailer hitched to a running truck. The truck was parked outside a house not far south of Val-Paradis. Kayla dropped me off on the road a few metres away, and after she’d driven back north for a minute or so I made my way to the truck.

The door was locked.

I smashed it with the butt of my SIG.

I climbed in and followed after the little two-seater.

I don’t think the owner heard a thing.