The Stranger (15 page)

Twenty

Ben hated it; you could see that. He helped pass the supplies to where I stood at the bottom of the harbor steps, but he hated it. The idea of being in Lewis terrified him. Being in the company of a stranger sweated him with fear. He kept shooting looks back across at Sullivan with its tennis courts, neatly trimmed lawns, comfortable homes, supermarkets and ordered lives.

I nodded across the water. “You can’t go back there, Ben, you know that?”

Again he shot a longing look at the tidy little town on the far side of the lake. I suddenly had a mental image of him taking the wheel of the boat and powering home. But he shook his head, his expression worried as hell. “I know,” he said. “Here, don’t forget your rifle.”

“Thanks.” Then I looked at Michaela. “We won’t be able to carry all this food at once.”

“I’ll go ahead with Ben, then bring back help.”

Ben nodded, that expression of uncertainty pasted all over his face. Walking through a burned-out city ruin with a stranger for company must have been as appealing to him as stepping out through hell with Satan on his arm. Like a man going to his execution he walked up the steps (taking them one unhappy riser at a time). “It’s the first time I’ve been off the island in more than six months,” he admitted. “It feels weird.”

“You’ll get used to it,” Michaela told him crisply. “You got a gun?”

“No.”

A gun in Ben’s hands with those twitchy fingers?

“We’ll have a spare you can have.”

“Well, I don’t use guns. I don’t think I’d—”

“You’ve got to, buddy. If you want to last more than a day out here.”

His look of uncertainty darkened into one I’d call depression. He appeared to me a man on a suicide mission. Before he picked up a sack of cans he shot me a glare that as good as said
Valdiva, you moron. How could you do this to me?

Michaela paid no attention. Turning to me, she jerked her head in the direction of Sullivan. “You think those guys will follow us across here?”

“I doubt it,” Ben said with feeling.

I shook my head. “Unlikely. They’re terrified of contamination. And like Ben, they’ve lost the knack of leaving the place.”

“Yeah, I lost the knack,” he muttered under his breath. “Lost it big time when everyone started dying.”

“Greg,” she said, “you best sit tight here and guard the food.”

Ben looked ’round at the dead tomb of a town. “Guard the food? You think there are actually people here who’d try and take it.”

“I don’t think,” she told him.
“I know.”

“Jesus.”

“Stick close to me.” Shouldering a holdall that clanked with cans, she rested the shotgun barrel on her other shoulder. Safety off, I noticed.

“We’ll be back in twenty minutes,” she told me; then, with Ben following, his head turning this way and that as he anxiously scanned the wrecked buildings, they walked away.

So I sat there in the ghost town with the sun going down. Shadows crept along the street like the buildings themselves bled darkness. It oozed over sidewalks, joined with more pools of shade and crept toward me. Cool air moved in from the lake. When the shadows crawled over me at last the chill of the evening slithered over my skin. Silence oozed in with the coming gloom. Even the birds stopped their chirping. I began to notice the smell, too. That compost smell that made you think of mushrooms, damp basements and decay.

Twenty minutes became half an hour. Still no sign of Michaela or her people to collect the supplies.
They’re not coming back, Valdiva. . . . Face it, you’re alone
.

To close off the thought I checked that the rifle was loaded (even though I knew it was), then counted how many cartons of shells I’d stuffed into the bag. Nine cartons. That should be ample for a while.

I stared along the street, expecting to see Michaela or Ben turn the corner at any second. As I stared I suddenly had this sensation of cool air playing on the back of my neck.

Someone’s behind you
.

I twisted fast to see who was there. Maybe Crowther junior couldn’t resist making the trip across the water to blow off my head when I wasn’t looking. Instead of Crowther leering down a rifle at me I saw a rat slinking through all that crud on the ground. It must have gotten the scent of the food I’d brought. Its claws rustled shreds of paper. When I stood up it disappeared under a burnt-out truck.

Forty minutes had crawled by since Michaela and Ben had left. Maybe she’d need to find her people if they’d relocated in the last twenty-four hours. That yard where they were camping was hardly the lap of luxury. They might have found a house somewhere that hadn’t been trashed.

Darkness was coming down a storm now. Clouds ballooned over the horizon to bury the sun as it rested on the hills. Soon nothing remained but a bloody smear of red across the western quarter of the sky. It grew cooler. I zipped up my leather jacket, then shivered to the roots of my bones. Now I found I couldn’t sit still. I paced the stretch of road where we’d stacked the food supplies. A police car rotted by the ferry terminal. Another rat sat in the back seat cleaning its whiskers. Across in Sullivan the town lights burned bright. Even though it wasn’t much more than three miles away, now it could have been on Neptune. Ben and I wouldn’t be welcomed back there with open arms for sure. In fact, it was my guess that the Caucus would issue an order that we be shot on sight if we even came within spitting distance of the place.

With the barrel of the rifle resting on my shoulder I nosed into the abandoned ticket hall of the ferry office (bread bandits had even torn the carpets up), then I crossed the street to look into what remained of a general store (nothing but empty boxes and baby bones). Next to it was a hotel that seemed pretty much intact. A canvas awning projected over the sidewalk. It looked dirty but otherwise undamaged. I began to ask myself if this would serve as a place to stay until we decided what we should do next.

I backstepped into the road, looking up at the six-storied building. Its facade could have been a tear-stained face. Rain teamed with soot from the fires that destroyed most of Lewis to create the illusion. Black bands ran down from each window. A pretty little bitch she wasn’t, but she might do for we poor waifs and strays who had no roof over our heads. Hell, even the glass in the windows was intact. And get this; this was the odd thing. All the glass in the windows must have been set at a certain precise angle because as I looked up into the dark face of the building I could see my reflection in a dozen or more windows.

I gazed up, and my reflection gazed down with a wide-eyed intensity that—

Shit. Those aren’t reflections, Valdiva
.

There, looking down at me, with a silent, brooding intensity, were men’s faces. There was something alien about the way they didn’t move. Only their eyes moved to follow me as I, not taking my eyes off them, edged slowly away.

Only when I had moved out of their line of sight did I turn my back on them. Then I moved quickly—but not running, not looking scared—because if I ran, a little bird with terrible frightened eyes told me, that would provoke those guys in the hotel into chasing me.

Ahead of me a group of men blocked my way. Pulling back the rifle bolt, I raised the muzzle, aimed.

“Greg. Whoa . . . it’s us. Don’t shoot.
Don’t shoot.”

I wiped the perspiration from my eyes to see Ben waving his hands above his head. With him were the people I’d seen yesterday, including Michaela. The others were more interested in the food bags. They hurried forward to drop down onto their knees, where they rooted through the supplies like excited kids at Christmas rifling through their stockings.

“Corned beef . . . hey, tinned chili.”

“Bread! Beautiful white bread!”

“Creamed chicken.”

“Get a load of this, tinned peaches. Wow!”

Heart thumping, I ran up to Michaela. “Get your people to pick up this stuff, then get out of here.”

“Greg, give them a minute or two to enjoy this, can’t you? They haven’t seen food like—”

“Michaela, get these people away from here!”

Instinct kicked in. She glanced ’round, her senses suddenly razor sharp. “What’s wrong?”

“There’s a bunch of people in a building back there.”

“They look like hornets?”

Ben frowned. “What the hell are hornets?”

“Bread bandits.”

“Oh, shit.”

Michaela slipped the shotgun from her shoulder. “They see you?”

I nodded. “But they didn’t seem to be in any rush to follow me.”

“If they stayed put we should have time to get away. They’re probably guarding a hive.”

The memory of that thing I found in the apartment came back to me like a bad taste in my mouth. “You mean there are more of those things ’round here?”

“Hives? Yes, probably dozens in a place this size.”

“Hornets? Hives?” Ben looked bewildered. “What are you guys talking about?”

I said, “Hell on Earth. That’s what we’re talking about, Ben. Hell on Earth.”

Twenty-one

We carried the supplies through darkened streets. Zak led the way, almost smelling the air for trouble. I counted ten in Michaela’s gang. They were all young and I couldn’t place anyone over the age of twenty. The youngest was the kid I’d first clapped eyes on when I arrived in Sullivan after my drinking binge (and who I nearly killed). He’d have been around ten years old.

As I walked I held this whispered conversation with Michaela. Ben tried to follow what we were talking about, although his expression, one that bonded fear and bewilderment, told me he understood precious little.

“Those hornets in the hotel,” I said, “they were guarding a hive?”

“I don’t want to see for myself, but my guess is that they are.”

“They won’t follow us?”

“Some of them might.”

“While the rest guard the hive?”

“That’s about the size of it.”

“But hornets don’t as a rule carry firearms, so we should be all right.”

“I’m glad you’re confident.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning if twenty or thirty jump us we won’t have the firepower to kill them all fast enough. Some might get through. They’ll have machetes, clubs, wrenches, knives.”

“You’ve lost people before like this?”

“Greg, when we started out our group numbered more than thirty. We’re down to ten. See?”

I nodded. “But the hive I found . . . I didn’t see any hornets. Why wasn’t it guarded like that one back there?”

Even under the burden of bags she shrugged. “A tainted hive.”

“You mean they go bad somehow? Or become corrupted?”

“Your guess is as good as mine, Greg. We’ve found hives with a couple of hundred hornets guarding them. They must be the really important ones. Usually the guards number between twenty and thirty. Then again . . .” She shrugged. “Sometimes there are none. It’s as if the hive’s gone wrong and they abandon it.”

“What actually is a hive, then? What’s its purpose?”

She smiled. “Questions, questions. I don’t know, Greg. We don’t have any professors of biology here, or even a two-bit test-tube jock. We’re just a bunch of kids trying to keep on the warm side of the grave. You follow?”

“But it’s just this hive. The smell of it, and how it looked . . .”

“You’re right. They’re weird. They’re also a God al-mighty mystery. . . .” She looked at me with a sudden sharpness, as if she’d read something in my expression. “What else is there, Greg?”

A strange churning sensation had started in my head. “I can’t explain it. . . . I know it’s impossible, but these hives . . . I think I’ve seen one before.”

Back at the yard that served as the makeshift camp Michaela had a hurried conversation with Zak and Tony. Then she came across to where Ben and I sat by the fire. “We’ll move on at first light,” she told us. “You best get some sleep now.”

Ben cast some pretty scared-looking glances out into the darkness. “What about the bread bandits, I—I mean hornets? Won’t they come looking for us?”

“It’s unlikely at night. But we’ll be taking turns to keep watch. Yours will be between two and three. So get some sleep now.”

He looked startled that he’d be expected to keep watch.

“Don’t worry,” she told him, “just keep your wits about you, then shout as loud as you can if you see anything. Think you can handle that?”

“Don’t worry.” He looked scared sick. “If I see any-thing you’ll hear me yell, all right.”

She added, “We’ve already loaded the bikes now so we can be away fast.”

“You’ve got bikes?”

“A nice pack of Harley Ds. We found them in a dealer’s showroom a couple of months ago.” She shot me a grin. “You didn’t think we walked everywhere, did you?” With that she pushed back her hair and lay down on a blanket. “By the way, Greg, take the watch after Ben’s.” She grinned again. “Sweet dreams.”

Yeah. As if
.

Twenty-two

“One thing we don’t have,” Michaela said the next morning (after a quiet night, thank God), “is a spare machine. You and Ben will have to ride double.”

The bikes looked in good shape, despite the burden of supplies they carried either strapped over fuel tanks, or in a trailer pulled by one monster of a Harley D that Zak rode. I saw the ten-year-old hop onto the trailer like he was riding on the back of a camel.

Ben went up to sit behind Tony. Michaela tied back her hair. “You can ride with me.”

I slipped the rifle across my shoulder. “Where are we headed?”

“Away from here’s the main priority.” She patted the bike’s fuel tank. “But we’re getting low on gas. We need to nose out a new supply. Luckily these things are pretty . . . shit, Greg, what are you doing?”

I did it in one movement. Slid the rifle from my shoulder, pulled the bolt, aimed, fired. Boy, the sound cracked back from the walls.

Grunting like a wild pig, the man charged from the bushes at the side of the yard. I chambered another round—
tried
to chamber another round—but the little fuck jammed. Zak and Tony moved fast, pulling guns from holsters. Only they couldn’t shoot because Michaela and I were in the firing line. The grunting guy moved faster—
helluva lot faster
—eyes blazing with pure ferocity. He bore down on where Michaela sat astride the Harley.

I cursed, jerking the rifle bolt, trying to clear the bastard so I could fire again.

With a grunt that became a full-blooded groan the guy flopped forward, smacking his face into the dirt. He didn’t get up. Come to that, he didn’t move; he didn’t breathe.

I saw the exit wound between his shoulder blades where my bullet had tumbled out at the speed of sound.

“Nice shot,” she said to me in such a matter-of-fact way she could have been complimenting me on my taste in coffee. “But don’t stand there all day. We need to be moving.”

There was no fuss or excitement with these guys. They’d seen it all before. For Ben and me this was something different. Bread bandit, hornet or just a poor goddam refugee with a bad case of the Jumpy— stick him with any name you want, this was the guy I’d just shot through the lungs the second he rushed from the bushes. I hoped my instincts always stayed as keen as that. Hell . . . in the back of my mind I couldn’t help but wonder what I’d do if any of these people who had somehow adopted Ben and me came down with a case of the Jumpy. Especially Michaela. What would I do if I found myself looking at her down the barrel of a gun?

“See?” Michaela called back over her shoulder as we rode through the forest. “We didn’t choose the bikes for their looks. Short of using a battle tank, they’re the only thing that’ll get you through this crap.”

She wasn’t wrong. The roads were totally crapped out. Every few yards there’d be a car or a truck or a bus lying rotting to hell. Many were at the roadside; others spanned the entire highway like they’d been deliberately employed as roadblocks, something that might not be far from the truth. Then there was the usual mess of broken bottles, boxes, fallen trees, human remains. What seemed odd was that skeletons could rot clean of meat and skin, but the clothes didn’t decompose as fast, so you’d find endless sets of articulated human bone still dressed in pants, jackets and shoes, complete with battery-powered watches on bone wrists that had quietly ticked off the seconds all these months. Anyway there was our band weaving ’round the obstacles on the bikes, heading south through the wooded hills in a loose convoy to God alone knew where.

God alone knew where
wound up being a barn on a hill-side that overlooked a cluster of lakes. The barn looked untouched since the day of the Fall. At one end bales of straw nearly reached the eaves, while a red tractor stood under a coat of dust at the other end.

“I’ll do the usual,” Tony said before opening the throttle on the bike and tearing off across the field.

Michaela unbuckled the straps that held the supplies on the back of the trailer. “We’ve got this like clock-work,” she told me. “Tony’s checking to make sure that there are no hornets in the neighborhood. We make the camp, build a fire, cook up a meal if we’ve food for the pot. You can help Boy collect firewood. Make sure you take your gun. We still don’t know if we’ve got company out here.”

Everyone knew their job. Everyone worked quickly. They brought the bikes into the barn (out of sight of any hornets who might amble by). Zak got to work with a can opener, opening tins of corned beef fresh from my cabin larder, dumping the blocks of pink meat into a big cooking pot. I saw him for the first time without that cowboy hat. Even though he’d just turned eighteen there wasn’t a hair on his head. He didn’t even possess eyebrows. Shock does weird things to people. Like Boy, who I’d been assigned to help collect firewood (yeah, I was the firewood guy again; there must be something in the way I walked that always got me that particular chore). Boy must have gone through plenty of bad stuff after the Fall. Bad enough to make him ditch his name and kill his old identity as if that might be enough to rid him of all the bad memories, too.

The noonday sun had burned through the cloud and it was really starting to heat up. I slipped on my sunglasses. The barn was well and truly in the middle of nowhere, with nothing but grass fields all around that had grown straggly and weed infested all these months without farmer intervention. There were no houses I could see. There wasn’t much in the way of trees to conceal any hornets. Even so, I checked that the rifle’s magazine carried a full load of shells.

Boy walked fast, with his jaw jutted forward. He scanned the ground with what your schoolteacher would have called a “practiced eye.” “Pick sticks for kindling and thicker stuff for a slow burn,” he told me. Told me? Ordered me, more like. But he seemed like a good kid to me. He was just doing the job that kept him and his bunch of buddies alive. “No, don’t bother with green wood,” he said as I picked up a branch. “Go for dry stuff. It doesn’t make as much smoke. That fence over there: Go rip out some palings; they’ll burn good. You hungry?”

“Yes.”

“Always eat as much as you can at meal times. You never know when your next meal’s gonna be.” He picked dry sticks out of the grass. “I like chocolate. But you don’t find chocolate these days. When it was my eighth birthday I got a chocolate car. As big as that.” He held his hands more than a foot apart. “It was a Formula One racing car. I ate chocolate every day for two weeks.”

“Who gave you it? Your parents?”

“Did they, hell. Have you got any chocolate?”

“No, I had to bring the boring stuff like dried pasta, flour, rice, canned meat, salt and—”

“You didn’t have chocolate in that place you lived? Michaela said you’d got food coming out ya ass.”

“I guess she was right, but I didn’t have time to bring any chocolate.”

“But you had chocolate in that place?”

“Yes. But I guess that will run out some day, along with coffee and other stuff they can’t produce locally. They’ll have to make do with—”

“I’m going there.”

“You want to go to Sullivan?”

“Yeah, if they’ve got chocolate.”

“I wouldn’t recommend it.”

“Why not?”

“They’re frightened of strangers.”

“I’m just a kid. I’m ten.”

“They still won’t let you in.”

“Yeah, the bastards. They don’t want to give away the chocolate. Do they have huge shakes? I used to have a shake maker. You put milk in the top and chocolate powder, then pressed a button and chocolate shake came out through a pipe. It buzzed so loud you thought your teeth would come out. They’ll have chocolate shakes in Sullivan, won’t they?” In the grass lay a skeleton wearing striped pajamas. Angrily, he kicked the skull from the shoulder bones. Suddenly, in my mind’s eye, I saw the farmer coming out here to check his precious cows. It’s late. He’s still in his pajamas. But he’s heard that hornets are on the rampage nearby. His wife begs him not to do it, but he’s desperate to make sure his animals are safe. In this field some hor-nets jump him and batter the shit out of him, leaving him to die in his blood-soaked PJs with the funky stripes.

Then ten months later an angry kid with a candy craving kicks the poor bastard’s skull clean off. Funny old world, huh?

Like a darting insect Boy snatched sticks from the ground.

“Don’t forget the fence,” he said without looking at me. “Get as many palings as you can carry.”

I kicked off the palings, then gathered them up as best I could with the rifle slipping forward off my shoulder. Sweating in the sun, we made our way back to the barn. “Remember the thing we found in the apartment?”

He didn’t answer. He walked sullenly with his arms stretched ’round a huge bundle of sticks.

“It was an ugly bitch, wasn’t it?” I said, trying to get him to speak.

Boy still kept clammed tight.

“You said it was a hive. Have you seen them before?”

“Yeah, lots.” He spoke as if he didn’t want to go into detail.

“Do you know what they are?”

“Yeah.”

“What are they?”

“They’re trouble. Capital
T
Trouble. You just want to stay clear of them. Once . . . once I saw them suck a girl dry. Sue and me went into this house and opened a bathroom door, just like you did in the apartment.” His eyes became glistening and wet-looking. From not wanting to talk at all the words started to shoot out like he was spitting them because they tasted bad in his mouth. “We’d just gone in there because we thought there’d be food in the kitchen. We hadn’t eaten for days. ’Course the bastards had cleaned out the cupboards, but we found this little piece of chocolate in the back of the refrigerator. Just one little square. Sue cut it in half and we licked it so we could make it last a long time. God, it tasted lovely. Really lovely.” He licked his lips. “I can taste it now. Then we went up-stairs to see if there was anything worth taking, or if someone had hidden any food. Sue was twenty. She only kept one thing from home. It was gold medal she’d won for running. She told me it was because she could run so fast that she was still alive. She could run faster than the hornets. Then she opened the bath-room door. And there was all this pink stuff like in the apartment. She wasn’t afraid; she looked into it . . . you know? Really into it, like she was looking into a pool of water. She said she could see hands and arms and legs and things. But then she screamed. She was shouting that it had got hold of her face. I don’t know how, but her face was stuck to it. I tried to get her away, but it held on to her; it glued her there or something. I couldn’t run away. I don’t know why, but I just stood there. . . . I thought it would let her go after a while. But then I saw these things come through that jelly, like they were swimming through it. They came right up to her. I was there for hours. I watched as they sucked everything out of her. She wrinkled up and just kept getting smaller, like she was a balloon that was going down bit by bit. That thing sucked her dry! That’s what hives do. They’ll suck me dry if they get me.”

“You mean the hive sucked the blood out of her?”

He looked at me in fury. “Why did you have to go talking about it? I didn’t want to remember! You dirty rotten bastard! I’m going to tell Michaela about what you’ve gone and done to me!”

With that he ran back to the barn. But he kept clinging to that bundle of sticks like a lost child clinging to a teddy bear.