Sparrow Rock

by Nate Kenyon

  Sparrow Rock

  Nate Kenyon

  LEISURE BOOKS NEW YORK CITY

  The Predators

  His face was missing. That was my first reaction. I could see white bone and gristle where his nose and eyes should be. It looked like something had been chewing at him and had gotten a good bellyful before losing interest and moving on to something else.

  As we all stared in silence and shock at the body, something moved at the edges of my vision, but when I glanced at the spot, whatever it was had disappeared.

  If I’d been thinking more clearly, maybe I would have wondered what exactly had made those scratching noises, and what the hell had moved the handle on that door. I might have said something if Sue hadn’t let out a shriek right then and run into the tunnel. I grabbed at her arm and missed, but Dan was quicker than me and before I could move he was after her. She got maybe five steps before he had her around the waist and held her back.

  This was a good thing, because even before I heard Sue screaming his name, I knew that the dead man was her grandfather, had recognized him even without his face. Whatever had happened to him, it was clear he was beyond saving. But Sue wasn’t going to hear that now.

  I stepped out into the hallway too, Tessa right behind me, and as impossible as it sounds, I thought I saw Sue’s grandfather’s leg twitch.

  That was when they attacked…

  To Karin “Grease Pot” Claus, contest winner and overall good sport.

  “We are close to dead. There are faces and bodies like gorged maggots on the dance floor, on the highway, in the city, in the stadium; they are a host of chemical machines who swallow the product of chemical factories, aspirin, preservatives, stimulant, relaxant, and breathe out their chemical wastes into a polluted air. The sense of a long last night over civilization is back again.”

  —Norman Mailer, Cannibals and Christians, 1966

  PROLOGUE

  We were all just sitting around the table playing cards, the pack of dog-eared ones that Big Sue found just before It Happened, when all of a sudden Jimmie stood up and started hollering at the top of his lungs, pulling at that scraggly hair of his and scratching at his hives, screaming stuff that didn’t make any sense. He wasn’t into the game, and we should have known he was about to finally lose his marbles, with the wound in his leg getting worse and the goddamned fever and the way he’d been handling the cards, his fingers all shaky, his thumb bending over the corners and straightening them out again one after another. After all, we’d been seeing the signs for days, and I of all people, with what happened to my father, should have known. But for some reason we didn’t see it now until it was too late.

  We were all on edge—who wouldn’t be after so long in the ground—and maybe that’s why Dan did what he did. He sat there for a moment and stared at Jimmie, and it would have been okay if he’d held on to his temper. But when Jimmie started raving about the rats again, Dan couldn’t seem to take it anymore. He just stood up and belted him right in the mouth.

  Jimmie staggered on his good leg but didn’t go down, which meant Dan pulled the punch a little. When the blood started flowing and Jimmie wiped a hand across his lips, smearing it across that scraggly goatee of his that he always thought made him look old enough to drink, Dan said, real quietlike, “We know all about the fucking rats. You don’t have to go bringing them up again.”

  Maybe he thought he had to say something. Me, I just sat there next to Sue and Tessa and tried not to giggle. I mean, it gets funny after a while; sometimes, no matter how serious the situation seems to be, you just have to laugh. You know the feeling? Like when you’re a kid sitting in geometry class and someone lets out a fart and you’re trying to keep calm about it but all of a sudden you can’t control yourself.

  Anyway, Jimmie was real quiet, but I could see something in his eyes, dark and stormy the way they got when he was stretched out. Something snapped back in there, all right. It had happened before. We lost Jay just four days ago, and Sue almost clawed her way out after him before we stopped her. Took Dan and me both to hold her down—she’s stronger than she looks. She loved Jay, all right. Even now, she won’t talk about him, not a single word.

  So I knew what I was looking at, with Jimmie. Still, I didn’t do anything to stop him.

  Jimmie muttered something about his hair falling out. He scratched at his scalp and some more came off in his hand. The stuff spread around topside wasn’t exactly perfume, and as far as anyone could tell about a molecule of it could fuck you royally. “I didn’t notice,” Sue said, which was stupid, because Jimmie was practically bald besides the long patches above his ears.

  That was when I couldn’t hold it in any longer. I started laughing, really bawling, and everyone looked at me like I was crazy. It’s a sickness I have, laughing at inappropriate moments. Jimmie backed away from the table, shaking his head like a dog with a bad case of ear mites, which only made me laugh harder. I mean, tears were streaming down my face.

  “Shut the fuck up,” Sue said, grabbing my leg under the table and squeezing hard. “Can’t you see what you’re doing to him?”

  Jimmie was pressing his skinny shoulders against the wall now, acting like he wanted to go right through it. The blood dripped down over his lip and off the point of his goatee. He kept slipping his tongue out and licking at it, and even that was sort of funny. He looked like one of those little dogs society girls carry around in their purses. I couldn’t stop laughing.

  “Hey, Jimmie,” Dan said. “I didn’t mean to hit you, man. It’s just, you know, I get tired of hearing…”

  “Itches,” Jimmie said, or so I thought. With the blood in his mouth, it could have been something else. He was feverish for sure, I could see the sweat on his skin, the way his flesh was stretched taut. That bite had done something to him and it was just getting worse; the hives had blossomed all over him, bulging with some kind of sickness.

  I didn’t want to think about that, what had happened the last time I saw that bulging under his skin. The things that had come out of him.

  Jimmie glanced across the little room at the steps heading to the surface. I knew what he was thinking. Maybe Jay made it. Maybe it’s not as bad as we think up there. Hell, he wouldn’t be the first to wonder about that—I’m sure we all had at one time or another. Once when the rest were asleep, Dan and I had talked about opening up the hatch to take a look, but that was after we’d downed a six-pack of Circle beer and smoked our last secret joint. We never actually did anything about it or anything.

  I guess Dan saw the look on Jimmie’s face too, because he made a sudden lunge across the table. Dan was a big guy, football type, did 200 push-ups every morning to keep in shape. But Jimmie was fast, even favoring that leg. He slithered away and quick as a flash he was up the steps, and we could hear him turning the hatch wheel. I could just see his stick legs from where I sat frozen, calves white as paint between the hives, and up high on the right where the flesh swelled and turned purple from the bite and the knife blade, his pair of dirty sneakers with drops of bright red blood on them.

  As I stared at the hives on his leg, they seemed to pulse outward once again, as if something was writhing inside trying to get out.

  Sue screamed. Dan found his footing again but he tripped over his chair trying to get back across the room, and then we all saw the light go on over the shelves and we heard the shriek of the alarm. There was a great whooshing noise as Jimmie broke the seal, and then a sound like the humming of a million bees; that’s the only way I know to describe it. Dan swore and started climbing the steps, but by now Jimmie’s feet had disappeared, and I knew he was out.

  That’s when things got a little fuzzy. I remembered getting up from my chair, and trying to move somewhere—whether I was going t
o help or just trying to hide, I don’t know—and then Sue was screaming again and Dan stumbled back with his hands to his face. The first thing I thought was he’d been bitten, that some new kind of creatures had gotten inside. I guess Sue thought so too, because she grabbed my arm and started pulling me toward the bedroom. She was moaning a little in the back of her throat, and it reminded me of when I used to hear her and Jay making love. She had a way of sucking in air and then pushing it out, and it got faster when she was going to come.

  All of a sudden the red light went off and the alarm stopped. Dan still had his hands to his face. I didn’t know how long we stood there, but it seemed like forever, the two of us just staring at Dan’s back across the room, ready to move fast if we saw that anything had latched onto him. Then I saw his shoulders moving up and down, and I realized he was crying. I’d never seen Dan cry.

  Big Sue dug her nails into my arm hard enough to draw blood.

  “Do something, Pete,” she said.

  When we’d checked the whole place over carefully and made sure the hatch was tight, I tried to tell Dan it wasn’t his fault. Of course it came out all wrong. Guys have a hard time communicating things like that; either it comes out sounding macho, or condescending. Hey, man, don’t worry about it, keep your chin up, all sorts of bullshit, neither of you looking each other in the eye like if you did you might want to hug or something.

  Dan just shrugged and stared at the floor. You could tell he didn’t want to talk about it. Tessa had this look on her face as if she were melting inside, like someone were hunting her down and she couldn’t get away. Me, I didn’t know what to think. Jimmie was gone. He’d always been sort of a whiner, but I knew I should be feeling sorry. After all, he was a good friend, my oldest friend, and it was at least partly my fault, what with my laughing fit and what had happened earlier between us in the kitchen.

  But lately everything was just numb. I was always the joker, even back when the sky was still blue and rats couldn’t open latched doors and everything was all right with the world.

  Now it seemed like the jokes were gone and I was still laughing, like some kind of crazy-ass clown making pie faces at cancer victims.

  I just didn’t know when to stop.

  Maybe I should go back to the beginning. Back when the world was sane. If that were ever really the case; because if you think about it, sanity never had anything to do with a thing like this, and looking back it’s clear to me that we were teetering on the edge of oblivion for a long, long time.

  Maybe it just took the right group of crazies to actually push the button.

  Hell, maybe I was one of them.

  Table of Contents

  Cover Page

  Title Page

  The Predators

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  PROLOGUE

  PART ONE: SPARROW ROCK

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  PART TWO: FALLOUT

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  PART THREE: THE INFECTED

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  PART FOUR: HIVE MIND

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  CHAPTER FORTY

  EPILOGUE

  Acknowledgments

  High Praise for Nate Kenyon’s Chilling Prose

  Other Leisure books by Nate Kenyon

  Copyright

  PART ONE:

  SPARROW ROCK

  “It’s the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine.”

  —R.E.M.

  CHAPTER ONE

  It’s ironic when I think of how it all went down. I mean, how we ended up in the hole. We weren’t exactly channeling Nostradamus. We were nothing but a bunch of horny teenagers, looking for a place to smoke and drink and bitch about our shitty lives. We got together to hang out at least once a week in those days, and we didn’t know it then, but we were about to grow up in a hurry.

  News flash: I’d had a fight with my mother. Back then it always seemed like she was looking for ways to get on me about something I should be doing. I didn’t study enough, didn’t focus enough, didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life. I didn’t see how much she was hurting, how she loved me and sacrificed for me or what a fuckup I must have seemed to everyone else. I was almost eighteen and high school was just about over and all I wanted to do was hang out with my friends and have a little fun before life moved in for the kill.

  Lord knows, my life hadn’t been all fun and games. The thing was, my mom was sick. She’d had progressive multiple sclerosis since she was in her early twenties, diagnosed before she had me. It’s a slow disease, but living with my alcoholic father didn’t help matters much, and by the time the bombs dropped, she was in a wheelchair and heavy drugs were all that kept the pain away.

  We were close, as close as a teenage boy could possibly be with his mother without turning into Norman Bates or something. During the hard times with my father she was the only thing that kept me sane, and deep down I knew it. But lately things had changed. Maybe I felt burdened by having to do more at home, maybe I just didn’t want to listen, or maybe I was just an asshole. But it seemed like the fighting was getting worse and neither one of us knew how to stop it anymore.

  That particular night my mother wanted me to write a letter to a professor she knew at Bates College, letting him know how much I wanted to be a “Bates man.” I wanted to catch up with Jimmie and debate the quality of the reefer we’d pinched from Jay’s older sister. The reefer won.

  “It’s your future,” she’d said, pleading with me as we argued in the kitchen. As if I didn’t know that. “We’ve worked so hard—”

  “We?” I said. “I didn’t see you sitting in on any of my classes. Doing the homework, taking exams.” The thing was, I knew what she’d been through to get me to this point, and I knew exactly what she meant. But it still pissed me off, and even though I was aware that I was wrong in taking the conversation down this particular path, I couldn’t stop myself.

  She sighed. “You’ve been through a heck of a lot more than most kids,” she said, rolling her chair closer and reaching out to touch my arm. “I understand that. But you have to rise above it, Petey, and stop being so self-destructive. You have to—”

  “Don’t call me that!” I said, recoiling away from her. “It drives me nuts.” It was her pet name for me, but it made me feel like a child. I wanted to be my own man, and I felt her holding me back, the weight of responsibility like a chain around my neck.

  “You never told me that before—”

  “Yeah, well, things change. I need space to breathe, Mom. Just leave me the hell alone.”

  My mother rolled away from me and crossed her arms over her chest. “I’m not going to be around forever,” she said quietly. A blush had crept into her cheeks, and I knew I’d hurt her badly. “I want to make sure you’re okay.”

  “I can handle it.”

>   She nodded. “I know you can. I know it. But you were always my little baby. You’re fragile too, Pete. Sometimes I need to save you from yourself. I know that too.”

  After dinner she rolled herself into her room and took the wine bottle with her, and I knew I wouldn’t see her again that night (after my father died, she’d taken to doing this quite a bit). So I snuck out the window, figuring I’d be back in again in an hour or two. Bye-bye, Mom. If the end of the world comes, don’t wait up for me.

  Jimmie was down the block in his red and gray Bondo ‘98 Mustang, tapping his fingers against the wheel to some old song by The Who as Tessa and I arrived. We drove to McDonald’s for a shake and fries. Big Sue and Jay were already there, and we all spent the next half an hour sitting around a table and making fun of Dan, who was working the counter.

  “Wear the little hat,” I told him. “It makes you look really buff.”

  He flipped me the bird and stomped into the back. “How about the hairnet, then, big boy?” I called after him.

  Dan and I met playing baseball for the eighth-grade team. I thought of myself as a dabbler in sports, a utility guy coordinated enough to make the team, not good enough to start, more nerd than jock. But I tried hard enough and wanted to fit in. Dan, on the other hand, was a multisport athlete, the kind where hitting a ball with a stick or throwing a pass seemed effortless. I used to watch him toss from the outfield to home plate as if the ball were on a string, whacking into the catcher’s mitt with a sound like a boxer hitting the heavy bag. I admired the hell out of him for it, although I’d never admit it to his face. He wasn’t much of a student, but he never pretended to be, and later on when we all entered high school I introduced him to Jimmie and Sue and Jay, and we all just sort of fell in together. Maybe I was the bridge between them, but Dan quickly took on a leadership role, and that was fine with the rest of us, even if I did give him a hard time every once in a while.