Chapter
Chapter 4 : Smoke On The Horizon
Mountain Trail, Colorado Rockies — January 12, 2020, Late Afternoon
The smoke thinned as Marcus climbed.
That was wrong. Smoke from a warming fire thickened toward evening—people fed it more fuel as temperatures dropped. Smoke that thinned meant the fire was dying. Dying because nobody was feeding it.
He adjusted the backpack straps cutting into his shoulders and pushed through a stand of bare aspens, their white trunks streaked with black knots that looked too much like eyes in the failing light. The hatchet swung from the pack's external loop, bumping his hip with each step. The hunting knife rode on his belt. His fingers kept drifting to the handle, checking. Still there. Still there.
The ridge was steep but short—maybe two hundred feet of elevation gain over a quarter mile. He took it at an angle, zigzagging to keep his footing on the icy slope, using aspen trunks as handholds. His boots—the dead woman's boots, traded for the pinching pair at the Runner's body—gripped better than expected. Small mercy.
At the top, he dropped to his stomach and crawled the last ten feet to the ridgeline.
Below: a clearing. A camp. Or what was left of one.
Three tents, two collapsed, one still standing but shredded along one side. A fire pit in the center, the source of the smoke—embers glowing dull orange under a layer of ash. Supplies scattered in the snow: a cooler on its side, canned goods rolling loose, a sleeping bag torn open with its stuffing scattered like gray snow. A truck—old Ford, rusted, doors open, engine compartment exposed.
And bodies.
Three of them. Two near the fire pit, one by the truck. Face-down, face-up, crumpled sideways. The snow around them was the wrong color. Pink going to brown where blood had melted the frost and then frozen again.
Marcus pulled the binoculars from the dead camp—
No. He didn't have binoculars yet. The outline said he'd find them here.
He squinted instead, studying the scene from two hundred yards. The bodies weren't moving. The infected didn't leave bodies that stayed down—they either turned or they were consumed. These people had been killed by something that used bullets and walked away.
Gunshots. That's what killed them. Not bites.
He waited fifteen minutes. Watched for movement. Watched the treeline on the far side, the truck, the tents. Nothing. The fire died a little more. A gust of wind caught the sleeping bag's stuffing and sent it skittering across the clearing like white insects.
Marcus descended.
Up close, the story told itself in details that made his stomach clench. The first body—a man, forties, heavy build, wearing a hunting vest over layers of thermal clothing—had been shot in the back. Entry wound between the shoulder blades, no exit wound visible. He'd been running toward the truck when it happened. His hand was still extended, fingers reaching for the driver's door handle he never touched.
The second body was a woman, similar age, lying near the fire pit. Shot twice—chest and head. The head shot was close range. Execution style. She'd been kneeling when it happened; her knees had left impressions in the snow that hadn't fully refilled.
The third was another man, younger, maybe early thirties. He'd made it to the truck's passenger side and died slumped against the tire. A pistol lay in the snow three feet from his hand—dropped, not placed. He'd tried to fight back.
Marcus checked the pistol first. Revolver, .38 Special, cylinder open. Empty. All six rounds fired. The young man had emptied his weapon and it hadn't been enough.
He searched the bodies with the clinical efficiency of a medic doing triage on patients who were past saving. Pockets emptied by whoever did this—no wallets, no ID, no ammunition. But they'd missed things. A pair of binoculars on a neck strap, tucked inside the hunting vest of the first man. A lighter in the woman's jacket pocket, butane, half-full. A folding knife clipped to the young man's belt, hidden under his body where the looters hadn't bothered to roll him.
Marcus took all of it. Added the binoculars and lighter to his pack. Clipped the folding knife to his own belt opposite the hunting knife.
[ITEMS ACQUIRED: BINOCULARS, BUTANE LIGHTER, FOLDING KNIFE]
[+2 XP — SCAVENGING]
[XP: 12/1,000]
He stood over the woman's body for a long moment. The execution wound. Someone had made her kneel in the snow and shot her in the face. Not in combat. Not in self-defense. As a statement.
Raiders.
He'd read about this—in fiction, in history, in the emergency management case studies about societal collapse. When infrastructure failed, the first year produced refugees. The second year produced warlords. After seventeen years, the ones who survived by taking were as entrenched as the ones who survived by building. More so, maybe. Building was hard. Taking was easy.
Boot prints in the snow confirmed it. At least six distinct treads, heavy, moving with purpose. They led northwest from the camp, packed tight—a group moving in formation. Alongside the boot prints: drag marks. Two sets, parallel, the kind made by people being hauled by their arms through snow that was too deep to walk through when your hands were tied.
Captives. The raiders had taken prisoners.
Marcus pulled out the trail map and oriented himself. The boot prints headed northwest, toward higher elevation. There was a hunting lodge marked on the map about four miles in that direction—one of those private retreats built for weekend warriors who wanted to pretend they were roughing it while sleeping on memory foam.
Six raiders minimum. Armed. They just killed three people for supplies and sport. They have hostages.
The arithmetic was simple. One man with a hatchet and two knives against six-plus armed killers was not a rescue mission. It was a creative form of suicide.
The System's directive pulsed in the back of his mind: Establish sustainable human civilization.
Civilization required people. People who were currently being dragged through the snow by men who shot women in the face.
This is stupid. This is objectively, measurably stupid.
He followed the tracks.
---
Two hours of careful pursuit, keeping five hundred yards back, using the binoculars every ten minutes to check for rear guards. The raiders weren't being cautious—their tracks were straight lines through the snow, no attempts to hide their trail, no doubling back. They didn't expect pursuit. Why would they? This was their territory. They'd just demonstrated what happened to people in their territory.
The hunting lodge appeared as the light turned amber. A-frame construction, log walls, stone chimney trailing smoke. A wide clearing around it—someone had cut the trees back to create sight lines. Smart. Professional, even. These weren't amateurs.
Marcus found a position on a wooded ridge overlooking the clearing, three hundred yards out, and settled in behind a fallen pine. The binoculars brought the scene close enough to read expressions.
Eight men. Not six—he'd miscounted the tracks, or two had been at the lodge already. All armed: rifles, shotguns, sidearms visible on hips and in shoulder holsters. They moved with the loose confidence of people who hadn't been challenged in a long time. A few wore mismatched military gear—FEDRA surplus, probably looted from a checkpoint or traded from deserters.
The two prisoners sat in the snow near the lodge's front entrance, hands bound behind their backs with what looked like zip ties. A woman and a teenage boy.
The woman was mid-thirties, dark hair, wrapped in a coat too thin for the weather. She sat upright, alert, her eyes tracking every raider who passed. Not crying. Not pleading. Watching. Calculating.
The boy—fifteen, maybe sixteen—sat with his head down, shoulders curled inward. His wrists were raw where the zip ties dug in. He hadn't moved since Marcus started watching.
One of the raiders—big, bearded, wearing a FEDRA field jacket with the insignia torn off—walked past the boy and kicked his legs apart for no reason. The boy flinched. The woman said something Marcus couldn't hear, and the raider backhanded her across the face. She took it without a sound. The raider laughed and walked to the fire.
Marcus's grip tightened on the hatchet until his knuckles went white.
Eight armed men. Two hostages. One of me. Twelve matches. A hatchet. Two knives. No firearm. No backup. No plan that doesn't end with my body in the snow next to theirs.
He opened a can of beans—the pull-tab kind, no opener needed—and ate them cold with his fingers. The paste-like mush hit his empty stomach with all the culinary grace of wallpaper adhesive. He ate every bite. Licked the can. Calories were survival. The medic knew that even when the man wanted to vomit.
The sun dropped behind the mountains. The raiders lit their fire higher, passed around bottles. Liquor. Good. The louder they got, the less they'd hear. The drunker they got, the slower they'd react.
Marcus checked the wind. Checked the terrain between his position and the lodge. Checked the positions of the sentries—two, walking a lazy perimeter that covered the front and sides but left the back approach screened by the lodge itself. Checked the woodshed behind the building, a lean-to structure stacked with split logs and kindling.
Three hours. He'd give them three hours to drink themselves stupid.
The woman was still watching the camp with those calculating eyes. The boy hadn't moved.
Marcus settled deeper into the snow and waited for midnight.
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3 : The Dead Town
Colorado Rockies — January 12, 2020, Midday
The walk nearly killed him three times.
The first was a river crossing—shallow but fast, the water black and so cold that when Marcus waded in up to his knees, his legs stopped sending signals to his brain for a full ten seconds. He made it across on momentum alone, hauling himself up the far bank by grabbing exposed roots, and spent five minutes on the other side just trying to convince his feet that they still existed.
The second was a slope. Steep, iced over, buried under a crust of snow that looked solid until it wasn't. He slid fifteen feet before catching himself on a boulder, the hunting knife driven into the frozen ground as an anchor, his ribs screaming where they'd met rock on the way down.
The third was himself. Mile eight, maybe nine—he'd stopped counting—when the exhaustion hit like a physical wall. His legs went heavy. His vision narrowed. The granola bar was a memory, the water bottle empty, and the cold had graduated from discomfort to a presence that lived inside his chest and squeezed.
He sat down against a tree.
Just for a minute. Just to catch my—
[WARNING: CORE TEMPERATURE DECLINING]
[HYPOTHERMIA RISK: MODERATE]
[RECOMMENDATION: SEEK SHELTER. INCREASE CALORIC INTAKE.]
Thanks. I'll just pop into the nearest café.
The sarcasm helped. It always had—dark humor as a coping mechanism, the medic's tool for getting through shifts where the patients didn't make it. He pushed himself upright, slapped his thighs to force blood flow, and kept moving.
The town materialized out of the forest like a ghost.
One moment: trees. The next: a gas station sign, rusted orange, canted at forty-five degrees, the price display still showing $2.89 a gallon. Then a road, cracked and buckled, grass pushing through asphalt seams frozen stiff. Then buildings. Houses. A main street with storefronts, their windows dark or shattered, awnings collapsed under years of snow weight.
Marcus crouched at the edge of the treeline and watched.
Nothing moved. The street was empty except for an overturned pickup truck near the gas station and what looked like a barricade of furniture and sheet metal across the road's south end—old, rusted, built by people who weren't here anymore. Wind pushed a shutter back and forth on a hardware store's second floor. The hinges screamed every three seconds.
Rhythmic. Not a threat. Just wind.
He pulled up the System's threat indicator.
[THREAT ASSESSMENT: LOCAL AREA]
[INFECTED DETECTED: 8-12 | TYPE: RUNNER (MAJORITY) | RANGE: SCATTERED]
[ALERT LEVEL: ELEVATED]
Eight to twelve Runners, spread across town. Not grouped, not patrolling—just existing, the way Runners did, shambling through the remains of the world they'd destroyed. Dormant, mostly. They tended to cluster in dark, enclosed spaces during daylight, reacting to sound and movement but not actively hunting.
Marcus studied the layout. General store on the left, two-story, windows intact on the ground floor. Hardware store across from it, the one with the screaming shutter. A pharmacy farther down, green cross sign hanging by one chain. Beyond that, the street curved past what looked like a municipal building—maybe a town hall, maybe a sheriff's station—before disappearing around a bend.
He needed food, medicine, tools, and information. The general store and pharmacy were priorities one and two. The hardware store was a bonus. The municipal building was a long shot for a radio or records.
Move building to building. Stay quiet. Check corners. Don't be stupid.
The general store first.
He crossed the road in a low crouch, boots crunching on frost-heaved asphalt. The front door was open—hanging off its hinges, actually, one of them sheared clean through. Inside, the light was gray and flat, filtering through dirty windows. Shelves, mostly stripped. The register sat open on the counter, empty except for a few coins nobody would ever spend again.
But the back room hadn't been emptied completely.
Canned food. Four cans, labels faded past reading but the seals intact. He tested each one by shaking—solid contents, no hissing, no bloating. Probably edible. Seventeen-year-old canned food was a gamble, but the alternative was starving.
On a shelf near the back door, a proper backpack—camping style, external frame, faded red. Someone had stashed it here and never come back. Marcus emptied his jacket pockets into it and transferred everything: knife, matches, water bottle, granola bar half, canned food.
The newspapers were stacked by the front counter. He'd seen the early ones in the cabin, but these were newer—relatively speaking.
COLORADO DAILY — September 26, 2003: CORDYCEPS PANDEMIC — CDC CONFIRMS AIRBORNE TRANSMISSION VIA SPORES.
October 14, 2003: QUARANTINE ZONES ESTABLISHED — FEMA AND MILITARY CONSOLIDATE.
November 3, 2003: FEDRA ASSUMES EMERGENCY AUTHORITY — FEDERAL GOVERNMENT DISSOLVED.
December 1, 2003: EVACUATION COMPLETE — ALL CIVILIANS REPORT TO NEAREST QZ.
And then nothing. The presses had stopped. The world had moved on to survival, and survival didn't need headlines.
The Cordyceps jumped from flour and grain products. Initial infection through contaminated food supply, then person-to-person through bites and spore inhalation. Society collapsed in weeks because the infrastructure was too interconnected—one city fell, supply chains broke, the next city fell harder.
He knew the broad strokes. Everyone who'd consumed the media knew the broad strokes. But reading the newspapers—holding them, feeling the brittle paper crack under his fingers, seeing the increasingly desperate font sizes as the headlines got worse—was different from knowing.
These had been real people. This had been a real town. And they'd had about three months between normal life and the end of everything.
---
The pharmacy yielded more.
Marcus checked the street before crossing—two Runners visible at the far end, near the barricade, standing in the kind of vacant half-stance that meant they were dormant. Not asleep, exactly. Waiting. They'd activate at significant noise, but his footsteps in the snow weren't enough. Not at this distance.
The pharmacy door was locked. He used the knife to pop the cheap deadbolt—a technique he'd learned not from any military manual but from a locksmith buddy in Denver who'd shown him the trick over beers one Sunday. The door swung inward.
Inside: shelves ransacked but not emptied. Someone had grabbed the obvious stuff—painkillers, bandages, anything in a recognizable box—and left the rest. Marcus went to the back, behind the counter, where the prescription medications were stored in labeled bins.
Antibiotics. Amoxicillin, ciprofloxacin, azithromycin. All expired—years expired—but antibiotics degraded slowly if kept dry. Fifty percent efficacy was better than zero. He took all of it, shoving bottles into the backpack's side pockets.
Ibuprofen. Acetaminophen. Gauze rolls, still sealed in plastic. Medical tape. A suture kit, the kind used for minor lacerations, in a sealed plastic case. He took that too.
The backpack was getting heavy. Good.
[INVENTORY UPDATED]
[SCAVENGING BONUS: +2 XP]
[XP: 7/1,000]
He left the pharmacy and moved to the hardware store. The screaming shutter was louder up close—a rhythmic, metallic shriek that set his teeth on edge but served a purpose. If a Runner was inside, the constant noise would mask his approach.
The door was open. Inside, tools hung on pegboard walls in the organized rows of a shop that had been maintained until the very end. Hammers, screwdrivers, pliers. A coil of rope—twenty feet, nylon, strong. He took it. A hatchet, the small camp variety, head still sharp. He tested the edge against his thumb and clipped it to the backpack's external loop.
Movement.
Marcus froze. A sound from the back of the store—not the shutter, not the wind. A wet, organic shuffling. Like bare feet on concrete.
He eased behind a shelf of paint cans and looked through the gap.
Three of them. Runners. Sitting—no, piled—against the back wall in a heap of limbs and fungal growth. Their breathing was synchronized, a slow collective rhythm, chests rising and falling together. Dormant. A nest.
He counted. Three visible. Could be more behind the counter or in the stockroom. The threat indicator confirmed:
[THREAT: 6 RUNNERS — DORMANT — 15M]
Six. In one building. The three he could see, and three more somewhere in the dark.
Marcus backed toward the door without turning around. One step. Two. The rope coil on his pack brushed a shelf, and a screwdriver rolled three inches to the right.
The sound it made was barely a whisper.
One of the Runners twitched. Its head rolled to the side, mouth opening, a low moan building in its chest.
Marcus was out the door before the moan finished. He crossed the street, pressed himself against the pharmacy wall, and waited. The moan faded. No pursuit. No screaming.
His heart was doing something medically impressive in his chest. He gave it thirty seconds to settle, then moved on.
---
The sheriff's station was at the end of the curve, a squat brick building with barred windows and a flag pole out front. The flag was gone—torn away by seventeen winters—but the pole stood straight, a monument to a government that had been replaced by something called FEDRA.
Inside, the station was intact. Whoever had left had done so in order—desks pushed to the walls, chairs stacked, a filing cabinet locked but not forced. The cells in the back were open and empty. A calendar on the wall showed December 2003, with a red circle around the 15th and the words "EVAC CONVOY — 0600" written in a firm hand.
They'd left together. Organized. Whoever ran this town had gotten people out.
Marcus moved through the station methodically. Desk drawers: empty. Filing cabinet: locked, but the key was in the desk's center drawer, because small-town cops trusted small-town locks. Inside: personnel files, incident reports, municipal records. Useless for survival. He closed it.
The dispatch room was in the back corner. A desk, a chair, a radio unit bolted to a steel shelf.
The radio was old—an AN/PRC-something, military surplus, the kind rural departments used when budget didn't stretch to modern equipment. A battery pack sat beside it, disconnected. Marcus checked the connections. Clean. No corrosion. He plugged the battery in and turned the dial.
Static. White noise, layered and featureless, filling the small room.
He scanned frequencies. AM, then FM, then the emergency bands. Static. Static. Static.
Then—
"...Boston Quarantine Zone still holding. FEDRA checkpoint Charlie operational. Civilian processing continues at reduced capacity. All incoming must submit to scan. Repeat—Boston QZ..."
The signal crumbled into static. Marcus adjusted the dial, chasing it, but the voice was gone.
He sat in the dispatch chair and stared at the radio.
Boston. Quarantine Zone. FEDRA checkpoints. Civilian processing.
People were alive. Not just surviving in cabins and hiding in ruins—organized, structured, running checkpoints and processing civilians. The world had collapsed, but pieces of it had been rebuilt. Badly, maybe. Oppressively, certainly—he knew enough about FEDRA from the source material to know their version of order involved martial law, public executions, and ration cards.
But alive. People were alive and organized.
[INTEL ACQUIRED: FEDRA QUARANTINE ZONES — CONFIRMED OPERATIONAL]
[KNOWLEDGE UPDATED: BOSTON QZ — ACTIVE]
[+3 XP]
[XP: 10/1,000]
He pulled out the trail map and spread it on the desk. Colorado. The town he was in now—he matched landmarks from the window to the map's topography and placed himself roughly here, in the foothills, southeast of the Continental Divide. Boston was two thousand miles east. Unreachable on foot in winter. Irrelevant for now.
But there would be closer zones. Closer settlements. The traders the story mentioned—people moving between communities, exchanging goods and information. They'd be on the roads. Or near them.
Marcus marked the town on the map with a pencil from the desk. Drew a circle around it. Then he marked the cabin where he'd woken, estimating the distance and direction. Drew a line between them. Twelve miles, give or take.
Where next?
He moved to the window. The street was empty. The Runners near the barricade hadn't moved. The light was changing—afternoon sliding toward dusk, the shadows stretching east. He had maybe three hours of daylight left.
The map showed two options. Northwest, a ski resort—closer, maybe eight miles, but uphill through heavier snow. Southeast, farther into the foothills, where a ranger station was marked with a green triangle.
Then he looked south.
Smoke.
Thin, gray-white, barely visible against the overcast sky. Rising from somewhere beyond the ridgeline, maybe five miles out. The kind of smoke that came from a fire built for warmth, not signaling—small, controlled, sustained.
Someone was out there. Someone alive, keeping a fire, surviving.
A ski resort might have supplies. A ranger station might have better maps, gear, maybe another radio. But smoke meant people. People meant answers, allies, threats—or all three.
Marcus folded the map. Tucked it into the backpack. Checked the knife on his belt, the hatchet on his pack, the weight of the cans and rope and medical supplies on his shoulders.
He left the station through the back door, crossed the empty lot behind it, and angled south toward the ridge.
The smoke rose steady and patient against the failing sky, and Marcus walked toward it with a knife on his hip and a System in his skull and absolutely no idea what he'd find on the other side
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