The Stranger (19 page)

Twenty-nine

Valdiva, kneel before the ditch
.
Bang
. . .
rifle bullet chews my brain
.
Zak pushes me into the ditch with the toe of his boot
. . .
Now you’re rat meat
. . . .

That scenario played out bright and clear, I can tell you, the moment Michaela stepped out of the repair shop. The others came, too, to form a line behind her. Wood in the fire snapped like pistol shots. Sparks climbed into the night sky. And it seemed all the stars in creation gazed down to see what would happen next.

“What’s it to be then?” I asked her. “You going to give me to the count of ten before you start shooting?”

“Greg . . .” She sounded pained. “No, nothing like that.”

“Oh?”

“But we do have to decide what’s best for the survival of our group.”

“I’ve been sitting out here thinking through your options.” I spoke to the group as much as to Michaela. “I figure you’ve got three ways to go with this. One: Let me continue staying with you. But I don’t consider that viable. Two: Kick me out. Three: Put a bullet in my head.”

“Greg—”

“After all, if you do exile me I might come back looking for you.”

“Now just you wait one minute, Greg.” Michaela’s eyes flared with anger in the firelight. “This hasn’t been easy for us. But we’ve got to decide what’s right. We’ve had strangers who’ve joined us in the past who have been infected. We’ve woken up in the night with them trying to hack out our brains. See!”

I didn’t anticipate what she’d do next. She lunged forward, grabbed my fingers and pushed them into her hair on top of her head. “Feel that ridge of skin? That’s scar tissue where a sweet little fourteen-year-old girl tried to open up my skull with a wrench. Of course, first of all she was chatty, friendly and perfectly normal-looking, so we had to sit down and talk it through among ourselves. Yes, she was a stranger. Yes, she might be infected. But, no, there were no symptoms. And we weren’t so brutal, Greg, that we decided to turn her away to die of starvation out there. We took her in, fed her, but a week later she went crazy and attacked. Tony, here, had to put three bullets through her back to get her off me. She was like a wildcat.” Michaela spoke fast, angry and hurt all at the same time. A huge glittering tear swelled in her eye before rolling down her cheek. “So, you see, Greg, we didn’t make this decision lightly.”

I took a breath to speak, but Ben held up his hand. “Listen to what they have to say, Greg.”

I nodded. “OK. What’s the verdict?”

Tony said, “We like you as a person—”

“Oh, please . . .” Sarcasm ran deep in my voice.

Again Ben spoke up. “Greg, hear them out.”

“But if you continue living here among us it’s going to tear our group apart. Some of us won’t be able to accept the uncertainty. That one day you’re going to be our pal—”

“The next our executioner.” This came from Zak. “But we realize that you’d be an asset to us. You’d be able to screen strangers for Jumpy.”

“That’s why we don’t want you to leave.” Michaela looked at me. Her eyes, compassionate and yet . . .

“You mean,” I said, “I’m like the old-time nuclear deterrent. Can’t live with me, can’t live without me. Well, that fills me with a warm, rosy glow, I can tell you. Many thanks. I feel like a leper . . . a leper with a sack full of marijuana at a dope fiends reunion party.” OK, so that comparison didn’t make a hat full of sense, but I was too angry to speak with any clarity, or logic, come to that.

“So what we’ve decided is,” Michaela pressed on despite my scornful remark, “is that we’re going to stay here for a while. We’ve food to last a week, there’s a fresh water well in the back yard, we’ve got a roof over our heads and there aren’t any hornets close by.”

“Sounds sweet. Go on.”

She continued, “You might not go along with what I’m going to suggest next. You might tell us to go to hell, but we think it’s as fair as it possibly can be under the circumstances.”

“Well?”

“There’s a house about five miles down the road. It’s been burned out, but the garage is still in once piece.”

“You want me to move in there?”

“If you agree . . . then we can still be of use to each other, but you’d be far enough away to remove this sense of danger that some of us feel when you’re with us.” She paused. “What’s your answer, Greg?”

I looked at the dozen or so faces watching me expectantly in the firelight.

“It stinks,” I told them. “It stinks like a mountain of crap.” Then, sighing, I shook my head. “But until we can figure out something better I’ll go along with it. For now.”

Home is a garage with one window, a lawn mower and an open-topped Jeep so old that the dirt crusting the bottom could be pure Danang delta mud. Zak, Ben and Michaela delivered me to the place the morning after I blew off the stranger’s head. They left me with supplies, my rifle, plenty of ammo and instructions that they would call on me—not the other way ’round, you’ll note.

Zak shook my hand. “Sorry it has to be this way, Greg. But you have to be a walking time bomb.” He smiled in a good-natured way. “We’ll see you soon.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Don’t be a stranger.” I meant it, too.

In the back of my mind I still harbored a suspicion they’d quietly leave without telling old Greg Valdiva, the guy with the Twitch that might just turn out fatal—
for you
.

Ben’s hands shook. I half wondered if he’d offer to camp out here with me, but this was the wrong side of paradise. The house, which had been burned to its foundations, lay at the edge of dark forest that looked sinister enough to be the lair of any number of murderous demons. In a dried-out swimming pool human bones lay in tangled heaps. A place of breathtaking beauty it wasn’t.

After they’d carried my gear into the garage, said some complimentary things about my new home (in the way I suspect parents spoke when depositing their kids in new rooms at college) they climbed onto the bikes and fired them up.

Michaela called me closer to speak to me. She rested her hand on my forearm as she spoke in a low voice so the others wouldn’t hear above the sounds of the Harley motors. “Greg, they’re frightened of you. And this is all new to them. Give them some time to come ’round to the idea of what’s inside you.” She squeezed my arm. “Listen to me; they’re going to realize soon that you’re special, and that they’re going to need you.”

I gave that you-might-be-right-you-might-be-wrong kind of shrug. “Drive carefully, Michaela.” Then I called out to the others, “See you soon, boys.”

Ben saluted and Zak waved his cowboy hat.

As they rode away into the misty morning light I found myself wondering if I’d ever see them again.

Thirty

“Twat!”

The ancient profanity erupted from my mouth as the wrench I was using to slacken the nuts on the Jeep slipped and my knuckles slammed into the wheel arch. “You sonnafabitch. You twat!”

After three days of waiting for hornets to find me (not one showed) I’d finally gotten bored enough to start work on the Jeep. I figured if I could get the machine roadworthy it might come in useful. Also, it gave me something to do. Those summer evenings alone had started to stretch out to something little short of infinity.

So, welcome to the Valdiva home. The garage was clean, dry and rat and bug free. I rigged up a bed in the corner. Rummaging through boxes at the back, I uncovered a barbecue and charcoal that served as a stove. I also found a hammock that I strung between a couple of trees not far from the bone-rich swimming pool. A box full of paperbacks provided light entertainment. They were mainly old thrillers, but what the hell?

When I became too restless to work on the Jeep or lie reading in the hammock I walked miles through the woods. There were no sign of any hornets, or anyone else come to that. In fact there was something eerie about the forest. I guessed it was ancient woodland where there’d been no tree felling to speak of. They just seemed to go on forever. Densely packed trees, thick canopies of branches overhead that roofed you in so completely you wouldn’t even catch a glimpse of sky. I walked deeper and deeper into them. It was almost dark beneath that ocean of leaves. Silent, too. A silence so strong you half believed you could reach out and sink your fingers into it.

Every so often the breeze would catch the leaves. Then there’d be hissing sounds. A thousand snakes sliding out of the earth all around you. At least that’s the image the
hissss
put into my mind.

The strange thing is, there was something compelling about the forest. It hypnotized you. Pulled you in. You longed to walk deeper and deeper and lose yourself there. Never come back. Never see the outside world. But keep walking among those trees, with that whispery
hissss
all around you . . . everything still . . . peaceful. I recalled that some Native Americans said the Wendigo haunted forests. That was the spirit of the forest. The Wendigo had the power to creep into your brain. Slowly it possessed you. Once it had control you suddenly ran away into the wilderness. Never to be seen again.

That forest did it to me. Maybe there was something in the old Wendigo legend after all.

Anyway, after taking a strip of skin from my knuckles as I tried to loosen the wheel nut rusted to damnation, I decided to take a lungful of fresh air. The late afternoon sun slanted down across the wood. Again it was silent except for the call of a lone bird in a tree. Despite the demon wheel nut, I’d put some good work into the Jeep. I’d cleaned the plugs, filters, topped up the oil from a sealed can I’d found in the garage. Once I’d replaced one badly worn tire with the spare all I’d need would be the gasoline. Then I saw myself roaring along those country roads in the rugged little Jeep, the breeze blasting through my hair. Sounded good.

After shouting “
Twat
” at the corroded nut a good half dozen times I was ready for a break anyway. There’d be little chance of Michaela, Ben or any of the others turning up now. They’d called by early morning to say that they were out on a gas search that would take all day. Of course, I offered to go along and help. They thanked me but passed on my offer. Some in the group were still uneasy about me. But then, witnessing the goatee guy having his head exploded by buckshot must still be as fresh in their minds as his mess of brains sticking to the fence.

I circled the barn two or three times like a restless dog. In my mind’s eye I found myself picturing Michaela’s face. She hadn’t spoken about relationships, but had she formed an attachment to . . . attachment? No, this was a visceral world now. Had she mated with Zak or Tony? Yeah,
mated;
that’s the word. I counted skulls in the swimming pool. Got bored by the time I reached eighteen . . . and I’d seen the telltale holes in the tops of the skulls where fractures radiated in a sun-burst affect—that was a sure sign that hornets had rounded up everyone in the neighborhood, then killed them with a blow to the head. I guess a pathologist would describe the injury that killed those poor bastards as a “grievous insult to the brain.” In other words the hammer blow would crunch right through the skull to rip the victim’s brain like wet toilet tissue. Then they’d been dropped into the swimming pool to rot.

So, to stop picturing those scenes of mass murder . . . complete with the screaming, the shitting of pants, the begging, the tears, the blood (see what I mean? It’s insidious, isn’t it?). To stop those mind movies I collected my rifle before heading off into the forest. And, perhaps, I even needed to get Michaela with those beautiful dark eyes out of my mind, too, for a while. Because right then I didn’t want her mated to anyone. The truth was, old Greg Valdiva experienced a tingling stir of interest.

For God’s sake stick to the path, Valdiva
, I told myself.
If you wander off it you’ll never find your way back. You’ll be lost our here until hell gets ice
.

The moment I stepped into the shade of the trees it was like stepping into a cathedral. One of those big old Gothic ones, where even on a summer’s afternoon it’s cool inside. And here, too, the fat columns of tree trunks rose up into a gloom-filled roof.

The path in front of me might have been made by ramblers. Then again, it might have been a million years old and formed by long-extinct animals with evil pig eyes and tusks that could rip you right through to the backbone. I walked deeper into the wood, the rhythm of my footsteps somehow matching the rhythm of my heart. Joining that was the rhythmic shush . . . shush . . . shush sound as a breath of wind whispered through the leaves.

Underfoot, there wasn’t much grass to speak off. Long fallen leaves, dead branches and moss formed a velvet shroud the same color as that dark, moist green that creeps over the faces of corpses within a month of burial. Grave moss. That’s what it looked like. Cool green grave moss.

That sensation took over again.
Walk deeper, Valdiva. Keep walking. Lose yourself in this place. Lose yourself forever
. . . .

Leaves whispered all around me. . . .

Those snakes are slipping out of the grave moss, buddy. They’re following you. They’re licking your heels with forked tongues
. I moved steadily on. Crazy as it sounds a promise of oblivion haunted this place. I wanted that cool, moist air of the forest to embrace me. To pull me in deeper. I smelled damp moss, decaying leaves, the rich scents of a million years of dead timber that formed the earth beneath my feet.

This is good, Valdiva. You can dissolve in here. You can forget about your mother and your sister lying beneath the stone tomb. You can forget that the world has toppled and broken into a million pieces. You can forget that thing in your blood that makes you kill infected men and women. You can forget, you can forget, you can forget . . .

The rhythm of words padding through my head merged with my footstep; they merged with the beat of my dark and bloody heart, my respiration and the
hissshissss
of leaves. In a trance I walked. The columns of trees appeared as a dense wall in front of me. I began to feel like a microbe passing through the skin of a beast into its muscles and nerves.

I lost track of time as I walked. It might have been blistering sunlight above the tree canopy; then again, it might have been dusk. I couldn’t tell down in that cool, unchanging gloom. Here, the air was still, with the odor of mushroom stirred richly into it. A dead bird that had been picked by ants down to bones and feathers lay on the path in front of me. I stepped over it, moved on, walking deeper into the forest.

Once, the path took me by a woodland pond. Round and deep, it looked like a bomb crater filled with water. That water was green as moss, too.

As I passed through the filter of trees my mind roved ahead, instinctively searching for any danger hiding out there. A gang of hornets maybe. Lurking behind trees, watching Greg Valdiva walk by. Easy meat, they’d think to themselves. We can crack his head like an egg, then watch him as he lies on the ground kicking and puking as his brains run out through the hole in his skull.

A sound came from my right. A sort of crunching sound like a foot pressing down on a long-dead branch with the heartwood rotted right out of it. The leaves hissed their warnings.
Bad things in this place, Valdiva
. Only no one knows what they are. No one ever sees them. Until it’s too late.

Wolves might still roam out here. There’d be bears as well. Grizzlies with bristling fur, savage eyes. With a jaw full of teeth that can bite you clean through. There’ll be snakes bloated with venom. Maybe there are other things, too. A million years ago beasts without names hunted here. Things that were part pig, part bear, maybe even part demon. They had cloven hooves, thick haunches, pelts of shaggy, rust-colored hair. Heads that were as big as a bull’s with teeth like knives.

Who’s to say that they’re extinct? That snuffling sound now coming way off to your left might be one. Its wet snout might be picking up the smell of your skin.

This time I did pause to slide the rifle from my shoulder. With the faintest of clicks I eased the bolt back. When I walked again I kept the rifle ready in my two hands. I scanned the forest, searching for a pair of eyes burning at me from the gloom. I didn’t get the Twitch now, but I sensed something out there watching me.

When I looked down at my feet a jolt like an electric shock ran from my balls to my throat. Goddammit. I’d left the path and never even noticed. I looked back into the wood, searching for that dark band of earth that feet, or paws, or cloven hooves had pressed into a hard track over the last million years or so. But nothing. Nothing but grave moss in a dull green blanket.

Shit, that’s your wake up call, Valdiva. You’ve gone and done it now. You’re lost. You’ve gone and lost yourself in the fucking dark wood
.

I took a deep breath. OK, keep moving. You’ll pick up the path again. Hell, you might walk another ten minutes and find the end of the forest with a highway and a town complete with fast-food joints and supermarkets. But then again, another voice whispered, dark and low in the back of my brain:
You might find that the forest never ends; that it gets darker and denser and more tangled, and you end your life crawling on your belly, dying of hunger
.

Gripping the rifle, I walked forward, determined to find a path. Only as I walked I found the trees in front of me were disappearing into shadow. The moss on the ground looked black as a lake at midnight. “It’s getting dark, you idiot,” I hissed. “You’ve been walking so long you haven’t realized how late it is. Now the sun’s gone. It’s dark. And you’ve lost yourself in a goddam forest.”

Keep moving, keep moving
. . . I repeated this as I walked. But, hell, it got so it was like walking through a cave deep underground. I could barely see individual trees now. A mist filtered through the wood to glide around me. Maybe these were the old ghosts of the forest coming to claim me. Darkness oozed up out of the ground. In a few minutes I’d be as good as blind. Then all I could do was lie down on the ground to wait until morning.

But hell . . . to spend a night here curled up on cold earth. Not being able to see what might be an arm’s length from me. That reptile hiss started as the leaves moved in the night air. How long would I lay there in the grave moss before I felt something reach out to touch me in the dark? A snake slipping up over my stomach? A wet mouth closing over my face? A cold hand clasping mine? The point of a knife penetrating my eye?

Those mental images of being touched in the darkness kept me walking fast. Although now I had to walk with one hand in front of me. In the gloom tree trunks appeared as suddenly as phantoms bursting out of the shadows.

Five minutes, ten minutes, I hurried through the wood with the weight of all that darkness and gravelike silence pressing into the back of my neck like a corpse’s hand.

Then the forest ended. As simple as that.

Once there were trees encircling me like a cage; now there were no trees. I stood blinking, looking into a clearing. Above me, I saw sky. Still blue, yet tinged with red; I realized the sun had just begun to set. Straight-away the air felt warmer. Flying insects moved in that slow, rotating dance of theirs.

In front of me stood a large house with a smaller building alongside it. The roofs were covered with dark shingles and the walls had been clad with boards that had been painted white. A road ran neatly up to the front door. The lawn was tidy. It gave the appearance of a rich person’s house that had been left untouched by the madness that had erupted in the outside world.

Only there was something unusual about the place.

I looked at the lawn again.

Then I said to myself: “Who’s been cutting the grass?”

My eyes returned to the house for a second, closer look. This time I saw what it really was. And I remember whispering to myself with a whole lungful of air, “
Jesus Christ
.”