The Forbidden Zone

by Whitley Strieber

  "Take it easy, Ellen," Brian said. But then he saw where she was looking. There was movement in the brush, coming toward them.

  Then he heard a siren, thin but unmistakable. He let a moment pass, another. They all listened, nobody making a sound. The boys knew how to count the changes in tone as the vehicle maneuvered through the town. "It's turned onto Main," Chris said.

  "It's the fire truck," his brother announced. A policeman's kids could tell just by the note which service was involved.

  Brian saw what looked like a long, thin tree limb appear above the line of the weeds.

  The hand spread, the claw-filed nails arcing to hooks. Then a second one appeared, gliding above the moonlit grass. Behind them another shadow slipped across the driveway.

  He heard more slithering, this time very close.

  A long wire rose over them, looking for all the world like a gigantic lobster's feeler. It danced in the air, swept down, touched Chris's shoulder. He skittered away, slapping at himself.

  "Only a moth, Chris!"

  "OK, Uncle Brian." But he continued to clutch the place on his shoulder where he'd been touched.

  The timbre of the siren changed. "It's turned," Joey announced as the sound faded.

  A coldness clutched Brian's heart, the dark seemed about to suffocate him. He ran a few steps down the driveway. "It's going down Queen's, it's leaving!" The raw bellow of his own voice shocked him.

  Loi slipped a hand into his, squeezed firmly. "It is on its way up Kelly Farm Road, husband."

  He looked down at the gleams of moonlight on her black hair.

  Then the volunteer fire brigade arrived, their truck lurching into the driveway. Air brakes hissed as the big old truck rocked to a stop. It was a mess, pumps dripping, hoses looped crazily in the back. The men looked exhausted, their slickers smeared with ashes and dirt. "Everybody outa there, Brian?" the driver asked. It was grizzly old Mort Cleber.

  "Everybody's out."

  The truck snarled, dug in, moved slowly toward the flaring ruins of the trailer.

  Loi spoke quietly to her husband. "Brian, I am bleeding again. Just a little." She leaned her head against his chest.

  Tommy Victor had followed the truck in his pickup. He stopped and leaned out. "Anybody hurt?"

  "I am," Chris said. His voice was choked, but he was being brave. "I got burned."

  "My wife needs a doctor, too."

  "My legs are hurt."

  "But nobody's dead?"

  "We're all accounted for," Brian said.

  "You're lucky. The Jaegers were killed about an hour ago. Whole family."

  "What's happening, Tommy?"

  "Cold snap in the summer, you always get the fires. Better get in, we wanta get you people to the docs."

  Brian was so stunned he was left speechless. They didn't know, not a thing! He looked at Ellen and Loi. Their expressions confirmed his helplessness. There was no way to tell the story.

  They rode out, Loi and the boys inside the cab, Ellen and Brian in the hay-dusted bay.

  To shelter from the night wind, the two of them sat silently together with their backs against the cab. Brian watched the ruins of the trailer recede into the night. "Thank God she's still alive," he said.

  "She's still a soldier," Ellen commented, "every inch of her."

  Brian considered the idea Little Loi, with her constantly lowered eyes, her scuttling feet, her quick kitchen hands... a soldier. "A refugee," he said. "It must be killing her. That trailer was the best thing she ever owned."

  "I'm sorry." The wind whipped Ellen's hair into Brian's face.

  He brushed it away. "What for?"

  She was silent. They were both watching car lights behind them, glowing, then going dark as they were lost in a curve of the road. The thick forest flashed past on both sides.

  When the lights disappeared and stayed gone, Ellen spoke again. "I went down in the root cellar. Back in the mine. I got something—a creature—I put it in my car. The next thing all hell broke loose."

  "It came after you."

  "And kept after me. All the way to your place."

  "Did you find it in the mine?"

  "Yeah. It was like a—well, a big, curled-up spider. But ten pounds at least. It wet on me."

  "Wet?"

  "Urine-type wet. It was so vile!"

  The car lights reappeared, this time much brighter, much closer. Ellen's hand gripped his.

  Even over the roar of the slipstream and the rattling of the old truck, they began to hear the deep thrumming of a powerful engine. "Oh, God, Brian!"

  The purple light—it would be fired directly into their faces. They'd go mad. "We have to get in the cab!"

  The car came closer yet, pounding around the curves, its lights slashing the darkness.

  Brian rose up, went to the side of the truck, leaned his head into the surging air, until his face was beside the driver's door. "We're gonna come in," he yelled.

  The truck started to slow down.

  "Don't stop! And don't look in the rearview mirror."

  Tommy was peering at Brian out of the corner of his eye, obviously aware of his reputation for being a little crazy.

  The car came closer, closer yet. The engine was drumming, thundering, howling. Ellen covered her face with her hands. Brian went around to the passenger side. "Loi, roll down the window!"

  It came down.

  Ellen was behind him, clawing at him. He put a leg over the side of the truck bed, pulled his way forward. The truck swerved onto the shoulder. "Don't slow down, Tommy!"

  "Brian, you're going to be killed!"

  "Tell him to keep driving!"

  The car's lights were flaring now. Ellen's face was white in their glare.

  And then, very suddenly, the car passed them.

  It wasn't a Dodge Viper, it wasn't even a sports car, and it wasn't red. It moved off, heading innocently south.

  Brian returned to the truck bed, slumped down beside Ellen. He looked out at the blackness of the night. Being here, now— this was alone. And he didn't just mean himself and Ellen and Loi and the other people in the truck.

  He had a feeling that every living soul was about to find out what a few people had already discovered: this little world of ours, lost out here in the dark, is very much alone.

  Eleven

  1.

  Shock numbs, but unfortunately not for long. At first they all welcomed the lights of Ludlum, the familiar cluster of fast-food places out at the Northway interchange, their signs challenging the dark.

  The tall Rodeway Inn sign invited Ellen. "I'll never, ever go back there again," she told Brian. "At dawn I'm outa here."

  Brian hardly heard her. Again and again his mind went over the events of the night. The fire had come up through the floor, just like the first time. The first one had been attributed to a defective propane line, but was that really true?

  He shivered, clutched himself. It was nearly two in the morning. He looked up at the sky, the moon red against the horizon, the stars like eyes, diamond-hard, cold as ice.

  He wanted to hold Loi, to enclose her precious body in a protective embrace.

  He couldn't protect anybody.

  "Two hours ago I was thinking in terms of moral obligations and major stories," Ellen said carefully. "Now I'm thinking in terms of saving ass. We've got to get out."

  And where did she think she would go?

  Then the truck was turning, and the buildings of Ludlum Community Hospital appeared ahead.

  When he got down off the truck, Brian embraced his wife. "How's it going?" he asked.

  "The bleeding stopped, Brian."

  He closed his eyes, felt relief wash through him.

  Young Chris was hunched over. Brian picked him up. "It's gonna be OK, guy," he said.

  "It's hurting real bad, Uncle Brian."

  "I know that, Chris. I know all about burns."

  As they entered the emergency room, Joey said, "Our house burned up." Nurses came, there was a
brief admission ritual, Loi was put in stirrups and Chris was laid on his stomach for an examination. Brian could tell at a glance that the boy's burns weren't serious, but those red welts must hurt like the very devil.

  Loi and Chris were in cubicles side by side. Brian stood between them. Chris cried when the ER doctor began dressing his burns. "You're lucky this wasn't worse," the young doctor said.

  "There was a bear out there," Joey announced. "It had long arms like a snake."

  The ER doctor didn't even look up. "We got a lotta bears coming down this summer," he said. "They like the landfills. I went to see the ones up in Long Lake. You ever see those, Chris?"

  "No, sir."

  Dr. Gidumal arrived for Loi. Brian slipped into the front end of her cubicle and kissed her cheek.

  She smiled at him, then closed her eyes as the doctor examined her.

  "This is doing well," he said. "You have a little bleeding, maybe, but this is doing well."

  Brian kissed her again, whispering in her shell-like ear, "Thank God for you, thank God for you." With a quick motion of her head, she gave him a peck.

  The doctor put his hand on Brian's shoulder. "How are you feeling, Brian?"

  "I'm good."

  He took Brian by the shoulders, looked into his face. "No, I beg to differ. You are not good. You are in shock."

  "I feel fine. I'm—yeah, I guess you'd say that."

  "You have lost your home, you are in a terrible time. You are not good."

  "Doctor—"

  "Do you two have a place you can go? Relatives, perhaps?"

  Brian did not want to go to any relatives. He wanted to do three things. The first was to get Ellen and Chris and Loi in a condition to travel. The second was to find Bob and Nancy and get them out of here. The third was to run.

  Ellen's leg was examined by a bored intern who announced that she'd brushed against nettles and experienced an unusually strong allergic response. She reflected on the futility of telling him what had actually happened. She'd already had Nate Harris laugh in her face, and Bob was on the psycho ward for blurting out his story.

  The doctor gave her antihistamine cream. "This'll keep the itching down. If you're not better by tomorrow afternoon, come back and we'll take another look at it. But I'm sure this is a very minor problem. You must have gotten in the nettles running away from the fire. Lucky that was all that happened. You're all very lucky."

  "You're sure it couldn't be anything else?"

  Smiling, he shook his curly young head. She read the easy condescension in his face.

  She wanted to yell a warning from the rooftops, but what could she say? Hey, my name is Ellen Maas and I think that Oscola's full of creepy crawlies. Please strap me to a bed beside Bob West.

  It sickened her to realize the truth: the enemy had been breathtakingly efficient. There were no hordes of refugees claiming to have witnessed the impossible. Only four people who knew what was happening had gotten away—Loi and Brian and Bob and a very frightened outsider called Ellen Maas. Not even Bob's children understood the truth.

  When she left the treatment area, she found the rest of the emergency facility quiet. Brian and Loi and the boys were gone. Looking around at the sudden emptiness, she felt hurt.

  The quiet, the soft voices of the intern and the resident talking together on the nurses' station, the distant whirr of the air-conditioning system, even the familiar hospital smell, combined to enforce upon her a sense of deep isolation.

  She would never return to Oscola, not even to get her belongings, not for any reason whatsoever.

  She paid her bill with a MasterCard. There wasn't any insurance, so the $270 would just eat a little further into her credit limit. It was possible to see a welfare office in the future, if she couldn't find work somewhere.

  "Did the Kellys say where they were going?" she asked the desk clerk.

  "No, ma'am. But I don't think they left the hospital."

  "Was Mrs. Kelly admitted?"

  "None of 'em were. But that guy with the truck, he told 'em goodbye. So I figure they're still here."

  Of course they were, and it was perfectly obvious where they had gone.

  She went through the long, echoing corridors to the so-called "Brain/Mind Suite."

  "I'm here to see Lieutenant West," she told the nurse at the station.

  The nurse peered along the hall. "They're all down there. Two-forty-three. Are you a relative?"

  Ellen walked into the open room, confronting a tableau of complex human emotions. Loi and Nancy were standing side by side, Brian was leaning over his friend. The two boys were in a corner, their eyes open wide.

  Their father was under restraint, his body wrapped in long, soft hospital-green clothing of a type she'd never seen before. There were lots of belts and straps. It froze her insides to see a human being treated like this. She'd never dreamed that this sort of thing was still done. Shades of Bedlam, with the mad chained to the walls.

  "Miss Maas," Nancy said. "Please—"

  "She is with us," Loi interrupted. "She has great courage. And you need to listen to her." Their eyes met.

  "Thank you," Ellen said. She turned to the bed, where Bob was straining against his straps, his face gleaming with sweat. The poor man was struggling to get up. Ellen looked to Brian.

  "He's absorbing it. Aren't you, buddy?"

  His voice when it came was a deep, throaty rumble, vastly weaker than Ellen remembered it. "It's... all of it..." Then he looked to Ellen, a fierce question appearing in his eyes.

  "It's true, Bob. I've seen them. You're not hallucinating."

  "You're not psychotic, Bobby," Nancy said. "The things you're remembering—the things with the arms and all—"

  Slowly, it sank in. Deeper and deeper it went. They could see the wonder come into his face, followed by a flicker of relief, a sudden turning of the head, a sigh as if a weight had lifted, then a widening of the eyes—wider, wider—and a great, long, rolling groan mixed of relief and triumph and abject terror.

  Followed by sudden silence.

  Then his eyes seemed to look into some far distance. "Get me out."

  Ellen began working the straps, then the others joined her, and they all untied him together. When he sat up in bed he wobbled a little, but then he was on his feet, swaying in his hospital gown, going down on one knee as two very excited boys flew into his arms. "You're gonna be OK, Dad," Chris said. Joey snuggled against him, burying his face in his father's chest, drinking his returned power.

  "I'm fine, boys, but I don't think the Yanks are."

  "Yes they are," Joey said, suddenly coming to life. "They just won six games in a row is all."

  While Loi and Brian and Ellen waited in the hallway, Bob dressed. "I really think we ought to all go to a motel," Ellen said.

  Loi looked at her. "We certainly can't stay in Oscola."

  "I thought I had some kind of an obligation, but this is beyond that."

  "Yes," Loi agreed, "our obligation is to survive." She put her hand on her belly. The pains had faded, but she did not feel strong.

  During the fire Loi had seen that Ellen was a very strong, mature woman. Somebody who was cool in the face of the unexpected, who was efficient at times of high danger, was not also an emotional baby. That woman would never try to seduce a married man.

  She hadn't lost Brian, she could see the love in his eyes. But she had certainly lost all her curtains and dishes, her marvelous dresses she'd bought at the Mode O'Day, her pretty furniture.

  She'd also lost her collection of books, the mathematics and physics texts she was studying, her poetry, her Great Novels in Outline. She had lost the papers that identified her as a new American and the wife of an important man: her citizenship certificate and her marriage license.

  She had lost her beloved Laughing Buddha, that was her luck. She was just a barefoot on the road again.

  She had stopped crying years ago. Weakness must never be revealed.

  "We gonna go home," Joey pipe
d as the Wests came out of the room.

  Bob hushed his son.

  Quietly, the whole group of them went to the far end of the hall and down the back stairs. It wasn't difficult to leave undetected; the hospital wasn't guarded.

  Now that the moon had set, the sky was filled with stars. Ellen did not like going out into the parking lot where there were only a few cars, did not like being in the dark, under the sky. "What if they're here?"

  "It's possible," Brian replied, "but I don't think so."

  "Well, why not? I mean—"

  "They're apt to be confined to the area of Oscola and Towayda, at least for a while. We've seen that they have limits, a sort of range."

  "But they'll spread?" Bob asked.

  They had reached the Wests' Taurus. "Oh, yes," Brian replied.

  "The bears?" Chris asked.

  "It's not bears," his mother replied.

  "Something else," Loi added. "We do not know for certain what it is."

  "Look," Brian said, "there's almost no chance that we can fight this on our own. And I doubt very much that we can get the evidence we need."

  Ellen looked at him. "Do you realize what you're saying?"

  Brian glanced down at the boys, nodded. Ellen thought she had never seen such sadness in a human face.

  "We go to the Ludlum Inn," Loi said. "Wait until dawn." She was holding her own shoulders. "I don't want to stay outside any longer."

  They got into the car, all except Ellen. There wasn't room for her. She leaned into the driver's window.

  "I'll catch up with you," she said. "Take a cab."

  The car pulled away, leaving Ellen to face the dark and silence alone.

  2.

  She hurried back to the hospital lobby. The car had obviously been jammed, but something about being left behind still hurt.

  The corridors were so quiet that she could hear the humming of the fluorescent light fixtures on the ceilings.

  So, where was she going to go? Following the others to the Ludlum Inn was one alternative. But she could also rent a car and just start driving.

  "Excuse me, ma'am." The maintenance man stood before her in his blue uniform, his keys in his hand.

  "Yes?"

  "You can't stay here at this hour."

  She used the phone in the entryway. When you need something after midnight in a small city like Ludlum you call the cab company. Sure enough, the Tru-Serve dispatcher knew of an all-night car rental. Allomar Texaco was also an Avis station. She took a cab there and soon had wheels again, a green Escort with a complicated stain on the front seat.