First Thrills - Lee Child [104]
Daylight came. Exhausted, Brent sat back at the table outside the tavern again. I took the bench opposite him. He looked up at me miserably. “I think it was a girl in Richmond. Johnny was Johnny then. Soldiers on the street were harassing her, calling her a monster. Johnny stopped them, but the next morning, he looked like hell. He told me that she had been a monster.”
“You still say Johnny did this? The men from schooner did this. I saw their bodies, Brent.”
“And how do you think they became what they are?” he asked me wearily. “I found a doctor, a surgeon, a man with the Union. That’s when I was captured. He’d seen it before; he was trying to find a cure. I prayed that Johnny would die, or that this man would find the cure. But . . .”
“I don’t believe you,” I told him. “Johnny didn’t do this.”
Brent started when we heard shouting again. He jumped to his feet. We ran back to the place where the smell of burning flesh was so terrible now, where the bonfire burned.
I heard Brent cry out and fall to his knees and I knew why.
He had found Janey Sue. Her throat had been ripped out; her left cheek was gone entirely.
I watched as Brent sobbed, and I was too numb to find tears myself for the girl who had been my best friend throughout the long years of the war.
Brent stood, ordering that she be burned like the rest. I set my hand on his shoulder. “Brent, you can bury her—”
He swung on me. “No, don’t you understand yet? Johnny is—he’s a zombie. And everyone he touches becomes the same.”
I pushed away from him, still refusing to believe. “Stop it, Brent, stop it! Johnny would never, ever, in a thousand years, have hurt his sister.”
It was daylight. I could no longer bear the horrid odor that rose to the fresh summer sky, or the sight of the bodies. I ran back to my house.
A few hours later, I decided that I was leaving. I would find my father. I would take one of the little sailboats, and if there was no wind that day, I would row. I was going in to Charleston.
The sun was falling; it was the perfect time to start the long journey. Night would save me from the heat, and the light house would guide me. At first, my plan was perfect. I caught a bit of a breeze, and the darkness fell, but the air was balmy and I was fine. Then, I felt the first thump against the boat. Then another.
And, in that balmy breeze, with the sea so gentle and the stars blazing in the sky above, the thing crawled aboard. It was Johnny. For a moment, his eyes were dull and dead. He came toward me and I scrambled swiftly, ready to leap overboard. He caught my shoulders, his strength incredible. He opened his mouth, aiming for my throat.
Then he paused. To my astonishment, tears came to his dead eyes. “I don’t want to, I don’t want to, oh, God, I remember you . . .”
“Johnny, let me go, for the love of God, Johnny,” I begged.
I felt the boat bump again.
Rescue, I thought, somehow, rescue.
Johnny jerked around. I looked past him.
It was another of the things.
I looked hard. My heart sank. It was one of them.
And it was my father.
He leaped at Johnny, rocking the small boat precariously, and I thought he had come to save me. But he wrenched Johnny from me, and then, I saw his eyes.
Dead eyes. Once, a dancing brown shade. Now, dead.
“Father, no!” I screamed in terror and misery. But he would have bitten down upon me, ripping and tearing, if Johnny hadn’t pulled him away. Johnny was still crying, and suddenly, my father was crying, too. But still, they weren’t battling to save me.
They were fighting over their prey.
I was desperate. I leaped off the small boat, though I knew that they could swim. I tried freeing myself from my cumbersome skirt and boots while they fought, unaware that I was gone. Then I set out for the island. I was a good swimmer, but still, I had come far from shore.
I was crying myself, gulping too much water, fighting the numbness of terror. I had left the island, and I had done so with the Colt, but little good that did me now. I’d never