Stranger

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.