Stranger

Twenty-two

“One thing we don’t have,” Michaela said the next morning (after a quiet night, thank God), “is a spare machine. You and Ben will have to ride double.”

The bikes looked in good shape, despite the burden of supplies they carried either strapped over fuel tanks, or in a trailer pulled by one monster of a Harley D that Zak rode. I saw the ten-year-old hop onto the trailer like he was riding on the back of a camel.

Ben went up to sit behind Tony. Michaela tied back her hair. “You can ride with me.”

I slipped the rifle across my shoulder. “Where are we headed?”

“Away from here’s the main priority.” She patted the bike’s fuel tank. “But we’re getting low on gas. We need to nose out a new supply. Luckily these things are pretty… shit, Greg, what are you doing?”

I did it in one movement. Slid the rifle from my shoulder, pulled the bolt, aimed, fired. Boy, the sound cracked back from the walls.

Grunting like a wild pig, the man charged from the bushes at the side of the yard. I chambered another round- tried to chamber another round-but the little fuck jammed. Zak and Tony moved fast, pulling guns from holsters. Only they couldn’t shoot because Michaela and I were in the firing line. The grunting guy moved faster- helluva lot faster -eyes blazing with pure ferocity. He bore down on where Michaela sat astride the Harley.

I cursed, jerking the rifle bolt, trying to clear the bastard so I could fire again.

With a grunt that became a full-blooded groan the guy flopped forward, smacking his face into the dirt. He didn’t get up. Come to that, he didn’t move; he didn’t breathe.

I saw the exit wound between his shoulder blades where my bullet had tumbled out at the speed of sound.

“Nice shot,” she said to me in such a matter-of-fact way she could have been complimenting me on my taste in coffee. “But don’t stand there all day. We need to be moving.”

There was no fuss or excitement with these guys. They’d seen it all before. For Ben and me this was something different. Bread bandit, hornet or just a poor goddam refugee with a bad case of the Jumpy- stick him with any name you want, this was the guy I’d just shot through the lungs the second he rushed from the bushes. I hoped my instincts always stayed as keen as that. Hell… in the back of my mind I couldn’t help but wonder what I’d do if any of these people who had somehow adopted Ben and me came down with a case of the Jumpy. Especially Michaela. What would I do if I found myself looking at her down the barrel of a gun?

“See?” Michaela called back over her shoulder as we rode through the forest. “We didn’t choose the bikes for their looks. Short of using a battle tank, they’re the only thing that’ll get you through this crap.”

She wasn’t wrong. The roads were totally crapped out. Every few yards there’d be a car or a truck or a bus lying rotting to hell. Many were at the roadside; others spanned the entire highway like they’d been deliberately employed as roadblocks, something that might not be far from the truth. Then there was the usual mess of broken bottles, boxes, fallen trees, human remains. What seemed odd was that skeletons could rot clean of meat and skin, but the clothes didn’t decompose as fast, so you’d find endless sets of articulated human bone still dressed in pants, jackets and shoes, complete with battery-powered watches on bone wrists that had quietly ticked off the seconds all these months. Anyway there was our band weaving ’round the obstacles on the bikes, heading south through the wooded hills in a loose convoy to God alone knew where.

God alone knew where wound up being a barn on a hill-side that overlooked a cluster of lakes. The barn looked untouched since the day of the Fall. At one end bales of straw nearly reached the eaves, while a red tractor stood under a coat of dust at the other end.

“I’ll do the usual,” Tony said before opening the throttle on the bike and tearing off across the field.

Michaela unbuckled the straps that held the supplies on the back of the trailer. “We’ve got this like clock-work,” she told me. “Tony’s checking to make sure that there are no hornets in the neighborhood. We make the camp, build a fire, cook up a meal if we’ve food for the pot. You can help Boy collect firewood. Make sure you take your gun. We still don’t know if we’ve got company out here.”

Everyone knew their job. Everyone worked quickly. They brought the bikes into the barn (out of sight of any hornets who might amble by). Zak got to work with a can opener, opening tins of corned beef fresh from my cabin larder, dumping the blocks of pink meat into a big cooking pot. I saw him for the first time without that cowboy hat. Even though he’d just turned eighteen there wasn’t a hair on his head. He didn’t even possess eyebrows. Shock does weird things to people. Like Boy, who I’d been assigned to help collect firewood (yeah, I was the firewood guy again; there must be something in the way I walked that always got me that particular chore). Boy must have gone through plenty of bad stuff after the Fall. Bad enough to make him ditch his name and kill his old identity as if that might be enough to rid him of all the bad memories, too.

The noonday sun had burned through the cloud and it was really starting to heat up. I slipped on my sunglasses. The barn was well and truly in the middle of nowhere, with nothing but grass fields all around that had grown straggly and weed infested all these months without farmer intervention. There were no houses I could see. There wasn’t much in the way of trees to conceal any hornets. Even so, I checked that the rifle’s magazine carried a full load of shells.

Boy walked fast, with his jaw jutted forward. He scanned the ground with what your schoolteacher would have called a “practiced eye.” “Pick sticks for kindling and thicker stuff for a slow burn,” he told me. Told me? Ordered me, more like. But he seemed like a good kid to me. He was just doing the job that kept him and his bunch of buddies alive. “No, don’t bother with green wood,” he said as I picked up a branch. “Go for dry stuff. It doesn’t make as much smoke. That fence over there: Go rip out some palings; they’ll burn good. You hungry?”

“Yes.”

“Always eat as much as you can at meal times. You never know when your next meal’s gonna be.” He picked dry sticks out of the grass. “I like chocolate. But you don’t find chocolate these days. When it was my eighth birthday I got a chocolate car. As big as that.” He held his hands more than a foot apart. “It was a Formula One racing car. I ate chocolate every day for two weeks.”

“Who gave you it? Your parents?”

“Did they, hell. Have you got any chocolate?”

“No, I had to bring the boring stuff like dried pasta, flour, rice, canned meat, salt and-”

“You didn’t have chocolate in that place you lived? Michaela said you’d got food coming out ya ass.”

“I guess she was right, but I didn’t have time to bring any chocolate.”

“But you had chocolate in that place?”

“Yes. But I guess that will run out some day, along with coffee and other stuff they can’t produce locally. They’ll have to make do with-”

“I’m going there.”

“You want to go to Sullivan?”

“Yeah, if they’ve got chocolate.”

“I wouldn’t recommend it.”

“Why not?”

“They’re frightened of strangers.”

“I’m just a kid. I’m ten.”

“They still won’t let you in.”

“Yeah, the bastards. They don’t want to give away the chocolate. Do they have huge shakes? I used to have a shake maker. You put milk in the top and chocolate powder, then pressed a button and chocolate shake came out through a pipe. It buzzed so loud you thought your teeth would come out. They’ll have chocolate shakes in Sullivan, won’t they?” In the grass lay a skeleton wearing striped pajamas. Angrily, he kicked the skull from the shoulder bones. Suddenly, in my mind’s eye, I saw the farmer coming out here to check his precious cows. It’s late. He’s still in his pajamas. But he’s heard that hornets are on the rampage nearby. His wife begs him not to do it, but he’s desperate to make sure his animals are safe. In this field some hor-nets jump him and batter the shit out of him, leaving him to die in his blood-soaked PJs with the funky stripes.

Then ten months later an angry kid with a candy craving kicks the poor bastard’s skull clean off. Funny old world, huh?

Like a darting insect Boy snatched sticks from the ground.

“Don’t forget the fence,” he said without looking at me. “Get as many palings as you can carry.”

I kicked off the palings, then gathered them up as best I could with the rifle slipping forward off my shoulder. Sweating in the sun, we made our way back to the barn. “Remember the thing we found in the apartment?”

He didn’t answer. He walked sullenly with his arms stretched ’round a huge bundle of sticks.

“It was an ugly bitch, wasn’t it?” I said, trying to get him to speak.

Boy still kept clammed tight.

“You said it was a hive. Have you seen them before?”

“Yeah, lots.” He spoke as if he didn’t want to go into detail.

“Do you know what they are?”

“Yeah.”

“What are they?”

“They’re trouble. Capital T Trouble. You just want to stay clear of them. Once… once I saw them suck a girl dry. Sue and me went into this house and opened a bathroom door, just like you did in the apartment.” His eyes became glistening and wet-looking. From not wanting to talk at all the words started to shoot out like he was spitting them because they tasted bad in his mouth. “We’d just gone in there because we thought there’d be food in the kitchen. We hadn’t eaten for days. ’Course the bastards had cleaned out the cupboards, but we found this little piece of chocolate in the back of the refrigerator. Just one little square. Sue cut it in half and we licked it so we could make it last a long time. God, it tasted lovely. Really lovely.” He licked his lips. “I can taste it now. Then we went up-stairs to see if there was anything worth taking, or if someone had hidden any food. Sue was twenty. She only kept one thing from home. It was gold medal she’d won for running. She told me it was because she could run so fast that she was still alive. She could run faster than the hornets. Then she opened the bath-room door. And there was all this pink stuff like in the apartment. She wasn’t afraid; she looked into it… you know? Really into it, like she was looking into a pool of water. She said she could see hands and arms and legs and things. But then she screamed. She was shouting that it had got hold of her face. I don’t know how, but her face was stuck to it. I tried to get her away, but it held on to her; it glued her there or something. I couldn’t run away. I don’t know why, but I just stood there… I thought it would let her go after a while. But then I saw these things come through that jelly, like they were swimming through it. They came right up to her. I was there for hours. I watched as they sucked everything out of her. She wrinkled up and just kept getting smaller, like she was a balloon that was going down bit by bit. That thing sucked her dry! That’s what hives do. They’ll suck me dry if they get me.”

“You mean the hive sucked the blood out of her?”

He looked at me in fury. “Why did you have to go talking about it? I didn’t want to remember! You dirty rotten bastard! I’m going to tell Michaela about what you’ve gone and done to me!”

With that he ran back to the barn. But he kept clinging to that bundle of sticks like a lost child clinging to a teddy bear.