"Sure! Negative perspiration!" Harold said heartily. He fumbled jerkily in his pack, got a chocolate Payday, and almost dropped it while stripping off the wrapper. He cursed it bitterly and then began to gobble it, holding it in both hands like a lollypop.
They had reached the farmhouse. Harold had to keep touching himself furtively as he ate his candy bar - had to keep making sure he wasn't hurt. He felt very sick. He was afraid to look down at his crotch. He was pretty sure he had wet himself shortly after the festivities back at the pink trailer got into high gear.
Dayna and Susan did most of the talking over a distraught brunch which some picked at but none really ate. Patty Kroger, who was seventeen and absolutely beautiful, occasionally added something. The woman with no name scrunched herself into the farthest corner of the dusty farmhouse kitchen. Shirley Hammett sat at a table, ate stale Nabisco Honey Grahams, and muttered.
Dayna had left Xenia in the company of Richard Darliss and Damon Bracknell. How many others had been alive in Xenia after the flu? Only three that she had seen, a very old man, a woman, and a little girl. Dayna and her friends asked the trio to join them, but the old man waved them off, saying something about "having business in the desert."
By the eighth of July, Dayna, Richard, and Damon had begun to suffer bad dreams about a sort of boogeyman. Very scary dreams. Rich had actually gotten the idea that the boogeyman was real, Dayna said, and living in California. He had an idea that this man, if he really was a man, was the business the other three people they'd met had in the desert. She and Damon had begun to fear for Rich's sanity. He called the dream-man "the hardcase" and said he was getting an army of hardcases together. He said this army would soon sweep out of the west and enslave everyone left alive, first in America, then in the rest of the world. Dayna and Damon had begun to privately discuss the possibility of slipping away from Rich some night, and had begun to believe that their own dreams were the result of Rich Darliss's powerful delusion.
In Williamstown, they had come around a curve in the highway to discover a large dump truck lying on its side in the middle of the road. There was a station wagon and a wrecker parked nearby.
"We assumed it was just another smashup," Dayna said, crumbling a graham cracker nervously between her fingers, "which was, of course, exactly what we were supposed to think."
They got off their cycles in order to trundle them around the dump truck, and that was when the four hardcases - to use Rich's word - opened up from the ditch. They had murdered Rich and Damon and had taken Dayna prisoner. She was the fourth addition to what they sometimes called "the zoo" and sometimes "the harem." One of the others had been the muttering Shirley Hammett, who at that time had still been almost normal, although she had been repeatedly raped, sodomized, and forced to perform fellatio on all four. "And once," Dayna said, "when she couldn't hold on until it was time for one of them to take her into the bushes, Ronnie wiped her ass with a handful of barbed wire. She bled from her rectum for three days."
"Jesus Christ," Stu said. "Which one was he?"
"The man with the shotgun," Susan Stern said. "The one I brained. I wish he was right here, lying on the floor, so I could do it again."
The man with the sandy beard and sunglasses they had known only as Doc. He and Virge had been part of an army detachment which had been sent to Akron when the flu broke out. Their job had been "media relations," which was an army euphemism for "media suppression." When that job was pretty well in hand, they had gone on to "crowd control," which was an army euphemism for shooting looters who ran and hanging looters who didn't. By the twenty-seventh of June, Doc had told them, the chain of command had a lot more holes than it did links. A good many of their own men were too ill to patrol, but by then it didn't matter anyway, as the citizens of Akron were too weak to read or write the news, let alone loot banks and jewelry stores.
By June 30, the unit was gone - its members dead, dying, or scattered. Doc and Virge were the only two scatterees, as a matter of fact, and that was when they had begun their new lives as zoo-keepers. Garvey had come along on the first of July, and Ronnie on the third. At that point they had closed their peculiar little club to further memberships.
"But after a while you must have outnumbered them," Glen said.
Unexpectedly, it was Shirley Hammett who spoke to this.