The newcomers laughed. I could see that one of the Malaysian girls especially was warming up to him. I loaded the shotgun, then finished my bread ration. Ben had worked miracles. Flavoring the bread with crushed wild garlic had to be a stroke of genius. I hadn’t tasted anything as good in a long while.
The thirteen-year-old girl darted to the repair shop and came back with news that baby and mother were fast asleep in the back of the Chevy. Boy showed off a card trick that impressed everyone. The new guy with the goatee beard sat opposite me on the far side of the fire. Smiling, he said he could make a stick turn to rubber. He did the old trick you’d do with a pencil, only this time he held the end of a piece of firewood in his fingertips and flicked it up and down so it gave the illusion of becoming rubbery. God, yes, a cheesy old trick, older than Noah’s goddamn Ark. But it raised a laugh from everyone. Boy grinned so hard I’d swear you could see every single tooth in his head.
Ben nudged me. “Don’t tell me that I’ve gone and poisoned you.”
I looked at him, puzzled. “What do you mean?”
“You’ve just eaten the bread.” He smiled. “Now you’re rubbing your stomach like it’s given you a bellyache.”
“And here’s another neat trick,” Ronald said, stroking his goatee.
That’s when I fired the shotgun blast that tore his head from the roots of his neck.
Twenty-eight
“Whoa, keep your hands up against the wall, Greg. Both hands… feet apart. I said feet apart!”
Like the old-time cops, they had me spread-eagled against the repair shop wall.
“Jesus, Greg,” Tony said as he jammed the rifle muzzle into the side of my neck, “what did you have to blow off the guy’s head for? What’d he ever do to you?”
“I had to. He was-”
“Keep facing the wall or I’ll blow a hole in you.”
“You don’t understand, I-”
“You bastard. You murdering bastard!” This came as a shriek from the mother, who advanced toward me with the baby in her arms. Her shoulders had hunched up to her ears. She looked like a wild cat ready to jump and claw my eyes out of my head. “You bastard! Why did you kill my husband? Ronald hadn’t done anything to you. He didn’t even have a gun and you fucking murdered him.” She crackled with hysteria. It sounds crazy, but purple lights seemed to detonate in that wild shrieking sound she made. “Wha’ ya plan to do with us? Ya going to kill all of us? It that it? Ya going to kill my baby? You going to kill her?” She looked ’round in terror at the others in Michaela’s gang. She thought they were going to leap on her and mutilate her. Michaela spoke soothingly to her. With the help of the Malaysian girls she got her back to the Chevy, where she sat in the front seat rocking backward and forward, eyes staring like light bulbs, the baby grunting in her arms.
“See what you’ve fucking done, Valdiva?” You could hear the horror juicing through Tony’s voice. He couldn’t believe what’d just happened out by the camp-fire.
I said, “Listen to me. I had to kill him; he-”
“What’s wrong? Didn’t like the shape of his face?”
“No, it’s not that. I had to kill him. Listen to me, I couldn’t stop myself.”
“Listen to that,” Zak said, behind me. “The guy’s psycho.”
Tony added, “Lucky we found out before he killed any more of us.” I heard a gun cock, and another muzzle pressed into the back of my neck. They were going to kill me there and then. In twenty seconds there’d be a splash of my blood right up that cinder block wall in front of me. The muzzle bit so deep into my neck it pushed my open mouth against the wall, grating my teeth against the blocks.
Then Michaela’s voice came close by. Disbelief turned it to a whisper. “What on Earth possessed you, Greg? Are you crazy? Is that why those people kept you out of town in the cabin?”
“No…”
“The poor guy was innocent. You just-”
“No,” I snarled into the cinder block. “Listen to me. I killed him because he was infected.”
Zak spat. “Valdiva’s out of his mind.”
“No, he’s not.” It took a second to place the softly spoken words.
“Ben, you better tell them.” I panted as the muzzles pressed harder against my skin. I could almost hear fingers tightening ’round triggers.
“Greg’s right when he says he couldn’t stop himself.” Ben spoke in a calm voice. “He’s been like that ever since I met him last year.”
Zak’s voice: “What do you mean?”
“Greg can tell when someone’s infected with Jumpy. I don’t know how he does it, but he knows before they start to display even the earliest symptoms.”
“That guy looked like an ordinary Joe to me,” Zak snapped.
“Didn’t he look edgy to you?” I said. “And isn’t irrational panic one of the first signs?”
“Shit. You’d be panicking if you were in his shoes today, with a bunch of hornets making for you.”
“It was more than that. He was panicked. He was losing control.”
“So he was scared.”
“Believe me,” I said, “I can tell when someone has Jumpy. It doesn’t always happen straightaway, but when I sat in front of him by the fire it hit me. I knew it. He was riddled with Jumpy. In a few days he would have tried to kill us.” They were quiet now, so I rammed home the point. “You know how it works. You’ve seen it before.”
“But we’ve only got your word for it,” Michaela said. “Ben might be providing an alibi.”
“You could always take a trip across the water to Sullivan and ask the people there,” I told her. “Only I don’t recommend it. They’re likely to shoot any stranger the moment they clap eyes on him these days.”
Zak pressed the muzzle of the gun into my jaw. “We only have your word for it.”
“He’s telling the truth.” This time it was Rowan, the thirteen-year-old, who’d had the presence of mind to wrap the baby in a towel when it was born.
Tony said, “What makes you so sure?”
“It was how Ronald acted. He’d been brave in the past. Once he’d climbed right into the top of a tree when I hid from some men who were trying to catch me. He got me out and he was always calm. But in the last few days he started getting frightened… like he was frightened of his own shadow. I didn’t think any-thing about it right up until now, but I’d never seen him getting panicky like that before, even when the hornets nearly caught us a few weeks ago and they killed Lana and Dean.”
“There’s your proof,” Ben told them. “Let Greg go. He’s more likely to save your necks than harm you.”
“Whoa. No, wait a moment here.” Zak didn’t remove the gun from my neck. “This is how I see it, tell me if I’m wrong, OK?”
“OK.”
“Greg Valdiva here has got some natural, in-built early warning system. He knows… or divines, somehow, when a person has Jumpy. And he knows before anyone else recognizes the symptoms, right?”
“That’s right,” Ben said.
“Then some kind of red mist comes down inside his head. Before he knows what’s happened he’s killed the infected person.”
“Yes, it’s as involuntary as…” I pictured Ben shrugging as he searched for a suitable illustration. “… as involuntary as hitting your knee and triggering the classic knee-jerk reaction. It’s instinctive.”
“Yes, yes, that sounds great. Greg here will screen any strangers we meet. If his instinct tells him that they’re infected then he executes them. If not, then we’re free to team up with them if that’s what everyone wants.”