“Jesus Christ,” Stu said. “Which one was he?”
“The man with the shotgun,” Susan Stern said. “The one I brained. I wish he was right here, lying on the floor, so I could do it again.”
The man with the sandy beard and sunglasses they had known only as Doc. He and Virge had been part of an army detachment which had been sent to Akron when the flu broke out. Their job had been “media relations,” which was an army euphemism for “media suppression.” When that job was pretty well in hand, they had gone on to “crowd control,” which was an army euphemism for shooting looters who ran and hanging looters who didn’t. By the twenty-seventh of June, Doc had told them, the chain of command had a lot more holes than it did links. A good many of their own men were too ill to patrol, but by then it didn’t matter anyway, as the citizens of Akron were too weak to read or write the news, let alone loot banks and jewelry stores.
By June 30, the unit was gone—its members dead, dying, or scattered. Doc and Virge were the only two scatterees, as a matter of fact, and that was when they had begun their new lives as zoo-keepers. Garvey had come along on the first of July, and Ronnie on the third. At that point they had closed their peculiar little club to further memberships.
“But after a while you must have outnumbered them,” Glen said.
Unexpectedly, it was Shirley Hammett who spoke to this.
“Pills,” she said, her trapped-mice eyes staring out at them from behind the fringe of her graying bangs. “Pills every morning to get up, pills every night to go down. Ups and downs.” Her voice had been sinking, and this last was barely audible. She paused, then began to mutter again.
Susan Stern took up the thread of the story. She and one of the dead women, Rachel Carmody, had been picked up on July 17, outside Columbus. By then the party was traveling in a caravan which consisted of two station wagons and the wrecker. The men used the wrecker to move crashed vehicles out of their way or to roadblock the highway, depending on what opportunities offered. Doc kept the pharmacy tied to his belt in an outsized poke. Heavy downers for bedtime; tranks for travel; reds for recess.
“I’d get up in the morning, be raped two or three times, and then wait for Doc to hand out the pills,” Susan said matter-of-factly. “The daytime pills, I mean. By the third day I had abrasions on my… well, you know, my vagina, and any sort of normal intercourse was very painful. I used to hope for Ronnie, because all Ronnie ever wanted was a blowjob. But after the pills, you got very calm. Not sleepy, just calm. Things didn’t seem to matter after you got yourself wrapped around a few of those blue pills. All you wanted to do was sit with your hands in your lap and watch the scenery go by or sit with your hands in your lap and watch them use the wrecker to move something out of the way. One day Garvey got mad because this one girl, she couldn’t have been any more than twelve, she wouldn’t do… well, I’m not going to tell you. It was that bad. So Garvey blew her head off. I didn’t even care. I was just… calm. After a while, you almost stopped thinking about escape. What you wanted more than getting away was those blue pills.”
Dayna and Patty Kroger were nodding.
But they seemed to recognize eight women as their effective limit, Patty said. When they took her on July 22 after murdering the fiftyish man she had been traveling with, they had killed a very old woman who had been a part of “the zoo” for about a week. When the unnamed girl sitting in the corner had been picked up near Archbold, a sixteen-year-old girl with strabismus had been shot and left in a ditch. “Doc used to joke about it,” Patty said. “He’d say, ‘I don’t walk under ladders, I don’t cross black cats’ paths, and I’m not going to have thirteen people traveling with me.’”
On the twenty-ninth, they had caught sight of Stu and the others for the first time. The zoo had been camped in a picnic area just off the interstate when the four of them passed by.
“Garvey was very taken with you,” Susan said, nodding toward Frannie. Frannie shuddered.
Dayna leaned closer to them and spoke softly. “And they’d made it pretty clear whose place you were going to take.” She nodded her head almost imperceptibly at Shirley Hammett, who was still muttering and eating graham crackers.
“That poor woman,” Frannie said.
“It was Dayna who decided you guys might be our best chance,” Patty said. “Or maybe our last chance. There were three men in your party—both she and Helen Roget had seen that. Three
“Dayna asked us to try and palm our pills this morning,” Susan went on. “They’d gotten sort of careless about making sure we really took them, too, and we knew that this morning they’d be busy pulling that big trailer out into the road and tipping it over. We didn’t tell everyone. The only ones in on it were Dayna and Patty and Helen Roget… one of the girls Ronnie shot back there. And me, of course. Helen said, ‘If they catch us trying to spit the pills into our hands, they’re going to kill us.’ And Dayna said they would kill us anyway, sooner or later, and only sooner if we were lucky, and of course we knew that was true. So we did it.”
“I had to hold mine in my mouth for quite a while,” Patty said. “It was starting to dissolve by the time I got a chance to spit it out.” She looked at Dayna. “I think Helen actually had to swallow hers. I think that’s why she was so slow.”
Dayna nodded. She was looking at Stu with a clear warmth that made Frannie uneasy. “It still would have worked if you hadn’t gotten wise, big fella.”
“I didn’t get wise near soon enough, looks like,” Stu said. “Next time I will.” He stood up, went to the window, and looked out. “You know, that’s half of what scares me,” he said. “How wise we’re all getting.”
Fran cared even less for the sympathetic way Dayna looked after him. She had no right to look sympathetic after all she’d been through.
“It’s a get-wise world, big fella,” Dayna said. “Get wise or die.”
Stu turned to look at her, really seeing her for the first time, and Fran felt a stab of pure jealous agony.
She happened to glance at Harold and saw that Harold was smiling in a guarded way, one hand up to his mouth to conceal it. It looked like a smile of relief. She suddenly felt that she would like to stand up, walk casually over to Harold, and hook his eyes out of his head with her fingernails.
Never?
Oh Lord. The worst has happened. At least in the books when it happens it’s over, something at least
Let me tell you everything, dear diary, even though it’s no great treat to write it down. I even hate to think about it.
Glen and Stu went into town (which happens to be Girard, Ohio, tonight) near dusk to look for some food, hopefully concentrates and freeze-dried stuff. They’re easy to carry and some of the concentrates are really tasty, but as far as I am concerned all the freeze-dried food has the same flavor, namely dried turkey turds. And when have you ever had dried turkey turds to serve as your basis for a comparison? Never mind, diary, some things will never be told, ha-ha.
They asked Harold and me if we wanted to come, but I said I’d had enough motorcycling for one day if they could do without me, and Harold said no, he would fetch some water and get it boiled up. Probably already laying his plans. Sorry to make him sound so scheming, but the simple fact is, he is.
Well, Mark and Perion were off somewhere, supposedly hunting for wild berries to supplement our diet, probably doing something else—they are quite modest about it & bully for them, say I—and so I was first
