funny, but I could actually feel it, feel The Shape out there-in my guts and along the back of my neck like a hand coming out of the darkness. You didn’t need to see it to know it was there. It wasn’t time for a selection, not for another week or more.
But The Shape was active.
We were in Bitter Creek.
It had been waiting for this.
But what I felt watching me was not The Shape. It could have been more of the infected like in that park. Because we’d already come across five or six other little communes like that, all of them dying or dead, but waiting. Just waiting.
I didn’t think it was them, though. This was something else.
I could feel it just fine. I didn’t know if the others could. There was someone out there. I just hoped that whoever it was, was human.
“When are you going to tell us why we’re here?” Janie asked me. “When will the grand plan be revealed to the faithful?”
I ignored the sarcasm. “When it’s revealed to me, that’s when.”
The tension between us was almost unbearable now. Everyone was aware of it, but nobody was talking about it. Too much shit to deal with without all that fucking baggage that Janie and I had so carefully packed. Mickey felt the tension and sidled up right next to me, making sure a bare arm or bare leg was in contact with me. Skin to skin. There was alchemy in that and she knew it.
I stood on a street corner, swallowing, feeling the town, sending out fingers of perception in every direction. Where was it? Where was the revelation? I knew it was here. I could feel it going up my spine like fingernails, coiling in my belly, filling my blood with electricity…where was it? When would it show itself?
I reached out to that sphere of darkness in my brain which I acquainted with The Shape’s WiFi, but got nothing. The Shape was near, but very much offline.
“Well, Nash?” Janie said. “Are we going to stand here while Mickey dry humps your leg or are we going to get to this already?”
“Fuck you,” Mickey told her.
“Wouldn’t put it past you,” Janie said.
I started walking again.
We came up to something like a town square. Lots of brick-fronted businesses with dusty windows, simple frame houses spread out beyond. The lawns were all yellow and overgrown, the streets plastered with wet leaves. A Mobil station, a video store, a bowling alley, a cafe…this could have been any of a thousand towns in the country. They were all laid out approximately the same…Main Street or Elm or whatever as a hub, everything else radiating out from it like the spokes of a bike tire. Same old, same old. Just another dismal little town filled with death. You could smell it in the air…a sharp, almost pungent yellow smell of age and decay and memory sucking into itself. The moldering, old smell of a library filled with rotting books…except it wasn’t the books that were rotting here.
I saw more white crosses. They seemed to be in the windows of every business and every home.
“What do you make of it?” I asked Texas.
He shrugged. “Damned if I know. The cross, as I understand it, only exists for two purposes: to call something in or ward something else off.”
I wondered what Specs would have made of it with that mind of his.
As we walked, sensing the place, letting it fill us like poisoned blood, Janie kept looking at me. I pretended I wasn’t aware of it. But, eventually, I looked over at her and those blue eyes of hers were blazing. Hate? Anger? No, maybe something like disappointment. Something beyond disappointment. I didn’t know what it was. Not then. But it was coming. She was brooding something inside. Something she was going to share with me when the time came.
But not before.
We all had our guns out and we were feeling tense. There was a thickness in the air, the sense that although maybe we were the only ones wading through this particular stream, there were others watching us from the grassy banks, just biding their time, studying us.
About that time, Mickey stopped. Stopped and cocked her head. “I feel…I feel like I’m being watched,” she said.
Janie sucked in a breath. Maybe I did, too.
“That’s just me,” Texas said. “I been watching your ass is all.”
“Shut up,” she said.
Mickey, as I’ve said, was intuitive as all hell…she could read people, she could read situations. And she wasn’t liking this one at all.
Morse, of course, seeing her standing there looking darkly beautiful and haunted like she did when she was sensing something, snapped a picture of her. Mickey didn’t even flinch. She’d had lots of pictures of her taken in the old days and she was a natural at it.
We moved through the streets very slowly, trying to pick up on what was watching us. Outside a little drug store, we found two bodies. Children. They were curled up on the sidewalk, reduced to husks… just wiry and blackened, crumbling. When Carl nudged one with his boot, it fell apart like cigarette ash. I’d seen it before. Sometimes, the Children just decayed like isotopes, burned themselves up from the inside out.
We kept moving.
And still, those eyes watched us.
“Nash,” Mickey said, gripping the Browning Hi-Power she carried in both hands like a cop on a shooting range, “I’m getting a real bad feeling here. There’s somebody watching us out there.”
Even Carl didn’t have a smartass response for that.
Morse scanned the streets with his telephoto lens, humming under his breath. Janie looked at me and I looked at her. Maybe I was going to take charge like a true leader, maybe I was about to rally my troops, but something happened.
A door slammed.
Slammed damn hard.
We all jumped.
Then we went after it. We cut down an alley and came out on another tree-lined street. Houses, buildings, and then a little ma and pa lunch counter at the end. I saw movement behind the plate glass windows and went after it. I went in first with my Beretta in my hands, ready to start busting caps. Inside, it was typical…flyspecked windows, a long counter, lots of empty tables. Everything dusty and wreathed with cobwebs. A cross on the glass.
And a girl.
She could have been eleven or twelve, I was thinking. She just sat there in a booth like she’d been waiting for us. She was out in the daytime, so I knew she wasn’t one of the Children.
“Hey,” I said. “What are you doing here?”
But she wouldn’t answer me.
She was dressed in rags that might have been jeans and a sweatshirt once. Her face was grimy, her red hair clotted with filth. And she stank like she hadn’t had a bath in months, like she’d been pissing and shitting herself. And judging from those dark stains at her crotch, I think she’d been menstruating, too.
“Take her,” I told Carl.
Carl liked that bit. Strictly stormtrooper fantasy. He handed his shotgun to Morse and went over to the girl.
“You got a name, sunshine?”
She just looked up at him with this dull, bovine look. He put the questions to her about who had survived and where they were and what she was doing alone. She just kept staring, though, either an idiot or mad or simply made that way by the world pissing down its own leg and leaving her stranded in a dead town.
He slapped her, just warming up. “Talk, you fucking cunt,” he said.
But the girl didn’t even make a sound. He might have been striking a rump roast thawing on the counter…this girl wasn’t much more than that: animate meat.
“Stop it!” Janie said. “She’s just a child! Don’t you dare hit her!”
