Stranger

by Simon Clark

  Ten.

  I put my feet down, my soles brushing the soil.

  Five miles an hour.

  I stopped. Then, with my feet balancing me I slipped the rifle off my shoulder and aimed along the track.

  For a while I sat there. The sun shone down. I heard birds in the trees. Butterflies flitted among yellow flowers in the meadow. Honeybees buzzed through the long grass. Sweat trickled down my face; my heart pounded with a dark funereal rhythm.

  The track ahead lay deserted. Maybe they’d gone back? Or cut through the trees into the field?

  But then I got it. The Twitch. Not for the first time I wondered if bread bandits, hornets or whatever you called them carried some smell so faint I didn’t consciously sense it. But the old dinosaur brain locked deep inside the folds of primate brain still sniffed it bright and clear on the hot summer air. My stomach muscles twitched. In my neck and back more muscles snapped tight. So tight the contracting neck muscles pulled my head back and forced my chin up.

  The bastards were here. They were right around the . . .

  Then they walked ’round the bend. I pulled back the bolt. I’d only have to do that once because this little beauty had a self-cocking mechanism. OK, Valdiva. All you need do is aim . . . squeeze the trigger . . . aim and squeeze . . . aim and squeeze. . . .

  Muscles twitched like they danced in my gut. Blood sparkled through my veins. My whole being squeezed into that cubic inch behind my right eye. The one that looked through the sight and along that gleaming barrel. I concentrated on nothing else now.

  There they were. A group of guys in their twenties and thirties, I figured. They moved purposefully toward me. Not running. Their eyes locked on me.

  But they wouldn’t spook me.

  I waited until they were maybe fifty yards away before squeezing the trigger.

  The first shot punched clean through the chest of the one in the lead. The bullet tumbled out through his back to smash into the mouth of the guy behind him. His teeth vanished in a cloud of red glory and enamel splinters.

  Both dropped down into the dirt. Two with one bullet! There was an angel on my shoulder today.

  Forty-five yards away I dropped the next guy with a chest shot, too. He went down kicking his legs, vomiting blood. That bastard was dead meat.

  I’d expected them to charge. There were still seventeen of them. I had eight rounds left in the clip. Do the math; I’d have to cut and run in the next ten seconds.

  Forty yards and closing.

  Bang . . . dropped the next with a head shot. A bald guy. The top of his scabby dome lifted off in one piece like you’d slice the top off a boiled egg. His comrades didn’t flinch when the guy’s brains spattered their faces.

  Thirty yards. Bang, bang. I dropped two more with head shots through their eyes. One round exited the back of the sick fuck’s skull to slice off the guy’s ear behind him. The one who lost the ear bled like a pig but it didn’t stop him. I had to drop him with a shot through his lungs. He sat down on God’s earth to cough blood into his cupped hands.

  Four rounds left. Thirteen mad fucks remaining.

  They were twenty yards away. If they ran now they’d reach me in maybe ten seconds.

  I fired again. Lousy shot, Valdiva. The bullet gouged out the hornet’s eye, but it exited through the side of his forehead, just below the temple. Most would have gone down with the sheer trauma of an injury like that. But his expression hardly flinched. His good eye still burned at me. And even though blood turned the righthand side of his face into a red mask he kept moving.

  Where have you gone, sweet angel of mine? Now I had to use another precious bullet on Seňor Solo Eye. It caught him in the throat. He went down gurgling to claw at the ground like it was the earth itself that hurt him.

  Fifteen yards.

  Then the goddam sly bastards went and did it. They cut and ran.

  The twelve that remained burst through the bushes at the side of the road to disappear into the trees. They left the tail-end guy, though. The one who’d killed the old man back along the track. He still had that steel bar, too. He ran straight at me with the bar raised above his head. Old man brains still stuck on the end. Christ, he was so close I could see the moles on his face that bristled with black hairs.

  I aimed at the center of his chest.

  But I didn’t fire the gun. Not then. What got into me, I don’t know. Maybe the angel on my shoulder moved over for a devil to settle there to whisper in my ear.

  Instead of blowing a hole in the killer’s chest I dropped the muzzle. When I fired the metal-jacketed slug smashed his balls. It might have chewed off his dick, too, I don’t know.

  With that high-pitched squeal you only hear when you accidentally stand on a dog’s paw, he dropped down into the soil at my feet. There he rolled from side to side, both hands clutching the blood-soaked mess between his legs.

  I didn’t have time to put a second slug in his head.

  I knew what remained of the hornet gang would be running as hard as they could to reach the people with the newborn baby. Now was the time . . . I started the Harley’s motor, revved it until it howled like a phantom war cry, then blasted down the track, the back wheel throwing up a geyser of dirt as high as the treetops and coating the fallen man in filth as he writhed in agony.

  It took seconds to reach the group. They hurried along the track. Some helped the mother, whose thighs were still slick with blood. A girl of around thirteen carried the baby. And there, cutting them off from going farther, hornets ran out of the wood. The young guy dropped a couple of them with the shotgun. Then he started fumbling with the thing, trying to reload.

  Slowing the bike, I fired my last shot. The hornet went down with a hole in the back of his head you could have shoved your fist through.

  There were still more than half a dozen left. I had to slow the bike, but I cut past the little band of survivors. I had nothing but air in the ammo clip now. Instead I accelerated toward the surviving bunch of killers. They were still intent on claiming their original prey and sidestepped me. One wasn’t fast enough. I caught him across the forehead with the rifle butt. He went down onto his back. Down but not out, he started to sit up. Whipping the bike ’round, wheels throwing out dirt like a smoke screen, I rode toward him. The front wheel bounced up over his chest, pinning him down to the ground. Slowly, hardly touching the throttle, I eased the bike forward until the rear tire pressed down deep into his belly. Frantically, he beat at my legs. His eyes bulged wide; spit bubbled through his lips in fast, glistening gobs. Bye, bye, freak boy. I opened up the throttle until the engine screamed; the back wheel blurred, spun and ripped out his intestine as efficiently as a chainsaw.

  That left me with the other hornets who closed in on the group. The guy still fumbled shells into the shotgun breech, dropping them on the ground in the process, picking them up, dropping them again, picking them up again, panic distorting his face into a mask from which jutted two terror-stricken eyes

  But then it was over.

  In a blur motorcycles buzzed past me. Zak, Michaela and Tony rode alongside the surviving hornets. Balancing their shotguns in the crooks of their elbows, they fired. And, man, you knew they’d done this be-fore. In less than ten seconds the half-dozen-strong bunch of bad guys lay dead in a growing pool of their own blood.

  Down in the valley the other hornets would have heard the bikes and the shooting. They’d come looking for us now. It was time to get that tired bunch of people with the newborn baby up the hill, then the hell out of there.

  Twenty-seven

  On the road again. There was ample saddle space for the group we’d rescued. The mother (who couldn’t have been more than sixteen herself) was another matter. No way could she ride double after giving birth just hours before. There was the newborn baby, too. Despite Zak’s joke, you couldn’t let it ride in the pannier. Finally Michaela and Ben worked out a way to seat her on the two-wheeled trailer that Tony pulled behind his Harley. They created a kind
of armchair from boxes of food, spare gas cans and blankets. She sat looking backward with the baby in her arms. The girl seemed dazed by it all and didn’t comment on the strange traveling arrangements. She just sat with the baby wrapped in towels, staring into its face. Incredibly, there was an aura of calm about her. I don’t think she even realized a battle had been fought down on the dirt track.

  There were six of them, if you counted the baby. There was the mother, the thirteen-year-old girl (the most self-assured of the group), twin Malaysian women in their twenties who’d been vacationing in New York when the Fall happened along and smashed civilization to crud and Ronald, a guy of around thirty, with a goatee that looked more like brown froth than hair. Constantly, he looked ’round with these scared blue eyes that you’d swear were close to bursting clean out of his skull. All the time, as we loaded the bikes at the barn, he’d repeat over and over, “We’ve got to get away. Those things down there are killers. We’ve got to get away.”

  The hornets had heard the gunshots and the roar of the engines. Around forty of them began prowling their way up the hill like a pack of dogs looking for a rabbit. But they were on foot; we had the bikes. We got away with time to spare. By late afternoon we were miles from the valley with its lakes. We didn’t see what happened to the group of ordinary Joes the hornets were pursuing. Only it took no genius to surmise what did happen to them when they found their way blocked by the river merging with the lake. A few shots fired, then hundreds of hornets would overwhelm the little band of survivors. End of story.

  We figured the best route would be simply to head away from the valley where the hornets had clustered. By late evening we reached a garage. One of those backwoods outfits with a couple of gas pumps, a tiny store that sold everything from toothpaste to ammo and fish bait. It had been picked clean, of course. Although Ben did find a single pack of gum behind the trashed counter. Alongside the store was a repair shop. Here a few cars sat gathering dust in varying stages of repair. A big old Chevy in strawberry red with a cream stripe down its side and whitewall tires stood on blocks. Someone had been lovingly restoring the old girl when civilization rolled over and died. The vast back seat made an ideal bed. Michaela guided the new mother to it and settled her and the baby down there. As Michaela got busy arranging blankets, fixing her a hot drink, finding clean towels for the baby to keep it warm, I found myself watching. Hell, I admired Michaela. She was so together. She always moved in a purposeful way, as if even the smallest chore was an important link in the survival chain. Which I guess it was. She cared for people, you could see that. A warm sensation flushed through me as I watched her slip a pillow she’d found in one of the cars beneath the new mom’s head. Despite Michaela’s external toughness she had a tender heart.

  She caught me staring at her. She said nothing. Her let’s-get-down-to-business expression didn’t falter, but I found myself blushing when she made eye contact with me. So I did what I was good at: I found firewood.

  By this time the sun had all but set. Zak arrived back from his search of the neighborhood. “Quiet as a grave,” he told me as he climbed off the bike. “No sign of hornets or any ordinary Joes like us. But the houses nearby have either been picked clean or torched.” He slapped the dust from his pants with the cowboy hat. “With luck there might still be some gas in those cars, or in the underground tanks.”

  Then it was business as usual. Tony rigged up the bread oven where the fire would be. The others did chores—making supper or mending clothes. Ben dug out the tub of flour ready to make more of the pancake bread.

  With plenty of trees nearby firewood was easy to find. Soon I had it piled in the yard (well away from the gas pumps, just in case). Once it was lit people gravitated toward it as darkness crept like a hungry ghost through the forest. Ben baked bread as Zak fanned the flames with his Stetson. The new arrivals got to know their rescuers. People made a fuss over the mom and her baby. Michaela made use of the rearview mirror in another car; she sat brushing her hair. I found myself staring again. But then, there was something compelling about the slow, rhythmic way she ran the brush through her long dark hair.

  “Supper’s ready,” Ben sang out while he set the flat loaves to cool. Before, mine had come out black; his were pale gold. They smelled good, too.

  Zak crouched down to look at them. “What have you done to these?”

  Ben looked anxious. “Is there something wrong with them?”

  “No, they smell great . . . hmmm. How you do that with bread and water?”

  Ben’s face switched to a boyish grin. “I found some garlic growing wild in the hedge bottom.”

  “Garlic! Hey this guy’s a genius. Garlic! Sweet Jesus! Oh, boy, did you hear that?” He laughed as he clutched his stomach. “My belly’s rumbling.” He called out to the others. “Come on, let’s eat.”

  I’d packed enough beer for a stubby apiece. Michaela said it was a good time to pass these out and celebrate the birth of the child and the expansion of our group by six—if the new people wanted to join, that is?

  Yes. They were all keen to hook up with us. Rowan, the thirteen-year-old, said that the hornets had been following them for more than six hours before the showdown in the lane. They’d run short of supplies. Most of the guns had been lost in a boat accident. The old guy had been a Marine and despite crippling arthritis had dived into the lake to retrieve what he could. One of the guns he found underwater in the mud had been the machine gun. That pretty much explained why it hadn’t fired as the hornets bore down on him. Added to those troubles Kira had gone into labor. Most of the others in the group had been for dumping her, as she slowed them down. But the old guy and these few had refused to leave her to die at the hands of the hornets and had done their best to help her.

  Like all survivors these days, this was a resilient bunch. Despite the trauma of what had happened earlier they soon relaxed (helped by the beer, I reckon) into the sense of security the fire offered. And the fact that we sat there cradling guns on our laps.

  As we sat ’round the crackling fire I took the opportunity to oil a pump-action shotgun Zak had told me was getting sticky. The cocking mechanism had become stiff, but I spent ten minutes or so dry firing it until the action became smooth. All the time the people ’round the fire swapped stories about what had happened to them over the last twelve months. Despite the fact that the nation had been laid to waste, it was surprising the funny stories people had to tell. Zak even made a joke of how his hair had fallen out after he’d been burned in the fire. “I went to sleep one night only to wake up in the morning to find all this hair covering the ground. I couldn’t believe what had happened. I looked in a mirror and saw my head was as smooth as a pool ball. The thing was, when I went back to my sleeping bag I found birds were taking my hair up into the trees to make nests. I remember running after them to try to get my hair back.” Zak rubbed his nude scalp. “As if it would have done me any good if I could.” He grinned. “It would take some pretty strong glue to hold all that in place.”

  The newcomers laughed. I could see that one of the Malaysian girls especially was warming up to him. I loaded the shotgun, then finished my bread ration. Ben had worked miracles. Flavoring the bread with crushed wild garlic had to be a stroke of genius. I hadn’t tasted anything as good in a long while.

  The thirteen-year-old girl darted to the repair shop and came back with news that baby and mother were fast asleep in the back of the Chevy. Boy showed off a card trick that impressed everyone. The new guy with the goatee beard sat opposite me on the far side of the fire. Smiling, he said he could make a stick turn to rubber. He did the old trick you’d do with a pencil, only this time he held the end of a piece of firewood in his fingertips and flicked it up and down so it gave the illusion of becoming rubbery. God, yes, a cheesy old trick, older than Noah’s goddamn Ark. But it raised a laugh from everyone. Boy grinned so hard I’d swear you could see every single tooth in his head.

  Ben nudged me. “Don’t tell me that I’ve
gone and poisoned you.”

  I looked at him, puzzled. “What do you mean?”

  “You’ve just eaten the bread.” He smiled. “Now you’re rubbing your stomach like it’s given you a bellyache.”

  “And here’s another neat trick,” Ronald said, stroking his goatee.

  That’s when I fired the shotgun blast that tore his head from the roots of his neck.

  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.