Skeletons (40 page)

Suddenly I became very afraid.

I pretended to be asleep, but watched her through lidded eyes. The silvery lowering moon behind Margaret Gray made her wild hair look like Medusa's mane. The look of vicious madness that had always been there in her eyes was magnified.

She walked slowly to my pallet and stood over me. For a long time she stared down at me. I felt something like electricity flowing from her. I could feel her hatred. I saw her hands flex tightly, the muscles straining, the fingers wanting to choke and rend.

Yet she did nothing.

Finally she gave a strangled, low cry of frustration. "This is not right!" she hissed.

She bent down closer. She hesitated, then touched my cheek with one long, dry finger.

"So He chooses you, not me," she whispered.

She turned away, went back out into the night and the revelry.

That night the Silent Army of Humanity was born.

Humans seemed to know where we were and flocked to us. In twos and threes, as we skirted every bleak prairie town in Nebraska and then Wyoming and Idaho, they rose from their hiding places, traveling sometimes hundreds of miles north or south, and joined us. They were the ones the skeletons had missed, the clever or lucky ones. Like a magnet we drew them to us. Amazingly, the skeletons had not noticed. It was as if we were cloaked, so far behind the advancing skeleton armies that they were blind to us.

But we followed in their wake, and grew.

I became used to people staring, and their deference. No longer did I have to work. Margaret never forbade it. But when I tried to pick up a shovel or bend to pick corn or potatoes, one of the others would appear and, without speaking, take my work from my hands.

Eventually, so gradually that I never noticed, they stopped speaking around me.

Margaret Gray ceased speaking to me, too. She gave me her cot and took to sleeping on the ground pallet. In her sleep she would cry out and thrash from side to side as if in fever. Sometimes during the night she would awaken after these dreams. I would catch her staring at me, eyes wide and unblinking, her face covered with sweat.

In the morning when I awoke, she would still be lying there, eyes wide and staring.

Quickly, I would walk past her to avoid her gaze.

When I finally lost count, our numbers had grown to two thousand. More arrived each day. When we reached the outskirts of Boise, Idaho, our numbers were almost doubled in one day, by a group of nearly eighteen hundred who had come together and were waiting for us.

"We knew you'd come," their leader, a black man named
Coine
, said, addressing me, ignoring Margaret Gray. "We've dreamed about you."

Silently, taking from the land, acquiring weapons and vehicles as we went, and clothing for the coming cold weather, we moved west.

The new man,
Coine
, had been a colonel in the air force. Very soon he became Margaret Gray's military commander.

Margaret had changed. In the beginning she would have had
Coine
executed as a threat. But now she was willing not only to take his advice but to defer to him. She spent most of her time in her tent or wandering the borders of the army by herself.

And, as Margaret stepped back into the shadows, the army held itself together under
Coine
, and grew strong.

One night in our tent, as I pretended to sleep,
Coine
and Margaret talked.
Coine
was a tall man, with a hard face and eyes like stones. But he never raised his voice. The glow of a Coleman lantern lit and softened his features as he bent over a camp table where a map was spread out.

"There will come a time . . . here, "
Coine
said, pointing at the map, “where we will have them vulnerable. We've had indications for months that what Lee is going to do is pause at the California-Oregon border, then turn north. Before they turn is the time to hit them."

Margaret Gray nodded slowly, staring at the map.

"I have a dozen men who can handle what we need,"
Coine
continued. "They were all stationed in Omaha when this started. They know how to work the overrides, and they can locate the codes."

Margaret said nothing.

"You do see, don't you?"
Coine
said, sounding exasperated. "If we can wipe out Lee, we really do have a chance." He rubbed his hand through his close-cropped hair. "I think it's our last one. If only we could hit Washington . . ."

Margaret looked over at him, looked back down at the map. She nodded.

"Then you approve?"
Coine
said.

She nodded again.

"Fine,"
Coine
said. He rolled his map, stood. Through lidded eyes, I watched him staring at me. "Strange girl," he said.

Margaret was staring at me, also.

Coine
said, "I was in the air force for ten years. After that the sheriff's office in Topeka, Kansas, for ten more. I thought I was the toughest nut I ever met. But I look at that girl . . ." He shook his head. "She makes me melt inside. I dreamed about her, so did most of the others. Everyone I talk to
here
keeps going, just because of her. She's . . . I don't know. It's as if you don't feel like you have to talk around her. And the dreams, the feelings, are getting stronger. If she wasn't here . . ." He waved his rolled map. "Well, I don't think any of us would bother."

Margaret kept glaring at me, even after
Coine
pushed his way through the tent flap and left.

Soon Colonel
Coine
was commanding the Silent Army of Humanity alone.

There was no coup. Margaret Gray merely left everything to him. She became a specter in the camp, seen at its edges, always alone, wrapped in a blanket like a cowl, staring at the sky. Her execution squads and spies seemed to melt into
Coine's
army and disappear.

Coine
was a good leader. He organized the army into work details and training brigades. New men, mostly his own, were put into command.

The weather was growing colder, but because of Colonel
Coine's
good planning, there was warm clothing for everyone, plenty to eat, and shelters from the cold rains that had begun to sweep the plains. Confident, we marched mostly by day now. We had three scout helicopters, flown by pilots outfitted with specially made skeleton masks that looked real from three feet away. I still thought of my mother a lot, but she was becoming a vague memory to me now, a sadness tucked away in the corner of my heart.

Still, I felt myself changing. Sometimes, when I looked at my hand, I felt a tingle there, and almost imagined a glow. I had grown taller. Somewhere in the middle of this, I realized, I had had a birthday. I had turned sixteen.

I was comfortable with the silence of others around me. It seemed right. As I walked the camp the children followed me, and I played with them. No one shunned me, but I was accorded a kind of respect I became used to.

Our numbers swelled to ten thousand.

Everyone had a job. There were details that baked bread in the open air, and those that mended blankets, fixed trucks, and gathered fresh water. We were like a moving hive. Margaret had abandoned her radios. But Colonel
Coine
monitored them carefully. The shortwave bands told us that the battle in the rest of the world was, essentially, over. Canadians who had joined us from the north, Mexicans and Peruvians and Nicaraguans from the south, told similar stories of the turning of the human race.

Coine
almost never consulted Margaret anymore. He had taken to wearing an air force uniform, open at the neck. It was rare that he visited my tent. When he did, it was mostly when I was alone and he thought I was asleep. He stood in the open doorway, smoking a cigarette and regarding me. I did not have the horrible fear around him I had when Margaret looked at me. In a way his visits were comforting. They seemed to give him comfort, too.

One night, while Margaret sat on a nearby hill, wrapped in her silent blanket, staring at a starlit sky,
Coine
came to my tent. He stood in the entryway and smoked his cigarette. But this time, instead of leaving after finishing it, he came inside and closed the flap behind him.

He stood for a while, as if trying to make a decision.

Finally, when I opened my eyes and looked at him, he strode forward, pulled a stool close to my bed, and sat down.

"I shouldn't bother you," he said.

I looked at him, smiled, and he suddenly grinned. "Those are the first words I've said to you since the day I rolled in here. I haven't done it to be impolite." He sat there, looking down at his hands.

"I haven't been this tongue-tied since I asked my wife to marry me twenty years ago."

I waited. Finally he looked up. There was pain in his eyes. The tall, straight man in charge, who showed only strength around those he commanded, let himself show weakness.

"I feel like a fool doing this."

I reached out, put my hand on his.

"I had a daughter, and a son," he said. "My little girl was only fourteen. They were all lost to me the day this started.”

I kept my hand on his.

His eyes became deep and haunted. "I prided myself my whole life on doing the right thing. They used to call me Straight Arrow. But God help me, what I had to do to my own family!"

He sat looking down.

"When I came home from the sheriff's office, the three of them had been turned. They tried to kill me! My own wife! My children! Since the day it happened, I haven't talked or even dared think about it.

"But there they were when I opened the door to my home, waiting for me in the living room, looking like . . . that. I'd prayed they were all right, called on God to spare them, because I knew we could get away, hide.

"When I walked in and saw them like that, sitting in the living room, turned to bones, I was stupid enough to think they could still be with us. The dining room table had been set for dinner. I smelled steak overcooking in the broiler. My wife got up—I could see her shadow surrounding that skeleton—and she walked to the table and said calmly, 'Why don't you come and eat, Sam?'

"So I closed the door behind me and walked past my children, who looked at me with those eye sockets, and my wife, Janet, stood at the dining room table, reached down to my place setting, and took the steak knife from next to my plate.

"'We had a visit today from my mother, from over the cemetery,' she said, and then she lunged at me and tried to drive the steak knife into my chest!"

He put his hands over his eyes, as if trying to drive out the image.

"I felt her in my arms! I felt her cold flesh press into me as those bones thrashed at me and tried to stab me. Then my son and daughter held on to my back and tried to pull me down. Oh, God—if I close my eyes now, I can still feel them on my back, the coldness, the rub of their bones through the flesh, but just as if they were asking me for a piggyback ride. It was my own son and daughter, but they were trying to kill me!"

He took his hands from his eyes. He stared hollowly. "Then my son, Jeremy, put his arms around my neck—God!—and began to choke me.

"I tried to throw them off, drive them away. My wife got the knife partway into my chest. She drew blood. My daughter, Tracy, tried to get my service revolver out. She pulled it from its holster before I knocked it across the room. I pulled at Jeremy's arms, pried them loose, and threw him down."

Again he covered his eyes. "I watched his head hit the corner of a table. He opened his mouth to cry out and then turned to nothing!"

Colonel
Coine
stood up. He knocked the camp stool back. He kept his hands over his eyes, weeping. "God, how can I live with this!"

He looked down at me. His weeping subsided. He straightened the camp stool and sat back down.

"I pushed my wife away from me," he said hollowly, "and she dropped the knife. Tracy picked it up and drove it into my leg.

"At that moment I almost let them have me. Janet had crawled to the dining room table, gotten another steak knife, and was stumbling back toward me. Tracy yanked the knife from my leg. I felt hot, searing pain. Then I thought,
Let me be with them
. I thought that if I let them have me, then I would be with them and they would love me again as I still loved them.

"But instead I . . .
noooooooooo
. . ."

He put his hands back to his face, covered his eyes, sought to grind the memories out. His knuckles turned white as his fingers dug into the flesh around his eyes. "Oh, Christ, how can I live with this!"

I put both of my hands over his.

"Oh, God . . ."

In a moment the fierce strength had left his hands. He let them fall open.

"I pushed them back away from me and threw myself across the room. I retrieved my service revolver and brought it up,” — he hesitated, as if surprised that he was actually saying this—"and I shot my wife and daughter, and watched them turn to dust."