The Apocalypse Club (23 page)

“What improvements?” I asked.

“Used a stronger chip clip,” Max said, pointing. “Holds position better.”

“Please tell me you’re not going to wear that in an abandoned mine.”

“I thought I just did say that.”

We never made it to the mine, though. We’d been hiking for about an hour when we came across the cabin. We followed a brown trickle of water called Stunted Creek for the first half hour and then broke away to head slightly more to the north. Max said it wasn’t safe to trust GPS out here, so we were entirely at the mercy of his map- and compass-reading skills.

“What’s wrong with GPS?” I asked.

“You want
them
telling you where you are?” Max said. “You know how many people they get rid of every year just by giving them the wrong directions?”

“No. And I don’t think you do, either.”

“No, I don’t. Because they all just disappear. They ask for directions to the nearest pizza place and the next thing you know, someone’s fishing their car out of Lake Baikal.”

“Uh huh.” I wasn’t used to walking in actual wilderness and thought it was a good idea to save my energy by avoiding an argument. I certainly knew that my water flask wasn’t going to be enough if we didn’t return to the cottage within four hours as scheduled. The creek water didn’t look like the cool, crisp northern spring water I had been expecting. It looked more like effluent. I guessed that was a side effect of being downstream from all the tailings ponds that probably surrounded the mine. Who knew what had leached into the groundwater over all that time. The only thing I did know for sure was that I wouldn’t be drinking any of it.

“Just wait until they invent self-driving cars,” Max continued. “It’s going to give the term ‘vehicular manslaughter’ a whole new meaning.”

“Uh huh.”

“You laugh. We’ll see who’s laughing ten years from now.”

My only hope was that I would still be around in ten years so that one of us could be proven right. If we didn’t find our way out of here, I wasn’t going to have to worry about my own sedan plotting to do me in.

“Hey, look at that!”

I was the first one to spot the cabin. It was in a small clearing between two rocky hills. Tall fir trees hid it from view on almost every side. Had we been walking past even 20 feet further south, we would probably have gone straight past without even noticing that it was there.

“Get down!” Max said excitedly, shoving me roughly on the left shoulder. I lost my footing and slid down the slight embankment while he dove for cover behind some rocks.

“I think you just tore my rotator cuff,” I grumbled as I pulled my way behind the rocks. My father watched a lot of baseball. From that I learned that pitchers were always tearing their rotator cuffs. I didn’t know what a rotator cuff was, but they were always doing career-ending things to them. I also learned that baseball is not the most exciting sport in the world, although it does have an edge over golf, which he also watched.

“Shhh!” Max said. He was busy readjusting his chip clip so that he could position the binoculars over his eyes without actually having to hold them. “Gotta get the twenty on this place.”

I wasn’t sure what the “20” was. Max was always saying that he had to get the 20 on something. I assumed it was some sort of military term for looking at something for so long without talking that everyone else got tired or bored or wandered off to pee behind a tree. That was my experience of it, anyway.

“Okay,” I said. “You spend your twenty minutes looking at what is, in all likelihood, an empty cabin. In the meantime, I’m going off to micturate behind some non-poisonous trees or bushes. The fact that I don’t know what’s poisonous and what isn’t will in no way factor into my decision. If, however, a small rodent or mammal attempts to masticate my member, I will let you know of my location immediately.”

“Quiet!” Max said. He had just managed to get the binoculars lined up with his eyes, but they were still stubbornly refusing to come anywhere within three inches of them. “Don’t go anywhere.”

“Sorry, Commander,” I said, getting up. “But duty before duty.”

I got up and jogged down the small hill, ignoring Max’s hissed protestations. I really did have to pee quite badly, and stopping the march had only made me more keenly aware of the fact. I made my way to the bottom of the slope and walked into the tree line, lining myself up in front of a trunk as thick as a Vatican pillar. Seemed silly to pee behind a tree, really. We had to be the only people for at least five miles in any direction. As the stream hit the bark, I leaned sideways to look at the cabin.

What I saw gave me pause. The roof was in rough shape and the front step appeared to be broken, but other than that, it looked to be in good condition. All of the curtains were pulled, so I couldn’t see inside. It certainly didn’t look like it had been sitting out here abandoned for years. Did somebody still live in it? Who? Was it an old miner’s cabin that somebody had held onto for sentimental reasons? You’d have to have a lot of warm feeling to hold on to a place like that out here. There were no roads, not even a path. In winter, the place would be totally inaccessible. There was no sign of a generator, so that would mean no electricity. Where would you get fresh water? You could probably chop wood for a fire, but who the hell wanted to do that? I had done it once the year before when my parents had insisted on trying out the fire pit, and I’d managed to get blisters on my palms after only fifteen minutes’ worth of chopping. The trees around here would probably not be quite as dry and easy to get through.

“What in the devil do you believe that you’re doing?”

At first I thought it was just Max doing a silly English accent. Who else would be standing behind me in the woods in the middle of nowhere? So I didn’t even turn around.

“Pissing on a tree. Fuck’s it look like I’m doing, Chauncey?”

Chauncey Uppercrust was my default name for anyone who either possessed or pretended to possess an English accent. Paddy O’Shitely was reserved for the fake Irish, Mel McGibson for fake Scots, Steve Clouseau for fake French and Roberto Banana for fake Italian. This one was so over the top that I didn’t give it a second thought.

Until I heard a sound that was most definitely not a fake rifle being cocked.

I quickly finished what I was doing. I raised my hands and turned slowly around to see a small blond-haired man dressed in clothes that looked to have been quite fancy about fifty years before they were used to fight in the muddy trenches of two ugly world wars. His age was impossible to guess. He looked like he was in his thirties, but he could be sixty for all I knew. He had pale skin and strange blue eyes that burned with an almost unearthly intensity.

What he was pointing at me was undoubtedly some sort of gun – it had a barrel and what was probably some sort of trigger mechanism – but not any type of weapon I had ever seen in a movie or video game. It had an elaborate grip and a scope that looked like it was better suited to spotting Napoleonic privateers. It was so strange-looking that I actually broke my rule about not mouthing off to anyone pointing a gun at me.

“What the hell is that?”

His cheeks flushed slightly. “This is a most fearsome cannon that shall without doubt re-arrange your transverse colon all over that tree you have just this moment finished soiling.”

“It looks like something you would use to apply an oil spray.”

“Well, I can assure you it is not. The only thing it will spray will be your miserable innards all over this meadow.”

“Who are you?”

He coughed. “My identity is of no concern whatsoever to one such as yourself.”

“Is that your cabin?”

He looked back over his shoulder in a possessive way that I believed answered my question. “I have no idea who may possess that rustic domicile. What are you doing here?”

“That
is
your cabin.”

“I insist that it is not!” he yelled. “I further insist that you answer my question!”

At that point, Max showed up out of nowhere pointing the pellet gun at the back of the stranger’s head.

“Drop it, old man.”

It was odd, but at that point I felt a strange combination of gratitude and fear. Gratitude to Max for stepping in as decisively as he did and fear that he might actually shoot the man. I was pretty sure that the guy wasn’t really going to shoot me with whatever that thing was he was carrying, but I didn’t feel the same certainty that Max wouldn’t do likewise with the pellet gun. Would a pellet gun kill somebody at that range? It knocked holes in beer cans, but could it actually puncture somebody’s skull? I didn’t want to find out. What would we do then? If the man died, somebody would find the body eventually, even way out here. It would become this great, horrible, overbearing secret that Max and I would agonize over for the rest of our lives, probably driving us to addiction and multiple marriages and visions of the man’s ghost causing us to throw ourselves off bridges. And what if he didn’t die? What if he just rolled around on the ground in extreme pain before finally recovering as some sort of brain-damaged husk of his former self? What if he had no speech and trouble walking? We couldn’t just leave him out here to fend for himself. How in the hell would explain that to my parents?
This is our friend…uh…Lenny. We found him out in the woods. He’s going to be staying with us for a while if that’s okay. Yeah, he was already shot in the head when we found him.

Somehow, I didn’t think they would just blindly accept such a story. At least, not without asking a lot of other questions we might not be able to answer.

All of this went through my mind in the half-second between when Max appeared and when the man whirled around, tripped over his own feet, and fell to the ground. The gun he was carrying discharged with a loud popping sound, sending what looked like a spear shooting straight up into the air where it nearly took the head off a squirrel and stuck in the trunk of a nearby tree.

“What the hell!” I shouted. Had I not just peed, I probably would have wet my pants.

Max rushed over and grabbed the spear gun out of the man’s hands. “Who is this guy?” he asked me.

I shrugged. “No idea. I went to take a whizz and he just showed up behind me. Thanks for stepping in, by the way.”

“No problem,” Max said, examining the confiscated weapon with a mixture of bewilderment and admiration. “What
is
this thing?”

The old man looked peeved. “It is designed to deter polar bears.”

This was not the answer either of us had been expecting. “Polar bears?” Max said. “Hate to break this to you, pops, but I don’t think we get a lot of them roaming around this area.”

“I am aware of that,” sniffed the man.

“So who are you?” Max asked. “You look a little too white to be a lost Inuit elder. They put you on an ice floe and push you out to sea and you landed here?”

“If you are not going to shoot me, I would prefer to stand,” the man said. “The grass is rather damp.”

“By all means,” Max said, waving the pellet gun. “The last thing we want to be accused of is soiling his lordship’s shorts.”

The man stopped, his eyes narrowing. “How did you know I was a lord?”

Max and I looked at each other. We just automatically called anyone who seemed haughty “your lordship.” Our chemistry teacher was Lord Gingrich of Burn Bunsen. Our school custodian was Lord Shitcan of Lesser Cafetorium (our cafeteria doubled as the school auditorium, hence the awkward neologisms). Never in our lives had the term been applied to someone who possessed the title in reality (with the exception of Conrad Black, whom I still refer to as Lord Asshat of Barbarabuttocks). This guy certainly didn’t look like a lord. Based on his clothes and apparent lack of a manor house, he looked more like a man who had spent more time alone in the backwoods than was mentally healthy. His voice, however, was a different matter. That was the thing that made me believe, despite all other evidence, that this guy was telling the truth.

“Lucky guess?” I mumbled.

The man got slowly to his feet. “Please excuse my avoidance of the usual pleasantries, but I’m afraid I cannot tell you my name. They’ve been looking for me for some time.”

This was another eyebrow raiser. Maybe I was mistaken and this guy really was just a backwoods nut, posh voice notwithstanding. “
They
? “ I asked. “Who’s
they
?”

Instead of answering, he squinted in the direction we had been travelling. “It appears you gentlemen are travelling west. I would not venture any further in that direction if I were you. They are building another Weather Station out on the old mine site. It is not…advisable…to stumble upon their works in progress.”

“You’re talking about GDI!” Max said, suddenly excited.

The old man shook his head. “GDI is one of the organizations they, or rather he, owns. Not the root. Just one of its many poisonous weeds.”

Max stuffed the pellet gun in his shorts so hastily that I worried he was going to shoot himself in the testicles. “You know about them, too!”

“They’re building them all over the world,” the man said. “Ostensibly, weather-monitoring stations. That’s what they’re designed to look like, at least. In reality, they are built to control, not to observe.”

“I knew it!” Max exclaimed, poking me in the ribs. “You never really believed it, but I told you, didn’t I?”

“Mmm hmm,” I said noncommittally. I didn’t think the claims of a self-professed “lord” rampaging through the wilderness with a spear gun designed for polar bears constituted evidence in any empirical sense.

“What would they do if we got too close?” Max asked.

The man looked nervous. “They have several GDI units guarding the site. I myself am preparing to leave this place. I would advise you to do likewise. More than a few errant hikers have already been officially ‘disappeared’ after straying too close for their liking.”

Max’s eyes lit up. I could see that he was thinking about modifying our plans slightly by turning them into a recon (possibly even sabotage) mission. Although I didn’t really believe a word the man was saying, my beliefs weren’t quite solid enough that I was willing to bet my life on speculation.