* * *
I didn’t sleep much that night. Abby did, and her small snores comforted me. If she suffered a return of the previous night’s nightmare, she gave no sign of it.
Lying there in the dark, I wondered just how much else I should have been doing to protect my daughter. Set traps in the woods? Not that I knew how, and if I tried to figure it out I might just be making it obvious that there were suspicious people nearby. I could at least have done the leaf trick before we’d left the cabin to let me know whether someone had been inside, though.
I tried to calm my mind. It was still spring, and summer would follow. We had plenty of canned food, and there would be game to hunt—maybe not with a gun, because that would advertise our presence, but I could probably find a bow somewhere. Out here in the mountains, come to think of it, it was at least a little strange that out of three houses—counting the cabin—I hadn’t found any sort of archery equipment yet.
Something to think about, anyway. And our winters were cold, but not so cold we couldn’t get by on warm clothing alone. The cabin’s woodstove was probably more than adequate, if we were still here by then, to keep the place toasty inside…though I didn’t think using it would be a great idea. The smell of burning wood would, again, let people know we were here.
Maybe an alcohol stove would work? If we could find the alcohol. And if we could rig enough of a draft that we wouldn’t have to worry about carbon monoxide poisoning. Fortunately the cabin’s walls did seem fairly thick—built, I guessed, with 2x6 boards rather than the usual 2x4’s. So…I should check out the insulation sometime. It might be pretty thick. Or if the walls weren’t insulated, I would have plenty of time to fix that before winter.
And all the time I planned and schemed to make our new little home worked for us, I wondered when we would have to leave it. Something was bound to happen.
The world just wasn’t static anymore.
* * *
“Abby! We need to get inside!”
My daughter stood, glanced my way, and pocketed two of the rocks she’d been playing with as she moved toward the cabin.
All day long I’d felt as if we were being watched. But I couldn’t see anything unusual. And the damn birds weren’t giving me any clues either.
But I’d just realized I was starting to hear a humming sound. Nothing I recognized, but lately new meant dangerous. Maybe it always had, but I’d been too insulated from the world to notice.
Also, I couldn’t hear any birds. Of course the humming was getting too loud anyway, but still: something else to think about.
I put the knife I’d been sharpening—out of boredom; I could probably have shaved with it before I’d started—back in the belt sheath I’d found down in the hidden room, picked up my shotgun, and turned toward the cabin once Abby was past me—then froze, as I heard a gunshot and saw a bullet kick up leaves about ten feet in front of me.
“Freeze!” a voice shouted helpfully from behind me. “One move and we shoot!”
I stood there, the shotgun still in my left hand, staring at my daughter’s head as she stood with one foot on the steps leading up to the cabin’s balcony. Why wasn’t I more worried?
I heard more than one set of footsteps behind me. Then a voice, sounding more cautious than angry.
“Mister, I don’t know who the hell you are, but put that shotgun down slowly, then turn around. We don’t want to hurt anyone.”
I did, turning slowly. A lantern-jawed man with white-blonde hair stood just inside the clearing, pointing some sort of military-style rifle at me. Another man, this one well over six feet tall and probably weighing close to three hundred pounds, walked out of the trees to my left and pointed a pistol at me.
“No offense mister, and no harm intended. But we need to get into the cabin right now,” the first man told me.
I shrugged. “No offense taken. Yet. But point one of those guns toward my daughter, and all bets are off.”
I heard a laugh behind me, and turned. Yet another guy, this one older with white shot through his black hair and beard, had come out of the woods.
The first guy was nodding at me. “Yeah. Let’s get inside.”
* * *
Abby and I were sitting on the futon. My hands were tied behind my back. But our captors hadn’t tried to hurt either of us. The big guy was leaning against the cold woodstove, the one with the jaw and white hair squatted on his haunches directly across from me, and the older man was looking out the window.
The big guy glanced toward the floor. “Got the door down there closed up?” he asked me.
“Yeah,” I told him. So much for thinking I had any kind of edge on these guys. Had they been here before? Had they scouted the place out as Abby and I had gone exploring? I cleared my throat. “Who—?”
“Where’s Johnny?” the big guy asked me.
I shook my head. “Sorry, I don’t know…”
“My brother,” he said. “The guy who built this place. He was here last week. Now it’s you and your daughter.”
Abby spoke up. “It was empty,” she said.
I leaned a little closer to her, and she hugged me. The big guy seemed…not angry. Morose didn’t cover it either. I got the sense he’d been half-expecting to find his brother gone.
“I’m Jerry,” the white-haired guy told me, looking up from picking at his fingernails. “That’s George there,” nodding toward the big guy, “and Frank there,” this with another nod toward the older man. “George and I went into town a couple of days ago to check on…some people we knew. Didn’t find ’em, but we met Frank. What’s your story?”
I thought about it. Did I have any secrets worth keeping? I couldn’t think of any. “I’m Ash. My daughter’s Abby. The rest of our family is…missing. Did you guys go anywhere near the high school?”
All three men looked right at me. I could feel their tension ratcheting. “What about the school?” Frank asked.
I shook my head, trying to placate them. “I got grabbed near downtown,” I said. “They stuck me into…I don’t know what to call it. A room full of people who seemed to be drugged or something. I got out, mostly because a…friend…helped.” If I could call Eisler a friend. And if by “helping” I meant he hadn’t shot me. Though come to think of it he had tossed me some car keys…
“Your friend still inside?” Jerry asked.
I shrugged. “Probably. He’s…well, not that much of a friend. Just a guy who thought he owed me something, really.”
“That school is Ground Zero Weird, man,” the big guy said. “Bunch o’ zombies and freaks. And Captain McDermott’s guys seem to—”
“Who’s McDermott?” I asked. “In fact…who are you guys?”
“Just a couple of local boys,” Jerry told me. I could tell that just from listening to their voices. But I could feel a lie in it too. There was something else going on there. “And McDermott?”
“Army,” Jerry said. “Kind of running the show. Well, him and the priest.”
“Reverend Bob?” I asked. “At the high school?”
“Yeah, him. Never liked that guy. Listen, Ash—you seem like an okay guy, and I don’t want this to turn hostile if it doesn’t need to. But right now we all need to stay inside, so I gotta ask: what’s up with your daughter?”
“Up?” I asked. “She’s…I don’t know what you mean.”
Jerry shook his head. “She’s a kid. Kids are weird, lately. You’ve seen that, right?”
I shuddered a little, thinking of the marching teenagers. And the boy with faceted eyes. “Yeah. I’ve seen it. I think maybe it has something to do with being all in a group. Abby seems pretty normal.”
“So far,” the big guy—George, they’d said, though I was thinking of him as George Two—grunted.
I didn’t argue. I also didn’t tell them she seemed to have occasional—or occasionally revealed—strength beyond what she should, or tell them she’d seemed to know about both the trap door and the hidden tunnel when she shouldn�
�t have.
Maybe, I told myself again, not believing it, Abby had just always been smarter than I’d realized. Intuitive.
“Okay,” Jerry said. “Guys? What say we let Ash here loose?”
Silence. After a moment Frank shrugged. George just sat there. Morose. I wanted to tell him I was sorry about his brother, but didn’t want to do it until I’d been free of restraints for a while—assuming they’d actually get around to untying me.
Abby took care of it. When nobody else moved she leaned over, pulled my knife out of its sheath, and cut the zip-ties Frank had used behind my back.
Nobody objected. Jerry made a noise that might have shared an ancestor with laughter.
“Attagirl,” I told her, and I got the impression she’d favorably impressed my—erstwhile?—captors.
Good. Probably.
“So what’s with the rush to get inside?” I asked.
“Bugs,” George said shortly.
* * *
Soon I was very glad the cabin’s windows were sealed. From their disinterested glances I guessed Frank, George and Jerry had already known they would be—maybe they’d waited out a bug-storm in here before?
“This is new to me. I mean the bugs,” I said as casually as I could while Abby sat very still and gripped my hand with even more strength than I’d thought she had.
“Kids,” Jerry said with a shrug. “Some of them pull the bugs out to play. They’re probably passing nearby.”
I wanted to look away, but couldn’t stop myself from staring at the windows. They were darkening as the bug-swarm rolled toward the cabin. Stinkbugs, ants, bees, wasps—even an eight-inch praying mantis, the largest I could remember seeing. The little guys would land, hang out, maybe quiet down a little—but as soon as a new arrival brushed against them, or after a minute or so in any case, they’d take off again. Some of them attacked each other, but I also saw a dragonfly land on the back of the praying mantis—maybe confused, maybe searching for a mate in its addled way—and take off again, covered with gnats but probably shedding them as it went.
More came. The room darkened enough that it was hard to make out the individual bugs. I reached for a lamp, but stopped myself. A light source might attract the bugs. More, I mean. “How long—”
“Probably best to sit still,” Jerry said. “Keep talking to a minimum. If we attract the bugs’ attention, they might pull in the kids too. So far this isn’t too bad.”
I settled back on the futon. Abby’s grip got tighter. Painful. But I let her hold on.
* * *
The bug-storm lessened after a while, then moved away.
“No cooking or smoking for a couple of hours,” Jerry said. “They might come back.”
I nodded slowly. Jerry seemed to be the leader of the little group.
“This kind of…swarm…happened to you before?” I asked. “In town? Where’d you hide?”
Jerry gave a skeletal grin. “We hadn’t run into Frank yet. George was in a house, and I was out scouting. So…I just lay myself down in a ditch. Breathed through my teeth.”
I stared. “You were out in the middle of that?”
“Yeah. It was…not my best day. Don’t know if I could do it again.”
Okay. Maybe this guy could be the leader. I didn’t know if I could have just let the bugs crawl all over me, breathing through my teeth as the sky darkened, trying not to do anything to attract attention and never knowing when they’d start to bite, to shred, or bring something worse…
“Bite much?” I asked.
The grin came back. “Naw. ’Course I smelled pretty bad. After.”
I nodded. “Be interesting to find out whether bug spray works or makes it worse,” I said. “Maybe next time you can try some out for me. Report back.”
George grunted a laugh. “I think I’m gonna like this guy.”
Hell with it. “Sorry about your brother,” I told him.
He looked away. “Yeah. He…wasn’t such a nice guy. You two,” he said, waving to indicate me and Abby, “wouldn’t have done so well, he was here.”
* * *
“I could get tired of canned food,” Jerry said.
“Want to take a rifle and go hunting?” I asked. “Then you could build a fire out there and cook. Bring us any leftovers.”
“Man,” Jerry said, laughing. “You sure are willing to send me out to die.”
I shrugged. “What’s your plan? We all sleeping in here tonight?”
* * *
“Break the door?” Frank asked. “Then you duck while I shoot?”
I shrugged and pointed. “Could. Leaf’s still where I left it though. Same in back. Probably empty.”
Frank shrugged. We were back at the little blue and gray house I’d liked. Jerry had gone to scout for neighbors along the road in the other direction. George and Abby were back at the cabin—which bothered me, a little, but not a lot. I didn’t figure George for the type to bother a little girl, and he was probably more capable than I was of defending her. Also, the three guys hadn’t said or done anything overt, but I was pretty sure Abby and I were still on probation as far as they were concerned.
As hostage situations went, I reflected, it could be worse. When we’d left Abby had been nagging George to help her clean the place up. He’d looked at her a bit askance, but the last I’d seen she had him reaching for a broom.
“Look,” I said to Frank. “Maybe somebody’s in there. But I doubt it, and I don’t want to bust the door down even if it’s true. How ’bout we just knock and see if someone answers?”
Frank’s eyes narrowed, and he opened his mouth to object—but as I stared at him he seemed to calm down. “Fine,” he said eventually. “You do the knocking. I’ll move back a bit. Wait for my signal?”
I shrugged, then watched him move back behind a tree. He settled himself with his rifle pointed toward the door—and me—then nodded.
I knocked. “Anybody home?” I called. No response, so I knocked again. “I’m coming in but I’m friendly,” I yelled.
Still nothing, so I opened the door. Then closed it behind me.
A while later Frank slammed the door open and I heard him roll to the side. After a couple of minutes he entered the house, slowly.
“What the hell?” he asked when he found me sitting on a couch in the living room.
I shrugged. “It’s quiet here. Except for you, I mean. Thought I might take a nap.”
I could see he wasn’t sure whether to laugh, yell, or shoot me. Eventually he grinned. “Okay. You do that. I’ll check out the rest of the place.”
I figured Frank and I were going to get along just fine. Once we got used to each other.
* * *
Back at the cabin we found George and Abby sitting on the porch. Talking.
“Anybody home?” George asked as we walked up.
“Nope,” Frank told him. “Left a leaf in the door so we’d know if anyone used it next time we go.”
I looked at Frank. He had a perfect deadpan expression going on.
“Smart,” George said. “Ash here do okay?”
“Oh yeah. Guy doesn’t have much of a sense of humor, though. We ought to practice telling jokes later.”
* * *
Jerry showed up with a couple of kids—about thirteen and eight, I guessed. “Look who I found!”
I cocked my head to the left. “In a house over that way?”
“Yeah. They’ve been hiding out.”
Well, that put the shoe on the other foot. I stared at the kids, wondering, while they stared mostly at Abby.
“I’m Sam,” the older kid said. “This is my little sister Amy.”
Neither of them looked too bright—pinched faces, the kind you got if you lived around here, didn’t ever get too much to eat, and had a family tree a little twistier than most outsiders were comfortable thinking about. But they’d survived, hadn’t they?
“Where are your parents?” Abby asked.
The little girl stared at th
e ground and stuck her thumb in her mouth. The boy blinked hard. “They went shopping,” he said.
“You two hungry?” George asked them.
“Naw. We have food.”
“They were cooking a couple of squirrels in the yard when I showed up,” Jerry told us. “Cleaned em up real nice first too.”
I hadn’t smelled the smoke, and Jerry had headed mostly upwind of the cabin, but the winds in our mountains could be capricious. “What’d you kill ’em with?” I asked the boy.
“I did it,” the little girl said with a touch of scorn. “Slingshot, like always.”
“It was her turn,” the boy explained after a moment.
* * *
The next day we decided to move our supplies to the blue-and-gray house next door. The cabin was a little small for all of us. Also I was hoping to put a closed door between me and George. His snoring was a thing out of legend.
* * *
I reached for the top corner of the window, stretching a piece of plastic sheeting to cover it with my left hand and bringing the stapler up in my right—and the ladder shifted underneath me. I caught my breath, then slowly eased back down. Maybe I should shift the thing a little to the—
The ladder twisted, the pile of rocks I’d put under its left foot collapsing, and started to throw me off the roof. I dropped the plastic sheeting and the stapler, reached frantically to grab at the window ledge—I couldn’t reach inside because we’d boarded it up with plywood before coming out here to finish the job with plastic—and something that felt like a pillow of air stabilized me on the ladder just as it seemed to catch itself.
I looked down just as my rushing daughter grabbed the bottom of the ladder, gave it a jerk that steadied it without dislodging me, and turned a worried gaze up to me.
The Secret: A Thriller Page 14