Stranger

Christmas

On the day I carried Tony out of the bunker on my back, trying not to knock his busted leg against the walls, it all changed. Only you never seem to know that you’ve reached one of those pivotal times in your life until much later, do you? Ben drove Tony back in the Jeep. The bottom of the vehicle almost dragged through the dirt, we’d piled so many supplies into the thing. All I knew then as I followed the Jeep was that I was grateful to be alive, that my buddies were alive and that the afternoon sunlight never seemed more beautiful to me than right then.

I rode alongside Zak on the Harley. For a while he’d talked about Phoenix and the girl in the bunker and asked me if she had some kind of telepathic powers. Would she have been able to reach inside our heads and control us, too? At last I smiled at him and called out over the noise of the motors, “Forget them, Zak. They’re dead. We’re not. That’s all that matters.”

So we rode on, seeing birds flying overhead. A deer ran alongside us for a while, as if wanting to join the pack, before peeling off to disappear into the heart of the forest. It still seemed then as if we’d carry on fighting for survival every single day of our lives. But that was the day we turned it all around.

Zak gave Michaela her antibiotic shots. It seemed in no time she was back to her old self, with those darkly erotic eyes and a smile so full of good humor you could almost light up a room with her. Tony’s leg healed. Before long he was hobbling ’round with a stick. Now it doesn’t bother him at all unless it rains; then he grumbles that it aches and he winds up growling like a bear with a sore rear end.

We know we would have starved if it weren’t for the bunker. First we had to clear out what was left of the hornets… dead ones, too, so they wouldn’t stink up the place. After that every few weeks we’d return with the Jeep (that now pulled a huge trailer); then we’d go crazy piling it high with fuel, food and ammunition before returning to the cabins on the hillside. What about Phoenix? Well, we never tried to break down the locked door that sealed Phoenix and the girl into what had become their tomb. “Let sleeping dogs lie,” was Michaela’s advice. Good advice, too. That episode was over. It was time to forget and start to live the rest of our lives.

And get this: The second half of the summer was a long and peaceful one. No hornets came our way. The biggest warm-blooded creature I saw was an elk that snuffled ’round the cabins one morning in the fall just as the leaves were turning red and the dawn mist bore an unmistakable chill. It was times like that I half believed I could climb on the Harley and roar all the way back home, where I’d push open the door to see Mom busy in the kitchen, and she’d smile up at me and say, “Hi, Greg. I made pizza for supper. Would you be a honey and go help Chelle with her homework?”

That was when ghosts came as stealthily as the dawnmist. But when all’s said and done ghosts are only memories. And memories are nothing more than movie clips from the past, right? They can’t-or shouldn’t-take control of your life. Even so every now and again old phantom memory would rise up. Once I dreamed of Phoenix. He was sitting on the end of the bed as Michaela slept beside me.

“I never thanked you for what you did, Valdiva,” he said. “Thanks, buddy; you set me free… You know she had me like a puppet… pull the string, pull the string…” Smiling, he pulled an invisible string.

“Phoenix?”

“Yes, old buddy?”

“I never asked you… why did you paint your face like an Egyptian pharaoh?”

He grinned. “Intimations of immortality… intimations of immortality…” He kept repeating this as he began to sprinkle rose petals from his fingertips. They covered the bed in red splotches. Just like the red splotches that covered the camera lens after the dynamite had exploded against his stomach. In the morning I recalled the dream. There were no red rose petals on the bed, though. Not that I expected there to be any. Phoenix, along with the thing that had squirmed from the hive, was dead.

Of course the time had to come when I dreamed about the girl. It was a day in October. One of those last warm, sunny days when you make the most of the heat. Boy and Tony had gone fishing. I walked with them by the river; then, when they chose a good place to cast their lines, I decided to walk on, following the flow of the stream. After a few minutes I found a sunlit spot on a bank protected from the cool breeze. It seemed a great place to relax for half an hour or so. I sat on the deep, soft grass at the edge of the river. Fish jumped for insects hovering above the surface. It was so peaceful my eyes closed.

“Greg Valdiva.”

I opened my eyes to see a woman standing on the far bank. She had long dark hair and big almond-shaped eyes that fixed on me from across the water. It was the girl from the bunker, the one Phoenix claimed had hatched from the hive. More phantom memories.

“You took some finding,” she said.

I yawned. “Well, you’ve found me now.” My dream self was calm, cool and very collected. “What do you want?”

She studied me like an expert appraising an antique. I noticed she was no longer naked. The prude in my unconscious had slipped her into a white dress. Water splashed against the rocks; another fish jumped to snap a fly from the air.

At last she said, “You are the same as me, Greg Valdiva.”

“I don’t think so. You’ve got the wrong guy. You must be mistaking me for someone else.”

“No, Greg. There’s no one else to mistake you with.”

“Is that a fact?”

“That’s a fact, Greg. You see, we’re the only ones who made it through the hive state.”

“You don’t say?” My dream persona was like chilled silk-cool, smooth.

“None of the other hives were viable. They became dessert for rats and snakes.”

“That’s a shame.”

“But it leaves you and me, Greg.”

“So you say.”

She looked at me steadily across the rush of water, her almond-shaped eyes huge luminous lights. “You’re not ready to join me yet, are you, Greg?”

“Nor will I ever be.”

“You will. One day. When you truly wake up and realize what you are.” She began to walk away, her bare feet pressing lightly against the sandy shore. She paused beneath the trees, a single beam of light picking her out, surrounding her in an unearthly radiance. “We’ll meet again in the future, Greg.”

The bushes seemed to fold ’round her and she was gone. Her feet made no sound as she glided away into the forest. After a while the eerie silence ended as the birds began to sing.

“Hey, Valdiva, are you going to sleep there all day?”

“Yeah, look at what we caught.”

I opened my eyes to see Boy and Tony standing over me. I squinted up against the light as Boy held a bunch of fish that dripped all over my face. Laughing, I waved him away. “Come on; we’ll make a barbecue of it.” I wiped water from my chin. “The way that wind’s shifting, I figure it’s going to be the last cookout this year.”

That should have been it. But as they roasted fish on the barbecue I went down to the river again, crossed it by the stepping stones, then followed it downstream to where I’d been sleeping on the far river bank. And there, where the girl in my dream had been standing, I saw a bare footprint in the sand. I scrubbed it out with the heel of my boot, returned to the barbecue and never mentioned it to another living soul.

There were seventeen of us in those log cabins. I shared a big room overlooking the river with Michaela. When nights dropped cooler as fall crumbled into winter we learned new tricks to keep each other warm.

Life continued its peaceful progress deep into the winter. North winds brought deep snow. Christmas came. We kept the parties going: we were a family; we were having fun. Christmas morning I crept out of the warm bed, leaving Michaela sleeping there with her hair spilling out onto the pillow. There’d been a fresh fall of snow. Now the world seemed to be made up of horizontal black and white lines. First came the white-covered lawn, then the black line of the fence. Beyond that a snow-covered meadow ran smoothly down to the thick black river. Beyond that were snow-covered fields and lines of black forest, until a dark horizon yielded to white, snow laden skies. Christmas Day. Soon everything would change.

The turkey might have come from bunker tins, but it still tasted good. Boy went to bring more wood for the fire that blazed in the hearth. A second later he was back.

“Get your guns! They’re coming up the hill!”

Hornets. Thousands of them. Tens of thousands. They surrounded the hill on every side. A gray tide surrounding an island. They moved like human slugs. Slowly getting closer and closer. Zak and Tony ran for their guns. Michaela reached out, grabbed my hand, held it tight. “We’re not running… and we’re not fighting, Greg,” she said gently. “There are too many of them.”

That was when a kind of calm crept down on us as gently as the snow falling from the sky. We stood there out on the lawn. We watched them advance slowly across the snowdrifts, turning the landscape from white to filthy gray.

Boy walked a few paces down the hill as if to meet them halfway. He was unarmed. Not that it mattered now. I knew there were too many. And for once the muscles in my stomach didn’t react. My breathing was steady. My heart had the good grace to beat with a slow, steady rhythm. No one spoke. No one even moved. We just waited, knowing that everything was moving to a close. Whatever we’d planned or dreamed about, this huge cycle of events had reached its end. But we’d done the impossible. We’d formed bonds in our community that had never broken. We wouldn’t be the ones to break them now.

Michaela’s hand gripped mine. I watched as the mass of gray resolved itself into thousands of individuals moving toward us through the snow. I saw the gray faces, the snowflakes speckling beards and hair. Their eyes fixed hard on us. Moments later the first ones moved away from the crowd that stretched for mile upon mile before us. The big man moved toward Boy, a hand outstretched. Boy never flinched. He stood, watching. Waiting for the final act.

In human beings the strongest instinct is to survive. In these creatures now moving across the snowdrifts toward us I realized that their overriding instinct was to kill. That is, to kill their enemy-us. They weren’t going to stop to eat, to find shelter; they’d walk a hundred miles through the snow to snuff out a single member of the human race. And that, I saw, was where Mother Nature had made her big mistake.

The man was a near giant. He waded through the snow toward Boy. His eyes locked onto the child’s face; he stretched out his arms as if to encircle the small neck with his huge hands. Then the man faltered. He struggled to raise his arms higher and failed. The blue lips twitched. That’s when Boy himself reached out and, without any fuss, without any exertion, pushed the giant in the chest. The man crashed down on his back. He didn’t even attempt to struggle to his feet. He lay there panting. I looked at his feet. Every single toe had vanished, eaten away by frostbite. Through the creature’s rags I saw a chest that was barely covered by gray skin. Cheekbones protruded through the man’s face. His blue lips were split and bleeding, destroyed by sheer cold. For a second his eyes locked on mine, the jaw working like he wanted to speak. But then with a sigh his head rolled back against the snow.

“He’s dead.” Boy gazed down at the lifeless face in awe. “He’s dead, Michaela.”

Michaela looked at the crowd toiling up the hill through the biting wind. Then she looked up at me, her eyes glistening. “They’re all dying, aren’t they?”

For a while we watched them struggle toward us. One after another fell exhausted into the snow where they died, arms outstretched toward us.

“Nature got it wrong this time,” I said, hearing the hush in my voice.

I looked at the others as smiles transformed their faces. Zak slapped Tony on the back. Ben ran forward through the dying multitudes, whooping wildly and shouting, “Extinction! All right! All fucking right!”

How long can you stand there on a freezing Christmas Day and watch men and women-or things that had once been men and women-drop down dead from starvation and frostbite? An hour, two hours? But then, we carried an instinct to survive. Before the cold damaged us we returned to the cabin. There, we sat, drinking beers and talking about what we’d seen and what it meant for us. We expected that there’d be at least one knock on the door. But there wasn’t. Not one.