Dies the Fire: A Novel of the Change by Stirling S. M

Author:Stirling, S. M. [Stirling, S. M.]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, mobi
Publisher: Roc
Published: 2004-08-02T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

“Lord and Lady, I don’t think I can stand this much longer,” Judy Barstow said, her olive Mediterranean skin gray.

Juniper nodded. They were ten miles north of Salem, and . . .

She wiped at the flies crawling over her face, spat, and pulled the bandana up over her face again, which let her breathe through her mouth without inhaling any of them—even after many days’ exposure, she hadn’t gotten used to the stink. Her eyes skipped over the bodies lying by the road, and the rats that crawled bloated and insolent among them. Rags and tatters of flesh were left; the crows were at them too, but the rats were so numerous that they could drive the birds off in chittering hordes. Inside an SUV windows pullulated with heaving gray bodies. . . .

“It’s almost as bad here as it was along I-5,” she said. “I don’t think we should try to get any closer to Portland.”

“No,” Judy said. “I don’t either. My grandfather got out of Lithuania in World War Two . . . I never really understood what he was talking about before.”

Almost compulsively she opened the economy-sized bottle of sanitizer again, and handed it around. Juniper’s face and hands were already raw and chapped from the desiccating effect of the alcohol-based solution, but she obediently scrubbed down all the exposed parts of her body. Steve and Vince followed suit.

None of them had much skin exposed, despite the mild heat. When you thought of where the flies had been . . .

“No, we shouldn’t be here,” the nurse-midwife went on. “We’re endangering the whole clan as well as ourselves. I never thought it could be as bad as this! If someone designed an environment to spread disease, this would be it.”

She swallowed and went on: “How . . . how can They let this happen?”

Juniper pushed her bicycle over beside her friend’s and put her arm around her shoulders; that was more symbolic than anything, when the person you hugged was wearing an armored jack, but symbols counted.

“How could They let the Holocaust happen, or the Black Death, or the Burning Times? We’re not People of the Book; everything’s connected, but we don’t have to imagine that everything happens according to a Divine Plan. It could be our fault, something humans did through carelessness or malice. It could be aliens doing the same. Or . . . it could be something the Otherworld did for our own good.”

“Our good?” Judy asked, looking around.

“We might have killed the planet, if this hadn’t happened. Killed the whole human race, and the plants and the animals too. I don’t know, but it’s possible.”

Judy drew a breath, coughed, and nodded. “All right. Thanks. But let’s get out of here!”

Juniper nodded and pulled out the map. “All right,” she said. “We had to know . . . but oh, how I wish we didn’t!” Her finger traced a road west and then south. “We’ll cross here, near Wheatland, and turn south towards Corvallis, then slant across to home the way I did right after the Change.

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