Clay's Ark

by Octavia E. Butler

  He remembered the thing running alongside his car on all fours. Running like an animal, a cat. Jacob. It was possible if this insanity spread, it was possible that he could have grandchildren who looked like Jacob. Things. Christ!

  The highway was ahead, down a slope. It looked empty and safe. Blake felt if he could reach it, he would have a chance.

  He accelerated, swung onto the highway, headed north again.

  “We’ve made it!” Rane shouted.

  Keira looked around. “Someone’s back there. I can see them.”

  “Sewage. I don’t see any—”

  Lights again. Lights behind them, then abruptly, lights in front.

  Blake was not aware of making the choice not to slow down. Apparently that choice had been made before, once and for all. He thought he saw a human shape leap from one of the cars, but the car kept coming. At the last instant, Blake tried to swerve up the slope and around. He did not quite make it. The front left corner of the Wagoneer hit the other car and Blake’s head hit the steering wheel.

  There was nothing else.

  Past 21

  ZERIAM MADE IT.

  He almost failed, almost survived. He had done a thorough job on his neck, but it was half-healed when Meda found him dead. The front of his throat was gaping, but the sides were merely bloody and scarred.

  Meda brought Eli to him. When Eli was able to think past shock, past sadness, past the terrible knowledge that Zeriam would eventually have to be replaced, he examined the man’s neck.

  “I wouldn’t have made it,” he said.

  “Made what?” Meda asked.

  “I wouldn’t have died—even if I had managed to cut my throat. I’d heal all the way.”

  “From a cut throat without a doctor? I don’t believe you.”

  “I was in a couple of dominance fights aboard ship.” He paused, remembering, shuddered inwardly. “The first time, I was stabbed through the heart twice. I healed. The second time, I was beaten literally to a pulp with a chunk of metal. I healed. Barely a scar. It takes a lot to kill us.”

  She helped him clean up the blood. It was she who found the letters. They were sealed in envelopes and marked “To Lorene” and “To my son.”

  Meda stared at them for several seconds, then looked toward the bedrooms. “I’m going to wake Lorene,” she said.

  He caught her shoulder. “I’ll do it.”

  She looked down and away from Zeriam. He felt her tremble and knew she was crying. She never liked him to see her when she cried. She thought it made her look ugly and weak. He thought it made her look humanly vulnerable. She reminded him that they were still humanly vulnerable in some ways.

  For once, she let him hold her, comfort her. He took her out of the kitchen, back to their room and stayed with her for a few minutes.

  “Go,” she said finally. “Talk to Lorene. God, how is she going to stand this a second time?”

  He did not know, did not really want to find out, but he got up to go.

  “Eli?”

  He looked back at her, almost went back to her; she looked so uncharacteristically childlike, so frightened. He did not understand why she was afraid.

  “No, go,” she said. “But … take care of yourself. I mean … no matter how strong you think this thing has made you, no matter what’s happened to you … before, don’t do anything careless or dumb. Don’t …”

  Don’t die, she meant. She rubbed her stomach, looked at him. Don’t die.

  Present 22

  BLAKE REGAINED CONSCIOUSNESS IN darkness.

  He lay still, realizing that he was no longer in his car. He was lying on something flat and hard—a carpeted floor, he thought after a moment. His head ached—seemed to pulsate with pain. And he was cold.

  His discomfort kept him from realizing immediately that his hands and feet were bound. Even when he tried to rub his head and discovered he had to move both arms, he did not understand why at once. He thought there was something more wrong with his body. When, finally, he understood, he struggled, tried to free himself, tried to stand up. He managed only to writhe around and sit up.

  “Is anyone here?” he said.

  There was no answer.

  He squinted, trying to penetrate the darkness, fearing that he might be blind. He remembered hitting his head as he sheared into the oncoming car. He probably had a concussion. And what else?

  Finally, dizzily, he managed to turn around, see dim light outlining draperies. He could still see, then.

  “Thank God,” he muttered.

  “Dad?”

  He started. “Rane?” he said. “Is that you?”

  “It’s me.” She sounded half awake. “Are you okay?”

  “Fine,” he lied. “Where the hell are we?”

  “A ranch house. Another ranch house.”

  “Another … ?”

  “It wasn’t Eli’s people, Dad. I mean, they were chasing us, too, but they didn’t catch us. A car gang caught us.”

  That took a moment to sink in. “Oh God.”

  “They think they can get a ransom for us. I made them look at your identification. Meanwhile, they’ve been exposed to the disease.”

  “If there was no break in their skins—”

  “There was. I scratched one myself. He tore my shirt open and I tore some skin off his arm.”

  That shook Blake from one kind of misery to another. “Are you all right?”

  “Yeah. A few bruises, that’s all. Before anyone could rape me, they decided I might be worth more … intact.”

  “And Keira?”

  “They let her alone too. She’s right here. She was awake for a while—said she felt awful. Said she’d left all her medicine at Eli’s.”

  “Is she tied?”

  “We both are.”

  He tried to see them, thought he could see Rane sitting up.

  “Shall I wake Keira?”

  “Let her sleep. That’s the only medicine she has left now. How long was I unconscious?”

  “Since last night. But you weren’t always unconscious. Every now and then you’d mumble and move around. And you threw up. They made me clean it with my hands still tied.”

  Concussion. And he had lost a day. He had also lost his freedom again. Worst of all, he had spread the disease. He had failed at all he had attempted. All …

  “There’s going to be an epidemic,” Rane whispered.

  Blake inched over toward her, groped for her.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Give me your hands.”

  “Dad, we’re not tied with ropes. That’s probably why I can still feel my hands and feet. We’re wearing cuffs—choke-cuffs.”

  Blake lay down again heavily. “Shit,” he muttered. Everything the car family did to hold them sealed its doom and increased the likelihood of an epidemic. He tested the cuffs, doing what he could first to slip them, then to pull their bands apart. They were plastic, but felt surprisingly soft and comfortable as long as he did not try to get rid of them. Once he began to struggle, however, they tightened until he thought they would cut off his hands.

  Pain stopped him. And the moment he relaxed, the cuffs eased their grip. People could be left hobbled as he was indefinitely. Choke-cuffs were called humane restraints. Blake had heard that in prisons—inevitably overcrowded—order was sometimes maintained by the threat of hobbling with such humane restraints. Hobbled prisoners were not isolated. They were left in with the general prison population—fair game. They frequently did not survive.

  Lying on his back, helpless, eaten alive with frustration and fear, Blake knew how they must have felt.

  Would it be possible to talk to the car family? Would there be even one member intelligent enough to understand the danger? And if there were one, what evidence could Blake show him? The bag was gone. Neither he nor the girls had symptoms yet. If Meda was right, there would be symptoms in a few days, but how far could a car family spread the disease in a few days?

  “Is this their b
ase?” he asked Rane. A true car family had no base, he knew, except their vehicles.

  “This place isn’t theirs,” Rane said. “They took it. They killed the men and raped the women. I think they’re still keeping some of the women alive somewhere else in the house.”

  Blake shook his head. “God, this is a sewer. There’s only one source of help that I can think of—and I don’t want to think of it.”

  “What? Who?”

  “Eli.”

  “Dad … Oh no. His kind … they aren’t people anymore.”

  “Neither are these, honey.”

  “But, please, I gave these all the information they needed to convince Grandmother and Granddad Maslin that we’re prisoners. They’ll ransom us.”

  “What makes you think people as degenerate as these will let us go after they get what they want?”

  “But they said … I mean, they haven’t hurt us.” She groped for reassurance. “Let’s face it. Grandmother and Granddad would ransom us if we were alive at all—no matter what had been done to us, but the car people haven’t done anything.”

  Blake sat up, tried to see her in the darkness. “Rane, don’t say that again. Not to anyone.” If only she thought before she opened her mouth. If only she hadn’t opened her mouth at all. If only no other listener had heard!

  Unexpectedly, Keira spoke into the silence. “Dad? Are you there?”

  Blake shifted from anger at Rane to concern for Keira. “We’re both here. How do you feel?”

  “Okay. No, lousy, really, but it doesn’t matter. We were worried about you. You took so long to regain consciousness. But now that you’re awake, and it’s night … what would you think about one of us hopping over to one of those windows and signaling Eli’s people?”

  Silence.

  “Rane wouldn’t let me do it,” Keira added.

  Blake touched Rane. “So you had thought of it.”

  “Not me. I would never have thought of that. Keira did. Dad, please. Eli’s people … I couldn’t stand to go back to them. I’d rather stay here.”

  “Why?” Blake asked. He thought he knew the answer, and he did not really want to hear her say it, but it needed to be said. She surprised him.

  “I can’t stand them,” she said. “They’re not human. Their children don’t even look human. …Yet they’re seductive. They could have pulled me in. That guy, Kaneshiro …”

  “Did he hurt you?”

  “You mean did he rape me? No! There’d be nothing seductive in that. Nobody raped me. But in a little while, a few days, he wouldn’t have had to. I’m afraid of those people. I’m scared shitless of them.”

  “That’s the way I feel about these car people!” Keira said. “Rane … so what if you were sort of … seduced by Eli’s people. I was, too. All it meant to me was that they weren’t really bad people—not the way rat packs are bad. They’re different and dangerous, but I’d rather be with them than here.”

  Blake began to inch across the room, making as little noise as possible. Hopping would have been too noisy.

  “Dad, don’t!” Rane begged.

  He ignored her. If any of Eli’s people were outside, he wanted them to know where he was. It was possible, of course, that they would simply shoot him, but he did not believe they would—they could have done that long ago. The Clay’s Ark people wanted their captives—their converts—back. Perhaps by now they also wanted any salvageable members of the car gang and the ranch family. Mainly, they wanted to keep the disease from spreading, keep it from destroying their way of life. They had been totally unrealistic to think they could go on hiding indefinitely, but at the moment Blake was on their side.

  He reached the window, managed to stand up, almost pulling down the drapes in the process. The leg restraints tightened as he stood.

  The moon was waning, but still bright in the clear desert air. It was possible that someone outside might be able to see him in the moon and starlight, but he hoped Eli’s people had told the truth when they claimed to be able to see in the dark. He pushed the draperies to one side and stood in plain view of anything outside. He could see hills not far distant. Before them was a shadowy jumble of huge rocks—as though there had been a slide—or perhaps merely weathering away of soil. The rocks could provide excellent cover for anyone out there.

  Off to one side was a building that might have been a barn. From the barn extended a corral. The barn looked spare and modern. The people of this ranch had not lived in the nineteenth century. It was possible that even the cuffs had been theirs. A car family would not care whether restraints were humane or not.

  Scanning as carefully as he could, Blake could see no sign of anyone. Still, he stood there, at one point holding up his hands to show that they were bound. He felt foolish, but he did not sit down until he felt he had given even an intermittent watcher a chance to see him.

  Finally, he hopped away from the window and let himself down quietly so that he could roll back to where the girls were. He had not quite made it when the door opened and someone switched on a light. He found himself squinting upward into the face of a squat, burly man in an ill-fitting new shirt and pants that were almost rags.

  “Looks like you’re going to live,” he said to Blake.

  Blake rolled onto his back and sat up. “I’d say so.”

  “Your people want you. Big surprise.”

  “I’m sure most of your victims have people who want them.”

  The man frowned at Blake as though he thought Blake might be making fun of him. Then he gave a loud, braying laugh. “Most of you walled-in types don’t give a piss for each other, Doc. You don’t know family like we do. But the hell with that. What I want to know is who else wants you?”

  Blake sat up straighter, staring at the man. “What do you mean?”

  The man pushed Blake over gently with his foot. “Those your own teeth, Doc?”

  Blake writhed back into a sitting position. “Look, I’ll tell you what I know. I just wanted to find out what’s happened since I’ve been unconscious.”

  “Nothing. Now who else wants you?”

  Blake wove a fantasy about Eli’s people, made them just another rat pack with ideas no loftier than this one’s. Ransom. He said nothing about the disease. There was nothing he could say to a man like this, he realized. Nothing that would not get his teeth kicked in. Or if the man believed him, he might shoot Blake and both girls, then run—on the theory that if he got away fast enough, he could escape the disease. Blake had known men like him before; confronting them with unfamiliar ideas was dangerous even in controlled, hospital surroundings.

  He got absolutely no response from the man until he mentioned the mountaintop ranch. The moment he said it, he knew he was talking too much.

  “Those people!” the burly man muttered. “I been planning for a long time to bury them. Maybe not bother to kill them first. Bony, stripped-down models. Shit, you’re a doctor. What’s the matter with those guys?”

  “They never gave me a chance to find out,” Blake lied. “I think they’re taking something.” Drugs. That was something a sewer rat could understand.

  “I know they’re taking something,” the man said. “One time I saw a couple of them running down jack rabbits and eating them. I mean like a coyote or a bobcat, tearing into them before they were all the way dead.”

  Blake blinked, repelled and amazed. “You saw them do that?”

  “I said I did, didn’t I? What have they got, Doc, and what do you think it’s worth?”

  “I tell you, I don’t know. We were prisoners. They didn’t tell us anything.”

  “You got eyes. What did you see?”

  “Dangerous, bone-thin people, faster than average, stronger than average, and close.”

  “What close?”

  “They give a piss for each other. Listen, who are you, anyway?”

  “Badger. I head this family.”

  He looked the part. “Well, Badger, I didn’t get the impression these people knew h
ow to forgive and forget. They probably see us as their property. They probably want us back—or maybe they’ll settle for a share of our ransom.”

  “Share? You’ve got too much sun, man. Or they have. What are they doing, growing something?”

  “I don’t know!”

  “I gotta know. I gotta find out! Shit, it must be good stuff.”

  “They look like a strong wind would blow them away, and you think they have good stuff?”

  Badger kicked Blake again, this time less gently. Blake fell over. “You’re a doctor,” Badger said. “You ought to know! What the hell is it?” Another hard kick.

  Through a haze of pain, Blake heard one of the girls scream, heard Badger say, “Get away from me, cunt!” heard a slap, another scream.

  “Listen!” Blake gasped, sitting up. “Listen, they have a garden!” His head and his side throbbed. What if his ribs were broken? Meda had said broken bones would be fatal to him now. “Those people have a big garden,” he said. “They never really let us see what they grew there. Maybe if you could—”

  He was cut off by the crack of a shot. The sound echoed several times into a world that had otherwise gone silent. Another shot. It hit the window near them, somewhere near ceiling level, then ricocheted with an odd whine. More bulletproof glass. A house located where this one was was probably hardened as much as possible against any form of attack.

  Someone outside had perhaps seen or heard Blake. Someone outside was either a bad shot trying to kill him or a good shot trying to protect him.

  “Shit!” Badger muttered. He turned and ran from the room, slamming the door behind him.

  “If we could break the windows,” Keira said when he was gone, “Eli’s people might come in and get us.”

  And Rane: “If bullets couldn’t break them, we sure can’t with our bare hands.”

  “But we’ve got to get out! That guy Badger is crazy. If he kicks Dad’s ribs in, Dad will die!”

  Blake lay listening to them, thinking he should say something reassuring, but now that the danger was less immediate, he could not make the effort. His side and head were competing with each other to see which could hurt more. He lay still, eyes closed, trying to breathe shallowly. He was desperately afraid one or more ribs were already broken, but he could do nothing. He felt consciousness slipping away again.