Stranger

Twenty-four

“Watch and learn, Valdiva… I’m going to show you how to make bread. Our kind of bread, that is, so it won’t come in a fancy wrapper.” Tony called across to Ben, “You best watch, too. You’ll be on bread duty in a day or so.”

Ben joined us at the fire that burned just outside the doorway of the barn. Sitting in the fire was an oven that looked to be made out of a steel toolbox. Soot encrusted the thing to hell and back-pretty it wasn’t. I’d seen Tony unloading the contraption from the bike trailer earlier. The others in the group were busy with their own chores: checking bikes, pumping tires, cleaning spark plugs, oiling firearms. Some sat in the shade fixing worn or torn clothes with needle and thread. A fifteen-year-old with bleached dreadlocks hammered tiny nails into the heel of his boot where it flapped loose. Only Zak took it easy. He’d climbed up onto the bales of hay where he’d fallen into a corpselike sleep with the black Stetson over his face. We could hear his snores from here.

Tony used a box lid to fan the flames until the embers burned white beneath the makeshift oven. “Stand the oven on stones or bricks or whatever’s at hand so there’s a gap between the bottom of it and the ground. The heat needs to be drawn through there to get it good and hot. You see? OK. Now you scoop a jug full of this flour from the red tub into the mixing bowl. Then replace the tub lid straightaway, because someone always winds up putting their foot in it and knocking it over. And flour is like gold dust these days.” He picked up a tin mug. “Now use this to add two mugs of water. Add a good pinch of salt. Mix the flour, water and salt together. When it’s the consistency of mud start kneading it with your hands.”

Ben frowned. “When do you add the yeast?”

“We’ve got no yeast.

We’ve never had yeast.”

“What makes it rise, then?”

“It doesn’t. This is the kind of bread they’d make in the old, old days. You know, Bible days? Ancient Egypt days? That’s right, guys, we’re living in the past. OK, it’s flat as your grandma’s pancakes, it tastes bland as toilet paper, but it fills that hole in your stomach.”

Ben caught my eye. I knew what he was thinking. That to survive we were going to endure some Stone Age living conditions.

Tony continued. “When you’ve kneaded the dough, break it up into small patties about the size and shape of a hamburger-economy-size hamburger, that is. After that, put them on this tray and into the oven for thirty minutes. There,” he said like a TV cook, sliding the tray with its cargo of dough lumps into the oven. “Nothing to it, is there?” He shot us a grin. “Of course the first half dozen or so times you do this you’ll make a king-sized mess of it. You’ll burn the bread one day. The next it’ll come out raw. You’ll drop the dough into the dirt and everyone will get mad at you.” Smiling, he shook his head. “I should know, it happened to me plenty, but you’ll get used to it.”

“I don’t think I want to get used to it,” Ben said.

“It’s that or go hungry.”

These people had got a little industry running like a finely tuned motor. Of course, what that industry produced was survival-survival one day at a time. Here they all were, busily keeping their bikes running, their clothes mended, making enough food to fill their bellies. It was an industry hanging by a thread. Call me pessimistic, but I wondered what happened when they ran out of gas for the bikes or flour for the bread.

Tony left me in charge of watching over the bread in the oven (it needed careful feeding with thin sticks of firewood, then fanning with the speed of a lunatic to keep the heat up). He took Ben across to the bikes, where he showed him how to ride the big Harley. A few of the others gathered ’round, amused when it appeared that Ben would fall off. Little did they know he was an expert on that old dirt bike of his, and he soon mastered the machine.

I broke sticks, eased them into the embers. I blew on the fire to get it blazing, then fanned it with my hand, which was pretty hopeless really. Soon my fingers felt as if they’d fly off from the knuckles, I was fanning that frantically.

“What are you doing, Valdiva? You look as if you’re spanking the invisible man.”

“I might as well be, for all the good I’m doing.” I squinted up into the sun to see Michaela standing there, watching me with obvious amusement.

“Here, this might be better.” She offered me a piece of stiff card.

“Thanks.”

“Are you getting the hang of it?”

“Making bread?” I shrugged. “So far so good. How’s Boy?”

“He’s fine now. But as you see it doesn’t take much to upset him. His nerves are still raw after what happened to his sister.”

“The girl was his sister? I didn’t know.”

Michaela sat on the ground beside me. She nibbled a shoot of grass, the tip of her tongue every now and again touching the stem as she tasted sweet sap. “He’d been living rough with his sister for a while. We don’t know how long exactly because he refuses to say any-thing about his past or where he was from, or even to admit what he’s really called. We found him in the house where his sister had been killed by the hive.”

“You mean he was living there?”

Her expression was grim. “Not living there. He’d just laid down at the top of the stairs. He’d have died if we hadn’t found him when we did. In fact, he was so dehydrated we thought we were going to lose him anyway.”

“Poor kid.”

“It was the shock, I guess. Seeing what that thing did to his own flesh and blood.”

“What did it do to her?”

She fixed me with those eyes that were so dark I’d swear they were black as coal. “You’ll keep asking me about the hive, won’t you? You’re never going to give up.”

“You said you’d tell me everything.”

“In exchange for the food.”

“Things have moved on since then. The way I look at it now, Ben and I are going to be dependent on you for survival, aren’t we?”

“More wood?”

“Huh?”

She nodded at the fire. “You’ve got to keep feeding the fire with sticks, otherwise the bread won’t bake properly.”

I broke more sticks and pushed them into the embers while she fanned the flame with the card. “I will tell you about the hive, but I’ve got something to con-fess.”

“Oh?”

“I know precious little. I knew you were keen… well, almost lusting after information about the hive would be more accurate. I’m afraid I exploited your curiosity to get food.” She gave an apologetic smile. “I figured you might not deliver the food if I didn’t have some lever on you.”

“But you know something?”

“A little. Not much.” She gave me a sideways look. “At least not enough to satisfy your curiosity.”

“OK, cough up what you do know.”

“You’ve got a charming turn of phrase, Valdiva. You know that?”

I shrugged at the same moment that I heard cheers and applause. Ben rode ’round the barn, his face blazing with the sheer joy of mastering the monster bike. When he returned to the others they slapped him on the back and rubbed his hair. He grinned back at the mass of grinning faces as he killed the motor.

I turned back to Michaela and smiled. “OK. The hive. What is it?”

“We’re going to wind up calling you Mr. Persistence.” Despite affecting a weary sigh, she nodded. “OK. About three months after the Fall, our group picked up a warning on a CB radio. Someone-we don’t know who-warned everyone who’d listen to him to beware of something he called a hive. When he described a hive-that it looked like a mass of goo filled with human body parts hanging suspended like pieces of fruit in strawberry Jell-O-we pretty much wrote him off as drunk or crazy.” She gazed into the fire as she fanned the flames, but I could see she was seeing some-thing terrible in her mind’s eye. “The first time we saw a hive was when we found Boy. We were searching houses for food. Of course they were all abandoned by that time. And the hornets had started their destructive rampage. You see, after they killed everyone that didn’t have Jumpy they went back and destroyed all their possessions. You might have missed it if you were holed up on that island. The hornets would go into a house, take all the food for themselves and then they’d just smash everything, tear clothes to pieces, or they’d just torch the place. I think military people call it ’scorched earth policy.’ You destroy anything and everything that might be of use to your enemy.” She took a breath. “So we went into the house where we found Boy. That’s when we saw the hive and what it had done to his sister.”

“What had it done?”

“Sucked her dry, Greg. If you ask me those things are like vampires. They batten onto people, only I don’t know how they do it. Maybe with some kind of teeth in the gel or disgusting tubes that burrow into the people it catches. Then it draws the blood right out of them. We’ve seen it again since. Victims look like pieces of dried fruit. Their faces become wrinkled and ridged like raisins, which sounds like a funny description, funny ha ha, but it’s not. If you saw for your-self you know how sickening it is. You want to puke when you look into those dried-up faces. Even their eyes shrivel.”

“What is a hive?”

“I don’t know,” she said, fanning the flames faster, as if trying to waft those mental images away. “Some disgusting parasite, maybe.”

“But you said that bread bandits-I mean hornets- guard them.”

“Mostly… not always.” Despite the heat I saw goose-bumps pucker the skin of her arms. “We decided we had to destroy them. The one that killed Boy’s sister we burned with gasoline. Where they were guarded by hornets we picked off the guards with our rifles, then torched the hive.”

“What stopped you killing more?”

“Because there were so many of them. We only had limited amounts of ammo. If there were twenty hornets guarding them it would still take more than twenty cartridges to kill them, even if our shooting was pretty good.”

“You’ve no idea at all what they might be?”

She sighed. “I think they’re connected with the Jumpy somehow. Zak believes Jumpy isn’t so much a disease but a metamorphosis. The early symptoms, the overwhelming panic, then this mindless urge for them to kill people that aren’t infected, were the first stages of that metamorphosis.”

“You mean that people infected with Jumpy will end up becoming hives?”

“That’s what we’ve figured out. If there’s a team of scientists still alive out there they might tell us it’s all crap. Until then, that’s our theory. What do you think?”

I nodded. “It seems as good as any to me.”

“There’s some other stuff as well.” She spoke as if the subject sickened her; she wanted to get off it fast. “So far we’ve only found hives in buildings, and they’re always either in a bathroom or a kitchen. Zak figures they need to be near a water supply. They also tend to be guarded, as I’ve said. And it seems as if they need food.”

“That’s why they pull the vampire trick?”

“That seems to be the case. They trap unwary people like Sue.”

“And the one back in Lewis nearly got me the same way.” I remembered the head lunging through the gel with the wide-open mouth.

“Or”-she stood up-“or the hornets who guard them procure victims for the hive to feed on. Any more than that I don’t know.”

A thought occurred to me. I stood up and reached out to catch her arm to stop her walking away. “But if this is some kind of metamorphosis, this hive must be the larval stage. So there must be a final stage.”

She looked up at me, then shrugged in a way that suggested she agreed. “You may be right, Greg. For all we know there may be something like a big, beautiful butterfly waiting to hatch out.” Her eyes hardened. “But until then we do know some facts. And the main fact is that if you get too close to one of those things you die.” She held eye contact with me for a while. Then she glanced down at the fire. “Greg, you’ve burned your bread.”

I looked down to see wisps of blue smoke coming from the top of the oven.

Crouching down, I opened the oven door, used the pliers to pull out the oven tray and saw a dozen bun-shaped cinders.

“Damn.”

“See,” she said. “Making our daily bread is tougher than you think.”

“Back to square one.” I set out the mixing bowl and tub of flour.

She smiled. This time there was warmth in it. “I’ll give you a hand,” she said. “Don’t worry, there’s no rush. This is for the meal tonight and breakfast tomorrow.”

The thing is that bread was going to burn, too. Because twenty minutes later Zak came running out of the barn with straw still stuck to his clothes from his makeshift bed. Panting, he shouted, “There are bad guys coming down through the valley.” He pulled the pistol from his belt. “There are hundreds of the bastards.”