“It was a real wagon,” the boy told me, “not a funky one like yours.” He sat between me and his dad in the driver’s box, seeming none the worse for wear.
Kids amaze me. They handle this shit a lot better than us so-called mature adults.
Jim said things were pretty bad up in Wheeling-a lot of looting was still going on in some parts of town. The hospitals were full to bursting; the shopping malls had turned into armed camps. “Then we get out here. First we lose the wagon, and then…” He shakes his head and shivers. “Weird shit. It was like the whole damn forest was watching us. Dog was going nuts for miles.” He glanced into the one remaining rearview mirror. “Can we go any faster?”
I urged the team into a weary trot. Behind me, Goldman started humming a soulful little ditty under his breath. “What’s that?” asked Jim.
Goldman stopped humming. “What’s what?”
“That song you’re humming. I’ve heard that before.” “Huh. I thought I was making it up.”
“No. No, I’ve heard that before,” Jim repeated. He was silent for a long while, and we all listened to the hushed voices from the truck bed behind us and watched rain sparkle in the lamplight.
“Is this Armageddon?” Jim murmured. “I swear I never thought it would be like this. This isn’t a war, it’s a plague of madness.”
Goldman started humming again. Guess he didn’t have an answer, either.
Not far up the road we were swept up by the Grave Creek welcome wagon-a bunch of guys on horseback armed with hockey sticks and homemade spears. To each his own, I guess. They’d seen us tangle with the tweaks and had come out to help. They seemed legitimately sorry to have missed all the action.
They escorted us into town, depositing us in the E.R. of the Grave Creek Community Hospital, where Doc was an immediate hit. He slipped easily into the role of medic, applying patches and checking wounds in the harsh light of a brace of Coleman lanterns. Within ten minutes of our arrival the two nurses on duty were following his quiet direction as if they’d been doing it for years. For my part, I tried to be a good patient, sitting quietly while one of them slathered my burnt hand with something that looked and smelled like mint Jell-O.
The kids, being kids, only wanted to compare notes about the “monsters,” and loudly interrupted every adult attempt at conversation. To them this was high adventure. They pretty much ignored Doc’s swabbing and patching, and chattered to Cal, faces flushed and shining. The two girls, Lissa and Melanie, flirted with the good-looking guy-the only adult who seemed interested in their take on things-while Gil pretended he’d never been scared once.
Their parents were grim and silent and clingy. I met Emily Gossett’s gaze over her son’s head. She gave me a weak smile that was more a wince and clutched her little boy’s shoulders so hard, he stopped talking, looked up and said, “What’s wrong, Mom?”
Cal paced. He fielded a few questions about what we’d seen on our westward trek, but quickly turned the questions back around. I could just imagine him in a courtroom-suited and tied, curly, fair hair carefully trimmed and styled-summing up before a judge. But no judge’d ever heard questions like these: Had you, Jim Gossett, ever seen these particular tweaks before? Were they nine feet tall or ten? Did it seem to you they were a little transparent? Did they seem intelligent?
Objection, Your Honor: this calls for conjecture on the part of the witness. (Okay, I used to watch Law amp; Order now and again. Guilty pleasures.)
They had seen these tweaks. Or thought they had. They’d picked them up earlier in the day below someplace named Moundsville, but until sunset the tweaks had kept their distance. “Lurkers,” Jim called them. The word put a chill into me.
Goldman, I noticed, had gone to ground in a corner, his back against the wall, his knees pulled up under his chin, his eyes open, staring at nothing. He’d been like that since we got here. Even while Doc patched him up he’d been silent. Not a gasp. Not an “ouch!” Not a peep.
This was unlike Goldman. He wasn’t a quiet person in any sense of the word. Sometimes he seemed peaceful enough on the outside, but even then I suspected there was still noise in there, like the little wheels that run his brain never stopped turning. Cal once described him to me as having bees in his head. For a long time now the bees had been asleep; the wheels had stopped.
It was creeping me out a little, and I’d just about decided I was going to slip over and see what was up when I realized Cal was talking to me.
“You said they just wandered off,” he said. “Any idea why?”
I blinked at him and shrugged. “Search me. They just split. They were afraid of the fire, but they’d figured that out. Maybe it was the rain. Maybe they don’t like getting wet.”
“Uh, no… no. It was as if they were, um … called off.”
Cal and I turned in unison. Goldman had gotten up and wandered into the middle of the exam area. He stopped in front of Cal and tucked his hands under his arms as if to keep them still.
“Called off?” Cal repeated. “What do you mean, called off?”
“What do I mean, ‘called off.’ I mean, like… dogs. Like, uh, pets. Like a hunting pack that hears the horn or catches a new scent.”
“Whose hunting pack?” asked Jim. He’d been watching Doc check his wife’s blood pressure. “Those weren’t any kind of animals I’ve ever seen.”
“Hold on,” I interrupted. “Anything might’ve drawn them off. It was cold, wet, windy. And, jeez, this is Goldman talking.” I gave him a sidewise glance.
He was nodding, his eyes on Cal’s feet. “Yes, that’s right. This is Goldman talking, and he’s a loon, so you can discount everything he says. But not this time. This time, listen to me.” He looked up and hit Cal with a dark, laser beam gaze. “Someone or something called those guys off. I heard it.”
“What did you hear, Goldie?”
Cal pays serious attention to everything Goldman says because, according to him, Goldman sensed the Change before it happened and tried to warn him. I had to admit I’d seen him do some pretty eerie things myself, so there were moments I could believe that. This was not one of them. Right now I was pretty sure Herman Goldman was not living on the same planet as the rest of us.
“Wait, wait,” Jim interrupted. “Guys? What guys?”
There was a moment of awkward silence that was about as full of wretchedness as a moment can get. Cal glanced at me, then said, “In our experience the Change seems to affect only human beings.”
I looked down, picking at the piece of gauze on my hand. Damn burn was already itching.
“Those were people?” Emily Gossett put a protective hand on her swollen belly.
I felt Cal’s eyes on my face. He’d ridden down to the scorched field. Taken a close look at the body. Out of the corner of my eye I saw him nod.
“How …?”
“How does it happen?” Doc Lysenko pulled the blood pressure cuff from Emily’s arm and finished the sentence for her. His English is better than mine, but it’s laced with the Motherland. “We don’t precisely know. We know only that it is, em, selective. Few people are changed. But there is no way to predict who will be, or when.”
The silence threatened to suck the air out of the room. Our two hovering nurses had stopped chattering, too, and turned grim attention to Stan Beecher’s bad leg.
Cal turned back to Goldie. “What did you hear?” he repeated.
“Hear-what’d I hear?” He started humming.
“Oh, jeez!” I said. “He didn’t hear anything because there was nothing to hear. Fire was roaring, those things were wailing like banshees, that damned dog-” I glanced over to where the dog in question snoozed peacefully under a gurney. “It was like you said, they caught another scent.”
“I said that,” said Goldman, jabbing a thumb into his chest.