I looked at her. She recognized something so serious in my expression that she stopped eating.
“Michaela, I won’t make a game of it,” I told her. “The truth is I might kill you.”
A tremor ran through her face. Her dark eyes widened in shock.
“Listen.” I clasped my hands together tightly in front of me, just in case they flew at her to crush her throat. “I don’t know what happened to me last year, or if it’s something I’ve always had… I know I’m not explaining this well. But if someone has got that thing in their blood I know. It’s instinctive. They might not have any symptoms. They might be sitting like you’re sitting there now, but I get this twitching in my stomach, the muscles in my back writhe like a whole heap of snakes, then before I know it I’ve killed them-man or woman. It’s like lightning inside my head. Pow, bang, then by the time I’ve got my control… my self-control back I’m standing over a body that’s hacked to pieces.” I took a breath, sickened by the memories that started to flood me. “It’s like a bomb hitting me. It’s that sudden.”
“You don’t feel this… this twitching with me now?”
“No.”
“Did you feel it when you were back with my people?”
“No. I thought I felt it when I followed the boy into the apartment. I know now it was because I was so close to that thing you call a hive. But there’s no guarantee it won’t happen.” Then I told her about the local guy who’d arrived in town a few days ago, that I knew he’d got Jumpy running in his veins and how I’d killed him in the street. “So this epidemic has changed,” I told her. “We thought it could only affect people from South America. Now it looks as if no one’s immune.”
She nodded. “That’s our experience. It looks as if that funky old Jumpy bug just took a little longer to get into the Yankee bloodstream.” She tried to talk in a lighthearted way, but I could see from her face that she was deadly serious. “The question we’ve been asking ourselves is, why haven’t we been infected yet?”
“Maybe some natural resistance.”
“Maybe. Or maybe we just managed to keep out of infected areas by chance. Just as you’ve put yourself in quarantine on this island.”
“Then we’re living on borrowed time? It’s going to come here whatever we do?”
She sipped her water. “Which is a depressing thought, you have to admit.”
“You know, I have a friend who can’t stop asking questions. For months he wondered why the whole country fell apart so quickly. How millions of people with the best armed forces and the best medical care in the world could just go.” I snapped my fingers. “Im-plode in a matter of days. Not even weeks.”
“You reckon the question he’d be asking right now would be: Were Americans in the early phase of the disease when the hornets launched this-what did the press call it?-Tet offensive and rioted all over the damn place?”
“Makes you wonder, doesn’t it, Michaela?”
“It does make you wonder, Greg. It makes you wonder what’s gonna happen next. And that question terrifies me. Oh, God.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing…” She shrugged, tired-looking. “I feel like hell, that’s all.” She shot me a faint smile. “Those days on the road are catching up with me. I don’t think we’ve slept more than two hours straight in the last week.”
“Wait there, I’ll run you a bath.”
“A what?”
“I’ll go fill the tub. While you have a soak in some hot water I’ll load food into the boat.”
Again that incredulous look. “You mean to say you’ve got hot water as well?”
“Sure. There’s an electric immersion heater. The electricity will have been cut at midnight, but it stays hot in the tank for hours.”
“Jeez. You’re the kind of guy who girls like me want to marry.” She suddenly blushed. “Take that as a figure of speech… but I wouldn’t say no to a bath.”
I stood up, ready to go run the water for her, but she waved her hand. “No, just point me at your bathroom and I’ll do the rest. You best get those supplies loaded.”
“It’s at the top of the stairs. First door on the right.”
“Thank you, Greg. I mean it… but just don’t go killing me before I’ve had at least ten minutes up to my chin in hot water, will you?” Wearily, she shook her head. “Sorry. Bad-taste joke. I’m terrible for that. I always joke about inappropriate subjects. But then, didn’t Freud write a paper about that?” She smiled again. “Sorry, Greg. I’m so tired I’m rambling.”
Within moments of her going upstairs I heard the water running into the tub. I grabbed a pair of heavy-duty holdalls and packed as much canned and dried food as I could carry. After three trips down to the boat I’d emptied the kitchen of every last bag of rice, pasta and bottle of beer. For a moment I considered taking the truck up to Ben’s to collect more food. I knew he’d got access to a cold store that was fed by electricity all the time. There’d be cheeses and sides of beef there, but to do that I might as well drive with the horn blaring and a sign on the truck roof that read JUST GETTING FOOD FOR STRANGERS, YOU MORONS.
Then what?
The townspeople would either lynch us there and then, or maybe they’d do it nice and slow, like they did with Lynne, and pile rocks on our chests until we suffocated. Those nice smiling bastards of Sullivan really knew how to squeeze the revenge juice out of a victim.
It took me less than an hour to make those trips to get all the food onto the boat. It wasn’t a great supply, as you can imagine. But it should keep Michaela’s group fed for a few days at least. With luck they might be able to find a house tucked away in the woods that hadn’t been picked clean.
I returned to the cabin to find the lamp had burned out and the place in near darkness, with all the blinds shut. Closing the screen door behind me, I listened. It had that special kind of silence, the tomb silence that seems more than there being no sound. There was a sense of the building holding its breath. Secret, secret, secret… there’s something hiding here you shouldn’t see, Valdiva.
Immediately the thought came to me that Michaela had been discovered. That maybe Crowther and his buddies were waiting in a darkened room with rifles cocked.
Shit. Where was Michaela? Why was the place so damned quiet? I’d only been down at the jetty less than ten minutes. Surely I’d have heard if some guys had pounced on her. Not risking relighting the lamp, I allowed my eyes to adjust to the thin wash of daylight filtering through the blinds. Then, walking as quietly as I could, I went upstairs. A candle still burned in the bathroom. The tub had been emptied. Trying to move like I was nothing more solid than a wisp of smoke, I crossed the landing to my bedroom.
In the gloom I saw a figure lying on my bed. Slowly, slowly, slowly, I eased myself into the bedroom. Michaela lay on the bed. She must have decided to lie down for a moment (while no doubt promising herself, No, I won’t let myself fall asleep), but there she lay, dead to the world, wearing nothing but my big bath towel, her long hair spread out against the white sheet in gleaming dark strands. Her breathing was slow, rhythmic. The poor kid couldn’t have slept in a clean bed for weeks, if not months.
At that moment, as I looked down at her, my stomach muscles twitched.
She’d turned over in her sleep, the movement making the towel come adrift where she’d fastened it high on her chest. The twitch came again. Following that came a tingle in my fingertips.
This was another kind of twitch. Not that fatal twitch that signaled I would attack. No, no, my man, this was very different.
For the first time I saw how beautiful she was. The dark arches of her eyebrows. The relaxed face that was a near perfect heart shape. She possessed a waiflike beauty that made her look so vulnerable asleep there on my bed. The towel had slipped down, exposing a smooth mound of breast. She breathed deeply in her sleep, raising her chest, making the towel slip down farther to expose skin almost as far as her nipple.
I moved quickly, closing the door behind me before going downstairs. Seconds later I’d lit the spare lamp in the kitchen and got busy making a jug of hot coffee on the camping stove. Let her sleep, I told myself. We can spare another hour here.
Boy, was I wrong. Was I wrong by a wide, country mile.
