When the eighth lash burnt across his body, Eric slumped against the wheel.
On the island there was no pain. The lake waters lapped the shore. Chickadees and blue jays flew among pine trees. The low sun glittered on the water’s surface as a cool breeze swept down from the blue skies. There was a house there, rough and awkwardly made. Outside the house there were two wicker chairs, whitewashed as clean as clouds. Out on the blue waters bobbed a single canoe. In it there were people, indistinct, shadows of people.
As Eric watched, a bright stroke of lightning struck the island and blinded his vision and his world cracked open like a gunshot. Through the crack poured blinding pain.
18
Lucia pulled over the truck and leaned over Eric. He was pale and unconscious.
“Keep going!” Birdie cried, her voice pitched high. “Don’t stop!” She was holding Eric’s head in her lap. Her hands trembled.
“It’s okay,” Lucia whispered. “They won’t follow us, okay? We’re all right. Eric,” Lucia continued, turning to Eric. “Are you awake?” She pressed her hand to his thin face. His skin was hot with fever. Lucia could see the blood on the truck seat. She had bandaged him as best she could, but they needed a place to stop so she could do it better. “Look,” she said, pointing out the truck window to a sign by the side of the road. “You did it. You got us here.”
The blue sign had white letters:
Maine, The Way Life Should Be.
Eric’s eyes did not open.
When Lucia pulled off the road onto Route 26, she looked and soon found a suitable house. She drove up the long, curling gravel road to the farmhouse. Taking the only weapon she had found, a tire iron, she crept into the farmhouse.
It had been ransacked, but it was totally empty of Zombies.
Lucia found a bedroom on the second floor and dragged down the mattress. As gently as she could, she pulled Eric out of the truck, brought him into the house, and put him stomach down on the mattress. His back was an angry map of a red chain of mountains, swollen, purple and oozing blood.
Birdie stood over him, sniffling and crying. “Is he going to die?” she asked her. “Is he, Lucia? Is he going to die?”
Lucia wanted to answer her, but Birdie was no ordinary girl. They had been through too much together. She couldn’t lie to her about this. She couldn’t say it was all going to be all right.
Lucia checked her rear view mirror. No Carl Doyle, not yet. He had followed them after they had fled Daniel Sullivan, but somewhere he had turned off, bringing the pursuit with him. She hadn’t seen him since. Now, without Eric to stop him, Lucia knew he was dangerous to both her and Birdie. To Doyle, they were traitors, savages, darkies. And they had no weapons to defend themselves.
It was dangerous to enter Bethel, but she had no choice. Eric needed medication or he would die of infection. She didn’t know what she would do without Eric. She had lost Sergio and that was too much to bear already. She left Birdie to care for Eric, swung up into the truck, and headed for the town.
Bethel was a small town in a rolling valley. Mountains rose in the distance, their heads shaved with ski slopes. Clapboard houses lined the streets of Bethel where, before the Vaca B, ski tourists once walked the streets. Now Lucia crept into the empty town slowly.
She hadn’t gone far when she saw Carl Doyle.
Doyle stumbled around his Rover, which was half inside the pharmacy, covered with glass. Lucia had parked the truck far down the street and slowly approached to watch Doyle.
As she crouched silently behind a car, Doyle leaned against the Land Rover and put his head on the roof. He stayed that way for so long, Lucia thought he might be dying right before her eyes. Yet he picked up his head, said something she couldn’t hear and then opened the door to the Rover and climbed in. A second later, he pulled the Rover out of the pharmacy and screeched out of Bethel, toward western Maine.
Lucia waited until she was sure Doyle would not return before she went into the pharmacy. Lying in the glass where Doyle must have struck it was a Zombie, looking more like a skeleton than a human. Lucia stepped over it, crunching through the glass and into the pharmacy.
It was another instance of Doyle saving them. If the Zombie was cracked, Lucia would have been at its mercy. As she searched the shelves of the mostly empty pharmacy, she thought about Doyle.
He had saved Eric. If he had not attacked when he did, Lucia doubted he could have lived through many more lashes. One moment the whip had been raised, the next the man with the cowboy hat and boots had been dead, shot through the right eye. The whip fell before he did. Then the crowd had erupted into shouts and cries of terror. Gunfire ripped through them, and, as people dropped in the street, Lucia grabbed Birdie and ran to Eric. In the chaos of Carl Doyle’s onslaught, as he fired into the crowd from some distant rooftop, Lucia had dragged Eric into a truck. That was the escape. Without Doyle, Lucia would have spent her life with Daniel Sullivan. She shuddered. She would not think of him again. Never again.
Lucia could find no serious antibiotics in the pharmacy. Almost everything was gone. In the end, all she found was a tube of antibacterial salve, a container of aspirin, and a bottle of isopropyl alcohol. She also found the skeleton of a child, with many of its bones missing. It looked like it had been torn apart by dogs.
She was about to leave when she heard the knocking.
The sound came from underneath a trap door behind the counter of the pharmacy. The door was chained shut with a bright steel padlock. Lucia stood over it. The faint noise continued.
Was there a rhythm to the knocking? The question coursed through her. Were Zombies capable of rhythm or had someone locked innocent people down there? She opened her mouth to call down through the door, but then shut it quickly. What if it was a cracked Zombie and the sound of her voice drove it crazy? What if it burst through the door? What if this door was not the only way it could get out? She had only a tire iron to protect her.
The sound continued.
What if it was a human, like her, like Eric, like Birdie? A survivor imprisoned by some sick, twisted person like Carl Doyle. The knock came again and she swallowed. If she could tell if there was a rhythm to the sound, maybe it would be different.
She crouched down. Her heart thudded in her chest. The knocking sound continued. Lucia bent down closer. If she could hear a rhythm or maybe a groan from inside, some indication that it was Zombie or human, she would know whether to open the door or not. She trembled and bent down even further until, finally, her ear touched the cold metal of the door.
The knock came again. She listened, holding her breath, trying to separate the sound of her own heartbeat from the silence throbbing below the trap door. She closed her eyes.
Immediately, as if he had been waiting for her, her brother came to her.
“Lucia,” Sergio said. “No seas tonta.” His voice was solemn with the power of the dead.
Lucia leapt away from the trap door with a soundless cry, blinking. She could still hear the knocking sound, but she scrambled away and leapt out the pharmacy window.
She did not look back.
Lucia had never sewn anything before. She took out the needle and the two pieces of cloth and began to practice. Her first try would not be on Eric’s skin.
Birdie sat beside her, watching her quietly.
“Puta!” she cried and sucked her finger.