Strangers in the Night (20 page)

He breathed deeply.

Lay back in bed.

“Don’t want your eggs?” Luca said.

“Later.”

“Not feeling too good?”

“It’s just this”—another stab at both temples. Mitts winced—“
headache
.”

Luca leaned into him.

Placed her pleasantly cool palm across his forehead.

“When they brought you back this morning there wasn’t a scratch on either of you. But you were both burning up. Like you’d got some sort of fever.” Luca jerked her thumb in the direction of the door. “You should’ve seen Samantha, she had her med supplies out, and everything. She was even talking about sticking you with a drip. To give you back some of the fluids you were sweating out.”

“Yeah,” Mitts said, feeling his heart give a slight jump, “I’m feeling pretty dehydrated.”

Luca got up from the armchair and then disappeared through the door to the en-suite bathroom.

She returned bearing a jug of water and a glass.

She poured then handed the glass over to Mitts.

He took it with extreme gratitude.

He touched the glass to his lips. The water felt like an elixir.

He drank the whole glass down in a single gulp.

Luca poured him out another one.

He drank that one down too.

She poured a third, adding, in admonishment, that he ‘take it easy, this time’.

Mitts did.

He took a sip and replaced the glass on the bedside table.

When he looked to Luca, he saw she was gazing out through the window.

Out to the rolling hills beyond the Village.

“What happened to the creatures?” Mitts said. “Did they . . . just
go
?”

Luca breathed in deeply.

Her chest puffed up.

Then deflated.

She glanced to the door.

Perhaps she was under instruction to leave out certain details.

“Luca?” Mitts pushed. “Please?”

Luca’s smile faded completely now.

She met Mitts’s eye briefly. Then her gaze shifted out the window again.

When she spoke once more, her tone was steady, almost robotic.

“The creatures,” she said, “they were surrounding you—you and Yuvna. When Dag and the others saw them, they . . . they opened fire.”

Inexplicably, Mitts felt a rising heat within his chest.

It pounded at his cheeks.

At his temples.

Although the migraine remained, it became only background noise in his skull.

Mitts hoiked himself upright in bed, leaned against the headboard. “They did
what
?”

Luca shook her head. She clutched her hands, laid them in her lap and then stared.

“There was no choice.”

“No choice?” Mitts said. “What’d you mean? Of course there was a choice. You said it yourself, we were still alive, they weren’t
doing
anything.”

Luca wouldn’t meet his eye now. “You have to understand, Mitts,” she said, “what they’ve done before.”

“What
did
they do before?”

Luca held herself very still.

She was breathing in deep, apparently trying to get her head together.

Trying to work out the best way to put what she had to say next.

She took so long to respond that Mitts convinced himself he would have to prod her into an answer once again.

But then, finally, she did reply.

A film of tears made the surface of her eyes appear glassy. “You don’t understand. They
kill
. . . they’ve
killed
everyone they’ve come across.”

Mitts felt the headache scale back a little.

His brain felt like mush.

As if it’d been kneaded over and over again.

He felt almost as if a void opened in his chest.

“You called me a hero when you came in.” He paused for a moment, and then added, “Why?”

Luca didn’t look away from Mitts this time.

“Anybody out there—anybody who’s ended up facing those creatures—they’ve been killed . . . you, though. You and Yuvna . . . you survived.”

Mitts felt himself sinking down into the mattress.

He closed his eyes.

Tried to see off the wave upon wave of pain which afflicted his tired mind.

* * *

Although Mitts sincerely dreaded it, he decided that he couldn’t stay inside his room for the rest of his life. That he would have to face the others eventually.

As he dressed—in the dark-green tank top, the black jeans—he heard muttering outside the door. He’d only just got himself dressed when there was a pair of short, sharp knocks.

He didn’t have a chance to tell them to come in.

They just barged right through.

Mitts surveyed the figure standing in the doorway.

The man from last night.

The man he had ‘saved’.

The chef, Yuvna.

He took in his large frame. His stomach sagged over the waistband of his jeans. His bald head was buffed to a shine. A chef’s hat balanced precariously on his scalp.

He wore a well-stained apron over his dark-green tank top.

The straps of the apron were almost lost to the mass of his neck.

Just like the night before, a scent of roast chicken clung to him.

For several seconds, Yuvna fixed Mitts with a stern glance.

Mitts was half expected Yuvna to take a swing at him.

But then, all of a sudden, Yuvna broke into a wide, toothy smile.

He tromped toward Mitts. Something jangled in his pockets as he threw his enormous arms about him. “My hero!” he said, sounding genuine enough.

Not knowing what to do, Mitts waited for Yuvna to get through with the hugging.

After about ten seconds, Yuvna pulled back.

He continued to beam at Mitts.

His blue-grey eyes swivelled about in their sockets.

“I never believed,” Yuvna said, speaking with a foreign accent, as he had the night before, “that someone would come to help me. I thought that I was dead.”

“Well,” Mitts replied, “I didn’t really do anything . . .”

Yuvna pinched his lips together into a pout.

Frown lines wrinkled his forehead.

He tilted his head slightly. Waggled his finger at Mitts.

“No, no, no! You
saved
me. There should be no doubt about that.”

“Okay,” Mitts said, with a slight smile, feeling a touch beleaguered by this whole experience.

“Tonight,” Yuvna said, taking a pair of steps back, toward the door, “tonight I shall cook up a feast that you shall never—
ever
—forget.” He grinned at Mitts. “Tell me, tell me, what is your very favourite dish?”

“I haven’t had hamburger and chips for a while.”

“Hamburger,” Yuvna replied, grinning all over, “and
chips
.”

Yuvna clapped his hands together, like a court jester tickled by an especially witty joke.

As he stomped out of the room, hands clasped, he muttered quietly, under his breath, “Yes, hamburger and chips. Hamburger and
chips
.”

And then, without another word, he was gone.

Only when Mitts heard the large man’s footsteps disappear off down the hall did he allow himself to relax.

Before he left the room himself, he glanced both ways to ensure Yuvna was really gone.

He couldn’t be too careful.

* * *

The Village gates were open.

As Mitts passed through, he expected the guards standing by to stop him.

But they only gave him a knowing nod.

Once he was out of the Village, and treading along the rolling, green hills, feeling the gentle suckle of the damp earth beneath him, and breathing in the cool breeze, he could almost imagine that he was back to the time before.

To the time he recalled from childhood.

Before everything had changed.

Mitts glanced to the large, concrete structure up on the hillside.

As he walked, he couldn’t take his eyes off it.

As if the spotlight might blink on at any second.

As if Heinmein might not really be
dead
.

Although he hadn’t taken the time to plan his route, he found himself soon walking toward the stretch of water. He thought about what Samantha had said—about how they were on a peninsula.

He wondered if he could really believe her.

Could he
trust
her?

Would she
trust
him?

He thought back to the meeting with Luca.

She had mentioned that Samantha had been looking in on him.

Making sure that he was doing okay.

Luca had said this attention wasn’t personal.

That Samantha would’ve done it for anybody.

He was nothing special.

And yet . . . and yet, the night before . . . however much he wanted to fight it, it was apparent that
something
had happened.

Something which Mitts could never have anticipated.

Judging by all the reactions, the feast coming that evening, he had achieved something which, quite simply, had never been achieved before.

Mitts walked along the water for a long while.

He stared off across the glassy, grey surface.

When it got dark, Mitts decided he’d better be getting back to the Village.

He might not be able to find his way
home
if he went too much further.

Not at night.

He paced back toward the dim, orange lights of the Village—the ones which hung about the perimeter of the wall. He felt the incline of the hill in his calf muscles.

He listened to the sound of cows lowing.

The clucks of chickens carrying on the wind.

The snorts of pigs.

Homey sounds.

Sounds which, he’d believed—in the stark, unnatural light of the Compound—he would never hear again.

They soothed him.

Calmed his aching head.

Dulled his migraine to a low-level throb.

As he continued back to the Village, he noticed something else.

A small, fenced-off area. Just to his right.

About a hundred metres from the gates to the Village.

Curious, he approached the fenced-off area.

As he drew closer, he saw that the fence was made—like everything else—of cast-off corrugated iron, pieces of wood nailed together, large rocks stacked up.

He glanced about, wondering if there might be somebody nearby. If he might be intruding on some place with a private purpose.

He scolded himself for thinking that way.

What was going to be so private that they’d decided to leave it way out here?

More than likely this was just a dump. Where they left all manner of rubbish from the Village.

Mitts glanced about the fence, trying to find the way in.

Soon, he found it.

Nothing more complicated than a busted door lying across a gap in the nailed-together wooden planks and corrugated iron strips.

He prised it back and walked through.

Into the fenced-off area.

As Mitts trod over the stodgy land, again feeling the mud suckling at his boots, he made out vague shapes in the fading light.

It took him a moment.

And then he realised what the shapes were.

Small, wooden crosses.

They stood up out of mounds of earth.

In horror, Mitts turned his attention downward.

To his feet.

He was standing on a grave.

Quickly, he took a backward step.

Shifted off.

He stood to the side, in the long grasses.

He’d knocked a cross over, too.

He crouched down.

Straightened it back up.

“They killed them all.”

Mitts’s heart leaped against his ribs.

He pivoted around.

Stood nose to nose with Samantha.

He reached up to rest his hand over his rapidly beating heart. “You scared the life out of me.”

Samantha gave him a slight smirk. She flipped on a torch.

A powerful, blue-white beam dazzled Mitts.

He held his forearm up to guard against the glare.

“Sorry,” she said, “that was immature.”

“
They
killed them all?” Mitts said.

“Uh-huh.”

Samantha glanced about the graveyard.

Her eyes passed over the anonymous, small wooden crosses.

Mitts looked back at her. “You don’t sound that . . . well,
sad
to say it.”

Samantha continued to look over the shallow graves.

She sniffed once.

Twice.

Mitts wondered if he might’ve pushed her to the edge. If she might burst into tears.

But she didn’t.

Her gaze remained strong.

Unmoved.

Finally, she looked back into Mitts’s eyes. “There’s no time to be sad,” she said. “I’ve lost everything already—I’ve cried all that I need to in my life. What’s the point in crying some more?”

Mitts felt a knot twist in his gut.

A chilly breeze blew across them.

He breathed in.

And then out.

“I don’t smell salt,” Mitts said, changing the subject. “That means we’re not by the sea.”

“No, we’re on a lake, in the middle of a mountain range.” She glanced back at him. “One of the most remote places on earth.”

“Yes, but
where
?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know—
nobody
knows.” She sighed out strongly. It was almost as if she was expressing some sort of disappointment at the deceased’s fates. “When it started to rain—when it didn’t
stop
raining—we just drove, and drove, and drove . . . we crossed oceans, or at least large rivers.” She glanced briefly at Mitts and then looked away, smirking. “To be honest, I slept most of the way.”

“What about those people you came with? Are they still alive?”

She shook her head. Turned her back to him. “Nah.”

Mitts thought she might be crying—
silently
—but when she spoke again, her voice was hard.

Firm
.

If she
was
crying then she was doing an extremely good job of hiding it.

“Come on,” she said, “we should be getting back. Don’t want to be late when you’re the Guest of Honour at your own feast, do you?”

Mitts gave a subtle sigh. “I guess not.”

Samantha led the way. She opened up the gate to the graveyard, watched Mitts through. Stood over him, almost like an overprotective mother.