Summer Of The Apocalypse Part 8

Jared pushed away from the wall, stood up, looked at the bat as if he'd just discovered it, and pointed it at Meg's face. "b.i.t.c.h." The vivid imprint of her hand glowed on his left cheek and his ear was bright red. The man on the third stool started sneezing: wheezy, wet expulsions of air that sounded silly and empty in the bas.e.m.e.nt. Eric saw the scene as so unreal that he wanted to scream. Turning to the sick man, the dark-haired woman hissed out a quick, "Shush."

"Shoot," said Jared, tucked the bat under his arm, and felt the man's forehead. "The guy's burning up." He snapped his hand away and shook it, as if the germs might fly off.

The dark-haired woman said, "It's just a cold." She sounded as if she were begging. "He's fine, really." Meg sniffed. "I told you he was no good from the start." She started up the stairs. "We'll bring the needles down later." She didn't close the door when she reached the top. Eric looked up. The floor above creaked so loudly that he could spot her position without trouble. Needles, he thought. What needles?

Breathing heavily, Jared stood in the center of the room eyeing the woman speculatively. A swollen, fat, sick old man in his underwear, badly in need of a bath, Jared scratched his bare leg. "We're alone, missy, at least for a second," he said to the woman and moved toward her. Breath bubbled deep in his lungs, and he smiled through a couple of strangled coughs. She strained backward on the stool, risking her balance. The rope pulled taut.

From the floor above, Meg's voice thundered, freezing Jared in mid-reach, "And stay away from the G.o.dd.a.m.ned woman!"

The other man sneezed again and groaned low in his throat. He seemed to be barely conscious, slumped to the side and letting his noose support part of his weight. Jared leaned toward the dark-haired woman, caught himself, then shook his fist at the ceiling.

"Fish," he said. Eric wasn't sure he'd heard him right. The word seemed ... inappropriate. "Fish guts," Jared said.

Then, looking at the dark-haired woman's chest the whole time, as if he could undo the b.u.t.tons with his eyes, he carefully placed his bare foot on the sick man's stool and pushed it out from under him. Twenty minutes later, long after the sick man had died, his sneakered feet only a couple of inches off the floor, a strange sound came from upstairs. Eric didn't pay attention to it at first. He couldn't take his eyes off the dead man. Thankfully, the man's face was hidden, but the noose pushed his head to the side, and his shoulders tilted slightly, so one hand dangled free, fingers slightly bent and relaxed-looking. Eric stared at the hand, not thinking about it really, but thinking about the difference between dead and alive. A moment. A little push was all it took. No more strength than to knock over a stool. So he didn't pay attention to the sound at first, but, eventually, he looked up. From upstairs came a rhythmic pounding and a distinctive squeak. After a few seconds, he placed ita"bedspringsa" and not long after that, he heard moaning. A soft voice cried over and over again, "Oh, oh, oh." It was Meg.

"They're dying, you know," said the dark-haired woman.

Late afternoon light cast a pale square on the wall opposite the window. Eric had been watching it crawl up the wall so he wouldn't keep staring at the dead man. An hour or so had pa.s.sed since he'd last heard noise from upstairs, and he'd almost forgotten someone else was in the room with him.

"It's the sickness, isn't it," he said. "My mom... my mother..." He swallowed hard. "She died." The woman nodded.

"You're not sick at all?" she said. "No cough? No pain swallowing?" Her voice was still hoa.r.s.e, throaty, but not unpleasant. It sounded weighty, the voice of someone competent.

"Uh uh."

She stood on the stool legs' crossbars and stretched her back. The rope fell across her chest and pushed her blouse part way open where the top b.u.t.ton had popped off. Her bra's thin white strap was twisted, and Eric wanted to straighten it for her, like when his mom would fix his collar in back if it was sticking up.

She sat. "I hope one of them comes down soon. I have to pee, and I'm thirsty." She smiled and looked at Eric. He liked her smile; it seemed unforced, as if she didn't care that she was tied by her throat to a wooden beam in some profoundly frightening people's bas.e.m.e.nt. Her eyes were deep and dark.

"Doesn't seem right to want both, does it?"

Eric almost laughed, then he remembered the corpse. "I've got to go too," he said soberly. A few more inches, and the square of light would be at the ceiling. It must be near sunset, Eric decided.

"It's getting dark. When will they turn on the lights?" he asked.

"Hasn't been any electricity for a week. Either that knock on the head rattled something loose, or you've been living in a cave."

A door shut upstairs. Somebody walked a few steps, then there was silence. They both looked at the ceiling.

Finally, Eric said, "The second one."

"Excuse me?"

"The second one. I've been living in a cave. Do you want to yell for them, or shall I?" Now that she mentioned it, he really had to go.

"I'll do it," she said, "but listen. They're sick, like I said, and scared to death about dying, like everybody else, but most handle it with more dignity. I mean, they accept it. They watched the news, listened to the President, and followed the emergency procedures. And when that didn't work, and they got sick anyway. They died in their homes."

Eric remembered his mom lying on the mattress in the cave, holding Dad's hand. The woman continued, "Some, of course, panicked. Riots, looting. But most people gave up the ghost sort of peacefully." She leaned forward, as far as the rope would permit. "These two, though, these two plan on beating it."

"How?"

"They think it's in the blood. Everybody who catches the disease dies. Zero recovery. Not everyone catches it though. Doctors said some people may never get it, so you're either dead, dying or safe. Not too many people left either. Lots of quiet houses with dead people in their beds. I drove from Aurora to Northglenn yesterday and went for blocks and blocks without seeing anyone, just houses with their drapes drawn. Then, there are a few homes like this, with the last of the living, but they're sick. And there's some, like you and me, not sick yet."

"So what do they want to do with us? We might get it eventually." I might get sick, Eric thought. He hadn't considered that before. Maybe the whole world will die. He tried to picture his own illness, but he couldn't do it. He thought, the idea is too ridiculous, and, like she said, we're not dead yet. She seemed so unafraid that he began to feel better too.

"Transfusions. Meg was a nurse a long time ago, and she's got this plan to round up the healthy and take blood from them to keep her and Jared alive. At any rate, they don't want us dead as long as they believe we're not sick and their plan might work, so if we cooperate, we might get out of here." Eric looked at where the rope ran through the pulley in the beam above and continued to a ring bolted in the wall. He couldn't see anyway, with his hands behind his back, that he had a chance to get loose. If they die or decide to leave us here, he thought, it will be impossible for us to set ourselves free, and if everyone is dead or dying, then we won't be rescued. The feeling of confidence faded. "What good will that do? If it works, they won't let us go, and if it doesn't, we're stuck." She smiled again, her teeth bright in the now almost dark room, then said, "And the horse might talk." Before he could ask what that meant, the door at the top of the stairs opened, and Jared and Meg started down.

"I need to go to the bathroom too," said Eric. Meg had placed on a TV table in front of him a small pile of clear, plastic tubing, several plastic connectors, a syringe and a couple of l.V. bags. Meg recinched the woman's rope to the ring bolt. She had untied it from the bolt and walked the woman into the bathroom while Jared gave her slack. He jerked the rope when the woman was almost in the bathroom, and she squawked. "Makin' sure you know I'm here, dearie," he said, but he didn't do it again after Meg gave him a venomous look.

"You take him," she said, and moved over to loosen Eric. She talked quietly, without opening her lips much. The chapping at the corners of her mouth looked worse. Big cracks deep with pus. "Undo his hands," said Jared.

"Wimp," said Meg.

"I'm not holding another man steady so he can take a p.i.s.s." The mechanics of how he was to go to the bathroom hadn't occurred to Eric. He envisioned overpowering Jared, maybe beating him with his own bat and becoming the hero. Old, slow and drunk, thought Eric. I can take him. But the thought of trying the same with Meg made him reconsider. She'd moved like a prize fighter when she'd beat Jared earlier. Her upper arms were meaty. She probably couldn't run a hundred yard dash, but underneath the weight lurked a perilous and strong woman. He'd better not.

As if reading his mind, Meg said, "I can haul you off the floor in a second, fellow. You're not too big for that."

When Eric stood, he realized what Meg meant. He was clearly taller than Jared, and had an inch or two on her. Jared referring to him as a man earlier, and Meg's careful hold on the rope made him think about how they might see him. I'm not a kid to them, he thought, but I feel like a kid. Maybe if I keep my mouth shut, they won't figure it out.

Any hope of finding a razor blade, or a shard of gla.s.s in the bathroom to use on his rope later vanished when he walked in. Jared pushed the door shut on the rope, and the thread of dim light through the door's crack revealed nothing. Eric felt for the toilet. Then, as he went to the bathroom, he wondered if the dark-haired woman thought of him as a child or an adult. Maybe we're just equal, he thought. Eric caught the dark-haired woman's eye as he walked back to his stool, and smiled a little to let her know his spirits were up, that he wasn't going to surrender. She lifted her chin slightly in acknowledgment.

As Meg tied his hands again, she said, "I'm going to take a bit of blood from you." She yanked on the rope. Eric flinched. He'd been tightening his wrists, figuring that when he relaxed, the knots would be loose, but Meg must have noticed. It felt as if his bones were being pushed together. She continued, "This'll go better if you don't fight me. If you move around, I might have to stick you a few times. I'm a bit rusty at this." She slapped her thigh, as if she'd told a joke, but she didn't smile, and her movements were sure and swift.

"Quit your jabbering and get on with it," said Jared. He stood by the T.V. table, looking worse than he had earlier in the day. Could be the light, thought Eric, but he couldn't tell. Black circles underlined Jared's eyes, and his breathing seemed faster and more watery.

Meg fastened a needle to one end of the plastic tubing, and the other to a three-way stopc.o.c.k. The syringe went into the middle plug on the stopc.o.c.k, and the I.V. bag fastened to the third. Jared said, "Is this gonna work?"

Meg turned Eric toward the water heatera"he couldn't see Jared or the dark-haired woman nowa"and swabbed his inner arm with a wet cotton ball. "Don't know," she said. "Better than the alternative." Eric bit his upper lip, afraid he would yelp when she poked the needle in. Then he said, "Don't you need to know what my blood type is?" He knew from biology cla.s.ses that blood types had to match for transfusions.

She gripped his upper arm hard and pushed the needle through the skin. He barely flinched. "I'm AB positive. Anything will work for me. Universal recipient," she said. "Don't know about Jared." She drew back on the syringe. The plastic tubing turned red. "Got to do this is a hurry. Little bit of heparin in the bag'll keep it from coagulating, but not long."

"What do you mean, you don't know about me?" Jared asked angrily.

"Don't. Ain't that clear? If the types don't match, might make you sick. Might kill you. I've got no way to type blood, and I don't know how. I figure the way your cough's going, and the way that fever keeps spiking, that you ain't good for three or four more days tops as it is." She turned the stopc.o.c.k and pushed blood into the I.V. bag. Eric couldn't connect the blood to him. The process was more interesting than frightening.

Eric said, "How much are you going to take?"

"Filled with questions, ain't we?" Meg turned the stopc.o.c.k again and pulled out another syringe full.

"Hospitals only take a pint, but I figure they're extra cautious." Blood squirted into the bag. "Couple pints. Might take more." She filled the syringe again. "Worried about it?" He didn't answer. Where the needle was taped to his arm began to burn a little, and he felt dizzy, so he shut his eyes. He heard the blood squirt into the bag several more times, then she jerked the tape off and put a band-aid over the tiny wound.

When she finished with the dark-haired woman, she piled the two blood-filled bags and the rest of the equipment onto the TV table, picked it up, and started out of the room.

Swaying on her seat, the dark-haired woman said, "You can't leave us like this all night. We've got to sleep."

Meg stopped. The room was nearly dark now, so her face was lost in the shadows. "You stay there till morning, child, and if the blood works, we'll see about chaining you to a wall or something, but until then, a night without sleep won't kill you."

And Jared said, "If the blood works, we might see about getting you some more lively company too." He spun the dead man on his rope. Thena"Eric couldn't be sure in the half-lighta"he winked at the woman and licked his lips.

Long after the last light faded, Eric asked, "You all right?" His stomach ached and he still felt dizzy. In the darkness, the silence scared him. He peered hard in the dark-haired woman's direction, eyes wide, trying for any sense of where she was.

"Yeah," she answered, finally.

"Do you think they're still in the house?" He hadn't heard a noise from upstairs for sometime.

"Probably." Her throaty voice floated in the air. "The blood idea, it won't work."

"How do you know?"

He heard her move on her stool, maybe to face him. "Scientists aren't stupid. If the plague could be treated this easily, no one would have it. They'd figure out what it was in the blood that keeps some people well, then they'd duplicate it. Nope, they're doomed."

He thought about that for a while. He could hear her breathing, the room was so quiet. "What did you mean earlier," he said, "about a horse learning to talk?"

The dark-haired woman chuckled, It was a tired sounding chuckle, but Eric liked it. "Oh, it's an old story. Goes like this, In an ancient kingdom there lived a cruel king who executed any one who upset him. Well, one day a man is hauled into the king's court for some minor crime, and the king's just about ready I p.r.o.nounce sentence, which will be death, when the man says to the king, 'If you give me a year, your Majesty, I can teach your horse to talk.' Well, this intrigues the king, so he tells the man to do it, but if the horse isn't talking at the end of the year, the man will be executed. As the man is being hauled down to the stables, the guard says to him, 'What a stupid thing to do. You'll never make that horse talk. Why'd you agree to try it?' The man looks him over, then says, 'This is the way I figure it. A lot can happen in a year. I might die. The king might die. Or h.e.l.l, the horse might talk.'"

Eric smiled in the darkness. His arms hurt. His stomach ached. He was dizzy, but he said, "Good point." Eric thought the story would have been a good place to end the night, but it didn't. They talked for a while longer. He learned she'd lived in Aurora in east Denver, and that Jared picked her up on the highway when her car broke down. Eric told her a little about the cave, since she asked about it, but he didn't feel comfortable talking about his dad, so the conversation trailed off, and after a bit he found himself drifting. I might dream about the ocean, he thought, if I don't fall off the stool. With that thought, he rested his chin on his chest and relaxed.

Sometime later, a noise snapped him into attentiveness. He couldn't place it. A squeak and a rattle. It was rope playing out of a pulley. He twitched his head side to side, trying to catch another sound, or a glimpse of anything. Something wheezed, like a dragon, he thought. Something's in the room. The dark-haired woman whispered hoa.r.s.ely, "Don't, G.o.dd.a.m.n it."

Cloth ripped.

"I told you I'd be back, missy."

Eric stood on the crossbars. What's happening? he thought, what's going on? A sc.r.a.ping noise. Must be the stool.

"Don't!" Then a m.u.f.fled yell, like a hand was over her mouth. A metal clink. Belt buckle? A swishing sound. Cloth on skin? Another m.u.f.fled yell, a pained moan this time.

Eric leaned forward, the rope snagging him short. His pulse beat in his ears like surf. Darkness pressed around. He recognized the feeling. It's like the dream! I can't stop the wave. I can't do anything. The water's coming in. I'm stuck. I'm stuck.

The noises came from below him. They were on the floor.

Fear, or something, anger, rose in him. He wanted to jump down, but he could feel the rope on his neck. The wave towered within him, dark, solid and unstoppable. There's nothing I can do! He'll kill us both. The noises struggled on the floor. Eric whimpered. His daddy wasn't up the beach. What could he do?

The nightmare never ends, he thought. In the dream he was frozen; in the dream he could do nothing to save himself. And in the dark, it was himself. He was being attacked. He felt hot breath on his chest, hands pushing down his jeans. He was in the dark-haired woman's head.

Jared's voice filled the dark. "Lay still, you b.i.t.c.h."

Then he couldn't stand it any longer. I'm not in a dream. I don't have to do nothing. I'm not a child. He opened he mouth and yelled, "Meg! Meg! Come down here quick!"

He felt the rush of air at his face before the blow reached him that knocked him off the stool.

Chapter Eleven EARTH DANCING.

Don't get up," said Teach.

Campfire light flashed rhythmically against the bluff's tan wall of stone where a swath of black marked the smoke trails of previous fires. Eric rested his back on his still rolled sleeping bag. The rest of the party sat equidistant from the fire, their faces yellow in the light; the back of their heads lost in the shadows.

"'Scuse me?" said Eric. His stomach bulged pleasantly from dinner, a savory squirrel stew, and he felt tired and lazy. The night was so warm he thought he might just go to sleep as he was, without unrolling the bag, like Dodge and Rabbit.

Teach put his hand out to Eric, motioning him to stay still. "A rare privilege. Earth dancers." He pointed beyond the fire behind Eric. The other men looked past him, holding their dinner plates still, as if frozen.

"Move slowly," said Teach.

Eric dropped a shoulder and turned. At first, blinded by the firelight, he saw nothing, then white shapes resolved themselves from the blackness. Men. They were clearly men, naked and painted white, dancing at the edge of the clearing.

Teach said, "Have you seen them before?"

The dancers, perhaps fifteen or so of them, bent low, brushing their hands against the ground, then jumped for the stars, throwing their hands wide open. Other than the crackle of flame, Eric heard nothing, but the dancers bounced in rhythm, all of them low, then they burst up, as if on cue, hanging in their outstretched poses, a mountain ballet.

"No," he whispered. He remembered the white figures in Phil's videos, the ones driving him crazy with fear. "Maybe," he added. "Who are they?"

One of them broke toward the fire, running, hands low and open, Forty feet away, he put his arms out like wings and veered away, rising from his crouch as if he could fly. One after another, others followed his lead, some coming as close as a dozen feet before curving back to the dark.

"First men," said Teach.

When they ran particularly close, Eric could see that the white was a powder, like chalk, some places smeared thickly enough to crack at the elbows and knees, and almost worn off in other places. Their hair was thick with it.

"My boys think they're spirits, or ghosts. Their momma's scared them with stories of Earth Dancers, and now they believe them to be supernatural."

Someone hissed, "We're not babies anymore, Teach." But the voice sounded awestruck. Teach continued, "Feral men. I think they're the children of the children of the children. No, don't speak to them. They'll run. When the plague moved on, some of the survivors were little kids, four, five, six years old. They must have been horribly afraid, their parents dead, the dogs going wild, so they hid in the city."

Eric hadn't thought of that before. The plague killed ninety-nine percent. In the weeks after, when only the survivors were left, one out of a hundred of everyone still lived. One out of a hundred of his school mates. That would mean twelve of them. One out of a hundred criminals. In prisons, behind the bars with the rest of the dead, waiting for guards who would never come to let them out. Were there a hundred people in iron lungs in Denver? Maybe. How long did the person in the iron lung survive, unable to move, maybe only able to see part of the room in the mirror mounted over his or her face, seeing a nurse slumped over her desk? And, of course, the children wandering in the empty shopping centers. He didn't know why he pictured them in shopping centers. Where would a five-year-old go? One out of a hundred of them went somewhere. One out of a hundred two-year-olds couldn't reach the doork.n.o.b, or couldn't turn it.

The image made Eric ill. He rubbed his eyes. The ground was real. It pressed hard against his knees. The slick fabric of the sleeping bag was real. The dancers, leaping unbelievably in the mountain air, beneath a million needle stars, were real. Bad memories shouldn't be real.

One of the dancers charged the fire, stopped at the invisible boundary, and instead of running away, began to wave his hands in the air in front of him, as if to capture the flames. Eric started, almost falling off his sleeping bag. This dancer was a woman, young one, maybe fourteen or fifteen, naked like the others. The chalk was almost gone from her lower legs, brushed off by gra.s.s Eric guessed, and her strong, dark skin rippled with the intensity of her movement as she swayed. She stared directly at Eric. She knows me, he thought.

Teach said, "They must have grown up like animals, isolated, maybe even forgetting their language, until, eventually, they met up. None of them trusting anyone who was not like themselves, avoiding the adults who might have taken them in. Angry, perhaps, at the adults who were their parents who had died and left them alone."

Another dancer joined the first, close enough to the fire that Eric could see the lines in their faces where the chalk had crinkled and fallen away from the corners of their mouths and eyes.

"And after a few years, these kids had kids, and then their kids had kids, each generation farther and farther from the Gone Time until what they are is what you see, true natives of the land." Five of the dancers gyrated in a line in front of Eric now, another one a woman. Eric thought they were scrawny, all muscle, limbs as lithe as coyotes. The first woman continued to lock her eyes on Eric, as if trying by force of will to get inside his head. The rest continued running and jumping, weaving patterns, sometimes touching each other in pa.s.sing, a hand on a shoulder or the top of a head. The eyes were unnerving, the feeling that the woman knew him. Eric said, "How do they live? They must freeze at night this high in the mountains."

A log popped in the fire sending an ember onto Eric's arm. He flinched, and it sizzled for a second, but he didn't want to knock it off, sure the sudden movement would end the boisterous ritual.

"Mostly they stick to the mine shafts. Mountains here are full of them, or natural caves. Pure hunters, too. Don't believe they raise a thing. If they can run it down, they eat it." Teach's voice stayed low and even, almost as if he were chanting. The dancers either didn't hear it or ignored the sound. "My guess is their homes are deep where the cold can't get them. They store food for the winter and don't come out. Sometimes the boys'll kill an elk or deer, dress it and leave it hanging in the woods. It disappears. Bear might have got it or the Earth Dancers. Don't matter much to them. I've never seen smoke from fires they might make, so I guess they don't use it, which might explain what we're watching now."

Another voice from the fire said, "I dream about them Teach. Women Earth Dancers, like that one." The two women, both tightly muscled, small-breasted, narrow-hipped, moved sinuously in the firelight. The voice continued, "They're, you know, those kinds of dreams." Someone else chuckled.

The voice snapped, "You never had a wild Earth Woman dream?" Whoever laughed didn't reply. "I have a dream like that and I figure whatever I do the next day is sort of... I don't know ... blessed." The wind shifted. The tops of pines creaked as they leaned slightly in the new direction. The dancers stopped, looked about as if aware of some danger. None of them said anything; he saw no gesture, but all except one woman turned and fled across the road and into the forest. Eric thought of fish in an aquarium, changing directions at the same time with no visible way of communicating. The woman watched the others leave, then she crouched, her knees wide apart, arms between her legs, hair covering her face. She smoothed the dirt at her feet, concentrating, unaware, it seemed, of the crowd of men staring at her from the fire. Eric could see them from the corners of his eyes, all intent on the young woman powdered in white.