Dies the Fire (46 page)

Almost compulsively she opened the economy-sized bottle of sanitizer again, and handed it around. Juniper's face and hands were already raw and chapped from the desiccating effect of the alcohol-based solution, but she obediently scrubbed down all the exposed parts of her body. Steve and Vince followed suit.

None of them had much skin exposed, despite the mild heat. When you thought of where the flies had been . . .

“No, we shouldn't be here,” the nurse-midwife went on. “We're endangering the whole clan as well as ourselves. I never thought it could be as bad as this! If someone
designed
an environment to spread disease, this would be it.”

She swallowed and went on: “How . . . how can They let this happen?”

Juniper pushed her bicycle over beside her friend's and put her arm around her shoulders; that was more symbolic than anything, when the person you hugged was wearing an armored jack, but symbols counted.

“How could They let the Holocaust happen, or the Black Death, or the Burning Times? We're not People of the Book; everything's connected, but we don't have to imagine that everything happens according to a Divine Plan. It could be
our
fault, something humans did through carelessness or malice. It could be aliens doing the same. Or . . . it could be something the Otherworld did for our own good.”

“Our
good
?” Judy asked, looking around.

“We might have killed the planet, if this hadn't happened. Killed the whole human race, and the plants and the animals too. I don't know, but it's possible.”

Judy drew a breath, coughed, and nodded. “All right. Thanks. But let's get
out
of here!”

Juniper nodded and pulled out the map. “All right,” she said. “We had to know . . . but oh, how I wish we didn't!” Her finger traced a road west and then south. “We'll cross here, near Wheatland, and turn south towards Corvallis, then slant across to home the way I did right after the Change.”

Vince Torelli had put an arrow to his bow as soon as they stopped. He left it there as he put the weapon back in its frame across the handlebars, held by the nock's grip on the string and the angle of the arrow-shelf. Then he stepped on the pedals and darted out ahead of them, keeping a careful hundred yards in advance. The two women followed; it took them a little more time to build up speed, as their bicycles were towing little baggage carts that held their modest supplies. Steve Matucheck followed behind, looking over his shoulder regularly.

The stink died down as they moved west—away from the produce truck that had probably attracted the group of people who stayed around it and died, and into open country. They wove down the two-lane blacktop, eyes busy keeping watch on the empty fields to either side—and not ignoring the abandoned cars and trucks that sat as they had since 6:15 P.M., March 17th.

Back at her cabin, she could go hours without thinking about the Change; days, sometimes, in the scramble to get the fields planted. Out here, not a minute went by when you could forget.

Once they were out from strip-mall development the fields were eerily silent; grass tall and shaggy, but not a cow to be seen; now and then a field of beets gone tangled with weeds, or wheat beginning to head out, or an orchard with fruits or nuts starting to swell. There were still occasional bodies by the road—people had stuck to those lines of travel, mostly trudging back and forth until they dropped, as far as she could see. The sun was cruelly bright, and she swallowed as a brace of crows launched themselves off a telephone wire.

Another hour, and they stopped for a drink from their canteens; Judy restrained herself from checking the water, since she'd made sure they brought it to a rolling boil for twenty minutes that morning.

“Anyone seen those dogs?” Juniper asked; a feral pack had shadowed them.

“Not since about ten,” Steve Matucheck said.

“Odd. We haven't seen a living soul since yesterday, and yet so many stayed by the roads until they died,” Juniper said.

Surprisingly, Vince Torelli spoke up. “Lady Juniper, I think it's part of the same thing. The ones that stayed at home, or walked back and forth on the roads, they died. The ones with sense enough to get away, they stood a better chance—but we won't be seeing them, much. Not around here.”

Juniper nodded, trying not to let the young man see how much being called
Lady Juniper
annoyed her. Yes, you called a High Priestess
Lady
in the circle, but it didn't apply in day-to-day life and Vince wasn't even a member of the coven. Dennis had started doing it, and she suspected it was as much to irritate her as anything else; his sense of humor had been easier to take when she only had to do it occasionally, instead of 24/7.

A little of that eagerness was sheer hunger. There hadn't been much to spare for them to take along on this trip; the Eternal Soup was a fond memory.

Judy nodded. “Just being away from a big city is the biggest survival factor,” she said. “But a close second would be sense enough to realize that the Change was here to stay, and not sit around waiting for rescue or go wandering aimlessly. Chuck and I managed to talk our people into getting right out. You made for the hills right away too.”

Some truth in that,
Juniper thought, bending to massage a kink out of one calf. Judy had a core of hard common sense, probably from her years as a nurse.

On the other hand, how could anyone
know
that the Change was here to stay, or that it was everywhere?

For that matter, she still didn't
know
that the Change was worldwide. She was morally certain, but that wasn't proof. If you were a garden-variety common-sense sort of person, staying put probably looked better . . . until it was too late.

“Plus we're just too close to Salem,” she said, looking back a little east of south. “The requisitioning parties probably got everything around here.”

They could still see the black columns of smoke around the city as a smudge on the horizon; luckily the wind was from the west, and bent them towards the distant line of the Cascades—she could still see the peaks of the Three Sisters from here.

“Are you sure?” she asked Judy.

The other woman nodded. “I'd never seen it before, but the black patches of skin and the swellings in the armpits and groin are unmistakable.”

A long breath. “It's been three days now. We'd be showing symptoms, if we'd caught it, but my skin still crawls.”

And mine, at the memory,
Juniper thought.
Those pits, where the bodies still smouldered . . .

The truck stop a little way up the road had a gas station with attached convenience store, and a long low-slung board building advertising the fact that Bill's BBQ had the best dry ribs in the Willamette; a graveled country lane crossed the blacktop there, and the parking lot was dirt. They swerved in, coming to rest in a rough line and looking the windows over.

Quite often there was something useful in places like that. Not food, of course, but aspirin, sterile bandages, condoms, toilet paper—newspaper left stains, they'd discovered, and twists of grass could leave you itching for days. Sometimes there was even instant coffee or diet sweetener, occasionally salt. Nothing with any calories, but it made bland boring food taste better, and they were all worth the effort of lugging along. Sometimes they spotted something useful enough and bulky enough that it was worth marking down for a foraging party to come fetch with a wagon and escort, although they were getting too far from home for that.

“Wait a second,” Juniper said, as she heeled down the kickstand of her bicycle. “I smell something cooking!”

It's meat, too.
Her mouth watered and her swallow was painful.
Meat and a trace of woodsmoke, or charcoal. Could someone have found a last strayed cow in this wilderness of death? Could they be talked or traded out of some?

Something moved behind a Subaru a few yards away. Juniper tensed slightly, then relaxed as she saw it was a girl in a stained white dress; about twelve, she thought, with stringy brown hair.

The girl waved and walked over towards them, smiling; a couple of her teeth were missing. As she got closer, Juniper wrinkled her nose.

I'm not a blooming rose myself, but that's awful,
she thought.

The girl
looked
bad, too. Not emaciated like so many they'd seen; if anything, a little overweight, which was something she
hadn't
seen much lately. But her hair was thin on top, showing patches of scalp, and there were odd-looking lumps on her arms; she walked like someone much younger, holding her hands behind her back and half skipping. There was a small sore beside her left eye, trailing yellow matter.

“You're sick!” Juniper said, and looked over at her friend.

“Not the plague,” Judy muttered. “Where have I seen—must have been a textbook—”

“It's all right!” Juniper called. “We don't want any of your food. Maybe we can help, if you're ill.”

The girl giggled, coming closer. “It's all right,” she said back, her tone singsong. “We've got plenty to eat. You can come for dinner!”

We?
Juniper thought.

Perhaps that was what made Juniper start to jerk backward as the hand came out from behind the girl's back with a glint of steel. The long kitchen knife missed her throat; it would still have killed her as it stabbed into her chest, but the plates of her jack turned it, breaking the point.

“Oooof!”
Juniper said, struggling for wind.

The girl screeched, puffing the smell of rotten meat in Juniper's face, stabbing again and again with the sharp broken stump of the knife. She'd probably never met body armor before. Long detested hours of instruction from Chuck and Aylward took over; made Juniper duck a shoulder forward to body-check and knock the enemy back on her heels, reach down and grab the hilt with the right hand, rip it out and
swing
with the same motion.

The point scored across the girl's body, and the cloth parted—skin beneath, too, blood leaking as she turned and fled clutching at herself and screaming in shrill squeals.

Juniper fought shock.
I just cut at a child!
she thought.

More figures popped up from among the cars and trucks and poured out of the buildings. One burst right out of the rear doors of a van not fifteen feet away, roaring and holding an ax above his head in both hands. He was naked to the waist, his torso covered in boils. Vince drew to the ear and waited until the axman was five feet away before shooting; the arrow struck full in the throat, splitting the neckbone with an audible
crack.
The shouting cut off with knife finality, and the man toppled backward like a cut-through tree.

A woman with a butcher's cleaver ran at Matucheck. “Night of the fucking living dead!” he screamed, eyes wild.

He punched the blow aside with his buckler in an iron clang of metal on metal and stabbed, as much in revulsion as anger. The point slid home.

Judy was grappling with a teenage boy who tried to gnaw at her face as they danced in clumsy circles. Juniper bared her own teeth and struck with her buckler, using it like a two-pound set of brass knuckles. The crumbling feeling as the steel disk struck just below the base of his skull made the hair bristle up along her spine even then.

“It's a nest of Eaters!” Juniper shouted.

Most people would rather die than turn cannibal, but when you were talking about millions, a small minority was far too large. And they were starting to get hungry, as their food became scarce in turn.

“Get back in here!” she called. “Stand them off!”

Three cars made a loose triangle; too loose, but the Eaters were all around them. The Mackenzies retreated, Vince shooting as fast as he could knock and draw, then turned at bay. But the gaps between the cars were too big, and the Eaters swarmed over the hoods and trunks as well. For a minute the four of them pushed and shoved, hit and stabbed and chopped; their jacks were a huge advantage, and health and sanity and real weapons they had some idea of how to use.

But there
were
too many; it was like trying to fight in a nightmare where nothing worked and more and more came at you. Juniper knew with some dim distant part of her mind that the horror would come back to her if she lived, but most of her was a reflex that shouted and swung and struck.

Then something hit her across the shoulders, sending her reeling forward into the press. Two Eaters grabbed at her buckler and dragged it down. Another hugged her sword arm, and a third raised a baseball bat in both hands—

A broad arrowhead stuck out from the Eater's chest, barely to the left of the breastbone. Blood gouted from his mouth, and he had just enough time to look surprised before he collapsed, kicking.

Behind him was a mounted giant with the head of a bear.

Juniper had only the blurred glimpse; then she was too busy getting her right arm free from the momentarily slackened grip. She hadn't lost her sword—the sword Dennie's gentle brother had made for show and play and the beauty of it, before the Change.

It was still the weapon of Rome's legions, the most dreadfully efficient tool of slaughter humankind had invented until Hiram Maxim's time. A short punching stab in the throat sent the Eater backward gobbling and clutching his throat.

“Let me
go!
” she shouted, chopping at the other two as if she were jointing a chicken. “Let me
go!
”

They did, running in squalling panic, grabbing at terrible slash-wounds, and then there were no more of their kind left within the space marked out with the three cars; none living, at least. Juniper gasped and leaned her fists on her knees as she tried to suck air in through a mouth gone paper-dry.