Forty
Caitlin haunted the edges of Brighton Hollow,
wandering the cold and the dark alone. They wouldn't let her in. Every
time she approached the guarded perimeter, she could hear rounds chambered
in high-powered hunting rifles with scopes. If she moved closer, someone
was bound to shoot her.
Regardless, hunger and not rejection forced her to
take her caterpillar away from Brighton Hollow. She moved at random in
the wilderness and found herself one cold morning close again to Orange
City.
It snowed during the long walk. Three more premature
inches of cold white powder fell from a low overcast. The wooded hills
would be barren soon. It would be harder to move about unseen. Now that
most of humanity knew about the caterpillars and their hosts, she feared
she would have to become an active huntress to survive. Even Derek
and Leon had not
been so evil as what she had become.
The outlying homes in Orange City came into view.
The first people she saw were not local. Three men intercepted her on an
open hillside. They were both black and white men, wearing light,
fashionable clothes and tennis shoes against the cold. They circled her
with gleaming switchblades, knowing her for what she was and taking for
granted she would have to die to safeguard their own lives.
Caitlin held her ground, confident they would back
away when they noticed the caterpillar missing from its usual position on
the shoulder of its host. Forewarned that they had not caught the bug and
its zombie unaware, they stood back to back to defend themselves against
the inevitable attack.
Despite their vigilance, the caterpillar crept
beneath the snow cover, climbed a sapling close to the trio, and killed
two of the men all but simultaneously. The third man escaped for whatever
his survival was worth to him.
Caitlin went on alone, leaving the caterpillar to
feed. The caterpillar caught up with her a half hour later and dropped
her to her knees to feed her in its usual, brutal fashion. It had
shredded her evening gown scampering up and down her body, leaving slashes
of white and bloodied skin exposed to the light of day.
While she was in the area, Caitlin went to check on
the young man and his baby. She found a tiny hole had been dug in the
front yard and marked by a crude cross. She checked inside and found the
young father of the infant a headless corpse in his bed. A shotgun lay
across the body.
Caitlin left the house knowing now why the hosts of
the caterpillars were called zombies. The cold emptiness inside her
intensified worse than ever. She walked in a fugue, unable to cry tears
over the two heartbreaking deaths, her life reduced to a blur of misery
and hopelessness.
She could hear nothing in the surrounding forest.
Had the entire human population of Orange City died? She approached the
town until somebody took a potshot at her. She turned off at a slight
angle as the crackle echoed in the hills. The population had taken refuge
in an easily-defended school, giving her the opportunity to rummage
through deserted houses for something more appropriate to wear.
She found a house that had not as yet been ransacked
for supplies. She looked through an upstairs bedroom and selected a
rugged pair of man's denim pants that would fit, an extra large flannel
shirt, and a pair of hunting boots with room to spare that laced up past
her ankles. As an afterthought, she pulled on a knit wool cap over her
ears and stuffed a pair of gloves in her pocket. She tried on a jacket,
but quickly overheated, and she discarded it.
As an afterthought, she folded the evening gown and
stuffed it inside her shirt, unwilling to part with the garment entirely.
People were not faring well in the countryside. She
found frozen bodies in a small hardware store on the edge of town. Two
had been shot. The others, including two children, were huddled about a
kerosene stove that had run out of fuel. She walked another five miles to
the interstate to see how civilization beyond Brighton County fared. She
sat an a hill overlooking a deserted truck stop and saw only two army
trucks come down the highway during the course of the day. She stared
east along the twin lanes of the highway cutting through the valley,
tempted to wander at random in that direction. She wasn't too many hours
walk from the small towns near Culverton where the Isbeks and the
Kingsleys had fought their foolish and petty feud. Not that it would be
good time to visit. She and her caterpillar would not be warmly welcomed.
It occurred to her that if she wandered too far from
Brighton Hollow for any extended period of time, she should say good-bye
to Rex Hogan and Aunt Vivian. She hadn't visited Aunt Vivian since Leon's
death, fearing that Vivian would panic at the sight of her. But Aunt
Vivian was her last tie with her old life and Caitlin owed her one last
apology and farewell before she left, and maybe a warning to Rex Logan to
bolster his guard around town when she was gone.
She waited until nightfall before she slipped back
into Brighton Hollow. Leon's house was dark, but the doors were unlocked
and the house empty, littered with the clothes of strangers, bones, and
the dust of bones. She ignored it all, wandering the dark rooms to
rekindle old memories.
Few were pleasant memories. She stood in the doorway
of her old bedroom, wishing her radio still worked. She missed music.
She hadn't slept in a bed in weeks. She hadn't slept at all. She held one of her old shifts
against her new body and laughed out loud. She could not have gotten it
over her head even.
She paused on the way past Vivian's room. The door
was ajar and she pushed it open and looked inside. She expected to see
nothing. It was far too cold for Aunt Vivian to be living here alone.
Regardless, Aunt Vivian was in bed after all, and she
had survived the caterpillars. She lay on her back, staring up at the
ceiling with her gnarled hands clutching an old comforter. The one window
in the room was broken. A tree branch had pushed itself inside and the
wind had blown in the last rain and coated everything with a glaze of ice,
including Aunt Vivian's hands and face.
"Aunt Vivian?"
Caitlin entered the room and closed the door behind
her. Unsteady on her feet and lightheaded, she sat on the edge of the bed
for a time. The caterpillar stirred restlessly on her shoulders, sensing
her upset.
Life had become so strange since the advent of the
caterpillars. It had become unreal, a very bad waking dream that she
couldn't hope to escape. If only she would wake up some morning to a
parallel world of warmth and Indian summer filled with gentle and loving
people.
Caitlin continued to wander the house, desperate to
revive sparse pleasant memories from her childhood. The effort was
futile. There were no pleasant memories, and she had no regrets that the past was gone. For the first time in
her life, she was on her own, and when she thought about it, she decided
she felt just fine. The caterpillar had given her everything she needed.
In trade, it had taken Leon Biggs and a world that would not have cared
had she been raped and murdered and buried in the hills behind her house
by the Rather brothers.
She left the house just before dawn, pulling the door
closed behind her for the last time. She cut between the houses of the
mostly deserted residential area of town to where Rex Logan lived above
the old meat market. A kerosene lantern burned in an upstairs window.
"Rex!"
Her cry echoed in the cold morning silence.
"Rex Logan, I need to speak with you!"
Wind stirred the brittle, frozen leaves in the
trees. The door at the foot of the stairs creaked, tugged by the cold
wind. Caitlin lifted her caterpillar from her shoulders and set it on the
side of a tree. She went up the stairs and paused the door at the top.
"Rex? Are you home?"
Someone had to be home. Neither Rex nor Connie would
have left the lantern burning, and Connie would have thrown hysterics at
the sound of her voice. That meant that Rex was here after all. He was
just reluctant to answer her, knowing what she wanted, and aware of his
feelings about her and his freedom to do what he wanted now that Leon
Biggs was gone.
Caitlin went inside the apartment. It was too warm.
The heat made her head spin. The faint aroma of roasted venison wafted
from the kitchen and turned her stomach. Just being inside a cramped
space made her claustrophobic. Her head brushed the door jam entering the
room.
The door creaked closed behind her. Caitlin turned,
smiling brightly, prepared at long last to let Rex Logan take her into his
arms.
But it was Connie Danielson standing before her.
Connie wore a terry cloth robe that hung open and furry white slippers on
her feet. She lifted a gun in her hand and fired twice at point blank
range without the slightest hesitation.
Caitlin's reactions would never be quicker than a
bullet, but they were far quicker than Connie's aim, or her trigger
finger. She had all the time in the world to step out of the way, first
to one side, then the other. One shot went through a window, and the
second went into a wall.
Connie's eyes widened in horror when she saw that she
had missed. She sidestepped Caitlin and fled down the stairs screaming.
Caitlin panicked. "No! Don't go out there!"
She went after the woman. She caught up with Connie
at the bottom of the steps, but it was already too late. Connie had
stopped. Caitlin reached out and turned her around by the shoulder.
A stray breeze opened the crimson robe, exposing her
pale white body.
And the caterpillar clutched to her midsection.
Feeding.
"No!" Caitlin shrieked. "Not her!"
Connie's head fell back with an expression of
complete horror frozen upon her face. Caitlin was still screaming as the
wave of blackness swept up the torso and melted one exposed breast.
Caitlin ran out into the yard, not entirely aware
that she was still screaming. A few moments later, a high velocity bullet
shattered a nearby fence slat with a bee-like whine and peppered the side
of her face with bits of wood. The sound came next, a rifle shot echoing
from several blocks away. She ran across the yard and leaped the picket
fence. Two more bullets sought her out, one splintering a sapling ten
feet in front of her, the other gouging the ground at her feet and
sparking brightly against a rock.
She paused just inside the trees at the edge of
town. Men were running to Connie's rescue from the nearby tavern. Rex
Logan was among them.
"It was an accident!" Caitlin screamed in a
powerful voice that echoed in the hills. "I didn't mean to do it!"
Rex found the body. He just stood there looking down
at what the caterpillar had left behind while Caitlin screamed at him,
trying to make him understand that she hadn't meant to do it.
Rex then lifted his rifle and fired. Again, before
she even heard the shot, she felt the wind of a bullet breeze by her head.
"I'll kill you!" came his echoing cry,
intermingled with her own plea for understanding.
"I didn't mean to do it! Rex, I love you!"
Rex threw the emptied rifle aside. He drew his
revolver. He walked down the sidewalk and out into the street for a clear
view, firing as he came. Caitlin closed her eyes and waited for death.
Bullets whined and snapping through the trees and dead foliage.
Rex saw what she was doing and stopped. He lowered
his revolver and stared at her with an expression both haunted and
horrified. Tears fell from his eyes and froze on his cheeks. Caitlin
began to fear he would freeze to death if he just stood there staring at
her.
Overpowered by guilt and remorse, all of the simple
pleasure of just being alive drained away from her. With it went any hope
of salvation. Even her everlasting love for Rex Logan died. Her soul had
been stripped bare by the killing machine she had become and the terror
she inflicted upon her own kind.
She turned away and walked back into the hills. Rex
and the townspeople refused to pursue her. She became a true zombie in
the hours and day that passed, an empty void of consciousness wandering at
random. She walked day and night to dispel the unwanted energy infused
into her when the caterpillar inflicted its regular force-feedings. She
walked through the rolling, tree-covered hills of the Appalachians wishing
she would stumble into a hole in the ground and fall deep enough for the
earth to cover her and hide her forever from the eyes of the world.
