The Stranger (18 page)

Twenty-seven

On the road again. There was ample saddle space for the group we’d rescued. The mother (who couldn’t have been more than sixteen herself) was another matter. No way could she ride double after giving birth just hours before. There was the newborn baby, too. Despite Zak’s joke, you couldn’t let it ride in the pannier. Finally Michaela and Ben worked out a way to seat her on the two-wheeled trailer that Tony pulled behind his Harley. They created a kind of armchair from boxes of food, spare gas cans and blankets. She sat looking backward with the baby in her arms. The girl seemed dazed by it all and didn’t comment on the strange traveling arrangements. She just sat with the baby wrapped in towels, staring into its face. Incredibly, there was an aura of calm about her. I don’t think she even realized a battle had been fought down on the dirt track.

There were six of them, if you counted the baby. There was the mother, the thirteen-year-old girl (the most self-assured of the group), twin Malaysian women in their twenties who’d been vacationing in New York when the Fall happened along and smashed civilization to crud and Ronald, a guy of around thirty, with a goatee that looked more like brown froth than hair. Constantly, he looked ’round with these scared blue eyes that you’d swear were close to bursting clean out of his skull. All the time, as we loaded the bikes at the barn, he’d repeat over and over, “We’ve got to get away. Those things down there are killers. We’ve got to get away.”

The hornets had heard the gunshots and the roar of the engines. Around forty of them began prowling their way up the hill like a pack of dogs looking for a rabbit. But they were on foot; we had the bikes. We got away with time to spare. By late afternoon we were miles from the valley with its lakes. We didn’t see what happened to the group of ordinary Joes the hornets were pursuing. Only it took no genius to surmise what did happen to them when they found their way blocked by the river merging with the lake. A few shots fired, then hundreds of hornets would overwhelm the little band of survivors. End of story.

We figured the best route would be simply to head away from the valley where the hornets had clustered. By late evening we reached a garage. One of those backwoods outfits with a couple of gas pumps, a tiny store that sold everything from toothpaste to ammo and fish bait. It had been picked clean, of course. Although Ben did find a single pack of gum behind the trashed counter. Alongside the store was a repair shop. Here a few cars sat gathering dust in varying stages of repair. A big old Chevy in strawberry red with a cream stripe down its side and whitewall tires stood on blocks. Someone had been lovingly restoring the old girl when civilization rolled over and died. The vast back seat made an ideal bed. Michaela guided the new mother to it and settled her and the baby down there. As Michaela got busy arranging blankets, fixing her a hot drink, finding clean towels for the baby to keep it warm, I found myself watching. Hell, I admired Michaela. She was so together. She always moved in a purposeful way, as if even the smallest chore was an important link in the survival chain. Which I guess it was. She cared for people, you could see that. A warm sensation flushed through me as I watched her slip a pillow she’d found in one of the cars beneath the new mom’s head. Despite Michaela’s external toughness she had a tender heart.

She caught me staring at her. She said nothing. Her let’s-get-down-to-business expression didn’t falter, but I found myself blushing when she made eye contact with me. So I did what I was good at: I found firewood.

By this time the sun had all but set. Zak arrived back from his search of the neighborhood. “Quiet as a grave,” he told me as he climbed off the bike. “No sign of hornets or any ordinary Joes like us. But the houses nearby have either been picked clean or torched.” He slapped the dust from his pants with the cowboy hat. “With luck there might still be some gas in those cars, or in the underground tanks.”

Then it was business as usual. Tony rigged up the bread oven where the fire would be. The others did chores—making supper or mending clothes. Ben dug out the tub of flour ready to make more of the pancake bread.

With plenty of trees nearby firewood was easy to find. Soon I had it piled in the yard (well away from the gas pumps, just in case). Once it was lit people gravitated toward it as darkness crept like a hungry ghost through the forest. Ben baked bread as Zak fanned the flames with his Stetson. The new arrivals got to know their rescuers. People made a fuss over the mom and her baby. Michaela made use of the rearview mirror in another car; she sat brushing her hair. I found myself staring again. But then, there was something compelling about the slow, rhythmic way she ran the brush through her long dark hair.

“Supper’s ready,” Ben sang out while he set the flat loaves to cool. Before, mine had come out black; his were pale gold. They smelled good, too.

Zak crouched down to look at them. “What have you done to these?”

Ben looked anxious. “Is there something wrong with them?”

“No, they smell great . . . hmmm. How you do that with bread and water?”

Ben’s face switched to a boyish grin. “I found some garlic growing wild in the hedge bottom.”

“Garlic! Hey this guy’s a genius. Garlic! Sweet Jesus! Oh, boy, did you hear that?” He laughed as he clutched his stomach. “My belly’s rumbling.” He called out to the others. “Come on, let’s eat.”

I’d packed enough beer for a stubby apiece. Michaela said it was a good time to pass these out and celebrate the birth of the child and the expansion of our group by six—if the new people wanted to join, that is?

Yes. They were all keen to hook up with us. Rowan, the thirteen-year-old, said that the hornets had been following them for more than six hours before the showdown in the lane. They’d run short of supplies. Most of the guns had been lost in a boat accident. The old guy had been a Marine and despite crippling arthritis had dived into the lake to retrieve what he could. One of the guns he found underwater in the mud had been the machine gun. That pretty much explained why it hadn’t fired as the hornets bore down on him. Added to those troubles Kira had gone into labor. Most of the others in the group had been for dumping her, as she slowed them down. But the old guy and these few had refused to leave her to die at the hands of the hornets and had done their best to help her.

Like all survivors these days, this was a resilient bunch. Despite the trauma of what had happened earlier they soon relaxed (helped by the beer, I reckon) into the sense of security the fire offered. And the fact that we sat there cradling guns on our laps.

As we sat ’round the crackling fire I took the opportunity to oil a pump-action shotgun Zak had told me was getting sticky. The cocking mechanism had become stiff, but I spent ten minutes or so dry firing it until the action became smooth. All the time the people ’round the fire swapped stories about what had happened to them over the last twelve months. Despite the fact that the nation had been laid to waste, it was surprising the funny stories people had to tell. Zak even made a joke of how his hair had fallen out after he’d been burned in the fire. “I went to sleep one night only to wake up in the morning to find all this hair covering the ground. I couldn’t believe what had happened. I looked in a mirror and saw my head was as smooth as a pool ball. The thing was, when I went back to my sleeping bag I found birds were taking my hair up into the trees to make nests. I remember running after them to try to get my hair back.” Zak rubbed his nude scalp. “As if it would have done me any good if I could.” He grinned. “It would take some pretty strong glue to hold all that in place.”

The newcomers laughed. I could see that one of the Malaysian girls especially was warming up to him. I loaded the shotgun, then finished my bread ration. Ben had worked miracles. Flavoring the bread with crushed wild garlic had to be a stroke of genius. I hadn’t tasted anything as good in a long while.

The thirteen-year-old girl darted to the repair shop and came back with news that baby and mother were fast asleep in the back of the Chevy. Boy showed off a card trick that impressed everyone. The new guy with the goatee beard sat opposite me on the far side of the fire. Smiling, he said he could make a stick turn to rubber. He did the old trick you’d do with a pencil, only this time he held the end of a piece of firewood in his fingertips and flicked it up and down so it gave the illusion of becoming rubbery. God, yes, a cheesy old trick, older than Noah’s goddamn Ark. But it raised a laugh from everyone. Boy grinned so hard I’d swear you could see every single tooth in his head.

Ben nudged me. “Don’t tell me that I’ve gone and poisoned you.”

I looked at him, puzzled. “What do you mean?”

“You’ve just eaten the bread.” He smiled. “Now you’re rubbing your stomach like it’s given you a bellyache.”

“And here’s another neat trick,” Ronald said, stroking his goatee.

That’s when I fired the shotgun blast that tore his head from the roots of his neck.

Twenty-eight

“Whoa, keep your hands up against the wall, Greg. Both hands . . . feet apart. I said feet apart!”

Like the old-time cops, they had me spread-eagled against the repair shop wall.

“Jesus, Greg,” Tony said as he jammed the rifle muzzle into the side of my neck, “what did you have to blow off the guy’s head for? What’d he ever do to you?”

“I had to. He was—”

“Keep facing the wall or I’ll blow a hole in you.”

“You don’t understand, I—”

“You bastard. You murdering bastard!” This came as a shriek from the mother, who advanced toward me with the baby in her arms. Her shoulders had hunched up to her ears. She looked like a wild cat ready to jump and claw my eyes out of my head. “You bastard! Why did you kill my husband? Ronald hadn’t done anything to you. He didn’t even have a gun and you fucking murdered him.” She crackled with hysteria. It sounds crazy, but purple lights seemed to detonate in that wild shrieking sound she made. “Wha’ ya plan to do with us? Ya going to kill all of us? It that it? Ya going to kill my baby? You going to kill her?” She looked ’round in terror at the others in Michaela’s gang. She thought they were going to leap on her and mutilate her. Michaela spoke soothingly to her. With the help of the Malaysian girls she got her back to the Chevy, where she sat in the front seat rocking backward and forward, eyes staring like light bulbs, the baby grunting in her arms.

“See what you’ve fucking done, Valdiva?” You could hear the horror juicing through Tony’s voice. He couldn’t believe what’d just happened out by the camp-fire.

I said, “Listen to me. I had to kill him; he—”

“What’s wrong? Didn’t like the shape of his face?”

“No, it’s not that. I had to kill him. Listen to me, I couldn’t stop myself.”

“Listen to that,” Zak said, behind me. “The guy’s psycho.”

Tony added, “Lucky we found out before he killed any more of us.” I heard a gun cock, and another muzzle pressed into the back of my neck. They were going to kill me there and then. In twenty seconds there’d be a splash of my blood right up that cinder block wall in front of me. The muzzle bit so deep into my neck it pushed my open mouth against the wall, grating my teeth against the blocks.

Then Michaela’s voice came close by. Disbelief turned it to a whisper. “What on Earth possessed you, Greg? Are you crazy? Is that why those people kept you out of town in the cabin?”

“No . . .”

“The poor guy was innocent. You just—”

“No,” I snarled into the cinder block. “Listen to me. I killed him because he was infected.”

Zak spat. “Valdiva’s out of his mind.”

“No, he’s not.” It took a second to place the softly spoken words.

“Ben, you better tell them.” I panted as the muzzles pressed harder against my skin. I could almost hear fingers tightening ’round triggers.

“Greg’s right when he says he couldn’t stop himself.” Ben spoke in a calm voice. “He’s been like that ever since I met him last year.”

Zak’s voice: “What do you mean?”

“Greg can tell when someone’s infected with Jumpy. I don’t know how he does it, but he knows before they start to display even the earliest symptoms.”

“That guy looked like an ordinary Joe to me,” Zak snapped.

“Didn’t he look edgy to you?” I said. “And isn’t irrational panic one of the first signs?”

“Shit. You’d be panicking if you were in his shoes today, with a bunch of hornets making for you.”

“It was more than that. He was panicked. He was losing control.”

“So he was scared.”

“Believe me,” I said, “I can tell when someone has Jumpy. It doesn’t always happen straightaway, but when I sat in front of him by the fire it hit me. I knew it. He was riddled with Jumpy. In a few days he would have tried to kill us.” They were quiet now, so I rammed home the point. “You know how it works. You’ve seen it before.”

“But we’ve only got your word for it,” Michaela said. “Ben might be providing an alibi.”

“You could always take a trip across the water to Sullivan and ask the people there,” I told her. “Only I don’t recommend it. They’re likely to shoot any stranger the moment they clap eyes on him these days.”

Zak pressed the muzzle of the gun into my jaw. “We only have your word for it.”

“He’s telling the truth.” This time it was Rowan, the thirteen-year-old, who’d had the presence of mind to wrap the baby in a towel when it was born.

Tony said, “What makes you so sure?”

“It was how Ronald acted. He’d been brave in the past. Once he’d climbed right into the top of a tree when I hid from some men who were trying to catch me. He got me out and he was always calm. But in the last few days he started getting frightened . . . like he was frightened of his own shadow. I didn’t think any-thing about it right up until now, but I’d never seen him getting panicky like that before, even when the hornets nearly caught us a few weeks ago and they killed Lana and Dean.”

“There’s your proof,” Ben told them. “Let Greg go. He’s more likely to save your necks than harm you.”

“Whoa. No, wait a moment here.” Zak didn’t remove the gun from my neck. “This is how I see it, tell me if I’m wrong, OK?”

“OK.”

“Greg Valdiva here has got some natural, in-built early warning system. He knows . . . or divines, somehow, when a person has Jumpy. And he knows before anyone else recognizes the symptoms, right?”

“That’s right,” Ben said.

“Then some kind of red mist comes down inside his head. Before he knows what’s happened he’s killed the infected person.”

“Yes, it’s as involuntary as . . .” I pictured Ben shrugging as he searched for a suitable illustration. “. . . as involuntary as hitting your knee and triggering the classic knee-jerk reaction. It’s instinctive.”

“Yes, yes, that sounds great. Greg here will screen any strangers we meet. If his instinct tells him that they’re infected then he executes them. If not, then we’re free to team up with them if that’s what everyone wants.”

“So,” Michaela said, “what’s the problem with that, Zak?”

“The problem is, what if that little alarm bell inside his skull starts ringing when he sits down next to one of us one day? What if he starts killing us one by one?”

Sighing, I shook my head. “I don’t feel it when I’m with you. With any of you, and that includes the people we found today with the exception of Ronald. He’s the only one infected.”

“For now.” Zak sounded like a lawyer nailing his man in court. “But what if you sniff those symptoms on us? Or what if you have a foul-up day and
think
one of us is lousy with Jumpy?”

“Zak, it doesn’t—”

“Do you blow my head off? Then say, ‘Oops, sorry, my mistake, Zak.’ Yeah, right, that will make me feel pretty damn joyful when you leave a personal note of apology on my grave.”

Ben said, “It doesn’t work like that.”

“Says you. But don’t you see?” Zak was like the lawyer addressing the judge and jury again. “If we allow Greg to stay with us, won’t it to be like sitting on a ticking bomb? OK, we might be fine this week and next week, and next month, but there might come a day when Greg gets the feeling on him. . . . Do you know what I’m saying? We’re not going to know when we sit down to eat breakfast with him whether he’s going to say, ‘Pass the salt, please’ or, ‘Meet your maker.
Boom.
’ Can we handle that kind of uncertainty?”

Michaela said, “Ben’s got a point, too. Greg here could be the best weapon we have. If he can detect Jumpy in people before they can harm us, that gives us another hatful of chances to survive.”

Zak’s voice turned cool. “Until he sees Jumpy in you, Michaela, or you, Tony, or you, Ben.”

Michaela stayed firm. “My vote is that Greg Valdiva stays.”

“I say he goes,” Zak said. “Tony?”

“Couldn’t we just disarm him?” Tony answered. “If he doesn’t have a gun he can’t hurt us.”

I sighed. “If this thing comes down on me the way it does, I’d kill you with my bare hands.”

“Shit.”

“I can’t help it, Tony. It’s something inside me. It just won’t stop.”

“OK,” Michaela said. “Greg’s unarmed now. Let go of him.”

The mood of the people in the repair shop did seem calmer. Tony and Zak took the guns out of my neck and stood back. I turned ’round to look at those faces in the lamplight. Their eyes were as intense as light-bulbs. They stared back at me. I’d seen that expression in faces back in Sullivan. These people were frightened of that
thing
I had inside me that had the power to look into people and
see
the infection. They were fearful I’d see it in them. Now this bunch of accidental nomads had to decide what they did with me. Or
to
me.

They thought it best that I wait outside while they put it to a vote. Whether I stayed. Or went. Or whatever . . .

Michaela and Tony looked apologetic when I returned to the campfire to pile on more wood. Zak had been shrewd, thinking through the implications of what I’d got inside me. I believe he really was reluctant to take the hard line he had. But part of me agreed he was right: I was dangerous. If I detected any sign of Jumpy in man or woman I’d kill. Hell, come to that, I couldn’t
stop
myself killing. I’d be like a dog after a rat.

A guard had been posted outside to watch out for any hornets happening by. But I did ask myself if they weren’t also keeping an eye on me while they continued their discussions behind the closed doors of the repair shop.

I prodded the fire with a stick that sent a gush of sparks into the night sky, where they lost themselves among the stars. The air was warm; moths darted in toward the firelight. Some set their wings alight and spiraled, fluttering, to the ground. They were governed by instincts, too, something so deeply embedded in their insect bodies that they couldn’t stop flying toward a light. If it resulted in their being damaged or dying, that mattered absolute zero to them. Most creatures were governed by instinct. Birds migrated. Bears hibernated. At given times of the year different species mated. I was no better and no worse than they were. Instinct ruled me.

A couple of hours later, close on midnight, the repair shop door swung open. Backlit by the lamps inside, I saw Michaela in silhouette. She stood, looking out at me, with a rifle in her hand. I guessed the band had reached a decision.