by Greg Bear
“Why the lock?” Stella asked.
“People drive around, sometimes they have guns… take potshots. Just not safe,” Trinket said. “It’s not safe for your kind. Since my wife’s death, I’ve made it one of my jobs, my duty, to protect those I come across on the road. Youngsters like you.”
“Where’s your daughter?” Stella asked.
“She’s in Idaho.”
“I don’t believe you,” Stella said.
“Oh, it’s true. They took her away last year. I’ve never been to visit her.”
“They let parents visit sometimes.”
“I just can’t bear the thought of going.” His expression had changed, and his smell, too.
“You’re lying,” Stella said. She could feel her glands working, itching. Stella could not smell it herself, could not in fact smell anything her nose was so dry, but she knew the room was thick with her persuasion scent.
Trinket seemed to deflate, arms dropping, hands relaxing. He pointed to the wire mesh door. He was thinking, or waiting. Stella moved away. The key dangled from the rope in his hand. “Your people,” he said, and scratched his nose.
“Let us go,” Stella said. It was more than a suggestion.
Trinket shook his head slowly, then lifted his eyes. She thought she might be having an effect on him, despite his nose plugs and the mints.
“Let us all go,” Stella said.
The old woman came in so quietly Stella did not hear her. She was surprisingly strong. She grabbed Stella around the ribs, pinning her arms and making her squeak like a mouse, and shoved her through the door. Her book fell to the floor. Trinket swung up and caught the key on its string, then slammed and locked the gate before Stella could turn around.
“They’re lonely in there,” Trinket’s mother told Stella. She wore a clothespin on her nose and her eyes were watering. “Let my son do his work. Fred, maybe now she’d like some lunch.”
Trinket took out a handkerchief and blew his nose, expelling the plugs. He looked at them in disgust, then pushed a button mounted on the wall. A lock clicked and buzzed and another wire door behind her popped open. Stella faced them through the mesh of the first door. She could not make a sound at first, she was so startled and so angry.
Trinket rubbed his eyes and shook his head. He gave a little kick and spun her book into the far corner. “Damn,” he said. “She’s good. She almost had me. Hellish little skunk.”
She stood shivering in the little cubicle. Trinket turned out the fluorescent lights. That left only the reflected glow from the rooms behind her.
A hand touched her elbow.
Stella screamed.
“What?”
She backed up against the mesh and stared at a boy. He was ten or eleven, taller than her by a couple of inches, and, if anything, skinnier. He had scratches on his face and his hair was unkempt and tufty.
“I didn’t mean to scare you,” the boy said. His cheeks flushed in little spots of pink and brown. His gold-flecked eyes followed her as she sidled to the left, into the corner, and held up her fists.
The boy’s nose wrinkled. “Wow,” he said. “You’re really shook.”
“What’s your name?” she asked, her voice high.
“What sort of name?” he asked. He leaned over, twisted his head, inhaled the air in front of her, and made a sour face.
“They scared me,” she explained, embarrassed.
“Yeah, I can tell.”
“Who are you?” she asked.
“Look,” he said, leaning forward, and his cheeks freckled again.
“So?”
He looked disappointed. “Some can do it.”
“What do your parents call you?”
“I don’t know. Kids call me Kevin. We live out in the woods. Mixed group. Not anymore. Trinket got me. I was stupid.”
Stella straightened and lowered her fists. “How many are in here?”
“Four, including me. Now, five.”
She heard the coughing again. “Somebody sick?”
“Yeah.”
“I’ve never been sick,” Stella said.
“Neither have I. Free Shape is sick.”
“Who?”
“I call her Free Shape. It’s not her name, probably. She’s almost as old as me.”
“Is Strong Will still here?”
“He doesn’t like that name. They call us names like that because they say we stink. Come on back. Nobody’s going anywhere soon, right? They sent me out here to see who else old Fred snared.”
Stella followed Kevin to the back of the long building. They passed four empty rooms equipped with cots and folding chairs and cheap old dressers.
At the very back, three young people sat around a small portable television. Stella hated television, never watched it. She saw that the television’s control panel had been covered with a metal plate. Two—an older boy, Will, Stella guessed, and a younger girl, no more than seven—sat on a battered gray couch. The third, a girl of nine or ten, curled up on a blanket on the floor.
The girl smelled bad. She smelled sick. She coughed into her palm and wiped it on her T-shirt without taking her eyes away from the television.
Will pushed off the couch and stood. He looked Stella over cautiously, then stuck his hands in his pockets. “This is Mabel,” he said, introducing the younger girl. “Or Maybelle. She doesn’t know. Girl on the floor doesn’t say much. I’m Will. I’m the oldest. I’m always the oldest. I may be the oldest alive.”
“Hello,” Stella said.
“New girl,” Kevin explained. “She smells really shook.”
“You do,” Mabel said and lifted her upper lip, then pinched the end of her nose.
Will looked back at Stella. “I can see your freckle name. But what’s your other name?”
“I think maybe her name is Rose or Daisy,” Kevin said.
“My parents call me Stella,” she said, her tone implying she wasn’t stuck with it; she could change the name anytime. She knelt beside the sick girl. “What’s wrong with her?”
“It isn’t a cold and it isn’t flu,” Will said. “I wouldn’t get too close. We don’t know where she comes from.”
“She needs a doctor,” Stella said.
“Tell that to the old mother when she brings your food,” Kevin suggested. “Just kidding. She won’t do anything. I think they’re going to turn us in, all at once, together.”
“That’s the way Fred makes his moochie,” Will said, rubbing his fingers together. “Bounty.”
Stella touched the sick girl’s shoulder. She looked up at Stella and closed her eyes. “Don’t look. Nothing to see,” the girl said. Her cheeks formed simple patterns, shapeless. Free Shape. Stella pushed harder on the girl’s arm. The arm went limp and she rolled onto her back. Stella shook her again and her eyes opened halfway, unfocused. “Mommy?”
“What’s your name?” Stella asked.
“Mommy?”
“What does Mommy call you?”
“Elvira,” the girl said, and coughed again.
“Ha ha,” Will said without humor. That was a cruel joke name.
“You have parents?” Kevin asked the girl, following Stella’s lead and kneeling.
Stella touched Elvira’s face. The skin was dry and hot and there was a bloody crust under her nose and also behind her ears. Stella felt beneath her jaw and then lifted her arms and felt there. “She has an infection,” Stella said. “Like mumps, maybe.”
“How do you know?”
“My mother is a doctor. Sort of.”
“Is it Shiver?” Will asked.
“I don’t think so. We don’t get that.” She looked up at Will and felt her cheeks signal a message, she did not know what: embarrassment, maybe.
“Look at me,” Will said. Stella got to her feet and faced him.
“You know how to talk this way?” he asked. His cheeks freckled and cleared. The dapple patterns came and went quickly, and synchronized somehow with the irises of his eyes, his f
acial muscles, and little sounds he made deep in his throat. Stella watched, fascinated, but had no idea what he was doing, what he was trying to convey. “I guess not. What do you smell, little deer?”
Stella felt her nose burn. She drew back.
“Practically illiterate,” Will said, but his smile was sympathetic. “It’s the Talk. Kids in the woods made it up.”
Stella realized Will wanted to be in charge, wanted people to think he was smart and capable. There was a weakness in his scent, however, that made him seem very vulnerable. He’s broken, she thought.
Elvira moaned and called for her mother. Will knelt and touched the girl’s forehead. “Her parents hid her in an attic. That’s what the kids in the woods said. Her mom and dad left for California, and she stayed behind with her grandmother. Then the grandmother died. Elvira ran away. She got caught on the street. She was raped, I think, more than once.” He cleared his throat and his cheeks were dark with angry blood. “She had the start of this cold or whatever it is, so she couldn’t fever-scent and make them stop. Fred found her two days after he found me. He took some pictures. He keeps us here until he has enough to get a good bounty.”
“One million dollars a head,” Kevin said. “Dead or alive.”
“Don’t be dramatic,” Will said. “I don’t know how much he gets, and they don’t pay if we’re dead. If we’re injured, he could even go to jail. That’s what I heard in the woods. The bounty is federal not state, so he tries to avoid the troopers.”
Stella was impressed by this show of knowledge. “It’s awful,” she said, her heart thumping. “I want to go home.”
“How did Fred catch you?” Will asked.
“I went for a walk,” Stella said.
“You ran away from home,” Will said. “Do your parents care?”
Stella thought of Kaye waking up to find her gone and wanted to cry. That made her nose hurt more, and her ears started to ache.
The wire mesh door rattled. Will pointed, and Kevin left to see what was going on. Stella glanced at Will and then followed Kevin. Mother Trinket was at the cage door. She had just finished shoving a cafeteria tray under the mesh frame. The tray held a paper plate covered with fried chicken backs and necks, a small scoop of dry potato salad, and several long spears of limp broccoli. The old woman watched them, eyes milky, chin withdrawn, strong mottled arms hanging like two birch logs.
“Yuck,” Kevin said, and picked up the tray. He gave it to Stella. “All yours,” he said.
“How’s the girl?” Mother Trinket asked.
“She’s really sick,” Kevin said.
“People coming. They’ll take care of her,” Mother Trinket said.
“What do you care?” Kevin asked.
The old woman blinked. “It’s my son,” she said, then turned and waddled through the door. She closed and locked it behind her.
The girl, Free Shape, was breathing in short, thick gasps as they carried Stella’s tray into the back room.
“She smells bad,” Mabel said. “I’m scared for her.”
“So am I,” Will said.
“Will is Papa here,” Mabel said. “Will should get help.”
Will looked miserably at Stella and fell back on the couch. Stella put the tray on a small folding table. She did not feel like eating. Both she and Kevin squatted by Elvira. Stella stroked the girl’s cheeks, making her freckles pale. They remained pale. The patches had steadied in the last few minutes, and were now even more meaningless and vague.
“Can we make her feel better?” Stella asked.
“We’re not angels,” Will said.
“My mother says we all have minds deep inside of us,” Stella said, desperate to find some answer. “Minds that talk to each other through chemicals and—”
“What the hell does she know?” Will asked sharply. “She’s human, right?”
“She’s Kaye Lang Rafelson,” Stella said, stung and defensive.
“I don’t care who she is,” Will said. “They hate us because we’re new and better.”
“Our parents don’t hate us,” Stella ventured hopefully, looking at Mabel and Kevin.
“Mine do,” Mabel said. “My father hates the government so he hid me, but he just took off one day. My mother left me in the bus station.”
Stella could see that these children had lived lives different from her own. They all smelled lonely and left out, like puppies pulled from a litter, whining and searching for something they had lost. Beneath the loneliness and other emotions of the moment lay their fundamentals: Will smelled rich and sharp like aged cheddar. Kevin smelled a little sweet. Mabel smelled like soapy bathwater, steam and flowers and clean, warm skin.
She could not detect Elvira’s fundamental. Underneath the illness she seemed to have no smell at all.
“We thought about escaping,” Kevin said. “There’s steel wire in all the walls. Fred told us he made this place strong.”
“He hates us,” Will said.
“We’re worth money,” Kevin said.
“He told me his daughter killed his wife,” Will said.
That kept them all quiet for a while, all but Free Shape, whose breath rasped.
“Teach me how to talk with my dapples,” Stella asked Will. She wanted to take their minds off the things they could not hope to do, like escape.
“What if Elvira dies?” Will asked, his forehead going pale.
“We’ll cry for her,” Mabel said.
“Right,” Kevin said. “We’ll make a little cross.”
“I’m not a Christian,” Will said.
“I am,” Mabel said. “Christ was one of us. I heard it in the woods. That’s why they killed him.”
Will shook his head sadly at this naÏveté. Stella felt ashamed at the words she had spoken to the men in the Texaco minimart. She knew she was nothing like Jesus. Deep inside, she did not feel merciful and charitable. She had never admitted that before, but watching Elvira gasping on the floor taught her what her emotions really were.
She hated Fred Trinket and his mother. She hated the federals coming for them.
“We’ll have to fight to get out,” Will said. “Fred is careful. He doesn’t come inside the cage. He won’t even call a doctor. He just calls for the vans. The vans come from Maryland and Richmond. Everyone wears suits and carries cattle prods and tranquilizer guns.”
Stella shivered. She had called her parents; her parents were coming. They might be captured, too.
“Sometimes when the vans come, the children die, maybe by accident, but they’re still dead,” Will continued. “They burn the bodies. That’s what we heard in the woods.” He added, “I don’t feel like teaching you how to freckle.”
“Then tell me about the woods,” Stella said.
“The woods are free,” Will said. “I wish the whole world was woods.”
19
The rain came back as drizzle. Kaye pulled off and parked just north of the private asphalt road that led to the big, white-pillared brick house and outbuildings. The sky was dark enough that the occupants of the house had turned on the interior lights. The black steel mailbox, mounted on a chest-high brick base, showed five gold reflective numbers.
“This is it,” Mitch said. He peered through the wet windshield and rolled down his window. A red pickup and camper had been parked in front. There were no other vehicles.
“Maybe we’re too late,” Kaye said, fighting back tears.
“It’s only been ten or fifteen minutes.”
“It took us twenty minutes. The sheriff might have come and gone.”
Mitch quietly opened the door. “If I can grab her, I’ll come right back.”
“No,” Kaye said. “I won’t be left alone. I don’t think I can stand it.” Her fingers gripped the steering wheel like cords of rope.
“Stay here, please,” Mitch said. “I’ll be okay. I can carry her. You can’t.”
“You’d be surprised,” Kaye said. Then, “Why would you have to carry her?”
> “For speed,” Mitch said. “For speed, that’s all.”
He opened the glove box and took out a cloth-wrapped bundle, pulled open the cloth, smelling of lubricant, and removed a pistol. He tucked the gun into his suit coat pocket. They had three handguns, all of them unregistered and illegal. Getting charged with gun possession was the last thing Mitch and Kaye lost sleep over. Nevertheless, they both looked on the guns with loathing, knowing that weapons give a false sense of security.
Mitch had cleaned and oiled all three last week.
He took a deep breath and stepped out, walking to the rear of the truck. Kaye released the brake and put the truck into neutral. Mitch pushed, grunting softly in the drizzle. Kaye stepped down and helped, steering with one hand, and together they rolled the truck up the asphalt road, stopping about halfway to the house. Kaye spun the wheel and turned the truck until it blocked the way. Hedges and brick walls lined the drive, and no vehicle would be able to get around the truck going in or out. She sat in the cab. Mitch took her face in his hands and kissed her cheek and she squeezed his arms. Then he walked toward the house, shoving his hands into the pockets of his slacks. He never looked comfortable in a suit. His shoulders and his hands were too big, his neck too long. He did not have the face for a suit.
Kaye watched with heart pounding, her mind a thicket.
The pillars and porch stood dark, the door closed. Mitch walked up the steps as softly as his hard-soled shoes allowed and peered through the tall, narrow window on the right.
Kaye watched him turn without knocking and descend the steps. He walked around the side of the house, out of sight. She started to sob and jammed her knuckles against her teeth and lips. They had been standing on tiptoes for eleven years. It was cruel, and whenever she felt she was used to the extremes of their life together, as she had this morning, almost, so close to feeling normal and productive and contented, working on her scientific paper, napping in front of her computer, she would come up short with some spontaneous vision of how they could lose it all. They had been lucky, she knew.
But rarely did her worst visions meet the level of this nightmare.
Mitch walked along the neatly trimmed grass margin, crouching below the windows along the side of the house. He heard a rasping, flacketing buzz, like a big insect, and glanced up with a scowl into the stormy gloom. Saw nothing.
