Regan Wolfrom - After The Fires Went Out - Coyote

“I can’t do that.”

“If we keep pushing them away, they’re going to move closer to Justin.”

“So?”

“So come on, Sara. You don’t see what’s happening here? Justin is becoming a problem. We can’t risk giving him a couple of new allies just because we’re stubborn.”

She nodded slowly. “I know. I’ll try.”

I leaned in and gave her a kiss. “I love you, Sara.”

She smiled.

“What?” I asked.

“You meant it that time.”

“What?”

“Sometimes it sounds like you’re just humouring me, like you feel you should say it because we just had sex or you just said something stupid. But that one was real.”

“Okay…”

“I love you,” she said.

She always meant it.

Today is Thursday, December 20th.

Graham and I hooked up the plow just before midnight without more than a small amount of trouble, and Lisa joined us a few minutes later, carrying the beat-up leather guitar case I’d kept in the basement.

“What the heck is that for?” Graham asked. “Baptiste’s gonna sing these guys to death?”

“Sing them to heaven with some Mumford & Sons,” I said.

“It’s not a guitar,” Lisa said.

“Oh,” Graham said.

She handed the case to me.

I put it in the cab of the gravel truck, behind the bench.

“Well,” Graham said, “what is it?”

“Not here,” I said.

Graham drove us through the first gate and then to the bridge, almost hitting 80 kph in the snow. There’s no way I would have been comfortable taking it that fast.

He stopped at the gate and I opened the door to hop out.

“Hold on,” he said. “What’s in the case?”

“A gun,” I said.

I hopped out and unlocked the gate.

Graham didn’t drive through at first, so I waved at him to get going. He shook his head and drove up past the gate.

I climbed back into the truck.

“What kind of gun?” he asked as he started driving toward Cochrane. “You have a hunting rifle or something?”

“A C12 light machine gun,” I told him. “It’s only semi-auto, but it does the job.”

“What…the heck?” He turned to Lisa. “You knew about this?”

She nodded.

“But…we could have been using this,” he said. “The whole time…the attack at the airport…”

“We didn’t need it,” I said. “It’s for emergencies only.”

“If that wasn’t an emergency ―”

“It wasn’t. And now we’re going to use it on those two cunts at Silver Queen Lake.”

I watched Graham cringe at the language. I made a mental note to say ‘cunt’ more often. Alanna used to say it all the time; she said that it was part and parcel of being a post-feminist, whatever the hell that meant.

“I can’t believe you guys kept this from me,” Graham said. “You don’t trust me?”

“It’s not about trust. It’s about needing to know. Lisa and I are both trained to use it ―”

“Wait…you showed her how to shoot it?”

“It’s not that hard,” Lisa said. “Just hold on tight and shoot.”

“So I know that if something happens while I’m gone, Lisa’s back at the cottage with the C12. That’s why she and I never scavenge together. Well…that and the sexual tension.”

Lisa smiled.

“This…” Graham said, “I’m not happy about this.”

“You’re allowed to be angry,” I said. “You’re allowed to think I’m an asshole.”

“That ship has sailed.”

“Just don’t tell anyone.”

“Why? Why is it a bad thing to have more people who know about that thing and how to use it?”

“I don’t want Justin to know I have it.”

“Why?”

“You’re like a two-year-old,” Lisa said. “So many goddamn questions.”

“Justin’s a problem,” I said. “That hasn’t changed.”

“So why do we keep him around?” Graham asked.

“Because he doesn’t need a semi-automatic to do the job. And just because he’s trouble doesn’t mean he isn’t useful. It just means that we can’t trust him.”

“I don’t get the hatred,” Graham said.

“It’s about trust,” I said. “That’s all.”

“So it stays a secret,” Lisa said. “That’s why we’re taking a risk here. This is the first time in over a year that we’ve left people behind with no real protection.”

“So what if Stems attacks?” Graham said.

“He won’t,” Lisa replied.

“He probably won’t,” I said. “But these guys will show up eventually if we don’t take them out. So we take the chance and hope to hell that we’re not making the biggest mistake since 3D television.”

Graham nodded.

He still seemed pissed. By that I mean angry, but I’m sure he was also still a tiny bit drunk.

We drove through Cochrane with the lights off, relying on the glint of the moonlight against the snow. If there was anyone there they’d hear us, but they wouldn’t be able to see that much.

We didn’t run into anyone; all we saw were forgotten and dead buildings, covered in a fresh blanket of snow. Most of the buildings in Cochrane were damaged in the fire; the south and west sides were hit the hardest, and looking around those neighbourhoods now looks like those old photos of Hiroshima after the A-bomb fell, blackened skeletons of brick and concrete that used to be churches or schools or hockey arenas, and every once in a while there’ll be a tree or a hydro pole that’s still standing, and you wonder just how it survived when even the cars burned up so much that they just look like bundles of metal sticks.

The rest of town didn’t get hit as badly, but there aren’t that many buildings that didn’t catch some of it. Sometimes when we scavenge I’ll walk up a flight of stairs wondering if they’ll collapse from some unseen damage, or I’ll walk through the front door before realizing that a back wall has caved in and there’s nothing left inside but rubble.

The polar bear habitat is still standing at the southeast edge of town; we walked through it once and could still see where someone had shot and butchered the four bears that had been housed there. The whole town looks like a carcass that’s been picked over.

We turned north on Western and head up to Clute, where we found a trailer at the bottleneck just like the one the Walkers had brought up to Silver Queen, but it was dark with a drift of snow blown halfway up the door.

“Guess they weren’t lying,” I said. “They’re sticking close to home.”

“No tracks anywhere,” Graham said. “No one’s out today.”

“So if we’re lucky those Spirit Assholes are bundled up by the fire,” Lisa said. “Just waiting for a couple of pretty little head shots.”

“Like shooting them with a gun,” Graham said, “or posing their corpses for a photograph?”

“That was totally something Matt would say,” I said. “You sure you two aren’t related?”

“Shut up,” Graham said.

We kept on driving toward Silver Queen Lake, along a road that was as lifeless as everywhere else.

Once we were at Silver Queen I told Graham to take the south road, without any solid reasoning; I had no evudence thay’d go back to the cottage where I’d first found them, since most of the cottages at Silver Queen had enough supplies leftover to keep a couple murderers comfortable.

“So let’s keep it simple,” I said. “I’ll take the front with my SIG and Lisa will take the back with the Mossberg. You’ve got your SIG, Graham, and a one-ton means of vehicular homicide. You see anyone who you haven’t slept with…” ― I motioned to Lisa ― “or wish you could become…” ― motioning to me ― “you know what to do.”