That was a new voice coming from off to my right. The kid said, "Dad," and ran across the clearing into the man"s arms.
Another little family, surviving in the wild, just like us. I put my hands in my pockets, feeling more than a little nervous.
"Sorry, I didn"t mean to scare anyone," I said, taking a step back.
This other man almost made me feel ashamed of myself. He was clean-shaven, with his hair buzzed short; his clothes were clean, and neat, not covered with stains; he had a pair of sungla.s.ses on his face, so that he wasn"t squinting at the glare of the snow, and a rifle slung over his shoulder. He had a big wad of gum in his mouth, and he was chewing with loud smacks.
He came toward me fast, hand extended in greeting. "No problem," he said. "You"re that guy who"s been camping up on the ridge with his two boys right?"
"Yeah-" I said.
But as soon as his hand closed on mine, I felt something snag in my coat. Looking down, I saw the tip of a hunting knife at my stomach.
He looked me straight in the eye. "Peace, okay?"
I said, "Okay."
He said, "I just want to be clear. We"re not friends. If you or your boys do anything to hurt my daughter, or even attempt to hurt my daughter, I will kill you without a moment"s hesitation."
I looked over at the kid. Now that he said something, I could see she was definitely a girl-the longer hair, the small chin, the thinner body-probably the same age as Josh. Her dad lowered the knife, let go of my hand, and took a step back. "Are we clear?" he asked.
I pulled my hand out of my coat pocket and showed him the .38 that I had aimed at him all along. "I feel the same way about my boys. So I think we have an understanding."
A small grin twitched at the corner of his mouth. Like he was a man who"d used a gun, and knew how to recognize one who hadn"t. Holding up his knife, he said, "You should save those bullets. They may be hard to replace."
"I figure I won"t use them unless I absolutely need to." I hoped that I was implying, Don"t make me need to. Don"t make me need to.
He blew a big pink bubble and let it pop. "You boys make an awful lot of noise up there."
The guy"s name was Mike, Mike Leptke, and his daughter"s name was Amanda. She was a year younger than Josh, but about ten years more mature in that way that girls have.
Mike would have been just as happy if we walked away and he never saw us again, but Amanda was bored with her dad"s company, and used to getting her own way, so by the end of the week she was coming over to our camp every day to play with the boys. Nick came out of his sh.e.l.l, and would run off after Amanda and Josh, throwing s...o...b..a.l.l.s at them. She got all big-sisterly around him.
One sunny morning, on a day the temperatures shot up to above freezing, we were sitting in our camp eating venison that Mike had shot and cleaned. Mike had built a good-sized fire, without much smoke, and for the first time in weeks, I didn"t feel cold. The kids ran off into the woods pretending to be Indians.
"Have you ever seen the rapeworms?" I asked, voicing something that had been on my mind for a while. "What if they aren"t real?"
"Oh, they"re real. I was stationed at Fort Benning when they fell on Atlanta."
"No s.h.i.t?"
"They look like dandelion fluff coming out of the sky. They"ll hitch a ride on anything, but they only do s.h.i.t to people." He shook his head. "I went AWOL-so did a lot of other guys after that-and came back to Ohio as fast as I could. Stole Amanda from my ex when she wouldn"t give her up."
"Ah."
"It"s us or them, us or them. I hope they nuked "em all straight back to h.e.l.l." He looked away. "What if," he asked, and then stopped.
"What if what?" I said, helping myself to another plate of stew. I had done my best to shave, and had melted enough water to wash most of the things in our camp, including myself and the boys.
"What if we"re the only people left?" Mike asked, in a tone that said it was painful for him.
"That"s crazy," I said around a mouthful of the best food I"d had in over a month.
He had his sungla.s.ses on, so I couldn"t see his eyes, and he always had a smile at the corner of his mouth. He lowered his head and spit between his feet. "What if it isn"t?"
I didn"t say anything. I wasn"t ready to think about Josh and Amanda as some kind of Adam and Eve.
"You were smart enough to get out of the cities," he said, and then didn"t say any more, seemingly on the principle that if you couldn"t say something nice, don"t say anything.
"Yeah?"
He shook his head. Then after a while, he said, "You mind if I take your older boy, Joshua, out in the woods and show him how to use a rifle?"
I was torn. I didn"t let the boys touch the guns we had-my old beliefs were too ingrained. But I could see his reasoning.
Before I could answer him, Josh came running back into the camp. "Dad! Mike! Nick, he found-"
We jumped up from the log we sat on and Josh froze, his mouth moving, but no words coming out.
Mike walked toward him. "What is it? Where"s Amanda?"
"Sh-sh-she was trying to help-"
"Where"s Amanda?"
Josh turned and ran back the way he came, and we ran after him. I stumbled, tripped, ran into trees, trying to keep up-what had happened to Nick?
Mike trotted easily at Josh"s side, his head up, eyes scanning the woods. As soon as he saw Nick"s bright blue coat against the mottled brown of bark and leaves, he bolted for him.
"Where"s Amanda?" he said.
I ran past Josh, who stood rooted well away from his brother, and reached Nick"s side at the same moment that Mike jumped back.
There was a dog, dead at Nick"s knees, a once beautiful golden retriever with a dirty white-and-green collar.
Its coat had gone gray, and it appeared to be molting right before our very eyes.
I jumped back ten feet, just as Mike had.
The dog was covered with hundreds of maggoty worms, silver-gray and slick, sprouting fluff-clouds of micro-wire-thin cilia at one end. The cilia moved, like the tentacles of tiny squids, tugging the creatures across the ground. The cilia sparked, seemingly at random, little blue explosions like static electricity.
"Nick?" I said, circling around to see his face.
His open mouth was full of the worms. Tiny tufts hung from his nose. One worm banged at the corner of his eye, pushing at his tear duct-while we watched, it shoved its way in, wiggling until it disappeared.
"s.h.i.t!"
"Dad, I"m so sorry, Dad!" Josh was crying, scared. "We were playing hide and seek-he-"
"It"s okay, son," Mike said. My tongue was pinned to my throat and I couldn"t speak. "Amanda ran to hide when she saw them, right?"
"She-" Josh sobbed, unable to speak.
"It"s okay," Mike said, taking a step back, abrupt and unexpected, like a missed heartbeat. "Which direction did she go?"
"They got in her face!" he screamed. "Before we could stop them."
Mike walked away without a word. I stood there-staring at Josh, staring at Nick, watching the worms crawl off the dog toward my kneeling son. I was sick. I didn"t know what to do, didn"t know who to ask. Josh took another step away, rubbed the corners of his eyes. "It"s not my fault!" he said.
I wanted to scream at him, to say, h.e.l.l, yes it was his fault, it was all his fault. But I knew the words were really directed at myself.
"It"s not your fault," I whispered. I wasn"t sure who I was talking to.
Mike returned in moments, wearing a gas mask like some kind of steel and plastic bug. He emptied a can of gasoline all over the corpse of the dog. The smell made me think of gas stations, of normal days. I ran up and grabbed Nick by the collar, dragging his limp body back as Mike tossed a match and the dog went up in flames.
"Look," I said, pointing at Nick. "Look, he"s okay! They"re all off him!"
"They"re not off him," Mike said as the flames danced in the reflections of his goggles. "They"re in him."
"What?"
"He"s too young. He"ll sit catatonic like that until he dies-unless you feed him. Then he"ll sit that way until he hits p.u.b.erty and the rapeworm kicks in."
"What?"
"Amanda can"t have gone far, not yet. We"re going to catch her before she joins the bang at Athens."
Athens was the home of Ohio University, nested in the wooded hills of southern Ohio. Mike was convinced that"s where the rapeworm colony had collected.
"Because it"s the biggest city around?" I asked.
"No," he said, as he thumped a box of clinking wine bottles into the bed of his 4x4. "Because the dog was wearing an O.U. collar-green and white, go Bobcats."
"Ah."
We left Nick with Josh in one of Mike"s deer blinds across the road. Bitter smoke filled the sky where the fire was smoldering out amid the snow-wet trees and the wet leaf cover.
"Dad, don"t leave me here," he said.
"You have to be brave," I said. "We"re going to go rescue Amanda, but I promise we"ll come back."
After Mike and I climbed into his truck and pulled out of the woods onto the main road, he said, "Don"t kid yourself-we"re not going to rescue Amanda."
He had to choke out the words.
To calm himself down, he started to explain that in Georgia, they"d seen the victims of the worms follow the paths of least resistance, moving along roads to the places where they gathered, what the soldiers had called bangs.
"Why bangs?" I asked.
He looked at me like I was stupid.
"Huh?"
Mike shook his head. Then he lifted his fist in the air and made a whistling sound like a bomb falling as he lowered it toward the dash. When it touched down, he popped it open and said, "Bang."
"Ah."
"Yeah, there was that reason too. Once a bang started we used to let them gather until there were enough to make the strike count," he said. Then he had to knuckle the corner of his eye. He shook it off and kept his head up, scanning the sides of the road for Amanda as we drove toward Athens.
I had the .38 in my pocket and the shotgun on my lap. Mike had checked both of them for me. He was loaded with ordinance like some video game character. I didn"t like the way this was headed.
"The people who are infected, they"re still people," I said.
"Maybe not. The scientists were saying that the worms don"t just rewire the brains when they lodge in them, they rewrite the DNA. The military guys thought, given enough time, they"ll find a virus or something that will take it out."
"But the people, like Amanda, like Nick, we can do something for them, keep them safe, keep them comfortable, until we find a cure-"
He laughed out loud.
"Wait until we get to Athens, you"ll see," he said.
But we didn"t get to Athens. We came up over a hill, and Mike slammed on the brakes. "s.h.i.t," he said.
He put it in reverse and backed down below the rim of the road.
Just over the hill, there was an old white farmhouse with a wrap-around porch. Next to the house were three tall blue silos and a red barn with the name McAufley McAufley, 1895 1895 spelled out in colored shingles on the roof. A long, one-story animal shed stood next to an unharvested cornfield. spelled out in colored shingles on the roof. A long, one-story animal shed stood next to an unharvested cornfield.
I had to wait until we loaded up and crouched back to the top of the road to see what Mike had seen instantly.
The farmhouse door hung open, with the ripped ends of curtains fluttering through the broken gla.s.s of the windows. On the barn, a rope hung from the hayloft pulley, spiraling around and around in the wind. A combine was tipped on its side in a ditch by the road.
There were people moving around the animal shed.
The shed was on the far side of the other buildings. We approached it carefully, creeping along the fence for cover. The stench of blood and s.h.i.t and sugar was overwhelming. Anguished moans sounded and faded.
"Something"s wrong here," I whispered. "The worms didn"t start falling until after the harvest. There shouldn"t be any corn-"