“Ah.”
“Yeah, there was that reason too. Once a bang started we used to let them gather until there were enough to make the strike count,” he said. Then he had to knuckle the corner of his eye. He shook it off and kept his head up, scanning the sides of the road for Amanda as we drove toward Athens.
I had the .38 in my pocket and the shotgun on my lap. Mike had checked both of them for me. He was loaded with ordinance like some video game character. I didn’t like the way this was headed.
“The people who are infected, they’re still people,” I said.
“Maybe not. The scientists were saying that the worms don’t just rewire the brains when they lodge in them, they rewrite the DNA. The military guys thought, given enough time, they’ll find a virus or something that will take it out.”
“But the people, like Amanda, like Nick, we can do something for them, keep them safe, keep them comfortable, until we find a cure—”
He laughed out loud.
“Wait until we get to Athens, you’ll see,” he said.
But we didn’t get to Athens. We came up over a hill, and Mike slammed on the brakes. “Shit,” he said.
He put it in reverse and backed down below the rim of the road.
Just over the hill, there was an old white farmhouse with a wrap-around porch. Next to the house were three tall blue silos and a red barn with the name McAufley, 1895 spelled out in colored shingles on the roof. A long, one-story animal shed stood next to an unharvested cornfield.
I had to wait until we loaded up and crouched back to the top of the road to see what Mike had seen instantly.
The farmhouse door hung open, with the ripped ends of curtains fluttering through the broken glass of the windows. On the barn, a rope hung from the hayloft pulley, spiraling around and around in the wind. A combine was tipped on its side in a ditch by the road.
There were people moving around the animal shed.
The shed was on the far side of the other buildings. We approached it carefully, creeping along the fence for cover. The stench of blood and shit and sugar was overwhelming. Anguished moans sounded and faded.
“Something’s wrong here,” I whispered. “The worms didn’t start falling until after the harvest. There shouldn’t be any corn—”
“Some folks thought it was the end of the world and stopped doing everything,” Mike said, shrugging. He nodded at the combine. “Maybe there was a rapture, and this guy was the only guy who got taken.”
Something rustled in the corn, the tall stalks swaying. Mike pushed me to the ground, dropped beside me, and brought up his gun.
An old man in a Tommy Hilfiger sweater walked out of the corn: his hair and beard were untrimmed and unkempt; his clothes hung from his body, tatters trailing like fringes from his arms; his smile was beatific and he mumbled nonsense words as he carried an armful of corn back toward the shed.
Mike gestured me to come along, and we followed the bearded guy around the other side of the shed, where we ducked down behind a four-hundred-gallon gas tank.
One wall of the shed had been pulled open, and the building was divided in half. On one side, a boy rested in the bed of straw. A woman crawled away from him, pulling ragged clothes back on. I was relieved to see it wasn’t Amanda.
On the other side of the shed, a dozen or more women were lined up in rows. Their heads were covered with rags, and pieces of old shag carpet and odd bits of blanket were wrapped around their shoulders to keep them warm. They stood in thawing mud, bare feet shifting constantly. The sound that I had mistaken for moaning was a constant low murmur of nonsense words.
When I saw that many of them were pregnant, I wanted to puke.
Mike shifted position, crouching around the other end of the tank. He was looking for Amanda. I was too disgusted to move. Every bone and muscle in my body screamed at me to throw down my guns and run away.
One woman moaned louder than the others. Her swollen belly popped out of her sparkly tee-shirt and soiled sweatpants.
The boy rose up from his bed of straw—he was not much older than Josh, with no beard to speak of and pale as a ghost. When he leaned in to sniff the woman’s mouth, she tried to bite his nose. He jerked his head away, then he bent down to sniff her crotch. Something satisfied him, because he tilted his head back and crooned in some inhuman language.
The old man in the fringe-tatter Tommy Hilfiger sweater dropped his new armload of earcorn and came, whining out his own reply. A third man, still wearing his business suit and tie, but hairy and ragdemalion like the others, came trotting around the corner.
Thing was, I could have known any of those men. I even recognized the cheerful smiles on their faces from a thousand days at the office, from the trips to the mall, from the visits to school.