S5, E10 | Locals

Enduring Northern Canada’s bitter evenings and uncomfortable afternoons for days at a time, the passenger-filled Wrangler and Silverado follow the tracks through the snow-covered mountains, keeping to the path laid out for them through the unforgiving wasteland of a deep-winter hellscape. Through sleepless nights and tiresome journeys, the survivors scrape by with as much energy as they can muster, barely making it to one pit stop and roadside fueling station after another.

Mostly spent in silence, the various attempts at breathing life into the dejected group do little to move those within either car, whose drivers work off of an hour or two of sleep each night in the name of moving forward. For other reasons, those tasked with simply enduring the long wait toward their eventual destination mostly remain awake as well, watching as strips of forest, seemingly no different from other swaths of woodland, pass by their windows.

After four days of the same, treacherous march, a light appears in the form of a town almost no bigger than a small village, which to the occupants of each vehicle, might as well shine like the lights of New York City. “I see an Esso...” Sonya murmurs aloud, watching as the variety of trees that had surrounded the majority of their journey appear to pull away, making room for an expanse of life that, whilst it doesn’t appear to be present, is represented in the remnant construction left behind.

“What does that mean?” Josie immediately wonders aloud, wearing defined bags beneath her eyes as they keep toward the snow-covered track, her face moving toward her passenger. “An Esso! I see an Esso!” Sonya proclaims with joy, sparking a newfound leash on life upon her sister and the man her head rests against, both Terry and the woman behind the steering wheel finding difficulty in understanding the motivation behind the seismic event-like eagerness.

“Use the fuckin’ English language, Sonya! What the fuck does an ‘Esso’ mean!?” Josie questions aloud, having fully been snapped out of her half-focus, half-inquisition by the reach that the passenger takes toward the wheel.

*honk honk*

“Dude, what are you doing!?” Josie shouts, swatting her passenger’s enthusiastic hands away from the horn that now catches the attention of the truck they follow. “An Esso is a gas station!” Sebastian raises his voice to reply calmly, feeling the car shift with the excited bounce of the younger Golden sibling’s chair, “the fact that there’s one here means this is probably more than one of those pitstops we’ve been finding over the last few days.”

Collectively pulling off of the tracks and rolling to a stop at the gas station’s fueling centre, the pair of vehicles close in on their next genuine stopping point, embracing the gentle snowfall that begins raining over the low-populated town. “I have never been more excited to see a gas station in my entire fucking life!” Sonya proclaims, the first to disembark from a vehicle, carrying her makeshift weapon as she journeys around the hood of the car, closing in on a corpse that rounds a corner.

“Sit your ass down, prick!” she orders, burying the nails of her pieced-together weapon into the frosty, rotten face of the corpse she bludgeons, smack-talking the dead before spitting on its lifeless body. “Someone’s been cooped up in that Wrangler for way too long” Jules jokes, climbing down from the Silverado as he wipes at his eyes, his expression wrought with the exhaustion you’d expect from a man who’d spent nearly sixty-six hours of the last seventy-two traversing the Canadian wilderness.

“You’re goddamn right, I was! Now, I’m free and I’m full of energy!” Sonya excitedly chirps, running across the fueling station as the other tired members of the group watch on. “I’m pretty sure she swiped one of my caffeine pills” Josie amusedly quips, hearing Courtney’s younger sibling grunt as she again whacks upon a roaming straggler, too tired to let out a noteworthy laugh, but presenting a breathy chuckle as best as she can.

“You’re goddamn right, I did!” Sonya proclaims, speaking freeing and allowing her voice to travel for as far as the expanse of land will take it, “now where the fuck are we!?” As if she were a kitten in a room full of elderly cats just wanting to settle down and take a nap, the younger sibling watches her younger sister shake her head with a smile, walking past the energetic survivor with a humoured look on her face and approaching the service station.

Shattering the window with her sleeve-covered arm, Courtney steps into the small mart and gives a half-hearted check at the empty interior, highly doubting that someone’s final moments before death could’ve been spent surrounded by bottles of oil and wiper fluid. “Alright, from the looks of it, we are in...” the older sister proclaims, unravelling a paper map before looking toward any print that appears to be scrawled upon more boldly than the others.

“Huh... Ain’t that ironic?” the woman finally mutters aloud after a pause, drawing an immediate concern out of a man near the back of the reunited group. “Oh, for fuck’s sake. Please tell me we haven’t just driven in a circle!” Terry asks with horror, watching the squint and refusing shake of Courtney’s head quell his concerns at once.

“We’ve been driving for days. No, you moron, we didn’t drive in a circle!” the woman chirps, turning the map’s face toward the folks she’d travelled alongside, “we’re in Golden. I said it’s ironic ‘cause it’s my last name.” Walking up to her sister, Sonya sets her sights upon the directory’s layout whilst the American side’s leader questions aloud.

“Alright, how far away from Calgary is that?” Terry inquires, watching the younger sibling’s eyes somehow widen even further than they already had been. “We’re still in B.C!?” Dropping his head, Lou presses his lips together whilst Adrian looks toward the heavens, letting out a sigh as he leans against the Silverado’s exterior. His own patience having been tested, Darnell drops to a knee on the ground and presses the side of his hand against his face.

Visibly bemused, Christina looks toward the ground and shakes her head before walking off, refusing to set her eyes upon Ally, who sits on the seat she’d occupied in the truck, one foot pressing atop the side bar whilst the other dangles freely. Clearly dissatisfied, Sebastian’s face fails to fall like many of the others, a bob of his head from one side to the other making it clear that he feels as though worse fortunes could have befallen them.

“Fuck, man. How big is your stupid, fucking country, bro!?” Jules asks aloud, souring his face as he rolls his eyes, slapping the air as he spins around dejectedly. “Clearly big enough for us not to be in Calgary yet” Sebastian responds, drawing a chuckle out of his girlfriend from afar, only for his mind to keep toward the reassurance he’d cleared the air to offer, “but this isn’t a bad thing. We’ve got a marker on how far we’ve got left to go, we can fuel up, and we get some sleep.”

“I’d like to stay here for a week. Maybe a month if possible” Sonya chirps, pointing the tip of her spear toward the Wrangler she’d just climbed out of less than five minutes ago, “for the love of god, I just don’t want to step into that deathtrap for as long as I can.”

“Then let’s start taking care of whatever corpses are walking around out here and find a place to lie low for a bit” Jenn responds, stepping between a downtrodden Lou and his bystanding protege to retrieve her baseball bat from the flatbed. “Why would we need to lie low?” Elsie queries, following the woman whilst shaking her tomahawk as if it were a maraca.

“Because little miss happy hands over there decided to blare the Jeep’s horn for the world to hear” Jenn rebuttals, gesturing her bat toward Sonya, who takes ownership over the sarcastic pseudonym by moving her hands and feet in a playful dance. “Fair enough” Courtney responds, pointing toward the sky with a finger that she swirls in a circle, “let’s see if the tankers under these machines have run dry yet and find a nice little residency to chill out in.”

Earning a few rolled eyes via the proclamation, the grounded paramotorist retreats for the arm that her boyfriend extends, wrapping it around her as the crew begrudgingly return to their vehicles, knowing the second journey to be a much shorter, more temporary one. Separated into two halves by the river that runs directly through it, the small town of Golden remains connected by only a pair of bridges, one being of the rail variety from a track the survivors hadn’t taken.

Both being blocked off by a group of vehicles somehow stacked atop each other, only the asphalt-paved river crossing sports a passage from one half of the town and into the other. Triggered by the sound of the distant blaring, a group of vehicles drive through the fence that had been erected between a pair of arranged cars, its door being pulled open by forces who call the quiet district home so those behind the wheel of their own rides can venture into the quartered off portion.

= RISE and REVOLT is created by Zachary Serra, all rights to the series from Season 1 onwards belong to Zachary Serra and his entity of Pacer1 =

“Are we looking for anything in particular here?” Sebastian inquires, looking through the windows of the Wrangler that remain intact, watching as one small, residential house after another passes them by without seemingly being stopped at. “A house big enough for all fourteen of us would be nice” Josie replies, keeping her eye out just as the Canadian group’s leader does, holding back her doubts that such a finding will be uncovered, “at least, that’s what I think they’re looking for.”

“That’s alright, we can just-” Sonya replies, leaning toward the driver’s seat before being quickly shoved back by the driver. “Keep your hands off the horn, jumpy” Josie demands, earning a pair of rolled eyes from the lady in the passenger seat as she keeps her foot lightly pressed upon the gas pedal. After a few further minutes, the Silverado ahead draws to a stop along the side street of a home with just a bush in the yard and a minivan parked in the snow-covered gravel driveway.

Departing their vehicles, the survivors reunite once again whilst Terry and Jules approach the front door, hopping over the wooden gate that separates the front yard from the parking lot. “Home sweet home, I guess?” Courtney queries, looking at the modest residential plot through squinted eyes, not taking it for even as much as her claim would suggest.

“It’s gonna be fine for a day or two. We’ll catch up on whatever rest we can, grab whatever loot we need to stack up on, and get back on the road” Sebastian replies, a conclusion that he and the American side’s leader had already agreed upon. “How much further do you think it’ll be before we get to Calgary?” Adrian wonders aloud, purposefully keeping his eyes on the fellow Canadians that his journey is shared with.

“It’s taken us four days to cross through the mountains. We still haven’t gotten to Banff yet” Courtney answers, leaning against the Wrangler’s door as she stares into the cloudy, yet bright sky. “At the rate we’re going, I’d say we still have another week to go” Sebastian concludes, immediately finding the spirits of Sonya to lower, her sigh accompanying the bow of her head as she leans against the Jeep’s hood.

“I didn’t just hear what I think I heard, right?” Ally queries, walking in the opposite direction of her now ex-boyfriend as he ventures alongside Marta, politely stepping through the home’s gate instead of hopping above it. “Yeah, we’ve got a week or some to go” Sebastian doubles down, watching as the remnants from the Silverado draw closer, allowing the four that had departed in favour of checking out the home to do so without interruption.

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“Anybody home?” Terry calls out, walking alongside his fellow, two-limbed former student as they enter a corridor lined with different rooms, most of whom remain free to enter with open doors. “It’s a good sign that it doesn’t smell like death, huh?” Jules wonders aloud, armed with a knife he’d snatched from the kitchen whilst his friend wields the weapon their former classmate had owned.

“I’ll take a clean-smelling home over one filled with bodies any day of the week, brother” Terry reassures, taking aim with the barrel of his weapon as he turns the corner toward a bedroom, its interior fitted with bunk beds and painted a light shade of blue. “I know we should’ve been doing this the whole time, but keep your eye out for guns” Jules states, offering a reminder that brings a nod over his partner, “they may be Canadian, but there has to be a few pistols around every now and then.”

Having stayed back and waited for their friends to scope out what’s left of the home, Lou and Marta look around the living room and adjacent kitchen without expecting to find much. Decorated modestly and not seeming to offer much in the way of personability, the building appears lined with some undisturbed furniture and modern decor, wooden coffee and end tables accompanying a cedarwood countertop atop the halfway between the two rooms.

“There’s only one floor, right?” Jules calls out, awaiting an answer from his friends at the end of the corridor as he steps out from the bathroom. “Uh... I don’t see any way into a basement or an attic from here, so we should-” Lou begins to reply, approaching the pair from the communal area before the sound of a sudden whirr beyond their building interrupts him.

Though the disturbance is unusual, no sudden onslaught of noise rings out from afar enough to bring about any sudden cause for action, the sound of car doors opening and slamming shut being the only thing that appears unusual. “What the hell are they doing out there?” Terry asks curiously, assuming the noises to have been brought about by their peers, their individual re-entry and re-exits from the Wrangler and the Sivlerado being what he pins the blame on.

“I have no idea” Lou mutters back, standing in place just like his protege does, staring in the direction of the living room without making the first move. Drawn by his curiosity, Jules squeezes through the man and woman that cut him off from the parlour and walks up to the windows, staring through the semi-transparent blinds that hang between himself and the glass dividers.

Unable to make out what’s being said, the approaching survivor’s ears make out the sounds of audible remarks, ones that are too dull to be made out coherently, but carry themselves to the tune of anger. Following Jules’ lead, Lou walks in the man’s shadow as the area in which his peers reside draws into view, the picture of what unfolds just beyond the home’s front gate becoming clear to them before it does for Marta and Terry just a metre and a half behind them.

“Who the fuck are they!?” Jules exclaims, watching a convoy of men and women armed with rifles surround the group that occupies the side yard. “Marta, they’re coming into the house! Look o-!” Adrian attempts to howl, kept from screaming any further warning as he’s struck in the back of the head with the rear end of a hunting rifle, his attempt at providing those within the residence a head’s up thwarted by the unnamed survivor who assaults him.

Forcing the lingering survivors that had stayed near the well-travelled vehicles into a set of vans, the assailants who’d taken advantage of the unified group’s lowered guard send a fleet of men hurrying toward the home’s entrance. Specifically watching as Ally’s throat is taken into the possession of a man’s hand and forced to surrender into the getaway vehicle, Lou’s every instinct bypasses the stinging pain in his neck as he races into action, cutting off the locals that draw nearer.

“Ally!” the silver slayer barks, dashing through the front door before cracking one of the pursuers over the head with his rebar staff and throwing his boot into the man that had travelled behind him. “Duck, Lou!” Terry proclaims, having followed his friend into the embrace of combat before raising Halston’s gun, opening fire on those that had snatched their group and killing the two men his one-armed ally had yet to reach.

“Ally!” Lou exclaims, lunging up from the ground he’d dropped toward upon Terry’s vehemence, and chasing after the van whose doors close upon his continued run. Having dragged every member of the visiting group into their vehicles, the locals scurry away from the survivors they’d been unable to surround as easily. “Jesus Christ! Drive! Drive! Drive!” an older woman exclaims, looking on in horror as the one-armed wanderer sprints, horrified by the ease in which her people had been disposed of.

Giving his best effort, Lou’s run finds itself incapable of matching the horsepower of the local fleet, Terry leading both Jules and Marta into the street that now clouds with snow at the surprise attack. Refusing to give up his chase, the silver slayer dashes through the wintery slush kicked up by the vans until the moment it rounds the corner, taking with it Ally’s face, which had pressed against the rear window in defiance of her captors.

“Ally!” Lou continues to scream, firing his boots into the accumulation of snow that has hidden the road beneath it until he no longer can, his body throwing himself forward as he loses his balance, refusing to surrender until the moment he dives into the winter mix. Struggling to catch up with the man whose run had been fueled purely by adrenaline, the three survivors that had evaded capture leap through the mountain of snow between themselves and their laid-out friend.

“Follow them! We’ve got to follow them!” Jules exclaims, watching Terry stop at Lou’s side before attempting to hurry past, the outstretched hand of the group’s American leader preventing him from doing so. “They’ve got our people and they’ve got guns! We can’t go getting ourselves killed!” the shot-caller from the continental forty-eight proclaims, watching as his friend’s eyes widen furiously.

“They’ve got our fucking friends! We have to go after them!” Jules barks back, violently shoving back the hand of the man who’d held him off from continuing to run. “Alright, nigga! What the fuck do you think we’re gonna do!?” Terry shouts back, shoving his fellow survivor backward before watching Lou attempt to stand, only for the stinging sensation in his neck to prevent him from getting off both knees, “you think we’re gonna just drive after them and slap box to the death, huh!?”

“I’m not gonna just stand back and watch them drive off with our people, T!” Jules screams, throwing his entire weight behind a shove that drops the American side of the group’s leader into the same ground that their one-armed friend had collapsed into. “You dumb motherf-!” Terry proclaims, itching for a fight that Marta refuses to let him have, her hand thrusting against the side of his face before she turns around and pushes the other man backward.

“Will you quit being alphamales for one goddamn second and chill the fuck out!?” the lone wanderer’s protege howls, splitting her attention between the men that surrender themselves to the fact that they can’t settle their issues with the woman standing between them. “We’re not gonna settle this by fighting each other, you stupid bastards!” Marta barks, watching as Lou retrieves his bo staff from the ground and attempts to step forward.

“Sit the fuck down, asshole!” Marta exclaims, refusing to hold back in efforts she deems necessary as she kicks her mentor’s leg out from beneath him. His silent attempt at continuing to pursue their group’s snatchers thwarted before it can even get underway, Lou’s face collides with the cold, mushy puddles the van had left in its wake, bested by his protege in a moment where it’s arguably most necessary.

“We can’t let them get away, Marta!” Jules exclaims, watching as the woman marches out ahead of Lou and continues to shove him into the ground, refusing him the continued attempt at marching after those they’d never catch up to. “There’s no other town remotely close to here, Jules! They couldn’t have gone far!” the woman barks back, struggling to refuse her pain-ridden mentor an attempt at getting back to his feet.

“That’s exactly why we have to go after-! AHH!... That’s exactly why we have to go after them!” Lou declares, forced to fall to his knees once more through the agonising pain, which is strong enough to drive him back to the ground, but not from finishing his proclamation. “No, Lou! We’ll wait until sundown for them to start a fire or turn on some lights or something!” Marta declares, finally uttering comments that convince her mentor to begrudgingly settle down from his adrenaline spike.

“Until then, we stay together and try to figure out how the fuck we get our family back!” the woman concludes, turning her eyes away from the distraught face of her mentor and toward the only two survivors that accompany them. As displeased as each other, Terry and Jules wear their sombre and bitter expressions as they walk in opposite directions of the other, using their stroll as a way to get rid of the frustration that fires through every inch of their bodies.

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“What do you mean you brought back people, Darla!? Like actual people!?” a man questions aloud, following the middle-aged woman whilst wearing a white cardigan and a pair of rectangular glasses. “Yes! Of course I mean actual people, Don!” the woman shouts back, her light red locks tied into a bun that sits at the back of her head, stepping out of the car port that the pair of vans park within and walking past a group of men with rifles who lead their victims into the adjacent home.

“How can that even be possible!? We haven’t seen new people since the town shut down!” Don proclaims, following after his jean jacket-wearing wife as they walk around their home, attempting to approach from the front. “They drove in!” Darla rejoinders, wiping off the railing at either side of their front steps now that the snow has stopped for the time being, “we found them parked outside of a home with a truck and what I’m pretty sure was a Jeep.”

“Darla, honey, that can’t be possible!” Don counters, entering their home with the most awe-struck face worn, “we finished blocking off both ends of Highway 1 three months ago!” Agitated, the woman sheds her jacket and throws it upon a couch in the living room, their stroll brings them to a stop in, turning back to face the man who calls her claims into question.

“I don’t know what to tell you, Don. You heard their horns! If you’re so eager to find out how they got in, go down and ask them yourself!” Darla proclaims, throwing her hand in the direction of the entrance to their basement, finding little other course of action to be preferable in her husband’s eyes.

“Okay, we’ll just drop it then! Forget about how they got in here, just tell me what you know about them!” Don exclaims, waving his hands toward the woman’s face so as to suggest they move past the irritating discourse. “Other than the fact that there were two or more people with them that we couldn’t grab, I don’t know anything about them” Darla answers, distressed over the situation as a whole, “one of the guys called out for a girl named ‘Marta’, but that’s all I know.”

“What happened with them? How did you not get them too?” Don questions, hurriedly moving on from one question to the next, trying to obtain whatever information can be divulged. “Because they killed the people we sent after them” Darla finally replies with something other than a tone of vocal outrage, setting a new course for the discussion that her husband follows suit with.

“What?” the man queries, watching as his wife frees her chin-length hair from the tight ponytail it had been fitted into. “Randy from across the street, Jimmy from the diner, and Lucas and Perry Mayhew” Darla names, pressing her palms against her hips and pushing down upon the love handles that spill out from the one-size too-small jeans that do little justice to her thighs, “there were people inside the house, so we sent them in. They killed them all just like that.”

“Oh my god. How- why would-?” Don inquires, finding himself troubled to come up with a reply fitting for the tragedy that he’s become privy to, only for his wife’s vehement shake of the head to be paid back. “I don’t know, Don. I’m waiting for the guys to offload them into the basement so I can figure out what’s going on myself” Darla answers, walking past the man and reaching for the cellar entrance’s door knob, “maybe we’ll be able to get a clue about where the hell they’re coming from.”

Granting herself entry into a narrow staircase, the woman in her early-to-mid fifties begins descending the carpeted steps one after another to the sound of aggravated groans and reluctance. “Is everyone off the truck?” Darla questions aloud, ducking beneath the level in which the main floor turns into the cellar’s ceiling to find ten survivors seated along a wall with their hands bound behind their backs.

“Everyone is accounted for, but none of them are willing to talk” an average-sized black man responds, pointing the barrel of his hunting rifle at the concrete ground, receiving a satisfied nod of approval from one half of the home’s primary tenant, who grabs a folding chair from the side of the room. “Thank you, Pete” Darla responds, dragging the legs of the seat along the ground before opening it, seating herself against the back of the throne that she rests her folded arms atop.

“We don’t usually get visitors coming through these parts of town. At least, we haven’t since everyone lost their minds” the woman explains, surveying the crowd of detainees lined up for her eyes to fall upon, their various looks of dissatisfaction or outright rage made potently clear. “We’ve blocked off both ends of the highway, so none of us are really sure how you even managed to get in here. It shouldn’t be possible, and that’s the case for a reason” Darla concludes.

As the only person refusing to show either a look of inherent anger or complete disgruntlement, Sebastian’s face soon takes the centre of their captor’s attention, her eyes locking upon his own. “We only have what we managed to save when looters started running amuck. We don’t take kindly to them coming back around again. We also don’t take kindly to them killing us” Darla explains, putting on a smile as fake as her attempt at hospitality.

“Then again, the people who killed us are not you. They’re likely your friends, but they’re not you specifically. That’s the only reason we didn’t shoot you all dead along the ride” the woman continues, shaking her head as she again investigates the group as a whole. “For that reason alone, I’m willing to hear you all out. I want to know who you are, why you’re here, where you come from, and most importantly...” Darla speaks, coming closer to her point, “...who did we leave back at that house?”

With various faces looking toward each other, the kidnapped group of hostages stare amongst each other whilst only one refuses to avert his eyes. “Now that I’ve made my desires clear, I believe it’s time to begin...” Darla ends, locking eyes with a straight-faced Sebastian, whose unwavering glare holds firmly upon her with no sign of relent, intriguing the woman enough to provoke a wide grin out of her, “...and I think I’d like to start with you” she utters, pointing out the Canadian leader.

== RISE and REVOLT ==