Stranger

by Simon Clark

  “Of course I do. Are they dangerous? Are there lots of them? Should we be searching for them and burning them to crap? I mean, if we’re—”

  “Wait.” She held up her hand to stop me. “You want answers from us?”

  “If these things are dangerous, we need to—”

  “Just one moment there.” Again she interrupted. “You know the old saying, you don’t get anythin’ for nothin’?”

  I nodded.

  “Then,” she said, standing, “get us food and we’ll tell you what we know.”

  I looked at those thin, half-starved faces. “OK,” I agreed after a moment. “It’s going to take a little time.”

  “We don’t have planes to catch, buddy,” growled the guy in the cowboy hat. “Take your time.”

  “But bring some mayonnaise,” chipped in his buddy. “Big, big jar.”

  “And beer.”

  “And bring steak. We can barbecue it right here.” The cowboy stamped his boot into the fire, pushing in a chunk of unburned wood. Sparks gushed into the night sky.

  “I’ll do my best.”

  “Your best my ass. No food, no hive talk. You follow?”

  “It’ll be a couple of hours.”

  “We’ll be here.”

  “You can’t go alone,” the girl told me. “By rights there should be hornets crawling all over the place.” She picked up the pump-action shotgun.

  “I’ll be just fine,” I told her. “Just lend me a gun.”

  The cowboy laughed. “Lend my ass.”

  The girl shook her head. “If you knew how many of us we lost getting hold of these babies you’d realize why we don’t go handing them out to strangers.” She nodded at a break in the fence. “Come on, make it quick. We’re hungry.”

  We walked through the downtown area of Lewis, heading to where I’d moored the boat at the ferry terminal. The first rays of the rising sun cast a blood-red light on rusted cars and scattered masonry.

  After ten minutes of walking in silence she suddenly said, “You hate our guts, don’t you?”

  “Hardly. I don’t even know you people.”

  “We must look like a rough bunch. But we didn’t start out that way. Tony comes from a family of well-todo tennis pros on Long Island, while Zak—he was the guy in the black Stetson—was studying at a Hebrew school in Manhattan when the world rolled over and died. Originally he was from Vancouver in Canada. He had those curly black side locks, you know?” She made a twirling motion with her fingers just below her ears. “But he lost all his hair in a fire when we camped in a kindergarten—some idiot kicked over a stove in his sleep. His hair never grew back. Not even his eyebrows or on his arms. He wasn’t badly burned, but I figure it must be the shock . . . wait.” She stopped, then looked up at me. “We’ve done this all wrong, haven’t we?”

  “Done what all wrong?”

  “We’re becoming so brutalized we’re even forgetting the social basics.” She held out her hand. “How do you do? I’m Michaela Ford.”

  I shook her hand. “I’m Greg Valdiva.”

  “Pleased to meet you, Greg.”

  “Likewise, Michaela.”

  That was rich. Standing there in a burned-out city full of skulls, shaking hands like we were meeting for the first time at a dinner party.

  She continued walking. Now she looked a little more relaxed.

  “So where do you come from, Michaela?” I asked.

  “Me? New York. My mother was in magazine publishing. We’d just moved into an apartment in Greenwich Village. I loved it there, especially the street markets on Sundays. I even wound up helping out on a stall there that sold African jewelry.”

  “Sounds swanky.”

  “Swanky?” She smiled. “What kind of old-time colloquial is that?”

  “It was a word my mother used. Swanky clothes, swanky cars, swanky houses.”

  “She’s dead?”

  “She’s dead.” I nodded.

  “Mine, too. I was staying with my father up at his place in the Catskills when the hornets went on the rampage. Like everyone else we thought it would be short-lived, but it just went on and on. They torched schools, houses, then whole towns and cities. My mother and father had been separated more than five years, but he was still anxious about her being in New York, especially after we heard that all those people had been killed in the streets on the first day.”

  As we walked along the street, where naked skulls seemed to grow out of the dirt like weird white mush-rooms, she talked. It seemed as if she and her father had dove into the car, then simply blazed south toward New York. Already the countryside had gone to shit. Bread bandits, or hornets, as she called them, had trashed everything. They drove past houses and churches in flames. She couldn’t believe her eyes the first time she started seeing corpses lying in the road. She even told her father she was hallucinating when she saw a dozen men hanging by their necks from a bridge running over the road. Then he’d had to drive the car under the hanging bodies. The feet of the dead men had scraped along the car roof. It’s still a sound she had nightmares about. Of course, the closer to New York they got the worse the roads became. Soon they were clogged with refugees flooding from the city. And every hour or so the bread bandits would attack like packs of marauding wolves. There was no one to protect the refugees. Hardly anyone had a gun. Michaela’s eyes went faraway as she described how maybe a hundred or so bread bandits would run along a gridlocked road tearing people out of their cars, dashing babies against the blacktop, torching vehicles, tearing eyes out with their bare hands.

  Nevertheless, Michaela’s father still forced a way through the jammed highways, horn blaring, lights flashing. They were still a good twenty miles from New York when she got the call on her mobile. It came from a friend of her mother’s. She was screaming into the telephone that her mother’s apartment had been ransacked and that her mother lay in the bathtub. “They drowned her in her own bathroom, can you believe that? Can you believe they’d do such a terrible thing? Michaela, your mother helped these people. She worked in the canteens at the park. She did everything she could. Now they’ve broken in and drowned her in her own bathtub.”

  There was nothing to do but turn back. Now they joined the flow of cars away from New York into the countryside. It took three hours to cover four miles. Then the driver’s door was torn open. Hands and arms burst into the car. Her father struggled with the attackers for maybe less than a minute before he’d gone. The mob carried him away, still struggling.

  Michaela waited there for them to come back for her. She’d accepted they would carry her away. But no one came. The other refugees did nothing to help her. They’d seen it happen time and time before. They merely sounded their horns before inching past her. After an hour of this she knew there was nothing she could do for her father.

  She slid across into the driver’s seat, started the engine, joined the exodus.

  Within a week she’d joined up with a bunch of other refugees who were camping out at an abandoned farm-house. For months they’d drifted from place to place, looking for food and a place of safety. Usually the hornets found them and drove them out. Sometimes they stayed put and made a fight of it, but there were too many hornets. Some of Michaela’s group died, so they’d eventually cut and run anyway. Now all that remained was the ten-strong group that sat ’round the campfire waiting for food.

  Poor bastards.

  Come to think of it, I’d had it pretty easy in Sullivan. The people sucked. But I had a home and plenty of food.

  We’d nearly reached the ferry terminal when she asked what had happened to me that first day of June.

  “The first I knew was the smell of burning. When I woke up the houses across the street were on fire . . . my mother called them swanky houses . . . you’re right, she was envious. We lived in . . .” I grimaced. “Humble accommodations. Anyway, we saw that the bread bandits, or the hornets, as you call them, were lining our neighbors up in the road. And . . . you know, there was someth
ing in those refugees’ faces that didn’t seem human anymore. After the hornets lined up our neighbors they just walked along from man to man, woman to woman . . . they had hammers, and they just . . . well, you don’t need me to paint a picture, do you?” I shrugged. “What could we do? We locked the door and watched all that shit happening on TV, how the cities were burning, the refugees flooding the streets. We even watched CNN when the bastards broke into the studios and beat the anchorman to death live on air. By that time we knew we had to find somewhere well away from the action, so to speak. We couldn’t just sit tight in the house and hope that we’d be left alone, so we started to pack groceries into bags, because we knew food would be scarce. But as we cleared out the cup-boards a guy just walked into the kitchen. We didn’t even hear the goddam door open. He just stood there with this expression on his face. It was just so weird. Like he wasn’t looking at the surface of our faces but somewhere at the back of our skulls. My mom grabbed Chelle to pull her away from him. That’s when he at-tacked. He just flailed at her with his fists. My mom sort of hugged Chelle into her stomach, then she bent over her to take the guy’s punches in her back so Chelle was protected.”

  I looked at Michaela. She gazed at me steadily. She must have heard this kind of story dozens of times before from survivors. But she listened with a serious expression. I even felt she was encouraging me to get it off my chest.

  “Well, I launched myself at the guy who was trying to kill my mom. . . .” My voice died away.

  “And?” she prompted gently.

  “And I lost my mind . . . at least for a while. When I came to I was lying in this mass of broken pottery. I thought the guy had knocked me unconscious, but it turned out I’d had some kind of blackout. But I had fought the guy. He’d opened a gash on my forehead and bloodied my nose. I don’t remember anything about it, but my mother told me I’d struggled with the guy, then grabbed him by the throat and smashed his head against the kitchen wall so hard it had cracked all the wall tiles. . . .” I shook my head. “My mother called those tiles her swanky tiles. She loved them.”

  “You saved their lives.”

  “Yeah, for what good it did.”

  “What then?”

  “The guy was out cold or dead, I don’t know. We picked up what groceries we could carry, then drove away. It was just luck, I suppose, but we found a house way up on a hillside, like it had been dug into a hole there. And that’s where we sat it out for month after month.”

  “The hornets didn’t find you?”

  “No. Not that I remember much about it. I’d drunk water from a stream that must have been contaminated by a dead animal or something. I was sick for weeks. Most of the time I was in such a high fever and delirious, I didn’t know day from night. I was out of it. I can’t remember a thing.”

  “Your mother and sister were able to care for you alone?”

  “Somehow they scavenged food from abandoned houses and stores. But like I said I didn’t know anything about it.”

  We reached the steps that lead to the boat. “Then for some reason we hit the road again,” I told her. “I don’t remember much. We wound up in a little town in the hills . . . or the remains of one. I still couldn’t eat and was still pretty much out of it. I don’t even know properly how it happened, but my sister and mother became sick. I was looking for help when a hunting party from Sullivan found me—Sullivan’s the place across the lake, there. They got us to a doctor, but my mother and Chelle died within hours of each other. The doctor said it was some kind of blood poisoning. But I’m not sure if he really knew what it was. What are you doing?”

  “Getting into the boat.”

  “No, you have to wait here. I’ll bring the food back across to you.”

  “How do I know that? You might change your mind and stay across there on paradise island and forget all about us.”

  “I’ll bring food,” I told her as she slipped the shotgun off her shoulder. “Or are you going to blow a hole in me if I don’t do what you tell me?”

  “And where’d that get me? You being dead won’t bring us the food.” She lay the gun on one of the bench seats.

  “Look, Michaela, I’m not allowed to bring strangers onto the island. Hell, I’m not even supposed to leave the island myself.”

  “I’m coming with you.”

  “No. If I’m found with you, they’ll kill us both. Believe me.”

  Her voice stayed firm. “Greg, I’m coming.”

  Seventeen

  Short of punching her unconscious and dumping her back on the harbor wall, what could I do? As I tied the boat to the jetty nearest my cabin, I whispered to her, “People tend not to wander down here in the early hours, so we shouldn’t meet anyone, but keep as quiet as you can. OK?”

  Shouldering the gun, she nodded. There was more than enough light to reveal us to anyone who happened to be taking a dawn stroll, so instead of using the track for the three-minute walk to my place I took a slightly longer route through the woods, where we’d be concealed by trees. I just thanked my lucky stars there’d been enough mist on the lake to conceal our crossing from Lewis to Sullivan.

  This was no ideal situation for sure, but I remember Michaela’s hungry friends. They deserved a chance, too. Besides, those nice, smiling bastards of Sullivan could spare some food. With luck I could run the supplies across to Lewis in the battery-powered launch and still be back before the dawn mist melted away.

  When we reached the cabin Michaela was amazed. In awe, she stared at the cans and jars I’d dumped on the table and worktops and never gotten ’round to putting into the cupboards.

  I’d already pulled the blinds down so I said, “You can relax now.”

  Still overawed, she just nodded. She didn’t look any more relaxed.

  “Michaela, you can talk normally as well. We’re a quarter of a mile from the nearest house.”

  “OK,” she said in a tiny whisper.

  “Sit down. I’ll fix you something to eat.”

  “I’m all right. Let’s get the food to the boat.”

  “You don’t look all right.” Maybe it was the sight of all that food after living on raw potatoes for a couple of days that did it, but she’d started to sway; her dark eyes suddenly unfocused.

  “It’ll take me a few minutes to get the stuff together. Sit down at the table. Here.” I put bowls in front of her. There were tomatoes, grown locally in greenhouses. Heaped in a basket were plums and mushrooms. A real dog’s dinner of a mixture, but she began to eat. I’d still got a good-sized chunk of bread that wasn’t overly dry and a can of corned beef. She watched me open that like I was producing diamonds from the can, not a block of boiled beef that was close to its “best by” date. Even though she must have been hungry as hell she didn’t eat like a hog. She sliced the corned beef with a knife, then slipped it between her lips. Then it hit me that I hadn’t eaten for more than twenty-four hours either. I filled a jug from the faucet and grabbed a couple of glasses.

  “You’ve water mains, too?” She sipped it like fine wine. “I wasn’t wrong: This is paradise.”

  “Water’s pumped from a well nearby. More?”

  “Please.”

  I refilled her glass, then ate, too.

  “I can’t believe you’ve got all this food. Haven’t hornets hassled you at all?”

  “No. Well . . . there’ve been a few, but they came in just ones or twos. They didn’t even attack. They just turned up asking for food and shelter.”

  “They were still in the early stages of it, then. What happened to them?”

  “I killed them.” I spoke matter-of-factly, but she shot me a startled look.

  “You killed them before they went full-blown and started attacking people?”

  “Yes. . . . Try these pickles. They’re good.” I aimed to change the line of talk, but she was having none of it.

  “You mean you kill every stranger that walks into this town?”

  “No. I think I’ve got some cheese somewhere
if you want to try—”

  “Greg, I don’t understand. You mean to say you’ve got some way of running medical screening? That you can tell if people are infected with Jumpy?”

  “No . . . nothing like that.”

  “What then?”

  “You tell me about these hives, then. That thing I found in the apartment was weird, you know?”

  “They are weird as hell, Greg. But I’m not saying anything about the hive until my people get the food you promised them.”

  I looked at her. She recognized something so serious in my expression that she stopped eating.

  “Michaela, I won’t make a game of it,” I told her. “The truth is I might kill you.”

  A tremor ran through her face. Her dark eyes widened in shock.

  “Listen.” I clasped my hands together tightly in front of me, just in case they flew at her to crush her throat. “I don’t know what happened to me last year, or if it’s something I’ve always had . . . I know I’m not explaining this well. But if someone has got that thing in their blood I know. It’s instinctive. They might not have any symptoms. They might be sitting like you’re sitting there now, but I get this twitching in my stomach, the muscles in my back writhe like a whole heap of snakes, then before I know it I’ve killed them—man or woman. It’s like lightning inside my head. Pow, bang, then by the time I’ve got my control . . . my self-control back I’m standing over a body that’s hacked to pieces.” I took a breath, sickened by the memories that started to flood me. “It’s like a bomb hitting me. It’s that sudden.”

  “You don’t feel this . . . this twitching with me now?”

  “No.”

  “Did you feel it when you were back with my people?”

  “No. I thought I felt it when I followed the boy into the apartment. I know now it was because I was so close to that thing you call a hive. But there’s no guarantee it won’t happen.” Then I told her about the local guy who’d arrived in town a few days ago, that I knew he’d got Jumpy running in his veins and how I’d killed him in the street. “So this epidemic has changed,” I told her. “We thought it could only affect people from South America. Now it looks as if no one’s immune.”