Missouri
The next day, Rico woke up on the splintered remains of his cot. Several blankets and some towels had been piled on top of the broken piece of camping equipment to form a not-so-shabby bed. He tried to roll over, but Linda was asleep and pinning his arm to the pillows they’d collected. He shook her awake so she would sit up enough for him to reclaim his arm.
“Hey there,” she said drearily. “Want some breakfast?”
“Hell yes, I do.”
“Good. There should be some in the store. Bring me back some toast and peanut butter.”
Rico pulled on his clothes, went to the store and found there wasn’t much else apart from toast to be had. After some scrounging in some of the other aisles, he found a box of Fruit Loops that was only a year and a half past its shelf life. He opened it, sniffed the contents of the plastic bag within the box and shrugged. With enough sugar and milk, he could get a bowl of gravel down long enough to take the edge off. Since there wasn’t any milk at the truck stop, Rico took the cereal and a handful of little plastic thimbles of nondairy creamer. Those, along with Linda’s peanut butter and toast, accompanied him back to his room.
They had a good breakfast and a few more laughs before it was time to get back to the real world. Linda gathered up the blankets and then said her goodbye with a peck on the cheek. He said his with a smack on the ass, which she greatly appreciated, and they parted ways before getting wrapped up in the same kinds of activities that had broken the cot the night before.
When he was done loading the car, Rico still hadn’t seen Haley. After checking his room one last time to make sure he’d gotten everything, he found her sitting at what used to be a waitress station in the little restaurant’s main room.
“There you are,” he said. “I was just about to leave.”
“You were just going to leave me behind? That’s real nice of you.”
“I thought maybe you wanted to stay behind and didn’t want to make a scene about it. Makes more sense than you sticking with me.”
“We already went through this,” she said as she picked up her backpack and slung it over a shoulder. “I’m going with you.”
“Yeah, well you made it this far as a guest,” Rico told her. “You go any farther and you’ll have to start pulling your weight.”
“Sure. Whatever. Can we just go?”
“What’s your problem? And where were you last night, anyway? Did you shack up with one of the truckers? I saw some of them looking you over pretty good since we got here.”
“No,” she said dryly. “I slept in one of the guest rooms. Two doors down from yours.”
“Oh…uh…I didn’t know you were there.”
“I’m surprised you know your own name after Big Linn screwed your brains out all night long.”
“Look, you can’t be jealous about something like that.”
“Not jealous,” Haley quickly said. “Tired. I’m tired because I couldn’t get any peace and quiet.”
“There had to be other rooms somewhere around here.”
“Right. Like the rooms a few feet away from those truckers that were looking me up and down pretty good?”
Rico ran his hand over the top of his head. “I see what you mean. Sorry about that.”
Tossing her backpack to him, she said, “You can make it up to me by carrying this to the car.”
“Fair enough.”
“AND I get to drive.”
“I’m the one that knows where we’re goin’,” Rico said with as much severity as he could put into his voice.
“Nice try,” she scolded. “Tell me where to turn, and I’ll turn. Other than that, it’s just keeping to the road and swerving to avoid the werewolf crossings.”
“Drivin’ with you is gonna be a real good time.”
“Hey, if you want a good time around here, I heard all you gotta do is call Big—”
“Don’t you say it!”
Haley grinned and walked past him to push through the front door.
After loading the rest of their things into the car, Rico went to the main building and pulled aside the makeshift barricade blocking the door to the pay shower. Cal sat inside, glaring at the Skinner hungrily. Rico reached under his jacket for a syringe and asked, “Ready for a ride?”
Several minutes later, Haley drove Rico to the front gate and waited for it to be opened. Gary approached her window and leaned down so he was eye level with the young driver.
“You sure you wanna take that with you?” Gary asked while glancing into the back seat.
Cal lay on his side, wrapped in old towels and several yards of chain padlocked good and tight to keep him from moving anything other than his head. The gnarled new breed of shapeshifter was out cold, panting through his nose since his mouth was stuffed full of rags.
“What?” Rico said. “You wanna keep him as a mascot for this place?”
“No, just making sure you can handle him. We could always strap him to the roof for ya.”
“Appreciate the thought, but no. I jacked him full of tranquilizers, and I’ve got enough left over to last all the way across a few more states.”
Gary reached in across Haley to offer his hand to Rico. “Take care,” he said. After Rico shook his hand, he pulled his arm out just enough to offer the same gesture to Haley. “Both of you.”
“Thanks for the gas and snacks,” she said.
Gary stepped back so the car could get moving.
When he saw Big Linn standing at the gate, Rico waved to her. She smiled back at him before turning to walk toward the gas pumps. “That was a lot better than I was expectin’ for a pit stop,” he said.
“Don’t remind me. I had to listen to you two flopping around like animals all night long.”
“Yeah,” Rico said through a toothy grin. “We’re definitely comin’ back.”
They hadn’t been driving for long before she found the ramp for I-255. That led them to I-270 which would take them around St. Louis. Rico watched the road intently, alert for any sign of movement from either side of the road. His hand tightened into a fist, and the relaxed grin that had been on his face since leaving the truck stop was now replaced by a pale scowl.
The Skinner’s intensity was an airborne toxin that seeped into Haley’s body to wind her nerves up like spaghetti around a twirling fork. “So,” she said, “Saint Louis is pretty bad, huh?”
“Yeah. It is.”
“Worse than anywhere else?”
Rico shrugged slightly. “There are some worse places, but this one was hit pretty hard. Probably because there was a lot of bad shit going on around here before the packs started running all over the place.”
“Like what?”
The turn onto I-270 was directly ahead, and Rico said, “Slow down. Now that you’re out of that little West Virginia town of yours, you should know some things about how things are. Like when you’re driving, you shouldn’t take any sharp turns too quickly. Werewolves ain’t the only things that like to ambush cars when they’re most likely to skid or roll. Could be stuff in the road. If not a trap, just wreckage from the last dumb bastard who was flipped over and dragged away somewhere.”
“Ok. Important safety tip. Now are you going to tell me about Saint Louis or not?”
“You remember the Mud Flu, don’t ya?”
“Oh yeah! That started here in some strip clubs or something, right? It was all over the news. Seems like forever ago.”
“There are Mongrel packs, Half Breed dens and more Nymar than you could shake a stick at around here.”
Haley giggled.
“Somethin’ funny?” he asked.
“More than you can shake a stick at?”
“Yeah. So? Doesn’t everyone say that?”
“Only if they’re from olden times,” she scoffed.
“You wanna be a smart ass? I’ll let you take a swing at the next bunch of Half Breeds that come along.”
“All right, all right. Don’t get cranky. So what are Mongrels?”
“Most of the packs are werewolves. That’s because they look kinda like wolves. Mongrels are were-everything else. Werecats, wereleopards, and some things that don’t look like anything at all.”
“Sound like freaks,” she said.
“Some of ‘em aren’t bad. They don’t usually like werewolves too much, but I can get into that later.”
“Great. More lessons.”
Rico looked over at her and said, “If you’re gonna be out and about, you need to know what else is out there with you. Or…you can just toddle along like these other dipshits you see laying on the side of the road.”
Rolling her eyes, Haley looked out her side window and found the dipshits Rico had been referring to. There were three or four of them, but it was hard to get an accurate count because the small group of corpses was torn into so many pieces that it was impossible to tell how many were laying in the tall grass. She quickly brought her eyes back to the road in front of her. “Point taken. Is it ok if I speed up now?”
“Yeah.”
Even after she’d pressed down on the gas pedal to whip down the interstate again, Haley grew increasingly nervous. “What about him?” she asked while taking a peek in the rearview mirror at Cal’s unmoving body.
“What about him?”
“Is he really asleep?”
“I said he was, didn’t I?” Rico snapped.
“Yeah, but if you could knock him out, why didn’t you do it before when we were back at the truck stop?”
“Suspicious little thing, ain’t ya?”
She shot him a sideways glance and steered around a car lying on its side in her lane.
“Nothing wrong with that,” Rico said. “Only reason I didn’t knock him out before was that it took a while for me to find my sedatives. Got plenty of ‘em in my kit, but the non-lethal stuff tends to fall to the bottom due to lack of use. Know what I mean?”
“Just as long as you’ve got enough to keep him out during the drive.”
“Enough and then some. Don’t you worry.”
Haley lightened up a bit when she heard that. A few minutes later, they were close enough to see some of St. Louis while skirting the city. There were signs of life scattered throughout the buildings as well as smoke rising from some of the larger ones. She even passed a few cars that weren’t charred wrecks. As they continued to drive, the city actually looked more and more like something from the days before the fall.
“You sure we can’t stop here?” she asked. “I mean, there’s more lights on in these buildings than any I’ve seen since we left West Virginia.”
“I’m sure.”
“Well…maybe we can find somewhere on the outskirts or in the burbs.” Before Rico could shoot her down again, she quickly added, “I’d just hate to waste an opportunity to soak up a little civilization before we move on, you know?”
“I know what you’re sayin’, kid. Just trust me that little places like that truck stop might be the ones to look for. Civilization is overrated.”
She glanced over at him in between watching the road or turning to look at the growing cityscape. “Speak for yourself, old man. Some of us haven’t been in a real city like this since before things got bad.” When Rico turned away from his window to glare at her, she said, “And if you keep calling me kid, then you should fully expect an oldness comment from me. It’s only fair.”
Rico shifted in his seat to look behind him and make sure Cal still hadn’t moved. When the car rolled through a pothole, the evolved Half Breed bounced like a load of dirty laundry. Sitting sideways so he could look directly at Haley while also keeping Cal in the corner of his eye, he asked, “You remember when I let that pack lead me a ways from the truck stop?”
“Yes.”
“Well, me and this one back there had us a chat.”
“I know,” Haley said. “We were watching you from a roof. You haven’t really said much about it.”
“I told Gary and them others some of what was said.”
“But there was more, right?” She glanced over at him just long enough to see Rico nod. “I thought so. You were talking for too long for it to just be some basic stuff about the packs.”
“I told Gary and them what they needed to know. As for the rest…I thought I’d check on it myself before spreading the word. The more I been thinking about it, though, the more it all makes sense.”
“All right. So…there was more. Feel like sharing?”
After taking one more look at the backseat, Rico flopped back around to face forward. He pulled one leg up to cross it over the other in an attempt to get a little more comfortable in the compact car. Finally, he asked, “Ain’t you ever wondered why the lights are still on? I mean, so much has gone to shit, but lots of places still got power.”
“Back in Saint Albans, we had generators.”
“I don’t mean generators. You’d expect generators to be goin’. I’m talking about power grids in some cities. Street lights. That kind of thing.”
Haley looked out the window and spoke in a softer, vaguely detached voice. “I just figured the government was doing something right for a change.”
“There ain’t no government anymore, kid. Everyone knows that.”
“There’s got to be someone doing something in the government. The Army is still out there.”
“The Army ain’t much more than a well-supplied militia,” Rico told her. “I know. I been runnin’ with ‘em for a while. There’s still some rumors about part of the federal government trying to do something, but not even the brass in the military believes that. After them nukes were dropped without putting much of a dent in the packs, the top tier of damn near every government ran out of ideas. In the year or so after that, they got picked off just like the rest of us. When folks feel their bones shift and the change comes over them, it don’t matter if they’re wearing fancy suits or if they have a real important title. Meat is meat to the packs, and every last one of us are either new members or a fresh meal to them.”
“Can we talk about something else?” Haley asked.
“No. If you’re gonna survive, with or without me, you need to open yer eyes to what’s really goin’ on out here.”
“I’ve seen what’s going on. I was almost killed by those things, remember?”
“It’s different when you’re keeping your head down, just trying to live to see the next day,” Rico said. “When you’re laying low, you protect whoever is close to you, keep chugging away and don’t worry about the storm until it cuts loose right on yer head.”
Although Haley clearly wanted to argue with him, she had to concede the point.
“I ain’t takin’ away from how tough it is to survive,” Rico added. “Things are damn hard, and sometimes it’s best to just worry about what’s right in front of you. If you decide to go out and roam that world, on the other hand, you gotta know as much as you can.”
Having pushed through her urge to defend herself, Haley took notice of something else. “You’re really nervous about something, aren’t you?”
“Yeah.” Rico looked at her again. He’d been studying her for some time and looked for something different with each glance. So far, he was mostly pleased with what he’d found. “You ever seen a Full Blood?” he asked.
“Is that one of those Mongrels or whatever you were telling me about?”
“No. This is one of the werewolves. The biggest kind there is.”
Suddenly, Haley’s eyes widened. “Oh! You mean like that thing that attacked Kansas City?”
“Yeah. There’s a few more of them out there as well. Biggest, baddest things there are.”
“I’ve seen some on Chatter Page Videos. Maybe we should find a spot where we can get online to see if there’s any more videos posted. I know there aren’t as many as before, but there’s got to be—”
“Stop,” Rico said curtly. “Just let me finish, ok?”
Haley nodded, gripped the steering wheel a little tighter and stared straight ahead. “Sure. Sorry. Nervous babbling. Go ahead.”
“Full Bloods are the worst kind of werewolves there are. So hard to kill that they might be close to immortal.”
She nodded uncomfortably and twisted her hands back and forth as if she was trying to wring water from the steering wheel.
“There ain’t a lot of ‘em around,” Rico continued, “but they’re the ones who run the packs.”
“Is….he one of those things?” Haley asked. She started to look in the mirror at the backseat, but was unable to bring herself to set her eyes on Cal.
“Him?” Rico grunted while shooting a quick look over his shoulder. “Hell no. The only thing that bugs me about him is that he seems to have some kinda link to the Full Bloods. He says he’s been gettin’ orders from one of them which would be the closest thing to a real leader the packs will ever have.”
“Orders? What orders?”
Part of Rico wanted to sugar-coat his next words. Another part wanted to just say them straight to see how she would react. Another part, a small sliver of compassion that had somehow survived after all these years, wanted to just change the subject altogether. He opted to go along with the second one and said, “Supposedly, the order was to keep the lights on.”
It took a moment for Haley to wrap her head around that. Eventually, she asked, “Why? It can’t be so those werewolves can see. They do just fine in the dark.”
“Sure, but they do even better when they can see where they need to go. Think of it this way…you’re drivin’ down the highway in the middle of the night. You’re hungry. You may see signs for a Denny’s, and you may even think you know where one’s at. Then you see a Burger King lit up like a Christmas tree. You still gonna take your chances with the Denny’s?”
“Ummm…depends on what I’m hungry for.”
Rico sighed and decided he’d allowed the compassionate sliver to affect him too much after all. “We’re food to these things, kid. Plain and simple. That’s the first thing people need to get through their heads. People are so busy thinkin’ mankind is so advanced and guns are so great and all this other garbage that they think everything else out there is afraid of us. We’re meat on a stick, and by keeping the lights on, it just makes it that much easier for the packs to find their next meal.”
“I didn’t think those animals were that smart,” Haley said. “I know they’re tough, but I’ve seen them run into fire and all sorts of things. They’re wild…right?”
“Yeah, but they got enough brains to take simple orders. When we’re driving through here,” Rico said as he swept his hand past the windows toward St. Louis, “what made you think it would be so great to live here?”
“Because it actually looks something like a city instead of a ripped-up dump.”
“And the lights are on. You said so yourself. If people ain’t home, the lights aren’t on. That’s always been true, but it didn’t make too much of a difference when there were lights all over the place and people crowding every square inch of real estate. But now that there’s fewer of us around and we’re trying so hard to keep hidden or behind closed doors, those mindless eating machines out there need a little guidance. At first, they could sniff us out without much problem, but we’ve gotten wise to that and doused everything in ammonia, vinegar or whatever else people can find to throw the packs off their scent.”
“So if the lights stay on,” Haley ventured, “those animals just have to look for that to know where we are.”
Rico nodded. “Yep, indeed. Kind of simple but effective. By allowing people to live in some comfort, the Full Bloods can take more time to…”
“To what?”
“That’s what I ain’t figured out yet,” Rico admitted. “I’ve been kicking it around on my own, though. Y’see, Full Bloods are more than just tough. They’re smart as hell. Since they’re so frickin’ old, some of ‘em have had decades, maybe even centuries to think about what to do once they were finally able to drop the hammer on us humans. Now that it’s happened, they get to put all them little theories an’ plans to work.”
Although Haley was shaken, she was keeping her head up and focusing on the road well enough to keep the car moving in a straight line. Her eyes were wide open and didn’t show the first sign of glazing over in an attempt to block out so much bad news. That put her a few notches above a bunch of the Army commanders Rico had had to brief over the last two years.
Since he’d already gone this far, Rico decided to spell it all out for her. If Haley was going to freak out about this sort of talk, it was best that he know right now. “But it ain’t just about the lights,” he said. “It’s electricity in general. If it wasn’t available, people would scatter or seek shelter in more remote places. Whether you know it or not, these things have been huntin’ us for a mighty long time. It just hasn’t been on the news until a little while ago. Cities are the easiest places to find humans, and the easiest way to find humans inside the cities is to look for their lights, listen for their music, smell their cooking food, that sort of thing. As long as the cities can provide a little shelter and some of those comforts, that’s where people will stay.”
“You mean that’s where the meat will stay,” she said evenly.
“As far as them animals are concerned…yeah. As long as the lights stay on, people will keep gravitating to the cities where they can keep getting picked off. With electricity, people can have a better chance of staying alive. To the Full Bloods and packs, that means their meat stays fresh for a whole lot longer.”
“Hooo boy,” Haley sighed.
“You all right?”
“I guess.” She shifted in her seat, took a deep breath and said, “What was that other thing you mentioned? You talked about the packs and…the Mylar?”
“Nymar. Basically vampires. They’ve been layin’ low.”
“Too bad. Vampires are cool.”
“Aw, don’t get me started on that shit,” Rico groaned.
“So what’s going on with them?”
“You doing ok with this?”
“Oh, I’m freaking out inside,” Haley said. “But it’s under control. Like you said, I might as well know as much as I can. Sure beats hiding in the dark and holding my breath.”
Rico grinned but didn’t let her see it. “With everything I just told you, I’m thinking the cities obviously ain’t the safest places to be anymore. Even if I’m wrong about the packs, the Nymar have always preferred city life. They’ll be hiding there, for sure.”
“Shouldn’t we tell someone else about that?”
“There’s the tricky question. And that’s the sort of stuff Skinners have always had to deal with. We could tell everyone what’s goin’ on just so they know, but all they can really do about it is panic and get all wound up. That leads to riots, and in the confusion, people get hurt. What little bit of civilization that’s been pieced back together could just get torn down again, and that won’t do anyone any good.”
“Rioting?” Haley asked. “Isn’t that better than being set up to be eaten?”
“We can’t tell everyone they’re fucked without having some kind of plan ready to go. Something else needs to be set up to give people a direction to go instead of just running wild.”
“Letting people stay where they’re in danger isn’t right,” Haley said. “They need to know what’s going on. If everyone had known about the werewolves and everything else before things went so bad, there may have been some panic for a while, but they could have gotten a handle on the problem before everything turned into…this.”
Rico looked out his window at the wreckage littering the sides of the road. Rows of buildings there were either gutted or converted into armed camps. “There’s another option,” he said. Looking at Haley so he could gauge her reaction, he said, “Skinners could bring people up to speed who can handle what they hear. We can look for people who got their heads on straight and might be able to do something to help solve the problem.”
“You mean recruiting.”
“That’s right. We used to keep the bar pretty high before bringing anyone else into the fold. But maybe that was the mistake. Or maybe it’s time to change somethin’ that ain’t been changed for hundreds of years. We can spread the word to form a wider network of folks who can do what we did back at that truck stop. Help where we can, show people how to do more damage and then move on.”
Haley smiled. “Kind of like the Resistance from World War Two meets the wandering Samurai.”
Rico nodded. “More or less. It’s a start anyway. We can teach people what they need to survive so they’ll have something to fall back on when they hear the rest of the story. Hell, for all I know this flea bag back there was just yankin’ my chain about the whole orders from Full Bloods thing,” Rico added while hooking a thumb toward the back seat. “With this much at stake we need to be damn sure before we start spreading any kind of news.”
“And what if things get even worse before there’s a chance to recruit or prepare or anything else?” she asked.
“I can always contact the IRD and spell it out for them. If they don’t take the ball and run with it, we go from city to city tellin’ people what they need to know and take our chances with the riots.”
Before long, Haley shrugged. “That’s the one cool thing about the apocalypse,” she said. “We all get a big do-over. With everything wide open, we can take care of things however we like.”
“I’ve always been a big fan of that sort of thing.”
“When we were talking during the drive from West Virginia, you were also saying how weird it was that the internet is still going. Got any theories on that?”
“A few, but it’s all just guesswork,” Rico admitted. “I never was much of a techie. What about you, kid?”
“I always thought it was weird, but it was never really an issue. There was only one guy I knew of who could log on, and he was in Charleston. Charged way too much unless you were a girl who wanted to do favors for him,” she said, putting the word favors in air quotes. “Real perv. Don’t you know anyone who can help you out on that one? I thought the military was full of tech guys.”
“It is, but when they’re dealin’ with Skinners, they want favors too, and they ain’t too far off from the kind of favors your boy in Charleston was after.”
“Eeeeewww!”
Rico laughed and settled into his seat. “There are some people I can talk to about that whole thing.”
“Is that who we’re going to see in Colorado?”
“Is it WE now? I thought you had family to get to.”
“Third cousins and some aunt who never talked to me when the world was going along normally. I doubt they even remember who I am.”
“Their loss,” Rico said.
“Awww. That’s sweet. So is this dude in Colorado your tech expert?” Haley asked.
“He knows more about that kind of thing than me, but I’m hoping he can put me in touch with another friend who knows all about computers and the internet and that sort of shit. Used to design video games back in the day.”
“Really? What games?”
“Some sniper thing, and then there was this other science fiction shooter thing with some fantasy thrown in.”
Haley’s enthusiasm quickly waned. “Toss in a few zombies and you’ve described just about every game put out in the last ten years. Well…not counting the most recent couple of years of course. He’s in Colorado too?”
“Honestly, I don’t know where the hell he is. I just hope he’s still alive.”
“Is he a Skinner?”
“Yeah,” Rico said.
“Then I bet he’s alive.” She kept driving with her chin up and both hands on the wheel. Before too long, she declared, “We’ll find him.”
“What makes you so sure?”
“Because,” she said without a hint of sarcasm, “things have been going pretty well so far.”
Rico leaned his head back and gave his eyes a rest. “Just another sunny day at the end of the world.”