by Ilsa J. Bick
Looks like you were wrong about that, too. Which brought up unsettling questions about the other children to whom she’d given the poison. But you had no choice. They were turning. The dogs told you so. Once that happens, there’s no coming back. As far as they knew. Considering the people-eater’s limited menu, just how would you keep someone like that alive long enough to find out?
“Doesn’t it say in the encyclopedia that the old Vedic recipe used honey and that it was supposed to make you immortal?” When she only gave him a look, Jayden shrugged. “Look, you have to get past this. I accept there’s science underneath all this. But we’ll never explain it without a detailed chemical analysis and a couple dozen experiments.”
“So, take this resurrection on faith?” She couldn’t resist. Clinging to science was, when you got right down to it, just a god of a different flavor.
“Ha-ha. Let’s hypothesize, all right? For whatever reason, his metabolic rate slowed down. There are precedents in nature. Many species of fish and insects and flies can live perfectly well in intense cold. They manufacture glycerol from fat, which lowers the freezing point of their blood. And before you tell me that he’s not a fly or fish, I’ll remind you that the human body also makes glycerol as a by-product of fat metabolism. So what if this particular mushroom also stimulates the production of glycerol? Then he’d be protected. His body would cool down, but his core and brain wouldn’t croak.” He pointed at the neurology text. “It says in there that they put coma patients on cooling blankets and used drugs to lower body temperature.”
“To protect the brain,” she said. “I know. But that’s still a lot of ifs.”
“A heck of a lot easier to accept than a miracle. There’s also something else we’re not considering. Maybe he’s just, you know, different.” Jayden tapped his temple. “Something about his brain protected him from the poison and turned it into something else. I mean, think about us. We ought to be people-eaters and we’re not. You can say it’s a miracle, but I’ll bet if there were scientists, they’d eventually figure out why we’re still okay.”
“If we stay that way. Some of the younger kids, like Eli and Ellie and Connor—they still might turn. We all might.”
“Okay, yeah, I’m not wild about the idea of waking up one morning with a hankering for a people-burger, but I can’t live every day waiting for the other shoe to drop. Know what I think is really bugging you?” Jayden stretched across the table and gave the back of her left hand a tentative touch. “You’re freaked because you think you made a mistake.”
“Because I was obviously wrong, and I don’t like mistakes. Make a mistake, people die.” She screwed her gaze to his fingers, long but rougher now and calloused from long hours of swinging an ax and reining horses. “And I didn’t give Chris a choice.”
“He wouldn’t have taken the drug. You know that,” he said, gently. “Besides, how do you know that we didn’t save him? What if the decoction was exactly what he needed? Think about that. This could be something really big.” His hand closed over hers. “It might help us in the future.”
She had to be careful. They made a good team. Just because Jayden wanted more didn’t mean she should encourage him—especially now, with the appearance of this strange boy whose face revived a host of other memories, most of them very bad. “If we understood it. It’s not an experiment I can run again until …” Until one of us is injured so badly we’ll die anyway. After another moment, she eased her hand away, covering the move by picking up her mug. “What about the girl? The one Ellie saw?”
“I don’t know,” Jayden said, his tone as suddenly stony as his face. “Tomorrow, I’ll take Connor and we’ll fetch Isaac to take a look at this kid. While I’m there, I can check with the others, see if anyone turned and got away before they could be … you know … dealt with. Just be glad that girl was alone. I’m not sure Ellie would’ve made it past more than one.”
“But what was that girl doing there? We’ve been so careful. We’re in the middle of nowhere. The winter won’t break for another month or two. There’s no reason for any kid to be wandering back where there were no kids in the first place. And she was out during the day. Jayden, what if they’re adapting, or changing again?” Lord knew, they already had enough problems without having to worry about people-eaters taking over their days, too.
“I don’t know, Hannah. If they are, there’s not much we can do about that. Let’s just chalk it up as one more big booga-booga supernatural mystery, all right?” Pushing back from the table, he gave her a tight smile. “Or a God-miracle, how about that?”
“Don’t.” Her eyes dodged to her books. “Don’t be angry with me.”
“Angry? Oh, Hannah.” There was a short silence and then the heavy tread of his boots as he headed for the door. “I wish I could be, because that would be so much easier.”
38
Two hours into this, and he was still doing all the talking, telling stories from after ’Nam: “… laid open my leg with a saw, and I’m thinking, no way I’m going to the emergency room. So I wander over to my neighbor, this lady doc, and show her—”
“S-someone … someone m-made them.”
Story forgotten, Weller pulled from his slouch. Now we’re cooking. He’d settled Tom onto his cot, and Weller now saw that the boy’s eyes were glazed, a little unfocused. Setting his own mug on the floor, Weller slid a finger to one of Tom’s wrists, felt that slow, steady pulse. Tom was a tough nut, but not even he could fight two Xanax, their aluminum bite covered with strong coffee and sugar. Better living through chemistry. A grim thought but entirely appropriate.
“Made them.” When there was no response, Weller gave the boy a little shake. “Tom?”
“Uhm.” Rousing himself, Tom swallowed. “Well. More like …” Tom had squared his mug on his chest, but when he tried to drink, the mug nearly slipped from his slack fingers.
“Here, let me take that.” Weller gently extricated the mug and set it down beside his. “Tell me what you saw.”
“They’re different.”
They. “More than one?”
“Uh-huh.” Tom gave a lethargic nod. “Boy, in the … the trees.”
“A boy. Waiting?”
“No.” Tom’s head rolled left then right. “Watching.” He licked his lips. “He should’ve come … come after me. I was beat up. Hurt. Had the Bravo by then, probably could’ve taken him down, but if there’d been more … don’t know if I would’ve made it. Only the kid … didn’t. He was … learning? No, s’not right. Studying. Maybe even … connected somehow.”
“Connected?” That got his attention. Jesus Christ, don’t tell me he actually figured out how. “How do you know that, Tom? What do you mean, connected? To the girl?”
“Yeah. Jusss … a feeling. I think there were others, too.”
“More Chuckies? Back in the trees?”
Tom nodded again. His skin was paler than his bandages. “But I thought … I also saw men.”
Weller felt the spit wick off his tongue. “What?”
“Men. Old. At least two, maybe three. They were—”
“Watching,” Weller finished for him. His stomach went icy. “Maybe evaluating?”
“Or working together. I think so.” Withdrawing his right arm from beneath a thick blanket, Tom held it, unsteadily, in front of his face before turning it to show Weller the crisscross of cuts and scrapes. “It makes no sense. That girl could’ve come for me earlier. I was …” His eyes rolled, drifted away, then gradually tacked to true. His words got mushier. “I wassen … wasn’t paying attention. Sh-she only showed herself after …”
“After you cut your hands. When the wind changed and she got your scent.” Which meant something Tom was not saying: that the girl, the boy, those other Chuckies and men probably came from somewhere relatively close—and goddamn it.
“Her … her eyes. J-jacked u-up.” Tom rubbed a slow hand over his mouth. “D-drugged.”
Even though he’d steeled himself
for this, the word knocked him back. “Drugged. You think she was fed something?”
Tom moved his head in a slow, deliberate nod. “When you’re outside the w-wire … d-don’t sleep. Can’t.”
“Because there are pills.” He knew exactly where this was going now. The standard Vietnam myth was that every American soldier was some kind of crazed junkie. Total bull. Oh, he’d known his share of potheads, dopers, boys into junk or fat A-bombs, which were blunts mixed with heroin. But it wasn’t as if the military didn’t help things along. Weller’s dad, a pilot, served during World War II, when the Army Air Force was only too tickled to dole out their little go-pills: good old-fashioned speed, which Weller used plenty of in his day, too. Ate it like candy sometimes. No other way to stay awake and alert. It could also screw you, big-time, the crash afterward so bad you thought you’d never dig yourself out of that hole.
There had been other pills, too, ones that did a whole lot more: not only kept you up but turned off sleep altogether. Weller knew plenty of guys who’d volunteered as guinea pigs, because, hell, he’d worked on them. For those soldiers, anything was better than playing the odds, when the life expectancy of a machine gunner in a hot LZ was about eight seconds.
“Or you find pills. I never … too scared they’d mess me up the way the Army—” Tom ground to a halt.
There we go. That’s what this is about. “What about the Army, Tom? What did they do?” When Tom was silent, Weller pressed: “In ’Nam, they got volunteers. Ran experiments. Not just the LSD or sarin or BZ. I’m talking drugs to make you crazy-good at killing—”
“I think they might have tried that,” Tom whispered. It came fast, as if he knew he was sinking and needed to get this out. “Because you got to stay alert. Can’t let yourself sleep. You live on speed and fear, or just plain fear.”
“Or you’re dead.”
“Or dreaming,” Tom said. “Just as bad. The dreams … they take over, like the flashbacks, until it’s like you’re in this bottle, no way out, and dreams and what’s real … they all mix together. So the shrinks … they have lots of pills.” He let out a cawing laugh, but it was wheezy and weak. “Call it ‘damage control.’ Keep the guys worst off close to the front lines, let them rest and get some decent chow, but also feed them all kinds of pills. So you take what the Army shrinks dole out, and other stuff, too.”
“Black market?”
“Some. Yeah. But if you take too much, or the wrong type …”
“You go crazy.”
“Worse.” The smudges under Tom’s haunted eyes were livid as bruises. “You can’t be stopped. You keep going in this … this frenzy. And that girl … her eyes. Blood eyes …”
“What?” Weller said sharply. “You mean, bloodshot, right? Like a bad hangover.”
“No.” Tom’s head wobbled, and his voice was dwindling like water spiraling down a drain. “No no no … no whites. Just red and black.”
Oh, you crazy bastard, you really did it this time around. “I’ve seen that,” Weller said. “In ’Nam, we called them berserkers.”
“Yeah?” Tom’s lips thinned in a faint grimace. His eyes drifted shut. “We didn’t.”
“No?” Weller waited, noting how Tom’s breathing had settled. “Tom?”
Tom didn’t reply. The deep lines of weariness and grief were still there, but his muscles had relaxed into sleep. That was all right. Weller now knew more than enough and understood that they all might be in real trouble. If the Chuckies could be manipulated, if that was possible, he knew precisely who was insane enough, smart enough, to do it. The world had gone to hell in a handbasket almost five months ago. Plenty of time, especially if you were well supplied, a planner and an experimenter, someone with a prepared mind. Lord knew, he’d nurtured his hunger for revenge long enough.
So what in hell am I going to do now? Weller skimmed a hand over his forehead and was not at all surprised that the palm came away oiled with sour sweat. This whole ugly business was out of control. It had changed to something he didn’t recognize. He should have gotten clear as soon as the mine went. Just picked up and left. For God’s sake, hadn’t he already avenged Mandy? Peter was dead, and Rule couldn’t be far behind, what with their precious little Chuckies well on their way home by now. Shouldn’t that be enough for him? Because there was revenge, and then there was … End Times. Revelations. And I don’t even believe in that crap.
Should he fight this? Try to do something? Did he even have to? Sure, he could take a chance, soldier to soldier, and tell Tom what he knew. But Mellie was right. Tom was on the brink, had been for a while, and there was no way to predict what the boy’s reaction might be. Getting himself killed trying to come clean wouldn’t help anyone, and he wasn’t even sure, exactly, of the bigger picture here or what was going on. All he had were bits and pieces, suppositions and suspicions. So, would it be better to get out now, while he still had the chance? Build himself a new life someplace where he wasn’t known, with what time he had left?
But there are these kids, just starting out in life. There’s Tom, carrying grief he shouldn’t have had to bear. We got them into this. No doubt Mellie saw the kids as expendable, too. But Weller just didn’t know what he should do, what was safest and which the lesser evil …
Tom sucked in a sudden breath as if he’d just found something in the dark of his mind and dragged it up to the light. When Weller looked back, Tom’s eyes were open again but so clear that it was like looking into the clean, deep, chilling blue of Superior.
“What?” Weller asked.
“Zombies,” Tom said, very clearly. “We called them zombies.”
PART THREE:
BREAKING POINT
39
Ten days after the avalanche, in the first week of March, Alex staggered from the wreckage of a tumbledown cabin just off a nondescript fire road somewhere west of the mine and southwest of Rule. At least, she thought it was west-southwest. After days on the trail, she had a lot on her mind. Like finding food before she became it.
There was new blood in her mouth and a huge knot on the back of her head. She didn’t need a mirror to see the swelling under her left cheek where Acne had clobbered her not so long ago. God, the kid’s fist had felt like the business end of a pile driver.
She was headed toward the shed—and that weird mound she’d seen earlier—but halfway there, she either fell or tripped, she wasn’t sure. Blundering through snow, her boots probably tangled. When she hit, she let herself sink, really dig in so the cold could start its work of burning her skin, scorching its way through her brain. Maybe reduce the monster to a cinder.
God, please. Please, help me. She had to fight. Can’t break. Can’t give in. Got to stay me, no matter what Wolf wants or thinks.
She began to swim, dragging herself on hands and knees, carving a snail’s path through snow, heading for a dilapidated shed next to a curtain of corroded chicken wire, sucking air through a windpipe that felt as if it had been slashed by razor wire. Another few seconds with his hands around her neck and Acne would’ve crushed her throat.
On her knees now before that mound. Patchy with snow, the hill was about three feet high and reared on the shed’s south side, where there was the most light and warmth. She stared at the mound a good ten seconds, maybe as long as thirty. A loamy aroma steamed from the rich, dark earth. The smell was a little like flat beer.
Then her eyes snagged on something small and black scuttling over a white patch.
Don’t think, Alex. She eyed another tiny black scuttle. Fight, you’ve got to fight. Just do it.
Because things were bad. Really, really bad.
Ten days ago:
Her memories of what happened after the avalanche were vague, a jumpy, chaotic collage about as comprehensible as a badly edited YouTube video. What came to her first was a rhythmic swaying like the pitch of a small boat in a high swell. Her chest was very hot, the tortured lining of her lungs on fire, even as her body shuddered with cold. Mostly, everything
was a swirly blur as she swayed back and forth and back and forth—and then she went away again, sinking into the dark waters of unconsciousness. She probably did that a couple times, like a periscope coming up for a peek.
Finally, fading back, she was first aware of a hand cupping the back of her head. She was falling, too, and she landed on … a bed? A boat? Her head was swimmy but also ballooning, expanding, the monster swelling and stretching as if it had sprouted arms and hands and fingers and was searching for something—someone—to grab. She was very relaxed, almost peaceful, which was strange if you considered the cold and the steady pressure on her chest, like the heel of a sturdy boot.
Then something skimmed her right cheek. The back of a hand—and were those fingers? Her head lolled toward a coil of scent that was black mist and something sweet, crisp … Chris? Or wait, no—the aroma was deep and rich and smoky. Tom. It felt like a thought and then a sigh because she tasted his name in a dreamy whisper. “Tom. Tom?”
In the next moment, she was falling even further, sinking away from herself but pulling him down with her, tasting him, warm, so warm, Tom’s urgent mouth on hers, the sigh of his breath over her tongue, the desire a hot rose that unfurled in her chest. A strange liquid heat raced up her thighs, and she felt her back arching, her heart beginning to thump harder and harder, and then his weight on her body, her arms twining around his neck, his hands slipping into her hair, over her face, and she moaned into his mouth—yes yes yes yes—as Tom’s fingers trailed over the sensitive skin of her throat, the ridge of her collarbone, before slipping just a little further—
