Regan Wolfrom - After The Fires Went Out - Coyote

“We might. So you’re just here to take our stuff?”

“You should come back with us,” Fiona said.

Rasheed frowned. “I can’t leave my friends.”

“Your friends aren’t bolted to the floor, are they? They can come, too.”

“I don’t think you understand. Maybe you should all come inside.”

I nodded to Graham, and he climbed down to join us, bringing the shotgun with him.

“I’d rather you left all of your guns out here on the porch,” Rasheed said.

“That’s not possible,” I said.

He just nodded and opened the door for us.

We all went aside.

The living room looked more like a storeroom, with boxes and bags of food in piles along the walls, but on top of every surface was one or more scented candles, all lit and casting their signature stench into the muddle. The combined result was overpowering, but underneath it all I felt like I could almost smell rot.

In the center of the room were two single mattresses next to a wood stove. A young ginger-haired woman was lying on one, apparently asleep, with a sheet over all of her body aside from her freckled face. She seemed thin and pale, much thinner than Rasheed, who himself was close to underweight.

“She doesn’t look well,” Fiona said. “I don’t understand…you still have some food, don’t you?”

“She hasn’t eaten in a while,” Rasheed said. “I think she’s sad.”

“Are you going to wake her up?”

“Just let her sleep…she’s tired.”

“Where’s everyone else?” I asked. It didn’t feel right.

“In the kitchen,” Rasheed said.

I glanced over to Graham; he seemed to understand that something was off.

“You two wait here,” I said.

Fiona looked like she was about to question me, but then she seemed to get the message.

Rasheed walked towards the kitchen door and I followed a few steps behind. He unlatched the door and pushed it open; I could feel the cool air pushing in towards us.

He’d closed off the kitchen; there was no heat in there.

But there was a smell that I recognized.

The smell of a corpse, that terrible odour of death that can’t be covered up no matter how many scented candles you try to burn.

I followed him inside.

There was a fridge, a stove, and a large chest freezer. I didn’t think any of them were running. I didn’t think there was any electricity.

Just the cold. And the smell.

“Where are your friends, Rasheed?” I asked.

“In the freezer,” he said.

“Did you kill them?”

“There wasn’t enough food.”

“Open the freezer for me, would you?”

He flipped up the lid and the rest of the smell came; it was far worse than the bodies in Cochrane, where the sunlight had done its job. In the freezer was a soup of turgid corpses, so rotten and putrefied that I couldn’t be sure how many there were.

“The power went out last summer,” he said. “I wasn’t able to get it working again.”

“Close the goddamned lid,” I said.

He closed the lid and gave me another nervous smile.

“I don’t know what to do, Rasheed,” I said.

“Just leave me be, Mr. Baptiste. Take what you want and go.”

I heard Fiona cry out from the next room. “Oh my god!” she screamed.

I ran out to the living room to see Fiona stooped down over the sleeping girl. She’d pulled off the sheet; the naked girl underneath had her wrists pinned to her side and her ankles bound, all with layer upon layer of fishing line.

“I think she’s dead,” Fiona said.

“She’s sleeping,” Rasheed said.

I dropped down beside Fiona. “She’s still breathing,” I said.

Graham pulled out his pocketknife and slowly began cutting the fishing line.

I stood back up and walked over to Rasheed.

“Take what you want and go,” he said. His demeanor hadn’t changed.

“Do you know what you did here?” I asked.

He nodded. “There wasn’t enough food.”

I punched him in the mouth. He fell to his knees.

“Baptiste, please,” Fiona said. “He’s obviously not well.”

“We can’t leave him here,” I said. “He’s dangerous.”

“We’re not taking him with us,” Graham said as he kept cutting.

I knew what I had to do. “I’m sorry, Fiona.”

“Please,” she said.

I wanted to try to convince her, but we didn’t have time. The starving girl needed help.

“We can’t just stuff her full of food,” Graham said. “We need to renourish her carefully. She needs milk, I think…Lisa will know.”

I grabbed Rasheed by the neck and dragged him towards the front door.

“No,” Fiona said. “Please don’t…”

I pulled him onto the porch and down the steps. “Stay there, Fiona,” I said.

She didn’t follow me.

I dragged Rasheed to the side of the cabin, to where I was sure Fiona couldn’t see. I pushed him down on his knees and pulled out my gun.

I fired a shot and he fell, and I fired again to make sure he was dead.

I left his body where it lay, and ran back in to help Graham wrap up the girl and carry her to the cart. Fiona held open the door and helped us lift the girl into place, and then she rode beside the girl all the way home, doing her best to give comfort.

I’m sure all she wanted to do on the trip back was cry, but she didn’t. I’m proud of her for that.

I called Lisa with the handheld to let her know what had happened, and by the time we’d arrived she was waiting at the door with Sara and Kayla in tow.

We laid the girl on the couch in the living room.

“Kayla,” Lisa said, “pour some goat’s milk into a cup and warm it up by sticking it in a bowl of hot water. We want it close to room temperature. Sara, see if you can find some clothes for her.” She turned to Graham and I. “You guys get back to work. We’ll take it from here.”

“What should I do?” Fiona asked.

“Just sit here with her,” Lisa said. “You’re her oldest friend right now.”

I followed Graham back to the front door. “I don’t understand,” I said.

“You don’t know Lisa as well as you think,” Graham said.

“What does that mean?”

“She was a nurse up in Moose Factory.”

“She’s never mentioned that. And from the quality of the work she’s done on me…”

“I know. And you shouldn’t bring it up with her.”

I nodded. “So we head back to Arpin?”

“I guess so. Rasheed did say they might have what we were looking for.”

“They’d better. Or else we waded into a big pile of shit for nothing.”

“Not for nothing, Baptiste. We may have saved that girl’s life.”

He was right.

I’d had to kill a young man to do it. But for whatever reason it didn’t bother me as much as I thought it should.

The trip back was worth it.

We found exactly what we wanted at Arpin. They’d been trying to do what we hope to do, growing wheat and oilseed, and doing every bit of it with renewables.

We towed the tractor we’d found back to our place to charge it with the battery bank. Once that’s done it’ll take at least another day to tow the rest of the equipment back with us, and then we’ll want to take a look at all of the other supplies they have.

Rasheed may have bought us another few months of food by losing his mind and killing his friends.

I’m no Sara, but by cuddling up with her inventory doc I can tell that even after adding the Marchands and that starving young girl, we should be able to last long enough to harvest our first crop.