Devil’s Wake

by Steven Barnes

  “For you, Mamí,” Ursalina whispered. Long before the beach was in sight, the scent of saltwater, brine, and sea breezes filled the bus. There had been one phone call—only one—and then she’d lost her parents to a void of questions. She hoped they were safe, or dead. It might be better if her parents were dead.

  All of them noticed the smell, sitting up straighter, craning to see through the darkness as the bus drove alongside the ocean.

  No gunfire rang. No screams in the night. Nothing to be on alert for. Ursalina lay her gun on the seat beside her and stretched her fingers, which were half numb from holding it so tightly. Her body sagged, resting.

  Grief came in a stomach cramp so sharp Ursalina nearly cried out. One of the last promises she had made to Mickey and Sharlene was that she would take them to the beach. She had hidden the memory from herself, but the ocean brought it back.

  Ursalina realized she was crying, but she didn’t try to cover her face.

  In darkness, no one can see your tears.

  The ocean rolled against the beach to their right, as it had since before the first human being stood upright, and would even after the last of us shuffled red-eyed through the sand.

  Somehow, defying all odds, the Blue Beauty had made it through two checkpoints and thirty miles. Terry found himself stroking the steering wheel almost sensually, wondering if it was wrong to fall in love with a bus.

  The password had worked just as Meeks had promised. A single case of MREs had brought them driving instructions to the camp and a living miracle: the ocean. It was concealed in shadows, but it was there.

  It was nine o’clock, dead night and dead dark, and the Beauty felt like a space shuttle lifting into orbit. All Terry could make out at first was the openness, an absence of trees. Then, suddenly, they were close enough to see glowing bonfires dotting the beach from campers who kept a careful distance from one another.

  The headlights illuminated a few more signs now: TRADING TODAY, said one. And WOOD AND FISH FOR TRADE, said another. Here, along the coast, life endured. They passed a car going north, and each vehicle moved as far to its own side of the road as possible. The other car was a station wagon, crammed with possessions and guns. Three adults and maybe two kids. A big, beefy woman, perhaps two. A guy with a beard turned to glare as he glided past.

  Terry wanted to yell out to him that there was nothing up north but death.

  The sun had long set, but the moon’s shadow danced like a dolphin on the waves, shimmered, bringing back memories of other times and places that sent Kendra rushing to the right side of the bus, pressing her face against the glass.

  “I haven’t seen the ocean in a year,” she said to no one but her reflection.

  “Washington beaches suck,” Darius said. “This is way better.” He and Dean slapped hands and broke into song simultaneously: “‘Wish they all could be California giiiirls.’” Impressive harmony. It was odd, and reassuring, to hear Dean singing.

  Something had changed. Even Hipshot moved to the right side of the bus, fogging his seat’s window with his tongue. He barked at the night-dark waves.

  A guy with a powerful flashlight guided them to the sand with a dead-eyed reminder that McKinleyville would only host them for twenty-four hours, warning that dawdlers might be conscripted into work crews. To some travelers, Kendra thought, forced labor might not be a bad trade for food and protection.

  The bus jounced along shallow dunes. Invisible waves marched across the shoreline with steady growls and whispers that seemed to stretch from one end of the earth to the other. The moon showed her flashes of cresting white from the waves, and the back of Kendra’s neck glowed with the unnameable joy of knowing that something was still the same.

  There were a half-dozen other campers out there, and three campfires. The fires might not be as warm as they looked, but it was still good to see the guards patrolling the sand, those guns pointed not at them but out at the road itself, or toward the surf.

  They parked several yards from a campfire that was home to three people: a man about fifty-five, a woman a little younger, and a kid who looked about thirteen. The group had been watching them race out of the Blue Beauty onto the sand, keeping an eye on them while they stretched, chased each other like puppies, and drank in the ocean air.

  “It’s freezing,” Ursalina said sourly, comparing it to beaches in her memory.

  “Fire,” Darius said. “Great invention.”

  “True,” Piranha said. “Let’s find driftwood.”

  The Twins and Piranha had just started combing the beach when the man at the fire rose and began walking toward them. Kendra tensed, but not for long. She saw none of the fearful caution of the others they had met on the road. The man probably had a handgun hidden somewhere, but he didn’t carry himself with that one-wrong-move-and-I’ll-shoot-you posture that was all the fashion since Freak Day.

  The woman walked closely behind him, leaving the boy at the fire. She wore a brace on her right leg and moved like a broken Slinky. She was pale-haired and pretty but looked as if she hadn’t slept in a month.

  Hipshot greeted the couple with a friendly bark and wagging tail.

  “Hi,” the woman said. “We’re the Lamphers, and my name is Sharon. Might take a while to build a good fire, so you’re welcome to share ours.”

  “I’m Joe,” the man said. “That scrawny kid tending the fire is our son, Adam. Think we might have a beer or two to spare. These days, we’re willing to bribe for company.”

  Kendra might risk her life for a Coke, but beer tasted horrible and only made her sleepy. But the offer was miraculous, and the others whooped.

  “Sir,” Ursalina said. “You’ve said the magic word. You can even check my ID.”

  The couple laughed at her joke, the idea of checking a driver’s license quaint and long-ago. The woman hung very close to her husband, holding the crook of his arm. It was only after they started moving toward the fire that Kendra realized she was blind.

  Joe had run a liquor store in Sacramento before Freak Day and had loaded up the camper with all the beer and booze they could hold, figuring to trade. The figuring had been pretty good. The tepid cans of Newcastle Brown Ale he offered hadn’t come from their store: it had been traded a hundred miles east for a case of Chivas, Joe figuring that cans of beer might be better small change than a fifth of whiskey.

  Kendra knew plenty about their story before she heard the details.

  When their neighborhood had fallen to infection, they’d risked packing up to stay with friends who owned a farm. That sanctuary had lasted a week, and then the farm had been overrun too. Neither of them mentioned dead friends or loved ones, but their long silence said enough. Adam poked at the fire angrily with a stick, and sparks sprayed up like fireworks.

  Finally, Joe sighed. “Pirates rule the roads, so everybody thinks towns are best,” he said. “You hear about these towns rebuilding, and they seem fine for a while. But it’s like the freaks can smell it. One day, everything is clear. The next, there’s a hundred freaks at the wire, somebody’s been bit, and his husband or wife won’t give warning. Within a couple of days, there’s freaks inside, and it’s all gone to hell. We’ve seen it, oh, a dozen times, just here in Northern California. We’ve learned how to move fast.”

  Sharon and Adam were nodding emphatically.

  Darius let out a satisfied beer belch and excused himself. “This place has a good setup,” he said. “How are they surviving?”

  “They know each other. Aren’t taking outsiders, except to camp and work. Plenty of guns and dogs,” Joe said.

  “Strange how dogs can tell,” Kendra said, ruffling Hipshot’s fur as he settled beside her. Hipshot usually gravitated between Terry and her.

  “You know what I think?” Sharon said. “I think we can all tell, but we don’t let ourselves know what we know.”

  With a shiver, Kendra remembered her father’s wild eyes after his bite. “Why would we do that?” she said.

  Sha
ron Lampher turned her face toward Kendra with a fond, distracted expression, her eyes turned more toward the night sky. “Because they’re us, darling. They may bite and tear, but when it comes right down to it, they’re our brothers and sisters and mothers and cousins. They are us, if we make one mistake. And so whatever signals we get are all confused, all scrambled up. We don’t want to know what we know.”

  Sharon closed her eyes about halfway, fluttered her eyelashes. Joe patted her knee. “Sharon…”

  “No, it’s all right,” Sharon said.

  “Mom used to give workshops, do readings… aura stuff,” Adam said. “Tarot. Native American juju. Stuff like that.”

  Joe folded his hands. “If you believe in that kind of thing,” he said.

  “O ye of little faith,” Sharon said. “Ask him why we went to you kids.”

  “Mom said you were okay,” the boy said simply.

  “Good auras,” Sharon said.

  Joe shrugged. “Sharon has great hunches, I’ll admit. I don’t know if ‘auras’ really exist outside our perception, or if it’s just what I’d call a ‘complex equivalent.’ ”

  “A what?” Sonia said. She had settled in Piranha’s lap, and his arms were wrapped around her as he rested his chin on her shoulder. Kendra envied their pose, but Terry was far on the other side of the fire. He kept glancing toward the Blue Beauty to make sure no one was trying to board the bus, still on alert. The Blue Beauty was Terry’s more than anyone’s.

  Joe went on. “Let’s say you have a whole lot of information you’ve picked up unconsciously. I went to engineering school, took psych classes. The unconscious mind is the ocean, and the conscious mind is a teacup. There’s just a pinhole to squeeze information through, and most of it never makes it. Haven’t you ever had a gut feeling you couldn’t explain?”

  Terry and Kendra glanced at each other when he said that, as if he’d tugged on puppet strings on opposite sides of the fire. Embarrassed, they both quickly looked away.

  “Maybe they just smell right… or wrong,” Joe said. “Or it’s their body language. But you don’t have time to run through a whole list, so you just get a feeling. Right? I think auras might be like that. We pick up a huge amount of information, can’t process all of it as data, but we get a feeling.”

  As if to demonstrate the point, Hipshot rested his muzzle in Sharon’s lap. “I saw everything about you in my head as soon as the bus drove up, no matter what he says,” she said. “Everybody here is kind, healthy, and un-bit. Especially this little guy. He’s about as un-bit as you could get!” She ruffled his fur. “Yes you are! Yes you are!” Her good-doggy voice set his tail to thumping.

  Then she looked at Kendra, and in the firelight Kendra thought her unseeing eyes changed from blue to the deeply green depths of the ocean. “You are especially interesting,” Sharon said. “I’ll be honest. You’re the reason I invited all of you to the fire, young lady.”

  Darius made a little chuffing sound, a joke he’d decided to keep to himself.

  “Me?” Kendra’s voice was small.

  “You.” She looked not at Kendra but slightly past her. “Do you remember your dreams?”

  Kendra had the oddest sensation, as if the world was focusing its way down to a tunnel, and that tunnel connected the two of them. No one else seemed to exist. Sharon repeated her question.

  Kendra nodded, a shallow little dip of her chin, but Sharon seemed to see her.

  “And what… do you dream about all of this?”

  “This?”

  Sharon’s smile was kind but stern. “Don’t pretend, little lady. We don’t have room or time for that. Maybe once upon a time, those of us who see could pretend not to. We could hide. But if you hadn’t noticed, we need every open eye we have.” She leaned forward. “Every open eye.”

  Kendra’s heart pounded in concert with the surf on the sand, with its steady rolling rhythm, the heartbeat of the planet, a love song between the earth and the moon dancing with her waves.

  Kendra looked around at her friends, suddenly aware that she didn’t want to answer the question. That this woman, with her blind green eyes, had peered more deeply into her than she wanted anyone to—now or ever. But they were all looking at her. Even Hipshot, gnawing on a rib bone Adam had given him, seemed to be waiting for her.

  “Sometimes,” Kendra began, so softly that she could barely hear her own voice. “Sometimes I remember my dreams, yes.”

  “And is there one that recurs? Anything that has changed since the outbreak?”

  She nodded slowly, remembering the disturbing dreams she’d had when she was living with Grandpa Joe in his cabin. She didn’t exactly remember images from her dreams, but they suddenly seemed like a story she told often. “I feel as if… I’m standing on a chessboard or something. Made out of strings of light. They connect off in the distance somewhere. Something is moving along those lines. Making the squares.”

  “Something?”

  “Something alive.”

  Sharon nodded. “Anything else?”

  “No,” Kendra said. “But I never had that dream before all of this… no, wait. That’s not true. I think I might have had it just a few times, but it started within a month or so of when everything fell apart.”

  “And did you ever dream about… the sick? Before it happened?”

  Kendra took a moment to realize that Sharon was referring to freaks as “the sick,” a term so compassionate that it sounded strange… but exactly right. She pulled her knees up to her chest and wrapped her arms around them. “I used to have dreams of being in a garden, and large plants grabbing me. And cities burning. I’d been having them for a couple of years. My parents said I would wake up screaming. It got bad. My mom didn’t want to keep me in the city anymore, but my dad didn’t want to leave. They started fighting all the time. Finally, they decided to move out of L.A. I felt so guilty, but I had to get out. Had to leave.”

  She looked at the group’s rapt eyes and then began to cry. For a few moments it was as if they were all too shocked to move, then Kendra felt an arm around her shoulders, and then another, and then they were all hugging her.

  Sharon Lampher’s voice was terribly gentle. “Look at what happened to the cities,” she said. “Pure panic. Breakdown of services. Millions died in the first months. You had a much better chance of survival in a small town.”

  “Weren’t you in Portland when your father got bit?” Terry said.

  Kendra nodded, surprised that he remembered. “I didn’t want to go. I really didn’t want to go. They wanted to give me that damn flu shot.”

  Kendra noticed something feral pass across Ursalina’s eyes: the soldier making a mental note to keep an eye on Kendra.

  “I never took the shot,” Kendra said quickly. “Or ate the mushroom. I never had the chance. The hospital was… bad. I begged them not to take me.”

  “Had you ever been afraid of getting a shot before?” Sharon said.

  She shook her head. “Not since I was a little kid.”

  “But you were afraid of this one.”

  Kendra was still, listening to the roar of her breathing, the pounding of her heart. Everything was so clear now. Her parents had moved for her. To help her. But some part of her—a part so small and weak that it could barely let itself be known, let its voice be heard—had been trying to save them.

  Why couldn’t she have seen more clearly? Enough to make a difference?

  “But what good is it?” Kendra said. “It wasn’t enough. Is there a way to make… that part of me stronger? Make the messages clearer?”

  “Just listen for it,” Sharon said. “My gift… it was easy. So much darkness, so little light. But you… with you, it was different. It will be different.”

  “Is it… too late?” Kendra asked. “For it to matter?”

  “If you can even ask that question,” Sharon said, “it’s not too late at all.”

  After a time the conversation died away, and they made their good-byes to prepar
e for sleep. The Lamphers hung to one side of the fire, and they circled the rest. No one was more than arm’s length away from the others, in case they needed to wake one another in a hurry. Silently.

  Kendra felt more comfortable with her bedroll on the sand when she lay down to close her eyes, pretending not to hear Piranha and Sonia get up to go, hand in hand, to investigate a dune a hundred feet north of their fire. It was a big no-no to disappear without alerting the others, but Piranha and Sonia behaved like a secret. Maybe they thought pretending would keep it from hurting as badly if something went wrong.

  When something went wrong, as Ursalina would say. And she ought to know.

  Terry was exhausted from endless driving, and there was no reason to drag him from sleep. Kendra sat up and pulled herself out of the sleeping bag. When no one by the fire stirred, she wandered down to the edge of the surf. Hipshot, of course, followed her, his feet padding on the damp sand.

  The water was liquid ice. The black water, nearly invisible in the dark, flowed up and rolled back, touching the tips of her toes, and she stared out across the quivering plane. The water swallowed her. Awed her. Mocked her.

  If you looked across the water, all the way across, what was there? Hawaii? No… that was farther south, wasn’t it? China? Japan? She was trying to remember her maps. And what was happening in those faraway lands? When Arizona and Montana had been made alien, the rest of the world was unknowable. Was there a world?

  The surf hissed up and down the shoreline that stretched to oblivion.

  Suddenly, Kendra needed to believe there were others standing on a distant beach, looking out at the ocean, wondering as she was. They were just as lonely and frightened, gazing east instead of west. Kendra closed her eyes and tried to feel a connection with the world. Was there something there? Anything?

  All she knew for certain was that somewhere out there lay an island called Devil’s Wake, where a blood relation might be waiting for her. Safety. Family. Could she hope Devil’s Wake was real, that her future was real, or was Devil’s Wake only another dream?