When I thought about it later, it all added up. I’d been downwind of them in the ditch. I’d smelled their aftershave. I’d smelled the infection, too.
Zak rode with the cowboy hat on his head, the brim flapping in the breeze. He grinned back at us. We’d be back at the cabins within the hour.
What happened next must have been fast. Only it seemed to roll in at me in slow motion. One minute there was open road, the banks of trees on either side of us. Then figures swarmed onto the road. Braking, I swerved to avoid them. I saw one aim a swing at me with a baseball bat. It smacked against the windshield. A white star appeared in the glass. Michaela shouted a warning. I swerved again, this time not to avoid the hornet but to use the car to smash his legs to crud.
I looked to my right to see Ben’s dirt bike in the grass at the side of the road, the wheels still spinning like fury. I braked hard. Zak and Tony wheeled the Harleys ’round and raced back toward the hornets. There were maybe twenty of them. Not a huge pack, but there might be more nearby. What’s more, they’d managed to topple Ben off the bike.
Zak and Tony, like old-time knights on horseback, charged the mob, the pair of them firing their sawedoff shotguns from the hip. The scattering buckshot dropped three or more of the bastards with every shell. I saw them go down kicking on the blacktop. Blood spurted from wounds in their faces.
I reversed hard. Smashing the legs of any that got in the way. One old girl went down with a screech beneath the back wheels.
“Greg, the dynamite!” Michaela shouted.
I looked ‚round. More hornets piled into the road from the forest. With sticks and iron bars they struck at the car. Some beat at the boxes of dynamite, sending a flurry of splinters into the air. I lurched the car forward. A stick caught me on the shoulder, but I kept powering away from the mob. I looked back again. Zak and Tony rode in a circle ’round Ben, back tires ripping up the sod into a green blizzard that filled the air. They were keeping the hornets at bay as Ben hoisted the bike upright. Thank God the engine still fired. I could see the exhaust hazing the air behind the muffler. Hornets tried to rush him, but the ever-circling Zak and Tony kept them back with a few well-aimed shotgun blasts. A moment later Ben climbed back on the dirt bike. With a twist of the throttle he wheelied right out of there, Zak and Tony following. Zak fired back as the hornets ran after them, turning one guy’s face into a mess the color of crushed strawberries.
“Damn, that was a close one,” I said to Michaela as I accelerated away. Then I glanced at her. Her head rolled to the rhythm of the wheels. Her eyes were shut. Streaming from the gash in the top of her head came what seemed to be a whole river of blood. Not a trickle, but a gush of blood that ran into the soft hollows of her eyes, down her cheeks like crimson tears, then down her throat to soak her T-shirt.
“Michaela?” I shook her shoulder as I drove. “ Michaela, can you hear me? Michaela!”
A rush of air tore the words from my mouth. “Michaela?” I kept calling her name. But as the red stained her chest my voice slowly died.
Forty-eight
“Is she dead? Zak… is she dead?”
“Just clear back there; let me see.”
On the drive back to the cabins on the mountainside Michaela had shown no sign of life. Where her skin showed through smears of blood it had been the color of milk… a deathly gleaming white that chilled me to the bone. I’d carried her into a cabin to lay her on a bed. Immediately the others had gathered ’round, their eyes huge with shock when they’d seen the wound on top of her head. Boy sat on the floor with his back to the wall, his knees hugged to his chest, watching people rushing ’round with bowls of water, towels, surgical dressings. I crouched beside the bed as Zak carefully moved Michaela’s long hair aside so he could inspect the wound.
I repeated the question. “Zak? Is she dead?”
“Ben, pass me that mirror.”
Ben handed Zak the small mirror from the dresser. Zak held it beneath Michaela’s nose. It seemed to take forever before I saw the glass mist.
“Thank God for that.” Zak sighed with relief. “She’s breathing.. .. It’s shallow, but it’s there.”
“What now?” I asked.
“We’ve no medical training. All we can do is patch u p her wound, then wait and see.”
“Jesus.”
Zak gently parted her hair. “But look at the size of the scalp wound. It’s a big one… there’s a lot of blood, too.”
He must have seen my sickened expression.
“Greg, that’s a good sign, believe me.”
“Good? You call that good? The bastard nearly tore off her entire scalp.”
“It shows it was a glancing blow. Instead of coming down hard into her skull, the club struck at a shallow angle, tearing her scalp.” Zak peered down at the head wound. It was a three-cornered tear like when you rip clothing on a nail. Through the pool of blood there gleamed the pink curve of the skull. Zak knelt with his hands open, fingers splayed. They barely trembled, yet I noticed they were smeared red from fingertip to knuckle.
“OK, OK. I know I can do this. I can. I can.” He clenched his jaw. He was psyching himself up to do something. “Tony, find me that first aid kit. Not the domestic one. The big one we found in the ambulance.”
“What are you going to do?”
“This is a bad tear in her scalp… really bad. I’m going to have to sew it back together.”
I looked at him. “You’ve done this before?”
“No, but trust me.” His eyes were fixed on the bleeding wound. “I know I can do it. One thing, though.” He looked ’round. “Clear the room. I need to be able to concentrate.”
With Zak working on Michaela in the cabin I had to keep myself busy. Dark clouds overlaid the sky like a purple bruise. With Tony’s help I shifted the dynamite to a spare cabin some distance from the others. This stuff should be stable, but I wasn’t going to take any damn-fool chances. For a while we worked without talking. Only when I moved the Jeep to a garage alongside one of the cabins did Tony break the silence.
Wrapping a rag around his hand, he reached into the back of the Jeep to pull out a hunk of what looked like steel rod. As thick as my thumb, it was maybe two feet in length.
I stared at it for a moment.
“The hornet’s weapon of choice,” Tony said at last. “Evil-looking thing, isn’t it?”
I nodded. “Do you think that’s what hit her?”
“Could be. But there’s no blood.” He shook his head, sickened. “Maybe one threw it as you passed, or he lost his grip on it when they attacked.” He looked more closely at it. “The problem is, they smear these things with their own shit. Whether it’s a crazy ritual or whether it’s to spread infection I don’t know.”
I found myself glancing back at the cabin where Michaela lay. “What are you saying, Tony?”
“Michaela should really have a shot of antibiotics and a tetanus inoculation.”
“You mean if she recovers from the head wound she still might go down with blood poisoning?”
“It’s happened to us in the past. We’ve lost people.”
“But you’ve got first aid kits and medicines, right?”
“But we haven’t any antibiotics or inoculation shots. They’re long gone.”
“Hell.” I rubbed my jaw. “But I know where there are some.”
“The bunker?”
“First thing tomorrow we’re going back there.” I shot him a grim look. “We’re going to take whatever we need from that place.”
“But you said it was built like a fortress.”
“It is… so this is where we start making the impossible possible. It’s a habit we’re going to have to learn; otherwise we won’t survive.”
“Greg… Greg!”
I turned to see Boy come running across the grass. His eyes were big as boiled eggs; the whites flashed in a way that sent shivers prickling across my back.
Boy shouted, “Greg… Tony! Zak says to come back to the cabin!”
The bedroom where Michaela lay was in near darkness. Zak had drawn the blinds and turned down the kerosene lamp until only a smudge of light burned in the glass tube.