by John Saul
Russell stared at her. “Another teenager?”
She nodded. “Andy Bennett. Another one of the kids Julie and Kevin went to the movies with.”
“Oh, Jesus,” Russell breathed. “Poor Marian. She must—”
Karen jerked away from him, her eyes blazing. “Poor Marian?” she echoed. “Why are you so worried about her? What about me? I have a child missing, too! Or have you forgotten?” Suddenly all the fear she’d been trying to control all morning, all the frustration and helplessness that had been welling up inside her, coalesced into rage. “I don’t know why I ever came here,” she yelled, jerking away from Russell and starting toward the house. “My mother was right! This is a terrible place! It’s hot, and the people are horrible, and if the bees don’t kill you, the scorpions do! God, why did I marry you? Why did I ever think any of this was a good idea?”
She broke into a run, her head down as she fled toward the house. Molly scrambled out of the car and chased after her, and a moment later so did Russell, catching up to his wife and stepdaughter just as they reached the front porch.
Kevin, coming out of the barn, watched for a moment as his father and stepmother stood on the porch of the house, arguing. From inside the barn he’d heard everything that Karen had said, and gotten more worried by the second.
More worried, and more frightened.
So now Andy Bennett was gone, too.
Had he gone up to the cave where Jeff and Julie were?
What about the rest of his friends?
Where were Sara McLaughlin and Shelley Munson?
Were they feeling the same way he was?
Were they getting sick, too?
Suddenly he had to know.
Abandoning the chores that still had to be done, Kevin got behind the wheel of the Chevy and was about to start its engine when he heard his father yelling at him. Twisting the key in the ignition switch, he pumped the accelerator a couple of times. The motor coughed, then started. Putting the car in gear, Kevin drove it on up to the house. From the porch his father and stepmother gazed at him.
“I’m going to go see if I can find Sara and Shelley,” he said. “If Andy’s gone, too, maybe they know where he went.”
“You’re not going anywhere—” Russell began, but Karen cut him off.
“Why not?” she demanded. “At least he cares that they’re gone! Why shouldn’t he go look for his friends?”
Russell hesitated, then gave in. “All right,” he said. “But just be careful, Kevin, okay?”
Kevin smiled. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’m fine.”
Then he was gone.
Andy Bennett moved steadily into the hills.
The agonizing humming in his head was gone—had been gone almost from the second he’d jumped over the fence and fled from his mother and her car. He’d heard the crash when the truck hit the car door—even turned around to see what had happened. But seeing that his mother was okay—even though the door of her car was torn off—he hadn’t gone back to find out what had happened.
In fact, he wasn’t sure he’d have gone back even if someone had been hurt.
For now there was something new going on in his head.
A new sensation—not quite a sound, not quite an image.
Something else—something he’d never experienced before.
It was as if he was no longer in control of his own mind, or his own body, and as he walked up into the hills, he had no conscious idea where he was going.
But he knew he was going somewhere—somewhere he felt compelled to be—and as he moved along the paths, soon losing any real knowledge of where he was, that strange sensation of a presence in his mind seemed to guide him, seemed to know exactly where he should go.
Finally he came to the crest of a hill and found himself looking down into a valley. On the other side of the valley he could see a cave.
The cave, he suddenly knew, was where he needed to be.
His step quickening, Andy hurried down the hillside, crossed the stream that wound along the floor of the valley, and started up toward the cave.
He was still fifty feet away when he saw Jeff Larkin step out of the shadows that hid the interior of the cavern. Jeff neither waved nor spoke to him, but merely stepped back into the cave. When Andy finally was at the mouth of the cave, he wondered if Jeff had even seen him. But a moment later, as he stepped into the gloom within the cavern, Jeff fell in beside him.
Then he saw Julie.
She lay on the floor of the cave, near the back.
Her body was bloated, and every inch of her skin was covered with bees, whose wings vibrated steadily, filling the cave with the low hum of a hive.
Andy stopped, his stomach churning with nausea at the sight of her. He wanted to turn away, to run out of the cave, to flee back into the sunlight outside.
But he couldn’t.
Something inside him—something he could neither understand nor resist—took control of him.
He started slowly toward Julie as her arms rose and reached out to him.
Reached out with fingernails that had grown long.
Long, and pointed.
Pointed … like stingers.
CHAPTER 21
Carl Henderson pulled into the A&W stand, parking his car in the shade beneath the orange canopy over the drive-in service area. He’d been on the road most of the morning, dropping in on farmers as far north as Coalinga, and he was more than ready for lunch when Charlene Hopkins came over and rested her elbows on the window frame of the Cherokee. But before he could order, she sighed deeply, shook her head and clucked her tongue, which Carl knew was her habitual prelude to the announcement of bad news. Sure enough, a moment later, she brushed a stray wisp of platinum hair back from her forehead and said, “Isn’t it strange about all them kids?”
Carl frowned and his heartbeat skipped. What was she talking about? What kids? Surely they hadn’t found—But even before he could finish his thought, Charlene read the confusion on his face.
“You mean you haven’t heard? Seems like kids are disappearing all over the place today. First that Julie Spellman—you know, Russell Owen’s new stepdaughter? They say she was gone first thing this morning. And now Jeff Larkin and Andy Bennett are missing, too.” Her voice dropping conspiratorially, Charlene passed on the various bits and pieces of gossip she’d picked up over the course of the morning, from the tale of Marian Bennett’s convertible—which Charlene was pretty certain would result in Chuck’s divorcing Marian—to the fact that both Julie Spellman and Jeff Larkin had been taken to the clinic the night before. “And Dr. F. sent Roberto Muñoz over to someplace in San Luis Obispo with samples of their blood,” she finished, flushed with excitement. “I guess something pretty awful must be wrong with them, huh?”
Carl Henderson, his pulse racing, struggled to reveal nothing of the fear surging through him. Instead he simply nodded in agreement and tried to show just exactly the right level of interest. “Roberto have any idea what they’re looking for?”
“Search me,” Charlene replied. “Maybe drugs, I guess. Or maybe some kind of new sickness. I mean, that girl Julie’s been living in Los Angeles, and she could have brought all kinds of sickness up here, couldn’t she?”
“I guess,” Carl Henderson mused, his mind racing as he wondered if the lab in San Luis Obispo had already tested Julie’s blood. If they had, and found traces of the stuff he’d given Ellen Filmore as a bee antivenin …
He felt an almost irresistible urge to drive over to the clinic right now—this instant—and do whatever was necessary to retrieve the vial.
But he couldn’t give in to the urge, because he could imagine Charlene Hopkins telling her next customer: And you know, that Carl Henderson, he got so upset when I told him they were checking Julie’s blood! Why, he took off out of here like a bat out of hell! Then she would give that annoying little chuckle of hers and shake her head. I never did trust that man, he heard her saying. Always something strange about him.
And that would do it. Mark Shannon would be at his house again, but this time he wouldn’t just be asking questions.
Carl’s jaw tightened as he had a sudden vision of Charlene Hopkins hanging from the wall of his darkroom, her gossiping voice silenced forever as millions of his tiny carnivores quickly devoured her, cleaning her bones as quickly as they had that of—
He put the thought quickly out of his mind.
Calm.
The main thing was to stay calm and behave logically.
Feigning boredom with Charlene’s continuing recitation of the morning’s gossip—which, he noticed, she was embellishing even as she repeated it for him—he broke into her stream of words to order a hamburger, fries, and a chocolate malt.
As Charlene went to put his order in, his mind continued racing, and by the time the food came, he knew what to do.
He ate slowly, forcing himself to show no signs of rushing, determined that when he left, neither Charlene nor her husband, who worked as a cook behind the counter, would have any reason to comment on him later on.
Except to say that he’d seemed perfectly normal.
As he was getting ready to pay Charlene, he winced, then uttered a gasp of surprise.
Charlene glanced up from her order book. “You say something, Carl?”
Carl shook his head and put on a weak smile. “Uh-uh. Just a little gas, I guess.”
He winced again, and this time added a grunt, as if he were suppressing pain.
Charlene Hopkins’s smile faded. Her penciled eyebrows came together in a worried frown. “You sure you’re all right?” she asked. Then, with a guilty glance toward the interior of the drive-in, she leaned toward the window. “Maybe you better go over to the clinic and see Dr. F. yourself,” she said quietly. “I keep tellin’ George to make sure he cooks that meat real good, but I heard about another of those E. coli things just last week.” She clucked her tongue in disapproval. “I swear, if you can’t trust the meat anymore, I just don’t know what to think!”
Nodding as if not trusting himself to speak, Carl Henderson gave Charlene a ten-dollar bill, waited for his change, then started the car.
Even better than he’d hoped—it had been Charlene herself who sent him to see Ellen Filmore!
As he pulled into the clinic parking lot five minutes later, the worst of his fears began to ease when he didn’t see either of the town’s two squad cars in the lot.
And when the anxious look on Ellen Filmore’s face turned into a smile as she recognized him, Carl relaxed even more. No matter what she might have found out about Julie’s blood, at least so far she hadn’t put it together with the substance in the vial.
Even before he spoke, Ellen Filmore came out from behind Roberto’s desk, where she’d been filling in for her nurse until he got back from San Luis Obispo. “I hear you might have gotten some bad meat,” she said.
Carl feigned annoyance. “I don’t believe it—Charlene already called here?”
“E. coli is nothing to make light of,” Ellen told him, leading him into the same examining room where she’d treated Julie Spellman the day the bees had stung her. “And you can’t blame Charlene for worrying—if they served you tainted meat, you could sue them.”
“Right,” Carl said, rolling his eyes. “And if I did, nobody in town would speak to me, and I sure wouldn’t be able to eat anything anywhere. I think I’d rather take my chances.”
“Well, I agree with Charlene,” Ellen told him, handing him an examination smock. “Put this on, and call me when you’re ready.” She left the room, and Carl Henderson immediately checked the counter against the far wall, which was the last place he’d seen the brown vial he’d given Ellen Filmore less than a week ago.
It wasn’t there.
Quickly taking off his pants and shirt and putting the shapeless smock on over his underwear, Carl checked two of the drawers for the vial and was about to open a third when there was a sharp knock at the door.
“Are you all right?” he heard Ellen call.
“All set,” Carl called back, moving hurriedly to the examining table. By the time the doctor stepped through a moment later, Carl was perched on its edge, his fingers pressed to his stomach. “Probably nothing but a little gas,” he muttered as Ellen began going over him, checking his vital signs, then palpating his abdomen.
Ten minutes later she was done. “Okay,” she said, picking up Carl’s chart and jotting a few notes on it. “I think you can relax. If it’s E. coli, it’s the mildest case known to medical science.” Opening one of the cabinets over the counter, she took out a bottle of antacid tablets, handed one of them to Carl, and winked. “This is what I always take after one of George Hopkins’s burgers. If it doesn’t work, call me. But I suspect you were a lot closer to a diagnosis than Charlene was. Come out to the waiting room when you’re ready.”
Ellen Filmore closed the door to the examining room as she left, leaving him alone again. Then Carl went to work again, searching through one drawer after another.
Was it possible she’d used the entire contents of the vial?
But if she had, why hadn’t she called him, demanding more? After all, despite what he’d intended the contents of the vial to do, it had apparently proved as effective as the real antivenin. In fact, Carl still had no idea why the contents of the vial hadn’t killed Julie, but he knew that it had done something. And if they found traces of it in her blood—
Quickly, Carl opened the last drawer, and was about to close it again when he spotted the tiny brown bottle.
Snatching it up, he replaced it with the vial of the real antivenin that he’d transferred from his briefcase to his pants pocket on his way to the clinic from the A&W drive-in.
Less than five minutes after Ellen Filmore had left him to put his clothes back on, Carl Henderson was back in the waiting room.
“Feeling any better?” the doctor asked, glancing up from the medical journal she was reading.
Carl smiled broadly. “I’m fine,” he said, unknowingly repeating the same words Julie, Jeff, and Andy had all uttered over the last few days. “I’m just fine.”
But unlike the other three, Carl Henderson meant what he said.
Kevin Owen slowed his car to a stop at the bottom of the road leading up into the park. His head was throbbing and the terrible itching sensation that had spread all through his body was getting worse by the moment.
He was almost sure he was going crazy, for the more he thought about it, the more certain he was that what he’d seen in the cave that morning couldn’t possibly have been real.
But if it wasn’t real, where had the image that was so vivid in his head come from?
Once again, as he’d been trying to do all day, he struggled to remember exactly what had happened up there.
Jeff had been acting strange—of that Kevin was absolutely certain.
That he’d barely spoken as they hiked up into the hills was weird enough, given how much Jeff usually had to say. But the way he’d just kept walking, like he’d known where he was going all the time, was almost eerie.
Was it possible that he’d been up there before? Could he have gone with Julie when she went, and then come back down?
How come, Kevin wondered, he hadn’t been able to tell his father and Karen what had happened up there?
In fact, ever since that horrible thing had happened, when what had looked like a black cloud of gnats had swarmed up out of Jeff’s throat—he’d felt like something foreign was inside him.
Sort of like those movies he’d seen where space aliens came down and got inside human bodies, taking them over so they could pass themselves off as human.
But it wasn’t quite like that, either, because in those movies, the aliens always killed the real person and just used their bodies.
And he was still alive—he knew he was still alive!
Yet he still had that odd sense of something else being inside his body, and he knew that something had happened to him, becau
se he couldn’t say what he meant anymore.
In fact, he couldn’t even act like he wanted to!
He’d worked in the barn with his father, even though he felt so bad he kept thinking he might collapse at any minute. And when his father had asked him how he was, he kept going on about feeling fine, even though he’d been ready to puke the whole time.
Once, he even tried to vomit, figuring that if he did, at least his father would figure out that something was wrong with him.
But he couldn’t even throw up!
An hour ago he’d felt an urge to go back up into the hills. Twice, as he drove around town looking for Sara and Shelley, he found himself turning onto one of the streets that led toward the hills, but both times he’d managed to make himself turn back, determined that whatever happened, he wasn’t going to go back up to that cave!
Then, suddenly, he’d gotten hungry.
It wasn’t the kind of hunger he was used to, where he slowly began to feel like it would be nice to have something to eat.
No, this was something else—a ravening sense of starvation that made him feel that if he didn’t eat right away, he’d die.
That was when he’d gone to the A&W, where he ordered twice as much food as he’d ever eaten before.
And while he’d eaten, he listened to Charlene go on and on about all the weird things that were happening that morning.
When she finally got around to telling him about Andy Bennett taking off up into the hills, Kevin knew right away where he’d gone—it had to be the cave!
He started to wonder, then, if maybe he was going crazy, or if maybe even a spaceship really had landed, and he and the rest of the kids were being taken over by aliens, like in those movies.
But that was stupid! There weren’t any such things as spaceships or aliens!
Then what was happening to him?
After he finished the third hamburger at the A&W, he’d gone over to the grocery store where Sara’s mother was a cashier. Mrs. McLaughlin had seen right away that something was wrong with him, but he insisted he was fine and just wanted to find Sara and Shelley.