“Tweedledee and Tweedledumber,” Ursalina said, just loudly enough for them to hear. By silent vote, Terry was elected the one to make the initial approach. Protective coloration. Even Ursalina, the only one of them with military training, seemed satisfied to let him lead. Maybe she reckoned that hanging behind was safer than walking out front.
Terry walked within ten yards of the man, and stopped short. The man’s wide grin was unnerving, and Terry couldn’t quite read the look on his face. He seemed happy to see survivors, but there was something disturbing in his eyes. So what if he’s a little crazy? We’re all bugnuts by now, Terry thought. The man looked well-fed; in fact, he could stand to eat a little less. His clothes were grimy, but his skin and face were clean. He had somewhere to bathe. He didn’t stink.
If he was just a survivor, like them, they might have to vote on whether or not to let him ride with them to Domino Falls. Terry, Piranha, Sonia, and the Twins had started out as only five, but they’d picked up Kendra and Ursalina since they’d left Camp Round Meadow. Now they might end up with more. But could they trust this guy?
“You out here by yourself?” Terry said.
“Merry Christmas!” he said. “No, it’s me and my family. We don’t see many people, and I need some people today. Would you follow me back to the house?” He was already turning to walk up the road.
“Need people. Why?”
The man stopped and turned. He winked. “Come on. It’s Christmas! Well, it’s almost Christmas, anyway. Can’t fault folks for wanting company at Christmas.”
Christmas! Terry knew it was late December, so Christmas must be less than a week away. He’d felt a lack of holiday spirit in years past, but this year it felt ridiculous, maybe even irreverent, to think about Santa Claus.
“Ho, ho, ho,” Sonia said sarcastically. “Wonder what I’ll steal this year.”
Ursalina snickered. “I could use some hair conditioner. Big-time.”
“Yeah, grab me that new iPad,” Piranha said. “The one with the freak alarm.”
“Shhhhh,” Kendra shushed them. Kendra was the youngest in their group, only sixteen, but she already sounded like their mother. She moved closer to Terry, curious about the stranger. Terry held his arm out, rigid, to keep her from getting too close.
“I’m sorry, sir,” Kendra said. “We’d forgotten all about Christmas.”
The man’s grin vanished, and he suddenly looked grave. “Well, you can’t forget Christmas. No, sirree. Not in our house. Always been a very special day. Come on! We were just about to cut the cake, but I heard your engine. You’re the best gift of all. Guess you could say you’re what I’ve been praying for.”
His grin came back, brighter than before. He turned and began walking again, expecting them to follow.
For a moment, they all stood in silence, watching.
“You heard the man,” Darius said. “There’s cake.”
As if that settled everything. In a way, maybe it did.
“Okay, we’ll follow him,” Terry said. “But we’re getting back on the bus.”
The bus trundled along behind their guide and the Twins’ motorcycles down the empty road to a narrow path, where the stranger veered east. All joking had stopped once they were back on the Blue Beauty, and Kendra was glad. Jokes felt like bad luck. She wasn’t afraid of the man, not exactly, but something gnawing at the edge of her awareness made her wish they had ignored him and driven on.
A two-story white-frame house stood at the end of the road, its blue and white trim well-maintained, the front steps a bit weathered, almost ratty. The man stopped to make sure they were still following, then he opened the unlocked door and walked inside. Kendra could hardly imagine leaving a door unlocked now, even for a short time.
“Honey, we’re home,” Terry said, slowing to a crawl in front of the house. No one laughed. Hippy backed up in the Beauty’s stairwell, shivering.
“See that?” Piranha said, nodding toward Hipshot. “That’s mutt language for keep your butts moving.”
If they took a vote, Kendra wasn’t sure what she would say.
“This is California,” Terry said. “Maybe we should play by their rules. Be good neighbors. We’ve had nothing but hospitality since we crossed the Siskiyous. Let’s ride our good luck.”
The Blue Beauty sighed to a stop outside the house near the waiting motorcycles. Hippy lay in the aisle, looking at them. Not budging. Nothing quite right, nothing quite wrong. The Blue Beauty shivered enough to rattle the windows, the engine coughing.
“All right, muchachos,” Ursalina said. “We’ll go in, but we’ll be careful. Only two at first. We do a sweep—make sure there’re no ugly surprises. If it’s clear, we all go.”
“Keep the bus running, T,” Piranha said. “We’re burning gas, so we can’t stay long.”
“And if he’s telling the truth?” Terry said. “What if there’s a family and they want to come with us?”
They all looked at one another, except for Ursalina, who stared away. She probably didn’t want to pick up any survivors, but she’d been the last in, so she couldn’t complain.
“I guess they can come,” Sonia said reluctantly. Kendra noticed that she was holding Piranha’s hand. Since the night they’d spent with sanctuary on the beach, Sonia and Piranha no longer behaved as if they were hiding. “Especially if there’s kids.”
“Let’s ask the Twins,” Piranha said, “but Sonia’s right. As long as we have room, why not? They can ride as far as Domino Falls, anyway. No promises after that.”
There are no promises for any of us after that, Kendra thought, but she didn’t have to say it aloud. They all knew that Domino Falls might be a trap. Ursalina was right: radio signals were a lure. Things that sound too good to be true usually were. If not for the beachfront paradise a hundred fifty miles back, they’d have had no reason to believe in the promise of Domino Falls and its claims of safety and normalcy. Just like they wouldn’t have any reason to believe the word of a stranger standing in the road.
But they had to believe in something. Didn’t they?
“Who’s first in?” Terry said.
“I’ll go,” Ursalina said. “I’ll take Dean with me.”
They disembarked, stepping over Hipshot, and approached the house, walking no farther than the edge of the porch. Kendra tried not to be worried that the dog didn’t want to follow them, but it couldn’t be a good sign.
Silver cut-out letters were strung together on the front porch, reading Merry Christmas. They twisted gently in the wind, winding back and forth. Kendra heard happy holiday music from inside the house, and maybe the sound of laughter. Grandma got run over by a reindeer …
“Where’s Hippy?” Dean asked.
“Won’t get off the bus,” Terry said.
“PAWS in action. Smarter’n the rest of us combined,” Ursalina told Dean. “Come in with me. We’re sweeping the house for pirates.”
Dean looked from the bus to the house, weighing the matter. Then he nodded, his 9mm Hi-Point rifle at the ready.
The wait outside seemed interminable. The Christmas music changed to the Chipmunks singing about hula hoops, one of Kendra’s favorites when she was young. The high-pitched revelry made her eyes sting with tears. She and her parents had sucked helium from balloons and sung along to that song every year. The sudden memory was so vivid that her knees went wobbly and the sky seemed to dim.
After what seemed like forever, Ursalina and Dean came back out, trailed by the portly stranger. Only the stranger was smiling. He proudly held out a cake cutter he might have retrieved from the kitchen.
“Clear,” Ursalina said. “No one in the house. Looks like the family’s out back. We saw them through the window.”
“Kids?” Sonia said, anxious.
Ursalina nodded.
“Just like I told you,” the stranger said, and waved them all along the side of the house. “Come on around. They’re waiting.”
The little man bounced ahead of them to
a backyard gate that lay open, walking lightly on the balls of his feet. Happy happy, joy joy. Could it be contagious?
They followed him. First they passed a play set that looked almost new: swings and a small slide. Next to that, a tree house with both wood-slat ladders nailed into a bare-limbed apricot tree, and a knotted rope that looked an inch and a half thick, now swaying in the breeze. All of it looked like it might have been constructed since Freak Day.
Past the tree, Kendra finally saw the stranger’s family. Three of them sat at a large red cedar picnic table that had been draped with a gaily-colored tablecloth; two small girls and a woman with frizzy yellow hair. “One … two … three …” the girls were saying in piping unison, and dissolving into giggles. “One … two … three …”
The others didn’t see their approach because their backs were to them, all of them wearing identical birthday hats, oblivious to the world around them. A small evergreen beside the table was strung with tinsel and candy canes, and topped with a silver star. The table was piled with gaudily wrapped boxes and what looked like mailing tubes.
How had this family created an oasis when everything else was gone? The girls were laughing and eating cake with their fingers, not waiting for their father to cut it.
Kendra was close enough to Terry to hear him draw a startled breath. “I don’t know if I want to laugh or cry,” he whispered to her. Kendra wanted to do both. Her hand sought his, their fingers twining together. Everything seemed so … normal. As if the devastation that had touched the rest of the world hadn’t quite penetrated here.
But not quite. What was it? Suddenly, Kendra knew, and felt a chill: Why were they celebrating outside the house? The December air was cold, and only the father was wearing a jacket. The others were barely dressed, practically in rags. What the—
The sudden sound of Hipshot’s urgent barking made Kendra jump, startled. The dog had followed them after all, standing between them and the picnic table.
“I knew it …” Ursalina said, taking a step back. If not for the tremor in her voice, she’d have sounded triumphant.
Now that she was only twenty feet from the table, Kendra was close enough to see the cords wound around the family’s feet.
Dean swung his rifle up. “What the hell is going on?”
“Just a party,” the little man said, and when he turned, he seemed too bright, too happy. Why hadn’t they seen it? “Every day, we have a party. Can’t wait for Christmas.”
Their kids and the mother turned toward them, their private party disturbed. Their eyes were reddish, their faces threaded with tiny vines, like rogue veins, growing where no veins should grow. All three tried to lunge to their feet, but they were held in place by cables fastened to their waists. They hissed and thrashed, but the girls made laughing sounds. “One … two … three …” they said in unison, twins even now.
The girls might have been pretty once, but no more. Their round cheeks and matted blond hair were ghoulish. Kendra stood behind Terry, who had pulled out his Browning 9mm. Sometimes freaks could talk! After the way she’d lost Grandpa Joe, Kendra didn’t think she could ever forget it, but those girls had fooled her. What if one of them had been too close?
Everyone who’d brought a gun had it trained on a member of this bizarre family. Terry’s was on the stranger. “What do you want from us?” Terry said, raising his voice to be heard over Hipshot’s ferocious growling and barking. “Why’d you bring us back here?”
“The girls were born on Christmas Day,” the man said. Now Kendra could hear his pain, grief, shock. “We’ve always celebrated all month, so they wouldn’t feel cheated. Can you help me give them their present? I know it’s what they’d want.”
Terry backed up a step, and Kendra gladly retreated with him. Piranha cursed, and they formed an instinctive half-circle to protect themselves, ready to fire and flee. His family was straining at the end of their ropes now, mouths stretched wide, yearning, fingers questing.
“What present?” Terry said, his voice unsteady. “Man, you’re crazy. You can’t help them. Let us make sure you’re not bit, and you can come with us. Leave them here.”
The man shook his head, insistent. “I need you to help me give them their present,” he said, and his voice broke. “I can’t do it. Can’t you see? Look at them! Listen to my girls laughing! They sound exactly the same. I want to, but … I can’t.”
Those might have been his sanest words yet, Kendra realized. Her throat swelled with grief for a family she’d never known.
“Let’s get the hell out of here,” Sonia said, tugging on Piranha.
But Piranha didn’t move. He was staring at Terry. And Ursalina. For the first time Kendra could remember, they didn’t have a plan. They didn’t know what to do.
“She’s right,” Kendra said. “Let’s go. We shouldn’t have stopped.”
Terry shook his head, taking another step back. “I’m sorry,” he told the pleading man. “We can’t help you.”
But Kendra’s eyes were drawn to Ursalina, who was gazing at the kids with curled lips and dead eyes. Then Ursalina looked toward Dean, and their eyes locked with a spark of communication. A pair of barely perceptible nods between them, in a secret tongue only they seemed to know.
Ursalina, after all, had fought in a war when her National Guard had fallen to an army of freaks. And Dean’s war had followed him to his dreams; the war he’d fought at home.
“I can do it,” Dean said.
Ursalina nodded. “Yeah. We can handle this.”
Dean looked at Darius, who shook his head. All jokes were far from Darius’s face. “Not me, bro,” Darius said. “I’m going back to my bike.”
“Go on,” Dean said, nodding. “You and the others wait for us.”
“Sir?” Terry said gently to the man. “Step around front with us, please. You don’t want to be here right now.”
Kendra dared to hope that if she made it back to the bus fast enough and covered her ears, she could pretend she’d never seen the bizarre Christmas scene in the backyard. But she never had the chance.
The stranger didn’t come toward Terry. Instead, he rushed to the picnic table, toward his wife and children, his arms wide to embrace them. All Kendra saw was the ecstatic grin on his face. “I’m sorry, Melissa,” he said. “I’m sorry, Caitlin and Cathy. Merry Christmas, angels. Happy birthday!”
For an instant, Kendra thought they were only trying to hug him too; they were all wrapped in an iron embrace, a tangle of frantic limbs.
But Kendra closed her eyes when she saw their teeth.
By the time the gunshots finally came from Ursalina and Dean, she had been praying for the sound of death.
Three
For two miles, they drove along a body of water labeled the Domino Falls Reservoir. Then, just as the map said, they were entering the town itself; a hand-painted sign read WELCOME TO THREADVILLE.
Terry’s hope surged, pushing aside the recent, toxic memories. Was it actually possible that this was a real town? Mostly dry, brown farmland spread out on either side of them, not much visible from the road. And everything was fenced in, a triple barrier. Strings of barbed wire gleamed like silver spiderwebs in the sunlight. Terry thought the fencing was great, as long as it wasn’t a cage.
“Guess we better like it here,” Piranha said.
They passed a large white pickup truck parked between the barbed rows, and six hard-faced men busy burning freaks off the fence with flamethrowers that resembled back-mounted insecticide sprayers. Terry kept the Beauty moving so he wouldn’t press his luck, but he couldn’t help slowing down to watch the freaks slowly twisting in the concertina wire. One was almost cocooned, his labors ensnaring him more deeply in the razored strands. The three men spoke to one another without cheer.
From the bus, they all watched the flames like kids hypnotized by fireworks. The freaks twitched and twisted, the motions mild at first and then frenzied as the fire climbed their bodies and finally enshrouded them.
The freaks moaned loudly, more in confusion than pain. Terry doubted that freaks could feel pain the way humans did; they ignored their injuries too readily during a chase. But they seemed to know when they were dying. He could hear that they knew it. A … sadness? As if they were apologizing to someone or something for not fulfilling their proper function. A flesh-creeping sound. Then they were twitching, smoking marionettes.
Behind him, the others whooped and high-fived.
“Yep—I like it here,” Piranha said. “It’s got a real homey feel.”
“Hallelujah,” Ursalina said.
Terry caught Kendra’s eyes in the mirror just as she was looking for his. They both knew there was nothing joyful about burning flesh, infected or not.
He wasn’t about to shed any tears, but still …
Hell, that could be his body burning up there. Any of theirs. Any of them could.
The men backed away from the fence, and one of them turned around and saw the Blue Beauty. Terry slowed their vehicle to a crawl to demonstrate peaceful intentions. He waved to them, his expression sober. Ursalina gave them a thumbs-up through the window, but they didn’t return it. Kendra waved at the men, then Darius and Dean on their bikes. No one seemed surprised to see newcomers or the condition of their bus. As if they were part of an official procession, they continued down the road.
Further on, at least two hundred people were crowded on both sides of the asphalt, ragged tents clumped around cook fires. Heads turned to watch the arrival of their bus. A couple of dogs yapped, racing to snap at their rear bumper. A man who looked at least eighty leaned on a twisted makeshift crutch as he scooped a cup of water out of a rusty barrel. He glared at Terry as they rumbled past. Would any of them be allowed inside?
A man in a bright yellow shirt waved them on, and Terry was relieved. The camp was better than nothing, but he’d expected more—and he definitely wanted to camp inside the fences, not outside. Terry kept driving.
They passed two barbed-wire gates, guarded by three-man rifle teams. The guards were polite but firm, all of them decked out in identical black jeans and golden shirts buttoned to their collars. There were no grins or “How can I help yous,” and Terry figured there would be no “Have a nice day” when they were through.
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