Stranger

by Simon Clark

  There were seventeen of us in those log cabins. I shared a big room overlooking the river with Michaela. When nights dropped cooler as fall crumbled into winter we learned new tricks to keep each other warm.

  Life continued its peaceful progress deep into the winter. North winds brought deep snow. Christmas came. We kept the parties going: we were a family; we were having fun. Christmas morning I crept out of the warm bed, leaving Michaela sleeping there with her hair spilling out onto the pillow. There’d been a fresh fall of snow. Now the world seemed to be made up of horizontal black and white lines. First came the white-covered lawn, then the black line of the fence. Beyond that a snow-covered meadow ran smoothly down to the thick black river. Beyond that were snow-covered fields and lines of black forest, until a dark horizon yielded to white, snow laden skies. Christmas Day. Soon everything would change.

  The turkey might have come from bunker tins, but it still tasted good. Boy went to bring more wood for the fire that blazed in the hearth. A second later he was back.

  “Get your guns! They’re coming up the hill!”

  Hornets. Thousands of them. Tens of thousands. They surrounded the hill on every side. A gray tide surrounding an island. They moved like human slugs. Slowly getting closer and closer. Zak and Tony ran for their guns. Michaela reached out, grabbed my hand, held it tight. “We’re not running . . . and we’re not fighting, Greg,” she said gently. “There are too many of them.”

  That was when a kind of calm crept down on us as gently as the snow falling from the sky. We stood there out on the lawn. We watched them advance slowly across the snowdrifts, turning the landscape from white to filthy gray.

  Boy walked a few paces down the hill as if to meet them halfway. He was unarmed. Not that it mattered now. I knew there were too many. And for once the muscles in my stomach didn’t react. My breathing was steady. My heart had the good grace to beat with a slow, steady rhythm. No one spoke. No one even moved. We just waited, knowing that everything was moving to a close. Whatever we’d planned or dreamed about, this huge cycle of events had reached its end. But we’d done the impossible. We’d formed bonds in our community that had never broken. We wouldn’t be the ones to break them now.

  Michaela’s hand gripped mine. I watched as the mass of gray resolved itself into thousands of individuals moving toward us through the snow. I saw the gray faces, the snowflakes speckling beards and hair. Their eyes fixed hard on us. Moments later the first ones moved away from the crowd that stretched for mile upon mile before us. The big man moved toward Boy, a hand outstretched. Boy never flinched. He stood, watching. Waiting for the final act.

  In human beings the strongest instinct is to survive. In these creatures now moving across the snowdrifts toward us I realized that their overriding instinct was to kill. That is, to kill their enemy—us. They weren’t going to stop to eat, to find shelter; they’d walk a hundred miles through the snow to snuff out a single member of the human race. And that, I saw, was where Mother Nature had made her big mistake.

  The man was a near giant. He waded through the snow toward Boy. His eyes locked onto the child’s face; he stretched out his arms as if to encircle the small neck with his huge hands. Then the man faltered. He struggled to raise his arms higher and failed. The blue lips twitched. That’s when Boy himself reached out and, without any fuss, without any exertion, pushed the giant in the chest. The man crashed down on his back. He didn’t even attempt to struggle to his feet. He lay there panting. I looked at his feet. Every single toe had vanished, eaten away by frostbite. Through the creature’s rags I saw a chest that was barely covered by gray skin. Cheekbones protruded through the man’s face. His blue lips were split and bleeding, destroyed by sheer cold. For a second his eyes locked on mine, the jaw working like he wanted to speak. But then with a sigh his head rolled back against the snow.

  “He’s dead.” Boy gazed down at the lifeless face in awe. “He’s dead, Michaela.”

  Michaela looked at the crowd toiling up the hill through the biting wind. Then she looked up at me, her eyes glistening. “They’re all dying, aren’t they?”

  For a while we watched them struggle toward us. One after another fell exhausted into the snow where they died, arms outstretched toward us.

  “Nature got it wrong this time,” I said, hearing the hush in my voice.

  I looked at the others as smiles transformed their faces. Zak slapped Tony on the back. Ben ran forward through the dying multitudes, whooping wildly and shouting, “Extinction! All right! All fucking right!”

  How long can you stand there on a freezing Christmas Day and watch men and women—or things that had once been men and women—drop down dead from starvation and frostbite? An hour, two hours? But then, we carried an instinct to survive. Before the cold damaged us we returned to the cabin. There, we sat, drinking beers and talking about what we’d seen and what it meant for us. We expected that there’d be at least one knock on the door. But there wasn’t. Not one.

  Fourth of July

  “Call me crazy,” I told them. They did call me crazy. They tried to persuade me not to do it. Only I am crazy. Or at least half crazy, I guess. Only when they saw that I’d go alone if need be did they come, too. On the morning of the Fourth of July I loaded the Jeep with fireworks. I’d found them in a warehouse in the weeks after the hornets had died by the thousand outside our cabins.

  Now we lived in a different place, of course. In houses by a lake. We’re alone. No hornets bother us now. We all agreed that they’d simply starved or frozen to death during the winter. We didn’t see any human beings either. Most of us believed we were the last people on the planet.

  Me? I thought different. That was the reason I drove out that morning with fireworks piled in the open-top Jeep. Ben, Zak, Tony and Michaela came, too. Partly to see what I did, partly to stop me doing anything too crazy. I drove all day, heading for the highest mountain on the map possessing a road to the top. The little Jee p that was a veteran of Vietnam climbed steadily all the way to the top. From there I could see a hundre d miles of forest in every direction. Michaela and the rest watched me as if maybe even more craziness was running through my blood. But it was something I had to do. If this didn’t work I’d go back down the mountainside with Michaela. I’d agree that we were alone in the world. And we’d live the rest of our lives as well as we could with that understanding. But I had to give it one last shot.

  First we had to wait for the sun to go down. I sat on the hood of the Jeep gazing out over a hundred miles of America. She’d gone through hell during the last eighteen months, but she still looked as beautiful as she’d always done. Beneath perfect blue July skies I allowed my eyes to roam over forests, rivers and lakes. From here I could even see Lake Coben, with Sullivan showing as a pale speck on the shoreline. Of course the town was finished now. I’d been back there to walk through the deserted streets. The courthouse lay in ashes. Even my old cabin had been burned to the ground. Everyone had gone. Or were dead. I’d seen old man Crowther and that son of his decomposing on their own driveway. Their bodies were lying with their hands ’round each other’s throats. What drove them to kill each other I’ll never know. Nor do I care. They deserved each other.

  After that I left the ghost town to visit the white block of stones where I’d buried Mom and Chelle. Maybe I’d buried secrets with them, too. More than I dare spec-ulate about. I picked up a football-sized piece of rock and stood it on the mound of stones. “There,” I told them as they lay together in the ground. “It’s finished now.”

  Then I drove out of the place without looking back. Now I sat and I waited. No one said anything as the sun slipped out of the sky to sink into the horizon. As the stars came out I fired the first rocket. It climbed, leaving a trail of fire. A thousand feet above the mountaintop it burst, sending out red and silver balls of light.

  In a near whisper Tony said, “Happy Fourth of July.” I fired another. A huge chrysanthemum of purple sparks expanded to cover half the sky
. The explosion rolled down the mountainside and out across the face of a darkened America. I gazed outward, too, searching for the light of a house or even a campfire in the distance.

  There was nothing.

  I fired another rocket. It roared upward to break open, spilling streams of gold and silver. For the next two hours I fired a rocket every fifteen minutes. By midnight I’d reached the last one.

  Michaela slipped her arms ’round me. “Don’t let it bother you, Greg. Even if we are alone we can make this work.”

  The last rocket rose upward. It seemed to ascend right into the canopy of stars. Even when the powder had burned out it still floated upward, as if gravity could no longer restrain it. Then, at last, it burst without a sound. A waterfall of colored lights cascaded gently earthward—vivid blues, reds, silvers, yellows, greens—that seemed for a moment to become part of the night sky.

  “That’s the last one, Greg.” Zak spoke gently. “There’s beer in the Jeep. I know I could do with one right now.”

  The road where the Jeep sat lay just a few yards down the slope. In a moment I’d have to return to it, then head home, knowing I’d failed.

  Ben slapped me on the back. “You gave it a good shot, Greg. Even if there’s no one else out there we’re going to stick together. We can live on the food in the bunker for years. There’s enough gas there to . . .”

  His voice faded. Way, way to the north, just on the edge of visibility, a spark flickered on the horizon, then slowly faded.

  Ben breathed out. “Oh, my . . .”

  Zak turned to the south. “Greg, Michaela, look.”

  Tony grabbed my arm. “And over there, behind you.”

  Slowly, without fuss, without sound, skyrockets burst one after another on the far horizons. The nearest couldn’t have been any less than fifty miles away. But that didn’t matter. They were there. They were fired by human hands. And as dozens of rockets rose upward to burst in the sky on that Fourth of July night I knew without question that I was witnessing one of the most beautiful sights I’d ever seen.

  And that can’t be a bad way to bring this account of what happened to me to an end, can it?

  So just keep smiling. Keep hanging on in there. Because together we’re going to make it.

  Contents

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-one

  Twenty-two

  Twenty-three

  Twenty-four

  Twenty-five

  Twenty-six

  Twenty-seven

  Twenty-eight

  Twenty-nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-one

  Thirty-two

  Thirty-three

  Thirty-four

  Thirty-five

  Thirty-six

  Thirty-seven

  Thirty-eight

  Thirty-nine

  Forty

  Forty-one

  Forty-two

  Forty-three

  Forty-four

  Forty-five

  Forty-six

  Forty-seven

  Forty-eight

  Forty-nine

  Fifty

  Fifty-one

  Fifty-two

  Fifty-three

  Christmas

  Fourth of July