Clay's Ark Read online

  “They died! Maybe we’ll die!”

  “You won’t die. I’ll take care of you.”

  She touched his face, finally, traced the few premature lines there. “You aren’t sure,” she said. “My touch hurts you, doesn’t it?”

  He said nothing. His body had gone rigid. Its center, its focus was where her fingers caressed.

  “It must hurt you to hold back,” she said. “Your holding back hurts me.” There were agonizing seconds of silence. “You probably were the saboteur,” she said. “You’re strong enough to hurt yourself, so you thought you were strong enough to kill yourself. I want you. But I wish you had succeeded. I wish you had died.”

  He had no more strength of will at all. He seized her, dragged her behind the well, pushed her to the ground. She was not surprised, did not struggle. In fact, with her own drives compelling her, she helped him.

  But it was not only passion or physical pain that caused her to scratch and tear at his body with her nails.

  Present 12

  WHEN OREL INGRAHAM GRASPED Rane’s arm and led her from Meda’s house, she held her terror at bay by planning her escape. She would go either with her father and Keira or without them. If she had to leave them behind, she would send help back to them. She had no idea which law enforcement group policed this wilderness area, but she would find out. All that mattered now was escaping. Living long enough to escape, and escaping.

  She was terrified of Ingraham, certain that he was crazy, that he would kill her if she were not careful. If she committed herself to a poorly planned escape attempt and he caught her, he would certainly kill her.

  She noticed no trembling in the hand that held her arm. There were no facial tics now, no trembling anywhere. She did not know whether that was a good sign or not, but it comforted her. It made him seem more normal, less dangerous.

  As they walked, she looked around, memorizing the placement of the animal pens, the houses, the large chicken house, and something that was probably a barn. The buildings and large rocks could be excellent hiding places.

  The people were spooky; she saw only a few, all adults. They were busy feeding the animals, gardening, repairing tools. One woman sat in front of a house, cleaning a chicken. Rane watched with interest. She planned to be a doctor eventually, and was pleased that the sight did not repel her. What did repel her was the way people looked at her. Each person she passed paused for a moment to stare at her. They were all scrawny and their eyes seemed larger than normal in their gaunt faces. They looked at her with hunger or lust. They looked so intently she felt as though they had reached for her with their thin fingers. She could imagine them all grabbing her.

  At one point, an animal whizzed past—something lean and brown and catlike, running at a startling speed. It was much bigger than a housecat. Rane stared after it, wondering what it had been.

  “Show-off,” Ingraham muttered. But he was smiling. The smile made him look years younger, less intense, saner. Rane dared to question him.

  “What was that?” she asked.

  “Jacob,” Ingraham answered. “Stark naked as usual.”

  “Naked?” Rane said, frowning. “What was it?”

  He led her onto the porch of an unpainted, but otherwise complete, wooden house. There he stopped her. “Not ‘it,’” he said, “him. That was one of Meda’s kids. Now, shut up and listen!”

  Rane closed her mouth, swallowing her protests. But the running thing had definitely not been a child.

  “Our kids look like that,” he said. “You may as well get used to it because yours are going to look like that too. It’s a disease that we have, and now you have it—or you’ll soon get it. There isn’t a damn thing you can do about it.”

  With no further explanation, he took her into the house and turned her over to a tall, pregnant woman whose hair was almost long enough for her to trip over.

  Lupe, the woman’s name was. She was sharp-featured with thin arms and legs. In spite of her pregnancy, she clearly belonged among these people. She wore a caftan much like Keira’s. Her pregnant body looked like a balloon beneath it. She reached for Rane with thin, grasping hands.

  Rane drew back, but Ingraham still held her. She could not escape. The woman caught Rane’s other arm and held it in a grip just short of painful. The thinness was deceptive. These people were all abnormally strong.

  “Don’t be afraid,” the woman said with a slight accent. “We have to touch you, but we won’t hurt you.” Her voice was the friendliest thing Rane had heard since her capture. Rane tried to relax, tried to trust the friendly voice.

  “Why do you have to touch me?” she asked.

  “Because you’re not one of us yet,” Lupe said. “You will be. Be still.” She reached up so quickly that Rane had no chance to struggle, and made scratches across Rane’s left cheek.

  Rane squealed in surprise and pain, and, too late, jerked her head back. “What did you do that for?” she demanded.

  They ignored her. “You’re in a hurry,” Ingraham said to Lupe.

  “Eli says the sooner the better with this one and her father,” Lupe told him.

  “While he takes his time with his. Treats her like she’ll break if he touches her.”

  “She might. We never had anybody who was already sick.”

  “Yeah. I got us a healthy one, though.”

  They talked about her as though she were not there, Rane thought. Or as though she were no more than an animal who could not understand.

  She tried to pull free when Lupe took her away from Ingraham and sat her down on a long wooden bench. There, finally, she released Rane and stood before her studying Rane’s angry, hostile posture. Lupe shook her head.

  “I lied,” she told Rane. “We are going to hurt you. You’re going to fight us every chance you get, aren’t you? You’re going to make us hurt you.” The corners of her mouth turned downward. “Too bad. I can tell you from experience, it won’t help. It might kill you.”

  Rane glanced at the woman’s claws and said nothing. Lupe was as crazy as Ingraham and even more unpredictable with her soft words and sharp nails. Rane was terrified of her—and furious at her for inspiring fear. Why should one thin-limbed, pregnant woman be so frightening? One thin-limbed, startlingly strong, pregnant woman who sat down beside Rane and caressed Rane’s arm absently.

  Rane looked at Ingraham—actually found herself looking for help from the man who had held a gun to her head. To her utter humiliation, he laughed. Rane’s vision blurred and for an instant, she saw herself smashing his head with a rock.

  Suddenly Lupe grasped her chin, turned her head until she could see only Lupe, hear only Lupe.

  “Chica, nothing has ever truly hurt you before,” Lupe said. “Nothing has even threatened you enough to make you believe you could die. Not even your sister’s illness. So now you must learn a hard lesson very quickly. No, don’t say anything yet. Just listen. You think I’m threatening you, but I’m not. At least, not in the way you believe. We have given you a disease that can kill you. That’s what you need to understand. Some of our differences are signs of that disease. You must decide whether it’s better to live with such signs or die. Listen.”

  Rane listened. She heard about Eli and the Clay’s Ark and Proxima Centauri Two. She listened, but she believed almost nothing.

  “You know,” Lupe said when she had been talking for perhaps a half hour, “sometimes I look around and everything seems to be the wrong color. The sun is too bright and … not red. I feel surprised that it isn’t red. I couldn’t figure out what was going on when it first happened. It scared me. But when I told Eli, he said Proxi was red. A cool red star with its three planets hugging in close around it. He bought some red light bulbs in Needles and put them in his den. They’re not right either, really, but every now and then I go over there. Every now and then, everyone goes over there and stays for a while. It relaxes us. When things start to smell funny to you and you feel like you want to eat a live rabbit or rape a man
, we’ll take you over there. It helps. Keeps you from jumping out of your skin.”

  “I’ve got a better solution for that last feeling,” Ingraham said, grinning. He had gone away and come back. Now he sat watching Rane in a way that made her nervous. In spite of the huge meal Rane had seen him eat, he was munching nuts from a dish on the coffee table.

  Lupe looked at him and smiled—all teeth. “You touch her like that and I’ll cut your thing off.”

  Ingraham laughed, got up and kissed her, then stood before her, smiling. “You want me to get one of the kids for her to see?”

  “Get Jacob if you can catch up with him.”

  “Okay.” He went out.

  Looking after him, Rane sorted out two impressions. First, that Lupe meant her threat absolutely. She would kill him if she caught him with Rane or any other woman. Second, he knew it. He enjoyed her possessiveness. Thus Rane was probably safe from him in one way at least. Thank God.

  “You’re bright,” Lupe said to her softly. “Very bright, but stubborn. You think you can choose your realities. You can’t.”

  Rane made herself meet the woman’s eyes. “Reality,” she said with contempt. “My father is a doctor. He really could have gone out on the Ark. He has valuable training, he was within the age range when it left, and he was in good physical shape. Would you believe me if I told you he was a fugitive astronaut?”

  “Not if you’re his kid, honey. Nobody with young kids went. No white guy married to a black woman went either. Things never got that loose.”

  “And no ignorant con artist who can barely speak English went,” Rane snapped. “If Eli’s convinced you he did, you’re no smarter than he is!”

  Surprisingly, Lupe smiled. “You’re a lot less tolerant than I would have expected. A lot less observant too. But it doesn’t matter. Here’s Jacob.”

  Ingraham came into the room carrying a small, large-eyed, brown boy. The boy was slender—without childish pudginess—but not bone-thin like the adults. He wore a pair of blue shorts, but no shirt. He was startlingly beautiful, Rane realized when he turned in Ingraham’s arms and faced her. But there was something odd about him. He seemed nothing like the thing that had run past her outside, but he did appear to be built for speed. An odd, slender little boy.

  “Come on, miho,” Lupe said. “Let’s show you off a little bit. Come sit with us.”

  The boy scrambled against Ingraham, braced, and leaped to the bench on which Rane and Lupe sat. He landed next to Rane, who started violently. Jacob had leaped like a cat and landed on all fours. His legs and arms were clearly intended to be used this way. He was a quadruped. He had hands, however, and fingers. He looked at them, following Rane’s eyes.

  “They work,” he said in a clear, slightly deeper than average child’s voice. “They work like yours.” He grasped her arm with the small, startlingly strong, hard hands. Sharp little nails dug into her flesh, and she drew away. Squatting, the boy sniffed his hands, then wiped them on his shorts.

  “You smell,” he told Rane, and leaped off the bench and onto it again next to Lupe.

  Lupe laughed. “Shame, Jacob. That’s not nice to say.”

  “She does,” the boy insisted.

  “She’s not one of us yet. She will be soon. Then she’ll smell different.”

  Rane completely passed over the insult in her fascination with the boy—the whatever-it-was.

  “Can he walk on his feet alone?” she asked Lupe.

  “Not so well,” Lupe answered. “He tries sometimes because we all do, but it’s not natural to him. He gets tired, even sore if he keeps at it. And it’s too slow for him. You like to move fast, don’t you, mijo? She lifted the strange little body and placed it on her lap. Jacob immediately put his ear to her belly.

  “I can hear it,” he announced.

  “Hear the baby?” Rane asked.

  “Its heartbeat,” Lupe said. “He can hear it without putting his ear to me. It’s just a game he likes. He says this one’s going to be a girl. He doesn’t understand how he can tell, but he knows. Smell, maybe.”

  “Guessing, maybe,” Rane said.

  “Oh no, he does know. He’s called it right four times so far. Now women come and ask him.”

  “But … but, Lupe—”

  “Stop for a moment,” Lupe said. Then to the boy, “Okay, niño. Back out to play. Take some nuts.”

  The boy leaped down from her lap, trotted on all fours to the china nut dish on the plain, homemade coffee table. He took a handful of nuts, stuffed them into the pocket of his shorts and zipped it shut. He seemed to have no trouble using his hands. They were smaller than Rane thought they should have been, but he was less clumsy with them than a normal child would have been. He was certainly much faster than any normal child, probably faster than most adults. All his movements were smooth and graceful. A graceful four-year-old.

  He stopped in front of her—beautiful child head, sleek catlike body. A miniature sphinx. What would it be when it grew up? Not a man, certainly.

  “I don’t like you either,” Jacob said. “You’re fat and you smell and you’re ugly!”

  “Jacob!” Lupe stood up and started toward him. “Vayase! Ahora mismo! Outside!”

  Jacob bounded out the door. No, human beings did not move that way. How had any disease made such a creature of a child?

  “He’s telling the truth, you know,” Lupe said. “You do look fat and odd to him, though you’re not. And you smell … different. Also, he couldn’t miss how much you were repelled by him.”

  “I don’t understand how such a thing could happen,” Rane whispered.

  “It’s the disease, I told you. We don’t even have a name for it—the disease of Clay’s Ark. All our children are like Jacob.”

  “All … ?” Rane swallowed. “All animals? All things?”

  “Shit!” Lupe said. “You’re worse than I was. You should be more tolerant. He’s a little boy.”

  Rane stared at her pregnant belly.

  “Oh yes,” Lupe said. “This child will be like Jacob too, just as my son is. Beautiful and different. And, chica, your children will be like him too. The disease doesn’t go away. It just settles in and stays with you and you pass it on to strangers and to your children.”

  “Or you get treatment!” Rane said. “What the hell are you doing sitting in the middle of the desert giving birth to monsters and kidnapping people?”

  Lupe smiled. “Eli says we’re preserving humanity. I agree with him. We are. Our own humanity and everyone else’s because we let people alone. We isolate ourselves as much as we can, and the people outside stay alive and healthy—most of them.”

  “Most,” Rane said with bitterness. “Most for now. But even now, not me. Not my father or sister. And what about you? You don’t belong here either, do you?”

  “I do now,” Lupe said. “Before, I was a private hauler. You know. Good money if you survive. My truck broke down all the way over on I-Fifteen, and Eli caught me outside. When I realized what he had done to me, I thought I would bide my time and kill him. Now, I think I’d kill anyone who tried to hurt him. He’s family.”

  “Why?” demanded Rane. “If you really believe he’s the cause of this sickness—and you know he’s the guy who kidnapped you …” Rane shook her head. “Didn’t you have a husband or anything back in the real world? What about your business?”

  “I was divorced,” Lupe said. “I lived in the truck on the road.” She paused. Her voice became wistful. “I miss the road. I almost got killed more times than I like to think about, but I miss it.”

  Rane listened without comprehension. A woman who could be nostalgic for work that kept nearly killing her could probably make any irrational adjustment.

  “I didn’t have anybody,” Lupe said. “We lived in a cesspool. My parents’ house got caught in a gang war, got bombed. One of the gangs wanted to make a no-man’s-land, you know. They needed to put some space between their territory and their rivals’. So they bombed some
houses, torched others. They got their no-man’s-land. My parents, my brother, and a lot of other people got killed. My ex-husband, he’s a wino somewhere. Who cares? So I was alone. I’m not alone here. I’m part of something, and it feels good. Even Orel. There was a time when I carried two guns plus the truck’s usual defenses—and defensively, my truck was a goddamn tank—all to fight off people like him: bike packers, car bums, rogue truckers, every slimy maggot crawling over what’s left of the highway system. But they’re not all as bad as I thought. Orel isn’t. Take away the gang and give him something better and he turns into a person. A man.” Rane listened with interest in spite of herself. She could not understand Lupe’s interest in a man like Ingraham but she was beginning to respect Lupe. Rane liked to think of herself as tough, but she had an uncomfortable suspicion she could not have survived Lupe’s life. She had never been alone, never been without someone who would help her if she could not help herself. Now none of the people who cared about her could help her. Her father, her sister, two sets of grandparents, and on her mother’s side, a number of aunts, uncles, and cousins. Only a few of them were close to her, but every one of them could be counted on to come running if a member of the family needed help. Now, the only ones who knew of her need needed help as badly as she did.

  Past 13

  GABRIEL BOYD DIED.

  Death was a relief to him, an end to more than physical suffering. Alive, he was frightened, confused, full of self-loathing for feelings he could neither control nor understand.

  He had had to be put to bed because he was no longer able to keep his balance. He overcompensated, first for walking up and down steps, then for negotiating the irregularities of the ground outside, finally for walking over a level surface. He could crawl, but nothing more.

  As his sensitivity increased, he began to react with terror to slight sounds and cringe at the slightest touch. Most food—even the smell of food—nauseated him, though he was always hungry. Eli fed him ground, unseasoned raw meat, fresh vegetables, and fruit. He ate a little of this and kept it down.