Stranger

  She nodded. “That’s our experience. It looks as if that funky old Jumpy bug just took a little longer to get into the Yankee bloodstream.” She tried to talk in a lighthearted way, but I could see from her face that she was deadly serious. “The question we’ve been asking ourselves is, why haven’t we been infected yet?”

  “Maybe some natural resistance.”

  “Maybe. Or maybe we just managed to keep out of infected areas by chance. Just as you’ve put yourself in quarantine on this island.”

  “Then we’re living on borrowed time? It’s going to come here whatever we do?”

  She sipped her water. “Which is a depressing thought, you have to admit.”

  “You know, I have a friend who can’t stop asking questions. For months he wondered why the whole country fell apart so quickly. How millions of people with the best armed forces and the best medical care in the world could just go.” I snapped my fingers. “Im-plode in a matter of days. Not even weeks.”

  “You reckon the question he’d be asking right now would be: Were Americans in the early phase of the disease when the hornets launched this—what did the press call it?—Tet offensive and rioted all over the damn place?”

  “Makes you wonder, doesn’t it, Michaela?”

  “It does make you wonder, Greg. It makes you wonder what’s gonna happen next. And that question terrifies me. Oh, God.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing . . .” She shrugged, tired-looking. “I feel like hell, that’s all.” She shot me a faint smile. “Those days on the road are catching up with me. I don’t think we’ve slept more than two hours straight in the last week.”

  “Wait there, I’ll run you a bath.”

  “A what?”

  “I’ll go fill the tub. While you have a soak in some hot water I’ll load food into the boat.”

  Again that incredulous look. “You mean to say you’ve got hot water as well?”

  “Sure. There’s an electric immersion heater. The electricity will have been cut at midnight, but it stays hot in the tank for hours.”

  “Jeez. You’re the kind of guy who girls like me want to marry.” She suddenly blushed. “Take that as a figure of speech . . . but I wouldn’t say no to a bath.”

  I stood up, ready to go run the water for her, but she waved her hand. “No, just point me at your bathroom and I’ll do the rest. You best get those supplies loaded.”

  “It’s at the top of the stairs. First door on the right.”

  “Thank you, Greg. I mean it . . . but just don’t go killing me before I’ve had at least ten minutes up to my chin in hot water, will you?” Wearily, she shook her head. “Sorry. Bad-taste joke. I’m terrible for that. I always joke about inappropriate subjects. But then, didn’t Freud write a paper about that?” She smiled again. “Sorry, Greg. I’m so tired I’m rambling.”

  Within moments of her going upstairs I heard the water running into the tub. I grabbed a pair of heavy-duty holdalls and packed as much canned and dried food as I could carry. After three trips down to the boat I’d emptied the kitchen of every last bag of rice, pasta and bottle of beer. For a moment I considered taking the truck up to Ben’s to collect more food. I knew he’d got access to a cold store that was fed by electricity all the time. There’d be cheeses and sides of beef there, but to do that I might as well drive with the horn blaring and a sign on the truck roof that read JUST GETTING FOOD FOR STRANGERS, YOU MORONS .

  Then what?

  The townspeople would either lynch us there and then, or maybe they’d do it nice and slow, like they did with Lynne, and pile rocks on our chests until we suffocated. Those nice smiling bastards of Sullivan really knew how to squeeze the revenge juice out of a victim.

  It took me less than an hour to make those trips to get all the food onto the boat. It wasn’t a great supply, as you can imagine. But it should keep Michaela’s group fed for a few days at least. With luck they might be able to find a house tucked away in the woods that hadn’t been picked clean.

  I returned to the cabin to find the lamp had burned out and the place in near darkness, with all the blinds shut. Closing the screen door behind me, I listened. It had that special kind of silence, the tomb silence that seems more than there being no sound. There was a sense of the building holding its breath. Secret, secret, secret . . . there’s something hiding here you shouldn’t see, Valdiva.

  Immediately the thought came to me that Michaela had been discovered. That maybe Crowther and his buddies were waiting in a darkened room with rifles cocked.

  Shit. Where was Michaela? Why was the place so damned quiet? I’d only been down at the jetty less than ten minutes. Surely I’d have heard if some guys had pounced on her. Not risking relighting the lamp, I allowed my eyes to adjust to the thin wash of daylight filtering through the blinds. Then, walking as quietly as I could, I went upstairs. A candle still burned in the bathroom. The tub had been emptied. Trying to move like I was nothing more solid than a wisp of smoke, I crossed the landing to my bedroom.

  In the gloom I saw a figure lying on my bed. Slowly, slowly, slowly, I eased myself into the bedroom. Michaela lay on the bed. She must have decided to lie down for a moment (while no doubt promising herself, No, I won’t let myself fall asleep), but there she lay, dead to the world, wearing nothing but my big bath towel, her long hair spread out against the white sheet in gleaming dark strands. Her breathing was slow, rhythmic. The poor kid couldn’t have slept in a clean bed for weeks, if not months.

  At that moment, as I looked down at her, my stomach muscles twitched.

  She’d turned over in her sleep, the movement making the towel come adrift where she’d fastened it high on her chest. The twitch came again. Following that came a tingle in my fingertips.

  This was another kind of twitch. Not that fatal twitch that signaled I would attack. No, no, my man, this was very different.

  For the first time I saw how beautiful she was. The dark arches of her eyebrows. The relaxed face that was a near perfect heart shape. She possessed a waiflike beauty that made her look so vulnerable asleep there on my bed. The towel had slipped down, exposing a smooth mound of breast. She breathed deeply in her sleep, raising her chest, making the towel slip down farther to expose skin almost as far as her nipple.

  I moved quickly, closing the door behind me before going downstairs. Seconds later I’d lit the spare lamp in the kitchen and got busy making a jug of hot coffee on the camping stove. Let her sleep, I told myself. We can spare another hour here.

  Boy, was I wrong. Was I wrong by a wide, country mile.

  Eighteen

  “Oh, hell’s bells.” I used the phrase Mom would use when Chelle spilled her milk on the couch or the crotchety old car wouldn’t start.

  “What’s wrong?” Michaela whispered from behind me in the boat.

  “Damn battery’s dead.” I let out an annoyed hiss between my teeth as I checked the battery meter. Yup, the needle was in the red. Deep, deep in the red. “Damn thing . . . it runs off truck batteries, but from the look of them they’re older than my grandmother. They’re just not up to holding a charge for long.”

  Michaela glanced anxiously at the thinning mist out on the water. “We’ll be in clear view soon. Can you find a replacement?”

  “Not here.”

  “How about recharging them?”

  “I can only do that tonight when the juice starts flowing,” I said, nodding at the power cable that ran along the jetty. “But it will take around five hours to get enough charge in the batteries for a round trip across the lake.”

  “Then we’re stuck.”

  “At least until dark.”

  “Shit. My friends need that food.”

  “Will they wait for you?”

  She shrugged. “They will unless some hornets find them. Then they’ll have to run for it.”

  “Damn.” I slammed the boat’s steering wheel with my fist. “I should have checked that those batteries weren’t goddam antiques before I
took the boat. Look at the crust on them.”

  “Don’t blame yourself. After all, you weren’t planning this kind of operation when you took the trip across there, were you?”

  “No. The truth was, I’d just downed a bottle of whiskey and needed to get out of Paradiseville here for a change of air.”

  She tilted her head as if to ask why.

  “Long story. I’ll tell you another time, but we need to get these supplies covered up. Can you give me a hand with the tarp?”

  “What now?” she asked as she helped me pull the sheet over the bags of canned food and packets that I’d dumped into the bottom of the boat.

  “You need to keep out of sight until dark. Then I’ll run you across the water.” I stepped off the boat onto the jetty and held out my hand.

  She shook her head. “I’ll lay low here.”

  “You can’t stay in the boat all day.”

  “But from what you’ve said, Greg, if the townspeople find out that you’re helping me you’ll be in big trouble.”

  “Don’t worry, they won’t find you. All you need to do is sit tight in the spare bedroom in the cabin. Then we’ll leave after dark.”

  “OK . . . if you’re sure?”

  “Sure I’m sure; now give me your hand.”

  I grasped her slender hand and helped her off the boat. After that I pulled the cable that ran from the boat’s batteries and plugged it into the jetty power point. OK, the batteries weren’t tip-top. But with a full charge they’d make the return trip easily enough tonight.

  With the mist now melting fast we walked quickly back to the cabin. There, I showed Michaela the spare bedroom. At least she’d have the day to rest up.

  “Don’t raise the blinds,” I told her. “Or use the electric light when the power comes on this evening. I don’t get many people down here, but there’s always a chance one or two will drop by.”

  Yeah, it’s sods law, as the saying goes. No. One or two didn’t drop by; there was a steady flow. As if the whole freaking island had sniffed my little secret on the breeze and wanted to come and see the stranger for themselves.

  First by was Ben. He stood there on the porch with his hands shaking worse than ever. He said he’d been down the day before, couldn’t raise me and guessed I was sleeping. Clearly he was concerned that I had done something stupid after Lynne had been murdered by the townspeople (no, he didn’t use those words exactly). But I told him my eyes had hurt like hell after getting a face full of Mace, and that I’d stayed in bed for the day with a companion by the name of Jack Daniel’s.

  “I don’t blame you,” he said, his fingers fluttering like butterflies. Poor kid really was worried about me. “I just didn’t want you to—to go and do anything stupid.”

  “I stayed home,” I repeated the lie (repeat a lie three times and it starts to sound like the truth—even to the person who mouthed the lie) but of course I did do something stupid. I took a nighttime cruise across to the ghost town. I got mixed up with something weird called a hive and a bunch of people late of New York City. Now there was an eighteen-year-old stranger hiding up in a bedroom in my cabin. But I couldn’t tell Ben that. He wouldn’t snitch, I knew that much; but he might give something away with that nervous, jumpy (note: small j jumpy) manner of his. Besides, it wouldn’t be fair to burden him with my little secrets, would it?

  He wanted me to roll up to his apartment in town for breakfast and maybe burn off a few hours listening to some music. I thanked him but said I needed to saw up a mountain of logs for the firewood deliveries (although I had no intention of doing the rounds that day).

  I decided it would look good to any outsiders passing by if, for me, it was business as normal. So I fired up Big Bertha the chainsaw, then started chewing up logs. Yeah, business as usual, but in my mind I walked up-stairs to see Michaela lying there on the bed, no doubt listening to the buzz of the saw. Even though I tried to keep the image from my mind I recalled how she looked last night, lying on my bed naked but for the towel, her hair fanned out onto the sheet, her eyelids closed, those dark eyebrows that formed a pair of neat twin arches, the smooth rounded shape of her breasts and the way they—

  Hell. The chainsaw bucked up at my face as it hit a nail in the wood. You’re going to loose your nose if you don’t concentrate, Valdiva. But then, it was hard to concentrate with Michaela lying on the bed upstairs, maybe gazing at the ceiling with her eyes that were as glossy and as black as onyx.

  What’s more, if I managed to shut off images of her I replaced them with images of the thing that filled the apartment room as completely as water in a fish tank. The organic smell of the thing came back to me, the heat of it when I touched it. How that face came lunging out at it me. That was weird, believe me. Weird in a dark and dangerous way.

  But somehow a familiar way—that was something that made no sense at all. There should be nothing familiar about it. I’d seen nothing like it before, had I?

  Maybe I’d subconsciously linked it to the head Ben found in the driftwood a few days back. That was weird and inexplicable as well. There it was, lodged in the branches. A human head with a spare set of eyes bursting out through the skin of the cheek like a pair of tumors. Shit weird, if you ask me. Maybe that block of pink gel had got—

  “Greg . . . Greg? Turn off the . . .”

  I suddenly realized that someone was shouting my name. Killing the saw’s motor, I pulled up my goggles.

  “Hello, Mel. What can I do for you?”

  Mel was an easygoing redhead of around twenty-five who ran the fresh produce round. Milk, butter, bread, that kind of thing. She grew marijuana with her tomatoes on the other side of Sullivan. Although she wasn’t one of the town bastards she’d got old family going way back. You know the sort; she might be one of us today, but she could as easily switch to one of them tomorrow. It might seem a harsh judgment, but at a Christmas party she nearly sucked my damn face off, only the following day she pretended nothing had happened.

  Today she seemed her friendly self. “I tried to leave your milk and bread in the kitchen, but you’ve locked your door.”

  “Have I?” I shrugged, aiming to look casual. “I must have done it out of habit.”

  “So I haven’t been able to put your milk in the refrigerator. I put it under the table. It’s not in the sun at the moment, but it might spoil if it’s left there too long.”

  “Thanks. I’ll go move it.” I laid down the chainsaw, dusted my hands on the seat of my pants and headed off to the cabin. I was surprised to see that she’d followed me.

  “How are you for fruit and tomatoes? I’ve got loads with me if you need more.”

  “I’ve got plenty, thanks. The milk and bread will do me fine. I might go up to Ben’s later. He mentioned that someone was holding a barbecue.”

  Shut up, Valdiva. I realized I was talking too much. I was cooking up excuses I didn’t need.

  Mel still didn’t leave.

  She’s seen Michaela somehow.

  The smile on my face felt more unreal by the second. “Can I get you anything, Mel?”

  She glanced back at the truck. I saw a young guy there. I didn’t know him, but I’d seen him and Mel hand-in-hand a week or two back. Her latest flame, I guessed. He was also a pal of Crowther junior—the man who tried to rearrange my features with a hunk of firewood. Sweat trickled between my shoulder blades.

  What’s more, Mel wore a sudden secret smile. “Mel?” I prompted, wondering what was coming next.

  “Greg.” Her voice dropped. “This is something you don’t want to go spreading around . . .”

  She knows about the outsider in my cabin. “Just between us, Greg, I’ve grown a beautiful crop of grass. Do you want some? I’ve got a little of the first cut in the truck.”

  Jesus. I thought she knew everything about Michaela, and all she was doing was pushing some homegrown narcotic. I shook my head, smiling with relief. She probably thought I was grinning like a loon.

  “No, thanks, Mel,” I s
aid.

  “Go on, just take a little as a gift.” She leaned toward me, her eyes glittering. “You need something to help you to relax . . . you know, after what happened to Lynne.”

  “I’m fine,” I told her in an honest-to-goodness friendly way. “Thanks, but I’m just going to get stuck into my work. That’ll help best of all.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I’m sure, Mel. Thanks again. I appreciate it.”

  At last she went back to the truck. I watched her boyfriend fire up the engine and drive her away. She sounded the soul of compassion, the embodiment of neighborliness. But I recall she was one of the first to put a brick on Lynne’s chest. Funny old world, huh?

  That afternoon a few more people dropped by. Old man Crowther with a request for more firewood. I’d drop it off, I said. No, he said, he’d be obliged if he could take some right then, as he’d run clean out; his brother had caught a batch of fish; they were going to eat them while they were fresh. Blah, blah, blah. So I carried bundles of wood to his shiny Lexus and put them in the trunk. Miss Bertholly called. We regret what happened on Monday, was the gist of what she said, but we live in extraordinary times that call for extraordinary measures to maintain our security and our safety. So, please, Mr. Valdiva. No hard feelings. We want to embrace you into our community. . . . Blah, blah, blah.

  Then Mr. Gerletz trundled by to make sure his boats were all present and correct. I thought he’d check the lone battery cruiser tied to the jetty just down from my cabin, but he lumbered by in that old pickup of his. Almost immediately after that came my twice-weekly delivery of two-stroke for Big Bertha. Gordi Harper always wore a checkered shirt like a jacket over his regular shirt, even on the hottest of days. And this was a warm one. He rolled the drum of two-stroke into the tool-shed, took out the empty, then rolled it back to his truck. He waved. I waved back.

  As each visitor left I shot a look up at the bedroom window, hoping so hard it hurt inside that I wouldn’t see Michaela’s face in the frame. But she had a powerful streak of survival. The blinds stayed shut. She must have lain there all day, not moving, just in case a movement of air disturbed a blind or a telltale-tit creak of a floorboard might give her away.