Chapter Four
Jarhead
The sound of internal combustion engines wakes Chase from a hazy dream that slips away before he's removed the baseball cap from over his face and sat upright on the roof of the hardware store. He hadn't meant to fall asleep, but after the night's rest interrupted by the rasping of the undead somewhere in the woods near his campsite he's more exhausted than he'd realized and that exhaustion lingers still.
Abandoning his sleeping bag, Chase walks in a crouch to the roof's edge, peering down at the street and the approaching vehicles: an old Chevy pickup a shade lighter than the dirt smearing its hood and a later model silver SUV with a cracked fiberglass bumper. It's been over a month since he encountered anyone; most survivors in this region are probably only just contemplating emerging from their hidey-holes to find new stockpiles of food and perhaps set out for new destinations where the ground has already thawed and vegetable gardens resown on their own begun to propagate a new harvest.
He was never fond of salad at the hospital cafeteria, but after months living on Spam and Spaghetti-O's, the prospect of raiding someone's vegetable garden is almost orgasmic.
As he waits, watching, the cars pass by... then the SUV slows and backs up, and Chase realizes that he's been made. The bike is parked in the alley by the fire escape, and while it might be unobtrusive stripped to its original appearance, the red plastic gas can juxtaposed with its location is a rather obvious indication that it wasn't left behind in the town's evacuation.
His heart speeds up. He's met good people. And not so good people. And while he'd like to think his job made him a pretty good judge of character, that same job has made him uncomfortably aware of how hard it can be to peg a psychopath... and in a world where it's survival of the fittest, one could certainly argue that sociopathy is an evolutionary advantage over the masses who're hindered by emotions and conscience.
The truck keeps going, but two people get out of the SUV, a Caucasian man with a mullet carrying a sawed-off shotgun fixed with a bayonet and an African American woman with a crossbow. The woman heads into the storefront and the man enters the alley. Pulling his own riffle, Chase crawls to the other roof-line, well aware that protecting his property - his means of escape - and his supplies trump the sanctity of a stranger's life, however much that conflicts with his training at seminary and medical school.
Again he waits, watches the man inspect his vehicle - House's vehicle that he got out of police impound a week after the funeral and stowed in a storage locker with boxes of things from his apartment that he and Foreman had cleared out, assumed House's mother would sort through, but apparently she never got around to it either between mourning her son and starting a life with her new husband who'd wanted to take her to see his family in Ireland he'd herd from someone at Wilson's funeral...
Footsteps on gravel cause Chase to tense and before he can move the woman is behind him ordering, "Don't try anything or I'll put an arrow through your head."
He doesn't. After she calls her friend on a walkie-talkie, he obeys when she tells him to turn around slowly, keeping his hands where she can see them and then her mulletted companion is there as well and Chase's wrists are secured with a ziptie behind his back.
"Guilty until proven innocent?" Chase challenges, fainting an American accent, because he's found that gets fewer questions, less suspicions, and he's rather sick of being mistaken for British.
"We're on a mission," says the woman. "Can't take any chances."
"You saw us," the man expounds. "Could track us, pick us off. There's some real sick bastards out there, and we don't have time to figure out which side of the crazy fence you're on."
Chase scoffs a little. "And how do I know you're not on the homicidal side?"
The woman gives a smirking smile. "You don't."
His bedroll is left, but the man grabs his large camping backpack, hauling it downstairs. When they reach the hardware store bellow, the truck is back out front and two men, one black, one Hispanic, are loading rolls of plastic sheeting into the truck's bed. The older of the two who's built like Dr. Thomas, PPTH's (deceased) head of surgery, gives Chase a once over.
"You got a name?"
"Rob," he answers, because it sounds more familiar than 'Robert', even though he'd never gone by the diminutive until real life fell apart and he had to use more than just good cheekbones and a medical degree to ingratiate himself to people - people who weren't (generally) looking for sex. And while his skill-set might be enough to keep him from getting killed by most groups he's come across, it could also get him enslaved by those crazies he has no interest in helping with Dr. Frankenstein-esque experiments on the dead or curing the STDs of ex-con serial rapist gangs.
"Put him in the back," orders the burly man, whose clearly the leader.
The Hispanic man informs while muscling him toward the truck, "I think I saw some painter's lights toward the back."
Ten minutes later, Chase is riding in the bed of the truck with a bicycle chain lock keeping him fastened to a tarp hitch on one end and his jailer with a what looks like a Colt 45 - Adams gave him a crash course in firearms - resting in his lap on the other with rolls of plastic sheeting and two bright yellow portable flood lights with adjustable stands.
"Planning to do some remodeling?" Chase asks.
Instead of answering his question, the man responds, "I'm Wallace. I hope you understand, Rob, that we have to take certain precautions to ensure our safety. When this over, assuming you don't pose an eminent threat, we'll drop you off back at your bike and you can go on your merry way."
"I'd like to take you on your word at that," Chase replies, "but you could just be spouting bullshit en route to serving me up on a spit."
"Winter's over. There's enough wild game around that we don't need to resort to cannibalism," says the man with the mullet.
"Funny," Chase scoffs and Wallace's inscrutable expression reminds him a bit of Foreman, if Foreman was fifteen years older and at least a stone heavier.
They're heading out of town now and turn onto a country road, the opposite end of town from where he came in, though everything looks much the same. Fallow fields with rotting ears of corn on dead stalks, wilted soybeans, abandoned tractors, and rusting irrigation equipment protrude from melting piles of snow, a bit of green here-and-there indicating the change in seasons.
"How'd you end up out here on your own, Rob?" the burly man inquires.
Chase slouches a little, well versed in this interplay, but he's usually the one asking the questions. It's all about sousing out the truth from between the lies, deciding if he's trustworthy or prone to stab them in the back the moment he's set free. Although, at the moment, all of his weapons have been confiscated in the SUV with his pack.
"Same as anyone else, I imagine. My people were attacked back before winter. I was hunting at the time. I made it out, they didn't. Most of the people I've encountered since then aren't the hospitable type, so I've kept to myself."
"I saw your sword. You don't look like a jarhead, son."
Ah, yes, House's father's sword. It was in a cardboard tube with fishing equipment; Chase isn't even sure if his mother would have wanted it, considering all of the affairs she had during her marriage before getting re-hitched to one of her lovers shortly after the man's funeral. It's a moot point now as both of them are probably dead.
"Belonged to a friend. Less conspicuous way of wasting Walkers, even if it gets messy. Of course, traveling alone, no one's going to complain about my hygiene."
"You any good with it?"
He shrugs. He took fencing in college, because his father insisted - and never thought he'd be grateful for that. "Well, I'm still alive."
The SUV turns up ahead onto a dirt driveway and the truck follows, bringing them to an old farmhouse that was probably built in the 1940s and doesn't look to have ever been renovated, which probably means the insulation is crap and the plumbing even worse - but there's a large propane tank hooked up to one side and probably a well, though running any generators to provide power to the pumps would risk attracting Walkers. Storm shutters are closed on both the first and second floor, he would guess as much to keep light in as the dead out, and the larger windows on the ground floor are reinforced with sheets of plywood.
As they pull up to the house a woman with graying hair drawn back into a ponytail emerges, speaking without preamble, "You'd better hurry. Did you get everything on the list?"
"Some of it's second or third choice, but yeah," answers the other woman, popping the SUV's hatch and a slightly plump man with either Arab or South Asian features comes out to help the two women and the truck's driver while Wallace and the guy with the mullet extract Chase from the truck.
During the proceedings, Chase learns names by which to identify his captors. Roy gives him shifty looks while the woman with the crossbow that he calls Mona grabs garbage bags full of whatever they scavenged before ending up the hardware store.
It's all pretty meaningless until he spies a fire extinguisher-sized portable gas canister - not oxygen for emphysema or helium for filling balloons - they're not in a party mood, anyway - but nitrous oxide, a low-grade general anesthetic that must have been taken from a local dental office, and most-likely the boxes of latex gloves and masks that are turned out of the bags onto a dining room table as he's set into a chair, Eduardo/Eddy keeping a close watch, gun in hand, lest Chase try to flee in the ordered chaos of sorting through the loot.
It doesn't take a genius now to put it all together as Wallace, Roy, and Beno bring in the plastic sheeting and flood lamps, setting the latter up with car batteries already prepped with alligator clips to power them and illuminate the space. They're turning this room into an OR. If they hadn't acquired most of the goods before finding him, he might be concerned that they're just very anal-retentive cannibals planning to Dexter him before serving him for dinner.
Before he can consider voicing the observation, though, the floorboards in the hall creak and another person arrives. At first, he doesn't recognize her. Her hair is cut severely short and dark again and her blue-gray eyes hidden behind glasses that catch the light like glowing disks. And she's dressed in a stained pair of jeans, a long-sleeved Kansas Jayhawks shirt, and rubber-soled boots that are not remotely her taste or style of clothing.
For a moment, it's like time has stopped and he isn't even certain his voice comes out loud enough to hear above the sound of unwrapping plastic and tearing duct-tape. "Allison?"