Chapter 24
“Well that’s new,” I said, showering the night with my snark.
“It sure as hell is,” Mack agreed, though giving me the eye like he did sometimes; like he was still surprised I hadn’t given him more trouble about his drunk and what had happened. Three weeks and I still caught him looking at me like that. Sometimes I wondered if he credited me with any pride at all.
“Maybe it is the cold. They can’t settle down or something.”
Mack finally focused and said, “Maybe. For a fact if they were to fall asleep in this weather they’d freeze where they lay. Like those others we found last week.”
I made a face trying not to think of the condition the bodies had been in.
“Winx?”
“Yeah?”
“I shouldn’t have brought that up.”
I sighed and looked at him. “I’m sorry I went all girl on you. I just … the rats …”
“Yeah. And … that’s not what I meant. I just mean … aw hell, I don’t know what I mean anymore. Maybe we should just call it a night. It’s too damn cold.”
“Mack stop it. I’m not going to fall to pieces. And we need to know what is going on, why things are changing so much. Why are there suddenly so many Infecteds roaming and none of the Goober Squads. Things are too quiet. Best time to move is at night. Best time to move at night is when it is the coldest. You said it yourself. And you are not going to take me back to the Loudon house and suddenly get a stray hair and do this by yourself. We cover each other. That’s our way.”
He sighed in irritation. “This is going to be dangerous Winx. Military level dangerous.”
“So you said. About a million times already. You’ve taught me well Obi Won, time for me to earn my Scooby Snacks.”
“Dammit Winx this is not a game.”
Finally snapping I said, “I get it. Whatever happened is bad. Whatever we are going to find down there is bad. It’s probably dangerous too. It might give me nightmares even though I already have a library full of them. Well you know what would be worse? You going off like some stupid hero and me not ever hearing from you again because there was no one there to cover your back. So enough already. You cover me, I cover you. We both stay together and live to see another dawn’s buttcrack. Stop making a case of it. You can’t save me from this Mack. It's just life as it’s being handed to me.”
We both knew I wasn’t just talking about the right then and there but neither one of us said another word. And there really wasn’t a choice if we wanted to learn what we needed to to survive the latest changes.
A week after we buried Dylan we were just coming to terms with everything not being quite how we’d thought. Mack was still not certain that Dylan had been telling the truth but neither one of us had felt like he was lying either … we just didn’t know if he was so unmedicated that he didn’t know he was lying. We tried to do more salvaging but we didn’t get much because there were so many salvaging teams. They were all over the place and were getting closer to Base and Mack and I were both worried what was going to happen when they got too close. Finally we just decided it was best to stay at Base and try and shore up our defenses, finish the storage areas, and try to put everything away so if they did get inside they’d have to hunt for signs of someone living there. He asked me to stop cooking and cleaning the kitchen area that I used. We still slept in front of the fire, just not together as before. Mack also planned to build a sleeping area down in the basement now that most of the meece were gone from the main house … and he’d already started to exterminate with extreme prejudice all the mice in the other buildings on the grounds.
It was the time of year when their normal food was in short supply and they were overpopulated from doing the wild thang with impunity. They were hungry. Crazy hungry. They were so desperate they no longer were cautious about traps and bait. They didn’t care anymore than an Infected did. After having so much free and easy over the summer and fall, they were easy targets in the winter. There were days we nearly had to shovel the carcasses. But we dumped them in a street drain a couple of blocks away. We didn’t want the owls and few animals still around to eat the poisoned bodies and die as well. We hoped that other rats and mice would go cannibal, eat the poisoned bodies, and die. Mack said he was pretty sure some of that was going on as we started to find a lot of dead – but not by our hand – rats and mice dead around the dump site.
We worked every night through, from sundown to sun up. We enclosed not one storage space but three and made them as meece proof as possible. We moved all our inventory from the rest of the house … even all the furniture stuff … down into the basement. I would organize and inventory and Mack would caulk, shove steel wool in cracks and crevices, screw metal sheets over holes after filling them full of poison. The basement and cellar might not be 100% meece proof, but not for lack of trying.
Almost two weeks of that and we were both getting stir crazy and needed out. So we did. It was just going to be a quick run to see what we could see. Mack wanted to see if there was anything left in the hardware stores. I wanted to see if there was any black eyeliner in the discount store; I was growing my camouflage back. We expected to have to be real careful to miss the salvaging crews but not so much. We saw a few but they weren’t acting like they had before … full of confidence and junk. Instead they were creeping around like us, whispering, some of them acted scared of their own shadow. We made it to the first hardware store to find it had gotten trashed but there were still things worth taking. I was checking the backroom when I found them.
The smell was bad. I kinda expected to find something dead, we’d run across things like that before, but I didn’t expect to find a dozen of them. I also hadn’t expected to see the rats crawling all over them. My brain shut down, refusing to compute the message the eyes were sending. But my feet still knew enough to get me out of there. I ran straight to Mack. Straight into him in fact. Hard enough to knock us both down.
Mack said he finally figured out I hadn’t been screwing around because I was hyperventilating. Not too many things had ever set me off like that. Mack couldn’t even peel me off him. He finally managed to move by having me hang on to his backpack. When he saw what I’d seen he did some fancy cussing and nearly hurled as the smell had gotten stirred up when I’d disturbed the rats at their work. That was a bad day.
The days after it got worse in their own ways. No more goober goon squads. Lots more Infecteds just roaming around breaking stuff and yelling all day long. One of us had to stay awake at all times. We couldn’t risk a surprise attack from the Brigade or the Infected. Then day before yesterday the birds started circling the Brigade compound. Bad sign. Baaaaad sign.
