Stranger

by Simon Clark

  I cut more wood. Sweating, I glared up at the sun. Set, damn you, set.

  Tick followed by tock followed by tick. Time dragged on. Snails moved faster than those hands of my watch. All I wanted was for it to get dark. Then I could sneak Michaela into the boat, then head for Lewis. Within the hour I’d be back home in bed. God knows I was ready to sleep twelve hours straight.

  At six in the evening the juice started to flow through the wires again. Now I could fix a meal without having to light the little camping stove. Not that I had anything else but the eggs, bread and milk Mel had brought earlier in the day. I saw she’d also left a bag of fresh mushrooms. That would be enough for ome-lets with the bread and coffee.

  I made a meal, took Michaela hers which she ate in her room. There was still a chance of callers, with it being so early in the evening.

  Mine, I ate on the porch, washed down with ice cold water. I still aimed to present a picture of normality. Even though the tension compressed my stomach so much I didn’t want to eat much, I forced down a couple of omelets and almost half the loaf. It might be a while before I got the chance to eat again. I’d also have to find a way of replacing around two weeks’ worth of food (for me, anyway) in the kitchen without drawing attention.

  At close on eight I decided to check that the batteries were charging properly on the boat. All that after-noon the thought of them nagged at me. I didn’t trust them. They were old. Maybe water had got into the electrics. Perhaps that’s why the juice had drained from them so quickly. And why the hell hadn’t I switched the boat for another? But then, that would mean hoisting the food into the replacement boat. In daylight that would be risky.

  I’d reached the cabin door when I saw Ben pull up on that old 250cc dirt bike of his. He smiled when he saw me. He was still smiling when he walked up onto the porch; then the smile turned into an angry mask as he hissed. “Greg, you idiot. They know what you’re doing. The damn Guard are on their way!”

  Nineteen

  “Michaela . . . Michaela!”

  Heightened survival instincts made her move like a cat. In a flicker of movement she appeared on the stairs, aiming the shotgun at Ben’s chest.

  “Easy,” I said as I grabbed a holdall. “This’s Ben. He’s OK.”

  “They know I’m here?” she asked.

  “And they’ll be here in around thirty seconds flat,” Ben said, his hand trembling like crazy. “I was in the editor’s office and saw the alert come up on the PD screen. I tore down through those woods like a demon.”

  “Dammit to hell.” I shook my head as I grabbed the rifle from the rack. “How did they find out so fast?”

  “Mel Tourney reported to old man Crowther that she thought you were acting strange.”

  “Figures.”

  “Christ, Greg.” Ben watched as I scooped boxes of ammo from a drawer. “What y’gonna do, shoot your way out?”

  “Not if I can help it. We’ve got to run for it. Ready, Michaela?”

  “When you are.” She moved to the doorway. “No sign of anybody yet.”

  “I reckon it will take them a good ten minutes to assemble and drive down here.” The only road down here was a switchback track that took vehicles away from this part of the shoreline before it doubled back on itself to run alongside the lake. We might make it. Just. But there was another problem now.

  “Ben, what are your plans?”

  “Plans?”

  “They’re going to find out that you tipped me off, buddy. That’s got to be a capital offense these days.”

  “He can come with us,” Michaela said.

  Quick as the old greased lightning I stuffed my file of notes and cuttings into the bag, pulled on my leather jacket, then shouldered the rifle. “Looks as if you’ve no choice, Ben.”

  Michaela called out, “I see a cloud of dust . . . yup . . . around a dozen cars coming this way.”

  “That’ll be the Guard; make for the boat, Ben.” Ben stood there, his fingers seeming to vibrate. He’d seized up solid. “You mean leave?”

  “You can’t stay here, Ben, not now.”

  “You fucking idiot, Valdiva! You’ve killed us, that’s what you’ve done! Why couldn’t you leave her wherever you found her?”

  I heard the roar of approaching motors. “Ben, there isn’t time for this. Run. Just fucking run, will you?”

  Michaela already tore down the path to the jetty.

  “Oh, man, you’re an insane—” Ben started saying it, but I finished it by shoving him through the screen onto the porch. “Run!”

  The sight of those cars barreling down the road did it for him. He followed Michaela, running so hard his arms became a blur. Me? I didn’t give my home of ten months a backward glance. With the holdall and the rifle bouncing like wild animals on my shoulder, I pounded across the dirt.

  By the time I’d reached the jetty Michaela had already pulled the plug on the power cable that had been juicing the batteries. “Ben! Get the rope at the stern. . . . No, don’t untie it, pull it up over the post.”

  The Guard were maybe half a mile away, clearly visible in the low sun that glinted like gun flashes from their windshields. They swept by bushes so fast they ripped off leaves and raised dust devils that swirled around them. I knew there’d be guys standing in the backs of the pickups, rifles cocked and ready. Jesus, this was going to be tight.

  I made it to the boat’s control panel in one jump that sent the whole thing tilting madly to one side.

  “Careful,” Ben yelled. “You’ll tip us in.”

  “Keep your heads down!” I roared at them. “They’ll blast us with everything they’ve got.”

  Sweet Jesus, I hoped those batteries had taken the charge. With the sun shining on the gauge I couldn’t see whether the needle was in the red or not. One thing in our favor—you didn’t have to fire up the motor like you would a diesel or gas engine. You switched the thing on like a goddam Hoover. The downside? There’s always a downside, isn’t there? The thing had the horsepower to match.

  With the electric motor rising to a hum the boat moved away from the jetty. Slow, too damn slow. These things were built for tourists to amble around the lake while sipping Chardonnay or lazily peeling an orange.

  I looked back to see the jetty moving away, the water white from the boat’s propeller. Cars, pickups, a police truck with lights flashing and siren whooping raced up to the quay. Michaela and Ben squatted on their haunches watching the Guard jumping down from the pickups, then running along the jetty.

  Michaela chambered a round into the shotgun and aimed.

  “Keep your heads down,” I shouted at the pair. “I’ll take it out of sight ’round the headland.”

  I swung the wheel over, opened the throttle as far as it would go. On the jetty those guys were in a rage. In their eyes I was a traitor, I guess. I’d disobeyed the Caucus. I’d bought a stranger onto the island just like the old cop, Finch. But I had reasons that were good reasons. So I believed, anyway.

  Then the Guard blasted us. Man, whatever they had they let fly. Even though we were more than two hundred yards out in the lake I heard a frenzy of cracks and thumps.

  I threw myself into the bottom of the boat, allowing the thing to steer itself. The plastic windshield turned white as milk as buckshot tore into it. Bullets hit the hull as if a lunatic with a hammer beat it with a mad rhythm. Flakes of paint swirled all around us like snow. Michaela knelt up with the shotgun.

  “Aim over their heads,” Ben yelled. “I know those people.”

  “So why are they trying their damnedest to kill us then?” She squeezed the trigger, sending a bunch of shot back at the jetty. I saw she had aimed high. But still low enough to make the Guard duck their heads and spoil their aim. She ducked down herself behind the gunwale. “They weren’t ready for this kind of shooting,” she called at me. “They’re armed with shotguns and handguns. They’re not going to sink us with those.”

  Yeah, maybe. Even so, there were enough hits to bite chunks
of plastic out of the case that housed the control panel. If a bullet sliced a cable we’d wind up drifting like a leaf on the water. It wouldn’t be long before the Guard grabbed a boat and came out to find us.

  The firing from the jetty began to falter as they emptied their guns. Now was the time to see where we were headed. I risked a look and saw we were heading straight for the rocks of the headland. I swung the boat’s nose ’round and took her ’round the reef. Seconds later the tip of the headland slipped between the Guard and us.

  “You can put your heads up now. They can’t see us.” I glanced back to see heads raised. Flecks of white paint salted Michaela’s dark hair. They both looked dazed. “Are you two all right?”

  They said they hadn’t been hit. But I noticed Ben running trembling hands over his limbs and chest like he couldn’t believe that a slug hadn’t found its way through the hull to pierce a lung or arm.

  The boat had taken a mauling. Thin jets of water squirted in through the hull where bullets had punctured us below the waterline. All being well, the pumps in the bilges should cope with that for the short trip to Lewis, that godforsaken ghost town.

  Come to think of it, the place was no fair exchange for Sullivan, with its bars, diners, stores and warehouses bulging with food. But I’d made my bed, as my mother would have said. Time to go lie in it.

  The only sting of regret? Yeah, there was one: looking back at the headland to see the mound of milk-white stones that marked the graves of Chelle and Mom, I knew I’d never be able to visit them again.

  After a while I swung the boat so its nose pointed across the lake to Lewis. Even though the sun shone I saw what a forbidding place it was. Skeletons of blackened buildings. Ghostly dark voids behind shattered windows. Streets lousy with human skulls where a peeled human face might roll by in the breeze like a tumbleweed. Boy, oh boy. It looked like the ’burbs of hell.

  Twenty

  Ben hated it; you could see that. He helped pass the supplies to where I stood at the bottom of the harbor steps, but he hated it. The idea of being in Lewis terrified him. Being in the company of a stranger sweated him with fear. He kept shooting looks back across at Sullivan with its tennis courts, neatly trimmed lawns, comfortable homes, supermarkets and ordered lives.

  I nodded across the water. “You can’t go back there, Ben, you know that?”

  Again he shot a longing look at the tidy little town on the far side of the lake. I suddenly had a mental image of him taking the wheel of the boat and powering home. But he shook his head, his expression worried as hell. “I know,” he said. “Here, don’t forget your rifle.”

  “Thanks.” Then I looked at Michaela. “We won’t be able to carry all this food at once.”

  “I’ll go ahead with Ben, then bring back help.”

  Ben nodded, that expression of uncertainty pasted all over his face. Walking through a burned-out city ruin with a stranger for company must have been as appealing to him as stepping out through hell with Satan on his arm. Like a man going to his execution he walked up the steps (taking them one unhappy riser at a time). “It’s the first time I’ve been off the island in more than six months,” he admitted. “It feels weird.”

  “You’ll get used to it,” Michaela told him crisply. “You got a gun?”

  “No.”

  A gun in Ben’s hands with those twitchy fingers?

  “We’ll have a spare you can have.”

  “Well, I don’t use guns. I don’t think I’d—”

  “You’ve got to, buddy. If you want to last more than a day out here.”

  His look of uncertainty darkened into one I’d call depression. He appeared to me a man on a suicide mission. Before he picked up a sack of cans he shot me a glare that as good as said Valdiva, you moron. How could you do this to me?

  Michaela paid no attention. Turning to me, she jerked her head in the direction of Sullivan. “You think those guys will follow us across here?”

  “I doubt it,” Ben said with feeling.

  I shook my head. “Unlikely. They’re terrified of contamination. And like Ben, they’ve lost the knack of leaving the place.”

  “Yeah, I lost the knack,” he muttered under his breath. “Lost it big time when everyone started dying.”

  “Greg,” she said, “you best sit tight here and guard the food.”

  Ben looked ’round at the dead tomb of a town. “Guard the food? You think there are actually people here who’d try and take it.”

  “I don’t think,” she told him. “I know.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Stick close to me.” Shouldering a holdall that clanked with cans, she rested the shotgun barrel on her other shoulder. Safety off, I noticed.

  “We’ll be back in twenty minutes,” she told me; then, with Ben following, his head turning this way and that as he anxiously scanned the wrecked buildings, they walked away.

  So I sat there in the ghost town with the sun going down. Shadows crept along the street like the buildings themselves bled darkness. It oozed over sidewalks, joined with more pools of shade and crept toward me. Cool air moved in from the lake. When the shadows crawled over me at last the chill of the evening slithered over my skin. Silence oozed in with the coming gloom. Even the birds stopped their chirping. I began to notice the smell, too. That compost smell that made you think of mushrooms, damp basements and decay.

  Twenty minutes became half an hour. Still no sign of Michaela or her people to collect the supplies. They’re not coming back, Valdiva. . . . Face it, you’re alone.

  To close off the thought I checked that the rifle was loaded (even though I knew it was), then counted how many cartons of shells I’d stuffed into the bag. Nine cartons. That should be ample for a while.

  I stared along the street, expecting to see Michaela or Ben turn the corner at any second. As I stared I suddenly had this sensation of cool air playing on the back of my neck.

  Someone’s behind you.

  I twisted fast to see who was there. Maybe Crowther junior couldn’t resist making the trip across the water to blow off my head when I wasn’t looking. Instead of Crowther leering down a rifle at me I saw a rat slinking through all that crud on the ground. It must have gotten the scent of the food I’d brought. Its claws rustled shreds of paper. When I stood up it disappeared under a burnt-out truck.

  Forty minutes had crawled by since Michaela and Ben had left. Maybe she’d need to find her people if they’d relocated in the last twenty-four hours. That yard where they were camping was hardly the lap of luxury. They might have found a house somewhere that hadn’t been trashed.

  Darkness was coming down a storm now. Clouds ballooned over the horizon to bury the sun as it rested on the hills. Soon nothing remained but a bloody smear of red across the western quarter of the sky. It grew cooler. I zipped up my leather jacket, then shivered to the roots of my bones. Now I found I couldn’t sit still. I paced the stretch of road where we’d stacked the food supplies. A police car rotted by the ferry terminal. Another rat sat in the back seat cleaning its whiskers. Across in Sullivan the town lights burned bright. Even though it wasn’t much more than three miles away, now it could have been on Neptune. Ben and I wouldn’t be welcomed back there with open arms for sure. In fact, it was my guess that the Caucus would issue an order that we be shot on sight if we even came within spitting distance of the place.

  With the barrel of the rifle resting on my shoulder I nosed into the abandoned ticket hall of the ferry office (bread bandits had even torn the carpets up), then I crossed the street to look into what remained of a general store (nothing but empty boxes and baby bones). Next to it was a hotel that seemed pretty much intact. A canvas awning projected over the sidewalk. It looked dirty but otherwise undamaged. I began to ask myself if this would serve as a place to stay until we decided what we should do next.

  I backstepped into the road, looking up at the six-storied building. Its facade could have been a tear-stained face. Rain teamed with soot from the fires that des
troyed most of Lewis to create the illusion. Black bands ran down from each window. A pretty little bitch she wasn’t, but she might do for we poor waifs and strays who had no roof over our heads. Hell, even the glass in the windows was intact. And get this; this was the odd thing. All the glass in the windows must have been set at a certain precise angle because as I looked up into the dark face of the building I could see my reflection in a dozen or more windows.

  I gazed up, and my reflection gazed down with a wide-eyed intensity that—

  Shit. Those aren’t reflections, Valdiva.

  There, looking down at me, with a silent, brooding intensity, were men’s faces. There was something alien about the way they didn’t move. Only their eyes moved to follow me as I, not taking my eyes off them, edged slowly away.

  Only when I had moved out of their line of sight did I turn my back on them. Then I moved quickly—but not running, not looking scared—because if I ran, a little bird with terrible frightened eyes told me, that would provoke those guys in the hotel into chasing me.

  Ahead of me a group of men blocked my way. Pulling back the rifle bolt, I raised the muzzle, aimed.

  “Greg. Whoa . . . it’s us. Don’t shoot. Don’t shoot.”

  I wiped the perspiration from my eyes to see Ben waving his hands above his head. With him were the people I’d seen yesterday, including Michaela. The others were more interested in the food bags. They hurried forward to drop down onto their knees, where they rooted through the supplies like excited kids at Christmas rifling through their stockings.

  “Corned beef . . . hey, tinned chili.”

  “Bread! Beautiful white bread!”

  “Creamed chicken.”

  “Get a load of this, tinned peaches. Wow!”

  Heart thumping, I ran up to Michaela. “Get your people to pick up this stuff, then get out of here.”