My mother was awake. Her eyes looked bleary but she was up and sipping a cup of something I assumed Aunt Ella or Dorcas made for her.
“Are you okay?” I asked her.
“I am now,” she said. She smiled, but it was more like a pained frown than anything.
“We have to go. There’s a fire.”
“Who set off the alarm?”
I didn’t know how to answer that. I guess Trina had technically set off the alarm—or was it the poxer? Maybe it was the helicopter dive-bombing and exploding in the midst of the sticky covered trees. The real truth was that the alarm was probably coming from Black Point Fort and it wasn’t a fire alarm at all. It was a signal probably roughly interpreted as ‘intruder alert, intruder alert’.
Randy Stephens sat next to Eddie with the fake hair. His arm was draped around Eddie’s shoulder. Wow, fast mover. The two of them just looked at me and nodded, then both helped each other stand on weak legs.
“Hey kid,” wheezed Dorcas as she struggled to help Nedra Stein get up. “Give an old broad a hand.”
“Come on, Grandma,” I said. “You’re tougher than that.” She snorted and I reached my hand out to Nedra and pulled her to her feet.
Krystal was with Freaky Big Bird and Trudy Aiken. Trudy gently rubbed little Krystal’s bandaged arm. She didn’t want another bite, that’s for sure. Somehow, Trudy had bonded with her breakfast and it was all good.
“Time to go,” I said to them. They didn’t ask why. They just nodded their heads and began to move. Aunt Ella came in the back door holding a steaming pot of water, saw that we were all moving, turned right around, opened the door, and threw the boiling water into the wind. She didn’t asked questions. She just knew.
As a matter of fact, none of the adults asked why. They just solemnly gathered their things together, a little weak from a night of almost becoming poxers, and readied themselves to get gone.
Prianka, Bullseye, and Jimmy went through the aisles, grabbing anything that might be of use. Everyone was very orderly—very calm. Aunt Ella began gathering up the quilts and folding them neatly into tidy squares. I didn’t have to ask, I just knew that she meant to take them. Just because it was unseasonably warm out, didn’t mean that it was going to stay that way for long. This was New England—the land where people use both their air conditioners and their heaters in the same day.
The quilts we could use.
Right now, all I wanted was some of the penny candy, but Sanjay beat me to it. He had a Swifty’s bag with a little emblem of the fishing bear on it, and he was going from bin to bin, grabbing handfuls of licorice nibs and strips of colored dots on paper, and stuffing them into the bag.
Freaky Big Bird took little Krystal by the hand. “Let’s go outside, dear,” she said to her. I felt a twinge of sadness. It must be nice to be taken care of. I wasn’t sure I would ever feel like that again. When you’re a kid, everything is done for you. If you want food, your parents make it for you. If you want to be comforted, there’s always a lap to crawl on. Right now, it seemed like I would never have that wide-eyed, trusting feeling of safety. My life in Littleham was decades away and the future felt like it could be snuffed out in a heartbeat.
I heard a hrumpf, and turned to see Trudy Aiken. She looked downright awful. No one had bothered to tell her that she had dried blood on her mouth from when she bit Krystal. It crusted on her lips and a little on her chin. By now, the blood had turned brown. She heaved herself to her feet, steadying herself against the wall as she stood. The hot cup of liquid in her hand almost spilled, but she managed not to drop it. I pulled a paper towel off of a roll that was sitting on the counter and quietly slipped over to her.
“Trudy?” I said. “Ms. Aiken?” I gently took her cup from her and dipped one end of the paper towel into it, then dabbed softly at her chin with it. “You dribbled,” I whispered, and she smiled.
“Thank you,” she said as I wiped the crusty gore away from her chin and her lips.
“Can I ask you a question?”
“Yes,” she said. “What is it?”
I didn’t know quite what I was going to say until I said it. Then it just spilled out. “What was it like?” I asked her with my eyes down. I couldn’t look her in the face.
“Being sick?” she asked. Her chubby cheeks flushed against the fading gray of her skin.
That’s not what I wanted to know. I forced myself to ask the question. “Biting Krystal,” I asked, just above a whisper. “What made you do it?”
She licked her lips and looked away. It’s not that I needed to know. I just couldn’t imagine being overtaken by Necropoxy. I couldn’t even pretend to know what it felt like to want to take a bite out of another human being.
“Hungry,” she said as though she was more than a little embarrassed. “And trust me, I know what hungry feels like.” She wrung her hands together over her stomach. “But it was more than that,” she said. “I was ravenous. I’ve been ravenous before. When I get that way, I’ll always turn to macaroni and cheese. It’s the only thing that takes that feeling away.” Her eyes started to leak but she didn’t make any attempt to wipe away the tears. “This was different though. The hunger was all consuming, and it wasn’t for macaroni and cheese or cake or pizza. It was for flesh. I couldn’t think of anything else. It was like my very existence depended on eating her. I can still feel it inside of me—that desire—but it’s fading away.”
I was almost sorry I asked. The hurt on her face was painful to see. I felt sorry for her. I felt sorry for all of them. All I could manage was a small smile. I finished dabbing at the corners of her mouth, removing any evidence of what had happened that morning. Thankfully, Krystal would most likely forget all but the vaguest memory of being bitten. If she ever had a chance to grow up, maybe she would someday wear a small scar on her arm, faded to white, that she could proudly show as a badge of honor. She survived an almost-poxer attack. No one would be able to say that but her.
As I turned away, Trudy grabbed my arm.
“We have to stop this,” she said. “We have to stop this madness.”
As if I could. I was just a boy. It didn’t matter that I had rough stubble on my face from not shaving for a few days. At the end of the day, I was just a boy, and she was a fat lady.
How could we stop anything?
45
SMOKE WAFTED ACROSS the parking lot as the fire roared in the woods. We couldn’t see it yet, but we knew it was coming in fast. The siren blared through the morning. It was like someone was pouring acid in my ear. All I wanted was for it to stop. Any second now, I expected those jeeps in the front of Black Point Fort to come zooming down the road, filled with military guys like Luke and Cal. They were the two brilliant minds we found in Purgatory Chasm—you know, the kind of guys who weren’t members of MENSA. The kind of guys who shoot first and ask questions later.
Most of us were already outside. Both of Trina’s hands were wrapped in bandages. She leaned against the ambulance with a sour look on her face. Jimmy and Bullseye were putting bags of supplies in the minivan. Freaky Big Bird and Nedra Stein stood with Krystal by the bus. Sanjay, Andrew, and Newfie were out by the road, solemnly watching the smoke rise through the trees. He stretched his arms out wide. I could only assume he was chanting some sort of nonsense to keep us safe. Hey, we needed all the help we could get.
Eddie with the fake hair looked scared. He was leaning with his hands against the porch railing near the little fishing bear. Randy stood next to him, almost a foot taller. “I’m not cut out for this,” he said to Randy. Randy didn’t respond. He looked sort of lost. I guess they all did—the adults I mean. All I knew was that Eddie had better figure out a way to get ‘cut out’ for this soon, because there wasn’t any alternative. You run and you fight—you win or you die. Those were our only choices. You burn your relatives and your friends when they get bitten, and you leave baby poxers by the side of the road, no matter how desperate they seem. You shoot old men in pharmacies and you
leave them for dead, with only a bottle of pills to make the pain go away.
You run and run and run so no one can ever catch you—or you don’t live.
Prianka came up to me with a folded pamphlet in her hand. “Look at this,” she said as she opened it up. It was a map of the Quabbin Reservoir. She took it off the tourist rack in Swifty’s—the one that was filled with brochures about all the cool places in the area that tourists were never going to visit again.
She spread the map out in front of us. “We’re here,” she said and pointed at Swifty’s, which, not surprisingly, was featured on the map with a picture of a tiny fishing bear. “And here’s gate 29.” There was a little drawing of a gate and a squiggle surrounded by two pine trees. It was the path where the cellar holes were—the final resting place of Ross Esi Allan III. “And here’s Black Point Fort,” she said. “See the road?” I didn’t quite get what she meant at first. There was a tiny square on the map where the fort was, then a dark line that stretched away from it and about a third of the way up the reservoir, all the way to another gate called Gate 1. “Look at the legend,” she said and pointed to the little scale on the bottom that measured out fractions of inches as miles on the map. “That black line is the road that we saw leading away from Black Point Fort. It must be at least fifteen miles long.”
Now I got it—crystal clear. “Oh,” I murmured as I traced my finger along the map and around the reservoir to where we were. “And fifteen miles back. It doesn’t take long to drive thirty miles.”
“We have to go,” she said. “Right now.”
The door opened and my dad came out with my mom, followed by Aunt Ella, Trudy, and Dorcas. Everyone else was already outside.
Dorcas stopped and lit a cigarette. Her pockets were bulging with boxes of whatever brand she could get her hands on. I didn’t begrudge her the smokes at all. If I was eighty-two, I would be eating chocolate morning, noon, and night.
I pulled her aside.
“Look at this,” I whispered to her. I didn’t want the others to hear. Sure, they were scared, but I knew Dorcas was tough enough to take it. Prianka and I showed her the map and told her about the fort and the helicopter people and the sticky trees.
“Damn,” she whispered under her breath. She took a heavy drag on her cigarette and looked out over the parking lot and the smoke rising in the sky. Her eyes fell upon the road toward Gate 29. “What’s that way?” she said.
Prianka ruffled the map. “After Hollowton is a nothing place called Cotton Corner, then Apple. Then it goes to Waring, and back around to Bellingsfield.”
“Bellingsfield?” I said. “That’s near Littleham.” We drove through Bellingsfield that first day on our way to save Jimmy James in Amherst. That was a little over a week ago, I think. The days were starting to run together. It didn’t matter anymore if today was Friday or Saturday, or one of those weird days off from school when all the teachers got together and had meetings—probably complaining about how rotten we all were.
I looked at Uncle Don’s watch. It was smudged with dirt. I scraped the filth away with my fingernail. It was a little after 1:00 in the afternoon.
Dorcas flicked her cigarette. “All you have is food in the bus,” she said. “You can get more.”
“Huh?”
“Get everyone into the van and the ambulance,” she said, then stomped down the stairs and over to Aunt Ella. Dorcas said something to her and Aunt Ella reached into her pocket and handed over the bus keys to her without question.
“What’s she doing?” I whispered to Prianka.
Prianka’s eyes grew wide. “She is not,” she whispered under her breath as we watched Dorcas trudge over to the bus, push the accordion door open, climb in and start it up.
“‘She is not’, what?”
Just then, the siren abruptly stopped. It had been blaring for almost an hour—more than enough time for anyone at Black Point Fort to drive up to Gate 1 and loop around the Reservoir to where we were.
“She is,” said Prianka as she watched Dorcas pull the bus out of the parking lot and turn back the way we had originally come. “She’s going to block the road.”
Prianka was right. Dorcas pulled down about a hundred feet and maneuvered the big yellow monster sideways so it stretched from one side of the road to the other. The woods were thick there and the bus completely blocked the tar. Not even a jeep could get by.
“She’s my hero,” I said to Prianka as we trotted over to the adults and began hustling them into the ambulance. Sure it was going to be a tight squeeze, especially with Trudy, but I figured they would have to make do until we found another vehicle. The bus was a wash. It served its final purpose and now we’d have to find a different way for all of us to get around. For now, the adults would just have to deal with tight quarters.
As I was shouting for Dad, Mom, and everyone to get into the ambulance while Prianka got Jimmy, Trina and the others back into the van, I heard something. At first I thought it was the roar of the fire getting closer, but no, this was different. Crap, I thought when I realized it was the hum of a motor, coming from down the road, past where Dorcas had parked the bus.
She was still in there, gathering up a few bags of supplies, making sure that we didn’t leave anything vital behind.
I cupped my hands. “Dorcas,” I yelled out to her, but she didn’t hear me.
“What is it?” said my dad.
“Get in the ambulance,” I screamed at him. “Just drive. They’re coming.”
“But—”
“Do it, Dad. Go to Apple. It’s just down the road.” I grabbed the map from Prianka and shoved it into his hands. “We’ll be right behind you.” I turned to the bus and screamed out for Dorcas again.
This time, she didn’t need me to tell her that someone was coming. I saw her standing in the middle of the bus with her back to me. She was looking at something down the road. All of a sudden, she dashed to the front of the bus, pulled open the accordion door and tossed something into the woods.
I’ve played the scene over a hundred times in my head. Dorcas was smart. She wasn’t Sanjay smart or Poopy Puppy smart, but she was crafty. She threw the keys into the woods. That way no one could move the bus—not until they found them.
Dorcas closed the door and stood with her back to me. I heard the screech of tires against the road, and I heard voices. They were far enough away that I couldn’t make out what they were saying, but someone was barking at Dorcas and Dorcas opened up one of the bus windows and was hollering back at whoever it was.
I did hear one thing. It was faint, but I heard it and I’ll never forget it.
“No one over sixty, my ass,” Dorcas screamed. “Up yours.”
Seconds later, there was a single explosion. It’s not like I wasn’t used to the noise. I had heard it dozens and dozens of times over the past week. It was a gun shot.
The window behind Dorcas Duke splattered red and Prianka screamed.
Just like that, Dorcas was gone.
46
MY FACE WAS STONE. I didn’t have any room for tears. Somewhere, far away, I heard Prianka softly crying. She held my hand as I sped down the road in the minivan.
I heard Jimmy say something. He put his hand on my shoulder. Trina did too, but it wasn’t a hand—it was a bandaged mitt covering burnt skin.
They did that to her—the murderers.
Bullseye didn’t say anything and Sanjay mumbled to himself. Everyone else’s words were a million miles away, but Sanjay’s I somehow heard. “Take her now, take her now, for she faces the end of this life. By the earth and wind and the fire and rain, she’s on her way, remember her. Take her now, back to the earth from which she sprang and then returns. Help her cross over for now it is her turn. She is not afraid. Remember her.”
How many times was I going to hear him say that? How many freaking times?
My face was marble and my heart was granite and that’s all there was to it. Dorcas Duke was born, she lived, and she died, a
nd hopefully I would remember her all of my days, however many were left.
The worst part was, she wasn’t even killed by a poxer. She was killed by a human being. She was murdered in cold blood. I pressed my foot to the floor and the minivan lurched forward.
“You have to slow down,” whispered Prianka.
“Yeah, dude,” said Jimmy in that smoother-than-silk voice of his. “There’s nothing you could have done. But what you can do is make sure the rest of us make it to Apple in one piece.”
What a stupid name—Apple. I had heard of it before—Apple, Massachusetts. Before Trina and I were born, my dad and mom almost moved there—that is, until they saw the place. It was a mill town, in the middle of the woods. I remember my dad saying something about an apple a day keeping the doctor away, and the town of Apple being bad enough to keep any doctor worth his salt away permanently.
Apple couldn’t be worse than Guilford, that’s for sure. Maybe it had a few extra tattoo parlors or a Mickey Ds, but it was still in the butthole of the state. I saw a poster once that had a picture of Massachusetts divided into four separate parts. There was Boston and everything around it—that was called the East Coast. Cape Cod, Nantucket, and Martha’s Vineyard were known as Florida. Then there was Worcester out to Springfield—that’s where Lilttleham was. They called that the West Coast. Anything up north or to the left of that simply said, ‘There be dragons’—and that’s where we were. We were in the land of dragons and poxers, and poxers with tattoos and piercings on their bodies in places no one should ever have a piercing.
There be dragons, alright. Dorcas was killed by one.
A tear spilled out of the corner of my eye and trailed down my face. Okay, I gave one tear away for Dorcas Duke. Hell, she was awesome. If it weren’t for her, I would be poxer food for a monster that used to be named Millie Ludlow, being kept dead in the basement of Jolly’s Pharmacy. If not for Dorcas, maybe the helicopter people would have found me in the woods near the covered bridge, hiding with dead leaves and snakes.
The Dead (a Lot) Trilogy (Book 2): Wicked Dead Page 19
