Chapter 4: Single-Player

8 months ago

“So what is the Fort anyway?” I was the one driving which was a little strange considering that I didn't have the slightest idea where I was going.
“Turn left here,” my boss, Hutch, said. He filled the passenger side of the big truck and sipped from a sixty-four ounce Pepsi. The heat worked better than the radio, but we listened to the truck's iffy stereo anyway. Queen was cutting in and out. Another one bites the dust occasionally biting the dust itself. It didn't matter, anything was preferable to the Christmas music that was playing in every building in town.
“S'like a military base or something?” I'd lived in town my whole life and never heard anything called The Fort. I'd begun thinking of the place in captial letters.
“Huh? No, just a wearhouse.”
“Oh,” I said. When we were kids we called our clubhouses “forts”. I had pictured a magnificient tree house, all Swiss Family Robinson with rope ladders and multiple levels of hammocks and swings.
I noticed that we'd gone a few miles out of town into a more secluded wooded area. In town, the trees were encased in ice that looked like glass, out here the forest was so tight, it looked like the side of a glaciar.
“Up here on the left,” Hutch said.
I still didn't see anything, but I turned off the main road onto a bumpier side road that led deeper into the sharp, white woods. There was no tracks in the snow on the road, so I wasn't sure at anytime whether I'd meandered into the woods. I wasn't used to driving the truck in the winter yet, so my arms were tense and I'd started to sweat, imagining rolling the truck down one of the steep, icy hills that flanked the road. Another mile passed like that before we reached a clearing. The Fort.
It was even better than my imaginary tree house.
I could see why they called it The Fort. The reinforced concrete structure was larger on top than on the bottom giving it a Fort Apache, Garrisson-style look. The top level had a few rectangular windows, but the lower level only had the one loading bay door.
It looked like a helluva place to repel an invasion.
Or, at least, a good place to hide while the invasion raged outside.
I backed the truck up to the loading bay door and killed the engine. Like a human avalanche, Hutch slid out of the cab of the truck. I could hear the fresh snow crunching under his feet. He went around and unlocked the big door with the key card.
“Don't let me lose that. There's only two of them and I'd lose my dick if it wasn't in my wife's pocket.” Hutch had the worst memory of any pre-elderly person I knew.
As we unloaded some expensive-looking medical equiptment, he explained that The Fort used to belong to the Department of Natural Resources, but that the university acquired it. I could really see it. If the building had been built out of Lincon Logs, it would look like an old-timey ranger station. “We only put valuable stuff in here,” he said,”like this whateverthefuckitis.” He patted the machine of uncertain purpose with his meaty hand. “'Cept nobody ever comes back and gets the stuff, so it just sits here.”
I looked around the inside of the enormouse builidng. No windows on the first floor, only one door that apparenly only had two keys, secluded and spacious.
Be it ever so apocalyptic, there's no place like home.
I was already planning how to move stuff around, the place had an old forklift parked in one corner, when Hutch said he was ready to go. He'd left the key card sitting on the top of the machine of uncertain purpose when he gone to relieve himself. I picked it up as we headed out the door. As the snow started falling again, I tried to decide if it would be easier to try to make a copy or just lose this one. Hutch slapped the button on the way out and the large steel door rattled down behind us. Driving out would at least be easier than driving in had been, I had my own tracks to follow.

Later that day, I had my target shooting course. I aimed my pistol and cracked off a shot. I slipped my safety goggles off and inspected the damage. I'd hit the square paper target, but just barely.
I sighed. I'd cultivated a naïve trust in formal education. I felt that if you wanted to learn something you took a class. Practice makes perfect. I don't know. Maybe if you start young enough. I was facing the sad fact that I had absolutely no natural talent for shooting a pistol. Everything I had accomplished this semester had come from constant practice. I'd gotten into Advanced Marksmanship because there were six spots and only four applicants, all of them ROTC. Practice made good enough, but that was far from perfect.
I retrieved the target and stood in the firing range booth staring at it. One of the ROTC Action figures said something to one of the others about my feeling sorry for shooting it. That was the same guy who, when he found out that there was a non-ROTC female who had signed up for next semester's Advanced Marksmanship course, said that he didn't think it was legal for lesbos to carry guns. They said she had been permitted to take the class without the prerequisite. She must be good with a gun. If she was a lesbian, than she must be a killer lesbian. More power to her. The more tourists in this course the better. I kept staring at the target. It was kind of funny. It probably did look like I was sad that I had to put Ol' Yeller down. I mean...
Oh, shit.
I pulled out a black sharpie from my backpack and on either side of the center of the target drew two huge bloodshot eyes. Underneath the center, I drew a mouth with blood dripping from broken teeth. I returned the targed, reloaded my pistol and sank four out of five shots between the eyes.
I realized that I had been screaming as I fired.
Turning to get my things, I noticed that the Action Figures were staring at me.
I passed the time on the bus ride home the way I always did: counting people. There were thirteen people on the bus, not counting me. I kept a rolling tally of the people I saw outside on the frozen sidewalks. Fifteen. Sixteen. Seventeen. Twenty. Twenty-three in Starbucks. One at the ATM. That made twenty-four. I made a gun of my hand and carefully shot each one in the head. Bang. Bang. Bang. The bus window fogged up with my breadth. I wiped it off with my sleeve and continued the count.
Later at home, I shrugged my winter coat off and flicked the television on for background noise while I microwaved a Hungryman dinner. I'd given up my double-single dorm room and got a late lease off-campus apartment. It was not much bigger than my dorm had been, but it gave me a little more privacy. I took a can of Dr. Pepper out of the fridge and opened it.
After reading the dead-dead article, I'd meant to follow the news more, to keep up with what was going on, but the news was like watching LOST if you hadn't been following it, it was hard to just jump in and understand what was going on.
CNN was talking about a kid, ten-year-old Steve, who had been missing for several days in a Wisconsin snowstorm. Apparently, he had fallen through the ice on a frozen pond and drowned. The pond had frozen back over and his remains had only been discovered when a local youth league hockey team swept the ice clean to play. They showed a cell phone snapshot of the boy, frozen like an insect in blue amber.
I switched the channel.
Fox News. Authorities in Southern Florida were currently searching for a man who had murdered three women. Authorities had been at a loss to explain how the suspect had gained access to these women's apartments as the buildings had been old, but secure, until a witness described seeing a man, with a clipboard and a hardhat with a cable TV logo it, entering the premises on three different occasions. The witness said that nothing seemed odd at the time, even though the apartment buildings did not actually have cable.
I flipped the TV off.
I sat there for a moment drinking my Dr. Pepper.
I flipped the TV back on.
Fox News was still talking about the Florida killer and his clipboard.
I couldn't help but grin. There were many important lessons to be learned from serial killers.
The next day, after Hutch and Ben had left for the afternoon, I retrieved the truck keys from the board and headed out to the back lot where the trucks were parked.
I had been trying to get into several first aid classes, but they fill up fast, even the half-semester ones. I got a book out of the library and started making a list of supplies that I would likely need.
The University Medical Center was an uninspired block of Indiana limestone. I parked the truck back by the loading dock. I took several deep breaths trying to calm myself and then, very calmly, hopped out of the truck.
A security guard stood before me.
I might have peed a little.
“Hey, man,” the guard said. “You running late?”
“Yeah,” I heard my inner serial killer say. “My boss is a total asshole, though, so don't say anything.” I felt bad. Hutch is a really nice guy.
“Heard that.” The guard smiled, producing a pack of cigarettes from jacket. As the snow started falling, he stepped into the windbreak provided by my truck and lit up. “You know where you're going, right?”
“Oh, yeah,” I said, holding my empty clipboard up.
He waved me on with his empty hand.
I got my hand truck out of the back and headed inside. I had only been in the cold for a minute, but I couldn't stop shivering even after I got inside the building. I passed an employee that was pushing a laundry cart to a utility elevator. I nodded to him and waved with my clipboard. He returned a bored expression.
It took me twenty minutes of wandering to find the supply room and I'd almost given up when I turned the corner and found it. At University Storage we only ever moved equiptment, furniture storage containers. We didn't move supplies usually. They were dropped directly to the Medical Center and stored there. That was two things to remember. First, stick to regular schedule. Second, figure out the layout on a legitimate trip, so that when you come back later you'll know where to go. Case the joint, bitch.
The supply room wasn't where the nurses, doctors and medical professionals got there supplies from. They got their stuff from the supply closets up on the medical floors. The stuff just sat down here until the upper floors need restocking. It would be forever before anybody noticed this stuff missing, if ever.
I looked over the pallets and then took one of everything. Rubber gloves, syringes, compresses, bandages, first aid kits and a defibrillator. I didn't yet know what to do with it, or even how I would, uh, defibrillate myself without help, if it came to that, but I had my book. I would have to figure it out.
I stacked the supplies as neatly on the hand truck as I could, making it look as unified a pile as possible.
“Excuse me,” a nurse said, startling me.
“I have an invoice,” I said, holding up my clipboard.
“How's that working out for you?” She grabbed a case of rubber gloves and disappeard down the hallway.
I stood there for a minute. Was I really doing this?
“Yes,” I said out loud. I liked the decisive sound of my voice in the supply closet. I sounded like I knew what I was doing. I'd listen to me, if I weren't me. Good enough, I took the stuff and headed for the truck. The security guard was gone. Without warming up the truck or clearing the windshield properly, I sped out of the parking lot.
I stopped three blocks away and, with my hands shaking, scraped the snow off the window and let the cab warm up. The hard part was over. I just need to take the stuff to The Fort, drop it off and get the truck back. My adrenaline had been pumping so hard that it made my hands, now numb from the cold, hurt. I held them hard against my chest. I waited for the feeling to return to my fingers.
Finding the turnoff wasn't difficult after it was pointed out to me. I'd been driving past it my whole life and never realized that there was anything even back there.
The constantly falling, miserable snow had covered our tracks from the previous days trip, so I slowed to a creep to navigate the barely visible road. I flipped the high beams on, figuring no one could see them from the road and there was no one to see them from the The Fort.
One thing that I had not worked into my overall strategy was the cold. If the situation blew up during the winter, which was entirely possible, that I was completely unprepared. I would have to think about gas-powered heater, warm clothes, maybe some blankets...
Something darted out in the dark.
I slammed on the breaks. The wheels slid. The truck spun.
“Fuckfuckfuckfuck...”
The road out to The Fort was too narrow. Halfway through the spin, the truck left the road.
I pulled back uselessly on the steering wheel like a fighter pilot trying to pull out of a nosedive. “...Fuckfuckfuck....”
The truck lurched forward. The headlights lit snow blasted tree trunks. “...fuckfuckfuck...”
The truck stopped. “...fuck.”
I was still mostly on the road.
The truck started to slide forward. “Fuck?”
The truck tilted forward like a seesaw. I leaned back in my seat like that was going to make any difference.
My right foot ached with the pressue I had down on the break pedal, but I was terrified to let go of it. I gently dropped the truck into reverse and, as carefully as I could, moved my foot to the gas. I gave it some gas.
The truck responded with the dentist's drill whine of a tire sliding on ice. “Fuck.” I killed the engine, but left the lights on. I put my gloves on and opened the truck door. A cold blast of winter took my breath away. Trying to not fall on my face, I climbed from the tilted truck. Frozen snow covered the hillside and I slipped, catching the trunk of a tree to keep myself from sliding down into the dark cold at the bottom of the hill beyond the headlights. On my hands and knees, I climbed back up to the road.
The darkness was illuminated with a bluish light from the snow, giving the whole scene the look of a photographic negative. On another day, it might have seemed really beautiful. Not tonight.
“Fuck.” The truck was off the road with its rear tires in the air.
Okay, I was in a truck I was supposed to be using that was filled with stolen medical supplies and I was trespassing. I walked around the truck.
In a little hatchback, I could have hopped on the back and maybe gotten the wheels back down on the road. Even then, though, I would need someone to help me back the car up.
Ben.
I yanked the glove off my hand with my teeth and pulled the cellphone out of my pocket. I had not told Ben about any of this and wasn't sure if I could trust him. He could be flaky at times and I didn't know if he would take it seriously. I put the phone back into my pocket. I wiped my sweaty face with my bare hand. There was no other option. I took the phone back out. A friend will help you move, but a best friend will help you move a body. I'd only known him for a semester, I didn't know if we had that kind of relationship. I put the phone back in my pocket.
I walked around the truck again, stomping my feet to fight the numbness. The cold had gotten in to my sweat and was freezing me. I looked up at the dark, square shape of The Fort. I wondered if there was anything up there that could help me.
I marched up in the dark and the cold, swiped the card in the lock and stepped back.
Nothing happened.
I swiped the card again. Nothing happened again.
I pulled out my phone, flipped it open and used it as a flashlight. I swiped the card again. The small led screen red ENTER PIN. There was space for four digits.
“PIN? You gotta be fucking kidding me.” I didn't like the sound of my voice. It sounded like a guy who had no idea what he was doing. I would not follow this guy.
I kicked the snow, through a punch. In raw frustration, I kicked the snow again. Kicked the wall. What would Hutch use as a pin? There must be hundreds of possible combinations. What would Hutch use? His birthday? Don't know it. Anniversary? Hutch forget his anniversary and got in deep shit with Mrs. Hutch.
He forgot his anniversary. He forgets everything.
I typed: one, two, three, four.
The door motor kicked to life and the door started to rise. I ducked underneath it as it went up and flipped on the lights.
I saw the forklift before I'd even stood up all the way.
It took me an hour before I figured out how to get the forklift running and it was harder to manage on the snow than the truck was, but I managed to wedge it behind the truck and lower the fork down on the back. It put the weight of the fork on the back of the truck enough to get the wheels on the road.
I climbed back into the truck, started it up, dropped it in reverse and ever so gently back up. If, somehow, I backed over the forklift and sent it skidding down the hill on the other side, I was just going to go off into the snowy woods and freeze to death like that Steve kid in Wisconsin.
The truck wheels caught and I heard the truck bump the forklift as I backed up. Just enough.
I jumped out of the truck. The forklift was still on the road, though it had been scooted backward by the truck, but it didn't matter, because the truck was back on the road.
I returned the forklift, unloaded the truck and stashed the medical supplies inside the empty space of the machine of uncertain purpose, which had a coffin sized hole in it. I thought distantly, as I pushed the boxes inside, that it might be parts of a CAT scan machine. I still had to take the truck back.
By the time I got home, it was nearly three AM. I slumped on the couch with a cold Dr. Pepper, when what I really wanted was a coffee. I didn't have a coffee machine, coffee, a pot, a mug or any sugar, so that wasn't going to happen. I would have to remember to get that stuff when I went to the University Food Service. I'd heard a report about a meat recall due to E. coli, that made me think. E. coli was the shit bacteria. It made people jump. Shit always made people jump. When I went to get food, I would say,”Boo! E. coli! Gimme your tater-tots!”
I laughed, but didn't like the sound of my voice in the silence of my apartment.
I flicked the television on. CNN was still flogging the dead kid, frozen solid, spread eagle like an eternal snow angel. I flipped the TV off again. I couldn't face the kid.
The apocalypse had just been a hobby, but, tonight I stepped up my game.
The next step I had avoided for fear of drawing unwanted attention, now I saw no other way of moving forward without it.
I needed another pair of hands. I needed a partner.