Clay's Ark

  Eventually, pleased and tired, they both slept.

  It was ten to two when Keira awoke. She stumbled off to the bathroom, her mind barely awake until she saw the clock on the bookcase. Ten to two. Two. Oh God.

  Eli himself had given her reason to go. If she stayed and somehow lived, he would pass her on to some other man. She did not want to be passed on.

  And she did not want her father to leave without her—or try to leave and be killed because she could have helped and had not.

  By the time she came out of the bathroom, she had made up her mind. But how to get away from Eli? The door was locked. She had no idea where the key was. In his clothing, perhaps.

  But if she went searching through his clothing, then unlocking the door, he would awaken, stop her, and she would not get another chance.

  She would have to hurt him.

  She cringed from the thought. He had gone to some trouble to avoid hurting her. He was not exactly a good man, but she liked him, could have loved him, she thought, under other circumstances.

  Yet for her father, she had to hurt him. After all, he had not only the key to the room door, but the keys to the Wagoneer. Without the car keys, her father might have to spend too much time getting into the car and getting it started. He would be caught before he drove a foot.

  There was the clock—a non-digital antique with a luminous dial. It ticked loudly and needed neither batteries nor electricity. If she hit Eli with it, he could probably be hurt, but would he be knocked unconscious or would he wake up and knock her unconscious? The clock was heavy, but awkward and big. The elephant bookend would be better. She had noticed it when she put away the book she had tried to read. The space between the elephant’s trunk and its body offered a good handhold. The base was flat and would do less damage, less gouging and cutting when she hit him. It was unpainted cast iron, dull gray, heavy, and already just above Eli’s head on the headboard bookshelf.

  She went back to the bed, climbed in.

  “Hey,” Eli said sleepily. He reached for her. The gentleness of his hands told her he probably wanted to make love again. She would have given a great deal to stay there with him.

  Instead, she reached for the elephant, gripped its trunk, and brought it down with all her strength on his head.

  He gave a cry not much different from the one he had given at orgasm. Frightened, she hit him again. He went limp.

  She had hurt her own hands and arms with the force of her blows. She knew she was weak, had feared at first that she could not really hurt him at all. Now she feared she had killed him.

  She checked quickly to see that he was still breathing, still had a strong pulse. She found blood on his head, but not much of it. He was probably all right.

  She got off the bed, pulled on her caftan, and stepped into her shoes, then she tore into his scattered clothing. She found the car keys at once, but could not find the one for the room. The door was definitely locked, though she could not remember him stopping to lock it. And there was no key.

  She went to one of the larger of the four windows. It was not locked with a key, but it was closed so tightly she could not budge it. She could break it, of course, but that would bring any number of people running.

  On the bed, Eli made a whining sound, and she tore at the window. It opened inward rather than upward, but it had apparently been painted shut.

  She tried the other large window and found the same thing. Finally she tried the two smaller center windows. When one of them opened, she dragged a chair to it, thankful for the rug that muffled the sound. She spent long desperate seconds trying to get the screen open.

  In the end, she broke the catch, pushed the screen out, and jumped.

  PART 4

  Reunion

  Past 19

  “I FEEL LIKE HELL,” Andrew Zeriam whispered. “Everything stinks. Food tastes like shit. Light hurts my eyes …” He groaned.

  “You want me to go away?” Eli asked. He spoke very softly. Zeriam sat in a darkened room—he had refused to lie down—and held his ears in this silent desert place, trying to shut out sounds he had not noticed before. What, Eli wondered, would happen if the disease spread to the cities? How would newly sensitive ears endure the assault of noise?

  “Hell no, I don’t want you to go away,” Zeriam whispered. “I asked you to come in, didn’t I?”

  Silence.

  “Can you see me, Eli? I can see you, and that’s some trick.”

  “I can see you.”

  “It’s pitch dark in here. It must be. It’s night. The windows are shut. The lights are out. It’s dark!”

  “Yeah.”

  “Talk to me, Eli. Tell me what the hell is going on.”

  “You know what’s going on. Lorene told you yesterday.”

  More silence. Then: “What are you that you can sit there and admit what she said is true?”

  “I’m what you are, Andy—host to millions, or more likely billions, of extraterrestrials.”

  Zeriam lunged at him, swinging. Zeriam was faster and better coordinated than he had been, but he was not yet significantly stronger. Eli caught him, held him easily.

  “Andy, if you don’t sit your ass down or lie down, you’re going to make me hurt you.”

  Zeriam stared at him, then burst into bitter laughter. “Hurt me? Man, you’ve killed me. You’ve killed … Shit, you may have killed everybody. Who knows how far this plague of yours will spread.”

  “I don’t think I’ve killed you,” Eli said. “I think you’re going to live.”

  That stopped Zeriam’s words and his struggles. “Live?”

  “Your symptoms are like mine—weird, nerve-wracking, but not devastating. People who don’t make it can’t even stand up when they’re as far along as you are. Hell, you’re not even shaky.”

  “But … people die of this. Lorene’s husband, Gwyn’s …”

  “Yeah. Some people do. The women didn’t. I didn’t. You probably won’t.”

  “But you did this to me. You, ultimately, because you did it to Lorene. You’re worse than a goddamn Typhoid Mary!”

  “A what?” Eli asked. Zeriam had just become a history teacher a few months before his capture by the car family. Eli was used to either questioning or ignoring his historical allusions.

  “A carrier,” Zeriam said. “A disease carrier so irresponsible she had to be locked up to keep her from spreading her disease.”

  “It’s not irresponsibility,” Eli told him. “It’s compulsion. You don’t know anything about it yet—though you will. If I brought you an uninfected person now, you wouldn’t be able to prevent yourself from infecting him. If you were without a mate the way Lorene was, nothing short of death could stop you from infecting a woman.”

  “I don’t believe you!”

  “You believe every word. You feel it. And you can’t hide your feelings from us.”

  Zeriam turned away, paced across the room, then back. He glared at Eli. He looked around like a trapped animal.

  “Andy?”

  Zeriam did not answer.

  “Andy, there’s something you haven’t noticed yet. Something that might help you realize you can have a life here.”

  “What?”

  “Lorene is pregnant.”

  “She’s what? Already? I’ve only been here three weeks.”

  “You two didn’t waste any time.”

  “I don’t believe you. You can’t be sure.”

  “You’re the one who can’t be sure. I noticed the change because I’ve seen it before.”

  “What change in only three weeks?”

  “She smells different,” Eli said.

  “You’re crazy. She smells fine. She—”

  “I didn’t say she smells bad. Just different. It’s a difference you’ll learn to recognize.”

  “Hell, I ought to tell you how you smell.”

  “I know how I smell, Andy—especially to you. I’ve been through all this before. And you should keep in mind that
you’re beginning to smell as threatening, as wrong to me as I do to you. Later, we’ll have to get used to each other all over again. The organism seems to pull women together and push men apart—at least at first.” Eli sighed. “Now we can be men and work this out, work the ranch with the women and keep the disease to ourselves as much as possible, or we can let the organism make animals of us and we can kill each other—for nothing.”

  “We get a choice? It’s not another compulsion?”

  “No, just a strong inclination. But it will rule you if you let it. Lay back, and it will drive you like a car.”

  “So what are you doing? Holding it all at bay by sheer willpower? You’re so full of shit, Eli!”

  He was giving in to the organism, letting the smell of a “rival” male enrage him. No doubt it was easy. Anger was so much more satisfying than the uncertainty he had been feeling. He did not yet understand how easily his anger could get out of hand.

  Eli stood up. “I’ll send Lorene in,” he said as he moved toward the door. Zeriam was bright. He would learn to handle inappropriate passions eventually. Meanwhile, Eli decided it was his responsibility to avoid dominance fights Zeriam could lose so easily and so finally.

  Eli did not quite make it to the door. Zeriam grabbed his arm. “Why should you send her in here?” he demanded. “Keep her! You had her before. For all I know, it’s your kid she’s carrying!”

  He was not saying what he believed. He had given himself over to the organism for the first time. There was no thought behind his words—nor behind his swing a moment later.

  Eli caught his hand in mid-swing, held it, hit him open-handed before Zeriam could swing again. Eli struck twice more. He was in control because he knew Zeriam could not hurt him. If he had let the organism control him, if he had acted as though he were truly threatened, he would have killed Zeriam, and perhaps not even realized it until later, when he regained control.

  As it was, Zeriam was not seriously hurt. He would have fallen, but Eli caught him and put him in a chair. There, he sat, nursing a split lip and coming out of a rage that had probably surprised even him.

  “Eli,” he said after a while, “how much of what you do is what you really want to do—or at least, what you’ve decided on your own to do.” He paused. “How much of you is left?”

  “You’re asking how much of you will be left,” Eli said.

  “Yeah.”

  “A lot. Most of the time, a lot.”

  “And sometimes … insanity.”

  “Not insanity, Andy. Now is the most irrational time you’ll have to face. Get through this, and you’ll be able to deal with the rest.”

  Zeriam stared at him, then looked away. He was frightened, but he said nothing.

  Later that night, he sat at the kitchen table and wrote Lorene a long, surprisingly loving letter. There was no bitterness in it, no anger. He wrote a longer letter to his unborn child. He had convinced himself it would be a son. He talked about the impossibility of spending his life as the carrier of a deadly disease. He talked about his fear of losing himself, becoming someone or something else. He talked about courage and cowardice and confusion. Finally, he put the letters aside and cheated the microbe of the final few days it needed to tighten its hold on him. He took one of Meda’s sharp butcher knives and cut his throat.

  Present 20

  BLAKE WORRIED ABOUT HAVING to use lights to stay on the poorly marked dirt trail. He had night glasses—glasses that utilized ambient light—but he was afraid to trust them in this dangerous, unfamiliar place. Yet he knew he was giving Eli’s people a beacon to follow—and he had no doubt they were following.

  “I saw something,” Rane said, right on cue. She had climbed into the back because the seats in front were intended for only two. “Dad, they’re coming. Three or four of them. You can see them when the mountains aren’t directly behind them. They’re running without lights.”

  “They can see in the dark,” Keira said.

  “So they say,” Rane answered contemptuously. “Anyway, unless their cars are as different as they are, I don’t see how they can catch us.”

  “Keep your head down,” Blake told her. “They could have guns with night scopes. If they do, they can see in the dark all right. And they know these roads.”

  “Where will we go?” Keira asked.

  Blake thought about that, glanced at his dashboard compass. They were heading due north. To reach the mountaintop ranch, they had traveled southeast, then south. “Kerry, take a look at the map,” he said. “Use I-Forty as your northernmost point and the Colorado River bed as your easternmost. Give it fifty miles west of the river bed and south of the highway. Look for towns and a real road. We’ll probably have to go all the way back to Needles, but at least there should be a road.”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised,” Kerry said as she turned on the map and keyed in the area he had specified. He glanced over, saw Needles in the upper right hand corner of the screen and nodded.

  “I didn’t think any place could be as isolated as that ranch seemed to be,” Keira said. “U.S. Ninety-five runs north to Needles. The problem is, I don’t know where we are—how far we are from it. It might be to our advantage to stay on this road until we reach I-Forty.”

  Blake glanced at the map again. “Since we didn’t cross Ninety-five on the way to the ranch, it has to be east of us.”

  Keira nodded. “Yes, maybe six or seven miles east, and maybe a lot more.”

  “Damn!” Blake grunted as the car bounced into and out of a hole. “I’m going to turn off as soon as I get the chance.”

  “We could wind up going twice as far as necessary,” Rane said.

  “Take another look behind you,” Blake told her.

  Both girls looked. Keira gasped when she saw how much closer the pursuers were.

  “Watch for a turnoff,” Blake said. “Any turnoff. I need a road I can see.”

  Keira leaned back in her seat, eyes closed. “Dad, Ninety-five has ‘travel at your own risk’ signs all over it.”

  He glanced at her. She knew what she was saying could not matter, but she had had to say it.

  “‘High crime area,’” Rane read over Keira’s shoulder. “It’s a sewer! I didn’t know they existed in the desert.”

  Blake said nothing. He had treated patients from city sewers—people so mutilated they no longer looked human, would never look human again in spite of twenty-first-century medicine. What the rat packs did to each other and to unprotected city-dwellers was not something he wanted to expose his daughters to. They knew about it, of course. The small armies of police who guarded enclaves kept out intruders, but they could not keep out information. Still, for sixteen years, he had managed to shield his daughters from the contents of sewers and cesspools. Now he was taking them into a sewer.

  The turnoff they had been hoping for materialized suddenly out of the night, marked only by a dead Joshua tree. Blake turned. The new road was better—smooth, graded, straight. He increased his speed, slowly pulling away from the pursuers. The Wagoneer could travel. With its modified engine it was much faster now than it had been when it was made—as long as it was not running a half-seen obstacle course.

  Just over six miles later, the second dirt road ran into a paved highway—U.S. 95. They had gone from north to northeast. Now they were headed north again on a road that would take them to Needles—to safety.

  Abruptly there were headlights directly in front of them—two cars coming toward them on the wrong side of the highway. Two cars that clearly did not intend to let him pass.

  Reacting without thinking, Blake swung right. To his amazement, he discovered he was turning onto a road he had not noticed—another paved surface that headed him back almost in the direction from which he had come. Back toward the ranch.

  He was being herded, Blake realized. They were on the eastern side, the wrong side of 95 now, but it had not taken much to force him to turn the first time. He could be turned again, made to re-cross the highw
ay. All his effort so far could be for nothing.

  How had Eli’s people gotten ahead of him?

  He switched out the lights and turned off the road onto a dry wash. At almost the same moment, Keira shut off the glowing screen of the map. Now, let Eli’s people prove how well they could see in the dark. Nothing nothing would force Blake back to the ranch—force him out of the profession of healing and into a life of spreading disease. Nothing!

  Lights.

  A dirt road, smooth and level, cut across the wash just ahead. And along that road came a car. Only one. It could be a coincidence—some rancher going home, some hermit, a fragment of a car family, even lost tourists. But Blake was in no mood to take chances with anyone.

  He turned onto the dirt road toward the oncoming car. Abruptly, he switched on his lights and accelerated.

  The other car braked, skidded through the dust, swerved off the road into a thick, ancient creosote bush.

  Blake sped on, knowing the dirt road must lead back to 95. He switched out his lights again, praying.

  “That was a van,” Rane said. “Eli’s people have cars and trucks, but I didn’t see any vans.”

  “You think they let us see everything?” Keira asked.

  “I don’t think that van was one of Eli’s.”

  “I don’t care whose it was,” Blake said tightly. “I’m not stopping until I reach either a hospital or the police. We’re not giving this damned disease to anyone else!”

  “When Eli comes,” Keira said softly, “it will be to kill us, recapture us, or die trying. He won’t be frightened into a ditch by lights.”

  Blake glanced at her. He could hear certainty and fear in her voice. For once, he realized, he agreed with her. Eli and his people would do absolutely anything to prevent the destruction of their way of life. He could understand that. The life they had at their nearly self-sufficient desert enclave was better than what most people had these days. But there was the disease—no, call it what it was, the invasion. And that had to be stopped at any cost.