“Do you think…the rash, I mean whatever it is they had…was affecting their minds?”
Tim laughed again, louder this time. “Ash. All of our minds are affected lately, by one thing or another. Haven’t you noticed? But those guys probably hadn’t lost much capacity. Only one of them could read at all, at least in English, and I don’t think he’d be able to handle much more than that Dr. Seuss book you were staring at last night. The one just like Abby’s.”
Oh. I hadn’t realized I’d been that obvious. I inclined my head toward the house. “So, there’s a black Jeep in the driveway.”
“Yep. Only one I’ve seen. Wait here, will you?”
Chapter Seventeen
I was pretty sure this part of our journey was going to turn out pointless before Tim even got into the house. He’d raised his shirt to cover his mouth and nose. Maybe it was to try to protect against infection. But we were talking about a rash here. And anyway, he’d jerked a little and I was fairly sure he’d caught a whiff of—never mind; he came back out, leaving the front door open behind him, and I could smell the story for myself.
“How many?” I asked when he got closer.
Tim just shook his head. And walked away.
* * *
“You go in there right after I shoot you in the head,” Jerry said. “Not before.”
Tim, standing two feet away, shrugged without looking away from Jerry’s eyes. “I have to go in. If you shoot me, you shoot me.”
“Nobody’s shooting,” I said…and I pushed that a little bit.
Jerry shifted his weight, as if startled—and I could feel the tension draining from both of them. A little spooky, but at the moment I’d take it.
“Tim has to go back there,” I said. “It's his daughter.”
Jerry turned his head to the right and spat a yellow-brown gob onto the ground. “His daughter? She’s not even here. We haven't seen a single kid all day.”
We stood in the backyard of a house across the highway from the high school. We'd been taking turns watching through a knothole in the pine-board privacy fence.
“They might be inside,” Tim said. “Anyway, Bob is always here. He's the one who said he'd kill them if I didn't come back in four days. It's been three.”
“So we've got a little time,” I told him. “Let's just keep watching for a while.”
Tim shook his head. “I'm heading in when it starts to get dark. Don't want to take a chance on how Bob decides to count the days.”
“Deal,” I told him, giving him a light shoulder-punch. He met my eyes, saw I meant it, and nodded.
Jerry blinked and looked away. I'd have felt better about that if I could convince myself what I was doing was ethical, even in what I thought was a good cause. And if I hadn't noticed he was absently scratching himself under his left armpit.
* * *
After Tim left us, Jerry and I holed up in another empty house. One thing about Bob's control-freakery that was kind of nice: we didn't worry too much about people shooting us as we entered their homes. Or shooting us in general without a damned good reason. If anybody was hiding from Bob's patrols out here, they'd be as careful as we were about drawing attention with gunfire.
Though…we did have to worry about the patrols themselves. At least a little. So far they'd seemed to confine themselves to the middle of the street, though.
I wondered about that. How had Bob moved Henge's citizenry out of their homes, if his patrols weren't searching homes? Did they have some way of knowing which houses had people inside?
Or. Could they really, as Jerry thought, get that kind of information directly from the bug swarms?
On the other hand, maybe people had in general decided it was better to be in a group than alone. And Bob's group was the one they had.
It made a certain amount of sense.
I didn't like it.
* * *
The next morning Jerry got skittish about using the same route we'd taken before, and also insisted on moving very carefully as we approached the houses on the far side of the road from the high school.
I could see his point. But I didn't really think Tim would have gone in there and told Bob—or Eisler, or anybody else—that we were out here.
If pushed, and with his daughter’s life on the line? Then, yeah. Probably. But we'd talked about it beforehand. We didn't know whether someone in our mountain home had reported that Tim and his three companions had been brought to us. So Tim planned to tell the truth about that—and everything else, except that he was going to say he'd woken up the morning before and noticed the rest of us were sleeping, so he'd taken his chance to escape and come back to his daughter.
And anyway, who was I to say our lives were more important than Tim’s kid? He’d do what he needed to do.
Meanwhile I needed to check the school windows, again. Tim had promised to put a white square of cloth or paper in a window facing us if Robbie was in there.
I squinted and waited. No matter what I did, though? No white square. It took a while to be sure, because the windows were reflecting sunlight in the early morning—which we should have considered before coming over here—but eventually there was no way for me to keep telling myself I just hadn’t found Tim’s signal yet. It wasn’t there.
Jerry had quit looking at least an hour before I did. He sat, his back to the house we were hiding behind, and waited patiently.
“Nothing there,” I said eventually.
“Nope. I figure we should check out the VA hospital.”
I looked at him. “How come?”
He shrugged. “Heard from some military guys—they didn’t see me listening—that the organized folks in town actually have two strong spots. That’s the other one.”
I pondered this while looking at the back of his head. “You haven’t mentioned this before now?”
He shrugged, scratching his back and not looking in my direction. “I would have, as soon as it mattered.”
I sighed. “Anything else you want to tell me?”
He shrugged, stood, and took a quick look through the fence. Then froze. “Yeah, Ash. Actually—you ought to go find another hole and watch this. I think that’s McDermott himself pulling up.”
McDermott, huh? I wondered what he looked like—if I’d seen him at some point. I walked a few feet down the fence, lowered myself a few inches, and peered out across the street.
A couple of obviously military vehicles had driven up to the school. Hummers. Not the civilian model.
Several men in what looked like some sort of urban camouflage stepped out. One was clearly in charge—he gave instructions to another, who picked out a group to follow them inside and another to remain by the Hummers.
I wondered just how good at their jobs these guys were—none of them so much as glanced in our direction. There were no obvious insignia on their uniforms, at least none I could see from this distance, but it was still pretty clear which target should be taken out first—if they had enemies around, which fortunately for them we weren’t. Quite.
On the other hand, maybe worrying about snipers wasn’t so important under the circumstances. There were other dangers, now.
They didn’t do anything very interesting. One group went into the school, and the other stood guard—focusing most of their attention in the direction of the school, which I figured meant either that they weren’t worried about being attacked or that they figured the school was the biggest danger around.
“Didn’t think the old man would come in like this,” Jerry said. “He’s all about picking his ground and making people come to him when he’s ready for them.”
I quit looking at the high school and considered my companion. “Know him well, huh?”
He shrugged, still not pointing his eyes in my direction. “I used to. Not anymore.”
I wondered if I could make him tell me the story there. Decided he was already giving me the information he thought was helpful, and he had to know he was revealing himself, so�
�two choices. Either forcing him to talk with my spiffy new brain-powers was ethically iffy at best, or I was delusional and couldn’t do it anyway.
Whichever, I’d had enough of staring at the school. “No kids. Not much movement. Want to hang around and see if this McDermott guy does anything cool?”
“Nah. We already knew he was talking to the town people. I guess they might try to hold him, but it’s not likely. So all we’d see is him leaving again. Eventually.”
“Unless the rest of the military are all coming in,” I pointed out.
“Yeah. Unless that. Look, I didn’t want to say anything about the VA hospital if the doc was going to hear it. And I’d feel better if I didn’t think he knew exactly where we were, you know? Since he went inside. Alone. How ’bout we go look for your kid instead of hanging out around here?”
I nodded slowly. That sort of made sense, if you ignored the fact that Jerry hadn’t mentioned the VA hospital before Tim arrived on the scene either. But maybe he was worried about how people would react if they knew he was a deserter—or even if word that we had a deserter somehow got back to this McDermott character.
“Deal,” I said, already moving toward the fence on the other side of the yard—there was a hole we could get through, and from there we’d get out to Third Street through via a house that couldn’t be seen from the school.
And maybe take a creek. With only the two of us, I didn’t feel quite as comfortable walking down the streets of Henge as I had when Tim and George had been with us. Also with only two of us, there was a better chance we’d be able to pass through town via creek beds and backyards without getting noticed. Assuming there was anyone left to notice us.
I looked back over my shoulder. “You coming?”
* * *
We’d headed away from the high school, then circled back toward the highway that ran by it, figuring it was better not to cross the wide-open road anywhere near either Reverend Bob’s or McDermott’s people.
Here, at least a mile from the school, I stopped Jerry when he started to follow a road. “If we head southeast into the mountains we can circle around nearly to the hospital,” I told him. “Through woods, mostly.”
He glanced at me. “Means we’ll take hours to get there. It’s only about four miles by road.”
I figured it was more like five. “So, which way is less likely to get us shot or spotted?”
I got a shrug. Once we were in the woods—where I still felt more comfortable than I ever had in the town, and what was that about?—I found a good log and sat on it.
Jerry walked on without me. Then I heard him cursing, and he came back. “Need a little rest?” he asked, and I could see how hard it was for him to hold back a sneer.
I grinned. “Nope. Look, I didn’t see anything back at the high school that said my son might be there. And Tim didn’t leave a signal. And I’ve got no objection to checking out this VA place. But I want to know what your interest is.”
He sat on a rock, clasping his hands together over his knees and looking trapped.
“Start with McDermott,” I suggested. “What do you know about the military setup out there?”
“Military,” he scoffed. “Barely. Look, I don’t want this stuff to get around.”
I nodded, though he wasn’t looking at me. “I can keep my mouth shut. As long as it doesn’t put other people in danger.”
Jerry flinched at that. “Fairly put,” he said after a moment. “I came in with the Guard three days before the…before the power went out. Some kind of hush-hush deal at the prison, something about inmates getting sick. I didn’t get details—mostly I was just escorting some medical types.”
“So you were, what? A lieutenant?”
He shook his head. “Good guess.”
“Not really. You knew McDermott pretty well. You weren’t his boss. You were leading an escort. I don’t know much about the military, but it makes sense. So when did McDermott set up out of town?”
Jerry looked irritated. “I got orders to pull out of the prison, not that I’d ever been too far inside anyway. Instructions were to leave the medical team in place and haul ass due west, out of town. So I did, and we got met, and…shit got out of hand.”
“The EMP bomb?”
“Don’t know, man. Above my pay grade. What I know is we were supposed to get reinforcements and we didn’t. Regular Army types were supposed to show up later on, but they didn’t show. McDermott said we were all in a quarantine zone, and it was up to us to keep order. Keep people from trying to leave. His story was that there was a larger perimeter—all regular Army—surrounding us, but we weren’t supposed to go that way. Our job was to try to keep anyone else from going that way either.”
I sat and thought about it. “So why’d you take off?”
Jerry turned to face me. “We were dying. Fast. Some guys fell into a coma and never woke up. Some…changed, and either got dead or left, depending on their luck. And we weren’t getting any new supplies. Look, even in a quarantine zone stuff like food should have come in. It didn’t. So…we started raiding civilians’ houses, and whatever else we could find. At first we were supposed to use only filtered water, but after a couple of days that changed and the rule was never to drink filtered water. I figured it would all fall apart—I’m surprised it hasn’t, yet. Unless that’s why McDermott came in…to give up. Pass control to whatever looks like a civilian government around here.”
“What happens if someone tries to leave? Gets past that outer perimeter?”
He turned his hands palm-up. “Beats me, man. I didn’t try. I’m a local boy, you know?”
I sat for a while longer, mulling it over. It hadn’t occurred to me that the military might be just as screwed up as the town. And not just right here, either. If they had no reinforcements, okay—with a quarantine that made a certain amount of sense. But no supplies? And orders to drink the local water? Why?
Birds burst out of the trees all around us, shrieking and calling. Two squirrels thrashed their way through the underbrush. I saw a deer, a huge buck, give up his hiding place twenty feet from where we’d been standing.
“Dude, we got bigger problems,” Jerry said, his face twisting.
I glared at him. Bigger than whatever made the US military back away slowly from our town? “Bullshit, Jerry. You’ve got about two min—”
“Seriously, shut the hell up, Ash! Swarm coming!”
“Fuck,” I agreed after a moment. We looked around for shelter, but the swarm sounded like it was in the direction of the town. We had nowhere to go.
“Maybe they won’t come out this far?” I said.
“Yeah. Maybe.” Jerry turned away from me. “I’m running for the creek. Keep up if you can.”
And he was off.
I tore after him, jumping logs, crashing through leaves, tearing my skin on vines and nettles and bark. The creek might help. Maybe. Better than nothing. I hoped.
The buzz-roar kept getting closer. “Turn left!” I yelled as I saw Jerry getting off course. “Ten o’clock!”
He hesitated and I passed him. After a moment I heard him following. The trees were getting taller, the ground was sloping down…I tripped over a rock but rolled and came up running.
“This is it!” I called to Jerry behind me, but I could barely hear my own voice over the bugs.
I saw what was probably an overhung bank right in front of me—there was a drop-off. But the bugs were so close I didn’t have time to care. I ran out, tried to leap at the last second as the bank kind of squelched away under my foot…and landed on my side in about two feet of water.
Jerry’s feet landed next to my shoulder. He steadied himself. “Not deep enough!” he screamed, and stepped on me as he sloshed upstream.
I didn’t have time to move any farther. The bugs were there with us.
I closed my eyes and dug as much of my body as I could into the muddy creek bottom. I couldn’t hear Jerry, but the things were on my face, in my hair—in my nose!
I blew as explosively as I could, then pinched my nose shut with my left hand and tried to use my right to give myself a little airspace over my mouth.
They were in my clothes. They were in the water, too, but there were fewer of them—I was lying face-down, and from the way they tried to get into my nose, ears, mouth, and eyes…I was very glad I wasn’t exposing any more orifices.
I wanted to scream, to run shrieking away from the onslaught, but I didn’t. Yet.
Instead I lay there and let them crawl into my ears. I kept them out of my nose, and mostly out of my mouth—breathing shallowly through my teeth when I had to—but didn’t know how long I could take it.
Worse, a couple of times something larger stepped on me. Giant bugs? They weren’t big enough to be people. But they made shrill hooting sounds I could hear even over the buzz-roar. Hunters-I-mean-werewolves, junior size? No way was I going to chance taking a look.
Finally I decided nothing was worse than not knowing what was happening. I started to open my eyes but had to immediately abandon protecting my nose to stop what felt like a million gnats all trying to crawl under my eyelids. Then I frantically squeezed my nose, trying to kill whatever was inside, hoping the tickle of little legs in the back of my throat was in my imagination but not believing it. Especially when I started to gag. I vomited into the shallow creek, and tried to keep my eyes and nose protected as I did it. Then shut my mouth as quickly as I could. Which wasn’t fast enough.
I couldn’t take this much longer. I could tell I was going to break. Get up and run, dance and kill as many as I could—anything but lie there. I knew swarms could last for hours. There was no way I could last more than another few seconds.
“Damnit!” I yelled but didn’t hear, and then had to clean out my mouth—I gave up on using my fingers quickly and instead started chewing. Crunchy, squishy, still moving, some biting back—I lunged up and puked into the creek again, then tried to dig myself deeper.
Four times I started to give in, to rise and make a run for it. But each time things got so indescribably worse that I settled back down.
The Secret: A Thriller Page 17
