The noonday sun had burned through the cloud and it was really starting to heat up. I slipped on my sunglasses. The barn was well and truly in the middle of nowhere, with nothing but grass fields all around that had grown straggly and weed infested all these months without farmer intervention. There were no houses I could see. There wasn’t much in the way of trees to conceal any hornets. Even so, I checked that the rifle’s magazine carried a full load of shells.
Boy walked fast, with his jaw jutted forward. He scanned the ground with what your schoolteacher would have called a “practiced eye.” “Pick sticks for kindling and thicker stuff for a slow burn,” he told me. Told me? Ordered me, more like. But he seemed like a good kid to me. He was just doing the job that kept him and his bunch of buddies alive. “No, don’t bother with green wood,” he said as I picked up a branch. “Go for dry stuff. It doesn’t make as much smoke. That fence over there: Go rip out some palings; they’ll burn good. You hungry?”
“Yes.”
“Always eat as much as you can at meal times. You never know when your next meal’s gonna be.” He picked dry sticks out of the grass. “I like chocolate. But you don’t find chocolate these days. When it was my eighth birthday I got a chocolate car. As big as that.” He held his hands more than a foot apart. “It was a Formula One racing car. I ate chocolate every day for two weeks.”
“Who gave you it? Your parents?”
“Did they, hell. Have you got any chocolate?”
“No, I had to bring the boring stuff like dried pasta, flour, rice, canned meat, salt and-”
“You didn’t have chocolate in that place you lived? Michaela said you’d got food coming out ya ass.”
“I guess she was right, but I didn’t have time to bring any chocolate.”
“But you had chocolate in that place?”
“Yes. But I guess that will run out some day, along with coffee and other stuff they can’t produce locally. They’ll have to make do with-”
“I’m going there.”
“You want to go to Sullivan?”
“Yeah, if they’ve got chocolate.”
“I wouldn’t recommend it.”
“Why not?”
“They’re frightened of strangers.”
“I’m just a kid. I’m ten.”
“They still won’t let you in.”
“Yeah, the bastards. They don’t want to give away the chocolate. Do they have huge shakes? I used to have a shake maker. You put milk in the top and chocolate powder, then pressed a button and chocolate shake came out through a pipe. It buzzed so loud you thought your teeth would come out. They’ll have chocolate shakes in Sullivan, won’t they?” In the grass lay a skeleton wearing striped pajamas. Angrily, he kicked the skull from the shoulder bones. Suddenly, in my mind’s eye, I saw the farmer coming out here to check his precious cows. It’s late. He’s still in his pajamas. But he’s heard that hornets are on the rampage nearby. His wife begs him not to do it, but he’s desperate to make sure his animals are safe. In this field some hor-nets jump him and batter the shit out of him, leaving him to die in his blood-soaked PJs with the funky stripes.
Then ten months later an angry kid with a candy craving kicks the poor bastard’s skull clean off. Funny old world, huh?
Like a darting insect Boy snatched sticks from the ground.
“Don’t forget the fence,” he said without looking at me. “Get as many palings as you can carry.”
I kicked off the palings, then gathered them up as best I could with the rifle slipping forward off my shoulder. Sweating in the sun, we made our way back to the barn. “Remember the thing we found in the apartment?”
He didn’t answer. He walked sullenly with his arms stretched ’round a huge bundle of sticks.
“It was an ugly bitch, wasn’t it?” I said, trying to get him to speak.
Boy still kept clammed tight.
“You said it was a hive. Have you seen them before?”
“Yeah, lots.” He spoke as if he didn’t want to go into detail.
“Do you know what they are?”
“Yeah.”
“What are they?”
“They’re trouble. Capital T Trouble. You just want to stay clear of them. Once… once I saw them suck a girl dry. Sue and me went into this house and opened a bathroom door, just like you did in the apartment.” His eyes became glistening and wet-looking. From not wanting to talk at all the words started to shoot out like he was spitting them because they tasted bad in his mouth. “We’d just gone in there because we thought there’d be food in the kitchen. We hadn’t eaten for days. ’Course the bastards had cleaned out the cupboards, but we found this little piece of chocolate in the back of the refrigerator. Just one little square. Sue cut it in half and we licked it so we could make it last a long time. God, it tasted lovely. Really lovely.” He licked his lips. “I can taste it now. Then we went up-stairs to see if there was anything worth taking, or if someone had hidden any food. Sue was twenty. She only kept one thing from home. It was gold medal she’d won for running. She told me it was because she could run so fast that she was still alive. She could run faster than the hornets. Then she opened the bath-room door. And there was all this pink stuff like in the apartment. She wasn’t afraid; she looked into it… you know? Really into it, like she was looking into a pool of water. She said she could see hands and arms and legs and things. But then she screamed. She was shouting that it had got hold of her face. I don’t know how, but her face was stuck to it. I tried to get her away, but it held on to her; it glued her there or something. I couldn’t run away. I don’t know why, but I just stood there… I thought it would let her go after a while. But then I saw these things come through that jelly, like they were swimming through it. They came right up to her. I was there for hours. I watched as they sucked everything out of her. She wrinkled up and just kept getting smaller, like she was a balloon that was going down bit by bit. That thing sucked her dry! That’s what hives do. They’ll suck me dry if they get me.”
“You mean the hive sucked the blood out of her?”
He looked at me in fury. “Why did you have to go talking about it? I didn’t want to remember! You dirty rotten bastard! I’m going to tell Michaela about what you’ve gone and done to me!”
With that he ran back to the barn. But he kept clinging to that bundle of sticks like a lost child clinging to a teddy bear.
Twenty-three
“What did you have to go upsetting the kid for?” Zak’s bald head turned pink. He glared at me. And with those eyes that had no eyebrows, no eyelashes, there was a snakelike quality to his looks. To top it all off, the angry way he locked his eyes onto me made me think of a rattlesnake getting ready to strike.
“I didn’t intend to upset Boy. I was only talking to him.”
“About what?”
“I asked him if he knew anything about these hives.”
“What did you have to cross-examine the kid about it for? Why didn’t you ask me or Tony or Michaela? Why interrogate a little kid?”
We were standing arguing in the barn. Michaela stood with her arms ’round Boy while he hid his face in her chest. He might have been crying, but I couldn’t tell.
“I’m sorry,” I said, but my tone was angry rather than remorseful.
“You should be sorry.” Michaela’s expression was pretty ferocious, too. “Dear God, Valdiva, don’t you think we’ve all been pushed to the edge here? We’re hanging on by our fingernails above an almighty crevasse. We don’t need you blundering ’round pounding questions at us.”
“But you said that if I got you the food, you’d tell me-”
“Tell you about the hive? Yes, I will, but when we’re ready.” Then she added in a way that was stiff and formal-sounding, “And thank you for the food. Just in case you think we haven’t been grateful enough.”
I shook my head. “I didn’t know I was gonna upset the kid. Like I said, I was just talking to him.”
