I shook my head. “You saw the state that guy was in. It was all a delusion.”
“Was it?”
“Keep believing it was.” I gave a grim smile. “Because that’s what I intend to do. OK, Tony, old buddy? If you can manage it, it’s time to take a little walk.”
Christmas
On the day I carried Tony out of the bunker on my back, trying not to knock his busted leg against the walls, it all changed. Only you never seem to know that you’ve reached one of those pivotal times in your life until much later, do you? Ben drove Tony back in the Jeep. The bottom of the vehicle almost dragged through the dirt, we’d piled so many supplies into the thing. All I knew then as I followed the Jeep was that I was grateful to be alive, that my buddies were alive and that the afternoon sunlight never seemed more beautiful to me than right then.
I rode alongside Zak on the Harley. For a while he’d talked about Phoenix and the girl in the bunker and asked me if she had some kind of telepathic powers. Would she have been able to reach inside our heads and control us, too? At last I smiled at him and called out over the noise of the motors, “Forget them, Zak. They’re dead. We’re not. That’s all that matters.”
So we rode on, seeing birds flying overhead. A deer ran alongside us for a while, as if wanting to join the pack, before peeling off to disappear into the heart of the forest. It still seemed then as if we’d carry on fighting for survival every single day of our lives. But that was the day we turned it all around.
Zak gave Michaela her antibiotic shots. It seemed in no time she was back to her old self, with those darkly erotic eyes and a smile so full of good humor you could almost light up a room with her. Tony’s leg healed. Before long he was hobbling ’round with a stick. Now it doesn’t bother him at all unless it rains; then he grumbles that it aches and he winds up growling like a bear with a sore rear end.
We know we would have starved if it weren’t for the bunker. First we had to clear out what was left of the hornets… dead ones, too, so they wouldn’t stink up the place. After that every few weeks we’d return with the Jeep (that now pulled a huge trailer); then we’d go crazy piling it high with fuel, food and ammunition before returning to the cabins on the hillside. What about Phoenix? Well, we never tried to break down the locked door that sealed Phoenix and the girl into what had become their tomb. “Let sleeping dogs lie,” was Michaela’s advice. Good advice, too. That episode was over. It was time to forget and start to live the rest of our lives.
And get this: The second half of the summer was a long and peaceful one. No hornets came our way. The biggest warm-blooded creature I saw was an elk that snuffled ’round the cabins one morning in the fall just as the leaves were turning red and the dawn mist bore an unmistakable chill. It was times like that I half believed I could climb on the Harley and roar all the way back home, where I’d push open the door to see Mom busy in the kitchen, and she’d smile up at me and say, “Hi, Greg. I made pizza for supper. Would you be a honey and go help Chelle with her homework?”
That was when ghosts came as stealthily as the dawnmist. But when all’s said and done ghosts are only memories. And memories are nothing more than movie clips from the past, right? They can’t-or shouldn’t-take control of your life. Even so every now and again old phantom memory would rise up. Once I dreamed of Phoenix. He was sitting on the end of the bed as Michaela slept beside me.
“I never thanked you for what you did, Valdiva,” he said. “Thanks, buddy; you set me free… You know she had me like a puppet… pull the string, pull the string…” Smiling, he pulled an invisible string.
“Phoenix?”
“Yes, old buddy?”
“I never asked you… why did you paint your face like an Egyptian pharaoh?”
He grinned. “Intimations of immortality… intimations of immortality…” He kept repeating this as he began to sprinkle rose petals from his fingertips. They covered the bed in red splotches. Just like the red splotches that covered the camera lens after the dynamite had exploded against his stomach. In the morning I recalled the dream. There were no red rose petals on the bed, though. Not that I expected there to be any. Phoenix, along with the thing that had squirmed from the hive, was dead.
Of course the time had to come when I dreamed about the girl. It was a day in October. One of those last warm, sunny days when you make the most of the heat. Boy and Tony had gone fishing. I walked with them by the river; then, when they chose a good place to cast their lines, I decided to walk on, following the flow of the stream. After a few minutes I found a sunlit spot on a bank protected from the cool breeze. It seemed a great place to relax for half an hour or so. I sat on the deep, soft grass at the edge of the river. Fish jumped for insects hovering above the surface. It was so peaceful my eyes closed.
“Greg Valdiva.”
I opened my eyes to see a woman standing on the far bank. She had long dark hair and big almond-shaped eyes that fixed on me from across the water. It was the girl from the bunker, the one Phoenix claimed had hatched from the hive. More phantom memories.
“You took some finding,” she said.
I yawned. “Well, you’ve found me now.” My dream self was calm, cool and very collected. “What do you want?”
She studied me like an expert appraising an antique. I noticed she was no longer naked. The prude in my unconscious had slipped her into a white dress. Water splashed against the rocks; another fish jumped to snap a fly from the air.
At last she said, “You are the same as me, Greg Valdiva.”
“I don’t think so. You’ve got the wrong guy. You must be mistaking me for someone else.”
“No, Greg. There’s no one else to mistake you with.”
“Is that a fact?”
“That’s a fact, Greg. You see, we’re the only ones who made it through the hive state.”
“You don’t say?” My dream persona was like chilled silk-cool, smooth.
“None of the other hives were viable. They became dessert for rats and snakes.”
“That’s a shame.”
“But it leaves you and me, Greg.”
“So you say.”
She looked at me steadily across the rush of water, her almond-shaped eyes huge luminous lights. “You’re not ready to join me yet, are you, Greg?”
“Nor will I ever be.”
“You will. One day. When you truly wake up and realize what you are.” She began to walk away, her bare feet pressing lightly against the sandy shore. She paused beneath the trees, a single beam of light picking her out, surrounding her in an unearthly radiance. “We’ll meet again in the future, Greg.”
The bushes seemed to fold ’round her and she was gone. Her feet made no sound as she glided away into the forest. After a while the eerie silence ended as the birds began to sing.
“Hey, Valdiva, are you going to sleep there all day?”
“Yeah, look at what we caught.”
I opened my eyes to see Boy and Tony standing over me. I squinted up against the light as Boy held a bunch of fish that dripped all over my face. Laughing, I waved him away. “Come on; we’ll make a barbecue of it.” I wiped water from my chin. “The way that wind’s shifting, I figure it’s going to be the last cookout this year.”
That should have been it. But as they roasted fish on the barbecue I went down to the river again, crossed it by the stepping stones, then followed it downstream to where I’d been sleeping on the far river bank. And there, where the girl in my dream had been standing, I saw a bare footprint in the sand. I scrubbed it out with the heel of my boot, returned to the barbecue and never mentioned it to another living soul.
There were seventeen of us in those log cabins. I shared a big room overlooking the river with Michaela. When nights dropped cooler as fall crumbled into winter we learned new tricks to keep each other warm.
Life continued its peaceful progress deep into the winter. North winds brought deep snow. Christmas came. We kept the parties going: we were a family; we were having fun. Christmas morning I crept out of the warm bed, leaving Michaela sleeping there with her hair spilling out onto the pillow. There’d been a fresh fall of snow. Now the
