Pursuit of the Apocalypse (5 page)

Suffice it to say, Coy wasn’t that bright. And Willie wasn’t much brighter. A great many horrors were unleashed on the world when it ended with a bang. Entire stockpiles of weapons were thrown about. Everything from biological agents, experimental chemicals, and good old nuclear fallout drifted in the winds of the new landscape. Some caused plants to grow wild and become sentient. Others stripped the land of its vegetation altogether. Some even turned dumb animals into brilliant tacticians. But, there never was such a thing as a dumb bomb. Their lack of intelligence had nothing to with the apocalypse. Willie and Coy were simply not that bright to begin with.

If anything, mankind’s decimation had been a boon to their relative intelligence. Once the dumbest men in most any room, they now found most rooms to be much less crowded. By their logic, this increased their odds at being the smartest person in a room as well as making it more likely they would find a seat.

Contemporary conversation also contributed to their newfound intelligence. Prior to the bombs, intelligent conversation had required the participants to have knowledge of current events, political and economic theory, or the latest scientific breakthroughs. After the bombs, one only had to have an opinion of whether or not a rock formation looked like a dog sniffing another dog. And Willie and Coy certainly had an opinion on that.

The two had been friends since they could remember, and they used to spend their days doing a lot of nothing and enjoying every minute of it. They weren’t big on the idea of work. It seemed almost every job they had taken came with a boss that thought he had a right to tell them when to be there, what to do, what to wear, what to say to customers, to wash their hands, or to cover their tattoos and open wounds. That wasn’t the America they were promised. That wasn’t freedom. So instead they went into business for themselves making meth.

At least, that was the plan. They never actually got around to making the meth. Or even learning how to make meth. They did get as far as stealing a bunch of frying pans, but they stole a PlayStation at the same time and never got around to cooking anything.

Just as the bombs had made them smarter, they had also grown more ambitious. The new world was full of opportunity for those willing to go out and grab it. And now that the PlayStation no longer worked, there was no real reason to stay in. So Willie and Coy had gone to work. But they were going to do it their way.

Working eight hours a day to earn a couple of hundred dollars a week was just crazy. Only an idiot would work for that. The smart thing to do was work a few minutes each week to earn hundreds. A little hustle went a long way in the apocalypse. And opportunity was everywhere.

Just the day before, opportunity had appeared before them dressed in a stupid white suit and wearing a stupid white hat. Opportunity called itself Mr. Christopher and had knocked while Willie and Coy were out looking for new career options.

Technically, they were painting a naked woman on a billboard outside of town, but the man in white obviously recognized them as men of ambition and offered them employment. And it wouldn’t have happened if they’d been holed up somewhere instead of out in the world shaking things up.

That’s what hustle was. Making things happen.

Mr. Christopher had hired them to go to the Steakhouse in Bomb City and wait for a man called the Librarian. The boys jumped at the offer. They knew it was a job they could handle. Sitting and eating steak were two of their favorite things. And waiting took hardly any skill at all. This was their dream job.

Hiring the others had been Willie’s idea. He was full of them. He reasoned that if they subcontracted the part of the job that required them to stop the Librarian, then they could focus on the part of the job they were more qualified for—sitting and eating the steak. It was called “delegating,” Willie had said. And it was what all big shot business people did.

Of course, the plan had fallen apart once the Librarian started shooting everyone, but that could hardly be blamed on management. It was a failure on the subcontractors’ part. Every other part of the job had gone smoothly.

The only thing that remained was to meet Mr. Christopher at the Meetin’ Place and collect their money. It was a good thing, too. Because, like all men of ambition, the pair wanted things and they needed money to buy those things.

Coy’s bike, The Coy-o-te, could use a radio. He’d spent the last windfall on a paint job instead, but he didn’t regret it. It you brushed all the dust and mud off you could see that it was brown, just like a coyote. He loved the paint scheme, but some tunes would be nice.

The pair rode for several hours, on-road mostly, but off-road wherever it was either required or something offered up a sweet jump. They pulled off the interstate and followed the rusted signs for a state highway until they saw a grain mill. Willie pointed the landmark out to Coy. Coy nodded back and the pair pulled off the road and rode around the back of a large steel building.

They found the loading door open and rode inside until they reached the middle of the warehouse floor and dismounted their rides. They were alone.

Willie put a hand to his mouth and shouted. “Hey, Chris! The job’s done.”

There was no response from the darkness.

“You think he skipped out on us?” Coy asked.

“He’d better not. He owes us money.”

“I don’t see a body.” The voice came out of the shadows, bounced twice off the steel walls and landed at their feet with a thud.

“Chris?” Willie asked the dark.

“Where is his body?”

Willie and Coy looked around. Trying to pinpoint the speaker.

“Come on out and we’ll talk about it,” Coy said.

Silence followed for a long moment before the man in white emerged from a dark corridor behind them. “I’m only going to warn you once, do not try and double-cross me.”

Willie shuddered as the pair walked across the warehouse to meet him, hoping his reaction wasn’t noticeable in the low light. For such a small guy, their employer sure scared the hell out of him.

Willie smiled. “There you are. Why were you hiding, Chris?”

“Is the job done?” he asked.

“You bet,” Coy said. “We did just like you said.”

“Yeah,” Willie added. “We went to the steakhouse, sat, ate steak, and waited for that guy to show up.”

“And?” Mr. Christopher asked.

Coy nodded with half his body. “And he showed up. Just like you said he would.”

Mr. Christopher rolled his hands in the air to get the story moving.

“Well, then we had a bunch of guys jump him,” Willie said.

“Yeah, six or seven, even,” Coy added.

Willie stammered a bit. “But, um, well, he shot a lot of them.”

“Yeah, six or seven, even,” Coy added.

Mr. Christopher removed the hat from his head and ran his hand through thinning blonde hair. “You failed and still you came here? Why?”

Coy laughed. “To get the money you owe us.”

“I paid you to kill the Librarian and bring me his head!”

Willie held up his hands, trying to slow things down. “Now, I don’t want to get picky. But you said you’d pay us ten gold coins to go to the steakhouse, sit there, eat steak, and kill the Librarian when he showed up.”

“That’s true.” Mr. Christopher placed the hat back on his head. “It will be interesting to see where you’re going with this.”

“Well, me and Coy went to the steakhouse. We sat there. And we ate steak.”

“So?”

“So, that’s like eighty percent of what you asked us to do,” Willie said. “And we did it. So we figure you owe us eighty percent of the money.”

The man in white’s eyes grew wide and he stared at each man for an uncomfortable amount of time. He began to speak several times but abandoned his thoughts before they really got started. He finally settled on, “You two can’t honestly be this stupid.”

“Hey. No one calls us stupid,” Coy said.

“Yeah, we did the math and everything,” added Willie.

“But, I hired you to kill the Librarian!”

Willie held up a finger. “And that other stuff. The stuff we did.”

“I did not pay you to sit down to dinner, you fucking hillbilly.”

“Watch it, Chris,” Willie cautioned. “There’s no need for names. We’re all friends here.”

The man in white was small but quick. With a flash of his arm, he struck Willie across the face with a gun and knocked him to the floor. Then he pointed the weapon between Coy’s eyes and yelled. “You can’t be this stupid!”

Coy was terrified of their boss, but he was more afraid to lose his only friend. He leapt towards the man and grabbed the gun. He put all of his weight on Mr. Christopher’s arm until the weapon clattered to the ground.

Mr. Christopher pulled a knife with his free hand and raised it to strike.

Willie saw what was happening and sprang to his feet. He grabbed the man’s stupid hat and yanked it down over his eyes. He shoved the man back into the darkness of the warehouse and grabbed Coy by his shirt. “Run, Coy.”

The two friends ran through the warehouse and jumped on their bikes. They heard Mr. Christopher screaming as they started the engines and hit the throttle. The sound of squealing tires and gunshots filled the steel building as they raced away from the best job they had ever had.

They didn’t stop riding until they were miles away from the warehouse and in a place where a Jeep couldn’t follow. Willie pulled off the road and Coy followed. The two were still breathing heavy.

“That guy welched!” Coy cast an accusatory finger back to the west. “He’s a welcher.”

“I know, Coy. I know. You just can’t trust people to keep their word nowadays.”

Coy pouted for a minute before sighing. “Well, what are we going to do for money now?”

“I don’t know, Coy.” Willie stared off into the distance. He always believed that’s where really good ideas were found—somewhere off in the distance. That’s where the stars in the movies always looked. It’s where important people in paintings always looked. So that’s where Willie looked. But all he could see was the interstate. A lone truck made up all of the traffic of the once busy road. But, he sure didn’t see any ideas.

Then it was there. The great idea was right in front of him. “I do know what we’re going to do.” He pointed to the truck. “We’re going to catch the Librarian ourselves.”

“What are you talking about?” Coy asked.

Willie pointed in Mr. Christopher’s general direction. “Screw that jerk. If he was going to pay us ten to capture the guy, he’s probably getting at least twenty for him. Right? So we cut out the middle man and collect the money ourselves.”

Coy walked over and stood next to Willie. Together they watched the truck journey west. “You really think it’s as much as twenty?”

“Maybe more. Maybe thirty.” Willie was getting excited. He really liked this plan.

“But he whooped seven of us back there.”

“He’s after Mr. Christopher. We know that now. He’s distracted. We’ll use that.”

“But how are we going to stop him?” Coy asked.

“By using our smartness,” Willie said to the distance.

FIVE

Mr. Christopher watched the two bikes fade into the distance from the steel building’s loft. He cursed the two idiots and marveled at their sheer stupidity. Their failure had cost him nothing financially. But, it may have cost him his lead over his pursuer. The aggravation alone was worth murdering them both slowly.

Mr. Christopher wasn’t afraid of the Librarian. He was afraid of losing him. As long as he was ahead of the wanted man, he was in control, and that’s where he intended to stay.

He watched the horizon wondering if he would see the man appear in his truck ahead of a cloud of smoke. How had he caught up so fast to begin with? Christopher had stopped for nothing until the storm trapped him in Bomb City. How could his prey have made up the time?

He wanted to think that it was impossible. That no man could live up to their own legend, but the Librarian had managed to outwit, outshoot, outfight, and out-stab every man and minion Christopher had hired to take him down.

He’d hired dozens of locals across the wasteland and they had failed miserably to subdue the bounty. This was not surprising. He knew they stood little chance of stopping the target, and he expected most of them to end up broken or dead. He sent them to harass the Librarian and remind him that he would never be out of danger. The constant state of alertness was intended to fatigue his mark and keep him off-balance. But the man had proven surprisingly resilient.

Several bounty hunters of considerable repute had also met their ends at the hands of the Librarian. Mr. Christopher had agreed to split the bounty with men and women of fearsome reputations. Their failure, while disappointing, had spared him the trouble of double-crossing them at a later date.

Many morons had their place in his plans. They were extremely useful. They worked cheap because math gave them headaches. And, often they worked for free if you killed them later. They would believe anything you told them if you made it simple enough. And, if it was too complicated, you just had to make up a boogeyman for them to fight against. Even in the event they did ask questions, they were really stupid questions.

Up to this point every single person had failed him, so it should have been no surprise that the two morons he found vandalizing the sign with pornography had been unable to capture the man. He hadn’t hired them for their brains. But it was still profoundly stupid of them to try and collect the payment.

Their problem was obvious to him. They were too stupid to know how dumb they really were. It was a dangerous type of idiocy that couldn’t determine its own place in the natural order. Most people knew their limitations. If they didn’t excel at math, they would accept this and focus on other areas where they could succeed.

No, these two were just dumb enough to think they could think for themselves. These two morons would blame numbers for being stupid and mock anyone who understood them. They no doubt saw this new world as a land of opportunity free of authority and most likely gave themselves credit for surviving the end of civilization as if they had personally outsmarted the bombs and other horrors unleashed on the world.