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.”
“Greg,” she said, “you best sit tight here and guard the food.”
Ben looked ’round at the dead tomb of a town. “Guard the food? You think there are actually people here who’d try and take it.”
“I don’t think,” she told him. “I know.”
“Jesus.”
“Stick close to me.” Shouldering a holdall that clanked with cans, she rested the shotgun barrel on her other shoulder. Safety off, I noticed.
“We’ll be back in twenty minutes,” she told me; then, with Ben following, his head turning this way and that as he anxiously scanned the wrecked buildings, they walked away.
So I sat there in the ghost town with the sun going down. Shadows crept along the street like the buildings themselves bled darkness. It oozed over sidewalks, joined with more pools of shade and crept toward me. Cool air moved in from the lake. When the shadows crawled over me at last the chill of the evening slithered over my skin. Silence oozed in with the coming gloom. Even the birds stopped their chirping. I began to notice the smell, too. That compost smell that made you think of mushrooms, damp basements and decay.
Twenty minutes became half an hour. Still no sign of Michaela or her people to collect the supplies. They’re not coming back, Valdiva.
… Face it, you’re alone.
To close off the thought I checked that the rifle was loaded (even though I knew it was), then counted how many cartons of shells I’d stuffed into the bag. Nine cartons. That should be ample for a while.
I stared along the street, expecting to see Michaela or Ben turn the corner at any second. As I stared I suddenly had this sensation of cool air playing on the back of my neck.
Someone’s behind you.
I twisted fast to see who was there. Maybe Crowther junior couldn’t resist making the trip across the water to blow off my head when I wasn’t looking. Instead of Crowther leering down a rifle at me I saw a rat slinking through all that crud on the ground. It must have gotten the scent of the food I’d brought. Its claws rustled shreds of paper. When I stood up it disappeared under a burnt-out truck.
Forty minutes had crawled by since Michaela and Ben had left. Maybe she’d need to find her people if they’d relocated in the last twenty-four hours. That yard where they were camping was hardly the lap of luxury. They might have found a house somewhere that hadn’t been trashed.
Darkness was coming down a storm now. Clouds ballooned over the horizon to bury the sun as it rested on the hills. Soon nothing remained but a bloody smear of red across the western quarter of the sky. It grew cooler. I zipped up my leather jacket, then shivered to the roots of my bones. Now I found I couldn’t sit still. I paced the stretch of road where we’d stacked the food supplies. A police car rotted by the ferry terminal. Another rat sat in the back seat cleaning its whiskers. Across in Sullivan the town lights burned bright. Even though it wasn’t much more than three miles away, now it could have been on Neptune. Ben and I wouldn’t be welcomed back there with open arms for sure. In fact, it was my guess that the Caucus would issue an order that we be shot on sight if we even came within spitting distance of the place.