Jason Frost - Warlord 04 - Prisonland (8 page)

He handed her a stick about the size of a baseball club. “Here. This is your only hope.”

“Oh yeah? Gimme your knife, Mr. Wilderness. Mr. Hickory Nuts. I’ll make my own damn weapon.”

Eric handed her the Boy Scout knife with the broken tip expecting her to lash it to the club, fashioning a crude spear. But she didn’t. She took it and disappeared into the woods. He heard her sawing at a branch with the small knife. He sat down and waited.

When she returned she hid whatever she’d made behind her back. “ ‘Turn around, bright eyes,’ ” she sang.

Eric hesitated. He liked her, even admired the zany spunk with which she endured the kind of hardships he’d seen crush tough men. The singing, the nicknames. He understood. But he didn’t trust anyone anymore enough to expose his back.

“Okay, then,” she said and started to pull her T-shirt over her head. “They ain’t much, but if you want a cheap thrill ...” The shirt popped off over her head, leaving her standing in her bra. “You ever seen a couple eggs frying in a pan, you’ve seen more than you’re gonna see now.” She unhooked her bra.

Eric sighed, turned his back.

“Thanks,” she said with uncharacteristic sincerity. “I know that wasn’t easy, Rock ’n Roll Man. And not ’cause you wanted a peep show.”

He heard the rustle of her shirt slipping back on, but he didn’t turn around. He’d wait until she wanted him to.

“Aren’t you curious?” she teased.

“About what you’re making? A tank?”

“No, I mean about why I call you Rock ’n Roll Man.”

“I’ve been called worse.”

“You mean like Warlord?”

Eric didn’t respond.

“That’s worse to me,” D.B. said. “Warlord. Kinda suits you, but not entirely. Not like Rock ’n Roll Man or Doc Rock.”

“You’re a little bit crazy, D.B.”

She laughed. “You got me throwing rocks out of the tongue of a shoe and you’re calling
me
crazy.”

Eric heard the sound of material tearing.

“I’m like you, R.R., just as crazy as I have to be to stay sane. Know what I mean?”

“Yes.”

“I figured. Anyway, I like to compare people to the music I think they’re like. You’re like rock ’n roll, more than most of the guys who sing it.”

“How so?”

“Well, like I bet you’re a big fan of, let’s see, what’s your generation? Beatles, right?”

Eric smiled. She was the age of most of his freshman students, with the same unwitting cruelty about age. Barely 34, he never considered himself old enough to be of any generation.

“I’m right, aren’t I. All you guys went ape over the Beatles. My folks too. See, you’re not country music, that’s too corny. You’re not classical, too passive, too, um, genteel. Not jazz. Nope, you’re rock ’n roll. All that rage and energy hiding under a bass beat. A dark side waiting to explode like a guitar riff, like Jimi Hendrix.”

Eric was glad she couldn’t see the flush spreading across his cheeks. The shock of recognition startled him. “What are you making?” he said.

“This.” She stood up and walked around in front of him. Her sunglasses were pushed low on her nose. She smiled happily. “Now
this
is a slingshot.”

Eric took what she’d made and turned it over in his hand. It was straight out of Tom Sawyer. A Y-shaped branch with the elastic sides from her bra cut and re-enforced with the shoelaces from the other slingshot.

D.B. took it back, loaded a stone in the white elastic, aimed at the tree, stretched the sling back, and fired. The stone bounced off the tree trunk. She jumped in the air and grinned, “Well, Rock? Am I great white hunter or what?”

Eric pushed the sunglasses up on her nose. “You’re ready to take on anybody.”

“That mean we go? ‘The Long and Winding Road’?”

“We go,” Eric said.

She screamed and kept screaming until Eric caught up with her.

The screams surprised him, not so much because they came suddenly and with such a ring of terror—he’d heard enough screams in the past months to be almost used to that. But not from D.B.

She’d been tough through everything that had happened to her. Not just through the destruction of her family, her own physical abuse, and being dragged through the woods by Dodd. But now marching over rough terrain, eating squirrels and chipmunks, keeping up, complaining sometimes but making a joke of it, singing snatches of songs or answering Eric in song titles, calling him Rock ’n Roll Man. He had to remind himself she was only seventeen.

Standing there by the side of the 5 Freeway leading to San Francisco, screaming at the top of her lungs, tears racing down her cheek, she looked even younger.

Eric dropped his pack, raised his shotgun, and ran over to her.

And saw the bodies.

Three of them.

A man, a woman, a girl.

Naked.

The girl was about sixteen or seventeen. The man and woman looked like her parents.

Eric took one look at the bodies and jerked D.B. back. “Get away. Quick.”

She looked stunned, allowing him to drag her away. She threw her arms around his neck and sobbed against his chest. “Getting you wet,” she sniffled, pushing herself away, rubbing the wet spot on Eric’s shirt.

“No harm,” Eric said.

“I don’t usually do this. Act like a kid and all.”

“You
are
a kid, D.B.”

“Un uh. Not if I want to survive, I’m not. Kids don’t have a chance around here.” She took out her dark sunglasses and put them on, covering her red eyes.

Eric didn’t answer. He was thinking of Tim. Wondering whether he’d agree with D.B.

D.B. scrubbed the tears from her face with her fingers. She nodded at the dead family. “What happened to them?”

“Can’t be sure,” Eric said vaguely.

She gave him a stern look. “C’mon, Doc Rock. Don’t go protective on me now. I’m sorry about the crying, but that’s over. Last time, I swear.”

“Plague,” Eric said.

“Huh?”

“Can’t be sure, but it looks like plague. Bubonic, pneumonic, septicemic. Could be any of them. I don’t know enough about it to be certain.”

D.B. backed away another couple of steps. She brushed the blond wisps of hair from her face. A missed tear rolled down her chin, magnifying freckles as it moved. “I don’t understand. Plague.”

“Also called
Yersinia pestis
. Or Black Death. Dates back to the Bible, 1 Samuel, Chapters 5 and 6, around 1320 B.C. Next time we hear from it around 542 A.D. when it wipes out 100 million people. We’re talking about a time long before any population explosion. Nearly wiped the human race off the face of the earth. Somehow it didn’t. But it tried again around 1346 when it appeared during the siege of Caffa in the Crimea. By the time the plague got through chewing up Europe, one third of the population was dead.”

“Yeah, I saw stuff like that in the movies. Throwing bodies in carts and stuff. Like in
Forever Amber
.”

“Right.”

“That was a long time ago,” she said uncomfortably.

“Yeah, true. But try 1894. Canton and Hong Kong. Around 90,000 killed. Within 20 years it spread from southern China to the rest of the world, killing about 10,000,000 people.”

“Jesus.” She started examining her hands as if looking for signs, scratching her palms. “How do you know if you’ve got it?”

“Depends on what kind. Mostly fever, chills, vomiting, headaches, intolerance to light, pains in the back and limbs, sleeplessness—”

“Stop. I’m starting to feel each one as you name it.”

Eric smiled. “No song to cover the occasion?”

“Nothing seems to quite fit. Except maybe, ‘Get Back.’ “

Eric looked over at the bodies. “Good advice. We don’t know what kind it is. Bubonic is the most common, with swollen lymph nodes around the groin or neck. That’s what I think they had. In which case they aren’t especially contagious. But if it’s pneumatic, it can be transmitted through the air, through breathing. Gets in the lungs. Kills you pretty quickly.”

“Maybe we should be hauling ass then.”

“Good idea.”

Eric took the time to burn the bodies. What bothered him was that they were nude with no backpacks around them. Obviously someone stole their clothing and goods after finding the bodies. If he examined the women, he might even find they’d been sexually abused after death. He’d seen quite a bit of that lately. He didn’t want to know.

They hiked away from the road, the wind carrying the stench of burning flesh after them for several miles. Even after they were well out of range, Eric thought he still smelled the acrid scent hovering about him like a cloud of flies.

“Here,” D.B. cried out, pointing at the ground.: “Squirrel tracks. Right?”

Eric examined them. He’d been teaching her a few things about tracking and was pleased she’d recognized the markings. The four toes up front, the five in the rear. The tiny claw marks, the pads. Eric had noticed them earlier but had said nothing.

“Well?” she asked expectantly. “Am I right or am I right?”

“You’re right. Squirrel tracks.”

“All right, Doc Rock. We eat tonight.” She unfastened the slingshot from her waist. “A couple McSquirrel burgers comin’ right up.”

Eric put his hand on her arm. “Afraid not, D.B. No more squirrels. In fact, no more animals, not from around here. Not for a while.”

“Whata ya mean? I’m hungry.”

“We’ll eat. But not animals.”

She gave him a funny look, then a compassionate nod. “That got to you back there, huh? Burning those folks. The smell and all.”

Eric laughed. “Yeah, it got to me. But that didn’t turn me into a vegetarian. The reason we’re staying away from animals, especially squirrels, which are of the rodent order, is because they carry fleas. And fleas carry the plague. A flea bites you, then regurgitates bacilli into your blood.”

“Yeech. You mean it pukes into your vein or something?”

“Something like that. Ordinarily, fleas on wild animals won’t bite humans unless they have to, like if you kill their host.”

“Their host? You make it sound like a damn party.”

“More like a feast. Anyway, we’ve got to especially stay away from cats or dogs since the fleas they carry generally are more apt to carry human-biting fleas.”

“What will we eat? Roots and junk?”

Eric smiled. “Something nutritious.”

“Birds?” she asked hopefully.

“No. Too hard. You should never expend more energy to capture food than the amount of energy that food will supply.”

“No animals, no roots. What’s left?”

“Lots of things.”

They slept that night without eating. Just before dawn, Eric woke D.B. and they hiked to a nearby field of tall weeds.

“At night,” Eric whispered as they crept closer, the sun curling up over the horizon, “they climb the stalks and cling near the top. In early morning they’re still chilled and dormant, easy to pick.”

“What is?”

He grinned. “Grasshoppers.”

She made a sour face. “Get serious.”

“Trust me.”

Within hours they were snacking on roasted grasshoppers.

“How are they?” Eric asked.

He could see she was forcing them down, holding her breath as she chewed, but determined not to let Eric know how she really felt.

“Kinda tasty,” she said cheerfully. She started hopping about the fire like a grasshopper.

Eric sat back and laughed and soon she was laughing and hopping until the laughter made her sit back down again.

D.B. stared off into the distance. “I always thought it would be the Russians.”

“What?”

“You know, I figured if people were ever forced to live like this, burning bodies and keeping constant watch, it would be because of the Russians. World War III. I pictured all of the American survivors banding together fighting against Russian invaders. Hit and run stuff.”

“Guerrillas.”

“Yeah, guerrillas. I never figured we’d be hunting each other down.”

Eric remembered his own students discussing the Soviet threat with that same naive zeal that unwary Americans had once used in the early days of Vietnam. Communists had once again become the clear and present danger, the Enemy. And with that shift in attitude had come a new fervor to fight. Surely, the Soviets were not our friends, an enemy to be watched, a system to be hated. But it allowed us to be too easy on ourselves, ignore the enemy we had to fear most: the dark side of each of us that lurks beneath the icy surface. And in a split second of thoughtless venal action, strips us bare of everything we once were. The enemy here wasn’t Russians or Cubans or Chinese. It was the beast within.

“We have met the enemy,” Eric said, “and it is us.”

“Huh?”

“From a cartoon.
Pogo
.”

“Swamp creatures, right?”

He nodded.

“I didn’t know cartoons could be so profound,” D.B. said. “Except maybe
Doonesbury
or
Peanuts
.”

Eric began kicking dirt into the small campfire.

“I learned a lot since I hooked up with you, R.R. History, weapons, tracking, medicine—”

“Cartoons.”

She laughed. “Yeah, cartoons. It’s neat stuff. Makes me kinda sorry I never made it to the university. Guess I’ll never get an education now.”

Eric had been around students her age long enough to know when they were leading up to something, trying to be subtle, but still testing the waters. He waited for the bomb.

“Except with tutoring. Like you’ve been doing.”

There it was. She was talking about the future. Traveling together, a team, partners. Eric liked her, but he had Tim to think about. Going after Fallows was nothing short of a suicide mission. He couldn’t risk her life taking her along. Okay, even more important, he couldn’t risk having her inexperience ruin any chance he might have of rescuing Tim.

“Some of the camps I’ve seen have schools,” Eric said. Actually, he’d seen one school in a camp that was nothing more than a few families living in a church. The school was for their tots.

D.B. stared at him as if she could read his thoughts. “Yeah, sure.”

Eric hefted his pack onto his shoulders. “Let’s go.”

“What’s the hurry?” She stood in front of him and stripped off her T-shirt. Her skin was smooth and pale, freckles patterned on her chest like raindrops on a window. Her breasts were small, the nipples supple and bright. She stood with hands on hips, an earnest expression on her face. “We could make it if you want.”