The Host (25 page)

I felt the back of my neck get hot, but I ignored the last part. “I don't mind getting my hands dirty,” I murmured. As I recalled, the empty northeastern field was out of the way. Perhaps we would be able to work alone.

Once we got to the big plaza cave, we started passing humans. They all stared, infuriated, as usual. I was beginning to recognize most of them: the middle-aged woman with the long salt-and-pepper braid I had seen with the irrigation team yesterday. The short man with the round belly, thinning sandy hair, and ruddy cheeks had been with her. The athletic-looking woman with the caramel brown skin had been the one bent to tie her shoe the first time I'd come out here during the day. Another dark-skinned woman with thick lips and sleepy eyes had been in the kitchen, near the two black-haired children–perhaps she was their mother? Now we passed Maggie; she glowered at Jeb and turned her face away from me. We passed a pale, sick-looking man with white hair whom I was sure I'd never seen before. Then we passed Ian.

“Hey, Jeb,” he said cheerfully. “Whatcha up to?”

“Turning the soil in the east field,” Jeb grunted.

“Want some help?”

“
Ought
to make yourself useful,” Jeb muttered.

Ian took this as an assent and fell into step behind me. It gave me goose bumps, feeling his eyes on my back.

We passed a young man who couldn't have been many years older than Jamie–his dark hair stood up from his olive-toned forehead like steel wool.

“Hey, Wes,” Ian greeted him.

Wes watched in silence as we passed. Ian laughed at his expression.

We passed Doc.

“Hey, Doc,” Ian said.

“Ian.” Doc nodded. In his hands was a big wad of dough. His shirt was covered with dark, coarse flour. “Morning, Jeb. Morning, Wanda.”

“Morning,” Jeb answered.

I nodded uneasily.

“See you 'round,” Doc said, hurrying off with his burden.

“Wanda, huh?” Ian asked.

“My idea,” Jeb told him. “Suits her, I think.”

“Interesting” was all Ian said.

We finally made it to the northeastern field, where my hopes were dashed.

There were more people here than there had been in the passageways–five women and nine men. They all stopped what they were doing and scowled, naturally.

“Pay 'em no mind,” Jeb murmured to me.

Jeb proceeded to follow his own advice; he went to a jumbled pile of tools against the closest wall, shoved his gun through the strap at his waist, and grabbed a pick and two shovels.

I felt exposed, having him so far away. Ian was just a step behind me–I could hear him breathing. The others in the room continued to glower, their tools still in their hands. I didn't miss the fact that the picks and hoes that were breaking the earth could easily be used to break a body. It seemed to me, in reading a few of their expressions, that I wasn't the only one with that idea.

Jeb came back and handed me a shovel. I gripped the smooth, worn wooden handle, feeling its weight. After seeing the bloodlust in the humans' eyes, it was hard not to think of it as a weapon. I didn't like the idea. I doubted I could raise it as one, even to block a blow.

Jeb gave Ian the pick. The sharp, blackened metal looked deadly in his hands. It took all my willpower not to skip out of range.

“Let's take the back corner.”

At least Jeb took me to the least crowded spot in the long, sunny cave. He had Ian pulverize the hard-baked dirt ahead of us, while I flipped the clods over and he followed behind, crushing the chunks into usable soil with the edge of his shovel.

Watching the sweat run down Ian's fair skin–he'd removed his shirt after a few seconds in the dry scorch of the mirror light–and hearing Jeb's grunted breaths behind me, I could see that I had the easiest job. I wished I had something more difficult to do, something that would keep me from being distracted by the movements of the other humans. Their every motion had me cringing and flinching.

I couldn't do Ian's job–I didn't have the thick arm and back muscles needed to really chew into the hard soil. But I decided to do what I could of Jeb's, prechopping the clods into smaller bits before I moved on. It helped a little bit–kept my eyes busy and tired me out so that I had to concentrate on making myself work.

Ian brought us water now and then. There was a woman–short and fair, I'd seen her in the kitchen yesterday–who seemed to have the job of bringing water to the others, but she ignored us. Ian brought enough for three every time. I found his about-face in regard to me unsettling.

Was he really no longer intent on my death? Or just looking for an opportunity? The water always tasted funny here–sulfurous and stale–but now that taste seemed suspicious. I tried to ignore the paranoia as much as possible.

I was working hard enough to keep my eyes busy and my mind numb; I didn't notice when we hit the end of the last row. I stopped only when Ian did. He stretched, pulling the pick overhead with two hands and popping his joints. I shied away from the raised pick, but he didn't see. I realized that everyone else had stopped, too. I looked at the fresh-turned dirt, even across the entire floor, and realized that the field was complete.

“Good work,” Jeb announced in a loud voice to the group. “We'll seed and water tomorrow.” The room was filled with soft chatter and clanks as the tools were piled against the wall once more. Some of the talk was casual; some was still tense because of me. Ian held his hand out for my shovel, and I handed it to him, feeling my already low mood sink right to the floor. I had no doubt that I would be included in Jeb's “we.” Tomorrow would be just as hard as today.

I looked at Jeb mournfully, and he was smiling in my direction. There was a smugness to his grin that made me believe he knew what I was thinking–not only did he guess my discomfort, but he was enjoying it.

He winked at me, my crazy friend. I realized again that this was the best to be expected from human friendship.

“See you tomorrow, Wanda,” Ian called from across the room, and laughed to himself.

Everyone stared.

It was true that I did not smell good.

I'd lost count of how many days I'd spent here–was it more than a week now? more than two?–and all of them sweating into the same clothes I'd worn on my disastrous desert trek. So much salt had dried into my cotton shirt that it was creased into rigid accordion wrinkles. It used to be pale yellow; now it was a splotchy, diseased-looking print in the same dark purple color as the cave floor. My short hair was crunchy and gritty; I could feel it standing out in wild tangles around my head, with a stiff crest on top, like a cockatoo's. I hadn't seen my face recently, but I imagined it in two shades of purple: cave-dirt purple and healing-bruise purple.

So I could understand Jeb's point–yes, I needed a bath. And a change of clothes as well, to make the bath worth the effort. Jeb offered me some of Jamie's clothes to wear while mine dried, but I didn't want to ruin Jamie's few things by stretching them. Thankfully, he didn't try to offer me anything of Jared's. I ended up with an old but clean flannel shirt of Jeb's that had the sleeves ripped off, and a pair of faded, holey cutoff sweatpants that had gone unclaimed for months. These were draped over my arm–and a bumpy mound of vile-smelling, loosely molded chunks that Jeb claimed was homemade cactus soap was in my hand–as I followed Jeb to the room with the two rivers.

Again we were not alone, and again I was miserably disappointed that this was the case. Three men and one woman–the salt-and-pepper braid–were filling buckets with water from the smaller stream. A loud splashing and laughing echoed from the bathing room.

“We'll just wait our turn,” Jeb told me.

He leaned against the wall. I stood stiffly beside him, uncomfortably conscious of the four pairs of eyes on me, though I kept my own on the dark hot spring rushing by underneath the porous floor.

After a short wait, three women exited the bathing room, their wet hair dripping down the backs of their shirts–the athletic caramel-skinned woman, a young blonde I didn't remember seeing before, and Melanie's cousin Sharon. Their laughter stopped abruptly as soon as they caught sight of us.

“Afternoon, ladies,” Jeb said, touching his forehead as if it were the brim of a hat.

“Jeb,” the caramel woman acknowledged dryly.

Sharon and the other girl ignored us.

“Okay, Wanda,” he said when they'd passed. “It's all yours.” I gave him a glum look, then made my way carefully into the black room.

I tried to remember how the floor went–I was sure I had a few feet before the edge of the water. I took off my shoes first, so that I could feel for the water with my toes.

It was just so dark. I remembered the inky appearance of the pool–ripe with suggestions of what might lurk beneath its opaque surface–and shuddered. But the longer I waited, the longer I would have to be here, so I put the clean clothes next to my shoes, kept the smelly soap, and shuffled forward carefully until I found the lip of the pool.

The water was cool compared to the steamy air of the outer cavern. It felt nice. That didn't keep me from being terrified, but I could still appreciate the sensation. It had been a long time since anything had been
cool.
Still fully dressed in my dirty clothes, I waded in waist deep. I could feel the stream's current swirl around my ankles, hugging the rock. I was glad the water was not stagnant–it would be upsetting to sully it, filthy as I was, if that were the case.

I crouched down into the ink until I was immersed to my shoulders. I ran the coarse soap over my clothes, thinking this would be the easiest way to make sure they were clean. Where the soap touched my skin, it burned mildly.

I took off the soapy clothes and scrubbed them under the water. Then I rinsed them again and again until there was no way any of my sweat or tears could have survived, wrung them out, and laid them on the floor beside where I thought my shoes were.

The soap burned more strongly against my bare skin, but the sting was bearable because it meant I could be clean again. When I was done lathering, my skin prickled everywhere and my scalp felt scalded. It seemed as if the places where the bruises had formed were more sensitive than the rest of me–they must still have been there. I was happy to put the acidic soap on the rock floor and rinse my body again and again, the way I had my clothes.

It was with a strange mingling of relief and regret that I sloshed my way out of the pool. The water was very pleasant, as was the feeling of clean, if prickling, skin. But I'd had quite enough of the blindness and the things I could imagine into the darkness. I felt around until I found the dry clothes, then I pulled them quickly on and shoved my water-wrinkled feet into my shoes. I carried my wet clothes in one hand and the soap gingerly between two fingers of the other.

Jeb laughed when I emerged; his eyes were on the soap in my cautious grasp.

“Smarts a bit, don't it? We're trying to fix that.” He held out his hand, protected by the tail of his shirt, and I placed the soap in it.

I didn't answer his question because we weren't alone; there was a line waiting silently behind him–five people, all of them from the field turning.

Ian was first in line.

“You look better,” he told me, but I couldn't tell from his tone if he was surprised or annoyed that I did.

He raised one arm, extending his long, pale fingers toward my neck. I flinched away, and he dropped his hand quickly.

“Sorry about that,” he muttered.

Did he mean for scaring me now or for marking up my neck in the first place? I couldn't imagine that he was apologizing for trying to kill me. Surely he still wanted me dead. But I wasn't going to ask. I started walking, and Jeb fell into step behind me.

“So, today wasn't that bad,” Jeb said as we walked through the dark corridor.

“Not that bad,” I murmured. After all, I hadn't been murdered. That was always a plus.

“Tomorrow will be even better,” he promised. “I always enjoy planting–seeing the miracle of the little dead-looking seeds having so much life in them. Makes me feel like a withered old guy might have some potential left in him. Even if it's only to be fertilizer.” Jeb laughed at his joke.

When we got to the big garden cavern, Jeb took my elbow and steered me east rather than west.

“Don't try to tell me you're not hungry after all that digging,” he said. “It's not my job to provide room service. You're just going to have to eat where everyone else eats.” I grimaced at the floor but let him lead me to the kitchen.

It was a good thing the food was exactly the same thing as always, because if, miraculously, a filet mignon or a bag of Cheetos had materialized, I wouldn't have been able to taste a thing. It took all my concentration just to make myself swallow–I hated to make even that small sound in the dead silence that followed my appearance. The kitchen wasn't crowded, just ten people lounging against the counters, eating their tough rolls and drinking their watery soup. But I killed all conversation again. I wondered how long things could last like this.

The answer was exactly four days.

It also took me that long to understand what Jeb was up to, what the motivation was behind his switch from the courteous host to the curmudgeonly taskmaster.

The day after turning the soil I spent seeding and irrigating the same field. It was a different group of people than the day before; I imagined there was some kind of rotation of the chores here. Maggie was in this group, and the caramel-skinned woman, but I didn't learn her name.

Mostly everyone worked in silence. The silence felt unnatural–a protest against my presence.

Ian worked with us, when it was clearly not his turn, and this bothered me.

I had to eat in the kitchen again. Jamie was there, and he kept the room from total silence. I knew he was too sensitive not to notice the awkward hush, but he deliberately ignored it, seeming to pretend that he and Jeb and I were the only people in the room. He chattered about his day in Sharon's class, bragging a little about some trouble he'd gotten into for speaking out of turn, and complaining about the chores she'd given him as punishment. Jeb chastised him halfheartedly. They both did a very good job of acting normal. I had no acting ability. When Jamie asked me about my day, the best I could do was stare intently at my food and mumble one-word answers. This seemed to make him sad, but he didn't push me.

At night it was a different story–he wouldn't let me stop talking until I begged to be allowed to sleep. Jamie had reclaimed his room, taking Jared's side of the bed and insisting that I take his.

This was very much as Melanie remembered things, and she approved of the arrangement.

Jeb did, too. “Saves me the trouble of finding someone to play guard. Keep the gun close and don't forget it's there,” he told Jamie.

I protested again, but both the man and the boy refused to listen to me. So Jamie slept with the gun on the other side of his body from me, and I fretted and had nightmares about it.

The third day of chores, I worked in the kitchen. Jeb taught me how to knead the coarse bread dough, how to lay it out in round lumps and let it rise, and, later on, how to feed the fire in the bottom of the big stone oven when it was dark enough to let the smoke out.

In the middle of the afternoon, Jeb left.

“I'm gonna get some more flour,” he muttered, playing with the strap that held the gun to his waist.

The three silent women who kneaded alongside us didn't look up. I was up to my elbows in the sticky dough, but I started to scrape it off so I could follow him.

Jeb grinned, flashed a look at the unobserving women, and shook his head at me. Then he spun around and dashed out of the room before I could free myself.

I froze there, no longer breathing. I stared at the three women–the young blonde from the bathing room, the salt-and-pepper braid, and the heavy-lidded mother–waiting for them to realize that they could kill me now. No Jeb, no gun, my hands trapped in the gluey dough–nothing to stop them.

But the women kept on kneading and shaping, not seeming to realize this glaring truth. After a long, breathless moment, I started kneading again, too. My stillness would probably alert them to the situation sooner than if I kept working.

Jeb was gone for an eternity. Perhaps he had meant that he needed to
grind
more flour. That seemed like the only explanation for his endless absence.

“Took you long enough,” the salt-and-pepper-braid woman said when he got back, so I knew it wasn't just my imagination.

Jeb dropped a heavy burlap sack to the floor with a deep thud. “That's a lot of flour there. You try carryin' it, Trudy.”

Trudy snorted. “I imagine it took a lot of rest stops to get it this far.” Jeb grinned at her. “It sure did.”

My heart, which had been thrumming like a bird's for the entire episode, settled into a less frantic rhythm.

The next day we were cleaning mirrors in the room that housed the cornfield. Jeb told me this was something they had to do routinely, as the combination of humidity and dust caked the mirrors until the light was too dim to feed the plants. It was Ian, working with us again, who scaled the rickety wooden ladder while Jeb and I tried to keep the base steady. It was a difficult task, given Ian's weight and the homemade ladder's poor balance. By the end of the day, my arms were limp and aching.

I didn't even notice until we were done and heading for the kitchen that the improvised holster Jeb always wore was empty.

I gasped out loud, my knees locking like a startled colt's. My body tottered to a halt.

“What's wrong, Wanda?” Jeb asked, too innocent.

I would have answered if Ian hadn't been right beside him, watching my strange behavior with fascination in his vivid blue eyes.

So I just gave Jeb a wide-eyed look of mingled disbelief and reproach, and then slowly began walking beside him again, shaking my head. Jeb chuckled.

“What's that about?” Ian muttered to Jeb, as if I were deaf.

“Beats me,” Jeb said; he lied as only a human could, smooth and guileless.

He was a good liar, and I began to wonder if leaving the gun behind today, and leaving me alone yesterday, and all this effort forcing me into human company was his way of getting me killed without doing the job himself. Was the friendship all in my head? Another lie?

This was my fourth day eating in the kitchen.

Jeb, Ian, and I walked into the long, hot room–into a crowd of humans chatting in low voices about the day's events–and nothing happened.

Nothing happened.

There was no sudden silence. No one paused to stare daggers at me. No one seemed to notice us at all.

Jeb steered me to an empty counter and then went to get enough bread for three. Ian lounged next to me, casually turning to the girl on his other side. It was the young blonde–he called her Paige.

“How are things going? How are you holding up with Andy gone?” he asked her.

“I'd be fine if I weren't so worried,” she told him, biting her lip.

“He'll be home soon,” Ian assured her. “Jared always brings everyone home. He's got a real talent. We've had no accidents, no problems since he showed up. Andy will be fine.” My interest sparked when he mentioned Jared–and Melanie, so somnolent these days, stirred–but Ian didn't say anything else. He just patted Paige's shoulder and turned to take his food from Jeb.

Jeb sat next to me and surveyed the room with a deep sense of satisfaction plain on his face. I looked around the room, too, trying to see what he saw. This must have been what it was usually like here, when I wasn't around. Only today I didn't seem to bother them. They must have been tired of letting me interrupt their lives.

“Things are settling down,” Ian commented to Jeb.

“Knew they would. We're all reasonable folks here.”

I frowned to myself.

“That's true, at the moment,” Ian said, laughing. “My brother's not around.”

“Exactly,” Jeb agreed.

It was interesting to me that Ian counted himself among the reasonable folks. Had he noticed that Jeb was unarmed? I was burning with curiosity, but I couldn't risk pointing it out in case he hadn't.