Forty-six
She moved in a void of consciousness like a
formless dream. The uniform whiteness of the wilderness would have
swallowed her alive had it not been for the gentle grade leading
ever downward along the winding highway. Even with her eyes closed,
she could sense the slope and feel the smooth surface of the road
beneath the snow.
Within a span of two days, the temperatures
beneath a cloudy sky warmed to near melting. And then a heavy, wet
snow fell, forcing her to sit against the sheltered side of an oak
to wait out the storm. Another drop in temperature followed. By
morning, Caitlin was buried in an ice-encrusted hollow melted out by
her own body heat.
She broke free to a clear blue sky and a world
covered in rounded mounds of sparkling snow. Birds flitted about
ice-encrusted trees standing against the sun. Deer tracks
criss-crossed the snow where it had blown shallow across the crest
of hills. The faint chattering of animal life sounded from beneath
the snow drifts.
The silent world had been cleansed. If the
caterpillars killed every human being in the world, a great
abundance of life would remain behind to mourn their passing, or
more likely to cheer humanity's demise.
They were too stupid to do either, Caitlin
decided. Regardless, they were better off living and dying free of
the curse of conscious self-awareness. Life was better lived out
like a dream, without thought of beginnings and endings.
She made her way back to the highway and began
to methodically push her way through the even deeper snow. Another
day passed and her hunger began to warn of the need to find suitable
prey. Failure would doom her to the inhuman torment Derek and his
road gang had intended to inflict upon her, although that would
happen sooner or later regardless.
She shoved the awful thought from her mind.
Culverton lay ahead somewhere near. She would be of value there.
He tried to avoid thinking about the fate of those unfortunate
enough to lie in the path of her hunger. There would be predatory
transients from the east coast lurking about Culverton, preying upon
ordinary people to satisfy the viler hungers of monsters almost as
bad as the caterpillars. She would take those, she told herself,
and not the innocents who meant harm to no one.
Sometime in the early afternoon hours of the
day, she stopped without knowing why. Struggling back from the
depths of a mind gone blank, she finally noticed fresh footprints in
the snow not of her own making. Even as she watched, a brisk breeze
filled them in with blowing snow.
Someone had crossed her path not more than a
few minutes earlier. They had seen her coming and had hidden among
the trees lining the roadside. Despite the risk of blundering into
a hunter with a loaded rifle, she turned and trudged toward their
source. She would find prey, or die trying.
A few hundred feet into a dense stand of trees,
the footprints led to a body of a woman dressed in torn, bloodied
clothing, lying across a fallen tree. Fearing that she had stumbled
across the scene of an injured innocent, she surged forward with a
cry of dismay.
The size of the fallen woman forewarned her of
danger an instant before the caterpillar dropped from overhead. Its
long gray tongue lashed out at her even as it fell. Caitlin swiped
the barbed tongue aside and drop-kicked the insect a resounding blow
as it fell at her feet.
The woman feigning injury sprang to her feet
and attacked screaming. Caitlin's caterpillar silenced her in a
heartbeat. She dropped to her knees with a look of surprise, then
fell sideways against a sapling and held on for support.
"My caterpillar," she said with a gasp, spiked
in the shoulder and quickly dying.
Her caterpillar was dead, its oily guts laced
across the snow where it had fallen. "Your caterpillar is okay,"
Caitlin said.
"I want it."
"It's coming. It’s almost here."
The woman tried to focus on her face. "You're
a zombie."
"So are you."
"I was hungry."
Caitlin sighed. "So was I."
The body started to dissolve. "Okay, so take
it, damn you!" Caitlin screamed at her caterpillar. "I just killed
one of your fucking friends! So there!"
She turned her back on the insect and wiped at
the tears streaming from her eyes. But she waited for it to finish,
unable to simply walk away from her own hunger.
In time, the caterpillar crawled back upon her
shoulders. Caitlin retraced her footprints in the snow. When the
caterpillar fed her, she dropped again to her knees and stared
straight ahead, waiting patiently for the unwanted pleasure to end.
Culverton appeared between a break in the trees
just before dusk. The city lay out across the wide valley, bisected
by a meandering band of ice. Nothing moved in the streets. Only an
occasional tendril of smoke rose into the darkening sky. She could
not hear the sound of traffic anywhere.
She could sense that the city was not
completely dead. It cowered. The small part of it clinging to life
had guns. They would be on guard.
Caitlin went down to the four-lane interstate
that passed near the city. The sky darkened after the sun set, but
a rising moon dispelled complete darkness. She found old footprints
in the snow to follow into town, overly large footprints made by no
ordinary mortal.
She walked through Culverton and then
backtracked endlessly before deciding that the defenseless were all
dead by now. The only survivors were those like herself coming and
going like grim reapers in the night, assiduously avoiding one
another to prevent just the sort of accidental encounters that had
fed her one last time.
Her mission was lost. Culverton was gone.
She'd find no National Guard to save Osco and the other outlying
towns. She'd find no more prey for her caterpillar.
The moon was blood red, even at its zenith and
the sky black and entirely starless. Curtains of light rippled and
cascaded over one another in the northern sky.
Northern lights. The aurora borealis. She had
never seen it before in her life, and now the sky was on fire.
She headed back into the hills, the night
filled with the sound of her own labored breathing. She had all the
strength and energy she needed to start her way back to Brighton
Hollow, although going back home wasn't a conscious decision.
The only clearly rational thought that passed
through her mind came two days later, when she decided she'd be
better off abandoning the highway and cutting through the hills in
search of game hunters and their camps and the smaller communities
and isolated homes scattered here and there. She told herself that
she just wanted to be near people. She blocked out the intensity of
her never-ending hunger.
She climbed into the hills feeling like an ant
challenging the snowfields of Antarctica. By ordinary standards,
they were indeed impassable. She dug her way through ravines filled
with snow piled over her head, but kept as much as possible to the
ridges where the snow had blown clear. When the moon fell to the
horizon, she kept it in view a bit to her right. It and the rising
sun at her back would guide her way back to Brighton Hollow.
An hour or two before dawn, she heard a
growling sound rise and fall with the breeze. She paused and came
fully alert. For one heart-pounding moment, she thought it might be
a cougar. But cougars were only fairy tales in these parts, and as
she ventured forward again, it became nothing more than an idling
car engine.
The sound reflected off
the surrounding hills. She explored in one direction only to
have it fade away. Then she tried the opposite direction.
Again, it faded away. She chose a third direction at random. She
crossed a county road a few minutes later and saw lights among the
trees. The growl sounded louder than ever, and then died suddenly
and completely.
It was a four-wheel drive truck rather than a
car. One door of the truck had been left open, the interior light
casting a glow across the snow. Caitlin looked inside and saw that
the ignition was still on. The battery was strong, but the fuel
gauge read empty.
Behind the truck stood a
rich man's summer home, a pretentious log
cabin with skylights and chandeliers. A single light glowed in a
side window. Caitlin did not understand what was happening until
she drew close enough to see the dryer vent hose running from the
exhaust pipe of the truck into the house.
She tried the front door of the house and found
it unlocked. Inside, the air stank of exhaust fumes. She left the
door ajar and opened the back door as well, both to vent the house
as well as to reduce the stifling temperature.
She found two older people in bed together,
wrapped in blankets and naked in one another's arms. Carbon
monoxide poisoning had turned their skin bright red. Caitlin didn't
think they had been dead for very long.
The caterpillar ignored the dead. Caitlin went
into the living room and pulled a wooden rocking chair around to
face the open front door and the frigid moonlit night lying beyond.
She sat and rocked, watching the beautiful curtains of light to the
north.
It was time now to go home and die. One way or
another, it had to end. Her anger toward the insect was mounting.
In the end, she'd kill it herself in a fit of unstoppable rage. If
anything else was going to happen, it would happen soon, because she
could sense that the first stage of humanity's extermination was
ending.
