The Uninvited (29 page)

A chill touched the hearts and backbones of the two visiting FBI men. Chester asked, “Why should they be prevented from broadcasting? And where is the press? They should be swarming all over the place.”

“The press is being held back a couple of miles.” General Bornemann charged up. His eyes took in the ID's of the men, pinned on their skirts. “You people aren't assigned to this operation.”

“No, sir,” Lee said.

“Well, boys,” the General said. “You are sure here for the duration, now. Once you've seen all this, you're here.”

“Just our luck,” Chester muttered.

“General Bornemann!” yelled a reporter from a national TV network.

Bornemann spun around, anger in his eyes. “How in the hell did he slip through?” he muttered.

The reporter was red-faced from anger and frustration. “General? I demand to know what is happening here. The people have a right to know. You've violated more constitutional rights here today than the KKK does in a year. And I tell you this: I am going to lodge a strong protest about the treatment the press is receiving.”

General Bornemann looked at the reporter and smiled. Then he said something he had longed to say to a reporter since the early days of Vietnam. “Fuck you!”

The reporter's mouth dropped open. He looked as though someone had just slapped him across the face with a dripping piece of raw liver.

General Bornemann hollered to a group of MP's standing nearby. “Get this man out of here and
don't
allow him back in. Ever!” He wheeled about and stalked to his Command Post.

A huge tent with a hospital designation on it stood about five hundred yards from the bridge. It was there the visiting FBI men went.

An MP stopped them at the entrance, looked at their ID's, then waved them through. They walked through the maze of sophisticated-looking equipment and white-coated technicians until coming to a group of older men.

“Who is in charge here?” Lee asked.

The eyes of the men flicked to the ID's, then lifted to the agents' faces.
I am,” a man said. “I'm Dr. Wilkins. How may we help you?”

“I think we know something that might shed some light on this problem,” Lee said. “Is there a place we can talk in private?”

“There!” Brett pointed from the passenger side of Bob's pickup truck. “I knew I saw something moving.”

Bob drove slowly on, toward the figure trudging down the blacktop. “It's a kid,” he said. “'Bout fourteen or fifteen years old. Girl, I think. Yeah, it's a girl.”

They pulled up alongside the teenager, both of them noticing the bites on her arms and the strange wildness in her blackened, feverish eyes.

“Gimmie a lift into town?” she asked, her blurry words pushing past swollen lips.

“Where are your parents?” Bob asked, the window cracked just enough to speak through.

She shrugged. “Dead, I guess. Those things got 'em last night. I ran away.” She coughed up a thick brownish-white substance.

Don't let her get any closer to you,” Brett muttered. “I can't get a shot from here.”

Bob looked at his friend, the dread and hopelessness of the situation in his eyes. He returned his gaze to the girl. “You feel all right?” He knew he was stalling, prolonging the inevitable.

“Feel fine. You gonna give me a ride into town?” She moved closer.

She had once been a pretty girl, with a shapely figure, just at the point of blossoming into maturity. But now her face was beginning to swell with infection, and her hands were puffy.

I'm afraid I can't do that,” Bob said.

She leaped for the cab of the truck, her lips pulled back in a snarl.

Her face was wild with horrible rage as she spit and hissed at the men, covering the window with a runny, jelly-like filth. Bob floored the truck just as she leaped, but the girl managed to grab onto the side of the truck and swing into the bed. There, she hammered at the rear glass and beat her fists on the cab, howling like an animal on the attack.

Bob slammed on the brakes and the girl was flung forward, over the cab. She landed on the hood. She kicked at the front glass. Bob backed up, then went forward, trying to dislodge the girl. Somehow she clung on, her face contorted with madness. Brett rolled down his window, jacked the hammer back on the .45, and shot her twice in the chest. She slid to the blacktop.

Bob put his head on the steering wheel and cursed, loud and long. After a moment, he took his booted foot off the brake pedal and rolled on. He said, “I guess there'll be more of them.”

“I guess,” Brett said, trying to control his shaking hands, fighting his own feelings of sickness and dread.

And there were many more as the day dragged on. All the volunteers searching the Parish would find but a few who were not sick, dying, or dead.

All the volunteers, though, could not do what Brett and Bob and most of the others found the courage to do. They simply could not bring themselves to shoot men and women who had been their friends and neighbors all their lives, who had sat across from them in church, or at a football game, or who helped in Little League. So a few of the volunteers became as those they had set out to hunt and destroy. And then their friends had to hunt them. So it became a deadly game in Baronne and Lapeer Parishes, the will to live battling years of friendship and love.

 

 

At noon of this deadly day, Bob and Brett came upon a man sitting by the side of the road, a military M-1 in his hands. He was crying.

Bob parked across the road from the man, leaving the motor running and only cracking the window a bit. Both he and Brett thought they had learned all there was to know about survival in Vietnam. But they had learned so much more on this day.

Bob spoke the words that had become the most important in his vocabulary. “Have you been bitten?”

The man shook his head and wiped away streams of tears from his face. “No,” he said, his words heavy with sorrow. “But my whole family was.”

“Where are they?”

Dead.”

“Did you ... ?” He let his sentence die.

“Yes. All of them. My wife—we'd been married twenty-one years. My four kids: Albert, age seventeen; Betty, fifteen; Ruth, twelve; and Ricky, eight. All dead. All dead. By my hand. God forgive me.”

“Don't you think He will?” Brett asked.

The man shrugged.

“Get in the truck,” Bob said. “We'll take you into town.”

“Might as well,” the farmer said sourly. Then, as he looked at the men, a strength seemed to come to him. He rose and squared his shoulders. “I did this much to stay alive. I might as well keep on goin'. Although for what, I don't know.”

“To rebuild,” Bob said. “To start all over. Call it a beginning, not an end.”

The man got in the back of the truck, speaking to them through the sliding glass of the rear window.

“There isn't going to be any rebuilding, and both you guys know it. I first found them bugs—the big ones—yesterday, I think it was. Maybe the day before. I just don't remember. Everything's all kind of run together, you know? Well, I sprayed those bastards with everything I had. Put it on ‘em full strength after I seen the mixture wasn't going to stop 'em. Nothing stopped ‘em! Nothing! So I stomped on a bunch of the bugs. Know what the other bugs did? They ate 'em. Talk about a will to survive, those things got it. No, don't talk to me about rebuilding—it ain't gonna happen. You guys think the government's gonna just let those bugs keep on producing, multiplying? No way. But fire will stop them. I seen that. So you boys hear my words: the government will burn these Parishes till nothing will live—ever! You just mark my words on that.”

They rode in silence for a time. Brett asked,
How about your neighbors?”