The Secret: A Thriller (22 page)

Jerry walked on without me. Then I heard him cursing, and he came back. “Need a little rest?” he asked, and I could see how hard it was for him to hold back a sneer.

I grinned. “Nope. Look, I didn’t see anything back at the high school that said my son might be there. And Tim didn’t leave a signal. And I’ve got no objection to checking out this VA place. But I want to know what your interest is.”

He sat on a rock, clasping his hands together over his knees and looking trapped.

“Start with McDermott,” I suggested. “What do you know about the military setup out there?”

“Military,” he scoffed. “Barely. Look, I don’t want this stuff to get around.”

I nodded, though he wasn’t looking at me. “I can keep my mouth shut. As long as it doesn’t put other people in danger.”

Jerry flinched at that. “Fairly put,” he said after a moment. “I came in with the Guard three days before the…before the power went out. Some kind of hush-hush deal at the prison, something about inmates getting sick. I didn’t get details—mostly I was just escorting some medical types.”

“So you were, what? A lieutenant?”

He shook his head. “Good guess.”

“Not really. You knew McDermott pretty well. You weren’t his boss. You were leading an escort. I don’t know much about the military, but it makes sense. So when did McDermott set up out of town?”

Jerry looked irritated. “I got orders to pull out of the prison, not that I’d ever been too far inside anyway. Instructions were to leave the medical team in place and haul ass due west, out of town. So I did, and we got met, and…shit got out of hand.”

“The EMP bomb?”

“Don’t know, man. Above my pay grade. What I know is we were supposed to get reinforcements and we didn’t. Regular Army types were supposed to show up later on, but they didn’t show. McDermott said we were all in a quarantine zone, and it was up to us to keep order. Keep people from trying to leave. His story was that there was a larger perimeter—all regular Army—surrounding us, but we weren’t supposed to go that way. Our job was to try to keep anyone else from going that way either.”

I sat and thought about it. “So why’d you take off?”

Jerry turned to face me. “We were dying. Fast. Some guys fell into a coma and never woke up. Some…changed, and either got dead or left, depending on their luck. And we weren’t getting any new supplies. Look, even in a quarantine zone stuff like food should have come in. It didn’t. So…we started raiding civilians’ houses, and whatever else we could find. At first we were supposed to use
only
filtered water, but after a couple of days that changed and the rule was
never
to drink filtered water. I figured it would all fall apart—I’m surprised it hasn’t, yet. Unless that’s why McDermott came in…to give up. Pass control to whatever looks like a civilian government around here.”

“What happens if someone tries to leave? Gets past that outer perimeter?”

He turned his hands palm-up. “Beats me, man. I didn’t try. I’m a local boy, you know?”

I sat for a while longer, mulling it over. It hadn’t occurred to me that the military might be just as screwed up as the town. And not just right here, either. If they had no reinforcements, okay—with a quarantine that made a certain amount of sense. But no supplies? And orders to drink the local water? Why?

Birds burst out of the trees all around us, shrieking and calling. Two squirrels thrashed their way through the underbrush. I saw a deer, a huge buck, give up his hiding place twenty feet from where we’d been standing.

“Dude, we got bigger problems,” Jerry said, his face twisting.

I glared at him. Bigger than whatever made the US military back away slowly from our town? “Bullshit, Jerry. You’ve got about two min—”

“Seriously, shut the hell up, Ash! Swarm coming!”

“Fuck,” I agreed after a moment. We looked around for shelter, but the swarm sounded like it was in the direction of the town. We had nowhere to go.

“Maybe they won’t come out this far?” I said.

“Yeah. Maybe.” Jerry turned away from me. “I’m running for the creek. Keep up if you can.”

And he was off.

I tore after him, jumping logs, crashing through leaves, tearing my skin on vines and nettles and bark. The creek might help. Maybe. Better than nothing. I hoped.

The buzz-roar kept getting closer. “Turn left!” I yelled as I saw Jerry getting off course. “Ten o’clock!”

He hesitated and I passed him. After a moment I heard him following. The trees were getting taller, the ground was sloping down…I tripped over a rock but rolled and came up running.

“This is it!” I called to Jerry behind me, but I could barely hear my own voice over the bugs.

I saw what was probably an overhung bank right in front of me—there was a drop-off. But the bugs were so close I didn’t have time to care. I ran out, tried to leap at the last second as the bank kind of squelched away under my foot…and landed on my side in about two feet of water.

Jerry’s feet landed next to my shoulder. He steadied himself. “Not deep enough!” he screamed, and stepped on me as he sloshed upstream.

I didn’t have time to move any farther. The bugs were there with us.

I closed my eyes and dug as much of my body as I could into the muddy creek bottom. I couldn’t hear Jerry, but the things were on my face, in my hair—in my nose!

I blew as explosively as I could, then pinched my nose shut with my left hand and tried to use my right to give myself a little airspace over my mouth.

They were in my clothes. They were in the water, too, but there were fewer of them—I was lying face-down, and from the way they tried to get into my nose, ears, mouth, and eyes…I was very glad I wasn’t exposing any more orifices.

I wanted to scream, to run shrieking away from the onslaught, but I didn’t. Yet.

Instead I lay there and let them crawl into my ears. I kept them out of my nose, and mostly out of my mouth—breathing shallowly through my teeth when I had to—but didn’t know how long I could take it.

Worse, a couple of times something larger stepped on me. Giant bugs? They weren’t big enough to be people. But they made shrill hooting sounds I could hear even over the buzz-roar. Hunters-I-mean-werewolves, junior size? No way was I going to chance taking a look.

Finally I decided nothing was worse than not knowing what was happening. I started to open my eyes but had to immediately abandon protecting my nose to stop what felt like a million gnats all trying to crawl under my eyelids. Then I frantically squeezed my nose, trying to kill whatever was inside, hoping the tickle of little legs in the back of my throat was in my imagination but not believing it. Especially when I started to gag. I vomited into the shallow creek, and tried to keep my eyes and nose protected as I did it. Then shut my mouth as quickly as I could. Which wasn’t fast enough.

I couldn’t take this much longer. I could tell I was going to break. Get up and run, dance and kill as many as I could—
anything
but lie there. I knew swarms could last for hours. There was no way I could last more than another few seconds.

“Damnit!” I yelled but didn’t hear, and then had to clean out my mouth—I gave up on using my fingers quickly and instead started chewing. Crunchy, squishy, still moving, some biting back—I lunged up and puked into the creek again, then tried to dig myself deeper.

Four times I started to give in, to rise and make a run for it. But each time things got so indescribably worse that I settled back down.

Worst of all was that I
knew
I should be more passive, I
knew
I shouldn’t be killing the bugs because I couldn’t fight their numbers, I
knew
I couldn’t afford to be found out if they really did pass information on to some kind of overseer—I thought of the boy with faceted eyes, letting a wasp crawl into his mouth and smiling, smiling, smiling…

And then the swarm moved on.

* * *

I
hadn’t noticed any lessening, and in fact I was still writhing and twitching in the creek when I realized…only a few straggler fliers and crawlers were still with me. The rest had gone on to whatever they were going to do next.

I washed out my mouth as best I could, and nearly tore my clothes off my body, desperate to GET THEM OFF OF ME!

Eventually I calmed down, stopped shaking, and only ran my hand over my head or jumped, certain more were on my back, every few minutes. I felt little legs crawling all over my body, even where I could clearly see my skin and knew it was in my imagination. Didn’t help.

When I got my breathing back under control I methodically washed and wrung out my clothes. I still didn’t want to put them on—anything touching my skin felt like it was going to start crawling, biting, maybe trying to force its way
inside me
—but I made myself do it.

Eventually I got myself together, and went upstream in search of Jerry. I found him sitting buck naked on a log. As I walked up he twisted around, jumped up, and tried to brush probably-nonexistent bugs off his ass.

“We made it,” I said to let him know I was there.

He jumped again, stared at me as if he had no idea who I was, then shuddered and closed his eyes. “Yeah.”

He’d already cleaned his clothes—I could see them drying on a couple of boulders—and walked toward them.

I started to avert my eyes, but got a glimpse of his back and stared. From the way he moved I figured he knew I had seen and was watching him.

Once he was dressed he shook himself again, windmilled his arms, and gave me a skeletal grin. “Invigorating, isn’t it?”

“Oh yeah,” I agreed. “I’m going to want to do that every week.”

His grin died, and he sat down on a log. “You saw my back. The rash is pretty bad, isn’t it? I could feel it in my armpits at first, but now my whole back feels like somebody’s been beating on it with a tenderizer.”

“Might have been,” I agreed. “I don’t know if this is the same thing Tim wanted to treat, Jer. It looks more like…tumors, or something. Bumps starting under your shoulderblades, going almost up to your neck.”

He nodded. “If it’s not one damn thing…”

He’d been wearing the same set of clothes for our entire trip. We all had, since carrying any extra weight or bulk might be fatal. I took a closer look at him.

“I don’t know if I should even mention this,” I said hesitantly. “But Jerry…are you getting shorter?”

“
Fuck!
” he screamed, and walked away from me into the woods.

I nodded. Yeah, he’d noticed that too.

I was glad I hadn’t mentioned his ears were also changing. Getting a little…pointy.

One thing at a time, I thought. Then I gave a short laugh.

It wasn’t one thing at a time anymore. If it ever had been. It was everything, all at once.

* * *

J
erry came back after a while. Didn’t say anything, just sat near me.

“What I can’t get over,” I told him, “is that you were caught in a swarm before. In the open. No creek. If I even
hear
one of those things again I’ll probably lose my mind.”

He nodded. “Who says I haven’t lost mine already? But…yeah, the first one was worse. And it went on a lot longer. I wouldn’t say this to just anybody, but since you’ve been through it…when it happened before there was still running water in some parts of town. Almost the first thing I did when I got free of the bugs was shove a garden hose up my ass and give myself an enema.”

I felt a chill between my shoulderblades. “I can see that,” I told him. Truthfully. Though I didn’t want to think about it.

“Worst part,” he continued, “was that the whole time I was doing that I kept wondering if I was just pushing them deeper inside me. Were they going to wiggle around, bite me, or what? I didn’t quit feeling flutters down there for three days.” He shook his head slowly, looking at the ground. “I figured that was all in my head. Anyway,” he gave a skeletal grin, “the nightmares were worse. Still are, sometimes.”

I couldn’t think of anything to say. Eventually I clapped him on his left shoulder, being careful to avoid the sensitive-looking bumps I’d seen earlier. “Come on, man. Maybe we should head through town the way you wanted to.”

“Naw,” he said, standing. “You’re right. I don’t think…so far the swarm hasn’t tried to kill us. And I think we just caught the fringes of it, anyway. It was mostly back toward the road. If we circle out a bit farther we might avoid them entirely.”

“Your call,” I told him.

He gave me a strange look. I shrugged. I wasn’t the one whose back looked like it was giving birth to an alien.

My left ear started itching, but I waited until Jerry was walking in front of me to scratch it—and check the shape.

Normal.

So far.

* * *

J
erry turned his head in my direction. “We’re not learning much.”

“I’d noticed that.” We were sitting in the back of an SUV with tinted windows, watching to see who came and went to—and from, I guess—the VA hospital. We’d walked all around the place, but…it was a tall building, and we hadn’t really wanted to get closer. Or at least I hadn’t.

“Jer. What is it you’re not telling me?”

“Hmm?” he asked, not looking at me. “About what?”

“About why we’re here, dumbass,” I said. “We haven’t seen a single kid anywhere in town. Which…I don’t like. But there’s no reason to think we’ll learn anything else useful staring at this building. Yet here we are. And not leaving.”

He turned his head slightly in my direction, gave a sort of grin-smirk, and looked back toward the hospital. Or the main road going toward it, anyway. “See? This is why you’re in charge, back home,” he said. “You pay attention to stuff.”

Jerry’s weird sense of humor was…well, it was actually kind of fun. “Gonna tell me? It’s kind of important, since right now we should probably be getting back. And then there’s that,” I added, nodding toward the side window Jerry had broken so we could get into the vehicle. “If I hear the bugs coming, I’m probably going to shoot you.”

“You’re not that good a shot, man. I’m, like, two feet away.”