Stranger

by Simon Clark

  “What had it done?”

  “Sucked her dry, Greg. If you ask me those things are like vampires. They batten onto people, only I don’t know how they do it. Maybe with some kind of teeth in the gel or disgusting tubes that burrow into the people it catches. Then it draws the blood right out of them. We’ve seen it again since. Victims look like pieces of dried fruit. Their faces become wrinkled and ridged like raisins, which sounds like a funny description, funny ha ha, but it’s not. If you saw for your-self you know how sickening it is. You want to puke when you look into those dried-up faces. Even their eyes shrivel.”

  “What is a hive?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, fanning the flames faster, as if trying to waft those mental images away. “Some disgusting parasite, maybe.”

  “But you said that bread bandits—I mean hornets— guard them.”

  “Mostly . . . not always.” Despite the heat I saw goose-bumps pucker the skin of her arms. “We decided we had to destroy them. The one that killed Boy’s sister we burned with gasoline. Where they were guarded by hornets we picked off the guards with our rifles, then torched the hive.”

  “What stopped you killing more?”

  “Because there were so many of them. We only had limited amounts of ammo. If there were twenty hornets guarding them it would still take more than twenty cartridges to kill them, even if our shooting was pretty good.”

  “You’ve no idea at all what they might be?”

  She sighed. “I think they’re connected with the Jumpy somehow. Zak believes Jumpy isn’t so much a disease but a metamorphosis. The early symptoms, the overwhelming panic, then this mindless urge for them to kill people that aren’t infected, were the first stages of that metamorphosis.”

  “You mean that people infected with Jumpy will end up becoming hives?”

  “That’s what we’ve figured out. If there’s a team of scientists still alive out there they might tell us it’s all crap. Until then, that’s our theory. What do you think?”

  I nodded. “It seems as good as any to me.”

  “There’s some other stuff as well.” She spoke as if the subject sickened her; she wanted to get off it fast. “So far we’ve only found hives in buildings, and they’re always either in a bathroom or a kitchen. Zak figures they need to be near a water supply. They also tend to be guarded, as I’ve said. And it seems as if they need food.”

  “That’s why they pull the vampire trick?”

  “That seems to be the case. They trap unwary people like Sue.”

  “And the one back in Lewis nearly got me the same way.” I remembered the head lunging through the gel with the wide-open mouth.

  “Or”—she stood up—“or the hornets who guard them procure victims for the hive to feed on. Any more than that I don’t know.”

  A thought occurred to me. I stood up and reached out to catch her arm to stop her walking away. “But if this is some kind of metamorphosis, this hive must be the larval stage. So there must be a final stage.”

  She looked up at me, then shrugged in a way that suggested she agreed. “You may be right, Greg. For all we know there may be something like a big, beautiful butterfly waiting to hatch out.” Her eyes hardened. “But until then we do know some facts. And the main fact is that if you get too close to one of those things you die.” She held eye contact with me for a while. Then she glanced down at the fire. “Greg, you’ve burned your bread.”

  I looked down to see wisps of blue smoke coming from the top of the oven.

  Crouching down, I opened the oven door, used the pliers to pull out the oven tray and saw a dozen bun-shaped cinders.

  “Damn.”

  “See,” she said. “Making our daily bread is tougher than you think.”

  “Back to square one.” I set out the mixing bowl and tub of flour.

  She smiled. This time there was warmth in it. “I’ll give you a hand,” she said. “Don’t worry, there’s no rush. This is for the meal tonight and breakfast tomorrow.”

  The thing is that bread was going to burn, too. Because twenty minutes later Zak came running out of the barn with straw still stuck to his clothes from his makeshift bed. Panting, he shouted, “There are bad guys coming down through the valley.” He pulled the pistol from his belt. “There are hundreds of the bastards.”

  Twenty-five

  Zak sounded cool . . . in control. But he wasn’t dragging his feet. “There are hundreds of hornets down in the valley,” he called as he loped toward us.

  Michaela shielded her eyes as she looked down to-ward the lakes. “Are they coming this way?”

  “They don’t seem to be, but you can never tell with those sly bastards. They might be doing that on purpose; then they could double back over the hill to en-circle us.”

  Ben jogged up, scared-looking. “I guess this is where we leave pronto.”

  “Not yet,” Michaela said. “There’s no point in running until we know their intentions.”

  Zak nodded. “This is a good place to stay for a few days. They might just pass straight by.”

  Tony appeared with a pair of binoculars. He climbed a fence to stand astride the rail. For a good thirty seconds or so he studied the men and women flowing by in the valley bottom. From what I could see against the sun’s glare they moved in groups of twenty or so. They were walking purposefully enough away from us, but as Zak had said, it might be a trick. After passing out of sight they might return when we least expected it.

  With the binoculars to his eyes, Tony spoke. “Oh, crap . . .”

  “Have they seen us?”

  “No. They’re on a hunt.”

  Ben’s hands shook. “That’s bad, right?”

  “Right.” Tony lowered the binoculars. “They’re hunting people like us. There’s a group of around twenty down there, carrying backpacks. They’re still well ahead of the hornets, but do you see what I see?”

  He handed Michaela the binoculars.

  “There’s a second group moving parallel to them higher up the hill,” she said. “As far as I can tell a river joins the lake right in front of them.” She handed the binoculars to me. “They’re heading into a trap. Only the poor devils don’t know it.”

  Raising the binoculars to my eyes, I viewed the figures in sudden brutal close-up. “You’ve seen this before?”

  “Oh, yes. Lots.” She sounded grim. “Remember what we were just talking about?”

  “They’re hunting those people for a hive?”

  “I can’t swear to it, but let’s say I’m ninety percent sure.”

  “What are we waiting for, then?”

  “Greg, what do you mean ‘What are we waiting for’?”

  “Those people need our help.”

  “Ben, there are twelve of us. There are hundreds of bad guys.”

  “But we—”

  “We can do nothing but watch and make sure they don’t attack us.” She stared at me. “It sounds uncaring, but what can we do? You’d need a couple of helicopter gunships to take out those: They’re a whole army.” She tossed her head back to where a clutch of rifles leaned against the barn wall. “We’ve got a few peashooters.”

  I studied the group of survivors. They were all burdened by bundles of blankets, backpacks; most carried sacks that I guessed were stuffed with food. They were a desperate bunch. They knew they were being pursued, but they weren’t going to ditch their precious foodstuff just yet. Maybe they thought they could outrun the hornets. Only they didn’t know they were being driven into a narrow point of land that would be bound by a lake at one side and a fast-flowing river at the other. I panned to the right. A half mile behind were the hornets, moving in groups of around twenty. I couldn’t count them all, but I saw the murdering bastards numbered in their hundreds. The binoculars were powerful enough to show individual faces. The men all had thick tangled beards, with a thick tangle of hair. The women had tumbling manes of curls. Most wore rags. Some were naked. It was their eyes that really punched you in the gut. The
y were so goddam vicious. They blazed from those wild clocks of hair like fucking laser beams. And each pair of eyes had locked onto the men, women and children in front who were trying to outrun them.

  Zak shielded his eyes with the cowboy hat as we watched. “We need to send a couple of people down to keep an eye on them.”

  “I’ll go,” I said.

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea, do you?” Michaela said.

  Tony shook his head. “We get the feeling you might do something heroic.” He nodded down at the hornets swarming along the valley. “The kind of heroic that will get all of us killed.”

  Zak said, “Michaela, Tony, take the bikes down the track across there. That’ll bring you close enough, but you’ll still be uphill from them. . . . Keep behind that line of trees. They won’t see you there.”

  “What about the sound of the bikes?”

  “Don’t start the motors,” I said. “Freewheel down. Only fire them up if you’re seen.”

  Zak gave a grim smile. “He’s starting to think like one of us.”

  Ben looked uneasy. “But if they see you we’ll all have to run for it, won’t we?”

  “We will,” Zak agreed. “But we’ll have a head start and we’ll be on bikes. They’ll be on foot.”

  Michaela began to walk back to the bikes. “Zak, you best be ready to move out fast just in case. OK?”

  He nodded. “Don’t worry, we’ll be ready.”

  Within moments, Michaela and Tony were coasting down the hill, using gravity alone, not the big Harley motors, to power their descent. Even from just a few yards away I could hear nothing but the whisper of tires on soft dirt that had accumulated on the track. Seconds later I heard nothing at all as I watched them leave.

  Zak immediately got the others to gather up their belongings just in case we had to quit this place like greased lightning. That left me at the fence watching through the binoculars. The bunch of survivors were still well ahead of the hornets. They looked confident they were going to make it. Most had rifles ready in case they were attacked, but they still weren’t going to ditch their belongings so they could move faster. Those pitiful supplies were all that kept them from starvation.

  I checked the groups of hornets, who didn’t move in a great hurry either. But then, the cunning monsters knew that the people just ahead would run out of dry ground within the next ten minutes. At the foot of the hill Michaela and Tony had coasted down to the line of trees that hid them from the bad guys. OK. So far, so good.

  But wait . . . all those hornets in the valley moving in plain view across the meadows were eye-catching. You couldn’t miss seeing them for sure. I felt a twitch, just a flicker of a twitch in my stomach. That instinct was reaching out of the depths of my bones. It wasn’t quite the Twitch I’d experienced before. But it was some-thing like.

  I scanned the line of trees farther to the right that followed the line of the track. I damn well knew it . . . I damn well knew it. The hornets were still a good quarter of a mile away from Michaela and Tony, now at a standstill on their bikes as they watched the bad guys pass by farther down the valley, but sure as hell and high water there were a group of around twenty of the monsters moving along the same track. But that shouldn’t be too much to worry about, should it? They were a good distance away. And they weren’t walking fast.

  No. There had to be something else.

  Again I used the binoculars to sweep the line of trees. This time I made the pan much slower. Seeing each bush in turn. There had to be something else that—whoa. Got it.

  Maybe a hundred yards from Michaela and Tony, just around a curve in the track, I saw a group of five, maybe six people huddled against a tree. They weren’t hornets, I was positive of that. They seemed to be in a tight clump, with one guy carrying a shotgun moving backward and forward across the track. Even from this distance I could tell he was nervous as hell. He knew the hornets were following them. What he didn’t know was how far away the monsters were. I swept the binoculars back to the knot of people. A young woman sat on the ground. Her legs were somehow awkward under her, as if she wanted to stand only her legs were too weak. Others clustered ’round, trying to help. A girl of around thirteen wrapped an object in a large towel or piece of sheet.

  She handled the object gingerly, like it was incredibly fragile. All I could tell was that it was red. Not at all big.

  Hell . . . a goddam baby. That’s what it was. A newborn baby! The woman must have just given birth. I stared so fiercely through those lenses it felt as if my eyes would dry out. But I saw clearly enough now. The girl was wrapping a newborn baby still smeared with blood in a towel. The other people were trying to help the mother to her feet. Christ, she gave birth running from those monsters, now she had to get up and run again before they caught her and tore her face off.

  Once more I scanned the line of track. I saw another figure. This one had gray hair. He was—he was . . . damn. I forced my eyes to focus. That’s it. An old man. He was standing guard between the group with the newborn baby and the hornets bearing down on them.

  I watched a full five minutes as the old guy waited. A brave old guy at that. There must have been twenty bad guys and they were young and homicidally crazy. At least he appeared to carry a gun of some sort. It was too short and stubby for a rifle. A submachine gun, maybe. The guy would need formidable firepower against an enemy like that.

  It ended faster than I expected. The hornets came ’round the corner of the track. Not running, but moving quickly. They saw the old guy, made straight for him. Then this stupid thing happened. It was like watching an old comedy movie . . . only there was nothing funny about it . . . not one fucking bit funny . . . but it was fucking stupid. He aimed the submachine gun. I waited for the crackle of exploding cartridges and the jet of smoke from the muzzle.

  Nothing. Fucking nothing.

  The old guy looked at the gun. He jerked at the bolt, then the trigger. I saw him shake his gray head in dis-belief.

  And then . . .

  Over.

  That was it. Finished.

  One of the hornets pushed him, sending him dropping down onto his behind. He turned ’round on the ground, trying to stand. Only his old bones didn’t work as fast as they used to.

  Then the hornets were on him. I thought they’d pounce like mad dogs, but they just flowed ’round the old guy as he sat there on his backside in the dirt looking up at them as they walked by, ignoring him.

  Only the last one in the pack didn’t. He carried a heavy steel bar that must have been the length of his arm. He raised it above his head in a way that seemed almost casual. The old guy sat there in the dirt. He supported his top half with one hand against the track while with the other he tried to block the blow.

  The hornet swung the bar easily, missing the guy’s arm. The end of the iron bar whipped down, hitting into the old guy’s skull square in the top. The old boy looked as if he’d suddenly gotten way too tired. Slowly he lowered himself facedown into the dirt and lay still. The hornet struck him once more in the head with the bar. Then moved on without looking back.

  I found myself staring at the old guy lying there with his open mouth pressed against the road, willing him to get up, grab the gun and blow those bastards to shit. But he didn’t move and his gray hair turned the color of cranberry juice.

  While this happened I’d been locked into my own world, staring through the binoculars. I turned and ran back to where Zak readied the people near the bikes.

  I grabbed one by the handlebars and rocked it forward from the stand.

  “Hey!” Zak shouted. “What do you think you’re doing?”

  “There are hornets down there we didn’t see before. They’re going to find Michaela and Tony.”

  I was ready to punch my way through Zak if he argued. Instead: “OK. Catch.” He threw me a rifle. “It’s loaded with ten rounds. And it’s a semiauto. Just point and squeeze.”

  He swung a pump-action shotgun over his shoulder, then mad
e as if to start the bike’s engine.

  “Zak. Freewheel down there.”

  I didn’t want to signal those hornets with the sound of motors that their blood enemies were on the way. And I hadn’t told Zak everything, of course. I hadn’t mentioned the woman who’d just given birth on the road. Or the old man’s murder. Or that right now I planned to give those murdering sons of bitches a little taste of something they’d never forget.

  Twenty-six

  Dammit if the track didn’t have enough bumps to nearly throw us clean off the saddles. What’s more, it was steep enough to bring us close up to forty without having to fire up the Harley engines. Gripping the handlebars tight, the grass banks rising high and over-grown at either side of us soon made it look as if we were whistling through a green tunnel that blurred as we moved faster and faster.

  I glanced at Zak. He concentrated on the track ahead, avoiding ruts and holes in the ground. The thing is, it was so quiet. All I could hear were the whisper of air by my ears and the hiss of tires on dirt.

  At the bottom of the track Zak braked to bring himself to a stop where Michaela and Tony now shot us surprised looks. Only I didn’t stop. No way was I going to even touch the brake. I passed them in a blur, keeping the momentum going.

  Now the track had leveled out. Bit by bit the bike began to slow, but I was still doing thirty when I passed the bunch of men and women with the newborn baby.

  The guy with the shotgun looked as if he was making up his mind whether to shoot me or not when I called out, “Keep moving! You’re being followed!”

  Temptation started to bite now. I wanted to fire up the motorcycle and power up to that bunch of killers that must still be heading along the track. But I fought it down. When I arrived I wanted surprise on my side.

  The bike slowed as the track began to run uphill.

  Twenty miles an hour . . . fifteen.

  I saw a curve ahead.