Don't Watch

Chapter 1: The Lot

The radio at Bauer's Truck Plaza had gone quiet at ten past four, and nobody on the county channel had bothered to tell Angela Fischer.

She found out the way she found out most things that winter, by driving into it.

She was eleven miles into her run on County Road G, pushing a ridge of wet February snow off the shoulder with the wing blade, when the truck stop came up on her right. Bauer's sat at the crossroads where G met the river road, a long flat diner with a canopy of diesel pumps out front and a gravel lot big enough for thirty semis. Before the Turn, Angela had eaten breakfast there twice a week. Since the Line went up, the Guard had used it as a checkpoint, because it was the last building on the east bank before the bridge, and the bridge was the last one standing in Adams County.

The checkpoint lights were on. That was the first thing she noticed. The big halogen floods on their poles lit the lot white, and the canopy lights were on, and the neon BAUER'S sign over the diner door was on, buzzing pink against the dusk. Two Humvees sat nose to nose across the bridge approach with the concertina wire stretched between them.

There were people in the lot.

Angela eased off the throttle. The plow was a twelve-ton International with a ten-foot front blade and a wing blade that swung out from the right side like an arm, and it did not slow down quickly. She let it roll. The chains on the tires hummed on the packed snow, and the sound dropped lower and lower until the truck stopped at the edge of the lot with the engine idling.

She counted them without meaning to. She counted everything. It was a habit from twenty years of night driving, counting mile markers and culverts and the thump of frost heaves, because counting kept her awake and kept her on the road. There were forty of them, give or take. They stood scattered across the gravel between the pumps and the diner and the parked trucks, and none of them were moving.

They were not standing the way people stand. People shift their weight. People turn their heads and scratch their noses and stamp their feet in the cold. These forty stood with their feet planted and their arms hanging, and they had all tipped their faces up toward the sky at the same angle, like a field of sunflowers in August.

Angela looked where they were looking.

The starlings were coming in over the beet fields to roost. She had seen it a hundred times. Every winter evening along the river, the birds gathered in their thousands and wheeled over the flat white fields before they dropped into the cottonwoods for the night. Tonight there were more of them than she had ever seen, a black cloud that stretched from the tree line almost to the water tower in Arkdale, folding and pouring and turning in on itself. The cloud bulged and thinned and swept left all at once, and then swept right, every bird turning at the same moment without any leader she could see.

She looked back at the lot.

The forty faces turned left. Then right. They followed the birds, all together, the way a crowd at a tennis match follows the ball, except that nobody in a crowd turns at exactly the same instant. These people did. Their chins moved together. Their throats moved together. When the starlings swooped low over the river, forty mouths opened slightly at the same time, and Angela realized they were breathing together too. Their breath steamed in the cold, and it came out in one long white puff that hung over the lot and then faded, and then forty chests filled again.

Under the floodlights she could see their skin. It had the look she had seen on the news a thousand times, a greasy green shine across the cheeks and the backs of the hands, the color of a starling's feathers when the light hits them. It looked as if they had been rubbed with motor oil. She could not see their eyes from the cab, but she knew what was in them. Black specks in the whites, like pepper.

Some of them wore Guard uniforms.

Angela reached slowly across the cab and pushed down the lock on the passenger door. Then she locked her own. She turned the radio volume all the way down so it would not crackle. She did not turn off the engine, because if she had to leave, she would need to leave fast, and the International took a while to catch on a cold night.

The rules were simple, and everybody on the east bank knew them by heart. One infected person alone was just a sick person. They knew their names. They could talk to you and cry and beg you for help. Two or three together were dangerous. But when a group of them saw something move, something in their heads locked onto it, and the group became one thing. A flock. It breathed together and turned together and hunted together, and there was nobody inside it anymore. A flock hunted anything that moved out of its rhythm.

The rule that came after that one was the one the Guard printed on every pamphlet and every billboard along the interstate. If you see a flock, do not move. Do not run. Do not watch.

Angela was watching. She could not stop.

The door of the diner opened.

A soldier came out. He was young, so young that his helmet sat too low on his head, and he was holding a flare gun in both hands. He had been hiding in there, Angela thought. He had been hiding in the walk-in cooler or the bathroom while his unit stood out here and turned into this, and now he had decided to do something. His face under the helmet was white and wet. He looked at the forty backs in front of him, and Angela saw his lips move. He might have been praying. He might have been saying a name.

He raised the flare gun over his head and fired it straight up.

The flare went up with a pop and a hiss and burst red against the dark, high above the canopy. Angela understood what he meant to do. He wanted to pull their eyes away from himself, to give them something brighter than the birds to stare at while he ran for the Humvees. It was not a stupid idea. It was the kind of idea a nineteen-year-old has when he is alone and scared and the training manual is in a binder somewhere in Madison.

Forty heads turned at the same instant.

They did not look at the flare. They looked at him.

Angela would think about this for a long time afterward. The flare was the brightest thing in the sky. But the boy's arm had moved when he fired it, and his body had jerked with the kick, and that was the motion they caught. Forty faces came down out of the sky and swiveled around and fixed on him, all with the same smooth turn, like the heads of owls.

The boy saw it. He dropped the flare gun and ran.

He ran for the Humvees, which was the wrong way, because the flock stood between him and them. He seemed to realize it halfway across the lot and tried to turn back toward the diner, and his boots slid on the packed gravel, and he went down on one knee.

The flock exhaled.

It was a single long sigh, forty mouths opening wide at once, and what came out of them was not just steam. It was a cloud, faintly green in the floodlights, that rolled out across the lot low to the ground. Angela had read about this too. The spores came out with the breath. You were supposed to hold yours.

Then the flock moved.

It did not charge. That was the worst of it, worse than if they had screamed and rushed him. They walked. They walked fast, closing in from every side, and they all took their steps on the same beat, so that their boots crunched on the gravel in one sound. Crunch. Crunch. Crunch. Angela could hear it through the closed windows over the idle of the diesel.

The boy got up and tried to run again. Two of them caught his arms. They did not grab him the way a person grabs. They took hold of his wrists with both hands, one on each side, and they leaned back together, and his arms stretched out straight from his shoulders as if he were about to be measured for a suit. Two more took his ankles. They lifted him off the ground.

He was screaming now. Angela could hear that too.

The four holding him began to step backward, slowly and evenly, each one moving away from the center. The others came in close around him and laid their hands on his body, on his chest and his hips and his thighs, not hitting him, just holding him steady. There was something almost tender about it. They looked like people folding a bedsheet after it comes off the line, two at each corner, pulling it smooth before they bring the ends together.

His right shoulder came apart first. Angela heard it through the glass, a wet pop like a drumstick twisted off a roasted chicken. The arm did not come off. It just went long. It stretched an inch longer than an arm should be, then three inches, and the skin of his shoulder pulled white and tight over the gap where the joint had been. The scream he gave then was not a word or anything like one.

The flock leaned back together, breathing together, and his left shoulder went, and his hips. They worked him the way you work a stubborn knot loose, patiently, never hurrying, adjusting their grip each time something gave. His uniform sleeve tore open at the elbow, and the elbow came apart inside it, and the forearm swung loose from a rope of skin. His left knee bent the wrong way with a sound like a branch breaking in the cold.

He stopped screaming somewhere around then. His head hung back with the helmet still strapped on, and his face was turned toward Angela's truck, and his eyes were open.

She would never know if he saw her.

The flock let him down on the gravel in pieces that were still mostly connected, and then, all together, it straightened up and stood still. Forty faces tipped back up toward the sky. The starlings were almost down now, just a few black ribbons sliding into the cottonwoods by the river. The flock watched them go. Its breath steamed up in one cloud, and then another, slow and calm, like a sleeper's.

Angela realized she had her hand over her mouth and had not breathed in almost a minute. She let the breath out through her fingers very slowly.

None of them had looked at the plow. A twelve-ton orange truck with its running lights on, idling at the edge of the lot, and not one of them had looked at it. It had not moved. That was the only reason.

She reached up and turned off the running lights, then the dashboard lights. She put the truck in reverse. The backup beeper would sound the moment the transmission engaged, the way it did on every county truck, and so she reached under the dash with her left hand and found the wire the mechanics had shown her once and yanked it out of its clip. Then she eased her foot off the brake.

The International rolled backward down County Road G in the dark, so slowly that she could hear the snow squeak under the tires. She did not look at the lot. She looked at the side mirror and the dark road behind her and counted the reflectors on the guardrail posts as they went by. One. Two. Three. At thirty she was far enough back that the canopy lights were only a glow over the hill, and she stopped and turned the truck around in the Schaefer farm's driveway and drove home with her headlights off and the blade raised, steering by the gray line of the snowbanks.

She did not report it.

The county channel was right there, a turn of the knob away. She thought about the dispatcher, Marv, who would ask her to repeat herself and then patch her through to the Guard. She thought about the debrief. Anybody who witnessed a flock at close range went into seventy-two hours of observation at the old middle school in Arkdale, in a locked classroom with a cot and a bucket, while they waited to see if the specks came. Natalie would be home alone for three days. Angela told herself that was the reason.

The real reason was simpler. She did not have the words for what she had seen, and she did not want to say it out loud and hear how it sounded.

At the edge of town she turned her headlights back on. Her hands were shaking so hard on the wheel that the truck drifted over the center line, and she had to pull over by the grain elevator and sit for ten minutes with the heater blowing on her face before she could drive the last half mile home.