“Miss it? No.”
“Maybe you want to go back to that fucking hotel?”
“Not a chance.”
“Then what’s got you spooked?”
Louie took a long swallow and belched. “I’m worried about the people I left behind. I don’t think it went well for them in the end.”
“I thought you said they were all dead.”
“They are.” Louie hadn’t told him about the microscopic ticks he’d unleashed on level 10 of the DSC. He hadn’t shared the story with Roy of how he’d watched his old boss come back to life with a billion of the tiny arachnids controlling his every move. “I’m just concerned with some of the stuff they were working on when everything ended. It was some pretty freaky shit.”
“No sense worrying about it now. That freaky shit is behind us now.” Roy hadn’t told Louie he’d murdered a hundred and twelve people in cold blood. Some secrets were better kept to yourself. “Let’s have some more beers and forget about everything for the next ten hours or so. Eustache is only a couple miles away. Maybe we’ll find something to eat for breakfast there.”
Louie passed him another beer and the two drank in silence. Roy watched the flames. Louie kept an eye on the darkened city behind them.
The thing once called Tom Braden lurched along the destroyed sidewalk. The man that once held an important research position at the Winnipeg DSC was no longer human. He had died days earlier when the Tick LDV3 swarm had entered his body and clogged every artery and vein inside him. The ticks—feeding and growing on his cooling blood—had brought Tom back. He could no longer think. His brain was controlled by the swarm. They controlled his movements, they dictated where he went, and what he needed to do.
And the ticks needed Tom to find others to feed on. They needed new hosts to multiply their numbers. Tom stumbled along on swollen feet the color of mold. His fat toes burst open further with each step, releasing fat ticks onto the ground. The ticks scrambled away into the shadows, giving birth to thousands and millions more. These babies joined the growing swarm in search of fresh blood.
Behind Tom, thirty-seven previous employees of the DSC followed. Their arms and legs, their fingers and toes, all swollen and ready to burst.
They marched awkwardly through the smoldering destruction of what was, spreading what would be.
Chapter 27
“Where was it you used to work?” Roy asked as Louie vomited for the third time into the remains of their fire. “I know we were both pretty tanked last night, but I remember you saying something about them working on freaky shit. What was it exactly?”
Louie Finkbiner wiped his chin and rolled over onto the dead grass. “I knew we shouldn’t have eaten that spoiled meat. Christ… I’ve never been so sick in my life.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t have washed it down with a dozen warm beers.”
Louie pictured the beer in his mind. He could hear the tabs cracking open, and he could see the foam spilling up over the lids. The thought made his stomach rumble again. “Quit talking about it… please.”
“Then tell me about your workplace. Tell me about the freaky shit.”
“I worked at the DSC—that stands for Disease Study Center.”
“I’m not a fucking rube, I know what it stands for.”
Louie continued. “There was containment breach the day the bomb hit. A box holding some ticks broke open, released a swarm of the microscopic things… we evacuated the lower levels, but the damn things found a way out. I—that is we, spent the following days moving up level by level, attempting to secure the outbreak… a lot of good people were lost. I tried saving the last few, but the swarm moved too quickly. I was lucky to get out with my life.”
Roy was standing behind him, urinating. “Microscopic ticks… big deal. What’s so dangerous about that?” He turned, spraying yellow into the smouldering remains of the fire, dribbling across one of Louie’s feet along the way. “I had a dog once that used to get covered with wood ticks.”
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.