The Stranger (13 page)

I looked at Michaela. She gazed at me steadily. She must have heard this kind of story dozens of times before from survivors. But she listened with a serious expression. I even felt she was encouraging me to get it off my chest.

“Well, I launched myself at the guy who was trying to kill my mom. . . .” My voice died away.

“And?” she prompted gently.

“And I lost my mind . . . at least for a while. When I came to I was lying in this mass of broken pottery. I thought the guy had knocked me unconscious, but it turned out I’d had some kind of blackout. But I had fought the guy. He’d opened a gash on my forehead and bloodied my nose. I don’t remember anything about it, but my mother told me I’d struggled with the guy, then grabbed him by the throat and smashed his head against the kitchen wall so hard it had cracked all the wall tiles. . . .” I shook my head. “My mother called those tiles her swanky tiles. She loved them.”

“You saved their lives.”

“Yeah, for what good it did.”

“What then?”

“The guy was out cold or dead, I don’t know. We picked up what groceries we could carry, then drove away. It was just luck, I suppose, but we found a house way up on a hillside, like it had been dug into a hole there. And that’s where we sat it out for month after month.”

“The hornets didn’t find you?”

“No. Not that I remember much about it. I’d drunk water from a stream that must have been contaminated by a dead animal or something. I was sick for weeks. Most of the time I was in such a high fever and delirious, I didn’t know day from night. I was out of it. I can’t remember a thing.”

“Your mother and sister were able to care for you alone?”

“Somehow they scavenged food from abandoned houses and stores. But like I said I didn’t know anything about it.”

We reached the steps that lead to the boat. “Then for some reason we hit the road again,” I told her. “I don’t remember much. We wound up in a little town in the hills . . . or the remains of one. I still couldn’t eat and was still pretty much out of it. I don’t even know properly how it happened, but my sister and mother became sick. I was looking for help when a hunting party from Sullivan found me—Sullivan’s the place across the lake, there. They got us to a doctor, but my mother and Chelle died within hours of each other. The doctor said it was some kind of blood poisoning. But I’m not sure if he really knew what it was. What are you doing?”

“Getting into the boat.”

“No, you have to wait here. I’ll bring the food back across to you.”

“How do I know that? You might change your mind and stay across there on paradise island and forget all about us.”

“I’ll bring food,” I told her as she slipped the shotgun off her shoulder. “Or are you going to blow a hole in me if I don’t do what you tell me?”

“And where’d that get me? You being dead won’t bring us the food.” She lay the gun on one of the bench seats.

“Look, Michaela, I’m not allowed to bring strangers onto the island. Hell, I’m not even supposed to leave the island myself.”

“I’m coming with you.”

“No. If I’m found with you, they’ll kill us both. Believe me.”

Her voice stayed firm. “Greg, I’m coming.”

Seventeen

Short of punching her unconscious and dumping her back on the harbor wall, what could I do? As I tied the boat to the jetty nearest my cabin, I whispered to her, “People tend not to wander down here in the early hours, so we shouldn’t meet anyone, but keep as quiet as you can. OK?”

Shouldering the gun, she nodded. There was more than enough light to reveal us to anyone who happened to be taking a dawn stroll, so instead of using the track for the three-minute walk to my place I took a slightly longer route through the woods, where we’d be concealed by trees. I just thanked my lucky stars there’d been enough mist on the lake to conceal our crossing from Lewis to Sullivan.

This was no ideal situation for sure, but I remember Michaela’s hungry friends. They deserved a chance, too. Besides, those nice, smiling bastards of Sullivan could spare some food. With luck I could run the supplies across to Lewis in the battery-powered launch and still be back before the dawn mist melted away.

When we reached the cabin Michaela was amazed. In awe, she stared at the cans and jars I’d dumped on the table and worktops and never gotten ’round to putting into the cupboards.

I’d already pulled the blinds down so I said, “You can relax now.”

Still overawed, she just nodded. She didn’t look any more relaxed.

“Michaela, you can talk normally as well. We’re a quarter of a mile from the nearest house.”

“OK,” she said in a tiny whisper.

“Sit down. I’ll fix you something to eat.”

“I’m all right. Let’s get the food to the boat.”

“You don’t look all right.” Maybe it was the sight of all that food after living on raw potatoes for a couple of days that did it, but she’d started to sway; her dark eyes suddenly unfocused.

“It’ll take me a few minutes to get the stuff together. Sit down at the table. Here.” I put bowls in front of her. There were tomatoes, grown locally in greenhouses. Heaped in a basket were plums and mushrooms. A real dog’s dinner of a mixture, but she began to eat. I’d still got a good-sized chunk of bread that wasn’t overly dry and a can of corned beef. She watched me open that like I was producing diamonds from the can, not a block of boiled beef that was close to its “best by” date. Even though she must have been hungry as hell she didn’t eat like a hog. She sliced the corned beef with a knife, then slipped it between her lips. Then it hit me that I hadn’t eaten for more than twenty-four hours either. I filled a jug from the faucet and grabbed a couple of glasses.

“You’ve water mains, too?” She sipped it like fine wine. “I wasn’t wrong: This is paradise.”

“Water’s pumped from a well nearby. More?”

“Please.”

I refilled her glass, then ate, too.

“I can’t believe you’ve got all this food. Haven’t hornets hassled you at all?”

“No. Well . . . there’ve been a few, but they came in just ones or twos. They didn’t even attack. They just turned up asking for food and shelter.”

“They were still in the early stages of it, then. What happened to them?”

“I killed them.” I spoke matter-of-factly, but she shot me a startled look.

“You killed them before they went full-blown and started attacking people?”

“Yes. . . . Try these pickles. They’re good.” I aimed to change the line of talk, but she was having none of it.

“You mean you kill every stranger that walks into this town?”

“No. I think I’ve got some cheese somewhere if you want to try—”

“Greg, I don’t understand. You mean to say you’ve got some way of running medical screening? That you can tell if people are infected with Jumpy?”

“No . . . nothing like that.”

“What then?”

“You tell me about these hives, then. That thing I found in the apartment was weird, you know?”

“They are weird as hell, Greg. But I’m not saying anything about the hive until my people get the food you promised them.”

I looked at her. She recognized something so serious in my expression that she stopped eating.

“Michaela, I won’t make a game of it,” I told her. “The truth is I might kill you.”

A tremor ran through her face. Her dark eyes widened in shock.

“Listen.” I clasped my hands together tightly in front of me, just in case they flew at her to crush her throat. “I don’t know what happened to me last year, or if it’s something I’ve always had . . . I know I’m not explaining this well. But if someone has got that thing in their blood I know. It’s instinctive. They might not have any symptoms. They might be sitting like you’re sitting there now, but I get this twitching in my stomach, the muscles in my back writhe like a whole heap of snakes, then before I know it I’ve killed them—man or woman. It’s like lightning inside my head. Pow, bang, then by the time I’ve got my control . . . my self-control back I’m standing over a body that’s hacked to pieces.” I took a breath, sickened by the memories that started to flood me. “It’s like a bomb hitting me. It’s that sudden.”

“You don’t feel this . . . this twitching with me now?”

“No.”

“Did you feel it when you were back with my people?”

“No. I thought I felt it when I followed the boy into the apartment. I know now it was because I was so close to that thing you call a hive. But there’s no guarantee it won’t happen.” Then I told her about the local guy who’d arrived in town a few days ago, that I knew he’d got Jumpy running in his veins and how I’d killed him in the street. “So this epidemic
has
changed,” I told her. “We thought it could only affect people from South America. Now it looks as if no one’s immune.”

She nodded. “That’s our experience. It looks as if that funky old Jumpy bug just took a little longer to get into the Yankee bloodstream.” She tried to talk in a lighthearted way, but I could see from her face that she was deadly serious. “The question we’ve been asking ourselves is, why haven’t we been infected yet?”

“Maybe some natural resistance.”

“Maybe. Or maybe we just managed to keep out of infected areas by chance. Just as you’ve put yourself in quarantine on this island.”

“Then we’re living on borrowed time? It’s going to come here whatever we do?”

She sipped her water. “Which is a depressing thought, you have to admit.”

“You know, I have a friend who can’t stop asking questions. For months he wondered why the whole country fell apart so quickly. How millions of people with the best armed forces and the best medical care in the world could just go.” I snapped my fingers. “Im-plode in a matter of days. Not even weeks.”

“You reckon the question he’d be asking right now would be: Were Americans in the early phase of the disease when the hornets launched this—what did the press call it?—Tet offensive and rioted all over the damn place?”

“Makes you wonder, doesn’t it, Michaela?”

“It does make you wonder, Greg. It makes you wonder what’s gonna happen next. And that question terrifies me. Oh, God.”

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing . . .” She shrugged, tired-looking. “I feel like hell, that’s all.” She shot me a faint smile. “Those days on the road are catching up with me. I don’t think we’ve slept more than two hours straight in the last week.”

“Wait there, I’ll run you a bath.”

“A what?”

“I’ll go fill the tub. While you have a soak in some hot water I’ll load food into the boat.”

Again that incredulous look. “You mean to say you’ve got hot water as well?”

“Sure. There’s an electric immersion heater. The electricity will have been cut at midnight, but it stays hot in the tank for hours.”

“Jeez. You’re the kind of guy who girls like me want to marry.” She suddenly blushed. “Take that as a figure of speech . . . but I wouldn’t say no to a bath.”

I stood up, ready to go run the water for her, but she waved her hand. “No, just point me at your bathroom and I’ll do the rest. You best get those supplies loaded.”

“It’s at the top of the stairs. First door on the right.”

“Thank you, Greg. I mean it . . . but just don’t go killing me before I’ve had at least ten minutes up to my chin in hot water, will you?” Wearily, she shook her head. “Sorry. Bad-taste joke. I’m terrible for that. I always joke about inappropriate subjects. But then, didn’t Freud write a paper about that?” She smiled again. “Sorry, Greg. I’m so tired I’m rambling.”

Within moments of her going upstairs I heard the water running into the tub. I grabbed a pair of heavy-duty holdalls and packed as much canned and dried food as I could carry. After three trips down to the boat I’d emptied the kitchen of every last bag of rice, pasta and bottle of beer. For a moment I considered taking the truck up to Ben’s to collect more food. I knew he’d got access to a cold store that was fed by electricity all the time. There’d be cheeses and sides of beef there, but to do that I might as well drive with the horn blaring and a sign on the truck roof that read
JUST GETTING FOOD FOR STRANGERS, YOU MORONS
.

Then what?

The townspeople would either lynch us there and then, or maybe they’d do it nice and slow, like they did with Lynne, and pile rocks on our chests until we suffocated. Those nice smiling bastards of Sullivan really knew how to squeeze the revenge juice out of a victim.

It took me less than an hour to make those trips to get all the food onto the boat. It wasn’t a great supply, as you can imagine. But it should keep Michaela’s group fed for a few days at least. With luck they might be able to find a house tucked away in the woods that hadn’t been picked clean.

I returned to the cabin to find the lamp had burned out and the place in near darkness, with all the blinds shut. Closing the screen door behind me, I listened. It had that special kind of silence, the tomb silence that seems more than there being no sound. There was a sense of the building holding its breath. Secret, secret, secret . . . there’s something hiding here you shouldn’t see, Valdiva.

Immediately the thought came to me that Michaela had been discovered. That maybe Crowther and his buddies were waiting in a darkened room with rifles cocked.

Shit. Where was Michaela? Why was the place so damned quiet? I’d only been down at the jetty less than ten minutes. Surely I’d have heard if some guys had pounced on her. Not risking relighting the lamp, I allowed my eyes to adjust to the thin wash of daylight filtering through the blinds. Then, walking as quietly as I could, I went upstairs. A candle still burned in the bathroom. The tub had been emptied. Trying to move like I was nothing more solid than a wisp of smoke, I crossed the landing to my bedroom.

In the gloom I saw a figure lying on my bed. Slowly, slowly, slowly, I eased myself into the bedroom. Michaela lay on the bed. She must have decided to lie down for a moment (while no doubt promising herself,
No, I won’t let myself fall asleep
), but there she lay, dead to the world, wearing nothing but my big bath towel, her long hair spread out against the white sheet in gleaming dark strands. Her breathing was slow, rhythmic. The poor kid couldn’t have slept in a clean bed for weeks, if not months.

At that moment, as I looked down at her, my stomach muscles twitched.

She’d turned over in her sleep, the movement making the towel come adrift where she’d fastened it high on her chest. The twitch came again. Following that came a tingle in my fingertips.

This was another kind of twitch. Not that fatal twitch that signaled I would attack. No, no, my man, this was very different.

For the first time I saw how beautiful she was. The dark arches of her eyebrows. The relaxed face that was a near perfect heart shape. She possessed a waiflike beauty that made her look so vulnerable asleep there on my bed. The towel had slipped down, exposing a smooth mound of breast. She breathed deeply in her sleep, raising her chest, making the towel slip down farther to expose skin almost as far as her nipple.

I moved quickly, closing the door behind me before going downstairs. Seconds later I’d lit the spare lamp in the kitchen and got busy making a jug of hot coffee on the camping stove.
Let her sleep
, I told myself.
We can spare another hour here.

Boy, was I wrong. Was I wrong by a wide, country mile.