Worst of all was that I knew I should be more passive, I knew I shouldn’t be killing the bugs because I couldn’t fight their numbers, I knew I couldn’t afford to be found out if they really did pass information on to some kind of overseer—I thought of the boy with faceted eyes, letting a wasp crawl into his mouth and smiling, smiling, smiling…
And then the swarm moved on.
* * *
I hadn’t noticed any lessening, and in fact I was still writhing and twitching in the creek when I realized…only a few straggler fliers and crawlers were still with me. The rest had gone on to whatever they were going to do next.
I washed out my mouth as best I could, and nearly tore my clothes off my body, desperate to GET THEM OFF OF ME!
Eventually I calmed down, stopped shaking, and only ran my hand over my head or jumped, certain more were on my back, every few minutes. I felt little legs crawling all over my body, even where I could clearly see my skin and knew it was in my imagination. Didn’t help.
When I got my breathing back under control I methodically washed and wrung out my clothes. I still didn’t want to put them on—anything touching my skin felt like it was going to start crawling, biting, maybe trying to force its way inside me—but I made myself do it.
Eventually I got myself together, and went upstream in search of Jerry. I found him sitting buck naked on a log. As I walked up he twisted around, jumped up, and tried to brush probably-nonexistent bugs off his ass.
“We made it,” I said to let him know I was there.
He jumped again, stared at me as if he had no idea who I was, then shuddered and closed his eyes. “Yeah.”
He’d already cleaned his clothes—I could see them drying on a couple of boulders—and walked toward them.
I started to avert my eyes, but got a glimpse of his back and stared. From the way he moved I figured he knew I had seen and was watching him.
Once he was dressed he shook himself again, windmilled his arms, and gave me a skeletal grin. “Invigorating, isn’t it?”
“Oh yeah,” I agreed. “I’m going to want to do that every week.”
His grin died, and he sat down on a log. “You saw my back. The rash is pretty bad, isn’t it? I could feel it in my armpits at first, but now my whole back feels like somebody’s been beating on it with a tenderizer.”
“Might have been,” I agreed. “I don’t know if this is the same thing Tim wanted to treat, Jer. It looks more like…tumors, or something. Bumps starting under your shoulderblades, going almost up to your neck.”
He nodded. “If it’s not one damn thing…”
He’d been wearing the same set of clothes for our entire trip. We all had, since carrying any extra weight or bulk might be fatal. I took a closer look at him.
“I don’t know if I should even mention this,” I said hesitantly. “But Jerry…are you getting shorter?”
“Fuck!” he screamed, and walked away from me into the woods.
I nodded. Yeah, he’d noticed that too.
I was glad I hadn’t mentioned his ears were also changing. Getting a little…pointy.
One thing at a time, I thought. Then I gave a short laugh.
It wasn’t one thing at a time anymore. If it ever had been. It was everything, all at once.
* * *
Jerry came back after a while. Didn’t say anything, just sat near me.
“What I can’t get over,” I told him, “is that you were caught in a swarm before. In the open. No creek. If I even hear one of those things again I’ll probably lose my mind.”
He nodded. “Who says I haven’t lost mine already? But…yeah, the first one was worse. And it went on a lot longer. I wouldn’t say this to just anybody, but since you’ve been through it…when it happened before there was still running water in some parts of town. Almost the first thing I did when I got free of the bugs was shove a garden hose up my ass and give myself an enema.”
I felt a chill between my shoulderblades. “I can see that,” I told him. Truthfully. Though I didn’t want to think about it.
“Worst part,” he continued, “was that the whole time I was doing that I kept wondering if I was just pushing them deeper inside me. Were they going to wiggle around, bite me, or what? I didn’t quit feeling flutters down there for three days.” He shook his head slowly, looking at the ground. “I figured that was all in my head. Anyway,” he gave a skeletal grin, “the nightmares were worse. Still are, sometimes.”
I couldn’t think of anything to say. Eventually I clapped him on his left shoulder, being careful to avoid the sensitive-looking bumps I’d seen earlier. “Come on, man. Maybe we should head through town the way you wanted to.”
“Naw,” he said, standing. “You’re right. I don’t think…so far the swarm hasn’t tried to kill us. And I think we just caught the fringes of it, anyway. It was mostly back toward the road. If we circle out a bit farther we might avoid them entirely.”
“Your call,” I told him.
He gave me a strange look. I shrugged. I wasn’t the one whose back looked like it was giving birth to an alien.
My left ear started itching, but I waited until Jerry was walking in front of me to scratch it—and check the shape.
Normal.
So far.
* * *
Jerry turned his head in my direction. “We’re not learning much.”
“I’d noticed that.” We were sitting in the back of an SUV with tinted windows, watching to see who came and went to—and from, I guess—the VA hospital. We’d walked all around the place, but…it was a tall building, and we hadn’t really wanted to get closer. Or at least I hadn’t.
“Jer. What is it you’re not telling me?”
“Hmm?” he asked, not looking at me. “About what?”
“About why we’re here, dumbass,” I said. “We haven’t seen a single kid anywhere in town. Which…I don’t like. But there’s no reason to think we’ll learn anything else useful staring at this building. Yet here we are. And not leaving.”
He turned his head slightly in my direction, gave a sort of grin-smirk, and looked back toward the hospital. Or the main road going toward it, anyway. “See? This is why you’re in charge, back home,” he said. “You pay attention to stuff.”
Jerry’s weird sense of humor was…well, it was actually kind of fun. “Gonna tell me? It’s kind of important, since right now we should probably be getting back. And then there’s that,” I added, nodding toward the side window Jerry had broken so we could get into the vehicle. “If I hear the bugs coming, I’m probably going to shoot you.”
“You’re not that good a shot, man. I’m, like, two feet away.”
“So I’ll aim to miss, and you’ll be screwed. Come on.”
“It’s my mom.”
“What’s your mom?” I asked, though I was pretty sure I knew where this was going.
“Last I heard, from a neighbor, she was headed here to check on a friend of hers. She didn’t come back.”
I frowned. “How do you know?”
“Her place was one of the houses we looked at, over by the high school,” he said. “Windows busted, nobody home.”
I shook my head slowly. “You’re a piece of work, man. From what you’re saying she could just as—”
“Hey, look out the window, dude. Chew me out later.”
A pickup was rolling away from the VA. It had five men with red armbands—at least most of them wore armbands; I couldn’t tell with a couple of them—and it drove right past us. Jerry and I slowly settled ourselves lower, below window level, then raised up in unison to stare after them. “What the hell was that?” I asked.
A shrug. “Beats me. Look, another one.”
This was a Lincoln Town Car, but I saw one armband inside and made assumptions about its other passengers. “Patrols maybe?”
“Let’s get out of here,” Jerry said. “If they’re…shit.”
I looked. More people—men and women, this time—and on foot.
If they came this way and looked in the SUV we were screwed.
* * *
“I think we’re safe for now,” Jerry said. “But Ash. Dude. You’re right. We should leave.”
I drummed my fingers on the kitchen table of the house we’d broken into. “Yeah? If we leave right now, while we know they’re patrolling, what happens? Besides,” I went on after a moment, “did you notice the armbands?”
“Of course I noticed the fucking armbands. What’s your point?”
“If they were all going in the same direction, it might mean they were going to be around some other group—in uniform, maybe—and the other group didn’t know them by sight. But that’s not what they did. Some went one way, some another. Some in cars, some on foot. So—to me, that means there are a ton of people wandering around out there right now. And maybe we can…”
Jerry was nodding. “Let’s go see what we can find in this place. Gotta be something red.”
* * *
We were back on the street, walking down the center of the road, moving directly toward the hospital and planning to get past it into the woods.
“Here they come,” Jerry said, nodding ahead and to the right.
I glanced quickly without turning my head. I saw at least four red-banded people coming out of a house.
We kept going, hoping our armbands would pass muster, without overtly paying much attention. I wondered…could I actually do something about this situation?
I closed my eyes for a second, then opened them again when I stumbled over a rock.
“Steady, dude,” Jerry said, sounding completely casual.
“Yeah.” But in that three seconds, I’d…felt…the people ahead. More, I counted them. There were seven in the group. Could I—?
Jerry chuckled beside me. “Be great if we found out they have a rule about always traveling in threes.”
I shook my head, tuning him out. I could sense we were attracting attention. Nobody here, I thought toward them. Just more of your team. Not worth looking at.
Jerry took a half-step away from me. “Ash? What’re you—”
“Walk,” I told him. “No talking,”
I could feel he wanted to argue. But I really didn’t want him to. So he didn’t.
Chapter Eighteen
I quit concentrating on my nobody-here vibe soon after we got into the woods, then had to sit and lean against a tree to keep from falling over.
Jerry, a couple of feet behind me, stopped. “Dude? Were you, like, in my mind for a while there?”
I held up a hand, panting, then gave up and laid myself out on the ground with my feet propped on the tree. “Guess so?”
“Shit.”
I nodded, wondering. What would—
Jerry sat himself down next to me, hands wrapped over his knees. “Good trick. That first group looked like it was about to come after us, then…they lost interest. How long’ve you been able to do that?”
My mind was a mostly-dry sponge, still being wrung out but with almost nothing left. “Not sure.”
“Yeah? Well…cool, I guess. Here, watch this.”
I turned my head, still breathing hard. Jerry, pointing at a rock about five feet away from us. Nothing special; it looked to be about a pound’s worth of granite. “What—?”
“Shh.”
He sounded…strained. I glanced at his face. His eyes were shut, and his forehead was ridged in concentration.
And I could feel something change. In his head.
The rock rolled itself out of the ground, pulling dirt and roots into the light as it came. I could see it was bigger than I’d guessed, and a couple of beetles scurried for safety. I let them go, but it was a near thing.
The bugs had caught my attention—we really needed to get out of the area before the next swarm hit us with no protection—but still, under that was amazement.
Then the rock rolled toward us, coming to rest against Jerry’s boot.
He gasped suddenly. “Shit! That was hard.”
I nodded, pretty sure I knew what he meant. “How long…?”
I got a quick grin. “Not sure. But I figured you should know. I’m…changing. More than a little.”
I glanced at him, then away. “I think we all are.”
“Yeah.” He shoved himself up on his feet. “But right now I just want to get the hell out of here.”
* * *
Traipsing through the woods, I wondered what the hell we were going to do when we got back…home, I decided to call it. Why not.
Looked like Bob and Eisler’s group knew about us. There were no kids to be seen in town. The military commander, if that was still McDermott’s role, had come into town without a lot of force to back him up. That didn’t look like the move of a guy in a strong position.
Unless his position was so strong he thought he’d be safe? If so, could—
Birds burst from the trees.
“Shit,” Jerry said, and I heard it coming too.
Bugs!
We ran.
* * *
The noise got louder as we went. I could sense they weren’t far away, and realized I’d dropped my shotgun in my haste to get away. Then I saw Jerry had done the same and felt a little better about it, but.
The swarm was a larger concern.
I saw Jerry go down, tripping over a fallen tree limb, and I stopped to pull him up.
“Fuck!” Jerry screamed, and I yelled too as I felt the bugs on my skin. I shut my eyes as hard as I could, pinched my nose with my left hand…clenched my ass too, thinking about Jerry’s story and hoping they wouldn’t really…
Damnit! I thought at the swarm. Go away!
The buzz-roar got louder, the loudest I’d heard yet. But then I realized…Jerry wasn’t thrashing. And the bugs were all around me—my arms wanted to windmill, smashing as many as I could—but they were just sort of brushing against me, not exploring every crevice as they had before. Barely touching me at all, actually.
I opened my eyes and tried to get a glimpse of Jerry, but the bugs were so thick I could barely see him. I flopped in his direction, hoping I was killing a few hundred of the damn things, and lay shoulder to shoulder with him. I could feel something…
Yes. Jerry was doing the same thing he’d done with the rock, only keeping the bugs about an eighth of an inch away from his skin. Had he been able to do some of that before? Was that how he’d managed to survive the two swarms already? Had he known he was doing it?
Suddenly I could feel Jerry’s mind beside mine, and I wondered. What if we could…
I reached out to his mind, caught and soothed his startled response, and started trying to hold the bugs off his body as well as mine.
He sensed what I was doing, and reached out to do the same for me.
Ah! Better! I wanted to grin or shout with joy, but still didn’t dare open my mouth. Or chance disturbing Jerry’s concentration. Mine, either.
Together, we could hold them off. They swarmed, and this time I could watch them.
Centipedes, yup. Lots of beetles. Ants, but not so many. Dragonflies, mayflies, wasps, bees.
They all tumbled over the ground and through the air, colliding sometimes but mostly moving in strange swirling patterns, as if…well, it looked like a search pattern, the kind of thing I remembered from my early Computer Science classes in college.
So was someone directing this? I closed my eyes again, and felt…I didn’t know what to call them. Lines of force all around, I guess, although they didn’t seem strictly limited to three dimensions. A pattern, anyway, sort of fractal and beautiful.
Jerry’s mind was still linked with mine and I could feel he was getting worried that I’d use up too much of our energy on figuring stuff out when all he wanted was to hold the bugs off as long as possible.
He was right.
* * *
I think it lasted for hours. I experimented with using more and less mental energy, and discovered holding the bugs about a foot away from us wa
s the sweet spot. Closer, and they disturbed the link between me and Jerry. Farther out, and I could feel us tiring more rapidly. I wanted to see how far away I could push them, but I didn’t dare try it.
So we held them off, waiting.
After a while they—attacked?—in more force, and I nearly lost our ability to hold them off. Then they retreated and did it again.
I could feel myself blacking out. The bugs pressed in closer, I pushed them away, they came in again…each time I pushed I could feel they moved a little less than the time before.
My head a solid ball of ache, my eyes gritty beyond belief, I could feel them wedging their strange lines between me and Jerry. If this kept up much longer…
Then the swarm…hesitated. Quit pressing so hard. And slowly backed off, creating a buzzing circular wall about ten feet in diameter.
And I saw a young girl with faceted eyes step through the wall and frown at me.
Jerry spasmed, and I tried to push NOBODY HERE at her. She frowned slightly.
And everything went black.
* * *
Somebody was kicking my feet. “Wake up, Ash. I don’t have time for this.”
God, I ached. And I wanted to sleep for another week. However long I’d been unconscious, it hadn’t been long enough.
Again with the foot-kick. “Open your eyes and look at me or so help me I’ll just shoot you right now.”
I knew that voice. I tried to open my eyes—gummy; sticky—and tried to raise a hand to wipe them…but it didn’t move.
Blinking, I realized I was leaning against a wall with my hands tied behind my back.
Water hit my face. Didn’t help; I was already as awake as I’d get anytime soon.
Eventually I got my eyes to stay mostly open and squinted up at Eisler. “Hey Mike. How’s the law business treating you?”
The left corner of his mouth quirked up. “Poorly. You can’t get away this time, Ash. Bob wants to see you in a couple of hours.”
The Secret: A Thriller Page 18