“He had some books—made of paper, I mean—and an old book-end in the shape of an elephant. It was made of cast iron.”
“Get in, Kerry!”
“I didn’t want to hurt him. I didn’t think I could hit him hard enough to do any real harm.” She got in through the door he had opened.
He started to close the door, then instead squatted beside her. “Kerry, did you hear anything about Rane? Do you know where she is?”
“With Ingraham and Lupe. I don’t know which house they’re in.”
She did not know. And how many people would he wake up if he tried to find out? One would be enough to recapture him. He had not even been bright enough to get himself another knife—not that the first one had done him any good. What he needed was a gun.
“Daddy, I heard something,” Keira said.
He froze, listened, heard it himself—someone moving around carelessly in the house nearest to him. It may have been just someone going to the bathroom, but it frightened him. He rounded the car in a few long steps, got in, and heedless of noise, started the engine. At that moment, someone opened the door of the house from which the noise had come. It was a man, a stranger, who actually managed to catch the car as Blake swung it around toward the rocky trail that led down from the ranch. The stranger tried to tear Blake’s door open as Ingraham had earlier. But with the car moving and his body inadequately braced, he failed to break the lock. He was dragged several yards as Blake picked up speed. As a final gesture, he managed to release his hold with one hand, raise his fist, and smash it into the window beside Blake’s head. Like the lock, the glass held. It broke, cracks raying outward in all directions from the impact of the blow, but it did not shatter. Its breaking amazed Blake. The glass was special, expected to stop bullets with less damage. Blake realized again how powerful these people were. If they caught him, they could literally tear him limb from limb.
He drove on, praying that he would see Rane, that he would have a chance to pick her up. But he saw only stick people—menacing, utterly terrifying in their difference and their intensity. In the moonlight, they seemed other than human. One refused to move from the car’s path, apparently trying to make Blake swerve and hit a house or a huge rock.
Blake did not swerve. No experienced city driver would have swerved or slowed. At the last possible instant, the “victim” leaped aside and clung to the rock like an insect.
Something that moved like a cat, but was too big to be a cat, ran alongside the car briefly, and Keira screamed.
“Don’t hit him,” she said. “Don’t hurt him!”
The car accelerated, leaving the running thing behind.
“What the hell was that?” Blake asked.
“Be careful,” she said. “Remember the rocks Eli had to dodge around.”
He remembered. It was impossible to speed past those boulders. On the other hand, it was very possible that Meda’s people in the mountains above could start rockslides that would close the narrow road entirely if he crept along slowly.
As though in answer to his thought, he heard a rumbling from above. Praying as he had not since childhood, he drove on, managed to swerve around one boulder just in time to see a rockslide beginning ahead.
He pushed the accelerator to the floor, sped past the slide area as the first rocks came down. Twice the car was hit by rocks big enough to shake it, but Blake managed to stay on the road. He did not slow down until he came to a sharp curve around which he thought he recalled a rock.
There was a rock. Many rocks. Another slide had blocked the road with a steep hill of loose rocks and dirt. Blake had no time to think. The car would climb the slide or it would not. It was a Jeep, after all, antique or no.
The car struggled for traction in the loose dirt and rock, then shuddered heavily as something landed on its roof. The something made an indentation they could see inside the car.
Suddenly Keira pushed her door open. Blake grabbed for her, not understanding. His hand just missed her as she leaned out. Then he saw what she had seen—a small, bloody face hanging upside down from the cartop.
“Rane!” he shouted. He leaned across Keira, indifferent for the moment to the way Keira bruised almost at a touch. He caught Rane’s arm, pulled her down and into the car across Keira, then slammed the door and locked it as something else began tearing at it.
Blake hit the accelerator and the car leaped onto the loose dirt and rock. For an instant, the wheels spun uselessly, throwing out sand. Then they found traction and the car lunged up the slide. A rock bounced off the windshield, chipping it slightly. Another hit the top, doing no important damage.
Blake reached the crest of the slide, rolled down it, and sped on down the mountain. Minutes later, they were in open desert. Keira and Rane, still tangled together, both hurting, both silent with terror until they looked around and saw that they had left the mountains and their captivity behind. Then they hugged each other, Rane laughing and Keira crying. Rane’s bare arms and her face had been cut and bruised somehow. If she had not been contaminated before, she was now. Blake worried, but said nothing. Contamination had probably been inevitable, however. The disease could be studied, understood, stopped, or at least controlled—and it had to be. The disease was only a disease. It was the willing human carriers intent on spreading it that made it so deadly.
Blake relaxed in his seat and surveyed the damage to the car. Nothing terminal. Nothing that would stop him from reaching civilization and getting medical care. He wondered why Eli’s people had not shot him, or at least shot at him. Bullets would have been more effective than rocks. But then, it was like Eli to hold back. He had saved Rane from Ingraham, held off contaminating Keira—probably for as long as he could—even tried bloodlessly to avoid a fight with Blake, though he could probably have broken Blake’s bones with no effort.
“How did you get free?” Keira was asking Rane. “Did you have to hurt someone?”
“I was tied up for the night,” Rane said. “Jacob let me loose. He didn’t like me, but he couldn’t stand the thought of anything being tied up. Then you two broke away and everyone was too busy chasing you to watch me. I almost killed myself running and falling down that goddamn mountain.”
“Jacob?” Blake said. “Isn’t that one of Meda’s sons?”
The girls looked at each other, then at him warily. “You know about Jacob?” Rane asked.
“Only that Meda has a son by that name.”
“He’s her son and Eli’s.” There was an odd pause. For the second time in twenty-four hours, Rane seemed unwilling to say what was on her mind. “Have you seen him?” she asked.
“No. But I don’t imagine he would be normal. Not after what the bag told me about Meda.”
“… he isn’t.”
“What’s he like?”
“You saw him,” Keira said softly. “He ran alongside the car for a few seconds. That was him.”
Blake frowned, gave her a quick glance. “But that was … an animal.”
“Disease-induced mutation. Every child born to them after they get the disease is mutated that way. Jacob is the oldest of eleven.”
Blake glanced at Keira. She was not looking at him, would not look at him.
“Jacob’s beautiful, really,” she continued. “The way he moves—catlike, smooth, graceful, very fast. And he’s as bright as or brighter than any other kid his age. He’s—”
“Not human,” Blake said flatly. “Jesus, what are they breeding back there?”
The girls looked at each other again, shifted uncomfortably, sharing some understanding that excluded him. Now neither would face him. Suddenly he wanted to be excluded. He drove on in silence, suspicion growing in his mind. He concentrated on putting distance between himself and those who would certainly follow—though he could not help wondering whether what followed was really worse than what they carried with them.
PART 2
P.O.W.
Past 11
WITHIN A DAY of Christian’s
collapse, Eli had seven irrational people huddling around him. They had no idea what was happening to them, but they knew they were in trouble. They were combative, fearful, confused, lustful, driven, guilt-ridden, and utterly miserable.
They huddled together, not knowing what to do. They were fearful of going near outsiders with their painfully enhanced senses and their odd compulsions, but Eli was one of them. More, he was complete. He smelled right to them. And he could see their needs clearer than they could. He could respond to them as they required, offering comfort, sternness, advice, brute strength, whatever was necessary from moment to moment.
He found comfort in shepherding them. It was as though in a very real way, he was making them his family—a family with ugly problems.
Meda found both her brothers and her father after her, and she, like them, was alternately lustful and horrified. Her father suffered more than the others. He felt he had gone from patriarch and man of God to criminally depraved pervert unable to keep his hands off his own daughter. Nor could he accept these feelings as his own. They must be signs of either demonic possession or God’s punishment for some terrible sin. He and his sons were badly frightened.
His wife and daughters-in-law were terrified. Not only were they unable to understand the behavior of their men, but they were confused and embarrassed by their own enhanced sensory awareness. They could smell the men and each other as they never had before. They kept trying to wash away normal scents that would not vanish. They spoke more softly as they realized the substantial walls no longer stopped sound as well as they had. They discovered they were able to see in the dark—whether they wanted to or not. Touching, even accidentally, became a startlingly intense sensual experience. The women ceased to touch each other. They also ceased to touch the men except for their own husbands. And Eli.
They all developed huge appetites as their bodies changed. Worse, they developed unusual tastes, and this frightened them.
“I’m so hungry,” Gwyn told Eli on the day her symptoms became undeniable. She gestured toward a pair of chickens—part of the Boyd flock of thousands. This pair were scratching and pecking at the sand in the shade of the well tank. “Suddenly, those things smell good to me,” she said. “Can you believe that? They smell edible.”
“They are,” Eli said softly. It had been necessary for him to supplement his diet with one or two of them or with several eggs every night when the family was asleep.
“But how could they smell good raw?” Gwyn said. “And alive?”
Living prey smelled wonderful, Eli knew. But Gwyn was not ready to face that yet. “Go raid the refrigerator,” he told her. “Maybe Junior is hungry.”
She looked down at her pregnant belly and tried to smile, but she was clearly frightened.
He did what he would never have done before this day. He took her arm and led her back to the house to the kitchen. There he saw to it that she ate. She seemed to appreciate the attention.
“Something feels wrong “ she said once. “Not with the baby,” she added quickly when Eli looked alarmed. “I don’t know. The food tastes too sweet or too salty or too spicy or too something. It tasted okay yesterday, but now … When I started to eat, I thought I was going to be sick. But that’s not right either. It’s not really nauseating. It’s just … I don’t know.”
“Bad?” he asked, knowing the answer.
“Not really. Just different.” She shook her head, picked up a piece of cold fried chicken. “This is okay, but I’m not sure the ones running around outside wouldn’t be better.”
Eli said nothing. Since his return to Earth, he knew he preferred his food raw and unseasoned. It tasted better. Yet he would go on eating cooked food. It was a human thing that he clung to. His changed body seemed able to digest almost anything. It tempted him by making nonhuman behavior pleasurable, but most of the time, it let him decide, let him choose to cling to as much of his humanity as he could.
Though certain drives at certain times inevitably went out of control.
Meda brought him her symptoms and her suspicions not long after he left Gwyn.
“This is your doing,” she said. “Everybody’s crazy except you. You’ve done something to us.”
“Yes,” he admitted, breathing in the scent of her. She had some idea now what she was doing to him just by coming near.
“What have you done?” she demanded.
“What do you feel?” he asked, facing her.
She blinked, turned away frightened. “What have you done?” she repeated.
“It’s a disease.” He took a deep breath. He had never imagined that telling her would be easy. He had already decided to be as straightforward as possible. “It’s an extraterrestrial disease. It will change you, but no more than I’m changed.”
“A disease?” She frowned. “You came back sick and gave us a disease? Did you know you had it?”
“Yes.”
“And you knew we could catch it?”
He nodded.
“Then you gave it to us deliberately!”
“No, not deliberately.”
“But if you knew …”
“Meda …” He wanted to touch her, take her by the shoulders and reassure her. But if he began to touch her, he would not be able to stop. “Meda, you’ll be all right. I’ll take care of you. I stayed to take care of you.”
“You came here to give us a disease!”
“No!” He turned his head toward the well tank. “No, I came … to get water and food.”
“But you—”
“I couldn’t die. I wanted to, but I couldn’t. I can go out of my mind; I can become an animal; but I can’t kill myself.”
“What about the others, the crew?”
“All dead like I told you, like your Barstow news said. The disease took some of them—before we found out how to help them.” A half-truth. A deletion. Disa and two others had died in spite of the help they got. “The others died here—with the ship. Someone—maybe more than one—apparently managed a little sabotage. I wish they’d done it in space, or back on Proxi Two.”
“How do you know someone sabotaged the ship? Maybe it was an accident.”
“I don’t know. I don’t remember. I blacked out.”
“How did you get off the ship?”
“I don’t know. I have off-and-on memories of running, hiding. I know I took shelter in mountains of volcanic rock, lived in a half-collapsed lava tunnel for three days and two nights. I nearly starved to death.”
“People can’t starve in just three days.”
“We can. You and me, now.”
She only stared at him.
“It was raining,” he continued. “I remember we deliberately chose to land in a storm in the middle of nowhere so we could get away before anyone found out what we were. Even with speeded up reflexes, increased strength, and enhanced senses, we nearly disintegrated, then nearly crashed. We kept them from shooting us down by talking. God, we talked. The brave heroes giving all the information they could before they crashed. Before they died. We could no more imagine ourselves dying than we could imagine not coming straight in to Earth. It was a magnet for us in more ways than one. All those people … all those … billions of uninfected people.”
“You came to infect … everybody?” she whispered.
“We had to come. We couldn’t not come; it was impossible. But we thought we could control it once we were here. We thought we could take only a few people at a time. A few isolated people. That’s why we chose such an empty place.”
“Why would you think you could have any … any luck controlling yourselves here in the middle of all the billions if you couldn’t control yourselves on Proxima Centauri Two?”
“We weren’t sure,” he said. “Maybe it was just something we told ourselves to keep from going completely crazy. On the other hand …” He looked at her, glad she was alive and well enough to be her questioning, demanding self. “On the other hand, maybe we were right. I don’t want to leave
this place to reach anyone else. Not now. Not yet.”
“You’ve done enough damage here.”
“Do you want to leave?”
“Eli, I live here!”
“Doesn’t matter. Do you want to go to a hospital? See if somebody can figure out a cure?”
She looked uncomfortable, a little frightened. “I was wondering why you didn’t do that.”
“I can’t. Can you?”
“What do you mean you can’t?”
“Go if you can. I’ll … try not to stop you. I’ll try.”
“This is my home! I don’t have to go anywhere!”
“Meda—”
“Why don’t you leave! You’re the cause of all this! You’re the problem!”
“Shall I go, Meda?”
Silence. He had frightened and confused her, touched a brand new tender spot that she might not have discovered on her own for a while. She wanted to stay with her own kind. Being alone was terrifying, mind-numbing, he knew.
“You went away,” she said, reading him unconsciously. “You left the rest of the crew.”
“Not deliberately.”
“Do you ever do anything deliberately?” She came a little closer to him. “You got out. Only you.”
He realized where she was headed and did not want to hear her, but she continued.
“The one sure way you could have known when to run is if you were the saboteur.”
His hands gripped each other. If they had gripped anything else at that moment, they would have crushed it. “Do you think I haven’t thought about that?” he said. “I’ve tried to remember.”
“If I were you, I wouldn’t want to remember.”
“But I’ve tried. Not that it makes any difference in the end. The others died and I should have died. If I did it, I killed my friends then made their deaths meaningless. If someone else did it, my survival made the sacrifice meaningless anyway.”
“The dogs died,” she said. “Remember? One of them was hurt, but not bad. The other wasn’t hurt at all, but they died. We couldn’t understand it.”
“I’m sorry.”
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