Instinct (27 page)

“Not at all,” Pete said. Lisa shook her head.

“Robby, help me out,” Romie said.

They looked at the boy again.

“I don’t know if I can,” Robby said. He took a breath and let it out slowly. “Take a ribbon, and fold it back and forth. Then stick a pin through the center. You made one hole with one pin. But if you take the pin out, and stretch the ribbon out again, it looks like many holes.”

“Time is folded,” Brad said.

“In some higher dimension, it doesn’t have to be,” Robby said.

Pete pushed away the can of chili he had been eating cold. “What else happened in your dream, Romie?”

“That’s about all I can remember,” she said.

“How about you fill in some more details, Robby. You clearly had another perspective on the same topic.”

Robby pushed back from the table and stood. “I think we’ve had enough talk for now. I suggest we sit on what Romie said for a while.”

Robby walked from the room.
 

Brad watched the flickering candles and then turned to the sunrise coming through the windows. They had lived nocturnally long enough so that the sight of the sunrise made him yawn automatically. He swallowed one back only to see Lisa throw back her head and yawn. That set off a chain reaction amongst them. Pete looked at his watch. Romie pushed back from the table.

“I guess the conversation is over then,” she said.

“Wait,” Brad said. “What about the taxidermy?”

Romie leaned over the table, holding herself up with her palms on either side of the fancy place setting.

“What?”

“The bear? The wolves? We saw taxidermy come back to life and attack us. Those things were just fur over top of foam and metal skeletons. How did they come back to life? If this thing has the power to reanimate animal skins, why would it need to go to all the trouble to manipulate dead bodies like puppets?”

“I don’t have the whole picture,” Romie said. She walked out.

They watched her leave and heard her climbing the stairs. They hadn’t explored the rest of the inn. Brad wondered if the room doors would be locked. He figured they wouldn’t, but he hadn’t stayed in a Bed & Breakfast before.
 

“Now we’ve got two of them,” Pete said.

“You said that already,” Lisa said. She stood and began collecting the cans they’d eaten from.

CHAPTER 17: NEW YORK

J
UDY
HAD
TWO
PAIRS
of jeans. She was scrubbing the cuffs of her good jeans when Ron walked by. He slowed as he passed.

“Hey,” Ron said.

“Hey.”

“Meet me on the porch,” he said. He kept walking.

Judy paused for a fraction of a second to watch him walk away and then returned her focus to her jeans.

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She didn’t see him at first. Judy walked up and reviewed the chore list. She was still excused from chores, apparently. Her name didn’t appear on any of the lists.

“Hey,” she heard from the side of the building.
 

She glanced around. She was still being tracked. Two bearded men sat on a bench outside one of the barns and kept an eye on her. Judy moved to the end of the porch and sat down with her back against the wall of the house. She cupped her chin in her hand to disguise her whisper.

“Hey,” she whispered.

“What did they do to you?” Ron asked, from around the corner.

“Nothing,” she said. “They’ve been watching me, but they didn’t do anything to me.”

“They questioned me for an hour. They wanted to know how I found that hatch in the bottom of the grain shed.”

“Luke asked me about that, but I didn’t tell him anything.”

“Yeah,” Ron said, with a long pause. “Me neither. I think we have to do something. Like maybe we should tell everyone else. Luke and his men are trying to cover something up.”

“Yeah?”

“Don’t you think? Why would they be so secretive. I think they knew about that hatch the whole time. Or, maybe they knew about it, but didn’t know where it was or something.”

“Really?”

“I don’t know,” Ron said. “I’m just trying to make sense of what’s going on.”

“They’re coming,” Judy said.

She heard the bushes rustle as Ron moved away from his side of the house. Judy stayed where she was and watched the men approach. Three of them approached. The pair on the bench held their position, but watched carefully.

Judy recognized the bearded man they all called Hampton. He walked between two other bearded me. She’d seen them before, but didn’t know their names. Hampton had joined their group near the end of the journey. He said he had been living alone and saw their convoy when they stopped to refuel. He had joined up with Luke’s little army right away, but his beard was still scraggly compared to the men who had been growing them for weeks.

“Judy,” Hampton said. He made a motion to the other two and they backed up and turned around.

“Hello,” she said.

“They call me Hampton. My name is Sam. You can call me either.”

“Okay.”

“Where’s Luke?”

Judy shrugged and raised her eyebrows. “Haven’t seen him.”

“He didn’t come to visit you?” Hampton waited for an answer, even though the question implied that he already knew the answer.

“Yesterday,” Judy said. “He came to my tent yesterday.”

“Not in the woods today, beyond the manure pit?”

“I hope not,” Judy said. “I was peeing in the woods.”

“Two men saw him go into the woods after you. He wanted to talk with you about something and asked the men to hold back. They say that fifteen minutes later, you came back alone.”

“That doesn’t sound right. It doesn’t take me fifteen minutes to pee. Are they sure?”

“You didn’t see Luke?”

Judy shook her head. “Maybe he ran away?”

“We found his sidearm,” Hampton said.

“Careless,” Judy said, shaking her head. “It’s careless to lose your gun like that. What if a kid found it?”

Hampton regarded her for a second before he spoke again. His tone changed. “I think you did see him. I want to know what happened in those woods.”

“Can I be honest, Sam?”

“Of course.”

“You guys scare me. You bearded guys are like the pigs in
Animal Farm
. Or maybe you’re the dobermans. Either way, you scare me. I don’t know why you’re following me around. We went on a supply run, I got attacked, and then I screwed up when I followed Ron down into that crazy silo. We thought it was just a bomb shelter or something and we got lost. I told Luke the same thing yesterday and I haven’t seen him since.”

Hampton nodded. He made eye contact with Judy and then nodded again.

“Can I be honest with you, Judy?”

“Sure, Sam.”

“I have to use a testosterone cream to grow this beard. I rub the cream on my arm, but it gives me the hormones I need to grow the beard.” He scratched his face and then smiled again. “I don’t even like wearing it. It itches like hell. But I would use the testosterone cream anyway. It helps me maintain my muscle mass. I’ve had to use it since I was twenty four. That’s when I volunteered to have my testicles removed.”

Judy flinched and scrunched up her mouth, like she’d just taken a bite out of a lemon.

“Some people thought that it would be enough to give us vasectomies, but I’m glad they neutered us. I’d rather be alive with no balls, then to vanish like everyone else. You’re looking at me like I’m crazy, but Luke told me what you said yesterday. You said that there wasn’t a fertile person in the whole group, and I believe you’re right. They wouldn’t have left any breeders amongst us. That wouldn’t fit their plan. I assume that most of the survivors, like yourself, just happen to be sterile. Others, like me, made a conscious decision. Now that you know what I’ve sacrificed to be here, would you like to reconsider the lies you’ve been trying to feed me?”

“Hampton… Sam… I don’t know what you mean.”

He blinked. “People have studied this phenomenon since the beginning of science, Judy. There are little clues everywhere, if you know how to look. You’re not the first person that has gotten caught up in this story.”

“Phenomenon?”

“The oral history of humans is clouded by mysticism, but legends of cataclysms exist in every culture. Before all this happened, people were obsessed with the idea of an apocalypse. You saw it movies, and books, and even songs. As a race, we all had a sense of what was coming.”

“You think that people knew about all this?” Judy threw up her hands with her palms towards the sky.
 

“They had a sense of it. Some organizations, like the one I work for, planned for it.”

“Well good fucking job. You did a stellar job with this whole thing.”

“There were circumstances beyond our control, but our operation wasn’t a total failure. We’re still here, aren’t we?”

“Just by dumb luck.” Judy laughed.

“It’s not luck that I had myself sterilized. That was planning, and sacrifice. It’s not luck that this farm is here. It
was
luck that the initial landing didn’t happen where we had hoped, but it was bad luck. If everything had gone to plan, our casualties would have been much fewer.”

“Why did you bring people here?” Judy asked. “If this is all some kind of plan, why did you round up all these people and bring them to the farm? You’re suggesting that everyone is sterile, so I know you’re not intending to repopulate the Earth from this group.”

“I think you know the answer to that, Judy. Let’s dispense with questions that we already know the answers to. Why did you come here, and what did you do with Luke?”

“Honestly? I have no idea. I’m not some mastermind, regardless of what you think. I’m the victim of wrong place, wrong time. That’s all.”

“I don’t know what your role is supposed to be in all this, but you know much more than you’re telling me. We’re watching you, Judy. We’re always watching.”

Hampton stood and walked away. When he reached the other two men, they fell in behind him.

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Judy left the porch and headed for the latrine. On her way back to the tents, she saw Ron hanging out near one of the barns. She walked right up to him, despite the two men who watched her from the fence.

“Are you okay? I saw those guys asking you questions,” Ron said.

“Everything is fine. Listen, don’t tell anyone, but that guy Hampton is the new Luke.”

“What happened to Luke?”

“Nobody knows. Maybe he had something to do with it, because now he’s making a move for control. I think it’s going to be fine, but a lot of people say that he will do anything to get his way. I don’t know if he and Luke had a disagreement, or what.”

“What was he asking you about?”

“He knows that Luke and I are close, and he wanted to find out what I know, I guess.”

“That’s weird,” Ron said.

“Listen—just don’t mention it to anyone. I don’t want it to become a big thing.”

“No problem.”

Judy walked away, satisfied that she knew what Ron would do.

CHAPTER 18: ROCHESTER, NEW YORK

“L
ISTEN
. LISTEN!” T
IM
SHOUTED
. In the back seat of the plane, Cedric barked.

The girl flinched for a second and then resumed her feeble attempts to grab at the controls for the airplane. Tim held her back with one arm, and corrected their course with his other.

“Do you see that down there?” Tim asked. He tipped the plane and pointed out her window. They were fairly low. She still didn’t seem to see what he was pointing at. Tim suspected that either her vision wasn’t very good, or maybe the drugs were affecting her eyesight. “That’s a helipad. I think it’s a hospital.”

She mumbled something. She didn’t comprehend that he couldn’t hear her over the noise of the engine unless she shouted.