Stranger

Sixteen

“We can’t give you food.”

The girl with black eyes told me this as we sat by the fire that crackled away like crazy in the yard of a house. When I say she had black eyes I don’t mean that she’d been in a fight. No… it was the color of the irises. They were this pure onyx black. A lustrous, glossy black. Believe me, I’d not seen eyes like those before. I found myself staring as she talked to me. But then, there was something pretty compelling about her. She had a thin waif face and a body to match. Her clothes were clean, considering, while her long hair was as glossy and as dark as her beautiful eyes. I put her age at around eighteen.

“We lost what was left of our food two days ago. The last place we were staying got jumped by a bunch of hornets. We were lucky to escape with our skins.”

“Hornets?” I shook my head, not understanding.

“Hornets. You know?”

I shrugged.

“Bread bandits?”

“Oh, right.” I nodded.

Now she shook her head. “Have you been in hiber-nation? No one’s called the bad guys bread bandits in months.” Her face there in the firelight never broke into a smile once. In fact the whole party wore grim expressions. She continued with a nod at the boy. “He got so shaken up that he ran off the moment we got here. We’d been looking for him for hours when we saw the pair of you in the street.”

“Has he told you what happened?”

“He said you found a hive in an apartment. That you torched the place.” Her lips gave a little twist, the closest to a smile I’d seen on her face. “Good work. The filthy bastard deserved it.”

A guy of around twenty in a cowboy hat picked up on the conversation. “What we don’t understand is why there weren’t any hornets guarding it. They don’t usually desert a hive.”

I frowned. “You’re losing me again. Hive? What is this hive? The kid used the word after we set fire to it.”

“Sweet Jesus, you have been out of circulation.” The girl pushed another piece of wood into the flames. “Where did you say this town was where you lived? On the moon?”

Yeah, she was joking. But still not smiling.

I shrugged. “We keep to ourselves.”

“You can say that again.”

“But it sounds like a nice place to be,” chipped in one of the others. “You say you’ve got electricity? Clean water? Food?”

“We must have gotten lucky.”

“I’ll say.”

“I’m going to get a hold of a handful of dirt from your town and keep it in my pocket.” The kid gave a grim smile. “Maybe some of your luck will rub off on me.”

“A decent meal would be pretty good right now.”

“Pretty good? We’d be in damn heaven.”

I’d got questions that could do with buddying up with some answers, but suddenly this dog-eared group of people around the fire started shooting one-liners at each other.

“Give me beefsteak with mayonnaise.”

“Mayonnaise?”

“I don’t know why. I just want to eat mayonnaise. I haven’t tasted it in months.”

“Give me the beefsteak. A couple of pounds medium rare would work some magic for me.”

“With a dozen beers.”

“And an order of fries.”

“Golden fries.”

“Give me a loaf of bread. That’s all I need right now.”

“Coffee and a cigarette. It’s weeks since I had a cigarette.”

“You don’t smoke.”

“I did once. Until the crap hit the fan.”

“See? Every apocalypse has a silver lining. If you don’t smoke you’ll live to be a hundred.”

“Yeah. Live to a hundred in some shack with nothing to eat but dirt and leaves, and nothing to drink but ditch water.”

“Wait,” I said, breaking into their fantasy food orgy. “Tell me more about these hives.”

“Do you mind, man?” The guy sounded annoyed. “We were talking about food.”

“Seeing as we don’t have the real thing,” added the black-eyed girl.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “But there’s something been happening in the outside world. Something important that I don’t know anything about. Listen, I find a room full of pink goo that has body parts floating in it that are still alive like… like fish in a damn fish tank! In my book, that’s important!”

“And so is mayonnaise.” The guy in the cowboy hat growled, angry now. “Or do you think we’re all going to get fat dining on fucking fresh air?”

“No, I’m sorry, but-”

“Sorry my ass, you-”

Another broke in, “We take you off the street, give you protection, give you a place by the fire we made, and you get ticked off when we talk about something we want to talk about.”

The boy spat on the ground. “Yeah, we never have enough to eat. You don’t know what it’s like to be so hungry you feel as if your brains are on fire.”

I spoke as patiently as I could. “All I want to know is, what are these hives you’re talking about? Should I be warning the people in the town where I live?” Some might have said I should warn my people. But Sullivan wasn’t my people. I didn’t like nine tenths of them. I bore it no allegiance. Yet I knew young children still lived in the town. And then were was Ben and a few others who were decent, including Lynne’s husband and daughters. As for the rest, well, damn them. I didn’t give so much as a flying fuck.

“You really want to know about the hives?” The girl looked at me with those eyes that were like black jewels.

“Of course I do. Are they dangerous? Are there lots of them? Should we be searching for them and burning them to crap? I mean, if we’re-”

“Wait.” She held up her hand to stop me. “You want answers from us?”

“If these things are dangerous, we need to-”

“Just one moment there.” Again she interrupted. “You know the old saying, you don’t get anythin’ for nothin’?”

I nodded.

“Then,” she said, standing, “get us food and we’ll tell you what we know.”

I looked at those thin, half-starved faces. “OK,” I agreed after a moment. “It’s going to take a little time.”

“We don’t have planes to catch, buddy,” growled the guy in the cowboy hat. “Take your time.”

“But bring some mayonnaise,” chipped in his buddy. “Big, big jar.”

“And beer.”

“And bring steak. We can barbecue it right here.” The cowboy stamped his boot into the fire, pushing in a chunk of unburned wood. Sparks gushed into the night sky.

“I’ll do my best.”

“Your best my ass. No food, no hive talk. You follow?”

“It’ll be a couple of hours.”

“We’ll be here.”

“You can’t go alone,” the girl told me. “By rights there should be hornets crawling all over the place.” She picked up the pump-action shotgun.

“I’ll be just fine,” I told her. “Just lend me a gun.”

The cowboy laughed. “Lend my ass.”

The girl shook her head. “If you knew how many of us we lost getting hold of these babies you’d realize why we don’t go handing them out to strangers.” She nodded at a break in the fence. “Come on, make it quick. We’re hungry.”

We walked through the downtown area of Lewis, heading to where I’d moored the boat at the ferry terminal. The first rays of the rising sun cast a blood-red light on rusted cars and scattered masonry.

After ten minutes of walking in silence she suddenly said, “You hate our guts, don’t you?”

“Hardly. I don’t even know you people.”

“We must look like a rough bunch. But we didn’t start out that way. Tony comes from a family of well-todo tennis pros on Long Island, while Zak-he was the guy in the black Stetson-was studying at a Hebrew school in Manhattan when the world rolled over and died. Originally he was from Vancouver in Canada. He had those curly black side locks, you know?” She made a twirling motion with her fingers just below her ears. “But he lost all his hair in a fire when we camped in a kindergarten-some idiot kicked over a stove in his sleep. His hair never grew back. Not even his eyebrows or on his arms. He wasn’t badly burned, but I figure it must be the shock… wait.” She stopped, then looked up at me. “We’ve done this all wrong, haven’t we?”

“Done what all wrong?”

“We’re becoming so brutalized we’re even forgetting the social basics.” She held out her hand. “How do you do? I’m Michaela Ford.”

I shook her hand. “I’m Greg Valdiva.”

“Pleased to meet you, Greg.”

“Likewise, Michaela.”

That was rich. Standing there in a burned-out city full of skulls, shaking hands like we were meeting for the first time at a dinner party.

She continued walking. Now she looked a little more relaxed.

“So where do you come from, Michaela?” I asked.

“Me? New York. My mother was in magazine publishing. We’d just moved into an apartment in Greenwich Village. I loved it there, especially the street markets on Sundays. I even wound up helping out on a stall there that sold African jewelry.”

“Sounds swanky.”

“Swanky?” She smiled. “What kind of old-time colloquial is that?”

“It was a word my mother used. Swanky clothes, swanky cars, swanky houses.”

“She’s dead?”

“She’s dead.” I nodded.

“Mine, too. I was staying with my father up at his place in the Catskills when the hornets went on the rampage. Like everyone else we thought it would be short-lived, but it just went on and on. They torched schools, houses, then whole towns and cities. My mother and father had been separated more than five years, but he was still anxious about her being in New York, especially after we heard that all those people had been killed in the streets on the first day.”

As we walked along the street, where naked skulls seemed to grow out of the dirt like weird white mush-rooms, she talked. It seemed as if she and her father had dove into the car, then simply blazed south toward New York. Already the countryside had gone to shit. Bread bandits, or hornets, as she called them, had trashed everything. They drove past houses and churches in flames. She couldn’t believe her eyes the first time she started seeing corpses lying in the road. She even told her father she was hallucinating when she saw a dozen men hanging by their necks from a bridge running over the road. Then he’d had to drive the car under the hanging bodies. The feet of the dead men had scraped along the car roof. It’s still a sound she had nightmares about. Of course, the closer to New York they got the worse the roads became. Soon they were clogged with refugees flooding from the city. And every hour or so the bread bandits would attack like packs of marauding wolves. There was no one to protect the refugees. Hardly anyone had a gun. Michaela’s eyes went faraway as she described how maybe a hundred or so bread bandits would run along a gridlocked road tearing people out of their cars, dashing babies against the blacktop, torching vehicles, tearing eyes out with their bare hands.

Nevertheless, Michaela’s father still forced a way through the jammed highways, horn blaring, lights flashing. They were still a good twenty miles from New York when she got the call on her mobile. It came from a friend of her mother’s. She was screaming into the telephone that her mother’s apartment had been ransacked and that her mother lay in the bathtub. “They drowned her in her own bathroom, can you believe that? Can you believe they’d do such a terrible thing? Michaela, your mother helped these people. She worked in the canteens at the park. She did everything she could. Now they’ve broken in and drowned her in her own bathtub.”

There was nothing to do but turn back. Now they joined the flow of cars away from New York into the countryside. It took three hours to cover four miles. Then the driver’s door was torn open. Hands and arms burst into the car. Her father struggled with the attackers for maybe less than a minute before he’d gone. The mob carried him away, still struggling.

Michaela waited there for them to come back for her. She’d accepted they would carry her away. But no one came. The other refugees did nothing to help her. They’d seen it happen time and time before. They merely sounded their horns before inching past her. After an hour of this she knew there was nothing she could do for her father.

She slid across into the driver’s seat, started the engine, joined the exodus.

Within a week she’d joined up with a bunch of other refugees who were camping out at an abandoned farm-house. For months they’d drifted from place to place, looking for food and a place of safety. Usually the hornets found them and drove them out. Sometimes they stayed put and made a fight of it, but there were too many hornets. Some of Michaela’s group died, so they’d eventually cut and run anyway. Now all that remained was the ten-strong group that sat ’round the campfire waiting for food.

Poor bastards.

Come to think of it, I’d had it pretty easy in Sullivan. The people sucked. But I had a home and plenty of food.

We’d nearly reached the ferry terminal when she asked what had happened to me that first day of June.

“The first I knew was the smell of burning. When I woke up the houses across the street were on fire… my mother called them swanky houses… you’re right, she was envious. We lived in…” I grimaced. “Humble accommodations. Anyway, we saw that the bread bandits, or the hornets, as you call them, were lining our neighbors up in the road. And… you know, there was something in those refugees’ faces that didn’t seem human anymore. After the hornets lined up our neighbors they just walked along from man to man, woman to woman… they had hammers, and they just… well, you don’t need me to paint a picture, do you?” I shrugged. “What could we do? We locked the door and watched all that shit happening on TV, how the cities were burning, the refugees flooding the streets. We even watched CNN when the bastards broke into the studios and beat the anchorman to death live on air. By that time we knew we had to find somewhere well away from the action, so to speak. We couldn’t just sit tight in the house and hope that we’d be left alone, so we started to pack groceries into bags, because we knew food would be scarce. But as we cleared out the cup-boards a guy just walked into the kitchen. We didn’t even hear the goddam door open. He just stood there with this expression on his face. It was just so weird. Like he wasn’t looking at the surface of our faces but somewhere at the back of our skulls. My mom grabbed Chelle to pull her away from him. That’s when he at-tacked. He just flailed at her with his fists. My mom sort of hugged Chelle into her stomach, then she bent over her to take the guy’s punches in her back so Chelle was protected.”

I looked at Michaela. She gazed at me steadily. She must have heard this kind of story dozens of times before from survivors. But she listened with a serious expression. I even felt she was encouraging me to get it off my chest.

“Well, I launched myself at the guy who was trying to kill my mom.

…” My voice died away.

“And?” she prompted gently.

“And I lost my mind… at least for a while. When I came to I was lying in this mass of broken pottery. I thought the guy had knocked me unconscious, but it turned out I’d had some kind of blackout. But I had fought the guy. He’d opened a gash on my forehead and bloodied my nose. I don’t remember anything about it, but my mother told me I’d struggled with the guy, then grabbed him by the throat and smashed his head against the kitchen wall so hard it had cracked all the wall tiles…” I shook my head. “My mother called those tiles her swanky tiles. She loved them.”

“You saved their lives.”

“Yeah, for what good it did.”

“What then?”

“The guy was out cold or dead, I don’t know. We picked up what groceries we could carry, then drove away. It was just luck, I suppose, but we found a house way up on a hillside, like it had been dug into a hole there. And that’s where we sat it out for month after month.”

“The hornets didn’t find you?”

“No. Not that I remember much about it. I’d drunk water from a stream that must have been contaminated by a dead animal or something. I was sick for weeks. Most of the time I was in such a high fever and delirious, I didn’t know day from night. I was out of it. I can’t remember a thing.”

“Your mother and sister were able to care for you alone?”

“Somehow they scavenged food from abandoned houses and stores. But like I said I didn’t know anything about it.”

We reached the steps that lead to the boat. “Then for some reason we hit the road again,” I told her. “I don’t remember much. We wound up in a little town in the hills… or the remains of one. I still couldn’t eat and was still pretty much out of it. I don’t even know properly how it happened, but my sister and mother became sick. I was looking for help when a hunting party from Sullivan found me-Sullivan’s the place across the lake, there. They got us to a doctor, but my mother and Chelle died within hours of each other. The doctor said it was some kind of blood poisoning. But I’m not sure if he really knew what it was. What are you doing?”

“Getting into the boat.”

“No, you have to wait here. I’ll bring the food back across to you.”

“How do I know that? You might change your mind and stay across there on paradise island and forget all about us.”

“I’ll bring food,” I told her as she slipped the shotgun off her shoulder. “Or are you going to blow a hole in me if I don’t do what you tell me?”

“And where’d that get me? You being dead won’t bring us the food.” She lay the gun on one of the bench seats.

“Look, Michaela, I’m not allowed to bring strangers onto the island. Hell, I’m not even supposed to leave the island myself.”

“I’m coming with you.”

“No. If I’m found with you, they’ll kill us both. Believe me.”

Her voice stayed firm. “Greg, I’m coming.”