The Stranger (16 page)

Twenty-three

“What did you have to go upsetting the kid for?” Zak’s bald head turned pink. He glared at me. And with those eyes that had no eyebrows, no eyelashes, there was a snakelike quality to his looks. To top it all off, the angry way he locked his eyes onto me made me think of a rattlesnake getting ready to strike.

“I didn’t intend to upset Boy. I was only talking to him.”

“About what?”

“I asked him if he knew anything about these hives.”

“What did you have to cross-examine the kid about it for? Why didn’t you ask me or Tony or Michaela? Why interrogate a little kid?”

We were standing arguing in the barn. Michaela stood with her arms ’round Boy while he hid his face in her chest. He might have been crying, but I couldn’t tell.

“I’m sorry,” I said, but my tone was angry rather than remorseful.

“You should be sorry.” Michaela’s expression was pretty ferocious, too. “Dear God, Valdiva, don’t you think we’ve all been pushed to the edge here? We’re hanging on by our fingernails above an almighty crevasse. We don’t need you blundering ’round pounding questions at us.”

“But you said that if I got you the food, you’d tell me—”

“Tell you about the hive? Yes, I will, but when we’re ready.” Then she added in a way that was stiff and formal-sounding, “And thank you for the food. Just in case you think we haven’t been grateful enough.”

I shook my head. “I didn’t know I was gonna upset the kid. Like I said, I was just talking to him.”

Zak shot me a suddenly shrewd look. “Why’re you so fascinated with the hive?”

I shrugged. “Just curious, I suppose. I’ve never seen anything like it before.” The moment I spoke the words I felt those cold spider feet across my back.
I’ve never seen anything like it before
. Why did that sentence feel like a lie in my mouth? And why was I so curious about the hive? OK, it was bizarre. Something completely alien. But when I thought about the hive it worked its way under my skin. It became an itch I wanted to scratch. I don’t know why, but I wanted to find out more. Maybe deep down I was getting obsessive about it. Unhealthily obsessive at that.

Ben stood by the tractor while this fiery scene played itself out. His hands trembled, his face the picture of unhappiness. You could tell he didn’t want to be here with a gang of strangers. He didn’t like their straggly hair. He detested their worn-out clothes. He despised the gaunt faces hardened by hunger and daily battles for survival. Old Ben, my buddy of nine months, hated everything; was scared of everything. All he craved right now was to be home in Sullivan.

Michaela looked at me. She seemed calmer. “We’ll talk about the Hive when we’ve finished establishing the camp. People need to eat and rest first. You get to learn what your priorities—Greg? Where are you going?”

I was pissed. But was I pissed at them? Or at the little kid who ran back blabbing like he was going to tell his mom because I’d played rough with him? Or was I pissed at myself for maybe lacking tact? Maybe I thought that when I delivered food to this bunch they’d sit down to explain what the hive was. So was I pissed at not getting the answers I expected? Because there was something about the hive. It was more than the shock—and disgust—of seeing that repulsive thing. There was something else I just couldn’t put my finger on. Like seeing a face in a crowd that you’re sure you’ve seen before. You find yourself ransacking your memory for a name. It bugs you. You keep thinking about it.
Oh, hell, Valdiva, go do something useful.

I walked uphill from the barn through blazing sun-light. Passed the striped pajamas that skeleton boy was wearing. Then I kicked the crap out of the fence. I was telling myself I was procuring a little more firewood. The truth? I poured my anger and frustrations into that fence through the steel toe cap of my boot.
Pow!
A paling burst into splinters.
Crash!
A post snapped in two.
Crack!
A railing busted to hell.

Anger roared through my blood. Why did the nice bastards of Sullivan murder Lynne? Why did they have to be so fucking brutal they crushed the life out of her? Why did the whole town participate? Why did they keep their smiling heads stuck in the goddam sand? Why did they pretend that they could keep their little isolated society running like it always had forever? Didn’t they know that somewhere down the line, in ten or twenty years, the gasoline would run out? And sure as hell they’d run out of canned food long before then, or it would eventually spoil in the tins. They were like Adolf Hitler in his bunker way back, when he sent orders to armies that no longer existed and the Russians were overrunning Berlin. Sullivan shut out the inevitable. They were like people suffering from terminal cancer who were saving for a retirement condo they’d never live to see.

I kicked the fence so hard sparks flew from my boot where it struck a nail.

And I knew I was angry because I’d gotten Ben into this. He should be at home writing stories for the newspaper while listening to his Jimi Hendrix albums.

“Are you planning on knocking every fence down, or do you intend to stop when you reach Wyoming?”

I looked up to see Zak watching me. He wore a pistol pushed into the belt of his pants.

“Valdiva, it’s not a good idea to go off by yourself without a gun.”

“It’s not a good idea to shove the gun into your pants like that. You might blow your dick off.”

“It hasn’t happened yet.”

“Yet.”

He watched me, his hairless head looking as shiny as a pool ball in the sun. “You must be angrier at us than we thought.”

“I’m not angry. I’m collecting more firewood.”

“What are you going to do? Roast a cow?”

“Might as well get a good supply.”

“Rule number one: prioritize. Don’t do work that isn’t absolutely necessary.”

“Don’t worry, I’m learning fast.”

His unwavering stare fixed on me. “Valdiva, you’ve got plenty to learn. This world out here’s completely different from that island. This world is never safe. There’s never enough food. There are no certainties.” He shrugged. “With the exception of hunger and death. If we see one hornet there’s sure to be more of them. So we move on.”

“It looks quiet enough ’round here.”

“Take my word for it, they’ll come. It’s like they can smell us.”

I began gathering the wood into a neat pile I could carry. “You should find yourself an island. There are plenty in the lakes ’round here.”

“But they don’t have big stores of food. We’ve got to keep moving from place to place to find supplies.”

“Nomads, eh?”

“We’re not nomads for fun, you know? We’re dog-tired, but we’ve got to keep moving. Finding food. Finding fuel. Looking for fresh water. Running from the crazy guys.” He smiled. “So there’s no wonder we’re grouchy. It must feel like you’re walking on eggshells when you’re with us.”

I didn’t answer but collected the wood, then used the skeleton’s stripy PJ pants to tie the wood into a bundle. Zak watched me for a while, then said, “We might look like a bunch of misfits, but we’re close. Probably closer than most families get in a whole life-time. So if one of us is hurt we all feel hurt. Boy’s endured tough stuff. We get protective over him. We really care about each other, but that might seem dopey to you. But to risk repeating myself, I’m closer to these people than my own family. And as a family we Samuels were pretty close. Even if I did give my mother and father a hard time. My father ran a health insurance business in Canada, so we lived in Toronto most of the year. Thing is, my parents wanted me so much to become a rabbi, so they sent me to Hebrew school in New York. From the age of eleven I was flying back and forth on my own. I did well academically, but I wanted to be a stand-up comic. That’s what I loved doing. I loved to make people laugh. When I was sixteen I’d sneak off to a little comedy bar just off Broadway where you could put your name down for a five-minute spot on stage. They called it the Kamikaze because you had to be suicidal to stand there in front of a bunch of New Yorkers and try to make them laugh. Boy, they could give you heat if you sucked. So what I’d do is this.” He bunched his fist, then put it into his pocket. “I’d say, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, I have very funny jokes for you tonight. You must laugh because I have a cute little puppy in my coat pocket. If you don’t laugh I will squeeze its throat with my hand. Right, this is joke number one. Yesterday, I went to see my doctor. I told him I keep thinking I’m a moth. The doctor said, So why did you come to see me, then? I replied, I couldn’t help myself. I saw your light in the window.’ Then I’d glare at the audience with a real look of irritation. ‘I don’t hear you laughing,’ I’d say. ‘Listen, I warned you, didn’t I?’ Then I’d pretend to squeeze the imaginary puppy in my pocket and make these crying puppy sounds, you know like a ventriloquist? Without moving my lips? Well, the puppy in the pocket routine worked like a charm. I got loads of laughs and bookings, but then it all went bad. Some construction workers came in for a beer but left their sense of humor back home. They got really angry and started yelling that I shouldn’t be hurting the puppy in my pocket. That’s when I got cute and told them that if they didn’t stop heckling me I’d squeeze the goddam puppy until its eyes popped.”

I found myself smiling. “What then?”

“They ran up on the stage to free the puppy . . . my beautiful, fluffy,
imaginary
puppy. ‘It’s not real, it’s not real,’ I screamed at them.
Really
screamed, because they were big guys, with stronger muscles in their eye-lids than I’d got in my entire body. And they’re yelling, ‘You’ve got a puppy in your coat because we hear it yelping in pain.’ I decided it was a good time to leave. As they grabbed me by the coat I slipped out of it and ran as hard as I could. It was a month before I went back. I never used the puppy routine again.” He grinned. “No, sir. I used an imaginary kitten instead.”

I found myself laughing. Zak joined in with the kind of chuckle that makes you want to laugh even more.

Then, wiping his eyes, he said, “Let me give you a hand with that firewood. The food should be ready anyway and I’m starving. So, Greg? Are you going to come quietly?” He bunched his fist in his pocket. “Or do I have to torture this cute little puppy?”
Without
moving his lips he made pained, whiney sounds in the back of his throat.

I couldn’t keep the grin from my face. “OK, OK, I’m coming.”

Chatting easily now, we carried the firewood down to the barn. Things had lightened up down there. Tony had lit a fire. The sun shone in a perfect sky. Michaela and Boy threw a Frisbee to one another, and I saw Michaela call to Ben to join in. He caught the Frisbee and spun it back to Boy. When Boy easily plucked it out of the air his laughter carried across the field.

Michaela must have worked her magic to cheer up the kid. That image of a few carefree moments stayed with me. It wasn’t always going to be like that. You know as well as I do, when life starts to look nice and easy that’s the time you really should start to worry.

Twenty-four

“Watch and learn, Valdiva . . . I’m going to show you how to make bread. Our kind of bread, that is, so it won’t come in a fancy wrapper.” Tony called across to Ben, “You best watch, too. You’ll be on bread duty in a day or so.”

Ben joined us at the fire that burned just outside the doorway of the barn. Sitting in the fire was an oven that looked to be made out of a steel toolbox. Soot encrusted the thing to hell and back—pretty it wasn’t. I’d seen Tony unloading the contraption from the bike trailer earlier. The others in the group were busy with their own chores: checking bikes, pumping tires, cleaning spark plugs, oiling firearms. Some sat in the shade fixing worn or torn clothes with needle and thread. A fifteen-year-old with bleached dreadlocks hammered tiny nails into the heel of his boot where it flapped loose. Only Zak took it easy. He’d climbed up onto the bales of hay where he’d fallen into a corpselike sleep with the black Stetson over his face. We could hear his snores from here.

Tony used a box lid to fan the flames until the embers burned white beneath the makeshift oven. “Stand the oven on stones or bricks or whatever’s at hand so there’s a gap between the bottom of it and the ground. The heat needs to be drawn through there to get it good and hot. You see? OK. Now you scoop a jug full of this flour from the red tub into the mixing bowl. Then replace the tub lid straightaway, because someone always winds up putting their foot in it and knocking it over. And flour is like gold dust these days.” He picked up a tin mug. “Now use this to add two mugs of water. Add a good pinch of salt. Mix the flour, water and salt together. When it’s the consistency of mud start kneading it with your hands.”

Ben frowned. “When do you add the yeast?”

“We’ve got no yeast.

We’ve never had yeast.”

“What makes it rise, then?”

“It doesn’t. This is the kind of bread they’d make in the old, old days. You know, Bible days? Ancient Egypt days? That’s right, guys, we’re living in the past. OK, it’s flat as your grandma’s pancakes, it tastes bland as toilet paper, but it fills that hole in your stomach.”

Ben caught my eye. I knew what he was thinking. That to survive we were going to endure some Stone Age living conditions.

Tony continued. “When you’ve kneaded the dough, break it up into small patties about the size and shape of a hamburger—economy-size hamburger, that is. After that, put them on this tray and into the oven for thirty minutes. There,” he said like a TV cook, sliding the tray with its cargo of dough lumps into the oven. “Nothing to it, is there?” He shot us a grin. “Of course the first half dozen or so times you do this you’ll make a king-sized mess of it. You’ll burn the bread one day. The next it’ll come out raw. You’ll drop the dough into the dirt and everyone will get mad at you.” Smiling, he shook his head. “I should know, it happened to me plenty, but you’ll get used to it.”

“I don’t think I want to get used to it,” Ben said.

“It’s that or go hungry.”

These people had got a little industry running like a finely tuned motor. Of course, what that industry produced was survival—survival one day at a time. Here they all were, busily keeping their bikes running, their clothes mended, making enough food to fill their bellies. It was an industry hanging by a thread. Call me pessimistic, but I wondered what happened when they ran out of gas for the bikes or flour for the bread.

Tony left me in charge of watching over the bread in the oven (it needed careful feeding with thin sticks of firewood, then fanning with the speed of a lunatic to keep the heat up). He took Ben across to the bikes, where he showed him how to ride the big Harley. A few of the others gathered ’round, amused when it appeared that Ben would fall off. Little did they know he was an expert on that old dirt bike of his, and he soon mastered the machine.

I broke sticks, eased them into the embers. I blew on the fire to get it blazing, then fanned it with my hand, which was pretty hopeless really. Soon my fingers felt as if they’d fly off from the knuckles, I was fanning that frantically.

“What are you doing, Valdiva? You look as if you’re spanking the invisible man.”

“I might as well be, for all the good I’m doing.” I squinted up into the sun to see Michaela standing there, watching me with obvious amusement.

“Here, this might be better.” She offered me a piece of stiff card.

“Thanks.”

“Are you getting the hang of it?”

“Making bread?” I shrugged. “So far so good. How’s Boy?”

“He’s fine now. But as you see it doesn’t take much to upset him. His nerves are still raw after what happened to his sister.”

“The girl was his sister? I didn’t know.”

Michaela sat on the ground beside me. She nibbled a shoot of grass, the tip of her tongue every now and again touching the stem as she tasted sweet sap. “He’d been living rough with his sister for a while. We don’t know how long exactly because he refuses to say any-thing about his past or where he was from, or even to admit what he’s really called. We found him in the house where his sister had been killed by the hive.”

“You mean he was living there?”

Her expression was grim. “Not living there. He’d just laid down at the top of the stairs. He’d have died if we hadn’t found him when we did. In fact, he was so dehydrated we thought we were going to lose him anyway.”

“Poor kid.”

“It was the shock, I guess. Seeing what that thing did to his own flesh and blood.”

“What did it do to her?”

She fixed me with those eyes that were so dark I’d swear they were black as coal. “You’ll keep asking me about the hive, won’t you? You’re never going to give up.”

“You said you’d tell me everything.”

“In exchange for the food.”

“Things have moved on since then. The way I look at it now, Ben and I are going to be dependent on you for survival, aren’t we?”

“More wood?”

“Huh?”

She nodded at the fire. “You’ve got to keep feeding the fire with sticks, otherwise the bread won’t bake properly.”

I broke more sticks and pushed them into the embers while she fanned the flame with the card. “I will tell you about the hive, but I’ve got something to con-fess.”

“Oh?”

“I know precious little. I knew you were keen . . . well, almost lusting after information about the hive would be more accurate. I’m afraid I exploited your curiosity to get food.” She gave an apologetic smile. “I figured you might not deliver the food if I didn’t have some lever on you.”

“But you know something?”

“A little. Not much.” She gave me a sideways look. “At least not enough to satisfy your curiosity.”

“OK, cough up what you do know.”

“You’ve got a charming turn of phrase, Valdiva. You know that?”

I shrugged at the same moment that I heard cheers and applause. Ben rode ’round the barn, his face blazing with the sheer joy of mastering the monster bike. When he returned to the others they slapped him on the back and rubbed his hair. He grinned back at the mass of grinning faces as he killed the motor.

I turned back to Michaela and smiled. “OK. The hive. What is it?”

“We’re going to wind up calling you Mr. Persistence.” Despite affecting a weary sigh, she nodded. “OK. About three months after the Fall, our group picked up a warning on a CB radio. Someone—we don’t know who—warned everyone who’d listen to him to beware of something he called a hive. When he described a hive—that it looked like a mass of goo filled with human body parts hanging suspended like pieces of fruit in strawberry Jell-O—we pretty much wrote him off as drunk or crazy.” She gazed into the fire as she fanned the flames, but I could see she was seeing some-thing terrible in her mind’s eye. “The first time we saw a hive was when we found Boy. We were searching houses for food. Of course they were all abandoned by that time. And the hornets had started their destructive rampage. You see, after they killed everyone that didn’t have Jumpy they went back and destroyed all their possessions. You might have missed it if you were holed up on that island. The hornets would go into a house, take all the food for themselves and then they’d just smash everything, tear clothes to pieces, or they’d just torch the place. I think military people call it ’scorched earth policy.’ You destroy anything and everything that might be of use to your enemy.” She took a breath. “So we went into the house where we found Boy. That’s when we saw the hive and what it had done to his sister.”

“What had it done?”

“Sucked her dry, Greg. If you ask me those things are like vampires. They batten onto people, only I don’t know how they do it. Maybe with some kind of teeth in the gel or disgusting tubes that burrow into the people it catches. Then it draws the blood right out of them. We’ve seen it again since. Victims look like pieces of dried fruit. Their faces become wrinkled and ridged like raisins, which sounds like a funny description, funny ha ha, but it’s not. If you saw for your-self you know how sickening it is. You want to puke when you look into those dried-up faces. Even their eyes shrivel.”

“What is a hive?”

“I don’t know,” she said, fanning the flames faster, as if trying to waft those mental images away. “Some disgusting parasite, maybe.”

“But you said that bread bandits—I mean hornets— guard them.”

“Mostly . . . not always.” Despite the heat I saw goose-bumps pucker the skin of her arms. “We decided we had to destroy them. The one that killed Boy’s sister we burned with gasoline. Where they were guarded by hornets we picked off the guards with our rifles, then torched the hive.”

“What stopped you killing more?”

“Because there were so many of them. We only had limited amounts of ammo. If there were twenty hornets guarding them it would still take more than twenty cartridges to kill them, even if our shooting was pretty good.”

“You’ve no idea at all what they might be?”

She sighed. “I think they’re connected with the Jumpy somehow. Zak believes Jumpy isn’t so much a disease but a metamorphosis. The early symptoms, the overwhelming panic, then this mindless urge for them to kill people that aren’t infected, were the first stages of that metamorphosis.”

“You mean that people infected with Jumpy will end up becoming hives?”

“That’s what we’ve figured out. If there’s a team of scientists still alive out there they might tell us it’s all crap. Until then, that’s our theory. What do you think?”

I nodded. “It seems as good as any to me.”

“There’s some other stuff as well.” She spoke as if the subject sickened her; she wanted to get off it fast. “So far we’ve only found hives in buildings, and they’re always either in a bathroom or a kitchen. Zak figures they need to be near a water supply. They also tend to be guarded, as I’ve said. And it seems as if they need food.”

“That’s why they pull the vampire trick?”

“That seems to be the case. They trap unwary people like Sue.”

“And the one back in Lewis nearly got me the same way.” I remembered the head lunging through the gel with the wide-open mouth.

“Or”—she stood up—“or the hornets who guard them procure victims for the hive to feed on. Any more than that I don’t know.”

A thought occurred to me. I stood up and reached out to catch her arm to stop her walking away. “But if this is some kind of metamorphosis, this hive must be the larval stage. So there must be a final stage.”

She looked up at me, then shrugged in a way that suggested she agreed. “You may be right, Greg. For all we know there may be something like a big, beautiful butterfly waiting to hatch out.” Her eyes hardened. “But until then we do know some facts. And the main fact is that if you get too close to one of those things you die.” She held eye contact with me for a while. Then she glanced down at the fire. “Greg, you’ve burned your bread.”

I looked down to see wisps of blue smoke coming from the top of the oven.

Crouching down, I opened the oven door, used the pliers to pull out the oven tray and saw a dozen bun-shaped cinders.

“Damn.”

“See,” she said. “Making our daily bread is tougher than you think.”

“Back to square one.” I set out the mixing bowl and tub of flour.

She smiled. This time there was warmth in it. “I’ll give you a hand,” she said. “Don’t worry, there’s no rush. This is for the meal tonight and breakfast tomorrow.”

The thing is that bread was going to burn, too. Because twenty minutes later Zak came running out of the barn with straw still stuck to his clothes from his makeshift bed. Panting, he shouted, “There are bad guys coming down through the valley.” He pulled the pistol from his belt. “There are hundreds of the bastards.”