Stranger

Seven

“You’re kidding me, Valdiva.”

“No, I’m not.”

“Straight up?”

“Straight up.”

“You told them to hang the Crowther kid and they were actually going to do it?”

I nodded as I hooked the log before pulling it out of the lake onto the beach.

“But you say his own father was there?” Ben’s eyes were huge. He couldn’t get his head ’round this slice of news. “He was just going to stand by and watch his own son be killed?”

“He’d have put the noose ’round his own son’s neck if I’d demanded it.”

“Jesus.”

“I tell you, they looked weird. If you ask me the… what do you call it? Trauma… the trauma of what’s happened to these people over the last few months has gotten to them. They’re getting desperate.”

“Why? We’re safe enough here.”

“For the time being.”

“We’re damn lucky, Greg, The Caucus is publishing a report next week. They say we’ve got enough gasoline in those big storage tanks in the interchange to last ten years.”

“Yeah, I know, and enough juice for the power plant for twenty years if they ration the electricity supply to six hours a day.”

“And five warehouses crammed with canned foodstuff.”

“And close on a hundred thousand gallons of beer, truckloads of whiskey and about ten million cigarettes.” I hooked another hunk of wood and started hauling in. “Yeah, everything’s peachy.”

“Not peachy, Greg. But everything’s OK. What with the dairy herds and the poultry farms, fish from the lake and fruit from the orchards.” He sounded enthused now; words came tumbling out. “And the crops on the south end of the island, we’re self-sufficient. We can sit here for a decade and still not have to break sweat to feed ourselves. That’s going to be more than enough time for the country to get back to… oh, hell.”

The “oh, hell” indicated that the piece of timber I’d been hauling wasn’t a piece of timber after all. Instead of a three-foot hunk of firewood I saw a fraying head linked to a torso. The face and eyes had gone. Whether it was a man or woman I couldn’t say. All I could say for sure was that fifty pounds of human flesh had seen better days. I pushed it back out into the lake with the pole. Gas from inside the body bubbled out, making it sink slowly out of sight.

“Now you know why the fish get so fat these days,” I told Ben. “So you’re telling me the Caucus master plan is that we all sit tight here waiting for the government to announce that society is back to normal?”

“There’s no point in doing anything rash.”

I nodded across the lake at the distant hills. “You mean nothing rash like going out there and finding out for ourselves whether the country’s getting back on its feet again?”

“You know it’s too dangerous to leave the island.”

“You mean guys have left, but they never came back?”

“Sure, so why risk it?”

“Why risk it?” I hooked more wood-this time it was a window frame-and pulled it out of the water. “I figure we should satisfy ourselves that America, probably the whole world, has bellied up good and hard; then we can stop this pretense that one day the radio and TV stations will come back on air, and that the president’s going to announce everything’s hunky dory.”

“You don’t think it’s going to happen, Greg?”

“Do I hell. There is no president anymore. There is no government. They’re all dead.”

So we carried on. Ben being bright-eyed and optimistic. Me? Well, I was cynical as hell. Our nation, and every other nation, without doubt, was well and truly busted. Only the men and women of Sullivan, population 4800, were still locked down with a tungstenhard case of denial. USA’s A-OK? No way, amigo. USA’s DOA.

I liked Ben. He was one of the few guys in the town I could talk with. He was a year older than me at twenty. He liked the same music. He had the same sense of humor. When I first met him he seemed one of those super-intelligent people who towered over you and made you feel prickly, as if he were going to put you down the first time you opened your mouth and let slip you’re no Einstein. The first time we met was when the Caucus ordered him to show me ’round the island. I’d have been in Sullivan just a week at that point.

“Of course ‘island’ is a misnomer,” he’d told me as he drove through town in a Ford.

Misnomer? Christ, what kind of guy uses the word misnomer? I decided this bright-eyed student type with arms and a neck as thin as wires would only be my best buddy when hell developed icicles. And did you see that? I told myself as he fiddled with the car’s CD player. His hands shook like someone was running a couple of hundred volts through him. He could hardly push the buttons. His jerky fingers were all over the damn place. If he aimed to pick his nose he’d wind up with his finger in an eye. Probably not even his own.

“Calling Sullivan an island is a misnomer,” he was saying while prodding the buttons. “You probably saw as you came in, it’s connected by a narrow strip of land to the mainland. The only road into Sullivan runs along that. If anything, Sullivan is shaped like a frying pan, with the handle forming the isthmus connecting us to the mainland. Across there is the Crowther distribution center. All those warehouses used to supply Lewis-that’s the big town, over the lake. You see, in years gone by it was easier to transport food, gasoline and general goods into Sullivan by railroad, than ship them across the lake. The terrain around here’s pretty bad for a decent road system… across there is the power plant. There, the building with the tall silver chimney. We’re so isolated we’ve got our own generators.”

“They still work?”

“Absolutely. Years ago they found pockets of orimulsion under the island.”

“Orimulsion?” That was a new one on me; sounded like something to do with house paint.

“Orimulsion.” He tried flicking a bug away from his face. Those trembling fingers fluttered with the speed of batwings. “Orimulsion is a naturally occurring gas that’s highly inflammable. It’s no good for domestic use. Too corrosive. It’d rot your stove to crud inside twelve months. But it’s great for industrial use. What they did was bore down into the orimulsion pocket, then simply build the power plant over the top of it. That gas is good for twenty years yet.” The bug buzzed back and his damn fluttery fingers jerked up. He was steering with one hand now, and boy, those shakes. The car started flipping side-to-side on the street. A couple of kids on bicycles were pedaling the other way. “The Caucus… that’s the committee that governs Sullivan… they ruled that in order to eke out the orimulsion stock we shouldn’t squander electricity, so…” He tried flicking the insect from his face, only those trembling fingers were going all over the place. He even knocked the rearview mirror. And, Christ, those kids. They were going to be road meat in ten seconds flat. I flicked the bug against the windshield, where I crushed it under my knuckle.

“Good shot,” he said, then carried on, happily talking about what a brilliant job his hometown was making of what must have been the biggest disaster this side of Noah’s flood. “So they decided to ration electricity to six hours a day, running from six in the evening until midnight. You see, dark evenings are bad for morale, so if we keep the power going for lighting and home entertainment people can watch movies on tape and disk and so on.”

At last his trembling finger hit the play button. At that moment electric guitar sounds soared from the speakers. A driving bass pumped loud enough to shake the car.

“Hendrix!” He nodded to the rhythm as he drove. “This is gold.. . pure gold.”

We drove out of town and past fields where cows chewed their cud. He waved to a woman walking her dog. A rat-sized thing on the end of a leash that wore a tartan coat.

“That’s Miss Bertholly. She’s a big cheese on the Caucus.” He looked at me. “She’s a real iceberg in pants; don’t let her order you ’round.”

Then he flashed me a wide friendly grin. Something gave way inside me. I don’t know what. Because for the last few days I’d been wearing a face engraved out of granite, or as good as. I’d not cracked a single smile since I’d buried my sister and mom out on the bluff. Suddenly I felt this big object moving through me and didn’t know what the hell it was. Then it came out, and I was making this weird braying sound.

Jesus. I looked at myself in the rearview mirror that Ben’s jerky hand had knocked to face me. There I was with my black hair sticking up in wild spikes, my dark eyes glistening, and I realized I was laughing. It wasn’t as if Ben had said the wittiest line in the world. But it uncorked a hell of a lot of emotion pent up inside me. Now I was laughing so hard I thought my guts would rip out through my skin.

Ben looked at me with a grin. Before you knew it, he was laughing, too.

So roaring like a pair of madmen we cruised around the island that wasn’t really an island, while all the time Hendrix’s guitar blazed from the speakers like the cosmos itself had found its own voice and begun to sing.

After that I’d go out for a beer or two with Ben, or we’d hang out with a few like-minded souls.

Ben had one of these brains that people describe as lively and inquiring. He’d been hot as biology student. For months he speculated about the real cause of the “disease” that infected the bread bandits.

Often he’d air his ideas as I made my daily round, using a hook on the end of a twenty-foot pole to haul driftwood from the lake. I’d leave it there on the shore in piles, then either me or old Mr. Locksley would roll up in the truck and haul it back to my cabin, where I’d cut it up for firewood.

“Greg,” Ben once said to me, “you know that scientists never did find bacteria or a virus that could be attributed to the disease?”

“What?” I said, half listening as I hauled branches out of the water. “You mean old Jumpy?”

“Jumpy.” He grinned. “That’s it, give a terrible disease a comical name and it doesn’t seem half so bad, does it?”

“Well, Jumpy seemed to sum it up well enough. Once those bread bandits had a full-blown case they nearly jumped out of their skin. They got so they were terrified of their own shadows.”

“Sure, the disease was named. Officially it was Gantose Syndrome, then it became corrupted to Jumpy. But they don’t know what caused it, or what it actually is, never mind the question of how it could be cured.”

“Does it matter now? No… it’s OK, Ben. I’ll pull it out of the water.” Good-natured Ben would sometimes try and help, but his hands would shake so much he’d shake the wet wood and spray water into our faces. He was good company, though, when I was out fishing for wood, so I always encouraged him to walk with me ’round the shoreline.

And so he’d tell me his latest theory. “If you ask me, Greg, even if Jumpy is a disease it’s not caused by bacteria or a virus.”

“It has to be one or the other, Ben. Even I know that you don’t get sick without some kind of infection.”

“That’s not true. Your body can be invaded by something called a prion.”

“A prion. What the hell’s that when it’s at home?”

“A prion can’t even be described as being alive as such. Usually it’s referred to as an agent, but it seems to be capable of reproduction. What’s more, it’s far smaller than a virus. Even worse, it’s virtually indestructible and can’t be destroyed by heat. Prions have been transmitted using scalpels that have been sterilized.”

“Then why haven’t these prions killed everyone off in the past?”

“Because the diseases they cause are rare. And prions tend not to be harmful as a rule. We’ve all got them swimming about inside us, but as I said, they’re rarely dangerous. They just lie dormant all our lives.”

“What’s the problem then? Don’t we all have benign bugs inside us?”

“That’s true. Normally prions don’t bother us. But if they do turn nasty…”

“I could see that big BUT coming.”

“But if they do turn nasty,” he said, getting enthusiastic again, “they produce a substance called amyloid, which always forms in brain tissue, not in any other part of the body.”

“Ah.” I saw where he was going with this. “If it attacks the brain, then it’s going to affect behavior.”

“Bull’s eye. And prions are transmissible.”

“You mean that these prions may be responsible for Jumpy?”

“I do. And that it caused millions of people in South America to act in such a bizarre and unusual way.”

“But simultaneously?”

“Some diseases spread fast. You’ve ridden a bus in winter when half the passengers are sneezing and coughing.”

“Have prion diseases spread as fast as this before?”

“Not to anyone’s knowledge.” He gave a grim smile. “A tad worrying, isn’t it?”

We talked on the beach as I collected wood that lake currents delivered to us with all the regularity of the old-time mailman. That had been my job of work for the last few months. For that I lived rent-free and took a weekly wage. Dollar bills in the outside world might only be good for starting campfires, but here in Sullivan they were still legal tender.

Never going out farther than their statutory two hundred yards were half a dozen rowboats, each with two or maybe three guys fishing. They’d never go beyond the orange buoys that marked the two-hundred-yard boundary offshore. If you ask me, they’d die of a heart attack if you even suggested they fire up the outboard motors and ride the four miles or so across the lake to Lewis, which now sat there like a crusty black scab. Those old guys’d tell you they didn’t believe in ghosts. But get this: They were still scared of them.

Fish jumped from the shallows. Birds sang in the woods. The sun climbed toward midday. The temperature soared with it, too.

“It’s getting too hot to do this much longer,” I told Ben.

He smiled. “Well, I know a place where we can find some cold beers.”

“Show me that place, Ben.” I grinned. “It sounds like a good place to be.”

Ben reached down into the water’s edge to grab a hefty branch that divided itself off into a mass of twigs.

“Leave it,” I told him. “We’ve got enough for today.”

“Kindling,” he panted as he hauled it in. It must have been heavier than it looked. “It’ll make good kindling.”

I laid the hooked pole down onto the beach, ready to give him a hand, when he let out this cry of shock.

“What’s wrong?” I saw that he was staring into the mass of twigs. His eyes had turned big and round in his face. His body had fixed into the same position, as if he couldn’t bring himself to move.

“Oh, my God…” he gasped, then lost his balance to fall back onto his butt on the shingle.

“Ben?” I bent down to look into the tangle of sticks that still dripped water. “What’s the matter, it’s only a head. So what’s the problem, buddy? You’ve seen three of those today.”

“Not like this one I haven’t.”

“Why, what’s so different about it?”

“Take a look for yourself.” He swallowed hard, as if his breakfast threatened to come storming back. “And while you’re about it: Count the eyes.”