The Secret: A Thriller (7 page)

But of course I couldn’t do it. My best guess was that nobody else could either. I suspected Tor itself was probably being used by the military, since they’d helped to build it initially; otherwise it would be down too. Maybe they had some secret exit nodes that were still working?

But then I remembered: a couple of search engines had addresses
internal
to the Tor network. Maybe, even if I couldn’t actually see any websites, I could manage to see some slightly out-of-date search listings? Would they still be working?

And there? I struck gold.

Eyes glued to the screen, I wanted to stay and read for hours. But I needed to get back to my family.

* * *

OBAMA: TERRORISTS ATTACK OUR FREEDOMS

The President spoke to a shocked nation today about the latest outrage…

MORE VANDALISM IN ATTACKED ZONES

Out-of-control rioters trying to escape the New Jersey quarantine zone…

POISON GAS SPREADS; CASUALTIES HIGH

Contrary to original estimates, some terrorist gas strikes are still affecting…

MORE DEATHS FROM RADIATION

In the Folsom quarantine zone at least three thousand bodies have been…

ALIENS FINALLY ARRIVED ON EARTH?

But apparently they forgot to tell the White House. “I saw them! A whole…

CONSPIRACY THEORISTS FOUND

Two New York Times columnists were apprehended today after subverting…

PROTESTERS RIOT, ATTACK POLICE

Authorities were forced to fire into a crowd of looters outside the Oklahoma…

GOV’T TO SHUT DOWN INTERNET FOR THE DURATION

For public safety, in a move to cut off terrorist communication, a White House…

* * *

“R
ose, please,” I begged. “Come with me. We’ve got plenty of room.”

“Ash. I was born in this house,” she said. “And I’ll happily die here. Today, if I have to. This is my home.” She gave an evil grin. “Besides, I wouldn’t give your great-grandmother the satisfaction of hiding in
her
house even if it is mostly gone and her dead with it.”

I stared across Rose’s living room at an awful quilt she’d made and hung on the wall years before. My teeth hurt from grinding them…I’d thought I quit doing that when I was a teenager. “Rose. It’s worse than you know. This isn’t just happening in Henge. It’s in at least three other places. The government has shut down the internet, they’re telling people all over its terrorist attacks…this is serious. People are dying.”

“Sonny boy,” she reminded me serenely, “I just said I’ll die here. In my home. Did you think I was joking?”

I threw up my hands, thought about grabbing her forcibly…but I couldn’t make myself do it. “Fine,” I told her. “I’ll leave the truck with you.” I raised a hand when she tried to object. “I need the truck to get online and I don’t want to use my gas for anything but internet access anyway.” Actually I was sure I could siphon as much as I needed from abandoned vehicles, and any 12-volt battery would work as well as the one in the truck. But Rose wouldn’t know that. “If something else happens…in an emergency, you know where we are. Get in the truck, drive like a bat out of hell, and don’t worry about the paint job when you get into the woods.”

She was shaking her head. “Ash. I’m not—”

“Please. Promise you’ll come, if you need to.”

W
alking down the street, I was pretty sure something had died nearby. I was hoping it was a deer. Or even a dog. The stench was awful.

I put a hand over my face, and then heard…singing?…up ahead, and looked for a place to hide. It sounded like some sort of parade. But who…?

“Jacob!” I heard from my left. “Come inside! Immediately!”

Leo Morrison, who’d taught all my History classes in high school, had opened his front door and poked his head out. His uncharacteristically spiky comb-over waved at me. He also flapped one hand frantically. “Come, Jacob! Quickly!”

I’d been walking back toward the scrub wood from Rose’s house—I figured I could cut across and save at least a mile of street walking—and so far I hadn’t seen too many people. Morrison looked a little off, but it had been a tough couple of days and he’d always struck me as a level-headed guy. I trotted across his yard. “Hi, Mr. Morrison. Do you have any idea what—”

“Inside, damnit!” He grabbed my arm and pulled. The guy was barely five feet tall…but I let him pull me inside.

“Okay! Okay. What’s going on?” I asked.

He glared at me through his monocle—the only one I’d ever seen in person—and closed the door. “The children, Jacob. They don’t…they don’t always recognize the people who belong.”

“The people who what?”

“Shh!” He motioned to the window. “See for yourself! But be still, Jacob. Please. Don’t draw their attention.”

I moved to the window with him, and we watched the street. For a while, all was silence. I opened my mouth to ask again what was happening, but Mr. Morrison shushed me angrily. I decided to humor him…and then I heard it again: the older, long-disallowed version of the Henge High Barbarians fight song, as always delivered by teenage-or-younger voices. Bemused, I grinned a little…and wondered what was up.

Just as it was ending (“…SWIRLS OF BLUE! EYES OF FIRE! STANDING TALL, WE LIGHT YOUR PYRE! GO…BARBS!”) I saw the first kids come into sight. And my grin went away.

Some of them seemed barely upright, as if they might fall over any second. Some looked full of energy. Most wore clothing ripped to rags, or were barely dressed at all. I looked closer…one girl, maybe ten years old, was entirely naked. Many of them sported blue paint on their clothes and bodies. Each and every one, regardless of how their bodies swayed or twitched, stepped along precisely in time. Spasmodic jerking, graceful dancing, a couple were spinning as they went and one of them might have been comatose or dead but was being walked along, feet kicked back and forth in perfect rhythm. I wanted to throw up but didn’t dare move.

Then came the next wave. These were slightly older kids—Robbie’s age, or Rachel’s. Or Felicia’s. I swallowed, hard. And swayed on my feet.

At the end of the procession came Chief Eisler’s cruiser. But he wasn’t driving it. More kids were pushing it, pulling it, moving it along. The steering wheel had drifted to the left but they didn’t seem to care. It was as if they’d forgotten what it was for. Somehow they just shoved the car back into line, and marched on.

As they moved out of sight they started a new chant. “WE PLEDGE ALLEGIANCE TO THE FLAG…”

I sat down, hard, when they were gone.

* * *

“Y
es,” Mr. Morrison soothed me, one hand on my left shoulder. “It can be difficult at first.”

I tried to get my breathing under control, and stared up at him. “At first?”

“Jacob, Jacob. The young ones are a little enthusiastic, true. But they understand: we must defend our own.”

I swallowed. “Against…what?”

“Whom, Jacob. Against whom.” He paused, waiting for acknowledgment. I waved for him to continue. “Against outsiders, dear boy. People who don’t belong here, by reason of race, creed or—not to put too fine a point on it—birth.” He looked into my face, and chuckled. “Relax, boy. Relax. Come by the church tonight—Reverend Bob can explain it to you. It’s simple, really. You’ve missed the noon sermon, but this evening will do as well.”

I stood awkwardly, moving to the window so he wouldn’t see my face. “Bob Germain?”

“Why yes, of course. We must pull together, Jacob. These are difficult times.”

I nodded, still facing away. “Very true,” I said, and tried the only idea I had. “Let me go get my family. They’ll want to hear.”

“Oh!” Mr. Morrison chuckled. “An excellent notion. We’ll look forward to seeing you. All of you this time, if you please.”

He opened his door for me, giving a maniacally happy grin, lunacy sparkling from his monocle. “All of you.”

I nodded and got out of there as smoothly as I could. I wanted to draw my gun but I didn’t want to attract attention.

Even after he closed the door I tried to walk normally, betraying nothing, as I moved down the street.

Two doors down I saw a couple of dead bodies lying in somebody’s front yard. One of them seemed to be clutching a skateboard…but it was hard to tell much about who they’d been. Whom.

So, not a deer or a dog. Still spooked, I kept walking. All those kids had come right by here, and none of them had visibly reacted. Even though the bodies were largely…eaten. By something.

What in the hell was going on? I had no idea. This morning I’d supposed—as a fall-back plan, if nothing else worked—we could try to drive out of town. Now? I wondered whether we could survive the attempt.

And where would we go, anyway? Was anywhere at all safe?

* * *

I
felt better as soon as I got into the woods. Until today I’d thought that, whatever was happening, the threats were external. From sources out of town. Of course, Mr. Morrison still seemed to feel that way…but he and the marching kids were more frightening to me than any number of explosions. Or even fanged monkey-people.

My knees shook as I staggered through the woods. Fear or exhaustion, I wondered? Did it matter? I got slightly lost—I’ve never had any sense of direction at all—but found a creek and knew where I had to be. Sighing, I sat on a rock. My feet hurt a little, so I took off the custom-made boots I’d ordered via the internet. Expensive, but…anyway, it still felt like a betrayal of my principles to have anything on my feet. But I didn’t want anything to slow me down if I had to run, I hadn’t wanted to attract any more attention than necessary while walking around town, and there was poison ivy out here too.

Never mind. I dangled my left foot in a pool of water. It felt so good I did the same with my other foot.

Less than a quarter of a mile from here sat Great-Granddad’s old stock tank. Basically a pond he’d dug out with a tractor, and the creek kept it full. Generations of teenagers had used it as a swimming hole.

A feeling I’d been fighting off rose to the fore. I couldn’t wrap my head around it, but—this place was my home. The town, yes, but
especially
the woods. It felt safe even now. What kind of perverted sense did that make? People were dying by the thousands—millions?—out in the world, my family was in danger right here, and somehow…I had trouble worrying about it. Was whatever had happened to Mr. Morrison—and those kids—happening to me too?

If so I couldn’t do anything about it just then, could I? I stank, though. And the swimming hole was pretty close. I could stop and clean myself up a little before I went on. So I forged on, still barefoot, walking in the creek more often than not, with my pants rolled up to my knees.

The pond water was cool, and its surface significantly less scummy than it could sometimes become, which was nice. I took off my clothes and splashed around a little. This place had always been able to calm me down. An inner voice screamed at me that I needed to get back to my family—but I told myself that was just panic. Free-floating anxiety. Yes, I needed to get back. But I also needed to think, and figure out what to do next, if I could, without a bunch of people talking at once.

I found a seat on some stones next to the pond that had been arranged into a sort of chair, and tried to relax. I supposed generations of bored kids had done the same. Anyway, the chair had been there since before I was born. It was usually a throne in the games we’d played.

Whatever was going on, it had started—here in Henge, at least—at the prison. Somehow it spread to the town, and maybe beyond. What was it? Some sort of virus? The news articles I’d seen summarized seemed to be talking about a gas attack, and whether that was true or not there might be danger from radiation, depending on what caused the EMP and on how the prison had been destroyed.

But…I sat up suddenly.

Fact: Somebody had blown up at least one water tower, which had cut off supply to a bunch of houses. Including Rose’s, and she’d seemed fine. Bruised, heart-sore, but sane.

Fact: There had been a warning at Walmart about algae in Lake Henge. Lakes, I noted, generally had water in them. And the water table had been dropping in our area for decades, so the city’s supply came mostly from the lake these days.

Not much to build a theory on, but…the kids I’d seen playing in hydrant-spray during my run that same day, the day of the storm…were they some of the same kids I’d seen marching today? The city had apparently been decontaminating its water supply by opening up hydrants. Had the kids
played
in…whatever was causing this?

Or had something traveled from the prison, to the town, via our water lines? Was my family still sane because—of all the ridiculous ways to be saved—we didn’t trust the municipal water, and ran it through two kinds of filter before we drank it?

Thoroughly alarmed, I stared at the pond. But that was surface water. Of course, so was the lake….

Had I just contaminated myself?

Whatever feeling I’d had of safety, or belonging to this place, had fled screaming into the trees. I got dressed, shoes included, and set off toward the old basement at a trot.

* * *

C
rash!

I stopped running and ducked, tripping myself and ending up flat on my face in a pile of leaves. A man-sized shape had just burst from a clump of bushes and jumped over my head. From the ground, I twisted and stared up at it—ragged clothes, bestial face.

It grinned at me from a lower limb of an ancient live oak and hooted over its shoulder. I saw scraps of a recent bloody meal dangling from its fangs, and I froze. Another hoot came from off to my left, and a deer leapt from its cover behind a bush not ten feet from me. With more hooting, Fang-Boy and his companion bounded after it.

My God. I’d thought I was safer in the woods?

But they hadn’t attacked me. I’d had the sense they were playing. Whether with me, the deer, or both…wasn’t clear. And the fact that they’d been enjoying themselves didn’t make me less likely to be eaten. If they ate people.