II. THE FAMILIAR 6 страница

“Lila—”

She shook her head emphatically, not looking at him. “I won’t have you talk this way.”

“We have to get out of here.”

With a clatter she tossed the bowl into the sink and turned on the tap, violently pumping the lever back and forth, to no avail. “Goddamnit, there’s no water. Why is there no fucking water? ”

Grey got to his feet. She spun to face him, her fists balled with anger.

“Don’t you understand? I can’t lose her again! I can’t!”

Did she mean the baby? And what did she mean by “again”?

“We can’t stay.” He took another cautious step, as if approaching a wary animal. “It’s not safe here.”

Furious tears began to spill down her cheeks. “Why do you have to do this? Why?”

She lurched toward him, fists raised like hammers. Grey was thrust back on his heels. She began to pummel his chest as if she were trying to break down a door. But her attack wasn’t organized; it was an expression of pure panic, of the storm of emotion breaking inside her. As she reared back again, Grey regained his balance and pulled her into him like a boxer into a clinch, encircling her upper body and pinning her arms to her sides. The gesture was reflexive; he didn’t know what else to do. “Don’t say that,” Lila pleaded, thrashing inside his grip. “It isn’t true, it isn’t true.…” Then, with a rush of breath and a whimper of surrender, the air let out of her and she collapsed against him.

For a period that might have been a full minute they stayed that way, locked in an awkward embrace. Grey couldn’t have been more astonished—not by her violent reaction, which he could have foreseen, but by the mere presence of a woman’s body in his arms. How slight she was! How different from himself! How long had it been since Grey had hugged a woman, hugged anyone? Or even been touched by another person? He could feel the hard roundness of Lila’s belly pressed against him, an insistent presence. A baby, Grey thought, and for the first time, the full implications of this fact dawned in his mind. In the midst of the chaos and carnage of a world gone mad, this poor woman was going to have a baby.

Grey relaxed his grip and backed away. Lila was looking at the floor. The brisk, officious woman he’d met in the paint aisle was gone; in her place stood a frail, diminished creature, almost childlike.

“Can I ask you something, Lawrence?” Her voice was very small.

Grey nodded.

“What did you do before?”

For a moment he didn’t understand what she was asking; then he realized she meant what job. “I cleaned,” he said, and shrugged. “I mean, I was a janitor.”

Lila considered his statement without expression. “Well, I guess you’ve got me there,” she said miserably. She rubbed her nose with the back of her wrist. “To tell you the truth, I don’t think I was anything at all.”

Another silence descended, Lila staring at the floor, Grey wondering what she would next say. Whatever it was, he sensed their survival depended on it.

“I lost one before, you see,” Lila said. “A baby girl.”

Grey waited.

“Her heart, you understand,” she said, and placed a hand against her chest. “It was a problem with her heart.”

It was strange; standing in the quiet, Grey felt as if he’d known this about her all along. Or, if not the thing itself, then the kind of thing. It was as if he were looking at one of those pictures that made no sense when you saw it up close, but then you backed away and suddenly it did.

“What was her name?” Grey asked.

Lila raised her tear-streaked face. For a moment she just looked at him, her eyes pulled into an appraising squint. He wondered if he’d made a mistake, asking this. The question had just popped out.

“Thank you, Lawrence. Nobody ever asks me that. I can’t tell you how long it’s been.”

“Why wouldn’t they?”

“I don’t know.” Her shoulders lifted with a tiny shrug. “I guess they think it’s bad luck or something.”

“Not to me.”

A brief silence passed. Grey didn’t think he’d ever felt so awful for anybody in his life.

“Eva,” Lila said. “My daughter was Eva.”

They stood together in the presence of this name. Outside, beyond the windows of Lila’s house, the night was pressing down. Grey realized it had begun to rain—a quiet, soaking, summer rain, pattering the windows.

“I’m not really who you think I am,” Grey confessed.

“No?”

What did he want to tell her? The truth, surely, or some version of it, but in the last day and a half, the idea of truth seemed to have slipped its moorings completely. He didn’t even know where to begin.

“It’s all right,” Lila said. “You don’t have to say anything. Whoever you were before, it doesn’t make much difference now.”

“It might. I’ve had… some troubles.”

“So that would make you just like the rest of us, wouldn’t it? One more person with a secret.” She looked away. “That’s the worst part, really, when you think about it. Try as you might, nobody will ever truly know who you are. You’re just somebody alone in a house with your thoughts and nothing else.”

Grey nodded. What was there to say?

“Promise me you won’t leave,” Lila said. “Whatever happens, don’t do that.”

“Okay.”

“You’ll look after me. We’ll look after each other.”

“I promise.”

The conversation seemed to end there. Lila, exhaling a weary breath, pushed her shoulders back. “Well. I guess I’d better turn in. I expect you’ll want to be leaving first thing in the morning. If I’m reading you correctly.”

“I think that’s best.”

Her eyes wistfully traveled the room with its shiny appliances and overflowing trash bags and dirty dishes in piles. “It’s too bad, really. I did want to finish the nursery. But I guess that will have to wait.” She found his face again. “Just one thing. You can’t make me think about it.”

Grey understood what she was asking. Don’t make me think about the world. “If that’s what you want.”

“We’re just …” She looked for the words. “Taking a drive in the country. How does that sound? Do you think you can do that for me?”

Grey nodded. The request struck him as strange, even a little silly, but he would have put on a clown suit if that’s what it took to get her out of there.

“Good. Just so long as that’s settled.”

He waited for her to say something more, or else leave the room, but neither thing happened. A change came into Lila’s face—a look of intense concentration, as if she were reading tiny print that only she could see. Then, abruptly, her eyes grew very wide; she seemed about to laugh.

“Oh my goodness, what a scene I made! I can’t believe I did that!” Her hands darted to her cheeks, her hair. “I must look terrible. Do I look terrible?”

“I think you look fine,” Grey managed.

“Here you are, a guest in my home, and off go the waterworks. It drives Brad absolutely crazy.”

The name wasn’t one he’d heard from her before. “Who’s Brad?”

Lila frowned. “My husband, of course.”

“I thought David was your husband.”

She gave him a blank stare. “Well, he is. David, I mean.”

“But you said—”

Lila waved this away. “I say a lot of things, Lawrence. That’s one thing you’ll have to learn about me. Probably you think I’m just some crazy woman, and you wouldn’t be wrong.”

“I don’t think that at all,” Grey lied.

An ironic smile creased her fine-boned face. “Well. We both know you’re only saying that because you’re being nice. But I appreciate the gesture.” She surveyed the room again, nodding vaguely. “So, it’s been quite a day, don’t you think? I’m afraid we don’t really have a proper guest room, but I made up the couch for you. If you don’t mind, I think I’ll just leave the dishes for the morning and say good night.”

Grey had no idea what to make of any of this. It was as if Lila had broken her trance of denial, only to slip back into it again. Not slip, he thought; she had done this to herself, forcing her thoughts back into place with an act of will. He watched in dumb wonder as she made her way to the doorway, where she turned to face him.

“I’m so very glad you’re here, Lawrence,” she said, and smiled emptily. “We’re going to be good friends, you and I. I just know it.”

Then she was gone. Grey listened to her slow trudge down the hallway and up the stairs. He cleared the rest of the dishes from the table. He would have liked to wash them, so she could come down to a clean kitchen in the morning, but there was nothing he could do but deposit them in the sink with the others.

He carried one of the candles from the table to the living room. But the minute he lay down on the sofa, he knew sleep was out of the question. His brain was bouncing with alertness; he still felt a little nauseated from the soup. His mind returned to the scene in the kitchen, and the moment when he’d put his arms around her. Not a hug, exactly; he’d just been trying to get Lila to stop hitting him. But at some point it had become something hug like. It had felt good—more than good, actually. The feeling wasn’t anything sexual, not as Grey recalled it. Years had gone by since Grey had experienced anything that even approximated a sexual thought—the anti-androgens saw to that—on top of which, the woman was pregnant, for God’s sake. Which, come to think of it, was maybe what was so nice about the whole thing. Pregnant women didn’t just go hugging people for no reason. Holding Lila, Grey had felt as if he’d stepped into a circle, and within this circle there were not just two people but three—because the baby was there, too. Maybe Lila was crazy and maybe she wasn’t. He was hardly the person to judge. But he couldn’t see that this made a difference one way or the other. She’d chosen him to help her, and that was exactly what he’d do.

Grey had almost talked his way into sleep when the silence was cut by an animal yelp. He lurched upright on the couch, shaking off his disorientation; the sound had come from outside. He hurried to the window.

That was when he remembered Iggy’s gun. He’d been so distracted, he’d left it at the Home Depot. How could he have been so dumb?

He pressed his face to the glass. A dog-sized hump was lying in the middle of the street. It didn’t seem to be moving. Grey waited a moment, his breath suspended. A pale shape bounded through the treetops, the image fading, then gone.

Grey knew he wouldn’t shut his eyes all night. But it didn’t matter. Upstairs Lila slept, dreaming of a world that was no more, while outside the walls of the house, a monstrous evil lurked—an evil Grey was part of. His mind returned to the scene in the kitchen, and the image of Lila, standing at the sink, desperate tears flowing down her cheeks, her fists clenched with rage. I can’t lose her again, I can’t.

He would stand guard at the window till morning, and then, come sunrise, get them the hell out of here.

Lila Kyle was brooding in the dark.

She’d heard the yelp from outside. A dog, she thought; something had happened to a dog. Some thoughtless motorist, speeding down the street? Surely that was what had happened. People should be more careful with their pets.

Don’t think, she told herself. Don’t think don’t think don’t think.

Lila wondered what it would be like, being a dog. She could see how there might be some advantages. A purely thoughtless existence, nothing on one’s mind but the next pat on the head, a walk around the block, the sensation of food in one’s belly. Probably Roscoe (because it was Roscoe she had heard; poor Roscoe) hadn’t even known what was happening to him. Maybe a little bit, at the end. One minute he was snuffling down the street, searching for something to eat—Lila recalled the floppy thing she’d seen in his mouth that morning, instantly pushing this unpleasant memory aside—and the next: well, there was no next. Roscoe was sailing into oblivion.

And now there was this man. This Lawrence Grey. About whom, Lila realized, she knew exactly nothing. He was a janitor. He cleaned. What did he clean? Probably David would have a conniption if he knew she’d let a total stranger into the house. She would have liked to see the look on David’s face. Lila supposed it was possible she’d misjudged the man, this Lawrence Grey, but she didn’t think so. She’d always been a good judge of character. Granted, Lawrence had said some disturbing things in the kitchen— very disturbing. About the lights being out and people missing and all the rest. (Dead, dead, everyone was dead.) He’d certainly gotten her upset. But to be fair, he’d done a wonderful job with the nursery, and she could tell just by looking at him that his heart was in the right place. Which was another of her father’s favorite expressions. What did it mean, exactly? Could the heart be anywhere else? Daddy, I’m a doctor, she’d told him once, laughing; I can tell you for a fact, the heart is where it is.

Lila heard herself sigh. Such an effort, just to keep everything straight in her mind. Because that was what you had to do; you had to look at things in a certain light and no other, and no matter what happened, you couldn’t break your gaze away. The world could overwhelm you otherwise, it could drown you like a wave, and then where would you be? The house itself was nothing she would miss; she had secretly hated it from the moment she’d stepped inside, its show-offy dimensions and too-many rooms and gaseous yellow light. It wasn’t at all like the one that she and Brad had lived in on Maribel Street—snug, homey, full of the things they’d loved—but how could it be? What was a house but the life it contained? This pompous monstrosity, this museum of nothing. It had been David’s idea, of course. The House of David: wasn’t that something from the Bible? The Bible was full of houses, the house of so-and-so and the house of such-and-such. Lila remembered being a little girl, snuggled up on the sofa to watch A Charlie Brown Christmas —she’d loved Snoopy almost as much as Peter Rabbit—and the moment when Linus, the smart one, the one who was really just a man pretending to be a boy with his blanket, stepped downstage to tell Charlie Brown what Christmas was all about. And there were in that same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flocks by night. And lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them, and they were sore afraid. And the angel said unto them, Fear not, for behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, which is Christ the Lord.

City of David, House of David.

But the baby, Lila thought. The baby was where her thoughts belonged. Not with the house, or noises from outside (there were monsters), or David not coming home (dead David), or any of the rest. All the literature had clearly shown, indisputably shown, that negative emotions affected the fetus. It thought as you thought, it felt as you felt, and if you were frightened all the time, what then? Those upsetting things Lawrence had said in the kitchen: the man meant well, he was only trying to do what he thought was best for her and Eva (Eva?), but did these things have to be true, simply because he’d said them? They were theories. They were just his opinions. Which wasn’t to say she disagreed. Probably it was time to go. It had gotten awfully quiet around this place. (Poor Roscoe.) If Brad were here, that’s what he would have said to her. Lila, it’s time to go.

Because sometimes, lots of times, all the time, it felt to Lila Kyle as if the baby growing inside her wasn’t somebody new, a whole new person. Since the morning she’d squatted on the toilet with the plastic wand between her thighs, watching in mute wonderment as the little blue cross appeared, the idea had taken root. The baby wasn’t a new Eva, or a different Eva, or a replacement Eva: she was Eva, their own little girl, come home. It was as if the world had righted itself, the cosmic mistake of Eva’s death undone.

She wanted to tell Brad about it. More than wanted: his name produced a longing so powerful it brought tears to her eyes. She hadn’t meant to marry David! Why had Lila married David—sanctimonious, overbearing, eternally do-gooding David—when she was already married to Brad? Especially now, with Eva on the way, coming to make them a family again?

Lila still loved him; that was the thing. That was the sad and sorrowful mystery of it all. She’d never stopped loving Brad, nor he her, not for a second, even when their love was too much pain for either to carry, because their little girl was gone. They had parted as a way to forget, neither being able to accomplish this in the company of the other—a sad, inevitable sundering, like the primordial separation of continents. Until the very end they’d fought it. The night before he’d moved out, his suitcases in the hall of the house on Maribel Street, the lawyers properly apprised, so many tears having been shed that no one even knew what they were crying about anymore—a condition as general as the weather, a world of everlasting tears—he’d come to her in the bedroom he had long since vacated, slid beneath the covers, and for a single hour they’d been a couple again, silently moving together, their bodies still wanting what their hearts could no longer bear. Not a word had passed between them; in the morning Lila awoke alone.

But now all of that had changed. Eva was coming! Eva was practically here! She would write Brad a letter; that’s what Lila would do. Surely he was going to come look for her, it was just the kind of man he was, you could always count on Brad when things went to hell in a handbasket, and how would it be for him to find she wasn’t there? Her spirits restored by this decision, Lila crept to the little desk under the windows, fumbling in the drawer for a pencil and a sheet of notebook paper. Now, what words to choose? I am going away. I don’t know quite where. Wait for me, my darling. I love you. Eva will be here soon. Simple and clear, elegantly capturing the essence of the thing. Satisfied, she folded the paper into thirds, slid it into an envelope, wrote “Brad” on the outside, and propped it on the desk so she would see it in the morning.

She lay back down. From across the room, the letter watched her, a rectangle of glowing whiteness. Closing her eyes, Lila let her hands drift down to the hard curve of her belly. A feeling of fullness, and then, from within, a gaseous twitch, then another and another. The baby was hiccupping. Hiccup! went the tiny baby. Lila closed her eyes, allowing the sensation to wash over her. Inside her, in the space beneath her heart, a small life was waiting to be born, but even more: she, Eva, was coming home. The day was catching up to her, Lila knew; her mind was riding the currents of sleep like a surfer paddling on the curve of a wave; in another moment the wave would wash over her, taking her under. Eva had quieted under her fingertips. I love you, Eva, thought Lila Kyle, and with that she fell asleep.

It was nearly ten A.M. by the time they got to Mile High. Driving into downtown, Danny found himself caught in a maze of barricades: abandoned Humvees, machine-gun positions with their piles of sandbags, even a few tanks. A dozen times he was forced to backtrack in search of an alternate route, only to find his passage blocked. Finally, as the last of the morning haze was burning off, he found a clear path under the freeway and ascended the ramp to the stadium.

The parking area was a grid of olive-green tents, eerily becalmed under the morning sun. Surrounding this was a ring of vehicles, passenger cars and ambulances and police cruisers, many of them looking half-crushed: windows smashed, fenders torn from the frames, doors ripped off their hinges. Danny brought the bus to a halt.

They disembarked into a stench of decay so thick that Danny nearly gagged. Worse than Momma, worse than all the bodies he’d seen that morning, walking to the depot. It was the kind of smell that could snake inside you, into your nose and mouth, and linger there for days.

“Hello!” April called. Her voice echoed across the lot. “Is anybody here? Hello!”

Danny had a bad feeling in the pit of his stomach. Some of this was the smell, but some wasn’t. He had the jangly feeling all over.

“Hello!” April called again, her hands cupped around her mouth. “Can anyone hear me?”

“Maybe we should go,” Danny suggested.

“The Army’s supposed to be here.”

“Maybe they left already.”

April removed her backpack, unzipped the top, and withdrew a hammer. She gave it a swing, as if to test its weight.

“Tim, you stay by me. Understand? No wandering off.”

The boy was standing at the base of the bus’s steps, pinching his nose. “But it smells gross,” he said in a nasal voice.

April slid her arms into the straps. “The whole city smells gross. You’ll just have to deal with it. Now come on.”

Danny didn’t want to go either, but the girl was determined. He followed the two of them as they made their way into the maze of vehicles. Step by step, Danny began to comprehend what he was seeing. The cars had been positioned around the tents as a defense. Like in pioneer times, the way settlers would circle the covered wagons when the Indians attacked. But these weren’t Indians, Danny knew, and whatever had happened here, it looked to be long over. There were corpses, somewhere—the smell seemed to intensify the farther they went—but so far they’d seen no trace of them. It was as if everyone had vanished.

They came to the first of the tents. April entered first, holding the hammer up before her, ready to swing. The space was a mess of overturned gurneys and IV poles, debris strewn everywhere—bandages, basins, syringes. But still there were no bodies.

They looked in another tent, then a third. Each was the same. “So where did everybody go?” April said.

The only place left to look was the stadium. Danny didn’t want to, but April wouldn’t take no for an answer. If the Army said to come here, she insisted, there had to be a reason. They moved up the ramp toward the entrance. April was leading the way, clutching Tim with one hand, the hammer with the other. For the first time, Danny noticed the birds. A huge black cloud wheeling over the stadium, their hoarse calls seeming to break the silence and to deepen it at the same time.

Then, from behind them, a man’s voice:

“I wouldn’t go in there if I were you.”

* * *

The Ferrari had died as Kittridge was pulling into the parking area. By this time the car was bucking like a half-broke horse, plumes of oily smoke pouring from the hood and undercarriage. There was no mistaking what had happened: Kittridge’s rocket ride out of the parking ramp—that leap into space and then the hard bang on the pavement—had cracked the oil pan. As the oil had drained away, the motor had gradually overheated, metal expanding until the pistons had seized in their cylinders.

Sorry about your car, Warren. It sure was good while it lasted.

After what he’d seen in the stadium, Kittridge needed some time to collect himself. Jesus, what a scene. It wasn’t anything he couldn’t have predicted, but staring it in the face was something else. It sickened him to the core. His hands were actually shaking; he thought he might be ill. Kittridge had seen some things in his life, horrible things. Bodies in pits lined up like cordwood; whole villages gassed, families lying where they’d fallen, their hands reaching out in vain for the last touch of a loved one; the indecipherable remains of men and women and children, blasted to bits in a marketplace by some lunatic with a bomb strapped to his chest. But never anything even remotely on this scale.

He’d been sitting on the hood of the Ferrari, considering his options, when in the distance he’d heard a vehicle approaching. Kittridge’s nerves snapped to attention. A large diesel engine by the sound of it: an APC? But then, lumbering up the ramp, came the surreal vision of a big yellow school bus.

How about that, Kittridge thought. Holy son of a bitch. A goddamned school bus, like a class trip to the end of the world.

Kittridge watched as the bus came to a stop. Three people emerged: a girl with a streak of pink in her hair, a knobby-kneed boy in a T-shirt and shorts, and a man in a funny-looking hat, whom Kittridge guessed was the driver. Hello! the girl called out. Is anybody here? A moment of conferral, then they advanced into the tangle of vehicles, the girl leading the way.

Probably it was time to say something, Kittridge thought. But alerting them to his presence could incur a host of obligations he’d vowed to avoid from the start. Other people weren’t part of the plan; the plan was to get gone. Travel light, stay alive as long as possible, take as many virals with him as he could when the end came. Last Stand in Denver making his bright, meteoric descent into the void.

But then Kittridge realized what was about to happen. The three of them were headed straight for the stadium. Of course that’s where they’d go; Kittridge had done the same. These were kids, for God’s sake; plan or no plan, no way could he let them go in there.

Kittridge grabbed his rifle and hustled to head them off.

At the sound of Kittridge’s voice, the driver reacted so violently that Kittridge was momentarily frozen into inaction. Erupting with a yelp, the man lurched forward, stumbling over his feet while simultaneously burying his face in the crook of his elbow. The other two scurried away, the girl yanking the little boy protectively to her waist, swiveling toward Kittridge with a hammer held before her.

“Whoa, steady there,” Kittridge said. Pointing the rifle skyward, he raised his hands. “I’m one of the good guys.”

Kittridge saw that the girl was older than he’d first guessed, seventeen or so. The pink hair was ridiculous, and both her ears had so many studs in them they looked like they’d been riveted to her head, but the way she regarded him, coolly and without a hint of panic, told him she was more than she appeared. There was no doubt in his mind that she’d use the hammer on him, or try to, if he went another step. She had on a tight black T-shirt, jeans worn to threads at the knees, a pair of Chuck Taylors, and bracelets of leather and silver up and down both arms; a backpack, crime-scene yellow, hung from her shoulders. The boy was obviously her brother, their familial connection evident not only in the unmistakable arrangement of their features—the slightly too-small nose with its buttony tip, the high, sudden planes of the cheekbones, eyes of the same aquatic blue—but also in the way she had reacted, shielding him with a fierce protectiveness that struck Kittridge as distinctly parental.

The third member of their group, the driver, was harder to quantify. Something was definitely off about the guy. He was dressed in khakis and a white oxford shirt buttoned to the collar; his hair, a reddish-blond mop peeking from the sides of his peculiar cap, looked like it had been cut by pinking shears. But the real difference wasn’t any of these things. It was the way he held himself.

The boy was the first to speak. He had just about the worst cowlick Kittridge had ever laid eyes on. “Is that a real AK?” he said, pointing.

“Quiet, Tim.” Drawing him closer, the girl lifted the hammer, ready to swing. “Who the hell are you?”

Kittridge’s hands were still raised. For the moment, the notion that the hammer presented an actual threat was something he was willing to indulge. “My name’s Kittridge. And yes,” he said, speaking to the boy, “it’s a real AK. Just don’t go thinking I’ll let you touch it, young man.”

The boy’s face lit with excitement. “That’s cool. ”

Kittridge lifted his chin toward the driver, who was now gazing intently at his shoes. “Is he okay?”

“He doesn’t like to be touched is all.” The girl was still studying Kittridge warily. “The Army said to come here. We heard it on the radio.”

“I expect they did. But it looks like they’ve flown the coop on us. Now, I don’t believe I caught your names.”

The girl hesitated. “I’m April. This is my brother, Tim. The other one is Danny.”

“Pleased to meet you, April.” He offered his most reassuring smile. “So do you think it would be all right with you if I put my hands down now? Seeing as we’ve all been properly introduced.”

“Where’d you get that rifle?”

“Outdoor World. I’m a salesman.”

“You sell guns?”

“Camping and fishing gear, mostly.” Kittridge replied. “But they give a nice discount. So what do you say? We’re all on the same team here, April.”

“What team’s that?”

He shrugged. “The human one, I’d say.”

The girl was weighing him with her eyes. A cautious one, this April. Kittridge reminded himself that she wasn’t just a girl; she was a survivor. Whatever else was true, she deserved to be taken seriously. A few seconds passed, then she lowered the hammer.

“What’s in the stadium?” Tim asked.

“Nothing you want to see.” Kittridge looked at the girl again. She seemed like an April, he decided. Funny how it sometimes worked that way. “How’d you all get by?”

Дата добавления: 2015-11-14