The Hoard

by Alan Ryker

  * * *

  They did indeed remove his handcuffs, and then all his clothing, which was to be incinerated. But it wasn’t that they trusted him, necessarily. Besides his near nudity ensuring that he wouldn’t leave, an armed officer stood at the entrance to the wing.

  The room had four beds, but the hospital had left the fourth empty, giving the entire room to the Grish family. At first, it had seemed impossible to keep Teddy in his own bed, attached to his IV, but eventually the nurses gave him something “to calm him down,” and he went to sleep.

  This gave Pete and Kathy time to talk, which Pete didn’t exactly welcome.

  “I don’t like being a Guinea pig,” Kathy said. “You can tell the doctors are just throwing everything they can at these things.”

  Pete nodded. “I’m certain they got to you two in time.”

  “I sure hope so,” Kathy said.

  The first thing the doctors had done upon their arrival was to use local anesthetic on Kathy and Teddy’s wounds and fish the grubs out of them with tweezers. They hadn’t gotten far, hadn’t gotten to the large vessels, so the doctors said they were giving them parasite medication only as a precaution.

  “I watched about five minutes of a show about exotic parasites.” Kathy started scratching her scalp. “They showed this guy who had worms swimming in his eyes, and it sounded like they didn’t know how to kill the worms without killing him.”

  “But I found you in time. Try not to worry.”

  Kathy looked over at Teddy, who breathed heavily in sedated sleep. Her jaw started to quiver.

  “Junior.”

  “I know.”

  She covered her face with her hands, and soon sobs shook her entire body. Pete couldn’t stand it, being stuck in his bed, unable to comfort his wife, unable to find his son.

  “We should have let them take her.” Wracked breaths chopped the sentence into chunks.

  “I know.” Pete knew it was his fault. If he hadn’t been such a wimp, a lot of dead people would be alive, a lot of infected people would be healthy, and his son would be safe.

  “That crazy bitch,” Kathy growled wetly. She still wouldn’t look at Pete, still hid behind her hands.

  Pete’s anger grew as well. Anger at the cops for keeping him there. Anger at his mother, for disguising her illness as stubbornness. Anger at himself, for being such a wimp. Anger at Kathy, for blaming him, though he deserved it, and for being there to witness all his mistakes.

  He choked it all down. “I don’t think she’ll hurt him.”

  “Won’t hurt him?” She dropped her hands. Her pink, wet lips distended in a snarl. “Look at what she’s done! This entire floor—”

  “She didn’t do this. That other one did. She called him Victor. She thinks Junior is Victor.”

  Kathy’s eyes lit. The way she stared at him, Pete knew that at that moment she truly hated him. “I can’t believe you’re still defending that monster. What if she doesn’t kill Junior? Instead she’s going to bury him in some hole until he’s one of them? How is that better? If she’d lived like a human being instead of an animal this never…”

  Kathy kept going, but Pete’s mind turned inward. His mother would bury Junior in some hole, in some dank, dark hole. But they’d taken her house and his shop.

  She thought Junior was Victor.

  She needed a burrow. A moist place to hide from the sun. She’d need one as quickly as possible.

  And she thought he was Victor.

  The creek.

  Pete sat up and pulled the tube from his arm. Kathy quieted. Pete hopped out of bed, and instantly felt nauseous. Whatever they had pumped into him was harsh stuff.

  “I think I know where she is. If you don’t hear from me in a few hours, tell them to check by the creek, where Victor died.”

  “Oh my God…”

  Pete kissed Teddy on the forehead, then on both of his fat cheeks. Then he left the room.

  His feet slapped the cold tile as he walked down the white corridor. On either side of him were rooms full of people who were very sick because of him, but he couldn’t think about that just then. He had to save his son.

  Pete had recognized the cop sitting in the molded plastic chair at the end of the hallway when he’d first come in. It was Nathaniel Meyer. He’d gone to Lockton High at the same time as Pete, though he was two years younger. They’d never interacted much, but Pete remembered him as a pretty good guy. A bit of a nerd. He caught some hell from the school bullies, but Pete had never bothered him. He seemed to remember that they took an art class together.

  Nathaniel noticed Pete when he was about ten yards away, folded up his newspaper and stood.

  “Hold up there.”

  Pete stopped a respectful distance away. “Nathaniel, I need a favor.”

  Nathaniel’s face screwed up, but recognition quickly replaced confusion. “Pete, right?”

  “Yep, Pete Grish.”

  “Wow, it’s been a long time. How are you…” Nathaniel trailed off, looked abashed. Pete ignored the stupid question.

  “This is really important.”

  “What do you need?”

  “I need to leave. My son’s still out there.”

  Nathaniel shook his head emphatically. “Sorry, Pete. No way.”

  “Listen, I know where he is.”

  “I’ll pass the information along, but there’s absolutely no way I can let you leave.”

  Pete considered it. But it would take them too long to find the spot, and once they did, Pete didn’t believe they could get his son safely away from his mother. She’d fight like a cornered animal. But she still recognized Pete. He could still reach her.

  “I have to go myself. Nathaniel, do you have kids?”

  Nathaniel nodded. “A boy and a girl.”

  Pete stepped closer, confiding in his old classmate. “Then you understand. What if it was one of them? You wouldn’t be able to lay back and let someone else take care of it.”

  Nathaniel looked at him for a long time. Pete saw the argument working at him, as a parent, as a compassionate human being.

  “I’m sorry, Pete, but—”

  Pete punched him in the jaw. Nathaniel’s eyes rolled back, his knees went loose and he dropped straight to the tile.

  Pete grabbed an ankle and started dragging him down the hall. He peeked into the nearest room. A small woman slept in the nearest bed. She looked to be in bad shape, one of the buried, and she was probably sedated. Pete stepped in. The other bed had another bad case.

  “Hey,” he said. Neither responded.

  Pete dragged Nathaniel to the nearest bed, took the handcuffs from his duty belt and handcuffed both hands behind his back and around the leg of the bed.

  Nathaniel had started groaning. Pete took a sheet from the small woman, twisted it up and tied it around Nathaniel’s head and through his mouth. He closed the door behind him as he left.

  * * *

  Pete left through an emergency exit at the end of the first floor of the east wing. With a claxon alarm sounding behind him, Pete held his gown shut behind him with one hand as he ran barefoot and nearly naked through the pelting rain. It had picked up considerably since he’d first noticed it, and was now a true deluge. Luckily, it was keeping casual traffic off the street.

  Three blocks to the south, Pete stood outside of the Quickstop and called his good friend Ronny Sullivan who worked at a farming equipment dealership at the edge of town. Then he waited behind the gas station, sitting on a flipped-over two-liter crate as far beneath the small overhang as he could get. Ten minutes passed like ten hours as he expected to hear the sirens of the Lockton police closing in at any moment, but it was Ronny’s pickup that finally pulled around the corner.

  “What the hell is going on?” Ronny asked as Pete got into the passenger side. “I heard about some crazy stuff going on at your mom’s place? All those missing people and whatever?”

  As Ronny drove, Pete explained what he felt like explaining. But there wa
s too much. Even with all the details, the events of the past weeks barely made sense.

  Ronny offered to take Pete by his place to get some clothes. Pete could probably squeeze into Ronny’s sweats. But Ronny’s place was in the wrong direction. And Pete couldn’t go home, because it was very likely that deputies would be waiting there for him.

  So twenty minutes after being picked up by Ronny, Pete again found himself walking through the rain, barefoot and dressed only in a hospital gown. Ronny dropped Pete off at the pasture on the opposite side of the creek from Pete’s house, then continued on to Pete’s house to wait for him.

  Pete pressed through a hedgerow. Three-inch thorns, somehow sharper for being wet, raked across his bare skin. They caught and tore at the thin gown. He covered his face and genitals as best he could and shoved through, then set off across the pasture.

  CHAPTER 23

  “Thank you for saving me, Momma,” Victor said.

  “I should have saved you.”

  “You did save me.”

  Outside, the pouring rain collected in the streambed. The gray sky hid powerless behind the dense foliage. The new den wasn’t perfect. It was barren. She had a lot of work to do. But it was already deep and cool and moist.

  “Once, I didn’t.” Once she’d let him die in a hole. In that hole. Once he’d swum for hours. She thought of it all the time, him fighting to climb the muddy tunnel, then sliding back and swimming in the underground pool for hour after hour. She imagined his limbs growing so tired that he could barely feel them, let alone move them fast enough to keep himself afloat.

  “That doesn’t matter now.”

  She imagined him sliding beneath the muddy water, there in the total blackness of a hole at night then finding the strength to move leaden limbs, to get his head back above the water for a few more seconds, grabbing another breath, choking and sputtering.

  While she stared up into trees and searched the corners of barns, he was dying. Victor was slipping beneath the water more and more often, and staying under for longer, until finally he didn’t come up. She imagined him kicking his feet and paddling with his arms, but still sinking down. She imagined him holding his breath for as long as he could, until colors burst behind his eyelids and his lungs burned as bad as something could burn, and then burned worse.

  And then she imagined him imagining her. Under the water, his brain growing darker and weaker, his lungs growing redder and angrier, in the few moments before the need to inhale finally won, he thought of her. He wondered why she didn’t come for him. He wondered what she heard instead of him, when he managed to get his face above water and call out for her.

  “My baby, my baby, my baby Victor…I’m so, so sorry.”

  Victor looked at her with those big, intelligent eyes that had seemed so perceptive ever since he first opened them forty years ago, and said, “Momma, it’s all better now.”

  But he also looked at her with big, scared eyes, perceptive eyes that saw her as she was: filthy, broken and insane. Eyes filled with fear. And he wailed, “Grandma, I’m Peter Junior!”

  A quiet voice inside of her wailed in unison. It told Anna that Victor had died there, long ago. But it wasn’t true. The voice lied. Victor had lived here. He had gone underground because he was such a smart boy. He knew. He knew that the blasted earth above was no place to live. Years before Anna had figured things out, Victor had known to burrow deep.

  “We’ll start again tonight,” Victor said. “Rest now.”

  She pulled him to her and hugged him close.

  The monster Bryce was dead. Her family was still safe. Victor was with her in a snug new den.

  Everything was good. The stirrings in her veins told her so.

  But she hurt. Her bones hurt. Her broken ribs. The hole in her gut hurt.

  The thin skin on the back of Anna’s hand bulged until a tiny rip opened and crimson rivulets of blood flowed across it. Thin red limbs pressed through and unfolded, then dragged a long segment of body out behind, then more limbs, then more body.

  Then warmth and peace washed over her, and she went to sleep.

  She awoke once, when Victor smacked into her feet first. Always so energetic, the eager beaver had tried to crawl out of their den, but slid back in the mud.

  But it was too early. They should wait until night.

  Anna grabbed the waistband of his dungarees and pulled him to her. She breathed in the sweet and sour little-boy smell in the warmth of his hair. He shook. He was cold.

  She wrapped herself around him to warm him, and, holding him tightly, fell back asleep.

  * * *

  “Junior!”

  A shout from the world outside the new den jerked her from sleep. Victor struggled weakly in her arms, pressing down on her wrists.

  “Dad! Help! Grandma’s crazy!”

  “Stay calm, Junior. I’ll get you out.”

  Electricity buzzed in Anna’s brain. She flipped onto all fours and, digging fingers and toes deep into the wet earth, crawled halfway up the tunnel. She stared Peter in the face, as he held his hands above his eyes and squinted down into her den. A large bandage covered his nose, and both of his eyes were blackened with bruise.

  Behind her, Victor said, “He wants to take me from you.”

  But why would he do that? Peter was such a good boy.

  “He tried to take your first nest. He stole your last nest. He’s not a good boy.”

  “No, Peter’s good.”

  Then from outside, “Yes, Mom. It’s Pete. Please come out. I want to help you.”

  Anna began to slink backwards into her den.

  “No, you can’t hide now,” Victor said.

  She was about to argue when electricity jolted through her heart and brain, overwhelming her with rage. She exploded out of the tunnel, slamming into Peter so that he tumbled backwards, rolling until he settled in the creek bed, his head smacking on one of the boulders she’d dragged out of the way.

  “Peter!”

  Maternal concern and love shoved down the irrational anger. Anna didn’t understand what was going on inside her head, but she knew that Peter was her son and that he loved her and she loved him. She scrambled down the steep bank to where he lay unconscious in the muddy creek water, his head propped up on the rock that had finally ended his tumble.

  Sitting in the rising water, the rain pouring down on both of them, she pulled him onto her lap, stroking him and cooing, but he didn’t open his eyes or move. She felt at the back of his head. When she brought her hand away, there was blood on her fingertips.

  He might be hurt badly. Bryce had said that a bump there could make your brain swell. She had to get him out of the rain, and down into her safe new nest. She only knew of one way to make him better.

  Anna grabbed both of Peter’s arms and began dragging him up the bank. By holding his arms high, she managed to keep his head from banging on the ground. She backed into the hole and tried to support him as they went, but his wide shoulders got wedged in the narrow tunnel. She pulled, gently at first, then as hard as she could. The hole in her gut tore, and just when she thought she’d have to give up, she gave one final yank with everything she had and he popped past the sticking point. They slid to the bottom of the cave in a tangled heap.

  If it had been her home, or any proper nest, she could have buried him so that he could rest and emerge healed. She made due by slathering both of her sons thickly in mud. She dug down deep, scooping it up with both arms. Then she lay down beside them.

  Anna was battered. Nearly broken. She held a hand over the hole in her stomach. The exertion of moving the boulders and her son had started it leaking again. Blood and other more difficult to identify substances. In her fight with Bryce, her face had been ruined, her ribs broken, and her entire body covered in bruises that would have healed quickly if her body had had the resources. But it didn’t. She knew it.

  She was tired and it was time for her to go. There was no fear. Warmth spread over her. Though the wrigg
ling in her veins intensified, she felt completely peaceful. Across her contused and lacerated body, her papery skin began to rupture, and she felt her small friends working their way out. Peter was hurt, but they would care for him.

  Lying beside both her sons in the snug nest, Anna grew very tired. As the wriggling left her veins, she fell into a heavy sleep, and knew nothing of her dying.

  CHAPTER 24

  Pete didn’t know where he was, and for some reason, he didn’t care. He felt wonderfully drowsy, and was blanketed in something so close and snug it was almost a second skin, but heavy, too. It pressed down on him reassuringly.

  He slowly worked up the motivation to open his eyes. He couldn’t see much. Cool light streamed dimly down from above, and in it he saw Junior’s peaceful face. Pete remembered that he’d been looking for Junior. He must have found him, and now they slept snuggly side by side.

  It struck him though, that if he’d been looking for Junior, he’d been missing. His heart pounded for a few hard beats as his mind tried to piece things together, to make sense of the lingering fear. Then a burst of tingling warmth exploded in the base of his skull and wrapped itself around his brain.

  His son was safe, and Pete stopped fighting the drowsiness. He let it drag him down into the dark depths of leaden slumber. Even after sleep took him, he continued to sink.

  * * *

  The words came from another world at first. A world far removed from and less real than the featureless one of dreamless sleep he’d inhabited for as long as he could remember.

  “I think this must be it.”

  “Anything down there?”

  “Holy shit. The old woman. I’m thinking she’s dead.”

  “Yeah? What makes you say that?”

  “Most of her insides are on the outside.”

  “What about Grish and the kid?”