Stranger

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.