Someplace in the distance, gunshots popped. They sounded like fireworks. The air stank of burning and char and had all day. Clay thought they were smelling it more strongly now because it was wet. He wondered how long before the smell of decaying flesh turned the fug hanging over greater Boston into a reek. He supposed it depended on how warm the days ahead turned out to be.
"If we meet normal people and they ask us what we're doing or where we're going, remember the story," she said.
"We're looking for survivors," Tom said.
"That's right. Because they're our friends and neighbors. Any people we meet will just be passing through. They'll want to keep moving. Later on we'll probably want to hook up with other normal people, because there's safety in numbers, but right now--"
"Right now we'd like to get to those guns," Clay said. "If there are any guns to get. Come on, Alice, let's do this."
She looked worriedly at him. "What's wrong? What am I missing? You can tell me, I know I'm just a kid."
Patiently--as patiently as he could with nerves that felt like overtuned guitar-strings--Clay said, "There's nothing wrong with it, honey. I just want to get rolling. I don't think we're going to see anyone, anyway. I think it's too soon."
"I hope you're right," she said. "My hair's a mess and I've chipped a nail."
They looked at her silently for a moment, then laughed. After that it was better among them, and stayed better until the end.
20
"No," Alice said. She made a gagging sound. "No. No, I can't." A louder gagging sound. Then: "I'm going to throw up. I'm sorry."
She plunged out of the Coleman's glare and into the gloom of the Nickersons' living room, which adjoined the kitchen via a wide arch. Clay heard a soft thump as she went to her knees on the carpet, then more gagging. A pause, a gasp, and then she was vomiting. He was almost relieved.
"Oh Christ," Tom said. He pulled in a long, gasping breath and this time spoke in a wavering exhalation that was nearly a howl. "Oh Chruuust."
"Tom," Clay said. He saw how the little man was swaying on his feet and understood he was on the verge of fainting. Why not? These bloody leavings had been his neighbors.
"Tom!" He stepped between Tom and the two bodies on the kitchen floor, between Tom and most of the splattered blood, which looked as black as India ink in the Coleman's unforgiving white glare. He tapped the side of Tom's face with his free hand. "Don't pass out!" And when he saw Tom steady on his feet, he dropped his voice a little. "Go on in the other room and take care of Alice. I'll take care of the kitchen."
"Why would you want to go in there?" Tom asked. "That's Beth Nickerson with her brains... her b-brains all over..." He swallowed. There was an audible click in his throat. "Most of her face is gone, but I recognize the blue jumper with the white snowflakes on it. And that's Heidi on the floor by the center island. Their daughter. I recognize her, even with..." He shook his head, as if to clear it, then repeated: "Why would you want to?"
"I'm pretty sure I see what we came for," Clay said. He was astounded by how calm he sounded.
"In the kitchen?"
Tom tried to look past him and Clay moved to block his view. "Trust me. You see to Alice. If she can, you two start looking around for more guns. Shout if you hit paydirt. And be careful, Mr. Nickerson may be here, too. I mean, we could assume he was at work when all this went down, but as Alice's dad says--"
"Assume makes an ass out of you and me," Tom said. He managed a sickly smile. "Gotcha." He started to turn away, then turned back. "I don't care where we go, Clay, but I don't want to stay here any longer than we have to. I didn't exactly love Arnie and Beth Nickerson, but they were my neighbors. And they treated me a hell of a lot better than that idiot Scottoni from around the block." "Understood."
Tom snapped on his flashlight and went into the Nickerson living room. Clay heard him murmuring to Alice, comforting her.
Steeling himself, Clay walked into the kitchen with the Coleman lantern held up, stepping around the puddles of blood on the hardwood floor. It had dried now, but he still didn't want to put his shoes in any more of it than he had to.
The girl lying on her back by the center island had been tall, but both her pigtails and the angular lines of her body suggested a child two or three years younger than Alice. Her head was cocked at a strenuous angle, almost a parody of interrogation, and her dead eyes bulged. Her hair had been broom straw-blond, but all of it on the left side of her head--the side that had taken the blow which had killed her--was now the same dark maroon as the stains on the floor.
Her mother reclined below the counter to the right of the stove, where the handsome cherrywood cabinets came together to form a corner. Her hands were ghost-white with flour and her bloody, bitten legs were indecorously splayed. Once, before starting work on a limited-run comic called Battle Hell, Clay had accessed a selection of fatal-gunshot photos on the Web, thinking there might be something he could use. There was not. Gunshot wounds spoke a terrible blank language of their own, and here it was again. Beth Nickerson was mostly spray and gristle from her left eye on up. Her right eye had drifted into the upper orbit of its socket, as if she had died trying to look into her own head. Her back hair and a good deal of her brain-matter was caked on the cherrywood cabinet against which she had leaned in her brief moments of dying. A few flies were buzzing around her.
Clay began to gag. He turned his head and covered his mouth. He told himself he had to control himself. In the other room Alice had stopped vomiting--in fact he could hear her and Tom talking together as they moved deeper into the house--and he didn't want to get her going again.
Think of them as dummies, props in a movie, he told himself, but he knew he could never do that.
When he looked back, he looked at the other things on the floor instead. That helped. The gun he had already seen. The kitchen was spacious and the gun was all the way on the other side, lying between the fridge and one of the cabinets with the barrel sticking out. His first impulse on seeing the dead woman and the dead girl had been to avert his eyes; they'd happened on the gun-barrel purely by accident.
But maybe I would have known there had to be a gun.
He even saw where it had been: a wall-mounted clip between the built-in TV and the industrial-size can-opener. They were gadget-nuts as well as gun-nuts, Tom had said, and a wall-mounted pistol in your kitchen just waiting to leap into your hand... why, if that wasn't the best of both worlds, what was?
"Clay?" That was Alice. Coming from some distance.
"What?"
There followed the sound of feet quickly ascending a set of stairs, then Alice called from the living room. "Tom said you wanted to know if we hit paydirt. We just did. There must be a dozen guns downstairs in the den. Rifles and pistols both. They're in a cabinet with an alarm-company sticker on it, so we'll probably get arrested... that's a joke. Are you coming?"
"In a minute, hon. Don't come out here."
"Don't worry. Don't you stay there and get grossed out."
He was beyond grossed out, far beyond. There were two other objects lying on the bloody hardwood floor of the Nickerson kitchen. One was a rolling pin, which made sense. There was a pie tin, a mixing bowl, and a cheery yellow canister marked FLOUR sitting on the center island. The other object on the floor, this one lying not too distant from one of Heidi Nickerson's hands, was a cell phone only a teenager could love, blue with big orange daisy decals plastered all over it.
Clay could see what had happened, little as he wanted to. Beth Nickerson is making a pie. Does she know something awful has started to happen in greater Boston, in America, maybe in the world? Is it on TV? If so, the TV didn't send her a crazygram, Clay was sure of that.
Her daughter got one, though. Oh yes. And Heidi attacked her mother. Did Beth Nickerson try to reason with her daughter before driving her to the floor with a blow from the rolling pin, or did she just strike? Not in hate, but in pain and fear? In any case, it wasn't enough. And Beth wasn't wearing pants. She was wearing a
jumper, and her legs were bare.
Clay pulled down the dead woman's skirt. He did it gently, covering the plain working-at-home underwear that she had soiled at the end.
Heidi, surely no older than fourteen and perhaps only twelve, must have been growling in that savage nonsense-language they seemed to learn all at once after they got a full dose of Sane-B-Gone from their phones, saying things like rast and eelah and kazzalah-CAN! The first blow from the rolling pin had knocked her down but not out, and the mad girl had begun to work on her mother's legs. Not little nips, either, but deep, searing bites, some that had driven all the way to the bone. Clay could see not only toothmarks but ghostly tattoos that must have been left by young Heidi's braces. And so--probably screaming, undoubtedly in agony, almost certainly not aware of what she was doing--Beth Nickerson had struck again, this time much harder. Clay could almost hear the muffled crack as the girl's neck broke. Beloved daughter, dead on the floor of the state-of-the-art kitchen, with braces on her teeth and her state-of-the-art cell phone by one outstretched hand.
And had her mother stopped to consider before popping the gun from its clip between the TV and the can-opener, where it had been waiting who knew how long for a burglar or rapist to appear in this clean, well-lighted kitchen? Clay thought not. Clay thought there would have been no pause, that she would have wanted to catch up with her daughter's fleeing soul while the explanation for what she had done was still fresh on her lips.
Clay went to the gun and picked it up. From a gadget-boy like Arnie Nickerson he would have expected an automatic--maybe even one with a laser sight--but this was a plain old Colt .45 revolver. He supposed it made sense. His wife might feel more comfortable with this kind of gun; no nonsense about making sure it was loaded if the gun was needed (or wasting time fishing a clip out from behind the spatulas or spices if it wasn't), then racking the slide to make sure there was a hot one in the chamber. No, with this old whore you just had to swing the barrel out, which Clay did with ease. He'd drawn a thousand variations of this very gun for Dark Wanderer. As he'd expected, only one of the six chambers was empty. He shook out one of the other loads, knowing just what he would find. Beth Nickerson's .45 was loaded with highly illegal cop-killer bullets. Fraggers. No wonder the top of her head was gone. The wonder was that she had any left at all. He looked down at the remains of the woman leaning in the corner and began to cry.
"Clay?" That was Tom, coming up the stairs from the basement. "Man, Arnie had everything! There's an automatic weapon that would have gotten him a stretch in Walpole, I bet... Clay? Are you all right?"
"I'm coming," Clay said, wiping his eyes. He safetied the revolver and stuck it in his belt. Then he took off the knife and laid it on Beth Nickerson's counter, still in its homemade scabbard. It seemed they were trading up. "Give me two more minutes."
"Yo."
Clay heard Tom clumping back to Arnie Nickerson's downstairs armory and smiled in spite of the tears still running down his face. Here was something he would have to remember: give a nice little gay guy from Malden a roomful of guns to play with, he starts to say yo just like Sylvester Stallone.
Clay started going through drawers. In the third one he tried, he found a heavy red box marked AMERICAN DEFENDER .45 CALIBER AMERICAN DEFENDER 50 ROUNDS. It was under the dishtowels. He put the box in his pocket and went to join Tom and Alice. He wanted to get out of here now, and as quickly as possible. The trick would be getting them to go without trying to take Arnie Nickerson's entire gun collection along.
Halfway through the arch he paused and glanced back, holding the Coleman lantern high, looking at the bodies. Pulling down the skirt of the woman's jumper hadn't helped much. They were still just corpses, their wounds as naked as Noah when his son had come upon him in liquor. He could find something to cover them with, but once he started covering bodies, where would it end? Where? With Sharon? With his son?
"God forbid," he whispered, but he doubted that God would simply because he asked. He lowered the lantern and followed the dancing glow of flashlights downstairs to Tom and Alice.
21
They both wore belts with large-caliber handguns in the holsters, and these were automatics. Tom had also slung an ammunition bandolier over his shoulder. Clay didn't know whether to laugh or start crying again. Part of him felt like doing both at the same time. Of course if he did that, they would think he was having hysterics. And of course they would be right.
The plasma TV mounted on the wall down here was the big--very big--brother of the one in the kitchen. Another TV, only slightly smaller, had a multibrand videogame hookup Clay would, once upon a time, have loved to examine. To fawn over, maybe. As if to balance it off, a vintage Seeberg jukebox stood in the corner next to the Nickersons' Ping-Pong table, all its fabulous colors dark and dead. And of course there were the gun cabinets, two of them, still locked but with their glass fronts broken.
"There were locking-bars, but he had a toolbox in his garage," Tom said. "Alice used a wrench to break them off."
"They were cookies," Alice said modestly. "This was in the garage behind the toolbox, wrapped in a piece of blanket. Is it what I think it is?" She picked it up off the Ping-Pong table, holding it carefully by the wire stock, and carried it over to Clay.
"Holy shit," he said. "This is..." He squinted at the embossing above the trigger-guard. "I think it's Russian."
"I'm sure it is," Tom said. "Do you think it's a Kalashnikov?"
"You got me. Are there bullets that match it? In boxes that match the printing on the gun, I mean?"
"Halfa dozen. Heavy boxes. It's a machine gun, isn't it?"
"You might as well call it that, I guess." Clay flicked a lever. "I'm pretty sure one of these positions is single shot and the other is autofire."
"How many rounds does it fire a minute?" Alice asked.
"I don't know," Clay said, "but I think it's rounds per second."
"Whoa." Her eyes got round. "Can you figure out how to shoot it?"
"Alice--I'm pretty sure they teach sixteen-year-old farmboys how to shoot these. Yes, I can figure it out. It might take a box of ammo, but I can figure it out." Please God don't let it blow up in my hands, he thought.
"Is something like that legal in Massachusetts?" she asked.
"It is now, Alice," Tom said, not smiling. "Is it time to go?"
"Yes," she said, and then--perhaps still not entirely comfortable being the one to make the decisions--she looked at Clay.
"Yes," he said. "North."
"Fine with me," Alice said.
"Yeah," Tom said. "North. Let's do it."
GAITEN ACADEMY
1
When rainy daylight arose the next morning, Clay, Alice, and Tom were camped in the barn adjacent to an abandoned horse-farm in North Reading. They watched from the door as the first groups of crazyfolk began to appear, flocking southwest on Route 62 in the direction of Wilmington. Their clothes looked uniformly soaked and shabby. Some were without shoes. By noon they were gone. Around four, as the sun broke through the clouds in long, spoking rays, they began flocking back in the direction from which they had come. Many were munching as they walked. Some were helping those who were having a hard time walking on their own. If there were acts of murder today, Clay, Tom, and Alice did not see any.
Perhaps half a dozen of the crazies were lugging large objects that looked familiar to Clay; Alice had found one in the closet of Tom's guest bedroom. The three of them had stood around it, afraid to turn it on.
"Clay?" Alice asked. "Why are some of them carrying boomboxes?"
"I don't know," he said.
"I don't like it," Tom said. "I don't like the flocking behavior, I don't like them helping each other, and I like seeing them with those big portable sound-systems least of all."
"There's only a few with--" Clay began.
"Check her out, right there," Tom interrupted, pointing to a middle-aged woman who was staggering up Highway 62 with a radio/CD player the size of a livin
g room hassock cradled in her arms. She held it against her breasts as though it were a sleeping toddler. Its power-cord had come out of the little storage compartment in back and dragged beside her on the road. "And you don't see any of them carrying lamps or toasters, do you? What if they're programmed to set up battery-powered radios, turn them on, and start broadcasting that tone, pulse, subliminal message, whatever-it-is? What if they want to get the ones they missed the first time?"
They. The ever-popular paranoid they. Alice had produced her little sneaker from somewhere and was squeezing it in her hand, but when she spoke, her voice was calm enough. "I don't think that's it," she said.
"Why not?" Tom asked.
She shook her head. "I can't say. Just that it doesn't feel right."
"Woman's intuition?" He was smiling, but he wasn't sneering.
"Maybe," she said, "but I think one thing's obvious."
"What's that, Alice?" Clay asked. He had an idea what she was going to say, and he was right.
"They're getting smarter. Not on their own, but because they're thinking together. Probably that sounds crazy, but I think it's more likely than them collecting a big pile of battery-powered FM suitcases to blast us all into loony-land."
"Telepathic group-think," Tom said. He mulled it over. Alice watched him do it. Clay, who had already decided she was right, looked out the barn door at the last of the day. He was thinking they needed to stop somewhere and pick up a road-atlas.
Tom was nodding. "Hey, why not? After all, that's probably what flocking is: telepathic group-think."
"Do you really think so or are you just saying that to make me--"
"I really think so," he said. He reached out and touched her hand, which was now squeezing the little sneaker rapidly. "I really really do. Give that thing a rest, will you?"
She gave him a fleeting, distracted smile. Clay saw it and thought again how beautiful she was, how really beautiful. And how close to breaking. "That hay looks soft and I'm tired. I think I'll take a nice long nap."
"Get down with your bad self," Clay said.
2
Clay dreamed that he and Sharon and Johnny-Gee were having a picnic behind their little house in Kent Pond. Sharon had spread her Navajo blanket on the grass. They were having sandwiches and iced tea. Suddenly the day went dark. Sharon pointed over Clay's shoulder and said, "Look! Telepaths!" But when he turned that way, he saw nothing but a flock of crows, one so huge it blotted out the sun. Then a tinkling began. It sounded like the Mister Softee truck playing the Sesame Street theme song, but he knew it was a ring-tone, and in his dream he was terrified. He turned back and Johnny-Gee was gone. When he asked Sharon where he was--already dreading, already knowing the answer--she said Johnny had gone under the blanket to answer his cell phone. There was a bump in the blanket. Clay dove under, into the overpowering smell of sweet hay, shouting for Johnny not to pick up, not to answer, reaching for him and finding instead only the cold curve of a glass ball: the paperweight he'd bought in Small Treasures, the one with the haze of dandelion fluff floating deep down inside like a pocket fog.