The Secret: A Thriller (18 page)

“Yeah, him. Never liked that guy. Listen, Ash—you seem like an okay guy, and I don’t want this to turn hostile if it doesn’t need to. But right now we all need to stay inside, so I gotta ask: what’s up with your daughter?”

“Up?” I asked. “She’s…I don’t know what you mean.”

Jerry shook his head. “She’s a kid. Kids are weird, lately. You’ve seen that, right?”

I shuddered a little, thinking of the marching teenagers. And the boy with faceted eyes. “Yeah. I’ve seen it. I think maybe it has something to do with being all in a group. Abby seems pretty normal.”

“So far,” the big guy—George, they’d said, though I was thinking of him as George Two—grunted.

I didn’t argue. I also didn’t tell them she seemed to have occasional—or occasionally
revealed
—strength beyond what she should, or tell them she’d seemed to know about both the trap door and the hidden tunnel when she shouldn’t have.

Maybe, I told myself again, not believing it, Abby had just always been smarter than I’d realized. Intuitive.

“Okay,” Jerry said. “Guys? What say we let Ash here loose?”

Silence. After a moment Frank shrugged. George just sat there. Morose. I wanted to tell him I was sorry about his brother, but didn’t want to do it until I’d been free of restraints for a while—assuming they’d actually get around to untying me.

Abby took care of it. When nobody else moved she leaned over, pulled my knife out of its sheath, and cut the zip-ties Frank had used behind my back.

Nobody objected. Jerry made a noise that might have shared an ancestor with laughter.

“Attagirl,” I told her, and I got the impression she’d favorably impressed my—erstwhile?—captors.

Good. Probably.

“So what’s with the rush to get inside?” I asked.

“Bugs,” George said shortly.

* * *

S
oon I was very glad the cabin’s windows were sealed. From their disinterested glances I guessed Frank, George and Jerry had already known they would be—maybe they’d waited out a bug-storm in here before?

“This is new to me. I mean the bugs,” I said as casually as I could while Abby sat very still and gripped my hand with even more strength than I’d thought she had.

“Kids,” Jerry said with a shrug. “Some of them pull the bugs out to play. They’re probably passing nearby.”

I wanted to look away, but couldn’t stop myself from staring at the windows. They were darkening as the bug-swarm rolled toward the cabin. Stinkbugs, ants, bees, wasps—even an eight-inch praying mantis, the largest I could remember seeing. The little guys would land, hang out, maybe quiet down a little—but as soon as a new arrival brushed against them, or after a minute or so in any case, they’d take off again. Some of them attacked each other, but I also saw a dragonfly land on the back of the praying mantis—maybe confused, maybe searching for a mate in its addled way—and take off again, covered with gnats but probably shedding them as it went.

More came. The room darkened enough that it was hard to make out the individual bugs. I reached for a lamp, but stopped myself. A light source might attract the bugs. More, I mean. “How long—”

“Probably best to sit still,” Jerry said. “Keep talking to a minimum. If we attract the bugs’ attention, they might pull in the kids too. So far this isn’t too bad.”

I settled back on the futon. Abby’s grip got tighter. Painful. But I let her hold on.

* * *

T
he bug-storm lessened after a while, then moved away.

“No cooking or smoking for a couple of hours,” Jerry said. “They might come back.”

I nodded slowly. Jerry seemed to be the leader of the little group.

“This kind of…swarm…happened to you before?” I asked. “In town? Where’d you hide?”

Jerry gave a skeletal grin. “We hadn’t run into Frank yet. George was in a house, and I was out scouting. So…I just lay myself down in a ditch. Breathed through my teeth.”

I stared. “You were out in the middle of that?”

“Yeah. It was…not my best day. Don’t know if I could do it again.”

Okay. Maybe this guy could
be
the leader. I didn’t know if I could have just let the bugs crawl all over me, breathing through my teeth as the sky darkened, trying not to do anything to attract attention and never knowing when they’d start to bite, to shred, or bring something worse…

“Bite much?” I asked.

The grin came back. “Naw. ’Course I smelled pretty bad. After.”

I nodded. “Be interesting to find out whether bug spray works or makes it worse,” I said. “Maybe next time you can try some out for me. Report back.”

George grunted a laugh. “I think I’m gonna like this guy.”

Hell with it. “Sorry about your brother,” I told him.

He looked away. “Yeah. He…wasn’t such a nice guy. You two,” he said, waving to indicate me and Abby, “wouldn’t have done so well, he was here.”

* * *

“I
could get tired of canned food,” Jerry said.

“Want to take a rifle and go hunting?” I asked. “Then you could build a fire out there and cook. Bring us any leftovers.”

“Man,” Jerry said, laughing. “You sure are willing to send me out to die.”

I shrugged. “What’s your plan? We all sleeping in here tonight?”

* * *

“B
reak the door?” Frank asked. “Then you duck while I shoot?”

I shrugged and pointed. “Could. Leaf’s still where I left it though. Same in back. Probably empty.”

Frank shrugged. We were back at the little blue and gray house I’d liked. Jerry had gone to scout for neighbors along the road in the other direction. George and Abby were back at the cabin—which bothered me, a little, but not a lot. I didn’t figure George for the type to bother a little girl, and he was probably more capable than I was of defending her. Also, the three guys hadn’t said or done anything overt, but I was pretty sure Abby and I were still on probation as far as they were concerned.

As hostage situations went, I reflected, it could be worse. When we’d left Abby had been nagging George to help her clean the place up. He’d looked at her a bit askance, but the last I’d seen she had him reaching for a broom.

“Look,” I said to Frank. “Maybe somebody’s in there. But I doubt it, and I don’t want to bust the door down even if it’s true. How ’bout we just knock and see if someone answers?”

Frank’s eyes narrowed, and he opened his mouth to object—but as I stared at him he seemed to calm down. “Fine,” he said eventually. “You do the knocking. I’ll move back a bit. Wait for my signal?”

I shrugged, then watched him move back behind a tree. He settled himself with his rifle pointed toward the door—and me—then nodded.

I knocked. “Anybody home?” I called. No response, so I knocked again. “I’m coming in but I’m friendly,” I yelled.

Still nothing, so I opened the door. Then closed it behind me.

A while later Frank slammed the door open and I heard him roll to the side. After a couple of minutes he entered the house, slowly.

“What the hell?” he asked when he found me sitting on a couch in the living room.

I shrugged. “It’s quiet here. Except for you, I mean. Thought I might take a nap.”

I could see he wasn’t sure whether to laugh, yell, or shoot me. Eventually he grinned. “Okay. You do that. I’ll check out the rest of the place.”

I figured Frank and I were going to get along just fine. Once we got used to each other.

* * *

B
ack at the cabin we found George and Abby sitting on the porch. Talking.

“Anybody home?” George asked as we walked up.

“Nope,” Frank told him. “Left a leaf in the door so we’d know if anyone used it next time we go.”

I looked at Frank. He had a perfect deadpan expression going on.

“Smart,” George said. “Ash here do okay?”

“Oh yeah. Guy doesn’t have much of a sense of humor, though. We ought to practice telling jokes later.”

* * *

J
erry showed up with a couple of kids—about thirteen and eight, I guessed. “Look who I found!”

I cocked my head to the left. “In a house over that way?”

“Yeah. They’ve been hiding out.”

Well, that put the shoe on the other foot. I stared at the kids, wondering, while they stared mostly at Abby.

“I’m Sam,” the older kid said. “This is my little sister Amy.”

Neither of them looked too bright—pinched faces, the kind you got if you lived around here, didn’t ever get too much to eat, and had a family tree a little twistier than most outsiders were comfortable thinking about. But they’d survived, hadn’t they?

“Where are your parents?” Abby asked.

The little girl stared at the ground and stuck her thumb in her mouth. The boy blinked hard. “They went shopping,” he said.

“You two hungry?” George asked them.

“Naw. We have food.”

“They were cooking a couple of squirrels in the yard when I showed up,” Jerry told us. “Cleaned em up real nice first too.”

I hadn’t smelled the smoke, and Jerry had headed mostly upwind of the cabin, but the winds in our mountains could be capricious. “What’d you kill ’em with?” I asked the boy.

“I did it,” the little girl said with a touch of scorn. “Slingshot, like always.”

“It was her turn,” the boy explained after a moment.

* * *

T
he next day we decided to move our supplies to the blue-and-gray house next door. The cabin was a little small for all of us. Also I was hoping to put a closed door between me and George. His snoring was a thing out of legend.

* * *

I
reached for the top corner of the window, stretching a piece of plastic sheeting to cover it with my left hand and bringing the stapler up in my right—and the ladder shifted underneath me. I caught my breath, then slowly eased back down. Maybe I should shift the thing a little to the—

The ladder twisted, the pile of rocks I’d put under its left foot collapsing, and started to throw me off the roof. I dropped the plastic sheeting and the stapler, reached frantically to grab at the window ledge—I couldn’t reach inside because we’d boarded it up with plywood before coming out here to finish the job with plastic—and something that felt like a pillow of air stabilized me on the ladder just as it seemed to catch itself.

I looked down just as my rushing daughter grabbed the bottom of the ladder, gave it a jerk that steadied it without dislodging me, and turned a worried gaze up to me.

I stood there for a moment, taking deep breaths, then started climbing down—glad I held neither the sheeting nor the stapler in my hands. My arms and legs were trembling.

Not so much from the near fall, though. How had Abby managed to steady the ladder? She couldn’t have that much strength in her nine-year-old arms. Also, what in the hell had caught me before she got there?

Our little group had grown—two more men had come out of the woods, and Jerry had found a family of four, parents and two adult children, wandering in town on one of his scouting expeditions. So we had decided to fix up the house that had once had a picture window facing the valley below.

I looked around when I reached the ground. No adults nearby. I could see only Abby…and Sam, the kid I’d originally thought was thirteen. But he was so smart and all-around competent I’d begun to think that was off by at least a couple of years. Maybe more. Small for his age—malnutrition, maybe? He was staring back at me, frowning.

After a while I found a better place to brace the ladder and climbed up to finish sealing around the window—we were going to caulk the inside, too, in case of bugs.

So—had Abby somehow shoved me to safety
with her mind?
Or had it been Sam? Either way, there was more going on with the kids than we adults knew. Or at least with Abby.

I wasn’t planning to mention it, though. No upside to that.

* * *

F
rank stuck his head into the room where Abby, Amy and a couple of kids I didn’t know yet were about to start working on their math skills, it being my turn to figure out something to keep the mob of urchins busy. “Ash? Got somebody out here who says he knows you.”

My eyes felt tight. It couldn’t be Rebecca—probably. Robbie? Though it could just be some more remote family member, or someone I’d gone to school with, I cautioned myself. Too soon to get excited. “Coming,” I told him. “Hey kids? How about you tell each other stories or something for a while. I’ll be right back.”

“Thank God,” one of the girls said fervently. “Math sucks ass.”

I didn’t know whether to laugh or try to maintain some sort of discipline, but just shook it off and did neither. I’d worry about the kids’ social skills later.

J
erry had taken a couple of guys with him this time, and they’d come back with an actual flatbed truck—with people on the back. Strangers, as far as I could see from where I stood, next to where Sam was busily hanging a deer to let it bleed out.

Which was pretty cool. Useful kid. I gave Sam a pat on the back. He rolled his eyes and grinned, which I figured was a fair mix of reactions.

But that deer reminded me: we had plenty of food for the moment. But we were starting to have a town again, too. At some point we were going to have to come up with a believable way to sustain ourselves.

Move back into the valley and grow crops? Go on foraging expeditions for supplies? Start hunting larger game than squirrels in earnest, rather than playing at it as we had been so far? I couldn’t think of any safe options for us. But what else were we going to do? Huddle together and starve?

Then I grinned a little. Maybe we could build a bunch of bug traps. And eat well after a swarm.

I followed George to the other side of the truck, passing a few wide-eyed newcomers as they began to walk around, taking in our little ad-hoc village. Civilization, sort of.

We walked up to a group of four men lying on the ground, tied up and hooded. A couple sported what looked like recent gunshot wounds. Jerry stood over them.