up solid. “You mean leave?”
“You can’t stay here, Ben, not now.”
“You fucking idiot, Valdiva! You’ve killed us, that’s what you’ve done! Why couldn’t you leave her wherever you found her?”
I heard the roar of approaching motors. “Ben, there isn’t time for this. Run. Just fucking run, will you?”
Michaela already tore down the path to the jetty.
“Oh, man, you’re an insane-” Ben started saying it, but I finished it by shoving him through the screen onto the porch. “Run!”
The sight of those cars barreling down the road did it for him. He followed Michaela, running so hard his arms became a blur. Me? I didn’t give my home of ten months a backward glance. With the holdall and the rifle bouncing like wild animals on my shoulder, I pounded across the dirt.
By the time I’d reached the jetty Michaela had already pulled the plug on the power cable that had been juicing the batteries. “Ben! Get the rope at the stern… No, don’t untie it, pull it up over the post.”
The Guard were maybe half a mile away, clearly visible in the low sun that glinted like gun flashes from their windshields. They swept by bushes so fast they ripped off leaves and raised dust devils that swirled around them. I knew there’d be guys standing in the backs of the pickups, rifles cocked and ready. Jesus, this was going to be tight.
I made it to the boat’s control panel in one jump that sent the whole thing tilting madly to one side.
“Careful,” Ben yelled. “You’ll tip us in.”
“Keep your heads down!” I roared at them. “They’ll blast us with everything they’ve got.”
Sweet Jesus, I hoped those batteries had taken the charge. With the sun shining on the gauge I couldn’t see whether the needle was in the red or not. One thing in our favor-you didn’t have to fire up the motor like you would a diesel or gas engine. You switched the thing on like a goddam Hoover. The downside? There’s always a downside, isn’t there? The thing had the horsepower to match.
With the electric motor rising to a hum the boat moved away from the jetty. Slow, too damn slow. These things were built for tourists to amble around the lake while sipping Chardonnay or lazily peeling an orange.
I looked back to see the jetty moving away, the water white from the boat’s propeller. Cars, pickups, a police truck with lights flashing and siren whooping raced up to the quay. Michaela and Ben squatted on their haunches watching the Guard jumping down from the pickups, then running along the jetty.
Michaela chambered a round into the shotgun and aimed.
“Keep your heads down,” I shouted at the pair. “I’ll take it out of sight ’round the headland.”
I swung the wheel over, opened the throttle as far as it would go. On the jetty those guys were in a rage. In their eyes I was a traitor, I guess. I’d disobeyed the Caucus. I’d bought a stranger onto the island just like the old cop, Finch. But I had reasons that were good reasons. So I believed, anyway.
Then the Guard blasted us. Man, whatever they had they let fly. Even though we were more than two hundred yards out in the lake I heard a frenzy of cracks and thumps.
I threw myself into the bottom of the boat, allowing the thing to steer itself. The plastic windshield turned white as milk as buckshot tore into it. Bullets hit the hull as if a lunatic with a hammer beat it with a mad rhythm. Flakes of paint swirled all around us like snow. Michaela knelt up with the shotgun.
“Aim over their heads,” Ben yelled. “I know those people.”
“So why are they trying their damnedest to kill us then?” She squeezed the trigger, sending a bunch of shot back at the jetty. I saw she had aimed high. But still low enough to make the Guard duck their heads and spoil their aim. She ducked down herself behind the gunwale. “They weren’t ready for this kind of shooting,” she called at me. “They’re armed with shotguns and handguns. They’re not going to sink us with those.”
Yeah, maybe. Even so, there were enough hits to bite chunks of plastic out of the case that housed the control panel. If a bullet sliced a cable we’d wind up drifting like a leaf on the water. It wouldn’t be long before the Guard grabbed a boat and came out to find us.
The firing from the jetty began to falter as they emptied their guns. Now was the time to see where we were headed. I risked a look and saw we were heading straight for the rocks of the headland. I swung the boat’s nose ’round and took her ’round the reef. Seconds later the tip of the headland slipped between the Guard and us.
“You can put your heads up now. They can’t see us.” I glanced back to see heads raised. Flecks of white paint salted Michaela’s dark hair. They both looked dazed. “Are you two all right?”
They said they hadn’t been hit. But I noticed Ben running trembling hands over his limbs and chest like he couldn’t believe that a slug hadn’t found its way through the hull to pierce a lung or arm.
The boat had taken a mauling. Thin jets of water squirted in through the hull where bullets had punctured us below the waterline. All being well, the pumps in the bilges should cope with that for the short trip to Lewis, that godforsaken ghost town.
Come to think of it, the place was no fair exchange for Sullivan, with its bars, diners, stores and warehouses bulging with food. But I’d made my bed, as my mother would have said. Time to go lie in it.
The only sting of regret? Yeah, there was one: looking back at the headland to see the mound of milk-white stones that marked the graves of Chelle and Mom, I knew I’d never be able to visit them again.
After a while I swung the boat so its nose pointed across the lake to Lewis. Even though the sun shone I saw what a forbidding place it was. Skeletons of blackened buildings. Ghostly dark voids behind shattered windows. Streets lousy with human skulls where a peeled human face might roll by in the breeze like a tumbleweed. Boy, oh boy. It looked like the ’burbs of hell.
Twenty
Ben hated it; you could see that. He helped pass the supplies to where I stood at the bottom of the harbor steps, but he hated it. The idea of being in Lewis terrified him. Being in the company of a stranger sweated him with fear. He kept shooting looks back across at Sullivan with its tennis courts, neatly trimmed lawns, comfortable homes, supermarkets and ordered lives.
I nodded across the water. “You can’t go back there, Ben, you know that?”
Again he shot a longing look at the tidy little town on the far side of the lake. I suddenly had a mental image of him taking the wheel of the boat and powering home. But he shook his head, his expression worried as hell. “I know,” he said. “Here, don’t forget your rifle.”
“Thanks.” Then I looked at Michaela. “We won’t be able to carry all this food at once.”
“I’ll go ahead with Ben, then bring back help.”
Ben nodded, that expression of uncertainty pasted all over his face. Walking through a burned-out city ruin with a stranger for company must have been as appealing to him as stepping out through hell with Satan on his arm. Like a man going to his execution he walked up the steps (taking them one unhappy riser at a time). “It’s the first time I’ve been off the island in more than six months,” he admitted. “It feels weird.”
“You’ll get used to it,” Michaela told him crisply. “You got a gun?”
“No.”
A gun in Ben’s hands with those twitchy fingers?
“We’ll have a spare you can have.”
“Well, I don’t use guns. I don’t think I’d-”
“You’ve got to, buddy. If you want to last more than a day out here.”
His look of uncertainty darkened into one I’d call depression. He appeared to me a man on a suicide mission. Before he picked up a sack of cans he shot me a glare that as good as said Valdiva, you moron. How could you do this to me?
Michaela paid no attention. Turning to me, she jerked her head in the direction of Sullivan. “You think those guys will follow us across here?”
“I doubt it,” Ben said with feeling.
I shook my head. “Unlikely. They’re terrified of contamination. And like Ben, they’ve lost the knack of leaving the place.”
“Yeah, I lost the knack,” he muttered under his breath. “Lost it big time when everyone started dying.”
