“So that’s where we go,” I said.
“After we get my bag,” Tim put in. “If it’s still there. I kicked it into a culvert when you guys,” he said, nodding to Jerry, “were rounding us up.”
Jerry looked at Tim, his face blank. “What do you need? We picked you up closer to the school than I want to go for this part of the job. To get to the Projects we can just circle around town. What say we hit a pharmacy or something instead?”
Tim shook his head. “Won’t do any good. Bob had all their stock moved to the school. What he didn’t grab the military guys took. So unless you want to go around town looking in people’s medicine cabinets…”
* * *
We sat under a bridge, waiting while a pair of helicopters moved out of sight.
“If we’d just driven the truck you picked up last time we’d have been there hours ago,” Tim said, scowling at Jerry.
Jerry shrugged. “Just as soon stay quiet. If I hadn’t had prisoners last time I wouldn’t have used a truck then either. And hey, Doc? I don’t think you want me to start deciding not to take prisoners along. You know?”
Tim’s face went blank. He didn’t seem to have any trouble deciphering his current status in Jerry’s mind.
“Time to go,” George said. “Choppers are gone.”
* * *
The humming was getting louder. “Start looking for houses,” I said, as if we hadn’t all been doing that already. I shook my head a little—I suspected I’d been a better “leader” when I hadn’t known I was supposed to be doing it.
We were in an alley behind Henge Transmission, and had to get across Main Street on its other side to find a house anywhere nearby—but houses were our best bet against a swarm. Businesses near us had had a lot of plate glass windows, and we hadn’t seen any of them unbroken.
The broken windows seemed too consistent, too systematic, to be a coincidence. Was this the result of a combination of boredom and fear, plus readily available firearms and no law enforcement? Or…was it deliberate policy? Maybe to ensure the insect swarms had access to the buildings?
“I saw a place that looked okay last time I was here,” Jerry said. “Follow me.”
We all trotted around the building and across the street, following Jerry as he turned into one of the town’s newer residential areas. Made sense to me—the older-style Victorians (interspersed with occasional single- or double-wides) in the area weren’t as likely to be airtight. Or bug-tight.
The humming increased as Jerry ran up and tried the front door. “Locked!” he called back. I was already heading toward the back of the house.
Also locked. I hesitated for a moment, then broke out the glass on a storm door.
I heard Tim curse behind me, but maybe…I reached through the broken pane. Yes! The door behind it was unlocked.
I opened it and stepped through, holding it for the others. I could see bugs less than a block away. “In!” I shouted over their roaring buzz.
Jerry was last in. He ripped the door out of my hand as I held it for him, slamming it behind and shuddering.
“Hey, Jer,” I said after a moment. “You look a little…bug-eyed. No offense.”
“Fuck you, man,” he said, laughing in spite of himself. “You haven’t been caught out in one of those.”
I nodded. “Fair point. You figure this house is sealed?”
He nodded, his breath heaving, and held up a hand. “Think so. Been looking for buildings with all their windows every chance I get. We might want to check the place out a little better though. Get set up in an interior room and see if we can block it off.”
George unlimbered the shotgun he’d been carrying slung across his back. “Also we should see if anybody answers when I do this.” Then he turned to face the interior of the house. “Yoohoo! Anybody home?”
Tim grinned a little. “Bob hasn’t let people live in their houses for a while now.”
“Worth checking,” George countered, and he moved off to do more of just that.
Jerry took a final deep breath and went with him. “Watch the doc,” he warned me over his shoulder.
Tim shook his head slightly. I patted his shoulder. “Kitchen’s over there,” I said, pointing. “Let’s check for plastic bags, tape, whatever we can find.”
Only the bathrooms lacked an exterior window. Maybe we should have set ourselves up in one of them, but by common consent we settled on what had been a child’s bedroom instead. It was bigger. And…they wouldn’t help against bugs, but there were bars over the window. It just seemed generally safer that way.
I wanted to nail a board over the window too, but we didn’t have one and we didn’t have much time either.
“You sure sound matters?” I asked Jerry. “The swarm itself’s so loud…”
“Not sure. Not taking the chance.”
He stuffed towels under the door to the bedroom. “Everybody sit against the outside wall,” he told us. “Don’t be visible from the window.”
Tim sat. I caught George’s eye. “Think you can reach that?” I asked, tilting my head toward a vent in the ceiling.
He walked over, looked at it, and grabbed a plastic sword that looked like it would glow in the dark. Then used it to slide a lever to close the vent.
Jerry looked up and blinked in surprise. “Good thought,” he said, sounding a little calmer than he had earlier. “Okay, let’s all shut up until this thing passes.”
Almost immediately after we all got situated I suddenly needed to piss, and my left leg went to sleep a little later. I shifted, trying to relax, as the light darkened outside our window.
I was curious about the swarm and would have liked to look at it, just to see if I could figure out anything about how it behaved.
Also, looking out the window would mean I didn’t have to look around the room we were in. It had belonged to a little boy. No sign of him or his parents, which was probably a good thing on more than one level, but the bedroom reminded me of Robbie when he was younger. When I’d been able to keep him safe.
George picked up a book as if to read it, sighed, and put it down. It was “One Fish, Two Fish” by Dr. Seuss. The same book Abby had read to comfort herself, during the last night we spent in our own home.
The swarm lasted for hours, and the light outside only got darker. Eventually I figured out it was nighttime, and we were going to stay put till morning. But the swarm’s buzz-roar dwindled not long after I had that thought. After a while I pulled out the towel under the door and went to check out the rest of the house.
No visible or audible bugs. Good to know.
I slept on a couch in the living room. I’d looked at the kid’s toys long enough, and there were family pictures in the master bedroom. There was a guest room, but Jerry had claimed it.
Fine with me, actually. I didn’t really want to sleep in a stranger’s bed tonight anyway. Even using the couch bugged me more than it probably should have. All those toys, back in the room.
Jerry came into the living room a bit later, offering me his watch. I eyed it. Some kind of fancy Italian self-winding thing. Very nice. Had he owned it before all this started? If not, where had it come from? Not that I blamed him if he’d found it on a body…if it had been a dead body, anyway. I still wasn’t completely sure about this guy. “Thought you were sleeping,” I told him.
“Naw. Just rested for a bit. I figure one of us ought to be awake in case something happens. Actually we probably ought to do that back home too, keep a good watch overnight, but you—I mean, I’ve thought about bringing it up but it just never seemed like the right time.”
I eyed him curiously. As well as I could, anyway. Moonlight ghosted through the windows, illuminating only the left half of his face.
Not the right time? That didn’t make a lot of sense. Actually there wasn’t much we could do if we were attacked here in the house, so I wasn’t sure how much being awake would help. Sure, we might be able to deal with a single invader—but not an insect swarm t
hat found its way in, and not an attack from the high school. Or one of the Hunters-I-mean-werewolves either. It had actually made a lot more sense to keep a watch back…home. As Jerry called it. And he hadn’t mentioned it until now? And it had been somehow up to me to ask?
I shook my head. Our little compound didn’t feel like home to me—yet. But maybe it would, soon. Maybe if I could get Robbie and take him back with us. And get back to Abby.
I shook my head. “Worried about something around here?” I asked Jerry.
He grinned faintly and bounced his eyebrows. “Not a damned thing. But I can’t keep my eyes open. Figured I’d ask you to stay up for a couple-three hours. Then wake up George?”
And not Tim, he didn’t say, but I understood him fine. “Sure. Get some rest, man. We probably have a busy day tomorrow.”
I tried staying awake on the couch but got up again because I didn’t trust myself to keep my eyes open if I was too comfortable. George was snoring in a recliner in the far corner of the room, so that option was unavailable. I paced for a while, then went to sit in a wooden chair at the kitchen table. It wasn’t comfortable enough for me to go to sleep—probably.
I wondered again about what Jerry had said. It was almost as if, unbeknownst to me, I was the kind of leader who not only made the decisions but discouraged feedback—the night-sentry thing was fairly obvious, now that it had been pointed out. So, what the hell?
I sighed, trying not to lean my head on the table. We were a hell of a crew. Tim was going to turn himself in as soon as he got the chance, to protect his daughter. Jerry was along, he said, to make sure I didn’t make a dumb decision about trusting my son—or whatever was left of my son. George had come without saying why, which I figured meant he had a damned good reason to come and also a damned good reason not to tell us about it. Or at least not to tell me about it.
It actually was the sort of thing you’d expect to come up in conversation. I mean, “Sure, I’ll go risk my life to check things out instead of sitting back and resting, but just because I’m in the mood” didn’t quite ring true. But he’d said nothing.
And then there was me. What was my goal, anyway? Part of me wanted to find a high-minded answer within myself, but the truth was plain: Robbie was my goal. I stared into the darkness. That made me a pretty poor leader for the others, didn’t it? But I’d use them, if I had to, to save my son. I only hoped it wouldn’t come to that.
And also: what did I want to do after we found Robbie and got him out? I’d somehow been elected to be a leader. Did I want that? I was pretty sure I didn’t.
After a while I noticed it was getting darker outside, and went to a window. Looked like clouds were rolling in and blocking the moonlight. I hesitated, then quietly opened the back door and stepped out into the yard.
I could see flashes of lightning off to the south, but didn’t hear any thunder. Yet. The moon was completely swallowed by a dark mass about two minutes after I went out.
Henge had never been this dark at night before, not that I’d seen anyway. When I was a kid we used to drive twenty miles out of town to set up our telescopes and one-up each other finding remote galaxies in the sky. Not that I’d been a geek. Or competitive.
I stood outside until the rain started to come down, then slipped back in.
Thunder crashed, getting louder. I realized I’d nearly drifted off sitting on the living room couch when a bolt of lightning woke me—it wasn’t quite as bright as the flash when I’d been in Walmart—and that had been in the daytime—but it was more than enough to bring me back to full alertness.
George shifted on the couch. “Ash? You awake over there?” he asked.
“Yeah. Keeping watch, for what it’s worth. I can’t see much out there, and all I hear is the storm.”
I heard him yawn. “Still a good idea,” he said. “My turn yet?”
“You ought to get some more sleep,” I said. “I’ll wake you in a while. Hey George—did you ever think about posting a sentry, or something, when we were back up on the mountain?”
“Yeah,” he said, sounding surprised. “I told Jerry it was a good idea once. We meant to mention that, but I guess we didn’t get to it.”
“Huh.”
“You know,” George said, “it’s kind of funny that Jerry didn’t make a big deal out of it—it was his idea tonight, right?”
“Yeah. Funny how?”
“Just his…history, I guess.”
“History meaning what?”
“Oh, he—oh, who the hell knows. I’m tired, man. If you want to know about Jerry you should ask him. Not me.”
Sitting there in the dark, I had the odd sense that I could see Frank better than in the daylight. Not literally—but it was as if the darkness—or maybe our situation, out here away from the little community we’d been building on the mountainside—had loosened something in him. For sure I’d heard more words out of him tonight than ever before.
“Dangerous history?” I asked. “Something that’ll come back to bite us? I think I need to know about it, George.”
“It’s really not any of my business.”
I raised my voice a little. “Dude. If he’s—”
“Okay,” he said so quietly I almost didn’t hear it. “I’ll tell you. It’s just…Jerry’s a deserter, I guess. From the National Guard. He said he figured he’d live longer if he walked away, so he did just that as soon as he got the chance.”
“He came in with them? Lately, I mean?”
“Yeah. He’s a local boy, but they called him up a while back.”
“Because of the prison situation?” I asked, guessing.
I heard him shift in his chair. “Don’t know. I really don’t want to talk about this.”
“Okay,” I said after a moment, and I heard him sigh.
Silence from the chair where he sat.
Had I been…controlling George somehow? The idea was ridiculous—except that people had told me that was one of Reverend Bob’s tricks. Was I…changing? Becoming more like him?
I didn’t want to. But maybe it wasn’t just me. Maybe people—except me and Bob, and maybe Eisler, were getting easier to control. Giving up their free will?
Absurd. Also, not cool if it was actually true. Not any of it.
“You still up, man?” I asked George after a while.
“Yeah,” he said. Sounding a little tense. Scared maybe.
“Don’t worry about what you said,” I said. “I won’t mention it.”
“Excellent,” he said, sounding totally satisfied there in the dark. Or not. “Why don’t you get some sleep, Ash? I’ve got some thinking to do anyway.”
I was a lot more awake than I’d been at any time since Jerry woke me. But I didn’t want to argue with George. Was he doing what I told him to do, against his will?
Or was I deluding myself? Maybe all the stress was making me lose my mind.
I grinned at the thought after a moment. Well, what the hell. The damn thing didn’t seem to do me all that much good anyway.
I settled back on the couch. I heard George get up and walk into the kitchen.
* * *
Daylight coming in through the windows. I wondered where I was, then realized a hand was shaking my shoulder. I squinted—it was Jerry—and wriggled away from him. Man, I was sleepy.
“What’s—”
“George is gone.”
I blinked, and looked back into Jerry’s face. Tim stood behind him. “Did you fall asleep,” Tim asked, “or…”
“George got up,” I said. “Thunder woke him up. Told me he’d take over.”
Tim sighed. “Either of you know where he’d go? He might be working for Eisler or Bob, or both. Or someone else.”
I sat up. Jerry looked…thoughtful. He didn’t volunteer any ideas.
Had I really pushed George into saying things he hadn’t wanted to, last night? Or had that been either a dream or an artifact of a confused and sleepy mind—meaning mine?
Had he left to kee
p me from doing it again?
“Maybe it’s about his brother,” I suggested.
Jerry shook his head. “He could have said. If that was it.”
* * *
“This is where it happened,” Jerry told us. “Where they started shooting at us. Doc, you were right over—”
“Between those houses,” Tim said testily. “I didn’t forget.”
I pursed my lips. The two of them had been sniping at each other all morning. It was beginning to remind me of dealing with teenagers.
Though that probably meant something entirely different, these days.
“Bag’s in those bushes. I hope,” Tim said, pointing with his left index finger.
I sensed Jerry moving away, and glanced to see what he was up to. He was staring at Tim’s right hand. Which was busily scratching above his right hip.
“Got an itch?” Jerry asked, too casually.
“Yeah,” Tim told him. Waited a beat. “I don’t like it any better than you do.”
He walked over to the bushes and started moving branches out of the way.
For some reason Jerry seemed to have calmed down. Maybe he’d liked Tim’s answer?
Whatever. I decided I was as happy as I was going to get, as long as they weren’t going to shoot each other.
“Got it.”
* * *
We saw no sign of movement from the house Tim led us to. The screen door was off its hinges, and there were bullet dents in the main door. It’d been built stronger than I would have guessed. Then again, this had been a high crime area.
I sighed. I’d begun to get very tired of these situations.
“How many people were we supposed to find here?” I asked Tim.
He shrugged. “More than five. If this is the house. If it’s even the right street.”
I frowned at him. “Not sure about the address?”
He gave a short laugh. “None of them could tell me the address. Or even street names. I tried to ask them, but I got stuff like ‘turn just past where Leticia lives, you know, her house, then you just look for the black Jeep.’”
The Secret: A Thriller Page 16