by Tim Sullivan
"The city? Yeah, you can still get there. But there ain't much left in New York. A few street people, some raving loonies, and maybe a couple of flea-bitten cats."
Alex almost laughed. The first two categories pretty well covered him and the convoy. He wondered if Pat weren't a little off center himself, in spite of his flinty attitude. There was a wild look in his eye, but he seemed a straightforward guy and he was clearly the leader of this group of survivors. It seemed that he had done a pretty good job of organizing them.
"If we get to New York in time," Alex said, "we might be able to stop the colloids."
"Stop 'em from doing what?" a woman asked from behind a leafless tree, off to Alex's left. "Seems as if they've already done their damnedest."
"Yeah," Pat said. "Lil's got a point. The colloids ain't bothering us anymore, so why run up to New York and look for a fight with them?"
"Because they're definitely going to bother us again," Alex said. "They're planning something that just might wipe out the few people who are left on earth."
"What are you talking about?" Pat demanded.
"They're making a baby," said Alex.
"A baby?"
"Their kind of baby. They can't live on Earth much longer the way they are now, so they're creating something that can. If we can stop them, then maybe they'll die out."
"Just like that?" Pat asked sarcastically.
"No, they'll try this more than once. But I have a way of knowing when and where they'll do it. And I'm confident that there are pockets of survivors all over the world who will help us fight them."
"Can you hold on a minute?" Pat retreated behind the barricade and talked in low tones with his people. After a minute or two, he re-emerged, and said, "Want us to go with you?"
Alex felt himself grinning like a fool. "I thought you'd never ask."
"Well, we got eleven people here. If you can help us start these cars, we'll go along. We've got some jumper cables."
Alex instructed Riquelme to bring one of the jeeps around. While the batteries were being charged, Alex looked Pat straight in the eye. "It's going to be rough," he said.
"Usually is." Pat pronounced it "youzhully."
The Jersey guerrillas got their gear together, and climbed into their cars. The convoy was soon back on the road, and spirits were higher than ever before, though the odds had only been infinitesimally improved.
Crowley's comment about the dejected survivors in New York made Alex a little more optimistic, too. He suspected that people would fight for their world, no matter how unlikely it seemed that they would triumph. If he could find and arm enough of them, maybe the Earth still had a chance.
He found that the more time passed, the less knowledge he retained about the colloids. Still, he remembered more than a few things, and his link with Jo had strengthened whenever they made love. Each time he felt a surge of emotion he sensed the stirrings of her mind, though the communication ran only one way in such instances. Jo had confided in him that she experienced the same thing when her passions ran high. But only when they achieved orgasm together were they totally, truly linked—mind to mind and soul to soul.
As the convoy roared along the country roads, Alex wondered what would become of them. He had come to love the guerrillas like a family, and now he was leading them to death. Was it his right to do this?
The best rationale he could come up with was that he had not forced anyone to go on this junket.
A dip in the road, leading down to a swampy mudhole, brought his ruminations to an abrupt end. They had been approaching the so-called meadowlands, hundreds of square miles of marshes through central and northern New Jersey. Pat had voiced some concern about the inevitability of such obstacles, so they weren't completely unprepared. The mud, however, ranged from the woods on the left side of the road to the rocks on the right. It appeared to be impassable.
Alex cut his engine and held up his right hand, signalling the rest of the convoy to stop. In a moment, all the motors were still, pinging with internal heat. Alex's ears rang in the abrupt silence. Stretching, the guerrillas got out of the jeeps and trucks, some of them walking up to the mudhole.
"This is worse than I thought," Pat said, peering down at the obstruction. "Not even your motorcycle could get through this."
"Maybe we can put enough logs over it to get across," Alex said. "There's a hatchet in one of the jeeps."
Pat nodded. "Worth a try."
Working fast, Alex chopped down a slender birch tree while the others gathered branches. As soon as he got tired, Riquelme took over with the hatchet. In an hour, they had cut down four trees and laid them across the mudhole.
Chopping down a fifth tree, Alex stopped for a breather and handed the hatchet back to Riquelme. In spite of the cold air, he was sweating profusely and was nearly out of breath. Jo joined him and they walked a few yards into the woods. Occasionally they heard the shouts of the guerrillas and the hatchet ringing steadily against the wood.
"Do you think this is going to work?" Jo asked.
"I think there's a chance."
"Those logs look awful flimsy."
"Yeah, they might snap."
"And I used to think traveling to New York was bad in the old days," Jo said ruefully.
Alex laughed in spite of everything. "Even Amtrak was better than this."
Forty minutes later, they were through working. They had laid down three more tree trunks, and the first jeep was brought forward. Riquelme was driving.
"Take it easy going across," Pat advised him. "But if it starts to go, gun the engine and try to get over before it's too late. You don't want to sink into that mud."
Riquelme nodded and revved up the engine for a minute or two, and then began to inch onto the makeshift bridge. His wheels spun against the slick wood, and Alex felt himself sucking in breath as white bark was stripped and flew through the air.
"Easy!" Pat shouted.
Riquelme eased up on the gas and suddenly his wheels caught. He drove across the log bridge and stopped on the rise on the far side.
Everyone cheered and shouted for a moment, and then the rest of the vehicles were driven across the logs.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
The road went to higher ground for a few miles, but they continued to drive cautiously. They had stacked the logs in one of the trucks in case of another mudhole. Alex sensed a positive attitude about their journey that left him a little incredulous. It was as if their success at fording that little mudhole was perceived as some sort of good omen.
Well, why not? It might have been a minor victory, but it was a victory. Anything that helped them now was good, as far as he was concerned.
They came to the crest of a hill, and spread out before them were the seemingly endless marshes of New Jersey. The tall grass was yellow and brown, and the road snaked around white snow patches. Crowley and his son joined Alex and Jo as the convoy cooled their engines.
"Yeah, old Route Thirty-One didn't youzhully have much traffic," Pat said. "Farmers and local people used it, though. It runs between the Garden State Parkway and the Jersey Turnpike, and used to come in handy for tractors and such."
"We're lucky you didn't just watch us go on by instead of stopping us with your barricade," Jo said.
"Well, we thought about letting you go. We could hear you coming for twenty minutes before you got into Larkin. That's the town we were in, Larkin. Anyway, we decided to face you. Even though we haven't seen many marauders lately, we weren't about to welcome an armed convoy into town."
"Seems like you've got pretty good reconnaissance, Pat," Alex said.
"My boy Jack scouted ahead. We knew how many of you were coming, and that you were loaded for bear." Young Jack Crowley grinned and shook his blond hair from his eyes as his father slapped him on one brawny shoulder. Alex estimated his age at sixteen or seventeen. He seemed a bright and earnest sort of kid, and his skills might come in handy when they got to New York. "In fact," Pat added. "I'm going to
send Jack out now, to try and find out what's in store for us."
"I don't know," Alex said. "It might be pretty dangerous."
"Not on the Harley," Ronnie said, clearly hoping to get her bike back. She was sitting on the warm hood of a jeep. "We can outrun anything on my hog."
Jack looked eagerly at his father, and then at Ronnie. The idea of riding off with a pretty young girl obviously appealed to him.
"Seems like a good idea," Pat said. "If they see anything, they can head back. If something happens, they can fire a couple of shots in the air and we'll go after them."
"Sounds like a plan, Dad," Jack said.
"Well, I guess it'll be okay," Alex agreed reluctantly.
Ronnie eagerly hopped off the hood and joined them.
"I want you to take Jack up ahead," Pat said, "past the marshes, and see what you can find."
She looked at Alex for confirmation, and, when he nodded, she said, "Okay."
"Grab some chow first," Alex said. "The rest of us will take a rest here and let you get a good head start."
"Jack," said Pat Crowley, "you know what to do if you get into trouble."
"The usual, Dad? Fire two shots and run like hell."
"Yeah." Pat nodded grimly. "Don't be a hero. Just get back here in one piece."
"How far you want us to go?" Ronnie asked.
"When you're getting close to the river, or when you see the city, then you've gone too far. If you haven't run into anything before that, then we can take the initiative and head right into the Big Apple."
"And if we have run into something, we'll make a U-turn and come back here real fast," Ronnie said.
"Right, the Harley will be the best vehicle for that. It can turn on a dime and goes a lot faster than any of these other vehicles. Another consideration is that it will be a lot easier to pull out of the mud than one of these jeeps."
"Let's eat, so we can get going, okay?" said Jack, looking admiringly at Ronnie. "We want to get started pretty soon, don't we?"
"Yeah." Ronnie smiled shyly at Jack.
The two kids bolted down their food and roared off on their mission. Alex, Pat, and Jo watched them go, and then joined the others just as Claire propounded a new theory.
"Alex and Jo were not infected in the same way as previous victims," she began, "but they still—"
"Infected!" One of the Jersey people shouted, a man named Dan Galouye. "They were infected?"
"Yes, but they threw off the infection," Claire explained.
"That's impossible," said Pat.
"Concerning the infection that you are familiar with," Claire said, "that may very well be true. But they were infected in a different way. Neurotropic, yes. But not tissue-devouring. We assumed that the colloids developed this refinement to infiltrate our ranks, but I think there was another reason for it."
"What?"
Siegel paused for a moment. "The colloids had analyzed billions of human bodies, studying them even as they consumed them. But they had a need to study a functioning nervous system that was untainted, or as nearly so as they could manage. The creature which they are about to unleash on our long-suffering world, which I will refer to as the neonate, will require a highly developed mental ability. Since it will be composed of mostly human tissues, they must use the human brain as their model."
"I see what you're driving at, Claire," Jo said. "The colloids themselves are nothing without their hosts. They might not be able to survive on Earth if there were more to them. Consequently, they can't use themselves as the model for the, uh, neonate's nervous system. It has to resemble a human brain."
"It's speculation," said Alex, "but it makes more sense than our previous theory about why they infiltrated us."
"True as far as it goes, but there's more to it than that." Claire smiled knowingly.
"Well?"
"Try not to get a swelled head, Alex, but I think the new infection was designed to invade only the more . . . shall we say sophisticated minds."
"Then yours should have been one of the first, and yet you weren't infected, Claire."
"Perhaps my mind is a little too unbalanced, even for this new refinement. Or perhaps they have somehow found a way to identify those with leadership capabilities. Who can say?"
They all mulled this over, Pat and his little group sitting off to the side of the road together. It occurred to Alex that the Jersey people were disturbed by what they had just heard. Claire had not considered their reaction when she had begun her little speech, which might turn out to be a costly mistake.
"Pat, Dan, and the rest of you, I want you to know that I'm all right," Alex said. "It's true, what Dr. Siegel was just saying."
"You look pretty healthy, all right. But I never heard of somebody getting uninfected."
"Well, remember how I told you that I knew certain things about the colloids and their plans?"
"Yeah."
"I know these things because of my infection. They didn't know they should keep things from me, because they didn't realize I could get rid of the infection."
Pat shook his head. "Jesus Christ."
"You and your friends can turn back," Alex said.
"My boy's gone ahead with that girl," Pat said angrily. "How the hell can I turn back?"
Alex looked down at the dirt. "As soon as they return, you can go."
Pat spat into the bushes at the side of the road. "We'll talk it over among ourselves, and we'll let you know. In the meantime, if you've got any more surprises, you'd better lay 'em on us right now, all right?"
"Nothing that I can think of." Alex didn't like the way this was developing. He wanted to make it clear to Pat Crowley and friends that he could be trusted. "Pat, what are you thinking?" he asked.
Crowley shook his head. "I don't know whether to believe you or not. You seem okay, but I never heard of anybody living through an infection before."
"I was the victim of a new kind of infection."
"So the old woman said." Pat narrowed his eyes. "But it's funny we've never heard of such a thing."
"Neither had I up until a few days ago." Alex found himself tiring of this argument. "I sat at the side of a highway in Philadelphia through a long night, and I finally worked up enough craziness to drive the thing out of my body. That's all there is to it. You can believe it if you want to. I don't care."
Alex turned away to join the other guerrillas, without waiting to gauge Crowley's reaction. If these new people didn't trust him, there was little sense in trying to persuade them to fight alongside the guerrillas. It would be better to mount a smaller force that was strongly united.
"How did it go?" Jo asked as he approached her.
"I don't know. They're confused, and who can blame them? They've only known us for a few hours, and we tell them something that runs contrary to everything they've heard. How could we expect any other reaction?"
"Yeah, we should have thought of that."
Alex sighed and turned to the others. "The kids have had a few minutes' head start. Let's saddle up and get out of here."
The guerrillas piled into their vehicles and started up the engines. Grudgingly, Pat Crowley and his little group got into their cars, too. The convoy started across the marshes.
CHAPTER THIRTY
The soft mud showed the motorcycle's track clearly on the humped ribbon of road running through the meadowland. At every curve Alex feared that they would emerge into a vast mob of the infected, the wreckage of the Harley strewn into the rushes, the bloody bodies of Ronnie and Jack crawling with colloids.
But the track went on and on, and the narrow, muddy road made for slow going. Alex was grateful for the din of the engines, certain that the silence of the marshes would be extremely enervating.
From time to time a racoon or rabbit would dart out of their way, and birds frequently fluttered out of the yellow rushes. These creatures had not heard the roar of a motor for years, and they would not hear such a sound again once the convoy had passed—not for a very
long time. Alex dared hope that it would not be forever.
The terrain became more hilly, and Pat pointed to the east. As they topped a rise, the skyline of New York came into view. Or what was left of the skyline, at least.
The crumbling remnants of Manhattan ranged to the north; the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building were both gone, the shattered plinths of their lower floors all that was left.
Pat Crowley, rifle slung over his shoulder, walked up to Alex and Jo.