Fire Birds (15 page)

Everything he said was true, but I wasn’t going to admit it.

“I’ll get her to stay,” he said. “You’re pretty crafty for an old dude.”

“I’m not old,” I said and left the RV.

Grant and Christine didn’t do any shooting that day. We all just avoided each other and kept ourselves busy with little chores while we waited for the broadcast. I was clearing out the small greenhouse around four o’clock that afternoon when Sara brought a bottle of water to me.

“It’s almost time,” she said.

I looked at my watch and nodded. “Okay.”

“Grant and Christine are going to listen to the radio in Julio’s van.”

“They don’t want us around, huh?”

“They don’t want you around,” she said. She gave me a quick, sympathetic smile.

“No need in that,” I said in a dismissive tone. “They can sit in the RV if they want to. I’ll sit in my truck.”

“I’ll let them know,” she said and leaned against the doorway. “What do you think you’ll do? Will you join up with this new group?”

“I doubt it,” I said with a shrug. “I won’t be unfriendly, but I have a nice setup here. We have a nice setup. Why would I want to leave after all this hard work? Besides, we haven’t had much luck merging with other groups, have we?”

She didn’t reply. I tried to read her and figure out what she wasn’t saying.

“Why would I want to go in and work for someone else now?” I said, feeling the need to explain myself. “As it is now, I’m a free man. I make my own rules. I answer to no one.”

She looked down at her feet and stayed quiet.

I stared at her a moment.

“What’s on your mind?” I said finally.

“If no one is willing to cooperate, there’ll be no hope for the world…none at all.”

“I can cooperate with decent men,” I said. “What I won’t do is wind up under the thumb of men like Nathan Camp and Willy Rupe and Wheeler. If this Dan guy in the airplane is like them then I’m not interested.” I wiped the sweat from my face with the bottom of my t-shirt and looked out the front windows of the building. “I wish Somerville would come back. The councilman wasn’t like those other men. He had scruples at least. He loved Clayfield at least and wanted to rebuild.”

“Clayfield isn’t ever going to be Clayfield again,” she said. “If you got away from here for a week or two you’d realize that. Nothing is what it was, and nothing is ever going to be that again…not in our lifetime.”

“I know that,” I said. “But we can hold on to some of it for the sake of those that come after. They shouldn’t have to start over completely. We could try to…try to keep it safe for them.”

“Our kids?” she said with an expression of expectation.

I stared at her blankly and tried to find the words I was comfortable using in that moment.

“The next generation,” I said.

She frowned and nodded. I knew I had offended her, but I didn’t want to give her any false hope that I would personally want to bring children into this world, not right then.

“Would it hurt your feelings if I listened to the broadcast with Grant and Christine?” she asked hesitantly.

It did bother me, but I didn’t let on, “No. Why?”

“It’s just that I don’t want Christine to think I’m turning my back on her. I want her to stay with us. I’m worried about her.”

“Sure,” I said. “Whatever.”

“I mean, it’s just a radio broadcast,” she said.

“Yeah. Whatever.”

“Okay,” she said. “I thought I’d make dinner now. We could eat it while we listened.”

“After,” I said on impulse. Then, I thought about it and decided it would be best. “After for sure. We can discuss what Dan has to say over dinner.”

“Okay,” she said. “After. I’ll go ahead and cook it though. We have two boxes of pasta left in the van–rigatoni, I think. How does that sound? There’s a big can of peaches, too.”

“Sounds good,” I said with the best smile I could fake.

At five o’clock, I was sitting in my pickup alone drinking a beer and listening to that nasally voice tell me over and over that “this is a recordin’.” Sara, Grant, and Christine were in the RV. I kept looking over at it wondering what they were talking about.

My truck was parked facing the road. The undead out there were still making some noise, but they had calmed down since the shooting had stopped. They stared at me. Many of them had vacant expressions, but there were just as many that had expressions that I can only describe as a mixture of curiosity and hunger, sort of the way a dog will look at you when you’re eating.

Then the radio went silent for a moment, there were a couple of clicks, and the nasally voice spoke again.

“Hello to the livin’. Andrew here again. I apologize for not being on the air yesterday. I hope I didn’t disappoint anybody, but I guess you understand.”

He chuckled nervously and paused. I could hear some bumping around, and he cleared his throat.

“Uh…well, for the longest time I didn’t know if anybody was listenin’ out there. I hoped …I hoped there were thousands, but I just wasn’t sure. Today, I think I can be sure there are some new listeners out there, and I want to just talk directly to them. If there are others out there that’s been listenin’ to me for a while, I hope you’ll excuse our detour away from our regular Bible study today, and I hope you’ll bear with me while I do a little recappin’.”

He cleared his throat again.

“I am one of a group of survivors. Right now, there are six in our group. My name is Andrew. As we get to know each other, I would be honored if you would call me Pastor Andrew. Before Canton B, I lived here in Clayfield. I’m retired, and I was a member there at the First Baptist Church. Dan and his sister Cheryl are two other people in our group. Dan’s the one you saw flyin’ the airplane. Tim and Laney are a fine married couple. I performed the ceremony myself. Last, but not least, is Gail. She used to work for the radio station at the university, so she’s the one that’s responsible for gettin’ us on the air.”

There was a thump on the microphone and a scratching sound. I could hear muffled voices. Then Andrew came back on.

“Uh…this is to the ones at the farm–the ones we dropped the package to. Stop shootin’. We were able to find you because you’ve been shootin’ for days. I guess that’s good because we know you’re out there, but they’re attracted to noise too. You ought to know that by now, but I’m tellin’ you just in case you don’t know. We haven’t heard you for a few hours, so I guess you got our note. I’m guessin’ that if you made it this long, you already know what there is to know. If you’re exposed, you can drink alcohol, and that’ll kill the virus. It won’t kill it forever; you’ll have to drink every time. We’ve noticed that they are drawn to women that are…that are…you know…going through their time in the month. This might be what is happenin’ to you right now. If you will quit shootin’ and be quiet, we’ll be able to help you with that in a couple of days.”

There was the sound of shuffling papers.

“Okay…uh…I can tell you what we know. The disease spread worldwide accordin’ to the news. We don’t know of any place that was spared. We have monitored standard radio and also ham radio. Dan and Cheryl flew north and west to see what they could see. Due to the difficulties of landin’ his plane and refuelin’, he was only able to travel so far. But he never saw any sign of safety. He says that he thinks a weapon, possibly nuclear and possibly more than one, was set off in Illinois. We don’t really know what that might mean for us in terms of fallout or exposure to radiation, but there’s not a lot we can do about it. Also, Dan said that some weeks ago, before he and I met, he witnessed massive fires burnin’ in Illinois and Indiana. Thousands of acres have burned, no doubt takin’ whole towns with them. Hopefully, for the sake of any survivors there, those fires have burned themselves out by now.”

He sighed and cleared his throat.

“Our group is small. We are good people. We love the Lord and have Bible study everyday. We don’t want trouble and don’t want to cause trouble. It’s live and let live with us. We want to work together with other survivors to form a community. We would like to invite you to join with us or at least work with us to establish a safe haven in Clayfield. I’d like to see the First Baptist Church in operation again. We haven’t had any takers yet, maybe because nobody listens to the radio anymore and maybe because nobody trusts nobody anymore. But listen…no one needs to fall to the virus ever again. We plan to eliminate the threat effectively and humanely in this area, but we can’t do it alone. The job is too great.

“It is our belief that as we grow and as our light shines in this sinful world, others will seek us out. We believe that there must be people like us all over. We’d like to meet you. We’d like to meet any group out there so long as you want what we want. To the group at the farm: if your package didn’t break when we dropped it, we can talk tomorrow. One or more of us will drive out near your location…uh…we can plan on around noon. If we do not talk, continue to listen to this station every day at five. If you want to meet, we ask that you do not come to the station. We do not live there, but we do guard it. We have defensive measures set up to deter trespass. We will be at the old Plaza Shopping Center in the parking lot between the movie theater and the shoe store on Tuesday around ten in the morning. We’ll wait there as long as we can.

“That’s all for now. I’m going to end today’s broadcast with some Neil Diamond. My wife always loved Neil Diamond’s music. It makes me think of her. I hope you like it.”

There was silence then music started and Neil sang Red, Red Wine.

I listened to the song and stared at the side door of the RV, waiting for Sara to exit. Would she come right out or would she stay in there and talk a while? Maybe she would stay in there and listen to the song.

The door opened on the RV, so I turned off the radio. I chugged the rest of my beer, crushed the can, and dropped it to the floorboard. Sara stepped out of the RV but stood in the open door, still talking to Grant and Christine. She looked over her shoulder at me, said a few more words to the others, and shut the door.

I got out when she approached my truck and met her halfway.

“What did you think?” she said.

“They sounded nice enough,” I said.

“Christine is disappointed,” she said. “She wanted to go in with them, but she thinks they’ll turn out to be religious nuts, because of the Bible study thing.”

“You were into church and Jesus, and she’s friends with you,” I said.

“Church is over,” Sara said. “I’m sad about that, but it is. I never really talked about it with her.”

“She’ll not find anything better with them than she has here anyway,” I said. “I’d rather she stay here, but I can’t stop her if she decides to go.”

“I thought they sounded good. They have electricity somehow. They’re making broadcasts somehow.”

“Yeah, well…” I shook my head and looked at the ground.

“I know,” she said. “You’ve worked hard here. I don’t want to pressure you to leave.”

“What? Are you thinking about going?”

She shrugged but didn’t answer.

“As much trouble as we’ve had before, we need to be careful here,” I said. “That group out at the high school looked pretty good in the beginning too.”

“I know.”

“What did Grant say?”

“He didn’t really say anything.”

“What does Bruce Lee have to do with this?” I said.

She pushed her hair away from her face with both hands and frowned.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Nothing at all, I guess. They didn’t mention him, so...”

“At some point, we need to sit down, and you need to tell me everything,” I said.

“I did tell you everything,” she said, defensively.

“I understand why you wanted to keep stuff from me, but–”

“I told you everything.”

“Is this guy dangerous?”

“I don’t know. He could be.”

“Did you see anything that led you to believe he might–”

“Let it go!” she yelled. “I told you he was a geeky guy. He might be unstable. He has a sword. What do you want from me?”

“What was your relationship like?”

“Really?” she said, stepping in closer. “Is this all you really want to know? If we hooked up? Yeah, we did. I felt sorry for the guy. Happy now? Turns out I’m just as big a slut as Jen, but I guess that’s what you like.”

“Sara…what the hell? Why would you say that?”

“Bruce was a total weirdo. He was nice at first. He was really nice...He wasn’t Corndog or anything.”

She turned to walk away.

“Sara.”

She stopped and looked at me, waiting for me to say something. I didn’t know what to say, I just didn’t want her to walk away.

“I love you,” she said. “But I’m not your property. If that’s what you think, then…well…don’t think that. I thought you were dead. I never cheated on you. I was trying to get over losing you.”

“Sara,” I said again. My mouth moved, but there was nothing more. I finally shut it and just stared at her.