“… he isn’t.”
“What’s he like?”
“You saw him,” Keira said softly. “He ran alongside the car for a few seconds. That was him.”
Blake frowned, gave her a quick glance. “But that was … an animal.”
“Disease-induced mutation. Every child born to them after they get the disease is mutated that way. Jacob is the oldest of eleven.”
Blake glanced at Keira. She was not looking at him, would not look at him.
“Jacob’s beautiful, really,” she continued. “The way he moves—catlike, smooth, graceful, very fast. And he’s as bright as or brighter than any other kid his age. He’s—”
“Not human,” Blake said flatly. “Jesus, what are they breeding back there?”
The girls looked at each other again, shifted uncomfortably, sharing some understanding that excluded him. Now neither would face him. Suddenly he wanted to be excluded. He drove on in silence, suspicion growing in his mind. He concentrated on putting distance between himself and those who would certainly follow—though he could not help wondering whether what followed was really worse than what they carried with them.
PART 2
P.O.W.
Past 11
WITHIN A DAY of Christian’s collapse, Eli had seven irrational people huddling around him. They had no idea what was happening to them, but they knew they were in trouble. They were combative, fearful, confused, lustful, driven, guilt-ridden, and utterly miserable.
They huddled together, not knowing what to do. They were fearful of going near outsiders with their painfully enhanced senses and their odd compulsions, but Eli was one of them. More, he was complete. He smelled right to them. And he could see their needs clearer than they could. He could respond to them as they required, offering comfort, sternness, advice, brute strength, whatever was necessary from moment to moment.
He found comfort in shepherding them. It was as though in a very real way, he was making them his family—a family with ugly problems.
Meda found both her brothers and her father after her, and she, like them, was alternately lustful and horrified. Her father suffered more than the others. He felt he had gone from patriarch and man of God to criminally depraved pervert unable to keep his hands off his own daughter. Nor could he accept these feelings as his own. They must be signs of either demonic possession or God’s punishment for some terrible sin. He and his sons were badly frightened.
His wife and daughters-in-law were terrified. Not only were they unable to understand the behavior of their men, but they were confused and embarrassed by their own enhanced sensory awareness. They could smell the men and each other as they never had before. They kept trying to wash away normal scents that would not vanish. They spoke more softly as they realized the substantial walls no longer stopped sound as well as they had. They discovered they were able to see in the dark—whether they wanted to or not. Touching, even accidentally, became a startlingly intense sensual experience. The women ceased to touch each other. They also ceased to touch the men except for their own husbands. And Eli.
They all developed huge appetites as their bodies changed. Worse, they developed unusual tastes, and this frightened them.
“I’m so hungry,” Gwyn told Eli on the day her symptoms became undeniable. She gestured toward a pair of chickens—part of the Boyd flock of thousands. This pair were scratching and pecking at the sand in the shade of the well tank. “Suddenly, those things smell good to me,” she said. “Can you believe that? They smell edible.”
“They are,” Eli said softly. It had been necessary for him to supplement his diet with one or two of them or with several eggs every night when the family was asleep.
“But how could they smell good raw?” Gwyn said. “And alive?”
Living prey smelled wonderful, Eli knew. But Gwyn was not ready to face that yet. “Go raid the refrigerator,” he told her. “Maybe Junior is hungry.”
She looked down at her pregnant belly and tried to smile, but she was clearly frightened.
He did what he would never have done before this day. He took her arm and led her back to the house to the kitchen. There he saw to it that she ate. She seemed to appreciate the attention.
“Something feels wrong “ she said once. “Not with the baby,” she added quickly when Eli looked alarmed. “I don’t know. The food tastes too sweet or too salty or too spicy or too something. It tasted okay yesterday, but now … When I started to eat, I thought I was going to be sick. But that’s not right either. It’s not really nauseating. It’s just … I don’t know.”
“Bad?” he asked, knowing the answer.
“Not really. Just different.” She shook her head, picked up a piece of cold fried chicken. “This is okay, but I’m not sure the ones running around outside wouldn’t be better.”
Eli said nothing. Since his return to Earth, he knew he preferred his food raw and unseasoned. It tasted better. Yet he would go on eating cooked food. It was a human thing that he clung to. His changed body seemed able to digest almost anything. It tempted him by making nonhuman behavior pleasurable, but most of the time, it let him decide, let him choose to cling to as much of his humanity as he could.
Though certain drives at certain times inevitably went out of control.
Meda brought him her symptoms and her suspicions not long after he left Gwyn.
“This is your doing,” she said. “Everybody’s crazy except you. You’ve done something to us.”
“Yes,” he admitted, breathing in the scent of her. She had some idea now what she was doing to him just by coming near.
“What have you done?” she demanded.
“What do you feel?” he asked, facing her.
She blinked, turned away frightened. “What have you done?” she repeated.
“It’s a disease.” He took a deep breath. He had never imagined that telling her would be easy. He had already decided to be as straightforward as possible. “It’s an extraterrestrial disease. It will change you, but no more than I’m changed.”
“A disease?” She frowned. “You came back sick and gave us a disease? Did you know you had it?”
“Yes.”
“And you knew we could catch it?”
He nodded.
“Then you gave it to us deliberately!”
“No, not deliberately.”
“But if you knew …”
“Meda …” He wanted to touch her, take her by the shoulders and reassure her. But if he began to touch her, he would not be able to stop. “Meda, you’ll be all right. I’ll take care of you. I stayed to take care of you.”
“You came here to give us a disease!”
“No!” He turned his head toward the well tank. “No, I came … to get water and food.”
“But you—”
“I couldn’t die. I wanted to, but I couldn’t. I can go out of my mind; I can become an animal; but I can’t kill myself.”
“What about the others, the crew?”
“All dead like I told you, like your Barstow news said. The disease took some of them—before we found out how to help them.” A half-truth. A deletion. Disa and two others had died in spite of the help they got. “The others died here—with the ship. Someone—maybe more than one—apparently managed a little sabotage. I wish they’d done it in space, or back on Proxi Two.”
“How do you know someone sabotaged the ship? Maybe it was an accident.”
“I don’t know. I don’t remember. I blacked out.”
“How did you get off the ship?”
“I don’t know. I have off-and-on memories of running, hiding. I know I took shelter in mountains of volcanic rock, lived in a half-collapsed lava tunnel for three days and two nights. I nearly starved to death.”
“People can’t starve in just three days.”
“We can. You and me, now.”
She only stared at him.
“It was raining,” he continued. “I remember we deliberately chose to land in a stor
m in the middle of nowhere so we could get away before anyone found out what we were. Even with speeded up reflexes, increased strength, and enhanced senses, we nearly disintegrated, then nearly crashed. We kept them from shooting us down by talking. God, we talked. The brave heroes giving all the information they could before they crashed. Before they died. We could no more imagine ourselves dying than we could imagine not coming straight in to Earth. It was a magnet for us in more ways than one. All those people … all those … billions of uninfected people.”
“You came to infect … everybody?” she whispered.
“We had to come. We couldn’t not come; it was impossible. But we thought we could control it once we were here. We thought we could take only a few people at a time. A few isolated people. That’s why we chose such an empty place.”
“Why would you think you could have any … any luck controlling yourselves here in the middle of all the billions if you couldn’t control yourselves on Proxima Centauri Two?”
“We weren’t sure,” he said. “Maybe it was just something we told ourselves to keep from going completely crazy. On the other hand …” He looked at her, glad she was alive and well enough to be her questioning, demanding self. “On the other hand, maybe we were right. I don’t want to leave this place to reach anyone else. Not now. Not yet.”
“You’ve done enough damage here.”
“Do you want to leave?”
“Eli, I live here!”
“Doesn’t matter. Do you want to go to a hospital? See if somebody can figure out a cure?”
She looked uncomfortable, a little frightened. “I was wondering why you didn’t do that.”
“I can’t. Can you?”
“What do you mean you can’t?”
“Go if you can. I’ll … try not to stop you. I’ll try.”
“This is my home! I don’t have to go anywhere!”
“Meda—”
“Why don’t you leave! You’re the cause of all this! You’re the problem!”
“Shall I go, Meda?”
Silence. He had frightened and confused her, touched a brand new tender spot that she might not have discovered on her own for a while. She wanted to stay with her own kind. Being alone was terrifying, mind-numbing, he knew.
“You went away,” she said, reading him unconsciously. “You left the rest of the crew.”
“Not deliberately.”
“Do you ever do anything deliberately?” She came a little closer to him. “You got out. Only you.”
He realized where she was headed and did not want to hear her, but she continued.
“The one sure way you could have known when to run is if you were the saboteur.”
His hands gripped each other. If they had gripped anything else at that moment, they would have crushed it. “Do you think I haven’t thought about that?” he said. “I’ve tried to remember.”
“If I were you, I wouldn’t want to remember.”
“But I’ve tried. Not that it makes any difference in the end. The others died and I should have died. If I did it, I killed my friends then made their deaths meaningless. If someone else did it, my survival made the sacrifice meaningless anyway.”
“The dogs died,” she said. “Remember? One of them was hurt, but not bad. The other wasn’t hurt at all, but they died. We couldn’t understand it.”
“I’m sorry.”
“They died! Maybe we’ll die!”
“You won’t die. I’ll take care of you.”
She touched his face, finally, traced the few premature lines there. “You aren’t sure,” she said. “My touch hurts you, doesn’t it?”
He said nothing. His body had gone rigid. Its center, its focus was where her fingers caressed.
“It must hurt you to hold back,” she said. “Your holding back hurts me.” There were agonizing seconds of silence. “You probably were the saboteur,” she said. “You’re strong enough to hurt yourself, so you thought you were strong enough to kill yourself. I want you. But I wish you had succeeded. I wish you had died.”
He had no more strength of will at all. He seized her, dragged her behind the well, pushed her to the ground. She was not surprised, did not struggle. In fact, with her own drives compelling her, she helped him.
But it was not only passion or physical pain that caused her to scratch and tear at his body with her nails.
Present 12
WHEN OREL INGRAHAM GRASPED Rane’s arm and led her from Meda’s house, she held her terror at bay by planning her escape. She would go either with her father and Keira or without them. If she had to leave them behind, she would send help back to them. She had no idea which law enforcement group policed this wilderness area, but she would find out. All that mattered now was escaping. Living long enough to escape, and escaping.
She was terrified of Ingraham, certain that he was crazy, that he would kill her if she were not careful. If she committed herself to a poorly planned escape attempt and he caught her, he would certainly kill her.
She noticed no trembling in the hand that held her arm. There were no facial tics now, no trembling anywhere. She did not know whether that was a good sign or not, but it comforted her. It made him seem more normal, less dangerous.
As they walked, she looked around, memorizing the placement of the animal pens, the houses, the large chicken house, and something that was probably a barn. The buildings and large rocks could be excellent hiding places.
The people were spooky; she saw only a few, all adults. They were busy feeding the animals, gardening, repairing tools. One woman sat in front of a house, cleaning a chicken. Rane watched with interest. She planned to be a doctor eventually, and was pleased that the sight did not repel her. What did repel her was the way people looked at her. Each person she passed paused for a moment to stare at her. They were all scrawny and their eyes seemed larger than normal in their gaunt faces. They looked at her with hunger or lust. They looked so intently she felt as though they had reached for her with their thin fingers. She could imagine them all grabbing her.
At one point, an animal whizzed past—something lean and brown and catlike, running at a startling speed. It was much bigger than a housecat. Rane stared after it, wondering what it had been.
“Show-off,” Ingraham muttered. But he was smiling. The smile made him look years younger, less intense, saner. Rane dared to question him.
“What was that?” she asked.
“Jacob,” Ingraham answered. “Stark naked as usual.”
“Naked?” Rane said, frowning. “What was it?”
He led her onto the porch of an unpainted, but otherwise complete, wooden house. There he stopped her. “Not ‘it,’” he said, “him. That was one of Meda’s kids. Now, shut up and listen!”
Rane closed her mouth, swallowing her protests. But the running thing had definitely not been a child.
“Our kids look like that,” he said. “You may as well get used to it because yours are going to look like that too. It’s a disease that we have, and now you have it—or you’ll soon get it. There isn’t a damn thing you can do about it.”
With no further explanation, he took her into the house and turned her over to a tall, pregnant woman whose hair was almost long enough for her to trip over.
Lupe, the woman’s name was. She was sharp-featured with thin arms and legs. In spite of her pregnancy, she clearly belonged among these people. She wore a caftan much like Keira’s. Her pregnant body looked like a balloon beneath it. She reached for Rane with thin, grasping hands.
Rane drew back, but Ingraham still held her. She could not escape. The woman caught Rane’s other arm and held it in a grip just short of painful. The thinness was deceptive. These people were all abnormally strong.
“Don’t be afraid,” the woman said with a slight accent. “We have to touch you, but we won’t hurt you.” Her voice was the friendliest thing Rane had heard since her capture. Rane tried to relax, tried to trust the friendly voice.
“Why do you
have to touch me?” she asked.
“Because you’re not one of us yet,” Lupe said. “You will be. Be still.” She reached up so quickly that Rane had no chance to struggle, and made scratches across Rane’s left cheek.
Rane squealed in surprise and pain, and, too late, jerked her head back. “What did you do that for?” she demanded.
They ignored her. “You’re in a hurry,” Ingraham said to Lupe.
“Eli says the sooner the better with this one and her father,” Lupe told him.
“While he takes his time with his. Treats her like she’ll break if he touches her.”
“She might. We never had anybody who was already sick.”
“Yeah. I got us a healthy one, though.”
They talked about her as though she were not there, Rane thought. Or as though she were no more than an animal who could not understand.
She tried to pull free when Lupe took her away from Ingraham and sat her down on a long wooden bench. There, finally, she released Rane and stood before her studying Rane’s angry, hostile posture. Lupe shook her head.
“I lied,” she told Rane. “We are going to hurt you. You’re going to fight us every chance you get, aren’t you? You’re going to make us hurt you.” The corners of her mouth turned downward. “Too bad. I can tell you from experience, it won’t help. It might kill you.”
Rane glanced at the woman’s claws and said nothing. Lupe was as crazy as Ingraham and even more unpredictable with her soft words and sharp nails. Rane was terrified of her—and furious at her for inspiring fear. Why should one thin-limbed, pregnant woman be so frightening? One thin-limbed, startlingly strong, pregnant woman who sat down beside Rane and caressed Rane’s arm absently.
Rane looked at Ingraham—actually found herself looking for help from the man who had held a gun to her head. To her utter humiliation, he laughed. Rane’s vision blurred and for an instant, she saw herself smashing his head with a rock.
Suddenly Lupe grasped her chin, turned her head until she could see only Lupe, hear only Lupe.
“Chica, nothing has ever truly hurt you before,” Lupe said. “Nothing has even threatened you enough to make you believe you could die. Not even your sister’s illness. So now you must learn a hard lesson very quickly. No, don’t say anything yet. Just listen. You think I’m threatening you, but I’m not. At least, not in the way you believe. We have given you a disease that can kill you. That’s what you need to understand. Some of our differences are signs of that disease. You must decide whether it’s better to live with such signs or die. Listen.”