Geoff North - How the World Ends

Louie sat up. “These weren’t your ordinary variety of wood ticks. They were genetically enhanced. They operate through a hive-collective, they move as one… they feed as one.”

“And these ticks will spread out?”

“They’ll consume everything in their path.” Louie couldn’t prove the LDV3 ticks had moved beyond the destroyed confines of the DSC. He could only go with what he had seen. He had lied to Roy about how they had been set loose, but he’d seen what they had done to Richard Sheffield. That part of it was true. “We’re not safe in the city. We have to keep moving.”

Roy pushed the last bit of piss free from his bladder. It steamed over the coals, sending a cloud of stink into Louie’s face. “They would need living things to feed on. There isn’t much of anything to feed on back in the city.”

“I watched them take over a dead body. My boss rose back up.”

“I’ll believe that when I see it.” Roy zipped his pants and lifted Louie up from the ground. “Come on, buddy. We’ll keep heading west, see what we can find.” What was who , and who was a grey-haired, shop-lifting dyke travelling with a couple of kids.

Louie started to feel better after a quarter mile of walking. His stomach, though emptied and once again in need of food, was no longer turning over. “So you know I worked at the DSC… You haven’t told me much about working in the shopping mall.”

“What the fuck else do you need to know? I was a security guard. I caught kids stealing and phoned their parents. I wasn’t some big-shot disease research asshole.”

They walked past a trucker’s weigh station a few miles ahead. Louie had wanted to explore the small building, but Roy had talked him out of it. Roy wanted to see what was in the gas stations and C-stores up ahead. They found very little.

“Maybe we should get off the main highway,” Louie offered. He pointed south, towards a distant forest. “There’s a care home that way, not far that far down 43. I had an uncle once that was sent there after his brains were kicked in by a horse.”

“A place for retards?”

“Convalescence,” Louie sighed. “A home for the elderly and disabled.”

“Did your uncle recover?”

“He died there about three years ago.”

“Doesn’t sound like a place I’d want to send a loved one.” Roy started south anyway, down highway 43. They weren’t going to find anything else in the looted town of Eustache.

Green Forest Haven was right where Louie said it would be, three miles south of the Trans-Canada Highway, nestled in a forest that wasn’t all that green anymore. It hadn’t always been a care home, Roy figured. It looked more like a hulking three-story prison built sometime in the first half of the twentieth century. It was a red brick monstrosity with high narrow windows. Roy could see bars set behind the glass. “Some place to send your uncle. I would’ve died here, too… probably hung myself.”

“Don’t let the appearance fool you. They took good care of their clients.”

“It looks like a goddamned house of horrors.”

“It used to be a residential school for First Nations children, so it may well have been many years ago.”

“Fucking Indians?”

“You’re a class act, Roy.”

Roy shrugged and walked up the wide concrete steps to the front doors. “They should’ve dropped one of those bombs here and cleaned up this eyesore.” He tried the handle. Locked. “Fucking figures. World goes to hell and everyone becomes a paranoid asshole.” The doors were old, but well kept. Each consisted more of glass set into six individual panes with a single dead bolt lock joining them together. Roy stepped back and then kicked at the frames in the middle. They gave way on his first attempt, banging inwards. Some of the glass insets shattered, depositing shards across the dull green linoleum inside.

“You could’ve rung the buzzer,” a woman said. “Or at least knocked.”

She was standing behind a desk at the reception counter. Louie groaned inwardly when he saw the rifle in her hands. She was tiny, smaller than the crazy woman that had ordered them to strip down in the underground parkade of the Sandman hotel. Marie Hodgkin would’ve shot them down like dogs if Roy hadn’t wrestled a gun from one of her security goons first and ended her life before she could give the order. “Sorry about that,” he said in a soothing tone. He offered up his empty hands. “Everything’s locked up these days, and we haven’t come across a single soul willing to help out. My friend and I are starving… we haven’t eaten in days.”

She lowered the rifle, but kept it aimed in Roy’s general direction.

The big ex-mall-security-guard studied the weapon while his companion continued speaking to the woman. It was a single-shot .22 calibre rifle. Thing looks older than the building we’re in. Roy had seen hundreds of them growing up, usually sitting in barns, or stored in the front porch closets of farm houses for easy access. They were good for killing gophers and scaring off skunks, but not much else. If the thing’s even loaded, she’ll only have time to take one of us down.

Louie was still talking. “Yeah, the city’s a mess. We’ve been slowly moving out for over a week, helping out those we can along the way.” He introduced himself and Roy.

She set the rifle down on the desk and shook her head. “Forgive me. My name’s Tracy Klausburg… I’ve been under so much stress since it happened. All the administrators and other nurses just up and left. Most of the residents—at least those capable enough—wandered off later. There’s only a few left.”

They stepped forward. Louie went to shake the small hand, and Roy punched her in the face. She fell back into the chair behind the desk, her nose shattered and spilling blood. Louie hooked onto his thick wrist and tried pulling him back. “Why did you do that? She put the gun down!”

Roy pushed him away. “You’re an idiot sometimes, Finkbiner… too damn trusting.” He went behind the counter and inspected the rifle. “Fucking empty. It figures. This bitch wouldn’t have had the nerve to shoot us even if it was loaded.”

Tracy Klausburg groaned in her chair. Blood was leaking out between the small fingers covering her face. A tooth was sitting on her lap.

“Did you have to hit her so hard?”

“No.” Roy placed the rifle back down on the desk. “I’m going to check this place out… see what we can take. You stay with her.” There were two winding stairways behind the reception counter. Roy started up one of them.

Louie called after him. “I thought you said stealing was wrong. You told me the only thing that would keep civilization going was if we obeyed the laws.”

“I said shop-lifting was wrong. And that shit about civilization and laws doesn’t apply anymore. I lost my fucking job.” He vanished up onto the second floor, leaving Louie alone with the last staff member on duty at Green Forest Haven.

The first few rooms he entered were empty. Roy continued down the narrow hallway. The third door to the left was open. He found the first of the six remaining residents lying in a bed, staring up at the ceiling with a comatose expression on his sunken face. Roy went and stood over the frail-looking man. He could see white patches at the corners of his mouth where saliva had dried. More of it had soaked into the pillow beneath his head.

Roy nudged the man’s boney shoulder. “What’s your fucking problem? You just going to lay there and let that bitch downstairs take care of you?”

The man didn’t answer. Roy slapped the side of his face. “The world’s ended, pal. There was a big war and everybody lost. Get up and start taking care of yourself. No one’s going to wipe your ass anymore.”