with the sheer joy of mastering the monster bike. When he returned to the others they slapped him on the back and rubbed his hair. He grinned back at the mass of grinning faces as he killed the motor.
I turned back to Michaela and smiled. “OK. The hive. What is it?”
“We’re going to wind up calling you Mr. Persistence.” Despite affecting a weary sigh, she nodded. “OK. About three months after the Fall, our group picked up a warning on a CB radio. Someone-we don’t know who-warned everyone who’d listen to him to beware of something he called a hive. When he described a hive-that it looked like a mass of goo filled with human body parts hanging suspended like pieces of fruit in strawberry Jell-O-we pretty much wrote him off as drunk or crazy.” She gazed into the fire as she fanned the flames, but I could see she was seeing some-thing terrible in her mind’s eye. “The first time we saw a hive was when we found Boy. We were searching houses for food. Of course they were all abandoned by that time. And the hornets had started their destructive rampage. You see, after they killed everyone that didn’t have Jumpy they went back and destroyed all their possessions. You might have missed it if you were holed up on that island. The hornets would go into a house, take all the food for themselves and then they’d just smash everything, tear clothes to pieces, or they’d just torch the place. I think military people call it ’scorched earth policy.’ You destroy anything and everything that might be of use to your enemy.” She took a breath. “So we went into the house where we found Boy. That’s when we saw the hive and what it had done to his sister.”
“What had it done?”
“Sucked her dry, Greg. If you ask me those things are like vampires. They batten onto people, only I don’t know how they do it. Maybe with some kind of teeth in the gel or disgusting tubes that burrow into the people it catches. Then it draws the blood right out of them. We’ve seen it again since. Victims look like pieces of dried fruit. Their faces become wrinkled and ridged like raisins, which sounds like a funny description, funny ha ha, but it’s not. If you saw for your-self you know how sickening it is. You want to puke when you look into those dried-up faces. Even their eyes shrivel.”
“What is a hive?”
“I don’t know,” she said, fanning the flames faster, as if trying to waft those mental images away. “Some disgusting parasite, maybe.”
“But you said that bread bandits-I mean hornets- guard them.”
“Mostly… not always.” Despite the heat I saw goose-bumps pucker the skin of her arms. “We decided we had to destroy them. The one that killed Boy’s sister we burned with gasoline. Where they were guarded by hornets we picked off the guards with our rifles, then torched the hive.”
“What stopped you killing more?”
“Because there were so many of them. We only had limited amounts of ammo. If there were twenty hornets guarding them it would still take more than twenty cartridges to kill them, even if our shooting was pretty good.”
“You’ve no idea at all what they might be?”
She sighed. “I think they’re connected with the Jumpy somehow. Zak believes Jumpy isn’t so much a disease but a metamorphosis. The early symptoms, the overwhelming panic, then this mindless urge for them to kill people that aren’t infected, were the first stages of that metamorphosis.”
“You mean that people infected with Jumpy will end up becoming hives?”
“That’s what we’ve figured out. If there’s a team of scientists still alive out there they might tell us it’s all crap. Until then, that’s our theory. What do you think?”
I nodded. “It seems as good as any to me.”
“There’s some other stuff as well.” She spoke as if the subject sickened her; she wanted to get off it fast. “So far we’ve only found hives in buildings, and they’re always either in a bathroom or a kitchen. Zak figures they need to be near a water supply. They also tend to be guarded, as I’ve said. And it seems as if they need food.”
“That’s why they pull the vampire trick?”
“That seems to be the case. They trap unwary people like Sue.”
“And the one back in Lewis nearly got me the same way.” I remembered the head lunging through the gel with the wide-open mouth.
“Or”-she stood up-“or the hornets who guard them procure victims for the hive to feed on. Any more than that I don’t know.”
A thought occurred to me. I stood up and reached out to catch her arm to stop her walking away. “But if this is some kind of metamorphosis, this hive must be the larval stage. So there must be a final stage.”
She looked up at me, then shrugged in a way that suggested she agreed. “You may be right, Greg. For all we know there may be something like a big, beautiful butterfly waiting to hatch out.” Her eyes hardened. “But until then we do know some facts. And the main fact is that if you get too close to one of those things you die.” She held eye contact with me for a while. Then she glanced down at the fire. “Greg, you’ve burned your bread.”
I looked down to see wisps of blue smoke coming from the top of the oven.
Crouching down, I opened the oven door, used the pliers to pull out the oven tray and saw a dozen bun- shaped cinders.
“Damn.”
“See,” she said. “Making our daily bread is tougher than you think.”
“Back to square one.” I set out the mixing bowl and tub of flour.
She smiled. This time there was warmth in it. “I’ll give you a hand,” she said. “Don’t worry, there’s no rush. This is for the meal tonight and breakfast tomorrow.”
The thing is that bread was going to burn, too. Because twenty minutes later Zak came running out of the barn with straw still stuck to his clothes from his makeshift bed. Panting, he shouted, “There are bad guys coming down through the valley.” He pulled the pistol from his belt. “There are hundreds of the bastards.”
Twenty-five
Zak sounded cool… in control. But he wasn’t dragging his feet. “There are hundreds of hornets down in the valley,” he called as he loped toward us.
Michaela shielded her eyes as she looked down to-ward the lakes. “Are they coming this way?”
“They don’t seem to be, but you can never tell with those sly bastards. They might be doing that on purpose; then they could double back over the hill to en-circle us.”
Ben jogged up, scared-looking. “I guess this is where we leave pronto.”
“Not yet,” Michaela said. “There’s no point in running until we know their intentions.”
Zak nodded. “This is a good place to stay for a few days. They might just pass straight by.”
Tony appeared with a pair of binoculars. He climbed a fence to stand astride the rail. For a good thirty seconds or so he studied the men and women flowing by in the valley bottom. From what I could see against the sun’s glare they moved in groups of twenty or so. They were walking purposefully enough away from us, but as Zak had said, it might be a trick. After passing out of sight they might return when we least expected it.
With the binoculars to his eyes, Tony spoke. “Oh, crap…”
“Have they seen us?”
“No. They’re on a hunt.”
Ben’s hands shook. “That’s bad, right?”
“Right.” Tony lowered the binoculars. “They’re hunting people like us. There’s a group of around twenty down there, carrying backpacks. They’re still well ahead of the hornets, but do you see what I see?”
He handed Michaela the binoculars.
“There’s a second group moving parallel to them higher up the hill,” she said. “As far as I can tell a river joins the lake right in front of them.” She handed the binoculars to me. “They’re heading into a trap. Only the poor devils don’t know it.”
Raising the binoculars to my eyes, I viewed the figures in sudden brutal close-up. “You’ve seen this before?”
“Oh, yes. Lots.” She sounded grim. “Remember what we were just talking about?”
“They’re hunting those people for a hive?”
